7 Believe in Betty Crocker

In 1952, Jean wrote an issue of BBDO’s Wedge entitled “All the Rest of Your Natural Life.” This advertising parable opened with the portrait of a sleep-deprived young father of a newborn son asking the narrator, “Tell me . . . how long does this keep up?” When the narrator presses him to specify, he returns, “Oh, you know . . . this losing sleep and getting up to look at the baby and wondering if he’s covered and walking the floor.” To which the seasoned friend replies, philosophically, that “this”—“the greatness and the goodness and the terror and the trial” of being human and caring for other humans—“keeps up all the rest of your natural life.” The piece went on to pledge that BBDO knew how to tap into “the emotional tides that ebb and flow in the hearts of men”—and promised to bring its selling power to bear on any client’s product.1

When the issue crossed the desk of the vice president of U.S. Steel, a longtime BBDO client, he admired it so much he sent a letter to his friend Bruce Barton, a founding partner and chairman of the board at the Madison Avenue giant. “My compliments to the fellow who did the job,” he wrote, hinting that Barton himself might be the author. “I agree with you one thousand percent,” Barton responded, explaining that the “fellow” was none other than Jean Rindlaub. He added that she was so precious an asset to the firm that “we lock her up in the safe every night so that U.S. Steel or some other big corporation can’t steal her.”2 The executive’s mistake was understandable. Barton had made his name writing public relations copy for such corporate behemoths as General Motors and General Electric, spearheading what would become a standard style of institutional “service” advertising during the 1920s. And “All the Rest of Your Natural Life” seemed like vintage Barton.

There were many avenues by which corporations could project an image of themselves as public servants concerned with the welfare of their larger communities.3 But the strategy on which Barton built his reputation was that of imbuing big business with a folksy “human touch,” using what historian Roland Marchand called “a homespun yet expansive language of service.”4 In his work for General Motors, Barton realized that size was the firm’s biggest weakness, opening it up to perennial charges of being a greedy monopoly or a soulless, bureaucratic machine. His advertising sought to counter these charges by forging an associative link between greatness and benevolence: GM, the ads promised, was large and capacious enough to gather the whole nation under its wing, bringing prosperity and better living to all. In a complementary move, Barton humanized GM’s line of cars as a “family of vehicles,” introduced to the public in all their lovable particularity: the august Cadillac, paterfamilias; the more modest Oldsmobile, the family “pioneer”; and finally the Chevrolet, humble but reliable foot solider in the “unfinished task of making the nation a neighborhood.”5

Barton’s work for General Electric aimed even higher in its claims for the corporation’s benevolent, millennial mission as bringer of light. He recommended the company create a series of ads illustrating “what electricity is doing for human life,” highlighting the myriad ways that its main customers—central power stations, the railroads—were increasing the health and comfort of average Americans. Vaulting, “big picture” images of generators and combines were juxtaposed with close portraits of humble American family life by lamplight, illustrated by Norman Rockwell.6

These analogies, by which people were trained to see their own family circle as a microcosm of the nation and globe, all united in one big Family of Man, had been key to the sentimental appeal of Barton’s advertising style, as they were to Jean’s. More important, this rhetorical mode was perfectly suited to advancing the national narrative that was steadily gaining ground in the 1950s: that the free, untrammeled consumption of goods in the pursuit of private happiness was the lever by which the public good—and the equitable distribution of goods—would be attained.

An article Barton wrote for a 1955 issue of Reader’s Digest, “Advertising: Its Contribution to the American Way of Life,” has been preserved in Jean’s files, carefully clipped. In it, Barton rehearses the familiar paean to free-market capitalism as an agent of moral and material progress, guarantor not only of a vaguely formulated Christian righteousness but also the purest form of democracy. He explained advertising as the facilitator of modern mass production and mass economies, exerting a downward pressure on prices until “the luxury of the rich became the possession of every family that was willing to work.” Free-market competition not only worked as a leveling force, creating equality of access to the fruits of the earth and toppling “elites,” but was an essential arm of the democratic process itself. Every day, customers voted with their pocketbooks and thus kept each manufacturer striving “through continuous research to improve his product” and earn the public confidence. In totalitarian societies, Barton noted, advertising doesn’t exist—for allowing a people to choose consumer goods in the marketplace could easily tip over into allowing them to choose leaders at the ballot box. As a force that wields the power to move markets and change lives, Barton concluded, advertising “needs to be handled carefully, truthfully, sometimes even prayerfully.”7

Barton, a minister’s son, had been reared on the very same Prosperity Gospel staples as Jean, and he developed a signature style that one GE official dubbed “business sermonettes.”8 It was a style that dovetailed perfectly with Barton’s most famous extracurricular endeavor: chronicling the life of Jesus as an exemplary “servant leader” and the most successful adman in history in a 1925 bestselling biography, The Man Nobody Knows. “Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant. Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:27–28). Barton’s New Testament–inspired concept of the business-servant leader was to have a long afterlife in the intertwined worlds of American free enterprise and evangelical Christianity.9 It is not surprising, then, that Barton’s advertising carried an aura of head-bowing prayerfulness, a firm faith that in making ads, he was following the Gospel’s call to be about his Father’s business. Jean would continue that ministry.

Jean’s own work in the field of institutional advertising for General Mills in the late 1940s and ’50s bore the unmistakable stamp of Barton’s style. In a series of projected service advertisements, Jean worked to soften the “big” in “big business,” both by painting General Mills as a “big sister” to the average American housewife and by linking its size not to big money but to largeness of spirit. “Something called the profit system has been taking quite a beating at the hands of America’s critics of late,” the copy opened ruefully. “People are supposed to be half-apologetic when they talk about making a profit.” But that system was the “secret of all successful business”—indeed, of a successful America. General Mill’s Four-Square profits meant the farmers who grew the grain, the workers who milled it, the stockholders who funded it, and the people who ate it all enjoyed greater wealth and health, basking in “the highest living standard of any people on the face of the earth.” The next time someone was to suggest a “substitute for the profit system,” the copy closed, one should ask: “How’s it doing at showing its people a PROFIT?” A companion ad was entitled “This Little Miller,” projected to feature a “fanciful, Disney-ish” cartoon of a miller at the head, and undoubtedly intended to put a human face on “big business.” “What is big business?,” the ad queried. “Time after time, you know it yourself, it is a little business that had the courage, the faith, the purpose, the spirit, to grow big.” Under the “American system,” big business doesn’t just mean big plants, number of employees, volume of goods; big business is “first of all big in spirit.”10

Another parallel series of ads specifically portrayed housewives as “partners” with General Mills. One ad, “Me and My Partner—General Mills!” was slated to feature an image of a newlywed couple, the wife feeding her husband a spoonful of pie at the kitchen table. “Yes, for quite a while now—years—General Mills has been operating a little cooking partnership with the women of America,” the copy opened. Housewives put up the cash and the cooking skill; GM put up “all that sun and wind and rain and knowledge of soils and farming skills can do for grain, all that careful, honest testing can do to guarantee quality, all that helpful big-sisterly advice and counsel . . . can do” to help make women better cooks. In another ad from the same series, “It was only a book about cookies,” the narrator gave a series of homey snapshots of American families and cookies—mothers baking them, grinning kids pulling them from the jar—before reminding the reader that “we’re not really talking about that.” General Mills’ sponsored series of cookbooks was just one illustration of the fact that “‘big business’ though it may be, it’s a warm and friendly and woman-minded business, a neighborly, responsible cooking-partnership with the women of America, when its name is General Mills.”11

That Jean firmly believed her own copy is beyond doubt. In a memo she sent to higher-ups in BBDO dated November 23, 1948, she vented her frustration at the current fad for advertisements that hooked themselves to specific social causes. “Advertising has always been a social force,” she insisted, simply by serving the smooth functioning of a free-market economy. “The social consequences of mill shutdowns, layoffs, pay cuts and other grim results of failure to market the things a manufacturer makes are very real,” she warned.12 In the shadow of the totalitarian horrors of war-ravaged Europe, Jean—like Barton—was adamant that the “American business model” provided the only way forward. To free-market naysayers, she had a ready riposte: “Up to now nothing else has ever come along that has done so much in the way of material things for the comfort and happiness of its people,” was her standard reply. “And I have yet to have too positive a demonstration that an underfed, underprivileged, over-dominated people are spiritually happier than a free and privileged people.”13

In this, Jean was giving new shape to the old utopian Christian capitalism first formulated by the Social Gospelers in the early part of the century and tweaked, by Barton, into a powerful means of promoting the corporation as a “service” institution working in the public interest. Managing producer supply and consumer demand, and bringing the two into harmony, was a sacred role without which God’s kingdom of peace and goodwill would never be realized. In her ad series for General Mills, Jean expanded the word “profit” to include not only the cash profits going into corporate pockets but the more incalculable profit in emotional and material well-being created by the corporate machine: not only “the highest standard of living in history of any country on earth,” but also emotional dividends of “healthier, happier” families.

The conceptual blurring and deliberate imprecision in the words used to rally the public around free-market values at midcentury was key to heading off any real political challenge to the status quo. When Barton breezily equated consumer choice with political choice, he was performing a sleight-of-hand that diverted political energy toward private consumption. Similarly, what Jean called “love-and-kisses” or “heart-tug” copy worked through the rigorous flattening-out of difference, shearing away historical context to bask in universal human experience: “the greatness and the goodness and the terror and the trial,” as she writes in “All the Rest of Your Natural Life,” of simply being human. When Jean challenged the General Mills customer to ask how good any alternative economic system was at “making its people a PROFIT,” the question was thoroughly rhetorical. So completely had she collapsed her public into the egalitarian catchall of “the people,” so thoroughly had she blurred the concept of “profit” to refer to capital and to amber waves of grain and to maternal love, all at the same time, that the question lost all sense. It might be easier, the copy seems to nudge, to stop worrying and just bake a cake.

Jean’s most successful copy relied on precisely such facile shifts of scale, collapsing the personal, the familial, the national, and the global into a sentimental vision of shared “human interest.” In no campaign of her career was she able to do this work so consistently and effectively as in her advertising for Betty Crocker cake mixes—an account she was handed in 1952, on the strength of her wartime “heart-tug” copy for Community Plate.

The fictional character of Betty Crocker had been a mainstay of General Mills’ sales strategy since before its founding, invented as a name and signature in 1921 by General Mills’s parent company, Washburn-Crosby Flour. Betty Crocker rode the rising tide of demand for female home economics and “domestic science” experts in the first decades of the new century. In 1924, Washburn-Crosby purchased one of the nation’s first radio stations, WCCO, and launched The Betty Crocker Cooking School, with the part of Betty voiced by Blanche Ingersoll. The show’s popularity spread, and soon there were at least thirteen “Betty Crockers” nationwide on the airwaves, all delivering copy prepared by (now) General Mills’ in-house copy writer, Marjorie Husted.14

But it was Jeanette Kelly who in 1944 really consolidated the operation and the Betty Crocker concept by proposing that Betty Crocker should be housed in a “test kitchen” at General Mills headquarters, a laboratory from which she would disseminate recipes as well as cooking “standards” by which home bakers might measure their own culinary efforts.15 The idea, according to advertising vice president Samuel C. Gale, was “to sell results rather than products.”16

Betty Crocker made the leap to television in 1950 when radio personality Adelaide Hawley was hired to represent her in a cooking show on CBS, The Betty Crocker Hour. The following year General Mills changed tack and cast Hawley in a talk-show/entertainment vehicle for ABC, The Betty Crocker Star Matinee, in which America’s favorite homemaker interviewed Hollywood notables. Hawley, blonde and smiling, didn’t in the least resemble the sterner, dark-haired matron who had been the face of Betty Crocker since 1936, when General Mills had hired an artist to paint “a perfect composite of the twentieth-century American woman.”17 This inconsistency didn’t appear, however, to dent her character’s believability or her following.

By 1952, General Mills felt it needed to rethink the Betty Crocker strategy yet again, to breathe fresh life into her character as an emblem for the entire portfolio of products (which included, among others, Gold Medal flour, Bisquick, Wheaties, Cheerios, and a panoply of Betty Crocker baking mixes). In the burgeoning field of cake mixes, in particular, General Mills was now lagging behind Duncan Hines and Pillsbury. BBDO, along with a handful of other ad agencies, was invited out to company headquarters in Minneapolis to present ideas on how—and if—General Mills should continue with Betty Crocker as a branding device.

Jean saw immediately the immense value of Betty Crocker’s trusted name, if properly deployed. Betty Crocker, she argued, was “a valuable piece of property” who “shouldn’t be shut up in a museum” and “shouldn’t talk like a stuffed shirt.” Instead, it was time to reinvigorate her as a “warm and friendly and believable personality, someone women turn to in a crisis.”18 Betty Crocker, in short, should come across as “a woman who would understand and share the problems and perplexities of General Mills’ best customer, today’s American housewife.”19 It was on the force of Jean’s feeling for the Betty Crocker “character” and how to mobilize her that BBDO won the account.20

The cake mix advertising campaign Jean designed and presented to General Mills executives in March 1953 was “simplicity itself,” she assured them. In her own in-house polling matched against national surveys, Jean discovered the secret to the American housewife’s reluctance to bake cakes. It was not that baking cakes took too much money, or too much trouble, or too much time. Rather, quite simply, “Women are scared to make a cake.” This fear of failure, she pronounced grimly, “holds back more women from baking cakes than any other thing we can find.”21 All the other factors that surveys had tested to measure cake-baking attitudes—should a mix use dried eggs or fresh? milk or water?—were beside the point: a woman wanted a cake that looked and tasted mouth watering, and would buy the one she trusted to turn out that way. General Mills needed to meet that fear head on, she proposed, and combat it with a “fighting promise,” directly from the mouth of Betty Crocker: “I guarantee you a perfect cake, every time you bake . . . cake after cake after cake after cake.” The “Betty Crocker Guarantee,” combined with big, colorful pictures that look “good enough to eat,” was Jean’s secret to winning the cake wars.

General Mills wavered, initially, on including a guarantee with their cakes. “They think guarantee is a little strong for that nice ladylike character Betty Crocker,” Jean explained to colleagues on the account.22 But Jean was adamant that the old-fashioned prejudice that “nice ladies don’t sell” simply didn’t hold up in this context. In a gingerly worded memo to the advertising czar at General Mills, Jean explained that allowing Betty Crocker to issue a sales guarantee would in no way tarnish her reputation. Across platforms, from radio to magazine to television station identifications, “a great deal of space and a great deal of time and a great deal of money is being devoted to the development of the character and personality of Betty Crocker,” she argued, to make her “the warm, believable, understanding character” that the American housewife yearned for. Jean assured them that the apparent vulgarity of selling would disappear into this larger background of service. “It is our point of view that when Betty Crocker promises a young bride or a weary cook that she can remove the fear of failure that has made cake-making an ordeal, then that is service, in its finest form.” When the voice of Betty Crocker gave a guarantee, it was not a “sales message,” Jean qualified; “it is actually rather cake-insurance, cake-ASSURANCE, cake-baking REASSURANCE.”23 Eventually, Jean’s logic won the day.

In late August 1953, General Mills vice president Walter Barry wrote BBDO’s Ben Duffy of the company’s general enthusiasm for the new Betty Crocker cake mix double-page spread ads, just appearing in women’s magazines. “Not that one swallow makes a summer,” he temporized, but “we sense a determination on the part of everybody at BBDO to really go to town on this exciting challenge.”24 The Betty Crocker print and television campaign went into full effect on September 2, 1953. By the end of the month, the Market Research Corporation report on cake mixes showed Betty Crocker had narrowed the gap with Pillsbury by four percentage points, putting them effectively neck and neck. “Congratulations!” Jean’s colleague and BBDO vice president Charlie Brower scribbled on the bottom of a memo he passed on to her. “I never knew advertising to work this fast.”25

By the time Jean went to Minneapolis to give the General Mills execs their yearly campaign wrap-up for 1955, Betty Crocker was outpacing her competitors in the cake mix market. It had been a “red-letter year” according to all the major readership and opinion polling, Jean touted, with “one of the all-round best seen, all around best Starch [ratings], all around best Gallup campaigns of the food year.” Among Ladies’ Home Journal ads—the ones Walter Barry had tentatively praised—Betty Crocker now ranked as best read and best seen; Pillsbury came in a distant sixteenth. Moving into 1956, Betty Crocker was going to continue to capitalize on these advertising strategies: the soul-soothing Betty Crocker guarantee, joined with “service” in the form of timely, newsy, baking ideas for every season.26 But on top of that, she was going to “blossom forth with a new kind of cake mix advertising,” “the first advertising ever in cake mix history to take full advantage of the tremendous emotional importance a woman attaches to baking a cake.”27

The sample copy for these advertisements singled out “heart-tug” family moments: a cake to mark a child’s first birthday or to welcome Daddy home from a long day at the office; a “kiss-n-make-up” cake to end a silly quarrel. In the eventual “kiss-n-make-up” ad, a young wife and husband touched foreheads, smiling contritely, and held hands over a voluptuously white-frosted cake with “I’M SORRY” scrolled in pink across the top. “Who knows who began it? Who cares . . . really?” asked the copy beneath the image. “The thing to do now is to end it.” And the good housewife knew just how: “Steak. Thick, no-respect-for-the-budget steak. And French fries. And a splendiferous, enormous, I-love-you-truly magic of a cake.” They would remember this night, Jean promised—this night, and “the love that rings it ’round for a long, long, two-hearts-forever time.”28

Another ad in the print series, “Daddy’s Cake,” pictured a little girl carrying a giant chocolate cake to the dining room table. “It took a long time to light the candles on Daddy’s cake,” mused the copy. “Such a small candle-lighter. Such a lot of candles.” But it would take much longer for Mommy and Daddy to forget this “tremendous moment of family oneness,” when “the sparks from a pair of soft brown eyes afire with the glow of candles carry a cosmic charge strong enough to weld a gay young mother and a strong young father and a small young daughter into a single whole. And time stands still.” And just as the homemaker flipping through her Ladies’ Home Journal suddenly felt a lump in her throat, the ad copy prompted her: “Baking an eternity cake? A cake that matters . . . forever? No lesser mixes for this job.”

The “emotional copy” of the magazine advertisements was echoed on television, where Betty Crocker now made regular guest appearances on such family-friendly variety programs as The Bob Crosby Show and The Garry Moore Show. In 1950, eight million American homes had television sets; that number more than quintupled, to forty-one million, by 1958.29 In 1956, corporate sponsors were still scrambling to figure out how best to use television to push sales. Adelaide Hawley’s early Betty Crocker vehicles from 1950 to 1952 had yielded disappointing results. As a reporter for the trade magazine Sponsor noted, the medium “presents curious problems for the further development of the Betty Crocker idea.”30 Entertainment shows rather than “service” shows seemed to be the way television was heading, yet “the entertainment format violated the basic service concept of Betty Crocker.” “None of the General Mills agencies has up to now been able to come up with an answer” to this conundrum, Sponsor concluded.

While in her 1956 General Mills briefing Jean admitted that the jury was still out on how best to use television, “one way that has a sound record of sales success is through the use of trusted, believable, recognizable, real personalities.” And that, Jean suggested, was precisely what BBDO was banking on by integrating Betty Crocker’s warm, friendly personality into the warm, friendly setting of TV talk shows with “trusted” personalities like Crosby and Moore. The “relaxed, easy-going, story-telling, personal involvement” quality of the walk-ons seamlessly blended entertainment and sales pitch, so that the viewer was hard pressed to tell where one stopped and the other started.31

This was especially true when Betty Crocker moved out of the morning slots and into evening prime time, with a series of regular appearances on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show from 1955 through 1958.32 One of the half-hour show’s central conceits was to blur the boundary between real life and fiction: while the plot lines were pure invention, the establishing shot often panned to Burns and Allen’s actual house. The couple’s adult children made walk-on appearances—sometimes as actors playing a role, sometimes as themselves. Burns also routinely broke the “fourth wall” when, at the end of each show, he could be seen watching episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on the television in his study.

Such a tongue-in-cheek nod to theatricality, and to the blurred line between real-life personality and television “personality,” was a perfect vehicle for Betty Crocker. “Oh George, you’ll never guess what kind of cake I baked today,” chirped Allen to Burns in one episode. “Well, what do we have here?” he responded, taking a plate of cake from his wife. “Well, it’s a Calico Cake.” (“A Calico Cake!” whistled her bemused husband, turning to the camera.) “Yeah! Betty Crocker taught me how to make it!” Viewers may have suspected that Adelaide Hawley was a hired actress and that Betty Crocker was a fantasy, but it didn’t matter in the context of personality-driven television, where entertainment trumped verisimilitude every time.

The discovery that personality was a tried-and-true seller on television quickly expanded beyond live actors to invest inanimate objects as well: each of Betty Crocker’s cakes was imagined as a “personality” in its own right. The Calico Cake was not the Marble Cake was not the Devil’s Food Cake; each had its own distinct character and niche, and had to be marketed as such. “In print, and in television, every mix in the Betty Crocker family has advertising that reflects its own personality,” Jean assured General Mills executives, “advertising [that] answers its special problems, and builds it, independently, toward the top-of-the-market spot it deserves.”33

Much like Bruce Barton’s ingenious marketing of the General Motors “family” of vehicles, Jean solidified General Mills as the ultimate “family” brand. She did this not only by gathering all of General Mills’ products into a single Betty Crocker “family”—the crazy, fun-loving Calico Cake; the homespun Ginger Cake; the elegant Angel Cake—but by associating Betty Crocker with one of America’s best-loved fictional families: Burns and Allen. Toward the end of her General Mills address, Jean congratulated her executive audience on their recent media coup: “You rode into good night time with big night names—Burns and Allen—and you moved right in and integrated these two well-known personalities right into the Betty Crocker family,” she affirmed. “It is our firm opinion at BBDO that you could see its results in your sales.”34

Betty Crocker’s promise seeped into the American unconscious, saturating the radio waves, popping off the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal, smiling out from the family television. A January 1955 episode of The Bob Crosby Show offered a case in point. The host read aloud a letter he’d received from a fan recounting that her young son had come to her recently and asked that she bake an “after cake.” Perplexed, she told him she wasn’t quite sure what kind of cake that was. “You know,” the boy pressed. “The kind Betty Crocker promises come out perfect: cake after cake after cake.”35 In the end, General Mills’ fear that the “Betty Crocker Guarantee” would tarnish her reputation by turning her into a salesgirl was unfounded. Betty Crocker was selling peace of mind and the fantasy, if not the reality, of family togetherness. It was a product for which American housewives were happy to pay.

Jean’s Betty Crocker campaign, launched in 1953, reached its peak in the half decade following 1955. Her sentimental appeals to family—with a devoted wife and mother at its center, dispensing love with every cookie or cake—was welcome balm to a generation of new families eager to turn the page on war and settle down to the ease and abundance of peacetime. But this turn inward to the pleasures of private consumption took shape against the backdrop of the Cold War. Looming on the horizon was the specter of communism on the move, a force to be contained abroad and ferreted out and destroyed at home. The arms race and the atom bomb cast a long shadow, threatening that America’s postwar abundance could go up, at any moment, in a giant mushroom cloud.

A newspaper clipping in Jean’s papers, a 1957 opinion column by Anita Colby entitled “Leave it to the Girls to Blast the Bomb!,” captured the period anxiety well. Colby records a general sense of helplessness among postwar women who “are sitting around listening to . . . man talk,” “terrified” at his predictions for the future. After shuddering through Orwell’s bleak prognosis in 1984, now women must reckon with Nevil Shute’s recent bestselling novel On the Beach, a postapocalyptic account of a group of atom bomb survivors. Shute is such a compelling storyteller, Colby quipped, that “by the time that last page is finished you are convinced you’re finished, too.”36

Enter Jean: Colby recorded that, just as her faith in the future had been all but destroyed, she decided to consult her friend Jean Rindlaub. From Jean she heard a different, woman-centered version of the “boom” to come: not nuclear Armageddon but a baby boom, and a consequent boom in living standards and “general well-being.” “While the men have been seeing nothing but disaster ahead, women have been serenely planning for a bigger and brighter future,” Jean assured her. The families that women had started, uncertainly, in wartime were now almost grown up, “all set to keep the cycle of family and home going” into the future. The population explosion would fuel an expanding economy, leading to a level of prosperity yet undreamed of. Colby closed out her column by urging readers to rub the “nuclear dust” out of their eyes and “take a look at the other side of the prognosticating business—the woman’s side.” For her, women’s only choice for wresting the future away from disaster rested, predictably, in the private sphere of reproduction and consumption. It was not through politics but “serenely,” quietly, through domestic investment and by wielding their dollars wisely that women would bring about the long-awaited Kingdom of Peace.

Jean’s Betty Crocker guarantee was aimed, initially, at easing the modest fear of failing to bake an edible cake. Yet the guarantee also worked to keep larger global and political anxieties at bay, suggesting that women could best contribute to world peace through the small, humble, homey act of baking a cake. In her series of “emotional copy” cake ads, Jean suggested a “Cake for Every Birthday” advertisement. The copy assured women, rather incredibly, that a home in which every child’s birthday was celebrated with a Betty Crocker confection was a home immune to the dangers of teenage delinquency. “You can quote me,” Jean imagined a Family Relations Court judge pronouncing. “You rarely find a juvenile delinquent in a house where there’s a birthday cake for every birthday.” The copy went on to pledge, “When LOVE FLIES in the window, crime—or the things that breed it—walk quietly out the door.”37

Jean’s advertisements from the mid-1950s are permeated by her “love-and-kisses” copy, appeals that posit maternal love as the healing balm that can help make bearable a crazy, mixed-up masculine world of striving and struggle. In a talk to prospective clients in 1954, “We Love LOVE!,” Jean pressed this idea home. “You could think of a cake—or a pie—or a tray of R.C. colas—as a contribution to family living—a shared social experience for the family,” she urged. “And there are people who would tell you that it is good experiences shared that deepen and enrich the family’s living and that deeper family living is the beginning of better community living and better community living might be the answer to such social problems as juvenile delinquency and adult inadequacy.”38

In another proposed campaign, Jean suggested the Betty Crocker guarantee should be explicitly identified as the lowly housewife’s contribution to world peace—one properly contained within the feminine domestic sphere. “I can’t change the headlines, but I’ve got to do something,” sighed one troubled woman. “So I’ve gone back to baking bread.” “I can’t make the world over,” another mother testified. “So I keep the cookie jar full. And the house full of children. With crumbs left over for the birds.” A woman could do worse, Betty Crocker suggested, squaring her shoulders in the face of chaos. Baking was “one small way to start re-making the whole wide world.”39

Jean was convinced that by privately consuming “love and kisses” in the form of a cake or a cola, American families were furthering the cause of global peace and social harmony. Her files are filled with tidbits clipped and copied from social scientists whose work backed up her theory. “Lack of love and understanding toward others is attacked by a scientist who sees humanity doomed unless new human values are adopted,” ran the headline of an article by Dr. M. F. Ashley Montagu that Jean typed out for her files. “Men who do not love one another are sick,” proclaimed the medical anthropologist, as “love and cooperation among men . . . have a support in the findings of biological science.”40 A memo Jean received from a colleague included a newspaper clipping entitled “Psychiatrist Says Man Needs Love in His Diet to Make Him Happy.” “Man is not fed by calories alone,” argued Dr. Richard McGraw. “In home cooking, approbation, affection, love are mixed in with the batter.” Jean’s friend quipped: “Aren’t you glad the psychiatrists are catching on to what you’ve been saying all along?”41

Jean taught women how to think of consumption as an act of love; she tutored them in the sentimental language of capitalism and offered them a script that helped them square feminine virtue with the cold, masculine logic of the market. And when housewives felt the world outside their doors was too big and out of control, Jean gave them a soothing, private language of hope that was vastly more attractive than the hard language of reality.42