Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America.

Abstract

Although advertising was becoming increasingly visible in 19th century America, it was not until 1920s that it became a central feature of an expanding consumer culture. Vast social and technological changes, a world war and several presidents adept at manipulating public opinion all helped endow advertising with new spiritual and patriotic properties. Lord of Attention examines this cultural transformation through career of Gerald Stanley Lee, a writer with an obsessive interest in crowd psychology. Lee was an exuberant advocate of advertising and a self-proclaimed prophet of machine age. His story is symptomatic of an important strain of social thought behind rise of mass marketing and public relations in early 20th century. A congregational minister, Lee had become fascinated with idea of channeling behaviour of crowds. In due course he left pulpit and began preaching instead to a national audience about the crowd principle and what he called inspired millionaires and attention engineers. His book Crowds: A Moving Picture became a best-seller and his ideas were reflected in thought of a number of business evangelists and entrepreneurs, including Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Fels, Edward Filene, Ivy Lee and John D.Rockefeller. In Gregory W.Bush's view, Lee is a transitional figure, an extreme example of America's shift from an individualistic, moralistic society of small entrepreneurs to an interdependent, impersonal corporate state. Bush explores use of crowd as a cultural metaphor - one that sometimes connoted a fear of labour mobs and foreign-born hordes in American cities and at other times presented a more benign audience or market. Through Lee's life, Bush demonstrates growing power of mass persuasion in early 20th century and explores cultural roots of our present-day consumer society.