5 Community Is Correct

In an article she wrote for an advertising trade journal, “Main Street . . . and How to Find Your Way Back,” Jean addressed the perennial worry among admen that, from their perch on Madison Avenue, they might not have their finger on the pulse of the average American. Giving them permission to move past these fears, Jean conjured a picture of a “little white house” on a tree-lined street, with a family inside, celebrating good days—“the birth of a kitten, four A’s on a report card, a Boy Scout award”—as well knuckling through the tough times—“a layoff, a sudden illness, the girl who didn’t get invited to the Prom.” “Thing is,” she coaxed them, “you know that house.” Sure, the adman may live a citified life now. But Jean urged him to reach back to his own small-town childhood, nestled somewhere in the heartland. “It is a part of you, a far deeper part than dinner at 21 Club or a night in the Pump Room,” she reminded him. “Main Street isn’t as far away from any of us as we pretend.”1

Let’s suppose that the typical adman didn’t have a white house with a picket fence—Jean’s “little piece of heaven”—lodged in his American unconscious. Even then he would know about Main Street because his agency’s tireless surveys and questionnaires and polls and panels guaranteed him a constant supply of information about the common man. In fact, Jean ventured, “I sometimes think Madison Avenue has earned the right to be called the Heartland of America. For we know a lot more about Main Street than the people who live on it.” She proceeded to rattle off facts that she knew, for certain, about average Americans: the wife spent twenty-nine minutes preparing breakfast for her family. Seven out of ten ate dinner in the kitchen. The husband didn’t like the taste of liver (he preferred turkey).2

And she was right. By 1940, an entire sprawling industry devoted to taking the collective pulse of the nation had emerged. Corporations and advertising firms who represented them, federal government agencies anxious to measure economic and political trends, and a newly minted professoriate of “social scientists” stood at the ready, prepared to poke and prod the common man to find out what made him tick. Jean, as a central member of the Women’s Copy team for one of the nation’s largest advertising firms, occupied a key position in this massive enterprise.

Efforts to give a face and a shape to the “average American” have a long history. John Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur offered one of the first studied attempts to paint this mythical creature’s portrait in his 1782 meditation Letters from an American Farmer. For him, the average American is of European descent and possesses a character marked by the “innovation” and “mobility” that freedom from the shackles of Old World prejudice makes gloriously possible. Alexis de Tocqueville undertook the charge again in his 1835 study, Democracy in America, where the typical American is a hearty descendant of “the English race” whose character is (again) marked by “the equality of social conditions” afforded in the New World. Both of these attempts chose to elide the messy reality of the American population—a mixture of African-born slaves, Native Americans, white European indentured servants, and white men and women—to enshrine the white, free-born, property-owning male as most “typical.”3

Beyond such essayistic firsthand accounts, the statistical push to observe, measure, and quantify the American population had its earliest flowering as an adjunct to nineteenth-century reform movements. The Industrial Revolution brought in its wake an increasingly diverse, poor, and urban population whose “deviant” and possibly revolutionary potential needed to be managed. The poor, immigrants, African Americans, criminals, alcoholics, factory workers—precisely those people absent from the profiles of Crèvecoeur and Tocqueville—all passed under the microscope of middle- and upper-middle-class white reformers. While occasionally billed as “scientific” studies, the central mission of these early sociological forays, the majority of which were funded by private philanthropies, remained prescriptive: to push for policy that would assimilate (or at the very least neutralize) potentially disruptive social elements. Indeed, the birth of the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century was part of a larger effort to replace the waning authority of religion with the more democratic, secular authority of social “engineering.”4

But as Americans became increasingly integrated into a “mass” national culture both socially and economically, social data gatherers shifted their focus from the margins to the center. The first of these “main street” studies to be widely publicized was titled, appropriately, Middletown. Published in 1929, the study of Muncie, Indiana, was conducted by Robert Lynd and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation; it was designed to plumb the depths of Protestant religious life in the modern heartland. Reformist like earlier studies were, this survey was driven by Rockefeller’s belief that a reanimation of Christian values in an increasingly secularized age might salve the wounds of social and economic strife brought about by industrialization (from which he had profited extravagantly). But unlike the earlier studies, intended exclusively for experts tasked with devising policies to reform “deviant” populations, the studies canvassing “typical” American communities were eagerly consumed by the very subject of the studies themselves: the newspaper-reading and radio-listening public. Middletown was an unexpected bestseller, and its findings were hashed and rehashed on radio and in the press, sparking a nationwide conversation about who, exactly, Americans were.5

A number of factors in the 1930s produced this groundswell of interest, at times bordering on panic, in pinning down who counted as an “average American.”6 Demographically, the country was in rapid transition. Between 1880 and 1930, twenty-seven million immigrants, primarily from southern and eastern Europe, poured into the country, bringing with them new religions, cultures, and languages. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African Americans living in the rural south migrated northward and west, populating urban centers from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles.7 These population shifts unsettled America’s traditional vision of itself as white Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

If America’s traditional cultural and religious identity was open to question, so was its economic identity. The conviction that capitalism was a benign, progressive force evolving toward ever higher levels of productivity and abundance was, by the 1920s, one of the country’s most widely held and unifying beliefs about itself. This faith in American capitalism as a natural social and economic equalizer was abruptly shattered by the market crash of 1929. The First Red Scare in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had spawned widespread conspiracy theories linking political radicalism to “alien” immigrant infiltrators, and the European political scene in the 1930s renewed these earlier suspicions. Stalin responded to the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany by encouraging communists across Europe to join with socialists and progressives in forming an antifascist Popular Front.8 Conservatives in the United States, including industrialists and their business allies, feared the spread of left-wing radicalism on their home soil and accused Roosevelt’s New Deal measures of being a “collectivist” attack on Americans’ traditional economic freedoms.

Not all signs of the times pointed to division. The country was increasingly knit together by an expansive network of mass media, nationally distributed magazines and newspapers in addition to the new medium of radio. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” united the country by bringing the president, quite literally, into the intimate parlor of each American home. And it was precisely by partnering with the expanding institutions of the national mass media that a man named George Gallup was able to take the country’s free-floating quest for identity and give it a more concrete shape in the form of the national opinion poll.

In 1936 Gallup, along with a handful of other emerging pollsters, challenged the established presidential straw poll conducted in election years by the Literary Digest. Gallup employed a new model of “scientific sampling” and one-on-one interviews that allowed him to arrive at a correct prediction, using only a fraction of the Digest’s respondents and its laborious mail-in ballot method. The Literary Digest poll had the additional handicap of being wrong that year. Gallup’s success in predicting the outcome of the presidential election gave him credibility as he expanded his polling subjects far beyond politics, digging into “virtually unexplored sectors of the public mind,” as he described it. By 1940, Gallup had a syndicated triweekly column, America Speaks!, that gave eight million readers a “week-by-week picture of what Americans are thinking” on everything from FDR to labor unions, from the Neutrality Act to the best way to curb syphilis.9 Opinion pollsters like Gallup and Elmo Roper moved quickly to professionalize, partnering with academic social scientists, writing for scholarly journals, and creating their own credentialing organization, the American Association of Public Opinion Research.10

Opinion pollsters like Gallup and Roper envisioned themselves as laboratory scientists, aligning themselves with a growing class of managerial “experts” who promised to lead the country forward in the turbulent post-Depression years. Yet Gallup and Roper were careful to highlight their difference from governmental managers. Far from being eggheaded technocrats, they billed themselves as pure conduits for the voice of the humble man in the street, broadcasting whatever he had on his mind and in his heart. Gallup credited the advent of mass communication networks—newspapers, radio, motion pictures, telephones—with expanding the scope of public opinion beyond a “small exclusive class” of politicians to “all classes and sections of the community.” Even as these new organs were seized on by those in power to push their own agendas, he argued, modern research methods provided a “machinery for directly approaching the mass of the people and hearing what they have to say.”11

In an atomized and bureaucratized world, Gallup promised that polling would reinvigorate American democracy, give power back to the people. “Shall the common people be free to express their basic needs and purposes, or shall they be dominated by a small ruling clique?” Gallup prodded his readers. “Shall the goal be the free expression of public opinion, or shall efforts be made to ensure its repression?”12 Against the backdrop of the rise of Stalin and Hitler in Europe, public opinion polls were infused with symbolic meaning, elevated as tokens of America’s commitment to freedom, openness, and democratic norms.13

Gallup’s stirring defense of popular polling was part of a broader cultural movement by which “democracy” and “freedom” were increasingly enshrined as quasi-religious national values. This trend toward sacralizing democracy in what one sociologist later called a unique American “civil religion” had been under way at least since the country’s entry into World War I, which Woodrow Wilson led under the crusade-like banner of making the world “safe for democracy.” Wilson appointed George Creel head of the wartime Committee on Public Information, an agency tasked both with monitoring press access to sensitive government war information and creating pro-American propaganda abroad. Creel once confessed that democracy was “a religion with [him],” defining it as a “theory of spiritual progress.”14 Indeed, lest there be any doubt as to the evangelical cast of the democratic project, the title of Creel’s 1920 memoir dispels it: How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe. Gallup believed that by distilling the broadly democratic aggregate voice of the “common man” and bringing it into the halls of power, he was doing God-appointed work.15

One of Jean’s signature achievements at BBDO was to found two in-house opinion panels, staffed by women: the Junior Council (aged twenty-two to twenty-eight) and the Homemaker’s Council (aged over twenty-nine). The Junior Council, composed of 150 typists, secretaries, stenographers, and copywriters, was a key sounding board for Jean as well as for other account executives who wanted to test out campaign ideas. She made council members taste cakes and sip soups and wash their hair with competing shampoos. She made them flip through endless brand slogans and illustrations to find out what caught their eye and what didn’t. She polled them ceaselessly about the minutiae of their domestic lives and their social lives, dug deep into their professional and romantic aspirations. She cross-checked their answers against national polls: Gallup, Starch Ratings, McCall’s Reader Surveys. Then she took the results, her homegrown version of America Speaks!, to her corporate clients.

In step with Gallup and Roper’s tendency to frame their quantitative data as the voice of “Americans” in the aggregate, Jean carefully pitched her findings as the tried-and-true voice of Everywoman. Jean often opened her speeches to clients with sociological mini-disquisitions on the “ordinariness” of her panel members, giving their bona fides as an accurate barometer of the client’s target audience. In a representative 1946 speech to Oneida Silverware executives, Jean ran down some statistics that assured them that the Junior Council comprised “a pretty normal and typical sample of today’s youth market.” She rattled off a sampling of domestic facts about “YOUR CUSTOMER, 1946”—she went to church (“63 say every week”), she liked to cook, she set the table when company came to dinner—before deducing from this data a plausible advertising strategy to get them to buy silverware.16

In 1940, Oneida Limited and its trademark Community Plate silver was one of a handful of national manufacturers battling it out for market share in an age when every middle-class American bride—as well as those working girls who aspired to that status—had to have a proper set of silverware for entertaining. Oneida had gotten on the advertising train early in the 1910s, hiring such iconic magazine illustrators as Maxwell Parrish and Coles Phillips to design full-page, sumptuously colored “pin-up girl” ads. But whoever was handling the Oneida account after its heyday in the Roaring ’20s had obviously fallen asleep on the job. Oneida advertisements in the Ladies’ Home Journal throughout the late ’30s and the first half of 1940 were distinctly lackluster: a hodgepodge of anemically tinted elements thrown together into a half-page text box, without any single visual anchor to draw the viewer in. The slogan, “Leadership in Design Authority,” struggled for attention—and authority—at the bottom of the page.

When BBDO landed the account in 1940, Jean rolled up her sleeves and got to work. While the previous ads had made halfhearted appeals to the bridal market, Jean designed an intensive, yearlong campaign for 1941 that would target this all-important population systematically. First, she contracted with four of America’s most renowned clothing designers—Sally Milgrim, Hattie Carnegie, Orry-Kelly, and Vogue—to design bridal dresses inspired by Community Plate patterns. Jean explained the reasoning for this to Oneida’s executives: with the fall of France in the early summer of 1940, “American fashion accounts hurried home from Paris”—and found, to their surprise, that American designers were ready and willing to take up the sartorial slack. “Fashion openings this year were just as crowded, just as important as ever before,” she reported, “but in New York, not Paris.” Department stores got into the spirit as well, featuring American designers rather than the European mainstays in their advertising. The USA was now the fashion center of the free world—and Oneida was poised to profit from it.17

The new advertisements dropped the washed-out palette in favor of richly textured, jewel-like color that popped off the page. The central image in each ad was a full-length photograph of a model in a signature white designer wedding dress, paired with a spoon of the matching Oneida pattern in all of its sumptuous silver glory. Carnegie’s private clients included “the first names of stage, screen, and the social register,” while Orry-Kelly was dressmaker to such august figures as Bette Davis and Mary Astor. “It’s not a gown for Main Street,” Jean admitted of Carnegie’s luxurious confection, which featured a highly ornamental, nun-like headdress. But imitation by Main Street wasn’t BBDO’s aim. The point of the pairings, Jean was quick to point out, was to create dresses that would be “looked at . . . and talked about,” that would fuel bridal fantasies (whether realized or not).18

Although she had significantly overhauled the visuals of Oneida’s Community Plate ads, Jean wasn’t satisfied with the campaign motto, “Leadership in Design Authority.” Both the words “Leadership” and “Authority,” she found through her in-house polling, were sounding a false note. When asked what the words meant to them, Junior Council women returned strange answers. “I know what leadership means, but I’m puzzled by that word authority,” returned one girl. “Is it something like Port Authority?” queried another rather literal-minded respondent, referring to the intercommerce regulatory agency policing river traffic between New York and New Jersey. The logo was, decidedly, not meeting its mark.

Jean diagnosed the semantic stumble almost immediately. Appeals to authority could sell medicine and cosmetics. But when a bride-to-be buys a set of silverware, Jean guessed, she doesn’t care what the experts say; she wants to know what her friends and neighbors will say. “Etiquette columns,” Jean told Oneida executives in 1941, “are among the best-read sections of the newspaper,” and etiquette books were topping bestseller lists. “This desire of men and women to know and to do the right thing is a serious one.” Today’s young woman, Jean suggested, is never sure of her taste, but “she wants—terribly—to be right.”19

Jean was on to something. America’s new brand of civil religion was also a religion of civility, centered on the values of tolerance, teamwork, and a scrupulous avoidance of “giving offense.” The exercise of tact in all dealings with one’s neighbor was the ultimate test of adhesion to America’s consensus creed. Jean’s brilliantly amended slogan for Oneida was “If It’s Community, It’s Correct.” The adjective summoned up both an etiquette book and a Sunday sermon; it offered a handy tip on how to choose fish knives that doubled as a watered-down injunction to Love Thy Neighbor. It was the perfect distillation of the period obsession with averageness and agreement. One should strive to get along with one’s peers, to fall in line, to be one of the gang: to agree with your chums on the most flattering cut of jacket or the proper table setting was not just polite; it was a sign of deep moral Judeo-Christian consensus. Jean knew instinctively that she could take this sentiment and make it sell silverware.

When Jean ran the copy by her test group this time, the slogan resonated. What does “Community Is Correct” mean to you? “It means Community is socially correct,” offered one respondent. She could invite friends to dinner assured that she was executing her role as hostess properly. “It means it’s correctly designed—correct implements and everything,” offered another. She wouldn’t be caught short—she wouldn’t be missing dessert spoons, if such were required. But most important: “If you have Community, you know you are right” was the resounding answer.20

Jean’s insight into the extraordinary selling power of peer acceptance was not limited to silverware. In notes for a speech before Betty Crocker executives, Jean focused on the talismanic magic of the word “homogenized” in marketing campaigns. Homogenized milk first caught on the United States in the 1920s; the altered fat globules would remain in suspension rather than rise to the top of the jug, producing a more consistently creamy, evenly textured product. But since that time, Jean observed, the word “homogenization” had surpassed its technical definition to become an adjective that had “extra selling strength—sometimes over and above and beyond its actual functions.” It was an adjective that could be usefully tacked on to any “mixed” product, from cake to cosmetics, to boost sales.

And it was, in fact, a BBDO team that first struck on the idea of using it to market bread: Bond bread baked from previously “homogenized” or emulsified ingredients was touted as yielding a tastier product. Whether in face cream or bread, Jean suggested, “Always, even to women who could not explain it, [homogenized] has connoted something better, something richer, something good.” When Jean tested the phrase “homogenized for moister, homemade taste” on cake mixes for baking housewives, the results came back resoundingly positive. Survey respondents identified the homogenized mix as likely to be “lighter, higher, fluffier, more surely successful” than the nonhomogenized competitor. They imagined it would be “more digestible” with “more thoroughly mixed ingredients.”21

Such midcentury enthusiasm for homogenization—whether in cake batter or cultures—echoed the original Progressive Era faith in market standardization as the most efficient and “American” of social equalizers. The market left to its own devices would achieve on its own what Europeans sought to legislate through class-based politics and statist intervention. Simon Patten, that early Pollyanna of the corporate order, had praised expanding consumption and market standardization as the ticket to national harmony. Modern consumers, he insisted, were “generalists” who saw the world whole; they would eventually turn the tide against stick-in-the-mud provincials who clung stubbornly to “the tyranny of local conditions.” “The standardized succeed,” Patten lectured, while “the unstandardized leave town or drop into unmarked graves. . . . It is only the newer impulses and ideals which all have in common that serve as a basis of unity.”22

Yet conveniently sidelined from these discussions was the fact that entire swathes of the population were blocked, on account of class and race, from transcending the “tyranny of local conditions” and entering the promised land of standardized equality.23 In fact, the “homogenized” American as he appeared on the radio, in the movies, in the newspapers, and in Gallup polls in the 1930s and ’40s was anything but an empirically representative reflection of actual Americans. From the start, “everyman” studies were carefully curated to focus on native-born whites. In selecting a city for his Middletown study, proto-pollster Robert Lynd rejected South Bend, Indiana, in favor of Muncie precisely because of the former’s cultural and religious heterogeneity. The completely atypical homogeneity of Muncie, lacking either a significant African American or an immigrant population, was chosen for its absence of “complicating factors,” not in spite of them.24 Given the iconic status Lynd’s study eventually earned both in popular culture and in academic research, these sampling decisions had far-reaching consequences.

Gallup and his colleagues persistently sampled only native-born whites. They used the term “unreachables” for those who didn’t respond to their inquiries by virtue of their class or racial distance from (and distrust of) the middle-class white pollsters knocking at their door. As a result, these voices were muted in the final tallies. There were also more intrinsic imbalances generated by a system that tied the larger and more rigorous polling to election results. By keying surveys to “likely voters,” pollsters virtually guaranteed the results would be skewed in the direction of white, middle-class males.25 Gallup’s polls and those modeled on it were less democratic in fact than in theory.

That Jean knew full well the average American was, to some extent, a fiction is indicated by her detailed marketing plans, which address the diversity of her clients’ target audience. When advertising firms like BBDO set about defining markets, they of course looked for lowest common denominators, something like a statistical “average” in the product’s projected buying public that, if the client could tap into it, would stimulate sales. But as canny businessmen, they knew better than to put too much faith in—or money behind—the kind of generalized, aggregate American “averageness” featured on radio shows and in the columns of the Saturday Evening Post. Knowing “Where the People Stand” was fine, but it wasn’t as good as knowing “Where Bride-Aged White Women Stand.” Actual markets were crucially differentiated by such factors as gender, class, race, and education. It was important to hit all the targets, not just an airbrushed composite of the typical consumer.

Speaking to Oneida Limited’s management in 1940, Jean broke down their prospective market into three slices of the American female population: bride-aged women, eighteen to twenty-nine, looking to buy silverware; married hostess-aged women, thirty to thirty-nine, whose “silver needs are expanding”; and women forty to forty-nine, mothers of the brides. But the advertising strategy had to dig deeper than gender and age, and segment more specifically by socioeconomic status. Beyond the Saturday Evening Post (the nation’s most-read and widely circulated periodical), Oneida’s Community Plate would also be advertised in the four most popular middle-class women’s magazines—Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Better Home and Gardens. Finally, the working-class or “mass” market would be targeted as well, with ads in True Story and Mademoiselle, while the “class” market—“women of sufficient income and taste to want the best in fashion”—would be reached by ads in Vogue and House and Garden.

Corporate clients who paid for market and opinion poll research were thus privy to a level of heterogeneity in the American public that was systematically flattened when the same data was presented to “the public” itself as objective, poll-generated percentages on “What America Thinks” or “Where The People Stand.”26 For while Jean and Oneida were well aware of the considerable socioeconomic diversity within the American bridal market, the ad copy itself worked rigorously to efface such differences, to sell precisely the democratic “averageness” and social conformity that national opinion polls were enshrining in the popular consciousness. Middle-class whiteness was a useful fiction, an aspirational ideal masquerading as quantified, empirical fact. For marketing purposes, it functioned just as well—if not better—as an idealized composite than as a reality.

But the objectivity of national opinion polling was compromised by more than just design flaws and blind spots in the sampling methodology. Perhaps more insidious, because less obvious, was the ideological debt polling owed to the corporate, profit-driven mindset. All of the major early pollsters—Archibald Crossley, Elmo Roper, George Gallup—got their start in marketing research. Gallup’s PhD in applied psychology, “An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper,” immediately got the attention of corporate behemoths such as Lever Brothers, General Foods, and the Hearst Sunday papers, who hired him as a consultant. The advertising agency Young and Rubicam brought him on as director of its research division in 1932. Given their training, early pollsters and communications researchers unsurprisingly modeled their social inquiries on the marketplace logic of consumer preference. They were market driven not only because their training was in market research and its noncritical stance toward its subject but because to reach the public, polls had to pass through the market logic of corporate-owned and sponsored news media, whether magazines, film, or radio. The market biases baked into the mass media shaped not only the form but also the content of the information that got air time.

Among Jean’s papers is an undated typed manuscript she edited for the Saturday Evening Post, entitled “No Man Knows the Origin of the Marketplace.” The short article rehearses an analogy long dear to political and economic liberalism: that just as economic competition in the free market allows superior products to rise to the top, so “free trade in ideas” in the public sphere and in the media helps democracies arrive at the “best” ideas. The mass media, in this construction, is a transparent, open forum where widely separated and widely diverse individuals exchange ideas and goods. While we don’t know the origin and end destination of this one-page piece of promotional copy touting the value of the Saturday Evening Post, the rhetoric of the piece, and Jean’s edits of it, shed light on the way idealized assumptions about “freedom” and “democracy” shaped the midcentury public’s understanding of how markets—whether for goods and services or for news and information—worked.

The copy opens by imagining markets of yore, the “shifting, colorful, kaleidoscopic pageant” in which “the vendors’ wares meet the buyers’ needs in a harmony of fulfillment.” Jean—or the author—anticipates the readers’ objection: today’s America is too big, too spread out, to make the fantasy of a single marketplace realistic. “Yet here you will be wrong,” she cautions. The marketplace is no longer to be found in the literal public square but in the pages of national newspapers and magazines: “Here men come, as they came to markets of old, to sharpen one mind against the whetstone of another.” “Here merchants spread their wares and shoppers explore—and buyer and seller meet in a very real partnership.”

The pages of the Post are, further, a radically democratic space, its contents—from fiction to news to advertisements—shaped by the desires of the people who read it. “Just as the buyers and sellers who wear down the cobblestones ARE the marketplace, so . . . the readers of the Post ARE the Post. It is they who have made it—in the image of their own wants,” the copy contends. In the “changing political and social and economic pageant” of the news items, readers see reflected the rich diversity of their world. And in the “ever changing pageant of the advertisements,” both buyer and seller will see writ large the underlying desires and aspirations of the common man for the “enrichment of his material life.” The Saturday Evening Post is “America’s marketplace,” an agora for the free and friendly and democratic exchange of goods and ideas.27

Except that, as researchers in the nascent field of communication studies increasingly noted, the widespread analogy of mass media to a “free” market (itself a regulative fiction) was entirely misleading. Mass media content was, from the get-go, shaped and constrained by the material and institutional interests of its corporate owners and sponsors, who paid for its circulation and diffusion. When the Social Science Research Council drew up a 1948 report criticizing the most prominent pollsters, including Gallup, for following “journalistic rather than scientific demands” in their research, they were entirely correct: the polls were funded by newspaper publishers, broadcasting companies, and other corporations, whose interests thus dictated both their form and content. For instance, publishers who ran Gallup’s America Speaks! column and radio studios weighed in on how poll data should be presented, requiring “surveyors to encapsulate complicated findings in an easily summarized chart or a fifteen-minute broadcast” to avoid “perplexing” the reader or listener. The obvious objective was, of course, to protect the network’s ratings.28

A ratings- and market-based rationale shaped not only formatting decisions but also the content itself—particularly as reflected in what didn’t make it into print or onto the airwaves. The absence of “race issue” questions in Gallup’s early polls was the result of his client newspapers being predominantly based in the South. NBC’s radio programming in the 1930s and ’40s prohibited the discussion on air of “labor questions,” and NBC aired Roper’s radio show precisely because it “avoid[ed] the partisanship that all too often means disgruntled customers.”29 When media analyst Leila Sussmann studied radio coverage of labor issues in 1944, she found that across major networks, a combination of editorial selection and presentation decisions led to labor being presented as “morally wrong five times as often as it was morally right.”30 The mass media provided a market for ideas that was “free” in theory—except when it threatened the popularity and profit of its shareholders; then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

This development did not go unnoticed by sociologists and other influential academic researchers who worked side by side with nonacademic pollsters. Scholars in the nascent disciplines of sociology and communications studies sounded the alarm early on, pointing out that in their technocratic drive to generate data about populations—whether at the behest of government agencies or corporations—researchers tended to present those data in value-neutral terms, as scientific descriptions of natural facts, without calling attention to the deeper historical, political, and economic contexts shaping mass media and polling methods themselves.

Columbia University professor Paul Lazarsfeld flagged the problem in 1941, noting that “the technique of manipulating large masses of people is developed in the business world and from there permeates our whole culture,” including the operation of mass media channels. Supposedly value-neutral content analyses or audience response polls failed to question the larger economic and social context in which mass media operated, leading to a dangerous species of “spurious objectivity,” in the words of media analyst William Albig.31 The political specter of his time, Lazarsfeld predicted, was that the mass media “public sphere” would lose its independence, henceforth operating solely within the “framework of commodity merchandising.” What was worse, social science research, which helped to study, monitor, and guide mass media, was following suit: “more and more of this research is seen to succumb to the fate of mass media content itself in being implicitly tailored to the specifications of industrial and market operations.”

Gallup’s claim that opinion polls would wrest power out of the hands of the few—“powerful newspapers,” “motion picture and radio executives”—belied the fact that it was those very vested powers that were, at least to some extent, the gatekeepers deciding what was fit (and profitable) to print and air. If the “public” that emerged from these polls and studies miraculously resembled precisely the kind of public a corporate order required to keep humming along, then, it was not a coincidence.

Jean didn’t just rely on the data she collated from BBDO Junior Council questionnaires and national opinion, marketing, and readership polls. She also marshaled, in anecdotal form, the support of academic social scientists whose work illuminated cultural and social trends in America. Jean was fond of trotting out her gloss on David Riesman’s 1950 The Lonely Crowd, a portrait of middle-class conformity in a nation transitioning from a producer to a consumer society. Riesman devised a neat, tripartite division of human history into three epochal social “types”: the “tradition-directed” person of primitive society was supplanted by the “inner-directed” person of an industrial producer-society, now being ousted by the “other-directed” individual of modern democratic and consumer-driven culture. In Riesman’s estimation, authority shifted away from its basis in tradition and family or class identity, as a standardized and democratized populace learned to look to their peers for validation and a sense of belonging.

In a speech at a United Fruit Cookbook Conference on the American family’s changing eating patterns, Jean cited Riesman’s concept of “other-direction,” noting that she and her fellow advertisers were, precisely, the “others” currently setting the patterns. “It is a frightening thing, an awesome thing,” she mused, “to know that we are holding in our hands not only the wellbeing of [an] individual can of soup or box of cake mix but we are serving as . . . an other director to a confused, driven, harried, helpless, crazy, mixed up world.” Being an other director was a solemn responsibility, she concluded, one that demanded not only individual strength and bravery, but a dollop of divine assistance as well: “Have you prayed enough for that?” Jean finally queried of her gathered audience-cum-congregation.32

Jean’s files are stuffed with clippings from social scientific studies that she thought might come in handy in promoting advertising as a profession, generally, and her individual client campaigns, in particular. In addition to using Riesman, her client pitches included snippets from anthropologist Margaret Mead’s studies on gender roles and offhand references to William Whyte’s portrait of midcentury white-collar culture in Organization Man. She was fond of referring to her Junior Council members as “100 Beautiful Guinea Pigs,” a nod to a Depression-era bestselling book by consumer advocates Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink entitled 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs.

Yet anyone who had actually digested these sociological studies knew their analyses of contemporary American culture were not intended as data-driven reports on “today’s consumer,” information to be put to work by advertisers and their corporate clients in the business of efficiently channeling consumer desire. These studies, like the Middletown study from which they drew inspiration, were imbued with critique at times bordering on undisguised horror at the scene they surveyed. They were intended as critical levers by which modern society could more clearly understand and thus improve itself.

Riesman, for instance, found in contemporary Americans’ “other-directed” ethos a spooky abdication of anything like a coherent morality or value system. Instead, “approval itself, irrespective of content, becomes almost the only unequivocal good . . . : one makes good when one is approved of.”33 This heightened sensitivity to the ever-shifting “actions and wishes of others,” rather than allegiance to a traditional external code of ethics, was the natural outcome of a culture increasingly driven by market logic. Even language, Riesman observed with some melancholy, had become a consumer good: “It is used neither . . . to relate the self to others in any really intimate way, nor to recall the past, nor yet as sheer word play. Rather it is used in the peer-groups today much as popular tunes seem to be used: as a set of counters” by which individuals establish their market viability.34 The cultural phenomenon of “other direction,” which in Riesman’s eyes betokened an impoverishment of values, could be cheerfully repurposed to sell silverware.

The fact that Jean could strip Riesman’s study of its critical thrust and use it to craft marketing strategies—all in perfectly good faith—was entirely characteristic of the midcentury advertising industry. As another example, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, which was subtitled Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics, took aim at corporations, lax government regulators, and advertising agencies for “making profits by experimenting on [consumers] with poisons, irritants, harmful chemical preservatives, and dangerous drugs.”35 While the scientific accuracy of some of the book’s claims were debated, it went through thirteen printings and served as a catalyst for the eventual passage of stricter consumer protections in the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938. The reference to guinea pigs was intended as a stiff critique of industry ethics. And yet Jean was able to strip away the value judgement and leverage the popular title for its sheer name recognition, giving BBDO an edge in competing for corporate clients. Such blithe dismissal of context and sloppy conceptual blurring was the very lifeblood of advertising, where context was considered “highbrow” and “jingles” didn’t have to mean anything; they just had to stick.

Jean could speak with such confidence about Main Street, USA, not only because it was her business to study the average American consumer but because her own family so closely mirrored, at least on the surface, the idealized image she helped create: white, middle-class, suburban, Protestant. Jean’s archive does not contain much personal material that would give insight into her private family life. For this, we must depend on the rare references Jean made to her husband and children in the interviews she gave and the articles she wrote. These allusions, of course, were carefully curated for public consumption. In a sponsored editorial that appeared in the Daily News, for example, Jean plugged Wildroot Shampoo by pledging her family’s personal commitment to the product. The homey details she shared with her reader were calculated to establish her credibility as housewife and mother. “By day I sit at a desk and write ads,” she began. But “by night I live in a house in the country with a husband and two children and a dog and a half dozen hamsters (by last count).”36 Her teenage daughter Anne swears by Wildroot (“her hair’s so thick and soft and young it kind of makes my heart skip [you know mothers!]”). Even her husband—“he’s a little short of hair these days”—reaches for the bottle in the shower. All of Jean’s references, from playful poke at her balding husband to mock despair at her children’s ever-multiplying pet population, establish her as a stock maternal character: slightly harried, always loyal, ever loving wife and mother.

One place in the archive where Jean’s work selling “average” American family values and her own private family life appear to intersect is around the celebration of Christmas. Jean was sometimes tasked with writing public relations holiday cards for clients to send out to their customers at Christmas. One series of “Season’s Greetings” messages that she crafted for Oneida Limited drew on the kind of bland, sentimental well-wishing one might expect from a corporate Christmas card: “Good wishes Unlimited from Oneida Limited,” ran one possible card insert. “Bless you . . . for being you, for being kind, for being a friend to be thankful for at Christmas!” ran another. A third option conjured up the cozy domestic atmosphere on which Oneida had built its brand: “Fragrant balsam . . . polished mahogany . . . glowing candles . . . gleaming silver. . . . All these are part of Christmas! May yours be deeply content.”37

But these corporate greetings are almost indistinguishable from a series of Christmas-themed meditations filed in a folder marked “Personal—Inspiration.” On a scrap of bright pink paper appears a poem by Christian inspirational poet Grace Noll Crowell: a prayer for clarity and peace at Christmastime amid the “breathless rushing” of “hurried, flurried women” caught up in the tempest of gift buying and tree trimming. Another typed snippet, with the heading “Busy! Busy! Busy!,” takes up the same theme but is pure Jean. It paints a picture of a couple collapsing in post-Christmas exhaustion, after the turkey has been eaten and the gifts opened and the kids packed off to bed. They realize with a sudden pang that the Christmas cards they sent out that year had been filled with apologies for having been so busy, not having had time to connect, for being absent in their friends’ lives. “This year, please God, we hope to change the pattern,” murmurs the speaker. “Because . . . what better time could there be to share a fragment of the peace that passeth understanding than with every note you send with a Christmas card.”38 The format of the page, with its formal title, makes it seem as though it might have been a piece of advertising copy, a homespun vignette to be used as an inset for a Christmas ad.

But it is just as likely that Jean could have cribbed a line or two of the copy to include in her own personal Christmas cards. Photographs in Jean’s archive include custom-made Christmas greeting cards: one series, circa 1937, feature a photo of Jean and Willard’s toddler son, John, superimposed on a reindeer-drawn sled; in another, John beams at the camera, a silhouette of Santa and his pack of toys looming in the background. “Merry Christmas from Willard, Jean and John,” reads the cheery script. Later Christmas photographs from the early ’40s feature both John and his younger sister, Anne, grinning in front of a stocking-draped fireplace. It is difficult, looking at these overlapping files, to say where Jean’s public persona ends and her private one begins.

The question for the biographer is not, ultimately, to what extent the “real Jean” coincided with her public performances of white middle-class suburban motherhood. This is a question to which the surviving documents can, in any case, supply no real answer. Rather, the more interesting point to note is how difficult it is, in poring over Jean’s archive, to detect any difference between scripted and unscripted selves, between the average housewife she wrote ads for and the housewife she privately aimed to be, between “real” maternal sentiment and its commodified, mass-marketed signifiers. It gives us a measure of how powerful a social force this fictional composite of an “averaged American,” shaped and then endlessly amplified through mass media, was at midcentury.