The Early History of “Selling America to Americans”

In February of 1948, Business Screen magazine featured an essay by Henry Link, vice president of the polling company the Psychological Corporation, titled “How to Sell America to the Americans.” Its essential argument was that corporate communicators not only could, but must use their persuasive skills to create mass media that would lead the public to an appreciation of private enterprise. Link’s essay was part of a larger strand of late 1940s popular business discourse that touted the importance of “selling America to Americans” in the emergent postwar social order. Such discourses tended not to state directly what it meant, exactly, to sell America to Americans, but contextual cues suggested that when such discourses mentioned selling America, they often meant selling an appreciation for American capitalism, both in theory and in practice. 

Link asserted that people in the U.S., despite enjoying the nation’s economic prosperity, were either misinformed or misled about the American capitalist system. Link’s essay conveyed an idea that was prevalent in popular business discourse by the late 1940s: “American industry has not been nearly so successful in selling the principles of free enterprise as it has been in selling its products.” Link’s directives signaled an implicit model of persuasion: to “sell” the idea that U.S. managerial capitalism itself was synonymous with democracy, freedom, and patriotic tradition, corporate communicators should use mass media to deploy facts in concert with emotional and moral appeals. 

The catchphrase “selling America to Americans” had developed from the late 1910s until the late 1930s, and came to signal a constellation of meanings — including antiradical politics, managerial ideals of efficiency, and an affirmative style of promotional nationalism. By the late 1930s, the catchphrase was being used in ways that strategically left little room for political debate, compromise, or opposition to be recognized as legitimate. From this perspective, being sold on America required people to not only internalize hegemonic understandings of the nation’s language, history, and civics, but also to experience feelings of patriotic pride and optimism. Far from being a mere catchphrase, the motto of selling America to Americans drew upon managerial ideals of efficient persuasion to crystallize an affirmative style of political discourse in which positive affect was both the promise of a bright future and the means to reaching it. 

Between the First and Second World Wars, the slogan of selling America to Americans conveyed a hope that promotional techniques could systematically and efficiently create an environment of public opinion friendly to the interests of industrial management. The ideas that undergirded such projects were evident in promotional discourses of the moment, such as in advertising trade journal cartoons from 1919 that depicted employee education as a bulwark against violent radicalism: in these images, a wild-eyed agitator serves as the foil to a manager whose clean-cut and tranquil employees receive instruction in “reason” and “American ideals” amid a stack of “educational literature” topped with American flags and a portrait of President Lincoln. Editorial copy on the facing page urged advertising professionals to support a congressional bill promoting English literacy, warning that illiteracy was “the basis of mob violence, and what is worse than that, the seed of Bolshevism.” Through such measures, the commentary added with approval, “we improve the reading public to the purpose of being more responsive to advertising.” The Australian academic Alex Carey argued that the rhetoric of American identity in the 1910s was linked to industrial conditions, especially the rising public profile of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which, Carey argued, provoked an Americanization movement that stirred fears of “an alien workforce captured by a radical union movement.” 

The project of assimilating immigrants took on increased urgency, and garnered more public attention, during and after World War I. The tone of these projects was inflected by the first Red Scare. In June 1919 the Famous Players–Lasky Motion Picture Company announced the production of Your America, a series of short films made in partnership with the Department of the Interior and approved by its secretary, Franklin Knight Lane. Publicity materials announcing the film series touted “Mr. Lane’s mighty project of selling America to Americans,” noting that films would focus on such topics as labor relations, natural resources, and assimilation of immigrants. At a subsequent meeting with film industry executives in December 1919 that the Indianapolis Star described as a “fight for Americanism,” officials drew comparisons between wartime propaganda and peacetime patriotic messaging. Lane framed national identity as part of a battle of ideas, declaring that in the aftermath of the war, leaders would need to inspire the populace to “a patriotism of peace as intense as the patriotism of war.” Vice President Thomas Marshall indicated the role the film industry could play in this movement, asserting that the motion picture industry had done more than any other to “arouse the zeal, the fervor and the patriotism of the country” during the war, and going on to suggest that movies could play a similar role of “winning … America for Americans” in peacetime. As film historian Cristina Stanciu documented, the meeting would spur the formation of the Americanism Committee of the Motion Picture Industry, which facilitated U.S. motion picture companies’ production of short features on Americanization themes. Subsequent meetings made clear what Lane had in mind: films designed to “combat Bolshevism and ultra-radical tendencies” by portraying themes of cooperation between labor and management against a backdrop of patriotism. Film historian Larry Ceplair observed that Lane’s exhortations to the motion picture industry resulted in relatively few film productions. However, Lane’s Americanization drive and its fascination with the uses of motion pictures illustrated how the catchphrase of selling America to Americans encapsulated a promise to resolve managerial capitalism’s cultural contradictions, while incorporating its promotional logics to encourage patriotic sentiments and deflect conflict or critique.

Managerial capitalism — in which the owners of large business enterprises turned the day-to-day operations of the firm over to a hierarchical system of “salaried managers who had little or no equity ownership in the enterprises they operated,” in the words of business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. — had developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, facilitating a U.S. management culture that Chandler notes was oriented toward efficiency and marketing. Labor historian Stephen Meyer described how changes to the techniques of manufacturing ramped up production capacity dramatically and opened up employment opportunities for workers with little prior training, many of them European immigrants. Further, as historian James R. Barrett described, the so-called new immigration wave of the 1890s to 1910s included many southern and eastern Europeans, as compared to the western and northern Europeans of prior immigration waves. The Americanization movement had aimed to cultivate such immigrants’ compatibility with the infrastructures of managerial capitalism. As historian Gary Gerstle noted, Americanization became embedded in community and educational institutions through requirements to teach “citizenship.” Americanization was about more than one’s place of birth: it was, as communication theorist Jennifer Daryl Slack observed, a process of “becoming socialized into the industrial culture” of the United States. 

Meanwhile, in the field of advertising, ideas about how to efficiently persuade mass audiences were circulating — and these ideas bore similarities to Interior Secretary Lane and Vice President Marshall’s hopes of using mass media to fight political radicalism by arousing patriotic feelings. As branded goods had become more prevalent in the early twentieth century, the promotional industries had both expanded and became more professionalized. As business historian Walter A. Friedman describes, corporations and entrepreneurs had adapted traveling salesmen’s earlier methods for selling and sales management to create systematized, scalable, and reproducible practices while retaining much of the optimistic and confident affect of salesmanship. In advertising copy, too, an attention to feelings and the ineffable was part of the systematization of the field. For example, psychologist Walter Dill Scott touted what he called “scientific advertising,” arguing that advertisements that linked sensory, emotional appeals to product attributes would be more efficient than the advertising strategy of conveying concrete information about product attributes and benefits in a straightforward, evidence-based manner. Advertising historian Peggy Kreshel places Scott first among the applied psychologists whose systematic studies of persuasion posed a challenge to the expertise claims of copywriters (who, for their part, imagined themselves to be educating rational consumers).

The most scientifically advanced advertisements, Scott argued in a 1904 essay in the Atlantic magazine, would use words and illustrations with such nuance and grace that the reader could imagine the feeling of using the product. If advertising was done correctly, the reader would be able to vividly imagine the experience of product use, including the senses it would stimulate and the social situations it would facilitate. Scott’s perspective gained popularity over the course of the 1910s, resulting in magazine advertisements that increasingly highlighted pathos alongside product attributes. Scott’s personal involvement in the First World War was focused on personnel classification and other management tasks, as business historian Edmund C. Lynch has documented. Yet, the effectiveness of his persuasive techniques was seemingly borne out by the United States’ propaganda arm, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which had used the techniques of advertising — emotive imagery, memorable slogans, and stirring copywriting — to convey persuasive messages of public importance via familiar media formats. Indeed, advertising historians Robert Jackall and Janice M. Hirota documented how the CPI tapped the presidents of the AAAA and the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World for leadership positions in the CPI’s Division of Advertising. The CPI’s chairman, George Creel, would later characterize the organization’s work across its many divisions as advertising: Creel’s memoir of his time leading the CPI was titled How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe. 

A similar attention to the power of stirring words and images characterized mass-mediated Americanization efforts. The widespread use of film by the Americanization movement, Cristina Stanciu has shown, was premised on assumptions that silent film could transcend language barriers. Film could also communicate across language divides by offering powerful images with affective punch, a capacity that may have inspired some of Franklin K. Lane’s interest. The importance of feelings in Interior Secretary Lane’s imagining of Americanism can be better understood by examining his speech “The Living Flame of Americanism,” which was published posthumously in the New York Times Company’s magazine Current History in 1921 and circulated further through its inclusion in numerous readers for schoolchildren or general audiences. The speech reflected a conviction that it was not enough for immigrants to adopt the English language or take on everyday practices common in the United States: they also, Lane argued, had to experience an inner transformation that developed a depth of personal feeling. Lane declared, “the process is not one of science; the process is one of humanity”: being an American meant being inspired by American ideals, he asserted, and this inspiration could only be conveyed by those who were, themselves, “aglow with the sacred fire” as shown by “our kindness, our courage, our generosity, our fairness.” Lane was suggesting that American identity, to borrow social scientist Zizi Papacharissi’s description of affective attunement, was something that immigrants had to “feel their way into.”

Considering these conditions, the slogan of selling America to Americans could carry considerable symbolic weight: its metaphor of selling gestured to how emotive appeals were thought to be powerfully efficient at influencing the attitudes and behaviors of mass media audiences, and its invocations of the nation and its people captured the tensions between a xenophobic Anglo-American establishment and its demand for immigrant labor. Lane’s “mighty project of selling America to Americans” combined business-friendly notions of immigrants’ cultural assimilation with a growing sense of mass media’s capacities to deliver persuasively efficient appeals to emotion and sensation. Many of the anticommunist currents that developed during the Red Scare continued to find expression over the course of the 1920s. For supporters of the industrial status quo, the slogan of selling America would often be marshaled to impart a sunny tone to a promotional nationalism that imagined capitalism and patriotism to be cut from the same cloth.

Excerpted and adapted from Business as Usual by Caroline Jack, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2024 by Caroline Jack. All rights reserved.

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