Only Yesterday: Chapter VII

For prodigious changes were taking place in the national diet as the result of the public’s discovery of the useful vitamin, the propaganda for a more varied menu, and the invention of better methods of shipping perishable foods.

Villages which had once prospered because they were “on the railroad” languished with economic anemia; villages on Route 61 bloomed with garages, filling stations, hot-dog stands, chicken-dinner restaurants, tearooms, tourists’ rests, camping sites, and affluence.

The interurban trolley perished, or survived only as a pathetic anachronism.

By the end of the decade, what a difference!—red and green lights, blinkers, one-way streets, boulevard stops, stringent and yet more stringent parking ordinances—and still a shining flow of traffic that backed up for blocks along Main Street every Saturday and Sunday afternoon.

Better, in fact; for at any moment you could turn a knob and get “Barney Google” or “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More” by way of respite.

The advertiser must plan elaborate national campaigns, consult with psychologists, and employ all the eloquence of poets to cajole, exhort, or intimidate the consumer into buying,—to “break down consumer resistance.”

The salesman must have the ardor of a zealot, must force his way into people’s houses by hook or by crook, must let nothing stand between him and the consummation of his sale.

The public, generally speaking, could be relied upon to regard with complacence the most flagrant assaults upon its credulity by the advertiser and the most outrageous invasions of its privacy by the salesman; for the public was in a mood to forgive every sin committed in the holy name of business.

Among the schemes suggested by the Dartnell Company of Chicago, which had more than ten thousand American business organizations subscribing to its service, was that of buying various novelties and sending them to the salesman at weekly intervals: one week a miniature feather duster with a tag urging him to “dust his territory,” another week an imitation cannon cracker with the injunction to “make a big noise,” and so on.

And Selling News awarded one of its cash prizes for “sales ideas” to a vender of electric cleaners who told the following story of commercial prowess.

Skeptics might smile, thanking themselves that they were not of the company on that interminable evening; but the advertisement stuck in their minds.

Halitosis had the power of dramatic advertising behind it, and Listerine swept to greater and greater profits on a tide of public trepidation.

In this case Scripture was apparently taken as setting a standard for business to meet—to its own pecuniary profit.

Calvin Coolidge still believed in the old American copybook maxims when almost everybody else had half forgotten them or was beginning to doubt them.

Prosperity has its undeniable advantages, and a President who is astute enough to know how to encourage it without getting himself into hot water may possibly be forgiven such complacency as appears in his Autobiography.