Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Thursday, August 23, 1923. Trotsky schemes, Turkey votes yes, Bluebeard's 8th Wife, Nancy Hayes Green dies, Fr. Giovanni Minzoni assassinated.

The Grand National Assembly of Turkey ratified the Treaty of Lausanne.  British, French, and Italian troops were withdrawing from Istanbul in accordance with the treaty.

Germany announced that it was introducing heavy taxation in order to address the country's economic woes.

Trotsky persuaded the Politburo, in a secret meeting, to finance the German Communist Party, the KDP, in order to overthrow the Weimar Republic.  A revolution in October was the goal, which planned for a Communist Germany to develop the agricultural Soviet Union, demonstrating how Communism, at the end of the day, always has an industrialized corporatism view of things, posters of smiling buxom peasant girls aside.

Bluebeard's 8th Wife was released.


Nancy Hayes Green, born in 1834, died after being hit by a car as a pedestrian. The car had hit a laundry truck.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, Green was already a widow by the end of the Civil War, having suffered the loss of her children as well.  Relocated to Chicago, she was employed in the household of Charles and Amanda Walker, transplanted Kentuckians.  Upon the Walkers recommendation, she was hired to portray "Aunt Jemima" for the RT Davis Milling Company.   The role was frankly demeaning by modern standards as it portrayed a happy picture of the antebellum south, including the status of slaves.  She continued to play the role for twenty years until replaced by Agnes Moodey, as Green would not travel to the 1900 Paris Expedition.  She used her fame from the role to advocate for the poor and for equal rights.

Portrait of Green, maybe, in character.  This could also be successor model Anna Robinson.

The depiction used for the pancake mix changed over the years as society became awakened to its inherent racism.  There was no real way, in the end, to disassociate it with its racist past, however, and Quaker Oats, the then owner of the brand, discontinued the image in 2020, during which time a variety of such depictions of brands were taken out of use by various companies.
Horrifying 1909 advertisement using the Aunt Jemima theme.


1935 Quaker Oats advertisement using a more familiar theme.

The name of the brand was changed completely to Pearl Milling Company, but interestingly minor use of the name and its branding continues by current owner, PepsiCo, so as to not have it become abandoned and become public domain.  Descendants of Robinson, it might be noted, protested the change in branding on the basis that ignored the history and heritage of the brand and American society, for good or ill.

Fr. Giovanni Minzoni, age 38, a Catholic Priest who opposed the fascist rule of Mussolini, was murdered in Argenta.  It is widely assumed that fascist Italo Balbo ordered his murder.


Balbo briefly resigned from office, but would return and was the Governor General of Libya when World War Two broke out.  He died in 1940 when an airplane he was a passenger in was shot down by friendly fire while trying to land at Tobruk.

Saturday, August 19, 2023

Why Ted Cruz?

 


Is there a reason to take Ted Cruz seriously?

This all stems apparently from the Dylan Mulvaney episode, and now Cruz is asserting that the brewer was marking to minors.

There are a lot of serious things going on right now, and this isn't one of them. Anheuser-Busch ought to just tell Ted to shove it where the sun doesn't shine, and he ought to get to work.

Friday, June 23, 2023

Saturday, June 21, 1923. Somewhere West of Laramie and somewhere near Hutchinson, Kansas.

Earlier this week, we noted this:

Thursday, June 21, 1923. Dawn of the advertising age. Somewhere West Of Laramie.

The modern advertising age dawned on this day in 1921 with an ad for the Jordan Playboy automobile:

Today In Wyoming's History: June 211923   This advertisement first ran in the Saturday Evening Post:


The advertisement is the most famous car ad of all time, and the ad itself revolutionized advertising.  Based on the recollection of the Jordan Motor Car Company's founder in seeing a striking mounted girl outside of Laramie, while he was traveling by train, the advertisement is all image, revealing next to nothing about the actual product.  While the Jordan Motor Car Company did not survive the Great Depression, the revolution in advertising was permanent.

Anyway you look at it, it's still a great ad.

This, by the way, is the print date.  The actual issue of the magazine would be a few days later.

On this date, the advertisement actually ran.  I've always thought that it ran in the form set out above, but there were multiple versions, and it would appear that in actuality, the version below is the one that ran.

It's similiar.


But I like the one set out at the very top better.

Sculptor Guzon Borglum began carving the Stone Mountain Memorial bas-relief.  He'd work on the Confederate memorial until 1925, and then abandon the project, blasting his carving of Robert E. Lee off the mountain.  None of his work at Stone Mountain remains.

Harding stopped in Hutchinson, Kansas.


Summer themes were the topic of illustrations on the weekly magazines.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Thursday, June 21, 1923. Dawn of the advertising age. Somewhere West Of Laramie.

The modern advertising age dawned on this day in 1921 with an ad for the Jordan Playboy automobile:

Today In Wyoming's History: June 211923   This advertisement first ran in the Saturday Evening Post:


The advertisement is the most famous car ad of all time, and the ad itself revolutionized advertising.  Based on the recollection of the Jordan Motor Car Company's founder in seeing a striking mounted girl outside of Laramie, while he was traveling by train, the advertisement is all image, revealing next to nothing about the actual product.  While the Jordan Motor Car Company did not survive the Great Depression, the revolution in advertising was permanent.

Anyway you look at it, it's still a great ad.

This, by the way, is the print date.  The actual issue of the magazine would be a few days later.

President Harding gave a speech in St. Louis on his first stop of his western whistle-stop tour.  The speech was carried live by radio.

Marcus Garvey was sentenced to five years in prison for mail fraud.

The Jamaican born Garvey was a controversial black nationalist who had been in the United States since 1916.  He appealed his conviction and ultimately Calvin Coolidge would commute the sentence in 1927, acting on advice that the conviction was regarded as racial in nature.  As a condition of his commutation, he was subject to deportation.  He spent the rest of this life in the United Kingdom, dying in 1940 at age 52.

The downfall of the Consolidated Stock Exchange of New York commenced when William S. Silkworth, its president, was forced to resign due to financial irregularities in his personal finances.  Investigations of the exchange followed, and it ceased operation three years later.

Watching the mule auction this past Sunday brought me to a possible explanation as to why so many Western legal organizations like to feature cowboys in their propoganda.

And that's because it's honest, and manly, work.

Cowboy, 1888.   This is, for some reason, how lawyers often tend to see themselves.

It was Bates v. State Bar of Arizona in which the United States Supreme Court destroyed the professionalism of the legal profession.  In that 5 to 4 decision, the Court found that a rule of the Arizona State Bar preventing advertising violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It further held that allowing attorneys to advertise would not harm the legal profession or the administration of justice.

They were wrong.

As was often the case in that era, the majority had its head up its butt.  In reality, advertising destroyed decades of work by the early 20th Century American Bar Association and drug the occupation of being a lawyer from that of a learned profession down to a carnival barker.

Recently I watched the Netflix uploaded episodes of the Korean television series The Extraordinary Attorney Woo (이상한 변호사 우영우). In it, every one addressed attorneys by their patronymic and the title "Attorney", even if they were personally familiar with them.  So, for example, every time somebody addressed the central protagonist, they did so as "Attorney Woo".   That struck me as odd, so I looked it up to see if that was correct, and found a Korean language site entry that stated off with a comment that was something like "unlike the United States, attorneys in Korea are a respected profession".

That struck me, as I hadn't really thought about it like that.  When I started off in this line of work, we were still somewhat regarded as respected professionals and its hard to forget that's now in the past.

The decline was in, however, already by that time.  When we were admitted to the bar, Federal Judge Court Brimmer gave a speech about civility in litigation.  I've heard versions of it many times since. When I first started practicing, advertising was just starting here, and it was the domain of plaintiff's lawyers for the most part.  It still is.

Bates got us rolling in this direction, but the flood of 60s and 70s vintage law school graduates did as well.  Too many lawyers with too little to do, expanded what could be done in court.  Lawyers have backed every bad cause imaginable in the name of social justice. That's drug the profession down.

How we imagine ourselves.

I think we know that, which is why I think we also go out of our way to associate ourselves with occupations that have real worth.  We like conventions featuring the West, both for defense and plaintiffs, rather than sitting in front of our computers in office buildings in Denver and Salt Lake City.

Nobody, that is, wants to go to the "2023 Sitting On Your Ass Asking Insurance Carriers For Money" conference.  No, we do not.  We want to go instead to the "2023 Blazing Saddles and High Noon Conference".  

But what are we really?

How everyone else sees us.

It's a real red meat question, but it needs to be asked.  To some extent, civil litigation started off as a substitute for private warfare.  But now?  Many people have asked if this is a virtuous profession, but beyond that is it, well, manly?

Many lawyers aren't men, of course.  But if there are occupations that exhibit male virtues and natures, is this one?

Our constant association of ourselves with occupations that do, and the use of language borrowed from fields that are, suggests we don't think so.

As we really are.

Monday, June 5, 2023

A Hairy Time


This is an advertisement commissioned by the Wyoming Department of Health, and my gosh does it bring home a really overlooked point about the past. . . and today.

Very well done, and very much worth the watching.

Not all that long ago getting a simple infection, and tetanus is more than a simple infection, could kill you.  Calvin Coolidge, Jr., the then Vice President's son, died from a staph infection resulting from a blister on a toe that he acquired playing tennis barefoot.  The infection killed the poor boy within a week of its occurrence.

Infections acquired at barber shops, sometimes deadly, were such a problem that they were a major topic of local physician's organizations.  Tetanus was only one of the killer diseases that lurked there. Even anthrax could be picked up from razor strop, if it had been made from a diseased animal.  Bacteria lurking in barbers brushes, used all day long on multiple clients, posed another danger.

And of course, as the story of Calvin Coolidge, Jr. shows, infections could be picked up anywhere, and kill you.

Memories of such things remained strong in my parents' generation.  My mother recalled that her father used to occasionally get a shave at the barbers, which was odd as this was well after the safety razor came about, and that he invariably developed "barber's cancer", a colloquial term meaning a bad rash from an infection.  The family tried to prevent him from doing this, but he would occasionally anyhow, and given the line of work he was in, it was probably in order to engage with members of the local public.  My father, for his part, never approved of going barefoot, regarding it as an invitation to infection.

Now, simple vaccinations eliminate the danger.

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Monday, May 10, 1943. Not even bothering with the Reichstag.

Hitler extended the Enabling Act of 1933, the organic act of his dictatorship, indefinitely, not even bothering to cal the Reichstag into session to do it.

300 large U.S. libraries flew their flags at half-mast on the same day to mark the book burnings that had occurred in Nazi Germany.

On the same day, he approved the plans for Operation Citadel, a giant planned attack on the Kursk Citadel, while, at the same time, as Sarah Sundin notes, Axis efforts were collapsing in North Africa:

Today in World War II History—May 10, 1943: 80 Years Ago—May 10, 1943: In Tunisia, British First Army takes Hammamet, cutting off Cap Bon Peninsula.

Time magazine issued one of its classic covers of World War Two, depicting a stone faced German Admiral Doenitz as a periscope, accompanied by other periscopes depicted as snake heads.

Monday, April 17, 2023

Bud Light, controversy, and why are you drinking that stuff anyway?

Real beer, made locally.

In one of the absurd American corporate efforts to get on the cutting edge of a social trend, irrespective of whether it's temporary, existentially justified, or related to the product, Budweiser released an advertisement with Dylan Mulvaney, a man claiming to be transgendered and who affects a very girlish persona, badly, in a cartoonish fashion.  Indeed, it's an example of how those who claim to be transgendered men sometime affect a much more girlish behavior than girls do, and it's accordingly more than a little cartoonish.  It's a pretty extreme example, which raises its own questions.

Mulvaney is apparently an actor, and came to prominence in the play The Book Of Mormon.  I haven't seen the play and don't care to.  I'm obviously not a Mormon, but I don't like people poking fun of, or making a satire out of, religious beliefs in that fashion.  Eye of the Tiber or The Babylon Bee are one thing, but they aren't actually hostile to religion, and indeed the Bee has come to be controversial as it has started being satirical about society in general, from a general Christian prospective.  The three person team who are responsible for The Book Of Mormon, however, are out of South Park, which is an aggressively nasty cartoon, and one of them is a stated atheist and the other, a theist who declares religion itself to be silly, something that shows a massive intellectual deficit on his part.  It's sort of like saying that you believe in cars but find transportation silly. They aren't coming out of a prospective of love, suffice it to say, and while I haven't seen The Book Of Mormon, South Park is of the National Lampoon brand of humor which is juvenile, self focused, and mean.  I don't know if Book takes a mean spirited approach to Mormons, but what I tend to find is that for people who live outside the Rocky Mountain West, the LDS faith isn't understood in any context at all, and people tend to think of them as 1) some sort of Protestant evangelistic faith, maybe like the Baptists, or 2) something that Warren Jeffs defines, or 3) a tiny silly group.  None of that would be correct, and in the Rocky Mountain West the LDS church is a major institution, not some sort of odd joke.  From a Christian prospective, particularly in from a Catholic one, there are a lot of things that could be taken on, discussed and critiqued about the LDS, but making fun of them in a sophomoric fashion is disrespectful and reflects very poorly on the people doing it and a society that finds it amusing.

My overall view of mine is that if you wouldn't feel comfortable making analogous jokes about Islam, you probably flat out avoid doing it about any other faith.  In other words, if you are going to do a Book of Mormon, you ought to follow it up with The Koran in the same fashion.

That's not going to happen, nor should it either, as The Book Of Mormon shouldn't have.

But I digress.

Mulvaney decided he would affect the appearance of a woman, sort of, at some point and has affected an Audrey Hepburn like style, which nobody in this current age does. Hepburn's style was unique to herself, but she was a genuine, lithe, woman, who genuinely defined grace in her own era, and to a large extent still does.  She wasn't girlish, but rather very mature while young at the same time, and frankly rising up in popularity as a reaction to the Playboy influenced huge boob actresses of the time, something that would actually see further influence in the 60s while really being limited, however, to movies and television.  Mulvaney on the other hand, if truth be told, looks like a really anemic guy trying to look like a girl, and failing at an attempt to affect an appearance of an actress of a prior era, something he's tried to do in a TikTok series apparently called Days of Girlhood.  It's really creepy.

For some weird reason, Budweiser thought he'd make a good spokesman for Bud Light.

Bud Light is awful, as are most of the mass-produced light beers.  I don't know why anyone drinks it, which brings me to this, something that has nothing really to do with transgenderism.

Light beer, or American Light Lager as beer aficionados like to call it, is so popular in the US that even small local breweries brew it.  Small local breweries have gotten really good, and they tend to put out a better product than huge industrial alcohol concerns like  AB InBev, which owns Budweiser.

I really don't think average companies have any place in social movements of any kind. I'll make an exception for companies particularly associated with some sort of institution. So, for example, a company that makes backpacking equipment being involved in conservation, etc., makes sense to me. But beer is just beer.  If there was a cause associated with beer, it would be combating alcoholism, but a cause like that wouldn't exactly sell more beer.

Here the decision was blisteringly odd.  Is AB InBev trying to show its hip cool and down with the times, in a Justice Kennedy type fashion?  The beer market is saturated (no pun), and therefore the only real option left is to try to grab somebody else's market share, but do people who claim to be transgendered constitute a self-conscious body when they buy beer, or are they just people buying beer?

I'm guessing they're just people buying beer.

Obviously AB InBev thought there was some market share to grab there, while not losing some, but as market decisions go, it seems like a rather odd one.

Oh well, it's worth noting that this is the same beer brand that once sent out paintings of Custer's Last Stand, although they probably had their actual market right at that time.

Anyhow, just buy local.  If a microbrewery is boosting a cause, it's probably a local one, or one that's more focused, and it probably doesn't involve a cynical marketing effort like this does.

And indeed, just this past week I went to a local microbrewery and bought two small growlers of their beer.  It actually did have a beer that it had brewed boosting a cause.  I didn't buy it, but I did buy two of their other beers, to go with the first grilling attempt of the season.  The brots I bought were from a local butcher.

There are other options out there, and given that there are, why would a person, causes aside, go with a bad massed produced beer, ever?

Sunday, August 28, 2022

Monday, August 28, 1922. The dawn of electronic advertising.

A.C.M. Co. Mill, Bonner Montana.  Copyright deposit, August 28, 1922

WEAF in New York City, a radio station owned by Western Electric, which itself was a subsidary of AT&T, ran the first radio commercial.  

The audio ad was for the newly opened Queensboro Apartments in Jackson Heights and ran for fifteen minutes.


The military funeral of Michael Collins was held.  It had massive public turnout.

The terrible mine disaster in California hit the front page of the Casper newspaper.


Prohibition's prospects in Sweden and Mexico were also noted.


Unusually casually dressed man photographed on this day in front of a Navy seaplane.

.
Horse on this day at the Washington Animal Rescue.

Treasury watchtower, photographed on this day.

Page 8 of the same newspaper noted above was advertising suits for boys now that school was back in session.


It'd be a rare kid who'd dress like that at school today.  For that matter, nobody would have dressed like that when I was a kid.

The same page was advertising housing to the refinery workers next to the refinery.

See Ben Realty continued to exist up until just a few years ago.
 

Saturday, January 1, 2022

Thursday, January 1, 1942. Birth of the United Nations, an Automobile Manufacturing Hiatus.

President Roosevelt had declared New Year's Day, 1942, a National Day of Prayer.  He and Winston Churchill attended church together.

It was otherwise a working day for both men, on a day that's traditionally a holiday.

Boy Scouts with United Nations poster in 1943.

On that day, the Arcadia Conference produced the Declaration of the United Nations.

Signing of the declaration.

It stated:
A JOINT DECLARATION BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND, THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, CHINA, AUSTRALIA, BELGIUM, CANADA, COSTA RICA, CUBA, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, DOMICAN REPUBLIC, EL SALVADOR, GREECE, GUATELMALA, HAITI, HONDURAS, INDIA, LUXEMBOURG, NETHERLANDS, NEW ZEALAND, NICARAGUA, NORWAY, PANAMA, POLAND, SOUTH AFRICA, YUGOSLAVIA
The Governments signatory hereto,
Having subscribed to a common program of purposes and principles embodied in the Joint Declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Great Britain dated August 14, 1941, known as the Atlantic Charter,
Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world,
Declare:
(1) Each Government pledges itself to employ its full resources, military or economic, against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such government is at war.
(2) Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.
The foregoing declaration may be adhered to by other nations which are, or which may be, rendering material assistance and contributions in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.
More nations would join in the document, which was effectively the creation of the United Nations, as the war went on.


While the UN has had a rocky history since World War Two, its origin was remarkable and does suggest that most of the world's nations can unite for a crisis.

On the same day, a significant event happened in terms of the US war effort and life on the home front, as discussed here on our companion blog Today In Wyoming's History: January 1. New Year's Day:

1942 The U.S. Office of Production Management prohibited sales of new cars and trucks to civilians.

The reason was simple enough, the war industry had gone over to war manufacturing, and not just of vehicles, but armaments and other war materials as well.

There actually are 1942 model vehicles, as they came out in 1941.  Detroit actually had produced about 1,000,000 combined 1942 models before this day, about 1/4 of the number of vehicles they produced as 1941 models.  Production of civilian automobiles would not resume, however, until the summer of 1945, and the 1946 models were actually the 1942 models.

The cessation of civilian vehicles, while predictable, did catch people off guard.  In truth, vehicles made prior to the late 20th Century really didn't last very long, something that is hard for people today to really appreciate.  For this reason, vehicles that were even a decade, or less, old at the time, were in fact old.  The cessation of production meant that for many Americans who had just come out of the Great Depression the needed to replace a vehicle was converted into a need to keep an old one running.


Interestingly civilian manufacturers at the same time worried that their conversion into war industries would mean that they'd be forgotten and lose market share following the war.  This was true of manufacturers in every sector, not just the automobile sector.

Manufactureers took different approches in the war, with some simply seeking to recall brand loyalty or even inspire longing.


But providing examples of what they were building was also extremely common.


The very late 1940s had seen an evolution in car design, with vehicles becoming more rounded.  The war itself, however, would introduce all the major manufacturers to off-road vehicles in a new way, something that impacted various manufacturers in different ways, and which is something that they didn't at first quite know what to do with in terms of their post-war production.  Indeed, Willys, as late as 1943, was still emphasizing that post-war it would be making cars again.

Ultimately two manufacturers, Dodge and Willys, would come to embrace their wartime vehicles, with Willys not only realizing that its post-war future was with the Jeep, but with it also seeking to capitalize on that during the war itself.




Indeed, Willys would start advertising for civilian sales of the Jeep before it could make civilian sales, emphasizing its off-road capabilities, although often in ways that didn't really match what would become its post-war market.  At first, for example, it was often shown pulling a plow.


It would also, however, feature such items as a letter from a girl asking for Jeep advertisement illustrations.

It might be noted, interestingly enough, German manufacturers, perhaps with the same concerns, also advertised in German journals during the war.


Their advertisements tended to be very martial, not too surprisingly.


In terms of illustrated magazines, Vogue magazine declared it a "New Year, New Vistas, New Fashions".

That would be true in all sorts of ways. . . save for civilian automobiles.

The usual football bowl games were played, although the Rose Bowl was played in Durham, North Carolina, out of a fear that the Japanese would attack.

Closer to Home.

Again, I don't know for sure what my parents would have done on this day, but for Catholics it the Solemnity of Mary, a Holy Day of Obligation.  If they hadn't gone to Mass the night prior, in their respective localities, they would have today.

My father, living in Scotsbluff, Nebraska at the time, may very well have gone duck and goose hunting with his father later in the day.  At any rate, he and they probably would have listened to one of the football games that were broadcast on the radio.

Thursday, July 1, 2021

Tuesday, July 1, 1941. The dawn of the Television commercial.


On this date in history, the first television commercial ran, which you can now watch above.

It was an interesting day in the history of television overall:

Today in World War II History—July 1, 1941


On this day in 1941 a Federal photographer was photographing defense housing in Marrimack Park, Virginia.  You can tell which photographer it is by the fact that one of them consistently could never fully focus his camera.  Perhaps it was his equipment, but the photos are always out of focus.

Defense housing. Merrimack Park, Norfolk, Virginia. This project to house married enlisted personnel of the Norfolk naval base has 500 units which include single-story detached dwellings, two family houses, two-story group houses and apartments. Built at a cost of $1,980,000 by the US

Defense housing. Merrimack Park, Norfolk, Virginia.   Enlisted housing.

On the same day, the British took took the Syrian location of Palmyra.

British troops in Palmyra.

The battle featured mechanized British cavalry, and the Arab Legion, which would become famous post war in regard to the early Arab Israeli conflicts.  The location was inhabited since vastly ancient times, but was abandoned in 1932.

A press photographer photographed a convalescent home for British officers.  One of the photos appears here:
Lady MacMichael, at the Knights of St. John's Br. Red Cross, convalescent house for officers.

The Germans and Finns were also advancing, in the northernmost front of the war.  They jointly commenced Operation Arctic Fox, which aimed to capture Murmansk.  The operation would run until November, and fall short of its goal.

That failure was significant, as was the Finnish participation in the effort to seize the port.  The seizure would have choked off Allied supplies from that port, one of the most significant routes to the Red Army by sea.

The Vichy French government froze Soviet assets in France.

The Germans killed a small number of Polish academics and their families in Lwow, a targeted strike against the Polish intellectual community.  The death tole was 25, small in comparison to the number of people being executed elsewhere, but its still significant nonetheless.

Friday, May 21, 2021

On the 100th anniversary of Wonder Bread, a blog mirror post on white bread.

 

Not Wonder Bread.  19th Century Persian bakery.

Why did our ancestors prefer white bread to wholegrains?

As a note, as I added down below on the thread on May 21, 1921, I don't like Wonder Bread.  But I do like white bread and I'm truly not keen on whole grain bread.

My mother was. She'd buy really grainy breads and then slather slices of it with peanut butter.  Ick.

Anyhow, a scholarly article by a scholar packed with densely (which any bread my mother baked also was. . . i.e., dense) with information, such as this:

For most of history, after the shift to agriculture, a large proportion of the world’s population depended on grains such as wheat, rice, corn (maize), barley, oats, rye, or millet for as much as 70-90% of their calories. This would have been true of farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of our ancestors would have been).

Indeed, in the current craze of the Keto diet, which apparently avoids all breads like the plague, this is something worth considering.  Humans have been eating bread for a really darned long time.  In fact, in another one of those "d'oh" moments that was published the other day, it turns out that Neanderthals, i.e., Home Sapien Neanderthalensis, ate piles of carbs.

Well of course they did.  They were, after all. . . people.

My mother also made a lot of bread, fairly badly, with oatmeal, which became sort of a commercial trend in later years.  And she used lots of barley for thickeners in stuff, such as stew.  I was surprised to hear a comment on a Medieval history podcast a year ago or so that this was a Medieval practice and that modern people wouldn't know what that tastes like.

I do.

Anyhow, this article is really good on the switch from whole grain breads to white bread.  I highly recommend it.

As a slight aside, Wonder Bread is mentioned in the article but not dwelt on.  The article notes how "Wonder Bread" came, during the 1960s and 1970s, to be sort of a symbol of a bland American whiteness, ethnicity wise, during the rise of the counterculture.  That's really unfair to the product (which I'll note that I don't personally like), as bread pretty much crosses color lines and ethnicities.  Indeed, that's more symbolic I think of the odd American cultural trait of associating food and substances with everything, which is why we now hair care products that advertise what's really a food substance as being in them.

Anyhow, when looking up Wonder Bread for the May 21, 1921 post, I tried to find an advertisement dating back that far and couldn't.  But I did hit up on a lot of advertisements, and I was surprised to learn that Wonder Bread's straight arrow reputation may be a bit overdone.  At least up to the 1960s, it like to feature shapely women in its advertisements wearing swimsuits and the like.  In at least one advertisement of the 40s and 50s it plopped a mid teens teenage girl in an advertisement wearing as little as legally possible with the promise, more or less, that Wonder Bread would help turn her into a bombshell.  In the 60s it ran an entire campaign based on the promise that sandwiches made by spouse aspiring women with Wonder Bread were "boy traps" or "date traps".  Not exactly kid stuff, and more than a little weird.

Saturday, December 26, 2020

Poster Saturday. Some posters we saved to put up, and then didn't get around to it, in 2020

One of our "trailing threads" here are posters, which we like, and which we typically post on Saturdays, if we get around to it, which more often than not, we do not.

As the computer files on which the posters were saved are about to go, as there's a lot of them, and we're going into a new year, I thought I'd put some of those that were saved to post, but which weren't posted, up.  

More often than not, I don't comment on the posters. Some of them deserve comment, however, so its here.  Comment yourself if  you feel like it, and if feel like, please comment.


The poster is an old Hires Root Beer advertisement.

In a year in which Mia, the Native American woman on the cover of Land O Lake dairy products, was sent packing as culturally insensitive, this old poster no doubt also is.  Indeed, she reminds me of the Navajo Trucking of a blue eyed ostensibly Native American woman still on the doors of their trucking fleet. Still, this blog chronicles the century old and the poster is visually attractive.  

What role does birch bark play in Root Beer?

1920 was a banner year for women and we've posted a lot of magazine covers that dealt with that.  We missed the one above from July, 1920, however.

Magazine illustrations of the period, we'd note, were really art. That's something that's really been lost in the past century.

We also saved a lot of World War Two related posters that never went up.   Some of them are below.










The poster above is interesting in that the printing style retained the World War One appearance, even though its a World War Two vintage poster.  Which is a nice way to note that we also saved a few World War One era posters we didn't get around to putting up, in part because our century retrospectives dealt with the 1920, and not 1914 through 1918.


Cigarettes actually became a big deal during World War One. They weren't nearly as popular before the Great War.  The results would be disaterous.

The thought of Liberty calling on an old style rotary dial phone is a bit odd.  Not one of the better posters of the Great War.

1920 was a tragic year in the Russian Civil War; seeing the Whites driven out of Crimea and into exile, if they survived to make it into exile.  We covered that a bit this past year.  Surprisingly, given the conditions in which it was fought, it generated a lot of poster art, including this White poster from below.


1940, like 2020, was a census year.  The Federal Government according issued this poster hoping to get the populace to be counted.

2020 turned out to be an oddly controversial year this way, having to do ultimately with the counting of illegal residents in the country.  The topic of who to count is an oddly old one in American history going all the way back to the adoption of the Constitution which saw a compromise that slaves and Indians would be counted as less than a full person.  As the count determines representation in the House of Representatives, how people who cannot vote are counted has accordingly been a very long lasting feature of American politics.