Exchange Cards: Advertising, Album Making, and the Commodification Of

Exchange Cards Advertising, Album Making, and the Commodification of Sentiment in the Gilded Age Jennifer M. Black This article examines the materiality of advertising trade cards used in the Gilded Age United States and resituates the medium within the post–Civil War culture of sentimental and personal exchange. Mobilizing evidence from over 3,000 cards and numerous scrapbooks, this article demonstrates that market culture commodified sentimental images and themes in chromolithographed cards, enabling consumers to appropriate them for sentimental expression in albums. The function and usage patterns of such cards as album keepsakes thus illustrates an underlying tension in the nineteenth-century ideals of separate spheres and sincere expression. N CHRISTMAS DAY, 1877, nineteen- Whitman, who signed his name on Valentine’sDay year-old Lizzie Cadmus received an album in 1880 (fig. 1). Around his name, he—or someone O for a present. Over the next five years, else—drew a beautiful pink blossom that outlined Lizzie collected signatures, verses, and drawings in and framed his signature, mimicking the appear- her book from friends and family members. The sig- ance of a decorated calling card (figs. 2 and 3). The natories included her cousin Emma L. Cadmus and soft, colored pencil drawing is not alone in the al- her friend Winfield Margerum, who worked as a bum, however: throughout Cadmus’s book the names bookkeeper a few blocks away from her family’s are decorated with pen and pencil drawings that home in Philadelphia. Several friends, including mimic the design of personal calling cards and Winfield, drew intricate designs around their names commercial trade cards (small printed advertise- to further decorate the pages of Lizzie’sbook.But ments). Thirteen years later, Elsie Sargeant Abbot the page that stands out most is the one for Albert visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chi- cago. As she moved through the exposition’s halls, Elsie collected advertising trade cards and other 4 Jennifer M. Black is assistant professor of history and govern- printed souvenirs of the displays (fig. ). When ment and program codirector, NHD-PA Region 2, at Misericordia she returned home to Germantown, PA, outside University and network editor in chief at H-Material Culture. of Philadelphia, she pasted the materials in an al- Researching, writing, and revising this article was generously bum she received from a friend, Dorothy Welsh. supported through grants and fellowships offered by the Winter- ’ thur Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Library, Although Cadmus s album contained inscriptions the University of Southern California, and Misericordia University. and verses shared by friends, Abbot’s album acts For their comments on various versions and sections of this man- more like a visual diary, chronicling her passage be- uscript, the author thanks Vanessa Schwartz, Karen Halttunen, Georgia “Gigi” Barnhill, David Mihaly, Pamela Walker Laird, Sarah tween public and private life. Theater programs Fried-Gintis, Noelia Saenz, Anca Lasc, Deb Harkness, Daniela and photographs intermingle with pressed flowers Bleichmar, the late Jeffrey “Okla” Elliott, Margot Wielgus, Amanda and handwritten notes commenting on the experi- Caleb, Ryan Watson, George Shea, and the audiences/respon- dents at various conferences in Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Winter- ences Abbot had as a young middle-class woman, thur, and Charleston. Finally, the author owes a debt of thanks to traveling about the eastern seaboard and socializ- the Winterthur Portfolio Managing Editor Amy Earls, the editorial ing with other young adults. What’s interesting staff, and the anonymous reviewers for shepherding this article to publication. about both of these albums is that they crosscut cat- © 2017 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, egories in terms of their content, function, and use. Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2017/5101-0001$10.00 Cadmus’s album contained personal expressions This content downloaded from 137.146.103.224 on November 08, 2017 08:24:42 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 2 Winterthur Portfolio 51:1 Fig. 1. Page from Lizzie Cadmus album, 1877–82, showing Albert Whitman signature, Febru- ary 14, 1880. Colored pencil and ink on paper; H. 5⅛00,W.7⅞00. ( Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Library.) yet was shared widely with her friends and family these cards as objects divorced from their commer- members—a semipublic record of her private rela- cial origins and instead inherently connected to per- tionships. Likewise, Abbot’s album contained com- sonal expression and gift giving. As objects that mercial prints and records of public entertainments borrowed aspects of sentimental culture for com- yet appeared to be kept private. Finally, although mercial purposes, trade cards—and especially their they had different objectives in mind, both of these consumption in albums—help to highlight the in- women appropriated handheld chromolithographs herent tension within the nineteenth-century desire for personal expression and memory making in al- to separate public and private spheres, on the one bums. hand, and within the ideal of sincere expression, a These two elements—chromolithography and cult of manners and public display prescribed by personal expression (creative, communicative, and the American middle classes as a way to distinguish diaristic) through albums—came together in the themselves from working-class people, on the other 1870s as the nascent advertising industry struggled hand. In borrowing images of children and flowers, to appeal to an expanding class of consumers by framing their ads as gifts, and facilitating the con- experimenting with new strategies and slogans, sumption of trade cards in albums, printers and new media and images. One tactic that created an advertisers infused this commercial medium with almost overnight sensation was the adoption of the codes of personal expression. Moreover, Cad- chromolithographed trade cards for advertising. mus’s and Abbot’s albums demonstrate that individ- These handheld colorful objects functioned to ual consumers appropriated commercial objects for communicate information about a product or ser- sentimental purposes in these years, precisely at the vice from the provider to the public and circulated same time that market culture was appropriating like calling cards had in the antebellum years. They sentimental images for commercial ends—in effect, won the favor of middle-class consumers of all ages, commodifying sentiment by packaging it for con- sexes, and backgrounds, by appropriating the for- sumption by the American middle class. Cadmus’s mat, iconography, and usage patterns of other and Abbot’s albums, and many others like them, il- forms of exchange media that had circulated since lustrate the fluidity, in the consumer’smind,of the 1820s. By looking at the consumption of ad- the boundaries between object and image, commer- vertising trade cards in scrapbooks and albums, it cial and private. It was the materiality—the appear- becomes clear that scrapbookkeepers received ance, imagery, and usage patterns—of advertising This content downloaded from 137.146.103.224 on November 08, 2017 08:24:42 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Advertising, Album Making, and the Commodification of Sentiment in the Gilded Age 3 Fig. 2. Calling card for Ella Aldrow, ca. 1890. Chromo- lithograph on paper; H. 1½00,W.3½00. ( Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Win- Fig. 3. Calling card for Mary A. Grant, ca. 1890.Chromo- terthur Library.) 00 00 lithograph on paper; H. 2 ,W.3 . ( John and Carolyn Grossman Collection, Winterthur Library.) trade cards that helped them fit within an existing culture of personal exchange. Likewise, these historians suggest that the designs Since the so-called cultural turn of the late twen- on trade cards betrayed the Gilded Age’spreoccu- tieth century, trade cards have received much-needed pation with abundance and opulence and that the attention from historians of advertising in the cards themselves typically served to socialize individ- United States. However, many historians have tradi- uals—especially women and children—to the gen- tionally de-emphasized the impact of trade cards on dered, racial, and classed roles prescribed by Amer- the rest of advertising history, relegating them to a ican society and to the consumerist ethos that would 3 premodern moment in advertising chronology be- prevail in the twentieth century. While these inves- cause of their pre-1890 emergence. In such histo- tigations provoke important understandings of the ries, these quaint and odd little pieces of ephemera place of visual culture, and especially advertising, appear primarily in the prologue to the main story: in the history of the United States, their producer- bursting into American popular culture at a mo- focused arguments fail to consider the place of ment that typically bears little relation to the so- trade cards as material objects that people sought called modern advertising of the 1920s, once adver- out, possessed, treasured, modified, displayed, and tising firms had professionalized and developed 1 gifted to others. Furthermore, such investigations winning techniques. Historians who have given overlook the ways that trade cards’ materiality facili- trade cards serious

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