Made in America

Alarmed by such figures, Congress in 1990 introduced the Children’s Television Act, mandating that stations show programs with some educational value. The result, alas, was not better programming but more creative program descriptions. One station described the cartoon series GI Joe as “a pedagogical tool” that “promoted social consciousness” and familiarized children with “the dangers of mass destruction.” Another described Chip ’n’ Dale Rescue Rangers as a valuable demonstration of “the rewards of team effort.” The Flintstones, meanwhile, was found to promote initiative and family values.

During the 1982 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee ran a television advertisement praising President Reagan for providing cost-of-living pay increases to federal workers “in spite of those sticks-in-the-mud who tried to keep him from doing what we elected him to do.” When it was pointed out that the increases had in fact been mandated by law since 1975 and that Reagan had in any case three times tried to block them, a Republican official responded: “Since when is a commercial supposed to be accurate?”

We may smile at the advertising ruses of the 1920s—frightening people with the threat of “fallen stomach” and “scabby toes”—but in fact such creative manipulation still goes on, albeit at a slightly more sophisticated level. The New York Times Magazine reported in 1990 how an advertising copywriter had been told to come up with some impressive labels for a putative hand cream. She invented the arresting and healthful-sounding term oxygenating moisturizers and wrote accompanying copy with references to “tiny bubbles of oxygen that release moisture into your skin.” This done, the advertising was turned over to the company’s research and development department, which was instructed to come up with a product that matched the copy.

By the 1890s, Broadway was already being described as “the Great White Way” because of its dazzling lights (almost all of them advertising products). People came from all over just to see the lights, which included the world’s first flashing sign, for Manhattan Beach and its hotels. Standing fifty feet high and eighty feet wide, the sign would light up line by line and then flash rhythmically before starting the cycle over again. It seemed a wonder of modern technology. In fact it was manually operated by a man in a rooftop shack.

In 1903, the year that the Ford Motor Company was incorporated, Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson of Vermont, accompanied by a mechanic named Crocker and a dog named Bud (who, like his companions, wore goggles throughout the trip), made the first transcontinental crossing by car in a two-cylinder, open-top Winton. The trip took them sixty-five days, but made them heroes. For the most part, cars of the period simply weren’t up to the challenge. Those who tried to drive through the Rockies generally discovered that the only way was to back up them; otherwise the fuel flowed away from the engine.