America’s roadside reading

In the not-too-distant future, billboards may become obsolete, replaced by holographic advertisements projected onto car windshields by the vehicles’ own “enhanced vision” systems -- a technology that will allow drivers to see, for instance, movie starting times superimposed over theaters they pass, or lunch specials available at a restaurant. These airy figments of virtual shilling will know you better than you know yourself. They’ll be finely crafted to your tastes, your interests, even your politics, thanks to encrypted data in your car’s transponder. Instead of billboards, advertisers will lease bits of the communications spectrum within a given zone of coverage.

This will be convenient for Viacom and Clear Channel Communications, companies that dominate outdoor advertising as well as radio broadcasting.

For many Americans hitting the road this Memorial Day weekend, a billboard-free horizon is devoutly to be wished. There are roughly half a million billboards shouting mutely along U.S. highways, endless corridors of commercial Tourette’s: Nissan ... Verizon ... Allstate ... Miller Lite ... McDonald’s ... Army of One ... Jesus Saves.

Spending, outdoor advertising tabulators say, totaled $5.5 billion in 2003, almost twice that of a decade ago. Much of it is for standard rectangular billboards with images printed on large vinyl sheets and assembled on-site. However, the industry is multiplexing, with ads at bus stops and pedestrian overpasses, atop taxis, shrink-wrapped around buses and draped on buildings. In downtown Los Angeles, 12-story Laker players rampaged Godzilla-like across the cityscape.

Ugly? That depends on whom you ask.

For most of the 20th century, America the Beautiful waged war with America the Prosperous over the issue of billboard advertising. This struggle is recounted in two recent books: “Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape” by Catherine Gudis and “Signs in America’s Auto Age: Signatures of Landscape and Place” by John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle.

There is a fair amount of overlap between them -- both are generously illustrated, often with the same images -- and for them to land in bookstores together is a little like two women arriving at a party wearing the same dress. Yet both are richly detailed investigations that help explain why this land -- your land, my land -- is over-marched by these flat-faced, spindle-legged giants.

Jakle and Sculle have a broader mandate, to discuss signs of all kinds, not only commercial billboards but also traffic signals, directional signs and markers of community and territory: neighborhood graffiti, for example, or town names on water towers or -- from my own experience -- the forbidding “Klan Kountry” billboards I used to see in North Carolina in the 1960s.

The most famous example of all clings to the hills above Los Angeles. The “Hollywood” sign began in 1923 as a rank bit of hype for a real estate development owned by -- among others -- the Los Angeles Times’ Publisher Harry Chandler. Yet over the decades, the sign acquired a wonderful patina of meaning. Bigger than life (the letters are 50 feet tall) and bolder than good taste would dictate, it is emblematic of the boisterous, elbow-throwing city at its feet. It connects past to present. All that we associate with Hollywood -- glamour and corruption, idealism and decadence -- illuminates the sign like floodlights. The sign is skywriting for dreamers.

Jakle and Sculle’s thesis is sensible enough: that signs create zones of behavioral expectation (“Use Burma-Shave,” “No Spitting”), impose a kind of coherence on the rampant and rambling American landscape (“Welcome to the Great State of Texas”) and orient viewers both practically and emotionally (“Rest Stop 2 Miles”). But the book grows fusty and academic when it wanders into the semiotics of “landscape visualization.”

Gudis’ prose is more aerodynamic, if you will, and her focus is narrower: a cultural history of roadside advertising, its meanings and methods, and how it reshaped the American scene.

The prime mover in this tale, of course, is the automobile. In 1921, there were 8 million cars lurching and bumbling along America’s mostly unpaved roads. A decade later, there were 23 million cars on roads veining out from cities and towns into the virgin countryside (today, there are about 200 million vehicles). The Lincoln Highway laced the coasts together.

Billboard advertisers chased the newly mobile consumer wherever he went. In fact, companies such as Sunoco and Standard Oil used billboard images of unspoiled American landscape -- grand umber-and-gold desert vistas, mountains purple in their majesty -- to encourage the public to drive and so consume their products. The myth of the Great American Road, a myth that yet drives us onto the highway by the millions, was first a contrivance of commerce.

By the early 1920s, America’s roadsides were tatterdemalions littered with garish billboard advertisements of all description. The public rebelled. Many who complained were veterans of the recent utopian City Beautiful movement that had tried, with only spotty success, to regulate advertising squalor in America’s urban centers. As roads and automobiles fanned out from the cities, the billposter’s noxious paper seemed to be trailing in their draft, threatening Eden.

From the 1920s until the 1960s, the “roadside reform” movement, largely organized by civic-minded women’s groups, agitated for restrictions to roadside advertising, in court and in Congress, to preserve the nation’s landscapes. The “scenic sisters” were led by Elizabeth Boyd Lawton and the National Roadside Council. Their antagonists were the “billboard barons” and their industry machine, the Outdoor Advertising Assn. of America.

The battle lines were familiar: Pro-sign advocates argued that restrictions to billboard advertising hobbled commerce, cost jobs and denied landowners their rights to profit from roadside holdings. The association, often in its trade journal Sign of the Times, derided the scenic sisters as idle bourgeois “do-gooders” whose fragile sensibilities couldn’t be allowed to trump free-market forces. The anti-sign coalition -- and it was just that, at times including groups as diverse as the American Automobile Assn. and elements of the real estate industry -- contended that billboards blighted the commonwealth, depriving travelers of the natural beauty that was the inheritance of all Americans.

The animating principle went beyond aesthetics: Americans liked to think of themselves as an agrarian people, a sentimental self-deception rooted in the Enlightenment’s pastoral ideals. From Thomas Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt, from James Fenimore Cooper to John Greenleaf Whittier, Americans valorized the wild and free landscapes as the nation’s spiritual heart and moral center.

Where would the frontiersmen be without the frontier?

“Nature and country came to be seen as a resource,” Gudis writes, “where one could escape from industrial social constraints that thwarted individualism, and one might find sanctuary from the hollowness and excessive artificiality of urban society.”

What’s striking about the Billboard Wars, the outcome of which is plain to see on any highway, is just how naive the roadside reformers’ efforts seem compared with the shrewd, often brilliant, tactics of the advertising group.

There was no equal-time requirement in outdoor advertising. For decades, the billboard barons hooked politicians on the heroin of free advertising and, if they rebelled, waged campaigns against them with their billboards as the bully pulpit. The industry lobbied Washington ceaselessly (and still does). Perhaps its greatest achievement was to knock the stuffing out of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, championed by no less than Lady Bird Johnson, the president’s wife.

Among other things, the loophole-ridden law required the federal government to compensate owners for the removal of noncompliant signs, although funding for sign removal would have to be appropriated annually, creating a classic unfunded mandate. The legislation had forsaken national standards for signage, leaving it to the Department of Transportation to frame rules consistent with “customary use” in each state. Confusion and inaction reigned. And though the law created highway setback zones where no billboards could be placed, it set no limits on height or size of signage on commercial property. Thus was born the skyscraping “monopole” sign visible from low-Earth orbit.

Still, it’s worth noting that since the law’s passage, nearly a million roadside signs have been dismantled, hard as that may be to believe when out on the open road.

The advertising association’s greatest skill was a kind of marketing jujitsu, turning the arguments of the scenic sisters against them with a cynical agility that was as marvelous as it was awful. Responding to the charge that billboards were slapdash and rickety, the organization adopted standardization rules. Not only did these rules help consolidate control of the billboard industry in the hands of its members, they made outdoor advertising more attractive to the increasing numbers of corporate-branded advertisers, such as Coca-Cola and Morton Salt. These companies’ quaint tin signs, now collectibles, were part of a long tradition of random sign “sniping,” which had drawn fire from reformers.

Unwilling to concede the moral high ground to the reformers, the billboard business wrapped itself in civic virtue, adopting prim standards of decency and providing space for public service messages promoting literacy, hygiene, patriotism and morality. The Foster & Kleiser company had its “Ad Andy” mascot dispensing civilizing bromides from on high.

When reformers claimed that the signs were distracting and unsafe, the billboard boosters argued that, in fact, the colorful advertising helped prevent “highway hypnosis.”

Most audacious of all was the industry’s attempt to reframe, so to speak, billboard advertising as art for the masses. Beginning with the frame: In the 1930s, Streamline Moderne-styled billboard designs appeared. In Los Angeles and other West Coast cities, Foster & Kleiser created elaborate “sign parks” with lush landscaping, fountains, white-lattice architecture and neoclassical nymphs nicknamed “Lizzies” -- an arch reference to Elizabeth Boyd Lawton. (Foster & Kleiser also sponsored a weekly radio program, “Gardens of the Air,” in an effort to ingratiate itself with the garden club troublemakers. Meantime, the ever-resourceful ad organization recruited female employees to infiltrate and spy on garden clubs.)

In 1938, the group put on a “showing” of 5,000 billboards with the image of Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy.” The association said it was a “masterpiece presented for the benefit of the public.”

They needn’t have bothered. Art and advertising were already on a collision course due to the aesthetics of speed.

A viewer traveling in an automobile cannot be asked to read more than three or four words. It isn’t safe. Consequently, billboard advertising became increasingly nonverbal, more schematic and abstract, more colorful, with larger, simplified forms, often relying on the nonlinear and symbolic associations crafted with increasing accuracy thanks to the emergence of psychoanalysis.

These were, in fact, many of Modernism’s traits and tenets. And in both cases, the Machine was the muse.

Europeans looked with envy across the Atlantic, to a country “unencumbered by Old World cultural and historical baggage,” Gudis writes. America, virile and industrious, was the “youthful progenitor of an aesthetic suitable to the modern technological age.” And so the distinction between high and low art -- the art of expression and ideas and the art of commercial purpose -- became increasingly vague and inconsequential.

The distinction vanished altogether in the 1960s, when Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein co-opted the visual rhetoric of advertising. Or was it the other way around? What to make of the Absolut vodka ads by Rosser, Keeler and Becker? What to make of Levi’s ads by Jenny Holzer? This indeterminacy shadows the irony of postmodernism and mocks the culture-jamming hi-jinks of saboteurs who alter corporate billboards (changing, for example, “Joe Camel” to “Joe Chemo”). What if it’s art, after all?

Seven decades later, billboard advertising is both ubiquitous and largely unopposed, as background and foreground in our hyper-consumerist culture. With our branded clothing, we even dress like billboards. During the planning for the revitalization of Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, “tall wall” advertising was purposely zoned in, as were many other billboard-friendly measures. (Although the famous Marlboro Man was felled by anti-tobacco legislation.) The purpose, said one city councilman, was to make the drive down the Sunset Strip like flipping through the ad-choked pages of Vanity Fair magazine.

The billboard barons succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. *