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The
Rhetoric of Democracy
(from "About
Language” by William H. Roberts )
Daniel
J.Boorstin
We’ve all heard the cliché "as American as
apple pie and motherhood.” A more accurate short list of things
quintessentially American would include advertising. As Daniel J. Boorstin
explains in this chapter from his book Democracy and Its Discontents,
advertising is at the heart of our culture, a phenomenon uniquely American.
With notable clarity, Boorstin analyzes the historical reasons for this
phenomenon, the qualities of our advertising, and the implications of these
qualities. Boorstin is well qualified to speak on the American character. One
of our country’s best-respected historians, he has written more than fifteen
books on U.S. history and has served as senior historian of the Smithsonian
Institution and as director of the Library of Congress.
▀ JOURNAL PROMPT Write about the effects
of advertisements on you as a consumer. What qualities do most advertisements
have in common? Do advertisements always emphasize persuasion at the expense of
knowledge, as Boorstin suggests?
1.
Advertising, of course, has been part of the mainstream of American
civilization, although you might not know it if you read the most respectable
surveys of American history. It has been one of the enticements to the
settlement of this New World, it has been a producer of the peopling of the United States,
and in its modern form, in its world-wide reach, it has been one of our most
characteristic products.
2. Never was
there a more outrageous or more unscrupulous or more ill-informed advertising
campaign than that by which the promoters for the American colonies brought
settlers here. Brochures published in English in the seventeenth century, some
even earlier, were full of hopeful overstatements, half-truths, and downright
lies, along with some facts which nowadays surely would be the basis for a
restraining order from the Federal Trade Commission. Gold and Silver, fountains
of youth, plenty of fish, venison without limit, all these were promised, and
of course some of them were found. It would be interesting to speculate on how
long it might have taken to settle this continent if there had not been such
promotion by enterprising advertisers. How has American civilization been
shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those
people who were willing to believe advertising?
3.
Advertising has taken the lead in promising and exploiting the new. This was a
new world, and one of the advertisement for it appears on the dollar bill on
the Great Seal of the United States, which reads novus ordo seclorum, one of the most effective advertising slogan
to come out of this country. "A new order of the centuries” – belief in novelty
and in the desirability of opening novelty to everybody has been important in
our lives throughout our history and especially in this century. Again and
again advertising has been an agency for inducing Americans to try anything and
everything – from the continent itself to a new brand of soap. As one of the
more literate and poetic of the advertising copywriters, James Kenneth Frazier,
a Cornell graduate, wrote in 1900
in "The Doctor’s Lament”:
This lean
M.D. is Dr. Brown
Who fares
but ill in Spotless
Town.
The town is
so confounded clean,
It is no
wonder he is lean,
He’s lost
all patients now, you know,
Because
they use Sapolio.
4. The same
literary talent that once was used to retail Sapolio was later used to induce
people to try the Edsel or the Mustang, to experiment with Lifebuoy or
Body-All, to drink Pepsi-Cola or Royal Crown Cola, or to shave with a Trac II
razor.
5. And as
expansion and novelty have become essential to our economy, advertising has
played an ever-larger role: in the settling of the continent, in the expansion
of the economy, and in the building of an American standard of living.
Advertising has expressed the optimism, the hyperbole, and the sense of
community, the sense of reaching which has been so important a feature of our
civilization.
6. Here I
wish to explore the significance of advertising, not as a force in the economy
or in shaping an American standard of living, but rather as a touchstone of the
ways in which we Americans have learned about all sorts of things.
7. The
problems of advertising are of course not peculiar to advertising, for they are
just one aspect of the problems of democracy. They reflect the rise of what I
have called Consumption Communities and Statistical Communities, and many of
the special problems of advertising have arisen from our continuously energetic
effort to give everybody everything.
8. If we consider democracy not just as a political
system, but as a set of institutions which do aim to make everything available
to everybody, it would not be an overstatement to describe advertising as the
characteristic rhetoric of democracy. One of the tendencies of democracy, which
Plato and other antidemocrats warned against a long time ago, was the danger
that rhetoric would displace or at least overshadow epistemology; that is, the temptation to allow the problem of
persuasion to overshadow the problem of knowledge. Democratic societies
tend to become more concerned with what people believe than with what is true,
to become more concerned with credibility than with truth. All these problems
become accentuated in a large-scale democracy like ours, which possesses all
apparatus of modern industry. And the problems are accentuated still further by
universal literacy, by instantaneous communication, and by the daily plague of
words and images.
9. In the early days it was common for
advertising men to define advertisements as a kind of news. The best admen,
like the best journalists, were supposed to be those who were able to make
their news the most interesting and readable. This was natural enough, since
the verb to "advertise” originally meant, intransitively, to take note or to
consider. For a person to "advertise” meant originally, in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, to reflect on something, to think about something. Then it
came to mean, transitively, to call the attention of another to something, to
give him notice, to notify, admonish, warn or inform in a formal or impressive
manner. And then, by the sixteenth century, it came to mean: to give notice of
anything, to make generally known. It was not until the late eighteenth century
that the word "advertising” in English came to have a specifically
"advertising” connotation as we might say today, and not until the late
nineteenth century that it began to have a specifically commercial connotation.
By 1879 someone was saying, "Don’t advertise unless you have something worth
advertising.” But even into the present century, newspapers continued to call
themselves by the title "Advertiser” – for example, the Boston Daily Advertiser, which was a newspaper
of long tradition and one of the most dignified papers in Boston until William
Randolph Hearst took it over in 1917. Newspapers carried "Advertiser” on their
mastheads, not because they sold advertisements but because they brought news.
10. Now,
the main role of advertising in American civilization came increasingly to be
that of persuading and appealing rather than that of educating and informing.
By 1921, for instance, one of the more popular textbooks, Blanchard’s
Essentials of Advertising, began: "Anything employed to influence people
favorably is advertising. The mission of advertising is to persuade men and
women to act in a way that will be of advantage to the advertiser.” This
development – in a country where a shared, a rising, and a democratized
standard of living was the national pride and the national hallmark – meant
that advertising had become the rhetoric of democracy.
11. What, then,
were some of the main features of modern American advertising – if we consider
it as a form of rhetoric? First, and perhaps most obvious is repetition. It is hard for us to realize
that the use of repetition in advertising is not an ancient device but a modern
one, which actually did not come into common use in American journalism until
just past the middle of the nineteenth century.
12. The
development of what came to be called "iteration copy” was a result of a
struggle by a courageous man of letters and advertising pioneer, Robert Bonner,
who bought the old New York
Merchant’s Ledger in 1851 and turned
it into a popular journal. He then had the temerity to try to change the ways
of James Gordon Bennett, who of course was one of the most successful of the
American newspaper pioneers, and who was both a sensationalist and at the same
time an extremely stuffy man when it came to things that he did not consider to
be news. Bonner was determined to use advertisements in Bennett’s
wide-circulating New York
Herald to sell his own literary
product, but he found it difficult to persuade Bennett to allow him to use any
but agate type in his advertising. (Agate was the smallest type used by
newspapers in that day, only barely legible to the naked eye.) Bennett would
not allow advertisers to use large type, nor would he allow them to use
illustrations except stock cuts, because he thought it was undignified. He
said, too, that to allow a variation in the format of ads would be
undemocratic. He insisted that all advertisers use the same size type so that
no one would be allowed to prevail over another simply by presenting his
message in a larger, more clever, or more attention-getting form.
13. Finally
Bonner managed to overcome Bennett’s rigidity by leasing whole pages of the
paper and using the tiny agate type to form larger letters across the top of
the page. In this way he produced a message such as "Bring home the New York
Ledger tonight.” His were unimaginative messages, and when repeated all across
the page they technically did not violate Bennett’s agate rule. But they opened
a new era and presaged a new freedom for advertisers in their use of the
newspaper page. Iteration copy – the practice of presenting prosaic content in
ingenious, repetitive form – became common, and nowadays of course is
commonplace.
14. A second characteristic of American
advertising which is not unrelated to this is the development of an advertising style. We have histories of most other kinds of style – including
the style of many unread writers who are
remembered today only because they have been forgotten – but we have very few
accounts of the history of advertising style, which of course is one of the
most important forms of our language and one of the most widely influential.
15. The development
of advertising style was the convergence of several very respectable American
traditions. One of these was the tradition of the "plain style,” which the
Puritans made so much of and which accounts for so much of the strength of the
Puritan literature. The "plain style” was of course much influenced by the
Bible and found its way into the rhetoric of American writers and speakers of
great power like Abraham Lincoln. When advertising began to be self-conscious
in the early years of this century, the pioneers urged copywriters not to be
too clever, and especially not to be fancy. One of the pioneers of the
advertising copywriters, John Powers, said, for example, "The commonplace is
the proper level for writing in business; where the first virtue is plainness,
‘fine writing’ is not only intellectual, it is offensive.” George P. Rowell,
another advertising pioneer, said, "You must write your advertisement to catch
damned fools – not college professors.” He was a very tactful person. And he
added, "And you’ll catch just as many college professors as you will of any
other sort.” In the 1920’s, when advertising was beginning to come into its
own, Claude Hopkins, whose name is known to all in the trade, said, "Brilliant
writing has no place in advertising. A unique style takes attention from the
subject. Any apparent effort to sell creates corresponding resistance… One
should be natural and simple. His language should not be conspicuous. In
fishing for buyers, as in fishing for bass, one should not reveal the hook.” So
there developed a characteristic advertising style in which plainness, the
phrase that anyone could understand, was a distinguishing mark.
16. At the
same time, the American advertising style drew on another, and what might seem
an antithetic, tradition – the tradition of hyperbole in tall talk, the
language of Davy Crockett and Mike Fink. While advertising could think of
itself as 99.44 percent pure, it used the language of "Toronado” and "Cutlass”.
As I listen to the radio in Washington, I hear
a celebration of heroic qualities which would make the characteristics of Mike
Fink and Davy Crockett pale, only to discover at the end of the paean that what
I have been hearing is a description of the Ford dealers in the District of Columbia
neighborhood. And along with the folk tradition of hyperbole and talk comes the
rhythm of folk music. We hear that Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, that it’s for the
young generation – and we hear other products celebrated in music which we
cannot forget and sometimes don’t want to remember.
17. There
grew somehow out of all these contradictory tendencies – combining the
commonsense language of the "plain style,” and the fantasy language of "tall
talk” – an advertising style. This characteristic way of talking about things
was especially designed to reach and catch the millions. It created a whole new
world of myth. A myth, the dictionary tells us, is a notion based more on
tradition or convenience than on facts; it is a received idea. Myth is not just
fantasy and not just fact but exists in a limbo, in the world of the "Will to
Believe,” which William James has written about so eloquently and so
perceptively. This is the world of the neither true nor false – of the statement
that 60 percent of the physicians who expressed a choice said that our brand of
aspirin would be more effective in curing a simple headache than any other
leading brand.
18. That
kind of statement exists in a penumbra. I would call this the "advertising
penumbra.” It is not untrue, and yet, in its connotation it is not exactly
true.
19. Now,
there is still another characteristic of advertising so obvious that we are
inclined perhaps to overlook it. I call that ubiquity. Advertising abhors a
vacuum and we discover new vacuums every day. The parable, of course, is the
story of the man who thought of putting the advertisement on the other side of
the cigarette package. Until then, that was wasted space and a society which
aims at a democratic standard of living, at extending the benefits of
consumption and all sorts of things and services to everybody, must miss no
chance to reach people. The highway billboard and other outdoor advertising,
but and streetcar and subway advertising, and skywriting, radio and TV
commercials – all these are of course obvious evidence that advertising abhors
a vacuum.
20. We
might reverse the old mousetrap slogan and say that anyone who can devise
another place to put another mousetrap to catch a consumer will find people
beating a path to his door. "Avoiding advertising will become a little harder
next January,” the Wall Street Journal
reported on May 17, 1973, "when a Studio City, California, company launches a
venture called Store Vision. Its product is a system of billboards that move on
a track across supermarket ceilings. Some 650 supermarkets so far are set to
have the system.” All of which helps us understand the observation attributed
to a French man of letters during his recent visit to Times
Square. "What a beautiful place, if only one could not read!”
Everywhere is a place to be filled, as we discover in a recent Publishers Weekly description of one advertising program: "The $1.95 paperback
education of Dr.Thomas A. Harris’ million-copy best seller ‘I’m O.K., You’re
O.K.’ is in for full-scale promotion in July by its publisher, Avon Books.
Plans range from bumper stickers to airplane streamers, from planes flying
above Fire Island, the Hamptons and Malibu. In addition, the
$100,000 promotion budget calls for 200,000 bookmarks, plus brochures, buttons,
lipcards, floor and counter displays, and advertising in magazines and TV.”
21. The
ubiquity of advertising is of course just another effect of our uninhibited
efforts to use all the media to get all sorts of information to everybody
everywhere. Since the places to be filled are everywhere, the amount of
advertising is not determined by the needs
of advertising, but by the opportunities
for advertising which become unlimited.
22. But the
most effective advertising, in an energetic, novelty-ridden society like ours,
tends to be "self-liquidating.” To create a cliché you must offer something
which everybody accepts. The most successful advertising therefore
self-destructs because it becomes cliché. Examples of this are found in the
tendency for copy-righted names of trademarks to enter the vernacular – for the
proper names of products which have been made familiar by costly advertising to
become common nouns, and so to apply to anybody’s products. Kodak becomes a
synonym for camera. Kleenex a synonym for facial tissue, when both begin with a
small k, and Xerox (now, too, with a
small x) is used to describe all
processes of copying, and so on. These are prototypes of the problem. If you
are successful enough, then you will defeat your purpose in the long run – by
making the name and the message so familiar that people won’t notice them, and
then people will cease to distinguish your product from everybody else’s.
23. In a sense, of course, as well see,
the whole of American civilization is an example. When this was a "new” world,
if people succeeded in building a civilization here, the New
World would survive and would reach the time – in our age – when
it would cease to be new. And now we have the oldest written Constitution in
use in the world. This is only a parable of which there are many more examples.
24. The
advertising man who is successful in marketing any particular product, then –
in our high-technology, well-to-do democratic society, which aims to get
everything to everybody – is apt to be diluting the demand for his particular
product in the very act of satisfying it. But luckily for him, he is at the
very same time creating a fresh demand for his services as advertiser.
25. And as consequence,
there is yet another role which is assigned to American advertising. This is
what I call "erasure”. Insofar as advertising is competitive or innovation is
widespread, erasure is required in order to persuade consumers that this year’s
model is superior to last year’s. In fact, we consumers learn that we might be
risking our lives if we go out the highway with those very devices that were
last year’s lifesavers but without whatever special kind of brakes or wipers or
seat belt is on this year’s model. This is what I mean by "erasure” – and we
see it on our advertising pages or our television screen every day. We read in
the New York Times (May 20,
1973), for example, that "For the price of something small and ugly, you can
drive something small and beautiful” – an advertisement for the Fiat 250
Spider. Or another, perhaps more subtle example is the advertisement for shirts
under a picture of Oliver Drab: "Oliver Drab. A name to remember in fine
designer shirt? No kidding. … Because you pay extra money for Oliver Drab. And
for all the other superstars of the fashion world. Golden Vee [the name of the
brand that is advertised] does not have a designer’s label. But we do have
designers… By keeping their names off
our label and simply saying Golden Vee, we can afford to sell our $7 to $12
shirts for just $7 to $12, which should make Golden Vee a name to remember.
Golden Vee, you only pay for the shirt.”
26. Having mentioned
two special characteristics – the self-liquidating tendency and the need for
erasure – which arise from the dynamism of the American economy, I would like
to try to place advertising in a larger perspective. The special role of
advertising in our life gives a clue to a pervasive oddity in American
civilization. A leading feature of past cultures, as anthropologists have
explained, is the tendency to distinguish between "high” culture and "low”
culture – between the culture of the literate and the learned on the one hand
and that of the populace on the other. In other words, between the language of
literature and the language of the vernacular. Some of the most useful
statements of this distinction have been made by social scientists at the
University of Chicago – first by the late Robert Redfield in his several
pioneering books on peasant society, and then by Milton Singer in his
remarkable study of Indian civilization, When
a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972). This distinction between the great
tradition and the little tradition, between the high culture and the folk
culture, has begun to become a commonplace of modern anthropology.
27. Some of
the obvious features of advertising in modern American offer us an opportunity
to note the significance or insignificance of that distinction for us.
Elsewhere I have tried to point out some of the peculiarities of the American
attitude toward the high culture.
There is something distinctive about the place of thought in American life,
which I think is not quite what it has been in certain Old
World cultures.
28. But
what about distinctive American attitudes to popular culture? What is our analogue to the folk culture of other
peoples? Advertising gives us some clues – to a characteristically American
democratic folk culture. Fork culture is a name for the culture which ordinary
people everywhere lean on. It is not the writings of Dante and Chaucer and
Shakespeare and Milton, the teachings of Machiavelli and Descartes, Locke or
Marx. It is, rather, the pattern of slogans, local traditions, tales, songs,
dances, and ditties. And of course holiday observances. Popular culture in other
civilizations has been for the most part both an area of continuity with the
past, a way in which people reach back into the past and out to their
community, and at the same time an area of local variations. An are of
individual and amateur expression in which a person has his own way of saying,
or notes his mother’s way of saying or singing, or his own way of dancing, his
own view of folk wisdom and the cliché.
29. And here
is an interesting point of contrast. In other societies outside the United States,
it is the high culture that has
generally been an area of centralized, organized control. In West
Europe, for example, universities and churches have tended to be
closely allied to the government. The institutions of higher learning have had
a relatively limited access to the people as a whole. This was inevitable, of
course, in most parts of the world, because there were so few universities. In England, for
example, there were only two universities until the early nineteenth century.
And there was central control over the printed matter that used in universities
or in the liturgy. The government tended to be close to the high culture, and
that was easy because the high culture itself was so centralized and because
literacy was relatively limited.
30. In our society, however, we seem to
have turned all of this around. Our high culture is one of the least
centralized areas of our culture. And our universities express the atomistic,
diffused, chaotic, and individualistic aspect of our life. We have in this
country more than twenty-five hundred colleges and universities, institutions
of so-called higher learning. We have a vast population in these institutions,
somewhere over seven million students.
31. But
when we turn to our popular culture, what do we find? We find that in our
nation of Consumption Communities and emphasis on Gross National Product (GNP)
and growth rates, advertising has become the heart of the folk culture and even
its very prototype. And as we have seen, American advertising shows many
characteristics of the folk culture of other societies: repetition, a plain
style, hyperbole and tall talk, folk verse, and folk music. Folk culture,
wherever it has flourished, has tended to thrive in a limbo between fact and
fantasy, and of course, depending on the spoken word and the oral tradition, it
spreads easily and tends to be ubiquitous. These are all familiar
characteristics of folk culture and they are ways of describing our folk
culture, but how do the expressions of our peculiar folk culture come to us?
32. They no
longer sprout from the earth, from the village, from the farm, or even from the
neighborhood or the city. They come to us primarily from enormous centralized
self-consciously creative (an
overused word, for the overuse of which advertising agencies are in no small
part responsible) organizations. They come from advertising agencies, from
networks of newspapers, radio, and television, from outdoor-advertising
agencies, from the copywriters for ads in the largest-circulation magazines,
and so on. These "creators” of folk culture – or pseudo-folk culture – aim at
the widest intelligibility and charm and appeal.
33. But in
the United States,
we must recall, the advertising folk culture (like all advertising) is also
confronted with the problems of self-liquidation and erasure. These are
by-products of the expansive, energetic character of our economy. And they,
too, distinguish American folk culture from folk cultures elsewhere.
34. Our
folk culture is distinguished from others by being discontinuous, ephemeral,
and self-destructive. Where does this leave the common citizen? All of us are
qualified to answer.
35. In our society, then, those who cannot
lean on the world of learning, on the high culture of the classics, on the
elaborated wisdom of the books, have a new problem. The University of Chicago,
for example, in the 1930’s and 1940’s was the center of a quest for a "common
discourse.” The champions of that quest, which became a kind of crusade,
believed that such a discourse could be found through familiarity with the
classics of great literature – and especially of Western European literature. I
think they were misled; such works were not, nor are they apt to become, the
common discourse of our society. Most people, even in a democracy, and a rich
democracy like ours, live in a world of popular culture, our special kind of
popular culture.
36. The
characteristic folk culture of our society is a creature of advertising, and in
a sense it is advertising. But advertising,
our own popular culture, is harder to make into a source of continuity than the
received wisdom and common sense slogans and catchy songs of the vivid
vernacular. The popular culture of advertising attenuates and is always
dissolving before our very eyes. Among the charms, challenges, and tribulations
of modern life, we must count this peculiar fluidity, this ephemeral character
of that very kind of culture on which other peoples have been able to lean, the
kind of culture to which they have looked for the continuity of their
traditions, for their ties with the past and with the future.
37. We are
perhaps the first people in history to have a centrally organized mass-produced
folk culture. Our kind of popular culture is here today and gone tomorrow – or
the day after tomorrow. Or whenever the next semiannual model appears. And
insofar as folk culture becomes advertising, and advertising becomes
centralized, it becomes a way of depriving people of their opportunities for
individual and small-community expression. Our technology and our economy and
our democratic ideals have all helped make that possible. Here we have a new
test of the problem that is at least as old as Heraclitus – an everyday test of
man’s ability to find continuity in his experience. And here democratic man has
a new opportunity to accommodate himself, if he can, to the unknown.
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