Pseudoculture

OUR MASTER'S VOICE--James Rorty-- Day ($3). Advertising, defined variously as an art, a racket, a Midas, a parasite, is one of the twelve greatest U. S. industries. In 1929 it did a two-billion dollar business. Like most other U. S. industries, advertising since 1929 has had many a hard knock. Your Money's Worth (TIME, July 25, 1927), by Stuart Chase & F. J. Schlink, and 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (1933), by F. J. Schlink and Arthur Kallet, lifted the lid on some cynical advertising secrets. Last week, amid cries of "Foul!" from its partisans, advertising took a shrewd blow to the midriff from a onetime hireling. Onetime Adman Rorty is no reformed copywriter, for his heart was never in his job ; no reformer either, for he thinks the present "unstable equilibrium" necessitates "the adman's foot on the throttle, speeding up consumption, preaching emulative expenditure, 'styling' clothes, kitchens, automobiles -- everything, in the interest of more rapid obsolescence and replacement." In Our Master's Voice he describes advertising's economic and cultural causes and consequences, thinks history will soon or late describe its cure. Adman Rorty came in on advertising's comparatively modest ground floor in 1913, worked at it off and on for 19 years, says his first three days on the job taught him "all that any bright young man needed to know about the mysteries of advertising copy-writing." Scoffing at the notion that advertising is an art, he says: "If any genuine creation goes on in advertising agencies I have never seen it. . . . By and large there is no such thing as art in advertising any more than there is such a thing as advertising literature." In the same breath he admits that "advertising today, while anything but efficient, is far better designed and written than it needs to be ; obviously it costs far, far more to produce than it ought to cost. Part of the explanation, I think, lies in a private impurity of the advertising craftsman; he is more interested in beauty than he is in selling. For him the advertisement is a thing-in-itself." Advertising ("the Business Nobody Knows"), says Rorty, is not confined to the agencies but includes newspapers, magazines, radio, all businesses which owe their living to advertising revenue. The Saturday Evening Post "may or may not consider itself primarily an advertising medium; it is so regarded by the advertiser and his agent. ... If the press were or could be a disinterested educational instrumentality it might be expected to correct the miseducation sponsored by its advertisers, but then, if the press functioned in the interests of its readers rather than in the interests of its advertisers, it would not publish pseudoscientific, more or less deceptive advertising. . . . Given a literate population, the press becomes one of the instruments of government. ... If the press is financed by the vested property interests of business, then in the end business becomes government." Taking his tip from the late great Thorstein Veblen's Absentee Ownership (1923), Rorty analyzes the growth and present state of advertising, finds it has established a U. S. pseudoculture, has attempted to graft its salesman's values on the old U. S. tradition. He thinks the U. S. "tends increasingly to speak, think, feel in terms of this jabberwocky," that "the stimuli of art, science, religion are progressively expelled to the periphery of American life to become marginal values, cultivated by marginal people on marginal time." The Author-- Born (1890) in Middletown, N. Y., where his Irish immigrant father kept store, James Rorty peddled papers, worked his way through Tufts College, went to Manhattan to be an adman. The War failed to rouse his enthusiasm but he enlisted in an ambulance unit, was awarded the D. S. C. for service in the Argonne. After the War he married, free-lanced in California, where he met Poet Robinson Jeffers and was instrumental in getting his work recognized. Rorty himself has won The Nation's poetry prize (Prelude: When We Dead Awaken; 1921), has published two books of verse (What Michael Said to the Census Taker, Children of the Sun). One of the founders in 1926 and for a time an editor of The New Masses, he is once again a freelance. Radical but no Communist, he is a leader of the American Workers Party.

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