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The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America ReviewRichard Fried wrote a fantastic book on US Cold War homefront pageantry (THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!) a few years back, but he's perhaps not the world's most dramatic writer, and his new biography of legendary adman Bruce Barton is serviceable, but nothing outstanding. Fried estimates that Barton was the 20th century's most famous man for whom no full length biography had ever been attempted. That may be so, but maybe there was a reason no one else had tried to get Barton into hard covers.
From what I can make out, his achievements are paltry, and boosted by hot air (he was, after all, one of the kings of Madison Avenue, though not a particularly original designer or thinker). As Fried reveals, Barton was so well-known at the time that many credited him wrongly with every advertising campaign that got noticed; thus he was like the Dorothy Parker of advertising (Parker got the credit for every halfway decent quip uttered at the Algonquin Round Table.) His agency, BBDO, made the Campbell Kids popular on TV, and Carton thought that their creation Chiquita Banana, a talking banana developed for United Fruit, was a masterpiece. Values are screwy in the ad world, and yet Barton had the balls to write one of the all time best sellers of the 20th century (the #1 nonfiction book of 1926), a life of Christ called THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS in which he attempted to paint Jesus Christ as the ultimate businessman, good at molding little people into good workers, a glad hand for everyone, the kind of guy who pats you on the back at a Kiwanis luncheon.
Barton played up his marriage as something sacrosanct but he got caught with his pants down in the early 1930s, when a conniving pre-Code type of minx got her hooks in him and threatened to expose their office affair unless he paid her off to the tune of $25,000. When he did, and she came back again with renewed demands, he went public with his affair, and charged the woman with blackmail. He handled the whole sorry mess with aplomb, but it left his reputation a little dog-eared, poor guy.
Oh well, it was worth a try but at this date it might be too late to try to rehabilitate one of the dumbest careers of modern times. Fried does his best but fails to convince us that Barton's life was any more interesting than that of, oh, someone like Dick Clark. There's shallow, then there's mad shallow.The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America Overview
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