The Capitol dome, once shrouded in darkness during the Second World War, re-emerges as a brilliantly lit citadel. Rivaling its luminosity is an advertisement for the Tide Water Associated Oil Company. Adorning the surface of a retired wartime dirigible, the aerial display alludes to Tydol’s former aid to the American military. Against the darkened sky, soaring spirits of patriotism collide with the captivating allure of mass consumption.
Concurrent with America’s imperialist ambitions overseas was the rise of outdoor advertising on domestic soil. The airship pictured above was the brainchild of Douglas Leigh, a leading figure in twentieth-century outdoor advertising. This article shows how Leigh’s multi-media ad campaigns crafted a unified national identity by incorporating theatrical techniques into the urban landscape of postwar America. I begin with the impact of WWII on Leigh’s electronic billboards in New York City, which increasingly drew from scenography principles to showcase America’s technical and economic triumph. I then investigate how Leigh employed remote communication technologies to enact an imaginary link between geographically dispersed figures and events.1Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 32–33. Finally, I analyze how Leigh’s dirigible PR stunts mediated the relationship between individual and national identity through corporate imagery. By conceptualizing advertising as scenic rather than merely visual or pictorial, Leigh’s outdoor marketing illuminates the performative power inherent in advertising.
Lighting Up the Home Front
Like all “self-made men” who came before him, Douglas Leigh had an elaborate origin story. In 1929, having left rural Alabama at the age of twenty-six, Leigh landed in New York with an old Ford and an empty pocket. Like a moth to a flame, Leigh headed straight to Broadway. He spent the night counting every light bulb illuminating the Theater District.2Douglas Leigh, “Interview Transcript,” 1942, Box 10, Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. Within a decade, Douglas Leigh became the biggest name in outdoor advertising.
Prior to Leigh’s arrival, the penetrating glare of electric light had already replaced the soft glow of gas lights on the streets of Broadway. Encouraged by the Edison Illuminating Company, lighting design emerged as an integral aspect of theater production both inside and outside the buildings.3Bobbi Owen, Lighting Design on Broadway: Designers and Their Credits, 1915–1990 (Greenwood, 1991). In 1906, the Knickerbocker Theater unveiled the first outdoor electric sign to promote The Red Mill, drawing curious crowds and inspiring numerous venues to adopt similar practices. Commercial catalogs boasted a diversity of lights and effects: when designed intentionally, architectural lighting had the capacity to “hold an audience spellbound for a few moments.”4The History of Stage and Theatre Lighting (Boston Edison Company, 1929), 45. Its emphasis was on novelty. The goal was to attract.
Before the war, Douglas Leigh approached electrical spectaculars as a logical progression of the flashing lights on the Great White Way — his success lay in upstaging them. To market cigarettes, he concealed windpipes behind the billboard. On a windless day, smoke drifted across busy sidewalks and into the ongoing traffic.5 Tom Barrett, “Radiant City,” Connoisseur, December 1982, 110. To sell coffee, Leigh affixed real steam to an enlarged cup. Supplied by the New York Steam Company, the sign expended 50,000 pounds of steam every month.6Leonard Angelillo, “Signs in the Sky,” Signs of the Time: The National Journal of Display Advertising, 1942. For further dramatic effect, Leigh designed an artificial waterfall that pulled 150,000 gallons of water to the top of a building.7Ibid. The self-proclaimed “King of Signs” was uncompromising in his vision and heavy-handed in his execution.
The Second World War imbued an additional layer of significance to the gleaming signs on Broadway. In 1942, anticipating emergency blackout requests, the NYC Mayor’s office required the installation of a central switch to control the electrical signs on the Great White Way. The engineering project was taken over by Douglas Leigh Inc.8 “Blackout Wiring for Big Signs Ordered, with Discontinuous Only Alternative,” The New York Times, March 2, 1942.
To test the system, Leigh enforced a blackout drill. On the evening of April 28, fifty thousand visitors flooded the streets from the Village to 124th Street to witness the historical moment. Described as “the greatest show on earth,”9“Crowd Enjoys Time Square Blackout Test,” The Sun, May 1, 1942. the event positioned New Yorkers as vanguards of national security. Visitors supervised each other so that not even a spark from a cigarette could be observed during the blackout. Just as the lighting up of new signs attracted public interest, the simultaneous dimming of all existing signs marked a major occasion. The press, keenly aware of how the darkened skyline would hamper morale, tactically framed the event as an opportunity to demonstrate allegiance to the nation.
Though the blackout generated much-appreciated press for Leigh, its demands were ultimately bad for business. In response, Leigh advocated for an alternative operation: a “bright out” that would relocate the bright lights from urban centers to rural towns. Electrical lights could be arranged to confuse air raid pilots; their searing radiance might even illuminate the silhouette of the enemy air jets and render them easier targets for shootdowns. Though the idea never came to fruition, it was presented by newspapers as a serious proposal. Branding himself as a lighting expert and a concerned citizen, Leigh consciously channeled the popular discourse of national defense and public safety in favor of his commercial agenda.10“Can Brightouts Save our Cities from Being Blitzed?” Box 2, General Scrapbook 4, Nov 1938-1939. Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.
Temporarily liberated from the pragmatic concerns of concrete projects during the war, Leigh began to imagine the future of spectacular signs.11Meyer Berger, “From White Way: 3rd Dimension for Advertising,” Newsweek, August 14, 1944. His sketches took a turn toward the fantastical. Straw-like contraptions pull beverages upward so that billboards no longer hang on buildings but stretch over the entire façade. A colossal orange balloon floats over buildings structurally modified to resemble a glass container. Instead of striving towards photographic realism, Leigh drew from the iconography of popular cartoons. Architecture metamorphosed into commodities, while branded products transformed into elemental atmospheres of liquid and steam, functioning as affective surrounds that enveloped passersby as they went about their daily lives.
Moreover, Leigh saw individual projects as contributing elements to the overall scenic experience of the cityscape. His scrapbook showcases New York City as a futuristic wonderland that even Fritz Lang would linger to admire. Accompanying his orange juice campaign are dozens of grand contraptions attached to yet-to-be-specified brands. On the densely populated streets, some pedestrians gaze in awe at the magnificent city, while others walk briskly, attending to their daily affairs. More memorable than they are inhabitable, the buildings oscillate between the stimulating foreground and the stable background of everyday existence. The vast crowd simultaneously serves as the awestruck spectacle and an integral part of a grand performance that flaunted wartime America’s economic prosperity and technological progress. It wasn’t simply that advertising harnessed pre-existing nationalistic sentiments to promote products; the reverse was also true. Just as German dramatist Georg Fuchs viewed the total work of art as essential for achieving the volkish ideal, Leigh’s Gesamtkunstwerk leveraged the iconicity and unifying potential of corporate brands to cultivate national consciousness.
After the war, Allied Chemical purchased a skyscraper at 1475 Broadway. Once the prime real estate for advertising projections and billboards, the building was redesigned as the new showroom for corporate office space — a testament to the nation’s industrial production and technical ingenuity. Unsurprisingly, the patriotic enterprise was entrusted to Leigh. For his service, Leigh was awarded an honor citation by the mayor’s office, signaling official recognition for his commitment to the nation’s prosperity.
Mobile Technologies, Virtual Territories
In addition to using electricity to illuminate and animate commercial billboards, Leigh was invested in electricity’s power to facilitate remote communication. In 1939, Leigh installed a weather forecast sign for a Coca-Cola campaign that, in his own words, “dramatize(d) the company’s slogan at the time: ‘thirst knows no season.’”12NYC Tide, February 1, 1939. Obtaining its data from the United States Bureau, Leigh’s Coca-Cola weather forecast was “considered by many more accurate than newspaper reports.”13Info Magazine, March 17, 1939. Following the sign’s debut, an unnamed journalist ventured as far as Leigh’s office in Manhattan, where he made notes of the mechanics for controlling the weather sign: a panel resembling a telephone dial, on which each of the six weathers corresponds to a number. According to the journalist, Leigh contacted the United States Bureau up to four times today to obtain the latest information about the weather. Afterward, Leigh personally updated the control panel. “It’s like a device somewhat like the one the President of the United States uses when he opens a convention,” the journalist concludes.14Douglas Leigh, “Interview Transcript,” 1942, Box 2, Folder 4, Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. Italicized by the author. The comparison was meant to underscore the magnificence of Leigh’s power, with his office serving as a centralized locus that metaphorically, yet no less miraculously, controlled the weather.
In 1947, Douglas Leigh Inc. made national headlines with its purchase of two dirigibles. Operated by an ex-Navy officer, the former U.S. Navy K-Type airships proved to be an easy crowd-pleaser in early Cold War America. In the winter of 1947, the reporter Walter E. Huelle was invited abroad to the airship. He provided a detailed account of his journey above the clouds, meticulously describing his vision of Westchester County. Fascinated by glimpses of local landmarks such as Port Chester and Mount Kisco, Huelle noticed how viewing the city from above changes one’s spatial awareness. “The thing that makes lower Westchester unusual, as viewed from the air, is that except for the Yonkers corner, there are marked contrasts of urban and rural landscape close together,” wrote the reporter.15Citizen Register, December 11, 1947. Through an inventive use of wartime technology, Leigh offered the American populace a vision of the landscape that at once underscored and transgressed urban-rural divides.
The following year, the airship made headlines again by turning itself into an electrical whale. The press, ever so aware of the public’s taste for superlatives, hardly missed a beat. “It will be the largest reproduction of an animal ever to appear in the sky,” emphasized the NK Journal.16“A Whale in the Sky,” NK Journal, May 13, 1948. Leigh’s scrapbook documented the whirlwind of newspapers that reported the sighting.17Douglas Leigh, Tydol Flying Airship Dirigible Scrapbook II, 1947–1949, Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. As the whale flew across urban centers and rural towns, news spread across the city and countryside, picked up by the New York PM and Fairport Herald-Mail alike. If Leigh’s outdoor signs unified the city under a single temporal and meteorological zone, the airship, consciously joining forces with the press, formed an expansive network that stitched together the metropolis and the suburbia under the banner of the same nation.
Traveling from its home base at Lakehurst, N.J. to the Bloomsburg Municipal Airport, the flying whale offered novel ways of imagining and configuring space — a fact passionately foregrounded by a local writer, John McNulty, who described his first encounter with the nocturnal wonder:
I looked out the window the other deep night, about 8:30 or so, and there was the whale, a couple thousand feet up, heading from up over Newtown Creek toward Bayonne, I should judge, only going about it the hard way. The easy way would be in the water down the East River, around the Battery, and thence to Jersey. The hard way is up there past the spire of the Chrysler, thence to be startled by the jumping-off places of the Empire tower.18John McNulty, “‘Get Out of Town,” Says Whale in the Sky,” P.M., May 4, 1948.
The way of water is different from the way of the sky. Momentarily suspending his disbelief, the author imaginatively charted the route taken by the whale, an airway ladened with obstacles and memories. Building tops bore witness to the city’s collective history, including the rapid ascent of the automobile industry and the profound despair of the Great Depression. McNulty compared the flying animation to the cetacean antagonist in Moby-Dick and cited lyrics from Jelly Roll Morton’s “Jerry Roll Blues.” The luminous whale cleverly gestured to the colossal measurement of its aerial carrier and appeared as a stirring emblem of American cultural identity.
The flying whale charted imaginary territories for an imagined community. In her study of late nineteenth-century Paris, Vanessa Schwartz writes that “the visual representation of reality as spectacle…created a shared experience through which people might begin to imagine themselves as participants in a metropolitan culture because they had visual evidence that such a shared world, of which they were a part, existed.”19Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 6. In the Cold War context, Leigh’s spectacular objects attracted the gaze of spectators, but also looked back. McNulty described the flying whale as “swimming and winking across the night-blue sky,” performing the dual acts of migration and acknowledgment. Huelle similarly reminded his readers, “That dirigible they call a blimp you saw in the sky over Westchester yesterday was spying on you.”20Citizen Register, December 11, 1947. The gaze of the dirigible was not passive or neutral, but watchful and suggestive. Serving as the focalizing point across vast stretches of land, the dirigible actively returned the gaze of its viewers. Through a pair of electric oculars, the American public experienced the horizontal comradeship of nationhood.21Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33.
The Hero’s Quest
In 1945, the year Douglas Leigh’s fantastical rendering of the New York cityscape captured the cultural imagination of urban and rural dwellers alike, two atomic bombs flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1948, the year that the animated whale flew above enthusiastic crowds, the Marshall Plan provided conditional aid to Europe in service of the interests of corporate America. As the United States aggressively promoted the principles of liberal internationalism abroad, domestic advertisers like Leigh depicted the nation as a beacon of hope for the global order. Such portrayals not only entailed propagandist representations of the empire but, more effectively, the presentation of national identity in everyday life.
Not only did Leigh apply theatrical techniques to the design of outdoor advertisements, but he also inserted advertisements into the realm of radio drama. In 1937, Leigh participated in a radio show to promote his new EPOK sign. Through a tactical use of sound effects and voice acting, the broadcast transported its listener to the lively streets of the Great White Way on a Saturday night, among a crowd standing in front of a newly installed electric sign. When beckoned by Leigh to describe an ideal sign, the interviewer provided an elaborate verbal account of a billboard for Vitalis — a hair tonic for men and, conveniently, the show’s sponsor.22Vitalis Presents “For Men Only” September 27,1937, Station WHN, 8:30 to 9:00. Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. Already present in Leigh’s early work was the tendency to blur the line between interviews and advertisements, between real conversations and staged encounters.
The novelty and magnitude of the dirigibles made them ideal actors. By publishing their take-off and landing information, Leigh transformed collective sightings into site-specific performances. The sky-bound Leviathans were not simply summoned to attract a crowd; they were there to send a message. In July 1947, the dirigible carried the professional diver Joe Hackney over the Atlantic Ocean, whereupon he divided headfirst into the water to rebel against the mid-summer heat.23“New High in a High Dive,” The Evening Bulletin, July 7, 1947. Attracting the attention of a dozen local newspapers, the dive marked the beginning of a series of aerial performances that rendered scenes of everyday life into performances of national identity.
One ordinary Monday morning, an elementary student named Jimmy expressed to his teacher the conviction that the word “Tydol” contained the letter “A.”24Douglas Leigh, “Dirigible Scrapbook 10,” Box 27, Folder 2, Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. Jimmy’s source of confusion was readily apparent. Serving as the dirigible campaign’s first client, Tydol painted its logo — a letter “A” — in bright red on the airships. For Leigh, the child’s misguided perception illustrated the effectiveness of the advertising campaign, now capable of imprinting a corporate symbol onto the young minds of America.
Working with Tydol, Leigh seized the opportunity for a publicity stunt. A few days later, Jimmy’s classmates and teachers gathered in front of the school. They gazed upwards towards the distance in anticipation. Soon enough, a dirigible bearing the Tydol logo appeared. Under the watchful gaze of the entire school and through the eager lens of professional photographers, a small parachute dropped from the airship. Attached to the parachute was a package addressed to Jimmy. It consisted of a toy — a replica of the Tydol dirigible — and a letter from the Tydol executives. Following the elaborately staged ceremony, Tydol published the open letter, which expressed gratitude for Jimmy’s unwavering conviction in the company’s image. The letter emphasized, “There is an even more important letter than the Flying -A-, and that’s the letter F. F stands for freedom, the most important thing in our America.”25Ibid. The charitable act spoke favorably to Tydol’s brand image, which had become increasingly indistinguishable from the corporate ethos of America itself.
Tydol’s publicity stunt was only one of the many heroic feats performed by the dirigibles. Amidst a heavy blanket of snow that posed a fatal threat to forest wildlife, the airships made headlines once again by air-dropping food for local birds and rabbits. The feat was framed as a “rescue mission” that exemplified one of the many “peacetime feats of this honorably discharged U.S. Navy airship.”26Herald Tribune, April 18, 1948. Assuming the power and responsibility of a superhero, Tydol’s self-congratulatory campaign demonstrated not only the nation’s material abundance but also its role as a humanitarian leader.
On the eve of Christmas in 1947, Santa didn’t glide through the skies on a traditional reindeer-drawn sleigh but instead aboard a retired army warship. Leigh’s dirigibles were tasked to transport Santa to a New York hospital, where gifts from Tydol executives were distributed to sick children. “Everyone is sure, however, that this afternoon Santa will arrive at Sunshine cottage by blimp, and that was enough to disrupt the orderly routine of the hospital today,” wrote the reporter.27“Children Wait for Santa by Air,” The Standard-Star, December 22, 1947. As a mobile advertising vehicle, the dirigible transformed ordinary neighborhoods into stages of personal significance, inviting Americans to engage with narratives of patriotic virtue. By aligning themselves with the Tydol brand, the populace was encouraged to embody and rehearse these ideals in their everyday lives. In the hands of Leigh, advertising became a means through which corporate personality fused with national identity.
As early as the 1920s, scenic designers for Broadway shows and Hollywood films, notably Joseph Urban and Norman Bel Geddes, regularly applied their training in the theaters to industrial design, fashion, and architecture. As selling a product became synonymous with selling the reality endorsed by the product, advertisements became performative, not simply in the theatrical sense of putting on a good show, but in the Erving Goffman sense of the word – as social actions through which one comes to define the self and the world. Though the intersecting history of theatrical forms and commercial culture, or what the scholar Christopher Innes describes as “an inherent theatricality in much of American life,” has long been established, Leigh’s outdoor advertising foregrounds corporate personhood as a crucial site of mediation between the formation of the individual and the nation-state.28Christopher Innes, Designing Modern America (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), 34. By mobilizing electronic media toward the staging of corporate identity, Douglas Leigh blurred the lines between the city and the stage, between life and theater, so that commercial representation and social reality could only be studied as a scenic totality.
Notes
| ↑1 | Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 32–33. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Douglas Leigh, “Interview Transcript,” 1942, Box 10, Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. |
| ↑3 | Bobbi Owen, Lighting Design on Broadway: Designers and Their Credits, 1915–1990 (Greenwood, 1991). |
| ↑4 | The History of Stage and Theatre Lighting (Boston Edison Company, 1929), 45. |
| ↑5 | Tom Barrett, “Radiant City,” Connoisseur, December 1982, 110. |
| ↑6 | Leonard Angelillo, “Signs in the Sky,” Signs of the Time: The National Journal of Display Advertising, 1942. |
| ↑7, ↑25 | Ibid. |
| ↑8 | “Blackout Wiring for Big Signs Ordered, with Discontinuous Only Alternative,” The New York Times, March 2, 1942. |
| ↑9 | “Crowd Enjoys Time Square Blackout Test,” The Sun, May 1, 1942. |
| ↑10 | “Can Brightouts Save our Cities from Being Blitzed?” Box 2, General Scrapbook 4, Nov 1938-1939. Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. |
| ↑11 | Meyer Berger, “From White Way: 3rd Dimension for Advertising,” Newsweek, August 14, 1944. |
| ↑12 | NYC Tide, February 1, 1939. |
| ↑13 | Info Magazine, March 17, 1939. |
| ↑14 | Douglas Leigh, “Interview Transcript,” 1942, Box 2, Folder 4, Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. Italicized by the author. |
| ↑15, ↑20 | Citizen Register, December 11, 1947. |
| ↑16 | “A Whale in the Sky,” NK Journal, May 13, 1948. |
| ↑17 | Douglas Leigh, Tydol Flying Airship Dirigible Scrapbook II, 1947–1949, Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. |
| ↑18 | John McNulty, “‘Get Out of Town,” Says Whale in the Sky,” P.M., May 4, 1948. |
| ↑19 | Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 6. |
| ↑21 | Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33. |
| ↑22 | Vitalis Presents “For Men Only” September 27,1937, Station WHN, 8:30 to 9:00. Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. |
| ↑23 | “New High in a High Dive,” The Evening Bulletin, July 7, 1947. |
| ↑24 | Douglas Leigh, “Dirigible Scrapbook 10,” Box 27, Folder 2, Douglas Leigh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. |
| ↑26 | Herald Tribune, April 18, 1948. |
| ↑27 | “Children Wait for Santa by Air,” The Standard-Star, December 22, 1947. |
| ↑28 | Christopher Innes, Designing Modern America (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), 34. |
Jane Zhang is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies programs at Yale University. Her research explores staging and scenographic practices in commercial contexts. Her current research traces a material history of personality through the intersecting histories of industrial design, market research, and psychopharmacology at the turn of the twentieth century, with a transnational focus on Japan, Germany, and the United States.
What a way to learn even more about the Grandfather I never met. The way you articulated who he was as a person, his passion for what he did, and how he made Times Square what it is, is mesmerizing. The beautiful visualizations you were able to capture and the information shared, is almost as great as sitting with the man himself.