Our Master’s Voice

Front matter

Our Masters

OCE: |, Advertising James Rorty œ public domain introduction by edition

James Rorty

Contents

FOREWORD ix

PREEACE to the mediastudies.press edition xi

JAMES RORTY’S VOICE: Introduction to the mediastudies.press edition

Foreword

Two BAsic definitions will perhaps assist the reader to understand the scope and intent of this book."

The advertising business is taken to mean the total apparatus of newspaper and magazine publishing in America, plus radio broadcasting, and with important qualifications the movies; plus the advertising agency structure, car card, poster, and direct-by-mail companies, plus the services of supply: printing, lithography, engraving, etc. which are largely dependent upon the advertising business for their existence.

The advertising technique is taken to mean the technique of manufacturing customers by producing systematized illusions of value or desirability in the minds of the particular public at which the technique is directed.

The book is an attempt, by an advertising man and journalist, to tell how and why the traditional conception and function of journalism has lapsed in this country. It describes the progressive seizure and use, by business, of the apparatus of social communication in America. Naturally, this story has not been “covered”, has not been considered fit to print, in any newspaper or magazine dependent for its existence upon advertising.

In attempting to examine the phenomenon of American advertising in the context of the culture it became necessary to examine the culture itself and even to trace its economic and ideological origins. This enlargement of scope necessitated a somewhat cursory and inadequate treatment of many detailed aspects of the subject. The writer accepted this limitation, feeling that what was chiefly important was to establish, if possible, the essential structure and functioning of the phenomena.

Since the book is presented not as sociology, but as journalism, the writer felt free to use satirical and even fictional literary techniques for whatever they might yield in the way of understanding and emphasis. The writer wishes to acknowledge gratefully the help and encouragement he has received from many friends in and out

1 [Clarifying footnotes from the reprint editor, Jefferson Pooley, will appear in brackets]

of the advertising business. The section on “The Magazines” is almost wholly the work of Winifred Raushenbush and Hal Swanson. Thanks are due to Professor Robert Lynd for reading portions of the manuscript and for many stimulating suggestions; to Professor Sidney Hook for permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts; to F. J. Schlink and his associates on the staff of Consumers’ Research for permission to use certain data; to Stuart Chase for much useful counsel and encouragement; to Dr. Meyer Schapiro for valuable criticisms of the manuscript and to Elliot E. Cohen for help in revising the proofs; to the officials of the Food and Drug Administrations for courteously and conscientiously answering questions.

PREFACE to the mediastudies.press edition

JAMES Rorty’s Our Master’s Voice is buried treasure. The book set off tremors when published in 1934, perhaps because its author

so decisively repudiated his former profession. But after the Second World War, Rorty and his spirited takedown of advertising fell into near obscurity. The scholarly literature that coalesced around “mass communication” in the early postwar decades makes almost no mention of the book. Popular treatments of advertising—like Vance Packard’s 1957 best seller The Hidden Persuaders—neglect the book too.t And when Our Master’s Voice does surface today, there’s usually a filial explanation: The book tends to appear in biographical sketches of Rorty’s far more famous son, Richard.”

So no one reads James Rorty anymore. This is too bad, since the book remains remarkably spry eighty-five years after its first printing. In fact, Rorty’s dissection of the ad business has fresh things to say to scholars of Google-style “surveillance capitalism.” The goodnatured urgency of Rorty’s prose resonates too—maybe especially because his aim to bury the “ad-man’s pseudoculture” proved a spectacular failure. We can, in 2020, pick up where Rorty left off.

Thus Our Master's Voice is the right book to inaugurate our Public Domain series. It is, of course, in the public domain, having lapsed out of copyright in 1962. But that copy-freedom is just the book’s baseline qualification: We are, at mediastudies.press, looking to republish works that cling to relevance, even if they’ve long since fallen out of print. An even narrower wedge of books stands out, like Our Master’s Voice, for their unmerited banishment from the field’s memory. Such books—unheralded for no good reason—are what we have in mind for the new series.

The Public Domain project has a pair of inspirations. The first is the University of Chicago Press’s long-running Heritage of Sociology series, established by Morris Janowitz in the early 1960s on his return to Chicago. The first handful of volumes were devoted to prominent figures in what was, by then, known as the “Chicago School.” But the series grew more catholic over time, with volumes devoted to doi

2 See, for example, Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 1.

3 In his history of the Chicago department, Andrew Abbott called Janowitz scholars—Kenneth Burke and Martin Buber—far beyond the orbit of Chicago or even sociology itself.

That ecumenical spirit also animates the second inspiration for the Public Domain series, a 2004 reader titled Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919-1968, edited by John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson.* The tome (and it really is one) collects almost seventy excerpts and reprints of media-related reflection. What unites a 1919 Sherwood Anderson short story and, say, the obscure 1959 study “The Social-Anatomy of the Romance-Confession Cover Girl”? These texts—and the other entries in the anthology— all offer sedimented reflections on what was a then new panoply of mass mediums. “These observers,” Peters and Simonson write, hold unique historical positions as part of the first generations to live with commercially supported, national-scope broadcast technologies. They are at once informants, ancestors, and teachers. As informants, they tell us about experiencing and studying ‘mass communication’ as a generation new to it. As ancestors, they speak languages we recognize but in dialects different than our own. As teachers, their role is more complex. Often they speak with more clarity and conceptual insight than do the journals and books of our own day, and thus they teach by precept and example. At other times, they display their blind spots, weaknesses, or arrogance in such a way that we either swear never to follow their lead or perhaps see something better because of their failure.>

The editors sifted through their candidate texts—“blowing dust off bound volumes”—with an eye for works that have something to say to the present.° This is our aim too. We endorse, moreover, the view that a work’s warrant for attention may take a variety of forms. A jarring anachronism may merit a reader as much as, or more than, a still apposite line of reasoning.

Peters and Simonson fault media and communication research for its “rather pinched view of the past,” and position their anthology as a recovery project for the field’s forgotten pluralism.” In the same spirit, this Public Domain series seeks to ventilate the field’s memory of itself.

On the model of Our Master’s Voice, then, we plan to re-publish works that:

1. are in the public domain; 2. promise contemporary relevance; and yet, 3. have settled into obscurity.

The first criterion constitutes an undeniable limitation, but an important one. We are committed to open access (OA) on principle, so

“the most industrious retrospective creator of the first Chicago school” and a “self-appointed prophet of the past”—all on the strength of the Heritage series. Andrew Delano Abbott, Department & Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 18-19.

4John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson, eds., Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919-1968 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

5 Peters and Simonson, Mass Communication and American Social Thought, 2.

é Peters and Simonson, Mass Communication and American Social Thought, 495. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the editors included an excerpt from Our Master's Voice: “The Business Nobody Knows,” 106-9.

7 Peters and Simonson, Mass Communication and American Social Thought, 8.

charging readers to cover copyright fees isn’t an option for us. Fortunately, all works published in the United States before 1924 are already in the public domain. What’s less well known is that many books published between 1924 and 1963 are also owned by the public. Before the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 made renewal automatic, copyright holders were required to file for an extension before their twenty-eight-year initial term ran out. Books published in 1964 were up for renewal when the 1992 law passed, so they (and all subsequent published works) remain intellectual property—and will stay locked for a long time.® The good news is that up to 80 percent of the copyright holders that published between 1924 and 1963 failed to renew—so those works are now owned by the public.? Our Master’s Voice falls into that category: Rorty and/or the John Day Company, the volume’s publisher, did not file for renewal, thus the copyright lapsed.

So our Public Domain books are on the open web and—crucially— they’re discoverable. We assign a new ISBN for each reprint, DOIs for each chapter, and otherwise work to ensure that the volumes show up in library, OA directory, and web searches. Because they’re digital, Our Master’s Voice and other volumes in the series are easy to search and excerpt. Our underlying PubPub platform—nonprofit and open source—adds public annotation, citation formatting, and a robust array of auto-generated download options. We include a high-quality scan of the corresponding originals, in all their sepia-and-Baskerville glory. Corrections and updates are simple to make, since there’s no fixed version of record.

Major advantages thus adhere to our web-based model of open publishing. Like the Heritage of Sociology series, we commission freshly written introductions to contextualize the republished work. But we sidestep the copyright muck, and the costs passed on to readers. The Peters and Simonson volume includes four dense pages of small-print permissions—and it’s priced accordingly, out of reach for most readers.*°

Rorty, back in 1934, summarized Our Master’s Voice as “an attempt, by an advertising man and journalist, to tell how and why the traditional conception and function of journalism has lapsed in this country.” The book describes “the progressive seizure and use, by business, of the apparatus of social communication in America.”** Eighty-five years later, and we are still domiciled.

Jefferson Pooley Bethlehem, PA xiii

8 The best book on the corporate enclosure of public knowledge remains James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), which is, fittingly, free to download.

9 Sean Redmond, “U.S. Copyright History, 1923-1964,” New York Public Library Blog, May 31, 2019, https: //www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/ us- copyright -history- 1923-1964.

1 Peters and Simonson, Mass Communication and American Social Thought,

519-23.

“ Rorty, Our Master’s Voice, ix.

JAMES RORTY’S VOICE: Introduction to the mediastudies.press edition

Jefferson Pooley

James RorTY announced his working knowledge of the trade in

the opening paragraph of Our Master's Voice. Thirty years before, he reports, he had taken a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency in New York City. Though he preferred poetry and journalism, Rorty would continue to work intermittently in the ad business through the 1920s. Our Master’s Voice, among the most penetrating critiques of advertising ever published, offers an insider’s account: “I was an ad-man once,” Rorty confesses."

The book is Rorty’s coming-to-terms with an institution he knew. But it neither chronicles his career nor gives an accounting of his impressions. Rather, it has a different, and surprising, character: Steeped in Rorty’s leftist politics, Our Master’s Voice presents advertising as the linchpin of a capitalist economy that it also helps justify.

Who dared take on the publication of Our Master’s Voice in 1934? The John Day Company, a New York firm that had—amid a steep, Depression-era drop-off in books sales—published a series of fortyfive pamphlets notable for left-wing topics and authors.* Our Master’s Voice appeared in this spirit, though dense and promiscuous across twenty-six chapters and nearly four hundred pages in its original printing. It contains fictional interludes, detours through New Deal regulatory skirmishes, and a chapter devoted to Gillette’s campaign against the beard.

Rorty made no apologies for the book’s undisciplined format. Indeed, he disclaimed any academic purpose on the first page.

Our Master’s Voice was presented, he wrote, as journalism, “not as sociology.”? Thus he granted himself license to code-switch, with what amounts to a short story slotted in as the fourth chapter, and doi

1 Rorty, Our Master’s Voice, ix. Page references are to the mediastudies.press edition; subsequent citations to the book are rendered as OMV.

? Rorty published his own thirty-two-page pamphlet, Order on the Air!, in The John Day Pamphlets series the same year. Rorty, Order on the Air! (New York: John Day Company, 1934).

For an overview of Rorty’s critique

of commercial radio in particular, see Bruce Lenthall, Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2007), 30-39; and Kathleen M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 60-63.

another devoted to composite portraits (“names, places and incidents have been disguised”) of ad workers he had known. Nevertheless, the book abounds with dense and sophisticated analysis that is, by any measure, academic. One especially lengthy, chart-filled chapter, co-authored with his wife and another colleague, reports on a major empirical study of magazines. Throughout the book Rorty spars with the country’s leading social scientists, quoting and then lacerating their work in what should undeniably be counted as academic debate.

More important, and despite its pastiche quality, the book presents a coherent and original theory of advertising. Its main tenet holds that the ad business can only be understood within the totality of the country’s economy and culture. The alternative—to treat the business of publicity as a “carbuncular excrescence”—misses its centrality, its foundational place in American life.t Rorty thus insisted on a holistic approach—in conscious contrast to the bounded inquiries of his analytic rivals in the university system.

Rorty believed that the ad-man and his persuasive copy propped up American society—its capitalist economy, its culture of competitive emulation.° In effect, he makes his argument at two levels. The first is economic: All the billboards and radio spots, according to Rorty, provide the fuel that keeps people buying—the coal powering the country’s merchandising juggernaut. American business would collapse without the ad-man’s ventilation.

The book’s second, complementary point is that the system— an exploitative one, in Rorty’s view—telies on advertising for its ideological warrant. This claim emerges with greater subtlety, or at least erected around a series of sub-arguments, in the book’s first few chapters. But the key takeaway suggests that advertising serves to ratify the prevailing American regime of class-stratified consumption. Rorty’s former coworkers are, as it were, the master’s voice.

Published into the Great Depression in 1934, the book agitated an already wounded publicity industry. It generated spirited reviews in the popular press, too. But social scientists—the sociologists and psychologists taking up the study of media and their audiences in small but growing numbers—ignored Our Master's Voice. They paid the book no heed when it was published, and media scholars have scarcely noticed it since.

He Was AN AD-MAN ONCE

One reason for the neglect, then and since, lies with Rorty himself. He was no academic, and he didn’t write like one. He was an intellectual—a poet, an essayist, a political journalist—in the orbit of

XV

3 OMV, ix.

5I have adopted Rorty’s genderexclusive language to remain faithful to the book’s historical context, but do not otherwise condone the phrasing.

xvi the New York literary world. Like many of his peers, he embraced a radical worldview that, over the course of the 1920s, became more explicitly Marxist.

Rorty was born in 1890 in Middletown, New York, to an Irish immigrant, himself an aspiring poet, and his schoolteacher wife. The family ran a struggling dry goods business. We know nothing much of the young Rorty’s life, but in high school he apprenticed at a local newspaper before attending Tufts College. After graduating in 1913, he took a copywriting post at the New York advertising agency H.

K. McCann, his first of three stints in the business. When the U.S. joined the war, Rorty enlisted in the Army ambulance corps, served in France, and earned a Distinguished Service Cross.” He briefly returned to New York after the war, then moved to California, where he wrote poetry and covered the San Francisco literary and artistic scene for the Nation. In need of funds, he soon resumed work for advertising agencies, including a stint at McCann’s San Francisco office. A first marriage collapsed, but Rorty soon afterward met Winifred Raushenbush, then a research assistant to the Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park.’ Rorty and Raushenbush, the daughter of a prominent social gospel minister, fueled each other’s radical politics on their return to New York in the mid-1920s.'° Both were steeped in the city’s intellectual culture of so-called little magazines, including Marxist organs like the New Masses."

During this period, working from a rural Connecticut cabin, Rorty reluctantly picked up advertising work a third time. Daniel Pope quotes Rorty’s unpublished memoir: “I returned to my advertising vomit, prodding my fair white soul up and down Madison Avenue and offering it for sale to the highest bidder.”** Yet with the economy’s collapse, Rorty was laid off in 1930.3 Like many other intellectuals in the wake of the Depression, Rorty turned to Marxist politics with new avidity. For a short stint, he even worked on behalf of the Communist Party’s 1932 presidential slate, though he soon fell out with the party, which he never joined. In the cause of the recently exiled Leon Trotsky, Rorty’s politics took on a decidedly anti-Stalinist cast.'* As Richard Rorty, Raushenbush and Rorty’s only child and a future post-philosophical luminary, recounted in a memoir, “my parents had been classified by the Daily Worker as ‘Trotskyites,’ and they more or less accepted the description.”

The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 stiffened Rorty’s anti-Soviet posture. By then his radical ardor had also cooled, and he began to endorse, for the first time, New Deal interventions like the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the war years his freelance writing, which he assiduously continued to produce for a variety of popular and literary magazines, shifted to health, nutrition, and consumer topics.’® By

€ Daniel Pope, “His Master’s Voice: James Rorty and the Critique of Advertising,” Maryland Historian 19 (1988): 6.

In addition to Pope’s excellent account, the two other biographical sources on Rorty are Neil Gross, Richard Rorty:

The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 1; and John Michael Boles, “James Rorty’s Social Ecology: Technology, Culture, and the Economic Base of an Environmentally Sustainable Society,” Organization & Environment 11, no. 2 (1998): 155-79

7 Gross, Richard Rorty, 36; and Pope, “His Master’s Voice,” 6.

8 Pope, “His Master’s Voice,” 7; and Gross, Richard Rorty, 36.

9 Raushenbush trained in Chicago’s famed Sociology Department and, along with other research support, assisted Robert Park in his 1922 The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper & Bros.). Raushenbush,

a writer in her own right, worked closely with Rorty on his prose projects, including Our Master’s Voice. Late in life she published a biography of Park, Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979).

‘© In 1927 Raushenbush and Rorty, for example, were arrested in Boston for protesting the imminent executions of Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Boles, “James Rorty’s Social Ecology,” 159.

“ Rorty was a founding co-editor of

the New Masses in 1926, though he

was ousted the next year after political and editorial disputes. Pope, “His Master’s Voice,” 8; Gross, Richard Rorty, 30n4; and Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 54-55.

* Pope, “His Master’s Voice,” 8.

3 Newman, Radio Active, 59-60.

14 Gross, Richard Rorty, 51-52; and Boles, “James Rorty’s Social Ecology,” 160. For a detailed account of Rorty’s early 1930s entanglements with the Communist the 1950s he had become an aggressive Cold Warrior, penning anti- Soviet scripts for the Voice of America and clamoring for the American Communist Party’s legal shuttering.*7 His 1954 McCarthy and the Communists, co-authored with Moshe Decter, faulted the Wisconsin senator for botching the anticommunist cause—for discrediting the otherwise urgent campaign to purge Reds.1®

Rorty wrote on a range of other topics through the early 1960s, including technology, race relations, food culture, and, notably, ecological issues—the last an area he had addressed, precociously, all the way back in the early 1930s.*9 Even as Rorty drifted right, he remained a critic of the country’s acquisitive culture. In an unpublished reflection—written a decade before his 1972 death—he looked back on his Depression-era critique of advertising:

I wrote Our Master’s Voice with the object of curing surgically what I considered a malignant degeneration of culture: Advertising. Not only did I not cure it; the disease like a cancer increased not only relatively to the total culture but absolutely so that one might well say that the American culture is dying from this malignancy.?°

SYSTEMATIZED ILLUSIONS

It was Thorstein Veblen, not Marx, who supplied for Rorty the book’s argumentative anchor. Rorty acknowledged his debts to the splenetic economist-cum-social critic with such regularity, and with such reverence, that the book can be read—at one register—as an extension of Veblen’s scattered remarks on advertising. Though Veblen treated “salesmanship” as an important constituent of the pecuniary culture, he never devoted a treatise to the business of selling. One of just two sustained meditations on advertising appeared in a late work, the 1923 Absentee Ownership, and it was this chapter (on “Manufactures and Salesmanship”) that animated Rorty’s analysis.** Yet Veblen’s imprint sinks deeper than that. Rorty’s scabrous ironizing, for example, pays explicit homage to his onetime teacher. And the concept of emulation—the dynamic of prestige and consumption that Veblen outlined in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)—is the real engine of Our Master’s Voice.** Rorty notably refused to isolate selling from the wider “pseudoculture,” opting instead for a fisheye-lens approach. In that respect Our Master’s Voice constitutes an enlargement, even a gentle overhaul, of Veblen’s critique of advertising.

Rorty was already familiar with Veblen’s work when he attended the elder scholar’s classes at the New School for Social Research in the early 1920s.73 According to Rorty’s unpublished memoirs, he and Veblen struck up a brief friendship while living in the same New York City boarding house. Rorty and the building’s owner xvii

Party, fast disillusion, and Trotskyite sympathies, see Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 56-62, 102-5, 271. A trio of prominent anti-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals—Sidney Hook, Elliot Cohen, and Meyer Schapiro—are thanked in Our Master’s Voice for their help with the manuscript. OMV, x.

5 Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 6. James Rorty had nearly accompanied the philosopher John Dewey to Mexico for Dewey’s investigation into the Moscow Trotsky show trials. As Richard Rorty remembers, the two-volume Dewey Commission report “were books that radiated redemptive truth and moral splendor” (“Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 5).

16 Boles, “James Rorty’s Social Ecology,” 162-63.

17 Pope, “His Master’s Voice,” 14.

8 James Rorty and Moshe Decter, McCarthy and the Communists (Boston: Beacon, 1954). Rorty’s anti-ccommunism soon took a paranoid turn, as Pope notes: “Rorty was convinced that the Communist Party had planted its agents as handymen on his Connecticut farm, had joined forces against him with Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association, and had induced fellow-traveling bookstore clerks to hide his writings from public display.” Pope, “His Master’s Voice,” 14n41. See also Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 272-73. 1 Boles, “James Rorty’s Social Ecology,” 161.

2 Quoted in Pope, “His Master’s Voice,” 14.

= Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New York: B. W.

Huebsch, 1923), chap. 11. The other treatment, which Rorty rarely cited, appears in Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 55-60. For a superb treatment of both works in the wider context of Veblen’s project, see Sidney Plotkin, “Misdirected Effort: Thorstein Veblen’s Critique of Advertising,” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 6, no. 4 (2014): 501-22.

22 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899).

3 Veblen was among the New School’s xviii detailed to Veblen their experiences in the ad business—testimony that, Rorty later claimed, informed Veblen’s analysis in Absentee Ownership. Wrote Rorty: “What he got out of us was transmuted

into the refined gold of the long footnote” on religion in the book’s advertising chapter.*4 If Rorty was right—that Veblen’s excursus on the “propagation of faith” reflected their conversations from the early 1920s—then the compliment was returned in Our Master's Voice. He singled out Veblen’s “footnote”—really a six-page addendum to the chapter—as the key to grasping the resonance of Christianity and the “modern Church of Advertising.”*5

Rorty dedicated Our Master’s Voice to the “memory of Thorstein Veblen,” and he quoted him in one of the book’s three epigraphs.?° Veblenian lacerations—phrases like doctrinal memoranda and creative psychiatry—pockmark Rorty’s pages.” And sentences like “Again, Veblen furnishes us with the essential clue,” are typical.?8 Veblen’s name appears more than three dozen times in Rorty’s treatise—or once every seven pages. Thus it seems fair to conclude, at first pass, that Our Master’s Voice is the book Veblen would have written had he devoted himself to the task.

Rorty certainly encouraged that inference. He lavished particular praise on Absentee Ownership. Veblen’s “brief treatment of advertising” in the book, Rorty wrote, “remains today the most exact description of the nature of the advertising phenomenon which has yet appeared.”*9 Late in Our Master’s Voice, Rorty admitted that Veblen’s volume, “in general, has supplied the framework of theory for this analysis.”3° Readers might thus easily get the impression that Our Master’s Voice offers but a book-length elaboration of Veblen’s penetrating, if brief, reflections on advertising.

This isn’t quite right. Rorty, for all his borrowings, departed from his teacher in a handful of significant ways. He placed advertising at the center of things where Veblen, if anything, deflated its importance. For Veblen, advertising didn’t change much; its main effect was to shuffle the allotment of sales among firms all vying for a fixed, zero-sum buying capacity. Yet Rorty, writing in the wake of the Gatsby-esque 1920s, realized that advertising had helped change the economy itself, expanding (together with popular credit instruments) the role of everyday consumption. Without using the phrase, Our Master’s Voice articulated the idea of demand stimulation—the adfueled fanning of consumer desire that helped remake the country’s economy and culture. Rorty’s reflections on the interlaced economics of publicity and consumption were, to be sure, tempered by the brute fact of the Depression. But the blueprint of an advertising-stimulated consumption economy—an answer to overproduction and slack demand—exists in Our Master's Voice. The book anticipates, more founding faculty. See Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), 14-16.

% This account of Rorty’s brief personal exposure to Veblen is drawn from Boles, “James Rorty’s Social Ecology,” 157. Boles cites, and quotes from, Rorty, “Unpublished Memoirs: Version 1,” n.d., box 2, James Rorty Papers, Special Collections, University of Oregon.

Veblen’s “Note” appears in Absentee Ownership, 319-25. The owner of the boarding house, Alice Boughton,

was research director at the J. Walter Thompson Company. Pope, “His Master’s Voice,” 6-7.

3 Rorty, before quoting Veblen’s first paragraph, wrote: “The close analogy between the sales publicity methods

of the Christian Church and those of the modern Church of Advertising

was noted in 1923 by Thorstein Veblen, who missed little, if any, of the comedy of the American scene. Veblen’s long foot-note (p. 319, Absentee Ownership) should be read in its entirety in this connection.” OMV, 208.

than Veblen’s work, the fuller postwar articulation of advertising’s Keynesianism-through-desire.3*

Crucially, Veblen embeds his treatment of the “business of publicity” in his broader analysis of the U.S. economy.3* The core idea, from The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) onward, is that businesses deliberately scale back production to protect their profits—to prevent prices from falling below costs. Veblen called this “sabotage,” with profit-hoarding “business” hollowing out “industry.” Since the “market is not to be overstocked to an unprofitable extent,” the captains of business turn to the “strategic withholding of productive efficiency.”33 Veblen regarded the slackening as deeply offensive—an affront to the country’s productive capacity and a deplorable and selfish waste, one that underwrote a parasitic leisure class.

Veblen applied this sabotage framework, including its Norwegian asceticism and producerist ethic, to advertising itself—resulting in a strikingly autarkic analysis. Spending on “salesmanship,” Veblen’s preferred term, was growing rapidly, leading to higher prices for consumers. Yet all those advertising outlays merely reshuffled a deck of, ultimately, capped size: “The total volume of sales at any given time is fixed within a narrow margin.” Salesmanship is all about winning customers from competitors—“the art of taking over a disproportionate share of this run of sales.”34

Yes, Veblen concluded, advertising matters; after all, it’s taking a growing share of the economy and running up production costs (and therefore prices). Yet he ultimately considered it waste, professionalized waste, since what’s at stake is market share among big profit-protecting firms. To Veblen, the proportion of the economy given over to consumption was a zero-sum game.?> Salesmanship resembled trench warfare, with small, meaningless gains made at great expense. The whole sector, then, was irrational, if also explainable: Firms ramp up publicity spending as a competitive necessity, since otherwise their competitors will drive them out of business with their own campaigns.3° This arms race generates a sprawling, even routinized advertising industry—staffed by “publicity engineers” trained (to Veblen’s disgust) at the country’s most august universities.37