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PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

DERRICK COLEMAN: They gave up on me. But I’ve been deaf since I was three so I didn’t listen.

PETER: This is the Seattle Seahawk’s Derrick Coleman doing the voice over for a stirring bit of cinematography.

DERRICK COLEMAN: And now I’m here with the loudest fans in the NFL cheering me on.

PETER: But this is no documentary film. It’s a commercial from last year’s Super Bowl for Duracell batteries. Today on BackStory, the ad industry in America. We’ll hear how advertisers perfected the art of the soft sell, the catchy jingle, and the association with All-American heroes.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Tang, chosen for the Gemini astronauts.

PETER: Plus ads for BackStory that you asked us to produce.

MALE SPEAKER 1: This history is moving fast, people. Don’t delay.

PETER: A history of advertising today on BackStory. Don’t go away. Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

MALE SPEAKER 1: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Now if you’re listening to this show on the radio, you probably heard Peter do something a few minutes ago that we in the business refer to as a billboard. It’s at one-minute tease, apparently effective, for the rest of the show, complete with highlights, some big questions for the hour, some catchy music. And it’s basically an attempt to razzle dazzle you in the sticking with us through the new break.

Well, that radio billboard has its roots in the pre-radio age. And like a lot of what we talk about on BackStory, it dates back to the last few decades of the 19th century.

CATHERINE GUDIS: There are banners. There are posters for circuses and other celebrations.

PETER: This is Cathy Gudis, a historian in California who has written about advertising’s early days. A lot of it centered on East Coast cities but had a certain Wild West sensibility to it. Picture roving wagons covered with enormous ads, itinerant men with sandwich boards or ads on their hats, gangs of bill posters prowling in the streets with buckets of wheat paste and broadsides announcing all manner of products and events. Everywhere you looked, Gudis says, somebody would be trying to razzle dazzle you into seeing the benefits of what they had to sell.

CATHERINE GUDIS: You might have a series of text-based handbills or theater programs. They look like theater programs. And they’re slathered on the exteriors of the buildings at street level. But then as you sort of almost look up the side of the building, the ads become larger and more pictorial until you get to the top of the building, where an electrically illuminated ad is outlined. There’s an image. There are words spelled out. And there’s revolving color that just sort of creates an entire cityscape of commerce.

ED: Now it does make sense that advertisers in this era would focus on cities because dense populations meant that you got the most bang for your advertising buck. But Gudis says there were countryscapes of commerce as well.

CATHERINE GUDIS: Right. There’s actually a description of a few people who really prided themselves on going into remote areas with their waders on and painting on a rock so a train that might be passing by would have this perfect vision of it.

ED: Whether they were painted on big, illuminated signs in the city, screaming at passing trains from trees and rocks in the country, or filling the space between articles in local newspapers, one type of ad appeared everywhere– ads for patent medicines.

CATHERINE GUDIS: You’d learn of something like Buchu, which was recommended for everything from syphilis to rheumatism. Or you might have seen Jones’ Tonic, a sure cure for paralysis, vertigo, insomnia, jim jams– don’t ask me what jim jams were.

PETER: If the conditions these so-called medicines were curing seem mysterious, their ingredients were even more so. Sometimes these potions would contain opium, morphine. More often, they would contain potent doses of grain alcohol. One manufacturer boasted that– I’m quoting– “I can advertise dishwater and sell it just as well as an article of merit. It is all in the advertising.”

ED: On the back of this advertising, patent medicine sales climbed from a total of round $3.5 million before the Civil War to $75 million by the turn of the century. And there are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, patent medicines put advertising on the map and showed that advertising in itself could be a profitable business. A lot of the early ad agents got their start hocking patent medicine ads to newspaper and magazine printers.

But on the other hand, the shadiness of the whole patent medicine enterprise kind of tarred advertising and gave it a bad name. It would take a whole new generation of advertisers with a whole new approach to advertising to really turn that story around.

BRIAN: Across America this weekend, a lot of people are talking about football. But as there always is on Super Bowl Sunday, there is just as much excitement– if not more– about what’s taking place off the field interstices of the big game, the advertising. So today on the show, we’re looking at advertising’s history. How did advertising move from the margins of respectability to the $180 billion industry that it is today? And why is it that Americans today don’t just tolerate advertising’s ubiquity, they actually celebrate it?

ED: We’ll begin where we left off in the last couple of decades of the 19th century. It was then that a handful of ad middleman started making a name for themselves as ad agents who could be trusted. Now these weren’t the fly-by-night guys of a few years earlier, known for extorting as much as possible from publishers and advertisers alike. These were guys with solid circulation figures, clear fee structures, and standards of what they would and wouldn’t sell.

So patent medicines were out. And things like, well, soap we’re in.

PETER: Oh, yeah.

ED: So guys, I’ve got a magazine ad from this period that I want to share with you. It’s for Pears, the famous English complexion soap and features the portrait of Henry Ward Beecher, a kind of rock star preacher of the day with a kind of a mullet actually along with a supposed a quotation from Beecher extolling the virtues of this wonderful soap. And it’s typical of a lot of what was coming out of these early ad agencies. Places like NW Ayer & Son and J Walter Thompson were discovering that they were in the business of selling trust. And their ads were all about convincing consumers that these products were trustworthy.

PETER: Uh-huh. Right.

ED: So you have that image in your head.

PETER: Yep.

ED: Now consider this one. It’s also a soap ad– Woodbury Soap– but it’s from a few decades later, 1917 to be exact. It’s in full color. A young woman lounges in a revealing dress. A handsome man in a suit leans over her. He’s clasping her hand and kissing her neck. The tagline running across the top of the page is simple. “A skin you love to touch.”

So this seems pretty racy for 1911.

KATHLEEN FRANZ: Pretty sexy, right?

ED: Yeah, really.

KATHLEEN FRANZ: Yeah. Some more conservative magazines wouldn’t take this ad.

ED: This is Kathleen Franz. She’s a historian who’s working on a new Smithsonian exhibit about the history of advertising. And when I spoke to her, she pointed out that there’s something besides the raciness of this second ad that makes a groundbreaking. And that’s that there’s hardly anything in it about soap itself.

KATHLEEN FRANZ: One of the things about the creator of this ad and why it’s such a revolutionary ad is that it is moving very quickly into what the product can do for the consumer and how it will change their life. It puts the product at the bottom of the ad, not central to the ad. It gives you a view of the consumer, which is you, right? I mean, this is completely aspirational.

The product can bridge that gap between your working class status or lower middle class status and the achievement of an American dream, which here is very represented by not only the beautiful clothing and the kind of wealth that exudes, but also this kind of sexiness. The message that the ad wants to give to you and wants you to believe in is that if you use this soap, you’ll be a more attractive person.

ED: So who’s behind this ad? It seems to me it’s persuasive even 100 years later. I believe she does attract men. So who was the mastermind that realized this is the direction advertising should take?

KATHLEEN FRANZ: Well, it was a woman named Helen Landsdowne Resor. There are women in advertising in this period. They are helping shape the new messaging that advertising is putting out, this move really from telling you again about the product and what the product is and moving it to a more emotional appeal. And that really sets modern advertising.

So the interesting thing about Helen Resor is really that she’s at the top of the company. She’s running the offices of J Walter Thompson, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, with her husband’s family. She’s really the creative side of the house. And he’s doing the business side. And she’s cultivating this sort of new type of emotional-based advertising.

ED: I am struck by the fact that there would be a place for women in this as there had not been a place for women in any kind of industry before. So how do you explain that, Kathleen?

KATHLEEN FRANZ: I think women knew how to reach other women. And the male advertisers who are running these companies begin to understand that, especially in this period. And so you know J Walter Thompson really had built its reputation on advertising in women’s magazines. They knew that women were the primary consumers of most products, especially for the household, so soaps, things that are being mass produced at this time. And they are responding to this emotional appeal.

And Helen Landsdowne Resor, she tailors the advertising to them. She is saying it’s OK for women to be sexy and that products can help with that. And you sales numbers coming back is that it reportedly increased sales of this soap 1,000%. So when you have the marketing data back to say that these kinds of very women-centered approaches are working, it’s all the more reason to trust the women who are writing the ads.

ED: Kathleen France is a historian at American University. She’s one of the curators of an upcoming Smithsonian exhibition on the history of advertising in America.

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, we’re marking advertising’s annual championship match, the Super Bowl, with an hour on the history of advertising in America. We’ve heard a little bit about the early days of the advertising industry in the first couple of decades the 20th century. We’re going to pick up our story now in the 1920s, the point at which the industry hit the road.

PETER: In the 1920s, Americans were falling in love with their cars. Tens of millions of them were taking to the roads. And where motorist went, billboards quickly followed.

Driving down the highway, Americans would see row after row of horizontally spanning billboards just like we might see today. Many of them were full of color and illuminated by electric lighting. But that’s not all. The roads signs were also blanketed in a number of smaller and less professional ads tacked up on trees and poles.

It was all largely unregulated. Companies and the ad agents working for them could put up billboards wherever landowners would rent them space. Before long, the roadsides were crowded with commerce.

BRIAN: Historian Cathy Gudis, who we heard from at the top of today’s show, has written about this early efflorescence of outdoor advertising and about the opposition that grew up alongside it. She told me that women were very much the forefront of the movement that worked for decades to do away with these billboards.

CATHERINE GUDIS: I think it was, in part, springing from the municipal housekeeping movement of an earlier period. This idea that women were responsible for civilizing the home and also had a knowledge of beauty and that they were somehow going to be keepers of the landscape, too–

BRIAN: So who was supporting billboards?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Well, the billboard boys, of course.

BRIAN: The boys? Billboard boys?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Well, the women like to call them varyingly the boys of the barons. I love the idea of the barons because it suggests that they are colonizing the landscape–

BRIAN: Yeah.

CATHERINE GUDIS: –taking it over with commercial advertising. And they are. I mean, that’s the goal. It’s partly because the industry becomes big and incorporates nationally and has a lobbying arm. It’s called the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

BRIAN: It sounds so–

CATHERINE GUDIS: And they resented–

BRIAN: It sounds so pastoral.

CATHERINE GUDIS: Oh, it’s so pastoral. It’s not billboards. Right? It’s not litter on a stick. It’s outdoor advertising.

BRIAN: No. Litter on a stick! All right. So what do the barons call the women? I don’t want to know the locker room term. But what do they call them in public?

CATHERINE GUDIS: The language that they use persistently is incredibly gendered. They are these flower-sniffing aesthetes with no concern. Right? The have no concern.

BRIAN: Flower-sniffing no less!

CATHERINE GUDIS: Oh, yeah. Because this idea that they are aesthetes with no conception of the financial ramifications of being able to advertise across the American landscape.

BRIAN: Well, how did these flower-sniffing ladies, so-called– what do they bring to the table? How do they fight these guys who are a national industry?

CATHERINE GUDIS: They basically harness their powers through women’s clubs and the garden clubs. And so for instance, this one woman named Elizabeth Lawton, who is so impressive, she organizes a group called the National Roadside Counsel. And put it this way, the outdoor industry disliked her to the extent that when I went through their files, I found her information in a file that was labeled nuisances abated. And on the top, was her obituary.

[LAUGHTER]

So she was definitely a thorn.

BRIAN: You’re not suggesting foul play, are you?

CATHERINE GUDIS: No foul play. I really don’t think there was foul play. But I think she was just so annoying. She annoyed them to no end. The letter writing campaigns were out of control, letters to the editor. And they’re mostly middle class women who were writing a lot of letters.

BRIAN: And what did these women want? Did they want advertising to go away? I mean, what was their goal?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Yeah. I mean, I think that would’ve been an ideal. What they were looking at, though, we have to remember is that they were driving along a road and the highways were constructed in part as touristic landscapes. And what do you find when you go out into the countryside? You see billboard alleys that are lining the highways, endlessly repeating one after another, oftentimes in full color, dramatic spectacular view, with lights eliminating them if you were in a major city or on your way into a major city.

And so I think that they really were amazing spectacles for people who embraced commerce. But for the scenic sisters, this was not a sense of a technologically sublime of commerce. Right? It was that the roadside vista is not this public space, is not open to democratic access, because billboards are turning into a physical and a conceptual blight. They block the view.

BRIAN: It’s a commercialized space?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Yeah. It’s a commercialized space. But it’s more than that. I think it’s more than that. I think it’s also that they’re blocking the notion that the American landscape is held commonly, that it doesn’t have property borders, that it’s free to all. And that’s a conception of the view, the view from the road, right? That we should all have access to that untrammeled view. It should not be sullied by commerce.

BRIAN: This battle, this goes on for decades, of course. Does the introduction of the Interstate Highway Act in the ’50s make a difference?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Oh, it makes a huge difference. Once the Federal Interstate Act is passed in 1956, the idea is that is this in a $25 billion investment going to be lined with commerce? And who’s going to be paying for that? So as legislators are organizing around the Federal Interstate Act, reformers are seeking to ensure that that whole expressway system, coast to coast, North to South, is going to be protected from billboard advertising.

So through the ’50s, they continue their activities. And then once Lyndon Johnson becomes president and despite the fact that he himself had advertised in his campaigns using billboards, he comes forward as being on their side, in part because his wife, Lady Bird, is really interested in beautification. And she even pushes him to call the US Secretary of Commerce in 1964 to tell him to do something to clean up the road side.

BRIAN: Ah, I remember that.

CATHERINE GUDIS: Interestingly, we see the gender game being played out again even at that moment. I mean, it starts when Johnson says, you know I love that woman, referring to his wife, and she wants that Highway Beautification Act. By God, we’re going to get it for her. And indeed–

BRIAN: He didn’t call her, the little lady, did he?

CATHERINE GUDIS: He said, you know I love that woman. No, he doesn’t say, a little lady. He might as well have. No. So she begins to advocate. And so he begins to meet with people to make this happen. So they form some task forces on natural beauty and, from there, begin to craft the language that will ultimately be passed in 1965 as the Highway Beautification Act.

BRIAN: And does it work?

CATHERINE GUDIS: What finally passes as the Highway Beautification Act, the reformers don’t see as a triumph. They see it as a failure in many ways because it doesn’t just outright ban billboards. It limits them. It restricts them. More than that, for the billboards that were there, the federal government and state governments are to pay the owners of the billboards to remove them.

What they see is that this is going to be a continuing battle in which governmental and legislative forces favor industry. But I have to say that in looking at photographs and comparing what the landscape scenes looked like, if it’s hard not to see it as actually having played a significant role that’s interesting in a lot of ways. Because instead of a lot a little signs lining the highways or the interstates as former in these corridors–

BRIAN: We see some very big ones now.

CATHERINE GUDIS: We see really big ones. Yeah. And so it becomes– for me, I see it as metaphorical for the industry at large. The industry itself consolidates, the whole advertising industry not just outdoor advertising. It consolidates. It becomes something huge and unavoidable, omniscient and omnipresent. And I say both of those words for a reason.

Advertisers now can chart where we are, where we move, what our preferences might be, and tailor their advertisements to us. And so the consolidation of space changes the look, but it doesn’t necessarily change the principle of advertising in public space and colonizing that space through commerce.

BRIAN: Cathy, I just have to ask, when your book came out, were you tempted to advertise it on a big billboard?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Given another chance, I think I might advertise my book on a billboard.

BRIAN: OK. Well, thank you for joining us on BackStory today.

CATHERINE GUDIS: Thank you for having me.

[MUSIC – DEL REEVES, “GIRL ON THE BILLBOARD”]

BRIAN: Cathy Gudis is a historian at the University of California Riverside. She’s the author of Buyways– that would B-U-Y ways– Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape.

If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory, and we’re talking today about the history of advertising in America. Peter, Ed, where did the advertising that I would recognize as advertising today, where did that come from?

PETER: That would get you to buy something?

BRIAN: Exactly.

PETER: That’d be some really good advertising.

BRIAN: Exactly.

ED: I would say that you’d be surprised to think that it happened in the period that I specialize in.

BRIAN: No kidding.

ED: Here’s what I would mean by that. And I think the advertising that we would recognize as advertising is image rich, right? It is mass produced. It is building a brand. And I think that really evolves over the 19th century along with newspapers that can spread all that.

And so you think about things like Ivory Soap. They have the image that they still use today. And they would have a slogan. And the other things that they would have would be testimonials. Because you’re trying to build a personal connection between the consumer and a mass produced good.

BRIAN: So what’s an example of a testimonial? What kind of person would offer that?

ED: You know, when it came time to bathe my new baby, I wondered where I could find a soap that I knew would be safe for her gentle skin. And I remember hearing that Ivory was 99.4% pure.

BRIAN: I got my credit card out already, Ed.

ED: And I used Ivory–

BRIAN: That’s really impressive.

ED: We don’t take credit cards in the 19th century.

BRIAN: Oh, darn.

ED: I appreciate the thought. And after I bathed my baby, she smelled so good. And I knew that I would buy Ivory Soap again. I hope you will, too. So that’s my belief of what advertising that we would recognize as our own emerges. And this really takes form in the late 19th century, which makes me wonder how people actually bought stuff before that. You know?

PETER: I want to tell you, Ed, they did. And they did in a big way. And I think the real challenge for us is to understand what it was that would get the attention of consumers. Because I think that’s what advertising is really about, reaching out from producer to consumer or from merchandiser to the ultimate user. And that begins, well, you might say, from the beginning of time. But in America, I think what really is determinative is the spread of print.

Because in a traditional culture, where everybody knows everybody else, and you know where you’re going to get your horseshoes, you know where you’re going to get your flour, in a customary world of these kind of intimate transactions, advertising is unnecessary. But what happens when you have long distances between the producer and the consumer? What happens in urban centers, like Philadelphia, is that you have, thanks to print and all the ways that print can indicate to consumers what’s available, simply listing things. What I want to communicate to you guys is the sheer excitement of knowing what’s in a shop.

BRIAN: So you’re focusing on the medium that Ed kind of took for granted.

PETER: Yeah, that’s right. And this is what I defy you to do is to try to imagine how reading a list of things could just rock your world.

ED: I remember the early days of the internet, Peter. It wasn’t that hard.

PETER: That was the same thing, wasn’t it?

BRIAN: And who’s placing these so-called ads?

PETER: OK, you got the problem of inventory and turnover. And you wait a long time to get a shipment of tea from Bohea or from wherever it is.

BRIAN: So you’re talking about importers?

PETER: Yeah, we’re basically talking about importers because day-to-day needs are satisfied in local markets. But the cutting edge, the leading edge of the market– what becomes the market revolution– the leading edge of consumption, that’s with imports. So it could be something like tea. It would be porcelain. It could be textiles. There are any number of things–

BRIAN: So people would see a list of China.

PETER: Yeah.

BRIAN: And get really worked up about it.

PETER: And the important thing to keep in mind– again, something we take for granted– is to have advertising, you have to have literacy. Now you’d say it is a broad literacy. There’s visual as well as conventional literacy. But the American population is the most literate in the world with the possible exception of Sweden.

BRIAN: Right. Because they really couldn’t produce the kind of images that Ed might have in the late 19th century? Like these really were word.

PETER: The image that would only work at a local market is a one off, a painting, that would hang in front of a tavern or something like that. And that’s important.

ED: Yeah.

PETER: But I want to emphasize the way that you can read into a word or a list of things pictures of goods. I would say a word is worth a thousand pictures in this period. You know, we flip it around in the modern period to talk about all you can learn from a picture. That’s what really excites the desire of consumers is to know what they can get.

BRIAN: And did they buy more than they should have?

PETER: Well, of course!

BRIAN: Or is that just a 20th century thing.

PETER: Of course. You talk about credit cards. We don’t have those, but we have credit. And we have bankruptcies galore. So merchants are eager to enable purchasing. But in order to get the whole thing going, to get the machinery working, you’ve got to make the fundamental connection. It’s an information problem. It’s getting information to consumers about what’s on offer.

ED: So Brian, you ask where advertising as we know it comes from. They have surprisingly deep roots. But it strikes me that the 20th century is in many ways kind of recycling things that we already knew from the 18th and 19th century, right? It’s that people buy because of real or imagined personal connections to the product. You know?

And back in Peter’s time, it’s the shopkeepers who can tell you, hey, I’ve got these great things. You’d really want to buy this cloth. Or in my time, the testimonials whispering to you from the pages of newspaper. It strikes me that radio, television, movies build upon that, but maybe don’t invent that much that’s new.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been inviting your ideas for advertising styles from the past that we might draw on to create ads for our own program. So we got a lot of great suggestions. And after blowing through our multi-million dollar advertising budget, we are going to share with you today two of the ads that we decided to go ahead and produce. The first was inspired by a request from listener Jim Mica in Ithaca, New York.

JIM MICA: Hi there, BackStory. My suggestion for an ad to promote your show would be something from the hard-hitting ’70s when we had all those fabulous ads for American cars. Let us put you in a brand new American moment of history.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Attention history fans in Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and all across America. Drive away in a brand new episode of BackStory today. We’ve got stories for all your history needs. Want to hear about fat, little presidents? We got John Adams!

You want 19th century ladies to get stuff done? No problem. Need some pork in your diet? We got the Bay of freaking Pigs. So put those headphones on today. 0% down, 0% financing. And monthly payments of no pennies on the dollar. BackStory– find us on your local radio station, iTunes, SoundCloud, and always online at backstoryradio.org. This history’s moving fast, people. Don’t delay!

[MUSIC – “WHEATIES JINGLE”]

ED: Have you tried Wheaties? They’re whole wheat with all of the bran. That, according to General Mills, was the first ever commercial jingle broadcast in America. It went out over Minneapolis airwaves on Christmas Eve 1926. And since it seemed to boost sales locally, company execs made the song the headliner of a national campaign in a desperate attempt to save a dying brand. Apparently, it worked. Wheaties sales skyrocketed. And ever since, the story goes, jingles have been used to sell everything from used cars to community colleges.

Here’s a more recent jingle with a little more, shall we say, stickiness than that Wheaties tune had.

[MUSIC – “KIT KAT JINGLE”]

The long running Kit Kat candy jingle premiered in 1988. And since then, it has achieved many millions of times over what every jingle is created to do– get stuck in your head on loop ad infinitum.

MICHAEL LEVINE: (SINGING) Give me a break. And break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar.

BRIAN: This is Michael Levine, a musician in LA. And he’s the one who’s responsible for this insidious earworm of a jingle. Over the course of his career, Levine has composed music for more than 1,500 ads. But I gotta tell you that no ad enjoyed more success than that darn Kit Kat tune. So I had to ask him, how did he come up with that jingle in the first place?

MICHAEL LEVINE: Well, I got a call from Chris [? McHale ?], who was the music producer at Doyle Dane Bernbach, who was the advertising agency handling the Kit Kat account for Hershey. And they already had a campaign they were in love with. And they had spent a fortune on it and got all sorts of famous people to sing on it and this and that. But they needed what is called a cannon fodder campaign. They needed something that the client could reject. So they assigned their lowest ranking copywriter and their lowest ranking music supplier, me– their the lowest ranking copywriter being Ken Schuldman– to come up with something for which they were going to pay us so little money that I didn’t even have money to hire jingle singers.

But first of all, in terms of how it came about is Ken had written a whole lot of lyrics including, “give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar” and the bridge of the song. And I had it in my hand. We talked a little bit about direction. And I got into the elevator. And by the time I was on the first floor, I pretty much had the song.

BRIAN: Where did you start?

MICHAEL LEVINE: I believe it was the third floor.

BRIAN: Two whole floors for Kit Kat.

MICHAEL LEVINE: Yeah, it was a slow elevator. So at any rate, we had so little money that we ended up Chris and his assistant, Joe Barone, and I sang the demo. And the client loved it. And one thing led to another. It’s a many faceted road after that. But the fall out of it was that I ended up singing on the commercials for many years.

And because of the way that the Screen Actors Guild contracts are structured, which is how people who sing on television commercials or in SAG contracts, I actually made more money as a singer than as the composer.

BRIAN: Well, I’m going to get metaphysical here. What’s your theory about what makes an earworm?

MICHAEL LEVINE: Well, I really like when Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this. And he alluded to a kind of wrongness. It’s the idea that there’s something that is incomplete or out of place and your mind can’t quite let it sit. If something is really just perfectly tidy and ordered, it’s done. Fine. Your brain goes on to the next thing.

To get all musico-technical on you, the first phrase is a pentatonic melody. (SINGING) Give me a break.

BRIAN: Uh-huh.

MICHAEL LEVINE: That scale ascending has this very bright, childish character. But then the very next note is (SINGING) give me a break. (SPEAKING) That is what musicians would call the dominant 7 or the flat seventh.

BRIAN: Right.

MICHAEL LEVINE: And it’s kind of a dark note. It comes from the blues. And a lot of the contradiction that’s embodied in blues and jazz comes from this mixture of dark and light.

BRIAN: So the general itself has a bit of ying and yang in it?

MICHAEL LEVINE: Absolutely.

BRIAN: The music. The music.

MICHAEL LEVINE: And I think that most of the great ones do.

BRIAN: Very interesting. Well, you just showed off your chops as a serious composer. And you’ve also worked in film and television. Does it ever bug you that some people know you as the guy who wrote the Kit Kat jingle?

MICHAEL LEVINE: No. I’m actually quite proud of this. And I think that oftentimes there’s this kind of artificial division between commerce and art. And I’ve always felt very comfortable in both worlds. Maybe they really aren’t different worlds.

As an example, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote this stack full of cantatas that are just beautiful, some of our greatest musical heritage. And he wrote them because he had a job. He was a capellmeister. That’s a choir director. And he had to come up with new material. So that was what he was getting paid to do.

And no, I’m not saying the Kit Kat jingle is on par with Back, but I’m as proud of it as I am of the serious pieces I’ve written because it’s still being used nearly 30 years after it was written. I mean, one of the things they told me back in the day was they actually had to build another plant to make more Kit Kats.

BRIAN: Wow.

MICHAEL LEVINE: So clearly, it touched a lot of people.

BRIAN: Michael Levine is the composer of the long running “Give Me A Break” Kit Kat jingle. He spoke to us from his studio in LA. And before he said goodbye, he told us that he had a little surprise for us. Now you’ll recall a little earlier in the show, we mentioned that we’ve been soliciting listener input for the production of historic sounding BackStory ads. Well, it turns out that Michael Levine had something ready for the cause, something that, to be perfectly honest, we’d be hard pressed to beat.

MICHAEL LEVINE: (SINGING) When my history is feeling kind of shallow, I go get me more days of yore from Onuf, Ayers, and Balogh. I get back to my BackStory. Back to my BackStory. But Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, it just ain’t fair that All Things Considered gets so much Fresh Air. I’ve been there, I’ve done that with Brian Lehrer. I got to get back to my BackStory. Back to my BackStory.

PETER: We need to take a short break, but we’ll be (SINGING) back with more of your BackStory in just a minute. Don’t even think about going away.

BRIAN: (SINGING) I’m back with your BackStory. (SPEAKING) And I’m still Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’re talking today about the history of advertising it in America.

BRIAN: In 1928, the American Tobacco Company had a problem. Their Lucky Strike brands of cigarettes was one of the fastest growing in the United States. But there was one totally untapped corner of the market– women. Smoking, at this time, was still seen as a manly activity. Many would have associated it with soldiers on the front lines of World War I, for instance. Women lighting up cigarettes, that was relatively unheard of. And socially, it was certainly taboo.

PETER: To break this taboo, American Tobacco turned to a man named Edward Bernays. He was part ad man, part PR guy, and all ego. In the ’20s, Bernays had revolutionized the way products were sold in America. Instead of direct advertising, he used techniques lifted from his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to tap into the underlying reasons people had for making the choices they did.

So when publishers, for instance, came to him to up their book sales, he did more than just place ads in newspapers. He convinced the leading architects of American homes to build bookshelves into the walls.

LARRY TYE: He figured a vacuum needs to be filled. And if you had bookshelves in a home, you weren’t going to fill it with cereal boxes. You were going to fill it with books.

BRIAN: This is author Larry Tye, who wrote a biography of Bernays. He says Bernays banked on Americans’ desire to impress their friends with all the books they owned even if they had never cracked open any of those books on their shelves. The result was huge sales for publishers.

LARRY TYE: So he took a very basic behavior, and he transformed it to the point where every time I’m in someone’s home now and I see a built-in bookshelf, I think, that is Eddie Bernays.

BRIAN: American Tobacco most likely knew it would take this sort of outside-of-the-box thinking to reshape Americans’ associations with smoking. And Bernays delivered the goods. His first step was to enlist medical professionals. They gave him quotes attesting to the health benefits of smoking, particularly that it made women thinner.

Then Bernays pushed those quotes to reporters. But when I sat down with Tye, he told me that journalists and doctors weren’t the only ones that Bernays targeted in 1928.

LARRY TYE: He convinced a guy, a photographer named Nicholas Murray, to ask other photographers and artists to sing the praises of the thin. And Murray said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the slender woman who, combining suppleness and grace with slenderness, who instead of overeating sweets and desserts lights a cigarette, has created a whole new standard female loveliness.”

And Bernays actually turned that into a slogan– “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” And by doing that, he was tapping into people who he knew helped set the trends in America. So in this case, it was a photographer. In other cases, it was nutritionists and health experts. But to me, the most symbolically wonderful and the most poetic of the ways he went to work was he decided to enlist some of the most extraordinary debutantes in New York society and got these women to sign up for what they thought was striking a blow not for smoking cigarettes but for women’s liberation.

On Easter Sunday, marching down America’s Boulevard, which was Fifth Avenue, he got them to light up what he called “their torches of freedom.” So Easter Sunday, Fifth Avenue, America’s leading debutantes lighting up their torches a freedom.

BRIAN: Brilliant. But you know, what if some competitor, some knock off brand is capitalizing on all his good work? Some competing tobacco company?

LARRY TYE: They did. But he increased sales enough for the whole market. And the people who were hiring him already had the lion’s share of any market he was going into. That it worked for them. But Bernays actually decided that many women weren’t smoking Luckies because the green package with the red bullseye clashed with their favorite clothing. This was an extraordinary notion in two ways. One, that the choice of a cigarette would depend on how it went with your clothing was extraordinary enough. More chutzpa was the notion that he could actually change the taste of women in terms of the color they preferred. And he proceeded to do just that.

BRIAN: Unbelievable.

LARRY TYE: With Lucky Strikes, he decided that they would go best if the color green– if women were wearing green. And he helped make green the fashion color of the year. He could change people’s taste in everything from what they ate to what they wore. And he used every technique that he ever tried in any other format to get women smoking cigarettes.

BRIAN: To stand up for Bernays, as I recall he made the case that more propaganda, which in those days, in fairness, really meant information, would lead to more informed debate. In other words, both sides could have at it. I remember those poor candy makers. They weren’t happy about the slim is better campaign. And if I’m not mistaken, Bernays’s attitude when they struck back at him was, hey, this is good. This just creates more free publicity.

LARRY TYE: So you bring up a really important point. Bernays’s legacy was the best and the worst of what public relations and propaganda can be. The best was getting more information out there, educating the public. He really did believe in an informed public. The worst was that he didn’t want to inform that public with really straight information. He decided to educate the public with only the selected information that benefited his clients.

BRIAN: Did he use his products? Did Bernays smoke?

LARRY TYE: He had never been tempted to smoke himself. But at the very moment when he was having women march down Fifth Avenue with their torches of freedom, he was telling his young daughters at home when they saw their mother smoking a cigarette, to try to take the pack of cigarettes and– as he said– “break them in half like they were brittle bones and flush them down the toilet.” So 50 years later, when he went to work for the American Lung Association trying to wean women off the habit he had created, he said to America, basically, if I had known how dangerous this product was, I would never have helped create the addiction to it.

That would have been very convincing if he hadn’t left behind in the Library of Congress all his own records showing just how he did know. Tragically he ignored– and didn’t just ignore– covered up the evidence. And tragically, we saw the result as women’s rates of lung cancer in America started to catch up to men at the same time their rates of buying products from American Tobacco was catching up to men. The question to me is, why would he create these kinds of illusions and misapprehensions about what he was doing and then leave all the papers that prove that he was lying to the Library of Congress where some day somebody would look at them? And my only answer to that is that he was old enough when he left the papers and there were so many of them that he might not have been aware of just how damning his own evidence was on his own lying.

BRIAN: Or perhaps he was even prouder of his ability to manipulate than of his moral compass.

LARRY TYE: I didn’t think anybody could be more cynical about Eddie than I am. But I think that you could absolutely be right.

BRIAN: Well, Larry, thank you for unspinning this truly complex figure in American history for us.

LARRY TYE: It’s been great to be with you. Thank you.

BRIAN: Larry Tye is the author of The Father of Spin: Edward L Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations.

[MUSIC – PATSY CLINE, “THREE CIGARETTES IN THE ASHTRAY”]

CAMERON: Hi. My name is Cameron. I’m calling from Regina, Saskatchewan. And I’d love to see an ad in the style of the mid-century cigarette ad including health advice from a doctor about the positive benefits of listening to BackStory. Bye.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Hello, folks. Has the modern world become overwhelming? Are the choices in podcasts and radio boggling your mind? Making your head hurt? Well, the wonders of modern science can address that.

I’m in the lab there with Dr. Kenneth Johnson. Dr. Johnson, what have you been working on?

DR. KENNETH JOHNSON: Well, using the power of modern science, we have been able to extract white noise and confusion away from audio.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Oh, I do hate white noise and confusion. I simply don’t have time to consider all things.

[LAUGHTER]

DR. KENNETH JOHNSON: Yes. Well, now we have an audio condenser we call the contextor. So you get more background and a deeper knowledge without all the junk. The product is a smoother, clearer sound that’s healthier for you. We call it BackStory.

MALE SPEAKER 1: BackStory. I like the sound of that. Say, let me have a taste. Wow. That is smoother on the ears. Is it really true that BackStory will make you smarter and thinner using this contextor?

DR. KENNETH JOHNSON: Oh, yes. Medical studies have proven it.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Well, that’s all I need to know. So remember, folks, for a deeper smoother and clearer take on life, use BackStory on your local public radio station or wherever you get your podcasts.

ED: Our final story today is less about selling a product and more about generating support for an idea. Put another way, it’s about public relations, public relations for space travel.

NEIL ARMSTRONG: That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

ED: This, of course, is audio from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s first stroll on the moon, July 20, 1969. Many of us remember that date. What we don’t tend to remember as well is how rapidly the space program took shape. As late as 1949, a Gallup poll found that only 15% of Americans thought it possible that humans would set foot on the moon by the end of the century.

BRIAN: The program that made space travel a reality depended on getting Americans on board with the idea that, well, it could be a reality. And that’s where PR came in. Richard Jurek is the co-author of a new book called Marketing the Moon. He says that the concept of manned space travel, long a subject of science fiction, made its debut in the nonfiction media in 1952. That’s when Collier’s Magazine launched a major series of graphically illustrated articles by scientists making the case that space travel was just around the corner.

RICHARD JUREK: After the Collier’s publication, support instantly jump up to 38%.

ED: The first article in the Collier’s series was written by a distinguish rocket scientist named Wernher Von Braun. At that time, in the employ at the US Military, he quickly became something of a media darling.

RICHARD JUREK: And then in 1955, Von Braun partnered with Walt Disney, of all people, who was launching his Disneyland television show on TV.

ED: The very first episode was called “Man in Space,” and like the Collier’s articles, made the case that space travel was well within our grasp.

MALE SPEAKER 2: Here to introduce you to this new series is Walt Disney.

WALT DISNEY: One of a man’s oldest dreams has been the desire for space travel, to travel to other worlds. Until recently, this seemed to be an impossibility. But great, new discoveries have brought us to the threshold of a new frontier.

RICHARD JUREK: And Eisenhower saw this and, the next day, asked for a copy and showed it to everyone in the Pentagon. And just two months later, said that we will launch our first satellite in ’57. In 1958, NASA was formed. And senators even thanked Disney on the floor of the Senate for what he helped to do to convince the politicians, the military, and the American public to start an ambitious space program, which eventually led us going to the moon.

BRIAN: If public relations was key to launching NASA in the late ’50s, it remained central to the agency’s operations once it was airborne. Today, says Jurek, it’s easy to take for granted. But considering the military backgrounds of many in the program, it could just as easily have been that the Apollo program took shape in secret.

RICHARD JUREK: Under the military program– and many of the folks involved in NASA were on loan from the military– you could not discuss a project until there was what was called “fire in the tail,” until the rocket was launching in the air. NASA public affairs, starting from Walter T Bonney, the first head of Public Affairs, all the way through Julian Scheer, who ran it during the Apollo program, they were all ex-journalists who were deeply committed to the open program and who pushed to go beyond “fire in the tail.” So that when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, we saw it live and with no delay. Compared to the closed military program of space travel in the Soviet Union and to what the US program was just a few short years before, it was a phenomenal achievement.

ED: The pinnacle of NASA’s public relations efforts was, without a doubt, the live, televised broadcast from the Apollo missions. Some 3,000 journalist were on hand at Cape Canaveral for the launch of Armstrong’s mission. And NASA made a point of providing support for all of them. But had it not been for the insistence of the PR guys, Jurek says, all of those historic moments could very easily have gone unrecorded.

RICHARD JUREK: Back in the ’60s, cameras were huge. They were heavy. And the astronauts themselves, many of them, didn’t want cameras aboard. Because when you had three-person crews going on board, the commander didn’t want his crew quote unquote “performing for the cameras,” but focused on the mission. And so there was this huge internal debate that went on between public affairs, Washington, the astronauts and others. And thankfully, television won out.

MALE SPEAKER 3: Armstrong is on the moon, Neil Armstrong. 38-year-old American standing on the surface of the moon.

MALE SPEAKER 4: Well, thank you, television, for letting us watch this one.

MALE SPEAKER 3: This is something. 240,000 miles out there on the moon and we’re seeing this.

BRIAN: 94% of Americans with a TV set watched at least part of the Apollo 11 broadcast in July of 1969. And never was public support for the space program higher. For the first and only time in the 1960s, a majority of Americans polled believe the lunar program was worth its enormous cost.

But even as Armstrong and Aldrin were taking their first steps on the moon’s surface, NASA was already facing budget cuts and layoffs. And it didn’t take long before public support for the program started to wane as well.

RICHARD JUREK: The moment Buzz Aldrin declared it a magnificent desolation and the moment the astronauts brought back just a bag of rocks– there was no life, there were no precious metals, we couldn’t mine it for oil, when we discovered that the biggest thing was the rarity and the fragility of the earth, we started to look inward.

BRIAN: The idea of a return trip to this dead rock became a tougher and tougher sell.

ED: And yet, at the very same time that overall support for the space program was waning, there was one group of Americans who saw it as a winning proposition, one that was worth every cent. Advertisers.

RICHARD JUREK: It was a program that every brand wanted to be associated with. Even if you had nothing to do with the space program, you want to imply it.

MALE SPEAKER 5: When I volunteered for moon duty, they said I could have anything I wanted. So here I am, alone with Trix, the corn cereal with fruit-flavored goodness.

RICHARD JUREK: When you at something as innocuous and iconic as something like Tang–

MALE SPEAKER 6: The astronauts do some things you do. In space, they drank Tang. They mixed it like this, in a zero-G pouch because with no gravity, it would fly all over.

RICHARD JUREK: Back in the day, Tang was kind of a failed product for General Foods. And it was only after it became known through General Foods marketing of Tang as a space food that it became a runaway best seller.

MALE SPEAKER 6: Tang, chosen for the Gemini astronauts. Have a blast. Have some Tang.

ED: Tang and Trix clearly benefited from their association with NASA. But Jurek points out that food manufacturers weren’t the only ones hitching themselves to the moon missions.

RICHARD JUREK: The Boeings and the Raytheons of the world who, let’s face it, were caught up in the Vietnam War. And it’s kind of hard to be advertising your great missile that might be killing somebody. But it’s a lot easier to advertise your technological prowess when you’re getting people to the moon and taking on a peaceful effort with the technology that you’re creating and putting out into the marketplace.

BRIAN: Half a century on from the first lunar landing, three in four Americans have a favorable view of NASA. Nearly 2/3 of us believe astronauts will have landed on Mars by 2050. Yet, most of us still don’t want to pay what it would cost to get them there. And funding for space exploration continues to be cut.

ED: But the vision championed by NASA’s early public affairs department of an open, very visible space program has flourished in the social media age. Astronauts in the International Space Station point cameras at themselves.

FEMALE SPEAKER 1: A lot of people ask me how I wash my hair in space. And I thought I’d show you how I do it.

ED: At their food.

MALE SPEAKER 7: So in space, normally we just eat the asparagus. And then we eat the grits and keep things simple. Otherwise, they’re just everywhere.

ED: And occasionally, even serenade us back here on earth.

MALE SPEAKER 8: (SINGING) Ground control to Major Tom. Lock your Soyuz hatch and put your helmet on.

ED: It may be YouTube, not narrated live by Walter Cronkite for a TV audience of millions. But these days, what is?

MALE SPEAKER 8: (SINGING) Commencing countdown, engines on.

PETER: That, unfortunately, is where we’re going to have to leave things today. But we’re eager to hear your thoughts on today’s show. You can find us at backstoryradio.org. Our email address is there as our descriptions of all the shows we have in the works. Please, take a moment and share your thoughts on those shows. Whatever you do, please, don’t be a stranger.

[MUSIC – “SPACE ODDITY”]

ED: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones Emily [? Gaddock, ?] and Robert [? Arango ?]. [? Jamal ?] [? Milner ?] is our engineer. We had help from Emily [? Charnock ?] and [? Colee ?] [? Elhi. ?]

BRIAN: Special thanks this week to Alan [? Andres, ?] Richard [? Buel, ?] Carl [? Keys ?], James [? Killaris, ?] Stephen [? Fox, ?] and Bob Garfield. And to our voice actors for the BackStory ad, James [? Scales ?] and Adam [? Broch. ?] BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER 2: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

BRIAN: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

DERRICK COLEMAN: They gave up on me. But I’ve been deaf since I was three so I didn’t listen.

PETER: This is the Seattle Seahawk’s Derrick Coleman doing the voice over for a stirring bit of cinematography.

DERRICK COLEMAN: And now I’m here with the loudest fans in the NFL cheering me on.

PETER: But this is no documentary film. It’s a commercial from last year’s Super Bowl for Duracell batteries. Today on BackStory, the ad industry in America. We’ll hear how advertisers perfected the art of the soft sell, the catchy jingle, and the association with All-American heroes.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Tang, chosen for the Gemini astronauts.

PETER: Plus ads for BackStory that you asked us to produce.

MALE SPEAKER 1: This history is moving fast, people. Don’t delay.

PETER: A history of advertising today on BackStory. Don’t go away. Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

MALE SPEAKER 1: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Now if you’re listening to this show on the radio, you probably heard Peter do something a few minutes ago that we in the business refer to as a billboard. It’s at one-minute tease, apparently effective, for the rest of the show, complete with highlights, some big questions for the hour, some catchy music. And it’s basically an attempt to razzle dazzle you in the sticking with us through the new break.

Well, that radio billboard has its roots in the pre-radio age. And like a lot of what we talk about on BackStory, it dates back to the last few decades of the 19th century.

CATHERINE GUDIS: There are banners. There are posters for circuses and other celebrations.

PETER: This is Cathy Gudis, a historian in California who has written about advertising’s early days. A lot of it centered on East Coast cities but had a certain Wild West sensibility to it. Picture roving wagons covered with enormous ads, itinerant men with sandwich boards or ads on their hats, gangs of bill posters prowling in the streets with buckets of wheat paste and broadsides announcing all manner of products and events. Everywhere you looked, Gudis says, somebody would be trying to razzle dazzle you into seeing the benefits of what they had to sell.

CATHERINE GUDIS: You might have a series of text-based handbills or theater programs. They look like theater programs. And they’re slathered on the exteriors of the buildings at street level. But then as you sort of almost look up the side of the building, the ads become larger and more pictorial until you get to the top of the building, where an electrically illuminated ad is outlined. There’s an image. There are words spelled out. And there’s revolving color that just sort of creates an entire cityscape of commerce.

ED: Now it does make sense that advertisers in this era would focus on cities because dense populations meant that you got the most bang for your advertising buck. But Gudis says there were countryscapes of commerce as well.

CATHERINE GUDIS: Right. There’s actually a description of a few people who really prided themselves on going into remote areas with their waders on and painting on a rock so a train that might be passing by would have this perfect vision of it.

ED: Whether they were painted on big, illuminated signs in the city, screaming at passing trains from trees and rocks in the country, or filling the space between articles in local newspapers, one type of ad appeared everywhere– ads for patent medicines.

CATHERINE GUDIS: You’d learn of something like Buchu, which was recommended for everything from syphilis to rheumatism. Or you might have seen Jones’ Tonic, a sure cure for paralysis, vertigo, insomnia, jim jams– don’t ask me what jim jams were.

PETER: If the conditions these so-called medicines were curing seem mysterious, their ingredients were even more so. Sometimes these potions would contain opium, morphine. More often, they would contain potent doses of grain alcohol. One manufacturer boasted that– I’m quoting– “I can advertise dishwater and sell it just as well as an article of merit. It is all in the advertising.”

ED: On the back of this advertising, patent medicine sales climbed from a total of round $3.5 million before the Civil War to $75 million by the turn of the century. And there are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, patent medicines put advertising on the map and showed that advertising in itself could be a profitable business. A lot of the early ad agents got their start hocking patent medicine ads to newspaper and magazine printers.

But on the other hand, the shadiness of the whole patent medicine enterprise kind of tarred advertising and gave it a bad name. It would take a whole new generation of advertisers with a whole new approach to advertising to really turn that story around.

BRIAN: Across America this weekend, a lot of people are talking about football. But as there always is on Super Bowl Sunday, there is just as much excitement– if not more– about what’s taking place off the field interstices of the big game, the advertising. So today on the show, we’re looking at advertising’s history. How did advertising move from the margins of respectability to the $180 billion industry that it is today? And why is it that Americans today don’t just tolerate advertising’s ubiquity, they actually celebrate it?

ED: We’ll begin where we left off in the last couple of decades of the 19th century. It was then that a handful of ad middleman started making a name for themselves as ad agents who could be trusted. Now these weren’t the fly-by-night guys of a few years earlier, known for extorting as much as possible from publishers and advertisers alike. These were guys with solid circulation figures, clear fee structures, and standards of what they would and wouldn’t sell.

So patent medicines were out. And things like, well, soap we’re in.

PETER: Oh, yeah.

ED: So guys, I’ve got a magazine ad from this period that I want to share with you. It’s for Pears, the famous English complexion soap and features the portrait of Henry Ward Beecher, a kind of rock star preacher of the day with a kind of a mullet actually along with a supposed a quotation from Beecher extolling the virtues of this wonderful soap. And it’s typical of a lot of what was coming out of these early ad agencies. Places like NW Ayer & Son and J Walter Thompson were discovering that they were in the business of selling trust. And their ads were all about convincing consumers that these products were trustworthy.

PETER: Uh-huh. Right.

ED: So you have that image in your head.

PETER: Yep.

ED: Now consider this one. It’s also a soap ad– Woodbury Soap– but it’s from a few decades later, 1917 to be exact. It’s in full color. A young woman lounges in a revealing dress. A handsome man in a suit leans over her. He’s clasping her hand and kissing her neck. The tagline running across the top of the page is simple. “A skin you love to touch.”

So this seems pretty racy for 1911.

KATHLEEN FRANZ: Pretty sexy, right?

ED: Yeah, really.

KATHLEEN FRANZ: Yeah. Some more conservative magazines wouldn’t take this ad.

ED: This is Kathleen Franz. She’s a historian who’s working on a new Smithsonian exhibit about the history of advertising. And when I spoke to her, she pointed out that there’s something besides the raciness of this second ad that makes a groundbreaking. And that’s that there’s hardly anything in it about soap itself.

KATHLEEN FRANZ: One of the things about the creator of this ad and why it’s such a revolutionary ad is that it is moving very quickly into what the product can do for the consumer and how it will change their life. It puts the product at the bottom of the ad, not central to the ad. It gives you a view of the consumer, which is you, right? I mean, this is completely aspirational.

The product can bridge that gap between your working class status or lower middle class status and the achievement of an American dream, which here is very represented by not only the beautiful clothing and the kind of wealth that exudes, but also this kind of sexiness. The message that the ad wants to give to you and wants you to believe in is that if you use this soap, you’ll be a more attractive person.

ED: So who’s behind this ad? It seems to me it’s persuasive even 100 years later. I believe she does attract men. So who was the mastermind that realized this is the direction advertising should take?

KATHLEEN FRANZ: Well, it was a woman named Helen Landsdowne Resor. There are women in advertising in this period. They are helping shape the new messaging that advertising is putting out, this move really from telling you again about the product and what the product is and moving it to a more emotional appeal. And that really sets modern advertising.

So the interesting thing about Helen Resor is really that she’s at the top of the company. She’s running the offices of J Walter Thompson, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, with her husband’s family. She’s really the creative side of the house. And he’s doing the business side. And she’s cultivating this sort of new type of emotional-based advertising.

ED: I am struck by the fact that there would be a place for women in this as there had not been a place for women in any kind of industry before. So how do you explain that, Kathleen?

KATHLEEN FRANZ: I think women knew how to reach other women. And the male advertisers who are running these companies begin to understand that, especially in this period. And so you know J Walter Thompson really had built its reputation on advertising in women’s magazines. They knew that women were the primary consumers of most products, especially for the household, so soaps, things that are being mass produced at this time. And they are responding to this emotional appeal.

And Helen Landsdowne Resor, she tailors the advertising to them. She is saying it’s OK for women to be sexy and that products can help with that. And you sales numbers coming back is that it reportedly increased sales of this soap 1,000%. So when you have the marketing data back to say that these kinds of very women-centered approaches are working, it’s all the more reason to trust the women who are writing the ads.

ED: Kathleen France is a historian at American University. She’s one of the curators of an upcoming Smithsonian exhibition on the history of advertising in America.

PETER: It’s time for a short break. When we get back, a master of musical jingles teaches us something about making history catchy.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be right back.

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, we’re marking advertising’s annual championship match, the Super Bowl, with an hour on the history of advertising in America. We’ve heard a little bit about the early days of the advertising industry in the first couple of decades the 20th century. We’re going to pick up our story now in the 1920s, the point at which the industry hit the road.

PETER: In the 1920s, Americans were falling in love with their cars. Tens of millions of them were taking to the roads. And where motorist went, billboards quickly followed.

Driving down the highway, Americans would see row after row of horizontally spanning billboards just like we might see today. Many of them were full of color and illuminated by electric lighting. But that’s not all. The roads signs were also blanketed in a number of smaller and less professional ads tacked up on trees and poles.

It was all largely unregulated. Companies and the ad agents working for them could put up billboards wherever landowners would rent them space. Before long, the roadsides were crowded with commerce.

BRIAN: Historian Cathy Gudis, who we heard from at the top of today’s show, has written about this early efflorescence of outdoor advertising and about the opposition that grew up alongside it. She told me that women were very much the forefront of the movement that worked for decades to do away with these billboards.

CATHERINE GUDIS: I think it was, in part, springing from the municipal housekeeping movement of an earlier period. This idea that women were responsible for civilizing the home and also had a knowledge of beauty and that they were somehow going to be keepers of the landscape, too–

BRIAN: So who was supporting billboards?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Well, the billboard boys, of course.

BRIAN: The boys? Billboard boys?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Well, the women like to call them varyingly the boys of the barons. I love the idea of the barons because it suggests that they are colonizing the landscape–

BRIAN: Yeah.

CATHERINE GUDIS: –taking it over with commercial advertising. And they are. I mean, that’s the goal. It’s partly because the industry becomes big and incorporates nationally and has a lobbying arm. It’s called the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

BRIAN: It sounds so–

CATHERINE GUDIS: And they resented–

BRIAN: It sounds so pastoral.

CATHERINE GUDIS: Oh, it’s so pastoral. It’s not billboards. Right? It’s not litter on a stick. It’s outdoor advertising.

BRIAN: No. Litter on a stick! All right. So what do the barons call the women? I don’t want to know the locker room term. But what do they call them in public?

CATHERINE GUDIS: The language that they use persistently is incredibly gendered. They are these flower-sniffing aesthetes with no concern. Right? The have no concern.

BRIAN: Flower-sniffing no less!

CATHERINE GUDIS: Oh, yeah. Because this idea that they are aesthetes with no conception of the financial ramifications of being able to advertise across the American landscape.

BRIAN: Well, how did these flower-sniffing ladies, so-called– what do they bring to the table? How do they fight these guys who are a national industry?

CATHERINE GUDIS: They basically harness their powers through women’s clubs and the garden clubs. And so for instance, this one woman named Elizabeth Lawton, who is so impressive, she organizes a group called the National Roadside Counsel. And put it this way, the outdoor industry disliked her to the extent that when I went through their files, I found her information in a file that was labeled nuisances abated. And on the top, was her obituary.

[LAUGHTER]

So she was definitely a thorn.

BRIAN: You’re not suggesting foul play, are you?

CATHERINE GUDIS: No foul play. I really don’t think there was foul play. But I think she was just so annoying. She annoyed them to no end. The letter writing campaigns were out of control, letters to the editor. And they’re mostly middle class women who were writing a lot of letters.

BRIAN: And what did these women want? Did they want advertising to go away? I mean, what was their goal?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Yeah. I mean, I think that would’ve been an ideal. What they were looking at, though, we have to remember is that they were driving along a road and the highways were constructed in part as touristic landscapes. And what do you find when you go out into the countryside? You see billboard alleys that are lining the highways, endlessly repeating one after another, oftentimes in full color, dramatic spectacular view, with lights eliminating them if you were in a major city or on your way into a major city.

And so I think that they really were amazing spectacles for people who embraced commerce. But for the scenic sisters, this was not a sense of a technologically sublime of commerce. Right? It was that the roadside vista is not this public space, is not open to democratic access, because billboards are turning into a physical and a conceptual blight. They block the view.

BRIAN: It’s a commercialized space?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Yeah. It’s a commercialized space. But it’s more than that. I think it’s more than that. I think it’s also that they’re blocking the notion that the American landscape is held commonly, that it doesn’t have property borders, that it’s free to all. And that’s a conception of the view, the view from the road, right? That we should all have access to that untrammeled view. It should not be sullied by commerce.

BRIAN: This battle, this goes on for decades, of course. Does the introduction of the Interstate Highway Act in the ’50s make a difference?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Oh, it makes a huge difference. Once the Federal Interstate Act is passed in 1956, the idea is that is this in a $25 billion investment going to be lined with commerce? And who’s going to be paying for that? So as legislators are organizing around the Federal Interstate Act, reformers are seeking to ensure that that whole expressway system, coast to coast, North to South, is going to be protected from billboard advertising.

So through the ’50s, they continue their activities. And then once Lyndon Johnson becomes president and despite the fact that he himself had advertised in his campaigns using billboards, he comes forward as being on their side, in part because his wife, Lady Bird, is really interested in beautification. And she even pushes him to call the US Secretary of Commerce in 1964 to tell him to do something to clean up the road side.

BRIAN: Ah, I remember that.

CATHERINE GUDIS: Interestingly, we see the gender game being played out again even at that moment. I mean, it starts when Johnson says, you know I love that woman, referring to his wife, and she wants that Highway Beautification Act. By God, we’re going to get it for her. And indeed–

BRIAN: He didn’t call her, the little lady, did he?

CATHERINE GUDIS: He said, you know I love that woman. No, he doesn’t say, a little lady. He might as well have. No. So she begins to advocate. And so he begins to meet with people to make this happen. So they form some task forces on natural beauty and, from there, begin to craft the language that will ultimately be passed in 1965 as the Highway Beautification Act.

BRIAN: And does it work?

CATHERINE GUDIS: What finally passes as the Highway Beautification Act, the reformers don’t see as a triumph. They see it as a failure in many ways because it doesn’t just outright ban billboards. It limits them. It restricts them. More than that, for the billboards that were there, the federal government and state governments are to pay the owners of the billboards to remove them.

What they see is that this is going to be a continuing battle in which governmental and legislative forces favor industry. But I have to say that in looking at photographs and comparing what the landscape scenes looked like, if it’s hard not to see it as actually having played a significant role that’s interesting in a lot of ways. Because instead of a lot a little signs lining the highways or the interstates as former in these corridors–

BRIAN: We see some very big ones now.

CATHERINE GUDIS: We see really big ones. Yeah. And so it becomes– for me, I see it as metaphorical for the industry at large. The industry itself consolidates, the whole advertising industry not just outdoor advertising. It consolidates. It becomes something huge and unavoidable, omniscient and omnipresent. And I say both of those words for a reason.

Advertisers now can chart where we are, where we move, what our preferences might be, and tailor their advertisements to us. And so the consolidation of space changes the look, but it doesn’t necessarily change the principle of advertising in public space and colonizing that space through commerce.

BRIAN: Cathy, I just have to ask, when your book came out, were you tempted to advertise it on a big billboard?

CATHERINE GUDIS: Given another chance, I think I might advertise my book on a billboard.

BRIAN: OK. Well, thank you for joining us on BackStory today.

CATHERINE GUDIS: Thank you for having me.

[MUSIC – DEL REEVES, “GIRL ON THE BILLBOARD”]

BRIAN: Cathy Gudis is a historian at the University of California Riverside. She’s the author of Buyways– that would B-U-Y ways– Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape.

If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory, and we’re talking today about the history of advertising in America. Peter, Ed, where did the advertising that I would recognize as advertising today, where did that come from?

PETER: That would get you to buy something?

BRIAN: Exactly.

PETER: That’d be some really good advertising.

BRIAN: Exactly.

ED: I would say that you’d be surprised to think that it happened in the period that I specialize in.

BRIAN: No kidding.

ED: Here’s what I would mean by that. And I think the advertising that we would recognize as advertising is image rich, right? It is mass produced. It is building a brand. And I think that really evolves over the 19th century along with newspapers that can spread all that.

And so you think about things like Ivory Soap. They have the image that they still use today. And they would have a slogan. And the other things that they would have would be testimonials. Because you’re trying to build a personal connection between the consumer and a mass produced good.

BRIAN: So what’s an example of a testimonial? What kind of person would offer that?

ED: You know, when it came time to bathe my new baby, I wondered where I could find a soap that I knew would be safe for her gentle skin. And I remember hearing that Ivory was 99.4% pure.

BRIAN: I got my credit card out already, Ed.

ED: And I used Ivory–

BRIAN: That’s really impressive.

ED: We don’t take credit cards in the 19th century.

BRIAN: Oh, darn.

ED: I appreciate the thought. And after I bathed my baby, she smelled so good. And I knew that I would buy Ivory Soap again. I hope you will, too. So that’s my belief of what advertising that we would recognize as our own emerges. And this really takes form in the late 19th century, which makes me wonder how people actually bought stuff before that. You know?

PETER: I want to tell you, Ed, they did. And they did in a big way. And I think the real challenge for us is to understand what it was that would get the attention of consumers. Because I think that’s what advertising is really about, reaching out from producer to consumer or from merchandiser to the ultimate user. And that begins, well, you might say, from the beginning of time. But in America, I think what really is determinative is the spread of print.

Because in a traditional culture, where everybody knows everybody else, and you know where you’re going to get your horseshoes, you know where you’re going to get your flour, in a customary world of these kind of intimate transactions, advertising is unnecessary. But what happens when you have long distances between the producer and the consumer? What happens in urban centers, like Philadelphia, is that you have, thanks to print and all the ways that print can indicate to consumers what’s available, simply listing things. What I want to communicate to you guys is the sheer excitement of knowing what’s in a shop.

BRIAN: So you’re focusing on the medium that Ed kind of took for granted.

PETER: Yeah, that’s right. And this is what I defy you to do is to try to imagine how reading a list of things could just rock your world.

ED: I remember the early days of the internet, Peter. It wasn’t that hard.

PETER: That was the same thing, wasn’t it?

BRIAN: And who’s placing these so-called ads?

PETER: OK, you got the problem of inventory and turnover. And you wait a long time to get a shipment of tea from Bohea or from wherever it is.

BRIAN: So you’re talking about importers?

PETER: Yeah, we’re basically talking about importers because day-to-day needs are satisfied in local markets. But the cutting edge, the leading edge of the market– what becomes the market revolution– the leading edge of consumption, that’s with imports. So it could be something like tea. It would be porcelain. It could be textiles. There are any number of things–

BRIAN: So people would see a list of China.

PETER: Yeah.

BRIAN: And get really worked up about it.

PETER: And the important thing to keep in mind– again, something we take for granted– is to have advertising, you have to have literacy. Now you’d say it is a broad literacy. There’s visual as well as conventional literacy. But the American population is the most literate in the world with the possible exception of Sweden.

BRIAN: Right. Because they really couldn’t produce the kind of images that Ed might have in the late 19th century? Like these really were word.

PETER: The image that would only work at a local market is a one off, a painting, that would hang in front of a tavern or something like that. And that’s important.

ED: Yeah.

PETER: But I want to emphasize the way that you can read into a word or a list of things pictures of goods. I would say a word is worth a thousand pictures in this period. You know, we flip it around in the modern period to talk about all you can learn from a picture. That’s what really excites the desire of consumers is to know what they can get.

BRIAN: And did they buy more than they should have?

PETER: Well, of course!

BRIAN: Or is that just a 20th century thing.

PETER: Of course. You talk about credit cards. We don’t have those, but we have credit. And we have bankruptcies galore. So merchants are eager to enable purchasing. But in order to get the whole thing going, to get the machinery working, you’ve got to make the fundamental connection. It’s an information problem. It’s getting information to consumers about what’s on offer.

ED: So Brian, you ask where advertising as we know it comes from. They have surprisingly deep roots. But it strikes me that the 20th century is in many ways kind of recycling things that we already knew from the 18th and 19th century, right? It’s that people buy because of real or imagined personal connections to the product. You know?

And back in Peter’s time, it’s the shopkeepers who can tell you, hey, I’ve got these great things. You’d really want to buy this cloth. Or in my time, the testimonials whispering to you from the pages of newspaper. It strikes me that radio, television, movies build upon that, but maybe don’t invent that much that’s new.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been inviting your ideas for advertising styles from the past that we might draw on to create ads for our own program. So we got a lot of great suggestions. And after blowing through our multi-million dollar advertising budget, we are going to share with you today two of the ads that we decided to go ahead and produce. The first was inspired by a request from listener Jim Mica in Ithaca, New York.

JIM MICA: Hi there, BackStory. My suggestion for an ad to promote your show would be something from the hard-hitting ’70s when we had all those fabulous ads for American cars. Let us put you in a brand new American moment of history.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Attention history fans in Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and all across America. Drive away in a brand new episode of BackStory today. We’ve got stories for all your history needs. Want to hear about fat, little presidents? We got John Adams!

You want 19th century ladies to get stuff done? No problem. Need some pork in your diet? We got the Bay of freaking Pigs. So put those headphones on today. 0% down, 0% financing. And monthly payments of no pennies on the dollar. BackStory– find us on your local radio station, iTunes, SoundCloud, and always online at backstoryradio.org. This history’s moving fast, people. Don’t delay!

[MUSIC – “WHEATIES JINGLE”]

ED: Have you tried Wheaties? They’re whole wheat with all of the bran. That, according to General Mills, was the first ever commercial jingle broadcast in America. It went out over Minneapolis airwaves on Christmas Eve 1926. And since it seemed to boost sales locally, company execs made the song the headliner of a national campaign in a desperate attempt to save a dying brand. Apparently, it worked. Wheaties sales skyrocketed. And ever since, the story goes, jingles have been used to sell everything from used cars to community colleges.

Here’s a more recent jingle with a little more, shall we say, stickiness than that Wheaties tune had.

[MUSIC – “KIT KAT JINGLE”]

The long running Kit Kat candy jingle premiered in 1988. And since then, it has achieved many millions of times over what every jingle is created to do– get stuck in your head on loop ad infinitum.

MICHAEL LEVINE: (SINGING) Give me a break. And break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar.

BRIAN: This is Michael Levine, a musician in LA. And he’s the one who’s responsible for this insidious earworm of a jingle. Over the course of his career, Levine has composed music for more than 1,500 ads. But I gotta tell you that no ad enjoyed more success than that darn Kit Kat tune. So I had to ask him, how did he come up with that jingle in the first place?

MICHAEL LEVINE: Well, I got a call from Chris [? McHale ?], who was the music producer at Doyle Dane Bernbach, who was the advertising agency handling the Kit Kat account for Hershey. And they already had a campaign they were in love with. And they had spent a fortune on it and got all sorts of famous people to sing on it and this and that. But they needed what is called a cannon fodder campaign. They needed something that the client could reject. So they assigned their lowest ranking copywriter and their lowest ranking music supplier, me– their the lowest ranking copywriter being Ken Schuldman– to come up with something for which they were going to pay us so little money that I didn’t even have money to hire jingle singers.

But first of all, in terms of how it came about is Ken had written a whole lot of lyrics including, “give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar” and the bridge of the song. And I had it in my hand. We talked a little bit about direction. And I got into the elevator. And by the time I was on the first floor, I pretty much had the song.

BRIAN: Where did you start?

MICHAEL LEVINE: I believe it was the third floor.

BRIAN: Two whole floors for Kit Kat.

MICHAEL LEVINE: Yeah, it was a slow elevator. So at any rate, we had so little money that we ended up Chris and his assistant, Joe Barone, and I sang the demo. And the client loved it. And one thing led to another. It’s a many faceted road after that. But the fall out of it was that I ended up singing on the commercials for many years.

And because of the way that the Screen Actors Guild contracts are structured, which is how people who sing on television commercials or in SAG contracts, I actually made more money as a singer than as the composer.

BRIAN: Well, I’m going to get metaphysical here. What’s your theory about what makes an earworm?

MICHAEL LEVINE: Well, I really like when Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this. And he alluded to a kind of wrongness. It’s the idea that there’s something that is incomplete or out of place and your mind can’t quite let it sit. If something is really just perfectly tidy and ordered, it’s done. Fine. Your brain goes on to the next thing.

To get all musico-technical on you, the first phrase is a pentatonic melody. (SINGING) Give me a break.

BRIAN: Uh-huh.

MICHAEL LEVINE: That scale ascending has this very bright, childish character. But then the very next note is (SINGING) give me a break. (SPEAKING) That is what musicians would call the dominant 7 or the flat seventh.

BRIAN: Right.

MICHAEL LEVINE: And it’s kind of a dark note. It comes from the blues. And a lot of the contradiction that’s embodied in blues and jazz comes from this mixture of dark and light.

BRIAN: So the general itself has a bit of ying and yang in it?

MICHAEL LEVINE: Absolutely.

BRIAN: The music. The music.

MICHAEL LEVINE: And I think that most of the great ones do.

BRIAN: Very interesting. Well, you just showed off your chops as a serious composer. And you’ve also worked in film and television. Does it ever bug you that some people know you as the guy who wrote the Kit Kat jingle?

MICHAEL LEVINE: No. I’m actually quite proud of this. And I think that oftentimes there’s this kind of artificial division between commerce and art. And I’ve always felt very comfortable in both worlds. Maybe they really aren’t different worlds.

As an example, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote this stack full of cantatas that are just beautiful, some of our greatest musical heritage. And he wrote them because he had a job. He was a capellmeister. That’s a choir director. And he had to come up with new material. So that was what he was getting paid to do.

And no, I’m not saying the Kit Kat jingle is on par with Back, but I’m as proud of it as I am of the serious pieces I’ve written because it’s still being used nearly 30 years after it was written. I mean, one of the things they told me back in the day was they actually had to build another plant to make more Kit Kats.

BRIAN: Wow.

MICHAEL LEVINE: So clearly, it touched a lot of people.

BRIAN: Michael Levine is the composer of the long running “Give Me A Break” Kit Kat jingle. He spoke to us from his studio in LA. And before he said goodbye, he told us that he had a little surprise for us. Now you’ll recall a little earlier in the show, we mentioned that we’ve been soliciting listener input for the production of historic sounding BackStory ads. Well, it turns out that Michael Levine had something ready for the cause, something that, to be perfectly honest, we’d be hard pressed to beat.

MICHAEL LEVINE: (SINGING) When my history is feeling kind of shallow, I go get me more days of yore from Onuf, Ayers, and Balogh. I get back to my BackStory. Back to my BackStory. But Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, it just ain’t fair that All Things Considered gets so much Fresh Air. I’ve been there, I’ve done that with Brian Lehrer. I got to get back to my BackStory. Back to my BackStory.

PETER: We need to take a short break, but we’ll be (SINGING) back with more of your BackStory in just a minute. Don’t even think about going away.

BRIAN: (SINGING) I’m back with your BackStory. (SPEAKING) And I’m still Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’re talking today about the history of advertising it in America.

BRIAN: In 1928, the American Tobacco Company had a problem. Their Lucky Strike brands of cigarettes was one of the fastest growing in the United States. But there was one totally untapped corner of the market– women. Smoking, at this time, was still seen as a manly activity. Many would have associated it with soldiers on the front lines of World War I, for instance. Women lighting up cigarettes, that was relatively unheard of. And socially, it was certainly taboo.

PETER: To break this taboo, American Tobacco turned to a man named Edward Bernays. He was part ad man, part PR guy, and all ego. In the ’20s, Bernays had revolutionized the way products were sold in America. Instead of direct advertising, he used techniques lifted from his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to tap into the underlying reasons people had for making the choices they did.

So when publishers, for instance, came to him to up their book sales, he did more than just place ads in newspapers. He convinced the leading architects of American homes to build bookshelves into the walls.

LARRY TYE: He figured a vacuum needs to be filled. And if you had bookshelves in a home, you weren’t going to fill it with cereal boxes. You were going to fill it with books.

BRIAN: This is author Larry Tye, who wrote a biography of Bernays. He says Bernays banked on Americans’ desire to impress their friends with all the books they owned even if they had never cracked open any of those books on their shelves. The result was huge sales for publishers.

LARRY TYE: So he took a very basic behavior, and he transformed it to the point where every time I’m in someone’s home now and I see a built-in bookshelf, I think, that is Eddie Bernays.

BRIAN: American Tobacco most likely knew it would take this sort of outside-of-the-box thinking to reshape Americans’ associations with smoking. And Bernays delivered the goods. His first step was to enlist medical professionals. They gave him quotes attesting to the health benefits of smoking, particularly that it made women thinner.

Then Bernays pushed those quotes to reporters. But when I sat down with Tye, he told me that journalists and doctors weren’t the only ones that Bernays targeted in 1928.

LARRY TYE: He convinced a guy, a photographer named Nicholas Murray, to ask other photographers and artists to sing the praises of the thin. And Murray said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the slender woman who, combining suppleness and grace with slenderness, who instead of overeating sweets and desserts lights a cigarette, has created a whole new standard female loveliness.”

And Bernays actually turned that into a slogan– “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” And by doing that, he was tapping into people who he knew helped set the trends in America. So in this case, it was a photographer. In other cases, it was nutritionists and health experts. But to me, the most symbolically wonderful and the most poetic of the ways he went to work was he decided to enlist some of the most extraordinary debutantes in New York society and got these women to sign up for what they thought was striking a blow not for smoking cigarettes but for women’s liberation.

On Easter Sunday, marching down America’s Boulevard, which was Fifth Avenue, he got them to light up what he called “their torches of freedom.” So Easter Sunday, Fifth Avenue, America’s leading debutantes lighting up their torches a freedom.

BRIAN: Brilliant. But you know, what if some competitor, some knock off brand is capitalizing on all his good work? Some competing tobacco company?

LARRY TYE: They did. But he increased sales enough for the whole market. And the people who were hiring him already had the lion’s share of any market he was going into. That it worked for them. But Bernays actually decided that many women weren’t smoking Luckies because the green package with the red bullseye clashed with their favorite clothing. This was an extraordinary notion in two ways. One, that the choice of a cigarette would depend on how it went with your clothing was extraordinary enough. More chutzpa was the notion that he could actually change the taste of women in terms of the color they preferred. And he proceeded to do just that.

BRIAN: Unbelievable.

LARRY TYE: With Lucky Strikes, he decided that they would go best if the color green– if women were wearing green. And he helped make green the fashion color of the year. He could change people’s taste in everything from what they ate to what they wore. And he used every technique that he ever tried in any other format to get women smoking cigarettes.

BRIAN: To stand up for Bernays, as I recall he made the case that more propaganda, which in those days, in fairness, really meant information, would lead to more informed debate. In other words, both sides could have at it. I remember those poor candy makers. They weren’t happy about the slim is better campaign. And if I’m not mistaken, Bernays’s attitude when they struck back at him was, hey, this is good. This just creates more free publicity.

LARRY TYE: So you bring up a really important point. Bernays’s legacy was the best and the worst of what public relations and propaganda can be. The best was getting more information out there, educating the public. He really did believe in an informed public. The worst was that he didn’t want to inform that public with really straight information. He decided to educate the public with only the selected information that benefited his clients.

BRIAN: Did he use his products? Did Bernays smoke?

LARRY TYE: He had never been tempted to smoke himself. But at the very moment when he was having women march down Fifth Avenue with their torches of freedom, he was telling his young daughters at home when they saw their mother smoking a cigarette, to try to take the pack of cigarettes and– as he said– “break them in half like they were brittle bones and flush them down the toilet.” So 50 years later, when he went to work for the American Lung Association trying to wean women off the habit he had created, he said to America, basically, if I had known how dangerous this product was, I would never have helped create the addiction to it.

That would have been very convincing if he hadn’t left behind in the Library of Congress all his own records showing just how he did know. Tragically he ignored– and didn’t just ignore– covered up the evidence. And tragically, we saw the result as women’s rates of lung cancer in America started to catch up to men at the same time their rates of buying products from American Tobacco was catching up to men. The question to me is, why would he create these kinds of illusions and misapprehensions about what he was doing and then leave all the papers that prove that he was lying to the Library of Congress where some day somebody would look at them? And my only answer to that is that he was old enough when he left the papers and there were so many of them that he might not have been aware of just how damning his own evidence was on his own lying.

BRIAN: Or perhaps he was even prouder of his ability to manipulate than of his moral compass.

LARRY TYE: I didn’t think anybody could be more cynical about Eddie than I am. But I think that you could absolutely be right.

BRIAN: Well, Larry, thank you for unspinning this truly complex figure in American history for us.

LARRY TYE: It’s been great to be with you. Thank you.

BRIAN: Larry Tye is the author of The Father of Spin: Edward L Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations.

[MUSIC – PATSY CLINE, “THREE CIGARETTES IN THE ASHTRAY”]

CAMERON: Hi. My name is Cameron. I’m calling from Regina, Saskatchewan. And I’d love to see an ad in the style of the mid-century cigarette ad including health advice from a doctor about the positive benefits of listening to BackStory. Bye.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Hello, folks. Has the modern world become overwhelming? Are the choices in podcasts and radio boggling your mind? Making your head hurt? Well, the wonders of modern science can address that.

I’m in the lab there with Dr. Kenneth Johnson. Dr. Johnson, what have you been working on?

DR. KENNETH JOHNSON: Well, using the power of modern science, we have been able to extract white noise and confusion away from audio.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Oh, I do hate white noise and confusion. I simply don’t have time to consider all things.

[LAUGHTER]

DR. KENNETH JOHNSON: Yes. Well, now we have an audio condenser we call the contextor. So you get more background and a deeper knowledge without all the junk. The product is a smoother, clearer sound that’s healthier for you. We call it BackStory.

MALE SPEAKER 1: BackStory. I like the sound of that. Say, let me have a taste. Wow. That is smoother on the ears. Is it really true that BackStory will make you smarter and thinner using this contextor?

DR. KENNETH JOHNSON: Oh, yes. Medical studies have proven it.

MALE SPEAKER 1: Well, that’s all I need to know. So remember, folks, for a deeper smoother and clearer take on life, use BackStory on your local public radio station or wherever you get your podcasts.

ED: Our final story today is less about selling a product and more about generating support for an idea. Put another way, it’s about public relations, public relations for space travel.

NEIL ARMSTRONG: That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

ED: This, of course, is audio from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s first stroll on the moon, July 20, 1969. Many of us remember that date. What we don’t tend to remember as well is how rapidly the space program took shape. As late as 1949, a Gallup poll found that only 15% of Americans thought it possible that humans would set foot on the moon by the end of the century.

BRIAN: The program that made space travel a reality depended on getting Americans on board with the idea that, well, it could be a reality. And that’s where PR came in. Richard Jurek is the co-author of a new book called Marketing the Moon. He says that the concept of manned space travel, long a subject of science fiction, made its debut in the nonfiction media in 1952. That’s when Collier’s Magazine launched a major series of graphically illustrated articles by scientists making the case that space travel was just around the corner.

RICHARD JUREK: After the Collier’s publication, support instantly jump up to 38%.

ED: The first article in the Collier’s series was written by a distinguish rocket scientist named Wernher Von Braun. At that time, in the employ at the US Military, he quickly became something of a media darling.

RICHARD JUREK: And then in 1955, Von Braun partnered with Walt Disney, of all people, who was launching his Disneyland television show on TV.

ED: The very first episode was called “Man in Space,” and like the Collier’s articles, made the case that space travel was well within our grasp.

MALE SPEAKER 2: Here to introduce you to this new series is Walt Disney.

WALT DISNEY: One of a man’s oldest dreams has been the desire for space travel, to travel to other worlds. Until recently, this seemed to be an impossibility. But great, new discoveries have brought us to the threshold of a new frontier.

RICHARD JUREK: And Eisenhower saw this and, the next day, asked for a copy and showed it to everyone in the Pentagon. And just two months later, said that we will launch our first satellite in ’57. In 1958, NASA was formed. And senators even thanked Disney on the floor of the Senate for what he helped to do to convince the politicians, the military, and the American public to start an ambitious space program, which eventually led us going to the moon.

BRIAN: If public relations was key to launching NASA in the late ’50s, it remained central to the agency’s operations once it was airborne. Today, says Jurek, it’s easy to take for granted. But considering the military backgrounds of many in the program, it could just as easily have been that the Apollo program took shape in secret.

RICHARD JUREK: Under the military program– and many of the folks involved in NASA were on loan from the military– you could not discuss a project until there was what was called “fire in the tail,” until the rocket was launching in the air. NASA public affairs, starting from Walter T Bonney, the first head of Public Affairs, all the way through Julian Scheer, who ran it during the Apollo program, they were all ex-journalists who were deeply committed to the open program and who pushed to go beyond “fire in the tail.” So that when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, we saw it live and with no delay. Compared to the closed military program of space travel in the Soviet Union and to what the US program was just a few short years before, it was a phenomenal achievement.

ED: The pinnacle of NASA’s public relations efforts was, without a doubt, the live, televised broadcast from the Apollo missions. Some 3,000 journalist were on hand at Cape Canaveral for the launch of Armstrong’s mission. And NASA made a point of providing support for all of them. But had it not been for the insistence of the PR guys, Jurek says, all of those historic moments could very easily have gone unrecorded.

RICHARD JUREK: Back in the ’60s, cameras were huge. They were heavy. And the astronauts themselves, many of them, didn’t want cameras aboard. Because when you had three-person crews going on board, the commander didn’t want his crew quote unquote “performing for the cameras,” but focused on the mission. And so there was this huge internal debate that went on between public affairs, Washington, the astronauts and others. And thankfully, television won out.

MALE SPEAKER 3: Armstrong is on the moon, Neil Armstrong. 38-year-old American standing on the surface of the moon.

MALE SPEAKER 4: Well, thank you, television, for letting us watch this one.

MALE SPEAKER 3: This is something. 240,000 miles out there on the moon and we’re seeing this.

BRIAN: 94% of Americans with a TV set watched at least part of the Apollo 11 broadcast in July of 1969. And never was public support for the space program higher. For the first and only time in the 1960s, a majority of Americans polled believe the lunar program was worth its enormous cost.

But even as Armstrong and Aldrin were taking their first steps on the moon’s surface, NASA was already facing budget cuts and layoffs. And it didn’t take long before public support for the program started to wane as well.

RICHARD JUREK: The moment Buzz Aldrin declared it a magnificent desolation and the moment the astronauts brought back just a bag of rocks– there was no life, there were no precious metals, we couldn’t mine it for oil, when we discovered that the biggest thing was the rarity and the fragility of the earth, we started to look inward.

BRIAN: The idea of a return trip to this dead rock became a tougher and tougher sell.

ED: And yet, at the very same time that overall support for the space program was waning, there was one group of Americans who saw it as a winning proposition, one that was worth every cent. Advertisers.

RICHARD JUREK: It was a program that every brand wanted to be associated with. Even if you had nothing to do with the space program, you want to imply it.

MALE SPEAKER 5: When I volunteered for moon duty, they said I could have anything I wanted. So here I am, alone with Trix, the corn cereal with fruit-flavored goodness.

RICHARD JUREK: When you at something as innocuous and iconic as something like Tang–

MALE SPEAKER 6: The astronauts do some things you do. In space, they drank Tang. They mixed it like this, in a zero-G pouch because with no gravity, it would fly all over.

RICHARD JUREK: Back in the day, Tang was kind of a failed product for General Foods. And it was only after it became known through General Foods marketing of Tang as a space food that it became a runaway best seller.

MALE SPEAKER 6: Tang, chosen for the Gemini astronauts. Have a blast. Have some Tang.

ED: Tang and Trix clearly benefited from their association with NASA. But Jurek points out that food manufacturers weren’t the only ones hitching themselves to the moon missions.

RICHARD JUREK: The Boeings and the Raytheons of the world who, let’s face it, were caught up in the Vietnam War. And it’s kind of hard to be advertising your great missile that might be killing somebody. But it’s a lot easier to advertise your technological prowess when you’re getting people to the moon and taking on a peaceful effort with the technology that you’re creating and putting out into the marketplace.

BRIAN: Half a century on from the first lunar landing, three in four Americans have a favorable view of NASA. Nearly 2/3 of us believe astronauts will have landed on Mars by 2050. Yet, most of us still don’t want to pay what it would cost to get them there. And funding for space exploration continues to be cut.

ED: But the vision championed by NASA’s early public affairs department of an open, very visible space program has flourished in the social media age. Astronauts in the International Space Station point cameras at themselves.

FEMALE SPEAKER 1: A lot of people ask me how I wash my hair in space. And I thought I’d show you how I do it.

ED: At their food.

MALE SPEAKER 7: So in space, normally we just eat the asparagus. And then we eat the grits and keep things simple. Otherwise, they’re just everywhere.

ED: And occasionally, even serenade us back here on earth.

MALE SPEAKER 8: (SINGING) Ground control to Major Tom. Lock your Soyuz hatch and put your helmet on.

ED: It may be YouTube, not narrated live by Walter Cronkite for a TV audience of millions. But these days, what is?

MALE SPEAKER 8: (SINGING) Commencing countdown, engines on.

PETER: That, unfortunately, is where we’re going to have to leave things today. But we’re eager to hear your thoughts on today’s show. You can find us at backstoryradio.org. Our email address is there as our descriptions of all the shows we have in the works. Please, take a moment and share your thoughts on those shows. Whatever you do, please, don’t be a stranger.

[MUSIC – “SPACE ODDITY”]

ED: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones Emily [? Gaddock, ?] and Robert [? Arango ?]. [? Jamal ?] [? Milner ?] is our engineer. We had help from Emily [? Charnock ?] and [? Colee ?] [? Elhi. ?]

BRIAN: Special thanks this week to Alan [? Andres, ?] Richard [? Buel, ?] Carl [? Keys ?], James [? Killaris, ?] Stephen [? Fox, ?] and Bob Garfield. And to our voice actors for the BackStory ad, James [? Scales ?] and Adam [? Broch. ?] BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER 2: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

BRIAN: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.