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THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
tion to an expanding consumer market to "captains of consciousness" who sought to extend their control into all areas
of social behavior. Business became infused and confused with
religion and patriotism. A new "philosophy of life advertising"
was developed which greeted abundant consumption as a mark
of civilization and freedom. In its admitted infiltration of family,
school, church and union, advertising worked for a reorientation
of the consciousness of the masses away from past traditions
and towards a packaged and marketable future. Advertising
performed the social service of nullifying the "customs of ages... break[ing] down the barrriers of individual habits." Traditions, particularly those of the many immigrants who made up
the early industrial work force, had to be Americanized. Industry
first had to train mass production workers to accept the system
of wages and mechanical time on which the factory system
depends; then these same frugal and diligent workers had to
be transformed into mass consumers. Advertising pledged itself
to "superimpose new conceptions of individual attainment and
community desire" on the masses in order to fight what businessmen called "puritanism in consumption." The consumer
was promised a future in which his dissatisfactions and failures
within the industrial society would be remedied by commercial
products, and industry was assured of a consumer market which
could be channeled to fluctuate with the changing demands of
the market economy.
A curious romanticism in early advertisers led them to describe the social manipulation practiced by their industry in
organic, spiritual and even mythic terms, "at once the destroyer
and creator in the process of the ever-evolving new." Comparing
itself to the grandiose movement of nature or of some vast
dialectic, advertising in the twenties saw how it could become
the prime moving force in the shaping of contemporary history.
In his essay, which constists of a detailed explication of a
Sunkist orange juice ad, Leo Spitzer does not chart the history
of advertising or the effects of advertising on history. His masterful hermeneutic analysis does reveal, however, the fabrication
in a specific advertising text of an artificial history in which
the realities of industrial production are replaced by fanciful
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