[Earnest Elmo Calkins, Business the Civilizer (Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press Publication, Little, Brown, and Company, 1928) pp. 1-3, 12-18]

A young man who had just joined the staff of one of the larger advertising agencies sought his boss in some perturbation. "I wish you would tell me the truth about this advertising business, chief. Is it all bunk?" To which his employer replied, "There is just as much bunk in advertising as there is in law or medicine, or for that matter, in literature and life, but it is never necessary to use bunk to practise advertising successfully."

That young man's state of mind was the natural result of his reading. He had been recruited from the profession of writing, and he still followed the ultra-intellectual world, which has lately concerned itself with the inconsistencies, the waste, and the smugness of advertising. In short, with the bunk.

The pages of those delightful magazines which are distinguished by good writing, distinctive typography, small circulation, and no advertising, offer some interesting points of view to the professional advertising man—who unfortunately does not as a rule read them.

William McFee finds the floor of his post office at Westport littered knee-deep with circulars cast off by disdainful recipients, and deplores the destruction of forests to make the paper for so futile an end. And Joseph Pennell, who was pleased with few things apparently despised advertising more cordially and with stronger adjectives than any other manifestation of our commercial civilization.

Then there are the fiction makers, with less restriction and more imagination. The younger men, most of them after brief experiences inside advertising organizations, have seized the excellent opportunity for satire which modern business affords, and we have . . . Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Christopher Morley's Ginger Cubes, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Sherwood Anderson's Story-teller's Story, and Bunk, Lottery, and Bread and Circuses by William Woodward, all presenting advertising as a sort of gigantic conspiracy, fostered and maintained by highly paid advertising men whose interests, like those of the priests of ancient religions, lie in keeping up the great illusion, and who go about their work with their tongues in their cheeks. Sometimes the conspiracy is imagined as directed against the business man, but the popular conception is that the public is the victim, and that manufacturer and agent are working together to put something over. This something may be higher prices for worthless goods, creating unnecessary wants and desires, or exterminating a competitor making a better article at a lower price, but generally just misleading people with bunk about memory courses, or hair restorers, or correspondence universities.

The slogan "It pays to advertise" acquired its currency from George M. Cohan's play. Admitting that advertising pays, whom does it pay? It pays the professional advertising man, beyond doubt. It also pays the manufacturer who uses it to increase his business. But the crucial question is, does it pay the public? Are the people as a whole better off for it? Is it a benefit to mankind? And who pays for it? Is it added to the cost of the goods? Would it be desirable, as writers have suggested, to remove advertising from our commercial fabric, and would we be better off without it?

When I was a boy, about fifty years ago more or less, mother used to buy a bar of Castile soap half a yard long and four inches square and saw it up into cakes an inch thick. The cake was hard as Stonehenge, the corners sharper than a serpent's tooth. It took weeks of use to wear it down so that it comfortably fitted the hand.

To-day we have a cake of toilet soap—a great many of them, in fact just the right shape to fit the hand, just as pure as Castile, scented if we like, tinted to match the bathroom decorations if we prefer, reasonable in price; and when we want another cake we go to the nearest grocery or drug store, and there it is.

And not only toilet soap. We have seen the evolution of shaving creams, safety razors, and tooth pastes, as well as soap powders, laundry chips, washing machines, vegetable shortenings, self-rising flours, electric sadirons, vacuum cleaners, hot-water taps, aluminum cooking utensils, refrigerators, kitchen cabinets—everything, in short, that constitutes the difference between our mothers' kitchens and our wives'.

The amount of sheer drudgery that has been taken out of housekeeping in fifty years can be realized only by comparison, by drawing the illuminating parallel. An iron, soft-coal cook-stove; a reservoir at the back the only source of hot-water supply; the green-painted iron pump in the wooden corner sink for cold; drinking water from the pump outside; saleratus instead of baking powder; hog lard instead of vegetable shortening; butter and milk hung down the well by a string to keep them cold; heavy iron pots and skillets to be lifted, to say nothing of the coalhod; dishes washed by hand; no device to alleviate the frightful labor—no rubber scrapers, scouring mops, metal-ring dishrags, no wire brushes, or drying racks, or cleansing powders; baked beans an eighteen-hour job; oatmeal an overnight operation; sugar, salt, dried fruit, pickles, crackers, rice, coffee, pepper, spices, lard, bought in bulk, scooped out of open boxes or barrels or tierces, exposed until sold, dumped on a sheet of paper laid on the scales. Molasses and vinegar drawn from the wood, and between whiles the gallon measures standing around, proving the adage that molasses attracts more flies than vinegar. Food was unclean, there was no sponsor for its quality, and it came to the kitchen almost in a state of nature. The housemother became a miniature manufacturing plant before the food was ready for the family to eat. And the preparation of meals was but a small portion of the housewife's burden. There was cleaning with no other implements but a rag, a broom, and a turkey wing. Clothes were washed with a rub-rub-rub that wore the zinc from the washboard.

Put such a kitchen beside the one pictured in most advertisements selling kitchen equipment, or those complete ones shown in the housekeeping departments of the women's magazines, "How to Furnish the Ideal Kitchen." Better still, take a modern housewife, not the delicatessen and can-opener type, but a real housekeeper, who keeps her house and takes pride in it—there are such even to-day—and put her in an old-fashioned kitchen like that described above. She could not do in a week what my mother did every day of her toil-bound life. To keep house with what was available half a century ago was an art handed down from generation to generation, which happily has been lost, except among the newly arrived foreign-born.

The amelioration that has come about in fifty years is due directly and indirectly to advertising. These things did not come into existence because women demanded them. Women did not know that they were possible. They exist because there was a method of distributing them, of teaching possible buyers what a help they would be, of educating the housewife while offering her the means of applying what she learned, and of doing it on a large scale. And the strongest urge to invent desirable labor-saving devices has been this same possibility of distributing them—that is, selling enough of them to make it worth while.

Sometimes advertising supplies a demand, but in most cases it creates demand for things that were beyond even the imagination of those who would be most benefited by them. A woman knew the use of a broom, but she could not imagine a vacuum cleaner. Therefore she could not demand one, save with that vague unspoken desire which has existed from the beginning for some lightening of the terrible drudgery of keeping a house livable. The vacuum cleaner was introduced by educational advertising. The advertising was done partly by manufacturers anxious to sell vacuum cleaners, and partly by electric-light companies anxious to sell current. The spread of electrical housekeeping devices has followed the increase in the number of houses wired for electricity, and that too has been brought about by advertising, by the selfish desire to do more business, to sell more goods. But the result has been a public benefit, an increasing willingness to spend money to lighten the human burden, 'to cut down the waste of human energy spent in the operation of living.

No vacuum-cleaner factory could do business as a neighborhood proposition. Only a national market would furnish enough business to make the manufacture economically possible. And a national market is possible only through advertising. And that advertising must be educational. It must teach the sound economy of paying more to get the greater benefit. The woman's time and health and strength are worth more than the difference in cost between a broom and a cleaner. But not all of these improvements are in the vacuum-cleaner class. Most of them add nothing to the cost of upkeep. The greater number lower it. They teach the use of something better that costs less.

I do not think I am claiming too much in giving to advertising the credit of the great change in housekeeping that we have seen. I have had to observe it very closely for thirty years, and I have to some extent helped to bring it about. Some may be inclined to think it is due to the women's magazines. It is true that they have directed their editorial energies to the same ends and with remarkable results.

But it should not be forgotten that it is advertising that makes such magazines possible. It is the revenue from the advertisers that pays for the services of domestic economists, physicians, interior decorators, cooks, dressmakers, and other experts who teach women better ways of doing things. More than that, while such departments are conducted with the primary purpose of being helpful to readers, they furnish an excellent background for the advertising. Magazines with constructive departments on the care of babies, cooking, furnishing, housekeeping, dressmaking, laundry work, and all the other activities which go into home-making are preparing audiences to listen to manufacturers who sell sanitary nursing bottles, infants' wear, prepared foods, salad oils, paints, fabrics, wall papers, electric mangles, and washing powders.

Behind the successful and intelligently conducted magazine is the advertiser, who buys space and makes the magazine profitable; and so the educational work of home-making magazines should be credited largely to him.

Advertising is not an end. It is a means to an end. So the question is not, Is advertising desirable, but Are those ends desirable, and is advertising too great a price to pay for them? To those who look upon advertising as merely the selfish effort of manufacturers to induce them to buy more goods it seems that the world could easily do without it. People say to themselves, "I do not want to be persuaded to buy more goods," and that should settle it. As far as they are concerned advertising is unnecessary. For the manufacturer who uses it, advertising is a means of selling goods, but its present proportions are due not to the manufacturer's desire to sell goods, but to the real public need it supplies.

A familiar paradox is the man who tells you with much earnestness that he never reads advertising, and does not believe in it. And as he sits there he is dressed from head to foot in advertised goods. His office is equipped and his home is furnished with advertised goods. How did they get there? Because they were the things most accessible, the ones for sale in the stores where he bought, the ones the salesman showed him, and the ones that most exactly met his needs. It was not necessary for him to read the advertising. The advertising he did not read distributed the goods, brought them within his reach geographically and financially, and keeps them there for his benefit—better things than he could buy for the same money were it not for the tremendous savings that quantity production brings about. And most of them would not even exist, to say nothing of being distributed, if there had not been advertising.

But advertising adds to the cost of the goods! You still hear that. So does production add to the cost of the goods, and traveling salesmen, and retail stores, and jobbers' percentages. Everything that is done to a manufactured article and all handling of natural products must be added to the price that the customer pays. But nothing is so well established as the simple fact that the more you make the less the cost of each. And not only is cost of making lessened, but also the cost of selling, including cost of advertising. And the cost of selling can be and is lessened until the advertising costs nothing. Why does a tailor-made suit cost more than a ready-made? Why do custom-made shoes cost more than the product of the factories? It is difficult to prove these things by tables of statistics because prices of all things have advanced so in the years since the war.

But consider the motor car. Nearly everyone is interested in this product of advertising. Nearly everyone is aware of the continual improvement in the cars and the steady lowering of price, due to quantity production. Some are as much concerned over the congestion of motor cars as they are over the congestion of advertising. They feel that there is too much of both. Granted in both cases; but the only alternative is to turn back the page to mediaeval times, when each village was self-contained, or forward to one of the many Utopias which promise enough of everything and not too much of anything.

The point is that we cannot eat our cake of accessible and convenient apparatus of living and still have our cake of freedom from advertising, freight trains, industrial villages, steel and cement construction, riveting hammers, congested highways, and the many other annoyances of a prosperous, material, and mercantile age. It's a fair question whether or not our modern life is worth while, but it has nothing to do with this question, which is, If our modern life is worth while and we want to continue it, is advertising necessary to that end?