In the late 1910s,and then repeatedly through the 1920s,Curtis held up its readership not only as an audience ripe for advertisers,but as a measure of potential product consumption.Parlin and his staff concluded that by taking subscriber addresses and charting them on a map,they could reasonably estimate the areas of a city and county that consumed the most products.“Curtis circulation parallels market opportunity,”Parlin told a group of musical instrument manufacturers in 1921.Digests of Principal Research Department Studies,Vols.I and II;Charles Coolidge Parlin,“Music Master”address,type,c.1921,Curtis papers,Box 148,Folder 30.Two years later,in a study titled“Where Do The Best Customers Live A Study of Curtis Distribution,”the company used“representative towns”to show how Curtis publications were distributed to the sections of town with the highest incomes in a small city(Bloomington,Illinois),a county(McClean County,Illinois),a minor city(Indianapolis)and a major city(Chicago).In Each case,the company claimed to have more readers in what it called the“Red Zone”-the most-affluent areas-than any other magazine.That was not a coincidence,it said,but rather the result of a twenty-five year sales effort that it called“a perfectly selfish enterprise in every phase of its development.We are anxious to build as large a volume of permanent circulation as we can.We are anxious to have it among people who will patronize our advertisers because our revenue comes from them and they must get their profits before we can get ours.”Blair,“Where Do The Best Customers Live?”By 1925,more than fifty manufacturers,including the Corona Typewriter Company,Log Cabin Products,Parker Pen,Carnation Milk Products,Swift&Company,Home Appliance Corporation,Coleman Lamp Company and Lever Brothers were setting sales quotas based on Curtis circulation.Parlin,“Music Master”address;Parlin,untitled address,January 1926;Parlin,untitled address,Common Brick Association,type,1925,CP,Box 149,Folder 56;Parlin,untitled address,American Management Association,type,April 23,1925,Box 149,Folder 54;“Some Manufacturers Who Use the Curtis Quota Plan,”Bulletin 61(April 22,1925),Box 160,Folder 190.
The stated intention for mapping circulation was to help manufacturers determine the potential for their products,but the comparisons were also clearly aimed at helping Curtis magazines maintain their reputation as invaluable sales tools.As such,there was a common denominator in nearly all of the company's market studies,as well as its promotional and sales materials:exclusion.Publishers like Curtis were interested in reaching a growing middle class,a middle class that they saw as a homogenous group of white,and usually native-born,Americans whose genetic makeup and inherent abilities had allowed them to rise to prosperity.These elites were seen as different and disparate from the lower classes(the“shawl”class,as Parlin called them).Because of that,Curtis rejected from its target audience both blacks and immigrants from Eastern Europe,the type of people that Parlin considered“worthless elements”and that the company considered to have“lowered tastes.”Parlin,“Department Store Lines:Textiles,”Vol.B,pp.35-38.At one point,Curtis even tried to make a case that its readers were truly at the top of the evolutionary ladder.“To the illiterate,the slovenly,the foreign-speaking,the shiftless,the improvident,the appeal(of the Journal)is of no moment-or,at least,not enough to warrant purchase,”the company said in an advertisement in 1912.
“Those who can't read,those who won't read,and those who can't afford to read are automatically excluded...”“The Value of the Fittest,”advertisement,PI,May 30,1912,p.23;“Natural Selection,”advertisement,PI,July 11,1912,p.21.Money,literacy and education had for years been measures of worth in American society,but the divisiveness of class intensified with the growth of a consumer society at the turn of the century.At the same time that advertisers and publishers sought to tap into and promote a new middle class,they used the methods of social science to exclude and marginalize those who failed to share in the rewards of modern industrial capitalism.Blacks recognized this economic prejudice and attempted to act on it around the turn of the century.August Meier notes that some black leaders thought that if blacks could achieve high economic status and high moral character,whites would recognize their worth and allow them their rights and participation in the political process.During Reconstruction,elite leaders,who had some financial stability,stressed political and civil rights and the importance of education.Economic improvement was a lower priority.The masses,who had little economically,sought land ownership,education and politics,in that order-the reverse order of what the elite sought.See August Meier,Negro Thought in America,1880-1915(Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press,1969),pp.8-15,25-35.
