Preface

Folk wisdom teaches us that "a picture is worth a thousand words." American businessmen have long recognized the validity of this observation, especially in the second half of the 19th century when they began to aggressively advertise their products.

The United States has been a multicultural society from its earliest days, and businessmen have always known this. It was not until the late 19th century, however, that they combined the newly-emerging processes of photographic and color reproduction with the social fact of massive immigration and ethnic diversity to create a world of advertisements to sell their products.

Some of these advertisements were based on stereotypes of various ethnic groups. In the early years, they were usually crude and condescending images that appealed to largely Anglo-American audiences who found it difficult to reconcile their own vision of beauty, order and behavior with that of non-Anglo-Americans. Later, these images were softened because of complaints from the ethnic groups involved and the growing sophistication of the advertising industry.

Today, ethnic images tend to be positive, upbeat, even "uplifting." Indeed, in their portrayal of certain individuals as role-models for entire ethnic groups, the advertisers may have gone too far in the other direction and created stereotypes of "successful" ethnic group members that are as unrealistic as those of the previous century.

In any event, as this exhibit illustrates, for more than 100 years American businessmen and advertisers have dealt in telling ways with the reality of multicultural America and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the future. Social realities stretched into positive or negative stereotypes, sell products.

The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies is proud to present this traveling exhibit to the American public. I hope that through the presentation of this exhibit on a century of ethnic images in advertisements, we will all learn something of value about the problems, challenges, and promises of our pluralistic society.

M. Mark Stolarik
Executive Director
The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies


Introduction

This exhibition comprises ethnic images employed by the American advertising industry to sell products during the past century. While most of the images are of ethnic Americans, the boundaries between homeland and adopted land are often blurred. It is not uncommon, for instance, for traditional folk costumes to be used by the advertising industry as a way of indicating the ethnic origins of Americans, even though that form of dress was unlikely to be in general use in this country.

All of the advertisements included here use visual representations of people. Aunt Jemima, the Dutch Cleanser girl and Chiquita Banana are familiar images, and we seldom stop to think about the attitudes they exhibit toward the ethnic groups they represent. These images are stereotypes - oversimplified expressions which impose uniformity on a group without consideration of individual differences.

Ethnic groups are likely to appear more frequently in advertisements that originate in regions where their population is concentrated. (Ads featuring Mexican-American images, for example, are much more common in the West and Southwest than in the East.) Most of the images included here are from national advertising campaigns. Some ethnic groups are notable for their absence. Images of Eastern Europeans (other than Jews) rarely appear in American advertising. The reason for their absence is unclear, but it may be the result of confusion on the part of Americans over the differences between the various Slavic groups.

What appears in the exhibit is inevitably the result of a selection process. Many magazine pages were acquired from dealers who specialize in collecting, framing and selling them. Often the ones that have survived are here because of their visual interest or design quality. The same is true for many of the images that have survived in institutional collections, such as the Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Art at the New York Historical Society.

The addition of images from the entertainment industry served to enlarge considerably the number of ethnic groups represented in the exhibition. Movie posters and songsheet covers constitute a kind of "packaging" of culture. The types of associations they depict differ from, say, the association of a product like pancake flour with an image like that of Aunt Jemima. Advertisements used by the entertainment industry are usually directly tied to the content of the product represented (e.g., the plot of a film, or the lyrics of a song). But, like other forms of advertising, a movie poster or other promotional piece communicates, in an abbreviated form, important cultural messages to the prospective consumer.

A fascinating aspect of developing this exhibition has been the diversity of sources from which the images were drawn. While much of the material is from institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Library Company of Philadelphia and The Museum of Modern Mythology, other items were culled from the "collections" of the supermarket and the drugstore. In each case, the basis for selection was the ethnic content of the advertisement. Considerations of gender, age and class figured only incidentally in the selection process. While many of the images are powerful visually, the graphic quality of the advertisement was considered secondary to its ethnic content.

Although ethnic images continue to be used to sell products in today's national market, unflattering stereotypes of the groups who have been here longest are disappearing or have been replaced by more positive images. Stereotypes of newer groups, or of groups whose numbers are more limited, still persist--and provide some measure of the gap that continues to exist between appearance and reality in advertising.

Gail F. Stern


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