Early in the afternoon on Oct. 4, 1918, the lobby of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel was crowded with businessmen about to attend a trade convention. Many had fortified themselves with spirits, if only to ward off the Spanish Flu (which had killed more people in a month than all the German guns, according to an ad in that week’s Literary Digest.)
These men were the proud members of a one-year-old trade group called the Direct Mail Advertising Association(now the DMA). And they were about to face their first crisis.
Their chairman, Homer Buckley, had that morning received a letter from Dr. E.O. Merchant, of the War Industries Board, a wartime oversight agency. Pointing to vast paper shortages, Merchant suggested that U.S. business halt all advertising mail for the duration of the World War then raging, an action that would have put many of the men in the hotel lobby out of business.
Worse yet, the letter contained a message that would be repeated in many ways over the next nine decades—that ad circulars “tend to create an unfavorable impression in the minds of the persons to whom they are addressed rather than the opposite, and this raises the question of whether direct circular advertising actually pays under present conditions.”
Buckley and his fellow industry leaders debated this urgent matter over coffee and cigars that evening.
Now featured in the DMA Hall of Fame, Buckley was the co-founder of Buckley-Dement, a direct mail agency and lettershop equipped with all the best technology of the time—like multigraphs and envelope sealers—and women who could either type or hand-address envelopes. (“Neat writers only used by Buckley-Dement,” the firm promised.)
Buckley not only proselytized for the medium, some believed that he named it.
“To put it bluntly, the business world has suddenly awakened to the fact that it has been pouring water into a sieve,” he wrote. “It has been getting business at great expense through advertising and personal solicitation—and losing it by incompetent correspondence.”
Another future Hall-of-Famer sitting at the table was O.E. McIntyre, who 30 years later would found the enterprise known as Metromail. Though he had started at Sears, Roebuck (“I’m working at Sears, but don’t tell my mom—she thinks I’m playing piano in a call house”), he now worked for Charles Williams Stores, a retail chain and mail order house owned by the Arbuckle Sugar family. The 1919 Williams catalog would top 800 pages and offer everything from furniture to children’s shoes.
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And though they didn’t make the Hall of Fame, there were other industry leaders there, like Hank Schott of Montgomery Ward, and Tim Thrift, editor of The Mailbag, the monthly trade magazine. These stalwarts reviewed the previous 18 months. It had not been a happy time.
Like many people, ad mailers had cheered when Congress declared war in April 1917, if only for selfish reasons. Some predicted that the war would speed up freight schedules, and that the drafting of salesmen would prompt advertisers to replace “man power with mail power.”
And there were many patriotic mailings. For example, Indianapolis clothier I. Strauss sent letters offering to refund half the price of a suit to any man drafted before a certain date.
But their attitude changed as the war went on and mailing lists were “shot to pieces” by the draft. Then the government started doing things like seizing trains and raising postage. And now there was this problem.
The question was: Did the mail community have a single card to play?
Probably not.
Yes, advertising mail had contributed to the war effort. Banks had done a good job selling Liberty Loans via direct mail. “The Liberty Loan provides what is perhaps the first opportunity the average man has had to definitely serve his country,” wrote Harry T. Ramsdell, president of the Manufacturers and Traders National Bank of Buffalo, NY, in a letter to 27,000 residents of his city.
Moreover, by educating the common man on the meaning of words like bonds, mortgages and stocks, these mailings had created an entirely new market for postwar bond issues, some said. By the end of the war, there were 17 million bond buyers, compared with 300,000 in the spring of 1917. (They were singing a different tune after October 1929).
But advertising mail was still relatively small. Buckley estimated no more than $90 million was spent on it per year, and maybe 300 men worked full-time to produce it. What’s more, he later admitted that in 1918, direct mail was “an orphan medium of advertising abused and misused on all sides, and was more frequently termed ‘circularizing,’ with the stigma of cheapness attached to it.”
After much discussion, the group drafted a response to the War Industries Board, pledging a “savings of 25% in the total tonnage of paper used in the production of direct advertising.” To accomplish this, they planned to change paper sizes, reduce advertising sales, restrict print runs to actual requirements, and discourage hoarding of paper. (How they planned to enforce all this they didn’t say).
But they also gently pointed out the benefits of advertising mail. “The records of economy and absolute necessity of direct-constructive and result-getting force is a vital factor in maintaining established business lines and is essential in the replacement of manpower,” they wrote to the War Industries Board.
The letter was approved by the membership, and the convention adjourned later that week. The government accepted the plan, and mailers dug in for a long siege of mailing less.
But they were the beneficiaries of some good timing. Like other Americans, they awoke on Monday, Nov. 11 to find that the war had ended.
That was a day to remember. Church bells rang, guns were fired and people carried effigies of Kaiser Wilhelm II and signs like, “The Cur Quit.” A.H. Henderson, advertising manager of the Cleveland Twist Drill Co. was so moved that he wrote, "America is drunk, thank God, drunk with that mighiest of drinks--pure, unadulterated, 1000 percent-proof, government-bonded patriotism!" Apart from that, direct mailers indeed had reason to celebrate.
“As we go to press, the latest advises are that paper restrictions will be lifted and that house organs and other direct-mail advertising will be restored to past tonnage basis for a period of two months to test out the effect of lifting the restrictions,” Tim Thrift assured his readers in the December issue of The Mailbag.
Soon, the paper restrictions were lifted altogether, and direct mailers entered what was up to then their most prosperous and creative decade.
