The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage)

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  It was to advertise this museum that he invented his famous “brick man”—a perfect, if somewhat primitive, example of the connection between “pseudo-events” and advertising. Barnum hired a stout, hearty-looking man for $1.50 a day and handed him five bricks. He instructed the man to lay one brick at each of four points which Barnum indicated near the American Museum. The man kept the fifth brick in his hand and marched rapidly from one brick to another, at each point exchanging the one in his hand for the one on the street; he kept this up in a constant circuit. At the end of every hour, however, the brick man entered the American Museum, spent fifteen minutes solemnly surveying all the halls, then left, and resumed his work. Each time, a dozen or more persons would buy tickets and follow him into the museum hoping to learn the purpose of his movements. Their entrance fees more than paid the brick man’s wages. Additional interest was created when a policeman (who had been let in on the trick) objected that the crowds were obstructing traffic, and ordered Barnum to call in his brick man. “This trivial incident,” Barnum recounted, “excited considerable talk and amusement; it advertised me; and it materially advanced my purpose of making a lively corner near the Museum.”

  One of Barnum’s great successes was his mermaid. A painting outside the museum depicted an attractive half woman, half fish about eight feet long. Illustrated handbills portrayed her capture on a Pacific island. The specimen was said to have been purchased by a Dr. Griffith as agent for the Lyceum of Natural History in London. Barnum had this “Dr. Griffith” (who was in fact a Barnum assistant named Lyman) exhibit it before a large meeting of New York scientists in the Concert Hall. Actually what was being exhibited was only the preserved head of a monkey attached to the dried body of a fish. “The public appeared to be satisfied,” Barnum recalled, “but as some persons always will take things literally, and make no allowance for poetic license even in mermaids, an occasional visitor, after having seen the large transparency in front of the hall, representing a beautiful creature, half woman and half fish … would be slightly surprised to find that the reality was a black-looking specimen of dried monkey and fish that a boy a few years old could easily run away with under his arm.” Other Barnum triumphs were General Tom Thumb, a five-year-old dwarf who was less than two feet high and weighed sixteen pounds when he was first displayed on Thanksgiving Day, 1842, and who attracted over a hundred thousand people in the first year; and Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale” whose real name was Mme. Otto Goldschmidt. She was advertised as being paid a thousand dollars a concert, all of which she supposedly gave to charity. Barnum first opened “The Greatest Show on Earth” in Brooklyn in 1871. There, and on tour, he displayed countless freaks and monstrosities, among them “Jumbo,” a large, gentle African Elephant advertised as “The Only Mastodon on Earth.”

  Contrary to popular belief, Barnum’s great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather, how much the public enjoyed being deceived. Especially if they could see how it was being done. They were flattered that anyone would use such ingenuity to entertain them. Barnum argued that his “clap-trap” was perfectly justifiable so long as it was occasionally “mixed up with the great realities which I provide. The titles of ‘humbug,’ and ‘prince of humbugs,’ were first applied to me by myself. I made these titles a part of my ‘stock in trade.’ ” Barnum’s autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs (published in 1854, the year of Thoreau’s Walden), recounted his exploits with disarming candor and precise detail. It soon became a best seller.

  Barnum was perhaps the first modern master of pseudo-events, of contrived occurrences which lent themselves to being widely and vividly reported. When his winter circus quarters burned, he managed to pyramid the news by announcing that insurance had covered only a fraction of the losses. When newspapers disputed him, he remained unconcerned, finding that the insurance controversy itself was a fruitful source of additional publicity. When Jumbo, the African elephant, was killed in a railroad accident, Barnum put out the story that Jumbo died sacrificing himself to save a baby elephant; he then imported “Alice,” whom he billed as Jumbo’s widow, posing her next to the stuffed body of her deceased “husband.” Barnum was a doubly appropriate symbol of the opening of the era of the Graphic Revolution: by making colossal pseudo-events, he himself became a celebrity.

  A talent for advertising and a talent for making news have ever since been connected. Albert D. Lasker, an advertising master of the twentieth century, once characterized all good advertising as news.

  Advertising, however, contained an ingredient not generally found in the other pseudo-events which were mere “made news.” For while any pseudo-event—an interview, for example—was a happening incited into existence for the purpose of being reported, an advertisement was designed to suggest not merely that something had happened, but also that something was good. An advertisement usually conjured up an image in order to persuade people that something was worth buying. It combined a pseudo-event with a pseudo-ideal. The pseudo-event must be vividly newsworthy, the pseudo-ideal must be vividly desirable.

  Much of the appeal of advertising has actually consisted in its effort, which we all appreciate, to satisfy our extravagant expectations. The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our “deceivers” than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced. The Graphic Revolution has produced new categories of experience. They are no longer simply classifiable by the old common sense tests of true or false.

  IV

  OUR FRENETIC earnestness to attack advertising, our fear of advertising, and our inability to fit advertising into old-time familiar cubbyholes of our experience—all these prevent us from seeing its all-encompassing significance as a touchstone of our changing concept of knowledge and of reality. Our attitude toward advertising is comparable to the eighteenth-century English and American attitude toward insanity and mental disorders. Unable to understand the insane, the sane, respectable people of London saw in them something wicked and diabolical, put them in chains, confined them in Bedlam, punished them with whips. Madmen ceased to be treated as half witch, half criminal only in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century when physicians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts helped us see that “madmen” suffered from mental diseases. The great forward steps in public understanding came only when people began to realize that the disorders of the “insane” and the perverted—hysteria, paranoia, schizophrenia, homosexuality, etc.—were only extreme examples of tendencies in each of us “normal” people. The understanding of “insanity” in this way has gradually led each of us to a better understanding of himself.

  Similarly with advertising. Baffled and suspicious, we deride the “witch doctors” of Madison Avenue. It is they, we say, who want to involve us in the figments of their disordered imaginations. They lie to us; they persuade us against our will. Accusing them, we fail to see what their activities can teach us about ourselves. Since the Graphic Revolution, the multiplication of images has had a revolutionary effect on all our imaginations, on our concept of verisimilitude, on what passes for truth in common experience.

  This can be summed up as the shift in common experience from an emphasis on “truth” to an emphasis on “credibility.” All of us—not merely the supposed witch doctors of Madison Avenue, but all American citizen-consumers—are daily less interested in whether something is a fact than in whether it is convenient that it should be believed. Today the master of truth is not the master of facts but the practitioner of the arts of self-fulfilling prophecy. What seems important is not truth but verisimilitude. In this new world, where almost anything can be true, the socially rewarded art is that of making things seem true. It is the art not of discovery, but of invention. Finding a fact is easy; making a fact “believed” is slightly more difficult. The greatest effort goes into the realization not of dreams, but of illusions. God makes our dreams come true. Skillful advertising men bring
us our illusions, then make them seem true.

  The whole American tradition of pragmatism—from Benjamin Franklin, who insisted that it was less important whether any religious belief was true than whether the consequences of the belief were wholesome, down to William James, who explored the consequences of the “Will to Believe” and focused interest on how whatever people believed or wanted to believe overshadowed whatever might be out there in the “real” world—this tradition has expressed a consuming interest in the appearances of things.

  One explanation of increasing American interest in credibility is a simple paradox of the Graphic Revolution. While that Revolution has multiplied and vivified our images of the world, it has by no means generally sharpened or clarified the visible outlines of the world which fill our experience. Quite the contrary. By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs. By sharpening our images we have blurred all our experience. The new images have blurred traditional distinctions.

  The broadest of the old distinctions which no longer serve us as they did is the distinction between “true” and “false.” Well-meaning critics (including many in the advertising profession) who say the essential problem is false advertising are firing volleys at an obsolete target. Few advertisers are liars. A strong advertising profession has its own earnest ethic. Lies are not so readily diffused through newspapers and magazines, over radio and television. They are not so eagerly believed. The “evils” of advertising could be easily enough reduced if they came only from lies. The deeper problem is quite different. In some ways it is quite opposite. Advertising befuddles our experience, not because advertisers are liars, but precisely because they are not. Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths. The whole apparatus of the Graphic Revolution has put a new elusiveness, iridescence, and ambiguity into everyday truth in twentieth-century America.

  The so-called “Baltimore Truth Declaration,” which was adopted at an early convention of advertising men in 1913, committed them to “Truth in Advertising.” This later became the slogan of the Advertising Federation of America and its local affiliates. Advertisers were welcomed to that historic convention by the word TRUTH displayed in the largest electric sign yet erected in Baltimore. On the whole, the advertising profession has since then followed its credo with a dangerously literal persistence. The advertising profession was founded on “Truth,” but it has survived by its power to give Truth a new meaning.

  Several novel appeals have come to characterize the most successful advertising statements. All are both effects and causes of our exaggerated expectations: products and by-products of image-thinking. These first developed in advertising, but have spread out to all our experience. As nature now imitates art, as the geysers in Yellowstone now provide us tourist attractions, more and more of our experience nowadays imitates advertising. The pseudo-event, or that which looks like a pseudo-event, seldom fails to dominate.

  (1) The appeal of the neither-true-nor-false. The larger proportion of advertising statements subsist in this new limbo. They cannot be parsed in the old grammar of epistemology because modern experience is newly ambiguous. The complexity of new manufacturing processes, the new vagueness that can be designed into vivid images, the new uncertainty of relation between the image and the thing imaged (Is it an actual photograph?)—all these make the simple question, “Is it true?” as obsolete as the horse and buggy. Here, too, the once-simple notion of an “original” has acquired a tantalizing ambiguity bordering on meaninglessness.

  The advertiser’s art then consists largely of the art of making persuasive statements which are neither true nor false. He does not violate the old truth-morality. Rather, like the news maker, he evades it. It is not only advertising which has become a tissue of contrivance and illusion. Rather, it is the whole world. The ambiguities and illusions of advertising are only symptoms. Advertising events are no less or more unreal than all other pseudo-events. A few commonplace examples will suffice.

  One of the most familiar is the use of the open comparative adjective—“the better beer”—without specifying that with which it is being compared. This can hardly fail to be true of every beer which is not the worst in the world.

  When Claude C. Hopkins, one of the pioneers of American advertising, took on the Schlitz Beer account some years ago, he prepared himself by learning all he could about brewing. On his tour through the Schlitz brewery Hopkins noticed that bottles were purified by live steam before being filled. This caught his fancy. He developed an advertising program around the notion that Schlitz beer was pure because the bottles were steam-sterilized. Schlitz quickly rose from fifth place in national sales to near first place. What he said was, of course, gospel truth. Consumers simply did not know enough about beer making to realize that the beer of every respectable brand was bottled in this way. The use of live steam by Schlitz became a more vivid fact than its use by any of the competitors. Hopkins had concocted the pseudo-event he was looking for. He had made news. This pseudo-event was then given a nationally advertised dignity making it predominate over the same prosaic fact which was equally “true” about all reputable beers. Competitors dared not match the boast for fear they might seem to be imitating Schlitz. Schlitz continued to sell as the beer in sterilized bottles. This was a “fact” if there ever was one. Yet by being touted as a pseudo-event it became only a quasi-truth. This itself made it overshadow the simple facts.

  Lucky Strike cigarettes sold well by pre-empting the slogan “It’s Toasted.” They were toasted! So was every other American cigarette. Soon the sales of Lucky Strike reached nearly six billion cigarettes a year.

  The growing field of packaged foods, drugs, and cosmetics is a world of just such quasi-information. Toothpastes are “ammoniated.” Hair tonics contain “lanolin”—one even contains “cholesterol, the heart of lanolin.” Of course they really do contain what they say. Advertisers are so honest they will even concoct a chemical in order to be able truthfully to advertise it.

  Statements are given a peculiar, specious kind of truth—and an overshadowing vividness—in the process of being made into pseudo-events. What is called for in these advertising situations is less a verifiable fact than a credible statement. The credibility cannot exist without the “truth”; the seduction cannot exist without the “falsehood.” As pseudo-events, of course, they are all quite reputable.

  (2) The appeal of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The Graphic Revolution has given advertisers—like news makers, celebrity makers, tour agents, movie directors, do-it-yourself photographers, and each of us in a thousand new ways—an unprecedented power to make things “true.” Much of our befuddlement, I have suggested, comes from the fact that advertisers insist on offering only statements that are “true.” They go to the most devious lengths, employing the most ingenious devices, to procure a persuasive credibility which passes for truth in our everyday life. The successful advertiser is the master of a new art: the art of making things true by saying they are so. He is a devotee of the technique of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

  An elementary example is testimonial-endorsement advertising, which has been elaborated in this century. Even at common law, statements employed to promote sale were called “puffs” and were allowed wide latitude. A puff, even if not literally true, was not necessarily legally actionable. Much of the ingenuity of modern advertising derives from the refusal to accept this traditional latitude; and the effort, instead, to force other facts into being in order to make an improbable fact seem true.

  So straightforward a statement as one that someone approves or uses a product has become one of the most interesting of pseudo-events. From a most simple declaration of fact, it has become a formula of compounding ambiguity. What could have been a more unambiguous statement, once upon a time, than to say about any product that a particular person, say Mr. J. Edgar Hoover
, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, used it? Nowadays the commercial value of such statements, plus the insistence of reputable advertising agencies on being truthful, has loaded just such simple declaratory sentences with all kinds of innuendo. We can read about this in William M. Freeman’s Big Name (1957), a practical handbook on how to secure credible testimonials and how to use them in advertising. Endorsements have become a specialized and profitable enterprise. Dealers in big names have made them big business.

  According to Jules Alberti, president of Endorsements, Inc., a firm specializing in bringing together advertiser and endorser, the endorsement business has prospered. Between 1945 and 1957, he observed:

  Approximately 8,000 celebrities have been used in all combined media, including television, for approximately 4,500 separate products. They have covered apparel, household appliances, cosmetics, beverages, food, tobacco, jewelry, autos, etc. This was through approximately 1,400 agencies. The combined cost of media space and time in twelve years runs well over $700,000,000. The combined fees paid to celebrities were probably about 1 per cent of this amount.

  Rarely does anyone become a celebrity solely by selling his name or his picture for endorsements. But even this phenomenon (no paradox in the world of celebrities, where a celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness) occasionally does occur: for example, the Hathaway Shirt man with the patch on his eye; the bearded Commander Whitehead, Schweppes tonic endorser; the attractive “Fire and Ice” model for Revlon nail polish and lipstick; and Miss Rheingold. The endorsement business usually deals in personalities who have already become celebrities in some way (namely, movie stars, sports figures, and beauty queens).