Advertising Council, consumer movement & ad industry public relations Selling Advertising The Ad Industry's Battle Against the Consumer Movement of the 1930s: An Interview with Inger Stole Carrie McLaren | Issue #18 I was pretty psyched to come across Inger Stole’s dissertation, Selling Advertising. For the last couple of years, I’ve been obsessed with the history of advertising–specifically, advertising’s relationship to its critics. A large part of this history deals with the industry’s long-standing efforts to better its rep, through the Advertising Council and other efforts, to shape what the public thinks when they think of "advertising." In retrospect, sixty-plus years later, these efforts sound straight out of Public Relations 101: lobbying groups, fake grassroots groups, campaigns to advertise advertising, and "charitable" efforts. Unfortunately, the history of the ad industry’s PR machine is largely unwritten–which is what makes Inger Stole’s work so important. Selling Advertising is one of the first in-depth studies of the ad industry’s fight against critics. Although not intended for mass consumption, it is rich with detail on the 1930s and 1940s, a period that in many ways set the stage for what has followed. Inger Stole teaches at the University of Illinois, where she is working on a book about the 1930s consumer movement. —Carrie McLaren Stay Free: How did you become interested in the consumer movement? What was your point of entry? Inger Stole: For my master’s thesis, I researched the role that advertising played in setting up 1950s television, and I started thinking, "Why didn’t anyone say this stinks?" Television was set up to be purely commercial and that was never questioned. I thought there must have been a time when people debated these issues, so I started going back until I arrived at the consumers movement in the late 1920s and 30s. It sought federal regulation of advertising as well as the grading and labeling of food. Stay Free: How was advertising regulated before then? Inger: There was the FTC Act of 1914, which regulated advertising in a business context. If company A’s advertising hurt its competitor, the FTC could step in. But if a person was hurt by an ad, that was out of its jurisdiction. Stay Free: So if you tried an advertised shampoo and it burned off your scalp, you’d be out of luck. Inger: Right. Stay Free: When did this change? When did the government make it illegal for advertised products to, say, kill people? Inger: There was a case in the late 1920s involving a diet cure called Marmola. It turned out that Marmola contained a chemical that burned human tissue. But by the time the government could do anything about it, about 70 people had died. The FTC issued a "desist and refrain" order against Marmola ads but the Supreme Court ruled that the FTC acted outside its jurisdiction. Under existing laws, Marmola ads were fully legal. Stay Free: When does the consumer movement enter the picture? Inger: Well, the National Consumers League was formed around 1899. They were concerned with food safety, labor conditions, things like that. They were the muckrakers. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle. Around the 1920s, consumer leaders started recognizing the impact of advertising. People were no longer making their own soap or clothes at home–they were relying on advertising as the link between the producer and consumer. But advertising wasn’t telling people much. So in the 1930s, consumer groups started demanding that advertisers provide more product information. Not only did they want to end false and misleading advertising, they wanted to outlaw advertisements that were ambiguous or made inferences. Stay Free: But what counts as an inference? Wouldn’t that outlaw just about all ads? Inger: Exactly. The industry jumped all over these people because, as you say, who’s to say what makes an inference? If a soap ad has a picture of a beautiful women, is that inferring that the soap makes you lovely? So the critics backed down pretty fast on this point. But they still wanted advertisers to provide more information. Stay Free: Were they thinking there should be some sort of standardized format for ads? Inger: They didn’t get far enough to even consider that. Really, just the idea that advertisers would have to state basic, hard facts would defeat all kinds of product advertising. If you look at ten different soaps, they’re all pretty much the same, so people would go for the lowest price. It was a big threat to brand- building. Stay Free: So what did the consumer groups lobby for? Inger: They managed to get the Tugwell Bill introduced in the Senate in 1933. But it was rewritten several times and each rewrite had the industry’s fingerprints all over it. Tugwell was shot down and it ended up as the Wheeler-Lea Act, which advertisers loved. The Tugwell bill held advertisers responsible for ads that created false and misleading impressions; advertisers would have had to defend themselves if any of their ads were challenged. The Wheeler-Lea bill placed the burden of proof with the government. It gave the FTC the power to issue "cease and desist" orders or fines, but it did little to prevent misleading ads from appearing in the first place. Under Wheeler-Lea, by the time the FTC ever got around to stopping an ad, it could already have hurt consumers or their pocketbooks. This is actually still the case today. The Wheeler- Lea act remains the major advertising regulatory law in the country. Stay Free: Was Congress back then any more or less probusiness than it is now? Inger: That’s hard to say, but business clearly ran the House and Senate hearings. Consumers’ Research and Consumers Union were very rarely called upon. And Royal Copeland, the senator who preceded over the Tugwell hearings, was simultaneously doing testimonial ads for Fleischmann’s Yeast. The man calling for federal regulation of false advertising was at the same time telling them that clogged-up intestines were the source of all their troubles. Stay Free: What were some of the other ways, other than legislation, that the industry undermined the consumer movement? Inger: One thing business people did was start their own consumer groups to confuse the public. The names of these groups were very similar to the grassroots efforts. One called the Consumers’ Advertising Council, for example, was funded by advertisers and publishers to counter antiadvertising sentiments. The Foundation for Consumer Education was another. It attacked Consumers’ Research and accused it of trying to destroy free enterprise. The Crowell Publishing Company’s Consumer Division surveyed consumer activities to develop a program that would derail "left-leaning" groups. These business groups not only confused the public but scared the media: "Hey, if we go with any of these suggestions, advertising will be crippled and then we won’t have any revenue." Stay Free: What about the initiative for teaching home economics in schools? Was that a business thing as well? Inger: Not at first. Many educators were genuinely interested in consumer issues. Advertisers didn’t like that too much, so this is where you see the first wave of business-sponsored school materials. Companies like Heinz, Hershey, and General Motors would design booklets and materials for use in schools, free of charge. These had educational-sounding titles like Transportation Progress or The Romance of Rubber– but were often vaguely concealed commercials. Pall Mall, for example, designed a contest for college students that offered cash prizes for the best Pall Mall ads. Stay Free: It’s always amazed me how sucessful business has been in co-opting opposition. But I wonder whether this wasn’t just a case of co-option because, to some extent, the consumer movement actually fed the business agenda themselves. I have an old consumer education textbook from 1938 and it states that the consumer movement actually tried to sell schools on the idea that consumer education was good for business. In other words, consumer advocates argued that it made sense for business to have educated consumers because then consumers could make more rational purchases. It sort’ve played into that libertarian idea of the free market, that the market works best when people are perfectly informed. Inger: Well, the consumer movement was made of up various factions. You had moderates, like the National League of Women Voters, and various home economics associations. And then you had more radical critics who were less comfortable with capitalism per se. Arthur Kallet of Consumers Union, for example; and Robert Lynd, who wrote the books about Middletown with his wife Helen. Stay Free: But even Consumers Union, and lefties like Stuart Chase, argued for making people more rational buyers. That’s in a lot of their literature. I mean, think of where that’s led them today. My parents talk a lot about getting good deals and subscribe to Consumer Reports. But they’re also very free market. It seems to me that there’s an assumption that consumerism and free-market ideas are inconsistent, where in fact they’re quite complementary. Inger: Consumers’ Research was a radical group before 1935, when the guy who ran things, F. J. Schlink, refused to recognize the rights of workers to unionize. He had gone through some sort of transformation and became completely paranoid about communism. So two of the leaders, Arthur Kallet and Colston Warne, split off and formed Consumers Union in 1936. In the early days, they published the magazine, Consumer Reports [which remains to this day], but they also covered labor conditions, safety issues, things like that.