BURP

There is something in the American temper, something quickly sensed by European visitors, that tolerates an incongrous mixing of the practical and the aesthetic. As early as the eighteenth century, Samuel Sewall's diary records as a matter of course that Sewall's family, on an outing, sang psalms and played games by turns. Indeed, this same trail, together with a good proportion of well-varnished dishonesty, is responsible for the present pitiful condition of American advertising.

Advertisers are the greatest Sophists of all time; and today only a keen, dispassionate mind can drive straight to the point of inquiring whether or not a product is really of the slightest use. Weaker souls are at once mired in the gumbo of sentimentality and rhetoric. When they buy, they pay for the most expensive romantic poetry ever written.

A few years ago, Stuart Chase let a good deal of light into this jungle by writing a book called "Your Money's Worth," in which he showed that the individual buyer is hopelessly lost in a Wonderland of conflicting and meaningless claims. Though large consumers, such as great hotels, can command the services of testing laboratories and can lower expenses by letting manufacturers offer bids to their rigid specifications, the unprotected small buyer has none of the technical facilities to make comparative tests. Mr. Chase urged that unbiased information be made available to every intelligent buyer. Recently this has been done by the Consumer's League of Boston in the form of bulletins issued periodically to its subscribers.

The newest and best-known crusader in this cause is the magazine called Ballyhoo, which for several months now has been breaking in upon the great American devotional rites like a muddy dog at a church wedding. All the advertisements both fore and aft of the main matter are insidious variations on insidious originals. Regrettably, the editors have let their youthful spirits run away with them a bit in the main portion of the magazine, where they print a sprinkling of jokes and drawings that even a college humorous publication would have the taste to omit. Whether willingly or not, the monarchs of trade are having their false whiskers peeled off and their thrones jerked from under them; and still the slaughter goes on. Ballyhoo, even though it has probably succumbed to subsidazation by leading advertisers, has injected a healthy spirit of cynicism into a devout atmosphere.