The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Homer Buckley, said to be father of direct mail, was not proud of his offspring. It was, he charged, “an orphan medium of advertising abused and misused on all sides, with a stigma of cheapness attached to it.” And he would have known, for he had baeen sending it since 1902, while still an advertising clerk at the Marshall Fields department store:

“The development of this direct by mail solicitation fell into my hands,” he wrote. Sensing an opportunity, he left the store and with a partner, Merritt H. Dement, opened a lettershop, a firm for handling “the entire mechanical function of a mass mailing.”

Buckley, who had the face of an impish choir boy, was credited with inventing the term “direct mail,” although a British writer had used the phrase in 1897. In 1916, though, acting on an idea by Louis Victor Eytinge, he announced the start of the Direct Mail Advertising Association (the DMMA, later known as the DMA), and incorporated it the following year. And things rolled along until the night of April 2, 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war against Germany.

At first, Buckley saw the war as good for business. Salesmen would be drafted, and companies would replace “man power with mail power,” he exulted. But it wasn’t that simple. Men were drafted, all right, almost three million, and their names disappeared from mailing lists. Worse, the government started seizing trains for military use. In the fall of 1917, 180,000 railroad cars sat idle on sidings. Merchants blamed the Post Office.

Meanwhile, the public mood deteriorated, and it wasn’t helped by “the colossal waste of public money, the savage persecution of all opponents and critics of the war…the half-insane reviling of the enemy,” in H.L. Mencken’s words. Even the charities got combative with each other. “We have been advised to abandon these American families until after the war is over,” wrote the Caney Creek Community Center of Kentucky in a letter requesting donations for homes for the poor. “Is this consistent? None hesitates to affirm that each French baby ought to be and must be saved. Why is it not equally important that Lincoln’s people should be rescued?”

Still, business had to go on, and Buckley decided it was time for the DMMA to hold its first convention. It opened on Oct. 4, 1918 at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago.

Many guests had fortified themselves with spirits, if only to ward off the Spanish flu then kiliing people. Buckley greeted them. This was his show, and he was careful to project the right image. There would be no speeches in absentia by the convicted killer Louis Victor Eytinge.

Buckley had that morning received a threatening letter from the War Industries Board, an oversight agency run by the financier Bernard Baruch. “We understand that there is going to be a conference of direct mail advertisers on October 9th to 12th to consider the use of mail power to replace man power,” Dr. E.O. Merchant wrote, using Buckley’s phrase.

The Board didn’t approve. To save paper, it wanted to “greatly reduce, or entirely eliminate direct circulation advertising,” for the duration, Merchant wrote, adding this sidewise swipe: That direct mail letters created “an unfavorable impression in the minds of the persons to whom they are addressed.”

Buckley and his fellow leaders discussed the letter that night. An outright ban would put them all out of business, not that Merchant had that kind of power. What had the Board accomplished, anyway? The garment industry had shortened women’s skirt lengths to save fabric. Ha! Still, they had to respond. Could anything be said in their favor? Well, yes. For one, they supported the war effort by selling Liberty Loans by mail; Even the convict Louis Victor Eytinge wrote Liberty Loan copy.

The Liberty Loan provides what is perhaps the first opportunity the average man has had to definitely serve his country, said Harry T. Ramsdell, president of the Manufacturers and Traders National Bank of Buffalo, in a typical letter. If, as Ramsdell boasted, there was no sacrifice in a subscription to the Liberty Loan, there was even less for the banks or the mail houses: Liberty Loan mailings went out free under government frank.

Then there was Postage magazine’s campaign to send tobacco to the boys overseas. “Do you know what it means to find yourself at the end of a good, hard day’s work with nothing to smoke?” it asked in an ad. “Now think of Uncle Sam’s fighters in France, out there in the thick of things fighting your battles…Don’t let them go smoke-hungry.” Buckley had to know this poignant message wouldn’t sway anyone, nor would an honest review of the direct mail business, for even some practitioners had doubts about the uses to which it was put.

For example, the Boston copywriter E.M. Dunbar had refused to work for mail order liquor houses. “I am a writer of advertising, and sometimes I take a drink when I want to, but I don’t write booze advertisements,” he wrote. Dunbar, for his “soul’s safety,” did not want to be party to a tragedy like one that had occurred in Georgia, when a man drunk on mail order liquor shot his own brother to death.

If Chicago was home to the great mail order houses and New York the center of publishing, Kansas City was in the early 1900s the mail order liquor capital of the United States, home to over 100 firms selling mostly to dry counties.

They didn’t need Dunbar, not when they had writers like Elmer Davis, age 21, from Kansas City. Dear Friend: Did you ever wake up in the morning, head buzzing `round like a Kansas cyclone, a dark brown taste in your mouth, and a desire to lick the living daylights out of everything that got in your way? Davis wrote in one letter, or so he later claimed. Fortunately, Congress outlawed mail order liquor sales in 1917.

Buckley and company turned to their biggest dilemma: mail fraud. There were more brazen examples of it every day. Every time they opened an newspaper, it seemed, there was a story about some miscreant selling a cure for “weak manhood.” Worse, the papers regularly published statistics on how much money was stolen by mail—$183 million from 1909 to 1912.

The list of frauds was staggering:

• Promoting and sale of worthless mining or other stocks
• Inducing betting on fake horse races and athletic contests
• Fake land schemes
• Commission merchant swindles
• Selling worthless goods through misrepresentations.
• Obtaining commissions on fraudulent order
• Work at home schemes
• Failure to furnish goods ordered
• False correspondence school
• Sale of cheap books and dividing rods for locating minerals
• Phone guarantee of stocks and bonds
• Forged bills of lading
• Selling diplomas and requiring little or no study before granting them
• Fake trance mediums
• Green-goods swindles
• Sales of fake recipes
• Obtaining money to assist in securing fake inheritances
• Obtaining payments from relatives of deceased persons for goods supposed to have been ordered before death
• Selling interest in non-existing moving picture theaters
• Obtaining subscriptions for charitable institutions
• Fake employment bureaus

Some of these promotions are being used online today.

Anyone who had forgotten about fraud was reminded of it on Sept. 21, 1915, when Anthony Comstock died at age 71. The New York Times praised the old warrior for “the almost innumerable convictions of counterfeiters and green goods men,” and his fight against the Louisiana Lottery.

Some at the table must have thought it was hopeless. But Buckley rallied them, and after another sniifter of brandy or two, they drafted a response to the Board, pledging a “savings of 25% in the total tonnage of paper used.” This would be achieved by reducing paper size and limiting print runs. This document was submitted to the membership the next day, and the convention ended with a banquet on Friday night. E. St. Elmo Lewis, of Detroit, spoke on the subject of “Beating the Hun with Bigger Business.”

Chapter 20: Peace

By Ray Schultz

John P. Cramer was another small businessman who found a way to make a dollar off junk mail around  the turn of the 20th century. He owned the Multi-Mailing Co., a lettershop that performed “the entire mechanical function of a mass mailing.” Located on Park Row, this outfit printed circulars and stuffed them into envelopes. And it compiled mailing lists out of telephone directories. “The rural telephone sorts out the influential classes in every community, and lists of names made up from telephones are excellent for high-class propositions,” Cramer said. “I should call such names the very best that could be secured for investment advertising.

“Here are the telephone directories of the country around Akron, Ohio. Some of the little independent lines built by farmers for their own communities are only fifteen miles long. They have perhaps 100 subscribers. The subscribers’ list of such a line gives names that have been hard to get heretofore, as they are in no directory.”

Firms like Cramer’s drew legitimate clients. For instance, the Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company sent circulars printed on tinted paper to names taken from the Elite Directory or Blue Book: HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF HAVING A TELEPHONE IN YOUR HOUSE? Those little worries and annoyances that cause so much friction in household affairs are abolished by the telephone, which makes the householder independent of distance, weather and promises.

In Chicago, the Irene How Sanitarium asked physicians to refer women who wish to seclude themselves until they have passed what might be an embarrassing confinement, and offered a liberal percentage for referrals. And it added, Where the mother wishes to dispose of her infant we find it a home with respectable people.

Other letters, those sent by charities, achieved a divine eloquence:

Dear Friend:

The Bowery Mission and its famous Bread Line are favorably known throughout the length and breath of our beloved land. In every State and in every county may be found those who, once stranded in the great Metropolis, homeless, friendless, and penniless, found, in the time of their direst need, and in the Bowery Mission a City of Refuge and a Haven of Rest…Think of a thousand homeless men and boys, in line every midnight for coffee and rolls. Think of the clothing, the shoes, the underwear, and the linen necessary to give the shabby men a respectable appearance that they may have a better show when seeking work! Think of the thousands of aged and feeble ones who must be sheltered from the wintry blasts in clean and wholesome beds!

All this requires funds. Give what you can, and give quickly, and may the blessing of Him who says, ‘Inasmuch as ye do it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me,’ be your recompense and your reward.

Not everyone liked getting letters from strangers, though. “If a man or woman utterly unknown to you should stop you in the street, and, after tapping you on the shoulder, begin to tell you a story about his or her affairs—what he or she has to sell and how good it is—you would consider it a great impertinence,” wrote a young businessman. “But is it any the less an impertinence for that strange man or woman to take advantage of the mails to do the same thing?

He complained that he was “the target of scores of paper bullets which are shot at me every morning. Here, for instance, is a good woman who has imported a lot of baby clothes, and stops me to tell me of it, or another boasts of her woman’s underwear…Another person brings a school to my attention; a second his meats and groceries; a third his unparalleled landaus or other carriages; a fourth his hotel in Florida.; another his pickles and other things in which I have no more interest than I have in the man in the moon, yet every day I am compelled to listen for several minutes to their ranting, when I want to be off about my own business.”

The astute consumer could tell an advertising circular mile away, so even the most honest firms tried to disguise them. It started with type. People so distrusted the “type writer” at first that Richard Sears sent only handwritten letters. By the late 1890s it was accepted. Printers had perfected a process by which they could print thousands of letters so that each looked as if were individually typed. “Experts can scarcely tell it from genuine typewriting,” said one.

The arts of camouflage were also applied to the envelope. A new device, Belknap’s Rapid Addressing Machine, operated with stencils—it fed the names in a continuous roll, and printed them on the envelopes or periodicals. But these spotted addresses were fit only for magazines. “They give a circular away at once,” said Cramer. “All addressing in this office is done either by hand or on typewriters.”

Another giveaway was a cheap envelope and stamp. For a single cent in postage, a company could mail a letter in a so-called patent envelope, leaving one flap unopened for inspection by the post office. The drawback was that “after a man has seen one he is seldom fooled,” said Cramer.

No matter. Legitimate companies were now studying these developments, and trying to determine if they could use the medium.

Chapter 17: The Hard-Luck Writer

By Ray Schultz

In 1875, in a article titled, “Fancy Advertising,” the New York Times reported a man whose letter and Post Office boxes were “daily ‘made the recipients’… of a lot of envelopes, which he is put to the trouble of opening, and which he finds contain only advertisements of articles that he does not want to buy, or of companies or professional persons that he does not wish to employ.”

Some of these doubtless came from the City Novelty Co. of Philadelphia, established in 1860. At the height of the Depression in 1873, it mailed a brochure in a hand-written envelope. “The Crisis that has so suddenly burst upon the Country and so rapidly extended to every branch of Business, has particularly affected manufacturers of Jewlery, and we find ourselves carrying a very etxensive stock of FINE GOODS for LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WEAR, And have determined to dispose of our Stock on the following plan, which is PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE, AND NOT A LOTTERY.”

And the plan? “We do not sell any tickets to tell you what article you can have for a dollar, but we sell you a box of very extra quality of Writing Pens, twenty-four in a box, for twenty-five cents, and warrant them to give entire satisfaction; will not corrode—and are adapted to any hand that can hold a pen. In this box we put a sealed envelope, that has in it a slip of paper with some one of the above articles named on it, which you can have if you desire it, by paying one dollar.

“We also sell the Ladies’ Casket for fifty cents, which contains the following articles, (whih are worth separately at retail $1.15) viz: four papers (100) of Cole’s Celebrated Duplex Silver Spring Steel Needles, Nos. 5 to 10, (Sharps); one Patent Button-Hole Cutter, twelve Yosemite Pens, one Silver Plated Pen Holder. The Casket opens like a book, with gold edges and clasp. In this Casket you will find two envelopes, each contaning a slip of paper, naming some article in this list which you can have, if you desire it, upon paying one dollar.”

Anthony Comstock had overlooked the City Novelty Company, but there were bigger bigger frauds being perpetrated. One was the so-called Green Goods scam. Having divined that most people were as dishonest as they were, rogues like Ed Parmalee and Tony Martin prospered by sending letters like this one:

“Dear Sir: — If you have no conscientious scruples regarding how men get money, I write to say that I am in a position to supply you with an ‘article’ that — for commercial purposes — is as good as gold.”

If the reader was too dense to grasp what he was being offered, the attached clipping, looking like it came right out of a New York newspaper, would set him straight:

“A COUNTERFEITER GOES FREE”

“The country flooded with $2,000,000,000 of counterfeit money in the past year, and pronounced by Government experts to be as good as the genuine greenback.”

Yes, counterfeit money. Most people got little mail of any kind, let alone letters from a stranger inviting them to commit a crime, but the note stated a truth obvious to many in that age of robber barons: “People are growing rich around you every day (no one knows why), why not you?

Another wrote, “My Dear Sir: I am desirous of obtaining a good shrewd agent in your locality to handle my ‘goods.’ If you have been unsuccessful in your business, I can supply you with goods with which you can pay off all your debts and start free and clear again. You can purchase mortgages, etc.”

Of course, most green-goods operators apologized for the intrusion. One said, “This communication may be somewhat startling or probably unwelcome. If so, I trust you will be good enough to destroy the same as no harm or insult is intended.”

The actual sale took place in two stages. If he responded, the would-be millionaire would be sent a free sample — usually a genuine $1 bill. After examining and spending it, he would send a sum of money for 10 times that amount in counterfeit notes (there was a sliding scale through which the customer received a better percentage the more he paid). On the happy day that his order arrived C.O.D., he would open the box to find not the greenbacks he had ordered, but sawdust or green paper.

Few victims griped because they feared “the odium that is attached to their being willing to be a party to purchasing and putting into circulation counterfeit money,” according to the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And they needn’t have expected any sympathy from Comstock. “Any person who sends money for counterfeit money should lose every cent of it,” he wrote.

Some green-goods artists ran industrial-strength enterprises (one group had free run of Jersey City city hall). Others operated out of saloons on Hudson Street in New York City, many of which had private mail boxes. They would come in for a beer and the mail, and quietly slip out if they saw anyone asking questions.

As for printing, some lottery men used processes that allowed them to mimic handwriting or typewriting. In 1883, a tip led Comstock to the back room of Eugene Marvin’s print shop on Eighth Ave., where he found two big cylinder presses, cutting and numbering machines, 875,000 green-goods circulars and phony Western Union telegraph blanks.

In 1890, Congress passed a law making it illegal not only to offer green goods by mail, but also to order them. (Ditto for “green articles,” “green coin,” “United States goods” and “green cigars”.) So the perpetrators returned to the practice they’d followed earlier: Conducting the swindle in person.

Invited to New York or to a smaller town (after the initial direct mail letter, all communications would be by telegraph), the mark would be plied with food and liquor by his hosts, and the party would retire to a hotel room to finalize the deal. Then one of two things would happen. In the first, men posing as police would barge in and threaten to arrest everyone for counterfeiting; the only way out would be for the one man with actual legal tender in his pocket to bribe the officers. In the second, the swindlers would switch a suitcase filled with cash for one containing sawdust. As one writer put it, the victim would find himself alone in the room, his money gone, the idea slowly dawning on him of just what a fool he had been.

Occasionally, this would backfire. Tony Martin, known as the Prince of Green-Goods Men, was shot to death by an outraged rube from whom he had euchred $650. Comstock attended the funeral, hoping to catch Martin’s Comstock. Failing that, he used the occasion to denounce the dead man to a reporter. “The woman he lived with was another man’s wife,” he said. “And he was a confirmed opium fiend.”

Chapter 11: The Crooked Road To The End

By Ray Schultz

The U.S. Post Office was then headquartered in a two-story building near the War Department in Washington. Opened during the Franklin Pierce administration, the structure was finished with white marble from Maryland and New York, none of which stopped the roof from leaking. Into this setting in 1861 came Montgomery Blair.

Abraham Lincoln had become President in March of that year. In May, partly to pay off a political debt, he appointed Blair, a border-state moderate whose family had a house across the street from the White House and another in Maryland, as postmaster general.

A former U.S. attorney who represented the fugitive slave Dred Scott, Blair was reviled by radical Republicans for his moderation on the slavery issue. To add to his woes, his house in Maryland was burned down by the Confederates led by General Jubal A.Early.. But Lincoln wrote of his service as postmaster that “I remember no single complaint against with you in connection therewith.”

Blair’s first problem was getting the mail to its destination. The dying words of a wounded Pony Express rider—“Get out of the way—of the—United—States—mail,” in no way implied certainty of delivery. In many areas, service was only nominally better that it was in Franklin’s time, when the main conveyance was the horse. Some rural towns got no mail at all during high water.

Things were worse out west. Jefferson Davis, the secretary of War for Franklin Pierce, had tested camels in the Southwest, but they proved unsuitable, being used to the soft desert sand of the Middle East, not the hard-scrabble ground in the West. All this bred a certain cynicism: Mark Twain expected the stage driver taking him to Utah to “unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and leave it to the Indians or whosoever wanted it.”

In 1862, largely thanks to Blair, the post office started operating mail cars on the growing national railroad system. Crews of men, “eyeshaded gnomes in shirt sleeves,” stood on their feet overnight, sorting mail by destination and dropping it into pouches.

One year later, mailmen started delivering to the door in the 49 largest cities. “Little can I tell how my life has been interwoven with those to whom I have carried mail,” said Morris Church, of Worchester, Mass. when he retired decades later. “Their joys and sorrows have taken a deep hold upon my life.”

And in November 1864, the post office started selling money orders so that families could send money to soldiers at the front without fear of theft. (Registered letters had been around since 1855, but the New York Times had argued that the system facilitated “fraud on the part of Post office officials, by pointing out the letters which contain money.”)

Finally, postage was now affordable. Advance payment had been mandatory since 1855, but Congress now sweetened it by lowering the rates and dividing mail into three classes: First class (regular letter mail); second class (periodicals); and third class (circulars).

The lottery men noted all this. And by the time Blair, who had offered to resign when it suited the President, was told by Lincoln, “The time has come,” they were taking full advantage of it.

Chapter 7: Ode To A Crook