Geopolitics, Nation, and Beyond: Performances of Security

Throughout the fall of 1954 and into 1955 and 1956, the Advertising Council managed a complicated public service campaign it called “People’s Capitalism.” Buoyed by the earlier successes of its “Our American Heritage” campaigns of the early 1950s (which featured the Freedom Train, a portable public service advertisement that crisscrossed America), the council trained its attention onto more explicitly political, and geopolitical, topics. By 1954 it announced its intention to intervene into the terrain of national security and the landscape of the cold war. “It was felt,” the council emphatically claimed, “that a dramatic rebuttal was needed of the communist claim that the common man must turn to communism to be ‘saved’” (Advertising Council 1955–1956, 9). This confrontation with the communist threat did not, however, inspire a campaign directed explicitly against the Soviet Union. Rather, the council sketched its dramatic response by targeting the practices and habits of America’s own working and middle classes. Its campaign, consisting of radio, print, and television advertisements, paid particular attention to the ownership of capital and attempted to “dramatize” the ways in which the American economy and its productive enterprises were owned and controlled by its great mass of workers. The campaign was conceived, the council reports, “as a way of dramatizing the fact that in the U.S. of today the people both supply much of the capital and receive the benefits” (Advertising Council 1955–1956, 9).