| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard M. Fried. The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2005. Pp. xv, 286. $27.50.
Bruce Barton at last has not only a biography, but a solid one that carefully explains him in several important contexts. Although best known in American history survey texts and lectures as the author of the 1920s bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows (1925), Barton achieved distinction in business, politics, and religion, as well as writing. He should be placed in the front ranks of American modernists. Though not an intellectual, Barton influenced minds with his advertising skill. As Richard M. Fried notes, the British observer of America Alistair Cooke said it best when he called Barton the "Moses of advertising" (p. 224). The description would have delighted Barton.	1
Barton did not invent modern advertising, but he was perhaps its best practitioner. He built on the already established promotion of brand names and institutional advertising to include full-service features for clients from producing motion pictures to designing delivery trucks. Through his powerhouse Madison Avenue firm he made clients like General Motors and General Electric household names. He helped transform advertising from nineteenth-century patent medicine hucksterism into a sophisticated profession that promised happiness to consumers. He aided in the transition from a puritanical producer ethic to a more therapeutic consumer one by linking advertising, which increasingly relied on psychological manipulation, with traditional values. Barton insisted that advertising provided a service, and he lived long enough to practice his craft successfully in print, radio, and television. Fried concludes that while Barton improved the image of advertising, his work still had a connection with "illusion, suggestion, and magic" (p. 86). Borrowing from Jackson Lears, he suggests that consumerism perhaps replaced some of the mystery and magic lost in the transition from medieval culture to the modern age.	. . .

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