Restoring Whiteness, Sanitizing Blackness and Authenticating Modern Artifice: Pepsodent Toothpaste and the Visual Branding of Amos ‘n’ Andy

Abstract

This essay examines the sponsorship of the Amos ‘n’ Andy radio serial by Pepsodent Toothpaste. How did this ‘aural blackface’ minstrel program function as a vehicle for selling toothpaste? Though it was a radio program, the show was also a thoroughly visual phenomenon. The associated publicity materials – advertisements, window displays, toys and other ephemera – can be read according to their negotiation of what it meant to be ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ in the emergent consumer culture of the early twentieth century. Advertisements framed Pepsodent as the proper means of reclaiming ‘real’ bodily health, and the network likewise attempted to establish the inimitability and authenticity of two characters whose act relied on an otherwise contrived set of racialized performance tropes. The insistence that both Pepsodent and Amos and Andy were the ‘real thing’ rather than generic products of mass culture therefore suggests that two were united (whether consciously or not) in confronting a basic cultural anxiety about the authenticity of self.