Time Magazine in the 1930s

I decided to look at Time Magazine from May of 1931.

The magazine opened up much like magazines today, with a multitude of advertisements. The magazine advertisements were similar to today’s ads in that a majority of them were either for cars, clothes, or beauty products. The ads also pushed owning the latest, and therefor “best”, model of each product. One car ad in particular incorporates a picture of a man buying flowers for the woman sitting in his new car.  This picture uses the glittering generalities technique, and subliminally sends the message that if you buy this latest car model it will change many different aspects of your life, such as romance, for the better. This indicates that 1930s America was a consumer society that valued physical beauty, and progress and innovation. It seems that little has change since then in that regard.

One difference I noticed between the advertisements of 1931 and today was the amount of information they gave about each product. Today, our advertisements contain few words, and instead use some sort of alluring picture at which we can quickly glance. However, in 1931 they printed full pages giving information about the product. At first it was difficult for me to decide which pages featured advertisements and which featured news stories.

I think this is tangible evidence of the idea we have been discussing in class that people are losing the capacity to focus for long periods of time and read deeply. The people of the ‘30s were clearly willing to sit down and read lengthy advertisements. But today’s society wants so much information so quickly that the best advertising strategy is publishing a picture that only needs a few seconds to spark a consumer’s interest. This gives evidence of a more simplistic yet more thorough consumer society in the 1930s. There simply weren’t as many products to evaluate as on the market today, so people more readily took the time to think through their purchases.

I then moved into the news section of the magazine. One of the most interesting differences I observed was how the international news was formatted. The news from each country was isolated into its own section, as opposed to the cross-cultural articles that are printed today. I think this indicates that the way of thinking about the global community was much more compartmentalized in the 1930s. They looked at countries individually, not as a component of the global society. This is reflective of the technology available at the time. The transfer of information globally was much slower, and countries were isolated, so individual cultural identity was more defined. For me, this contrast from today’s articles really highlights how globally blended culture has become today.

Another thing that surprised me about the magazine was the level of religious bias that appeared in the articles. The magazine showed its clear favor of Christianity by publishing articles like “Good Catholics.” This article glorifies Christianity by depicting it as the force battling Fascism, an ideal despised by American’s at the time. Another example appeared in an article about the death of a “great woman”. They listed being a churchwoman as one of her admirable qualities. This bias towards Christianity reflects the elite status of Christians at the time. Little attention was dedicated to understanding the religions and beliefs of the minority. This shows a more rigid mindset. They held the ideal that “my truth is the ultimate truth.” The America of the 1930s was much less egalitarian.

It is interesting to see how some values in our society have remained the same, and how others have completely changed. Americans remain individualists and have a capitalist mentality that leads them to pursue happiness through the latest and most innovative products.  They have become less selective of these products, though, simply due to volume. They have also adjusted to the global community by drawing connections cross-culturally and working to understand all different types of belief systems.