by Joshua Zeitz
Magazines and catalogs were flooded with ads for “60 Exquisite ‘Chanel’ Rhinestone Bags”11 (priced at $15.95 each) and “copies of Patou12, Vionnet, Agnès, Chanel, Le Bouvier, in gorgeous gowns of satin, crepe Elizabeth, Canon crepe, luminous velvet, lace, transparent velvet, chiffon, metal lame and brocade.” Department stores like Macy’s and bargain shops like Broadway Basement, Best, and Mimi’s offered copies of “Paris hats … so exact that only the labels and prices tell the story.”13
When The New York Times observed in 1926 that even farm girls had access to high fashion, the Old Gray Lady was on to something.14
True, farm prices plummeted in the aftermath of World War I and widened the already pronounced gulf between America’s comfortable, electrified towns and cities and its primitive, unelectrified, and chronically impoverished countryside. But in the decade before the war, farm income in regions like the upper South climbed by almost half. If millions of the nation’s farmers were caught in a vicious cycle of tenancy, debt, and deprivation, many others were able to devote small amounts of money to buying Kodak cameras, table lamps or china sets, and the occasional piece of factory-produced clothing.
Rural free delivery and parcel post, two services introduced in 1896 and 1912, respectively, by the U.S. Postal Service, made it possible for farm families to participate in the burgeoning consumer culture without traveling to far-off market towns and cities.15 Mail-order catalogs like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck became so popular that rural schools used them to teach children about the latest scientific and cultural achievements of the growing nation. Men and women alike looked to the monthly catalogs for information on urban styles and fashions.
If a farmer’s wife couldn’t afford the price of a new dress, no problem. Most of the leading mail-order companies introduced credit offices by the 1920s and allowed customers to buy items “on time.”16
Throughout the 1920s, it took only twelve to twenty-four months for the latest in couture to travel from the pages of Vogue to the pages of the Sears catalog. For as little as $8.98 a young farm girl living miles outside Duluth, Minnesota, could purchase a silk flat crepe skirt and chemise of the latest flapper style; another 95 cents bought her a real “Clara Bow hat” to match.17
America was becoming a more standardized country. Just as the advent of mail-order catalogs and national advertising eliminated regional variations in dialect and vocabulary—the “sling-bam” or “sling-blade,” as it was popularly known by southern farmers, was soon known far and wide as a “weed cutter”—so too was fashion partly democratized and the chasm between rural and urban bridged by a new, common sensibility.
Just as it was easy to come by a convincing, durable Chanel knockoff on Main Street, American women also enjoyed access to cheap costume jewelry. In 1868, two brothers from Albany, New York—John Wesley Hyatt and Isaiah Hyatt—invented “celluloid,” a synthetic substance they used to manufacture cheap alternatives to ivory billiard balls. It didn’t take long before someone realized that the new material was also handy for making buttons and buckles.
Over the next fifty years, the plastics industry kicked into high gear as ingenious minds found new ways to imitate precious minerals like amber, horn, tortoise, mother-of-pearl, coral, jade, ivory, and diamond. By the eve of World War I, women who worked on farms and in factories could drape themselves in as much cheap imitation jewelry as they could afford, thanks to country stores and mail-order catalogs.18
But there was still a sharp distinction between women who wore real pearls and women who wore fake ones—until the rise of Coco Chanel.
Coco embraced fake jewelry and made it “costume jewelry.” Her couture house churned out colorful necklaces, bracelets, lapel pins, and earrings crafted from glass beads and plastic gemstone look-alikes. These weren’t new items. Fashion-conscious women of modest means had been wearing them for years. But Coco made it chic to don fake jewelry and to admit to it freely. Wealthy women were now buying essentially the same synthetic trinkets at Saks Fifth Avenue that blue-collar women were ordering by catalog on the cheap. The end result was a dramatic leveling of the social playing field.
“Now that Woolworth’s has gotten out its own version of the plain gold or silver necklet,” joked Lois Long, young working women no longer had to “mourn that the tin rings around Heinz pickle jars are not bigger.”19
“Today,” wrote one observer, “both the parlor maid and the debutante wear ornaments which may be classified roughly as ‘attention getters’ or what the professional buyers call ‘conversation pieces,’ designed to bridge the first awkward seconds in a momentous encounter.”20
Indeed, by the mid-1920s, it was hard to tell what was or was not authentic and what constituted a fair price. Long doubted whether there were any French designs that could be seen “at one big shop exclusively” and even suggested that “the copies you buy in regulation sizes probably will be better made and fit better than any bought at the original Paris shop.”21
“It is most annoying,” Long quipped on another occasion, “after having spent a large sum for a particularly smart frock, to find that the tiny hole-in-the-wall next door happens to know the same wholesaler patronized by your specialty shop, and is able to sell it for half the price you paid.22 Ho-hum, what it is to be exclusive!”
She was on to something. It wasn’t just that imitation blurred the distinction among different qualities of clothing and jewelry. It blurred the distinction among different qualities of people. “I used to be able to tell something about the background of a girl applying for a job as stenographer by her clothes,” remarked a businessman in Muncie, Indiana, “but today I often have to wait till she speaks, shows a gold tooth, or otherwise gives me a second clue.”23
Stuart Chase, a prominent 1920s social critic, marveled at the democratizing influence of fashion. “Only a connoisseur can distinguish Miss Astorbilt on Fifth Avenue from her father’s stenographer or secretary,” he wrote in 1929.24 “An immigrant arriving on the Avenue from the Polish plain described all American women as countesses. So eager are the lower income groups to dress as well in style, if not in quality, as their economic superiors, that class distinctions have all but disappeared. To the casual observer all American women dress alike.” As another writer observed, “Nowadays no one can tell … whether a given person lives on Riverside Drive or East 4th Street.”25
This might have been a slight overstatement of the truth. A discerning eye could still separate people by their clothes.26 Jane Addams, the legendary Chicago settlement house founder, noticed that working-class women—many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants—“imitate, sometimes in more showy and often in more trying colors, in cheap and flimsy materials, in poor shoes and flippant hats, the extreme fashions of the well-to-do.”
Nevertheless, something was changing, and Coco Chanel understood this better than most. Though she issued a pro forma ban on copy-house sketch artists at her runway shows, Coco was far more permissive than her fellow couturiers when it came to imitation. “Let them copy,” she said.27 “I am on the side of women, not the fashion houses.” Coco believed that all of the imitation “accessories I’ve made fashionable—the chains, the necklaces, the stones, the broaches, all the things that have enriched women so much and so cheaply,” helped level the social and political playing field. “Thanks to me,” she boasted, working women “can walk around like millionaires.”28
There was irony in all of this. For all their glitter and fascination, the 1920s were years of profound inequality. Rarely in American history had power, wealth, and income been concentrated so singularly in the hands of a relatively small elite. Labor unions were anemic. Workers wouldn’t enjoy federal unemployment insurance, disability benefits, or Social Security until the late 1930s. Few Americans could afford decent health care.
All the while, a powerful combination of mass disenfranchisement in the South (courtesy of poll taxes, literacy tests, and state-sanctioned violence) and gerrymandering in
the North (small towns often sent the same number of legislators to the state capital as did large cities) made it exceedingly difficult for ordinary people to exercise meaningful political sovereignty.
But as working men and women lost control over their political and economic lives, they flexed their muscles in the purchase of shiny new things, an activity that seemed to hold out the promise of a new brand of “democratic” citizenship. Upward mobility was redefined as the right to dress like the Rockefellers rather than earn like the Rockefellers; the ownership of commodities replaced the ownership of labor as a mark of social achievement. More and more, the personal became political.
In effect, Americans embraced a new definition of freedom that hinged on participation in a burgeoning consumer economy. How “democratic” this new order—and how “free” the average consumer—really was was open to debate. A social critic for The Atlantic Monthly worried that “individuality, in the sense of a man’s distinct personality, in the material domain, is becoming an increasingly rare phenomenon. We are forced to a common standard. Even those of us who have not material objectives cannot be non-conformers. For the few are powerless to escape the brand of eighty millions. We are socialized into an average.”29
Such protestations could barely be heard against the general din. A powerful group of cultural mediators made material things seem like the stuff of human liberty.
In the late 1920s, George W. Hill, owner of American Tobacco, hired America’s leading public relations guru, Edward Bernays, to design a new advertising initiative. The problem was simple: Despite a decade’s worth of movies, magazine photos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, many Americans still regarded women smokers as “hussies.” Working on behalf of his new, prize client, Bernays hired a prominent psychoanalyst, A. A. Brill, to see what might be done to eliminate once and forever the negative connotations associated with cigarette-wielding women.
“Some women regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom,” Brill advised. “Smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism: holding a cigarette in the mouth excites the oral zone. It is perfectly normal for women to want to smoke cigarettes. Further, the first women who smoked probably had an excess of masculine components and adopted the habit as a masculine act. But today the emancipation of women has suppressed many of the feminine desires. More women now do the same work as men do.… Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.”30
Torches of freedom. The idea leaped out from the page at Edward Bernays. “I found a way to help break the taboo against women smoking in public,” he later boasted. “Why not a parade of women lighting torches of freedom—smoking cigarettes.”
Bernays contacted Ruth Hale, “a leading feminist,” and arranged to have “ten young women lighting ‘torches of freedom’ ” at the 1929 Easter parade on Fifth Avenue. Newspapers carried front-page items marveling at this “bold protest against women’s inequality.” And American Tobacco had itself a new market segment.
“The man with the proper imagination is able to conceive of any commodity in such a way that it becomes an object of emotion,” wrote a prominent advertising guru in 1911, “ … and hence creates desire rather than a mere feeling or thought.”31 In the 1920s, the man who could create desire was the new apostle of American freedom.
17
WITHOUT IMAGINATION, NO WANTS
IN LATE NOVEMBER 1928, with the winter holiday season in high gear, millions of American magazine readers opened the latest edition of The Saturday Evening Post and saw a familiar, illustrated icon staring past them. Tall and angular, young and chic, outfitted stylishly in distinctive flapper wear, the “Fisher Body Girl” seemed, at first glance, to be selling clothes, or makeup, or shoes.1 On closer consideration, she was selling automobiles. “Of all those who express motor car body preference,” announced the advertisement, “95% Prefer ‘Body by Fisher.’ ” The message couldn’t have been clearer: Buy a GM model—be it a Pontiac, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, or Buick—and this body was yours.
The idea of using sex and fashion to sell cars wouldn’t have made a great deal of sense to the prewar generation. But it was well in line with the ethos of the Jazz Age. By the 1920s, a powerful group of advertising specialists, headquartered along Madison Avenue in New York City, had perfected ways of using the flapper to sell consumer items and using consumer items to define the flapper.
One of the more curious publishing phenomena of 1925 was a sparsely written biography of Jesus Christ authored by a leading New York advertising executive, Bruce Barton.2 Almost as quickly as it hit bookstores, The Man Nobody Knows climbed to the top of the best-seller list, where it remained for more than two years and through twenty-seven different printings. The half-million readers who thumbed through Barton’s slim volume learned that Christ was, above all, “the founder of modern business” and a sage for all times who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” It was a wholly unusual take on Jesus Christ, but it seemed to strike a chord.
A typical John Held flapper in a moment of deep contemplation.
The son of a prominent Congregational minister, Bruce Barton was born in 1886 and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. After a successful undergraduate career at Amherst, he scrapped plans to pursue a PhD in history and instead found his way to New York City, where he earned personal fortune and popular acclaim as a magazine writer and advertising executive. His firm, Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, grew into one of Madison Avenue’s premier agencies—so much so that by the 1920s, Barton could afford to divide his attention among various political, literary, and business endeavors.
Living in the shadow of his father, a distinguished liberal clergyman and amateur biographer of Abraham Lincoln, the younger Barton struggled to reconcile his role as an apostle of American consumer culture with his deeply felt sense of Christian faith. Hawking new products for his clients demanded that Barton argue against the ethos of rectitude and thrift that pervaded the Protestant Midwest of his youth. Ordinary Americans wouldn’t spend money on luxuries, he believed, unless they were disabused of long-held ideas that privileged a life of self-denial over a life of indulgence.
Barton turned to precisely this question when, in a short profile of the automobile magnate Henry Ford, he urged readers of the American Magazine to discard “the old fashioned notion that the chief end in life is a steadily growing savings account, and that one must eliminate all pleasures from his vigorous years in order to prepare for possible want in old age.”3 In a new era of mass production and consumption, he argued, “life is meant to live and enjoy as you go along.… If self-denial is necessary, I’ll practice some of it when I’m old and not try to do all of it now. For who knows? I may never be old.”
This ethic of self-indulgence didn’t square with the rock-ribbed values that many Americans had imbibed as children. The challenge was to find a way to invoke 1920s vernacular in a manner that gave consumer culture a stamp of approval from none other than Jesus Christ. Which was exactly what Barton accomplished in The Man Nobody Knows. In a twist on the well-worn question “What would Jesus do?” Barton implicitly invited readers to ask what Jesus might have thought about 1920s American capitalism. The answer, of course, was that Christ would have approved wholeheartedly of the new culture of consumption.
In Barton’s rendering, Christ was a born salesman who “recognized the basic principle that all good advertising is news” and who catered scrupulously to the “marketplace.” “Few of his sermons were delivered in synagogues,” Barton asserted. “For the most part he was in the crowded places, the Temple Court, the city squares, the centers where goods were bought and sold.”
Whereas in Christ’s time the marketplace was, quite literally, a town square where people gathered to buy and sell their wares, “the present day market-place is the newspaper and the magazine. Printed columns are the modern thoroughfares; published advertisements are the cross-roads where the selle
rs and the buyers meet. Any issue of a national magazine is a world’s fair, a bazaar filled with the products of the new world’s work. Clothes and clocks and candle sticks; soup and soap and cigarettes; lingerie and limousines—the best of all of them are there, proclaimed by their makers in persuasive tones.”
Would Jesus disapprove? Not at all. “He would be a national advertiser today, I am sure, as he was the great advertiser of his own day.”4
As a leading ad executive, Bruce Barton represented a new cadre of elite men and women who enjoyed unprecedented influence over the ways in which Americans envisioned and understood the world around them. They would play a central role in disseminating flapper fashion and style and, even more important, in shaping the contours of femininity, sexuality, and physique in the 1920s.
As recently as the 1890s, advertising agents had served as little more than freelance brokers who purchased newspaper ad space in bulk and sold it back to local businesses at a marginal profit.5 Ads were tucked away discreetly in the back pages of magazines and serials, used small print, and contained only the most essential information. No pictures, no catchphrases, no extra draw. Just the facts.
This status quo couldn’t last. In the several decades following the Civil War, American industry expanded in leaps and bounds, resulting in warehouses virtually overflowing with unsold consumer goods. Businessmen now faced an unforeseen embarrassment of riches. They could produce the goods, but they couldn’t always unload them.
On paper, at least, America seemed ripe for the development of a national market. Since the mid–nineteenth century, armies of itinerant workers had laid down thousands of miles of railroad tracks, half of which were still less than twenty-five years old on the eve of World War I. Telegraph services and telephone lines facilitated an instant flow of information from coast to coast. The potential was there to move ideas, business orders, raw materials, and finished products across vast amounts of space over relatively little time.
