J.C. Leyendecker & Male Consumer Desire (1907–1931)

1900–1930s U.S. = rapid industrialisation, urbanisation, rise of national brands, mass-market magazines
Middle-class white men shift from independent entrepreneurship ➔ salaried “white-collar” positions
- Produced anxieties about proving manliness without manual labour
Consumer culture explodes; advertising turns from rational argument ➔ emotional appeal
Simultaneous cultural logics
- White masculinity = disciplined, efficient, rational
- Applied psychology (Walter Dill Scott) = consumers fundamentally irrational, driven by unconscious desire

Walter Dill Scott quotes
- “Modern conception… man rarely reasons at all”
- Advocated appealing to emotion, suggestion, desire
Illustration preferred over photography
- Believed photo too “cold”
- Hand-drawn art could exaggerate ideals, embed symbolism, trigger affect

Born 1874; trained at Art Institute of Chicago + Académie Julian/Colarossi, Paris
First Saturday Evening Post cover 1899
1907: hired by Calkins & Holden for Arrow Collar campaign (Cluett, Peabody & Co.)
- Launched career; ads so famous Teddy Roosevelt called models “ $\text{a superb example of the common man}$ ”
Income example: 1908 Collier’s commission $\$350\approx\$9{,}000_{2019}$ each (≈ average annual wage of worker then)
Avoided working from photos; preferred live models (esp. Charles Beach – rumoured partner/model)
Destroyed personal letters (1951) ➔ historians rely on visual archive

Explosion of illustrated newspapers/magazines 1880s-90s ➔ lucrative but suspect (linked to “crass” commerce, even called “women’s work”)
Society of Illustrators (1901)
- Excluded women from voting membership until 1920s
- Used stag dinners, balls, annual shows to forge networks & masculinise field
- 1914 Illustrators’ Ball photos: drag & blackface → shows gender/racial play in professional culture

Combines three visual traditions
1. Built muscular form (borrowed from working-class & racialised bodies)
2. Conventions of Western female nude (exposed breast/nipple, flushed cheeks)
3. Middle-class sartorial markers (collars, tailored suits)
Creates “queer white middle-class muscular masculinity”
- Neither working-class trade nor effeminate invert/fairy
- Consumable by sexually normative & non-normative men
Frequent devices
- Tight “looking circuits”: male figures gazing at each other/viewer; triangulation
- Haptic emphasis: fabric, touch, close-up of hands
- Colour coding (e.g., red jersey linked to sexual inversion narratives c.1900)

Young white professionals exchange glances; collar = signifier of class & character
Critic 1955: features “broad brow… bow lips… ‘American dream man’”

Foreground labourer with veined hands vs. bespectacled pay-clerk → contrasts bodywork vs. management

Sailors in trademark white uniforms + exotic fruit/monkey → link military, empire, consumption, erotic sailor icon
Copy variations: “The U.S. Navy – and what it offers” / “Service, Travel, Trade” (’trade’ also queer slang)

Use naval uniforms to sell civilian suits; ads in Saturday Evening Post; elaborate gaze triangulation

Seated man admires socks on feet
Same model pulls sock over hand, blushes (echo of 1908 Woodbury “skin you love to touch”)
Variant with “fairy” posture: robe open, caresses leg; over-the-top tactile pleasure

Football player (torn jersey, exposed chest) + pilgrim; shared gaze; rifles/book vs. sport → links colonial conquest, modern athletics, white male lineage

Committee on Public Information (CPI), 1917-1918
- George Creel (head); Charles Dana Gibson (pres. Society of Illustrators) forms Pictorial Division
- Output ≈ $700$ posters, $310$ ad illus., $287$ cartoons
- Weekly stag dinners to recruit artists
Gibson: posters must show “spiritual side,” use emotional advertising methods
Success of Liberty Bond campaigns reframes advertising as patriotic social good

CPI prestige ➔ advertising + illustration gain legitimacy; by mid-1920s fully “commercial art”
Leyendecker’s wartime work cements muscular form as middle-class norm
Saturday Evening Post circulation $2.4{-}2.8\,\text{million}$ (late 1920s); ad revenue > $\$50\,\text{million}$ /yr

1910s–20s “queer” dual meaning:
- Orientation opposed to normative (“oblong orientation to the ordinary” – Brown)
- Emerging middle/upper-class identity not based on inversion
Leyendecker’s men helped shift gay male ideal from fairy/invert ➔ virile, built, respectable
Illustrations offered public, desiring images that folded consumer longing & erotic longing together

Muscular body appropriated from workers & people of colour; re-whitened, refined
Imperial commodities (tropical fruit, global travel) displayed alongside sailor bodies; ties consumption to empire
White supremacy undergirds appeal: ads promise racial mastery & national dominance

Commercial imagery normalised white male dominance while mining queer erotic codes
Illustrations blur line between art & commerce; raise questions of exploitation vs. creativity
War propaganda illustrates power of affective persuasion – precursor to modern political marketing

Gail Bederman, John Kasson, Stuart Ewen, Roland Marchand → masculinity & advertising
Walter Dill Scott → psychology of advertising
George Chauncey, Elspeth Brown → queer urban cultures, glamour photography
Michelle Bogart, Ernest Elmo Calkins → art/advert profession histories

“Looking circuit” = mutual gazes among figures + viewer; creates identification & desire
“Haptic image” (Campt) = evokes touch; Leyendecker via fabric, hands
“Triangulation” (Sedgwick/Girard) = desire mediated through third party (often woman, object)
Red garments, exposed male breast = coded sexual inversion cues 1900s
Advertising shift: rational appeal ➔ emotional sell (Scott, Calkins)

Leyendecker’s art innovatively merged queer eroticism with mainstream ideals, selling products, patriotism, and a new template of white middle-class masculinity.
His success helped legitimise illustration, demonstrated power of affect in mass persuasion, and provided visual scaffolding for modern gay male identity grounded in muscular normativity rather than gender inversion.