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

by Joshua Zeitz

  With that idea in mind, Lippmann encouraged the president to appoint leading advertising men, publicists, newspaper editors, and film directors to a new propaganda agency that would convince the American public that the war was a necessary step “to make a world that is safe for democracy.” The end result was Executive Order No. 2594, which established the Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the so-called House of Truth—under the direction of George Creel, a well-known progressive journalist.2

  Although the committee’s original mandate was to provide the public with hard facts and information, allowing citizens to reach their own conclusions about the war, it soon gave way to the manipulations of prominent advertising men on staff. Even Creel came gradually to admit that “people do not live by bread alone; they live mostly by slogans.” Realizing that the CPI would have to appeal to raw emotions and sensations, Creel drew together a talented group of communications professionals and artists, including the painter Charles Dana Gibson, who headed the CPI’s Division of Pictorial Publicity, and George Bowles, a Hollywood promoter who had largely masterminded the distribution of The Birth of a Nation.

  The end result was a massive propaganda campaign that included the dissemination of two hundred thousand different slides, stereotypes, and photographs; the enlistment of several hundred thousand “Four Minute Men” who delivered stock pro-war speeches in movie theaters while the film reels were being changed; a massive censorship effort that struck at any visible form of printed or spoken dissent; and, most ominously, posters, broadsides, and flyers that appealed mawkishly to love of country and more darkly to ever present strains of fear and raw prejudice.

  Not everyone involved with the project approved of its unanticipated trajectory, but as Gibson conceded, “One cannot create enthusiasm for the war on the basis of practical appeal. The spirit that will lead a man to put away the things of his accustomed life and go forth to all the hardships of war is not killed by showing him the facts.” No—the only way to compel an unwilling nation to embrace war was to “appeal to the heart.”

  Typical CPI posters presented a beleaguered Statue of Liberty collapsing under the strain of German fire, set against a backdrop of a wasted, burning New York City; a giant poisonous spider wearing a German combat helmet, accompanied by a banner that read SPIES ARE LISTENING; and a map of the United States, renamed New Prussia, with familiar places bearing new names like Heineapolis, Denverburg, Cape U Boat, and the Gulf of Hate.3

  While many reformers watched with horror as a onetime progressive president turned the United States into a quasi police state, arrested thousands of political dissidents, and used crass propaganda methods to appeal to the public’s basest sentiments, American businessmen basked in the glow of the CPI’s success. Pressed to experiment with new forms of mind control, and endowed with enormous sums of the federal government’s money, advertising and public relations professionals who worked for the CPI in 1917 and 1918 emerged from the war armed with new techniques that could be used to market consumer products.

  “The war taught us the power of propaganda,” Roger Babson, a leading business analyst, boasted in 1921.4 “Now when we have anything to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”

  Even before the war, advertising agencies had been experimenting with new methods of scientific surveying and social psychology. In fact, Madison Avenue enlisted the talents of some of America’s leading psychologists and psychiatrists.5 George Phelps, an ad executive who encouraged the marriage of social science and marketing, argued that the real challenge in advertising was “the process of getting people to do or think what you want them to do or think.”

  John B. Watson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and arguably the leading behavioral psychologist in America, led the way in 1922 when he resigned his university post and signed a lucrative contract with the J. Walter Thompson agency. Other prominent academics made the same leap soon after.

  Ivy Lee, a preeminent New York adman, spoke for many in his profession when he admitted, “I have found the Freudian theories concerning the psychology of the subconscious mind of great interest.”6 Lee, who once maintained that advertising was nothing more than disseminating facts, came around to the opinion that “publicity is essentially a matter of mass psychology.7 We must remember that people are guided more by sentiment than by mind.”

  Who better to consult on this subject than the master himself? If Madison Avenue didn’t enjoy direct access to Sigmund Freud, it had the next best thing: his nephew Edward Bernays—father of the “torches of freedom” display at the 1929 New York Easter parade. Bernays, a Viennese émigré and Freud’s nephew two times over—his mother was Sigmund’s sister; his father’s sister was Sigmund’s wife—was a veteran of George Creel’s CPI and America’s leading “public relations counsel” in the 1920s. With a client roster that included some of the nation’s most lucrative business concerns—the United Fruit Company, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Philco, and Liggett & Myers, among them—Bernays aggressively championed the integration of marketing and psychology.

  “Mass psychology is as yet far from being an exact science and the mysteries of human motivation are by no means all revealed,” Bernays conceded. “But at least theory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion … by operating a certain mechanism.”

  Though business practitioners of psychoanalytic theory badly mangled and conflated the work of Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, John Watson, and other important theorists, there emerged by the early 1920s a popular consensus among advertisers that humans were rarely, in writer Everett Dean Martin’s words, “governed by reason or consideration.”8 Rather, “instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving-power by which all mental activities are maintained.”

  With this idea in mind, advertising professionals were particularly successful in changing expectations about personal appearance and thus creating a new set of assumptions about body image and fashion. The flapper was one of their finest creations.

  Warnings, they found, were especially effective. “Critical eyes are sizing you up,” asserted an ad for Aqua Velva aftershave.9 “Keep your face fresh, firm, fit.”

  “The Picture He Carries Away,” another advertisement began. “Will it be an alluring image of charm and freshness, or the pitying recollection of a pretty girl made unattractive by a poor complexion?”

  In an urban society that was less personal and more anonymous, where chance encounters were more frequent and where one’s appearance spoke louder than his or her reputation, first impressions mattered. A lot. Indeed, everything was at stake.

  “It ruins romance,” warned an ad for Listerine.10 Beneath a picture of a young, well-groomed couple, each gazing suspiciously at the other, the text wondered: “Did you ever come face to face with a real cause of halitosis (unpleasant breath)? Can you imagine yourself married to a person offending this way?” Another ad delivered this lecture: “You will be amazed to find how many times in one day people glance at your nails.11 At each glance a judgment is made.… Indeed some people make a practice of basing their estimate of a new acquaintance largely upon this one detail.”

  If a mere warning didn’t suffice, advertisers were happy to trot out a cautionary tale. “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. … 12 Edna’s case was really a pathetic one. Like every woman her primary ambition was to marry. Most of the girls of her set were married—or about to be.… And as her birthdays crept gradually toward the tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever.… Listerine.”

  Magazine readers could be forgiven for expressing shock and alarm. They didn’t realize that maladies like halitosis were wholly made-up disorders. When Gerald Lambert, heir to the Lambert Pharmaceutical fortune, found himself strapped for cash in the wake of the 1921 economic recession, he decided it was time to put the firm’s household and topical antiseptic, Listeri
ne, to better use.

  Gerald, whose formative years were marked by unusual privilege—he rode in a chauffeured limousine between classroom buildings at Princeton University—later admitted that he was “quite used to having any material thing I wanted.” He certainly wasn’t about to let a little national recession plunge him into the depths of the upper middle class.

  Up until then, Listerine had been used to clean cuts and scrapes. When a member of the Lambert research team happened across the word halitosis in a British newspaper, and when the company’s staff scientists confirmed that there was no real health risk in swirling around a small dose of Listerine in one’s mouth, young Gerald—seeing a clear way out of his economic straits—immediately instructed his advertisers to market Listerine as the only proven cure for a serious medical and social disease: bad breath.

  “A few years ago,” read a typical Lambert ad, “bad breath was condoned as an unavoidable misfortune.13 Today it is judged one of the gravest social offenses.” Appealing to the anxieties of urban Americans who lived in proximity to one another and experienced the daily angst of anonymity and public scrutiny, the company saw sales of Listerine skyrocket by 33 percent after just one month of the new ad campaign.

  So it went with all sorts of new disorders—dandruff, athlete’s foot, body odor, face wrinkles, dry or oily hair, acne, rough skin. Beneath every imperfection lurked a disastrous end—a lost job, a lost love, a missed opportunity. And for every danger, there was a cure—a new face cream, antiseptic, soap, shade of lipstick, or hair tonic to ward off the looming threat of social failure. By the end of the decade, annual sales of toiletries and beauty services had mushroomed, and the volume of advertising for toiletries ranked second only to food.14

  Magazine ads promised beauty, youth, and success with fetching titles like “I Cured My Pimples—and Became a Bride,” “How a Wife Won Back Her Youth—A Surrender to Ugliness That Nearly Cost a Husband’s Love,” and “Do you wonder, when you meet a casual friend, whether your nose is too shiny?”15

  The accompanying pictures—featuring intimate scenes of married life, young love, office politics, random everyday encounters, and job interviews—gave the subtle impression that everywhere one turned there was always a keen eye trained on the most infinitesimal aspects of one’s appearance. For the would-be flapper, this was a powerful message. “Will his eyes confirm what his lips are saying?” wondered an advertisement for Palmolive. “The kindly candles of last night, the tell-tale revealments of noon! Do you fear the contrast they may offer?”

  On some level, the modern world did, in fact, lend itself to a more rigorous standard of examination. As recently as the mid–nineteenth century, most mirrors cast back cloudy representations of real life, leading one historian to speculate that “American women and men had only a hazy apprehension of their facial qualities.”16 When Maria Lydig Daley gazed on her image in a hotel mirror, she was appalled at how “old and ugly” she appeared. Upon returning home, Daley was reassured by her own looking glass, which offered a more familiar image of youth and beauty. “How few of us have a perfect idea how we look,” remarked an early photographer, “or who we resemble, or look like.”

  All of this had changed by the 1920s. People had better ways of examining themselves and those around them. The wall-to-wall mirrors in the department store (damning in their accuracy), the little girl on the street clutching a Kodak camera in her hand, the shiny, reflective storefront windows, the stranger on the commuter train with the suspicious gaze—each was quietly poised to sear an unflattering image into memory.

  As advertisers encouraged the American consumer to take greater stock of his or her appearance—to ratchet up standards of cleanliness, grooming, and artificial enhancement, to abandon the Sunday bath for the daily shower, to sculpt one’s features in the never-ending quest for eternal youth and perfection—old taboos against lipstick, mascara, rouge, and face powder gave way to a new imperative: self-improvement.

  In the nineteenth century, the only women who dared wear makeup were stage actresses, whose morals were considered highly suspect, and prostitutes. Miners in western camps warned that

  Hangtown Gals are plump and rosy,

  Hair in ringlets mighty cosy.17

  Painted cheeks and gassy bonnets;

  Touch them and they’ll sting like hornets.

  Popular convention held that makeup concealed one’s inner spirit. And who but a guilty or scheming person would mask his or her true nature? In an era when cities were first starting to expand and where people were being thrown for the first time into a sea of anonymous faces, the dominant culture placed a high premium on “a perfectly transparent character.”18 Moralists held that, for women especially, “the skin’s power of expression” was a vital sign of one’s innate spirit and integrity.19 Thus, women who “painted” their faces had something to hide, just as young ladies who “put on the tinsel”—fancy clothes, flashy adornments, nail polish—were playing a dangerous game, trying “to seem to be what they are not.”

  “The mask of fashion,” as critics sometimes called it, was turning everyday life into a “masquerade, in which we dress ourselves in the finest fashions of society, use a language suited to the characters we assume;—with smiling faces, mask aching hearts; address accents of kindness to our enemies, and often those of coldness to our friends.20 The part once assumed must be acted out, no matter at what expense of truth and feeling.”

  By the 1920s, popular opinion had completed a 180-degree shift. Now accustomed to the anonymity of the modern world, public authorities—more likely to be advertisers than ministers—encouraged Americans to cultivate their exterior appearance and present as polished a facade as possible. Cosmetics companies like Armand even urged the New Woman to “Find Yourself” through the application of makeup. “The questions and answers will discover the real you—not as you think you are—but as others see you.”21 What was once dismissed as “the mask of fashion” now held out the power to “make us look and feel more self-possessed, poised, and efficient.” Self-invention was a right; self-reinvention was a necessity.

  When a woman “begins to regard her appearance in her own mind as a fixed, unalterable quality,” warned Vogue’s Book of Beauty, “—that same moment, some vital, shining part of her is extinguished forever.”22 Drawing on popular psychoanalytic argot, Vogue’s editors found that an inattention to external appearance “destroys those potential personalities that psychologists tell us are lurking behind our ordinary selves.”

  Whereas Victorian moralists claimed that the use of makeup and a slavish attention to fashion somehow masked one’s inner self, the new apostles of consumerism claimed that lipstick and nice clothes empowered the superwoman beneath the skin. When a distraught woman from Detroit wrote to “Frances Ingram”—the pen name for the advertising department at Ingram’s Milkwood Cream—wondering if “maybe my appearance affected my chance at promotion,” “Frances Ingram” replied that in the current “age of self-development” there was an intimate relationship between “internal cleanliness” and a “radiant, attractive, and likeable” exterior.23

  “When a woman has a bad complexion,” advised “Frances Ingram,” “people notice immediately, and they have to get past it before they really like a person. I believe that the dullness of your complexion may have reacted on your subconscious in such a way that your confidence in yourself has become impaired.” The answer: Buy more Ingram’s Milkwood Cream.

  Change came swiftly: By the late 1920s, industry analysts claimed that 90 percent of adult women used face powder, 83 percent used talcum, 73 percent applied perfume, and 55 percent used rouge.24

  City women were more likely to use makeup than their small-town and country sisters, though even in the metropolis there was a wide gulf among women of different classes. An industry analyst noted that wealthy women in Chicago tended to use cosmetics “very carefully and sparingly,” whereas working-class women “use it in astonishing quantities.” Another c
ommentator lamented that “the shop girl has lost all sense of perspective. Each of her cheeks is a blooming peony. Her eyes are two smudges of dusky, shadowy black. Her lips are cruel with scarlet.”

  Department store counter clerks learned to differentiate among customers—Arden for the smart set, Pond’s for the working girl, Elcaya for everyone in between. And in cities like New York and Chicago, it was common knowledge that young “Jewish flappers” preferred Angelus lipstick in dark red or orange. “All Jewish girls use it,” explained a counter clerk who, according to an interviewer, “never asks what brand they want but gets the Angelus drawer out when she sees them coming.”

  As for rural America, “Towns under 1,000 are hopeless,” sighed a cosmetics account representative at the J. Walter Thompson agency. That wouldn’t be the case for long. A study of two thousand rural women conducted by Farm Journal just before World War II found almost universal use of face powder and widespread use of lipstick.

  Surveys of college women—the first generation raised on aggressive consumer advertising, movies, and radio—revealed that 85 percent used rouge, lipstick, face powder, and nail polish. At Vassar College, the J. Walter Thompson agency found that “again and again phrases that had been used in the Woodbury advertising were used by the girls, with apparent unconsciousness.”

  When prompted to describe the virtues of Woodbury cold cream, coeds at the University of Chicago repeated almost verbatim the product’s advertising copy—“[it] actually draws the dust and dirt out of the pores,” “one feels deliciously clean and fresh after using it.” At Smith College, a student admitted without prompting that she used Woodbury cream because she “longed for romance and thought perhaps a beautiful complexion would make me more fascinating.”