Made in the U.S.A.:
the American Trademark Association

In his study of advertising and mass-consumerism, Advertising the American Dream (1985), Roland Marchand notes that "By the end of the 1920s, the identification of advertising slogans [i.e, trademarks] had become a popular parlor game in some circles of American society. . . . Through advertising, Americans increasingly schooled themselves in a new 'language' -- a language that promised to assimilate them into a culture of high technology, complex economic and social relationships, and urbane sophistication" (p. 335).

In addition to providing a visual vocabulary for this new language, American trademarks were used as nationalistic economic markers, as part of an effort to exclude what was foreign from American soil and the national economy. (DETAIL NOTE Immigrants)

Ads in the Coolidge Papers case file Advertising - General, 1923-28 show that the 1928 advertising campaign of the American Trademark Association, by emphasizing the importance of buying merchandise "Made in the U.S.A." by American workers, appealed to patriotism in an effort to "offset the propaganda for imported goods which is being spread to the detriment of home industries." The appearance of the American Trademark Association advertising campaign coincided with a decade of particularly virulent hostility towards foreigners.