In her address to General Mills executives in 1956, Jean confided that although television was still in its infancy, and one could “argue for a long time” about the best way to use the new medium for advertising, one method with a “sound record of sales success” was the use of “trusted, believable, recognizable, real personalities”—like Betty Crocker. By combining her with talk-show hosts Garry Moore and Bob Crosby, General Mills had managed to seamlessly integrate cake commercials into the “relaxed, easy-going, story-telling, personal involvement” content of the shows themselves.1 It hadn’t been easy, Jean averred, and there was still much to learn. But General Mills and BBDO were committed to exploring the deep value of “personality selling,” “constantly striving to learn how to make the most of this factor of personal involvement which has so much to do with the customer’s choice of brands.”2
If in 1956 Jean knew something about the power of television and the peculiar feeling of intimacy it created, she had learned much of it in 1952 when the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Citizens for Eisenhower hired BBDO to work on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential campaign. For there, the agency deployed the power of “personality selling” via mass media in order, for the first time in history, to propel a product-candidate directly into the White House. Political reporter Edward Folliard, following Ike on the campaign trail, was struck by the power of the general’s “personal attraction” to the exclusion of any substantial political debate. When Folliard asked an older man at a rally to explain the phenomenon, he reportedly replied, “‘Well, I don’t know. I’d like to have old Ike cook me a steak.’”3 Likeability wasn’t a serendipitous add-on to Ike’s political platform; it was his political platform. And BBDO knew it could sell it.
Jean’s mentor Bruce Barton was not only a top-flight advertiser; he was also a lifelong counselor to the Republican Party and Republican candidates, in addition to serving a term in the US House of Representatives himself. His first political advisory role—albeit an informal one—was for fellow Amherst College alumnus Calvin Coolidge, in his 1924 bid for president. In 1936, the RNC tapped Barton to head its publicity campaign for Alf Landon’s presidential run. In 1948, Barton’s previously off-the-record mentorship of New York governor Thomas E. Dewey was formalized when the RNC hired BBDO for Dewey’s presidential campaign.4 When former Allied commander, NATO head, and all-around-national hero Dwight D. Eisenhower became the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952, the RNC again came knocking at BBDO’s doors.
Even as early as his days advising Coolidge, Barton understood how the incipient mass media of radio and television were going to change the nature of American political campaigns—and, eventually, the nature of American politics itself. “The radio audience is very different from the assembled crowd,” Barton advised Coolidge. “The radio audience tires quickly and can walk out on you without your knowing it.”5 The solution was to keep speeches short and simple; find a catchy, emotional message and hammer it home. While traditional party politics assumed the electorate was composed of competing interest groups, each of which needed to be appeased, Barton’s work in national advertising had trained him to view the public as a homogeneous unit. His sense was that politicians would do well to see the electorate in similar terms: not as a public of competing constituents but as a mass of consumers who could be persuaded using simplified slogans.
In advising Dewey during his second bid for the presidency, Barton warned him to steer clear of his usual crew of Albany policy wonks in developing themes for his speeches. “Albany doesn’t think about the United States,” he counseled his friend, “It thinks about Jews and Catholics, and the CIO and the AF of L, and of . . . God knows what.” “Forget about all the racial and economic groups to whom platforms make their separate appeals,” he urged. Instead, Dewey should aim to reach “the unorganized mass of folks who don’t belong to anything.”6 Politicians should appeal not to politics but to humanizing, timeless verities of the heart: fear and love, disgust and pride.
In the end, Dewey didn’t listen to Barton’s advice and lost the presidency to Truman. Four years later, however, Eisenhower offered a perfect specimen to test out Barton’s theories. Eisenhower was not a politician and thus had no team of party-machine “managers” attached to him. Indeed, he had not even publicly declared his party affiliation until right before the primary campaign.7 In the nation’s eyes, he was simply “the General”: the man who had led the Allied troops to victory. Even after adopting the mantle of the Republican Party and officially becoming a politician, he would frequently punctuate his speeches with the phrase “I’m no politician”—without, apparently, sensing any contradiction. In the words of contemporary political commentator William Lee Miller, Eisenhower was “the good man above politics”—and that was precisely what the culture, at that particular moment, was yearning for.8
Both the Republican National Convention and the grassroots booster organization Citizens for Eisenhower-Nixon tapped BBDO to spearhead Eisenhower’s 1952 bid. BBDO was placed in charge of radio and television, while two other firms were also brought in: Kudner for print media and the Ted Bates Company to produce a series of television “spots” titled “Eisenhower Answers America.”9 Television was in its incipient stages—in 1952, only 30 percent of American households owned a TV—but the advertising industry already sensed its untapped capacity. Barton gave Eisenhower some tips on how to come across to best advantage on TV: use notes instead of reading from a prepared speech to give the impression of “talking to people, as one frank, unassuming American to his fellow Americans.”10
As an example, Barton cited the popular television show Life Is Worth Living, hosted by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Set against a stage backdrop that strove to split the difference between knowledge-steeped library (walls lined with books) and the spectator’s own humble living room (plush sofas clustered casually around a coffee table), the impressively be-robed bishop lectured a live audience on how to live their best Christian life, scribbling on a blackboard for emphasis and sprinkling his commentary with the occasional homespun joke. (So popular was the bishop that he gave Milton Berle’s talk show, slotted opposite his on NBC, a run for his money; Berle, when asked about his competitor’s success, reportedly quipped, “He’s got better writers—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”) In September leading up to the election, Barton dashed off a letter to BBDO president Ben Duffy suggesting that Eisenhower go on television with a question-and-answer style program. Barton believed that a broadcast staging a cast of recognizable American “types” quizzing the general on their everyday concerns and questions would lend “human interest” punch to Ike’s candidacy, while simplifying the issues for voters.11
It is unclear whether Barton’s suggestion for a staged Q&A town forum was ever realized. Ultimately it was an up-and-coming adman at the Ted Bates Company, Rosser Reeves, who developed and saw to fruition Eisenhower’s most significant television campaign. The Bates agency had been an early industry trailblazer in “penetration” studies, or experiments set up to measure the number of viewers/listeners who actually remembered a commercial message. They established a “copy laboratory” in their offices, subjecting panels of guinea-pig viewers to television commercials and quizzing them afterwards.12 Reeves understood that, in general, getting maximum “penetration” was hard to achieve. This was particularly true of political speeches, the majority of which, in his opinion, “stank.” Interviewing a sizable sampling of people who had heard a standard Eisenhower campaign speech, Reeves discovered that an abysmally low number of respondents—between 1 and 2 percent—were able to recall anything he said.13 Political speeches were by definition low “penetration,” but Ike seemed to be remarkably forgettable.
This presented a particular danger in the age of mass media. Reeves had an idea for how to get the general “across” to the electorate. Major corporations typically sponsored one-hour radio and television programs at enormous expense—with the payoff that they cornered an equally enormous audience for their product. The Bates agency was known for its pioneering work taking advantage of station break time slots, “spots” each totaling a minute or less, that would air between shows. Spot advertising gave clients key—albeit brief—exposure to a massive built-in audience, at a fraction of the cost of sponsoring an entire show.14 In August 1952, Reeves approached the national chairman of Citizens for Eisenhower with the idea of doing a spot campaign for Ike. By stripping his message down into a series of pithy, twenty- or sixty-second sound bites and repeating them on a loop, Eisenhower would gain what hours of uninterrupted speechifying couldn’t deliver: audience penetration.
Eisenhower and his advisors were initially skeptical. The feared a spot campaign on the model of a Lever Brothers ad or a General Mills plug would cheapen his candidacy. Reeves reportedly delivered a classic reductio argument in response. “The essence of democracy is that the people be informed on the issues. Is there anything wrong with a twenty-minute speech? No. . . . Then what’s wrong with a one-minute speech or a fifteen-second speech?” Nothing, was the presumed answer. In any case, Eisenhower acquiesced.15
Filming with Eisenhower began on September 11, in the Transfilm Studio in Manhattan.16 Reeves was particular about the presentation, insisting that Ike remove his glasses, hiring makeup and lighting men to touch up the general’s face for the cameras, and coaching him on “the appropriate level of enthusiasm” in the delivery of his lines. The question part of the spots were filmed later, with performances provided by tourists—carefully curated to represent a “cross section of ethnic and regional types”—pulled from Radio City Music Hall. They were filmed reading questions off of cue cards, which were later spliced together with Eisenhower’s responses.17 The final campaign consisted of twenty-eight twenty-second Q&A spots and three one-minute spots. And so, on October 12, began an advertising blitz that, in the words of one commentator, featured “Dwight D. Eisenhower responding to the questions of individuals whom he had never seen in words written for him by an advertising man.”18
Barton had earlier predicted that hand-in-hand and face-to-face electioneering would soon come to an end, and 1952 sealed the prophecy. As Alan Taranton, who collaborated on Reeves’s spot ads, opined the night before the campaign aired: “Anything that General Eisenhower . . . will say [in person] on the subject of high prices, taxes, and corruption will represent a marginal supplementation to these short . . . almost ‘on-the-hour-every-hour’ Eisenhower broadcasts.”19
As part of his effort to convince Eisenhower and his team that brevity did not betoken a cheapening of the issues, Reeves reportedly cited Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as a masterpiece in the genre, coming in at under 272 words. Whatever value the spot ads might have had, the Gettysburg address they were not. One one-minute spot ad zeroed in on what Reeves, in consultation with George Gallup, had determined to be a major source of popular discontent with the Democratic administration: a spike in graft and corruption among politicians. A cranky citizen appeals to Ike with a newspaper in his hand. “‘Graft. Corruption. High Prices.’—headlines like that make me fighting mad, General!,” he grumbles. To which the presidentially stern Ike responds: “Yes, and the cold facts behind them would make you even madder. But we’re going to put an end to these national scandals. There’s going to be a change next January.”20
William Lee Miller, in a 1953 article commenting on Eisenhower’s use of public relations men in his campaign, had stern words for the practice. “A public relations man may defend his new role in politics by saying that he just takes good political ideas that haven’t gone across and makes them go across,” Miller observed. But advertising is “not simply neutral,” and “public relations men in politics seem spectacularly unaware . . . that the media over which you say something and the devices by which you say it alter what you say.”21 But, of course, this was precisely what the public relations men did understand. Political content had become irrelevant—or in any case, bore no necessary relationship to actual policy and follow-through. The adman, Miller went on to lament, coached politicians to craft their speeches using examples that were “memorable, whether or not they are illuminating or representative.” When a “man in the crowd” on one of Ike’s spot ads asked how bad waste in Washington was, Ike responded: “How bad? Recently, just one government bureau actually lost four hundred million dollars and not even the FBI can find it. It’s really time for a change!” The example had no content beyond shock and entertainment value: not an argument, but a punchline.
Rather than fitting “his actions to a reality that already existed,” Miller observed, the politician-turned-adman now “create[d] situations of reality.”22 As Reeves commented after Ike’s inauguration, “We did a tremendous amount of work and worry on how to ‘package’ the General” for the television spot campaign. “We changed the lights. We threw away the glasses. We put him in different clothes. We made him look vigorous, and dynamic—which he actually is.”23 That image and reality should coincide might add value to the package. But it wasn’t required for the sale.24
In Jean’s file is a script, typed on BBDO letterhead, of a planned television “Eisenhower Broadcast to Mothers” set to air on the eve of the election, November 3 1952. From Ben Duffy’s scribble on the cover page, it appears that “due to the time factor,” the show was ultimately scrapped in favor of a simple Q&A segment. But, Duffy noted, the transcript was “so good” that he wanted to pass a final copy along to her for safekeeping. The speech and staging of the piece were Jean at her heart-tugging best. But the themes that the script covered, however casual and spontaneous they appeared in Eisenhower’s homespun delivery, unfolded in lockstep with the three issues Gallup had identified as of pressing importance to voters: Korea, corruption, and communism.25
The script’s stage instructions indicated Ike and his family settled comfortably in a studio “living room,” over which the camera would slowly pan: “Camera comes in on Eisenhower, seated in a family circle. He looks up.” “Good morning, friends,” Ike addresses the camera. “Come right in. I want you to meet the family.” He introduces his first, “best” girl—his wife Mamie—before the camera passes to daughter-in-law Barbara Jean (his son John was off fighting in Korea) and their three children. He announces that he is determined to “talk sense” to the mothers of America, as the women in his life have always been “sensible women, wise women, strong women.” He knows, he says, that Korea must be first and foremost in all mothers’ minds. He pledges to make it his first priority if elected—because he, too, knows what it feels like to see your boy board a plane “in the chilly gray dawn,” not knowing when or whether he will be back.
The script then shifts to a pledge to “clean up” corrupt politicians. “I believe it is America’s women who have been quickest to resent the lack of integrity, the shameful misuse of public office, the mink coats, the freezers, the wasteful tossing away of our hard-earned tax money . . . the sorry picture that Washington presents today to the children of America.” He harks back to his own mother’s values: a good country woman who believed in God, in hard work, and thrift. But all too often, her values and those of her forebears are not seen in government. “There has been no serious effort, no evidence of genuine intent to cut our expenses” among the Democrats in power, Eisenhower laments. Well, “every good housekeeper knows” that costs in the home can be cut. “I believe in Government GOOD HOUSEKEEPING—and I pledge you, the good housekeepers of America, to live up to that belief.”
He closes out by reminding his viewers that this has been “family day” in the Eisenhower household—but that if they vote for him, “every day will be family day in the White House”—not only because the halls will ring with the laughter of his grandchildren but because “in the heart of your President, will be a deep-grained feeling that the welfare of the American family should be the first consideration in making any major decision.” (At the heart of this promise as well lies his uncompromising opposition to any “socialized medicine” nonsense.) His mother used to say his family was “a little short of ready cash but extra rich in love and loyalty, in the things that make it pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity.” And that is what he pledges to bring to America: that “privilege beyond all privilege,” summed up in one “short but all-embracing word . . . PEACE.”26
Jean wrote a political advertisement following precisely the same recipe she used to write a Betty Crocker segment: scan the polls; find out what consumers want to hear; then embed it in a heart-tugging storyline that makes people believe that women, from their humble station in the kitchen, are in fact the behind-the-scenes moral backbone of the nation. She’d used the formula to sell cake; it worked just as well to sell a president.
Eisenhower won by a landslide. While it isn’t clear to what extent the spot ad campaign boosted his numbers, what is certain is that he took the admen with him to the White House. Eisenhower found himself faced with a divided Republican Party in Congress: what he called “loud talking conservatives” pitted against the more ecumenical brand “Ike” represented. The party infighting got more press coverage than his own policy goals, and he and his advisors found themselves casting about for a means to “present his message over the head of Congress directly to the people in a way that cannot be criticized, and would help prepare public opinion,” in the words of Oval Office–cabinet liaison Maxwell Rabb.27
On November 23, 1953, Eisenhower circulated a memo to White House staff comparing his situation to that of the “advertising and sales activity of a great industrial organization” with a good product to sell. What was needed, he said, was “an effective and persuasive way of informing the public of the excellence of the product.”28 The solution was a series of live telecasts, direct reports from the capital, scheduled to air on all TV networks and radio simultaneously. The date selected for the inaugural telecast was Christmas Eve, 1953.
The producer Eisenhower selected was someone with on-camera experience aplenty: Hollywood celebrity Robert Montgomery. Montgomery, who began his career as a cinema darling and earned an Oscar nomination for his leading role in Night Must Fall, had gone on to direct before finally finding his niche as host of NBC’s 1950 television series, Robert Montgomery Presents.29 Montgomery introduced and frequently acted in the hour-long shows, which were abridgements of Hollywood films. As an early import to television, Montgomery played a key role in legitimating the new medium among his fellow stars. Montgomery had already appeared with Eisenhower on the campaign trail and was happy now to step up and take on the direction of a Christmas Eve broadcast.
Arriving at the White House in December, Montgomery went to work helping to craft the president’s speech, explaining his vision for the broadcast as a kind of “television version of Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chat.’” The filming took place on the south lawn, amid lighted candles and the twinkling of holiday decorations. Eisenhower invited the nation to join him in thanksgiving and prayer for the recently achieved peace (the Korean War Armistice Agreement had been signed in July) and the prospect of a bright and prosperous future, before the ceremonial lighting of a Christmas tree.
The broadcast was a success, and Montgomery—now the president’s full-time TV consultant—got busy planning others. A March 15, 1954, telecast went less well; Eisenhower had yet to master the teleprompter and appeared stiff and scripted behind a lectern. As a result, Montgomery coached the president to ad lib the next broadcast, encouraging him to be freer in his gestures and even giving him carte blanche to indulge his trademark tic—folding and unfolding his arms—a habit previous counselors had told him was “distracting.” In the April 5 broadcast, Eisenhower not only didn’t remain behind his desk, he strolled out in front of it and perched himself casually on its corner. The appearance was praised by Life magazine as Eisenhower’s “most professional television performance to date”—an assessment that Eisenhower found gratifying. “That’s what I’ve been telling you boys for a long time,” Ike expostulated. “Just let me get up and talk to the people. I can get through to them that way.”30
The Christmas Eve broadcast was noteworthy in yet another respect: Eisenhower’s emphasis on Christian faith as the core of American identity and the nation’s secret weapon in the mounting crusade against communism. Alluding to the cessation of hostilities in Korea, Eisenhower referred to the tree-lighting ceremony as part of Americans’ “traditional celebration of the birth, almost 2,000 years ago, of the Prince of Peace.” The world might still stand divided into “two antagonistic parts”—Communists versus the Free World—but America had a special weapon in reserve that would, one day, guarantee victory: “sincere and earnest prayer.” “More precisely than in any other way, prayer places freedom and communism in opposition, one to the other,” he suggested. For, “the Communist can find no reserve of strength in prayer because his doctrine of materialism and statism denies the dignity of man and . . . the existence of God.”31
In his personal life, Eisenhower was not a particularly religious man. He attended church only sporadically. But he almost instinctively crafted his message to dovetail with a general trend of religious revivalism sweeping America at midcentury, what one contemporary critic called a “surge of piety” that was sending Americans back to church.32 In a stroke of marketing genius, Eisenhower had kicked off his campaign for president by calling it a “great crusade,” leaving open who, precisely, the Infidel was and what was the prize to be wrested from him.33
Jean played her own small part in this national back-to-church movement. An active member of Christ Church in Teaneck, New Jersey, in 1950 she and her husband led a Bible discussion group, spurred on by the parishioners’ collective sense that “the use of the Bible in the home had declined” and that “people don’t know this greatest of all books as well as they once did.”34 To gauge her audience’s day-to-day familiarity with the Bible, she opened the discussion by asking them whether they ever noticed people reading the good Book “in a bus or on the subway or on a train or plane or anywhere else in public except in church.” “Would you yourself have the courage,” she probed further, “to take out a Pocket Testament or Bible and read it on a bus or subway?”35
Jean’s suggestion that it would require courage to read the Bible in public echoed sociologist John Murray Cuddihy’s assessment of American religious culture at midcentury. In a country where “pluralism is the de facto ‘established’ religion,” Cuddihy argued, Americans were schooled to “wear the pious smile of sociability” and keep their political and religious commitments politely to themselves.36 To speak of religion in public was a breach of etiquette, something akin to airing details of one’s sex life. It was, quite simply, “not correct,” in the terms of the successful catchphrase Jean had once formulated for Community Silver.
Jean’s next question to her parish audience made clear that faith and sex were equally taboo: “What other books would you hesitate to read in public? The Kinsey Report? The Police Gazette? Naked and the Dead? Margaret Mead’s new Male and Female?” The Bible ranked, she suggested, on the same level as girlie magazines, Norman Mailer’s raw prose, and detailed descriptions of the sex lives of Pacific Islanders in terms of social offensiveness. The Christ Church Bible discussion group hoped to remove some of that stigma in order, according to the program’s mission statement, to “reintroduce family and personal use of the Bible in the home.”37
Jean and her Christ Church friends need not have worried. The taboo on public professions of Christian faith was on its way to being lifted, and, in fact, the rumblings of an evangelical backlash against the Golden Rule “statism” of Roosevelt’s New Deal had been making slow but steady inroads for at least a decade. Roosevelt routinely used biblical allusions to translate his sweeping reforms into a language Americans could understand, declaring in his inaugural address, for instance, that his administration would sweep the moneychangers from their high seat in the temple of civilization.38 In keeping with a Social Gospel model of Christianity, Roosevelt chose parables that emphasized the state as duty-bound to feed the hungry and clothe the needy.
American business interests, dismayed by the New Deal’s creation of a “welfare state,” sought to parry this biblical thrust with one of their own. Roosevelt’s administration, they declared, had made a “false idol” of the state, perverting the emphasis of Christ’s teachings from manly individual salvation toward a feminized collectivism. Reasserting a Robert Wade–like prosperity gospel reading of America’s free-market Christian destiny was essential to reclaim the soul of the nation. Historian Kevin Kruse dates the decisive turn in the national Christian narrative to the fiery speech-cum-sermon delivered by H. W. Prentis, Jean’s former boss at Armstrong Cork and president of the National Association of Manufacturers, before the US Chamber of Commerce in 1940. Faith, not “economic facts,” Prentis thundered, was essential to “check the virus of collectivism” threatening to overrun the country and reestablish business as the standard bearer of America’s founding Christian values.39
Harry Truman provided a crucial link in this turn toward a closer pact between Christianity and the state when he sought to energize the forces of anticommunism by appealing to a Manichean opposition between the “religion” of dialectal materialism and Christianity. His 1947 announcement of the Truman Doctrine—that the United States would henceforth provide aid to countries struggling with internal or external interference with democracy, in a bid to check Soviet expansion—was followed by a 1948 State of the Union address that emphasized America’s strength lay not merely in its economy or its democratic tradition, but in its “spiritual” values. On Christmas Eve of 1950, Truman reminded a radio audience that “democracy’s most powerful weapon is not a gun, a tank, or a bomb. It is faith—faith in the brotherhood and dignity of man under God.”40
If Ike’s crusade-studded rhetoric three Christmases later was thus not entirely new, it nonetheless marked a decisive shift in the push and pull between Social Gospel and prosperity gospel Christianity that had defined the national narrative over the first half of the twentieth century. It denoted a turn away from the use of scripture by way of analogy, as a rhetorical tool to legitimate secular institutions, and a turn toward a definition of the American experiment as distinctively faith-based and Christian. In much the same way as the communist threat was envisioned as a satanic force or “virus” lying in wait, so Christian faith was imagined as America’s secret weapon: freedom-dealing kryptonite to the Soviet superman of collectivism. John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state and himself a virulent anticommunist, perhaps best summed up this new mode of imagining the red menace: only a spiritually vigorous and Christian America, Dulles opined, would be equipped to “resist the penetration of alien faiths” such as communism.41
Jean had a Dulles-style parable of American faith that she liked to pull out from time to time in her speeches. She had a friend whose daughter had married a diplomat assigned to the Bulgarian embassy; she was having a baby, and found herself behind the Iron Curtain when she went into labor and needed an emergency Caesarian. The sanitary conditions in the drafty hospital operating room were appalling: “No anesthetics. No medicine,” Jean recounted grimly. The Greek nurse on duty gave her courage to go on, however, by whispering in her ear: “Show them you’re an American.”42 Faith in the American way, Jean hinted, would not only see the young woman through pain, but even through sepsis if she only believed fervently enough. Anticommunist faith was, in some sense, a form of magical thinking: wishing something hard enough just might make it come true.
Roosevelt and Truman had initiated a rhetorical rapprochement between church and state, but Eisenhower codified the pact, officially investing previously secular civic rites with Christian content. In the decade and a half following Prentis’s rousing speech denouncing economic fact in favor of faith, corporate leaders would partner with preachers and politicians to establish America as “one nation under God.” Jean preserved a letter dated October 31, 1952—the eve of the presidential election—from Walter Williams, chairman of the Citizens for Eisenhower-Nixon Committee, thanking her for all she had done for Ike’s campaign. “Regardless of the outcome,” Williams encouraged her, “each of us has the inner satisfaction of knowing that the cause we have been fighting for is indeed a great crusade.”43 Once elected, Eisenhower sealed the rhetorical crusade into law. In 1954, Congress voted to add the words “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and in 1956 it ratified “In God We Trust” as the country’s official motto.44
Ike’s was a strange brand of religion. A good gauge of its oddness might be found in “God’s float,” designed for his 1953 inaugural parade. Featuring a square white edifice shaped to suggest an indeterminate house of worship, it was topped with a gold dome and rod that, in the words of the parade’s organizer, was ambiguous enough that spectators “will be unable to tell whether there’s a cross or a beam of light at the tip of the rod.”45 A snarkier commentator noted that, in aiming to represent all religions, “it had the symbols of none,” and “looked like nothing whatsoever in Heaven above, or in the earth beneath, except possibly an oversized model of a deformed molar left over from some dental exhibit.”46
But God’s float was indeterminate by design, not by accident. The vigorous reinvention of America’s Christian past had to avoid too blatant a violation of that other pillar of American identity, religious pluralism. It was not faith in a particular creed that was of the essence; rather, it was faith in faith itself, belief in believing, that mattered. The genial vagueness of Eisenhower’s indeterminate crusade was precisely its attraction: who could be against it? Americans’ strength and secret Communist-slaying weapon lay in their being a people of faith; it would be counterproductive to be too precise about its content. The fact that this faith resisted dissection or critical reflection was precisely its point. Indeed, those who sought to question it or garner a clearer definition of what, exactly, Americans were being asked to believe in were accused of being fancy-pants elitists, “those who dwell with words and phrases,” as Eisenhower once dismissed them. “Faith seems to be too simple a thing for some people to understand,” he complained.47
Eisenhower was the first president specifically marketed as a television personality by public relations and admen; he was also the first to so consistently rely on the language of Christian faith revival in his campaign. These two aspects of his candidacy were not unrelated. On the contrary: appealing to a contentless faith, a vague, oceanic surge of fellow feeling mingled with patriotic pride, was uniquely effective in swelling support for a candidate running on the power of personality rather than a specific and clearly articulated set of policies. Eisenhower, according to William Lee Miller, presented himself as “the negation of all that is meant by politics”—its messiness, its complexity, its incivility.48 “Faith” was a perfect information shortcut for potential voters, a piece of easily digestible personal information from which they could construct a narrative and infer policy. This turn in politics is what one might expect of a culture in which popularity, teamwork, and a species of private, inoffensive likability had become the lingua franca of public engagement.
Eisenhower tapped into the American spiritual awakening at midcentury; Jean did the same. In a speech at a 1956 Food Forum conference, Jean canvassed recent “depth psychologist” research on what motivated housewives to buy one food product over another. The first motivator was “newsiness,” “still the hottest word you can put into a headline, Mr. Gallup says.”49 The second motivator was “fun.” And the third, Jean announced, without missing a beat, was “a strong reaching out for religion.” She continued: “Maybe it’s reassurance. Maybe it’s nostalgia. But whatever it is, women want to find some way to be a little bit of use in the world.” So, in addition to offering housewives soups in new flavors or serving dishes or cupcakes with a funny icing smile on top, advertisers might satisfy the consumer’s spiritual longing by suggesting “that they bake two cakes and give one to a neighbor. Something like that.”50
Jean sought to put her depth research to the test by floating an advertising campaign that would tie Betty Crocker to the ambient national Christian revival. In an undated memo, she announced, “I believe Betty Crocker could spearhead a GREAT AMERICAN BAKING REVIVAL.” “There’s a nostalgia in the air,” Jean mused, “emotion waiting to catch on to something.” Betty Crocker could fill this wordless emotional emptiness with a worthy object: baking. “She wouldn’t begin it,” Jean was quick to point out. Any religious revival worth its salt depended on spontaneity—the spirit moves you, and you catch fire. Anything suspected of being orchestrated behind the scenes would smack of inauthenticity. Rather, Betty would “simply act as though it is an accepted fact that baking is back,” Jean advised. “And I think if we do it right, we could make it a reality.”51