Presentation Script

My interest in iconographic commercial imagery can be traced back to a document I found while working as an archivist for the Tacoma Northwest Room in 2022, processing the materials of Puget Sound historian Murray Morgan.

Amongst the drafts of his work, research materials, correspondence and historical photographs was an uncredited, undated catalog of log brands, corporate imagery that served the same purpose as animal branding, a stamp of ownership to deter or prosecute any potential thieves who may emerge in the timber’s path between the forest and the sawmill. There was something very interesting I found in these icons, designed to be “read” by two specific groups: employees within the timber company and people who intended to steal from them, while remaining utterly innocuous to the general public.

Since then, I’ve become interested in the progression of early commercial imagery such as advertising, logos, packaging and branding, in relation to the development of printing technology. Particularly, I’m interested in the advent of what some historians call the “new advertising” movement around 1900, when imagery ceased becoming ornate and referential to the founders or their factories in a “signatory style” one might associate with stationary letterheads. Instead, commercial imagery simplified and became iconographic, like the timber brands, into what historian Jennifer M. Black calls “a logo-based language, a hieroglyphic set of graphic signifiers”. Historian Roland Marchand contended these simplified images “aroused less psychological resistance” and played into advertiser’s belief that “the eye gets the facts quicker and more graphically than the mind.”

How did the iconographic turn in American commercial imagery reflect broader cultural, economic, and political transformations in the Inland Empire? Scaffolding this question, I am interested in exploring ways in which this iconographic turn also involved brand permanence in favor of consumer interactivity, its power in allowing commercial images to be “read” by the consumer unconsciously and its contemporaneous emergence with the formation of international trade routes and, subsequently, a more diverse American citizenry.

To engage with these questions, I am proposing a public-facing digital project on the social influences that shaped commercial imagery in the Inland Empire from the gilded age through the progressive era. In the digital exhibit, I am envisioning one section that is a 20-25 page text portion that fulfills the graduate student handbook requirement for a seminar-length paper. This section will provide the reader with my thesis, literature review, methodology, and findings. On another portion of the site I am considering a map where selecting a node would allow visitors to examine a carousel of the artifact, the company and founders which could be expanded to a full screen light box. Below the map, the object’s provenance and chronological metadata as well as a timeline of the companies life spans which can be toggled with significant regional and national events. All this is in effort to convey the ideas put forth in the thesis interactively and give readers a better sense of these objects in time and space.

So why this period, region and focus and why am I approaching this as a digital public history project as opposed to a traditional thesis?

Despite the incredible influence of advertising and public relations on American culture, scholarly output about these materials remain critically under researched in the academic landscape. This may be due to being stuck between the disciplines of history and public relations, a lack of preserved internal documentation from agencies or simply not seeming worthy of historical examination due to mass production.

While William Cronon and Roland Marchand have explored the relationship between industrialization and commercial imagery, these authors and many others on this slide focus almost completely on output from agencies located in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In contrast, The Inland Empire, a marketing term first applied to the greater Spokane area around the 1880s but was later coopted by California to brand it’s mid-century suburban and agricultural sprawl, is a unique region both in its rural consumers and also its largely Dutch financiers. Another perspective that I haven’t found yet in this literature is examining the commercial imagery of “boom and bust” aspirational metropolis’s like both Spokane and Tacoma during this period, both racing for industrial supremacy before ultimately losing out to Seattle, and both followed by long tails of recession in the wake of overbuilding.

Roland Marchand and Jennifer M. Black utilized the N.W. Ayer collection, one of the few advertising archives that contain first hand accounts from the “admen” themselves, rather than just the material they produced. The authors utilized this material to ground their historical arguments on the producer’s own words and avoid speculation that visual resource history is vulnerable to. In contrast, one of the challenges with this project, and any project that is focusing outside of the major American cities, outside of one collection of diaries from a Dutch commercial visual artist working in Spokane during this time period, I don’t anticipate encountering any internal documentation behind this corporate imagery in the Inland Empire.

That said, I can draw insights by looking at the lifespan of the corporations in relation to their adoption of “new advertising” design as well as examining the company founders and their workforce. I intend on complimenting my findings with a diverse pool of quantitative and statistical information and analyzing the geographic data surrounding where the materials were produced.

I am also interested in studying the region because of the extremely relevant holdings of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane, where I will be collaborating with the institution’s curator to digitize materials in May. The museum’s Joel E. Ferris Research Archives houses an incredibly unique collection of commercial and folk objects, ranging from quilts, commercial poster art, wholesale and retail packaging and commercial ephemera from this time period.

Critically, I find Spokane a unique subject area because the time frame of its development maps almost perfectly onto the formation of the advertising industry in the United States. In reviewing advertising history literature, the majority is focused on the mid century and moving forward. While there is certainly more documentation for agencies during this period, I would argue that findings are less clear by how complicated the media landscape was, even by 1960. In contrast, the 1880-1920 window reveals advertising before the adoption of public relations, how founders thought of themselves, the first adopters of marketing spin and ending in the first world war, when many historians believed advertising had truly galvanized through its implementation in propaganda. With this area of focus, we can examine both Spokane and the advertising industry as they experimented and attempted to assert their legitimacy at the same moment in time.

Because of the visual and comparative nature of this thesis, I believe a public history digital exhibit for this material would not only be the most compelling format but also the most pedagogically intuitive. Readers will be able to view the objects from multiple angles and engage with high definition close ups, which is vital to understanding the printing and packaging technology used in their creation and how they physically persisted or degraded over time. Additionally, the visualization section of the site will allow readers to contrast and compare materials along with their associated metadata and descriptions to engage with my thesis findings interactively.

Regarding who would benefit from this scholarship, I want to design the project so a diverse audience can engage with it. Academics in advertising and material history will have the knowledge base to use the text portion of the site, while readers with no formal training could use the visualization portion of the exhibit as a dynamic pedagogical tool. The work will provide the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture with hundreds of high-resolution photographs of undigitized portions of their collections and the site can be a showcase for innovative approaches at University of Idaho that are still rooted in traditional historical discipline. Additionally, the way that I approach this material could create a template that I could use to analyze other areas that were also “boom and bust” speculative ventures during this same time period. This combined material could be expanded into a future monograph.

In conclusion, I hope this presentation has demonstrated the scholarly gaps this study would address in advertising history and the unique opportunity to study the formation of modern American advertising alongside the development of Spokane and the greater Inland Empire.