Education: Propaganda Purge

Since 1927, when Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink scared the wits out of consumers in Your Money’s Worth, courses in consumer education in U. S. high schools have multiplied like mosquitoes. Because the object of this propaganda is to persuade buyers to be skeptical of advertising and be guided by such agencies as the U. S. Bureau of Standards and Consumers Union, admen view this trend with alarm. Fortnight ago, at the annual convention of the Advertising Federation of America in Manhattan, they decided to do something about it.

This week the Federation urged its 60 affiliated groups to campaign against the use in schools of textbooks which carry anti-advertising propaganda. With its message went a pamphlet attacking a text which the Federation considers particularly obnoxious: An Introduction to Problems of American Culture by Professor Harold Rugg of Columbia Teachers College.

The Federation’s research director, Alfred T. Falk, reported that Professor Rugg’s book is used by 4,200 school systems which teach an estimated 3,000,000 of the 7,000,000 U. S. high-school students. Mr. Falk found it full of “quaint economic theories.” He was especially aroused by its chapter on advertising.

This chapter accuses advertising of improper use of testimonials, of “widespread” misrepresentation of goods, of inducing people to want more things and become extravagant, of taking advantage of human psychology by playing on people’s vanity and emotions. It concedes that “it is impossible to carry on our economic life today without advertising,” but adds: “we must ask ourselves if all the advertising today is wise and necessary.” Among other things it credits Mr. Falk’s organization with having done much to eliminate unfair advertising practices. Mr. Falk retorts: “We regret that his discussion of [our work] is much too brief. compared with the opposing text, and that it does not change much the previously built-up picture of advertising as a pretty rotten sort of institution.”

Mr. Falk accuses Mr. Rugg of:>Creating the impression that most advertising is dishonest by citing exceptional examples. Widely advertised products, argues Mr. Falk, are more likely to be of good quality than those not advertised, because a producer of identifiable goods “is usually wise enough to protect their reputation by delivering quality products.”

>Implying that advertising’s purpose—”to make us buy”—”is the very essence of wickedness.” Says Mr. Falk: “Business has to sell goods, and has to sell more goods, if all of us consumers are to have greater national income and enjoy higher standards of living.”

>Representing that advertising increases selling costs and therefore raises prices. Mr. Falk disputes this on several counts: a) “It is a well-known fact that advertising is the cheapest form of selling effort”; b) the total cost of advertising in the U. S. ($1,500,000,000 a year) is less than 2% of the total income earned and spent in the country; c) prices of widely advertised products (e.g., autos, radios) have steadily declined as advertising made mass-production economies possible.