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Advertisements Promising Beauty and Prosperity
ОглавлениеAdvertising was an excellent tool for spreading Walker’s personal and corporate goals. In the early twentieth century, advertising was a relatively new development in the field of indirect marketing. Historian Daniel J. Boorstin notes that in the early days, advertising was like “buying a lottery ticket,” because there was no reliable information about the circulation figures of magazines and newspapers.80 However, as publishers began to provide “full and accurate facts about the circulation and character of their publications” by the early 1910s, advertising became “a commodity in the open market.”81 As soon as Walker went into business, she was fascinated by the power of advertising. According to the Kansas City Sun, an influential African American newspaper in the Midwest, she spent more money on “printer’s ink” than on bread and butter in the early days of her business.82 A surviving advertising manuscript (ca. 1912), elaborately designed with words, ←30 | 31→icons, and pictures, exemplifies her firm convictions that advertising would provide credibility to her methods and products.83
Her manual similarly attaches great importance to advertising and says that it is “the world’s greatest boon to business”; thus, the company employed “experts” and spent “thousands of dollars yearly” on advertising to help agents.84 The manual then exhorts the company’s agents to place small advertisements in local newspapers: “Why? Because a large Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company advertisement is likely appearing in the same paper at the same time and the reader immediately connect[s]; you with this great organization.”85 Such shrewd marketing helps to explain why Walker became “America’s Best Known Hair Culturist” and “the most wonderful, clever, aggressive and far-seeing personage” after only 11 years in business.86
African American entrepreneurs also began to notice the power of advertising because of the increased rate of black literacy and number of black periodicals. The literacy rate of nonwhites aged 14 years and over in the United States had increased significantly—from 47.2% in 1890 to 77% in 1920—resulting in a commensurate rise in the number of periodicals aimed at these potential readers.87 In “A Study of Negro Periodicals in the United States,” produced in 1928, Ellis Oneal Knox claims that there were then 511 religious and secular black periodicals, and then, in addition, hair preparation advertisements were among the most frequent kinds of advertisements to appear in such newspapers and magazines.88 According to Knox, African American periodicals not only mirrored the “characteristics of the race” but were also the “most powerful agent of Negro society” in that they expressed the “typical and idealistic characteristics” that shaped African Americans’ social attitudes.89 Notably, I found no quantitative data on local black newspapers’ female readership. Nevertheless, the language and images employed in Walker’s advertisements were directed at female readers.90
With a greater focus on science at the turn of the twentieth century, “scientific” advertising made beauty something that was attainable through practical expertise, instead of an abstract ideal.91 Walker and others in the female beauty business relied on scientific or pseudoscientific terminology to promote their products. An advertisement placed by Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in The Crisis, the official NAACP magazine, equated the word “scientific” with “thorough” and “practical”: “One of the best-known cures for dandruff, tetter, and eczema makes a friend once used if afflicted with these skin disease [sic]. Scientific, Thorough, and Practical.”92 An advertisement for cosmetics made by Chicago-based African American company, the Kashmir Institute, guaranteed women a safe and lucrative business: “One of the best-paying professions open ←31 | 32→to women today is scientific beauty culture.”93 These advertisements created the idea that the art of cultivating beauty required only the acquisition of scientific (or practical) knowledge and skills.
The ultimate subject of the advertisements for the company, however, was Walker herself. In the earliest days of her advertisements, she appeared in “before” and “after” pictures to physically demonstrate the effectiveness of her products.94 As Noliwe M. Rooks points out, this strategy has subliminal effects: in the “before” picture, she looks diffident and has downcast eyes, whereas in the “after” picture, Walker looks steadily at the camera and appears young, active, and full of confidence.95 Walker’s piercing eyes provide readers with a positive mindset, assuring them of their future success.
In 1911, Walker became “the woman of the hour” in the black community when she made a strategic $1,000 contribution toward the construction of a new Young Men’s Christian Association building in an African American neighborhood in Indianapolis.96 One article in 1913 summarized a business trip she made to Washington, D.C., as follows: “Like Caesar, ‘she came, she saw, she conquered.’ ”97 Later advertisements in the mid-1910s showed a glamorous portrait of Walker that almost served as a company logo. In the picture of the upper half of her body, she purposely and gracefully cast her eyes down, but viewers might still feel her appealing gaze. Her earrings and necklace substantiated the upward social mobility that she had realized through her lifetime of hard work.
By the late 1910s, she had become a national celebrity and a role model for African American women. The Kansas City Sun paid tribute to Walker in 1918: “Mrs. Madam C. J. Walker is more than a marvelous human success; she is an example and a sermon to mankind as truly as she is the incarnation of the advancement of Colored people.”98 Her personal charisma supplemented her advertisements, with her travels and speeches often appearing in black periodicals as news stories in their own right. As her fame spread, she attracted an increasing number of customers and agents with fewer advertisements. What Kate Dossett called her “hard-work narrative,” in which every effort was made toward success, pervaded black communities and attracted women throughout the country.99 Shared by the black community, Walker’s narrative centered on hair—fluffy hair once lost but now retrieved—which allowed her to replace the stereotype of enslaved womanhood with modern womanhood.
Advertisements invited black women with the same values and goals to an imaginary community reigned over by Walker, the guru. Advertisements guaranteed an upward social trajectory and spread a formula for success. Letters of appreciation from customers and agents demonstrate how much their hair meant ←32 | 33→to them. Mrs. Carter Robinson of Philadelphia, for example, writes, “I want to thank you for the most satisfactory results and real benefits derived from your treatment …. Trusting providence may let you live long to bring good results and happiness to all users of your goods.”100 Annie Kiser of Atlanta, Georgia, extolls Walker’s products: “I was almost bald headed when I began to use your goods, so I cannot praise them enough. They are a Godsend to humanity.”101 Belle Delashment from Illinois also rejoices at her results: “I am very pleased with your Wonderful Hair Course. My hair has grown at the rate of one inch per month ←33 | 34→ ←34 | 35→steadily, and it has become so straight and glossy. I am just delighted.”102 Walker’s advertisements urgently invited women to join her circle of success.
Advertising became increasingly overstated and image oriented around the year of her death. An advertisement placed in The Crisis in October 1919, “A Million Eyes Turned Upon it [sic] Daily: Madam C. J. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower,” shows well-dressed men and women, or would-be customers and agents, extending their hands to Walker’s sun-like company logo placed in the midst of an imaginary vista of the Atlantic Ocean.103 The advertisement boasts about the company’s success with inflated phrases, such as “We Belt the Globe” and “agents everywhere.” Walker’s illustrated figure as a logo is a reminder of her success story, suggestively connecting her products with middle-class status and wealth. In this way, even after her death, the company continued to rely on her charismatic image to sell its products and services.
Figure 1.2: “A Million Eyes Turned Upon It Daily: Madam C. J. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower” (advertisement). Crisis 18, no. 6 (1919): 323. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/civil-rights/crisis/1000-crisis-v18n06-w108.pdf (accessed May 31, 2019).
Walker’s advertisements circulated regularly among a large body of black women, so the number of new agents and customers kept expanding throughout the 1910s. A report from the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company stated that from August 1 to September 1, 1919, the company had sent 212 combs from the factory, with 128 going to new agents, 2 to old agents, 58 to foreign agents, and 4 to the New York Office; the company had also mailed 234,465 boxes of “Growers, Shampoos, and Gloss” to customers in the span of a single month.104 Behind every purchase were agents with their families and waiting customers. Walker’s advertising, highlighting the beauty, health, wealth, and power that were attainable through her products and skills, invited ambitious women to try her methods to improve their appearance and, thus, make an investment that would lead to a better future.
