THREEHIGH TIDE AND GREENGRASS: THE TWENTIESWhen in 1931 Frederick Lewis Allen wrote Only Yesterday, his classic reminiscence of the1920s, he felt obliged to begin the book with a bemused description of the faraway worldinhabited by a typical American family in 1919. From a vantage point of only a dozen yearslater, Allen already had to describe pre-1920s life in the wondering tones of ananthropologist describing an exotic culture from the distant past. Flashing ahead, Allenwondered how his 1919 family would deal with salient aspects of the coming decade: sometransient (home-run records, boxing gates, Mah-Jongg), some timeless (inflation andwomen's fashions), some extensions of things on hand (airplanes, cigarettes, sexuality, WallStreet, paved highways, and fast cars), some new and startling (prohibition, organized crime,jazz, radio broadcasts, tabloid news-papers, and vitamins). "Since 1919," Allen concluded,"the circumstances of American life have been transformed."Amid these fluid circumstances, advertising took on new powers. The first nationalexperience with total war had cracked society open, leaving broken certitudes and discardedpatterns. "Are we going to rest upon the record of advertising as a factor in the war," oneadman asked in 1919, "or are we going to develop it still further, to apply it to the manyfields in which it can serve in reconstruction and the days of peace?" Just approachingmaturity, the advertising industry stood ready with fresh patterns. New products-not merelynew versions of familiar items—changed American life, down to its78HIGH TIDE AND GREEN GRASS 79most intimate details, with a speed and totality that left observers groping for precedents.Novelists and politicians agreed in describing the decade as an entrepreneurial riot.Advertising grew fat in a buyer's market, with distribution and marketing replacingproduction as the natural limit on industrial activity. Standing athwart the pipeline, betweenthe factory and the consumer, advertising found a pliant audience for the gospel that the roadto happiness was paved with more goods and services. More than ever before or since,American culture and American advertising converged on a single point. Advertisingreached its apogee when it became hard to distinguish between ad life and real life. ("Youresemble the advertisement of the man," Daisy Buchanan told Jay Gatsby in the Fitzgeraldnovel. "You know the advertisement of the man-.") Ad life and real life, it seemed, bothoffered a clean, orderly existence, a cornucopia of products and promises. Advertising wouldnever again have it so plush: the public so uncritically accepting, the economy so robust, thegovernment so approving; the trade at its zenith, high tide and green grass.The J. Walter Thompson agency led the advertising industry into this first great boom inits history. Innovative in both copy styles and the variety of services offered to clients, JWTswept past the competition into first place in total billings, an eminence it would keep forfive decades. In a business normally described as ulceratingly unstable, Thompson year afteryear stood as an unassailable citadel, repelling successive waves of pretenders to the crown.This durable achievement belongs preeminently to Stanley and Helen Resor, husband andwife, a team of oddly matched but complementary skills and dispositions.Advertising more than most businesses responds to the caprices and gifts of individualpersonalities. Especially in its creative aspects, advertising is intensely personal, dependingon a particular individual's particular taste, inspiration, and sense of proportion. Mostagencies in their successful periods have taken their identities from the lengthened shadowsof one or two leading figures. Agencies then often stumble when the leader falters or departs.The hole at the top is not adequately filled. Even in agencies controlled by one family,dynastic successions are rare: few children of advertising fig-80 THE MIRROR MAKERSures go into the business; of those who do, even fewer work for the family agency; of thesestill fewer carry on with the verve and effect of the parent. For these reasons, then, findingthe next generation of leaders remains a recurrent dilemma of agency management.In the case of J. Walter Thompson, the man, after forty years in advertising he had losttouch. When W. G. Woodward, later a successful novelist and historian, went to work atJWT in 1907, he found the place years behind the times. While Elmo Calkins and AlbertLasker were making the preparation of art and copy the crucial agency functions, atThompson the account executives still personally owned their accounts, changing copy whenthey pleased and treating copywriters like office boys. Thompson himself was remote• and uninvolved. "Somewhere along the road to success," according to Woodward, "he hadmislaid his mind and had to go on thereafter without it. He had not done any thinking inyears." Thompson would make periodic inspection trips to his branch offices in Boston,Chicago, and other cities. There he would quiz employees on their command of grammar,check their appearance and deportment. At one picnic of a local advertising club he scoldedhis people for sipping highballs and thereby soiling the agency's image.Meantime, and none too soon, Stanley Resor had started his fast climb to the succession atJWT. GraduatedCrorn Yale in 1901 he had returned to his hometown of Cincinnati. Beforefinding his métier he worked in a bank and then for a machine-tool company. Lackingtechnical training in machinery, he felt inadequate as a salesman of machine tools. So, as herecalled it, he looked for a job in which he could become an authority, "knowing as much asany one in the field." His older brother Walter worked for Procter & Collier, an advertisingfirm that functioned mainly as the house agency in Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble. WithWalter's help Stanley joined the agency in March 1904 as a salesman.There he met Helen Lansdowne, seven years his junior and one year out of high school.After a brief stint at auditing bills for Procter & Collier she left to write retail ads for aCincinnati newspaper, then moved on again to write copy for a streetcar advertisingcompany. Back at Procter & Collier, Stanley Resor quickly acquired a reputation forrelentless drive and persistence. A hard worker who squeezed total efforts from hissubordinates, he also proved himself an imaginative planner of advertising campaigns. For