Hannah Chick
April 4, 2002
Humanities B
“The urban writers and performers of the 1920’s were the first to speculate that entertainment was to
be America’s biggest business and surest export and most reliable source material for its history.”
(Douglas, 20)
In Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas uses the arts in New York during the 1920’s as
her source material to construct a commentary on the ethos of the people living there at that
time. Douglas points to the 1920’s the time when America was finally breaking away entirely
from the colonial powers of Europe. At this time Americans began to focus their attention
less on Europe as the center of art and culture and began to turn their eyes to their own
shores. Douglas demonstrates the artistic and cultural rise of America, and particularly New
York, through a discussion of the beginnings of New York as center of sheet music and
book publishing and also the rise of advertising in New York. Prior to the 1920’s
entertainment in America mainly came from Europe and had not utilized a medium such as
mass media.
I think there is no doubt that we have been the inheritors of the 1920’s legacy.
Today it is impossible to open your eyes without seeing some form of entertainment as it
was developed in the 1920’s. One example of this legacy is modern advertising; if
advertising was widespread in the 1920’s, it has now engulfed us. There are advertisements
everywhere from on buses to on the Internet. A particular advertisement that Douglas
describes sounds so much like ones that are shown on television these days that it’s almost
hard to believe it was used in the 1920’s. Douglas describes this advertisement in which, “an
athletic larger-than-life young man seems to be rising over the Manhattan skyline; his eyes
are raised, his face bathed in light, and he is lifting a Buick in the palm of his hand, as if
offering it to the heavens” (68). This image reminds me of the multitude of car
advertisements that are on television and in print.
We are still using advertising techniques that began in the 1920’s. One of these
techniques that Douglas discusses is “scare copy” which was based in the terrible honesty
ethos (34). “Scare copy” was used in the 1920’s, as it is today, to convince the consumer
that ignorance will lead to disaster. The job then of the advertisements was to replace
ignorance with the knowledge that the consumer “needed”. We still this very much today.
A particular example that comes to mind is an advertisement for storm windows that warns
consumers that they could be losing money due to high heating costs. The advertisement
then reassures the consumers by telling them that if they replace their old windows with the
brand being advertised, they will save money on their energy bills.
Another development in advertising of the 1920’s that Douglas discusses is the use
of sexual allusions and the idea of sex appeal. One of the advertisements that Douglas
describes was for Camel cigarettes (47). The advertisement showed a man lighting a
woman’s cigarette and the caption read, “Pleasure Ahead”. The use of sex in advertisements
is still prevalent only now it is socially acceptable to be more explicit. Also, the use of
women as sex symbols in advertisements has progressed from the fully clothed woman
sitting on a car to women in bras and underwear advertising Victoria’s Secret.
In addition to print advertisement, Douglas explores book promotion, which began
in a new way in the 1920’s. Book releases became highly advertised (some times even before
the book had been written) and book promoters and advertisers found that they could create
best sellers through advertising. “The excitement about these campaigns was that they made
sellers out of books that were not natural sellers; they proved that advertising energy could
create market receptivity and revenue” (68). The ideas that the book promoters of the
1920’s developed are still widely used now although, they are used less to advertise books,
instead they are used to promote movies and music. We see the book promoting tactics in
the fact that movie trailers appear early (sometimes almost a whole year before the release
date) and are shown often; the same thing occurs with music releases.
Our art and culture owes a lot to the 1920’s; the decade gave us a lot in terms of
literature and music. Unfortunately, the 1920’s also aided the development of the advertising
that invades our lives. I don’t doubt that it would have developed to the extent that it has
without the contributions to the “art form” made in the 1920’s, but now I wonder if it
would be as wide spread. Some how, advertising has managed to proliferate for a very long
time and it has survived much as the advertisers of the 1920’s intended it-as entertainment as
much as anything else (although it is debatable that most advertisements these days are
entertaining). Douglas points out that in a 1931 consumer study it was determined that only
5 percent of the public believed, “any of the more obviously outrageous claims made by
ads”(68) and only 37 percent of the public believed any ads. I believe that similar numbers
would be collected today, which may demonstrate advertisings success as entertainmentgenerally we find things we don’t believe more entertaining than the truth.