A New Need
“Advertising had a dubious reputation in the post [Civil] war era, due in part to its most prominent clients: the patent medicine manufacturers who laced their products with alcohol and opium. Business self-promotion seemed Barnumesque; it smacked of a desperation and unsoundness. Even the best agencies, like Samuel Pettengill, New York’s and the country’s largest, shilled for newspaper and magazine publishers and lied shamelessly about circulation figures to wrest higher rates from advertisers.” (Burrows 1048)
This blurb from Edwin G. Burrows’ Gotham: A History of New York City demonstrates the general attitude of the country toward the corporate world in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Simply mixing alcohol and opium with ineffectual powders and liquids produced a nostrum whose effects were superficial and specious. The thought that businessmen could make a profit off of the horrors of the Civil War certainly soured public opinion greatly, but it didn’t sour the businessmen—nor their wallets. American capitalism boomed, and from the early 20th century we have inherited our ideas of modern America. The rise of the corporate environment from the turbulence of 19th century monopoly and economics attested to its strengths, but also highlighted its weaknesses.
Though these businesses pulled themselves out of liable, they had a surprising lack of readiness to defend themselves—or, at least, to defend themselves from accusations, however slanderous. “The time is easily recalled when men at the head of great combinations of capital were indifferent to blame,” opines Sherman Morse in an article highlighting the rise of the ‘Press Agent’, “Because of the ineffectual criticisms aimed at them, their indifference was perhaps natural” (Morse 457). Their willingness to let criticism slide attests to the power of the corporate ego, the ‘we’re too big to fault’ ideology that we still see from time to time.
But times were changing, and with it the way the public gathered information. Journalists, through muckracking articles and slumming with the working class, highlighted the workers’ plight, and brought into question the corporate indifference. Morse writes of the birth of this method, and its utilization of specific information, well circulated, that roused the collective public opinion, often in favor of the working class. “Instances of violation of law were presented, and explanations were generally demanded” from a public with a newfound agency in opinion: “Had the operators and the other great financial interests involved in the struggled realized then what they realize to-day [sic] how far-reaching is the power of public opinion when fully aroused, it is reasonable to believe they would have pursued a different course” (457-8). Thus, the battle for public opinion coincided with the battle for American consumerism, method, and, ultimately, American citizens’ rights.