The current blog, designed for readers and writers, scholars from every field, and the general public, explores romance in popular culture and fiction. The larger project includes a feature-length documentary focusing on the global community of romance readers, writers, and publishers and will include an expanded, interactive website allowing the website’s users to see romance novels in a broad context across time and place. The project also includes an academic symposium on the past and future of the romance novel hosted by the Library of Congress Center for the Book, and a nationwide series of library programs dealing with the past, present, and future of the romance novel, plus a traveling exhibit, organized by the American Library Association.

There are four key features:

• a Teaching Source Database with introductions and essential questions to offer guidance on how to use those sources critically and tools for annotating and organizing the sources;
• Website Reviews that focus on valuable online resources for teaching and learning Virginia state and local government;
• Teaching Activities focused on state and local government that provide context, teaching tools, and strategies for teaching primary sources drawn from the Teaching Source Database; and
• Teaching Case Studies by experienced scholars and teachers that model strategies for using primary sources to teach state and local government in the Commonwealth.

Q: The Typical American Family Was:

A: The Leathers family of Clarendon, Texas.

At least that was the conclusion of a panel of judges enlisted by the New York World’s Fair Corporation to make the choice out of forty-six families who had been selected by local newspapers across the United States as “typical” in their area. The contest was a promotional effort by the World’s Fair, which was in its second season. As research by Jon Zachman shows, the families chosen hardly represented a cross-section of America. None, for example, were African Americans; the largest group of winners by far were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Moreover, the ground rules of the contest mandated a very traditional notion of “family” as a nuclear family with two parents, headed by a male breadwinner.

Whatever the obvious biases of the contest and the selection process, the quest for the “average family” was itself quite representative of 1930s American culture. As historian Warren Susman points out, the thirties were the heyday of the notion of “the people,” which suggested “that a basic unity underpinned the social and culture structure of America.” Out of the quest for “the people”—the single voice that united American society—came the birth of “the concept of the average,” what Susman calls “a kind of statistical accounting of the people seen as a unit.” Whereas American culture had previously venerated individualism, it now celebrated the Average American and the Average American Family. This search for the average American reflects a deeply conservative impulse within a decade that is often mistakenly seen as largely radical—a “red decade,” as it is sometimes called.

And what were the “average” Leathers like? Mr. Leathers was a thirty-nine-year-old stock farmer; Mrs. Leathers was a thirty-eight-year-old housewife. Both were Baptists of English descent. Their teenage son, Johnny, was president of the 4-H Club; their sixteen-year-old daughter, Margaret Jean, belonged to the Pep Squad as well as the Home Making and Natural Music clubs. Mr. Leathers’s ambition was “to become a more useful citizen and raise more and better Hereford cattle.” His wife wanted “to give my children the very best education possible and teach them to be good American citizens.” At the end of a decade of great social turmoil, what could be more reassuring than to consider the Leathers as the average American family.

Sources: Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1984); Jon B. Zachman, “The Typical American Family during the Great Depression,” unpublished paper, George Mason University, 1996

Q: What Was America’s Longest-Running Radio Show?

A: The Grand Ole Opry.

In 1925, Nashville radio station WSM went on the air. Like many early radio stations, it was the voice of a particular commercial enterprise—in this case, the Nashville-based National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which was looking to move beyond sickness and accident insurance into life insurance. WSM program director George D. Hay, who had previously been an announcer on the Barn Dance on a Chicago radio station, organized a Saturday-night show which was also called the “barn dance.” Live performances ranged from minstrel acts to military bands, but “old-time” or “traditional” string bands performing “country music” dominated.

The show that preceded the barn dance was a classical music program called the Music Appreciation Hour. One night in 1927 Hay introduced the barn dance by saying “For the past hour you have been listening to music taken largely from the Grand Opera, but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.” The name stuck, and it continued to be broadcast under that name for the next six decades.

Although some “proper” Nashville residents thought the show was not in tune with the city’s genteel reputation, it soon became wildly popular. A new radio tower built in 1932 allowed WSM to reach most of the nation with the show, although southerners remained the core of the audience. Whereas commercial media like radio have sometimes been seen as a threat to “traditional” cultures, WSM and the Grand Ole Opry spread and preserved (while it also transformed) southern white rural music.

Source: Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989).

Q: Why Did WWI Change The Way We Blow Our Noses?

A: It gave birth to Kleenex.

Right before the outbreak of World War I, the Kimberly-Clark Corporation trademarked Cellucotton, an absorbent substitute for cotton that is derived from cellulose, which, in turn, comes largely from wood pulp. With cotton in short supply during the war, Cellucotton was widely used as a battlefield bandage. At the end of the war, the company pondered what to do with the huge surpluses of Cellucotton bulging out its warehouses.

One idea came from army nurses who had already discovered Cellucotton’s usefulness as a feminine napkin, which Kimberly-Clark began marketing in 1920 as Kotex. In 1924, the company came out with Kleenex Kerchiefs, which were billed as the “Sanitary Cold Cream Remover.” Ads featured actors like Helen Hayes and Ronald Colman removing makeup the “scientific way” with the Kleenex Kerchiefs. But the public had other ideas and began to adopt the cold cream removers as a disposable handkerchief. That underground use grew even more rapidly when the company started packaging Kleenex in the “Serv-a-Tissue,” the new pop-up tissue box invented by Andrew Olsen.

Only in the early 1930s did Kimberly-Clark finally begin to market Kleenex as disposable handkerchiefs. For good measure, the company also began to suggest other possible uses from polishing furniture to removing the grease from french fries.

Sources: Kimberly-Clark Corporation, The Story of Kleenex Facial Tissue (1990); Charles Panati, Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (1989).

Q: Why Did Soldiers Make M&Ms A National Institution?

A: Because they melted in your mouth, not in your hand.

Melting chocolate was not a trivial issue for a soldier who might have to put down his candy bar and pick up a gun.

Frank Mars began making candy in his kitchen in Tacoma, Washington, in 1911; in 1923 he developed the Milky Way bar, which quickly became a nationally known brand in an era when national brands were in many areas edging out locally made products. In the next two decades the Mars company further extended their national reach with Snickers and 3Musketeers. In 1932 they went international when Frank’s son Forrest moved to England to set up a candy business (and expanded into pet foods). When the war broke out Forrest returned to the United States and established M&M Limited in Newark, taking the name from his initial and that of executive Bruce Murrie. Further seeking to extend their market, they came up with M&Ms as a way of dealing with the falloff in candy sales over the summer, when consumers stopped buying chocolate and stores stopped stocking chocolate because, in an era before widespread air-conditioning, it had a tendency to turn into a gooey mess.

But the real success of M&Ms apparently came when it was issued as part of U.S. service personnel rations because its hard outer shell made of sugar prevented it from melting before being eaten. Soldiers came home eating M&Ms, and its particular appropriateness to all climates was encapsulated in the slogan (coined in 1954): “The milk chocolate melts in your mouth—not in your hand.”

M&Ms were not the only chocolate issued to soldiers. The Hershey company, at the request of the army, developed a chocolate ration that would sustain a soldier who had nothing else to eat and could be carried in his pocket unmelted. Throughout the war, Hershey turned out a half million bars a day of “Ration D,” a 4-ounce, 600-calorie chocolate bar.

Regular chocolate bars were also available at the PX, where they were the second most popular item after cigarettes. When American troops invaded Europe, the chocolate bar became closely associated with American GIs, who turned chocolate into the all-purpose medium of exchange that could be bartered for local antiques or even sexual favors.

The first change in the mix of M&M colors came in 1995 when blue replaced tan. In case you were wondering, an average batch of plain M&Ms is 30 percent browns, 20 percent each of yellows and reds, and 10 percent each of greens, oranges, and blues.

Sources: Marcia and Frederic Morton, Chocolate: An Illustrated History (1986); A Little Encyclopedia of M&M/Mars (1995); Ron Lees, A History of Sweet and Chocolate Manufacture (1988); “Candy and the War,” Newsweek, June 14, 1943, p. 77; Washington Post, September 11, 1995.

Q: Who was Betty Crocker?

A: One of the best-known women of the interwar years—Betty Crocker—never existed.

The Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis, one of the six big milling companies that merged into General Mills in 1928, received thousands of requests each year in the late 1910s and early 1920s for answers to baking questions. In 1921, managers decided that it would be more intimate to sign the responses personally; they combined the last name of a retired company executive, William Crocker, with the first name “Betty,” which was thought of as “warm and friendly.” The signature came from a secretary, who won a contest among female employees. (The same signature still appears on Betty Crocker products.)

In 1924, Betty Crocker acquired a voice with the radio debut of the nation’s first cooking show, which featured thirteen different actresses working from radio stations across the country. Later it became a national broadcast, The Betty Crocker School of the Air, which ran for twenty-four years.

Finally, in 1936 Betty Crocker got a face. Artist Neysa McMein brought together all the women in the company’s Home Service Department and “blended their features into an official likeness.” The widely circulated portrait reinforced the popular belief that Betty Crocker was a real woman. One public opinion poll rated her as the second most famous woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt.

Over the next seventy-five years, her face has changed seven times: she became younger in 1955; she became a “professional” woman in 1980; and in 1996 she became multicultural, acquiring a slightly darker and more “ethnic” look.

P.S. Sara Lee is a real person!

Sources; Charles Panati, Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (1989); Milton Moskowitz, Robert Levering, and Michael Katz, Everybody’s Business: A Field Guide to the 400 Leading Companies in America (1990); Tulsa World, March 27, 1996.

Q: Who Invented Body Odor?

A: Advertising Men

In the 1910s and particularly the 1920s, advertising agents focused their attention on identifying—and often inventing—personal anxieties that could be resolved by the purchase of specific products. “Advertising,” wrote one commentator in a trade publication, “helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.” Advertisers, as historian Stuart Ewen notes, tried to endow people with a “critical self-consciousness” directed especially at their personal appearances.

That was the strategy followed, for example, by Odo-Ro-No, a deodorant for women, which in 1919 became the first company to use the term “B.O.” (meaning, but not saying, “body odor”) in an advertisement. Previously, deodorant ads had confined their pitch to suggestions about how they would foster daintiness and sweetness. But Odo-Ro-No took a much more direct approach, telling potential customers to take the “Armhole Odor Test” and warning them that social success hinged on eliminating B.O.

Listerine mouthwash took a similar approach. The Lambert Pharmacal Company had developed the antibacterial liquid back in the 1880s, and it was long sold as a general antiseptic. After World War I, the company sought to expand its market. Advertising man Gordon Seagrove recalls being called in by the Lambert Brothers to discuss how this could be done. The company’s chief chemist was enlisted to describe the product and its uses. “As he read along in a singsong voice,” Seagrove remembers, “he mentioned halitosis. Everybody said ‘What’s that?’” Learning that it referred to “unpleasant breath,” they immediately thought “maybe that’s the peg we can hang our hat on.”

Although there was some worry about whether such a “delicate subject” could be handled in magazines and newspapers, Seagrove and his collaborator, Milton Feasley, launched an ad campaign that played heavily on fears about how others would react to a halitosis sufferer. The most famous of their ads concerned the “pathetic” case of “Edna,” who was “often a bridesmaid but never a bride.” She was approaching the “tragic” thirtieth birthday unmarried because she suffered from halitosis—a disorder that “you, yourself, rarely know when you have it. And even your closest friends won’t tell you.”

In response to the ad campaign, Listerine sales went from $100,000 per year in 1921 to more than $4 million in 1927. Meanwhile, the strategy of ads as “quick-tempo socio-dramas in which readers were invited to identify with temporary victims in tragedies of social shame,” writes historian Roland Marchand, led to a new “school of advertising practice.”

Sources: Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (1976); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920­1940 (1985); Jane and Michael Stern, Encyclopedia of Culture (1992); Julian Lewis Watkins, The 100 Greatest Advertisements (1949).