PC Back in B.C.: Politically Incorrect Direct Marketing

Hard as it may be to believe, early day direct marketers were no better than others when it came to slurring minority groups. Often, they used insensitive language even about the people they were targeting.

In 1927, for example, a Chicago agency executive named Allen T. Moore felt free, when addressing DMers, to comment on “the Hebe in bob and chiffon” he’d seen behind the counter of a record store. Yet Blue Book Publishing Co. of Philadelphia was that very month offering mailers a directory showing “Jewish population and purchasing power in every down and city in the United States.”

Seconds later, Moore made a derogatory comment about gays. There’s no record of anyone in the audience objecting to these slurs.

Then there was the terminology that crept into even the most polite commercial discourse. As late as 1946, Essex Lists promised that the “obvious poorer and colored sections” had been removed from a northern New Jersey residential file. And Reuban H. Donnelley Corp. offered a "Nativity" maps delineating the “American, Italian, Jewish and Colored” neighborhoods of cities.

Going back even further, there was the 1918 trade ad, “Me Can No Read English.” This, according to the author, W.J. Landi, was the “usual expression of the majority of Italians in this country.” Mr. Landi, who made his living translating direct mail letters into Italian, wrote an article on how he helped sell homes in the suburbs to tenement-bound Italian-Americans. “Dear Mr. Albano,” his letter started. “How long have you lived with your family in those dark rooms where you are now? It’s a pretty long time, is it not?…Are your children healthy? Are you and your wife healthy?”

Well, it shows that early mailers did understand segmentation. All of these quotes were published in trade articles or ads, by the way.

Women were another patronized group, although their power to influence was widely acclaimed, as in this 1928 article: “The hand that pours at bridge teas is the hand that rules the world. It’s the hand that opens a great deal of the direct mail advertising that comes to the American home; the hand that tosses such literature to the high winds of heaven—or shows it to the man who signs the checks.”

The writers of a 1918 mailing piece for accident insurance surely understood this: “Just think!” they wrote. “Your husband’s chances of getting home safe tonight are one in ten! Every minute over twenty people are accidentally hurt…These figures come from Washington, D.C. Better put this proposition on your husband’s supper plate tonight—accidents happen at such unexpected times—such an action may save a future life of drudgery.”

And men? There were many messages to them, and some vividly illustrated the relationship between the sexes. In 1919, florist J.M. Gasser Co., of Cleveland, sent this letter: “To You, Mr. Man: There are occasions that should never be forgotten and the two suggested on the enclosed card, while not the most important, are, to a woman, whether in the glowing fire of youth or the darkening embers of later life, periods that even a word of remembrance will bring, like the rainbow, memory of the sunshine past and promise of brightness to come.” The eminently forgettable occasions: birthdays and anniversaries.

Well, it was great copy.