In the early twentieth century, ethnic and racial trade characters
were accepted symbols of national brand campaigns. A 1915 issue of the
trade journal the Posterreported that among American housewives, the
most popular, indeed friendly, brand identifiers were the Armour Meat
Company and Cream of Wheat chefs, both black men, and Aunt Jemima,
precisely because of the customer’s identification with them as warm
character trademarks. Today Aunt Jemima is so positively engrained in the
popular subconscious that rather than retire her entirely, her handlers have
taken the bandanna off and given her a mainstream persona.
Stereotyping was common from the end of the Civil War through
the 1890 s, when the population expanded in urban areas and more goods
and services were required to feed and clothe them. Enterprise and
competition grew at a fast pace; numerous advertising techniques were
employed to make a large consumer base aware of mercantile options. The
earliest forms were typographic space ads, bills, and broadsides composed
by job printers. Then, as printing technology improved and color printing
became economically feasible, more specialized commercial artists took
responsibility for the design of advertising, including trade cards, posters,
and collateral ephemera. Racial and ethnic caricature was one of the most
commonly practiced graphic leitmotifs.Comic physiognomic distortion was
used with impunity for both political and social satire, and as entertainment
in forms such as Currier and Ives print series Darktown,Judge’s Blackville,
Puck’smildly Jewish humor book Pezneez(a transliteration of businessin a
Yiddish dialect), to name a few. Comic artists, including Thomas Worth, F.
W. Opper, R. F. Outcault, F. M. Homrath, A. B. Frost, and E. W. Kemble,
also developed character trademarks to sell soaps, patent medicines, writing
inks, and washing machines. Racial stereotyping in the service of commerce
was a benign graphic convention not intended to deride, or so the artists
may have believed. It was a right-of-passage, a tax levied upon all entrants
to the melting pot.
The process might be called democratic. Every major immigrant
group was indiscriminately pilloried by caricaturists—a curious badge of
distinction. Ultimately, however, most immigrant groups were allowed to
enter the mainstream, stereotype in tow. Often the groups themselves used
similar self-caricatures in their own media. But not so for African and
Native Americans. Stereotypes of the Native American “heathen” or “noble
savage” continued unabated, while African Americans were saddled with
various slave images (Uncle Tom, Mammy, etc.). The black minstrel image,
the birth of black face, was so popular that white performers would put on
burnt cork to entertain in theaters that otherwise restricted black people.
The grain of truth on which stereotypes were developed made
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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