Wednesday’s ad is for is by the United Brewers Industrial Foundation, from 1941. Beginning during World War II, the USBIF began a series of positive ads under the name “Morale is a Lot of Little Things” followed by an unnumbered series of illustrated ads that were a precursor to the numbered “Home Life in America,” the crown jewel of ads which ran from 1945 to 1956, also known as the Beer Belongs series. But they didn’t end there, and for a short time afterward, beginning in 1956, several more similar ads were created but without the numbering or the “Home Life in America” association. But even before those efforts, the UBIF put their toe in the trade advertising pond with ads under the title “The Record … Facts That Concern You” and always ending with the tagline “Beer … a beverage of moderation.”
In this ad, with the headline “This Book Isn’t Worth Reading … tear down the Library!,” they’re making the case that just because you might find one bad book, you wouldn’t condemn every book, and saying the same is true for the unscrupulous beer retailer, suggesting that they’re not all bad and you shouldn’t paint the entire industry as bad because of that one bad apple. I can’t help but wonder about how the prohibitionists were hammering them over this given that they made this effort to sway public opinion. I know that the prohibitionist wingnuts didn’t give up after repeal, and in fact came back hard to try to limit alcohol in every way they could, attacking it from many angles, using all manner of specious arguments and tactics (which I always find fascinating since they always claim the higher moral ground).
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