American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination by Bellows Amanda Brickell;

Author:Bellows, Amanda Brickell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

Advertising Ascendant in the United States and Russia

Advertising became increasingly important during the late nineteenth century when Russia and the United States simultaneously underwent manufacturing booms as numerous industries developed and cities expanded.3 In the United States, manufacturers created a vast array of goods, including clothing, agricultural equipment, automobiles, alcohol, and cigarettes.4 Many of these commercial items were distributed via the railroad system, which played a critical role in enabling producers to transport materials to geographically distant consumers.5 Meanwhile, Russia’s economic foundations similarly shifted from agricultural labor toward commerce, manufacturing, and textile production, a structural change that mirrored that of France during the first half of the nineteenth century.6 Improvements to communication systems and infrastructure, such as the government’s decision to increasingly invest in railroad construction and supervision in 1880, led to the enhanced flow of information and goods.7 Russian industries developed further after 1897, when Finance Minister Sergei Witte put the ruble on the gold standard to stimulate foreign investment. As Russia’s annual growth rate reached 8 percent during the 1890s, the nation witnessed a new era of production and distribution of material goods, many of which were available for purchase in bustling cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow.8

Industrialization, migration, and improvements to national infrastructure enabled Russian and American merchants and manufacturers to reach a wider range of potential customers. Advertising, a nascent industry in each country prior to the late nineteenth century, became an increasingly important component of companies’ marketing strategies as they promoted their goods to consumers. As they tried to inform buyers about the products now available to them, Russian and American firms also performed a balancing act by using marketing materials to reassure consumers who were apprehensive about social and economic changes. In Russia, Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II presided over autocratic regimes with paradoxical policies; although these rulers restricted political activity, they encouraged elements of economic liberalism, albeit under the state’s watchful eye. According to historian Sally West, Russian advertising mirrored this contradiction by deliberately promoting “a consumerist ethic at odds with autocratic society” that “spoke in the language of both tradition and change, simultaneously perpetuating and undermining the values of Russian cultural heritage.”9 Ultimately, Russia’s rapid economic transformation, inadequate protections for urban workers, and a lack of political rights sowed seeds of discontent that produced labor strikes, rioting, and general upheaval during the Revolution of 1905. Such unrest exceeded the potentially palliative effect of advertisements seeking to diminish the psychological hardships inherent in the process of modernization.

Americans were similarly troubled by the unsettling changes generated by industrialization. Discord was prevalent among laborers who worked long hours in factories and manufacturing plants. In Chicago’s Haymarket Square, laborers clashed with police after protesting conditions at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant in 1886, while an 1892 strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steel factory in Homestead, Pennsylvania, similarly ended in violence. In 1894, angry Americans marched across the country toward Washington, D.C., as part of labor leader Jacob Coxey’s army to encourage the government to enact policies to support unemployed workers.

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