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“Defacing the Beauties of Nature”
No caption.
This
cartoon compares a woman's use of cosmetics to marring the pristine
beauty of a mountainside with product advertisements. The prevalent use of outdoor advertising, particularly
painted signs on natural land formations, generated considerable
controversy in the late 1860s. Here,
the scene out the window is probably the Palisades, the cliffs along
the lower Hudson River.
The advertising copy on the cliff is a blatant reference to
Drake’s Plantation Bitters, a popular patent medicine, which
advertised with the mysterious trademark “S. T. 1860 X.”
J. H. Drake and his partner,
William P. Ward, insisted that “S. T. 1860 X” did not stand for
anything, but was a gimmick to capture public attention.
It worked. There was
much discussion over what the trademark meant, with the more popular
answer being, “Started Trade in 1860 with Ten Dollars.”
A more unlikely suggestion was that “1860” substituted for
“c-r-o-i” to spell “St. Croix,” the home to the rum that made up
much of the product. In 1867, public reaction against Drake’s painted signs on
the sides of the White Mountains prompted the New Hampshire legislature
to enact the first law in the nation regulating outdoor advertising.
The act prohibited the defacement of any natural setting of
scenic beauty with commercial advertisements.
Having migrated from England,
outdoor advertising was used in New England at least by the eighteenth
century, notably in lottery announcements posted on fences, walls, and
trees. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, circuses used
18-inch broadsides, patent medicine manufacturers painted product
information on boulders and fences, and clothing stores tacked up large
signs on the sides of buildings. In
1830, the first traveling advertisement appeared as a wagon covered with
product endorsements made its way through the streets of New York City.
By that time, the streets of major cities were littered with
promotional bills, especially for theaters, museums, patent medicines,
clothing stores, and hatters.
The 1840s witnessed the arrival of the
walking billboard in the form of a man or boy wearing a sandwich board
with advertisements on each side. It
was also the time when P. T. Barnum promoted his American Museum with
bigger and livelier posters, prodding other businesses to follow suit.
In the 1850s, clothing stores in major cities bet on the
effectiveness of repetition by erecting a series of roadside
announcements of their establishments from as far away as 50 miles.
Outdoor advertising proliferated so much in the 1850s that
newspaper editors condemned it as “a nuisance” and “a mania.”
By the end of the decade, patent medicine companies began
painting product information, several feet high, on cliffs, barns,
abandoned buildings, and other natural or man-made edifices.
During
the Civil War, federal and state governments were one of the most
prominent outdoor advertisers through their use of military recruitment
posters. Patent medicine
had been a big business before the Civil War, but it skyrocketed
afterward as servicemen brought home a taste for the tonics, which were
often spiked with alcohol, opium, or other addictive substances.
In 1870, the first national painting service, Bradbury and
Houghteling, was established, and it quickly gained a reputation for
being able to paint signs on rocks and other places previously
considered inaccessible.
An
advertisement for St. Jacob’s Oil painted on a rock at Niagara Falls
provoked national attention, and, as mentioned above, Drake’s
marketing on the cliffs of the White Mountains triggered the nation’s
first legislative prohibition (1867) on outdoor advertising.
In the late-nineteenth century, some legislatures outlawed
whiskey advertisements in public. Also,
the advertising industry policed itself through the Associated
Billposters of the United States, which censored the more lurid
advertisements, such as for burlesque shows.
Robert C. Kennedy
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