Previous Intro Note: Radio: A Consumer Product and a Producer of Consumption
Serials are particularly relevant to a collection on consumerism because they show the consumer economy in action -- product advertisements flash their appeals just as they did in the twenties, demonstrating exactly how consumers were engaged. To evoke for users of Coolidge-Consumerism the experience of perusing a period newsstand at the heyday of 1920s prosperity, most of the material from the 35 serials included in the collection has been drawn from issues published during 1926. Selecting a variety of serials from a single year has the virtue of providing a cross-sectional view of the economy at a given moment in time and enables users of the collection to compare the ways in which different magazines depicted the same merchant and consumer trends.
In the first part of the 1920s, many sectors of the economy still showed scars from the recession of 1920-1921, while afterwards the upswing seemed secure. The year 1926 was selected because that approximate midpoint of President Coolidge's tenure as president was the time, commentators say, when the economy functioned in the most consistently harmonious and widely prosperity-promoting way.
The electronic newsstand on view here reflects the preoccupations and aspirations of, as well as the advertising appeals made to, great numbers of consumers in general circulation magazines and, in some cases, in magazines catering to more specialized tastes. In addition, approximately one third of the serials included in Coolidge-Consumerism are trade and professional publications, advising merchants and retailers how best to reach the consumer. These, presumably, would have been available mainly through subscription rather than on newsstands.
Magazines targeting the consumer directly presented the home as an all-important yardstick for measuring level of consumer prosperity. The home was the showplace of the individual family's membership in good standing in the consumer society. (INTRO NOTE The Home) The Delineator, Good Housekeeping Magazine and House and Garden, serials focusing on how to improve and furnish a home, illustrate the economic segmentation of the consumer market -- its "pitch" to consumers at different spending levels. The segmentation is revealed by such things as the magazine's subscription cost, the format and content of the ads, as well as the content of the articles.
Many magazines of the period had less than a mass circulation, although they were still enjoyed by large numbers of people. The Messenger: The World's Greatest Negro Monthly specialized in political and business items of general interest to African Americans and is one of the few journals to offer a glimpse at manufacturer and merchant advertisements targeted to black consumers. (African Americans) Country Gentlemen targeted readers in farm and rural areas and small towns. (INTRO NOTE Farmers)
Magazines helped to "educate" immigrant as well as native-born readers in what and how to buy, and how they should furnish their homes. Through the medium, many "foreign-born" were "Americanized" into the mainstream consumer culture. (DETAIL NOTE Immigrants and "Americanism") The United American: A Magazine of Good Citizenship, a magazine published in Portland, Oregon, includes a few consumer product advertisements as well as articles directed at both the "foreign-born" and the native born.
Immigrant consumers were a more significant factor in the 1920s economy than our necessarily limited offering of journals suggests, however. Much of the advertising directed at new arrivals from Europe, Mexico and elsewhere appeared in newspapers, especially the foreign language press. The resources available to the Coolidge-Consumerism project were not sufficient to permit the canvassing of this literature. In addition, technical impediments related to page size and scanning from microfilm made it difficult to digitize these newspapers in 1995, when the Coolidge-Consumerism collection was in production.
A group of ten journals of opinion have been selected to reflect a variety of critical perspectives on consumerism, consumer products, advertising, President Coolidge, and the economy more broadly which appeared in the magazines of the time. (INTRO NOTES Critiques) Among them are Forum - A Magazine of Controversy, which tended to air criticism in the form of debates, pro and con, on the given issue, and to which consumer-activist Stuart Chase notably contributed, as he also did to
In addition, approximately one third of the serials collected here are trade and professional magazines. For example, the professional journal The Bulletin of the Taylor Society, which numbered among its member-subscribers executives in industry and management engineers, promoted "the science and art of administration and management." (INTRO NOTE Taylorism)
Trade journals were devoted to suggestions and instructions regarding how to advertise, display, and sell consumer products. They included such specialized periodicals as Talking Machine World, pitched to dealers, wholesalers and manufacturers of phonographs, phonograph records, and radios, an industry which numbered among its customers not only middle- and high-income groups, who were able to buy from across the spectrum of goods offered up by the consumer economy, but immigrants and African Americans, who were often on the edges of the mainstream consumer market. (INTRO NOTE African Americans)
It should probably be taken as a sign of the relatively wide affordability of phonographs, especially portables, that the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) estimated, in statistics released in 1925, that of the 26,000,000 homes in the United States, roughly 15,000,000, or 44.4 percent, had phonographs (the same number as were estimated to have automobiles).
Another trade publication, Automobile Trade Journal for January 1, 1926, instructed the trade in how to increase sales of new cars, compete ethically, and sell used cars. In the area of movies, Motion Picture News for March 20, 1926 carried several instructive articles on the favorably regarded advertising practice of "exploitation," the promotion of movies through tie-ins with holidays, public events or consumer products.
Previous Intro Note: Radio: A Consumer Product and a Producer of Consumption