Advertising: A Society Transformed

The era between the Civil War and World War I saw a country completely transformed in ways that made advertising, as we now know it, possible. The railroads united the country into one national market, while national magazines (made affordable by the invention of cheap, wood pulp–based newsprint) now reached into every home in the country. For the first time, the Shredded Wheat Company, located in Niagara Falls, New York, could promote their product to consumers in St. Louis by placing ads in the New York–based Ladies’ Home Journal. Of course, a skyrocketing urban population could no longer grow its own supper, so a currency-based market for food as well as consumer goods exploded. Moreover, with the advent of a national transportation network and the efficiencies of mass production, the price of food fell dramatically, while per capita income actually increased. In America even the poor could buy adequate quantities of food, and the burgeoning middle class had plenty of cash to spare. A little later, with the introduction of rural free delivery in 1896 and of parcel post in 1913, even the farming population was brought into the consumer economy.