The Rant's mission is to offer information that is useful in business administration, economics, finance, accounting, and everyday life. The mission of the People of God is to be salt of the earth and light of the world. This people is "a most sure seed of unity, hope, and salvation for the whole human race." Its destiny "is the Kingdom of God which has been begun by God himself on earth and which must be further extended until it has been brought to perfection by him at the end of time."
Beginning around 1980, the postindustrial age has been a period of cataclysmic change. For the first time, people became truly aware of the sensitive environment in which we live and became alarmed by our dependence on vital natural resources. During the acute energy shortages of the 1970s and the 1980s, a new marketing term, demarketing, appeared. Producers of energy and energy-consuming goods started using advertising to slow the demand for their products. Ads asked people to refrain from operating washers and dryers during the day when the demand for electricity peaked. In time, demarketing became a more aggressive strategic tool for advertisers to use against competitors, political opponents and social problems. The California Department of Health Services, for example, is one of many organizations today that actively seek to demarket the use of tobacco.
Then, following a period of unprecedented boom in the West and bust in the East, the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain came crumbling down. This finally ended the cold war and with it the need for a defense driven economy. Ogling the huge, new, untapped markets in the former Warsaw Pact states, Western financiers and marketers rubbed their hands in glee. To expand their power globally, big multinational companies and their advertising agencies went on a binge, buying other big companies and creating a new word in the financial lexicon: megamerger.
By now, European and Asian advertising had caught up with the United States. TV was suddenly the hot medium, and agencies focused on growth, acquisitions and superior creative executions. For several years. Young & Rubicam in New York and Dentsu in Japan alternated as the largest advertising agency in the world. Then two brothers in London, Charles and Maurice Saatchi started acquiring agencies globally. In rapid succession, a number of high-profile U.S. agencies disappeared under the Saatchi & Saatchi umbrella---big companies such as Ted Bates Worldwide and Dancer, Fitzagerald, Sample. Saatchi & Saatchi was suddenly the largest agency in the world. Then followed more buyouts as the big agencies from Europe, the United States, and Japan emulated the the merger mania of their huge multinational clients. Names of agency founders disappeared from the doors, replaced by initials and acronyms: WPP Group, RSCG, TBWA, FCA, DDB Needham, and FCB, to mention just a few.
The European agencies fueled their growth by establishing huge bulk-media-buying conglomerates, although their now-sophisticated clients stopped looking to the agencies for research and marketing advice. Rather, they expected extraordinary creative executions to give their brands an edge, and their agencies delivered. Awards at the Cannes International Advertising Festival disclosed the blossoming of creative advertising from Spain and confirmed the creative leadership of the British who were only slightly ahead of the French.
Unfortunately, the euphoria of this period was short-lived. Sparked by unprecedented layoffs in the defense industries, the United States, as well as much of the world fell into an economic recession. While it was technically short-lived, some regions of the country felt the effects of it from the late 1980s well into the mid-1990s. The mergers temporarily stopped, the business world sucked in its collective belt, and management turned to new theories of total quality management (TQM), reengineering, and downsizing---theories aimed at cutting costs and increasing efficiency, all in the name of better customer service. But to many employees of the period, they were simply euphemisms for "you're fired." And all too often the struggle to maintain profits resulted in reduced customer service.
Two related economic factors characterized the marketing world of this period: (1) the aging of traditional products, with a corresponding growth in competition, and (2) the growing affluence and sophistication of the consuming public, led by the huge baby boomer generation.
The most important factor was competition, intensified by lower trade barriers and growing international trade. As high profits lured imitators into the market place, each offering the most attractive product features at a lower cost, consumers became the beneficiaries of more choices, higher quality, and lower prices. The priests of positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout, foresaw this competitive struggle in the 1980s. They published Marketing Warfare, which portrayed marketing as a war that businesses must be prepared to wage. Ries and Trout outlined four strategic positions in the marketplace: defensive, offensive, flanking, and guerilla. Companies had to operate from one of these strategic positions, they said, based on their relative strengths and weaknesses.
On the demand side, newly affluent consumers concerned themselves more with the quality of their lives. With their basic commodity needs already met, the baby boomers were now interested in saving time and money to spend on more leisure-time activities or on products, services, and social causes that represented the kind of people they aspired to be.
By the mid-1980s, an avalanche of ads---especially in the toiletry and cosmetics industries was aimed at the "me" generation ("L'Oreal. Because I'm worth it."). At the same time, the nation's largest industrial concerns spent millions of dollars on corporate advertising to extol their social consciousness and good citizenship for cleaning up after themselves and protecting the environment.
As the U.S. economy slowed, many companies were chasing too few consumer dollars. Clients trimmed their ad budgets, and many turned to more cost-effective sales promotion alternatives, such as coupons, direct mail, and direct marketing, to build sales volume. By 1990 advertising had lost 25 percent of its share of the marketing budget to other forms of marketing communications.
As the 1990s unfolded, this recession deepened. The traditional advertising industry found itself threatened on all sides and suffering from overpopulation. Clients demanded better results from their promotional dollars; small, imaginative, upstart agencies competed for (and won) some big accounts that had never been available to them; TV viewers appeared immune to conventional commercials; and a plethora of new media options based on new technologies promised to reinvent the very process of advertising. In three short years, the advertising agency business lost over 13,500 jobs. Major clients such as Coca-Cola defected from Madison Avenue, giving various portions of their business to specialists in small, regional creative shops and media-buying services. But the setback went far beyond the agency business. Throughout the media world, newspapers, magazines, and TV networks all lost advertising dollars. About 40 magazines went out of business during the two-year slump.
By the mid-1990s, U.S. marketers had begun shifting dollars back from sales promotion to advertising to rebuild value in their brands. In 1994, ad budgets surged ahead by 8.1 percent to $150 billion nationally. And throughout the rest of the 1990s, ad spending increased about 7 percent every year until the year 2000, when U.S. advertisers spent $247.5 billion, a whopping 11.3 percent increase over the previous year.
But then the bubble burst. In 2001, the combination of a mild recession, the collapse of the stock market, and the bust of the dot-coms all contributed to a record decline in advertising activity. On September 11 of that year, terrorists attacked the United States and suddenly all marketing and advertising seemed to stop---not just in the United States but also around the world. The end result: 2001 was the worst year in recent times for the advertising industry. Spending in the United States declined 6.5 percent to $231 billion, and overseas spending dropped 8.6 percent to $210 billion.
A year later, though, the economy seemed to be turning around and marketers were again starting to spend money on advertising. By 2005, U.S. advertising expenditures had reached $264 billion, more than completely recovering from the 2001 decline. But hardly anyone thought the problems were over. Technology, evolving lifestyles, new fears over security, and the rising cost of reaching consumers had already changed the advertising business forever. With the explosion of the Internet, we had entered a new electronic frontier---what Tom Cuniff, VP/Creative director at Lord, Deatsu & Partners, called "the second creative revolution."
*SOURCE: CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING, 25TH ANNIVERSARY ED., WILLIAM F. ARENS, MICHAEL F. WEIGOLD, CHRISTIAN ARENS, PGS. 45-48*
The Industrial Age started around the turn of the twentieth century and lasted well into the 1970s. It was a period marked by tremendous growth and maturation of the country's industrial base. As U.S. industry met the basic needs of most of the population, commodity markets became saturated. Fresh mass markets then developed for the new, inexpensive brands of consumer luxury and convenience goods also known as consumer packaged goods ( products that are sold quickly and at relatively low cost. Examples include non-durable goods such as packaged foods, beverages, toiletries, over-the-counter drugs and many other consumables.)
During the industrialization age of the 19th century, wholesalers controlled the marketing process as they distributed the manufacturers' unbranded commodity products. When those markets became saturated, though, the wholesalers started playing one manufacturer off against another. This hurt manufacturers' profits dramatically, so they started looking for ways to wrest back control. The manufacturers changed their focus from a production orientation to sales orientation. They dedicated themselves to new product development, strengthened their own sales forces, packaged and branded their products and engaged in heavy national brand advertising. Early brands of this area included Wrigley's spearmint gum, Coca-Cola, Jell-O, Kellog's corn flakes, and Campbell's soup.
In the 1920s, the United States was rich and powerful. As the war machine returned to peacetime production, society became consumption driven. The era of salesmanship had arrived and its bible was Scientific Advertising, written by the legendary copywriter Claude Hopkins at Albert Lasker's agency, Lord & Thomas. Published in 1925, it became a classic and was republished in 1950 and 1980. "Advertising has reached the status of a science," Hopkins proclaimed. "It is based on fixed principles." His principles outlawed humor, style, literary flair and anything that might detract from his basic copy strategy of a preemptive product claim repeated loudly and often.
Radio was born at about the same time and rapidly became the nation's primary means of mass communication and a powerful new advertising medium with great immediacy. World and national news now arrived direct from the scene, and a whole new array of family entertainment---music, drama and sports---became possible. Suddenly national advertisers could quickly reach huge audiences. In fact, the first radio shows were produced by their sponsors' ad agencies.
On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed the Great Depression began and advertising expenditures plummeted. In the face of consumer sales resistance and corporate budget cutting, the advertising industry needed to improve its effectiveness. It turned to research, Daniel Stanch, A. C. Nielson and George Gallop had founded research groups to study consumer attitudes and preferences. By providing information on public opinion, the performance of ad messages, and sales of advertised products, these companies started a whole new business: the marketing research industry.
During this period, each brand sought to sell the product on its own special qualities. Wheaties became the "Breakfast of Champions" not because of its ingredients but because of its advertising. Manufacturers followed this strategy of product differentiation vigorously, seeking to portray their brands as different from and better than the competition by offering consumers quality, variety and convenience.
The greatest expansion of any medium up to that time occurred with the introduction of television in 1941. After World War II, TV advertising grew rapidly, and in time achieved its current state as the largest advertising medium in terms of advertising revenues.
During the post war prosperity of the late 1940s and the early 1950s, consumers tried to climb the social ladder by buying more and more modern products. Advertising entered its golden era. A creative revolution ensued in which ads focused on product features that implied social acceptance, style, luxury and success. Giants in the field emerged---people such as Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy and Bill Burnbach, who built their agencies from scratch and forever changed the way advertising was planned and created.
Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency introduced the idea that every ad must point out the product's USP (unique selling proposition)---features that differentiate it from competitive products. The USP was a logical extension of the Lasker and Hopkins "reason why" credo. But as the USP was used over and over, consumers started finding it difficult to see what was unique anymore.
Finally as more and more imitative products showed up in the marketplace, all offering quality, variety and convenience, the effectiveness of this strategy wore out. Companies turned to a new mantra: market segmentation, a process by which marketers search for unique groups of people whose needs could be addressed through more specialized products. The image era of the 1960s was thus the natural culmination of the creative revolution. Advertising's emphasis shifted from product features to brand image or personality as advertisers sought to align their brands with particularly profitable market segments. Cadillac, for example, became the worldwide image of luxury, the consumate symbol of success surpassed only by the aristocratic snootiness of Rolls-Royce.
But just as me-too product features killed the product differentiation era, me-too images eventually killed the market segmentation era. With increased competition, a new kind of advertising strategy evolved in the 1970s, where competition's strengths became just as important as the advertisers. Jack Trout and Al Ries trumpeted the arrival of the positioning era. They acknowledged the importance of product features and image, but they insisted that what really mattered was how the brand ranked against the competition in the consumer's mind---how it was positioned.
Positioning Strategy proved to be an effective way to separate a particular brand from its competitors by associating that brand with a particular set of customer needs that ranked high on the consumer's priority list. Thus, it became a more effective way to use product differentiation and market segmentation. The most famous American ads of the positioning era were Volkswagon ("Think Small"), Avis ("We're only no. 2"), and 7UP ("The uncola"). Product failures of the period such as Life Savers gum and RCA computers, were blamed on flawed positioning.
While this was all going on in the United States, across the Atlantic a new generation of 0advertising professionals had graduated from the training grounds of Procter and Gamble (P&G) and Colgate Palmolive and were now teaching their clients the secrets of mass marketing. Lagging somewhat behind their U.S. counterparts due to the economic ravages of World War II, European marketers discovered the USP and the one-page strategic brief, or summary statement, that P&G had popularized to bring focus to ad campaigns. immediately following the war, French advertising pioneer Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet waged a frustrating battle to introduce U.S. research tachniques to his country; a decade or two later, in-depth attitude and behavioral research was all the rage. Because commercial TV was not yet as big in the United States, European advertisers divided their media money between newspapers, and outdoor media, along with a healthy dose of cinema advertising. Germany, theNetherlands and Scananavia would not get commercial TV for another decade.
In the 1970s, though, the European Common Market already offered untapped opportunities. Following the American examples, agencies and clients began to think multinationally to gain economies of scale. But it was not easy. While physically close, the countries of Europe were still separated by a chasm of cultural diversity that made the use of single Europe-wide campaigns nearly impossible.
*SOURCE: CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING, 25TH ANNIVERSARY ED., 2008, WILLIAM F. ARENS, MICHAEL F. WEIGOLD AND CHRISTIAN ARENS, PGS. 42-45*
In the last post we looked at the communication dimension of advertising to get a sense of what advertising is and how it works. The marketing dimension, then, showed some of the many types of advertising that companies can employ to help them succeed, and it showed us where advertising fits into a company's overall marketing strategy. Now we will turn our attention to a broader dimension---economics, which has driven the growth of advertising since its earliest beginnings and has made it one of the hallmarks of the free enterprise system. As English historian Raymond Williams said, advertising is "the official art of capitalist society."
Today, business and advertising are undergoing the most dramatic changes in history. To understand the nature of these changes and why they are taking place, we need to look at how advertising has evolved.
Principals of Free-Market Economics
Our economy is based on the notion of free-market competition. While there is no such thing as perfect competition there are four fundamental assumptions of free-market economics that, to a greater or lesser extent, our market-driven society believes in and/or strives to achieve:
Self-interest. People and organizations tend to act in their own self-interest. By their very nature, people are inquisitive. They always want more---for less. Therefore, open competition between self-interested sellers advertising to self-interested buyers naturally leads to greater product availability at more competitive prices.
Complete information. Access by buyers and sellers to all information at all times about what products are available, at what quality and at what prices leads to greater competition and lower prices for all. (This is why attorneys are now allowed to advertise, so that people can know what services are available at what prices.)
Many buyers and sellers. Having a wide range of sellers ensures that if one company does not meet customer needs, another will be available to capitalize on the situation by producing a more market-responsive product. Similarly, having a wide range of buyers ensures that sellers can find customers who are interested in the unique products they are able to produce at a fair price. (This is why we have antitrust laws and why the government closely regulates the few monopolies we do have. If a company controls the market and is not responsive to customer needs, the government can intervene to break up the company or otherwise make sure that customers have the alternatives they want.)
Absence of externalities (social costs). Sometimes the sale or consumption of products may benefit (for example, by crime prevention) or harm (for example, with pollution) other people who are not involved in the transaction and did not pay for the product. In these cases, the government may use taxation and/or regulation to compensate for or eliminate the externalities (as with tobacco advertising).
Now given these basic assumptions, let's see how advertising fits into the scheme of a free-market economy.
Functions and Effects of Advertising in a Free Economy
For any business, advertising may perform a variety of functions, and, when executed correctly, its effects may be dramatic. To see how this works, let's go back to the beginning of Coca-Cola, when druggist, John Pemberton was still mixing the syrup in his lab.
Pemberton's business partner and bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, suggested the name "Coca-Cola" to identify the two main flavors and because he thought that "the two Cs would look well in advertising." Robinson wrote down the name in his flowing script, creating a logo that is now instantly recognizable around the world and is one of Coca-Cola's more valued assets. Later, a distinctive bottle shape---purportedly the brainchild of a bored glassblower, who based the design on a cacao pod instead of a coca nut, as intended---became the standard throughout the company. The proprietary curvy bottle helped customers differentiate Coca-Cola from other drinks. The creation of the Coca-Cola logo and contour bottle demonstrate one of the most basic functions of branding as well as advertising: to identify products and their source and to differentiate them from others.
When Pemberton first began selling Coca-Cola at Jacob's Pharmacy, he needed to let people know what it was---although we associate the word coke with a cold bubbly beverage, the people of Atlanta did not automatically make the same connection. Therefore Pemberton and Robertson added the suggestion drink before ads in the Atlanta Journal to let readers know why they should drink it (because it is "delicious, exhilarating, refreshing, and invigorating," it was the perfect "temperance drink" during Prohibition), how much it cost, and where they could get it. Here is another basic function of advertising: to communicate information about the product, its features and its location of sale.
After Asa Candler gained control of the Coca-Cola company he began to develop the market for the drink on a grander scale. With the help of Frank Robinson and a city directory, he mailed thousands of coupons for free drinks to Atlanta residents. Coupons were also handed out on the street and inserted in magazines. To cover the costs of the samples, the company gave free syrup to the soda fountain that offered the beverage. Later, the free sample campaign went along whenever Coca-Cola was introduced in a new market. Candler also distributed promotional items to vendors so that the Coca-Cola logo was visible everywhere both outside and inside the shop. To us, this campaign demonstrates another function of advertising: to entice customers to try new products and to suggest reuse. Through the early part of the 20th century, Coca-Cola was not the dominant force we know today. Competitors such as Pepsi and the now-defunct Moxie cut into Coca-Cola's market share. Outside forces also threatened the entire industry; sugar rationing during wartimes was especially damaging. Before the United States became involved in World War II, Coca-Cola executives preempted a repeat of the setbacks the company suffered during World War I rationing. They persuaded the government to give troops Coca-Cola instead of alcoholic beverages to boost their morale. The D'Arci advertising agency gathered endorsements from U.S. officers in training camps to support the company's bid to become an official military supplier---and therefore be exempt from rationing. The War Department agreed to the plan, and Coca-Cola borrowed $5.5 million to establish 64 bottling plants near the front lines. The risky investment had great returns. When the soldiers returned home, a survey showed they preferred Coke by eight to one over Pepsi. Coca-Cola masterfully blended patriotism with another of the most important functions of advertising: to increase product use.
As soft drinks became a staple in convenience stores, restaurants and homes throughout the United States, Coca-Cola began campaigns outside the country to affect beverage consumption globally. The first international Coca-Cola bottling plants were established in Canada, Cuba, and Panama in 1906; today the company bottles Coke and about 400 other drinks in more than 200 countries (2007). Coca-Cola franchise bottlers around the world can tweak the recipe to match local tastes by altering the amount of sweetener they add to the base syrup. Bottlers and distributors also supplement the company's advertising with their own promotions and event sponsorships---from a community clean-up day in Armenia to a major film festival in Korea. Through various activities, Coca-Cola has succeeded in accomplishing yet another function of advertising: to stimulate the distribution of a product---in this case, on a global level. In a free market economy, when one company starts to make significant profits, other companies immediately jump in to compete. Over the years, to battle the constant competitive threat, Coca-Cola has funded ongoing marketing communications campaigns to accomplish yet another function of advertising: to build value, brand preference, and loyalty. Although the taste test wars of the 1980s showed that many people liked the taste of Pepsi better than that of Coke, such blind preference has never knocked Coca-Cola out of the top spot.
*SOURCE: CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING, 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, 2008, WILLIAM F. ARENS, MICHAEL F. WEIGOLD, CHRISTIAN ARENS, PGS. 31-34*
Once an organization determines the target market (a particular group of consumers at which a product or service is aimed)for its products, it designs a strategy to serve that market profitability. Marketing strategy is the particular blend, or mix, of strategic elements over which the marketer has control: product concept, pricing, distribution and communication. For ease of memory, marketers often refer to these elements as the 4Ps: product, price, place and promotion. Each of these elements also influences the type of advertising used.
Product: Categories of Goods and Services
For example, for mass-merchandised grocery brands such as Altoids or Tide laundry detergent, companies use a type of advertising called consumer packaged-goods advertising. A BMW/Mini dealer's service center or a tax preparation firm is likely to use service advertising. Manufacturers of scientific and technical products use high-tech advertising. In other words, for virtually every product category, specialists in that area use a specific type of advertising.
Price: Strategies for Pricing
A firm's pricing strategy also affects advertising style. Companies that do not compete on price typically use image advertising to create a particular perception of the company or personality for the brand. Or they may use regular price-line advertising, in which the price of a product is not shown, or at least not highlighted, and the advertising may be aimed at justifying the nondiscounted price. Companies that are more price-competitive may regularly use sale advertising, clearance advertising, or loss-leader advertising. Sale and clearance advertising promotes goods that have been discounted in order to accelerate sales or move seasonal items out of the store. Loss-leader advertising promotes selected goods that have been discounted drastically to create an impression of storewide low prices and thereby increase custom traffic in the store.
Place: The Distribution Element
The third element of marketing strategy, distribution, also affects the type of advertising used. Global marketers such as Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Kodak may use global advertising, in which messages are consistent in ads placed around the world. Other firms may promote their products in foreign markets with international advertising, which may contain different messages and even be created locally in each geographic market.
Companies that market in several regions of the United States and use the major mass media are called national advertisers, and their promotion is called national advertising. Some companies sell only in one part of the country or in two or three states. They use regional advertising, placing their ads in local media or regional editions of national media. Finally, businesses and retailers that sell within one small area typically use local advertising placed in local media or direct mail.
Promotion: The Communication Element
The final element of marketing strategy is communication. Advertising is just one of the tools in the marketing communications tool kit. Marketing communications (often called marcom) typically refers to all the planned messages that companies and organizations create and disseminate to support their marketing objectives and strategies. In addition to advertising, major marketing communication tools include personal selling, sales promotion, public relations activities, and collateral. The extent to which an organization uses any or all of these tools again depends on its marketing needs, objectives and strategy.
Each marketing communication tool offers particular opportunities and benefits to the marketer. Personal selling, for example, in which salespeople deal directly with customers either face-to-face or via telemarketing, offers the flexibility possible only through human interaction. Personal selling is thus an excellent tool for conveying information, for giving demonstrations and particularly for consummating the scale (or exchange) especially on high-ticket items such as cars, real estate and furniture as well as most business to business products. The drawback to personal selling is its high cost, so companies that emphasize personal selling in their marketing mix often spend a lower percentage of sales on advertising than other firms.
As a marketing communications tool, advertising enables marketers to reach more prospects at lower cost than a salesperson could ever do. Further, the creativity inherent in advertising allows the marketer to conjure an image or personality, full of symbolic meaning and benefits for the company's brand. No sales person can do this. In fact, advertising does suffer from credibility gaps. Advertising is used to build brand value. And advertising is usually the marcom tool of choice for creating brand awareness, familiarity, and image, as well as reinforcing prior purchase decisions.
Advertising can be used to satisfy a variety of sponsor objectives. Some advertising is meant to help generate profit for the advertisers, some is sponsored by nonprofit groups. Some ads try to spur the target audience to immediate action, others to create awareness or understanding of the advertisers offering.
For example, to promote their goods and services, companies use product advertising. To sell ideas, though, organizations use nonproduct advertising. A British petroleum (BP) ad for its gasoline is a product ad. So are ads for banking, insurance, or legal services. But a BP ad promoting the company's mission or philosophy (how the company protects the environment while drilling for oil) is called nonproduct, corporate, or institutional advertising.
Similarly, while commercial advertising seeks profits, noncommercial advertising is used around the world by governments and nonprofit organizations to seek donations, volunteer support, or changes in consumer behavior.
Some ads are intended to bring about immediate action by the reader, others have a longer-time goal. The objectives of awareness advertising, for example, are to create an image for a product to position it competitively with the goal of getting readers or viewers to select the brand the next time they shop.
A direct-mail ad, on the other hand, exemplifies action (or direct-response) advertising because it seeks an immediate, direct response from the reader. Most ads on TV and radio are awareness ads, but some are a mixture of awareness and action. For example, a 60 second TV commercial may devote the first 50 seconds to image building and the last 10 to a toll-free phone number for immediate information.
Sales promotion is a communication tool that offers special incentives to motivate people to act right away. The incentives may be coupons, free samples, contests or rebates on the purchase price. By offering added value, sales promotion accelerates sales. So it is a very effective tool. It is often used in conjunction with advertising---to promote the promotion. However, like personal selling, it is very expensive; it suffers from other drawbacks as well. While ad agencies create and place media advertising, most sales promotion programs are created by firms that specialize in that field.
Public relations (PR) is an umbrella process---much like marketing---responsible for managing the firm's relationships with its various publics. These publics may include customers but are not limited to them. Public relations is also concerned with employees, stockholders, vendors and suppliers, government regulators and the press. So PR is much larger than just a tool of marketing communications. However, as part of their marketing mix, marketers use a number of public relations activities because they are so good at creating awareness and credibility for the firm at relatively low cost. These activities (often referred to as marketing PR) include publicity, press agentry, sponsorships, special events and a special kind of advertising called public relations advertising, which uses the structured, sponsored format of media advertising to accomplish public relations goals. While PR is closely aligned with advertising, it requires very different skills and is usually performed by professionals in PR firms rather than ad agency people. However, advertising people need to understand how important PR activities are.
Companies use a wide variety of promotional tools other than media advertising to communicate information about themselves and their brands. These collateral materials include flyers, brochures, catalogs, posters, sales kits, product specifications sheets, instruction booklets and so on. These materials may be very expensive or frightfully costly. But because they contribute so much information to customers and prospects, they are very important to both closing sales and reinforcing prior sales decisions. The people who produce collateral materials may work for the company's advertising agency, but often they work for outside graphic design firms, packaging specialists, and independent film and video producers.
*SOURCE: CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING, 2008, WILLIAM F. ARENS, MICHAEL F. WEIGOLD, CHRISTIAN ARENS, PGS. 18-25*
Like many converts to a new religion, Polingaysi was overtly zealous. She was young, she was courageous, she was brash---brash enough to challenge her Hopi elders and the whole beautifully interwoven cultural patterns of Hopi life. Had she at that time been able to do so, she would have abolished all the age-old rites, the kiva (an underground room used by Hopi men for ceremonies or councils) rituals, the sprinkling of sacred cornmeal, and especially the making of pabos, or prayer sticks.
At the same time, tempering her radical approach, she had a deep and unsatisfied curiosity concerning the very things that aroused in her the strongest resentment. As she walked across the field one day after visiting her family at New Oraibi, she saw a pabo thrust into the sand on a little hillock, its single eagle feather fluttering at the end of a short length of white cotton string.
Prayer sticks, either the long, wandlike ones with many feathers tied to them, or the short, sharpened sticks called pabos, are held in reverence by the Hopi people. For four days after the "planting" of a prayer, these sticks are thought to possess the essence of the offered prayer and to be very powerful and sacred. To disturb one before it has lost its power is to court disaster. Accident, even death, Polingaysi, had been taught, might result.
Well known to her was the story of the white woman who took prayer sticks from a shrine, then fell and broke her leg. Behind this accident the Hopi people saw the work of the invisible forces. The spirits had resented her action and had tripped her, they were convinced.
As she bent to pull the pabo from the sand, Polingaysi felt a wave of superstitious fear sweep over her. But she was a Christian now, she reminded herself, and need not fear the magic in a stick with a feather on it. Defiantly, she carried it home and challenged her father with it.
"What does this stick mean to you and to the Hopi people?" she asked with more arrogance than she realized. "To me, pah! It means nothing. It has no power. It's just a stick with a bit of cornhusk and a feather attached to it. Why do you, in this day and age, when you can have the message of the Bible, still have faith in sticks and feathers?"
Her father, true Hopi that he was, recoiled from the proffered pabo, refusing to touch it. There was a worried look in his eyes.
"Must you know?" he asked.
"Of course, I must know," Polingaysi declared. "Why shouldn't I know?"
"Lay it on the table," her father said, "and I will tell you."
She placed the stick on the rough board table which she had goaded the little man into making, and the two of them bent over it.
"Do you see that blue-green, chipped-off place here at the top?" her father asked, pointing. "That is the face of the prayer stick, it represents mossy places, moisture. Now this below is the body of the prayer stick. A red color, as you can see, like our colored sand. That represents the earth. Moisture to the earth, then, is what the pabo is for."
"A prayer for rain?'
"That, yes, and more. The stick carries a bundle on its back."
"The bit of cornhusk, bound with string? What is it for? What does it mean?"
"I don't know what is bound up in the cornhusk," her father said, "and I won't open it to find out. However, I think you might find there some grass seeds, a pinch of cornmeal, a pinch of pollen, and a pinch of honey."
"But, why, why?" Polingaysi demanded impatiently. "What good does it do?"
The little Hopi man had been carving a Kachina doll (a doll made of wood and decorated with paint, feathers, and other materials that represents various spirits to Native Americans in the Southwest) from the dried root of a cottonwood. He turned away and went back to his work, sitting down crosslegged on the floor and picking up his knife and the unfinished doll. Polingaysi stood looking down at him, waiting for his answer. He thought before he began to speak.
"The good it does depends on many things, my daughter. It depends most of all on faith of the one who made the pabo. If all those things I mentioned are inside the little bundle that it carries on its back, it would mean that the one making the pabo planted it in Mother Earth as a prayer for a plentiful harvest, with moisture enough to help Earth produce full ears of corn, plump beans, sweet melons." He looked up at her and his small face was worried. "Surely you have not forgotten the meaning of the feather? Feathers represent the spirits that are in all things. This one represents the spirit that is in the prayer the pabo offers up."
Polingaysi turned away and took the pabo in her hands. About to tear up the cornhusk, she looked down to see her father's hands stilled and horror in his expression. Suddenly she could not open the pabo's treasure without his permission. She could not fly in the face of tradition to that extent, knowing it would offend his spirit, however silent he remained, however little he reproached her openly.
"May I open it?"
Her father bent his head, possibly questioning the propriety of such an action and fearing the harm it might do him and his daughter. After a moment of hesitation, he sighed, saying, "It seems well weathered. I think it is more than four days old. If so, its purpose had been served and the power has left it. Use your left hand."
Gently, in spite of her pretended scorn, Polingaysi opened the bit of dried cornhusk. It had been folded while still green into a tiny triangle. In this little pouch there was a bit of material about the size of a pea. Seeds, cornmeal, pollen, held together with honey, as her father had predicted.
"Can't you see there's nothing of value in here?" Polingaysi cried.
"Not to you," her father agreed. "Not to me. But to the one who made it in prayer."
She would have questioned him further, but he took his work and went outside, his face enigmatic.
"For pity's sake, Mother," Polinaysi burst out, turning to Sevenka who had been working quickly on a basket during the discussion, "does everything in the life of a Hopi have a hidden meaning? Why, for instance, should I use my left hand to open that thing?"
"It seems foolish to you because you are young and do not understand everything," her mother said patiently. "Perhaps you are foolish because you do not understand Hopi ways, though you are a Hopi. I will tell you about the left hand.
"The left hand is on the heart side of the body. It is the hand that moves most slowly. It selects instead of grabbing as the right hand does. It is cleaner. It does not touch the mouth during the eating of food, nor does it clean the body after release of waste materials.
"Do you remember watching our medicine man---the Man With Eyes---at his work? In his healing rites and also in his religious ceremonies he uses the left hand, for those reasons I have just given you. The left hand, then, is the hand that is of the heart and the spirit, not of nature and the earth."
Polingaysi struggled to deny the beauty of the words her mother had spoken. She sought a scoffing answer, but found none. After a moment the older woman continued.
"One more thing I will tell you about the pabos. They must be kept free of the white man's ways if they are to have the full power of old times. That is why Hopi people do not sharpen them to a point with white man's steel blades, but grind them to sharpness on sandstone."
At that moment Polinaysi saw one of her mother's brothers passing the window. He knew nothing of the discussion and she had no desire to reopen it. With her left hand she placed the pabo on the window sill.
"Polingaysi!" the old man cried, his face crinkling into a big smile of welcome. "It is a great treat to my spirit to see you after so long a time. We are always happy to see our child come home, even if she does make us sit at a wooden platform when we eat."
Polinaysi lost some of her contentiousness and laughed. He had always complained about sitting at the table, insisting that he could not keep his feet warm while he was eating unless he sat on them, Hopi-fashion. Her little grandmother had been completely mystified by the table, and though Polingaysi had patiently explained its use, the old lady had laboriously climbed up on to it, instead of seating herself on the wooden bench that served as a chair.
She looked at her uncle and thought of all the new ideas that she had gleaned during her life among white people. The old man had no desire to share her knowledge. To him the old way was best. He asked little of life: enough food to keep the breath in his thin, worn old body, a little heat in the fireplace, a drink of water when he was dry.
It was she who was forever holding out her cup to be filled with knowledge. [1964]
*SOURCE: EXPERIENCING RACE, CLASS AND GENDER IN THE UNITED STATES, 2ND ED., 1997, VIRGINIA CYRUS, PGS. 23-25*
Ethnicity in American Life: The Historical Perspective
John Hope Franklin
The United States is unique in the ethnic composition of its population. No other country in the world can point to such a variety of cultural, racial, religious, and national backgrounds in its population. It was one of the salient features in the early history of this country; and it would continue to be so down into the twentieth century. From virtually every corner of the globe they came---some enthusiastically and some quite reluctantly. Britain and every part of the continent of Europe provided prospective Americans by the millions. Africa and Asia gave up great throngs. Other areas of the New World saw inhabitants desert their own lands to seek their fortunes in the colossus to the North. Those who came voluntarily were attracted by the prospect of freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from various forms of oppression. Those who were forced to come were offered the consolation that if they were white they would some day inherit the earth, and if they were black they would some day gather their reward in the Christian heaven.
One of the interesting and significant features of this coming together of peoples of many tongues and races and cultures was that the backgrounds out of which they came would soon be minimized and that the process by which they evolved into Americans would be of paramount performance. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur sought to describe this process in 1782 when he answered his own question. "What then, is the American, this new man?" He said, "He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country. . . . He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of the life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater (Latin: nourishing mother). Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world."
This was one of the earliest expressions of the notion that the process of Americanization involved the creation of an entirely new mode of life that would replace the ethnic backgrounds of those who were a part of the process. It contained some imprecisions and inaccuracies that would, in time, become a part of the lore or myth of the vaunted melting pot and would grossly misrepresent the crucial factor of ethnicity in American life. It ignored the tenacity with which the Pennsylvania Dutch held onto their language, religion, and way of life. It overlooked the way in which the Swedes of New Jersey remained Swedes and the manner in which the French Huguenots of New York and Charleston held onto their own past as though it was the source of all light and life. It described a process that in a distant day would gag at the notion that Irish Catholics could be assimilated on the broad lap of Alma Mater or that Asians could be seated on the basis of equality at the table of the Great American Feast.
By suggesting that only Europeans were involved in the process of becoming Americans, Crevecour pointedly ruled out three quarters of a million blacks already in the country who, along with their progeny, would be regarded as ineligible to become Americans for at least another two centuries. To be sure, the number of persons of African descent would increase enormously, but the view of their ineligibility for Americanization would be very slow to change. And when such a change occurred, even if it merely granted freedom from bondage, the change would be made most reluctantly and without any suggestion that freedom qualified one for equality on the broad lap of Alma Mater. It was beyond the conception of the founding fathers that Negroes, slave or free, could become true Americans, enjoying that fellowship in a common enterprise about which Crevecour spoke so warmly. It was as though Crevecour was arguing that ethnicity, where persons of African descent were concerned, was either so powerful or so unattractive as to make their assimilation entirely impossible or so insignificant as to make it entirely undesirable. In any case, Americanization in the late eighteenth century was a precious commodity to be cherished and enjoyed only by a select group of persons of European descent.
One must admit, therefore, that at the time of the birth of the new nation there was no clear-cut disposition to welcome into the American family persons of any and all ethnic backgrounds. Only Europeans were invited to fight for independence. And when the patriots at long last relented and gave persons of African descent a chance to fight the concession was made with great reluctance and after much equivocation and soul-searching. Only Europeans were regarded as full citizens in the new states and in the new nation. And when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States, they did not seem troubled by the distinctions on the basis of ethnic differences that the Constitution implied.
If the principal of ethnic exclusiveness was propounded so early and so successfully in the history of the United States, it is not surprising that it would, in time, become the basis for questioning the ethnic backgrounds of large numbers of prospective Americans, even Europeans. Thus, in 1819, a Jewish immigrant was chilled to hear a bystander refer to him and his companion as "more damned emigrants." A decade later there began a most scathing and multifaceted attack on the Catholic church. On two counts the church was a bad influence. First, its principal recruits were the Irish, the "very dregs" of the Old World social order; and secondly, its doctrine of papal supremacy ran counter to the idea of the political and religious independence of the United States. Roman Catholics, Protestant Americans warned, were engaged in a widespread conspiracy to subvert American institutions, through parochial schools, the Catholic press, immoral convents, and a sinister design to control the West by flooding it with Catholic settlers. The burning of convents and churches and the killing of Catholics themselves were indications of how deeply many Americans felt about religious and cultural differences for which they had a distaste and suspicion that bordered on paranoia.
Soon the distaste for the foreign-born became almost universal, with Roman Catholics themselves sharing in the hostility to those who followed them to the new Republic. Some expressed fear of the poverty and criminality that accompanied each wave of immigrants. Some felt that those newly arrived from abroad were a threat to republican freedom. Some saw in the ethnic differences of the newcomers an immediate danger to the moral standards of Puritan America. Some feared the competition that newcomers posed in the labor market. Some became convinced that the ideal of a national homogeneity would disappear with the influx of so many unassimilable elements. Soon, nativist societies sprang up all across the land, and they found national expression in 1850 in a new organization called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. With its slogan, "America for Americans," the order, which became the organizational basis for the Know-Nothing party, engendered a fear through its preachments that caused many an American to conclude that his country was being hopelessly subverted by the radical anti-Americanism of the great variety of ethnic strains that were present in the United States.
If there was some ambivalence regarding the ethnic diversity of white immigrants before the Civil War, it was dispelled by the view that prevailed regarding immigrants in the post-Civil War years. The "old" immigrants, so the argument went, were at least assimilable and had "entered practically every line of activity in nearly every part of the country." Even those who had been non-English speaking had mingled freely with native Americans and had therefore been quickly assimilated. Not so with the "new" immigrants who came after 1880. They "congregated together in sections apart from native Americans and the older immigrants to such an extent that assimilation had been slow." Small wonder that they were different. Small wonder that they were barely assimilable. They came from Austro-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Greece, Romania, and Turkey. They dressed differently, spoke in unfamiliar tongues, and clung to strange, if not exotic customs. It did not matter that Bohemians, Moravians, and Finns had lower percentages of illiteracy than had the Irish or Germans or that Jews had a higher percentage of skilled laborers than any group except the Scots. Nor did it matter that, in fact, the process of assimilation for the so-called "new" group was about as rapid as that of the so-called "old" group.
What did matter was that the new nativism was stronger and more virulent than any anti-immigration forces or groups of the early nineteenth century and that these groups were determined either to drive from the shores those who were different or to isolate them so that they could not contaminate American society. Old-stock Americans began to organize to preserve American institutions and the American way of life. Those who had been here for five years or a decade designated themselves as old-stock Americans and joined in the attack on those recently arrived. If the cult of Anglo-Saxon superiority was all but pervasive, those who were not born into the cult regarded themselves as honorary members. Thus, they could celebrate with as much feeling as any the virtues of Anglo-Saxon institutions and could condemn as vehemently as any those ideas and practices that were not strictly Anglo-Saxon. Whenever possible they joined the American Protective Association and the Immigrant Restriction League; and in so doing they sold their own ethnicity for the obscurity that a psudoassimilation brought. But in the end, they would be less than successful. The arrogance and presumption of the Anglo-Saxon complex was not broad enough to embrace the Jews of eastern Europe or the Bohemians of central Europe or the Turks of the Middle East. The power and drive of the Anglo-Saxon forces would prevail; and those who did not belong would be compelled to console themselves by extolling the virtues of cultural pluralism.
By that time---near the end of the nineteenth century---the United States had articulated quite clearly its exalted standards of ethnicity. They were standards that accepted Anglo Saxons as the norm, placed other whites on what may be called "ethnic probation," and excluded from serious consideration the Japanese, Chinese, and Negroes. It was not difficult to deal harshly with the Chinese and Japanese when they began to enter the United States in considerable numbers in the post-Civil War years. They simply did not meet the standards that the arbiters of American ethnicity had promulgated. They were different in race, religion, language, and private and public morality. They had to be excluded; and eventually they were.
The presence of persons of African descent almost from the beginning, had helped whites to define ethnicity and to establish and maintain the conditions by which it could be controlled. If their color and race, their condition of servitude, and their generally degraded position did not set them apart, the laws and customs surrounding them more than accomplished that feat. Whether in Puritan Massachusets or cosmopolitan New York or Anglican South Carolina, the colonists declared that Negroes, slave or free, did not and could not belong to the society of equal human beings. Thus, the newly arrived Crevecour could be as blind to the essential humanity of Negroes as the patriots who tried to keep them out of the Continental Army. They were not a part of America, these new men. And in succeeding years their presence would do more to define ethnicity than the advent of several scores of millions of Europeans.
It was not enough for Americans, already somewhat guilt-ridden for maintaining slavery in a free society, to exclude blacks from American society on the basis of race and condition of servitude. They proceeded from that point to argue that Negroes were inferior morally, intellectually and physically. Even as he reviewed the remarkable accomplishments of Benjamin Banneker, surveyor, almanacker, mathematician, and clockmaker, Thomas Jefferson had serious doubts about the mental capabilities of Africans, and he expressed these doubts to his European friends. What Jefferson speculated about at the end of the eighteenth century became indisputable dogma within a decade after his death.
In the South every intellectual, legal, and religious resource was employed in the task of describing the condition of Negroes in such a way as to make them the least attractive human beings on the face of the earth. Slavery was not only the natural lot of blacks, the slaveowners argued, but it was in accordance with God's will that they should be kept in slavery. As one sanctimonious divine put it, "We feel that the souls of our slaves are a solemn trust and we shall strive to present them faultless and complete before the presence of God. . . . However the world may judge us in connection with our institution of slavery, we consciously believe it to be a great missionary institution---one arranged by God, as He arranges all moral and religious influences of the world so that the good may be brought out of seeming evil and a blessing wrung out of every form of the curse." It was a difficult task that the owners of slaves set for themselves. Slaves had brought with them only heathenism, immorality, profligacy and irresponsibility. They possessed neither the mental capacity nor the moral impulse to improve themselves. Only if their sponsors---those to whom were entrusted not only their souls but their bodies---were fully committed to their improvement could they take even the slightest, halting steps toward civilization.
What began as a relatively moderate justification for slavery soon became a vigorous, aggressive defense of the institution. Slavery, to the latter-day defenders, was the cornerstone of the republican edifice. To a governor of South Carolina, it was the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence had bestowed upon the glorious region of the South. It was, indeed, one such a favored institution had found such a favored creature as the African to give slavery the high value that was placed on it. A childlike race, prone to docility and manageable in every respect, the African was the ideal subject for the slave role. Slaveholders had to work hard to be worthy of this great Providential blessing.
Nothing that Negroes could do or say could change or seriously affect this view. They might graduate from college as John Russwurm did in 1826, or they might write a most scathing attack against slavery, as David Walker did in 1829. It made no difference. They might teach in an all-white college, as Charles. B. Reason did in New York in the 1850s, or publish a newspaper, as Frederick Douglas did during that same decade. Their racial and cultural backgrounds disqualified them from becoming American citizens. They could even argue in favor of their capacities and potentialities, as Henry Highland Garnet did, or they might argue their right to fight for union and freedom, as 186,000 did in the Civil War. Still, it made no sense for white Americans to give serious consideration to their arguments and their actions. They were beyond the veil, as the Jews had been beyond the veil in the barbaric and bigoted communities of eastern Europe.
The views regarding Negroes that had been so carefully developed to justify and defend slavery would not disappear with emancipation. To those who had developed such views and to the vast numbers who subscribed to them, they were much too valid to be discarded simply because the institution of slavery had collapsed. In fact, if Negroes were heathens and barbarians and intellectual imbeciles in slavery, they were hardly qualified to function as equals in a free society. And any effort to impose them on a free society should be vigorously and relentlessly resisted, even if it meant that a new subordinate place for them had to be created.
When Americans set out to create such a place for the four million freedman after the Civil War, they found that it was convenient to put their formulation in the context of the ethnic factors that militated against complete assimilation. To do it this way seemed more fitting, perhaps even more palatable, for the white members of a so-called free society. And they had some experience on which to rely. In an earlier day it had been the Irish or the Germans or the free Negroes who presented problems of assimilation. They were different in various ways and did not seem to make desirable citizens. In time, the Irish, Germans, and other Europeans made it and were accepted on the broad lap of Alma Mater. But not the free Negroes that had always been a group apart in Boston, who continued to suffer disabilities even in the North in the years just before the Civil War. Was this the key to the solution of the postwar problems? Perhaps it was. After all, Negroes had always been a group apart in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and other northern cities. They all lived together in one part of the city---especially if they could find no other place to live. They had their own churches---after the whites drove them out of theirs. They had their own schools---after they were excluded from the schools attended by whites. They had their own social organizations---after the whites barred them from theirs.
If Negroes possessed so many ethnic characteristics such as living in the same community, having their own churches, schools and social clubs, and perhaps other agencies of cohesion, that was all very well. They even seemed "happier with their own kind," some patronizing observers remarked. They were like the Germans or the Irish or the Italians or the Jews. They had so much in common and so much to preserve. There was one significant difference, however.
For Europeans, the ethnic factors that brought a particular group together actually eased the task of assimilation and, in many ways, facilitated the process of assimilation, particularly as hostile elements sought to disorient them in their drive toward full citizenship. And in time, they achieved it.
For Negroes, however, such was not the case. They had been huddled together in northern ghettos since the eighteenth century. They had had their own churches since 1792 and their own schools since 1800. And this separateness, this ostracism, was supported and enforced by the full majesty of the law, state and federal, just to make certain that Negroes did, indeed, preserve their ethnicity! And as they preserved their ethnicity---all too frequently as they looked down the barrel of a policeman's pistol or a militia man's shotgun---full citizenship seemed many light years away. They saw other ethnic groups pass them by, one by one, and take their places in the sacred Order of the Star Spangled Banner, the American Protective Association, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan---not always fully assimilated but vehemently opposed to the assimilation of Negroes. The ethnic grouping that was a way station, a temporary resting place for Europeans as they became Americans, proved to be a terminal point for blacks who found it virtually impossible to become Americans in any real sense.
There was an explanation or at least a justification for this. The federal government and the state governments had tried to force Negroes into full citizenship and had tried to legislate them into equality with the whites. This was not natural and could not possibly succeed. Negroes had not made it because they were not fit, the social Darwinists said. Negroes were beasts, Charles Carole declared somewhat inelegantly. "Stateways cannot change folkways," William Graham Sumner, the distinguished scholar philosophized. The first forty years of negro freedom had been a failure, said John R. Commons, one of the nation's leading economists. This so-called failure was widely acknowledged in the country as northerners of rank and description acquiesced, virtually without a murmur of objection, to the southern settlement of the race problem characterized by disenfranchisement, segregation and discrimination.
Here was a new and exotic form of ethnicity. It was to be seen in the badges of inferiority and the symbols of racial degradation and discrimination that sprang up in every sector of American life---in the exclusion from the polling places with its specious justification that Negroes were unfit to participate in the sacred rite of voting; the back stairway or the freight elevator to public places; the separate, miserable railway car; the separate and hopelessly inferior school, and even the Jim Crow cemetery. Ethnic considerations had never been so important in the shaping of public policy. They had never before been used by the American government to define the role and place of other groups in American society. The United States had labored hard to create order out of its chaotic and diverse ethnic backgrounds. Having begun by meekly suggesting the difficulty in assimilating all groups into one great society, it had acknowledged failure by ruling out one group altogether, quite categorically, and frequently by law, solely on the basis of race.
It could not achieve this without doing irreparable harm to the early notions of the essential unity of America and Americans. The sentiments that promoted the disenfranchisement and segregation of Negroes also encouraged the infinite varieties of discrimination against Jews, Armenians, Turks, Japanese and Chinese. The conscious effort to degrade a particular ethnic group reflects a corrosive quality that dulls the sensitivities of both the perpetrators and the victims. It calls forth venomous hatreds and crude distinctions in high places as well as low places. It can affect the quality of mind of even the most cultivated scholar and place him in a position scarcely distinguishable from the Klansman or worse. It was nothing out of the ordinary, therefore, that at a dinner in honor of the winner of one of Harvard's most coveted prizes, Professor Barret Wendell warned that if a Negro or a Jew ever won the prize the dinner would have to be cancelled.
By the time that the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886 the words of Emma Lazurus on the base of it had a somewhat hollow ring. Could anyone seriously believe that the poor, tired, huddled masses "yearning to breathe free," were really welcome here? This was a land where millions of black human beings whose ancestors had been here for centuries were consistently treated as pariahs and untouchables! What interpretation could anyone place on the sentiments expressed on the statue except that the country had no real interest in or sympathy for the downtrodden unless they were white and preferably Anglo-Saxon? It was a disillusioning experience for some newcomers to discover that their own ethnic background was a barrier to success in their adopted land. It was a searing and shattering experience for Negroes to discover over and over again that three centuries of toil and loyalty were nullified by the misfortune of their own degraded ethnic background.
In the fullness of time---in the twentieth century---the nation would confront the moment of truth regarding ethnicity as a factor in its own historical development. Crevecour's words would have no real significance. The words of the Declaration of Independence would have no real meaning. The words of Emma Lazurus would not ring true. All such sentiments would be put to the severe test of public policy and private deeds and would be found wanting. The Ku Klux Klan would challenge the moral and human dignity of Jews, Catholics and Negroes. The quotas of the new immigration laws would define ethnic values in terms of race and national origin. The restrictive covenants (codes prohibiting members of some groups---often Blacks, Jews and Asians---from buying real estate in certain areas) would arrogate to a select group of bigots the power of determining what races or ethnic groups should live in certain houses or whether, indeed, they should have any houses at all in which to live. If some groups finally made it through the escape hatch and arrived at the point of acceptance, it was on the basis of race, now defined with sufficient breadth to include all or most peoples who were not of African descent.
By that time ethnicity in American life would come to have a special, clearly definable meaning. Its meaning would be descriptive of that group of people vaguely defined in the federal census returns as "others" or "non-whites." It would have something in common with that magnificent term "cultural pluralism," the consolation prize for those who were not and could not be assimilated. It would signify the same groping for respectability that describes that group of people who live in what is euphemistically called "the inner city." It would represent a rather earnest search for a hidden meaning that would make it seem a bit more palatable and surely more sophisticated than something merely racial. But in 1969 even a little child would know what ethnicity had come to mean.
In its history, ethnicity, in its true sense has extended and continues to extend beyond race. At time it has meant language, customs, religion, national origin. It has also meant race; and, to some, it has always meant only race. It had already begun to have a racial connotation in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, it had a larger racial component, even as other factors continued to loom large. In the present century, as these other factors have receded in importance, racial considerations have come to have even greater significance. If the history of ethnicity has meant anything at all during the last three centuries, it has meant the gradual but steady retreat from the broad and healthy regard for cultural and racial differences to a narrow, counter-productive concept of differences in terms of whim, intolerance and racial prejudice. We have come full circle. The really acceptable American is still that person whom Crevecour described almost two hundred years ago. But the true American, acceptable or not, is that person who seeks to act out his role in terms of his regard for human qualities irrespective of race. One of the great tragedies of American life at the beginning was that ethnicity was defined too narrowly. One of the great tragedies of today is that this continues to be the case. One can only hope that the nation and its people will all some day soon come to reassess ethnicity in terms of the integrity of the man rather than in terms of the integrity of the race. [1989]
*SOURCE: EXPERIENCING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN THE UNITED STATES, 2ND ED., 1997, VIRGINIA CYRUS, PGS. 14-19*
/81716831-58b9cc4d5f9b58af5ca75c64.jpg)
