Henthorn's look back can help us look ahead
By Greg Strid
From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939–1959 | By Cynthia Lee Henthorn
In From Submarines to Suburbs, Cynthia Henthorn delivers a thorough examination of the visual and rhetorical messages that large commercial enterprises fed the American public in the twenty-year period encompassing the preparation and conflict phases of World War II and the transition to the Cold War era. From Submarines to Suburbs offers not only a history of the use of print media advertising from the early stages of World War II to the postwar rise of the military-industrial complex, it also details the ideological battle that existed between proponents of the free market and liberal reformers, a conflict which is still with us today. Filled with illustrations and examples of the connection between advertising rhetoric and the road to a permanent militarization of America, this work sheds unique and critical light on the present, as America finds itself knee-deep in another war without end. The message that we are spreading American values of democracy—cleansing the world of liberty’s (and the free market's) opponents— is trumpeted through every available media, both old and new.
Henthorn’s narrative begins with the marketing efforts originally designed to revitalize corporate America’s image and instill the virtues of the free market, and ends with the country’s acceptance of external conflict as beneficial to the proper evolution of a democratic society. Following the stock market crash of 1929, big business suffered from an extremely poor image resulting from the stagnant economic conditions that rippled across America in the crash’s aftermath. The Great Depression was largely seen as resulting from the failure of big business and enduring as a consequence of avoiding corporate responsibilities. Meanwhile, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) greatly expanded the role of the federal government in the economy in order to increase consumer spending power and thus consumer demand. Compared to FDR, the private sector seemed incompetent and unconcerned with the welfare of the average American. The effort to mobilize the economy for war production would increase government spending and institute its control over many industries. This was corporate America’s worst fear—the further expansion of 1. government regulation and 2. the public’s expectation that government would solve social and economic problems better than corporate authority and the free market.
Once the war began, in a very short period of time the American economy was transformed from a land littered with shuttered factories into the “Arsenal of Democracy,” an industrial super hero responsible for victory in a conflict that engulfed the entire globe. Henthorn points out that there were two main advertising themes produced during the war: one focused on mobilization and the other on the postwar reconversion to a peacetime economy. Through advertising messages geared to mobilize the public for war, businesses lifted brand names to the front of the public’s sensibility. Although the national goal was to boost patriotism in order to focus the nation’s resources on winning the war, the business community often took advantage of the opportunity to restore public faith in the corporate hierarchy and take the credit as the real hero in the war effort. As an example, Henthorn depicts a 1943 aluminum advertisement depicting a giant fist crumpling a sheet of aluminum foil out of which fly bombers and fighter planes. The message is quite clear: the company’s management, represented by the over-sized, male fist, had transformed a mundane consumer product responsible for protecting food into an indispensable weapon for winning the war. Through images such as these, corporate management teams forged a public record of their contributions to victory and sought to give customers reasons to care about their brands throughout the conflict.
Henthorn’s detailed history of marketing campaigns throughout this pivotal time shows how the business of defense became an integral part of the public’s view of American prosperity. Due to the commercial propaganda efforts of businesses and private sector institutions, like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the War Advertising Counsel (WAC), victory on the battlefield was characterized as a product of business’ technical, and more importantly, managerial prowess. The magnificent weapons of war were made possible by a free market economy with corporate management at its helm. Such technological wonders were hailed as the key to victory on the battlefield and the ingredient for postwar prosperity. Through wartime industry, corporate management would produce a higher standard of living and catapult many average working-class Americans into a supposedly more hygienic way of being: the middle class. Henthorn points out that this effort to “sanitize” war by highlighting the industrial prowess and efficiency of corporate America created a society geared toward perpetual conflict.
Wartime advertising that focused on the country’s reconversion to peace not only associated consumer brands with winning the war, but also promised a magnificent “world of tomorrow” that would logically stem from the technological advances achieved during their heroic war effort. Such advertisements portrayed the war as a proving ground for consumer miracle products that would enrich the lives of ordinary Americans. Henthorn explains that “war, as a fuel for progress, was promoted as a guarantee for social evolution once victory was achieved.” In fact, the book’s title: From Submarines to Suburbs is an actual advertisement from the era. The visual imagery of this rubber ad and others in the book implied that the war served as a trial run for the new products that would provide for a better tomorrow.
An example of the business-oriented concept of American democracy can be seen in corporate-sponsored advertisements for war bonds. In a war against fascism, democracy was associated with consumerism. Henthorn offers several examples of advertisements tying war bonds—investments in victory—to a cleaner, leisure-filled post-war life. Such images blended visions of a blissful domestic future into advertising for the purchase of war bonds. They equated democracy and freedom (noble causes worthy of sacrifice) with a perfect postwar world overflowing with consumer goods and an elevated, yet affordable, standard of living, compliments of the business community. As a happy wartime homemaker in a 1942 kitchen ad exclaimed, “Buy War Bonds Today—Electric Kitchens Tomorrow. . . Every dollar I spend for War Bonds gives me a great big thrill of satisfaction! I figure I’m not only helping win the war but hastening the day when I’ll be able to own the kitchen I’ve always dreamed about.”
War bond advertising emphasized how fighting the war and prospering from it was an egalitarian prerequisite and fundamental to American democracy. Thus messages about consumers’ investments in victory suggested that the war’s creation of postwar prosperity would be available for all Americans of every class, race, and ethnic background. Despite the growing business fixation with black purchasing power at the time, the reality was that a better America would be available first to those whose skin color matched that of the sallow picket fences depicted in mainstream ads. As Henthorn states, “advertising in women’s and general-circulation magazines did not picture African Americans enjoying the forecast hygienic revolution—even though such progress was ostensibly democratized for all consumers.” Henthorn explores the ways such disparities, ignored by the white mainstream media, were exposed by African Americans in the black press.
Henthorn’s research reveals how African Americans took strategic advantage of the paradoxical equation between the fight for democracy and egalitarian access to a middle-class standard of living. Columnists and activists writing in the black press, she shows, “were focused on the collective goal of equality achieved through economic emancipation.” African Americans thus leveraged the free market brand of democracy as a way to access the right to full American citizenship.
Henthorn’s extensive research uncovered a NAM positioning paper from 1943 describing the war as an opportunity to repair business’ badly tarnished reputation by exploiting the image of business serving the national defense through its mastery of mass production. In response to the need perceived for NAM advertising campaigns to convince consumers that the future would be better if free enterprise dominated economic activity as opposed to the heavy hand of FDR’s New Deal administration, the NAM developed a wartime campaign to educate and mobilize the business community against the New Deal, and then created the marketing tools necessary to breed public acceptance of an economy ruled by corporate management. Henthorn reveals that this plan was implemented by the NAM’s public relations arm, the National Industrial Information Committee (NIIC), which offered guidelines to other businesses for gaining public acceptance of the corporate concept of American democracy. The goodwill generated by educating the public on corporate America’s sacrifices during the war was used as a foundation on which to construct and sell the acceptance of corporate rule over economic matters.
As suburbs began covering the landscape in the aftermath of this global conflagration, a new threat gathered in the form of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Similarly to the World War II era, America’s attention and resources were directed toward a new military and cultural challenge. However, the Cold War differed from the World War II-era in that the front lines reached the front lawns of the American middle class. Civil defense agencies trained the public to prepare for the worst. In this battle of ideologies, no one was safe. Significantly, Henthorn points out that “individualism and conspicuous consumption eclipsed thrift and collectivism.” The civil defense-ready, satisfied consumer became a symbol of the moral authority of a free market oriented society, a system of betterment contrasted with the state-controlled system that signified communist rule and a supposedly less hygienic (i.e., middle-class) way of life.
The nature of the Cold War fostered a series of flare ups and peace overtures, which in turn generated a permanent cycle of mobilization and reconversion. The economy continued to be defense-dependent, and actually thrived in this environment. Henthorn cites a 1948 Business Week article that identified government spending during World War II as a catalyst for the rise and institutionalization of this cycle—an insidious pattern diagnosed by President Eisenhower as the “military-industrial complex.” Government subsidized industrial research into new technologies, and many companies serving the consumer market lined up for their share of federal defense expenditures.
The economic plan during the Cold War years centered on national defense. Henthorn cites advertising agency J. Walter Thompson’s description of the Cold War from 1951: “It is within our ability to provide for BOTH defense AND better living….We can have $40 billion [in government spending] for defense and increase our standard of living too.” Advocates of the free market tied the spread of prosperity in America to defense spending, which resulted in higher levels of industrial production; this was the fountain from which abundance flowed. Advertising furthered the message that only a system based on individual enterprise could deliver these results.
Supporters of capitalism insisted that widespread prosperity was the only sure means to halt “collectivist” threats. Henthorn notes that the fear of global communism increased the anxiety and mistrust aimed at liberal reformers. This led to a more intense push for greater economic dependence on defense spending which would, it was argued, create more jobs and raise living standards. The resulting outcome, as history has shown, was an inseparable link between prosperity and a nation permanently organizing for war.
Many advertisers of the day seized upon the fear of global communism. Henthorn offers several examples of companies updating their fixation on domestic hygiene by inserting militaristic rhetoric into their marketing efforts. Without the development of “miracle” defense-related materials, not only would America lose the war against communism, but the liberation from household germs and domestic drudgery would never become a reality. Many advertisers borrowed from the emotionally charged headlines of the day, stepping beyond World War II’s rhetoric. They bestowed products with combat-ready attributes. As a result of this military emphasis, defense technologies were credited with the power to create a sanitary, rational and stable world that the consumer could leisurely experience in the safety and comfort of their suburban home.
An example of this approach is exhibited in a 1958 ad for tableware, in which a sleek and deadly missile soars through the sky just above a set of stainless steel utensils. Henthorn points out that the advertiser “associates the strength of its steel with military might and links these icons of durability to the promise of ‘better living’.” A similar example is demonstrated in a 1959 ad for “cook-and-serve ware” which displays a missile, coated with Pyroceram, hurtling toward the sky. Juxtaposed with the missile is its domestic counterpart, the cook-and-serve ware, which is coated with the same protective material as the warhead. Henthorn’s work reveals how manufacturers of dual-use technologies stressed the link they had made between middle-class domesticity and military technology.
The NAM, the newly-minted Advertising Council (formerly known as the War Advertising Council), and conservative members of government and academia believed that expansion into foreign markets was essential in order to secure postwar prosperity. Memories of the Great Depression were still fresh during the 1950s, and the American system of free enterprise could not rely on domestic consumption alone. In this view, foreign markets were essential to maintaining high standards of living and securing the free market brand of democracy with the added benefit of fighting the spread of communism. As a result, foreign policy relied more heavily on military force and became increasingly influenced by commercial interests.
With America well-ensconced in a new ideological conflict, one defined as a battle between democracy and Islamic extremism, freedom and oppression, and (more crudely) as a conflict between good and evil, such observations like Henthorn’s become more relevant than ever. Henthorn points out in the book’s “Afterword” that “an antiterrorist crusade has replaced the Cold War’s anti-communist quest.” One of the most important messages conveyed in From Submarines to Suburbs is that once America began the process of mobilization for World War II, it never returned to a peacetime condition. Today the nation’s current military budget is larger than the combined expenditures of the next fourteen largest countries combined—nearly seven times larger than that of China, a nation identified in 2001 as a prime “strategic competitor.” The American defense budget reached $420 billion in 2006, representing 50 percent of discretionary spending, not including the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is set to climb to $480 billion by 2008.
Far from delivering the promises of the “world of tomorrow,” the interventionist foreign policies that have marked the post-World War II era have done little to eradicate America’s persistent social and economic problems. Cynthia Henthorn offers a detailed account concerning the development of a permanently militarized American society, creating a prism through which to examine its advertising messages. The ideological struggle that erupted in the 1930s between proponents of the free market and supporters of liberal reform ended with a decisive victory for the former, and, as a result, America has embarked upon a destructive course marked by excessive defense spending and belligerent foreign policy.
America must now investigate the consequences of its current priorities, and, in order to do so, the empty rhetoric supporting them must be stripped away. The nation needs to question the messages it receives that advocate support for a foreign policy focused on fulfilling outdated colonial aspirations at the expense of domestic concerns. From Submarines to Suburbs provides a valuable history of the methods and messages used to create the foundation for current government policy decisions. Henthorn’s work, in addition to presenting a carefully detailed history of World War II commercial advertising, provides a wealth of information to those who question the status quo and will assist them in affecting positive change.
More from Greg Strid can be found at SplendidMarbles.com
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