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An introduction to the United States that provides information on the country's geography, people, culture, history, government, economy, and climate.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. Catherine Gudis is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma and received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She has worked for several museums, including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and is the editor of numerous art books, among them Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s and A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation .

Based in Los Angeles’s Skid Row and comprised largely of the area’s formerly homeless, the Los Angeles Poverty Department creates performances from the writings, stories, and experiences of its participants. The mission of LAPD (yes, their acronym is purposeful) is to illuminate the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. This article describes, and includes excerpts from, State of Incarceration, an LAPD production that taps the inside knowledge of core company members, including Kevin Michael Key, Riccarlo Porter, Anthony Taylor, and Ronnie Walker, and roomfuls of other participants, some from parolee reentry programs in the area.

As the urban environment decentralized in the 1920s and 1930s with the adoption of the car as a routine part of American life, the highway became more than merely a route to be traveled. It became the site of a new kind of public landscape and conception of public culture. To some, including the outdoor advertisers who are the main subject of this essay, the highway had become the “buyway,” a boundless marketplace bursting out of its traditional confinement within town and city centers that was “millions of miles long” and, thanks to the throngs it carried, “billions of dollars”

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the American landscape changed dramatically with the availability of automobiles, the construction of highways, and the development of a commercialized roadside environment. Integral to this changing landscape were the larger-than-life pictures and structures of outdoor advertisements, or billboards. This study examines how outdoor advertising helped to alter the shape and experience of the road and the roadside environment, from the growth of highways intended for automobile use in the late 1910s and 1920s to the passage of the Highway Beautification Act in 1965. It identifies the forces at work in transforming highways into corridors of consumption, where markets are mobile consumers, and traffic means trade. This study argues that outdoor advertisers helped decentralize the urban environment in the years between the First and Second World War. They did so in three ways: by defining markets as mobile, by marketing their mobile audiences as commodities to national advertisers, and by promoting commercial growth along the roadways leading into and out of towns and cities, at the fringes of densely populated areas. In so doing, outdoor advertisers dramatically altered both the physical locations and the perceptual understanding of public space, the public sphere, and the marketplace. Since outdoor advertising occupied private property but broadcast into and across public rights-of-way, it raised a host of questions to audiences newly discovering their independent abilities for automobile travel. These questions regarded who owned the road, the roadside, and the broadcast space around it, and whose interests should prevail in controlling its use and appearance. Advertisers and their audiences struggled to define the natural and commercial uses and values of the roadside environment. Both groups defined and contested the road and roadside as sites of commodity production, distribution, and consumption. Their mutual promotion of and resistance to advertising outdoors created the road to consumption.

In the densely populated cities of the late nineteenth century, outdoor advertisers had found ample audiences of pedestrians, carriages, and trolleys for their painted walls and posted billboards. Yet each decade of the twentieth century was increasingly characterized by rising automobile use, urban traffic congestion, and the suburbanization of both the upper and middle classes. Especially in the decades following World War I, huge increases in automobile ownership, nationally distributed goods, and highway construction reshaped American travel, settlement, and shopping patterns as well as the perception of the urban landscape. The automobile had turned America into a “nation on wheels.” At an annual conference of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America in 1929, one billboard operator characterized the changes. “People have become physically and mentally restless,” he said. “They have developed the habit of being on the go from place to place. To-day one room in most American families is outdoors. It is the family car. In it the members of the family go hurrying up and down the country”1Almost immediately, the outdoor advertising industry set out to package and sell these new automobile travelers by turning ordinary drivers into a mass mobile audience. Henry Ford’s assembly line had rationalized the production of automobiles, allowing wage earners and middle-class white-collar workers alike the luxury of automotive independence. Likewise, the outdoor advertising industry strove to produce and package the heterogeneous mass of people as a commodity for sale to interested advertisers. That is to say, the commodity sold by outdoor advertisers was the attention of a great new audience, the motoring public. The decades around the turn of the century are often viewed with respect to America’s shift from a production-oriented ethos to a con-sumer culture and from fears of scarcity to an embrace of plenty.2 But critical emphasis on consumerism and mass consumption too frequently skates over this fact: consumers are produced commodities. 3With every coming year, automobiles could be found in more and more places, thus expanding the marketing frontier and potential location of billboard spaces to areas heretofore untouched. Yet for outdoor advertisers this growth was not enough. The industry looked not merely to follow automobility trends but to augment and propagate them. After all, the more mobile the motorist, the more advertisements he would pass, often repeatedly and sometimes daily. If outdoor advertisers could actually encourage the practices of automobility, the value of the industry would soar.4 One 1928 Foster and Kleiser Company advertisement for the billboard industry illustrated this point (fig. 9). Using an authoritative quote from President Calvin Coolidge, it depicts the engines of industry churning out masses of identical packages. Yet left ambiguous in the image is whether the billboards are producing the goods or if they are producing the hordes of stick-figure audiences lined up and standing at rapt attention, mass consumers who are the commodities ready for distribution and sale.5

Salesmen for poster advertising explained that the appeal of the poster was its outdoors setting, where nature “puts people in a friendly, cheerful, optimistic frame of mind.” The poster, “allied with air and sunshine,” was “kith and kin to Nature herself.” “When the buying public is a-walk,” they noted, “motoring, on the street, in the hills, it is out from under the dead weight of much materialism, of worry, of self-analysis.”6 Out-of-doors, the consumer’s mind “is most open to suggestions.”7

Press, 1990), 152. The jumbled message of the multilayered posters was a popular subject for engravings in the period. See, for instance, “The Bill-Poster’s Dream,” 1862, Eno Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library (discussed in Henkin, City Reading, 69-72); an 1864 version, reproduced as plate 58 in Harry T. Peters, America on Stone (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1931); and another of 1871 in the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (mentioned in Young, Toadstool Millionaires, 119).