Selling America to Americans: Catchphrase Nationalism and Promotional Culture, 1919-1939
Economic education media—industry-sponsored, pro-capitalist films, pamphlets, advertisements, and other media that touted private enterprise as quintessentially American—flourished between 1940 and 1960 in the United States. Business historians have shown how supporters of economic education campaigns imagined both capitalism and democracy to be threatened by legislators, labor, and the public (Griffith, 1983; Fones-Wolf, 1994; Phillips-Fein, 2009; Glickman, 2019). Scholars often highlight the involvement of advertising professionals, observing how mid-century supporters of economic education media engaged in “selling America to Americans” (Fox, 1975, p.56; Wall, 2008, p.105), “sell[ing] Americans on the benefits of capitalism” (Fones-Wolf, 1994, p.38), or “sell[ing] ‘free enterprise’ to the American people” (Griffith, 1983, p.389). This paper asks: what did it mean to sell America at mid-century? Using evidence from historical newspapers, trade publications, and public speeches between 1919 and 1939, I argue that “selling America to Americans” was more than a pithy mid-century catchphrase: rather, business conservatives who used it in the 1940s and beyond to describe economic education campaigns drew upon prior meanings that intertwined national identity with political anti-radicalism, promotional optimism, and belief in the persuasive power of sensory and emotive appeals.
The paper examines uses of “selling America to Americans” in the 1920s and 1930s, finding different but related meanings in the two decades. Talk of selling America to Americans became prominent in the 1920s, both in ongoing anti-radical political projects and in efforts to promote the economically developing American West; in the 1930s these anti-radical and place-promoting senses of selling America were adapted to both oppose New Deal policies and construct a national identity based on hope and heritage that could set the U.S. apart from Europe. These articulations of selling America were compatible with economic education campaigns, which would use multimedia to promote managerially inflected visions not only of economic principles, but also of U.S. history, policy, and culture.
