Trade Cards

by John J. Appel


Part business card and part give-away "objet d'art" designed for mass appeal, the trade card was a hybrid between folk art and commercial art for national advertising. Trade cards touted business firms, products and services in the rapidly growing post Civil War consumer goods market, reaching the height of their vogue in the 1880's and 1890's. They declined after the turn of the century, when advertisers began to utilize nationally distributed magazines to reach selected audiences with more precisely targeted sales messages. When trade cards were at the height of their popularity, manufacturers of consumer goods, from cigars and cigarettes to stove polish and coffees, from patent medicines to cotton thread, inserted them as premiums in packaged merchandise or mailed and gave them away to build good will and attract customers.

Retailers purchased cards and imprinted their sales pitch and the firm's name and address on or under the picture, or provided a complete description of goods and services offered on the back. The Boston printing house of J.H. Bufford Sons, advertising in a Harper's Weekly of 1876, offered large commissions to agents selling their fine of "picture and chromo cards." Many of the surviving cards offered to today's collectors are specimens from such commission agents' sample trade card kits.

Trade cards should property be called advertising cards because they promoted brands or products rather than trades associated with their distributors. Their name derives from the earliest, eighteenth century cards used by English, American and European tradesmen and shopkeepers for advertising purposes. They were usually embellished with elaborate borders and pictured the sign hung over the shop door or a symbol associated with the trade. In England, the painter and cartoonist Hogarth was among those who designed trade cards.

The earliest known American trade cards date from the 1730's, but the bulk of the surviving cards, those that are of interest for this exhibit, were manufactured after 1870. Those produced after 1870, from the decade characterized by one of its critics as the "chromo civilization," are often masterpieces of the lithographer's art. They were frequently issued in sets, some including as many as fifty. They attracted attention and provided product identification for nationally traded goods. Children and adults pored over them, traded them, and pasted them into albums.

Many trade cards reflected widely shared perceptions of racial and ethnic groups during the peak years of the "old" immigration from northern and western Europe and at the onset of the "new" immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Some cards reflected the racist concepts inherent in the passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and in the legalization of "Jim Crow" segregation ordinances for blacks.

Designs ranged from simple, crude, black and white drawings on wallet-sized cards to post-card sized and larger pictures pulsating with bright, sometimes garish color. Most cards are somewhat florid by today's standards, some incorporating several typographical styles, with the words generally less provocative for today's viewer than the highly stylized pictures. Besides the flat, usually rectangular cards, there were also small booklets and mechanicals known as metamorphic cards, with pop-up or fold-over features.

Children avidly traded and collected baseball and other sports figures pictured on small cards inserted by the millions in merchandise packages by cigarette and tobacco companies. A tobacco card advertising "DUKE's Mixture" featured a humorous domestic scene in which an Irish housewife threatens her husband (in mock dialect) with a beating, should he dare to smoke anything but "DUKE's MIXTURE.".

Soap companies favored cards showing Chinese laundryman wearing "queues" (pigtails) who were at once both crafty and simple-minded. Other firms, like Lautz Brothers, showed a black baby turning white through the powerful cleansing properties of their soap. The manufacturers of Dixon Stove Polish reversed this process, showing white children turned instantly the color of their devoted black nurses through a single application of their superior blackening paste. "Wilson Packing Company's Corned Beef" produced a series of more than 30 cards, featuring Arabs, Indians, blacks, Germans, Russians, Frenchmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and others, all in a kind of Ripley Believe-It-Or-Not medley of romantic, funny, sad and astonishing images.

William G. McLaughlin, one of the first historians to take a searching look at trade cards as mirroring social attitudes and prejudices (in a 1967 issue of American Heritage) has characterized the depiction of foreign people and native races on trade cards as an "embarrassing expression of our national adolescence." Yet this ridicule of various ethnic groups, though sometimes unkind, nearly always condescending and certainly unacceptable (even shocking by today's standards), was seldom considered in poor taste in its day. Some of the cards made for local or regional (rather than national) distribution, did, however, exceed the bounds of good taste, offering the foulest kinds of racist appeals.

Many cards repeated the well worn themes, jokes and cartoons found in the pages of leading humor weeklies and presented on hundreds of vaudeville, burlesque and minstrel stages. American Indians were nearly always bonneted, painted hunters and fighters (or princesses); Spaniards romantic mandolinists and bullfighters. Every Scotsman wore a tartan; blacks danced and jigged good-naturedly when not performing domestic chores. There were grasping, money-hungry, overdressed Jews, drunken, brawling Irishmen, and fat, beer-swilling Germans with absurd accents.

The earlier trade cards with ethnic themes, from the 1870's and 1880's, seem to have been intended for largely Anglo-American, mainstream audiences which appreciated their humor (most of it fairly elementary or even aggressively sexist or chauvinistic). Immigrants and blacks--the butt of usually benign but sometimes intentionally cruel humor--were not seen as important consumers before the 1880's. Even after freed blacks and immigrants began to be invited to enjoy and purchase commodities, the appeals targeting these groups used stereotypes that are offensive by today's standards.

Finally, there are cards showing members of different ethnic groups uniting in the consumption community, on the order of automobile or telephone company advertising today, where a diverse group all join together in praise of a product or service. The "Wilson Packing Company's Corned Beef' series is one example of such a promotion, featuring over 30 different ethnic groups who, each in its own way, endorse the appeal of the product.



John J. Appel teaches at Michigan State University, and with his wife, Selma, lectures and writes about immigrant and ethnic stereotypes.


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