Advertising the American Dream

Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940

Roland Marchand

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520058859
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520403659
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

It has become impossible to imagine our culture without advertising. But how and why did advertising become a determiner of our self-image? Advertising the American Dream looks carefully at the two decades when advertising discovered striking new ways to play on our anxieties and to promise solace for the masses.

As American society became more urban, more complex, and more dominated by massive bureaucracies, the old American Dream seemed threatened. Advertisers may only have dimly perceived the profound transformations America was experiencing. However, the advertising they created is a wonderfully graphic record of the underlying assumptions and changing values in American culture. With extensive reference to the popular media—radio broadcasts, confession magazines, and tabloid newspapers—Professor Marchand describes how advertisers manipulated modern art and photography to promote an enduring "consumption ethic."


It has become impossible to imagine our culture without advertising. But how and why did advertising become a determiner of our self-image? Advertising the American Dream looks carefully at the two decades when advertising discovered striking new w

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• APOSTLES OF MODERNITY
• MEN OF THE PEOPLE: THE NEW PROFESSIONALS
• KEEPING THE AUDIENCE IN FOCUS
• ABANDONING THE GREAT GENTEEL HOPE: FROM SPONSORED RADIO TO THE FUNNY PAPERS
• THE CONSUMPTION ETHIC: STRATEGIES OF ART AND STYLE
• ADVERTISEMENTS AS SOCIAL TABLEAUX
• THE GREAT PARABLES
• VISUAL CLICHÉS: FANTASIES AND ICONS
• ADVERTISING IN OVERALLS: PARABLES AND VISUAL CLICHÉS OF THE DEPRESSION
• THE THERAPEUTICS OF ADVERTISING
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
• Sources for Illustrations
• Index