In 1961, Coca-Cola recruited actress Connie Clausen to star in its TV commercial that popularized the product with a strong message about the impact on women’s bodies: “There’s no waistline worry with Coke you know,” says the actress, before she outlines reasons why she drinks the beverage to stay skinny (“Sangroncito” 00:20). A bottle keeps her from eating something else, provides quick energy during a busy day, and “has no more calories than half a grapefruit” (00:25). Decades earlier in 1886, the “refreshing cold” drink was invented by John Pemberton not as a dietary product, but as a tonic to cure “mental and physical exhaustion, […] sick headache, neuralgia,” and as “a most wonderful invigorator of the sexual organs” (qtd. in Pendergrast 26–27). For almost 150 years, Coca-Cola has taken an active role in the popular and long-lasting advertising campaigning of its brand using women both as marketing strategies and target groups to sell their product. Coca-Cola’s advertising has been so enshrined into cultural consciousness that the first image one spots when going on the Wiktionary site of the term “advertisement,” is a Coca Cola ad from 1890 (“Advertisement”). According to the metadata, the image depicts an “1890s advertising poster” titled “Drink Coca-Cola 5¢” that shows “a woman in fancy clothes […] drinking Coke” (“File:Cocacola-5cents-1900.jpg”).[1] The metadata also states that “[s]omeone has crudely written on it at lower left […] ‘Our Favorite’ [sic]” and provides information on the “woman who modeled for this artwork”: Hilda Clark. The ad depicted Clark as a “well-dressed young woman, wearing hat, white gloves, and pearls,” while holding up a glass of Coca-Cola and being seated at a table with a vase of roses. The woman in the ad has childish features. Her cheeks are rather round and rosy. She does not look ahead, but rather passively off into space in a dreamy expression while lightly touching the cup.
Since advertising, which is a ubiquitous everyday phenomenon that permeates all areas of life, has to be constantly renewed, it helps scholars to examine social, cultural, and economic trends. “By tracing the frequency, length, ornamentation, language and marketing innovations present in these advertisements, historians can trace trends in consumer habits and fluctuations in local, regional and national markets” (Beals and Lavender 6). Both advertisements (from 1890 and 1961) employ women as marketing tools to promote their products, while simultaneously constructing powerful portrayals of idealized bodies and societal expectations of femininity. Why is the woman depicted as a young girl, dressed in ornate clothing with a low-cut neckline? This portrayal raises important questions about the intersection of femininity, youth, and sexualization in advertising and visual culture. The proliferation of advertisements, such as the Coca Cola TV commercial, has spurred scholarly discourse that has been addressing the problematic depictions of femininity (and masculinity) in advertising since the 1970s. In 1979, Erving Goffman published his study titled Gender Advertisements, in which he argues that ads are “the prime objects to show the subordination of women to men in American society” (29). Since then, many scholarly critiques of historical advertising have primarily focused on gendered representations in women or family magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, or the Ladies’ Home Journal that flourished in the twentieth century (Scheiding and Fazli 20).[2] Studies from women’s, gender, and feminist media studies are particularly extensive, which explore the normative images in magazines (see Beins). They function as access points for the uncovering of implicit and widespread societal ideas, as instruments of oppression from an ideology-critical perspective.[3] In his pioneering study Advertising the American Dream, Roland Marchand explores advertisements from the 1920s and 1930s that broadens an understanding of societal expectations. He posits that despite the consistent themes and motifs in advertising during that period, they may not have accurately reflected social reality (xvi). Marchand suggests that advertisers recognized that consumers desired not a faithful reflection but a “Zerrspiegel, a distorted mirror, one that would enhance certain images” (xvii). Consequently, advertisements aimed to portray an idealized version of life rather than a literal representation of reality (xvii). Jones and Tadajewski, among other scholars, have extended the temporal scope, asserting that the use of women as marketing strategies and target audiences that depicted consumers’ fantasies can be traced back to the nineteenth century, coinciding with the emergence of mass marketing practices.
Starting in the 1870s, the American press underwent a significant “[b]alance of [p]ower [s]hift” (Park 363), as advertising gradually replaced subscriptions as the primary source of revenue by the end of the nineteenth century (364). Based on his observation that foreign-language publications lagged behind the English-language press by forty years “in organization and in content,” he goes on to assume that the same delay applied to income distribution (365). In addition, published a hundred years ago, Park’s comparisons between the foreign-language and English-language press reflect a rather one-sided perspective, assuming that the German, Italian, or Yiddish press merely adopted strategies from the “American” press, as if editors lacked prior experience in news publishing from their countries of origin. These perspectives were inspired by scholarship at the time that predominantly studied migration history using “methods of Americanization” (vii). His study, however, offers a relevant argument for the importance of the economic background of the migrant press as his chapter “Contents of the Foreign-Language Press” does not start with editorials or news but with “advertising” (continued by the “Provincial Press” before turning to the “Cosmopolitan Press”). Parks argues that editorials were rarely read; instead, migrants were primarily interested in “news, births, and deaths” as well as advertisements, particularly patent medicine ads and labor want-ads” (110). Advertisements offer a particularly compelling lens through which to examine how capitalism operated on the pages of these newspapers. They reveal a process of mutual development between migrant communities and the broader American society, as well as dynamic exchanges between the cultural and economic frameworks of the home countries and the United States.
Despite constituting a significant body of source material, few scholars working on German-American press history have used advertisements as primary sources. These advertisements, however, offer valuable insights into how individuals and products were depicted, allowing for the examination of migrants’ “fantasies and aspirations” through a distorted mirror, as Marchand suggests (xvi). “[I]t is certain that the interests of business men, whether for good or for ill, do exercise a very great, and perhaps increasing, indirect influence upon the newspaper press” (Park 366). Moreover, while scholars have acknowledged the financial significance of advertising for newspapers during the turn of the century and its connection to the decline of papers during World War I (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 86), they have overlooked the influence of mass advertising from the 1860s onwards on the rise of the German migrant press. Additionally, they have not fully recognized the ways in which editors and advertisers circulated, manipulated, concealed, and presented German and American content as authentic German-American material for a German-American readership. During the nineteenth century, the lack of clear international copyright agreements or commitment to authors’ rights between Germany and the United States allowed for extensive textual exchange in the periodical press (as outlined in chapter 3). This legal gray area created ample opportunities for piracy, not only impacting the “stealing” of texts and textual features in the realms of novels, poems, and news, as shown in the previous chapters, but also in the context of advertisements.
In contrast to other genres, genre classification, as outlined in chapter 4, proved to be a rather easy task to computationally identify ads based on vocabulary about prices and terms. Scalable readings in this chapter, that bring together numerical, verbal, and visual features through linking the digitized newspapers from different aggregated perspectives, show that ads for women provided one of the most fertile grounds for reuse as they borrowed characteristics from other textual forms. To name only a few, ads were embedded in columns that usually featured news or were printed without titles, thereby visually conforming to news; advertising texts were structured like prose, lists, or poetry; customer statements, or testimonies, were taken from letters and likewise resembled eyewitness reports from detective fiction; images that complemented ads to cure diseases correlated with fictional writings about emancipation, ownership, and imprisonment (see chapter 6). A dataset of widely reused ads provides a vital resource to find texts for, by, and about women in order to argue that newspapers targeted German-American women as readers prior to the 1890s. In addition, an analysis of ads shows the strong impact this genre had on the development of the German-language press as a whole since advertising allowed publications to boom and survive in the second half of the nineteenth century until their decline around the turn of the century. Advertising texts helped migrants gain a foothold in the New World by informing them about job and housing opportunities and by promoting the businesses and services of people in the diaspora through ads in their everyday language (Keck, “Größer Eröffnungs-Lunsch” 188). Analyses of advertisements from 1870 to 1920, for instance, show that the process of language shift was already well underway and that editors were aware of this development (187). Scholars have emphasized the rising xenophobia during World War I that resulted in the banning of German-language publications in several states and the decreased interest of second-generation migrants in reading, writing, and speaking German for the gradual eradication of the German migrant press (Raab and Werner 16). The reasons for the decline were multifaceted. Diverse geographic, political, and economic developments played a role. There had been a range of legislation in the decades prior to the war that promoted the English language, which contributed to the decreasing number of German schools (Keck, “Größer Eröffnungs-Lunsch” 158). In addition, federal regulations on food, drugs, and copyright, which began to be introduced in the early twentieth century, further contributed to the decline.
As shown in the previous chapter, advertisements exhibit a significant level of reprint activity, with 20.43% of reuse clusters falling into the category of ads. This finding is not surprising, considering that advertisers paid for the repeated publication of their ads. By compiling ads from different decades and states into a dataset, it becomes apparent that numerous ads, however, had national distribution, thereby reaching a transregional readership of German Americans. Advertisements for doctors and patent medicines sometimes occupied a third or even half of the space in foreign-language newspapers, promoting the idea that illness could be magically cured through means such as electric batteries or hypnosis (Park 121). While Park acknowledges the sheer volume of advertising in general—and medical ads in particular—he does not examine the gender dynamics at play in these representations. This omission leaves unexplored how such advertisements constructed, targeted, or exploited gendered notions of health, vulnerability, and domestic responsibility. Examining the ads (in the genre-classified dataset of reused texts) that were nationally distributed reveals that women were already being targeted as readers of the German migrant press as early as the 1860s, as evidenced by the considerable number of ads related to child nutrition and women’s health concerns. For women, these ads served not only as promotional material but also as practical texts. By focusing on two extensively reprinted and enduring products, namely “Deutsches Kindermehl” (an infant formula) and “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” (a remedy for female weakness), this chapter aims to illustrate how advertisers replicated names, titles, texts, and images to provide information on beauty, the body, nutrition, reproduction, and sexual health.[4] Through these strategies, they sought to create influential and long-lasting marketing campaigns. At the same time, these popular products provide information about women’s concerns such as infant and child mortality and sexual health as widely discussed topics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ads are a rich source material to examine, on the one hand, the economic dimension of the migrant press which reveals the products consumed by and businesses owned by German migrants, and the newspapers’ important revenue stream. On the other hand, ads allow us to examine representations of migrants themselves as regards to body imagery and the portrayal of their social roles, identities, and cultural stereotypes in various contexts.
5.1. Ads at Scale: Networks of Profit and Help¶
My quantitative results align with Park’s observation regarding the prevalence of national advertising of medication and food in the migrant press (375). Although he does not provide a detailed content analysis, Park conducted a non-machine-based classification by examining the “advertising space” in a sample of foreign-language newspapers and estimating the proportion dedicated to various types of ads. Without specifying a precise time frame, he claims that approximately 64% of advertising space was devoted to local advertisements, noting that “organization, bank, doctor, and department-store ‘ads’” occupied the largest share (368). Ads were already a prominent feature in German migrant newspapers prior to the rise of mass advertising in the 1860s and the professionalization of marketing research in the 1890s. While advertising, brands, and magazines existed prior to the 1890s, most studies on the history of branding tend to focus, however, on periodicals from that era onwards. As early as 1836, almost half of the issue of Der Vaterlandsfreund, published by Peter Kaufmann, was dedicated to advertising.[5] Figure 16 serves as an illustration to show how the newspaper from Canton, Ohio, provided advertising space. These texts ranged from announcements by German doctors who had newly settled in the area to ads for German (“Teutsche”) taverns as well as a text written as a poem announcing that someone was selling their property. This page highlights both the extensive use of advertising space and the reuse of various genres and iconographic elements within advertisements. Symbols such as house illustrations, crosses, and even titles appear multiple times, repurposed across different texts.
Figure 16: Page three of Der Vaterlandsfreund, May 6, 1836, illustrating the newspaper’s use of advertising space.
In addition, two nearly identical texts were published on this page, with only the names of individuals changed. These texts, published in the name of two different migrants, informed readers that their wives (“Weiber”) had left them “ohne Grund und Ursache” (“without reason or cause”), and they cautioned other migrants not to lend or borrow anything on their behalf, as they would not be held responsible for payment. In these early decades, it was mainly the editor such as Kaufmann who used the information of the advertiser and turned it into a text that promoted or announced a product, a business, an event, or a condition. Advertising became a widespread and important industry for migrants. Kaufmann also purchased a horse and wagon to personally visit every house and farm in the surrounding area, selling the books and calendars he published, recruiting new subscribers, and collecting payments for his newspaper (Arndt and Olson 432). In the paper, he used the same illustrations for different content and modified texts by changing, deleting, or adding textual properties. He experimented with different pioneering editorial techniques and integrated advertising early on to support local economies and to keep his paper alive.
In this period, editors and advertisers increasingly experimented with new ways of promotion from adding illustrations to using features from other categories such as, for instance, poetry. “This early stage of industrialization began the slow shift away from the announcement-style of retailers’ and manufacturers’ print advertisements,” as Pamela Walker Laird explains (23). In the following decades, advertising continued to expand and started to occupy other pages and places in the newspaper. In the second half of the century, however, the number of ads, advertisers, and products increased dramatically fueled by several developments. First, between 1840 and 1893, the United States experienced a significant increase in population, with migrants accounting for nearly one-third of this growth (see Hausman). Over 16.3 million individuals migrated to the country during this period, and a substantial portion of them, approximately 4.7 million people, came from Germany as Moltmann writes: in the United States, “[t]hey could well use newcomers and workers to build up their country” (10). Moreover, real wages increased during this period and people had more money to spend. Growing numbers of products were being introduced to meet and take advantage of this rising demand and more and more manufacturers were choosing to advertise (Laird 118). Consequently, advertising in the United States turned into a common practice, influenced by significant changes and expansions of the transport, market, and publication systems (3). Throughout the century, advertisements about health care, liquor, tobacco, machinery, manufacturing, transportation, fashion, food, household goods, and local tourism started to be printed as posters on billboards or shops and as texts (with or without visual components) in newspapers and magazines across the country from small towns to metropolitan areas. Some advertisements documented the marketing efforts of local companies such as butcher’s shops or breweries, while others represented nationally campaigned products for nutrition, natural medicine, or the household. Through mass advertising that was transregionally promoted in the final decades of the nineteenth century, products such as Kodak, Heinz, and Coca-Cola were enshrined into public consciousness (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 91). Advertisers invested significant financial resources in creating influential advertising campaigns that achieved widespread popularity throughout the country. As Dorothy Schmidt points out, the volume of advertising increased proportionally to the expansion of the press system from 360 million dollars in 1890 to 821 million dollars in 1904 (10). In this wake, advertising became an important source for financing newspapers. Revenue from sales was often insufficient to cover the production expenses. Many publishers were investing in new machinery that allowed for increased circulation and reduced production costs. In this way, they could print and sell more papers to reach a broader audience. According to Blaschke, advertising became normalized in the German immigrant press during the 1880s, when its volume had tripled; by the 1890s, it had become the most important source of revenue for German-American publishers (Die Entdeckung 86). However, as the example of the third page of Der Vaterlandsfreund illustrates, advertising was already a prominent feature of the German migrant press decades earlier.
An analysis of ads highlights the fact that migrant newspapers not only informed about politics and battle, but served as a “social networking service,” to use a twenty-first-century neologism. “Through dozens of local news items, editorials, and advertisements, the bewildered immigrant is gradually and almost consciously led, through the only means of communication which he can use” (Wittke 5). The historiography often highlights the prevalence of advertisements in the press, but few studies engage with a detailed analysis of these advertising texts, their style, layout, and their impact on the growth of the German-language press in the U.S. Daniel Gossel’s transatlantic comparative study on media and politics spanning the eighteenth to twentieth centuries explores the influence of advertising on the press over an extended period. His focus, however, on migrants is limited, suggesting that advertising texts in foreign-language papers became shorter and more sensational due to migrants’ limited language skills (101). In this way, he only describes advertising texts that were translated from English into the language spoken by migrants. Blaschke’s examination of ads does not focus on the “regular” press but only on women’s pages and women’s magazines like Die Deutsche Hausfrau from the 1890s onwards. She argues that the increase in ads in the press correlated with the introduction of women’s pages in the 1890s (Die Entdeckung 116). Blaschke also emphasizes the need to shift attention from technological advancements to the readers, suggesting that without alignment between readers’ interests and editorial content, advertisers would not be attracted (91). In the introduction to his book on the migrant press, Park lists the most highly circulating magazines (three of which include “Women” or “Ladies” in their titles), yet his work does not explore the connection between gender and advertising or address the growing importance of women as readers in the nineteenth century (17).
To start addressing this gap, this chapter focuses on advertisements published in German-American newspapers, foregrounding the individuals depicted in them and drawing attention to ads with a transregional readership. This analysis reveals that ads were already prominently featured in publications at the beginning of the nineteenth century, challenging the notion that their prevalence was a development limited to later periods and metropolitan areas. This chapter explores the period preceding the turn of the century, that is between the 1860s and 1890s, a time when professional advertisers, market research, women’s pages, and mass-market women’s magazines were yet to emerge. It explores the early stages of increased advertising within the German migrant community, revealing its distinct characteristics and the adoption of “Germanness” as a strategic branding element for people, places, and products to illustrate the economic dimension of constructing an ethnicity. By shedding light on the financial support provided by advertisements, alongside technological advancements and the influx of new migrants, this chapter underscores the significant role played by advertising in fueling the growth of the German-language press in the U.S., a role that has been largely overlooked until now. While scholars have primarily focused on the seemingly political aspects of newspapers, such as news articles and editorials (Clark Efford 12), they have not fully examined the overtly commercial dimensions of the migrant press. As a result, they have not thoroughly recognized the impact of advertising on the rise and subsequent decline of the German-language press, nor have they acknowledged the early presence of women as readers prior to 1890. The abundance of ads addressed at women, dispersed across all pages of newspaper issues between news and entertainment content, serves as an indication that women were already being actively targeted as readers in decades preceding the turn of the century. Furthermore, these advertisements bring attention to subjects that were of great interest to women, such as pregnancy, infant feeding, and menstruation. During that time, women had limited sources of information on these topics.
The neglect of advertisements in previous scholarship can be attributed to the sheer abundance, heterogeneity, and serial nature of newspapers. Due to the vast number of publications, researchers, such as Blaschke, have had to narrow their focus and limit their examination to a specific time frame, such as a two-year period (1911–1912), to analyze the “Häufung gleicher Texte” (clustering of similar texts) (Die Entdeckung 28). With the advent of mass digitization, however, scholars studying newspapers now have access to new opportunities that allow them to explore the vastness and complexity of historical newspapers in more depth. According to Melvin Wevers, the accessibility and availability of newspaper repositories have facilitated the study of “ideas, values, and practices in public discourse” (228). This, in turn, has led to increased research in areas such as large-scale text reuse (as discussed in chapter 3) and discourse analysis (see Viola and Verheul; Oberbichler and Pfanzelter). These projects have demonstrated the transregional nature of news on a larger scale within and across national borders (see Keck et al., “Lajos Kossuth”; Paju et al.; or Oiva et al.) and have uncovered popular fiction and poetry (see Cordell, “‘Taken Possession Of’”; Cordell and Mullen; or Pigeon, “Steal it”). Computational periodical research, however, specifically focused on the representation of women in the press (see Klein, “Dimensions of Scale”), particularly in relation to targeted content such as advertisements, remains limited in its scope. In addition, as highlighted by Wevers, advertisements in newspapers have been relatively overlooked as a source of study, despite their rich and diverse nature as carriers of historical information (228). Wevers’ research explores how nationalism was employed as a marketing strategy in cigarette advertisements in digitized Dutch newspapers from 1890 to 1990. His study serves as one of the few examples that demonstrate the application of computational techniques to analyze advertisements on a larger scale using metadata such as textual category as a starting point. In line with Wevers’ approach, this chapter serves as a complementary exploration, using metadata to examine the presence and characteristics of advertising in newspapers. In digital archives like Chronicling America, texts are not typically classified according to textual categories, which presents a challenge when conducting text reuse analyses of a particular type. To address this issue, the text classifier developed in the previous chapter has been instrumental in creating metadata that allows for the analysis of text reuse clusters likely to be advertising texts (9,142 reuse clusters were classified as ads). While advertisements may initially appear uninteresting for text reuse analyses, comparing ads for the same or similar products reveals recurring advertising strategies specific to the German migrant press.
5.2. Made in Germany: Migrant Marketing to Address Mrs. Consumer¶
German migrants spent more money on publications than any other migrant group (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 88) and the German-language press played a vital role in preserving the native language (Huffines 241). “Germans tended to flock together in communities and tried to preserve ethnic customs and markers such as language, festivities, and clothing” (Birkle 140). In their research on Der Vorbote in Chicago, Keil and Jentz argue that the diversity resulting from multiple migration waves, social composition, generational structure, and cultural orientations made it difficult to speak of a “unified German identity” (380). American identity, in contrast, was increasingly defined by ethnic categories starting in the middle of the nineteenth century as a reaction to mass migration (Bungert 23). In other words, ethnicity developed in extensive discussion and conflict with other ethnic groups. Krawatzek and Sasse also point us to this relational dynamic by asserting that Germans developed a feeling of unity either through interactions with migrants from other nations or during instances of collective conflicts of interest (222). While scholars have highlighted the role of German-American clubs (Wiedemann-Citera 108; Schmidt-Beste 525), festivities (Bungert 13), brewing (Holian 70), the language (Wittke 2), and German-language newspapers in shaping a collective German identity (Bergquist, “The Val J. Peter Newspapers” 117–118; Clark Efford 11; Wittke 4, 7), they have often overlooked the significance of advertisements in constructing Germanness. Advertisements also allow us to study an “imagined community” through “vernacular linguistic unification” (Anderson 77). On a local level, a closer examination of ads within the migrant newspaper pages reveals a trend of promoting people, places, and products as distinctly “German” (“Teutsch”) even by the 1830s. While a hotel in Europe might have borne a specific name, in the United States it often became simply known as the “German hotel.” Similarly, in German-speaking neighborhoods, one would encounter a “German butcher” or a “German pharmacy.” In the 1860s, prior to German Unification but during and immediately after the American Civil War, such markers of Germanness circulated widely across state lines, notably through national advertising campaigns. The rise of widely circulated newspapers in the second half of the nineteenth century provided advertisers with a powerful platform to reach a national “German” audience and effectively market their products to many consumers across the country in a timely manner. This development encouraged advertisers to explore innovative marketing strategies, including “branding” (see Petty). The primary aim of branding was to create a unique and recognizable identity among consumers, thereby cultivating brand loyalty and increasing sales. By incorporating Germanness as a strategic branding element, businesses aimed to establish an emotional bond with migrant customers. The label “German” was stamped onto people, places, and products not (only) to signal ethnic affiliation, but to enhance their appeal and drive consumerism. Migrants used what Kathleen Conzen describes as a “colonizing vision” (“Phantom Landscapes” 11) as a marketing strategy. According to James Clifford, cultural meanings have roots in the conceptions of place that originated there without exception (316–317). The home country in all its historical and topographical complexity because of its heterogeneity in terms of geography and different complex reasons that triggered migration, in the words of Neal Alexander, “serves both as an abiding if not omnipresent frame of reference and as a reservoir of creative impetus” (24) for emphasizing German cultural values.
The act of consumption played a vital role in reinforcing German identity among migrants, and this was not limited to the realm of poetry alone, as discussed in chapter 3, but also extended to advertisements. An examination of the advertisements found on page four of the weekly issue of Die Minnesota Staats-Zeitung on August 26, 1869, as depicted in figure 17, exemplifies how German was enshrined into public consciousness through ads.[6] Ads such as “Deutsche Bank” (“German Bank”), “Deutsche Eisenwaaren” (“German Ironware”), or “Deutsches Hotel” (“German Hotel”) show how migrants effectively used commercial advertisements as a means to promote the consumption of their products or services by emphasizing the Germanness of their brands. These advertisements strategically combined images of identity, quality, and trust associated with German culture. The increased use of German as a marketing strategy within these advertisements is a testament to how migrants leveraged branding techniques to strengthen their cultural identity and establish a sense of familiarity and trust among consumers. During the 1860s and 1870s, the prevalence of advertisements in newspapers was on the rise, not just those featuring the term “German.” On Chronicling America, the user can go through the complete issue of the Minnesota Staats-Zeitung from August 26, 1869, to examine the arrangement of content throughout the newspaper. Navigating through the pages on Chronicling America, it becomes apparent that the initial two pages were primarily dedicated to fictional texts. The first column of the front page featured a text titled “Bedingungen” (“Conditions”), followed by advertisements and “Belletristisches” (“Belletristic Texts”) in the adjacent column. News articles were published starting from the third page, with national and international affairs preceding local news (“Locales”), followed by factual texts, which provided information on topics such as “Lungenkrankheiten” (“Lung Diseases”), “Tabakstempel” (“Tobacco Seals”), and “Unterseeische Dampfschiffahrt” (“Undersea Steam Navigation”). The text type, however, that consistently appeared on all pages, from the first column of the front page to the last column of the final page, was advertisements. Many of these ads also prominently highlighted the Germanness of individuals, products, or places such as a “Deutsche Apotheke” (“German Pharmacy”), German advocates and notaries, as well as various “German” hotels or taverns.[7] Even by the 1830s, these few pages reveal instances of content reuse within a single edition. Symbols, such as a mortar, were employed in multiple ads, including one for a German pharmacy. Entire titles or slogans were also reused, such as “Wein! Wein! Echter deutscher Rheinwein” (“Wine! Wine! Real German Wine from the Rhineland”), employed by two different suppliers on different pages.
Figure 17: Page four of Die Minnesota Staats-Zeitung,August 26, 1869, showing the manifoldness of ads about products, places, or services branded as “German.”
The ads published in Minnesota not only showcase the various uses of the term “deutsch,” the recycling of symbols, titles, and rhyme schemes as advertising strategies, but also highlight that women were already being directly addressed as consumers in the 1860s. These findings are derived from analyzing whom the advertisements targeted and the sequence in which audiences were addressed. Some advertisements, like “Washington Haus” (a guest house), presented in verse and rhyme narrated by the host himself, targeted both men and women as potential customers, but addressed mothers and daughters first: “Nun Mutter, Tochter, Vater und Sohn, kommt hin zu dem …” (“Mother, daughter, father, and son, come to …”). On the other hand, other ads exclusively focused on women, using phrases such as: “Wir laden die Damen St. Paul’s ein, sich unsere Waren anzusehen” (“We invite the Ladies of St. Paul to have a look at our goods”). In contrast to news articles, which extensively used terms such as “Weiber” or “Frauen” (women), ads opted for a more formal expression, using the term “Damen” (Ladies), or addressing women by their family status as mothers and daughters. Women were seen as important consumers and decision-makers within the household. Advertisers recognized the purchasing power of women and targeted them directly to influence their buying decisions. Secondly, as societal norms and gender roles were evolving during this time, there was a growing recognition of women’s agency and their increasing involvement in commercial activities. Addressing women in advertisements, therefore, was an acknowledgment of their role as active participants in the economy and to cater to their specific needs.
By the late 1860s, approximately half of the German migrant newspapers’ content was dedicated to advertisements. In the U.S., advertising experienced significant growth, particularly after the end of the Civil War, owing to various interconnected factors. These factors included the rise of mass production through industrialization, the ongoing process of urbanization, the expansion of transportation systems, and the emergence of new retail distribution models like department and chain stores. The demand for uniforms, shoes, and processed food during the Civil War stimulated the mass production of clothing and canned goods. Additionally, as men went off to war, women assumed greater responsibility for providing for their families, either by taking over stores or working in factories to earn income. With less time for domestic tasks, women used their earnings to purchase goods from stores. Material goods started to serve as new symbols for constructing identities, as Michael Schudson points out (155). Migrant newspapers provided an ideal platform for producers and merchants to disseminate information quickly and widely. While the themes, strategies, and product types align with Blaschke’s findings, her research locates these developments primarily in the early twentieth century. This overlooks a longer history: by the 1860s, women were already being targeted, reflecting earlier shifts such as changing gender roles during the war and demographic changes in migration patterns, with more women arriving compared to the first half of the century.
While the number of German migrant women as potential consumers, the size of markets, the variety of products, and the level of competition increased, many brands achieved national recognition and local availability including products for the artificial nutrition for infants. One of the top prominent terms, which did not immediately align with the vocabulary of medical products but instead food was “Kind” (child). Terms such as “Ernährung” (nutrition), “Stadium” (state), “Säugling” (infant), and “Kindermehl” (children’s flour) form a cluster around the term “Kind.” These terms were derived from texts that referenced products aimed at nourishing children. These texts offer not only insights into how women were targeted but also blur the lines between medical and food advertisements, as many seem to belong to both categories. The objective of marketing processed food to women was not only to simplify their daily tasks, but also aimed to provide sustenance for their children, responding to the high child mortality rates of the time. Several factors contributed to the elevated child mortality rates during the nineteenth century such as poor living conditions and inadequate access to medical care (K. Lee 585–586). Many families resided in crowded and unsanitary environments, making them more susceptible to diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and typhus (Preston and Haines 3). To address this issue, businesses began mass producing infant formula as a solution. In the migrant press, the concept of Germanness and future generations was not only applied to places or individuals but also extended to products such as “Deutsches Kindermehl” (“German Infant Formula”). An example of this can be seen on December 1, 1881, in Die Freie Presse für Texas, where “Deutsches Kindermehl” was prominently featured on the front page of the newspaper:
Müttern, die ihre Kinder gesund zu nähren wünschen, ohne im Stande zu sein, es durch ihre eigene Brust zu bewirken, kann nichts Besseres, Heilsameres und Billigeres empfohlen werden, als Neustädters Deutsches Kindermehl (Pädotrophine). Es ist der beste Ersatz für Muttermilch, es vereinigt alles Gute in sich, um eine vortreffliche Kindernahrung zu gewähren. Der brillanteste Erfolg wurde sogar bei kränklichen und schwachen Kindern erziehlt. “Deutsches Kindermehl” wird von Aerzten sehr empfohlen, und ist in allen renommirten Apotheken zu haben.[8]
The advertisement promoted the product as a substitute for breast milk targeting mothers who are unable to nurse their children, reassuring them that this product is the best, healthiest, and most affordable option for feeding their infants. It emphasized the product’s benefits, claiming that it not only serves as a superior alternative to breast milk but also achieves remarkable results, particularly for sickly or weak children. Furthermore, the endorsement by doctors and the product’s availability in reputable pharmacies lend credibility and trustworthiness to the claims, positioning it as a reliable choice for infant nutrition. The overall tone appealed to both maternal concerns for a child’s health and the authority of medical professionals, thus encouraging trust in the product. Upon examining the page, it becomes evident that although ads appear to be published in at least five out of the eight columns, this particular ad was not actually printed within those columns. Instead, the ad was embedded within the text-only columns, creating the illusion that it belongs to another form. In addition, it was published without a distinct title and directly targeted to mothers. Although the ad did not mention a price, its language emphasizing better quality, healing properties, and affordability categorizes it as an advertisement.
This particular ad promoted “Neustädter’s Deutsches Kindermehl.” Neustädter, was a pharmacist in New York, who advertised various products, including remedies for hemorrhoids and digestive problems for both adults and children, across different newspapers throughout the country. In one of these ads, he also cautioned customers about imitations: “Hütet euch vor Nachahmungen” (“Beware of imitations”).[9] As Daniel Delis Hill argues, the rise of mass production and mass advertising in the U.S. resulted in a proliferation of copied products. As a response, advertisements began to include warnings to consumers to “look out for frauds,” highlighting the presence of counterfeit or inferior goods in the market (1–2). Additionally, this phenomenon sparked a trend of disparaging other products and producers in advertisements, as companies sought to differentiate themselves and discredit their competitors. Advertisements for Deutsches Kindermehl spread nationwide, sometimes appearing with just the first sentence or without direct attribution to Neustädter. The New Yorker pharmacist, however, was not the sole advertiser of this product. As early as 1876, Der Deutsche Correspondent in Maryland published an ad on November 14, 1876, featuring Deutsches Kindermehl alongside an image of a child sitting in a highchair, joyfully holding a baby bottle.[10] This ad was preceded by another ad titled “Ein populäres Buch!” (“A popular book”) that advertised a guidebook on gender roles and marital issues, available for purchase from the “Deutsche Heilanstalt” (“German Sanitorium”) in St. Louis, Missouri. This version of Deutsches Kindermehl was surrounded by ads promoting various other products, including mouthwash, skincare products, and remedies for abdominal pain, while the adjacent column contained a condensed version of Neustädter’s Kindermehl without even mentioning Neustädter or a specific place to purchase it. These ads not only demonstrate the growing trend of branding places but specifically products with a German identity. They, furthermore, highlight the prevalence of advertisements about topics related to children, marriage, and household. Such advertisements appeared throughout the newspapers, not only in designated ad columns but also alongside news reports. They addressed mothers rather than fathers, indicating a gendered targeting strategy. The placement of these ads, often embedded within news articles or other genres and even featured on front pages, suggests that women were considered part of the intended readership of the German-language press well before 1890. Without interested readers, advertisers would not have a platform to promote their products (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 149).
Similar to Neustädter’s ad, the ad for Kindermehl that featured an image of a child, also claimed to be the best substitute for mother’s milk, endorsed by various doctors. This particular ad, available for purchase from “Vogeler, Sohn and Comp. in Baltimore or prominent German pharmacies,” however, used a specific childhood ailment “Sommerleiden” (summer complaint) to connect infant feeding with diseases. Advertisers increasingly incorporated material from non-commercial texts published in newspapers and medical journals to tackle broader societal issues, meet people’s needs, and explore innovative ways to combine information, products, and diseases.[11] Child mortality, specifically during the summer months, was a significant topic of discussion in the German-language press, as evident from another prominent text that circulated within the community. One of these widely reprinted advice features was a text that was commissioned by the “New Yorker Sanitätsbehörde” (New York Health Authority). Reprinted from 1873 to 1891 by editors in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, and Maryland, this text provided numerically structured guidelines for the nutrition and care of young children during the warmer season to combat summer complaints. On July 10, 1873, Der Westbote in Columbus, Ohio, published it under the title “Regeln für die Pflege Kleiner Kinder während der Sommer-Monate” (“Rules for the Care of Young Children during the Summer”).[12] To offer guidance on breastfeeding (“stillen kleiner Kinder”), the text recommended that women incorporate drinking or barley water into their infants’ diet after six months of breastfeeding. Additionally, on particularly hot days, a few drops of water were advised to be added. Alongside breastfeeding advice, the text also provided instructions for addressing constipation, vomiting, and overfeeding. It emphasized, however, that artificial nutrition should only be introduced if breast milk is insufficient, and that no child should be seated at the table before the age of two years. The content went beyond imparting knowledge on child nutrition, as it also played a role in shaping social norms regarding child rearing within families. In contrast to the advertising text, this advice was addressed to the entire family and positioned amidst discussions on history and politics. On the page, it was embedded within a factual text discussing the history of slave ships and news from abroad including a report from Germany about Friedrich Hecker, a German-American Forty-Eighter, who was scheduled to deliver a speech at a Fourth of July celebration organized by Americans in Kassel. These texts, printed in between or next to news about battle and events, did not feature titles or introductory lines that exclusively addressed women.
Three days earlier on July 6, 1873, the Sunday edition Westliche Blätter of Tägliches Cincinnati Volksblatt (1858–1885) in Cincinnati, Ohio, featured the same text under the title “Regeln für die Pflege Kleiner Kinder” on page five after listing the telegraphic news.[13] This Sunday edition, which started with a 17-stanza long poem titled “Mutterliebe” (“Motherly Love”) by Theodor Schröder, was dedicated primarily to entertainment and included serialized novels, short stories, riddles, anecdotes, historical essays, travel reports, articles on fashion, popular science, literature, humorous content, telegraphic news, and poems. The content of other reuses remained largely unchanged, but the title was modified in most cases. The weekly Westbote published it under the title “Hütet die Kleinen” (“Take Care of the Small Ones”) on July 29, 1886, while the daily Deutsche Correspondent simply used “Sommer-Regeln” (“Summer Rules”) as on June 18, 1891, and printed it under the section “Stadt Baltimore” (“City of Baltimore”) on its last page.[14] These anxieties were not confined to urban contexts, as evidenced by the circulation of such “rules” in the rural press. The weekly Hermanner Volksblatt featured the text on its front page, as seen on August 2, 1889, under the title “Zeitgemäße Rathschläge” (“Contemporary Advice”), which did not provide immediate information about the topic of children, strongly indicating a non-gender readership of this text.[15] The daily Die Freie Presse für Texas on June 16, 1880, in contrast, explicitly addressed women, that is mothers, in the title: “Zur Beachtung von Mütter” (“For Mothers’ Attention”) under “Lokales” (Local News).[16] The different titles already hint at the intended audiences of the texts. However, these titles were often “cut” during text reuse detection, as they tended to differ more significantly than the main content. By following the links to Chronicling America, I was able to trace the original titles and examine the texts’ placement on the newspaper pages, allowing me to identify both similarities and differences across reprints. In the Texan edition, I did not only find “Neustädter’s Deutsches Kindermehl” but also another ad titled “Mütter! Mütter! Mütter!” (Mothers! Mothers! Mothers!) which promoted “Mrs. Winslows Soothing Syrup,” an analgesic for children. The repetition serves as an emphatic and direct appeal to the primary audience of the advertisement. By repeating the word three times, the title aims to grab attention and evoke an emotional response, highlighting the importance of maternal care. The repetition also reinforces the idea that this message is of great urgency and significance to all mothers, drawing them into the ad’s content with a sense of personal responsibility and connection to their child’s well-being. It creates a bond with the reader by addressing them directly and repeatedly, making them feel that the product is tailored specifically to their needs as caregivers. These diverse examples and specifically the repetitions as illustrated in the last ad explain the high frequency of words denoting mothers in ads and related factual texts. On the other hand, they highlight the fact that there were local differences in strategies when it came to addressing national concerns including childhood diseases.
The geographical and temporal spread of such stories across decades and regions emphasize the high demand for knowledge about nutrition. From the 1870s onwards, factual texts concerning not only adult diseases and innovations but also advice for women and child feeding began to spread extensively. Given the limited medical knowledge on these issues, these texts served as vital resources for both men and women to acquire information about the body, nutrition, and childcare. Cordell categorizes such texts as listicles: a term borrowed from the internet. Listicles are concise, relatable texts that can be easily repurposed for different newspapers and audiences, fitting into various locations on the newspaper page as needed by editors (“Reprinting” 424). When considering the subscription numbers alongside the reprints in this dataset, one can observe that listicles like “Contemporary Advice” and ads about infant food circulated thousands of times across the country between 1870 and 1900. Even though listicles are “least explicable from the standpoint of literary history,” their prevalence shows that they “are important to a full understanding of nineteenth-century epistemologies” (425). These texts are valuable not only as how-to guides within the newspaper but also for their close connection to other genres, particularly advertisements. Both offer strong messages about self-improvement, especially relevant for migrants adjusting to a new environment. This text was not computationally classified as a factual text (“a text to inform and educate readers about a particular topic similar to a textbook, research paper, technical manual, or instructional guide”), but as an ad. Based on the annotation guidelines in chapter 4, a human would not classify it as such since it does not represent “a message printed in the newspaper in space paid for by the advertiser.” The classifier, however, assumes that it is an ad based on the vocabularies surrounding “children” and “nutrition,” which were overrepresented in ads compared to the other text types in the corpus. As this example exposes, one objective of computationally classifying texts is to bring texts together that share certain characteristics. In this way, the classifier brings to the fore texts that go beyond ads. As a new subset, these texts illustrate how editors discussed not only societal concerns such as child mortality but also provided information on breastfeeding for women.[17] The continuous reuse of such texts across decades not only shows the relevancy of the topic but also serves as an indicator for the usefulness of these “Regeln” (rules).
Even if one assumes that editors reused ads and listicles simply to fill the pages or to preserve the survival of their papers, it is highly likely that they were read by thousands of women, from residents of cities like St. Paul, Minnesota, to inhabitants of small towns like New Philadelphia, Ohio. Cordell further argues that this information literature can be viewed “as a kind of serialized and communally authored compendium of useful knowledge” (425) that shows the value of the topics to both editors and readers. Editors played a crucial role as educators, as they primarily printed these guidelines during the month of July to prepare families for the challenges they would face during the summer months. By providing these informative snippets, editors actively contributed to shaping public perception of infant mortality as a national social problem and an obstacle to population growth (Pozzi and Fariñas 56). “[P]ervasive reprinting of information literature cultivated an idea of the newspaper as a knowledge medium which could itself be cited as an authority, rather than deriving its authority entirely from the book-based genres from which it often drew” (Cordell, “Reprinting” 427). By encountering similar messaging styles, readers developed a sense of familiarity, fostering trust in the content of the newspaper pages.
These observations also suggest that prior to the information on child nutrition being shifted to gender-specific platforms like women’s pages and magazines in the early twentieth century, information literature in the form of ads, listicles, factual texts, or news was accessible to the entire migrant family. With the introduction of women’s pages, however, such information became reserved for those specific sections, even including dedicated segments on “Mutter und Kind” (“Mother and Child”) as Blaschke points out (Die Entdeckung 192). While Blaschke speaks of the “discovery” of the female audience at the turn of the century, I would argue instead for a shift or repositioning of the female audience within the public sphere and the press.
5.3. Periods, Pierce, and Pinkham: Spreading Hystories¶
In addition to the term “Kind” (“child”), there are other notable terms that stand out in terms of frequency such as “Dr.,” “Ayer,” and “Flasche” (“bottle”). These terms point to another significant topic in the discourse surrounding women’s health during the nineteenth century: patent medicines. “The first national advertisers were the patent-medicine manufacturers. It was discovered, about 1868 or 1870, that it was possible to sell certain kinds of commodities by mail-patent medicines, for example” (Park 369). The relevance of patent medicines in the American press can also be found on Chronicling America. In their new interface, Chronicling America offers a collection of “Topics in Chronicling America Research Guides” in a chronological order that provide insight into guiding research on specific people (“Zora Neale Hurston” or “Walt Whitman”), events (“Tulsa Race Massacre” or “Treaty of Versailles”), as well as specific topics (“Yoga,” “Tuberculosis,” or “Early Patent Medicines”). Users find a brief description of the topic as well as a timeline highlighting “important dates related to this topic.” For “Early Patent Medicines,” it lists:
1905 and 1906 as relevant dates because it marked the period when The Collier magazine “ran a series of influential articles by Samuel Hopkins Adams entitled, ‘The Great American Fraud,’ which exposed many of the deceitful and unsafe methods practiced by patent medicine manufacturers,”
June 30, 1906, as it was the day when President Theodore Roosevelt signed “The first federal Food and Drug Act” into law,
And 1912, emphasizing the year, when the Act was amended.
While the list of topics in Chronicling America offers a helpful overview of relevant themes, it includes relatively few non-English newspapers. At the same time, its timeline as well as their list of selected articles suggests that certain topics were primarily relevant at the beginning of the twentieth century, thereby obscuring their longer histories, which in fact shaped the development of the press throughout the entire nineteenth century.
While early market research studies were conducted in the early 1900s, it was not until the 1920s and 1930s that marketing research became more formally recognized as a field of study.[18] The first marketing research firm in the U.S., the N. W. Ayer Advertising Agency, was established in 1879 by Francis Ayer (Laird 157). Francis Ayer was not the only member of the Ayer family who left a significant mark on the history of advertising during this period. Decades earlier, James Ayer had become one of the wealthiest businessmen in the patent medicine industry. Like many of his contemporaries, he claimed the title of “Dr.” when entering the medicine business in the 1850s as a pharmacist (49). In the nineteenth century, patent medicines, and their producers, were successful for several reasons. The manufacturers were skilled at marketing and advertising their products, often making extravagant claims about their effectiveness (Robinson 74–75). There was a lack of regulation on the production and sale of medicines, which meant that many patent medicines contained ingredients that were not disclosed or were even harmful. As Norman Gevitz writes, “[m]orphine, alcohol, acetanilid, cocaine were commonly employed and yet despite their known side-effects these proprietaries were sold to the public without any warning of what they contained” (170). In addition, during this time, there was a lack of effective medical treatments available, which made people more willing to try alternative remedies (Delis Hill 4). Ads about these alleged Wunderheilmittel (miracle cures) were extensively published in the press all over the country. According to Michael Schudson, by 1880, English-language American newspapers dedicated 25% of space to these ads (162). This number, as Park notes, decreased extensively around the turn of the century, but not as strongly in the German migrant papers, which still allocated 13% of space to medical ads in the big daily papers (369). According to Park, American newspapers and magazines sought to expose fraudulent advertisements and attempted to eliminate them by purging their pages. In contrast, he argues, such “housecleaning” did not occur in the migrant press (370). This is particularly relevant in the case of gendered advertising. Ads targeting women, especially for patent medicines, relied on emotional appeals, pseudoscientific claims, and moralized imagery that exploited both cultural anxieties and the relative lack of consumer protection at the time.
Research has indicated that the growing presence of American women as consumers in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a corresponding increase in household products, but also in medical products that specifically targeted women’s health issues (Hill 1). “Creating a mass market required mass communication” (2). This dual phenomenon signifies not only a heightened focus on addressing women’s health concerns but also highlights the pressing need for women of all ages to acquire more information about their health. Young girls, for instance, desperately needed information and advice about sexual health since mothers proved to be too timid to act as advisors (Marchand 344), while pregnant women and mothers needed information on reproductive health. Medical research on these topics was still in its infancy, even though diseases, specifically the ones relating to infant mortality during summer, had been discussed in the centuries before by the founding fathers such as John Marshall (Shulman 165). But institutions such as the American Pediatrics Society (1888) were not established before the end of the nineteenth century (163). Advertisers used such “deficiencies,” which gave them “the opportunity to dispense the needed counsel in conjunction with their product” (Marchand 344). Ads dedicated to Wunderheilmittel were not only popular in German migrant newspapers, but also in magazines. Around the turn of the century, as Blaschke notes, German-American women from all over the country were writing to the editors of Die Deutsche Hausfrau, but also to the ones of women’s pages, demanding not only to discuss women’s rights (suffrage) or the transformation of gender roles, but they also wanted advice on marriage, including sexual and physical abuse, child education, and sexual health (Die Entdeckung 267–283). These topics should not be treated in isolation though, as they collectively illustrate that the pursuit of receiving more rights also entailed a demand for increased access to knowledge. On January 25, 1908, editors of Die Deutsche Hausfrau complained that many women wanted advice on health issues: “Sie suchen Heilung und Krankheiten und keine Zeitschrift (außer wirklich ärztlichen) ist dazu da” (“They are looking for advice on healing and diseases, but that is not the objective of a periodical [except for a medical one]”). Editors argued that it was not their responsibility to provide this kind of information, nor did they have the expert knowledge (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 286).
Recognizing the information needs of migrants, American producers early on targeted German migrant women as an additional consumer group. Advertisements addressing women’s concerns not only proliferated in women’s pages and magazines around the turn of the century, as documented by Blaschke (147–154). These texts had already achieved virality in the non-gendered spaces of the migrant press as early as the 1870s, aligning with Park’s observation that the rise of patent-medicine advertising on a national scale began around 1868 (or 1870). This indicates a significant interest in this type of information during the post-Civil War period correlating with the influx of migrants. Although Cordell does not specifically reference advertising, promotional texts can also be used to trace the networks of nineteenth-century print and shed light onto how information circulated among publications, influencing, and being influenced by various communities through textual exchange (“Viral Textuality” 47). As distribution and communication networks expanded, medicine sellers seized the opportunity by escalating the scale of their advertising campaigns. By the 1870s, with the establishment of transcontinental and national markets, medicine sellers emerged as the largest group of advertisers (Laird 19). The expansion of these networks through nationwide advertising not only attracted customers from different regions but also served as a source of inspiration for other producers, who sought to learn from and adopt or “steal” effective advertising techniques. An examination of the textual content of ads targeting women that widely circulated reveals that they extensively reused various elements from the “sensational public sphere,” such as testimonials that resembled eyewitness accounts found in detective fiction (Anthony 487). As the title “Mothers! Mothers! Mothers!” in the previous example demonstrates, they used, for instance, exclamation marks to intensify the sense of urgency and importance of the message. They created texts with a dramatic and emotional tone, emphasizing the call to action and capturing the reader’s attention immediately. The significance of sensationalism lay in its ability to attract readers and advertisers alike, creating a mass audience (Crouthamel and Jackson 295). While journalism began exploiting the public’s interest in stories of ordinary people in the mid-nineteenth century, purveyors of patent medicines had already employed these techniques in their testimonials much earlier (Laird 59).
One widely circulated advertisement in the 1870s was “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription,” targeting women seeking relief from any kind of female “weaknesses.” Ray Vaughn Pierce (1840–1914) was a physician from Buffalo and a U.S. Representative from New York (1879–1880). He produced a variety of medicines, many of which were primarily alcohol or opium solutions. Nearly a million bottles of his remedies were shipped annually from Buffalo, but his most successful product was an elixir aimed at treating “female weakness” (Gevitz 170). Pierce used letters written by women as advertising texts embellished with sensational titles reminiscent of newspaper headlines. While the Hermanner Volksblatt (Missouri), published now by “C. Graf” (and no longer “Frau Graf”), printed the ad with the title that read “Jetzt gesund und stark” (“Now Healthy and Strong”) as on April 19, 1877, other papers such as Der Deutsche Correspondent (Maryland), on June 4, 1877, Der Nordstern (Minnesota), on June 6, 1877, or the Millheim Journal (Pennsylvania), on June 14, 1877, used the headline: “Konnte kaum stehen” (“Could Barely Stand”).[19]
Dr. R. B. Pierce,
Werther Herr, ich muss Ihnen erzählen, was Ihre Medicin für mich gethan hat. Ehe ich Ihre Favorite Prescription [in Antiqua] (Lieblings-Verordnung) nahm, konnte ich kaum auf den Füßen stehen, aber durch Befolgung Ihres Rathes bin ich völlig geheilt. Die Favorite Prescription ist eine wunderbare Arznei für entkräftete und nervöse Frauen. Ich kann Ihnen gar nicht sagen, wie sehr ich Ihnen für Ihren Rat dankbar bin . Wahrhaft die Ihrige,
Mrs. Cornelia Allesor[20]
The ad disguised as a letter was a testimonial from one of Pierce’s collections of eyewitness accounts praising his medicine for its effectiveness in treating the woman’s severe debilitation and nervousness. In these lines, the patient described her initial condition as being so weak that she could barely stand. The phrase “barely stand” likely refers to severe pain or weakness, a symptom of various conditions, including menstrual cramps. Menstrual cramps, also known as dysmenorrhea, can cause intense lower abdominal pain that sometimes radiates to the lower back and thighs, making it difficult to stand or perform daily activities. Mrs. Allesor expressed profound gratitude for the benefits she received, highlighting the medicine’s positive impact on her health. This text serves as an endorsement of Dr. Pierce’s remedy, emphasizing its transformative effects on women’s health. These stories, the testimonies, and the sensational titles resonated with women experiencing menstrual cramps, allowing them to connect with the advertised product. The ad, however, provided no information about the price of the product or where it could be purchased. This gives the impression that the focus of the ad was on creating emotional appeal or trust rather than transactional details, prioritizing qualities like health benefits or endorsements over practical purchase information. Instead of concentrating on the purchase, it planted the idea of potential healing in people’s minds.
Lydia E. Pinkham’s “Vegetable Compound,” which also promised to cure all kinds of women’s complaints, in contrast, employed another strategy of familiarity in her advertising by using herself as an advertising technique. On the front page of the Freie Presse für Texas, San Antonio, on June 21, 1883, her ad similarly promised to be useful “für alle schmerzlichen Leiden die den besten unseres Geschlechtes so oft Sorge machen. Ein Heilmittel für Frauen. Von einer Frau erfunden. Von einer Frau zubereitet” (“For all painful ailments that so often cause concern for the best of our gender. A remedy for women. Invented by a woman. Prepared by a woman”).[21] Here again, the repetition of the word woman is used as an advertising strategy for various reasons. First, the repetition reinforced the idea of women helping other women, which may appeal to notions of empowerment, solidarity, and shared experiences. Second, by emphasizing that the remedy is both invented and prepared by a woman, the ad created a sense of trust and connection with its target audience by suggesting that it was developed with women’s specific needs in mind by someone who understands their experiences. Third, by repeatedly mentioning the term, the ad aimed to evoke an emotional response, making the product feel more personal and relevant to female consumers, who may feel more inclined to trust a product made by someone who shares their gender and potentially their concerns. Similar strategies can be found in the English-language press. The last “article” in the list of “selected articles” from Chronicling America on the topic of “Early Patent Medicine” directs the user to an “ad” of Pinkham’s compound. The ad titled “Facts for Sick Women” appeared on the last page of The Breckenridge News in Cloverport, Kentucky, more than twenty years later (October 20, 1909), alongside recipes, table decoration ideas, and snippets of local gossip: notes on who visited whom, or who had just arrived or departed.[22] After several paragraphs emphasizing the remedy’s widespread success, the ad concluded with a statement from Mrs. John G. Moldan of Minneapolis, Minnesota: “I read so much of what” Pinkham’s product “had done for other suffering women.” This ad, which ran nationally in both the English- and German-language press, connected women across state lines by allowing them to read about the ailments and experiences of other women, creating a shared narrative of illness and hope.
As the name suggests, text reuse detection focuses on textual content, not on the reuse of images. However, a closer look at newspaper pages in Chronicling America reveals the significance of visual culture in advertisements. The English-language ad, for instance, used a mix of typefaces—shifting from a playful font for the title to a more streamlined one for the main text—while both the product name and the patient testimonial were printed in bold for emphasis. To emphasize her gendered affiliation, expanding on the use of pronouns such as “our,” the ad in the Texan migrant paper was accompanied by an image depicting Pinkham as an elderly and wise woman along with her signature, both used to add a personal touch and establish credibility. In contrast to “Favorite Prescription,” Pinkham used a term for her product that was even more misleading to fool consumers. Even though the “vegetable compound” contained alcohol (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 149), leading to the creation of countless drug addicts (Gevitz 170), its name was designed to create the image of a fresh, healthy, and wholesome product. To strengthen this claim, taking the product would not only promise pain relief, but also the improvement of body posture, the appearance of shining eyes, and rosy cheeks. By disguising advertising in first-person narratives, Pinkham and others created a skillful form of early product placement that transformed text reuse into a ruse. The ploy went even further. As Robinson outlines, the Lydia E. Pinkham Company, founded in 1875, continued to encourage women for decades to write to Mrs. Pinkham, even though she had died in 1883 (80).
Mass advertising thus became a vehicle for mass storytelling. Instead of just focusing on a patient’s physical symptoms, there was a shift towards understanding the patient’s story. This approach helped in better analyzing, diagnosing, and potentially healing their issues. Similarly, advertising narratives provided insights into women’s dilemmas within a plot. These narratives, therefore, offer the opportunity to study both medical and human experiences. Advertisers did not just reuse narrative strategies from other sources such as letters in their ads, but with the advancements in lithography, they also started incorporating illustrations into their advertisements.[23] Prior to the 1900s, Pierce’s advertisements typically featured two images. The first one depicted beautiful, relatively young women with parts of their bodies visible in the image, while the second showed only the upper part of mature women, accompanying their testimonials. The use of illustrations, along with various claims, testimonials, wide geographic distribution, and caution about competing substitutes, became typical marketing techniques for all types of goods after the Civil War (Laird 22). While editors had already reused symbolic imagery in the first half of the century, advertisers in the second half began using images of people to accompany their texts. Images were extensively reused as they provided material that could easily be integrated into new contexts and embedded within textual environments. While scholars have acknowledged the shared use of verbal and visual techniques, they have not fully recognized the power of frequently repeated media images and ideas and their portrayal of women before the 1920s (Marchand xx).
Images have a significant potential for evoking emotions in viewers, making them an intriguing subject for reception and impact research (see Fazli). During the turn of the century, significant changes occurred not only in photography, leading to the integration of photos in newspapers and magazines for news stories, but also in advertising. Prior to 1900, the images depicted women who did not face straight ahead, reflecting an aesthetic influenced by portrait painting (W. Weber 134). This aesthetic, however, shifted around the turn of the century, as depicted in figure 18. In 1905, approximately half of the daily paper Der Deutsche Correspondent was covered in advertisements. The text on the front page of this issue, which is also illustrated on the cover of this book, integrated three different images. The largest one showing two women and a child, probably trying to depict three generations, the second one three children of different ages, and the last one probably a father and his daughter. This cover page story, however, was not a news article about a particular family but instead an ad about Peruna, a product for curing child diseases, which occupied half of the page including several paragraphs, subtitles, and large images of women.
Figure 18: Front page of Der Deutsche Correspondent, March 2, 1905, with more than half of the page occupied by an advertisement for “Peruna” explicitly addressed to mothers.
Various medicines during this period claimed to offer unique solutions to consumers’ difficulties, necessitating detailed explanations (Laird 18), creating a collective identity of mothers. In its first lines, the Peruna ad directly addressed the worries of mothers: “When the little ones get sick, the mother suffers the most” as they “worry and fear the terrible summer heat when they think about their children and consider the many dangers they face.” The Peruna ad spanned several paragraphs, with individual lines highlighted to separate sections such as “Mothers hold Peruna in high esteem,” “Peruna protects the whole family,” “No doctor required,” and “Peruna contains nothing narcotic.” The ad incorporated testimonials from individuals with different ethnic backgrounds, as suggested by their names and places of residence in the United States, ranging from Chicago to Pennsylvania. These “witnesses” included both mothers and fathers, but also grandmothers and children, who were depicted in the accompanying images, to report the benefits of the product for the entire family. While this long ad only ends with one short sentence revealing Dr. S.B. Hartman from Columbus, Ohio, as the producer, the English-language ad—listed in Chronicling America’s “selected articles”—published in the Los Angeles Herald two years later revealed other information about him.[24] According to this ad, Dr Hartman, “THE ORIGINAL COMPOUNDER OF PERUNA,” was a Mennonite from Pennsylvania. It is striking that the ads in the German-language press did not more explicitly emphasize Hartman’s German heritage as a marketing strategy, especially given that he was a second-generation migrant. Thanks to his growing customer base, Hartman became a multi-millionaire.
Advertisements such as “Peruna,” “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription,” and “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Pflanzen-Mischung (Vegetable Compound)” played a key role in promoting what can be called a national epidemic of health fraud in the nineteenth century. These remedies promised to treat a wide range of ailments, ranging from menstrual cramps and labor pains to childhood diseases (Thomas 110). Despite appearing under different names, in various publications, and on different pages, these ads often relied on remarkably similar narratives. These viral texts not only provided information on pain relief but also conveyed societal expectations of beauty and the ways in which the economy created images of women, portraying them as vulnerable or dysfunctional in order to sell products. These narratives relate to what Elaine Showalter describes as “hystories,” blending hysteria with stories and economic profit (Hystories). This exploitation of women’s health concerns for commercial gain highlights the intersection of medical discourse and gendered marketing strategies. These advertisements included both material and informational content about the female body, alongside sociopolitical messaging and strategies. They urged women to restore their health swiftly so they could resume their roles as wives, homemakers, and mothers, emphasizing the need to avoid being a burden to their husbands (Keck, “Let’s Talk Data” 80).
These snippets of text did not originate from individual creators but rather passed through an exchange system illustrating the power of virality in narrating “personal” experiences for marketing strategies. While these strategies were deployed and developed in all kinds of publications in the U.S., there are two factors that were specific for the German migrant press regarding language and durability. Unlike the ads about Deutsches Kindermehl, these products had English names, and were, therefore, printed in Antiqua typeface, while only the translated names, not always included, were presented in Fraktur. This distinction in typefaces highlighted the cultural differentiation within the ads. Although these texts were widely reproduced throughout the country, the use of different typefaces emphasized the sense of otherness. The second difference lies in their persistence. Patent medicine advertising continued to be popular in German migrant newspapers for a longer duration compared to other American publications (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 147). This demonstrates that publishers of German-language publications could rely on these ads for an extended duration to sustain their newspapers financially. For German-American publishers, these ads became an important source of revenue when readership declined around the turn of the century. “In order to keep alive they are willing, and sometimes eager, to sell themselves to interests and to causes in regard to which they are otherwise indifferent, if not hostile” (Park 367).
“The social stigma attached to topics like menopause and painful menses meant that public or private sources of accurate information on matters like these were limited” (Robinson 80). The products were successful among women consumers as they promised a fast cure based on the huge amount of alcohol and other harmful ingredients, which was, however, unknown to the user as such information did not have to be listed at that point. By writing to companies like Lydia E. Pinkham Company, women received more information on their sexual health. From this point of view, Pinkham’s clerks, which Robinson describes as Pinkham’s “advice network” helped women at some point “given the paucity of reliable public information” on women’s health (81). To ensure their success, Pierce, for instance, not only devoted time to developing effective marketing strategies, but he also served as president of the Proprietary Association for six terms (1888–1894). This association consisted of manufacturers of “patent medicines” who collectively opposed any legislation that would impose restrictions on the advertising, shipping, or sale of their products (Gevitz 170). While the network of patent medicine influencers freely “borrowed” strategies from each other, they also worked together to secure legal protections that allowed them to continue their sensational advertising. As more journalists, however, exposed the false claims made in these advertisements, such as Samuel Hopkins Adams (Collier’s Weekly) claiming that Peruna contained 28% alcohol, the patent medicine industry began to crumble (Fee 1391). Other newspapers such as the Los Angeles Herald ran articles such as “The Death Rate and ‘Patent’ Medicine” making these medications responsible for a “[m]illion [d]ead [b]abies”: “[T]he death rate decreased more rapidly in the decade of ‘adulterated’ food and ‘patent’ medicine than in any other decade.”[25] In 1906, Congress approved the Pure Food and Drug Act. This act had two main provisions regarding medicines: first, drugs containing certain substances must indicate the percentage or proportion of those drugs on their labels if they were sold across state lines. Second, the label must not include any false or misleading statements (Gevitz 171). These developments coincided with a decline in readership and advertisers in the German migrant press. “In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition of falsifications referred only to the ingredients of the medicine,” allowing advertisers to continue making other claims (Kennedy 46). However, as the twentieth century began, with the rise of gendered publications, advertisers started targeting women as a specific group in other publications.
Literature and advertising, which were often seen as extraneous fillers, solely intended to persuade readers to buy newspapers, were, in fact, the primary driving force behind the existence of the commercial press (Peterson, “The ‘Political’” 42). As illustrated in this chapter, advertising played a significant role in both the growth and decline of the migrant press. Moreover, the history of advertising in the press is closely linked to the advancements brought about by industrialization. The rapid economic growth of the late nineteenth century and the emergence of national markets provided the conditions for the production and promotion of mass-produced goods, leading to the development of a national advertising culture (Park 374). Advertisements played a pivotal role in the success of businesses, and newspapers acted as the intermediaries or “links” between producers and consumers (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 90). One might easily dismiss the prevalence of ads promoting medical miracles that proliferated through newspaper pages in the second half of the century. “To this day, old-time patent medicine sellers remain more noted for their advertising strategies and techniques than for their nostrums” (Laird 50). While individuals like Ayer or Pierce have been exposed for their dubious practices or praised for their shrewd business skills, the specific impact of these ads on women remains understudied. However, when viewed through the lens of women, these numerous ads aimed at curing women’s and children’s diseases reveal that women were captivated by them, as they had limited alternative sources for information about menstruation, pregnancy, pain, and medication. Ads depicted goods, ideas, and people that came to serve as symbols of identity within the migrant community and broader American society. The publication of ads legitimized consumer culture; however, in their concise lines and imagery, these ads demonstrate how widely disseminated periodical texts reflected the values of the larger culture. They portrayed women as vulnerable beings in need of protection, thereby “reinforcing their status as second-class citizens” (Keck, “Let’s Talk Data” 77).
It would be too simplistic to argue that it was solely women’s weakness that started these marketing strategies. According to Robinson, ads for patent medicines targeting both men and women began to appear extensively in the news in the 1860s, and these ads were among the first to advertise nationally and pioneer “the use of trademarked branded goods” (75).[26] Looking at ads around the turn of the century, he argues that they used both men’s and women’s weakness as the main cause for their complaints to sell the product. As regards the former, manufacturers targeted specifically young and single men in cities, many of whom had moved there from the rural areas or from abroad, who were looking for more information and cures for sexual dysfunction: “The social shame and popular ignorance surrounding sexuality and sexual health […] proved fertile ground for the marketing of remedies for [women’s and] ‘men’s diseases’” (81).
“Advertisements, framed in a way to intrigue the readers of the local press, made patent medicines popular in the remote villages” (Park 369). While Park argues for the important role that these patent medicines had on the provincial press, combining urban and rural publications shows that these ads were published in all regions. However, articles exposing their falsehood became a national media event that was, however, more prominently published in urban English-language newspapers and magazines. By analyzing text reuse “of” and “in” these advertisements, one can gain a deeper understanding of the cultural and economic dynamics of the past. Discussing the historical context of advertising and its influence on gender representations highlights the need for scholarly examination of advertisements as primary sources to understand societal ideas and norms. To learn more about the representation of gender in the press, specifically by tracing the “hystories” that went viral in the press, advertising provides a useful ground for exploration as it influenced and was influenced by other genres from fact to fiction. With this term, Showalter explores how hysteria, traditionally considered a female disorder, has been portrayed and understood in various contexts, including medical, literary, and media discourses. She argues that these “hystories,” a blend of hysteria and story, reflect broader societal anxieties and contribute to the shaping of public perceptions about mental health and gender. Showalter does not specifically advocate for the study of advertisements as her focus is primarily on how cultural narratives about hysteria and psychological phenomena are constructed and perpetuated through various media, including literature, film, and popular culture.
As this chapter has shown, the various ads published in newspapers offer valuable insights into popular medical knowledge about both women’s and men’s health issues. Although this chapter has focused on women’s medical concerns, the corpus includes numerous ads addressing men’s diseases as well. Future research on ads addressing men’s medical concerns could explore several key areas. First, it could examine how masculine ideals and stereotypes were constructed or reinforced through the portrayal of men’s health issues, particularly in relation to strength, vitality, and virility in the German-American press and how this differed to English-language or other migrant publications. Second, a comparative analysis between ads for men’s and women’s diseases could reveal how gender-specific language and imagery influence perceptions of illness and treatment options. Lastly, such research could investigate the types of ailments commonly associated with men in historical advertising, offering insights into the societal expectations and pressures placed on men’s health. Advertisements reveal societal attitudes and common medical practices of the time, highlighting the gendered dimensions of health and wellness in historical contexts. German-American newspapers should be recognized not only as historical sources about peoples and migration but also as a vital component of the nineteenth-century American economy. They played a significant role in shaping public opinion, disseminating medical knowledge, and reflecting the commercial landscape of the time. This dual function underscores their importance in understanding both cultural integration and economic dynamics in American history.
Advertisements may not initially appear as the most intriguing source for studying text reuse in the nineteenth century, especially when considering them within a single source. However, when broadening perspectives and examining ads that revolve around specific topics, it is possible to uncover valuable insights into the reading habits of larger groups and the societal demands of a particular era. Ads that were widespread across the country and persisted over decades serve as indicators of the collective interests and needs of a society. They reflect what people were reading and what products or services were in demand during a specific time period. The digitization of newspapers and the application of computational methods present valuable opportunities to explore the history of infant and child health, as well as mortality—an area that has often been overlooked until recently (Woods 1). In this study, computational methods provide insights into word co-occurrence patterns and clustering within the subset of advertisements that shed light on topics that reveal both local and transregional aspects of advertising. By leveraging new technologies and employing reading processes across digitized pages and platforms, one can turn the statistical analysis of texts into a dynamic engagement for scholars. These examples offer perspectives on what editors and readers considered significant. They provide insights not only into the knowledge possessed by experts at the time but also into the perspectives of the middle and lower classes who were the primary readers of these migrant newspapers (Shore et al. 3).
In front of the woman lies a card on a table that says: “Home Office, The Coca-Cola Co. Atlanta, Ga. Branches: Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Dallas.”
In addition to studies on the reception (see Hermes) and production (see Gough-Yates) of women’s magazines, men’s magazines have also become the focus of research influenced by men’s and masculinity studies (see Waling).
Ritchie et al. bring together several articles to emphasize women’s contributions in the context of magazines as editors, writers, photographers, and readers since the development of the periodical press in the nineteenth century. Together, the articles respond to feminist scholars who criticize the conservative and regressive motivation behind gender norms and ideals in magazines. However, in contrast to these critiques, they offer an expanded and diverse picture by highlighting the differing images and understandings of women in magazines, thereby also highlighting women’s active role as journalists and readers in both maintaining gender roles and pushing for changes.
The literal translation of Deutsches Kindermehl would be “German children’s flour.”
Peter Kaufmann, the editor of Der Vaterlandsfreund at that time, was a tobacconist by trade that had emigrated in 1820 to Philadelphia, where he established a labor for labor store, before moving to Canton, Ohio, in 1831, and taking over the paper from Solomon Sala a year later.
Die Minnesota Staats-Zeitung, August 26, 1869, p. 4.
Other types of ads announced ship contracts, new grocery stores (including price lists), liquor, medical products, carpets and wallpaper, furniture, shoes, and specific products like potatoes.
“Nothing better, more wholesome and cheaper than Neustädter’s German Infant Meal (Pädotrophins) can be recommended to mothers who wish to feed their children healthily without being able to bring it about through their own breasts. It is the best substitute for mother’s milk, it combines everything that is good to provide excellent nutrition for children. The most brilliant success was achieved even with sickly and weak children. ‘German children’s flour’ is highly recommended by doctors and is available in all well-known pharmacies.” Freie Presse für Texas, December 1, 1881, p. 2.
See, for instance, the ad titled “Anakefis” published on the front page in Der Deutsche Beoachter, Ohio, January 8, 1896, p. 1.
Der Deutsche Correspondent, November 14, 1876, p. 4.
Archives of Pediatrics, the first journal in English discussing the specific medical problems of children, was not established until 1884 (Shulman 163).
Der Westbote, Columbus, Ohio (1843–1918), an outspoken organ of abolitionism and that was against European monarchy, was published three times a week at that time before turning into a daily paper in 1893 (Arndt and Olson 477).
Westliche Blätter of Tägliches Cincinnati Volksblatt, July 6, 1873, p. 5.
Der Westbote, July 29, 1886, p. 4; Der Deutsche Correspondent, July 29, 1891.
Hermanner Volksblatt, August 2, 1889, p. 1. Adjacent to it was an advertisement titled “An Hausfrauen!” (To Housewives!), promoting Fleischmann’s Compressed Yeast, a product that revolutionized modern American baking. The company “Gaff, Fleischmann & Company” was founded by Charles Louis Fleischmann, his brother Maximilian, and James Gaff in 1868. Charles and Maximilian Fleischmann emigrated from Austria-Hungary in 1868 and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Fleischmann yeast soon became a household name. For a broader historical perspective on bread, including the impact of commercial yeast production and the role of companies like Fleischmann’s in changing baking practices, see Rubel.
Die Freie Presse für Texas, June 16, 1880, p. 4.
During that time, there were limited effective treatments available for diseases, and malnutrition was prevalent among the working classes. Insufficient food and nutrients weakened children’s immune systems, making them more vulnerable to illness. Childbirth was also perilous for both mothers and infants, with limited medical knowledge and many births taking place at home without trained professionals, increasing the risk of complications and fatalities. The mass production of “Nestlé’s Kindermehl” and similar products did not effectively address the issue of infant mortality. The breakthrough came after World War I thanks to the expansion of public healthcare and advancements in medicine and nutritional science (Pozzi and Ramiro Fariñas 56).
The emergence of marketing research as a discipline can be traced back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when merchants and manufacturers began collecting data about their customers and competitors. It, however, did not become institutionalized as a profession until 1890 (Robinson 87).
Hermanner Volksblatt, April 19, 1877, p. 4; Der Deutsche Correspondent, June 5, 1877, p. 4; Der Nordstern, June 7, 1877, p. 7; Millheim Journal, June 14, 1877, p. 2.
“Dr. R. V. Pierce, Dear Sir, I must tell you what your medicine has done for me. Before I took your Favorite Prescription (Lieblings-Verordnung), I could barely stand on my feet, but by following your advice, I am completely healed. The Favorite Prescription is a wonderful remedy for debilitated and nervous women. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your advice. Truly yours, Mrs. Cornelia Allesor.”
Freie Presse für Texas, June 21, 1883, p. 1.
The Breckenridge News, October 20, 1909, p. 8.
In 1871, Ayer had established his own lithograph and letterpress printing departments, producing eight million almanacs annually reaching up to 100,000 almanacs daily in twenty languages by 1889. Aside from his own productions, Ayer “also commissioned advertisements in various formats from job printers, distributing posters, trade cards, paper fans, and other novelties into the marketplace” (Laird 49).
Los Angeles Herald, April 7, 1907, p. 1.
Los Angeles Herald, May 27, 1906, p. 1.
For the English-language press in the U.S., patent medicines “formed the largest block of advertisers, comprising nearly half of newspaper advertising in 1860” (Robinson 74). Robinson analyzes how these advertisers used correspondence from patients to identify marketing strategies that they could use for their advertising texts including the reprint of testimonials or even faking testimonials (76). His research reveals that manufacturers employed personnel to read and reply to the letters, carefully ensuring that readers believed they were in direct communication with the owner.