"Rethinking the Development of American Consumer Society: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the History of Advertising"

In his oft-quoted 1983 work, The Making of Modern Advertising, Daniel Pope argued that modern consumer society took shape as the American market coalesced on a national scale in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Pope’s work was highly influential to advertising historians writing in the 1990s, including Susan Strasser, Pamela Walker Laird, and T. J. Jackson Lears. These works define “modern” advertising through full-service agencies, trademark-centered campaigns, reason-why copy, and the cultivation of desire—developments that only came to fruition in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with the growth of modern consumer society. Recent literature reinforces this narrative, notably in Gary Cross and Robert Proctor’s Packaged Pleasures (2014), Joseph Gabriel’s Medical Monopoly (2014), and Lawrence Kreiser’s Marketing the Blue & Gray (2019).
Yet as historians working in the history of capitalism have recently pointed out, the seeds of consumer society were planted in the late colonial and early national periods. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that research in legal history and cultural history—particularly through visual and material culture—helps transform our understanding of the institutional development of advertising practices and the economic impact of these prior to and during the Civil War. Drawing upon research in newspapers, almanacs, product labels, and unpublished court filings, this paper will outline key antebellum developments that destabilize the 1890s-centered timelines that dominate the histories of advertising and consumption in the US. Importantly, transformations prompted by the Market Revolution—especially the emergence of trademark litigation, the work of the first advertising agents, and innovations in print ads and patent medicine advertising—prompt a reconsideration of the antebellum era’s contributions to modern consumer society.