Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity & the Women Who Made America Modern

by Joshua Zeitz

  Indeed, “the goods must be moved,” cried a merchant in 1912.6 But how? People first needed to be taught how to consume.

  It became increasingly popular to view the problem as one of underconsumption rather than overproduction. Though a few left-wing voices like that of Edward Bellamy called on the government to guarantee a minimum income to every family in America—in effect, to impose a massive downward transfer of wealth that would allow the working poor, who were barely scraping by, to enjoy more of the fruits of American prosperity—more conservative voices won the day.

  “We are not concerned with the ability to pay,” wrote an early proponent of advertising, “but with the ability to want and choose.” Americans could and would empty the warehouses of their surplus goods, if only they were given the “imagination and emotion to desire.” “Without imagination, no wants,” explained another advertising guru in 1899.7 “Without wants, no demand to have them supplied.”

  The idea that advertisers should produce desire rather than simply provide information about specific products gained currency in the early years of the twentieth century. “It is all very well to get the sales of things that people want to buy,” argued a speaker at the Nashville Ad Club in 1916, “but that is too small in volume.8 We must make people want many other things, in order to get a big increase in business.”

  Between 1900 and 1920, the nature of advertising changed markedly. Leading firms no longer acted as mere brokers but now designed arresting ad copy and artwork that championed new brands. They suggested with varying degrees of subtlety that consumer items were not just luxuries, but necessities.

  Whereas a typical advertising expert9 in the 1890s claimed that “pictures are merely adjuncts to the ad. … When they dominate the ad they weaken it,” within the space of just a few years, industry professionals agreed that “the advertising of the future will be illustrated. There can hardly be a question about that.”

  By the early 1920s, the visual focus of ads had moved away from the product itself and toward the image of people enjoying the product. New Age admen weren’t selling soap, automobiles, and clothing. They were selling the happiness and exhilaration that came from buying soap, automobiles, and clothing. Hence, advertisements for Arrow shirts that featured a handsome, sharply chiseled man clad in elegant evening wear, descending a gilded staircase with a tall blonde at his side. Or the 1926 ad for Chesterfields featuring an attractive young couple seated by a secluded oceanfront horizon. The focus wasn’t on the product; it was on the dream that the product held out for its consumers.

  The smartest admen understood that in a world where ordinary people were increasingly beholden to the time clock and the company foreman, and where powerful and inaccessible bureaucracies—banks, government agencies, national corporations—enjoyed a disproportionate share of political and economic power, buying an Arrow shirt or a pack of Chesterfields offered the prospect of balance and compensation.

  “To those who cannot change their whole lives or occupation,” argued Helen Woodward, a successful ad copywriter in the 1920s, “even a new line in dress is often a relief.10 The woman who is tired of her husband or her home or her job feels some lifting of the weight of life from seeing a straight line change into a bouffant, or a gray pass into a beige.”

  It was a short step from longing for the latest dress to compensate for a sense of lost autonomy to using that dress to satisfy a desire for authenticity. In a world where indoor plumbing, centralized heating, canned foods, carpeting, home insulation, and electric lights removed ordinary people from the dirt, grime, smells, exertion, and discomforts of everyday life, people seemed to crave direct experience, and advertisers turned this yearning to their advantage. As G. Stanley Hall, a leading turn-of-the-century psychologist, argued, “Everyone, especially those who lead the drab life of the modern toiler, needs and craves an occasional ‘good time.’ Indeed, we all need to glow, tingle, and feel life intensely now and then.”11

  The admen instinctively grasped this idea and offered up consumer culture as a therapeutic answer to the dual crisis of individual autonomy and experiential living. “Go to a motion picture … and let yourself go,” began a typical ad in The Saturday Evening Post.12 “Before you know it you are living the story—laughing, loving, hating, struggling, winning! All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you lack in your daily life are in—Pictures! They take you completely out of yourself into a wonderful new world.… Out of the cage of everyday existence! If only for an afternoon or an evening—escape!”

  Though working people might not have enjoyed several crucial benefits of meaningful citizenship—a responsive government, autonomy in the workplace, fair wages, and economic security—at least they could drown their troubles in a sea of consumer plenty. However more subtle today’s advertisements seem by comparison, the same promise of a more authentic, fulfilling life surely permeates American media.

  Not everyone shared Madison Avenue’s enthusiasm for the new consumer culture. A few years after the Jazz Age had come and gone, the English critic Denys Thompson complained that “advertising tries to conceal the emptiness and make life feel good.13 It is as if the forces of advertising had decreed that the individual man or woman must not be allowed to develop his or her own potentialities.” This could be all too true of working women, whose economic, social, and (until 1920) political rights were sharply curtailed but who faced a steady barrage of advertisements urging them to find self-definition and freedom in $1.95 “Joan Crawford Hats.”14

  If advertisers only had to teach Americans to embrace a more self-indulgent ethos, their task would have been hard enough. But they also had to initiate citizens into an emerging national market in which brand names—a completely new invention—meant something. People who were used to buying soap and sugar out of large vats at the local dry goods store needed to be taught to prefer prepackaged cakes of Ivory and prewrapped packets of Domino sugar. Housewives accustomed to baking their own desserts and growing their own produce required instruction on the virtues of Uneeda biscuits (manufactured by the National Biscuit Company) and White Diamond corn.

  In the first years of the twentieth century, brand names sprang by the thousands from the wild imaginations of enterprising businessmen and, with the help of Madison Avenue, the new home of national advertising, were seared into the minds of ordinary Americans. Crisco, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Kodak, Sherwin-Williams, Waterman’s, Jell-O, Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, Wrigley’s Doublemint chewing gum, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum, Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum … The competition for mind share was fierce.

  Thanks to the highly successful efforts of advertising executives, by the eve of World War I, Americans were well on their way to becoming trained consumers, and consumer branding—a new form of intellectual property—was widely recognized as intrinsically valuable. When the U.S. Supreme Court broke up the American Tobacco Company in 1911, it appraised the total worth of its trademarks at $45 million—a sum equal to 20 percent of its total assets.15

  By 1920, grocers in Chicago had reported that more than three-quarters of their customers asked for baked beans by the brand name, while a national survey of three hundred men revealed that every last respondent could identify at least one brand name of a watch, soap, and fountain pen.16 Together, they pinpointed thirty-six different brand names of soft drinks.

  In their effort to reshape attitudes about spending, advertisers profited from vast changes in the way Americans saw the world around them. Until late in the nineteenth century, representations of reality—photographs, mirrors, paintings, and the like—were primitive and hard to come by. Only wealthy Americans in the 1840s and 1850s could employ portrait artists, whose work usually captured a rough outline of their subject’s appearance.

  It wasn’t until the invention of modern photography in 1839 and, even more so, the popular introduction of ferrotypes and tintypes sometime around the 1860s, that working men and women enjoyed affordable acce
ss to cartes-de-visite—small trading pictures that could be purchased for 10 cents on the dozen.17 At the same time, new technologies like halftone engraving, which came into wide use in the 1880s and 1890s, made it easier to reproduce photographs, oil paintings, and wash drawings in newspapers, broadsides, books, magazines, and advertisements.

  Almost overnight, visual reproduction, once scarcely imaginable, became an everyday convenience for millions of Americans. The effects of this cornucopia of sight and sensation were dramatic.

  In the 1880s and 1890s, around the same time that halftones became de rigueur, new printing techniques—particularly the chromolithograph (or chromo)—made it possible to introduce colors into trading cards, product wrappers, advertisements, mass-produced paintings, and even some photographs.18 And not just the primary colors. By the turn of the century, advances in coloration introduced as many as a thousand new tints into the color spectrum. Americans growing up just before World War I learned to recognize heretofore unknown shades like mauve and chrome yellow.

  Advertisers were quick to exploit these advances in printing and coloration. In the 1880s, young women became avid collectors of trade cards—a cross between magazine advertisements (which came into wider use after 1890) and baseball cards (which wouldn’t become popular until the 1920s)—that announced the arrival of new household products and brands. In her autobiography, Little Town on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of the delight that she took as a child in these collectors items.19 “The cards were the palest green,” she remarked, “and on each was a picture of a bobolink swaying and singing on a spray of goldenrod.”

  In the remote mountain towns of Kentucky, farm and mine families clipped ads from mail-order catalogs and magazines, mounted them to the wall with a mixture of red pepper, rat poison, and flour-and-water paste (to keep the mice from gnawing at the paper), and coated them with a combination of sweet anise roots and arrowroot to leave a friendlier aroma.20 Color pictures of new food brands adorned the walls of their country kitchens; ads featuring new toys formed a backdrop in children’s bedrooms; images of premade furniture and glass and porcelain finery decorated living rooms.

  In 1905, a social worker surveyed working-class tenement homes in downtown Manhattan and found that most contained cheap chromos—either reproductions of paintings or consumer ads—on the walls.

  The hunger of ordinary people for new pictures and colors held out part of the answer to the plague of underconsumption. Color, wrote Artemas Ward, an advertising industry pioneer, is a “priceless ingredient.21 … It creates desire for the good displayed.… It imprints on the buying memory. [It] speaks the universal picture language” and touches “foreigners, children, people in every station of life who can see or read at all.” A billboard promoter summed up the point best. “It is hard to get mental activity with cold type,” he said, but “YOU FEEL A PICTURE.”

  And pictures were there for the gazing. Between 1918 and 1920, the volume of annual consumer advertising doubled to an astounding $2.9 billion (equal to nearly $20 billion in today’s money).22

  Most of these new appeals were concentrated in magazines, which shifted in the 1880s and 1890s away from the old business model of high prices and low circulation toward a more profitable system of low newsstand and subscription rates and high circulation. Under the new arrangement, magazines turned most of their profits from advertising revenues rather than direct sales.

  Aided by the nation’s extensive railroad system, the introduction of cheaper, second-class postal rates in 1879 and rural free delivery in 1896, and new technological advances like the rotary press, magazine circulation in the United States jumped to a whopping two hundred million in 1929, or 1.6 magazines per person, per month.23 By the time Scott Fitzgerald was writing for The Saturday Evening Post, his stories were reaching over a quarter of all households in cities like Seattle, Washington. Other titles like Good Housekeeping and Collier’s enjoyed similar appeal in places as far-flung as Omaha, Nebraska, and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Though magazines remained a distinct trapping of the middle classes, the expansion of the magazine market created the first truly national institution combining both news and entertainment. In turn, this vital institution created a market for national branding and advertising where none had existed before.

  Among the highest-circulation magazines were several that catered specifically to women: Good Housekeeping, Women’s Home Companion, and Ladies’ Home Journal, which concentrated principally on homemaking topics, and McCall’s, Delineator, and Pictorial Review, which dedicated themselves increasingly to fashion and criticism. Other important women’s magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar had smaller circulations but exerted a disproportionate influence by virtue of their elite readership.

  All told, between 1890 and 1916 a handful of women’s publications attracted more than one-third of all magazine ad revenues, reflecting the commonly held (but never substantiated) belief that women accounted for the lion’s share of all consumer purchases.24 This meant that advertisers tailored many of their appeals to women, who were thought to be responsible for household purchases of soap, cleaners, canned foods, furniture, toiletries, and clothing.

  To coax women into this new world of getting and spending—to convince them of the need to purchase more goods for themselves and their families—advertisers introduced startling new ideas about body image and fashion. In so doing, they created a visual ideal of the flapper that many women would find difficult to achieve.

  Fashion artist Gordon Conway, 1921, introduced millions of magazine readers in Europe and America to the visual style of the New Woman.

  18

  10,000,000 FEMMES FATALES

  “HAPPY DREAMS AND illusions”—that’s what magazine advertisements and illustrations offered to American women, or so said Frank Crowninshield, the legendary editor of Vanity Fair.

  “Such pages spell romance to them,” he observed. “They are magic carpets on which they ride out to love, the secret gardens into which they wander in order to escape the workaday world and their well-meaning husbands … after a single hour’s reading of the advertising pages, 10,000,000 housewives, salesgirls, telephone operators, typists, and factory workers see themselves daily as femmes fatales, as Cleopatra, as Helen of Troy.”1

  In the pages of the slick new consumer magazines lay the images that American women increasingly aspired to imitate, and by the 1920s, arbiters of culture like Frank Crowninshield enjoyed considerable influence in crafting popular tastes and styles. Illustrated magazine covers depicting sleek, angular women with skirts flapping in the wind, legs bared to the elements, and elegant garments falling naturally along their silhouettes dictated the image of the modern woman no less than the glossy advertisements nestled inside the front and back pages.

  One of Crowninshield’s star cover artists, Gordon Conway, wielded more influence than most. No fewer than 110 fashion houses—including all of the leading Parisian couture shops—invited her to sketch their work. Department stores commissioned her for print advertisements. Broadway directors hired her to design sets and costumes. Filmmakers in London and Paris turned to her expertise when they outfitted their silent screen actresses. Though few people outside the art and publishing worlds knew her name, anyone who subscribed to Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Home Companion, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Judge, Town & Country, Metropolitan, Country Life—virtually every major fashion magazine of the era—knew her work. Anyone who saw a European film or took in a local production of a London or Broadway play saw her style.

  Conway’s flapper was slender, sleek, and brilliantly aloof. Her clothes were rendered with tremendous precision, yet her facial expressions and features were often distant and even obscure. For Conway, the New Woman’s grace and being came from her willowy outline and modern attire.

  Born in 1894 to John Conway, a prominent lumberyard owner, and Tommie Conway, his world-wise wife, Gordon spent the first years of an unusually privileged childhood roaming t
he grounds of her family’s handsome Queen Victoria frame house in Cleburne, Texas. Marked out from all the other neighborhood homes by its distinctive, fish-scale shingle facade and the rows of books and paintings that adorned its interior, the Conway residence bespoke the family’s unparalleled position in the community.

  From an early age, Gordon was treated like a little lady—not a little girl. Her parents were local apostles of high culture and considered it de rigueur that their daughter attend the numerous dance and orchestra performances they sponsored in their home. Gordon grew up on chamber music, poetry recitals, and salons staged on the long porch that wrapped around the Cleburne house, bounded on one side by a hand-carved balustrade.

  When Gordon was nine years old, her family—enjoying still greater prosperity from John’s lumber business—moved to a stately new mansion in Dallas, right on the corner of Ross and Harwood, a neighborhood known locally as “Silk Stocking Row” and the “Fifth Avenue of Dallas.”

  Dallas was a boomtown in those days, and Gordon was lucky to be among the “so-called 400,” the leading families who mattered most in the insular but wealthy community of Texas oil barons and lumber tycoons. There, in the blazing southwestern heat, the four hundred raised faux Gothic mansions and French châteaus, they lined their newly paved streets with tall trees from exotic places and paid one another visits in custom-made, horse-drawn carriages, each driven by a uniformed coachman.

  As the daughter of wealthy socialite parents, Gordon enjoyed a host of opportunities that equipped her with the sense of cosmopolitan style that would serve her well in her later career. Even after her father died young and unexpectedly in 1906, Gordon enjoyed a level of refinement and comfort unknown to most Americans of their era. Raised on a steady diet of opera, ballet, modern dance, classic and modern poetry, and symphony music, Gordon honed her already refined sensibilities as a student at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., where she studied piano, elocution, and dance and learned to speak Italian, Spanish, and French with relative ease, if not fluency. Tall, dark haired, and remarkably poised, Gordon was, according to her childhood friend Margaret Page Elliott, “as graceful as a fawn.2 She was not a beauty like her mother in a classic way, but she could just toss an old shawl around her shoulders and look as glamorous as all get-out. If the rest of us tried that we’d look like rough-dried laundry hanging on a clothesline.”