Blog Ethics - Sex Sells and so does Victor Lebow

I always find surprises in the google search topics that get people to my site. Dennis at AlaskaReport (by the way check out their story on Don "Corleone" Young while you're there) recently shared that he has an entertainment section because that's what people want - along with stats showing Heath Ledger, Britney Spears, and other celebs being top hits. So I shouldn't be surprised with all the people googling Bambi Tyree. In the last 40 or so site views six were looking for Bambi from:
Sophia, Bulgaria
Miami, Florida
Las Cruces, NM
Cranberry Twp, PA
Philadelphia, PA
Spokane, WA

Do you think if her parents had named her Martha things would have turned outdifferent?

On the other hand 10% of the last 100 were still looking up Victor Lebow, including someone from Ankara, Turkey. If you got here looking up Victor Lebow, go here. While in LA I looked up Victor Lebow I found a Victoria who lived near my mom. I phoned her and after a number of calls to relatives "I hadn't talked to in 55 years" she said that the Victor Lebow who wrote about American Consumerism is not related to her family. But the Victor Lebow from Wichita, KS whose picture I posted is a relative. So that confirms my suspicion they were two different people.

Also had someone from the US House of Representatives look at yesterday's chart of Blacks in Congress, and finally, someone got here googling:

"Carnival cruises send passenger flowers."

Media Ethics Note: Sometimes people do send me links to stories they'd like me to link, like the Corleone story. If I do link to these stories it's because I think they have something worthwhile. And I'm not above critiquing the stories people pass on to me. This doesn't happen a lot, but I mention it here because I think people should see what happens behind the scenes. Is it unethical for me to link to that story? No. Does the fact that AlaskaReport sometimes links to me a problem? It could be if I posted their stories because I thought it would keep them promoting my stories. This is the beginning of ethics creep. It starts out innocent enough, all with good intentions, but if one isn't careful, one's judgment gets lazy. I'm not a politician and I'm not making policy decisions based on favors others do for me. But readers should know if the newspapers, tv shows, or blogs they read are pushing stories or omitting stories because they might affect their advertising.

I say this because a lot of blogging chatter is about how to pump up site views. Trading links among sites is a popular means. I don't think this matters much for personal blogs among friends. But it does for blogs that edge into journalism. At the very least, there should be disclosure. So, let me disclose that last week when Alaska Report linked to my speculations about why Murkowski left the US Senate to be governor of Alaska, my site views for that day more than doubled. But I linked to the Don Young story above because it adds a few tidbits to what we know.

Victor Lebow Bio

I'm in the parking lot of the Fairview branch library in Santa Monica where I borrowed tons of books as a kid. I'd walk home with a pile of ten or twelve books a week or so balanced under my chin. Now I'm using their wifi since my Mom's computer is difficult (I'm not complaining, she uses email and checks my blog in her mid 80s) to load pictures on and I don't have the right connectors to hook into her modem. So, I'm doing as much as I can while I'm here. I could go in now, but they weren't open when they arrived so I started here in the car.

I've been getting lots and lots (at least for my little blog) of traffic from people looking up Victor Lebow. I earlier posted the complete article that his most famous quote (that has gotten lots of play on the internet) came from. So, before I left Anchorage I asked the Interlibrary loan folks if they could get me the beginning of Lebow's Free Enterpirse: The Opium of the American People so I could see if there was more info on Lebow. Well here's the brief bio at the beginning of the book. I haven't read what they sent me yet, and if it is worthwhile, I'll post more. This was published in 1972 - 36 years ago.

Victor Lebow's Complete Original 1955 Article

Summary:

• The article is at the end of this post.
• The article appears to be in the vein it is quoted - more a prescription of how retailers will have to market things than a critique of capitalism. But the quote itself shows he had a macro perspective as well as a micro perspective
• I haven't been able to find much more about Victor Lebow.
• There is the 1972 book titled, Free Market: The Opiate of the American People. Perhaps he got disillusioned about American business and this quote was an early insight he had.
• Are there any students of Lebow? Family? If you ever see this please help fill in the missing links.
• Kevin, this post is all your fault. Thanks.

[Note:  This all began with a Dec. 10, 2007 post on The Story of Stuff.]

[January 30, 2008 Update: I've just received and posted Lebow's bio from the 1972 book, Free Enterprise: The Opiate of the American People.]

[Update 13 May 2009: Yesterday's NYT article on Story of Stuff seems to have brought more than the regular number visitors here. Hundredgoals has given a link to a much easier to read pdf version of the 1955 article in a comment today.]

In a previous post I raised questions about a quote by Victor Lebow. Was this the serious blueprint for American business to insinuate consumerism into the spiritual center of American life or a critique of modern capitalism?

Most of the links I googled looked like they all linked back to the same source. There was no contemporary discussion of the 1955 article on line. The University library nearby didn't have the Journal of Retailing on line back to 1955, but did have hard copies. But then I found a 1972 book by Victor Lebow called Free Enterprise: The Opium of the American People. It seemed to me that someone writing a book with that title must have have written the above paragraph as a critique, not as a prescription. I decided not to follow up and find the original article.

But I got an email from Kevin in Chicago who was trying to track it down too. So I went to the library today. Got the microfiche and found the article. It looks like a serious retailing article, talks about the 1955 marketing year and what retailers are going to have to do. It's in that context the above quote is written. There is no electronic version available, and the copier connected to the microfiche wasn't working very well, so I ended up taking pictures. I still haven't figured out how to post pdf files on blogger, so I'm going to post the pictures of the microfiche screen. (See below)

In the midst of all this there was a fire alarm in the library and everyone had to evacuate. A staff person, it turned out, had burnt popcorn in the microwave. That all took about 40 minutes.

Googling today I've found a 1944 article:

The Nature of Postwar Retail Competition
Victor Lebow Journal of Marketing, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jul., 1944), pp. 11-18. [The link gets you page 1]


An OCTOBER 13, 1976 Manas Reprint article "MOTIVES OR METHODS?" that talks about a Victor Lebow book review of Robert Heilbroner's Business Civilization in Decline. Here Lebow appears as a critique of modern business culture, and is qouted writing, for example,

Capitalism is already showing signs that it can no longer generate the social morale so essential to continued existence. It is true that it has freed probably more than half the American people from scarcity and want. But at the heart of this business civilization is a "hollowness"—everything is evaluated in money terms. "Or consider advertising, perhaps the most value-destroying activity of a business civilization." That hollowness is further emphasized by the low estimation business places on the value of work, which it sees as a means to an end—not the true end in itself for that is profit, income, economic growth. Nor is industrial socialism immune to this outlook, for its roots lie "in machine process and worship of efficiency." Under a business culture [civilization as Heilbroner puts it sharply]. Stuffed into the dustbin of history would be[the values] of output are celebrated and those of input merely calculated."

Then there is a totally different sort of reference to a Victor Lebow. This is about a 1942 Wichita Kansas East High graduate who was part of a fantasy Martian Empire that was created in 1937, by the website owner's older brother.

My brother James was 13, and in the eighth grade at Robinson Junior High School in Wichita, Kansas. And in his mind he was fashioning a cosmic empire filled with strange and wonderful creatures and races — in which a stalwart group of Exiles from the planet Mars were the chief actors and heroes.

This Empire, the Martian Empire, eventually spread over most of the known Universe before it finally faded around 1948. During the eleven years it flourished, however, the Martian Epic became very elaborate — covering some 15 billion years of Martian history — and Martian technology, manners and morals, art, music, religion, language and literature. And it generated a narrative Epic that encompassed many galaxies.

Among the members of this empire he identifies Victor Lebow and includes a picture.

Victor Lebow: At East High: he was usually on the Honor Roll, was a member of the Nationally Honor Society, and a semi-finalist for the Summerfield Scholarship. At WU: he belonged to the Independent Students’ Association and Aesculapius.

I emailed Lee Streiff, the website owner, but the email came back undeliverable. [later: I guess that's because of this:

Thornton Lee Streiff, 72, died Sunday, August 1, 2004 in Wichita, KS. No service was held.]

This Victor Lebow graduated high school in 1942 and it is unlikely he would have authored an article in a business journal in 1944. He could be the author of the 1972 book on Free Enterprise. And the Lebow quoted in the Manas article above. But the Manas quote echoes thoughts from the original quote. It's probably a different Victor Lebow.

Meanwhile here are the bad copies of the original 1955 article that the quote comes from. The famous quotation comes from page 7, right column. There is a chunk that was skipped over, but it really doesn't change the tenor of the quote. But I saved these as high res photos so you should be able to click them and get them in readable = not good, but readable - size.

[Jan. 7, 2008 - Thanks to Nathan, one of the commenters on this post, I now have an account at scribn.com where you can park word, pdf., and other files. So I cleaned up these photos and saved them as a pdf. file. You can enlarge the document in the window or even download it. This should make reading it easier. I'll leave one or two of the old pages up so you can see the difference. It's on p. 5-10 in the journal, then skips to 42, then a part of page 44. The oft quoted part is on p. 7.]

[January 4, 2021:  This post, and I'm sure many others, is the victim of the demise of FLASH.  I'll have to figure out how to retrieve some of these documents in a still usable form.  Thanks for your patience.] [A little later:  That wasn't hard. SCRBD has figured it out and I just went back to SCRBD and the new embedding code works fine.]

LebowArticle by Steve

p.5 of the journal / (p.1 of the article)above

Not Consuming isn't just about Being Cheap

Our first VW van lasted 24+ years. We still have the TV my mom gave us when our son was a year old. And you may have read my post about replacing our Maytag washer this year, which we got when he was born. (Now he's older than I was when his little sister was born.) My mother was certainly an influence on this sort of behavior. She grew up in Germany where, even today in many places, you have to turn on the lights in the stairwell and they go off in two minutes. I was raised with a no wasting household, lights out when you leave the room, don't leave the water running while you're brushing your teeth, etc. - well at least that was the dominant mantra if not always practiced.

Living for two years in rural Thailand added to that earlier training. I lived in a house up on stilts. There was electricity and I could fill my large earthen jug with water with a hose from a tap outside. But basically I saw that life without all the things I took for granted was quite possible, even enjoyable. No telephone, no tv, no car. (This was the late 60s, everyone with a decent job has a cell phone in Thailand now.) I learned that most of the stuff just isn't necessary. That doesn't mean I don't use technology today, but I use the stuff that I need to do what I want to do. So I have my macbook and my Canon digital camera, but no cell phone.

The whole logic of capitalism has seemed to me to be a giant ponzi scheme. It works as long as you keep people buying and using up stuff. So you have to develop planned obsolescence, products that will break down so you have to keep buying new ones. So when I saw this video, I realized it voiced my reasoning pretty well. The whole video is at storyofstuff.com




I know there are people who will scream and yell things like socialism, communism, radical freak, etc. But their ancestors were the last to give up the flat earth theory, argued Hitler was Germany's future, and still think global warming is an environmentalist plot.

Here's a quote from the film attributed to Victor Lebow, The Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955, p. 7, as quoted in Michael Jacobson Marketing Madness,1995, pg."191. I can't find the article right now to confirm it because the UAA library on line data bases don't go back that far. But they do have copies - probably microfiche (awful stuff) - going back to 1955. And just because he wrote it, did anyone read it before this Michael Jacobson found it? Was it an important influence on American business? I just don't know. But it sure sounds like the philosophy that has been followed.


Maybe this quote sounded too good to be true. And the only people quoting it on the internet were anti-consumption people. Well, it was a 1955 reference, but something wasn't right. I looked up Vicor Lebow again. He wrote a book in 1972 called "Free Enterprise: The Opium of the American People." Did this man go through some great conversion between 1955 and 1972? Or was the original quote a critique rather than a prescription? I'll try to read the original article tomorrow. It doesn't change the point being made, but if this was a critique, it is hard to argue as they do in the film that this was the blueprint for planned obsolescence.

[follow up post with the complete original 1955 article posted here.]