Consumer Activism, Commercialism, and Curriculum Choices: Advertising in Schools in the 1930s

The commercialization of US education is one of the rapidly expanding developments in our times and for clear reasons. A visit to almost any modern high, middle, or elementary school in this country finds school cafeterias, hallways, and gymnasiums turned into giant advertising billboards for corporate sponsors, while the distribution of free product samples, the existence of commercially sponsored contests, and the mandatory watching of commercials during the school day have allowed advertisers a privileged place in many of the nation's classrooms (Linn 75-104; Schor 99-117; Channel One Network; Fox 86-89, 55-59, 153-61; Valkenburg 201-14). The quantity of advertising in the nation's classrooms exploded in the 1990s as Channel One was introduced in school after school. The ten-minute program initially consisted of two minutes of commercials mixed with eight minutes of news for students in grades six through twelve (Center for Commercial). By 1996, Channel One was reaching 8.1 million teenagers on a daily basis. This number translates to nearly forty percent of all twelve- to seventeen-year-olds (Fox 7-8; Center for Commercial), a level that has many parents and educators concerned. The lure of the large and rapidly expanding children's market is too tempting for many advertisers to resist. Kids under the age of thirteen influence $600 billion in family spending and have $40 billion in pocket money that they spend on products ranging from candy to clothes. And by 2008, according to one market-research firm, kids' spending power may climb as high as $52 billion. Eager to capture this market in order to create long-lasting brand loyalties, advertisers have intensified their efforts. The amount spent to advertise products and services to kids has more than doubled in the last decade and presently stands at an estimated $15 billion (Fonda 1; Azoulay 1). It should come as no surprise that marketers are constantly expanding their efforts to reach children in schools where they spend much of their time. The rapid growth of commercial influences in US schools is not a new phenomenon. Although advertisers were showing a keen interest in the child consumer as early as the 1920s (Madison 49-51), it was not until the 1930s that they directed their attention in a sustained manner to gaining access to the schools. To a large extent, advertisers wanted to use schools to sell their products. But even more important at the time, the general business community wanted to undercut a growing consumer movement and its efforts to teach a brand of consumer education that promoted a profound skepticism toward advertising. As such, the nation's schools became an important battleground for the broader fight between advertisers and consumer activists over the nature of federal advertising regulation, a battle the advertisers effectively won with the passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment in 1938 (Stole 549-64). Drawing on a range of historical sources including books, articles, accounts from the trade press, and archival documents, this article contends that advertisers succeeded in gaining an ideological foothold in the educational arena by fostering a view of advertising and commercial forces as benevolent and useful in the minds of students, teachers, parents, and the general population. Unlike advertising in mass media, where the product-propaganda nature is frequently obvious, advertising in school settings has the stealth-like ability to soften the sell and take advantage of teachers as seemingly impartial spokespersons. By benefiting from the teachers' classroom authority, in-school advertising emerged as a promotional hybrid: a mix of product advertising and public relations for the industry behind the products. A central focus in this article is on the range of negotiations between what we loosely refer to as "the consumer movement" and "the advertising industry." Both terms deserve more refined definitions. In "the consumer movement," we include the many professional women's groups as well as unorganized individuals, such as union workers, teachers, religious leaders, and scholars, who identified with the cause and strategies of Consumers' Research (CR) as well as those of Consumers Union (CU), the pro-union society that was born from a labor strike at CR in 1935 (Fox 124-25; Morse 28-29n, 40). …