The Nazis promised many things to many people. As the document by Goebbels shows, anti-Semitism allowed them to blend their racial nationalism, vaguely defined (and anti-Marxist) socialism, and disgust with the state of German culture and politics. Joseph Goebbels, one of the early members of the party, became director of propaganda for the party in 1928. Later, Hitler appointed him head of the National Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The Nazis worked hard to win the rural vote, as evidenced by the Nazi campaign pamphlet reprinted in the second excerpt. The Nazis tried to appeal to farmers' economic grievances; their fears of socialism, on the one hand, and big business, on the other; and their more general hostility to urban life and culture.
Joseph Goebbels, “Why Are We Enemies of the Jews?”
E are nationalists because we see in the nation the only possibility for the protection and the furtherance of
Our existence.
The nation is the organic bond of a people for the protection and defense of their lives. He is nationally minded who
Understands this in word and in deed____
Young nationalism has its unconditional demands, belief in the nation is a matter of all the people, not for individuals of rank, a class, or an industrial clique. The eternal must be separated from the contemporary. The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism; not only can I do it,
I also must do it. The germ of the rebirth of our people lies only in the destruction of the system of plundering the healthy power of the people.
We are nationalists because we, as Germans, love Germany. And because we love Germany, we demand the protection of its national spirit and we battle against its destroyers. why are we socialists?
We are socialists because we see in socialism the only possibility for maintaining our racial existence and through it the reconquest of our political freedom and the rebirth of the German state. socialism has its peculiar form first of all through its comradeship in arms with the forward-driving energy of a newly awakened nationalism. Without nationalism it is nothing, a phantom, a theory, a vision of air, a book. With it, it is everything, the future, freedom, fatherland! . . .
Why do we oppose the Jews?
We are enemies of the Jews, because we are fighters for the freedom of the German people. the Jew is the cause and the beneficiary of our misery. He has used the social difficulties of the broad masses of our people to deepen the unholy split between Right and Left among our people. He has made two halves of Germany. He is the real cause for our loss of the Great War.
The Jew has no interest in the solution of Germany's fateful problems. He cannot have any. for he lives on the fact that there has been no solution. If we would make the German people a unified community and give them freedom before the world, then the Jew can have no place among us. He has the best trumps in his hands when a people lives in inner and outer slavery. the Jew is responsible for our misery and he lives on it.
That is the reason why we, as nationalists and as socialists, oppose the Jew. he has corrupted our race, fouled our morals, undermined our customs, and broken our power.
In the Third Reich began with a 1933 law for the compulsory sterilization of “innumerable inferior and hereditarily tainted” people. This “social-hygienic racism” later became the systematic murder of mentally and physically ill patients. Social policy was governed by a basic division between those who possessed “value” and those who did not, with the aim of creating a racial utopia.
The centerpiece of Nazi racism was anti-Semitism. This centuries-old phenomenon was part of Christian society from the Middle Ages on. By the nineteenth century, traditional Christian anti-Semitism was joined by a current of nationalist anti-Jewish theory. A great many of the theorists of European nationalism saw the Jewish people as permanent outsiders who could only be assimilated and
National Socialist Campaign Pamphlet, 1932
ERMAN FARMER YOU BELONG TO HITLER! WHY?
The German farmer stands between two great dangers today:
The one danger is the American economic system—Big capitalism!
It means "world economic crisis" it means "eternal interest slavery" . . . it means that the world is nothing more than a bag of booty for Jewish finance in Wall Street, New York, and Paris it enslaves man under the slogans of progress, technology, rationalization, standardization, etc.
It knows only profit and dividends it wants to make the world into a giant trust
It puts the machine over man it annihilates the independent, earth-rooted farmer, and its final aim is the world dictatorship of Jewry [ . . . ]
It achieves this in the political sphere through parliament and the swindle of democracy. In the economic sphere, through the control of credit, the mortgaging of land, the stock exchange and the market principle [ . . . ]
The farmer's leagues, the Landvolk and the Bavarian Farmers' League all pay homage to this system.
The other danger is the Marxist economic system of bolshevism:
It knows only the state economy it knows only one class, the proletariat
It brings in the controlled economy it doesn't just annihilate the selfsufficient farmer economically—it roots him out [ . . . ]
It brings the rule of the tractor it nationalizes the land and creates mammoth factory-farms
It uproots and destroys man's soul, making him the powerless tool of the communist idea—or kills him
It destroys the family, belief, and customs [ . . . ]
It is anti-Christ, it desecrates the churches [ . . . ]
Its final aim is the world dictatorship of the proletariat, that means ultimately the world dictatorship of Jewry, for the Jew controls this powerless proletariat and uses it for his dark plans
Big capitalism and bolshevism work hand in hand; they are born of Jewish thought and serve the master plan of world Jewry.
Who alone can rescue the farmer from these dangers?
NATIONAL SOCIALISM!
Source (for both documents): Anton Kaes, Matin
Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, The Weimar Republic
Sourcebook (Los Angeles: 1994), pp. 137-38, 142.
Questions for Analysis
1. How did Goebbels use metaphors of illness and health, growth and decay? Do the metaphors suggest what the Nazis would try to do to cure the ills of Germany if they took power?
2. How does Goebbels's anti-Semitism differ from the nineteenth-century French anti-Semitism documented on page 779?
3. The Nazi campaign pamphlet of 1932 targeted German farmers. How did the pamphlet play on their fears of market manipulation by American big business and Bolshevik demands for collectivization and seizure of private land? How did the Nazis identify themselves with Christianity and traditional values, sincerely or not?
4. How, specifically, does the party propose to deal with the "two great dangers of today"?
Become citizens if they denied their Jewish identity. At the end of the nineteenth century, during the Dreyfus Affair in France (see Chapter 23), French and European anti-Semites launched a barrage of propaganda against Jews— scores of books, pamphlets, and magazines blamed Jews for all the troubles of modernity, from socialism to international banks and mass culture. The late nineteenth century also brought a wave of pogroms—violent assaults on Jewish communities—especially in Russia. Racial anti-Semitism drew the line between Jews and non-Jews on the basis of erroneous biology. Religious conversion, which traditional Christian anti-Semites encouraged, would not change biology. Nor would assimilation, which was counseled by more secular nationalist thinkers.
NAZI BOYCOTT OF JEWISH SHOPS IN BERLIN, 1933. Nazis stand in front of a Jewish-owned clothing store. "Germans! Buy nothing from the Jews!"
It is important not to generalize, but anti-Semitism in these different forms was a well-established and open political force in most of the West. By attacking Jews, anti-Semites attacked modern institutions—from socialist parties and the mass press to international banking—as part of an “international Jewish conspiracy” to undermine traditional authority and nationality. Conservative party leaders told shopkeepers and workers that “Jewish capitalists” were responsible for the demise of small businesses, for the rise of giant department stores, and for precarious economic swings that threatened their livelihoods. In Vienna, middle-class voters supported the openly antiSemitic Christian Democrats. In Germany, in 1893, sixteen avowed anti-Semites were elected to the Reichstag, and the Conservative party made anti-Semitism part of its official program. Hitler gave this anti-Semitism an especially murderous twist by tying it to doctrines of war and social-hygienic racism.
To what extent was the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism shared? Although the “Jewish Question” was clearly Hitler’s primary obsession during the early 1920s, he made the theme less central in campaign appearances as the Nazi movement entered mainstream politics, shifting instead to attacks on Marxism and the Weimar democracy. Moreover, anti-Semitic beliefs would not have distinguished the Nazi from any other party on the political right; it was likely of only secondary importance to people’s opinions of the Nazis. Soon after Hitler came to power, though, German
Jews faced discrimination, exclusion from rights as citizens, and violence. Racial laws excluded Jews from public office as early as April 1933. The Nazis encouraged a boycott of Jewish merchants, while the SA created a constant threat of random violence. In 1935, the Nuremberg Decrees deprived Jews (defined by bloodline) of their German citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and other Germans. Violence escalated. In November 1938, the SA attacked some 7,500 Jewish stores, burned nearly 200 synagogues, killed ninety-one Jews, and beat up thousands more in a campaign of terror known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Violence like this did raise some opposition from ordinary Germans. Legal persecution, however, met only silent acquiescence. And from the perspective of Jewish people, Kristallnacht made it plain that there was no safe place for them in Germany. Unfortunately, only one year remained before the outbreak of war made it impossible for Jews to escape.
What did national socialism and fascism have in common? Both arose in the interwar period as responses to the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Both were violently antisocialist and anticommunist, determined to “rescue” their nations from the threat of Bolshevism. Both were intensely nationalistic; they believed that national solidarity came before all other allegiances and superseded all other rights. Both opposed parliamentary government and democracy as cumbersome and divisive. Both found their power in mass-based authoritarian politics. Similar movements existed in all the countries of the West, but only in a few cases did they actually form regimes. Nazism, however, distinguished itself by making a racially pure state central to its vision, a vision that would lead to global struggle and mass murder.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE DEMOCRACIES
The histories of the three major Western democracies— Great Britain, France, and the United States—run roughly parallel during the years after the First World War. In all three countries, governments put their trust in prewar policies and assumptions until the Great Depression forced
Them to make major social and economic reforms, reforms that would lay the foundations of the modern welfare state. These nations weathered the upheavals of the interwar years, but they did not do so easily.
Both France and Britain sought to keep the price of manufactured goods low in the 1920s, to stimulate demand in the world markets. This policy of deflation kept businessmen happy but placed a great burden on French and British workers, whose wages and living standards remained low. In both countries, class conflict boiled just below the surface, as successive governments refused to raise taxes to pay for social reforms. Workers’ resentment in Britain helped elect the first Labour party government in 1924 and again in 1929. A general strike in Britain in 1926 succeeded only in increasing middle-class antipathy toward workers. In France, a period of strikes immediately after the war subsided and was followed by a period in which employers refused to bargain with labor unions. When the French government passed a modified social insurance program in 1930—insuring against sickness, old age, and death— French workers remained unsatisfied.
Among the democracies, the United States was a bastion of conservatism. Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover held a social philosophy formulated by the barons of big business in the nineteenth century. The Supreme Court used its power of judicial review to nullify progressive legislation enacted by state governments and occasionally by Congress.
The conservative economic and social policies of the prewar period were dealt their deathblow by the Great Depression of 1929. This worldwide depression peaked during the years 1929-33, but its effects lasted a decade. For those who went through it, the depression was perhaps the formative experience of their lives and the decisive crisis of the interwar period. It was an important factor in the rise of Nazism; but in fact, it forced every country to forge new economic policies and to deal with unprecedented economic turmoil.
The Origins of the Great Depression
What caused the Great Depression? Its deepest roots lay in the instability of national currencies and in the interdependence of national economies. Throughout the 1920s, Europeans had seen a sluggish growth rate. A major drop in world agricultural prices hurt the countries of southern and eastern Europe, where agriculture was small in scale and high in cost. Unable to make a profit on the international market, these agricultural countries bought fewer manufactured goods from the more industrial sectors of northern Europe, causing a widespread drop in industrial productivity. Restrictions on free trade crippled the economy even more. Although debtor nations needed open markets to sell their goods, most nations were raising high trade barriers to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition.
Then in October of 1929, prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed. On October 24, “Black Thursday,” 12 million shares were traded amid unprecedented chaos. Even more surprising, the market kept falling. Black Thursday was followed by Black Monday and then Black Tuesday: falling prices, combined with an enormously high number of trades, made for the worst day in the history of the stock exchange to that point. The rise of the United States as an international creditor during the Great War meant that the crash had immediate, disastrous consequences in Europe. When the value of stocks dropped, banks found themselves short of capital and then, when not rescued by the government, forced to close. International investors called in their debts. A series of banking houses shut their doors, among them Credit Anstalt, the biggest bank in Austria and one with significant interests in two-thirds of Austrian industry. Workers lost their jobs; indeed, manufacturers laid off virtually entire workforces. In 1930, 4 million Americans were unemployed; in 1933, 13 million—nearly a third of the workforce. By then, per capita income in the United States had fallen 48 percent. In Germany, too, the drop was brutal. In 1929, 2 million were unemployed; in 1932, 6 million. Production dropped 44 percent in Germany, 47 percent in the United States. The stock-market collapse led to widespread bank failure and brought the economy virtually to a standstill.
The governments of the West initially responded to the depression with monetary measures. In 1931, Great Britain abandoned the gold standard; the United States followed suit in 1933. By no longer pegging their currencies to the price of gold, these countries hoped to make money cheaper and thus more available for economic recovery programs. This action was the forerunner of a broad program of currency management, which became an important element in a general policy of economic nationalism. In another important move, Great Britain abandoned its time-honored policy of free trade in 1932, raising protective tariffs as high as 100 percent. But monetary policy alone could not end the hardships of ordinary families. Governments were increasingly forced to address their concerns with a wide range of social reforms.
Britain was the most cautious in its relief efforts. A national government composed of Conservative, Liberal, and Labour party members came to power in 1931. To underwrite effective programs of public assistance,
The Great Depression in the Democracies | 861
U. S. FARMERS ON THEIR WAY WEST IN THE 1930s. Forced from their land by depression, debts, and drought, thousands of farmers and their families headed to California, Oregon, and Washington in search of employment.
However, the government would have to spend beyond its income—something it was reluctant to do. France, on the other hand, adopted the most advanced set of policies to combat the effects of the depression. In 1936, responding to a threat from ultraconservatives to overthrow the republic, a Popular Front government under the leadership of the socialist Leon Blum was formed by the Radical, Radical Socialist, and Communist parties, and lasted for two years. The Popular Front nationalized the munitions industry and reorganized the Bank of France to break the largest stockholders’ monopolistic control over credit. The government also decreed a forty-hour week for all urban workers and initiated a program of public works. For the benefit of the farmers, it established a wheat office to fix the price and regulate the distribution of grain. Although the Popular Front temporarily quelled the threat from the political right, conservatives were generally uncooperative and unimpressed by the attempts to aid the French working class. Both a socialist and Jewish, Blum faced fierce antiSemitism in France. Fearing that Blum was the forerunner of a French Lenin, conservatives declared, “Better Hitler than Blum.” They got their wish before the decade was out.
The most dramatic response to the depression came in the United States for two reasons. First, the United States had clung longest to nineteenth-century economic philosophy. Before the depression, the business classes adhered firmly to the creed of freedom of contract. Industrialists insisted on their right to form monopolies, and they used the government as a tool to frustrate the demands of both workers and consumers. Second, the depression was more severe in the United States than in the European democracies. America had survived the First World War unscathed—and, indeed, had benefited enormously—but now its economy was ravaged even more than Europe’s. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded Herbert Hoover as president and announced the New Deal, a program of reform and reconstruction to rescue the country.
The New Deal aimed to get the country back on its feet without destroying the capitalist system. The government would manage the economy, sponsor relief programs, and fund public-works projects to increase mass purchasing power. These policies were shaped by the theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who had already proved influential during the 1919 treaty meetings at Paris. Keynes argued that capitalism could create a just and efficient society if governments played a part in its management. First, Keynes abandoned the sacred cow of balanced budgets. Without advocating continuous deficit financing, he would have the government deliberately operate in the red whenever private investments weren’t enough. Keynes also favored the creation of large amounts of venture capital—money for high-risk, high-reward investments—which he saw as the only socially productive form of capital. Finally, he recommended monetary control to promote prosperity and full employment.
Along with Social Security and other programs, the United States adopted a Keynesian program of “currency management,” regulating the value of the dollar according to the needs of the economy. The New Deal helped both individuals and the country recover, but it left the crucial problem of unemployment unsolved. In 1939, after six years of the New Deal, the United States still had more than 9 million jobless workers—a figure that exceeded the combined unemployment of the rest of the world. Only with the outbreak of a new world war—which required millions of soldiers and armament workers—did the United States reach the full recovery that the New Deal had failed to deliver.
The interwar period also brought dramatic upheavals in the arts and sciences. Artists, writers, architects, and composers brought the revolutionary artistic forms of the turn of the century into the mainstream as they rejected traditional aesthetic values and experimented with new forms of expression. Scientists and psychologists challenged deeply held beliefs about the universe and human nature. Finally, radio, movies, and advertising created a new kind of mass culture that fed off the atmosphere of crisis in politics and the arts, and contributed to the anxieties of the age.
Novelists, poets, and dramatists were disillusioned by the world war. Much literature in the interwar period reflected the themes of frustration, cynicism, and disenchantment that emerged from the failure of victory to fulfill its promises. The mood of the era is captured in the early work of the American Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) described a “lost generation.” The poetry of the Anglo-American T. S. Eliot explored a peculiarly modern form of despair: life as a living death, to be endured as boredom and frustration. The German author Bertolt Brecht depicted the cynical corruption of elite members of society in plays written for a working-class audience in cabarets.
Other writers focused their attention on consciousness and inner life, often experimenting with new forms of prose. The Irish writer James Joyce perfected a style that became known as “stream of consciousness” in Ulysses (1922), a technique also associated with French author Marcel Proust. In the same vein, British author Virginia Woolf offered an eloquent and biting critique of Britain’s elite institutions, from the universities that isolated women in separate, underfunded colleges to the suffocating decorum of middle-class families and relationships.
The depression of the 1930s fostered a second wave of more politicized literature, as a new generation felt called on to indict injustice and point the way to a better society. In The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the American writer John Steinbeck depicted the plight of impoverished farmers fleeing from the Dust Bowl to California only to find the land monopolized by companies that exploited their workers. Younger British authors such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood were communist sympathizers who believed that their duty as artists was to support the revolution.
The innovations of the prewar avant-garde thrived in the postwar period. Visual art responded to the rapid transformations of twentieth-century society: new technologies, scientific discoveries, the abandonment of traditional beliefs, and the influence of non-Western cultures. Like the writers of the period, visual artists pushed the boundaries,
MARCEL DUCHAMP. In these photos, Duchamp used shaving cream to transform his appearance. Much of Duchamp's artwork showed his questioning of the role of the artist.
ARCHITECTURAL STYLE IN GERMANY BETWEEN THE WARS. The Bauhaus, by Walter Gropius (1883-1969). This school in Dessau, Germany, is a starkly functional prototype of the interwar "international style."
Moving far beyond the conventional tastes of average men and women.
Pablo Picasso pursued his experiments in cubist variations and inventions. The “expressionists” argued that color and line expressed inherent psychological qualities by themselves, so paintings did not need a representational subject at all. The Russian Wassily Kandinsky followed this position to its logical conclusion, creating abstract and colorful paintings that he called “improvisations.” A second group of expressionists rejected such experiments and claimed that their goal was “objectivity,” by which they meant a candid appraisal of the state of humanity. Chief among this group was the German George Grosz (Grohz) whose cruel, satiric line has been likened to a “razor lancing a carbuncle.” His scathing cartoonlike images became the most popular portraits of the despised Weimar government.
The dadaists went further, rebelling against the very idea of aesthetic principle. Principles were based on reason, and the world had proved that reason did not exist. Pulling their name at random from a dictionary, the dadaists rejected formal artistic conventions, preferring random juxtapositions from cutouts and collage, bizarre assemblages from wood, glass, and metal. The artists—the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp, the German Max Ernst, and the Alsation Jean (Hans Arp)—claimed their works were meaningless and playful, but critics saw them as expressions of the subconscious. In Germany, dadaism took on political undertones as their anarchistic social critique challenged the very basis of national culture.
Other artists found inspiration for their work in social and political conflict. Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco and the Americans Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh sought to depict the social conditions of the modern world, presenting in graphic detail the lives of ordinary working people. These artists avoided the experimentalism of the dadaists or the expressionists and aimed instead for an intelligible art, available to all.
Architects, too, rejected tradition, seeking a style that was more in harmony with the needs of modern civilization. Otto Wagner in Austria, Charles Edouard Jeanneret (known as Le Corbusier) in France, and Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in the United States pioneered a style known as “functionalism.” Functionalists believed that the appearance of a building should proclaim its use and purpose. Ornament was designed to reflect an age of science and machines. The German functionalist Walter Gropius established a school in 1919— the Bauhaus—to serve as a center for the development of modern architecture. Their style of design, the so-called international style, explored the use of new materials— chromium, glass, steel, and concrete.
Interwar Scientific Developments
One powerful influence on the artists and intellectuals of the day was neither social nor political but scientific. The pioneering work of the German physicist Albert Einstein revolutionized not only the entire structure of physical science but also challenged ordinary people’s most basic beliefs about the universe. Quickly recognized as one of the greatest intellects of all time, Einstein began to question the very foundations of traditional physics early in the twentieth century. By 1915, he had proposed entirely new ways of thinking about space, matter, time, and gravity.
Einstein’s theories paved the way for another revolutionary development in physics—the splitting of the atom. As early as 1905, Einstein became convinced of the equivalence of mass and energy and worked out a formula for the conversion of one into the other: E = mc2
The formula had no practical application for years. Then in 1932, when the Englishman Sir James Chadwick discovered the neutron, scientists had an ideal weapon for bombarding the atom—that is, a way to split it. In 1939, two German physicists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, successfully split atoms of uranium by bombarding them with neutrons. The initial reaction produced a chain of reactions: each atom that was split shot off more neutrons, which split even more atoms. Scientists in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States were spurred on by governments anxious to turn these discoveries into weapons during the Second World War. American scientists soon prepared an atomic bomb, the most destructive weapon ever created. The legacy was ironic for Einstein, a man who devoted much of his life to promoting pacifism, liberalism, and social justice.
Another important contribution to physics that quickly entered popular culture was the “uncertainty principle” posited by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927. Heisenberg, who was strongly influenced by Einstein, showed that it is impossible—even in theory—to measure both the position and the speed of an object at the same time. The theory was of consequence only when dealing with atoms or subatomic particles. Though the public had little to no understanding of these groundbreaking scientific concepts, metaphorical invocations of relativity and the uncertainty principle fitted the ambiguities of the modern world. For many people, nothing was definite, everything was changing—and science seemed to be proving it.
Mass Culture and Its Possibilities
Cultural change, however, extended far beyond circles of artistic and intellectual elites. The explosive rise of mass media in the interwar years transformed popular culture and the lives of ordinary people. New mass media—especially radio and films—reached audiences of unprecedented size. Political life incorporated many of these new media, setting off worries that the common people, increasingly referred to as the “masses,” could be manipulated by demagogues and propaganda. In 1918, mass politics was rapidly becoming a fact of life: that meant nearly universal suffrage (varying by country), well-organized political parties reaching out to voters, and, in general, more participation in political life. Mass politics was accompanied by the rise of mass culture: books, newspapers, films, and fashions were produced in large numbers and standardized formats, which were less expensive and more accessible, appealing not only to more but to more kinds of people. Older forms of popular culture were often local and class specific; mass culture, at least in principle, cut across lines of class and ethnicity, and even nationality. The term, however, can easily become misleading. The world of culture did not suddenly become homogenous. No more than half the population read newspapers regularly. Not everyone listened to the radio, and those who did certainly did not believe everything they heard. The pace of cultural change, however, did quicken perceptibly. And in the interwar years, mass culture showed that it held both democratic and authoritarian potential.
The expansion of mass culture rested on widespread applications of existing technologies. Wireless communication, for instance, was invented before the turn of the twentieth century and saw limited use in the First World War. With major financial investment in the 1920s, though, the radio industry boomed. Three out of four British families had a radio by the end of the 1930s; and in Germany, the ratio was even higher. In every European country, broadcasting rights were controlled by the government; in the United States, radio was managed by corporations. The radio broadcast soon became the national soapbox for politicians, and it played no small role in creating new kinds of political language. President Franklin Roosevelt’s reassuring “fireside chats” took advantage of the way that radio bridged the public world of politics with the private world of the home. Hitler cultivated a different kind of radio personality, barking his fierce invectives; he made some fifty addresses in 1933 alone. In Germany, Nazi propagandists beamed their messages into homes or blared them through loudspeakers in town squares, constant and repetitive. Broadcasting created new rituals of political life—and new means of communication and persuasion.
So did advertising. Advertising was not new, but it was newly prominent. Businesses spent vastly more on advertising than they had before. Hard-hitting visual images replaced older ads that simply announced products, prices, and brand names. Many observers considered advertising the most “modern” of art forms. Why? It was efficient communication, streamlined and standardized, producing images that would appeal to all. It was scientific, drawing on modern psychology; advertising agencies claimed to have a science of selling to people. In a world remade by mass politics, and at a moment when the purchasing power of the common people was beginning to rise, however slowly, the high stakes in advertising (as in much of mass culture) were apparent to many.
World History
