are americans more willing to believe in advertising? -- 12/4/17

04 Dec 2017

are americans more willing to believe in advertising? -- 12/4/17

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Today's selection -- from Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen. From the earliest days, and continuing for decades and even centuries, promoters of the New World enticed colonizers with the promise of riches, causing the historian Daniel Boorstin to suggest that 'American civilization [has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising':

"Although [Sir Walter] Raleigh never visited North America himself, he believed that in addition to its gold deposits, his realm might somehow be the biblical Garden of Eden. ... A large fraction of the first settlers dispatched by Raleigh became sick and died. He dispatched a second expedition of gold-hunters. It also failed, and all those colonists died. But Sir Walter continued believing the dream of gold. ...

Map of El Dorado

"In 1606 the new English king, James, despite Raleigh's colonization disasters, gave a franchise to two new private enterprises, the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth, to start colonies. The southern one, under the auspices of London, they named Jamestown after the monarch. Their royal charter was clear about the main mission: 'to dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold ... And to HAVE and enjoy the Gold.' As Tocqueville wrote in his history two centuries later, 'It was ... gold-seekers who were sent to Virginia. No noble thought or conception above gain presided over the foundation of the new settlements.' Two-thirds of those first hundred gold-seekers promptly died. But the captain of the expedition returned to England claiming to have found 'gold showing mountains.' ... In fact, Jamestown ore they dug and refined and shipped to England turned out to be iron pyrite, fool's gold....

"The gold fantasy wasn't limited to colonists in the South. Those dispatched at the same time by the Plymouth Company, 120 of them, landed up on the Maine coast, also looking for gold and a faster route to Asia. They found signs of neither. But their desperation to believe the impossible is funny and sad. No gold so far, the colony president wrote home, but 'the natives constantly affirm that in these parts there are nutmegs, mace and cinnamon.' Tropical spices growing in New England?...

Advertisement for the Virginia Company

"Down in Virginia, meanwhile, more than six thousand people had emigrated to Jamestown by 1620, the equivalent of a midsize English city at the time. At least three-quarters had died but not the abiding dream. People kept coming and believing, hopefulness becoming delusion. It was a gold rush with no gold. Fifteen years after Jamestown's founding, a colonist wrote a friend to request a shipment of nails, cutlery, vinegar, cheese -- and also to make excuses for why he hadn't quite yet managed to get rich: 'By reason of my sickness & weakness I was not able to travel up and down the hills and dales of these countries but doo now intend every day to walk up and down the hills for good Minerals here is both gold [and] silver.'

"The sickness and weakness and death continued. Gold remained a chimera. Two decades into the seventeenth century, English America was a failing start-up, a vaporware tragedy and farce. But back in England the investors and their promotional agents continued printing posters, hyperbolic testimonials, and dozens of books and pamphlets, organizing lotteries, and fanning out hucksterish blue smoke. Thus the first English-speaking Americans tended to be the more wide-eyed and desperately wishful. 'Most of the 120,000 indentured servants and adventurers who sailed to the [South] in the seventeenth century,' according to the University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall's history of America, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 'did not know what lay ahead but were taken in by the propaganda of the sponsors.' The historian Daniel Boorstin went even further, suggesting that 'American civilization [has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising.' Western civilization's first great advertising campaign was created in order to inspire enough dreamers and suckers to create America.

"As a get-rich-quick enterprise, Virginia was a bust. The colonists who stayed resorted to the familiar drudgery of agriculture, although the cash crop that saved them was a harbinger of a certain future America -- it was indigenous, novel, glamorous, inessential, psychoactive, and addictive: tobacco."

Excerpted from Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire by Kurt Andersen Copyright © 2017 by Kurt Andersen. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.