Homesick America
I
WHOEVER looks at the advertising panorama with the detached eye of a social philosopher instead of that of an interested consumer must have noticed that advertising is subject to the whims of fashion, as much as sports clothes or drinking habits. The advertisements you see in magazines and newspapers get whatever individuality they have from the urge to sell, the effort to make merchandise as tempting as possible to purchasers, and also to the competitive spirit — the endeavor to make the announcement stand out and attract attention. This tendency is corrected to some extent by a species of emulation or imitation which impels advertisers to copy each other’s methods and styles, and these different conflicting forces give variety and interest to the display. But over and above that, advertising is susceptible to some of the same broad influences, ideas in the back of the public mind, which condition the flare of a hat, the length of a coat, or the draping of a window. And thus there arc definite trends common to all advertising whereby the character of the whole body of it at one period differs from that of another.
There has been a succession of styles — advertising fashions which strutted their brief day on the publicity stage, only to be succeeded by the next novelty. Every time a copy-writing Columbus discovers a new stunt, there is a stampede like a flock of hens after a chicken that has caught a bug, and the complexion of advertising changes at regular intervals as the new technique spreads. Silhouette illustration was an early fashion. The craze for jingles reached large proportions, and we had ‘Spotless Town,’ ‘Sunny Jim,’ ‘Phœbe Snow,’ ‘The Smile That Won’t Come Off,’ ‘See That Hump,’ and many others less famous.
Another fad or trend was dramatis personœ, characters to stand as symbols — the Gold Dust Twins, the Cream of Wheat chef, the little Dutch Boy advertising White Lead, Old Dutch Cleanser chasing dirt, Aunt Jemima. There was an age of ‘reason why ’ copy, strong, earnest, argumentative stuff, research, large space (the double-page spread period), mysterious protagonists like ‘B. O.’ and ’halitosis,’ narrative story-telling copy, comic-strip art; and finally, on the rising tide of the gilded twenties, modernism in art and copy came in with a blare of trumpets and held the centre of the stage for several dizzy years. I’ve seen them all come and all go. None was the elixir vitæ or the philosopher’s stone, but all helped, and advertising marches on.
And now we are having a touch of nostalgia, a wistful reaching back to the old forms and techniques, and advertising pages are taking on a reminiscent physiognomy. Advertisers are going through their files and digging up pre-war stuff. Force is staging a revival of Sunny Jim; Sapolio is dusting off Kenneth Fraser’s amusing puppets, the inhabitants of Spotless Town. Hartford Fire Insurance Company has abandoned its Fire Demon and restored the noble stag that marked its earliest advertising. Quaker Oats not only has exhumed that old Claude Hopkins stopper, ‘Food Shot from Guns,’ but is weighing the selling power that may yet remain in the slogan, ‘The Smile That Won’t Come Off.’
These are merely straws in the wind, for there is a marked change in advertising psychology — a feeling that we are down to realities, that people have no patience with subtle suggestion, with atmosphere, with delicacy, with what might be called the ‘fourth dimension ’ of merchandising. The hard realism of the 1930’s has taken the place of the rosy romanticism of the 1920’s.
The camera is more frequently employed, not merely because its products cost less than those of the artist, but because it is still trusted as an exponent of things as they are. And it is no longer used to photograph handfuls of matches or lumps of sugar scattered over a plane surface in a strong light to produce modernistic patterns. It is used to reproduce commonplace people in conventional attitudes carrying on dull and obvious conversations, their prosy words lettered in balloons coming from their mouths as in old caricatures of Stephen Douglas and Horace Greeley, old-fashioned stuff that can be depended on. Type that has been for three years performing unprinterlike antics off its feet, in the air, oblique and curved, is settling down to horizontal lines again, and is solid, heavy, and black. There is a fondness for the old sans-serif faces which in the old-time country newspaper office we called ‘stud-horse’ type. Other old-fashioned faces are being resurrected — Egyptian, Caledonian, Ionic, reminiscent of my prentice days in the printing office. There are pages of advertisements in the most costly mediums that might have been set in the 1880’s.
All this means, among other things, that advertisers are anxiously searching for the surest devices to reach the buying public; that they have lost faith in the more sophisticated extensions of advertising technique, and are turning hopefully back to the old fundamentalism, the simple, primitive, obvious A B C advertising of the past which was successful in its day, and may be again. But more than that, there is a mighty wave of homesickness behind it all, a sort of instinctive turning back to happier, more easily understood times, and all the habits, fashions, furniture, mental and physical, that were its familiar scenery.
II
Nor is it only in the advertising pages that you detect this backward glance toward the moods and modes of a happier era. In this particular phase of its many permutations, advertising is not so much setting a fashion, or even following one, as it is reflecting something stirring deep in the public mind which is affecting styles in other departments of human interest and expression in the same retroactive way. Woman’s clothes, — so sensitive to the nuances of popular opinion, — furniture and the decoration of houses, books, plays, our eating and drinking habits, are all turning reminiscently to the manner of bygone days.
What we vaguely call fashion is not so much progress or development as violent reaction from the last vogue after that has been pressed beyond endurance. The course of fashion is apparently a zigzag like the tacks of a sailing ship beating against the wind. Thus it was natural that long skirts should succeed short, large hats should follow small; that hair which had been stylishly bobbed should be allowed to grow again; but instead of developing these phases along new lines, as in the past, there is here and there more than a hint of revivals. ‘Back to Bangs,’ says an advertisement of Best and Company; ‘that’s the fashion from Mayfair to Hollywood. A famous English beauty, many of our smartest débutantes and young matrons, glamorous stars of the stage and screen, have adopted this piquant revival of the Victorian fringe.’
Veils are appearing sporadically. The corset, though now called a foundation, is creeping back. Patou puts a bunch of chiffon at the base of the spine which he boldly calls ‘the airplane bustle.’ The hair that is beginning to grow again on the heads of women is done up in coiffures that seem oddly familiar, like the old-time fashion plates. Best has designed a line of ‘Little Women dresses,’ inspired by Amy’s quaint picturesque frocks in the film of Louisa M. Alcott’s immortal story which millions are seeing. And Macy’s headlines one of its advertisements, ‘It’s smart to be old-fashioned.’
‘Smart’ is hardly the word. Say rather it is human, inevitable, even pathetic, that we should turn back to times that by contrast seem so peaceful and happy, and try to invoke them by the same rites and incantations that prevailed when they were with us. At least we can set the scenery in the hope that the setting will change our point of view if not economic facts.
Some day some social philosopher will analyze fashion and explore the psychology behind changing styles, for they are undoubtedly indexes of prevailing moods of the public consciousness. Here in the midst of a rampant, forward-looking modernism, with all the ingredients of exciting progress, stream-lined trains and raindrop motor cars, dymaxion houses and television, planned production and artificial climate, we find ourselves turning wistfully back to styles and habits, relics and heirlooms of earlier days — ‘old wood to burn, old books to read, old wine to drink, old friends to love.’
Many portents, some of them ridiculous, testify to this Lot’s-wife complex. Have you noticed the ubiquity of Venetian blinds? They checker the façades of tall business buildings. They form the back drop of every other window display on Fifth Avenue. You see them in homes in city and country. They are a distinctive feature in many of the interior decoration groupings that illustrate the magazines dedicated to the adornment of the domicile. One would think some indefatigable Bernays was behind them pulling the strings of propaganda. But no, these convenient shutters arc just another symbol snatched from the past to help us shut out the vista of the present.
There is the matter of Mae West’s curves. They occupy seemingly inexhaustible space in the newsprints. Why? Because they suggest the plumpness of other days before the female population starved itself down to fit the fashion and burned its skin to match its hosiery.
And the popularity of Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs. If the Mickey Mouse sequences are the fairy tales of the machine age, as Dr. Henry Seidel Canby so ingeniously suggests, Three Little Pigs is the old pre-everything stuff that those of us who are in our sixth decade heard at our mother’s knee. Nor is it without significance that the song, ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?’ has had such a run. This air may contribute to recovery the marching song to lead us out of our troubles as ‘Over There’ and ‘Tipperary’ pepped up the boys in the trenches. Stranger things have happened. Songs have often given armies the will to conquer. Who was it said that if he could write a nation’s songs he need not care who made its laws? And that may go for economic laws, too. It is no use disregarding sentiment in these psychological times. The reprinting in many newspapers of the Sun’s famous editorial, ‘Is There a Santa Claus?’ was greeted by a wave of approval.
The film version of Little Women, put on for a week’s run at Radio City, now in its seventh week as I write, and still packing the house, is creating new-old styles in clothes and hairdressing as well as in sentiment. Around me people of my age were weeping, not at the pathos of the story, but at the pathos of life, the remembrance of things far away and long ago.
(Parenthetically, it is fifty-five years since I last looked into those two little brown books — they were n’t Little, Brown books then — and it startled me to realize how vividly I remember them. Not an incident, not a bit of dialogue in the play that I could not recall, often the exact words. Is this age, with its strange grotesque physiognomy, making such indelible records on ten-year-old minds to-day? The thought makes one shudder.)
The film revival of Little Women now being shown simultaneously in four hundred picture theatres has stepped up the sales of the book, always in steady demand, to figures few current novels can boast, and is contributing its quota to a state of mind best expressed perhaps by the line Alfred Lord Tennyson filched from Dante, that ‘a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.’ And not only Tennyson, but another thoroughgoing old Victorian, Thomas liabington Macaulay, has received kind words recently from hard-boiled modern literary critics.
The ‘yesterday’ books, those amusing scrapbooks which go through files of old newspapers and tell us what we were doing, wearing, singing, and drinking ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, Our Times, Only Yesterday, The American Procession, are perhaps another symptom not merely of our interest in the past, but of our consciousness of the contrast between then and now, and our longing for the easier terms on which life was then lived. Lewis Gannett, in one reader’s opinion the best all-round book reviewer now working by the day, observes in his New Year’s review: —
Books about our own past are coming to the fore. There was Gladys Hasty Carroll’s cycle of the seasons in Maine, As the Earth Turns, and South Moon Under and Lamb in His Bosom in a similar mood in the Southland. Louis Bromfield’s The Farm reflected the same puzzled turning back to the American past.
The career of Anthony Adverse is something of a miracle. Here is a three-dollar book, twelve hundred pages, a best seller, now in its three-hundredth thousand. How can you explain it? Is it escape, or is it a familiar landmark, a reversion to an earlier literary form? For what is it after all but the old three-decker historical novel in the tradition of Scott and Dumas, with a dash of Freud and Jung, it is true, to season it to our modern literary palates, but essentially a form that modern writers, abetted by modern critics, thought they had effectually stamped out?
III
Another department of human interest which shows a decided tendency to reinstate the styles of the past is that somewhat clumsily known as ‘interior decoration,’of which the revival of the Venetian blind is an index. Even more significant is the mounting interest in Americana, Duncan Phyfe furniture, Stiegel glass, Currier and Ives lithographs, Godey fashion plates, hooked rugs, convex mirrors. On every main-traveled road the familiar sign ‘Antiques’ is as inevitable and frequent as the filling station or the hot-dog stand. Even during the depression, authentic old American pieces commanded good prices. People buy them and furnish their homes with them, and everywhere our newly acquired modernism wars with the old Lares and Penates.
Sloane’s, the genteel New York furniture house, has built inside one of its spacious storerooms a full-sized two-story house and furnished it from top to bottom. The architectural style is that of the Regency, and the furnishings are of various contemporary periods. Only the convenient accessories of a house — kitchen, pantry, bathroom, lighting and heating fixtures — are styled in the modern manner, and it should be noted how surprisingly well the two harmonize. But the charm of the house lies in the old things. It was this breath of the past, of the familiar, which drew the crowds that visited it in a steady and unending stream for a week.
Further, there has been a determined effort to restore the stodgy and stuffy interior of the Victorian era, with its antimacassars, cozy corners, drapes, and tufted furniture with frilled skirts, under the ægis of one with the appalling name of Biedermeier. Interiors in this genre were suggested in good faith by the decorat ion and furnishing journals, and many of them no doubt incorporated into homes.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just opened its exhibition of ‘New York State Furniture’ — Dutch Colonial, Sheraton, Hepplewhite, Chippendale, Empire; winding up with a convincing reproduction of a mid-Victorian parlor such as distinguished those old houses which Edith Wharton so deftly christened ‘Hudson River Bracketed.’ This parlor is æsthetically the most atrocious thing in the exhibition, but it is the hit of the show. People of my generation, with white hair, linger in front of it fascinated, spell-bound, unable to tear themselves away. It is the American parlor that flourished from the sixties until it yielded to the onslaughts of Edward Bok, who eliminated not only the furnishings, but the parlor itself, from American life. It endured almost up to the Great War, and it is to all but the last generation a symbol of ‘America the blest.’
It must be significant of something that Henry Ford, our chief human exponent of the machine age, finds his escape from the modern world he has helped so much to create in collecting old stagecoaches, restoring the Wayside Inn, and preserving the vestiges of our industrial past in his Edison Museum at Dearborn. Or that our modern Mæcenas, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., should be engaged simultaneously in two stupendous projects, — one the creation of a group of ultra-modern skyscrapers, and the other the restoration of an old Colonial city to its authentic pristine state, — and that Williamsburg should be apparently more successful from several human points of view than Radio City.
In the heartiness with which we voted to restore the old drinking habits we have perhaps the most striking evidence of our determination to bring back as large a section of our past as possible. For this particular pursuit of happiness — to be permitted, if not guaranteed, under the Constitution — may not have made the old days better, but it was at least a part of them. Nor have we yet brought back all the old scenery. There are some who think the saloon, with its brass rail, bock-beer poster, and family entrance, should have been included. Instead, liquor is dispensed in hastily equipped stores with unpainted counters and shelves, reminding one of a boom town; but the windows are dressed with the old shapes and labels, though at least one generation never saw any but artistic reproductions; and the clubs have refurbished their lounges and set plates of cheese on the sideboards, and many seem to think we have given a new hostage to fortune.
Such symptoms reveal the nation’s homesickness, some of them curious and amusing; too much significance should not be attached to them. They undoubtedly represent an instinctive reaction from difficulties and discomforts of the present times, but it should be remembered that creators of styles are quick to discern a trend, to capitalize and make the most of it; and there are also many who realize there is only one way out, and that is forward.
‘We look before and after and pine for what is not,’ and what is ’not’ is more apt to be ahead than behind us. History does her own repeating, and you cannot force her to retrace her steps by dressing the part and giving an old-time costume party. More than that, we have a President who is experimenting on a large scale with a new industrial pattern, one without precedent in the years behind us, which will make greater changes in our social and economic lives than the depression has; and whether the people understand all that his programme implies or not, the President still seems to have the nation massed solidly behind him. We may be homesick, but we are going on.