We’re Back

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Finally. After weeks of technological buffoonery, I’m happy to announce that the TellAllmarketing Blog is back up.

After a fashion. My old blog simply died one day—you could no longer access it. And it was beyond my technical skill to figure out why.

So I engaged WordPress, and created this new version, which looks a little like the old one. Granted, I’ve got questions to answer going forward—like what to do with the dead site. Do I repost the 700 or so items that had piled up, starting in 2010?

I’ve decided not to. I don’t want to be like the Nelson Algren character who saved old racing forms “against a day when age would lend them some value; as age had in no wise increased his own.”

But I have recycled some oldies for the record, like my interviews with Art Spiegelman and Charles Ludlam.

The question might be asked: Just what is the TellAllmrketing Blog about?

In theory, it’s about marketing. But it also delves into the history of marketing, especially the direct mail medium.

It may be true that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. But there’s a more positive reason to study it—to get an idea of our heritage, and how our forebears solved their problems.

The blog also contains appreciations of writers I admire. I’m no literary critic— these pieces are an excuse for sharing long quotes by the authors. In the end, it’s all about writing.

This isn’t the first time the blog has gone dark. It tends to suffer when I’m working on a deadline.

Deadlines? Yes. I write content for cutting-edge firms like Aimia and IBM, doing everything from blogs to white papers.

I’ve also been writing books. I’ve finished one on boxing, titled The Man With the Brass Jaw, about the great Cuban journeyman Angel Robinson Garcia. And I’m writing a commissioned biography of a leader in the distance-selling business, a direct marketing legend whose name you will recognize when it’s published.

In the interim, please forgive the typos, missing headlines and other errors that pop up on the blog. It’s clear I have hardly mastered this process.

But enough of all that. It’s Memorial Day. Let’s remember our departed heroes and return to work on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail, Chapter 12: Montgomery Ward Raises the Barn

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Of all of our myths, none is more cherished than the one that life was wonderful for settlers on the Great Plains. They had land, thanks to the Homestead Act of 1862, and that’s all they needed (that and pianos for sing-alongs).

But it wasn’t so. Some lived in hovels, not in the Victorian homes we envision. The conditions were harsh, the weather terrifying. Worse, the farmers had little human contact. Some had hallucinations, others committed suicide. This was powerfully captured by Willa Cather in My Antonia. “I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda,” the narrator writes. His exhausted spirit was “tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow.”

But what of those who did survive? They worked their farms. And when they needed seeds, tools, clothes or even coffee, they went miles to general stores which also served as post offices. And there they were gouged.

In 1872, 40 Midwestern farmers received what probably was the first piece of direct mail they’d ever seen. If the store owners had any idea what it was, they may not have handed it over—it threatened their interests. Not that there was any secret about it: It was headlined: “Grangers supplied by the Cheapest Cash House in America.”

“At the Earnest Solicitation of Many Granges we have consented to open a House devoted to furnishing Farmers and Mechanics throughout the Northwest with all kinds of Merchandise at Wholesale prices. Few indeed realize the extent to which the cost of living in this country is increased by the expense incidental to the distribution of goods under the older methods in vogue.” Attached was a price sheet, listing various staples.

The farmers could be forgiven for thinking it was too good to be true. But it was on the level. The letter had been sent from Chicago by a 39 year-old entrepreneur named Aaron Montgomery Ward. And whatever it lacked in style, it made up in sincerity. Ward was one of the first consumerists. He wanted to help the farmer (and, of course, make a small profit for himself).

Born in New Jersey in 1843, Ward grew up in Michigan, worked in factories and a general store, then held a series of sales jobs. At age 22, he was hired by the Marshall Fields department store in Chicago. Fields had a lucrative side business, selling merchandise wholesale to general stores by mail. Ward was handed this plum, and he came to know farmers and how badly they were robbed by almost everyone they did business with.

Ward had an epiphany: he envisioned a department store by mail. He bought some wholesale merchandise, lost it in the Chicago Fire of 1871, then started over. Scoffers ridiculed him for thinking that products could be sold sight unseen, and that women in particular would forego “the pleasurable excitement of shopping.”

But Ward knew better, and he had an advantage that even Marshal Fields lacked: He had the National Grange, the farmer’s organization, in his pocket. The Grange let him use its name and membership list, and Ward got himself appointed as purchasing agent for the Illinois Grange, which enabled him to get better prices for himself.

Of course, the Grange connection gave Ward something just as precious: access to the farmers. Attending their monthly meetings, Grangers were likely to find that the entertainment of the evening was a mustachioed figure—Ward himself. He assured the farmers that the pictures and words in his catalog were accurate; to prove it, he displayed the goods. There was one more thing: he gave a money-back guarantee.

In two years, Ward moved from a single sheet to a 32-page catalog that offered “notions, hose and gloves, hat trimmings, toilet goods, letter paper, needles, cutlery, jewelry and watches, fans and parasols, stereoscopes and albums, trunks and traveling bags, harness, Grange regalia, goods, clothing, hats and caps, boots and shoes,” according to Ward Catalogue No. 11, from 1874. And in time, he published his “big” books, omnibus catalogs that carried everything from underwear to stoves.

As time went on, Ward mailed also almanacs and tiny pocket catalogs, like one titled “4 Ways to get a copy of Montgomery Ward & Co’s Big Catalogue No. 73,” circa 1904. This was a form of prospecting: It was too expensive to mail the big book to non-customers or people who had not showed an interest.

“The average farmer feels like spending when, after he has sold his stock or grain and paid up his taxes, he finds a good fat roll still in his pockets,” Ward wrote. “If the mail order man’s literature is on the spot at the time, ten to one he will reap the benefit.”

Some operators encouraged the farmers themselves to try their hand at starting a mail order business. They offered products that a person might sell from his kitchen table—books like, “Why God Lets the Devil Exist.”

By 1888, Ward had a rival for the title of the farmer’s savior: Richard Sears. But Sears didn’t see himself as anyone’s savior. He was a hustler, one in a line. His father James had gone to California for the Gold rush of 1849, and came back broke. Sears went to work at 16 to help support his family, and eventually became a station manager for the Minneapolis St. Louis Railroad. He came upon a carton of watches refused by a local jewelry store, and sold them for a $2 markup to agents along the line. And he went on from there.

There was one major difference between Ward and Sears. Ward built his business with “missionary fervor and a deep desire to help each customer. Sears did it as an opportunist—for money, excitement and the joy of selling,” wrote the renowned mail order historian Cecil Hoge.

And yet, “as the firm grew, Sears made a special effort to keep the personal touch,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote. “For some time, even after the typewriter had come into general use, letters sent out by the company were handwritten out of respect for the feelings of the farm clientele who were sometimes offended to receive a letter that was ‘machine-made.’”

Sears sent personal letters, like this one to J.W. Bull, of West Virginia, on March 24, 1894:

Dear Sir:

About three weeks ago we sent out a special offer, offering as a present a $100.00 organ to the first one to order our $5.95 watch, and a $50.00 gold filled watch, as a present, to the first order received from each state. Up to the present time we have received no order from your state, so we write you confidentially under two cent stamp. If you will fill out the enclosed order blank immediately and send to us, with $5.95 for watch described, we will see that you get “at least” a very nice present at once.

As for Ward, he was not only a consumerist, he was an environmentalist. In 1890, he sued the city of Chicago for allowing its lakefront to be defiled with scaffolding and garbage.

Did the Ward and Sears catalogs really change the way people shopped? Oh, yes: the Main St. general stores were driven out of business, and the owners hated the men who had done this to them. O.E. McIntyre later joked, “I’m working for Sears, but don’t tell my mom—she thinks I’m playing piano in a call house.”

Chapter 13: The Confederate Croupiers

The Ten Girl Company

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

At a time when most firms would not even hire female secretaries, women were sending direct mail—in some cases to survive. The proof is these letters mailed around the turn of the 20th Century.

In Chicago, a group called The Ten Girl Company sent “Gold Plated Handy Pins” to individuals, relying on an honor system for payment.

THE TEN GIRL COMPANY greets you and sends you with this letter six pair of their Gold Plated Handy Pins. The price we have made is 30 cents for the six pair and we hope that you can use them at that price, which is a great deal less than the stores are asking for them.

The Ten pointed out that we are not objects of charity, but have to make a living and our little company of girls, has not enough capital to sell their goods in a regular way.

 We hope you will enclose three 10 cent pieces in the stamped envelope and mail it; if not, please be kind enough to put in the pins and return them. You don’t even need to write your name on the envelope, as the number tells us who pays for the pins.

 Begging your pardon for troubling you and thanking you in advance for your kindness, we remain,

 Yours for business, THE TEN GIRL COMPANY (1900)

 P.S. We hope you will let us hear from you promptly, for if you don’t, we cannot send out any more pins.

Some of our feminine pioneers were mendicants: They sent letters asking for small sums of money, usually quarters or other coins. But others had burgeoning little businesses.

Beulah Hubbard, of Passaic, New Jersey, mailed cards offering silk ties. The cards, featuring her photo, stated, How Would You Like to Earn Your Own Living at My Age?

If you had to, I suppose you would do just as I am doing—GET busy.

 “I am selling Neck Ties for my living and I want to supply You. I can supply you almost any color or combination of colors—Try me. Or will send Ladies Jabot if you prefer.

 If, when you get my tie, you don’t say it is as good a bargain as you ever saw at form 50 cents to $1.00, return the tie and I will send back your money.

I honestly believe you can sell lots of these Ties at from 50c to $1.00.

 $3.00 a dozen is my price to agents, prepaid.

 Second Fold Here….(triangle) last fold here…Put 25 cents here I NEED THE MONEY

 YOU’LL TRUST ME—WON’T YOU?

 You use ties every day. I can’t convey an adequate idea of just how pretty my ties are. A picture won’t bring out the delicate colorings nor the silky texture, so I say, if you are not in every way pleased, I will return your money. I can furnish Ladies Jabots if you prefer. Say which.

Then there were letters with serious propositions. This one, dated July 8, 1892, is from the Women’s Land Syndicate:

Dear Friend:

 The enclosed circular we trust will explain our plans and prospects fully. In it we have endeavored to show facts as they now exist on which we base our opinion that south Waukegan will have a population of at least 50,000, and when that point is reached our lots which cost the Syndicate $500,000 will be worth from three and one half to four million dollars.

 That our Profit-Sharing Investment Bonds are considered an exceptionally profitable investment is evidence by the large number being sold to some of the most prominent financiers in the country. A Wall Street (New York) banker has made his wife a present of one hundred of them and we could name a dozen other less prominent bankers that have purchased for their wives.

 You will notice in our circular what Mr. Jas. B. Hobbs, one of Chicago’s prominent bankers, has to say about us. Also Gen. Singleton, a man who has made more than a million dollars out of his shrewd investments.

 We are W.C.T.U. women, some of us having labored for years in the cause. We know these Bonds are sure to prove very profitable and therefore we naturally prefer to have them owned as far as possible by white ribboners.

 It is now evident that all our bonds will be sold before August 1st, so this will be your last opportunity to secure one or more in case you desire to do so.

You should therefore write us at once stating the exact number of Bonds you would like, enclosing a small deposit, and we ail reserve them for you until you can arrange to make the payment. They are $10 each and are sold only to women.

 As this will probably be our last announcement before the Bonds are all sold, we wish to say we are greatly indebted to the Union Signal for its generous aid, and to the many temperance workers who are assisting us all over the country.

 Thanking you in anticipation of an immediate reply, stating the number of Bonds you will want, if any, we are,

 Yours very truly…

 

The Vice Crusader

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Manhattanites were awakened on Friday, March 9, 1877 by the sounds of rain, gale-force wind and breaking glass. But that was nothing compared to the storm that hit N. Sherman Read around noon: His office door slammed open, and police and federal marshals came in, led by the bull-like vice crusader Anthony Comstock.

Comstock looked at the envelopes being addressed. Just as he thought—the Wyoming Lottery. He ordered his men to ransack the place. Within an hour, Read and two assistants were seated in the 26th Precinct, watching as a score of other lottery operators were brought in. Police followed with dripping boxes of envelopes and circulars.

Before he could interrogate the prisoners, Comstock had to deal with jurisdictional problems, the kind of thing he often overlooked in his zeal. But he finally started asking questions. Just what were they up to? And what was their link to the man who controlled “the bogus lottery and mining schemes that are now being advertised through this country and Canada”—the one known as J.M. Pattee?

Never heard of him, the suspects said. But Comstock had.

Comstock, like Pattee, grew up on a New England farm, but emerged with a different world view. Pattee exploited human weakness, Comstock refused to tolerate it even when it was legal. At 17, he broke into a tavern, “opened the faucets and drained off on to the floor every drop of liquor in the place.”

His life had not been a happy one. His mother died when he was 10—there would be no more warm cherry pie following all-day church services on Sunday—and his brother Samuel was killed at Gettysburg. Anthony enlisted to take his place, and returned from the war, in which he distinguished himself (when he wasn’t lecturing his fellow soldiers on morals), to face another setback: His father had lost the family farm.

Comstock moved to Manhattan and took a job as a dry goods clerk, living like many single men in rooming houses. There he noticed something that almost drove him to tears: His fellow boarders were fond of “obscene pictures and literature.”

Oh, the shame. Comstock found out where these books were sold, a basement on Warren St., and went there to buy one himself. This act of entrapment completed, he alerted police, who somehow found the time to deal with this offense while people were being murdered in the street, and they arrested the seller: Charles Conroy.

Not much came of it. But Comstock instigated other arrests, and in this way made a name for himself. In 1872, with the help of wealthy moralists, he was named secretary of the newly formed YMCA Committee for the Suppression of Vice, and started keeping a ledger.

When Conroy was arrested for the second time, Comstock recorded his age (36), his ancestry (Irish), his religion (Catholic), his education (Common), his offense (obscene books and circulars) and the disposition of his case (“Through mismanagement of Police & ignorance of law he was discharged”).

Nothing was too trivial for his notice: He even lashed out at 16 year-old John Gordon (“education poor”): “As some 40 ladies were leaving the Harlem boat at Fulton Market slip, this scoundrel jumped up on the fish crates lying on slip and made a gross exhibition of himself.”

But there were more important things in the offing–like a proposed measure to ban obscenity from the mails. This bill was delayed because Congress was mired in a growing national scandal–-Credit Mobilier, the financing arm of the Union Pacific, had bribed several Congressmen, and they had winked at cost overruns. Some of the people associated with it, like Durant, were well-known in Omaha when Pattee was running lotteries there.

Comstock refused to accept this delay. He went to Washington, and toured Congressional offices with his collection of mail order erotica. Historians disagree on his impact, but on March 2, the House passed the bill later known as the Comstock Act, and weeks later Comstock was appointed as an unpaid special agent of the post office.

Now empowered by a badge, Comstock took it upon himself to decide what obscenity was, and he saw it in everything from birth control literature to fine art; Madame Restell, the famed midwife and procurer, committed suicide after her brutal encounter with him.

But his most consistent target was Charles Conroy, who in Newark in 1874, found himself being collared by the vice crusader for the third time.

The pornographer couldn’t take any more. “While whining in pathetic tones, Conroy plunged his dirk into my face, severing four arteries,” wrote Comstock, who completed the arrest at gunpoint, and then was guided home by “the same One who has ever kept me.”

Wearing muttonchop whiskers to disguise the scar tissue, Comstock took to entrapping malefactors by mail. For example, he would request a catalog of birth control devices, then arrest the sender when it arrived. But the joke was on him: These same concerns rented his name out, and the mailbox he used was now stuffed with junk mail.

Comstock correctly concluded that anyone who replied to an advertisement “is liable to have a large circle of correspondents. The name once obtained must go the round of the fraternity, and, when thus used, is either kept for a new scheme by the same fraud or else sold to another one of the brotherhood.”

But there was a more egregious fraud going on, and Comstock was urged to fight it by an unlikely supporter. The New York Times, which had condemned his practice of entrapping people, now recanted. “If Anthony Comstock’s decoy system of obtaining evidence is ever justifiable, it is so when employed against the thieving lottery concerns,” it said in an editorial.

The call to duty had been sounded. And Comstock, who professed to live by the Talmudic saying, “Where no man is, be thou a man,” was ready. He nabbed several felons on this rainy March day. But where was the mastermind himself? Comstock was aware of Pattee’s existence, as shown by that night’s ledger entry:

“John M. Pattee.

Age: 55.

Nationality: American`

Religion: Protestant.

Education: Common

Married

Children: 4”

What did it mean? He summed it up in one line:

“The aliases and fraudulent schemes of this man are almost legion.”

Epilogue:

The next chapter was more about Pattee (whom Comstock was never able to nail) than it was about Comstock. But it ended on this note:

By the time he died in 1915, Comstock was widely viewed as a crank and an enemy of the First Amendment. “The fight for the young!” Heyward Broun wrote. “The phrase was always on Comstock’s lips…But, with the passing years, may it not have become a formula with which he sustained himself, unconscious that its relation to his work was growing increasingly remote?”

Comstock had changed in one respect. When younger, he had railed against direct mail. Under his leadership, though, the Society for the Prevention of Vice sent junk mail to donors, asking for “sympathy, co-operation, and such financial assistance as you may be disposed to give.”

But some things remained the same. In 1906, 38 years after their first encounter, Comstock again arrested the pornographer Charles Conroy. The ledger tells it all: age 66, Irish Cath., Scheme to defraud by mail. Tombs in default of $2,500 bail.

(From Dear Friend, The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail, Copyright 2016 by Ray Schultz)

Was Jesus An Advertising Man?

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

It’s forgotten now, but one of the biggest sellers of the 1920s was Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows. It posited that if Jesus Christ returned to earth, he would be an advertising man.

With all respect to my friends in advertising, this I doubt. But the book was published in an optimistic era, in which business people were lionized.

You can get the drift from a direct mail letter for the book written by the great copywriter Robert Collier:

Jesus Christ ‘the founder of modern business?’

Jesus a master of efficiency in organization, a born executive?

Jesus a sociable man, a cheerful, bright companion with a pat story on His lips…?

Jesus wording the best advertisements ever written?

This letter, and others like it, were accompanied by a brochure, asking: Was Jesus a Physical Weakling?

The painters have made Him look so—but He swung an adze and pushed a saw until He was thirty years old. He walked miles every day in the open air. He drove a crowd of hard-faced men out of the Temple.

It’s beautiful copy, but there’s one slur I don’t like: that Jesus “faced Jewish hatred and Roman power without a tremor.” The Catholic Church has said that Jews were not responsible for the death of Christ. (Thank you for that). For the record, the religious ones among us await the Moschiach, and nobody has predicted he will be an advertising man.

That said, Collier’s letter sold millions of books. But an upheaval was coming: the Great Depression. At that time, people viewed Jesus in a more traditional light: as minister to the poor and fallen.

As for Robert Collier, he was a direct mail legend, with or without help from the Messiah.

“Collier was first guy that really sold merchandise by mail,” said the direct marketing guru Bob Stone in 1997. “He came up with 10-day pre-trial guarantees, all things we use today. He was a merchandising genius. For example, he had a bunch of black raincoats that they couldn’t sell worth a damn. Who absolutely has to have a black raincoat? So he had a list of undertakers. and sold out entire stock. It was a lesson I never forgot.”

Stone met Collier at a conference in 1939. What was he like personally? “He wasn’t aloof , he was a loner. There’s a difference. He was a shy man. He was dedicated to the sale of merchandise. I don’t think he had a lot of pride. He had a merchandise business by selling those raincoats and hunting books, for himself mostly.”

One legend has it that Collier sold coal at some point. Finally, he joined P.F. Collier & Son Co., publishers of Colliers magazine and books like Harvard Classics, the Five-Foot Shelf of Books. It just so happened that P.F. Collier was his uncle, “but he had always told me he did not want me in the business until I could bring something to it they could get nowhere else,” Collier wrote. In I 931, Collier published his own book: the Robert Collier Letter Book,

And was he a believer in Jesus the businessman or Jesus the healer? This we don’t know.