Life of a Salesman

The first type is more common, the second more dangerous. So many of those who have resoundingly hit the success gong believed thoroughly in their own pitch, and if you suggested that there was any element of con to their activities, they probably wouldn’t know what you were talking about. None of them seems to have the least doubt in the worth of what they do, and the notion of a proper skepticism would feel as alien to them as would a Lubavitcher Hasid in Mecca.

Although he claimed a touch of doubt from time to time, Bruce Barton, who lent his name to the advertising agency of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (once transmuted by Harry Truman into “Bunko, Bull, Deceit & Obfuscation”), was a true believer. As an advertising man, he felt as if he were simultaneously doing capitalism’s, America’s, and the Lord’s work. In fact, he wrote a book, The Man Nobody Knows, a bestseller for many years and still in print, that made the claim that Jesus was, essentially, the first great advertising man.

Successful businessmen are often inclined to view themselves as doing the Lord’s work; or, if they are really vain, to think that the Lord was doing theirs. Lord Beaverbrook wrote a book in which he held that Jesus was the first great journalist. Malcolm Muggeridge, reviewing the book in the New Statesman, gave his review what has always seemed to me the best title for a book review that I’ve come across: “Jesus!”

The historian Richard M. Fried titles his biography of Bruce Barton The Man Everybody Knew. The past tense is operative here. Barton’s fame is by now thoroughly dissipated. But he had, as Professor Fried shows, a long and good run in which money, fame, and power were his. Fried has written a straight and fair account of the life of a man who, owing to a compelling glibness, a perfect pitch for the pithy, took this gift all the way to a congressional seat and was, at one time, even considered a possible presidential candidate. The element of iconoclasm in The Man Everybody Knew is present but unobtrusive. One wishes that, perhaps, Professor Fried might have gone deeper inside his subject; but, then, the thought occurs that there may have been no inside there.

Bruce Barton was born in 1886, the son of a Congregational minister. He grew up chiefly in Oak Park, Illinois, where Frank Lloyd Wright lived and Ernest Hemingway (born in 1899) also grew up. The phenomenon of the sons of ministers–preacher’s kids, as they used to be called–is itself an interesting sidebar in American history. The fathers of Henry Luce (founder of Time, Inc.), Robert Hutchins (boy president of the University of Chicago), and William Benton (of the advertising agency of Benton and Bowles and, later, owner of Encyclopaedia Britannica), all of them roughly of Bruce Barton’s generation, were also ministers, in some cases missionaries. Barton himself noted that a disproportionately high number of people in Who’s Who grew up in ministerial homes.

Luce, Hutchins, and Benton went to Yale, which George Santayana, on a visit early in the 20th century, recalls buoyed up by the spirit of muscular Christianity:

Bruce Barton went to Amherst, but he had, from his father, the Yale spirit. He was a go-getter, a self-starter. He sold maple syrup door-to-door as a high-school kid, and pots and pans when in college. No surprise here, he was voted Most Likely to Succeed in his graduating class. After working for a year or so in Montana, he returned to Chicago to begin his career with his pen. When a publishing company he worked for went bankrupt, Barton took out what was owed him in advertising space, which he in turn sold (and wrote the copy for) to a travel agency planning a tour to Oberammergau. Barton drew the useful lesson from this that “as long as a man keeps his health and his courage, there is hardly any experience, no matter how unpleasant, that can’t be turned to a profit.”

As that brief quotation shows, Barton was a positive thinker, with astonishing energy added. He had a great capacity for turning out articles, stories, editorials, and speeches, all with essentially the same theme and conclusion: life may not be easy–the road is bumpy, the current swift, the eggs runny–but you can win through. As an ad man, he created the slogan for the Salvation Army: “A man may be down, but he’s never out.” (That, I should say, could only have been written by a man who has never come close to having been down.) He once wrote an article titled “How I Found Health in a Dental Chair,” whose subject was how undergoing a root canal cleared up other health problems for him. Show Bruce Barton a silver lining and he would find gold in it.

When he became an editor of a publication called Every Week, Barton adopted a program for the magazine that was simplicity itself: “Our formula for Every Week,” he later wrote, “was Youth, Love, Success, Money and Health.” Give the customer what he wants was half of Barton’s credo; when he went into advertising, which he did just after World War I, the other half became and sell him what he doesn’t really need.

Barton had long been a dab hand at writing ad copy. During World War I he was head of publicity for the YMCA, the United War Work Campaign, and the Salvation Army. He wrote the copy to go with drawings by Norman Rockwell for a series of ads for General Electric: a case, surely, of the punishment fitting the crime. After the war, he teamed up with two contemporaries, Roy Durstine and Alex Osborn, to begin an advertising agency they called BDO. (They would later merge with the George Batten agency, whose owner died in 1918.)

This took place at a time when ad agencies were beginning to do more and more of the work of, if not outright replace, advertising departments in large companies. Radio was becoming more popular, the newspaper business was booming. Barton’s timing could not have been improved.

The anacronymistic BBDO–usually said with an ampersand between the final two letters–came to stand in for all modern ad agencies. Around the time of the founding of BBDO, as Fried writes, “‘Madison Avenue’ was about to become a metaphor to describe an activity that was becoming a conspicuous part of American capitalism.” People were doubtful about its worth, economic and moral, from its beginning.

One of Barton’s perennial roles was to express doubt about, and then ultimately defend, the importance of advertising in American life. “We build of imperishable materials, we who work with words,” he told an award dinner for ad men. People, he felt, “will never do what is good for them until a great deal of persuasion has been used,” and advertising was there to provide the persuasion. On another occasion, he wrote: “We live in a democracy, and when you make the world safe for democracy, you automatically make it safe for advertising.”

BBDO was aggressive in getting new clients, and Barton highly efficient in keeping them. He was said to have been masterly in other companies’ boardrooms, chummy just to the right degree. Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, cited Barton for his “tremendous capacity for friendship.” Which puts paid to the old proverb that holds you can’t con a con man.

As an agency man, Barton was a troubleshooter and an effective closer. He could also write an ad about a doctor saving the life of a child because the doctor happened to be driving a car built by General Motors (a BBDO client). He was never much troubled by the truth quotient in his own copy.

While doing all his work at BBDO, Barton kept up a fairly active free-lance life, placing articles and editorial bits in many of the mass-circulation magazines of the day. He earned $50,000 per annum on his journalism alone. He lived at good Manhattan addresses, kept his own horse, had his name in gossip columns, befriended the famous, was married with three children. Did I neglect to mention that he was strikingly handsome? He was to all appearances a happy man.

The one hitch in the early years of this otherwise onward and upward story is that, as Fried notes, Barton suffered from insomnia and hypochondria. Conscience, one may be permitted to doubt, hadn’t anything to do with either problem. More likely his mind raced at night thinking up new ad campaigns and devising further euphemisms. But it took more than such minor auxiliary miseries to stop the powerful inner locomotive driving the Barton Express.

As if things weren’t going smoothly enough, in 1925 Bruce Barton published his book about Jesus Christ, which was a smashing success. Fried aptly characterizes Barton’s intention as “to reconnect the realm of the spirit with the world of hustle and commerce.” In it, Barton took the mystery out of religion and put a cheering section in its place. No namby-pamby Jesus Christ, no sissified Sunday school Jesus for Bruce Barton, who presented a sinewy, a light and cheerful, and manly Jesus. His Jesus was an executive, a powerful salesman who, mutatis mutandis, might have played tailback for Yale. As for the Apostles, Jesus, in Barton’s words, “picked up 12 men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” Onward corporate soldier!

The Man Nobody Knows was praised by the popular clergymen of the day, though serious people, among them Reinhold Niebuhr, then a young minister in Detroit, in a review titled “Jesus as Efficiency Expert,” panned it for its smugness. Fundamentalist Protestants also roasted the book. But the success of Barton’s book, propelled in part by his own genius for publicity and self-promotion, could not be stopped by mere criticism. The book sold more than 250,000 copies in its first 18 months in print; by 1944 nearly 487,000 copies had been printed; and, Fried reports, “by 1959, when a new edition was being readied, sales figures totaled 726,890, if not more, in nine different editions. . . . For the rest of the 20th century, The Man was in print more often than not–in whole, in part, in combination with other works.”

The success of his Jesus book widened Barton’s fame: He was no longer an adman merely but now a publicist-philosopher. He had joined the punditi in a big-time way. The Atlantic asked him to review his fellow Oak Parker Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which he praised, his only negative note being his wish that the talented novelist would soon write about “more respectable people.” He had become a boldface, his name appearing in smart gossip columns. He was now the sort of man reporters interviewed as he came down ships’ gangplanks for his views on the economy, European politics, the state of the nation.

One of the problems for a layman writing a successful book on religion is that it sets one up for dispensing moral advice in a public way, which in turn is almost certain to entail scandal down the road, usually of the kind featuring, as Mencken once called it, “non-Euclidian sex.” In Barton’s case, a young woman working for him at BBDO flattered him into her bed. Only later did he learn that she was married, and when the husband threatened to sue Barton for alienation of affections, he bought the couple off for $25,000. She later tried to blackmail him, claiming she had written a novel about their love affair, and eventually went to prison for doing so. Fried ends his account of this misalliance by noting that “Barton emerged less mangled in reputation than he might have,” adding that “the affair had to have jolted Barton’s marriage, but it survived.”

After his success in advertising and publishing–if not in sexual adventuring–politics was the natural next step for Barton. His gambling instincts were near perfect, and he played the great American trifecta of Religion, Business, and Politics, and made it pay. On the national level, his first big horse, ridden before the success of his Jesus book, was Calvin Coolidge, a fellow Amherst graduate, whom he tried to promote into the Republican presidential nomination in the 1920 election. Warren Harding won the election, with Coolidge as his vice president. When Harding died in office, Barton’s man ascended to the presidency. Barton worked for Coolidge without payment then, and in his successful reelection campaign in 1924, but the payment came in giving him the reputation of a savvy adviser, a political insider.

As Fried points out, other admen had been involved in political campaigns before Bruce Barton. But Barton’s specialty was, somehow, to make himself and his candidates out as men who stood for both tradition and progress, the solid values of the past combined with the shiny promise of the future. He also early sensed that personality was becoming as important–perhaps more important–to politics as a politician’s positions on the issues, questions, and problems of the day. He advised his candidates to knock off the whistle-stop oratory and think more about the possibilities of mass communication.

Radiating sincerity was Barton’s specialty, and it was the quality of sincerity with which he attempted to endow the candidates he supported. He did this through the media of the day: placing carefully constructed interviews with them (often written by him), writing their speeches, dragging their families into press photographs. He beseeched Herbert Hoover to have photographs taken of himself “fishing or tree-chopping, something that shows him a human being.”

As for Barton’s own politics, Fried remarks that he “could most often be found on the conservative side of a given issue, [but] he was never a standpatter, still less a reactionary.” Barton opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, but never with the insane hatred that true-believer Republicans of the day brought to the job. He even allowed that Roosevelt had a real talent for speaking “in advertising language”–than which, from Barton, there could be no higher praise.

In 1937, Barton ran for Congress from the 17th District of New York, known in those days as the “silk-stocking” district, to fill out the term of an incumbent who died in office. He won, and won again in 1938, campaigning both times as a liberal Republican. He used the same technique of the hokey narrative in his political rhetoric (stories about little people besieged by government) as he used in some of his advertising (stories of people’s lives being vastly improved by products).

Barton claimed in his political campaigns that there were already too many lawyers in Congress, and that more salesmen were needed; salesmen, he contended, “know people.” He would later say much the same about advertising men: “We in the advertising business know more about people than politicians do.” The thought of a Congress loaded with ad men may, at first, seem terrifying, but then one realizes that the majority of the people now there are mostly in office owing to the machinations of advertising men and publicists of one sort or another.

Barton’s announced plan as a congressman was to repeal a law every week, though he found that regress was not all that easy. He was better at garnering publicity for himself as a “fresh voice,” “the most popular member of Congress,” and a man with a ready quotable line for the press. Such was Barton’s fame that he was actually spoken of as a presidential candidate in the 1940 election.

He ran, instead for the Senate, on an isolationist and anti-third-term-for-FDR platform, but it was no sale. In a speech, Roosevelt once used the phrase “Martin, Barton, and Fish” to mock three Republican Congressman–Joe Martin, Bruce Barton, and Hamilton Fish–who had voted against defense apppropriations; the phrase came to stand in as short hand for military unpreparedness. Barton claimed it cost him many Jewish votes in this Senate race. He was in any case routed by a now-forgotten Democrat named James Mead.

Like the elderly who feel that the world is going to hell because they soon won’t any longer be in it, so Barton, now out of electoral politics, began to feel that the United States was doomed. “It was a good republic while it lasted,” he would say. The truth is that he had no more political acumen than anyone else. He was against the Marshall Plan, not too good on race, and should have got splinters in his bottom for his fence-sitting on Senator Joseph McCarthy, neither joining nor rebuking him.

Out of the political wars, Barton went back to doing what he did best, which was advertising. BBDO’s business continued to grow: Standard Oil of California, Dodge, the 3M Company, United Fruit. (People of a certain age will recall Chiquita Banana, who warned us that we must “never put bananas in the refrigerator, no, no, no.”) In 1954, BBDO was third among all American advertising agencies, with total billings of $148 million. Much of this was because of Barton’s skill at manipulating words and clients.

Barton lived long enough to see advertising roundly attacked. Novels and movies–The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Hucksters–began to appear in which advertising men were thought the ultimate hollow men. Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, in which he made them out not hollow at all but filled with malevolent tricks. Madison Avenue began to replace Wall Street as the synecdoche and center of all capitalist sin.

How hard this hit Bruce Barton is not really known. It couldn’t have gone down easily for him. Advertising was his politics, quite possibly his religion, his only mode of thought: He called capitalism “the system of hustle and hope,” which sounds like nothing so much as an ad for it, too.

Fried concludes that Barton was more divided in himself than he may have given others to believe. He claims that Barton began to grow tired of lengthy and repetitious ads, and longed for more candid advertising. He quotes Barton wondering why an ad might not say, simply: “Lucky Strike is paying for this half of the ball game in the hope of pleasing you, not annoying you. If you haven’t tried Luckies, we hope you will. . . . If you are a Lucky smoker already, please credit us for not boring you by telling you a lot of things you already know.” But this kind of utterance only earned Barton the epithet, from a colleague at a rival ad agency, of “a preacher in a whorehouse.”

People nowadays do not get quite so worked up about billboards defacing the countryside, ads creating hopelessly artificial needs, the hypocritical contradiction of the New Yorker‘s liberal politics and its posh advertising pages, advertising itself as evidence of a coarsening and hopelessly vulgar American culture. To most of us, advertising seems at its best mildly entertaining, at its worst a minor nuisance. Were he a young man today, Bruce Barton would probably not have been tempted by it, and instead would likely have gone straight to divinity school.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.