Racialized Product Advertising

The use of racial and often racist imagery to sell products has a long history in the US. Scholars point out that when white Americans purchased consumer goods with these images and brought them into their homes, they were not signaling a broad acceptance and incorporation of an equitable and multicultural US. As we will see below, both the Geisha Girl Porcelain plates and the Aunt Jemima pancake mix recovered in the Charnley-Persky House archaeological project serve to differentiate and distance Asian and Black people from the dominant white group. Yet other products recovered from both the Charnley-Persky House and the Mecca Flats, such as the bottles of Pepsi-Cola and Yacht Club salad dressing, have more subtle connections to racial identity and class hierarchy that are not immediately apparent from the objects themselves.

Geisha Girl POrcelain

We recovered many fragments of Geisha Girl porcelain plates from the Charnley-Persky House Archaeological Project. These colorful plates were typically decorated with “kimono-clad women in stereotypical Japanese settings (temples, pagodas, arched bridges)” (Diagnostic Artifacts in Maryland 2002). They were made between about 1875 and 1952, including the American occupation of Japan (1945-1952). These printed ceramics were inexpensive, often sold in dime stores or given away as free premiums, frequently with large containers of Japanese tea.

On one hand, Geisha Girl plates are an example of consuming the imagery of Asian women—especially Japanese women—in a manner that both others them and makes them available as objects for consumption. But the presence of those plates also suggests that non-Asians were demonstrating, not only their identity as cosmopolitan consumers, but also as members of the racially and culturally dominant group, which claimed the right to make and consume representations of others.

Pepsi-Cola

“A Pepsi-Cola bottle is of special interpretative interest, as discovered by my undergraduate artifact laboratory analysis student, Lexie Nogulich. She located advertisements in the Black-owned Chicago Defender that were explicitly marketing Pepsi to Black consumers, as well as a story from 1943 noting that ‘Pepsi-Cola Gives Jobs to Negroes,’ suggesting that the choice of a Mecca tenant to purchase and consume Pepsi over other bottled sodas was,” among other things, “an ideological one (Chicago Defender 1943:22). This was a glimpse into a well-known story of how Pepsi executives attempted to expand into the Black market, but in a way quite different from its main competitor, Coca-Cola”. Where the latter corporation “donated money but did not create jobs in Black communities”, Pepsi executives aimed to create brand loyalty through outreach to Black churches and social organizations, “ad campaigns featuring Black middle-class life (Capparell 2008:xii)”, and an “experiment” of hiring three Black employees in 1940 (Graff 2022/under review). As Edward Boyd, one of the first Black executives hired by Herman T. Smith, himself the first Black Pepsi executive, said: “We'd been caricatured and stereotyped. The advertisement represented us as normal Americans” (Stewart 2007).

“In 1912, when the Mecca opened to Black tenants, the Negro Business League of Chicago printed a business directory that was introduced by a short essay, ‘The Negro Business and What It Means to the Negro Race.’ Explicitly calling on Black business owners to continue to develop their own economic systems, the authors provide a series of justifications for this call to work. In terms of this, one is especially important: ‘We have been sowing and building too much into the cosmos, and not enough into our respective communities’ (Washington 1912:1). He continues: ‘Negro business means negro employment,’ and the expansion of Black-owned businesses ‘means nothing more than deliverance from the social, political and economic slavery’ (Washington 1912:1,2)” (Graff 2022/under review).

“[Archaeologist Paul] Mullins notably characterized Black consumer choice like that made material in the Mecca as ‘a sociopolitical statement of civil aspirations, material desires, and resistance to monolithic racist caricatures’ (1999:18). Like the choice to drink a Pepsi or to decorate one’s store in Coca-Cola signs and thereby lock in an agreement to sell that product, these choices are not static, but are mediated by social and personal desires. The meaningfulness behind the consumer choice embodied in the Mecca’s Black-owned businesses cannot be understated” (Graff 2022/under review).

Aunt Jemima Pancakes

Aunt Jemima was a popular character in a 1889 minstrel show that became one of the most easily recognized products in the U.S. Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood’s R.T. Davis Milling Company used this stereotypical image of a Black “mammy” figure to advertise their pancake mix in 1890 (Behken and Smithers 2015:29). They hired Nancy Green, a Chicagoan who had been born enslaved in Kentucky, to demonstrate the product and serve as the first face of the brand. At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Green served pancakes from a flour barrel-shaped exhibit stand at the Fair (see image on left). Green originated the role, though other women followed.

The use of racialized “mascots” to advertise American foods include Aunt Jemima, but also extend to numerous other brands and characters: Cream of Wheat’s “Rastus”, Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice, Land O’ Lakes butter’s Indigenous woman, Mrs. Butterworth’s brand pancake syrup, and more. The use of geisha imagery on plates fits into this tradition. Some scholars have characterized racialized mascots as an extension of the late 19th-century process of “cosmopolitan domesticity,” a practice wherein "an increasingly bourgeois consumer population purchased literature, ‘Turkish curtains,’ ‘Oriental’ rugs, and ‘knickknacks from around the globe,’ which entered into the dining rooms and parlors of white Americans without disrupting the racial tranquility of their homes” (Behken and Smithers 2015:24).

One of the local exemplars of cosmopolitan domesticity was Bertha Honoré Palmer, neighbor of the Charnleys and president of the Board of Lady Managers for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. She decorated her home, the Castle, in multiple “exotic” themes—an Egyptian bedroom, a Spanish living room, a Flemish library, Chinese and French drawing rooms, and a Moorish ballroom (Hoganson 2002:58).

Yet incorporating these household decorations or using these food products did not mean that white consumers were demonstrating their equality with those represented in the advertising. “Rather, in an era when many millions of white Americans shared a common set of racial stereotypes about African Americans and Native Americans and felt unsettled by the ‘influx’ of immigrations from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and southern and eastern Europe, cosmopolitan domesticity allowed white middle-class Americans to indulge in an ‘orientalist’ aesthetic in which the ‘otherness’ of non-white people reinforced, rather than challenged, their sense of racial superiority” (Behken and Smithers 2015:24; Hoganson 2002). Cosmopolitan domesticity involving imagery of racial and ethnic Others provided yet another way to differentiate those whose goods (and even identities) could be consumed and those who would remain consumers.

Yacht club Salad Dressing

“By the 1870s Chicago was a center for salad dressing manufacture, a new product that had not previously been commercially bottled and sold (Smith 2007:513). Tildesley and Company’s Yacht Club salad dressing was one of the best-selling products. A 1912 advertisement in an Evanston, Illinois, church cookbook provides fascinating copy, linking domesticity, class, and modernity with condiments.

Socially speaking, good breeding and good salads are almost synonymous terms. One of the brightest club-women in America happily expressed this idea when she wittily said: ‘In good society a woman is known, not by the company she keeps, but by the salads she serves.’ . . . In ‘Yacht Club’ you have the ‘perfect dressing.’ A combination of the finest ingredients scientifically blended (First Presbyterian Church 1912:n.p.).

Thus class aspirations can be made material through salads, with the aid of scientific production techniques. In another Yacht Club advertisement from a 1914 Yacht Club Manual of Salads, a young woman dressed in what appears to be a maid’s uniform is shown dolloping Yacht Club salad dressing into a tomato (figure 5.7). This image again signals class status—here it couples the ability to employ domestic laborers in one’s home with the salad dressing product being advertised (Hayward 1914). The domestic servant in this ad is white and female, underscoring the preference of elite Chicagoans for European and American female workers inside their homes” (Graff 2020:143-144). Whether purchasers had domestic servants or simply aspired to them, Yacht Club reinforced the existence of significant connections among race, class, and consumption in the US at the turn of the 20th century.

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