Stole, Inger. Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government in the 1940s. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2012), Paperback, 268 pages, $30.When most historians speak of war time advertising in America, their touchstone is usually the Great War's Committee on Public Information. And for good reason: the nation's first full-time propaganda bureau was a seminal, colossal and persistently controversial institution in the manufacture of publicity, including advertising. Less well-known is the debate over advertising during World War II. Indeed, the quiet consensus had been that there wasn't much debate. Inger Stole made the same claim herself in a 2006 book, Advertising on Trial.But as this superb monograph makes clear, that's not accurate. Her wideranging archival investigation shows that the role of advertising before and during the Second World War was contentiously fought. Equally important, the crucible of the early 1940s is what finally solidified advertising's place in American society, enhancing its reputation, insulating it from regulation and protecting it from taxation. It was the war experience, she writes, every bit as much as the legislative battles of the 1930s, that defined the role of advertising in both our postwar political economy and our cultural firmament (11).The introduction of her book helpfully lays out some of the basic theory concerning advertising, particularly the counterintuitive premise that national brand advertising is fundamentally anti-competitive, a practice characteristic of oligopoly. Critics engaged in the consumer movement in the 1930s and 1940s understood these principles and were determined to rein in Madison Avenue, especially when advertising was often viewed during the Great Depression as a deceitful industry, thwarting the free market and exacerbating unemployment.Passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment in 1938, which rejected product grading and caved on misleading advertising, represented a victory for advertisers, but it hardly gave them peace or let them rest. Calls arose to close the loophole that allowed businesses to write offadvertising as a tax-exempt expense. Then with the onset of war, consumer advocates and some economists and politicians urged restricting or even suspending advertising, noting that it would directly conflict with rationing and probably contribute to inflation.Some of that pressure was brought by the Temporary National Economic Committee, established in 1938, which frequently wound up putting advertising in its crosshairs, even though it wasn't targeting the but simply looking at factors impeding economic recovery. T.N.E.C. experts authored numerous studies and held regular hearings, one, for example, examining why an aspiring toothpaste maker with a superior product was effectively kept out of the market by media managers insisting on a $100,000 ad buy.Yet strenuous lobbying by leaders helped check these efforts and eventually defanged T.N.E.C. In 1941 its final report was a vague and tepid document, blandly supporting stronger enforcement but saying little else. As TIME put it, 'With all the ammunition the committee had stored up, a terrific broadside might have been expected. Instead, the committee rolled a rusty BB gun into place' (28). The start of war and the revving up of the economy was another reason that the criticism may have been muted. But Stole credits the industry's public relations machinery with effectively stemming attacks.The Advertising Council played a central role in this story. One of a number of industry front groups (43), the organization was conceived in 1942 as both a means to enlist advertisers in the cause of the war and to safeguard their business interests under the facade of altruistic outreach. …
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Jul 2, 2013
Janaina Maquiaveli Cardoso 
Open Access
