"Blow some my way"

THE DELINEATION OF DESIRE IN 1920s COMMERCIAL ILLUSTRATION

- Dennis Raverty

Men are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions. -Edward Bernays

The 1920s in the United States was a decade of rapidly evolving mores and gender roles. This was reflected in a selfconsciously upward mobility in social status, made possible in part by an unprecedented economic boom that lasted until the stock market collapse in 1929. These changing attitudes and economic conditions made possible and contributed to the development of a new type of modern consumerism, with advertising devoted to the manufacture of desire, or "engineered consent," as it was called, informed by contemporaneous psychological theory, and embodied in commercial illustration from the period.

At the time of the entry of the United States into the First World War in 1917, a brilliant young Austrian-American publicist, Edward Bernays, was hired by the United States Committee on Public Information as a consultant on how to promote the idea of American participation in the war to a skeptical nation. Bernays was the nephew of the controversial Viennese psychologist, Sigmund Freud, and he would become one of the first marketers to utilize modern psychological techniques in business. As an Austrian-born, German-speaking American fluent in English, Bernays had unique insights into both the cultures of the Allies and of the Central Powers and he used this to his advantage. So important was Bernays' perceived contribution to the process that he was invited by President Wilson to accompany the American delegation at the peace conference in Versailles, France, following the war.