Abstract
Two of the major campaigns after World War II, the Freedom Train and “The Miracle of America,” established a peacetime network between advertising, the media, and the federal government.1 This network formed the invisible hand of persuasion that came to guide American free enterprise. These campaigns also helped create a brand identity, a positive essence associated with the brand and visual symbols that represented the brand for the United States. With these campaigns, the Advertising Council members helped free enterprise supporters situate advertising and free enterprise into the history of the United States. They attempted to convey to the public an unbreakable bond between democracy, free enterprise, and America’s mission. They hoped to inspire patriotism and demonstrate the advertising industry’s patriotism. They wanted to rally Americans behind the idea that American businesses should expand around the globe and also wanted to show other nations a positive image of the country’s civil rights record.
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Notes
See Richard Fried, The Russians are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold War America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991), 573–581; Stuart J. Little, “The Freedom Train: Citizenship and Postwar Political Culture 1946–1949,” American Studies, 34, no. 1 (Spring 1993);35–67; Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the ‘American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
William H. Harley and John Dugan, Your Heritage of Freedom — Suggestions for Teachers (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1948), NYPL; “Why Is There a Freedom Train? How It Started,” 1948, NYPL.
Frank Monaghan, Heritage of Freedom: The History and Significance of the Basic Documents of American Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947).
Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Robert H. Zieger and Gilbert J. Gall, American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2002).
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© 2011 Dawn Spring
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Spring, D. (2011). “Miracle, U.S.A.”. In: Advertising in the Age of Persuasion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339644_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339644_3
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