Whiteness as a Business Strategy: A Comparative Look at Newspaper Advertising in the Age of Jackson
The American advertising industry was born in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, when Volney Palmer established the first dedicated newspaper advertising agency in Philadelphia. Palmer pitched his services as a shrewd investment that would ensure one’s business could weather subsequent economic challenges. The surest way to do this, Palmer stipulated, was to earn public trust through advertising that transparently represented one’s “character.”
Cultural constructions of character permeated the early advertising trade in the US, as merchants and others clamored to develop positive reputations that would translate into future profits. In print and on the city streets, individuals performed their classed and racial identities in the language they used, the fashions they wore, and the behaviors they deployed. From the 1830s forward, advertisers drew upon the same signaling language to build rapport with potential customers, relying upon educational benchmarks, language fluency, and familiarity with commercial discourse and practices to communicate one’s middle-class identity. Yet such language was laced with coded frameworks that excluded people of color, working-class individuals, and immigrants from the middle class. The resulting public dialogue—between those who would extend middle-class respectability to nonwhites, and those who restricted and policed the boundaries of the middle class—played out, in part, in the vernacular of American newspaper advertising. This study offers a close and comparative reading of ads appearing in the mainstream and ethnic presses to trace the ways in which representations of whiteness reinforced cultural exclusivity in business. Using the language of whiteness as an advertising strategy, white middle-class entrepreneurs appealed to other whites as potential customers, drawing an imaginary line that excluded those who could not or would not conform to such codes of identity. In these ways, the standards of “good character” held up by the business community could serve as a euphemism for whiteness.
