Barton, Bruce (1886-1967)

Advertizing man, religious writer, and United States Congressman, the name of Bruce Barton is synonymous with the advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne, the agency Barton helped found in 1919. The firm's clients, including U.S. Steel, General Electric, General Motors, and Dunlop, were among the most powerful businesses of the American 1920s. Barton is best remembered for his bestselling book The Man Nobody Knows (1925), a conduct manual for American businessmen whose subtitle proclaimed itself "a discovery of the real Jesus."

The son of a prominent Congregational Minister, Barton was in the vanguard of the new advertising culture of the 1920s. In a period where the shift into a "mass" consumption economy had spawned a new service and leisure economy, advertising became an industry in its own right and led the way in reshaping the traditional Protestant morality of Victorian America into something more suited to the dictates of a modern consumer economy. Of those engaged in such work Barton was the most renowned. Orthodox Protestant values emphasized hard work, innate human sinfulness, and the evils of self-indulgence and idleness. These were not values that could be easily accommodated within a new commercial world which promoted the free play of conspicuous personal consumption and the selling of leisure. In a string of books and articles published across the decade Barton examined what he claimed were the New Testament origins of monopoly capitalism, arguing that the repression of desire, and the failure of the individual to pursue personal self-fulfillment (in private acts of consumption), were the greatest of all sins. His most famous book, The Man Nobody Knows, turned the life of Jesus into a template for the new commercial practices of the 1920s, citing the parables ("the most powerful advertisements of all time") alongside the insights of Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan. By making Jesus like a businessman, Barton made businessmen like Jesus. This reassuring message sat easily with the colossal extension of the market into all areas of American life during the 1920s, and The Man Nobody Knows itself sold 750,000 copies in its first two years. A follow up, The Book Nobody Knows (1926), and two subsequent studies in the same idiom, The Man of Galilee (1928), and On the Up and Up (1929), failed to sell in the same quantities.

Barton's writing can also be considered alongside the popularizing of psychoanalysis which took place in the 1920s, an explosion of interest in "feel good," "self help" publishing which stressed the power of the individual mind over material circumstances. Again, this "feel good" message sold well in a time of rapid economic transformation and subsequent collapse in the 1930s, and the cultural historian Ann Douglas has numbered The Man Nobody Knows in a lineage which runs from Emile Coue's Self-Mastery Through Conscious Auto-Suggestion (1923), through Walter Pitkin's Life Begins at Forty (1932), to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).

In the 1930s Barton launched a brief political career, running for Congress successfully in 1936, before returning to Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne in 1940. He remained chairman of the firm until his retirement in 1961.

—David Holloway

Further Reading:

Barton, Bruce. The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus. Indianapolis and New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1925.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. London, Picador, 1996.

Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1977.

Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York, Vintage, 1994.

Marchant, Roland. Advertizing the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986.

Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.