493787

research-article2013
JMQ90310.1177/1077699013493787Journalism & Mass Communication QuarterlyVos and Li

History
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
90(3) 559­–580
Justifying © 2013 AEJMC
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DOI: 10.1177/1077699013493787
Legitimating Discourses jmcq.sagepub.com

and the Rise of American

Advertising

Tim P. Vos1 and You Li2

Abstract
This historical discourse analysis examines how various social actors legitimated print
advertising from 1800 to 1870. The analysis shows how supporters of advertising
overcame ambivalence and hostility toward advertising. Prior to the early 1840s,
advertising was promoted by publishers, geared largely to general newspaper readers,
and restrained via subtle discursive strategies. Later, promoters of advertising—
including publishers and ad agents—tapped into socially and institutionally located
legitimating discourse to sell advertising to a wide range of American businesspersons.
The findings invite a reconsideration of conclusions made in previous advertising
histories.

Keywords
advertising history, legitimation, discourse analysis

The great surge in advertising in the mid- and late nineteenth century transformed
existing institutional arrangements and altered the habits and mores of many
Americans.1 How advertising became the legitimate practice it did in the nineteenth
century, however, is not clear, especially in light of early ambivalence or hostility
toward advertising. Much of the received wisdom on advertising history has empha-
sized the economic rationality of the actors involved.2 As manufacturing allowed for

1University of Missouri School of Journalism, Columbia, MO, USA

2Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:
Tim P. Vos, University of Missouri School of Journalism, 110 Neff Hall, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.
Email: vost@missouri.edu
560 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

economies of scale, manufacturers looked to advertising to expand markets and

thereby move their plants’ excess capacity. Advertisers, it is believed, played the lead
role in the expansion and legitimacy of advertising.3 However, these histories have
marshaled little convincing evidence in support of this explanation. Instead, a logic of
explanation poses as evidence: Because rational actors are assumed to pursue their
economic self-interest, we presume nineteenth-century businesspeople would have
logically embraced, or even instigated, the growth of advertising.4
Although advertising is largely understood today as the primary means of balanc-
ing supply and demand, nineteenth-century Americans had other means of balancing
supply and demand at their disposal.5 That advertising has proven over the years to be
the preferred means for regulating supply and demand does not mean that nineteenth-
century social actors had the wherewithal to arrive at the same conclusion. Indeed, it
would be unsurprising if economic actors proved reluctant to forego established rou-
tines for unfamiliar methods.6
There is reason to question whether social actors can easily transcend their cultural
and institutional situation and reliably recognize their most rational courses of action.7
Some economic actors will literally choose to starve rather than violate cultural con-
structs of what is normal, right, or wise.8 Likewise, if advertising was seen as abnor-
mal, wrong, or unwise, one might anticipate that some, perhaps many, social actors
would be reluctant to embrace, let alone champion, advertising. Indeed, some histories
point to early contempt for advertising. As Fox put it, “Everyone deplored advertis-
ing.”9 Readers balked at the bunkum the ads contained, newspapers and ad agents
denied moral or legal responsibility for ad content, and advertisers had their moral and
financial soundness questioned if they were perceived to need to advertise.10
What remains to be documented is how advertising overcame such antipathy and
emerged as a dominant, legitimate practice. This study focuses on the ways in which
early advocates of advertising sold the very idea and practice of advertising. In the
process, the study comes in contact, often implicitly, with discourse that was critical
of advertising and with how that discourse was met with attempts at the legitimation
of advertising. Indeed, the explanations offered for the arrival of institutions can be
their own form of legitimation. To argue that an institution emerges due to the ratio-
nality of historical actors is to suggest something about the rationality of the institution
itself.11

Framework and Literature

This study recognizes that individuals navigate in a social world structured by social
institutions.12 Culturally situated institutions, Hall and Taylor observed, influence
“what one can imagine oneself doing in a given context.”13 The meaning systems,
scripts, and symbols that institutions provide are the means by which individuals rec-
ognize or interpret a situation and then respond. As Hall and Taylor stated, “The rela-
tionship between the individual and the institution, then, is built on a kind of ‘practical
reasoning’ whereby the individual works with and reworks the available institutional
templates to devise a course of action.”14 Rational calculation is typically bound by
received meaning systems, symbols, and scripts: Historical actors cannot, for example,
Vos and Li 561

be expected to reliably maximize efficiency or to identify advertising as the best way

to coordinate supply and demand.15
A number of social institutions had a role in advertising’s growing legitimacy. An
institution, as it forms and changes, is typically subject to the influence of other institu-
tions.16 Another institution may have the cultural legitimacy to serve as a model for
some actions, norms, and scripts.17 Thus, institutions emerge and change by grafting
practices, norms, scripts, and symbols from other institutions, thereby legitimating the
new institution or its new practices. Symbols and scripts constitute a kind of discourse
that reflects an actor’s location within meaning-making institutions.18 Discourse, then,
plays a central role in creating the legitimacy of certain practices, and it may also play
a key role in forging the legitimacy of advertising.
While some studies make passing reference to the discourse of selling advertising,
advertising histories generally emphasize other factors in explaining advertising’s
rapid rise in the mid-nineteenth century. The growth of manufacturing and transporta-
tion in the 1830s and 1840s expanded productivity and reshaped business transactions.
This industrial revolution required advertising to introduce sellers in America’s major
industrial centers to buyers in distant markets.19 “With concentrated production the
goods of one section came to the people of another,” Burt said, “and with transporta-
tion came the need for some form of publicity to secure the sale of the goods at their
destination.”20 As Sivulka put it, “Advertising provided American manufacturers with
a way to stimulate demand for their output.”21 Norris concluded that these explana-
tions are naïve at best, but still argues that advertising owed its growth to manufactur-
ers.22 He argued that manufacturers sought market power and used advertising to gain
the upper hand on distributors. Some have suggested this growth in manufacturing
occurred later in the century, but that it nonetheless precipitated a growth in advertis-
ing.23 Fox concluded that after the Civil War, “an explosion in manufacturing capacity
brought new [advertising] possibilities.”24 Norris argued that advertising evolved into
a full-fledged institution only around 1870, when manufacturers began to use advertis-
ing to brand their products—a move designed to go around wholesalers and directly to
the ultimate buyers, the consumers.25 According to Rotzoll, the emergence of full-
blown advertising represented an attempt by manufacturers to avoid price competition
through differentiation of output.26
Other ad historians point to other factors in advertising’s ascent. Laird concluded
that retailers played the central role in advertising’s expansion.27 Chandler also under-
scored retailers’ role in changes to advertising, and, like others, emphasized depart-
ment stores’ role in advertising’s growth and legitimacy.28 Baldasty and Presbrey,
meanwhile, pointed to the growing commercialization of the press as key to advertis-
ing’s growth.29 While most newspapers had been political organs at the turn of the
nineteenth century, newspapers would increasingly become commercial organs
throughout the century.
While all these factors no doubt played a role in advertising’s eventual growth, they
fall short of a satisfying explanation for at least two related reasons.30
First, while advertising clearly played an important role in stimulating demand for
excess production, nineteenth-century businesspeople had other means at their dis-
posal. An array of middlemen, factors, and brokers had long served as marketers for
562 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

goods and produce.31 Through the mid-nineteenth century, factors and commission
merchants helped wholesalers who wanted to enter distant markets or seek buyers.32
These middlemen developed formidable skills at adapting to changing market condi-
tions and developments in transportation and communication.33 Meanwhile, traveling
salespeople also served as middlemen between manufacturers or wholesalers and local
retailers.34 The salespeople’s promotion and selling skills influenced the persuasion
techniques of subsequent advertising professionals.35 That advertising may have even-
tually proven to be the better marketing option does not negate the fact that businesses
had trusted options at their disposal to balance demand with supply. Given the institu-
tional routines of businesses, it cannot be assumed that they would easily abandon
these methods for print advertising.
Second, while many buyers and sellers may have welcomed the use of advertising
in the nineteenth century, many others had an opposite reaction. The industrial revolu-
tion, for all its gains, had also produced defeat and displacement, leading to distrust in
the legitimacy of the marketplace.36 Advertising, Fox concluded, did not comport to
older, genteel values:

Advertising was considered an embarrassment—the retarded child, the wastrel relative, the
unruly servant kept backstairs and never allowed into the front parlor. A firm risked its credit
rating by advertising; banks might take it as a confession of financial weakness.37

Some clearly saw advertising as illegitimate. Schudson argued that most newspa-
pers remained somewhat hostile to advertising until the 1870s.38 In the early nine-
teenth century, publishers made little attempt to lure newspaper advertising.39 Many
newspaper publishers set limits on the amounts and kinds of advertising they would
print.40 Publishers, advertisers, and ad agents all avoided taking responsibility for
advertising.41 Merchants and others simply remained unconvinced of the effectiveness
of advertising.42 To the extent that other marketing channels had greater legitimacy
with businesspersons and consumers, one could reasonably suspect that proponents of
advertising would have to convince reluctant parties of the value, wisdom, and respect-
ability of using advertising.43 Fullerton concluded that advertising only became
respectable among businessmen in the 1870s.44 Respectability was in no way inevitable—
the growing legitimacy of advertising was an historical, discursive accomplishment.45
Thus, this study intends to explore the legitimizing discourse that arose around adver-
tising during parts of the nineteenth century.
Some scholarship has alluded to the discourse, or the lack thereof, about the value
of advertising. One of the earliest forms of legitimating advertising, according to
Presbrey, could be found in the use of “advertiser” in the titles of newspapers—they
“help(ed) sell the idea of advertising,” even before 1800.46 Pope concluded that ad
agents ultimately produced little discourse about the benefits of advertising. As late as
the Civil War era, “(a)dvertising men had done nothing to explain or justify their work
to the public or to most businessmen.”47 Pope said ad agents had more pedestrian
aims—“trying to sell their clients’ products, not to peddle ideology.”48 Holland
described some of the reasons to advertise that Volney Palmer, generally considered
Vos and Li 563

the first advertising agent, put forward in his promotional materials for his advertising
agency.49 Nevertheless, a systematic analysis of discourse about the legitimacy of
advertising is lacking. Therefore, this study asks the following questions: What legiti-
mizing or delegitimizing discourse did proponents and opponents of advertising put
forward from 1800 to 1870? What discursive strategies were used? How, if at all, did
the discourse and discursive strategies change during this time period?

Method
This study examines the historical record for the publically circulated discourse about
advertising from 1800 to 1870. The time period takes in the early moments of the
industrial revolution, the time of the first advertising agents, and extends to the point
at which, according to the literature, advertising had become institutionalized in the
United States. The aim is reconstructing something of what the proponents and oppo-
nents of advertising had to say.
This discourse is retrieved from a variety of sources. Much of the data come from
searchable databases, such as NewsBank, American Periodicals Series, and the
Nineteenth-Century Periodical collection. The search looked to identify any news or
editorial content that addressed advertising. While the initial search generated many
thousands of items, a closer examination reduced the number considerably.50 Slightly
fewer than 500 items were analyzed for this discourse analysis. The data reflect a
diversity of publication types, places of publication, and periods of publication. Other
sources of data are pamphlets, directories, and other ephemera from advertising agents.
These materials were collected from a variety of sources, but mostly from the collec-
tions of the American Antiquarian Society.51
This study employs discourse analysis, a way of interpreting texts in their histori-
cal, social, and institutional context.52 By noting the use of voice, labels, inclusion, and
omission, discourse analysis opens up texts’ discursive themes and strategies.53 The
aim is to understand how the texts’ own words do or do not play a role in legitimating
advertising practices, actors, and institutions. The description of the texts’ discourse
that follows is arranged thematically and chronologically. Where the texts tap into a
historically potent legitimating discourse, that context is noted. Where the texts use
discursive strategies that borrow from social and institutional scripts, symbols, and
meaning systems, those are also noted.

Discourse about Advertising

Discourse about advertising clearly changed over the course of the seven-decade
period. As the analysis will illustrate, prior to the 1830s, publishers, or anyone else,
made only modest efforts to promote advertising. But in the 1830s, the discourse
began to evolve—selling advertising was restrained, but nevertheless promoted by
publishers, and geared largely to general newspaper readers. Starting in the early
1840s, advertising was more openly advocated, promoted by newly emergent ad
agents, such as Volney Palmer, as well as publishers, and aimed largely at
564 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

businesspeople. While the discourse evolved slowly over the seven decades, 1842 is
used here as something of a turning point.

Selling Advertising Prior to 1842

With rare exceptions, the earliest mentions of advertising offered little in the way of
actually promoting the practice. Advertisers, like subscribers, were simply asked to
patronize the paper out of loyalty to the newspaper’s cause.54 One editor promised to
print “pure and unadulterated republican principles,” and hence his like-minded
friends would “find it in their interest, and at the same time promote [the editor’s], by
advertising” in his paper.”55 Thus, in asking for advertisers’ patronage, publishers
understated, or left unstated, any benefits to the advertiser. Nevertheless, the portrayal
of advertising as loyalty to a partisan cause functioned as its own kind of legitimation.
The pitch of loyalty to a partisan cause resonated with a deeply rooted early-century
cultural and political value.56 But partisan patronage from advertisers also came under
attack as antidemocratic. An 1803 essay argued that “monarchial papers” had little
actual support from citizens, but stayed in business because “monarchists residing
principally in towns, and having a command of the advertising custom, are enabled to
support such traitorous publications.”57 Here advertising was portrayed as an affront to
democratic values, at least in this particular case.
Even in the age of the political press, many mercantile papers in the early nine-
teenth century bore “advertiser” in their titles.58 But even these “advertiser” papers
avoided explicit promotion, or even discussion, of advertising’s benefits. A Virginia
newspaper asked its friends to “recommend the Advertiser to such as may hereafter
have occasion to advertise, as a vehicle, which from its extensive circulation, holds out
greater advantages to them than any other in this place.”59 The paper left unsaid what
those advantages might be. Non-“advertisers” did the same—touting their ad columns
as “highly beneficial to the Mercantile part of the community,” without enumerating
those benefits.60 Meanwhile, “advertisers” and political papers alike saw advertising
as such a low priority that some routinely excluded ads from an issue when news was
plentiful and space was limited.61
As far as many newspapers were concerned, advertising operated on the margins of
respectability. It was nice to have “advertising friends,” as they were frequently called,
but newspapers could not appear to be too eager to appeal for advertising.62 In an 1801
quarrel between rival newspapers, the publishers exchanged charges, with all the
moral disdain commonly heaped on those who engaged in vice, that the other had
“solicited” advertisements.63 Even with friends like these, advertisers had their ene-
mies as well. Advertising, especially when it came from distant parts, was sometimes
portrayed as the province of “quack doctors,” exploited by those who could not build
their reputations on a record of superior local service.64
However, in at least one early nineteenth-century case, a New Jersey newspaper
openly touted the advantages of advertising. The paper, pointing to its own broad cir-
culation, argued that the farmer could get better prices at auction; the mechanic, “by
incurring this trifling expense, may obtain more business and better customers”; and
Vos and Li 565

the merchant could “extend his trade.”65 But this was exceedingly rare. For the most
part, publishers referred to advertising as a “favor” to the paper, rather than a benefit
to the advertiser.66 Most advocates of advertising—namely, publishers—appealed to
political values rather than commercial values in legitimating advertising. Opponents
of advertising did much the same—couching criticism in a political, moral discourse.
While the discourse of advertising as a favor to publishers persisted into the 1820s
and 1830s, publishers would eventually begin to talk more openly about advertising’s
benefits. Almost all of that discourse in the 1820s and 1830s came in the same form:
someone lost a valuable item, paid for an advertisement to announce the lost item, and
the item was returned. For example, a gentleman lost a valuable diamond and adver-
tised in The Providence Journal. Several months later, a reader saw the advertisement,
found the diamond, and returned it.67 Under the headline, “Advantages of advertis-
ing,” a Portland, Maine, newspaper wrote, “a person in Hartland, advertised two stray
colts in this paper in August last, which led to their discovery in a manner that shows
the importance of advertising a lost animal.”68 The recovery of any number of lost
items—from wallets to livestock—provided an occasion to promote the benefits of
advertising.69 One 1831 newspaper item simply concluded, without the mention of any
particular scenario or person, that advertisements helped restore many lost things to
their owners.70 As another paper put it later in the decade, having a lost item returned
amounted to “one of the most remarkable instances of the benefit of advertising.”71
In a time in which reader-supplied advertising was common, it should come as no
surprise that pitches about the benefits of advertising would be geared to the general
population.72 However, a survey of the ads in these newspapers shows very few actual
ads for lost items.73 Most ads, either from merchants or residents, were for the sale of
household items. That newspapers promoted the benefits of advertising almost entirely
in terms of lost items might simply reflect a desire to generate more “lost and found”
advertising. The more likely explanation is that this constituted a discursive strategy
for promoting advertising’s benefits without appeals to crass commercial or profit
motives. A Massachusetts paper employed a similar strategy by using a man’s suc-
cessful advertisement for a wife to extol the virtues of advertising.74 Readers were
being encouraged to think about the effectiveness of advertising, and by implication
about the propriety of advertising, without directly engaging the criticisms of
advertising.
It is also striking that so many newspapers engaged in essentially the same discur-
sive strategy to promote advertising. One plausible reason that newspapers made the
same pitch is that postal policies allowed printers to exchange papers through mail,
and hence printers regularly borrowed from each other.75 For example, multiple pub-
lishers reprinted, sometimes up to a year later, the story of the lost diamond that first
ran in The Providence Journal.76
Publishers only occasionally promoted the benefits of advertising directly to busi-
nesspeople. The few appeals that addressed businesspersons—almost exclusively
retailers—focused on advertising’s benefit to their basic operations. A merchant
advertised for a boy to help in his store and was able to hire a boy soon thereafter.77 A
merchant, who was unable to collect his debts, advertised that his account book would
566 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

be sold at auction and very few accounts remained unsettled when the auction day
arrived.78 The discourse stressed that advertising was effective, but avoided open dis-
cussion of advertising’s use to generate more sales. This comported with reticence to
talk openly about profit motives that were common in the early decades of the nine-
teenth century.79
Thus, this oblique discourse on the benefits of advertising blunted open criticism.
No doubt early advocates of advertising occasionally ventured into making bold
claims.80 But open discussion of advertising was just as likely to include criticism of
the practice as praise. An essay on advertising printed in a northeastern newspaper in
1838 argued that regular advertising meets “with a considerable share of success.” But
the essay also concluded that “by far the most important effect of advertising, is one of
an indirect nature; it conveys the impression that the party—pretending or not pretend-
ing, quackish or not quackish—is anxious for business.”81 And being anxious for busi-
ness was not a virtue—it put legitimate businesses on the same level as quacks and
pretenders.
However, attitudes about making profits began to change in the 1830s.82 This
change is borne out by two items from the 1830s. In the first item, a Massachusetts
newspaper told of a Kentucky merchant who was surprised to receive a large order
from a buyer in Missouri:

He could but admit the advertisement which he had inserted more for fashion than for any
belief in its certain utility, had been of immense advantage. To young Mechanics, and other
business men, we say, encourage the press with your subscriptions and advertisements.83

The story suggests that even though the merchant advertised mostly out of patron-
age of his local paper, the ad also increased the merchant’s own business. This
amounted to a subtle discursive strategy: without lauding self-interested gain, the story
emphasized an advantage to be gained from advertising.
The second item was an 1833 article about the differences in advertising practices
in Philadelphia and New York. It is the proverbial exception that proves the rule.84 The
essay was highly unusual in its promotion of advertising, while acknowledging a
reluctance to talk openly about business matters. The article warned that a failure to
advertise was not only a portent of business failure to come, but it was also a social and
moral failure. The article called on Philadelphia merchants to change their attitudes
about advertising. The Philadelphian pointed out that New York merchants showed
no reluctance to advertise. Advertisements in newspapers serve as “a branch of the
commercial system of a large city. They are vast saving machines to traders.”85 The
article describes the penny and mercantile papers of New York as testaments to the
business vitality of their city: “Over speculation is an evil which is certainly injurious
to individuals, but an active speculative spirit is exceedingly beneficial to masses, to
cities, to whole districts.”86 Advertisements were considered one of the principal
means that enabled New York to dominate the nation’s domestic trade, the writer con-
tended. “The mode in Philadelphia is altogether different. We seek concealment—we
dread publicity—it is either thought too expensive, or not thought of at all.”87
Vos and Li 567

Even though the essay is an open endorsement of advertising, it carefully sells

advertising as a benefit for the whole community rather than solely the individual
merchant. A nearly identical article ran in Philadelphia newspapers three years later,
again lauding advertising’s contribution to New York’s economy.88 The discourse
spread to Portland, Maine, and Boston, where publishers challenged their own mer-
chants to learn from New York’s success.89 Alexis de Tocqueville observed that
Americans spoke relatively openly about private economic gain in the 1830s; how-
ever, this open talk was apparently slow to make it into print.90 Efforts to sell mer-
chants on the benefits of advertising, still rare in the 1830s, would become commonplace
in the following decades.

Selling Advertising, 1842 and Beyond

Proponents of advertising in the early 1840s clearly wanted the general public’s
approval of advertising practices, but the overwhelming amount of their discourse was
aimed at convincing businesspeople to embrace advertising more fully. Advertising’s
advocates—largely publishers and ad agents—conceded only that advertising was not
sufficiently understood.91 But when pioneering ad agent Volney Palmer promoted the
benefits of advertising in 1842, rather than repeat the same old arguments about the
merits of ads, the pitch addressed a new kind of advertiser and a new kind of advertis-
ing.92 The new kind of advertiser was enterprising, and the new kind of advertising
was systematic.
To the proponents of advertising, there were two kinds of businesspeople: old style
businesspeople, who felt entitled to public patronage, but deviated little from age-old
traditions; and the new breed of businesspeople, who forged their way through their
energy and innovation. In a word, the new businesspeople were enterprising. With the
industrial revolution reshaping American commerce, businesspeople in the 1840s
began to define their credibility in their claims of enterprise.93 The advocates of adver-
tising borrowed liberally from the social script of enterprise to lend legitimacy to
advertising. By the 1840s, America’s businesspeople had begun to herald their endeav-
ors as central to national vitality. It was their enterprising spirit that was making the
nation great. As one magazine essayist put it, “American enterprise” flourished,
“untrammelled by ancient customs, uncurbed by despotic institutions or royal monop-
olies.”94 “Enterprise” or “American enterprise” became the buzzwords for the distinc-
tive American business spirit.95
Palmer’s early announcement encouraged the “enterprising mechanic, manufac-
turer, [and] merchant” to extend their business by advertising their goods.96 Palmer
was suggesting that it was the “enterprising portion of the community” or “enterpris-
ing businessmen” who would want to advertise.97 Palmer himself would be lauded by
a publisher for his enterprise, for “infus(ing) life and animation into the business oper-
ations of our country.”98
Publishers would continue to tap into the legitimizing discourse of enterprise for
years to come. One paper argued in 1845 that “(w)ere it not for the advantages offered
by the press many who are now thought to be enterprising would stand in idleness
568 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

behind their counters. Their true enterprise consists in their perception of the benefits
of advertising.”99 In other words, the very use of advertising was what constituted the
enterprise. The publishers of Graham’s Magazine made the same point in 1852 and
underscored the argument that there are two kinds of businesspeople.

Nearly all the men about here, who never advertised, have taken in their signs, shut up shop,
been taken in themselves and have gone to California—the dupes of the very advertising in
the newspapers, which they scorned while fortune was all around them.100

The magazine’s essay warned the nonadvertisers to “Wake up!” The magazine
warned the “drowsy head” to become an advertiser and hence an “enterprising busi-
nessman ready for customers.”101 To be an enterprising businessperson took intellec-
tual energy102—it took intellect to “keep pace with the times.”103 As another publisher
put it, “The man who refused to advertise, is behind the age.” But everyone knows that
a “small and insignificant business becomes a magnificent enterprise” when it adver-
tises.104 As V. B. Palmer’s New Yorker put it, a lack of enterprise could lead to “certain
death to those who do not seize the advantages of order, punctuality, prudence, econ-
omy, and a liberal use of the means of advertising.”105
Discourse on advertising acknowledged that some businesses remained reluctant to
advertise.106 But this confounding reluctance could be explained away as a sign that
those businesses were stuck in the old ways, what one newspaper called “twenty-five
years behind the age.”107 Failure to advertise, the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley
argued in a prize-winning essay in Palmer’s businessmen’s almanac, is a sign of “gross
incompetency and ruinous prodigality” and an aid to one’s “more enterprising and
capable rivals.”108 Expressing the same sentiment, an 1850 pamphlet on Palmer’s
advertising agency concluded, “A half-way and irresolute advertiser is rather a benefit
than otherwise to his more enterprising and persevering competitor.”109 The conclu-
sion ties together the two arguments advanced by the advocates of advertising—the
new kind of advertiser was enterprising, and the new kind of advertising was system-
atic. If advertising had been flawed in the past, one newspaper argued, it was because
it was not the new, systematic kind of advertising being promoted in the new, “enlight-
ened age.”110 Systematic advertising, while almost never clearly defined, is variously
portrayed as thorough, judicious, and consistent.111
Rather than carefully define systematic advertising, and thus give critics a clear
target, Volney Palmer offered an analogical, instead of an analytical, argument.
Palmer’s associate and eventual competitor, Samuel Pettengill, described how Palmer
pitched systematic advertising in the early years of his business.

He would ask men if they had ever tried [advertising], and if, as in one case the reply was
“Yes, I once spent ten dollars that way and I never received a dollar in return,” he then told
the old story of the Indian who had heard that sleeping on feathers made a bed softer and
more comfortable, and he tried it by buying a handful of feathers, and, putting them on a
smooth rock, lay down on them, but “didn’t rest any better, but was covered with the blank
things in the morning”—that feathers were “no good”—“they are a white man’s humbug.”112
Vos and Li 569

The discursive strategy is transparent enough. As Pettengill himself summarized, a

lot is more than a little, and to think otherwise was to be associated with a marginal-
ized other.
That systematic advertising was not systematically defined speaks to the discursive
strategy at play. To call a business practice systematic was simply a matter of using the
contemporaneous businessperson’s language. Charles Babbage had sold Americans
on the virtues of manufacturing as the system of manufacturing.113 Others simply
called this the “American system.”114 Babbage’s ideas about the systematic division of
labor and large-scale production had become the language of the new businessper-
son.115 To label any business practice as systematic was to confer on it the legitimacy
of the rationalized system of production that was at the heart of America’s industrial
growth.116 When Palmer argued that systematic advertising reflected the “grand prin-
ciple of the subdivision of labor,” it was as near a direct reference to Babbage’s ideas
as one would expect to find in this time period.117 Advertising, Palmer announced,
“has now become systematized.”118 Essay after essay and ad after ad promoted adver-
tising as systematic advertising. The knowledgeable, up-to-date businessperson who
used systematic advertising, proponents argued, would usher in a new business era,
when the multitudes of businesspeople each doing a small trade would be replaced by
what one newspaper said was “a few engaged in traffic, doing each a very large busi-
ness; thus liberating a great proportion of the agents, and servitors of Commerce to be
engaged thenceforth in Productive Labor.”119
In a similar fashion, testimonials promoted Palmer’s ad system as a kind of
machinery—“machinery which it might be for your interest to build, just for your own
business, if it did not exist.”120 The newspaper advertisement was described as a
machine, and if “not altogether a machine of making money,” then something very
much like it.121
Palmer’s 1849 almanac printed an essay by Greeley praising the great, new vitality
of modern American business and crediting systematic advertising as the “chief” rea-
son for such a beneficial change.122 The discourse took root. When a New York busi-
ness announced in 1865 that it had adopted the “new and popular plan of extensive and
systematic advertising,” it was promoting its own legitimacy.123 Such an announce-
ment also underscored the success of the discursive strategy by the proponents of
advertising. After relentlessly associating systematic advertising with sound business
practice, businesses had come to promote their soundness by claiming to be systematic
advertisers. Whereas advertising might be taken as a sign of moral or fiscal weakness
in earlier times, the proponents of advertising now asserted the opposite. “It gives a
merchant respectability,” a magazine said.124 Or, as one essay put it, “When a man
does not advertise his goods, it is generally supposed that their quality is not such as
should be brought under notice of the public.”125
Advocates of advertising used other legitimating discourse. Systematic advertising
was also depicted as scientific.126 One advocate promised, “Advertising has now
become systematized, reduced almost to a science.”127 This discursive tactic would
become more common in later years as scientific disciplines grew in legitimacy.128
Advocates also used ennobling metaphors to convince reluctant businesspeople to
570 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

pursue systematic advertising. One of the more poetic proponents argued, “Advertising
is not so much the feet and head and lever of trade, as the wings to the cap, wings to
the sandals, and wings to the rod of Mercury.”129 Other metaphors naturalized system-
atic advertising. One paper compared an investment in systematic advertising with the
investment of patience and effort required of an apple farmer before the first crop
would ever be harvested.130
Conversely, the metaphors could convey the foolishness of failing to advertise. The
businessman who clung to “unreasonable opposition” to advertising was like the man
who mistakenly ate the wrong end of an asparagus spear and then stubbornly refused
to acknowledge his mistake, Palmer’s almanac said. “(T)here are some who refuse to
avail themselves of the advantages accruing from advertising in distant papers, and
rather prefer to chew the tough end of the stalk.”131
Some of the discursive practices of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s echoed those of
previous decades, when proponents praised advertising for helping return lost items
and secure wives for bachelors. However, even these well-worn practices took on a
new style. An 1847 essay on the benefits of advertising noted that a gentleman had
advertised for a wife and received seventy-five applications.132 Advertising did not
just meet needs; it produced abundance. The promise of abundance would become a
prominent theme in discourse about advertising in the 1840s and beyond. One propo-
nent asserted that advertising was “undoubtedly the source of all wealth.”133 Another
warned advertisers that the tide of fortune would become a flood.134 A prize-winning
essayist claimed that advertising had quadrupled his fortune.135 A businessman claimed
advertising earned him $50,000 in four years and could produce a “stream of gold” for
others as well.136 Not to be outdone, a liberal user of advertising promised it had “made
me a million dollars.”137 Another story told of a reluctant advertiser who tried advertis-
ing out of desperation and crowds came and bought his entire stock.138 Advocates of
advertising no longer hid the economic self-interest that advertising served, and hence
they offered a full-throated discourse on the efficacy of advertising.
Proponents of advertising had significant institutional advantages with the appear-
ance of new and better venues for their messages. Mass circulation newspapers in
urban areas became strong advocates for advertising, and their essays on advertising
were widely recirculated by smaller papers.139 These nineteenth-century gatekeepers
gave almost no voice to the opponents of advertising; in fact, opposition to advertising
was framed almost entirely by the advocates of advertising. Proponents acknowledged
only those arguments—for example, that advertising did not pay—that they believed
they could win.140 If businesspeople had viable alternatives to advertising, such as
middlemen, factors, and other agents, the advocates of advertising simply did not
mention them.
Palmer and other ad agents produced an array of materials to carry the message of
advertising’s legitimacy.141 Palmer launched a series of newspapers in Boston, New
York, and Philadelphia that promoted enterprising business practice, newspaper read-
ership, and, of course, systematic advertising.142 Samuel Pettengill, one of the leading
ad agents of the 1850s and 1860s, launched Pettengill’s Reporter in the 1850s and also
used it to promote advertising.143 Opponents of advertising, such as they were, had a
Vos and Li 571

narrower institutional base from which to launch their criticisms. Meanwhile, propo-
nents of advertising practiced what they preached. They put great effort, creativity,
and expense into selling advertising.

Conclusion
This study demonstrates that discourse about the propriety of advertising underwent
significant changes from 1800 to 1870. In the first decades of the nineteenth century,
advertisements, like subscriptions, amounted to little more than patronage from like-
minded friends or a favor to publishers. Advertising was sold to the general public in
the 1820s and 1830s as a way to recover lost items or to storekeepers as a way to hire
help. Discourse about economic gain was muted. Even when promoting its benefits,
early proponents of advertising seemed deferential to an imaginary interlocutor who
was critical of advertising. However, the efforts to sell advertising pivoted in the
1840s. The advertising discourse of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s was aimed squarely
at businesspeople. Advertising’s advocates used newly emergent social and occupa-
tional scripts of the business community. They tapped into the legitimating discourse
of systematic manufacturing and business operations to emphasize that a new kind of
advertising befitted a new kind of enterprising businessperson. And given their role as
gatekeepers, the increasingly commercialized press could largely set the terms of the
debate, portraying reticence about advertising as a relic of an earlier, less enterprising
time. Skepticism about advertising was portrayed as simply naïve or associated with a
marginalized other. Ultimately, the discourse asserted that advertising was a normal,
right, and wise practice.
By tapping into the legitimating discourse of enterprise and systematic business
practice, advocates of advertising exhibited no more purposeful calculation than their
opponents. Both had their rational calculation bound by their historical, social, or
institutional location. The clearest evidence for this is that the loudest advocates for
systematic advertising, such as Volney Palmer, struggled to define what was system-
atic about systematic advertising. Palmer and other proponents of systematic advertis-
ing simply used the language and ideas of Charles Babbage, and the subsequent
generation of businesspeople, to give expression to their ideas about advertising.
These discursive strategies comport with how Sewell argues legitimacy is conferred—
historical actors in an emerging institution borrow from the meaning systems and
social scripts of other, legitimate institutions.144
The literature has emphasized that nineteenth-century advertisers—the business-
men with products or services to sell—championed advertising as a way to balance
supply and demand.145 The evidence that advertisers promoted advertising only comes
from the end of the period of study. While it is no doubt partly an artifact of the docu-
ments this study explored, the evidence suggests publishers and ad agents sought to
sell advertising to reluctant businesspeople who had to be convinced of the efficacy
and propriety of advertising. The study finds some support, particularly from discourse
of the early nineteenth century, for Fox’s claim that advertising was seen as an
unseemly practice.146 However, none of the documents located for this study expressed
572 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

the level of disdain that Fox reported. Antipathy to advertising was a pre-1840s expres-
sion. Likewise, this study found little of the hostility to advertising that Schudson says
existed in newspapers as late as 1870.147 Some documents expressed qualms with
advertising agents, but none expressed newspapers’ hostility to advertising practice.
This study generally supports Schudson’s conclusion that the 1830s witnessed a
shift from a “liberal mercantilist republic, still cradled in aristocratic values, family,
and deference, to an egalitarian market democracy, where money had new power, the
individual new standing, and the pursuit of self-interest new honor.”148 However, this
study suggests that shift still appeared to be subtle in the 1830s. Economic gains that
advertising might bring were promoted as beneficial to the community, rather than to
the advertiser. Only in the 1840s and beyond did the pursuit of an advertiser’s self-
interest become salient in the advertising discourse. The study’s findings do not sup-
port Pope’s argument that ad practitioners “had done nothing to explain or justify their
work” and that they did not “peddle ideology.”149 Through an array of specialty publi-
cations and newspaper and magazine essays on advertising, proponents pitched the
expanded and systematic use of advertising. Advertising discourse invoked a newly
rationalized division of labor, which was central to the modern American business
enterprise.
Historical discourse analysis, for all that it adds to an understanding of advertis-
ing’s emergence in the nineteenth century, has its limitations. The kinds of documents
that remain in the historical record are bound to favor one side of the discursive battle.
More is likely to be heard from proponents than opponents of advertising. Nevertheless,
research can provide a sense of how the discourse about advertising changed in the
nineteenth century and how proponents legitimated advertising as a normal, proper,
and wise practice.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
  1. Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Terence H. Qualter, Advertising and Democracy in
the Mass Age (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising
Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A
Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); James D.
Norris, Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920 (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1990). Note that all references to advertising in this study are to paid
placements in advertising columns.
Vos and Li 573

 2. F. Allen Burt, American Advertising Agencies: An Inquiry into Their Origin, Growth,
Functions and Future (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940); Donald R. Holland, “Volney
B. Palmer (1799-1864): The Nation’s First Advertising Agency Man,” Journalism
Monographs 44 (May 1976): 1-40; Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New
York: Basic Books, 1983); Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929); Juliann Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A
Cultural History of American Advertising (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998).
 3. Burt, American Advertising Agencies; Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising; Presbrey,
The History and Development of Advertising.
  4. For more on “logics of explanation,” see Tim P. Vos, “Explaining the Origins of Public
Relations: Logics of Historical Explanation,” Journal of Public Relations Research 23 (2,
2011): 119-40.
  5. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977); Fred Mitchell Jones, Middlemen in the Domestic Trade
of the United States, 1800-1860 (Urbana: The University of Illinois, 1937).
  6. William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society,
1750-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
  7. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Avery Hunt, “Introduction,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn:
New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Avery
Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1-34; Walter W. Powell and Paul
DiMaggio, eds. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991); Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture; William H. Sewell Jr., Logics
of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
  8. See Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture. Reddy shows that hand weavers literally went to
an early grave by refusing to adapt when mechanization overtook the textile industry.
  9. Stephen R. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators,
1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 15.
10. Fox, The Mirror Makers; T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Rise of American Advertising,” The
Wilson Quarterly 7 (5, 1983): 156-67; William M. O’Barr, “A Brief History of Advertising
in America,” Advertising and Society Review 11 (1, 2010), http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed
September 1, 2012).
11. Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New
Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44 (5, 1996): 936-57; Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and
Method in Historical Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also
Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and
Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012), for a discussion of how scholarly research
can act as a form of legitimation in its own right.
12. Mary C. Brinton and Victor Nee, The New Institutionalism in Sociology (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001); Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New
Institutionalisms”; B. Guy Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science: The “New
Institutionalism,” 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2005); Skocpol, Vision and Method in
Historical Sociology.
13. Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” 948.
14. Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” 949.
15. John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure As
Myth and Ceremony,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter
W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 41-62.
574 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

16. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New
York: Basic Books, 2004).
17. William H. Sewell Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,”
American Journal of Sociology 98 (1, 1992): 1-29.
18. Meyer and Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations.”
19. For example, Burt, American Advertising Agencies; Donald R. Holland, “Volney B. Palmer:
The Nation’s First Advertising Agency Man,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography 98 (3, 1974): 353-81; Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising; Presbrey, The
History and Development of Advertising; Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes.
20. Burt, American Advertising Agencies, 243. Note that the logic of explanation Burt uses
here is a functionalistic logic. Advertising became legitimate because it was needed. This
begs the question, of course, of why advertising was needed when other options to create
demand existed.
21. Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes, 14.
22. Vincent P. Norris, “Advertising History: According to the Textbooks,” Journal of
Advertising 9 (3, 1980): 3-11.
23. For example, Anthony R. Fellow and John William Tebbel, American Media History, 2nd
ed. (Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2009); Fox, The Mirror Makers.
24. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 22.
25. Vincent P. Norris, “Toward the Institutional Study of Advertising,” The American Academy
of Advertising 1 (1, 1966): 59-73. Also see Roy Church, “Advertising Consumer Goods
in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Reinterpretations,” The Economic History Review 53 (4,
2000): 621-45. Church makes the same point about advertising in Britain.
26. Kim B. Rotzoll, “Advertising in the Large: Four Institutional Views,” Journal of
Advertising 5 (3, 1976): 9-15.
27. Laird, Advertising Progress.
28. Chandler, The Visible Hand; see also Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in
the Nineteenth Century; Ronald A. Fullerton, “How Modern Is Modern Marketing?
Marketing’s Evolution and the Myth of the ‘Production Era,’” Journal of Marketing 52 (1,
1998): 108-25; George S. Low and Ronald A. Fullerton, “Brands, Brand Management, and
Brand Manager System: A Critical-Historical Evaluation,” Journal of Marketing Research
31 (2, 1994): 173-90.
29. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century; Frank Presbrey, The
History and Development of Advertising (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).
30. It is acknowledged that growth in manufacturing, transportation, and retailing plays a
necessary role in advertising’s development. However, the argument here is that these
factors are not sufficient for the explanation of advertising’s legitimacy. Legitimacy, as
Schudson and others have argued, is a discursive accomplishment. See Michael Schudson,
“The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism,” Journalism 2 (2, 2001): 149-70. Also
see Tim P. Vos, “Homo Journalisticus: Journalism Education’s Role in Articulating the
Objectivity Norm,” Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 13 (4, 2012): 435-49.
31. William W. Keep, Stanley C. Hollander, and Roger Dickinson, “Forces Impinging on
Long-Term Business-to-Business Relationships in the United States: An Historical
Perspective,” Journal of Marketing 62 (2, 1998): 31-45; O’Barr, “A Brief History of
Advertising in America.” Meanwhile, textile manufacturers employed a broad range of
marketing structures—from commission houses to wholesaler intermediaries to jobbers to
auction houses. See Keep, Hollander, and Dickinson, “Forces Impinging on Long-Term
Business-to-Business Relationships in the United States.”
Vos and Li 575

32. Jones, Middlemen in the Domestic Trade of the United States, 1800-1860.
33. Jones, Middlemen in the Domestic Trade of the United States, 1800-1860.
34. Fullerton, “How Modern Is Modern Marketing?”
35. O’Barr, “A Brief History of Advertising in America.”
36. Kevin G. Barnhurst and John C. Nerone, The Form of News: A History (New York:
Guilford, 2001).
37. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 15.
38. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers
(New York: Basic Books, 1978).
39. Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising; James Playsted Wood, The Story of
Advertising (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1958); Baldasty, The Commercialization
of News in the Nineteenth Century.
40. Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising; Wood, The Story of Advertising.
41. Fox, The Mirror Makers. This avoidance of responsibility for advertising may have
been rooted in the legal status of advertising. See Ivan L. Preston, The Great American
Blow-Up: Puffery in Advertising and Selling, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1996), for how nineteenth-century law strongly favored sellers, essentially allowing
advertisers to make all sorts of disingenuous claims. This legal status placed advertising
claims in an amoral universe and left buyers—and others—with deep suspicions about
advertising’s truth and morality.
42. Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799-1864).” See also Lears, Fables of Abundance. As Lears
has observed, from the 1820s into the post–Civil War period, most consumer-oriented
products remained traditional, generic goods. Consumers already knew about the nature of
these goods. Subsequently, businesspersons did not recognize a need to pay for advertising
to educate consumers.
43. See Holland, “Volney B. Palmer.” Holland notes that Volney Palmer, the first notable
advertising agent, found many in the business community to be reluctant and skeptical of
investing in advertising.
44. Fullerton, “How Modern Is Modern Marketing?”
45. Aside from advertising in particular, institutional theory concludes discourse plays a key
role in constituting legitimacy for any institution or institutional practice. See Sewell, “A
Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.”
46. Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising, 159. [Italics in original.] As
Presbrey points out, newspapers with “advertiser” in the title were common, even before
1800. See also Jeffery A. Smith, Franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened
Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 105. Smith points out that Benjamin
Franklin Bache’s use of “advertiser” in the nameplate of his paper indicated a desire for
advertiser support, even if that support was not always abundant. Later “advertisers” were
very successful in luring advertising.
47. Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising, 6.
48. Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising, 15-16. See also Burt, American Advertising
Agencies, 2. Burt concludes that advocates of advertising offered little more than a stock
argument: “contact thousands of new prospects; expand your business through advertising.”
49. Holland, “Volney B. Palmer”; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799-1864).” Holland argues
that Palmer was the first agent to successfully place ads for clients in multiple newspapers.
50. In the majority of cases, it turns out that the items did not actually address advertising in a
substantive way. It was also exceedingly common for the same item to be published mul-
tiple times and in multiple papers.
576 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

51. Other sources included the Benson Ford Research Center, the Library of Congress, and
items purchased from dealers in early American documents. Google Books also turned up
some sources. Duke University houses a substantial collection of advertising-related docu-
ments; however, nearly all of the publications date from 1870, and hence fall outside the
time range of this study. This gap in Duke’s collection reinforces the importance of study-
ing discourse about advertising from a time that receives proportionately less attention than
other periods.
52. Teun A. van Dijk, “Media Contents: The Interdisciplinary Study of News as Discourse,” in
A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research, ed. Klaus
Bruhn Jensen and Nicholas W. Jankowski (London: Routledge, 1991): 108-20. In examin-
ing the items for this study, the extent to which each item was part of a larger, ongoing
conversation about advertising became clear. The same stories would be repeated in pub-
lication after publication and then, frequently, would be addressed and answered in a sub-
sequent column. Answers would then circulate from one publication to another. This is in
line with the description of editorial exchanges described in John C. Nerone, “Newspapers
and the Public Sphere,” in The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, ed. Scott E. Casper (Chapel
Hill: Published in association with the American Antiquarian Society by the University of
North Carolina Press, 2007), 230-47.
53. Sonja K. Foss, Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice, 3rd ed. (Long Grove, IL:
Waveland Press, 2004); Stuart Hall, “Culture, Media, Language”: Working Papers in
Cultural Studies, 1972-79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
54. Note that “publisher” will be used throughout, even though this is an imprecise, and some-
times ahistorical, term. In the early nineteenth century, printer, publisher, and editor were
not always distinguished.
55. “Editor of the Constitutional Telegraphe,” Constitutional Telegraphe (Boston), April 4,
1801. [Italics in original.]
56. See Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early
American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
57. “Was a foreigner,” The Reporter (Brattleboro, VT), August 29, 1803, p. 3.
58. See Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising; Smith, Franklin and Bache.
59. “Alexandria Advertiser,” Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer, April 6, 1801.
60. “To the Public,” Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), December 12, 1800.
61. For example, “Want of Room,” Commercial Advertiser (New York), August 31, 1801;
“Apology to Advertising Friends,” Boston Gazette, June 5, 1815. Thus, early newspapers
had an “advertising hole” rather than a “news hole.”
62. For example, “Apology to Advertising Friends,” p. 3.
63. “The Centinel: Firm, Free and Temperate,” Centinel of Freedom (Newark, NJ), September
22, 1801, 3. Newspapers could solicit advertising; they just could not be caught soliciting
another paper’s advertisers. To solicit advertising from a competitor violated gentlemanly
propriety. See, for example, “The Reporter,” The Reporter (Brattleboro, VT), August 15,
1803, p. 3.
64. For example, “From Late London Papers,” The Bee (Hudson, NY), August 31, 1802, p. 3.
65. “Advertising,” True American (Trenton, NJ), May 2, 1803, p. 2.
66. For example, “To Advertising Patrons,” Repertory (Boston), December 6, 1811, 2;
“Apology to Advertising Friends,” p. 3.
67. “Advantages of Advertising,” Connecticut Courant (Hartford, CT) October 30, 1826, p. 3.
68. “Advantages of Advertising,” Eastern Argus (Portland, ME), January 15, 1828, p. 2.
Vos and Li 577

69. For example, “Advantage of Advertising,” The Daily Picayune (New Orleans), June 22,
1839, p. 2; “Advantages of Advertising,” Salem Gazette, January 22, 1828, p. 3; “Benefits
of Advertising,” Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, NH), February 28, 1829, p. 3.
70. “Advantages of Advertising,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, April 2,
1831, p. 2.
71. “Advantages of Advertising,” New Hampshire Sentinel (Keene, NH), September 26, 1838, p. 4.
72. See Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising.
73. Ads for runaway slaves, which amounted to a perverse kind of lost and found ad, routinely
appeared in newspapers in some areas. See, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger,
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
However, newspapers did not use the return of runaway slaves to promote the benefits of
advertising.
74. “Advantages of Advertising,“ Salem Gazette, August 6, 1833, p. 2.
75. See Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Modernization, Communication Policy, and the Geopolitics
of News, 1820-1860,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1, 1986): 21-35.
76. “Advantage of Advertising,” New Hampshire Gazette (Portsmouth), October 9, 1827,
p. 3; “Advantages of Advertising,” New Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette (Concord),
November 6, 1826, p. 3; “Advantages of Advertising,” Essex Register, November 9, 1826,
p. 2.
77. “The Benefits of Advertising,” The Huntress (Washington, DC), December 19, 1840, p. 2.
78. “Value of Advertising,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, April 26, 1834, p. 1.
79. See Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History,
2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990). Americans, of course, were fond of business,
but discourse focused on businesses’ contribution to the common good and human prog-
ress. Businessmen saw themselves as public trustees and financial stewards. Blackford and
Kerr also note that the rising ethic of individualism worked to erode this focus (see
pp. 114-19).
80. “For example, “Advantages of Advertising,” New Bedford Mercury, December 19, 1828,
p. 2.
81. “Philosophy of Advertising,” Waldo Patriot (Belfast, ME), August 3, 1838, p. 1. The
larger context indicates that the writer is using “anxious” in the sense of being “worried,”
rather than simply being “eager.”
82. See Blackford and Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History; Thomas Childs Cochran,
Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1981).
83. “Advantage of Advertising,” Salem Gazette, December 15, 1835, p. 1.
84. “Advantages of Advertising to Merchants,” New Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette
(Concord), November 11, 1833, p. 3.
85. “Advantages of Advertising to Merchants,” p. 3; this refers to a “system,” and a “machine”
would foreshadow the kind of discourse that would become ubiquitous after 1842.
86. “Advantages of Advertising to Merchants,” p. 3.
87. “Advantages of Advertising to Merchants.”
88. “New York,” Public Ledger (Philadelphia), April 16, 1836, p. 2.
89. “Advertising,” Eastern Argus (Portland, ME), May 3, 1836, p. 4.
90. Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Reeve, Democracy in America (New York: Bantam
Books, 2000).
91. “Philosophy of Advertising,” Barre Gazette, May 26, 1843, p. 2.
578 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

92. A. McElroy, M’Elroy’s Philadelphia Directory (Philadelphia: Isaac Ashmead and

Company, 1842); “New Facilities to the Business Community,” p. 4; and “Newspaper
Agency,” Baltimore Sun, March 12, 1842, p. 2.
  93. See Blackford and Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History, 114-19.
  94. “Prattsville Tannery,” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, 1847, 156. The same sort of expres-
sion could be found in a hagiography of great American merchants—the subtitle of which
invoked “enterprise” as a legitimating discourse. See John Frost, G. Mountfort, James
H. Lanman, and James C. Watts, Lives of American Merchants: Eminent for Integrity,
Enterprise and Public Spirit, 2nd ed. (New York: Saxton and Miles, 1844).
  95. See Blackford and Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History.
  96. “New Facilities to the Business Community,” p. 4.
 97. McElroy, M’Elroy’s Philadelphia Directory, 203; “New Facilities to the Business
Community,” p. 4.
  98. “Received from V. B. Palmer,” Vermont Phoenix (Brattleboro, VT), February 12, 1846, p. 2.
  99. “The Benefits of Advertising,” The Hudson River Chronicle (Sing Sing, NY), April 8,
1845, p. 2.
100. “Advertising,” Graham’s Magazine, March 1852, 334.
101. “Advertising,” Graham’s Magazine, 334.
102. Whig Almanac and United States Register for 1854 (New York: Cecelete and
McElrath, 1854).
103. George Adams, Boston Directory for the Year 1852 (Boston: George Adams, 1852), 34.
104. “From the Albany Argus,” The Pittsfield Sun, June 14, 1855, p. 1.
105. “Newspaper Competition,” V. B. Palmer’s New Yorker, August 1852, p. 4. [Italics in
original.]
106. For example, “The Benefits of Advertising,” Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, NH), May 11,
1859, p. 2; From the Albany Argus, “Where, When, and How to Advertise,” American
Publisher’s Circular and Literary Gazette, March 22, 1856.
107. “Advertising,” Barnstable Patriot, March 26, 1850, p. 1.
108. V. B. Palmer, V.B. Palmer’s Business-Men’s Almanac, for the Year 1851 (New York:
V. B. Palmer, 1951), 50.
109. “V. B. Palmer’s American Newspaper Subscription and Advertising Agency” [ca.
1850], 4 (papers, The Henry Ford Collection, Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn,
Michigan).
110. “The Benefits of Advertising,” Farmer’s Cabinet, p. 2.
111. For example, “Value of Advertising,” Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, NH), November 25,
1869, p. 1; “From the Albany Argus”; “Systematic Advertising,” State Gazette (Trenton,
NJ), March 22, 1852, p. 2.
112. S. M. Pettengill, “Reminiscences of the Advertising Business,” Printers’ Ink, December 24,
1890, 687.
113. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: C.
Knight, 1835).
114. See Daniel Walker Howe. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America,
1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
115. See Nicola De Liso, “Charles Babbage, Technological Change and the National System
of Innovation,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 162 (3, 2006): 470-85;
Richard M. Romano, “The Economic Ideas of Charles Babbage,” History of Political
Economy 14 (3, 1982): 385-405; George J. Stigler, “Charles Babbage,” Journal of
Economic Literature XXIX (September 1991): 1149-52.
Vos and Li 579

116. See Donald Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures
in the Private Sector (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
117. “Volney Palmer’s Column,” New York Daily Tribune, November 5, 1852, p. 2.
118. “V. B. Palmer’s American Newspaper Subscription and Advertising Agency,” p. 8.
119. “Systematic Advertising,” Norfolk Democrat, August 4, 1848, 1; see also “Newspaper
Agency,” The Semi-Weekly Eagle (Brattleboro, VT), August 7, 1848, p. 3.
120. “Chit-Chat of the Hour,” Home Journal, December 26, 1846, p. 2.
121. “Volney Palmer’s Column,” 2.
122. V. B. Palmer, V.B. Palmer’s Business-Men’s Almanac, for the Year 1849 (New York:
V. B. Palmer, 1849), 56.
123. “A Splendid Idea,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 16, 1865, p. 8.
124. “Benefits of Advertising,” Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, January 17, 1850, 128.
125. “Advertising,” The Semi-Weekly Eagle (Brattleboro, VT), 1852, p. 1.
126. Palmer, V.B. Palmer’s Business-Men’s Almanac, for the Year 1851; “V. B. Palmer’s
American Newspaper Subscription and Advertising Agency”; “Volney Palmer’s
Column.”
127. “Advertising,” Gloucester Telegraph, April 17, 1850, p. 2.
128. For example, “Nine Out of Every Eleven,” Christian Union, January 31, 1872, 134; “The
Science of Advertising,” Christian Union, January 28, 1874, 80; also see C. E. Rosenberg,
No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997).
129. “Advertising,” V.B. Palmer’s Register and Spirit of the Press (Boston), November 1849, p. 2.
130. “The Philosophy of Advertising,” Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, March 1,
1851, 394.
131. Palmer, V.B. Palmer’s Business-Men’s Almanac, for the Year 1851, 64.
132. “Benefits of Advertising,” Morning News (New London, CT), December 31, 1847, 203.
133. “The Benefits of Advertising,” Farmer’s Cabinet, p. 2.
134. “Systematic Advertising,” State Gazette.
135. “A Prize Essay on Advertising,” Barre Gazette, March 26, 1858, p. 3.
136. “Advertising,” Supplement to the Courant (Hartford, CT), April 28, 1855, p. 72.
137. “Benefits of Advertising,” Railway Times, April 9, 1870, 119.
138. “The Benefits of Advertising,” Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of
Agriculture, August 13, 1870, p. 119.
139. For example, “Received from V. B. Palmer,” Volney Palmer’s Column. Also, for
examples of smaller papers, see “Benefits of Advertising,” The Newport Mercury,
September 24, 1842, p. 3.
140. From the Albany Argus, “Where, When, and How to Advertise.”
141. For example, Palmer, V.B. Palmer’s Business-Men’s Almanac, for the Year 1849; Palmer,
V.B. Palmer’s Business-Men’s Almanac, for the Year 1851; “V. B. Palmer’s American
Newspaper Subscription and Advertising Agency.”
142. See “Advice to Young Men,” V.B. Palmer’s New Yorker, August 1852, 1; “Talent and
Industry,” V.B. Palmer’s Register and Spirit of the Press (Boston), January 1850, 1;
“Newspapers,” V.B. Palmer’s Register and Spirit of the Press (Boston), November 1849,
1; “Advertising,” V.B. Palmer’s Register and Spirit of the Press; and “Advertising,” V.B.
Palmer’s New Yorker, August 1852, p. 3.
143. Adams, Boston Directory for the Year 1852; “Advertising,” Supplement to the Courant.
144. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation.”
580 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90(3)

145. Burt, American Advertising Agencies; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799-1864)”;

Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising; Presbrey, The History and Development of
Advertising; Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes.
146. Fox, The Mirror Makers.
147. Schudson, Discovering the News.
148. Schudson, Discovering the News, 44.
149. Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising, 6, 16.