The Communication Review. 8: 27-52, 2005 Copyright O Taylor & Francis, Inc. lSSN 1071-4421 print / 0000-0000 online

DOI: 10.1080/10714420590917352

SACRIFICE, CONSUMPTION, AND THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE: ADVERTISING AND DOMESTIC PROPAGANDA DURING WORLD WAR II

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Dannagal Goldthwaite Young Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

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This paper explores the themes of sacrifice and consumption in World i War II advertising. including content analyses of advertisements and ! editorials in the Saturday Evening Post as well as a textual analysis of articles in the advertising trade publications Printer's Ink and Industrial Marketing in 1942 and 1943. Results are discussed in terms of Cohen's , (2003) concepts of "citizen consumer," "purchaser consumer," and the ultimate Americanpostwar dual-identity: 'purchaser as citizen." I

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Although rationing, price controls, and limited access to new products were all a part of the American home front experience during World War I1 the quality of life experienced by American civilians during the war was, for most, better than it had been throughout the previous decade. With war production came jobs, with jobs came money, and with money came the possibility of consumption that many had been denied during , the depression (Blum, 1976, p. 92). Lingeman's (1970) profile of domestic life during the war indicates that 1944 salaries were more than twice those of 1939 (increasing from $52.6 billion in 1939 to $1 12.8 billion in 1944), an increase that was not matched by the value of the dollar, hence , increasing purchasing power. Meanwhile, consumer spending rose from , about $60 billion in 1939 to close to $100 billion in 1944. While products like rubber, appliances, automobiles, coffee, butter, and gas were scarce, the diamond industry boomed during the war as did sales of greeting Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The author wishes to express thanks to Larry Gross and Rob Drew for helpful comments, Emily West for assistance with the content analysis, and Margaret Lavoie for inspiration. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA. November 2002. Address correspondence to Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, Annenberg School for Communication. 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. E-mail: [email protected]

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D.G. Young cards, unrationed brand-name food products (Lingeman, pp. 124126), and other luxury goods and services such as movie-going and eating out (Cohen, 2003, p. 70). "For the consumer in sum, it was a time of shortages, but not major sacrifices, except in certain places at certain times," concludes Lingeman (p. 125). Yet there is a strong sense of nostalgia surrounding American sacrifice during World War II. Images of victory gardens, rationing stamps, scrap drives, and canning define our conceptualization of the American wartime experience. Liberal critic and officer for the Office of Price Administration, John Kenneth Galbraith describes the incongruity between the rhetoric of sacrifice and the actual experience of American civilians during the war, stating that "never in the long history of human combat have so many talked so much about sacrifice with so little deprivation as in the United States in World War II." (Galbraith, 1980, p. 172). This analysis has several objectives pertaining to the understanding of the rhetoric of sacrifice and consumption in World War JI.The first is to describe how the concepts of American sacrifice and American consumption were discussed in advertisements, public service announcements,and editorials aimed at middle-and working-class Americans. The second is to assess how these concepts were being discussed among advertisers at the time. The third objective is to look across texts to understand how advertisers responded to the question of "what Americans were fighting for." Finally, the manuscript concludes with a brief discussion of oooular notions of consumption in the post-September 11 era, integrating recent work by Cohen (2003).

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THE HISTORY In response to the need to communicate wartime information from the military and the government to the American people, Roosevelt approved the creation of the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF). The OFF, created in October 1941, was responsible for the dissemination of information, in the form of facts and figures, regarding the progress of war-related activities. The contested role and content of wartime information soon led to a need for more centralized control of the messages that would reach the American people, and in June 1942 the Office of War Information (OWI) was created by executive order of the president with the responsibility of generating and distributing pro-American propaganda (Blum, 1976, pp. 26-31). In an attempt to harness the persuasive powers of the advertising industry, the OW1 established a relationship with advertising agencies, media executives, and corporate sponsors. Some were brought on board in supervisory roles within the organization, such as publisher and radio station owner Gardner Cowles, Jr., as head of the OW'S domestic branch,

Sacrifice and Consumption in WWII

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and later a former vice president of CBS (William Lewis) and a former vice president of Coca-Cola (Price Gilbert) (Winkler, 1978, p. 63). Also established in 1942 was the Advertising Council, a private nonprofit organization made up of advertising agency representative~, which aimed to integrate wartime themes into advertising content. ln exchange for their efforts in the propaganda war, the Treasury Department declared all wartime advertising tax-exempt, a ruling which contributed to an otherwise unlikely wave of advertising which, according to industry executives, was designed to sustain brand-recognition with wartime themes (Bentley, 1998, pp. 32-33). The messages created by the OW1 and by the Advertising Council carried out the task of mobilizing Americans on the home front, rallying support for the war effort abroad, and support for domestic wartime programs like rationing and the purchasing of war bonds. But perhaps more important, these messages addressed the question of what Americans were fighting for ( ~ h m 1976, , p. 33). With the addition of powerful advertising and media officials to the OW1 came tension between domestic branch writers who had been with the OFF since early in 1941 and the new Madison Avenue executives (Blum, 1976, pp. 38-39). The tension arose, as would be expected, from the difference in styles between the two and from internal debates over how to strike the balance between information and persuasion. Allan Winkler (1978) quotes the following statement issued to the press by Henry Pringle, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and several other domestic branch writers immediately prior to their resignations in 1943: As we see it, the activities of OW1 on the home front are now dominated by high-pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest information. .They are turning this Office of War Information into an Office of War Bally-Hoo. (Winkler, p. 65)

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In June 1943, Congress voted to all but eliminate funding of the OWI's domestic operation, leaving the job of pro-war propaganda to the creators of media content and advertisers without direct supervision or involvement from government officials (Blum, 1976, pp. 40-41). As Blum says, The action of the Congress had returned to the media and to those who bought advertising space the whole field of domestic propaganda, a field they had monopolized in peacetime and the government had entered, when war began, only partially, temporarily, and superficially. (p. 41)

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D.G. Young

Sacrifice and Consumption in WWII

THE LITERATURE

American at the war's end. Rather than futuristic images of an unfamiliar modernity, advertisers turned to images of plenty in rural and domestic settings. Corporations "served [their] desire to be unobtrusive" (p. 354) by illustrating the American way of life with small-town Main Street. In his earlier work, Marchand (1985) discussed the centrality of visual representations of the "family circle" to advertisements during the Depression, images which "stressed harmony, cohesion, and unity" (p. 251) in contrast to the "world of competition, ambition, and cold calculation" (p. 248) that existed at work. During the war, Marchand suggests, corporations portmyed themselves as family, communicating an "imagined humaneness and benevolence of an earlier personal relationship" (Marchand. 1998. p. 108). According to Robert Westbrook (l993), domestic images of home and family dominated wartime advertisements as well. In fact, Westbrook argues, the question of "why we fight" was answered in terms of private obligation to family and friends, hence overshadowing notions of "civic responsibility." Westbrook posits that wartime advertising's depictions of the "American way of life ... had little to do with citizenship" (p. 213):

Numerous scholars have discussed the role of the messages created by the OW1 and advertisers during World War I1 and what implications they may have had on postwar American life. As noted by Winkler (1978), the dominant theme that emerged from the OW1 and the War Advertising Council (it changed its name from the Advertising Council in 1943) was that of the power of everything American: American citizens, American labor, American military, American values, and American products: Public relations men sketched the war as a struggle for the American way of life and stressed the components-both spiritual and material-that to them made America great. And perhaps most important of all, the general image seemed consonant with the way ordinary Americans viewed the war. (Winkler, 1978, pp. 156-157) Marchand (1998) chronicles the public relations transformation of the image of American business in the 1940s, from the huge soulless giant of the Depression era to the friendly business we all know and trust in wartime and beyond. In addition to community based war-related activities and programs, Marchand contends that corporations used themes and imagery in advertising to communicate a sense of neighborliness and familiarity. Among these themes was the concept of old-fashioned "American know-how." By commenting upon American master craftsmanship, Marchand suggests, industry "attained the moral authority of an association with traditional republican values" (p. 336). This theme of "American know-how" complemented a broader theme employed by corporations in wartime ads, according to Marchand: the freedom of enterprise. In addition to Roosevelt's four freedoms (of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear), American business leaders focused on what Marchand refers to as the "fifth freedom." By contrasting the heavily regulated economies of Germany and Japan to America's free enterprise system, advertisers could invoke patriotic themes while reminding readers of goods and services that enhanced their quality of life: Drawing on this connection between political rights and the standard of living, many companies found it tactically astute to infuse a free enterprise message into their ads by conflating familiar products with the everyday "simple things" for which, in their precept, Americans were fighting. (Marchand, 1998, p. 324) According to Marchand (1998). wartime advertisements concentrated on "visions of tomorrow" with images of goods and services for every

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It was above all a rewarding domestic life for which Americans were fighting, a private sphere filled with goods and services provided by those who had for the duration halted production in order that their customers might effectivelydefend homes that would in the wake of victory be even more densely cluttered with commodities. (Westbrook, 1995, pp. 214215) I

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In contrast to Westbrook's, Marchand's, and Winkler's discussions of how consumption was integrated into wartime advertisements in spite of the lack of products on the market, Mark Leff s work (1991) addresses the role of American sacrifice in wartime rhetoric, suggest~ngthat the concept was a "malleable" one used by "certain groups to delimit ... [its] meaning-to define it in terms that reinforced the validity of their own political interests and claims" (p. 1298). In "The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War IZ," Leff concludes that the rhetoric of sacrifice in World War IZ was successful in reinforcing the dominant ideology of democracy defined by free enterprise and mass consumption. The central role of sacrifice in wartime political discourse might have threatened "free enterprise" values, as the push for "equality of sacrifice" through income limitation seemed to suggest. But in the struggle over the meaning of sacrifice ... ascendant political forces were positioned to curb its subversive potential and channel it in more established political directions, so that much of the political topography could survive in recognizable form (Leff, 1991, p. 1298).

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While the aforementioned literature on sacrifice and consumption addresses the role of these themes in advertisements and political discourse, the work of Cohen (2003) illuminates how these constructs functioned as ideologies among individual Americans. In "A Consumer's Republic," Cohen (2003) addresses the American dual identity during and after World War 11 defined both by sacrifice and consumption. Cohen describes two competing philosophies among Americans during the Depression and early years of World War 11: the "citizen consumer " (one who is "responsible for safeguarding the general good of the nation") and the "purchaser consumer" who "contribut[es] to the larger society more by exercising purchasing power than through asserting themselves politically" (p. 18). Cohen argues that the transition from American life during the Depression (with its high unemployment, inflation, and limited productivity) to American life during World War I1 (accompanied by increased wealth, scarcity of goods, and increased industrial productivity) played a major role in the union of these two concepts in postwar life. It was during wartime time that individuals were forced to adopt a dual identity: On the one hand, they were citizen consumers, sacrificing the acquisition of certain goods and tolerating rationing programs for the good of the nation, and on the other, they were purchaser consumers, buying war bonds that they would use to buy new and improved fruits of industry after the war was over. Cohen suggests that in postwar America the two competing identities of "citizen consumer" and "purchaser consumer" were united in the concept of the "purchaser as citizen," whose "[satisfaction of] personal material wants actually served the national interest" (p. 8). It appears from the literature that advertisers communicated two messages in one to American readers; both to feel the weight of the sacrifices they were making, and to cherish and fight for the free market that gave them those items in the first place. Meanwhile, according to Cohen (2003). during wartime, Americans experienced a shift in identity from the competing agendas of "citizen consumer" and "purchaser consumer" to the ultimate shared postwar identity of "purchaser as citizen." But how did advertisers integrate themes of sacrifice and consumption simultaneously without advancing competing agendas? And is the evolution of Cohen's citizen and consumer identities detectable in advertisements and in discussions among advertisers? This analysis examines how the content of wartime advertisements and editorials reflects the concepts of sacrifice, and consumption, and how advertisers defined the American way of life for which Americans were fighting. It also explores the content of advertising trade publications to understand how these themes and others were discussed among advertising executives.

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METHOD The Saturday Evening Post (SEP), with its extensive middle- and workingclass readership, was chosen as the subject of analysis for parts 1 and 2. As American literature and history scholar Jan Cohn (1989) writes, the Saturday Evening Post is an "artifact of American mass culture" (p. 6) and "for over a quarter of a century ... was unrivaled in codifying the ground rules that explained and defined Americanism" (p. 5). Though Cohn's examination of the SEP ends in December 1936 with the retirement of editor George Horace Lorimer, circulation of the Post continued to rise from three million in 1937 to four million in 1949 (Curtis Circulation Company, 2002). illustrating its role as an important and popular piece of American culture among a broad cross-section of Americans throughout World War 11. Part 3 examines the content of two prominent advertising trade publications, Industrial Marketing (IM), which focused on marketing to business and industry, and Printer's Ink (PI), a trade publication of the advertising, management, and sales industries.

Content Analysis of Advertisements and Public Service Announcements (PSAs) in the Saturday Evening Post I

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Method All full-page advertisements and PSAs (in the form of editorials and government-sponsored messages) from the Saturday Evening Post during two time periods were coded. The first time period included four issues from July 1942 (July 4, 11, 18, and 25) and consisted of 104 advertisements or PSAs. The second time period included three issues from late July and early August 1943 (July 31, August 7, and 14) and consisted of 108 ads or PSAs. Each advertisement or PSA was coded for date, page number, product or service being advertised, the category of that product, and the presence of several different themes. Product categories and wartime themes were coded by both the author and a trained graduate student who coded two sets of 20 advertisements and whose codes were compared with those of the author to obtain a reliability score. Ads and PSAs were coded for the presence or absence (coded 1 or 0) of several themes or references as well as for the type of product being advertised. The average Cohen's kappa across the categories of wartime themes was 0.73 and for product type was 0.81. The following wartime themes and references are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive:

Sacrifice. Explicit reference to sacrifice, suggestions o n how t o make products last longer because supply is scarce, acknowledgement

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D.G. Young

of customer hardships experienced because of scarcity of supply because of wartime production (Cohen's kappa = 0.91). Sacrifice ar a civic responsibility. Going without is patriotic, doing your best to make products last longer is your wartime duty, dealing with wartime inconvenience is the job of every good American (Cohen's kappa = 0.70). Sacrifice for home and family. Going without assures a good future for your children, doing your part to make products last long for your children and family is an investment in your farnily's future (Cohen's kappa = 1.00). American way of lijie. Explicit references to our "American way of life," the life of every American, the way we live, or our way of life (Cohen's kappa = 0.62). Consumption in the present. Any suggestion of a purchase that the reader should make today. Even if this purchase could contribute t o sacrifice (e.g., getting better spark plugs to make your car last longer) it is still considered to be consumption in the present. Ads and PSAs that encourage future consumption (e.g., after victory is won) do not count (Cohen's kappa = 0.69). Sanctity of production, glory of labor. Accounts of how a product was created, who produces the product, the invention of the technology behind the product that makes it work, the importance of workers who are producing wartime materials (Cohen's kappa = 0.52). As this category has a low reliability compared to most of the others, conclusions pertaining to the "sanctity of production" category are only tentative. Victory wiff be won with American products and services. Attributing imminent victory to American products, engineering, labor, technology, performance, and the free market system (Cohen's kappa = 0.61). Afer victory, new and improved good and services. Any reference to new products o r services that will be brought to Americans when the war is won (Cohen's kappa = 0.79). Buy war bondr. Any words encouraging the purchase of war stamps and bonds (Cohen's kappa = 0.83). Product Categories. Advertisements and PSAs were also coded for product category. These categories are mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Several of the product categories such as food, cigarettes, and clothing are self-explanatory. Home appliances such as dishwashers and refiigerators are included under the appliance category. Leisure includes such services as hotels, films, magazines, and golf and such products as playing cards. Toiletries include soap and other beauty products. PSAs include government

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messages or editorials. Materials include such items as linoleum, cotton, paper, copper, and brass. Communication includes telephone companies and telephone parts. Health includes vision institutes and pharmaceutical companies. For purposes of presentation, in several of the tables steel, chemicals, and rubber were combined with materials to form one category. Similarly, health and insurance were combined, as were tools and appliances. Cohen's kappa for original coding of product category was 0.8 1. Results By far the most frequent product category was that of transportation, with 32 percent of the advertisements being about automobile companies, railroads, airplanes, aviation industries, and oil and gas companies. Materials were the second most frequent with advertisement for products like steel, chemicals, and rubber contributing 15 percent of the advertisements; followed by food with 12 percent, and home appliances with 9 percent. (Frequencies of product categories are available on the left side of table 1, under the product category titles.) Table 1, presents the results of the wartime theme content analysis. In the top section of the table are the percentages of each theme in the overall sample of 212. To correctly interpret these results, it is important to recall that the theme categories are not mutually exclusive. For instance, an advertisement could mention sacrifice, consumption, and the "American way of life" all at the same time. The percentages in each cell simply indicate the percentage of the ads that contained that particular theme. According to these results, 50 percent of the total sample included some mention of victory being won with American products, 43 percent advocated some form of consumption in the present, 37 percent mentioned the sanctity of the production process, and 36 percent mentioned sacrifice. When broken down by product category we begin to tease out which industries were responsible for the creation of which messages. The two industries that did not mention sacrifice were toiletries and cigarettes. Meanwhile, all twenty-two of the advertisements that fell into either of these two categories called upon readers to consume their products. Cigarettes did win the "buy war bonds" category with 55 percent of their advertisements carrying the "buy war bond" message. At a distant second place in the war bond category were public service announcements (38 percent). PSAs made more mention of the "American way of life" than any other type of advertisement, with three-quarters of their messages discussing the importance of the way Americans live. Unlike product advertisements, PSAs often promoted sacrifice as a civic responsibility (38 percent of all PSAs), perhaps illustrative of the differences between the

8% 12%

2% 3%

0%

0% 0%

38% 0% 20% 0% 0% OX 2%

13%

0% 100% 50% 63% 33% 44%

27% 33% 0% 32% 44%

0%

0%

0%

38%

0%

0%

0%

5%

14%

52%

5%

12%

36%

27% 22%

9%

100%

67%

18%

88%

92%

0%

0%

67%

100%

19%

43%

3%

0%

33%

9%

0%

0%

75%

0%

0%

0%

33%

10%

47%

53%

0%

50%

18%

4%

17%

50%

0%

0%

9%

71%

37%

Consume in Glory of the Present Labor

41%

31%

75 % 72%

0%

0%

9%

4%

0%

50%

25%

0%

0%

57%

25%

13%

28%

0%

17%

9%

16%

25%

38%

25%

33%

55%

33%

24%

After Vlctory War New Goods Bonds

0%

33%

9%

8%

8%

75%

25%

0%

0%

86%

50%

Victory with U.S. Products

Note: Wartime theme categories are not mutually exclusive. Tbe percent indicated in each cell reflects the percenl of ads or PSAs in the said product category or time period that contains the given wartime theme.

Overall (N=ZlZ) By Product Category Appliances/Tools (N=21) Cigarettes (N=ll) Clothing (N=3) Communication (N=4) PSA (N=8) Leisure (N=12) Food (N=25) Health Insurance (N=ll) Electricity (N=6) Toiletries (N=ll) Transportation pJ=68) Materials, Steel, Chemicals, Rubber pJ=32)

Sacritlce as Sacrifice for American Way Sacrifice Civic Duty Home and Family of Li

laole I. rercentage of Ads Containing Wartime Themes Overall and by Product Category

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D.C. Young

an extra lease on life by replacing old, worn-out or inferior quality spark plugs with new Champions" (SEP, 1942). In this manner the texts are capable of simultaneously reminding Americans of their sacrifices and urging them to go out and buy something new. In the areas of transportation, materials, appliances, and in public service announcements emphasis was placed on several themes which were often tied together: the glory of labor, victory with American products, and an abundance of American products in the future. Take for example this advertisement by Philco Corporation, producers of refrigerators, air conditioners, and radios which refers to their workers as "soldiers of production": The inspiration of Philco's soldier of production is more than victory, more than the preservation of our precious freedom, for in their achievements for the use in war, they see the symbol of a new and abundant future ... a future that makes Victory worthwhile for a mankind that is free! (SEP, 1942) Companies such as General Electric, General Motors, North American, and Cessna, whose production lines were dedicated to the war effort, used the opportunity to simultaneously discuss the cutting-edge American technology involved in their products, their role in the war against Germany and Japan, and the soon-to-come innovations that would be a regular part of American postwar life. Cessna, for instance, emphasized how the craftsmanship of their planes was contributing to victory and articulated a postwar vision of airplanes for the average American, a "family car of the air": Right now Cessna is devoting its vast facilities and 31 year background in air craftsmanship to a 24 hour a day war effort ... the same sort of aviation "know how" that produced Cessna's famous Airmaster, three times judged the "World's most efficient airplane". But when peace comes to America, Cessna will turn those facilities into an even richer experience toward building the family car of the air that everyone can buy and fly. (SEP, 1942) Taken together, these three themes created a coherent message of the importance of present and future American production and of future American consumption. Applying Cohen's (2003) concepts to the results of the content analysis leads to some interesting conclusions. First, recall Westbrook's (1993) observations that advertisers' response to "why we fight" "had little to do with citizenship" (p. 213). According to the content analysis, only 1 2 percent

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WWZZ

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of the SEP advertisements discussed sacrifice in terms of civic responsibility. But, then again, only 5 percent described sacrifice in terms of home and family. Instead of explicit mentions of sacrifice, advertisements discussed the plentiful life that would be experienced after the war, and urged Americans to buy war bonds to plan for goods that would be available when the war ended. In doing so, advertisements implicitly defined the American way of life in economic rather than civic terms, either with abstract notions of free enterprise or with images of material goods. It seems that by describing the American way of life for which readers were fighting in material rather than political terms, these texts were in~plicitly redefining consumption-rather than sacrifice-as the preeminent civic duty. According to the texts, by buying war bonds and planning for the new and improved products of the future, citizens could "satisfy their personal material wants" and thus "serve the national interest" (Cohen, p. 8).

Content Analysis of Editorials in the Saturday Evening Post Starting in the spring of 1942, the SEP issued a series of full-page "statements," one per issue, which implicitly addressed the question "What are Americans fighting for?" the words of the Post, the statements were "voic[ing] the spirit and determination of a people whose one thought [was] victory-and buil[t] with it a sense of its responsibility in the future America" (SEP, 1942). In many instances, the statements were written in the form of letters to Japanese and German citizens and leaders. Headlines such as "Japanese Lady Buy from Pushcart .. . Not So in America!," "I'll Be Wearing This Uniform, Goring, When Yours Is in Mothballs!", and 'Three Cents for a Day's Work Isn't Much to Fight for, Suzuki-san?" framed the messages as public declarations of America's greatness to America's enemies. Of course these statements were not part of the international propaganda campaign, but were designed for an American audience, consistent with the previously discussed mission of the OWI. Hence, telling America's fictitious foreign enemies like "Suzuki-san" and foreign leaders like Goring what America was fighting for provided Post readers with a clear picture of what it was they were fighting for, or at least what the Saturday Evening Post saw that they were fighting for. Method A series of sixteen SEP statements was collected, including all those issued weekly from July 4, 1942, through October 3, 1942, (N = 14) as well as two issued in July and August 1943, when the statements occurred less frequently. The sample was coded for the presence of the same wartime themes as the advertisement content analysis described earlier. Results of the content analysis of editorials are presented in table 2.

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Table 2. Wartime Themes in Saturday Evening Post Editorials (N=16) Sacrifioe for Victory After Sacrifice Home American Consume with Victory as Civic and Way in the Glory US. New War Sacrifice Duty Family of Life Present of Labor Products Goods Bonds

Results The results of the content analysis are presented in table 2. The consistent message across the Post's editorials was that of the power of American production and the imminent victory that would result from the use of American products to fight the war. Present in every statement was the importance of the "American way of life," defined in terms of a "planned cycle of mass employment, mass production, mass advertising, mass distribution, and mass ownership" (SEP, 1942), a phrase that appeared almost verbatim in most of the statements, and was the only portion of the text appearing in bold print. The concept of free enterprise was the chief ideology defining the America for which people were sacrificing and fighting, according to statements such as the following: "It is well worth defending, this American system. And it will able to defend itself. For it's founded on an idea that's the very keystone of strength. The idea, born with Free Enterprise, that has given America its pattern of living" (SEP, 1942). Although sacrifice was mentioned more in editorials than in advertisements, when present it was described more in terms of home, family, and material goods (31 percent) than as a civic responsibility (6 percent). A letter to a German housewife makes explicit mention of the reason Americans were willing to make wartime sacrifices: We want to show you how we live here, and explain why we want nothing to do with your way of life. Why we'll make any sacrifice to keep on living as free people. Let's visit one of our modest homes first. Bathroom? Oh yes, we have bathrooms. You say many of your working men's homes don't even have a sink? That's not very good, is it? Telephone? Of course. Most of us have those too ... (SEP, 1942). Later in this same statement to the German housewife, the system of free enterprise is cited as the "principle" against which Germans were fighting. "You see, it is not just a country you're fighting. It's a principle

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you're trying to destroy ... Our great network of stores, our electrified homes, our plentiful foods, these are all the outgrowth of this principle of Free Enterprise under which we live as free Americans" (SEP, 1942). References to civic participation or traditional democratic notions of political freedoms are scarce, and when present appear as pointing cues leading up to the true "keystone" of the American way of life, free enterprise. For example, several of the texts give passing mention to the freedom of religion and freedom of speech, as they build up to the freedom of employment, or "the right of all Americans to farm or fish-write books or run machines-as their own hearts dictate. The right to change from the old way to the new" (SEP, 1942). The individual liberty that is emphasized is the American freedom to "do and be and have what we please ... to work where we please-and be paid enough to possess the products of our industry" (SEP, 1942). In a fictitious letter from an American mechanic to a German citizen, the mechanic states, "tomorrow, if I take a notion to buy a farm, or start a little business, that's my business" (SEP, 1942, emphasis in original). The two statements issued in 1943 continue to mention the "American way of life" and the victory that will be won with American tools, but the emphasis on American production and free enterprise is delivered in a different package. These messages concentrate on the America to which the soldiers will return, and what will make it a country worthy of their sacrifice. Again, the answer is provided in economic terms, but here it is in the form of letters to and from American soldiers. In a letter to a fictitious American soldier, a statement reads: It's pretty simple, isn't it, the thing you want when this is done. A j o k n o t charity. The privilege of returning to your place in a free man's world. This reward you will have earned, soldier, a reward we are working to guarantee you, the unfettered opportunity to build the kind of a life you want to have when you come back (SEP, 1943). Similarly, in the context of a letterfrom a fictitious soldier to the American people, he writes "when this is finished, we want to come home to a world where a man can have a job and raise a family in decency, without any fear of war or unemployment" (SEP, 1942). In sum, the editorials, like the advertisements, illustrate an America in which citizens were fighting to defend an economic system and the right to acquire goods and services. And while more of the editorials mention the theme of sacrifice (50 percent) than do the advertisements (36 percent), of those eight editorials that mention sacrifice, five of them do so in material-rather than civic-terms, again moving towards Cohen's (2003) proposition of the emergent postwar identity of "purchaser as citizen."

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Textual Analysis of Advertising Trade Publications Method A textual analysis of two trade publications was consulted to complement the content analyses. The study included eight issues of the monthly magazine Industrial Marketing (IM), four issues from spring 1942 and four issues from Summer and Fall 1943, as well as eight issues of the weekly publication Printer's Ink (PI), four issues from July 1942 and four issues from August 1943. The textual analysis included articles that addressed the issue of advertising's role in wartime. In particular, the analyses focused on how 'advertisers discussed a) what themes should be integrated into wartime advertisements, b) their plans for postwar reconversion, and c) how ads should address the question of what Americans were fighting for. Results In general, the content of I M and PI was quite consistent in its focus on the importance of sustained advertising during wartime and on its role in America's postwar economy as the stimulus of civilian consumption which would in turn drive production and employment. However, tensions did arise in several areas, including the extent to which advertisers should employ postwar themes or take credit for war victories. An additional contested issue, of particular interest given the questions posed at the outset, concerned how advertisers should respond to the question of what Americans were fighting for. The importance of maintaining advertising's presence throughout the war was consistent in both texts. Not wanting to witness the kind of economic devastation experienced during the Depression, advertisers emphasized the importance of sustained advertising as an "insurance policy" (IM 1942, p. 74). One marketing consultant urged, "Even though our ability to supply goods may be limited, we must keep our name prominent in the market pending the return of business as usual" (p. 34). In an essay published in PI (1942), advertising executive T. H. Thompson described the human memory as a "tricky thing" and that it was the advertising man's job to "fortify this self-adjusting mechanism of the mind with advertising ... and more advertising." The author continued: We cannot afford to let dealers and users forget. We must hammer away at their conscious and subconscious minds so that our wishes become their wills. ... The constant repetition of an advertising theme becomes a mesmeric drone. It projects the activity of the advertiser upon the passivity of the reader and listener. It shouts, whispers, harangues, coaxes, wheedles, suggests, pleads, directs ... in a never-ending banage that assaults the objective, captures the customers. (p. 64)

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Given that industrial advertising appropriations increased an average of 26.8 percent from 1942 to 1943 (IM, 1943), it seems that industry understood the importance of sustained advertising during wartime. Advertising executives urged colleagues to take advantage of the opportunity to market unrestricted goods, particularly given Americans' increased purchasing power and demand. In a February 1942 article by IM's publisher, G. D. Crain, advertisers were reminded that: With tremendous buying power released by the enonnous volume of war production, the ability of non-military production to absorb the incomes of the workers is the key to a strong economy. Much of this increased income will be siphoned off in taxes and in war savings; but much of it will be left for the purchase of the products which are still, fortunately, available in quantity for civilian use. (p. 70)

In addition to a boom in luxury goods like jewelry due to "excess millions burning holes in war workers' pockets" (PI, 1943, p. 21), the war had created other new markets to which advertisers were urged to turn their attention. An article encouraging advertisers to shift attention away from some markets and toward others pointed to lucrative markets like toys, black-out and dim-out products and services, yard furnishings and garden tools for victory gardens, and greeting cards to send to soldiers (PI, 1942). The lack of new products also created a need for expanded repair shops for old appliances, clothing, and hosiery. In a period when products were scarce, such markets presented advertisers with a rare opportunity to promote consumption in the present. While the articles indicate agreement on the importance of sustained advertising, they also point to disagreement concerning its content. One such tension surrounded the extent to which advertisers should write drum-banging patriotic copy versus practical how is your product going to help this war copy. For instance, an article in a 1942 issue of P I explained that industry needed "less rah rah, we-can-beat-the-world promotion and more pointed facts based on what most advertisers and agencies want to see" (p. 19). A piece in the March 1942 IM urged: "We need less flags waved and more guns fired. We need less 'Remember Pearl Harbor' and more 'Here's how to get out the goods' . .. What good is history now? What are you doing today to help win this war? ... Drop the war angle-talk the production angle" (pp. 77-78, emphasis in original). But talking about how new products were winning the war often ran the risk of appearing boastful. An IM editorial reminded advertisers that American industry would win the war "without bragging about it" and that explaining how your product is assisting the war effort "is always newsworthy if it is intelligently and not bombastically handled" (IM,

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1942, p. 77, emphasis in original). One fear concerned how such boastful text would alienate readers who saw it as tasteless. In an April 1942 piece in IM, S. Hopper of the Associated Business Papers argued that "platitudes, boasts, and unsupported claims, never popular with readers, are today a sure source of irritation" (p. 24). Not only would such claims annoy readers, but advertising bragging about products of the future could hurt the sales of older models. August 20, 1943, in the issue of PI, N. L. Cooperider of Butler Manufacturing wrote that "with ads picturing dream world products as postwar realities, salesmen will have to do a lot of arguing to sell old 1941 models" (p. 23). A second source of disagreement among advertising executives concerned how their advertising copy should address the question of what Americans were fighting for. All agreed that they were fighting to preserve the American way of life, but how that way of life should be defined was unclear. Some executives urged that the American way of life was the system of free enterprise, and it was this that had been attacked. W. D. Murphy, the president of the National Industrial Advertisers' Association, explained that the American way of life they were fighting for was made possible by an economy "based on competitive, private enterprise ... [and that] such a system is unique because it alone relies on advertising and selling" (IM, 1942, p. 99). Others agreed, but argued that the average American would not understand such an abstract concept. As explained by the president of Meredith Publishing, Americans were making sacrifices to win our personal opportunities, our comforts and conveniences.. . . To the man in the street, to the woman in the home, freedom is a total-a total of details and details are largely materialistic. "Freedom" to the average citizen is nebulous and academic. The details of our daily lives are understandable. (PI, 1942, p. 14) Similar sentiments were articulated in an essay published in the July 3, 1942, issue of PI. The author, "Bill Miller: American," acknowledged that while free speech, free press, and free enterprise might be the freedoms underlying what Americans were fighting for, they "were not what [he] was fighting for." He was fighting for such tangible things as a safe place for his son and dog to play, for the opportunity to kiss his son goodnight, and for a house with a lawn, flowers, and vegetable garden (p. 12). Other advertising executives saw the "blueberry pie" response to what Americans were fighting for as insulting. J. L. Stanley argued that advertisers should not dumb down the answer to this all-important question, railing against the use of such tangible concepts as "a slice of pie, a pet dog or a glass of beer." Stanley even went beyond advertising's common "freedom of enterprise" response, instead focusing on political concepts

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like the right of women to not be "subjected to the sort of violence inflicted on the women of Nanking" and the freedom of average Americans to be "spared the gas and bombs visited upon spear-brandishing Ethiopians by mechanized fascisti" (PI, 1943, p. 100). Stanley's position was not a common one. In fact, it was the only appearance of this line of argument in the trade publications examined here. Instead, most advertisers described what Americans were fighting for as either an abstract notion of free enterprise or with concrete illustrations of this same concept, including everyday conveniences of home. A third tension concerned advertisers' postwar planning. While most agreed that postwar planning was necessary to regulate future markets, articles in IM and P I suggested that among advertising executives and between the advertisers and government officials in Washington DC, discord arose concerning how much postwar planning advertisers should be carrying out before the war's end. In April 1942, the president of the National Industrial Advertisers Association (NIAA) discussed this tension, stating that the theme of "Advertising for Victory-and Tomorrow" was an unpopular one in Washington DC: First win the war, then plan the peace is the order of the day. I would do nothing to lessen the war effort one iota, but I think that consideration of the peace to come might even strengthen our present resolve. Industry is being called upon to win this war; it must insure as a matter of self-preservation that it wins the peace also. (IM, 1942, p. 98) In the summer of 1942, the NIAA held a three-day war conference in Atlantic City on which the third day was dedicated entirely to postwar planning, including a presentation entitled "Imagineering-Where Do We Go from Here?" A July 1942 article in P I urged advertisers to "get busy on postwar planning" as it was "not too soon for anyone to start" (p. 56). One simple way to encourage postwar markets was by advertising postwar products that Americans could purchase with war bond savings once the war was over. A July 24, 1942, headline in PI insisted that advertisers "Sell Tomorrow Today!" and urged, "By promoting post-war products NOW, advertisers can apply merchandising principles to moving war bonds, thus making dollars do double duty" (p. 13, emphasis in original). The author of the piece, F. Bohen of Meredith Publishing, insisted that the war effort would benefit from a guarantee of future prosperity ensured by "creating and maintaining desire for its products when they are again available" (p. 13). By 1943, however, it appears that while most advertisers were busy with postwar plans, some were concerned that postwar planning was a distraction from winning the war. An editorial that appeared in the July

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1943 issue of IM, entitled 'The War Effort Needs More Advertising Support," cited the fact that the war production had not met its quota for the first six months of 1943 and reminded advertisers of their main goal to "get the war over as quickly as possible." The authors advised advertising executives to avoid being "lured by the opportunity to revert to intriguing generalities under the guise of postwar planning" (p. 70), but instead to fill their copy with useful product maintenance information. Yet a fullpage ad several pages beyond that editorial presented the NIAA's "Declaration of Postwar Principles." The enumerated list included the notion that the free enterprise system had "provided the highest standard of living in the world and that the system could only be maintained with high productivity and employment, mass production and distribution of goods, and cooperation between industry, labor, and government (p. 133). The next month's issue of IM was even more loaded with articles on postwar planning, including "The Advertising Man and Postwar," "Washington's Postwar Thinking," and "How American Steel and Wire is Organizing Postwar Planning." It seems whatever concerns advertisers or government officials had about postwar plans distracting advertisers from war efforts did not change advertisers' growing focus on how to ensure a strong peacetime economy. The discussions were centered on how to forge relationships between business and government to avoid heavy governmental regulation, and how advertising could guarantee production by increasing civilian demand for postwar goods. Industry executives understood that goods alone would not create revenue, hence industry's increased production capabilities would not boost a postwar economy unless demand for those goods could be guaranteed. "Our greatest potential weapon in that home-front battle is a reservoir of buying power which immediately can be turned loose to absorb the peace-time products of our enormously expanded productive machine," wrote F. Bohen of Meredith Publishing (PI, 1942, p. 14). In an address to the NIAA, reprinted in the August 1943 issue of IM, E. L. Andrew of Fuller, Smith, and Ross explained simply, "Making things isn't going to be so much of a problem ... as is the problem of marketing them fast, cheaply, and soundly. The money doesn't come in to meet the pay roll until the goods are sold" (p. 31, emphasis in original). E. L. Lindseth of the Electric Illuminating Company described the marketer's job as "uniting the country's production and consumption capacities" (p. 35). As G. D. Crain, publisher of IM, wrote in a 1943 issue: The tremendous increases we are making in our productive capacity, under the urgings of war necessity, must be used to supply consumer needs when the war is over. ... Advertising, which conditions the public to new developments, which will become realities after the war, is

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already playing an important role in the creation of the new markets which we shall all be exploring when that great day comes. (IM, p. 74) As the success of postwar markets was contingent upon industry's ability to distribute the many products which were already able to be produced, attention was shifting from the production side of the equation to the consumption side. F. Jurasheck, a market researcher for the steel industry, advised advertisers to understand the "never-ending circle" of full employment, purchasing power, and demand for goods and services. "Demand will continue if purchasing will hold up if full employment is effected, full employment can be effected only if demand contin~es,"he wrote in the September 1943 IM (p. 24). An address by Modern Industry's postwar plans editor, Arthur Pearce, to the NIAA (reprinted in IM) described the postwar economy as a "centering of all economic planning on the maintenance of buying power ... insuring a level of consumption equal to the level of production" (IM 1943, p. 60). In that address, Pearce discussed the growing business-friendly view among Washington DC officials who were beginning to recognize the importance of private industry to the maintenance of high levels of employment at the war's end. As Washington DC officials were intent on maintaining high levels of production "to provide jobs, to provide physical products that make for a high standard of living, and the income base to support increased social security," urged Pearce, " it follows that we must have high levels of consumption" (p. 60). DISCUSSION Sacrifice and consumption, though seemingly contradictory concepts, proved surprisingly compatible in wartime advertisements. Industries such as food, leisure, and transportation were all capable of underscoring sacrifice in domestic American life while simultaneously urging the readers to make purchases to stay healthy and to make their current products last longer. Meanwhile the appliance, transportation, and materials industries created an image of a postwar life full of new and improved American products. By articulating a vision of abundance that would be experienced by all once their engines, rubber, steel, fan belts, and bolts won the war, corporations succeeded in defining a postwar American way of life in terms of material goods. The content of advertising trade publications indicates an ongoing negotiation between serving the good of the country and serving the good of industry. Advertisers were fraught with differences of opinion regarding how to describe the life for which Americans were fighting, how to provide useful product information without appearing competitive or

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boastful, and how to make postwar plans and still meet wartime needs. The resulting compromises succeeded in serving both war aims and the aims of industry. It also united the concepts of sacrifice and consumption: "Sacrifice today. Use this product information to make your old goods last as long as they need to. Understand that the system of free enterprise for which we are fighting is what provides these daily conveniences that you are currently missing, and that by buying war bonds today, you can own the cars and refrigerators of tomorrow." The union of sacrifice and consumption, and the dual identity encapsulated in Cohen's postwar notion of "purchaser as citizen," is illustrated in a comment made by F. Bohen of Meredith Publishing, 'The sacrifices of today, in large measure, will be bearable only as we can dream and plan for the years after the war" (PI, 1942, p. 14). For advertisers, victory meant a postwar era with sustained levels of production and with little government regulation. According to the content of advertisements, victory meant abundance for every American. As described by Gary Cross, author of An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (20001, The promise of the postwar era was a resurrection of the consumerist message from the 20s-an image of seamless harmony, the blending of old and new, the spiritual and material, the private and public. To consume was to be free. (p. 86) Among advertising executives, consumption was overtly discussed as the remedy to a potential economic downturn, and advertising as the tool to guarantee demand. Without the perception of need on the part of the consumer, it was argued, the entire cycle of production, distribution, and consumption would come to a grinding halt, in turn increasing unemployment. They argued that it was industry's job to "insure a level of consumption equal to the level of production" (IM, 1943, p. 60). They described the "reservoir of buying power" among Americans as "[their] greatest potential weapon in the home-front battle" (PI, 1942, p. 14) and reminded colleagues of their "important role in the creation of the new markets which we shall all be exploring when that great day comes" (IM, 1942, p. 74). It is interesting to note the discrepancy between this overt discussion among advertisers regarding the importance of consumption to a strong postwar economy and the themes that appeared in the actual advertisements. While the advertisements conveyed an image of postwar abundance, they never actually labeled consumption as an economic stimulus. Even the SEP editorials praising the system of free enterprise did not expose consumption's causal priority in this complex cycle. Instead, ownership

/ ! j 1

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of goods was most ofien discussed as an outcome of the system, a beneficial byproduct of mass production, not as the force necessary to keep the machine working.

I

The pattern of Free Enterprise is a simple one to understand. Mass production. Mass advertising. Mass distribution. Mass ownership. Lifting the living standards of the people. Bettering their lives. Encouraging all to share the products of industry. (SEP, 1942).

:

1

Such concepts as "our electrified homes [and] our plentiful foods" were described as "the outgrowth of this principle of Free Enterprise under which we live as free Americans" (SEP, 1942), not as necessary elements to guarantee the health of the system in the first place. But why would advertisers avoid exposing consumption for what it really was: an economic stimulus? It is conceivable that consumers did not need to be informed of the importance of their role in maintaining a strong peacetime economy; that appealing to their individual wants and needs was enough to stimulate the level of consumption necessary. Recalling advertisers' warning to avoid boastful patriotic copy, perhaps they feared that an explicit call to consume products in the name of national economic health would be considered offensive. Unfortunately, the advertising trade publications analyzed here did not address the issue of how consumption should be marketed as a remedy for the postwar economy; only that it was the necessary ingredient and should be guaranteed through the creation of demand. One of the most obvious questions to emerge from this analysis is whether ad and industry men of the 1940s are to blame for the birth of the "consumer's republic" (Cohen, 2003) and the global economic and environmental ills that have accompanied it. Did advertisers really manipulate the public to create artificial markets for goods that people did not need? Did they "hammer away at their conscious and subconscious minds so that their wishes became [advertisers'] wills" (PI, 1942, p. 64)?To argue that advertisers imposed their will on Americans during the war, fabricating artificial needs and cultivating false desires, assumes that at some level needs can be categorized as either genuine or illegitimate. Schudson (1986) argues that to separate "biological needs" from "socially constructed needs" is to deny the very elements that make us human. Needs are infused with meaning, he argues. "Once fed and sheltered," urges James Twitchell (1999), "our needs have always been cultural, not natural" (p. 283). Twitchell describes consumerism as the "triumph of the popular will ... far closer to what most people want most of the time than at any other period of modem history" (p. 285). However, as Schudson explains, advertising's purpose is not an altruistic quest to fulfill the

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preexisting wants or needs defined by popular will, but instead to market items "from among commercially viable choices" to potentially profitable customers (p. 235). So while it may be inappropriate to define a late 1940s housewife's desire for an electric refrigerator as an "artificial need," it is appropriate to conclude that the dialogue among advertisers in 1942 and 1943 was more about creating consumer needs than it was about discovering them. The notion that the entity for which advertisers claimed Americans were fighting was not as much a system of government as it was a system of free enterprise may be difficult to swallow. After all, Americans' nostalgic conceptualization of wartime America tends not to include the explicit glorification of America's economic system over America's political system. In fact, in the early days of America's War on Terror, many were quick to highlight the apparent contrast between the patriotic call to sacrifice in World War I1 and the somewhat hedonistic call to consume in post-September 11 America. Less than one week after the towers fell, for instance, Harry Levins of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote, "today's Home Front messages are the exact opposite of what American civilians heard in World War II" (Levins, 2001, p. A15). It is evident that the messages of the two eras were fundamentally different. With few products and services on the market, advertisers during World War I1 had few opportunities to urge consumers to purchase cars or take trips. And when issuing a promise of new and improved goods to come, advertisers of the 1940s did not publicly describe consumption as an economic stimulus. But that contrast should not overshadow the important role that the theme of consumption indeed did play during World War 11, both as a response to the question of why Americans were fighting and as a promise of postwar abundance. In post-September 1I America, consumers were often confronted with messages urging them to consume for the explicit purpose of strengthening the U.S. economy. The mission of the General Motors "Keep America Rolling" (0 percent financing) campaign was described in these terms on the General Motors Web site: For years the auto industry has played a crucial role in our economy. General Motors takes that responsibility seriously. We think it's important to keep workers working and for the economy to keep rolling along. (General Motors, 2002) As the airline industry experienced a post-September 11 drop in demand for flights, President Bush publicly issued statements encouraging Americans to travel, to fly, and to spend. In the media, this campaign was referred to as a "preconsumption publicity blitz" (Komblut, 2001, p. Al). Meanwhile,

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Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and John Keny both issued statements encouraging Americans to purchase cars, go to stores, or fly on airlines (Kowalczyk, 2001). The message had bipartisan support: Spend to keep America strong. In contrast to the implicit messages of the 1940s, in post-September 11 America Americans were appealed to as citizens of the consumer's republic, in which "the interests of individual purchasers as citizens and of the nation were one and the same" (Cohen, 2003). This fusion of American political and consumerist ideologies into one national identity defined by consumption was best illustrated in a PSA produced by the Ad Council in 2002. It was issued as a part of their "Campaign for Freedom," initiated in July 2002 to "celebrate our nation's freedom and remind Americans about the importance of freedom and the need to protect it for future generations" (Ad Council, 2002). The public service announcement was entitled "Choice." It began with the camera moving through the well-stocked aisles of a large supermarket. The text "Freedom" appeared in the foreground on the left side of the screen. As the camera continued to move through the aisles, panning across the colorful products on the shelves, the word freedom was followed by "Competition," then "Possibilities," and finally "Choice." The screen then faded to black, followed by the phrase, "It all starts with freedom ... Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it." It seems that historian Gary Cross (2000) was right; in the twentieth century, "Consumerism was the "ism" that won" (p. 1).

REFERENCES Ad Council. (2002). Campaign forjieedom. Retrieved from http://www.adcouncil. org/campaigns/campaign-for-freedom/ Retrieved August, 2002 Bentley, A. (1998). Eating for victory: Food rationing and the politics of domesticiv.

Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Blum, J. (1976). V was for victory: Politics and American culture during World War II. San Diego: Harvest. Cohen, L. (2003). A consumers' republic: The politics of mass conrumption in postwar America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cohn, J. (1989). Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cross, G. (2000). An all-conruming century: Why mmmercialism won in modem America. New York: Columbia University Press. Curtis Circulation Company. (2002). History of the Curtis Circulation Company. Retrieved from http://www.curtiscirc.com/history.htm Retrieved August, 2002 Galbraith, J.K. (1980). A lire in our times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. General Motors. (2002). Keep America Rolling Campaign. Retrieved from www.gm.com January, 2002.

D.G. Young Komblut, A. (2001, September 28). Bush urges a return to the skies, plan includes guard units a t airports. The Boston Globe, pp. Al. Kowalczyk, L. (2001, September 28). Patriotic purchasing americans are being urged t o spend, but analysts doubt the strategy will have an impact in the long run. TheBoston Globe, pp. C1. Leff, M.H. (1991). The politics of sacrifice on the American home front in World War 11. Journal ofAmerican History. 77, 1296-1 318. Levins, H. (2001, September 27). War effort cans for us to spend, spend, spend-It's not like WWII. St. Loub Part-DLrpatch, pp. A15. Lingeman, R.R. (1970). Don't you know there's a war on? The American hornefiont, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putman's Sons. Marchand, R. (1985). Advertising the American dream: Making wayjbr moderniry, 1920-1940. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Marchand, R. (1998). Creating the corporate soul: The rise of public relations and corporate imagey in American business. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schudson, M. (1986). Advertising: The uneasypersuasion. New York: Basic Books. Twitchell, J.B. (1999). Lead us into temptation. New York: Columbia University Press. Westbrook, R.B. (1993). Fighting for the American family: Private interests and political obligation in World War 11. In R. Fox & T. J. Jackson Lears (Eds.), The power of culture: critical essays in American history. (pp. 195-221) Chicago: University o f Chicago Press. Winkler, A.M. ( 1978). The politics of propaganda: The Oflce of War Infomation, 1942-1945. New Haven, CT: Yale, University Press.

The CommunicationReview, 8: 53-77.2005 Copyright c Taylor & Francis, Inc. ISSN 10714421 print /0000-0000 online

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THE TOWN OF ASA BRANCA: CONSTRUCnNG PUBLIC SPACES IN BRAZIL

Heloisa Pait S5o Paulo State University

This paper follows the construction of a teleuisual public space in Brazil since the 1950s until the present, with special attention to television fiction and soap operas, known as novelas in Brazil. The role of novela writers a s mass mediators responsible for weaving together a growing public is investigated, with emphasis on their political projects and their responsibilities when writing for millions. Although aided by an industrial process, their task of reaching the public is one fkll of misunderstandings, which I contend is an intrinsic part of the environment of mess communication. The acceptance of these unavoidable misunderstandings by all involved in mass communication is crucial for the continuation of a communicative game, as we see in the case of Brazilian teleuision.

INTRODUCTION "Asa Branca" is the name of a folk song I learned in elementary school; it speaks of a land so dry that peasants were forced to go elsewhere in their struggle for survival. GonzagSio (Gonzaga & Teixeira, 1968) laments leaving behind his starving favorite horse and his beloved girl, who would wait for hi111until "the green of her eyes spread onto the crops." In my elite Siio Paulo elementary school we celebrated the peasants' festivities and learned to avoid the tropical diseases that beset them. Only this song remained. I would like to thank all the people who watched television with me and made it a meaningful game, and especially my father Henrique Pait who, parodying the characters or inserting himself in the dialogues on the screen, managed to disrupt any intended melodrama and make the televisual space one of laughter and reflection. I would also like to thankthe novela writers and viewers who granted me interviews. the Brazilian Research Foundation CAPES for their support during my doctoral studies at The New School University, as well as The Communicalion Review kind editors and reviewers for their illuminating wmments. Address correspondence to Heloisa Pait, UNESP, Rua Paulistfinia 520. np 131 Sao Paulo, SP 05440-001, Brazil. E-mail: paithQuol.com.br