Selling out

I got lost in Duke University’s digital archives of American advertising. There are plenty of good things here! Related to Atlanta, of course. It’s hilarious how quaint and unsophisticated advertising was back in the day before sexy Don Draper told us cigarettes are healthy because they are toasted, or before Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus, you know? Now we have revolutionary ad campaigns like twelve years of cows who can’t spell and tell us to eat chicken – that’s both humorous and cutting edge!

Earlier I posted an ad from a 1910 program of Atlanta’s Grand Opera House (which, if I’m correct, later became Loew’s Grand Theatre and then even later became yet another victim of fire). There are so many more where that ad came from in this playbill! And also a list of characters in the performance, such as “The Senator’s Boys, Known About Town as ‘The Midnight Sons’–Dick, who plays with the ticker; Harry, who trifles with the Stage; Tom, who fusses with sport.” I would pay a lot of money (before my student discount) to find out more about the Midnight Sons! Hint, hint, Alliance Theatre. Here are some of the other businesses who bought space in the program. (Click anything for the larger version).


Another trend around this time was making a brochure full of grand lies about your product but peppering it with sentimental references to the Civil War so everyone would think it was a keepsake. Such was this Confederate Souvenir put out by the Haltiwanger-Taylor Drug Company, makers of this thing called the Cherokee Cure that definitely came out before the establishment of the FDA.

This leaflet also contained some side-splitting jokes for your next dinner party such as:

In 1896, the National Surgical Institute and Sanitarium put out a pamphlet on their services and such. Basically, you can think of this place as the great-grandfather of Grady Hospital, Emory Medical School, and the CDC combined. Here’s just some of the medical science that they said took place there:


There’s also a section that addresses “PRIVATE DISEASES” – “Though they have fallen in bad company we will relieve them, and then say, ‘Go, sin no more.’” That is certainly helpful, what with all the iniquity going on in Snake Nation and Murrel’s Row.

But why would such a prestigious medical facility as the National Surgical Institute and Sanitarium choose to locate in Atlanta, of all cities? FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK.

Other items of note: these apron thingies made at the Fulton Cotton Mill Lofts!

This sheet music for a song about the King Plow Lofts, written for the Cotton States and International Exposition from 1895!

And lots of other sheet music, most of which seems to be about Sherman’s march to the sea, told from both Yankee and Rebel perspectives. These, unrelated to the Civil War, are from 1912 and 1913, respectively.


And they used to make these in Atlanta too; can you believe it?

This was the only really convincing advertising I saw where I was like, “WHERE CAN I GET A EUGENE WINTER WAVE??” I am calling Dwight Eubanks first thing tomorrow. Doesn’t Mrs. John Nixon, socially prominent in New York and Atlanta, look glamorous?
At some point we’ll start acknowledging things that have gone on in this particular century in which we live and blog.

Tags: advertising