October 23, 2006
L. Frank Baum and Consumer Plenty Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST This weekend I saw the Broadway production of Wicked, the much-acclaimed musical based on Gregory Maguire’s prequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I’m a sucker for theater, and so I thoroughly enjoyed the show. But I was also reminded that Baum was a character of some significance in the development of modern American consumer culture, and that the original Wizard of Oz was something of a commercial allegory, if read in the context of Baum’s life and career.
As William Leach explains in his fascinating book Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture, Baum was an early pioneer in the department-store window display profession. In the 1890s he edited a trade journal devoted to the topic and also consulted for numerous companies on the subtle art of using light, mirrors, and artistic enticements to help produce consumer desire. Seen in this context, Oz makes a great deal of sense. Juxtaposed against the grim, black-and-white reality of Dorothy’s Kansas, in all its scarcity and austerity, Oz is multicolored wonderland of abundance.
Consider that in the 1890s, when Baum moved to Chicago and first involved himself in the new window display profession, American industry was expanding in leaps and bounds, resulting in warehouses virtually overflowing with unsold consumer goods. Businessmen faced an unforeseen embarrassment of riches. They could produce the goods, but they couldn’t always unload them. “The goods must be moved,” cried a merchant in 1912. But how? People first had to be taught how to consume.
It became increasingly popular to view the problem as one of underconsumption rather than overproduction. “We are not concerned with the ability to pay,” wrote an early proponent of advertising, “but with the ability to want and choose.” Americans could and would empty the warehouses of their surplus goods if only they were given the “imagination and emotion to desire.” “Without imagination, no wants,” explained another advertising guru in 1899. “Without wants, no demand to have them supplied.”
Between 1890 and 1920 the nature of advertising changed markedly. Leading firms no longer acted as mere brokers but now designed arresting ad copy and artwork that championed new brands. They suggested with varying degrees of subtlety that consumer items were not just luxuries, but necessities. Whereas a typical advertising expert in the 1890s claimed that “pictures are merely adjuncts to the ad. . . . When they dominate the ad they weaken it,” within the space of just a few years industry professionals agreed that “the advertising of the future will be illustrated. There can hardly be a question about that.”
So it was with department stores, which turned to L. Frank Baum and his colleagues to design stunning new window displays that used lights, mirrors, and bright colors to widen the eyes of potential customers. Much like the Wizard of Oz, who proves something of a huckster in Baum’s book (and something a little more sinister in Maguire’s), Baum was a modern-day salesman, pedaling a dream of consumer plenty in a country that was just coming to grips with its own prosperity and industrial potential.
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