In June 1914 a significant confluence of events occurred which would have lasting effects on literary history. World War I collided with, and altered, both the swelling modernist magazine culture in Europe and America, and the employment of advertising therein. Though the influence the war had on the artistic content in the “little magazines” is perhaps easily understood, the economic ramifications that forced publishers to reconsider their still nascent relationships with commodity culture advertising techniques are more confounding in their myriad consequences. In some magazines which never embraced advertising, such as The Owl and Wheels, effects of the economic downturn precipitated by the war are understandably difficult to ascertain without a detailed examination of their financial records. However, other magazines of the time, The New Age, Blast, and Poetry for example, exhibit either a noticeable flux in the frequency and content of their advertising, or in the case of Blast, an advertising philosophy that was seeming inspired by the conflict. Still another category of magazines, those like Scribner's that had been publishing for a greater length of time, weathered the war with more stability, with a shift in focus in their advertisements representing the only hint of the ongoing hostilities. Nevertheless, by the conclusion of the war in 1919 many of the “little magazines” were mortally wounded or already among the causalities. Still, the experiments in advertising the avant-garde that occurred during the war were undoubtably valuable for those that survived and those for whom publication was on the horizon.
With regard to advertising, modernist magazines, prior to the war, had differing mentalities on the utilization of such. While some avant-garde publications saw advertising as corruptive, other more mainstream publications viewed advertising as essential to both its overall flourish and further increase in circulation. The ensuing war, “The Great War”, would test both of these approaches, as necessary adaptations were essential to a magazine’s survival.
It seems obvious enough that if advertisers sought to profit, they would furthermore have to cater to an audience more prone to buy their product. But what becomes interesting is the shift in the aesthetic style and wording of advertisements. While ads initially sought to merely alert consumers of a products existence, insistence on a products necessity, and subtle insinuations as to how that product was defining to a desired lifestyle, emerged. Learning from the successes of advertising with relation to the Suffragist movement, advertisers played largely to women, who seemed to respond strongest to trends in consumerism. Products to be peddled ranged from clothing, to books, to vaccinations for children; and the “brand-name” became something tangible, and to be desired. The very first issue of The New Age, for example, contains over twenty individual ads, the majority of which catering to women. Bold letters reading “A Woman’s Question” turns out being an advertisement for The Daily News. Prunes are billed as “the perfect fruit”, preservatives lessen food sickness and “dyspepsia can be cured”…
It is arguably this fervor for material goods that alarmed avant-garde elitists, who in many cases strongly opposed the embrace for endorsement. In publications such as Wheels and The Owl, all reliance for success was put on a small subscription base, not on advertising revenue. These magazines (running for 6 and 3 issues, respectively) saw their content as a forum for “high art”, with no place for the intermingling of art and ad. If advertisements reflected ubiquitous consumerism, surely these artsy magazines with their small fan bases saw the material world as corrosive to the originality they championed, and in direct combatance with the notion of artistic integrity. But this abhorrence to advertising also made for a paradoxical conflict of interest. While the consumer culture spurred by advertising was viewed by the Modernist movement largely as a “debasement”, it could also be self-promoting.
As the world approached its “first world war”--- a war that would seriously hinder the global economy ---it seemed that many modernist publications were faced with the dilemma of staying financially afloat. Many magazines that scoffed at the notion of advertising as a means for revenue would go under, while other publications reliant on such revenue would either consolidate in a corporate fashion, or adjust their subscription prices accordingly. During the war years, mergers, not just in publishing but in most any commercial spheres, increased. Unable, and consequently unwilling to compete with each other, many publications saw a combination of content and reader base, in conjunction with a decrease of quantity, the most “democratic” approach to preserving quality. But even with the war’s end, this approach seldom seemed sustainable.
Other publications that had embraced advertising from the get go had to make their own war-time maneuvers. The New Age, which at its founding was dense with ads, had to adapt to the plummet in such seen by the declaration of world war. Oddly enough, the day after England declared war (the August 13 issue of 1914), the only ad run by The New Age was an ad that beckoned subscribers to loan money to the national treasury.
The actual content of The New Age would drastically change as well, as it now featured a regular war column and other such contributions that directly addressed the global crisis. Advertising in The New Age post-1914 became virtually non-existent until after the war’s end (which saw very little resurgence in endorsements). To make up for this loss of revenue, the price of a subscription, from the founding of The New Age until its demise shortly after the war’s end, nearly doubled.
Scribner's Magazine, which started in 1887, had an abundance of advertisements within each issue. Every issue devoted roughly half of its pages to advertisements which were positioned in the front section of the magazine as well as the back section. The advertisements ranged from household luxury items to groceries, as well as schools and colleges in New York State. The Modernist Journal Project only carries the issues from Volume 57 to Volume 60, which is a very limited amount compared to the amount of issues that were produced from the time it started publishing to its end in 1939. One thing that was interesting was that the first issue of volume 57 has a sort of preface to the advertisement section which describes the importance of advertising in the magazine. The statement which is called "Good Company and Advertisement" explains that "Only by what a magazine prints can you judge fairly of the people who read it". The statement praises the people who take time to read the advertisements as well as the people and companies who choose Scribner's Magazine to place their ads.
The MJP carries the issues from January of 1915 to December of 1916. These two years display a particular interest in the war within the advertisements. There is also a consistent flow of war advertisements during this period. The ads that dealt with the war were usually positioned in the beginning ad section. The ads mainly solicited books that dealt with the war. The magazine devoted whole pages to books that focused mainly on war topics. There were also ads for other magazines that talked about the war. For instance, "The New York Times" was publishing a semi-monthly magazine titled "Current History of the European War". It was described as "a practical necessity for all persons who follow the war at all seriously". There were plenty of other instances within the different issues of ads about "war books". However, these instances tended to be the same kind of advertisment. They consisted mostly of full or half pages that listed and briefly described books that discussed the war. Some of them focused on America's position in the war as well as America's military involvement.
The rest of the magazine was filled with essays, poems and artwork that covered many different topics. The editors also managed to infuse essays that discussed the war in different ways. The essays as well as the ads seemed to be trying to portray America's point of view about the war. In many of the ads the war was referred to as "The European War". It wasn't seen as something that was seriously affecting the American people, so it seemed as though the editors wanted to express America's position. One of the ads in Volume 57 was for "America and the War" by Theodore Roosevelt. There were many other instances that seemed to show that the editors were trying to give America a voice within this difficult time.
Poetry was a “little magazine” based out of Chicago that began publication in 1912, two years before the outbreak out the war. As its title suggests, Poetry had a particular artistic focus and as such the magazine’s contributions, though diverse in content, were primarily uniform in terms of genre. Although other magazines of the time, such as Wheels, similarly concentrated on the dissemination of a particular category of art, Scribner's, The New Age, Blast and other publications produced contemporaneously with Poetry included a decidedly more heterogeneous mix of items. While this divergence is of little consequence in and of itself, as historical documents, the magazines of the latter category, those which embraced not only poetry but essays, stories, and drawings as well, more readily facilitate analysis of how political events influenced the many spheres of thought at the time. Therefore, in order to appreciate the full bearing World War I had on Poetry, it is important to consider the entire contents of the magazine and not simply its literary contributions. Specifically, the advertisement section in each issue should be examined.
Though the first issue of Poetry, produced in October of 1912, contained only two advertisements, one for the magazine itself and another for the Alderbrink Press, that number steadily increased in the first few years of publication. By the outbreak of the war in June, 1914, the magazine had thirteen unique advertisers, among them, not only publishing houses and other “little magazines”, but a department store and a dog breeder. This diversity speaks not only to a willingness on the part of Poetry's publishers to participate in the burgeoning commodity culture, but also to a certain amount success the magazine must have been experiencing in its distribution and sales.
This prosperity ostensibly continued for many months after the conflict in Europe began, though mention of the war did begin to appear sporadically in advertisements beginning with the September, 1914 issue. In an entirely unemotional solicitation for contest submissions, “$100 for a War Poem” is the very first reference to World War I between the covers of Poetry. The impassivity of this advertisement's wording is interesting, however, as it may speak to America's then neutral position in the hostilities overseas. Nevertheless, the inclusion of this item indicates that there was a growing interest in the war in America.
By the November, 1914 issue of Poetry this interest had fully materialized, with almost every published poem either explicitly or implicitly referencing the war. Similarly, the advertising section reveals that other American publications were shifting their focus to The Great War. One advertisement for The Masses magazine employs numerous witticisms to demonstrate the content of their recent issue asking subscribers to “enlist now” so that they might read the “rifle-fire stories” of the contributers. Another more straightforwardly presented ad is for the Harper's Weekly “War Special” which promises readers “authentic, comprehensive” coverage. This issue of Poetry marks a new phase for the magazine in more than just its coverage of the war, however. Notably, this is the final issue in which Marshall Field & Co. department store advertises in the magazine, signaling the beginning of a general downturn in both the quantity and diversity of advertising in Poetry for the remainder of the war.
While it is difficult to ascertain the precise causes for the withdrawal of advertisers towards the end of 1914, it may be surmised that anxieties over the ongoing war, and the economic consequences thereof, at least played a role. In any case, by April of 1916, approximately one year before the US entered the war, Poetry's advertising section contained merely five unique advertisers, all of them publishing houses. Additionally, reference to the war in the advertisements between 1915 and 1917 was infrequent at best. For example, in 1916 the only mention is in the February issue where The Hutchinson Studio is announcing the availability of photographs, priced at $5.00, of the deceased poet/soldier Rupert Brooke.
Seemingly in response the dearth of ad revenue generated during the middle years of the war, the character of advertisements in Poetry changed greatly beginning in 1918. The one commodity advertiser, Horlick's Malted Milk, promoting its product in the magazine introduced a new campaign in the February, 1918 issue. Though Horlick's had been advertising in Poetry for several months, they had always appealed to the reader's frugality, their slogan being “drink it in place of tea or coffee”. Their new campaign, however, exploited American involvement in the war, asking readers to “Send [Horlick's] to your soldier boy”. By capitalizing on the sympathies of American citizen's, Horlick's connected their product with patriotism.
Similarly, book publishers advertising in Poetry manipulated the tragedies of the war to their advantage. In the January, 1919 issue, one of the last of the magazine published before the Treaty of Versailles, The Macmillan Co. included an endorsement from “a soldier in France” in its advertisement for an anthology of 20th century verse. The quote given both connects the publisher's product with the war and further elicits a sympathetic response from prospective buyers as the soldier claims that the book's “bold beauty [has] saved me from terror at moments when...the explosion of an enemy shell...fell without preface upon [him]”.
Ultimately, whether sheerly by luck or as a consequence of their willingness to adapt to the economic circumstances precipitated by the war, Poetry managed to remain financially viable well beyond the signing of the treaty, continuing, in fact, to the present day. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Blast, a London-based vorticist magazine, produced its final issue (only its second) in June of 1915. While many avant-garde publications of the time were similarly short lived, Blast in particular is interesting to contrast with Poetry in that the two magazines employed markedly different advertising strategies.
Like Poetry, each issue of Blast contained an advertising section. Unlike the “little magazine” from Chicago, however, Blast did not embrace commodity advertisers. Rather, the latter included, almost exlusively, self-promotional items. In Blast 2 the six page section at the back of the magazine contains one advertisement for contributer Ezra Pound's new book, followed by one for Blast 1, and finally four pages of advertisements for the publisher of Blast, John Lane. This type of symbiotic advertising was not atypical in “little magazines”, but the simple section is intriguing given Blast's own, more progressive, promotional techniques.
According to Mark Morrisson, Blast represented “perhaps the most radical...attempt to draw upon the energies of a promotional culture” (Morrisson 117). This manifested not only within the magazine itself, but also in the placement of ads in other modernist publications, often using unique rhetorical strategies. In The Egoist, for instance, a Blast 1 advertisement:
“used evocative phrases that obviously had no direct informational value and were staples of product-style advertisements: 'THE CUBE. THE PYRAMID. / Putrification of Guffaws Slain by Appearance of / BLAST. / No Pornography. No Old Pulp / END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA'” (Morrisson 119)
This transformation of commodity marketing technique into something individual and avant-garde sets Blast apart from its contemporaries. Though, by the second issue of the magazine an additional factor, The Great War, altered both the content of Blast's promotional strategies and, furthermore, put into new perspective its editor's advertising philosophies.
Even before hostilities began in earnest, Wyndham Lewis, the editor of Blast was an advocate of the war. Once the war began, as well, exploited the situation to his advantage, producing, and heavily promoting, Blast 2 as the "War Number". Not only did he expound this message in his magazine, but his relationship with advertising can itself be seen as an illustration of his militant ideologies.
According to Morrisson, Lewis developed a “changing conception of the artist from the feminized... to the masculine, virile, [and] violent” (Morrisson 126). This masculine aggression Lewis believed was so important to artists speaks not only to his support of the war but also to the two sides of Blast's employment of advertising: on the one hand insistent on self-promotion by way of a bold message, and on the other, allowing very little advertising to enter into the magazine from the outside. In other words, advertising was akin to sexual intercourse in Lewis' mind and as such he insisted on being the aggressor, the penetrator, rather than the passive receiver.
Without the context of the war this connection might be difficult to discern. In fact, it is likely that Lewis' promotional mindset was bolstered by the onset on World War I. Nevertheless, Blast failed to sustain itself past its first two issues perhaps due to Lewis' insistent, one-sided relationship with advertising.
Despite Blast's failure to produce a third issue, the guerrilla advertising tecniques Wyndham Lewis adopted from the sufferists, as well as the apurpt, sometimes bizarre, alteration of commodity marketing methods continue to have an influence today. Similarly the principled, if perhaps fatal, refusul of magazines like The Owl and Wheels to support themselves through ad revenues can be seen as an inspirational touchstone for countercultural publications, Adbusters for example, today. The lessons taught by The New Age, Poetry, and Scribner's are, however, perhaps the most influencial to current magazines. Ultimately, these publications showed that with in an uncontrolable politcal or economic climate it is, first and foremost, best to be have an established readership. Short of that, adaptation and experimentation is the only lifeline and even then success is far from ensured.
-Nickeisha, Natanya, Charlie
