From Barbarian Farmers to Yeoman Consumers: Curtis Publishing Company and the Search for Rural America, 1910–1930

Abstract

This article argues that rural America became an increasingly important focal point for marketers and advertisers in the early twentieth century even as the United States was becoming increasingly urban. It focuses on Curtis Publishing Company, the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal, and looks at how Curtis and others in the advertising world saw the farm market as crucial to creating a truly national marketplace as a consumer economy in the United States began to expand rapidly. It examines the rise of Curtis's farm magazine, Country Gentleman, and looks at how Curtis, especially, took the nineteenth-century symbol of the yeoman farmer and recast it in terms of consumption. In doing so, it created an idealistic image of a new class of consumers, an image that urban advertisers easily understood and willingly bought.