Being
Modern
“Modern ways for modern days” — to own was to belong to the present.
A Thesis in American History
Why We Buy
Advertisement & Consumerism During the Roaring Twenties
I
The Land of Desire
The Roaring Twenties remade America — its cars, its music, its movies, its idea of pleasure. Henry Ford's assembly line and the new gospel of buying-on-credit put automobiles, telephones, and appliances into ordinary homes. Americans turned, as one historian put it, inward.
As historian Lawrence Glickman observed, Americans began “enjoying the private pleasures” of the era, cultivating an image of “indifference or cynicism to the well-being of the public sphere.” William Leach gave the decade its truest name: the United States had become the land of desire.
The land of desire.
People craved goods, and producers raced to satisfy that craving. But beyond cheaper cars and easier credit, one force pushed consumer culture to a height it had never known — a revolution in the art of advertising. This is the story of how selling changed: from announcing what a product did, to whispering who you might become.
II
The Engines of Consumption
First, the machinery had to fall into place.
Henry Ford, the apostle of mass production, broke the automobile into stations along a moving line — each department building one part, the whole assembled at the end. Output soared as prices fell, until even working-class families bought Fords by the thousand.
Automobiles produced
0
1919–20 → 1920–21, as prices kept falling
Tractors produced
0
More than doubled in a single year
Personal savings rate
0%
1898–1916 → 1922–1929 — the will to save, falling
Installment credit did the rest. Where families once saved for years, a down payment now unlocked the purchase. Crucially, by the mid-1920s, buying on credit had ceased to feel sinful — a quiet moral revolution. The nation's savings drained into its driveways.
III
The Age of Thrift
Before desire, there was discipline.
To understand how radical the change was, remember what came before it. Thrift was not merely a habit in pre-1920s America — it was a civic virtue, taught in classrooms and printed on government posters.
From Massachusetts in 1911 onward, “thrift education” became a curriculum requirement in state after state. Schools opened savings banks not for convenience but, in the words of one program, as “a developer of character.” And the children answered.
28,000
student depositors, 1891
0
student depositors, 1915
More than fourteenfold in twenty-four years
The Great War only deepened the creed. The U.S. Food Administration printed posters ordering citizens to “waste nothing.” A 1918 pamphlet, The Patriotism of Saving, condemned waste as “the selfish destruction by one of things which many need.” To save was patriotic. To spend was suspect.
And the advertisements of that earlier world sold exactly what you would expect: usefulness. Efficiency. Simplicity. Cleanliness. The product's job was to work — and the ad's job was to prove it.
Victory Gearless
“Mr. Farmer,
Time is Money.”
Cream separated faster — efficiency as the whole pitch.
Kodak Film Tank
“Simple, easy, and understandable.”
No dark room, no skill — develop photographs in your own room.
Bissell Carpet Sweeper
“Woman's Hardest Task Is Sweeping with a Corn Broom.”
Labor-saving, time-saving, and it confined “dust and dangerous germs.”
Three ads, one argument: here is what it does for you.
THRIFT
DESIRE
Then advertising discovered the mind.
0 act of reason for every 0 acts of emotion
— a contemporary advertising agency, on how people really decide
Advertisers in the 1920s grasped what their predecessors had missed: choice is emotional, often irrational. The trade abandoned what historian Roland Marchand called the “factory viewpoint” — the catalogue of what a product did — and turned instead toward “the mental processes of the consumer.”
They learned to manufacture feeling on purpose. They would warn you that not owning a product made you someone undesirable — and promise that owning it made you someone enviable. Strong emotion drowns out arithmetic. Usually, the feeling wins.
IV
The Fear — Identities You Could Lose
Buy this, or become someone lesser.
The first lever was dread. Advertisers attached three social humiliations to not owning their product — and assured you that even your closest friends would never warn you in time.
01 Losing your romantic attraction
Listerine
“Often a Bridesmaid
but never a Bride.”
As she neared “the tragic thirty mark,” the culprit was halitosis — and “even your closest friends won't tell you.”
Woodbury's Facial Soap
“A Skin You Love to Touch.”
“At twenty — is a woman's skin always fresh and fair? At thirty — must it begin to fade?”
Odorono
“Why Will so Many Married Women Consider Themselves so Safe?”
Even “safely married” women risked an odor that no single girl would dare ignore.
02 A socially unrecognized appearance
Lysol Disinfectant
“She Looks Old Enough to Be His Mother.”
The “too old” wife was in fact five years younger than her husband — her charm betrayed by neglect.
Woodbury's Facial Soap
“Conspicuous Nose Pores — How to Reduce Them.”
“Complexions otherwise flawless are often ruined” — beauty undone by a single visible flaw.
Palmolive
“What's Become of the ‘Homely' Girl?”
Other women were “learning to make the most of their looks.” Fall behind, and you'd be left homely.
03 Lacking taste
Eaton's Highland Linen
“Would You Criticize a Friend behind Her Back?”
Cheap writing paper might “talk about you behind your back” — and friends were too loyal to say.
Rieger's Flower Drops
“The Most Precious Perfume in the World.”
“For years the favorite of women of taste” — to abstain was to exit the tasteful set.
Lussky, White & Coolidge
“Characteristics which appeal to public taste.”
Beyond “beauty and quality,” fabric had to signal taste — the wrong cloth marked you tasteless.
The arithmetic of dread: one act of reason for every twenty of emotion. With impulse in command, the buying rose.
V
The Promise — Identities You Could Buy
Or buy this, and become someone more.
If fear was one lever, aspiration was the other. The same products now offered a self worth envying — three identities, available for purchase. Scroll →
Being
Campbell's Tomato Soup
“The modern way of ‘making' soup.”
“I'm up to date” — modern people no longer made soup; they opened it.
Federal School of Commercial Designing
“Draw Your Way to Fame and Fortune.”
The “modern” artist “dresses well, lives in a fine home, drives his own car.”
Kuppenheimer Good Clothes
“The Modern Style Idea — to be well dressed without trying.”
Beauty and modernity, tailored into a single suit.
Among the
Elite
Status, sold by the bottle and the chassis — products “of the better classes.”
Cadillac
“America's Greatest Motoring Gift to the World.”
For the “substantial, luxury-loving Cadillac clientele” — not, the word implied, for everyone.
Kotex
“8 in every 10 women of the better classes already have adopted it.”
Hygiene reframed as a marker of social distinction.
Gouraud's Oriental Cream
“Rendering just this service to Society women, famous for their beauty.”
Not merely beautifying women — beautifying Society women.
Being
Masculine
Toughness without the battlefield's cost — manhood, conveniently bottled.
Pall Mall
“Captain X in the Field.”
For the civilian, the cigarette offered “heroic individualism and lonesome manhood” — minus the dirt and fear.
Roche Electric Hygienic Machine
“Be Well and Keep Well.”
“The vigorous man or woman is leader of all — don't be a dead one at 50.”
Gillette Big Fellow
“A Man-size Razor for a Man-size Job.”
A strong man at the factory — masculinity wherever the razor appeared.
In short
You were no longer buying a product.
You were buying a self.
VI
The Proof — It Worked
The psychology was not a theory. It was a balance sheet.
Listerine
0×
Revenue leapt from $115,000 in 1922 to over
$8 million by 1929 — roughly $152 million today — on a campaign
built around the fear of bad breath.
Kotex
0%
Held 70% of the sanitary-napkin market in the late
1920s — while charging nearly twice its rivals' price.
Odorono
+0%
Sales rose 112% in a single year, passing
$417,000 in 1920, after psychology entered the pitch.
VII
A National Ethos
Soon, Americans defined themselves by what they owned.
The change ran deeper than any single sale. From three directions at once — the pulpit, the parlor, and the President — consumption was reframed as identity itself.
“All work is worship; all useful service prayer.”
“I'll go without food before I'll see us give up the car.”
“The chief business of the American people is business.”
VIII
The Ledger
And the nation's spending tells the rest.
Across the decade, the figures move in one direction. Identity, it turned out, was a powerful thing to sell.
U.S. Census Bureau figures, across the Roaring Twenties.
IX
The Inheritance
Before the Twenties, thrift was a virtue and the ad sold a product's use. Within them, advertising learned to sell a self — and buying became the way Americans said who they were.
The decade ended in the Great Depression. But the machinery of desire it built never stopped running. The psychology is still in the advertisement; the identity is still in the purchase — well into our own century.
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