S E V E NREAL REFORM: NEW IMAGES IN THE MIRRORIn less than a decade the creative revolution gathered, prospered,I and then inevitably cycled away. Nothing is more fragile than an advertising fashion. But the temporary creativerevolution left behind more permanent changes in the advertising business. External events forced certain issueswith long histories on Madison Avenue to surface and compel serious attention for the first time.At the height of its powers, in the 1920s, advertising had been a primary, independent force in the molding ofAmerican culture and mores. Given a heady mix of general prosperity, a pliant consumer, an agreeablegovernment, and an unprecedented flood of new products, Madison Avenue sold its materialist visions withouthindrance. Since the 1920s, as all these circumstances changed in unfavorable ways, advertising had increasinglyfunctioned more as mirror than mindbender, responding to American culture more than shaping it.During the 1960s this diminished influence seemed especially obvious. The reform waves sweeping down MadisonAvenue, aside from the creative revolution itself, derived less from internal dynamics within the business, morefrom changes in society at large. Advertising—which sometimes claimed to foreshadow and direct social change—actually lagged behind the general course of events. The advertising mirror itself, the reflective devices that thetrade held up to Americans, remained stable, with the usual cyclical adjustments. What changed was Americansociety and culture, the objects infront of the mirror. Slowly, stubbornly, the mirrored image changed too. But the time lag remained. Advertisingnever quite caught up.REAL REFORM273First and most enduringly, the creative revolution was also an ethnic revolution. The WASP hegemony overAmerican culture finally broke down after decades of small losses. Madison Avenue then followed suit.Back at the turn of the century, in the early, fluid days before advertising became big business—with the ethnicpatterns of big business—Albert Lasker could rise to dominance even as a self-conscious Jew. His most celebratedcopywriters at Lord & Thomas were still gentiles like John Kennedy, Claude Hopkins, and Frank Hummert.Gradually Lasker filled the top management positions at L & T with Jews his son Edward, Sheldon Coons, DavidNoyes, William Sachse—whose names were less known in the trade but who wielded more real power at theagency. Outside their offices sat their Irish secretaries all in a row, Hannigan, Horrigan, Kerrigan, Finnegan andMulrooney. By the 1930s Don Francisco was the only non-Jew left on the L & T management committee.Occasionally Lasker would flex his advertising muscle on behalf of Jewish interests. In 1942, after the SaturdayEvening Post ran an article entitled "The Case Against the Jew," Lasker obtained a retraction and apology from thePost by threatening to withdraw his ad contracts.A few other agencies were known as Jewish shops, even if (like L&T) they did not bear Jewish names. LawrenceValenstein opened an art studio in New York in 1917; after advertising assignments he turned it into an agencynamed Grey, from the color of the office walls. At first Grey Advertising specialized in drawing up monthly salesplans for department stores. From this base in retailing Jewish stronghold in New York—Valenstein and hisassociates Arthur Fatt and Herbert Strauss acquired the Good Housekeeping and Mennen accounts and built Greyup to general agency status.But these were exceptions. From the 1920s through the 1950s, the mayor agencies like Thompson, REDO, Young& Rubicam, Ayer and McCann-Erickson were all known as WASP preserves, with some Jews in the creativedepartments but hardly any in management. In the early 1940s Charles Feldman and the gentile George Gribinwere regarded as the best copywriters at Y & R. "Since Charlie was Jewish," Draper Daniels recalled, "everyoneassumed that Grib would become creative director eventually." And in fact Feldman was passed over in favor ofGribbin. Some clients, such as Lawrence Jones of Four Roses whiskey, insisted that no Jews work274THE MIRROR MAKERSon their accounts. Meantime the Jewish agencies themselves were losing ground. When Lasker his interest in L &T he turned the agency over to three gentiles. In 1950 Grey Advertising ranked only twenty-eighth on AdvertisingAge's list of the biggest shops. In 1956 the Biow Company, the largest agency run by a Jew, collapsed and went outof business.During these years advertising thus trailed behind related fields in admitting Jews to positions of high authority andvisibility. After Lasker and before the 1960s, advertising produced nobody who compared with such Jews as Swopeand Guggenheim in industry; Goldwyn and Mayer in the movies; Sarnoff and Paley in broadcasting; Gimbel,Straus, and Bloomingdale in retailing; and Ochs, Meyer, and Schiff in newspaper publishing. As an avenue ofmobility for Jews, advertising most resembled politics, in which—outside New York and a few other ethniccenters—only deracinated Jews could make much progress at this time. Advertising and politicians both submittedtheir wares to a touchy American public that might render its verdict based on the most irrational, irrelevant criteria.Better not to complicate the matter, so the argument ran, with ethnic distractions. Even if Jews helped prepare anad, it was still pitched at a mythological middle America: a land of WASPs, white bread, and old -fashioned values.Other ethnic minorities ran into similar problems on Madison Avenue. Ben Duffy and his assistants formed anatypical Irish Catholic enclave at BBDO that was not duplicated at the other big agencies. Tom Carnese at TedBates and the Toigo cousins, Adolph at Lennen & Newell and John at Biow-Beirn-Toigo, were among the fewItalians to break into top management. John Toigo, from a coal-mining town in southern Illinois by way of theUniversity of Chicago, considered his unusual background an ideal training for advertising. "We all have the sameviewpoint," he explained, "all skeptical and analytical. You get that in a foreign -born home; it comes from living intwo cultures at once. What's true at home doesn't make sense in school, and vice versa. You learn that truth isrelative and depends on the viewpoint." But a typical advertising executive in this era sprang from an old -stock, IvyLeague family in the Northeast. The club door was ajar, but just barely.George Panetta, the son of a