HOPES AND ASHES
The Birth of Modern Times, 1929-1939
Alice Goldfarb Marquis
New York: The Free Press, 1986
274 pp., $22.50
If you can identify Lum and Abner, if you can remember when van Gogh was virtually unknown in the United States, and if you get a clear image of a great white tack and ball when you hear the words trylon and perisphere, you especially will savor Hopes and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times, 1929-1939. The book is a brisk if spotty social history of the 1930s emphasizing advertising and publicity as the nourishers of popular culture.
Even if you don't date from the thirties, you may be interested to learn that the inspiration for the separate sections of Time magazine (Medicine, Music, Science, Art) was the division of learning among departments at Yale, where Time founder Henry Luce went to school. Or that when Amos and Andy suggested on their radio show that they could use a typewriter, listeners sent them 1,880 machines. That's the sort of data presented with laudable brio by Alice Marquis, a professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.
This book is Marquis' answer to the question, what did people do for distraction and unstrenuous self-improvement before television? "While woolgathering in the library stacks," she says, "I was suddenly struck by the great number of magazines that had died during the Thirties," magazines like Delineator, Judge, Scriber's, the Century, and the Review of Reviews. Her curiosity led her to a large part of the answer: market research and advertising dethroned these magazines in favor of those accurately aimed at newly rich "consumption communities."
A new sophistication - cynicism, some would say - in opinion polling and cunning in advertising are what generated the popular culture of the thirties, when Americans were persuaded that consuming was virtually a patriotic duty and that Halitosis, B.O., and Pink Tooth Brush were grave but luckily avoidable threats to happiness. Popular culture rose not upward from the folk but for the first time descended downward from the commercial fantasy-merchants. To the horror of the genteel, the folk loved it.
Radio
Radio began in the early 1920s. At first, stations made their profit from owning part-interests in the manufacturers of radio sets. But soon commercials began to be heard. Initially they came on gingerly and in good taste: with some subtlety and even wit. Palmolive presented the singers "Olive Palmer" and "Paul Oliver." But anxiety about good taste proved unnecessary once it was found that although highbrows objected, most people either didn't mind or actively enjoyed the commercials. They didn't mind even the new singing ones when hey came along. Sadly disillusioned were people who had welcomed radio as a promising new instrument of intellect and education. The editor of Scientific Monthly had foreseen some future philosopher explicating has views over this new device "to a whole world." But before long it was clear that the editor of the New Republic was closer to the truth when he designated what came out of the speaker as "outrageous rubbish, both verbal and musical." Soon a dispute arose over
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