Clean Cuts Procter & Gamble’s Depression-Era Soap-Carving Contests Jennifer Jane Marshall In the 1920s and 1930s, Procter & Gamble popularized the art of soap carving through a series of annual competitions, which explicitly promoted handicraft as a therapeutic alternative to the machine age. However, soap sculpture in fact offered a way to accommodate the changes associated with commercial modernization. A do-it-yourself hobby that relied on mass production, turned the household chore of shaving soap into an art form, and produced compact works of art that reflected the demands of factory production, soap sculpture is an example ‘‘antimodern modernism’’—assimilating and aestheticizing the very processes of modernization it otherwise appeared to oppose. O N EASTER SUNDAY 1937, New York City policemen reported to an especially un- fortunate crime scene: three wasted bod- ies found in the small confines of a modest Beekman Hill apartment. A middle-aged woman and her grown daughter, an aspiring model said to pose for artists (reputable and otherwise), had been strangled and shoved under a bed in the front room. Another corpse bloodied the mattress in the back bedroom: the women’s boarder, an older British gentleman known to be hard of hearing, had been stabbed to death in his sleep. In re- constructing the tragic events, police detectives determined that the typical order of such matters had been reversed. Instead of a murderous in- truder surprising the women through an open win- dow or flimsy front door, the women arrived home to find their killer already there, patiently awaiting his opportunity for ambush. That he had been wait- ing for some time was evidenced by a particularly eerie detail. A small sculpture, carefully carved in or- dinary bath soap, was found at the scene, causing police to surmise that the killer had ‘‘whiled away his time carving the statue as he waited.’’ 1 This telltale calling card led detectives to identify their culprit, a so-called mad sculptor, whose earlier exploits had included employment in a waxworks studio in Los Angeles, an apprenticeship to the eminent sculptor Lorado Taft in Chicago, and a brief incarceration in a New York state hospital for the insane. In the man- hunt that ensued, police were dispatched to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they believed the killer carver was likely to seek solace. Instead, months passed before the amateur artist surren- dered himself and confessed. 2 Any triple homicide on Easter morning would have had plenty to recommend it to eager readers of true crime, but the deranged-hobbyist-as-killer conceit gave this story its exceptional appeal. Re- porters relished the blurry distinction between vir- tuous self-dedication and nefarious obsession, and the incriminating evidence—that carefully worked 1 ‘‘Chicago Center of Search for Triple Slayer,’’ Chicago Daily Tribune, April 9, 1937, 1. 2 Newspaper accounts of the period vary widely as to the specifics of the case. The details presented here as to the murders of Mary and Veronica Gedeon and their tenant, Frank Brynes, are Jennifer Jane Marshall is acting assistant professor of American art history at Stanford University. For help during her research, the author thanks Ed Rider and the staff of the Corporate Archives of Procter & Gamble Company, as well as the librarians of the Harvard Business School Library and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She also extends her gratitude to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Stanford Art and Art History Department, both of which provided funding in sup- port of this work. Finally, the author wishes to acknowledge the crit- ical support and indispensable good judgment of Scott Bukatman, Amy Earls, Diana Korzenik, Kate Mondloch, Jason Puskar, Ce ´cile Whiting, and the two anonymous readers of this piece, all of whose comments on the initial manuscript greatly improved the final text. B 2008 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. All rights reserved. 0084- 0416/2008/4201- 0003$10.00
In the 1920s and 1930s, Procter & Gamble popularized the art of soap carving through a series of annual competitions,which explicitly promoted handicraft as a therapeutic alternative to the machine age. However, soap sculpture in fact offered away to accommodate the changes associated with commercial modernization. A do-it-yourself hobby that relied on massproduction, turned the household chore of shaving soap into an art form, and produced compact works of art that reflected thedemands of factory production, soap sculpture is an example ‘‘antimodern modernism’’—assimilating and aestheticizing thevery processes of modernization it otherwise appeared to oppose.
ON EASTER SUNDAY 1937, New York Citypolicemen reported to an especially un-fortunate crime scene: three wasted bod-
ies found in the small confines of amodest BeekmanHill apartment. A middle-aged woman and hergrown daughter, an aspiring model said to posefor artists (reputable and otherwise), had beenstrangled and shoved under a bed in the frontroom. Another corpse bloodied themattress in theback bedroom: the women’s boarder, an olderBritish gentleman known to be hard of hearing,had been stabbed to death in his sleep. In re-constructing the tragic events, police detectivesdetermined that the typical order of such mattershad been reversed. Instead of a murderous in-truder surprising the women through an open win-
dow or flimsy front door, the women arrived hometo find their killer already there, patiently awaitinghis opportunity for ambush. That he had been wait-ing for some time was evidenced by a particularlyeerie detail. A small sculpture, carefully carved inor-dinary bath soap, was found at the scene, causingpolice to surmise that the killer had ‘‘whiled away histime carving the statue as he waited.’’1 This telltalecalling card led detectives to identify their culprit, aso-called mad sculptor, whose earlier exploits hadincluded employment in a waxworks studio in LosAngeles, an apprenticeship to the eminent sculptorLorado Taft in Chicago, and a brief incarceration ina New York state hospital for the insane. In the man-hunt that ensued, police were dispatched to theMetropolitan Museum of Art, where they believedthe killer carver was likely to seek solace. Instead,months passed before the amateur artist surren-dered himself and confessed.2
Any triple homicide on Easter morning wouldhave had plenty to recommend it to eager readersof true crime, but the deranged-hobbyist-as-killerconceit gave this story its exceptional appeal. Re-porters relished the blurry distinction between vir-tuous self-dedication and nefarious obsession, andthe incriminating evidence—that carefully worked
1 ‘‘Chicago Center of Search for Triple Slayer,’’ Chicago DailyTribune, April 9, 1937, 1.
2 Newspaper accounts of the period vary widely as to thespecifics of the case. The details presented here as to the murdersof Mary and Veronica Gedeon and their tenant, Frank Brynes, are
Jennifer Jane Marshall is acting assistant professor of Americanart history at Stanford University.
For help during her research, the author thanks Ed Rider andthe staff of the Corporate Archives of Procter & Gamble Company,as well as the librarians of the Harvard Business School Library andthe Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History ofWomen in America. She also extends her gratitude to both theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Stanford Art andArt History Department, both of which provided funding in sup-port of this work. Finally, the author wishes to acknowledge the crit-ical support and indispensable good judgment of Scott Bukatman,Amy Earls, Diana Korzenik, Kate Mondloch, Jason Puskar, CecileWhiting, and the two anonymous readers of this piece, all of whosecomments on the initial manuscript greatly improved the finaltext.
B 2008 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2008/4201-0003$10.00
piece of sweet-smelling sculpture—only heightenedthe story’s creepy fascination.
Readers of this mad sculptor story, whichreemerged occasionally well into the 1950s, wouldcertainly have been familiar with the killer’s chosenpastime. Indeed, soap carving boasted a kind ofubiquity at the time of the murders, satisfying thecreative impulse of adults and children alike withits yielding ease, its affordable accessibility, and itsnostalgic appeal to the folksy crafts of a bygone era.But this clean-cut hobby, like the mad sculptorhimself, was not quite what it seemed. If the soap-carving killer captivated readers by inverting thetypically wholesome associations with homespunhandicraft, close examination reveals that soap carv-ing itself was already marked by a number of similarsuch reversals.
The craft’smany proponents explicitly embracedsoap carving for its quaint, almost primitive sim-plicity and recommended it as nothing less than atherapeutic alternative to the alienating effects ofmechanized mass production. However, the factthat the hobby’s most vociferous proponent wasnone other than Procter&Gamble (P&G)hints nottoo subtly at the sort of commercial accommodationsthat the art of soap sculpture afforded. Corporatesponsorship, in the form of annual nationwide con-tests, came with a series of smaller ironies, too. Whathad once been a tedious aspect of housekeeping—cutting up a bar of soap for use in cleaning—wastransformed into an artistic act. And the top prizewinners in P&G’s contests—creating absolutelyunique works of art by hand—were rewarded withthe chance to have their pieces cast in bronze orporcelain and reproduced for mail-order sale. Con-tradiction and irony even suffused soap sculpture’sformal aesthetic, which, in accordance with thecontemporary ideals of both abstract modernismandDepression-era frugality, centeredon the valuesof simplicity and restraint.Carving’s procedural andformal insistence on subtraction thus ventured—simultaneously—a critique and a reinforcement ofmachine age modernization. Contradicting theassembly line’s multiplications and duplications insingular handmade objects, carving ironically also
advanced a style perfectly suited to efficient stand-ardization and rationalized reproduction: smooth,plain, compact, and uncomplicated (fig. 1).
In his influential work No Place of Grace: Anti-modernism and the Transformation of American Culture,T. J. Jackson Lears examines how the earnest ac-tivities of ‘‘antimodernism’’—the craft revivals,back-to-naturemovements, and primitivist celebra-tions of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies—actually accommodated corporate cap-italism by reinforcing its values of individual self-expression and fulfillment.3 As a hobby that soexpressly laid claim to antimodern values, soap carv-ing offers itself to Lears’s interpretive rubric, andits internal contradictions would seem further tosupport it. Moreover, and specifically because itwas a hobby, soap carving also aptly illustrates thefundamental inversion at the heart of modernleisure, namely, that the activities used to pass the
Fig. 1. Frank Balkovec, The Swabbing Gob, second quar-ter of the twentieth century. Soap sculpture. (Procter &Gamble Archives.)
culled from ‘‘Slain Model’s Father Held,’’ Chicago Daily Tribune,April 1, 1937, 1; William Fulton, ‘‘Hunt Sculptor in 8 States asSlayer of Trio,’’ Chicago Daily Tribune, April 6, 1937, 1; ‘‘Sought inGedeon Slayings,’’ Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1937, 2; ‘‘Irwin HuntGoes on Here,’’ New York Times, April 16, 1937, 48; ‘‘Victims of aSex-Crime Wave,’’ Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1937, G7; ‘‘IrwinConfesses 3 Gedeon Murders: Seized in Chicago,’’ New York Times,June 27, 1937, 1; Ellery Queen, ‘‘The Strange Case of the MadSculptor,’’ Washington Post, March 10, 1957, AW15.
3 See T. J. Jackson Lears,No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and theTransformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1994).
52 Winterthur Portfolio 42:1
time off the job so often reinforce the work ethicvalues that the job requires.4 Leisure historianStevenGelber calls this effect ‘‘disguised affirmation’’and suggests thatAmerica’s industrious, good-for-youhobbies (from fancywork to furniture building) allamount to somuch ‘‘ideological spillover,’’ extend-ing the imperatives of the workplace, even whileseeming to offer compensatory respite.5
Both Lears and Gelber take a sober view ofthese covert expansions of modernity’s governingnorms, and indeed soap sculpture seems to offer anespecially instructive example of Antonio Gramsci’sconcept of hegemony. An important model toLears’s analysis (and one devised in response to thesame processes of mechanization that provided thebackdrop for soap sculpture), hegemony accountsfor how dominant ideologies, including corporatecapitalism, maintain their dominance by reproduc-ing themselves as the cultural values held dear bysociety. With its claims to art, beauty, and populistaccessibility, soap sculpture discursively operatedabove the crass concerns of the marketplace and sooffered a particularly potent opportunity for unwit-ting cultural participation in business interests.
However, to the degree that soap carving ac-commodated many of the cultural forces it ap-peared to resist, this effect was not so simply a caseof corporate villainy or top-down deceit. For one,soap carvers were not so easily duped. They knewthe hobby was a marketing stunt (some even sub-mitted entries that directly referenced P&G’s ad-vertising themes), and they were likely aware of thecompromises that came with the pastime’s nostal-gic refusal of mechanization. Having to purchase abar of factory-made soap just to enjoy ‘‘actuallymak-ing an object,’’ in the words of one how-to guide,would certainly have offered an early clue.6The factwas that the hobby’s many internal contradictions,which so perfectly demonstrate themaneuvering ofhegemony, apparently did not interfere with itspromise to provide curative respite from the grow-ing pains of modernization, at least not to thethousands of enthusiastic American soap carvers.Instead, the contradictions themselves may wellhave been the very basis for its curative effects,offering the chance to begrudgemodern life, whileadjusting to its demands, in a ‘‘process of evasion’’
that Lears describes as ‘‘half-conscious’’ and amatter of ‘‘self-deception rather than deliberateduplicity.’’7 While perhaps not as spine tingling asthe tale of the soap-carving killer, the social arthistory of this popular American pastime thus hasits own twists: a complex web of internal contra-dictions and ironic inversions spun to deflect andultimately adjust to the particular challenges ofmachine age modernization.
Carving in the Machine Age
In the midst of the Great Depression, one news-paper pundit observed, ‘‘Less cash, more leisureand an urge to do something that will endure are acombination that is restoring the arts and crafts totheAmericanhome.’’8Thedramatic resurgence ofdo-it-yourself hobbies, well documented by socialhistorians of the period, offered a number ofpractical benefits to Americans strained by un-employment and anxiety.9 Not only did hobbies inthe workshop or garden pass the time, they alsoresulted in tangible, usable benefits, like book-shelves and bar stools and carrots and beets.Indeed, many enthusiasts explicitly identifiedinstrumentality as their primary motivation, speak-ing in terms that fairly substantiate Gelber’s thesisof ‘‘ideological spillover.’’ One California house-wife professed that she had found purpose in theart of hand carving, which put her hands to the‘‘useful’’ task of making something; anotherchalked the recent craft renaissance up to ‘‘Amer-ica’s philosophy’’ that ‘‘even leisure must beworthy.’’10 In the exceptional case of the Depres-sion, however, leisure’s ‘‘disguised affirmation’’ ofa normative work ethic was far from covert. Leisurevery often was work, and the more that pastimescould reinforce traditional values, the better.
4 See StevenM.Gelber,Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work inAmerica (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
5 Ibid., 15.6 National Soap Sculpture Committee, The Simple Craft of Carv-
ing Soap (n.p., n.d.), content ID Y-591, Procter & Gamble Cor-porate Archives, Cincinnati (hereafter P&G Archives).
7 Lears, No Place of Grace, 17.8 Gerald B. Burtnett, ‘‘If You’re Modern, Here’s Your Hobby—
It’s Wood Carving,’’ Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1934, H6.9 For more on the history of American hobbies during the
Depression, see Gelber, Hobbies; Susan Currell, The March of SpareTime: The Problem and Promise of Leisure in the Great Depression(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Anne D.Williams, ‘‘Leisure in theGreat Depression: TheMany Pieces of theJigsaw Puzzle Story,’’ Ephemera Journal 6 (1993): 99–115; and JosephJ. Corn, ‘‘Educating the Enthusiast: Print and Popularization ofTechnical Knowledge,’’ inPossible Dreams: Enthusiasm for Technology inAmerica, ed. JohnL.Wright (Dearborn,MI:Henry FordMuseumandGreenfield Village, 1992).
10 Burtnett, ‘‘If You’reModern’’; Charles W. Duke, ‘‘PerennialYouth—Where to Find It,’’ Washington Post, July 16, 1933, 49.
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In this climate, hand carving achieved specialstatus. In addition to providing the usual sort of up-lift associated with all hobbies, carving was furtherdistinguished both by the durability of its outputand by the manual and mental discipline it en-forced. In every sense, carving was hard work. Thesturdiness of hand-carved objects formally sug-gested the kind of artistic and moral solidity thatcrafters tended to associate with the work of mak-ing something by hand. In the same vein, carving’spractical challenges were said to foster a very spe-cific set of mental and manual skills: skills thatemphasized creative thrift and procedural parsi-mony. Making something through the process ofelimination required logical concentration andprep-aration: envisioning the object and then rationallydeducing what had to be stripped away in order toreveal it. Throughout the process, the carver bal-ancedmental labors withmanual exertion, and bothwere ultimately kept in check by the stubbornresilience of the material itself. Assuming an in-herent relationship between the carved object andthe disciplined mind, many advice columnists ofthe era promoted carving as a good way to ‘‘keep akeen edge on mental abilities’’ during the searchfor employment and to banish any of those ‘‘jobhunters’ jitters’’ in the meantime.11
There was some irony to this last endorsement.As the procedural opposite of assembly-line massproduction, carving was much more than a hobby:it was the very refusal of just those processes ofmodernization that many people viewed as theDepression’s root cause. The mechanization ofAmerican industry, once a source of pride and op-timism, had lately become the target of resentment,as the era’s new time- and labor-savingdevices startedto displace blue-collar workers from their manufac-turing posts. Economists and cultural critics of theera dubbed this ‘‘technological unemployment,’’ anunintended consequence of industrial modern-ization and one that gave many Americans morefree time than they knew what to do with.12 In-deed, as historian Susan Currell has shown, theearly twentieth-century leisuremovement centered
on the assumption that increased free time was tobe a fixture ofmodernAmerican life and that it wasin the country’s best interest to manage, control,and even profit from this new surplus of per-sonal downtime.13 ‘‘Overproduction’’ was the otherbogeyman of Depression-era commentary, as ex-perts and laypeople alike indicted the additions andmultiplications of assembly-line manufacturing forthe market’s volatility and collapse. Thus, with carv-ing, hobbyists ironically found a diversion that filledthe spare time of technological unemploymentwhile also performing the reversal of its causes:mak-ing by hand, instead of by machine, and makingone unique thing, instead of millions.
Carving’s implicit critique of mass productionrepeatedly emerged as a leitmotif in its discourse,particularly in many of the era’s human-intereststories about ‘‘expert amateurs.’’ Popular Mechanicshad a special penchant for working stiffs whodivided their time between the factory floor andthe homeworkshop. ErnestWarther of Dover,Ohio,a steel mill employee since age fourteen, was onesuch hobbyist. Carving whole train sets from wood,including every last nut, bolt, and bearing, Wartherbrought the nostalgic work of handicraft to bear onan icon of modern technology. His day job, whichrequired handling upward of thirty thousandpounds of steel every day, ten hours a day, was ‘‘notparticularly kind tohands,’’ in theunderstatedwordsof the article, but the ‘‘utmost precision’’ that carvingdemanded offered Warther a curative antithesis tohis repetitive and trying industrial labors.14 InCanada, ‘‘cowboy-rancher’’ W. G. Hodgson turnedcarving against mass production in another way.Whittling figurines of Voltaire, Gandhi, and Salomeout of juniper roots collected on the prairie,Hodgson used knives hemade himself, crafted from‘‘discarded Ford automobile parts,’’ which he hadpicked up as discerningly as he did his scrap wood.15
Hodgson’s creative procedure thus reclaimed thedetritus of Ford’s famous assembly lines for theopposite sort of work: creatively carving away in-stead of routinely adding to.
While ‘‘expert amateurs’’ like Warther andHodgson flourished with the challenges of woodcarving, most Americans weremoremodest in theirwhittling attempts. Cheaper than wood or stone,and much easier to work, ordinary bath soap
11 ‘‘Job Hunters’ Jitters—and How to Banish Them,’’ ChicagoDaily Tribune, October 6, 1937, B3.
12 For more on how this phenomenon affected the culturalclimate of the Depression in the United States, see Amy Sue Bix,Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs? America’s Debate over TechnologicalUnemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress andHagleyMuseum and Library, 2000); and Joel Dinerstein,Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African AmericanCulture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
13 See Currell, March of Spare Time.14 ‘‘Master Carver,’’ Popular Mechanics, April 1932, 588.15 ‘‘Rancher’s Hobby Wins Favor in Art World,’’ Popular
Mechanics, April 1934, 502.
54 Winterthur Portfolio 42:1
emerged as the public’s favorite medium for carv-ing, attracting enthusiasts from across the tradi-tional boundaries of race, gender, age, and class.Softly yielding to any household knife, soap pro-mised sculptural satisfaction to even the most im-patient novice (fig. 2). One expert amateur in thehobby, high school sophomore Doug Pickering,boasted that he could duplicate the ivory sculptureof ancient China in forty minutes flat.16 Not onlyeasy and gratifying, the craft also fulfilled the goalsof constructive leisure, encouraging both manualdexterity and keen observation and providing thethrill of being able ‘‘to point to your work and say,‘There is something I have done,’’’ as one writerenthused.17 Accordingly, soap carving was a stapleof local community centers and Young Men’sChristian Associations (YMCAs) across the country,providing tinkering adults and childrenwith awhole-some way to connect with their creative sides. Al-though his personal favorite was the poster-paintingclass, artist Jacob Lawrence later recalled that soapcarving hadbeen among themany activities availableto him at the Utopia Children’s Settlement Housein Harlem in the 1930s.18During the same years, a
New York City radio station offered a half-hourhow-to programon the topic of soap carving; mean-while, at a Chicago-area YMCA, ‘‘the Raider gangmight go to soap carving and the Cougars to shopwork.’’19 By the later years of the Depression, soapcarving managed to reach the pinnacle of leisure-time activities. In 1938, a newspaper headline pro-claimed the triumph: ‘‘Soap CarvingOusts ‘Jigsaws’as National Leisure-Spender.’’20
Soap carving was not just for children and am-ateurs. Students at both the Chicago Art Students’League and the Corcoran Art School used soap forsculpting exercises, and both schools featured themedium in their student exhibitions of the late1920s and early ’30s.21When theNational SculptureSociety staged its ambitious state-of-the-mediumshow in San Francisco in 1929, its publicity materialtook pains to draw attention to a handful of workscast from models originally carved in soap.22 Thesculptor Brenda Putnam included a section on soapcarving in her instructional art book, The Sculptor’sWay of 1939, and professional artistic magazines like
Fig. 2. Bovine soap sculpture, second quarter of the twentieth century.(Procter & Gamble Archives.)
16 ‘‘Soap Is Used to Aid Study of Literature,’’ Washington Post,March 7, 1937, P2.
17 National Soap Sculpture Committee, Simple Craft of CarvingSoap.
18 Online transcript of tape-recorded interview with JacobLawrence by Carroll Greene, October 26, 1968, Archives of AmericanArt, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/lawren68.htm.
19 ‘‘Today on the Radio,’’ New York Times, June 20, 1931, 22;‘‘BoyGangs Find It Pays to Play atDivision ‘Y,’’’Chicago Daily Tribune,July 26, 1936, NW1.
20 Rae Lewis, ‘‘Soap Carving Ousts ‘Jigsaws’ as National Leisure-Spender,’’ Washington Post, January 16, 1938, S7.
21 Eleanor Jewett, ‘‘Art and Artists,’’ Chicago Daily Tribune,June 20, 1926, E4; Ada Rainey, ‘‘Corcoran Art School Show CalledBest,’’ Washington Post, June 8, 1930, S7.
22 ‘‘Public Curious over Sculpture Exhibit Here,’’ San FranciscoChronicle, April 14, 1929.
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the American Architect also covered the art form, as-suming their readers would find soap carving‘‘desirable and valuable in studying certain detailsof ornament.’’23
Among all the advocates of soap carving, Putnamhad actually been its earliest, extolling its demo-cratic accessibility well before theDepressionmadethis a crucial selling point. In 1925, she observed:‘‘Everybody cannot afford to experiment in mar-ble, nor have they the strength to handle the heavyblocks, but white soap is available to everyone.’’24
Adding to this point, and countering any snobbyskepticism, Putnam observed, ‘‘It is hard work,mentally if not physically.’’25 Admitting that shehad first turned to soap as a cheap way to get somepractice in carving, Putnam, an electedmember ofthe National Academy of Design, said that whathappened next was an ‘‘inspiration.’’26 ‘‘Carving insoap has shown me how far I had gotten fromsculpting,’’ she said, adding that the oddball me-dium had helped to refocus her mind on the dis-tinctly sculptural values of volumes and voids, forcingher to create the former by cutting away the latter.27
As it happened, she relished the challenge andcredited this exercise in mental discipline for re-turning her to the noble work of what she called‘‘essential sculpture.’’28
With strong appeals to the ‘‘essence’’ of sculp-ture, Putnambegan to plot a course for what wouldbecome the aesthetic ideology of soap carving: acommingling of moral, economic, and artistic val-ues that potently combined a strong work ethicwith parsimonious frugality and artistic restraint.These would become crucial terms in the moraland aesthetic economies of the Depression and, atthe time of Putnam’s remarks in 1925, were al-ready ascendant in the Americanmodernist vocab-ulary of paring down and laying bare. But, asidefrom all that, Putnam’s approval was just good pub-licity. Her lofty ideas, reprinted widely, were is-sued as the proud sound bites of one of the earliestprize winners in P&G’s new national soap-carvingcontests.
The National Soap Sculpture Competitionin White Soap
Early in the case of themad sculptor, puzzled de-tectives called in some unusual expertise: a youngadvertising executive named Henry Bern. Policehoped that Bern would be able to identify thekiller, perhaps by discerning some distinctive stylein the soap statue left behind. At the time, Bern wasprobably the closest thing there was to a soapsculpture expert, as the primary publicity managerfor P&G’s annual soap-carving competitions. Whileit would take the tough times of the Depression toturn soap carving into a bona fide craze, the na-tional fad got its initial start with a little self-servingnudge from P&G. In 1924, the prominent soapmanufacturer announced a National Soap Sculp-ture Competition in White Soap, and it drew somany submissions and so much attention that thecompany made it an annual event, repeating thestunt regularly until the early 1940s.29 Little won-der, then, that Bern denied any recognition of thesoap carving left at the New York City crime scene.So what if he felt certain that it was the work of lastyear’s contest winner (as he later admitted)?30 It wasnot worth risking any bad publicity for the hobby hehad worked so hard to establish. Why mess withanything that was otherwise such good, clean fun?
No stranger to clever promotional ploys, P&Ghad long been a leading innovator in American ad-vertising. It was among the first companies in thecountry to market its product directly to the con-sumer, among the first to recognize the value ofbrand identification and loyalty, and among thefirst to offer free samples, premiums, and rebates.31
23 ‘‘Small Sculptures in Soap,’’ American Architect, June 20,1929, 823.
24 ‘‘The Prize Winners in Soap Sculpture,’’ Los Angeles Times,January 11, 1925, 27.
25 Brenda Putnam, The Sculptor’s Way: A Guide to Modelling andSculpture (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1948), 299.
26 ‘‘The Prize Winners in Soap Sculpture,’’ Los Angeles Times,January 11, 1925, 27.
27 Ibid.28 Ibid.
29 With the outbreak of the Second World War, leisure-timeactivities fell to the wayside as pocketknives were traded in forcarbine rifles, and manicure sticks (commonly suggested as an aidfor sculpting soap) were exchanged for rivet guns. Although somesoldiers would return to soap carving while convalescing in RedCross centers and military hospitals, for the most part the craft wasto be relegated to summer camps and kindergartens in the decadesafter World War II. ‘‘Sailors Learn New Skills in Navy Hospital,’’Chicago Daily Tribune, March 12, 1944, N1.
30 Henry Bern to A. H. Perrin, April 30, 1959, Public RelationsDepartment, the Procter & Gamble Company, P&G Archives.Bern’s memory of the murders does not exactly match up with thenewspaper coverage, and so it is subject to doubt whether the killer,Robert Irwin, actually was a prizewinner in the competition of1936. I have not been able to verify either way.
31 Advertising history reserves a special place for hygiene prod-uct manufacturers, which have long been industry leaders in pro-motional innovation. See Davis Dyer, Frederick Dalzell, and RowenaOlegario,RisingTide: Lessons from165Years of BrandBuilding at Procter& Gamble (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004); Ellen J.Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the
56 Winterthur Portfolio 42:1
It was also the first in the industry to sponsor a radioserial drama, with Ma Perkins making its debut asAmerica’s first soap opera in 1933. Moreover,throughout P&G’s promotional history, contestshad always been a central feature.32 Initiated in theearly 1890s by Harley Procter (son of cofounderWilliam Procter), P&G’s first contests invited con-sumers to write poems about one of the company’snewest products, an affordable approximation ofEurope’s famous castile-style soaps, called Ivory.33
In addition to their obvious promotional value,these competitions also furthered Harley Procter’sinsistence that P&G’s products be endowedwith anair of artistic distinction. Defending against any as-sociation with the hoax and humbug that had longcharacterized the personal hygiene trade, P&G de-veloped a promotional culture of its own, crafting apublic image founded on civic virtue andmoral up-rightness. In the early days, this effort manifesteditself in various ways: in frequent retellings of howHarley Procter named Ivory soap after an inspira-tional passage from the book of Psalms, in a printcampaign concentrated first in the Christian press,and in Ivory’s famous claim to be ‘‘99 44/
%0044/100per centpure.’’34 Such Victorian-tinged overtures to pietyand purity were nicely matched by P&G’s self-conscious attempts to incorporate art into its pub-licity material, where it could be leveraged as amark of cultural decency and, by extension, a kindof moral, personal cleanliness. Prominent illus-trators, including Maxfield Parrish, Alice BarberStephens, and Jessie Wilcox Smith, fulfilled com-
missions for the company’s full-page ads, whichcame to be coveted collectibles in their own right.35
The contests fit right in with these self-consciousattempts to imbue P&G’s product line—Ivory inparticular—with the social capital of artistic merit.Not mere lotteries, such contests enrolled con-sumers (usually female) as creative partners in de-veloping brand identity, while also honoring thegenteel tradition of a literate and imaginative ladyof the house.36
Under the leadership ofWilliamCooper Procter,Harley’s brother and company president from 1907to 1930, P&G rose to near-monopoly status. Buildingnew plants to the north, east, and west of its homebase in Cincinnati and making ambitious stridestoward vertical integration and horizontal acqui-sition in an internationalmarket, the soapmakerwasa multimillion dollar industry leader by the end ofthe 1920s. At that point, even the Depression had ahard time getting in its way. In 1939, Fortune mag-azine reported that few years had ‘‘been more con-genial than the last ten’’ to P&G’s bottom line.37
Over the course of what proved to be one of themost difficult periods for American business, themanufacturer sold more than 1.6 billion dollars’worth of soaps, shortenings, and detergents to ahardscrabble public, intent on scrimping and savingonmost everything else.38 Indeed, while some of theold domestic chores reappeared during these leanyears (e.g., home canning, which put a noticeabledent in the prepared foods market), there was nosignificant return to household soap making.39
Although consumers were willing to keepbuying factory-made soap during the Depression,other issues caused concern among its manufac-turers, thus perpetuating the need for aggressivemarketing strategies. The primary concern wassoap’s perilously low profit margin. A low-pricedcommodity that cost next to nothing tomake, soapdependedonmarketplace overconsumption for itsprofits, relying on exceptionally high levels of de-mand that, even by the 1920s, were not a foregoneconclusion. The mass market for sanitary productswas only yet in its infancy, andmechanization itself
Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination (Cambridge, MA: MIT ListVisual Arts Center, 1992); Procter&Gamble: The House That Ivory Built(Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, 1988); Oscar Schisgall, Eyeson Tomorrow: The Evolution of Procter & Gamble (Chicago: Ferguson,1981); Juliann Sivulka, Stronger than Dirt: A Cultural History of Ad-vertising Personal Hygiene in America, 1875–1940 (Amherst, NY: Hu-manity Books, 2001); Vincent Vinikas, Soft Soap, Hard Sell: AmericanHygiene in an Age of Advertisement (Ames: Iowa StateUniversity, 1992).
32 P&G continues to use folksy, nostalgic hobbies in their pro-motional strategies. Recently, the company has been instrumentalin revitalizing Bunco, a simple game of chance popular amongmiddle-aged women, the target demographic for heartburn rem-edies. Shrewdly, P&G currently sponsors a number of local andregional Bunco tournaments under the banner of its heartburnremedy, Prilosec. EllenBryton, ‘‘AnOldDiceGameCatches onAgain,Pushed by P&G,’’ Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2007, A1, A13.
33 Substantial monetary prizes encouraged submissions, whichwere only valid when accompanied by Ivory wrappers as proof ofpurchase. The top-ranking rhymes could draw $300, while winningideas for another contest, the most Unusual Uses for Ivory Soap,could rake in up to $1,000. Schisgall, Eyes on Tomorrow, 35.
34 Harley Procter, desperately seeking a name for thecompany’s newly developed soap, was said to have received divineinspiration from Ps. 45:8, read one Sunday during his regular Epis-copal mass. See ibid., 26; and Dyer, Dalzell, and Olegario, RisingTide, 27. For more on the fear of association with patent medicinepeddlers, see 28–29.
35 Schisgall, Eyes on Tomorrow, 35.36 The highly gendered nature of P&G’s early contests prove a
point of distinction with the company’s later more equal-opportunitysoap sculpture competitions. Judging from the available list of sub-missions and prize winners, there were nearly as many male contes-tants as female contestants in the P&G soap sculpture contests.
37 ‘‘99 44/%00
44/100% Pure Profit Record,’’ Fortune, April 1939, 78.38 Ibid.39 Recent Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research
Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 908.
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proved a threat. As historian Vincent Vinikas hasshown, all the modern conveniences that savedtime and labor also tidied up the work of daily life,thus decreasing demand for soap.40 Finally, thepromotion of soaps like Ivory as an all-purpose won-der product ran aground of a wildly diversifyingmarketplace, awash in deodorants, mouthwashes,perfumes, and detergents: all of which challengedbar soap’s security as the silver bullet for universalcleanliness. ‘‘The soap maker weeps,’’ wrote onesympathetic analyst.41
In response to these challenges, P&G, Palmol-ive, Colgate, and Lever Brothers overcame theirusual competitive enmity and formed the NationalAssociation of Soap and Glycerine Producers, withthe so-called Cleanliness Institute serving as itspublic voice starting in 1927. The council, whichcertainly did not lead to any collegial swapping oftrade secrets, energetically devoted itself to culti-vating an automatic association between ‘‘healthand wealth’’ and ‘‘soap and water.’’42
In the early 1920s, and just in advance of thesoap-carving contests, P&G matched this industry-wide assertiveness with renewed attention to itsown corporate identity. It took a significant step inthis direction when it brought an external con-sultant on board, hiring Edward Bernays, one ofthe era’s most prominent publicity gurus, as itsPR (public relations) director.43 During his tenure,which coincided with the activities of the CleanlinessInstitute and the start of the Depression, Bernays wassuccessful in furthering P&G’s ambition to join theideals of cleanliness and cultural distinction togetherin a corporate identity founded on social virtue. Artwould prove useful to this effort, just as it had formany other companies that had lately discovered theworth of ‘‘art-in-industry’’: a formula Bernays himselfhad been instrumental in developing. As the PRdirector for Jacques Seligmann and Company, aManhattan art dealer, Bernays came to understandthat the artworks everyone called the ‘‘most impor-tant,’’ were really just those that the art-collecting
coterie had made ‘‘fashionable.’’44 From this lesson,Bernays realized not only that ‘‘art served upward so-cial mobility in America’’ but also, and more sig-nificantly, that ‘‘the dealer who knew how to projectart symbols effectively reaped the profits.’’45 Thismaxim, Bernays would soondiscover, applied tomar-keting challenges far removed from art dealing.
As PR consultant for the silk manufacturingfirm Cheney Brothers during the 1920s (a posthe held concurrently with his P&G commission),Bernays sought to leverage the cultural associationsbetween art and ‘‘upward social mobility’’ by estab-lishing the company as a trendsetter in avant-gardestyle. He mounted textile exhibits at the Louvre,commissioned paintings from Georgia O’Keeffe touse in ads and window displays, introduced a lineinspired by the works of Marc Chagall, and stagedan Egyptian-themed fabric design contest, timed tocapitalize on the recent discovery of Tutankhamen’stomb.46 The calculated use of ‘‘art symbols,’’ asBernays called them, was an important ingredientin his complex recipe for promotional success.WithBernays, the point was not so much hawking anindividual product as developing corporate brandidentities around the distinct and desirable lifestylemarkers their products were said to promote. Hebrought this philosophy to bear on his work forP&G in the early 1920s, even though itmeant bring-ing high cultural values to a product that was knownfor being cheap, ubiquitous, and middling. Therewould be no O’Keeffe flowers for the soap makerandnogala events at theLouvre, but there wouldbesoap sculpture: an art symbolmobilized to unite thecontemporary ethic of modern artistic ‘‘purity’’with P&G’s chief hallmarks: clean purity, strongmoral fiber, and refined cultural distinction (fig. 3).
In the few pages of his autobiography thatBernays dedicated to his activities at P&G, heremembered that it had been Brenda Putnam, thesculptor and soap enthusiast herself, who had in-advertently sparked the idea for a soap-carving con-test. Struck by an impulse to carve cheap sculptural‘‘sketches’’ on a monumental scale, Putnam wroteto P&G and asked whether they would be willing tosend uncut blocks of oversized Ivory directly to herstudio. They obligedwithout comment. Soon after,however, reports of the unusual request began tospread through theCincinnati offices, bringing somelevity to what was otherwise an ‘‘exceedingly well
40 Vinikas, Soft Soap, 79, 82.41 Walter B. Pitkin, The Consumer: His Nature and His Changing
Habits (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1932), 45–47, quoted in Vinikas,Soft Soap, 83.
42 Quotes taken from an advertisement issued by the Cleanli-ness Institute in 1928 and reprinted in Sivulka, Stronger than Dirt,231–45.
43 P&G’s recently hired advertising agency, Blackman Com-pany, was directly responsible for Bernays’s hire, after the companyspecifically requested that a PR expert be brought on board. EdwardL. Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations CounselEdward L. Bernays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), 342.
44 Ibid., 339.45 Ibid.46 Ibid., 299–309.
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regulated’’ and ‘‘formal’’ corporate atmosphere,distinguished only by its unusually quiet, ‘‘yoga-likecalm.’’47 Eventually, the story wound its way toBernays, whose experiences with Seligmann andCheney Brothers had primed him to see Putnam’sletter as an unexpected gift of pure PR gold.
Winners of the first National Soap SculptureCompetition in White Soap were announced inJanuary 1925. The fuzzy institutional records andscant public reporting of this inaugural contestmakeit hard tonail down the specifics of the contest’s earlyformation, even though this lacuna also suggests thetentative way in which P&G first approached theidea. However, Bernays’s instinctive sense that soapcould be promoted successfully as an art supply—adding just one more application to Ivory’s long listof boastful claims—proved to be cannily astute.Restoring a little creative ingenuity to P&G’s contests(which by then had become mainly chance draw-ings), the soap sculpture competition boasted adouble-edged advantage. A popularizing admixtureof high and low, advanced in the interests of pub-licity, the contest appealed simultaneously to sculp-ture’s fine art associations and to craft’s popular
appeal. It conjoined the edifying potential of artwith the purifying potential of soap, and—like theCleanliness Institute’s guide to social advancement,‘‘Kit for Climbers’’—it presumed to offer thesocially uplifting benefits of both to everyone,regardless of class, age, race, gender, or skill level.48
Chiefly an ‘‘idea man,’’ Bernays was onlyminimally involved with the contests themselves.Just as he was not lakeside in Central Park for theIvory soap ‘‘yacht’’ regatta he dreamedup for youngboys, Bernays deferred the soap-carving contests toa publicity management team after the initial planwas inmotion (fig. 4).49This was whereHenry Berncame in. Dispatched with the task of coordinatingthe event, his limitless energy would prove equalto the mounting tasks that lay ahead. While ini-tiated with caution, P&G’s soap-carving contestsgrew boldly and consistently throughout the latterhalf of the 1920s, with submissions increasing fromaround 500 for the first contest to about 2,000 in1927 and to well over 5,000 in 1931.50 Moreover,these numbers were said to represent only a fractionof the hobby’s prodigious popularity. Not only weresome amateurs too shy to enter, but many of the en-tries came prescreened: winners of locally run con-tests that had advanced to thenational competition,sent by school board panels and community or-ganized councils. This ad hoc system of unofficialsemifinals reflected the contest’s wide geographiccoverage, spread more or less evenly across thecontinental United States. Bern later rememberedthe breadth of the contest’s appeal. As was typicalfor the adman, he boasted through anecdote: ‘‘Asfar as we know our youngest and oldest contestantwas 6 and 86 years respectively—the youngest was inNew England, the older in Portland, Oregon. Theyboth entered the same contest; they both chose astheir subject a whale; they were unknown to oneanother.’’51Nordid soap carving stop at the border:
44/100% Pure Profit Record,’’ Fortune, April 1939, 77.
48 The era’s popular commentary on soap carving suggests awide range of practitioners: from out-of-workmen to craft-inclinedwomen, from Anglo-American honors students to underprivilegedAfrican American youth, and from professionally trained sculptorsto absolute novices. Likewise, the existing lists of submissions andprize winners from the P&G contests would also seem to indicate arelatively high degree of diversity, at least as far as can be deducedfrom names and geographic location and certainly by comparisonto the contestant pools for P&G’s earlier competitions.
49 Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 344.50 ‘‘The Prize Winners in Soap Sculpture,’’ Los Angeles Times,
January 11, 1925, 27; ‘‘Soap Sculpture,’’ American Magazine of Art,August 1932, 128; Ernest Bruce Haswell, The Development and Use ofSoap Sculpture (New York: National Soap Sculpture Committee,1932), 9, content ID Y-561, P&G Archives.
51 Henry Bern to A. H. Perrin, January 19, 1959, Public RelationsDepartment, Procter & Gamble Company, P&G Archives.
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Fig. 4. Central Park, New York. From Ernest Bruce Haswell, The Development and Use of SoapSculpture (New York: National Soap Sculpture Committee, 1932), 25. (Procter & GambleArchives.)
Fig. 5. New York, second quarter of the twentieth century. From Ernest Bruce Haswell, TheDevelopment and Use of Soap Sculpture (New York: National Soap Sculpture Committee, 1932), 9.(Procter & Gamble Archives.)
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submissions came in from the territories, Canada,Britain, Europe, and Asia. Indeed, a special ForeignCommittee had to be established in 1930 to provideadequate international representationand,of course,to underscore the contest’s worldwide viability.
After all the entries arrived in their tiny cratesfrom all over the world, a distinguished committeeof artists, critics, art museum directors, industrialleaders, and education experts systematically ap-praised them, picking out nearly one hundred en-tries each year to receive prizes (figs. 5 and 6).52
The jury’s collective expertise was impressive. Inaddition to art world leaders like JohnCottonDanaof the Newark Museum and Alon Bement of theNational Alliance of Art and Industry, a number ofquite prominent artists also served as regular judges,constituting a roster that fairly reflected the diversityof American art at the time (fig. 7). Charles Dana
Gibson, an illustrator best known for his ubiquitousGibson Girl of the 1890s, was an obvious choicesince he—likeDana andBement—had considerableexperience in the cooperative labors of merging artand industry. Bessie Potter Vonnoh (a sculptor bestknown for her genre scenes in bronze and the firstwoman to be elected to the National Academy ofDesign) and Lorado Taft (erstwhile mentor to themurderous mad sculptor and author of the com-prehensive History of American Sculpture) joinedGutzon Borglum,Harriet Frishmuth, and Leo Lentelliin representing the academic wing of contemporarysculpture. Jury duty, however, was not relegated justto the big wigs of the old guard. Two of the mostprominent figures of sculpture’s youthful cuttingedge, Alexander Archipenko and Robert Laurent,also served time as contest jurors. Both men wereemigres to theUnited States andbroughtwith themradical new ideas for plastic expression, includ-ing a renewed emphasis on formal simplification.For Archipenko, simplification meant figurationthrough abstraction and the ironic activation of con-cave and negative spaces as the positive terms of
Fig. 6. Judges of the National Soap Sculpture Committee Annual Competition for SmallSculptures in White Soap, New York, second quarter of the twentieth century. (Procter &Gamble Archives.)
52 During the 1920s, the jury awarded between thirty-five andforty-five prizes per contest. Beginning in 1930, this number jumpedto over one hundred and was maintained during the decade at theadvertised ninety-six prizes and four special awards.
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three-dimensional composition. For Laurent, sim-plification was a procedural directive as much as aformal one. Like the hobbyists whom he judged inthe P&G contests, Laurent had adopted the sub-tractive method of carving, which he explicitlyembraced—in terms not far off from the officialcontest literature—as a way to ‘‘seize forms as theygradually appear while working.’’53 By and large,the list of prizewinnersdidnot include suchartworldnotables; only a young Eero Saarinen now stands outamong the commended. Saarinen, who competedin the Senior Group (ages fifteen to twenty-one),won several awards over the years, including firstplace for a piece called Sorrow in 1928 (figs. 8 and 9).However, Saarinen was still decades away from thetulip chairs and airport terminals that would earnhim fame (and which, it must be said, bear a certainresemblance to the chalky purity of carved soap). So,
it was left to the jury to supply the contest with its starpower and ‘‘glamour,’’ which Bern often stressed ascrucial for garnering press attention.54
The coverage was indeed considerable, focusedeach yearmainly on the exhibitions that capped offevery contest. Beginning inNew York in venues suchas the Art Center, the Anderson Galleries, and AlonBement’s National Alliance of Art and Industry,the shows included every entry that was submittedand came accompanied with a series of attention-getting events: including a press preview, a speciallunch or dinner honoring the winners, and a pub-lic conferral of the awards. As Bern remembered it,‘‘Winners who came to the New York ceremonies. . . experienced the same handling that glamorousHollywood Stars [sic] get when they come to NewYork’’ (fig. 10).55 After closing in Manhattan, theshow was then divided into smaller units for nationaltravel, circulating among department stores, schools,
Fig. 7. ‘‘Accomplished Sculptors Judge Soap Carvings,’’ New York, second quarter of the twentieth century. Panelfrom left to right: Hayworth Campbell, Paul B. Hoeber, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, A. Stirling Calder, Chester Beach,and W. S. Conrow. (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
54 Bern to Perrin, January 19, 1959, P&G Archives.55 Bern to Perrin, April 30, 1959, P&G Archives.
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and museums across the United States, along withscreenings of P&G’s instructional film on the hobby(figs. 11–13). These were the busiest days of the con-test year for Bern, setting up blocks of tickets forschoolchildren, inviting high society notables to‘‘host’’ the show on special days, drafting profilesof the contest winners for the syndicated press: justgenerally practicing the ‘‘ballyhoo’’ and ‘‘exploi-tations’’ of what he called his ‘‘publicist’s art.’’56
An added advantage of the soap-carving con-tests, from the PR-minded vantage point of Bernays
and Bern, was that P&G only surfaced in publicreports as the event’s generous benefactor, not itsstring-pullingmastermind. In order to enter, contes-tants had to send away for guidelines and submissionforms, which were available from an obscure or-ganization known by the name of the National SoapSculpture Committee. This sounded very official, in-deed, and its New York City address only punctuatedthe authenticity of the committee’s art world cred-ibility. All aspects of the contest were handled pub-licly under this name. The committee publishedevery contest announcement and exhibition cata-log, and it was also responsible for an informative
Fig. 8. ‘‘Some of the Prize Winners in the Fourth Annual Contest,’’ 1929 National Soap Sculpture Committeecontest, including Sorrow (top right), by Eero Saarinen. From Margaret J. Postgate, Carving Small Sculptures in IvorySoap (New York: National Soap Sculpture Committee, 1928), 8–9. (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
56 Ibid.
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series of books by soap carvers on the how-tos andwherefores of their chosen art form (fig. 14). Be-cause of the calculated prominence of the com-mittee, P&G appeared to have got involved onlysecondarily. News reports always identified P&G asthe sponsor of the contests, usuallymentioning theexact dollar amount of the donated prize money,but the company was never identified as the con-test’s sole originator and coordinator (thus ‘‘donat-ing’’ money only to its own PR programs). This way,P&G was able to avoid the appearance of impropri-ety, an important measure of decorum in an erawhen advertising gimmicks—and exasperation withthem—ran high.57 The ploy worked, if the opinionof the critic for the New York American can be takenas any indication. Comparing the contest’s soapsculpture exhibition to a similarly lowbrow show atJohn Cotton Dana’s Newark Museum, NothingTakes the Place of Leather, held in 1927–28, thewriter concluded, ‘‘It is all very well for the shoeindustry to hold to the ancient belief that ‘thereis nothing like leather,’ but it would be hard to
convince hundreds of young sculptors in theseUnited States that there was anything to equal whitesoap.’’58 In other words, some commercial interestshadmore persuasive claims to Bernays’s art symbolsthan others.
In part, the soap-carving contests dodged ac-cusations of crass self-interest by virtue of the qualityof the works themselves. To the surprise ofmany artcritics, many of the sculptures were remarkably finepieces of work. In their formal simplicity, technicalprecision, and artistic sophistication, they held theirown in the pages of Art and Archaeology and theAmerican Magazine of Art. The write-up in Art andArchaeology concluded: ‘‘Messrs. Proctor and Gam-ble are to be congratulated’’ for sponsoring amove-ment that brought hope to anyone concerned withthe future of American art. This piece, titled ‘‘TheClassics in Soap,’’ drew attention specifically to
Fig. 9. Eero Saarinen holding his soap sculpture,ca. 1926. (Cranbrook Archives.)
Fig. 10. Presentation of award for Third Prize in theStudent Senior Group to Faustina Monroe for her soapsculpture, Mother Love, New York, second quarter of thetwentieth century. (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
57 See Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Mak-ing Way for Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press,1985).
58 New York American, June 10, 1928, quoted in Margaret J.Postgate, Carving Small Sculptures in Ivory Soap (New York: NationalSmall Sculpture Committee, 1928), 15, content ID Y-596, P&GArchives. Formore onNewark’s populist exhibitionprogramof the1920s, see Nicolas Maffei, ‘‘ John Cotton Dana and the Politics ofExhibiting Industrial Art in the US, 1909–1929,’’ Journal of DesignHistory 13, no. 4 (2000): 301–17.
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those works that demonstrated the ideals of classicalsculpture.Under themastheadofArt andArchaeology,two illustrations of works from the P&G contestappear to demonstrate serious artistic refinement(fig. 15). In the context of the full page, the figurineslose their diminutive scale and so seem more for-midable than the inches-high pieces really were. As aresult, they credibly lived up to the high praise of thecritics, which submitted these homemade nudes asproof ‘‘thatmany of the oncoming artists . . . have alove for the fine and not too common things oflife.’’59
The approving mention of soap carving in thenational art press—particularly in terms that al-luded to the exalted purity of classical sculpture—suggests that the contests weremoreor less successfulin brooking the divide between popular hobby andhigh art distinction and, as a result, also successful asa publicity stunt that did not feel like publicity. ‘‘It isno trick,’’ wrote another writer, soap carving ‘‘is anauthentic art that has come to stay.’’60Still, ingenuoustestimonial and calculated publicity were ever hard to
disentangle. This latter assertion of authenticity camefrom the pen of Ernest Bruce Haswell, an artist con-tracted by P&G to write pamphlets for the NationalSoap Sculpture Committee.
The name of the so-called National Soap Sculp-ture Competition in White Soap was, in effect, an-other dodge. Although the brand name itself wasleft out of its title, the contest offered a clear op-portunity to promote specifically Ivory soap as theexclusive medium for soap carving. For one thing,Ivory was the only white soap then available on themarket. Called ‘‘Procter & Gamble’s White Soap’’before it was called Ivory, the soap’s opaque white-ness remainedoneof theproduct’smost distinguish-ing characteristics in the early twentieth century,setting it apart from the waxy yellow stuff thenavailable from grocers in bulk.61 Writers continu-ally admonished eager amateurs to restrict their ef-forts to the white variety, which, as one expert soapcarver explained, has ‘‘a fine, even texture that willallow you to carve the most delicate details.’’62
Fig. 11. ‘‘Sculpture in White Soap,’’ window display advertisement for Gimbel Brothers exhibit, eighth annualcompetition, 1932. (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
59 ‘‘The Classics in Soap,’’ Art and Archaeology 33, no. 4 ( July–August 1932): 221.
60 Haswell, Development and Use of Soap Sculpture, 8.
61 Dyer et al., Rising Tide, 26.62 Lester Gaba, Soap Carving: Cinderella of Sculpture (1935; repr.,
New York: Studio Publications and the National Soap SculptureCommittee, 1940), 16.
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While the emphasis onwhiteness correspondedto P&G’s promotional investment in hygienic pu-rity and to the art critics’ neoclassical comparisons,it is difficult to avoid noticing its implicit overturesto racial superiority, particularly given both the over-whelming tendency toward figurative work amongsoap carvers and the era’s fascination with eugenics,a racist pursuit not a little bit obsessed with the aes-thetics of cleanliness and hygiene, as art historianChristina Cogdell has shown.63 Indeed, Clarence J.Gamble, a grandson of one of P&G’s founding part-ners, was an active supporter of eugenicist causesin the 1930s, mainly devoting his energies (andinheritance) to the cause of promoting birth con-trol for poor communities in Puerto Rico and
Appalachia.64 However—and however uncon-sciously operative this connection between pure,white soap and pure, white bodies may have been—the literature on soap sculpture outwardly staked itsidealist claims not on racial purity but on techno-logical purity: on the quaint innocence of makingsomething by hand.
Ivory’s brand name alone went far in strength-ening the association between the modern craft ofsoap carving and the preindustrial tradition of hand-icraft: an association that only furthered P&G’soverall attempt to link soapwith the values of whole-some innocence and timeless purity. The ivory anal-ogy was an obvious one: ‘‘A carving made from a
Fig. 12. Production shot of Procter & Gamble instructional film on soap carving, second quarter of the twentiethcentury. (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
63 See Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America inthe 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
64 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S.Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press,2003), 103–8.
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soap like Ivory,’’ one pamphlet explained, ‘‘has theclear, translucent illusion of real ivory.’’65 Sureenough, claims to the visual similarity between com-mercial Ivory and its natural namesake ran rampantthrough P&G’s literature. In his many booklets forthe National Soap Sculpture Committee, Haswellusually began with a brief look at carving’s rolethroughout human history. In this narrative, carv-ing appeared as themost primitive and natural wayto create art in three dimensions, the oldest ‘‘folkart’’ known to every generation of ‘‘humble crafts-man,’’ and a ‘‘continuous line’’ of technique thatran throughout sculpture’s history. Animal ivorysuited this narrative perfectly. ‘‘Ivory carving, fromthe first scratched lines on the mammoth tusk tothe more recent work of the moderns,’’ he wrote,
‘‘is the history of art and of civilization.’’66 Suggest-ing that aspiring soap sculptors would do well toexamine prehistoric artifacts in actual ivory, andalso drawing upon the growing contemporary in-terest in Native American scrimshaw (fueled inpart by the official sponsorship of New Deal artsprograms),67Haswell’s booklets only furthered thepremodern, even primitivist, associations that P&Gfostered for the act of carving a bar of soap by hand.
Drawing a straight line between ‘‘thefirst scratchedlines on the mammoth tusk’’ and ‘‘the more re-cent work of themoderns,’’ Haswell acknowledgedthe current state of interwar American sculpture:tending definitely toward formal simplificationand accompanied by some rather strident calls for
Fig. 13. Production shot of Procter & Gamble instructional film on soap carving, second quarter of the twentiethcentury. (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
65 National Soap Sculpture Committee, ‘‘12th Annual Compe-tition for Small Sculptures inWhite Soap for the Procter & GamblePrizes, Closing May 1, 1936,’’ announcement, P&G Archives.
66 Ernest BruceHaswell, A Little Book about Small Sculpture (NewYork: National Soap Sculpture Committee, 1930), 4, content IDY-583, P&G Archives.
67 My thanks to Emily Moore for pointing this out to me.
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sculpture’s return to carving. In fact, when BrendaPutnam claimed that carving in soap had returnedher to the essence of sculpting, she was making arather pointed dig. Within the internal debates ofearly twentieth-century sculpture, to celebrate ‘‘di-rect carving’’ (as it was called)was to take sides againstmodeling and casting: essentially additive and re-productive procedures, against which both the sub-tractive technique and singular products of carvingcould offer defiant critique.68 Indeed, artists and
critics often embraced carving explicitly because ofits apparent antimodernism: its honest simplicityand singular uniqueness fitting nicely into a pre-scribed course away from excess and toward essence.
With increasing regularity through the late 1920sand early 1930s, art critics came to the conclusionthat American sculpture had reached a point ofcrisis. Not unlike the American economy, sculp-ture seemed a victim of its own success: suffocat-ing under theweight of its excessive details, overrunby decorative multiples, and guilty of meaninglessdecadence. Indeed, commercialism andmechanicalduplication haunted the reception of cast bronze,and it was because of the distaste for these mod-ernized modes of artistic production that carvingcould emerge as many critics’ sole ‘‘hope’’ for thefuture of American sculpture.69 Just as hand carv-ing was said to offer Americans a therapeutic hobby(and useful model of restraint) during the hardtimes of economic crisis, so, too, was its art-world re-vival embraced as a way to resuscitate the decliningart of fine sculpture.
The official discourse on soap sculpture reiter-ated many of the key terms in this debate betweendirect carving and bronze casting. P&G’s literatureurged amateurs to rebuke all ‘‘non-essentials’’ anddedicate themselves only to the most basic of art’s‘‘underlying principles.’’70The first trick in this ex-ercise was to ‘‘differentiate between the technique[s]of modeling and carving’’ and then to modify one’sgoals andapproach tomatch the latter’smoremodestaesthetic economy (fig. 16).71 One instructionalguide, issued by P&G for classroom use, cautionedthat frustration awaited any youngster who hoped tosimulate the detailed realism of bronze sculpture—itsfluttering leaves, manicured fingernails, and quiver-ing muscles—in a small bar of soap. But the writerwent on to suggest that this failure was a necessarystep toward personal and artistic growth. In fact,these ambitious students should be allowed to fail,forcing them to respect carving’s regulating lim-itations and so absorb valuable lessons in self-discipline and moderation.
Fig. 14. Cover of Ernest Bruce Haswell, A Little Bookabout Small Sculpture (New York: National Soap Sculp-ture Committee, 1934). (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
68 For more on the direct carving movement in modernAmerican sculpture, see Roberta K. Tarbell, ‘‘Direct Carving,’’ inVanguard American Sculpture, 1913–1939, ed. Joan M. Marter,
Roberta K. Tarbell, and Jeffrey Wechsler (New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1979), 45–66; and Judith Zilczer,‘‘The Theory of Direct Carving in Modern Sculpture,’’ Oxford ArtJournal 4, no. 2 (November 1981): 44–49.
69 Arthur Millier, ‘‘Nation’s Sculpture Shown,’’ Los AngelesTimes, May 12, 1929, C11.
70 Postgate, Carving Small Sculptures, 3.71 Cincinnati-area sculptor Mary L. Alexander, as quoted in
Catalogue: Small Sculptures in White Soap, Sixth Annual Competition forthe Procter and Gamble Prizes (New York: American-AndersonGalleries, 1930), n.p., P&G Archives.
68 Winterthur Portfolio 42:1
Fig. 15. Tom Robertson’s Torso and Ellen Bezaz’s Mohammedan Beggar. From ‘‘The CurrentIvory Soap Sculpture Awards,’’ Art and Archaeology 33, no. 4 ( July–August 1933): 218.
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The unanimous support for carving among thenation’s art writers likewise tended toward themor-alistic, tending to raise the process to an ortho-doxy, in spite of the fact that many of the sculptorsidentified with the ‘‘carve-direct school’’ warnedagainst making a fetish of technique. In fact, manycarvers, including soap sculpture judge RobertLaurent, often cast copies of works that they had ini-tially carved. That they could do this without muchinterruption to the critical embrace of carving sug-gests the degree to which process, rather than prod-uct, was theprized term in the rhetoric on carving.Asimilar hierarchy was active in the literature of soapsculpture, even in the analogy between bath soapand animal tusks. ‘‘A well-carved piece of soap,’’Haswell wrote in an especially encouraging passage,‘‘is of more artistic importance than a poorly carvedbit of ivory,’’ adding, ‘‘Art is not amatter ofmaterial,but of execution.’’72 Here, Haswell alluded to theleveling capacity of soap’s affordability, but, indoing so, he also placed the burden of aestheticvirtue on the process of making, rather than on thething that is made. In some sense, this was a nec-essary move. For one thing, many of the works sub-mitted were not as formally simple or conceptuallyoriginal as devotees of carving might have hoped.For another, directing attention to the premodernlabors of carving byhandhad the benefit of drawingattention away from the many ways in which thesoap-carving contests actually worked to oppositeeffect, demonstrating a deeper, self-contradictingcomplicity with commercial, industrial modernity.
Soap Sculpture’s Accommodations
The very idea of making a work of art out of a barof soap was itself unthinkable without the successof automation in the first place. In fact, Depression-era whittlers, busy making elephants and portraitbusts frombars of soap,werenot actually reviving anold craft tradition so much as they were ignoring
one. While, by the mid-nineteenth century, citydwellers were able to buy bulk soap from localgrocers, the majority of rural-dwelling Americanswere obliged tomake their own, a practice they con-tinued through the last decades of the century.73
Ivory was among the earliest prepackaged soaps tobe marketed and distributed nationally. It was aninstant success, adopted by hundreds of thousandsof families in its first year on the market and soauguring an end to the once ‘‘commonly practicedhousehold art’’ of home soap production, as thecompany frequently bragged.74 Soap carving thusdid not really recover a lost art for themodern era somuch as it ignored the craft heritage of soap pro-duction itself, traceable to myriad family recipesand countless hours spent working in the backyard.Developed directly out of a soapmanufacturer’s pro-motional gimmick, soap carving emerged as a‘‘revival’’ of craftsmanship, only given an initialand paradoxical disregard for themass productionof its medium.
Cutting up bars of soapwas not somenew thing.Indeed, carving soaphadoncebeenquite common,not for the creation of a solid piece of sculpture butinstead for the shavings it left behind. In 1910, P&Gpublished ahousekeeping advice booklet that intro-duced newlywed women to their fictitious counter-part, ‘‘ElizabethHarding, bride.’’ In an early chapter,Mrs. Harding looks ahead to her first house cleaningwith trepidation.75 However, with the help of a barof Ivory, she quickly learned to make her refinedhome—graced by a dwarfed copy of the WingedVictory of Samothrace—dazzle (fig. 17). Even with herdelicate hands, Elizabeth could easily cut usefulflakes from the bar, and these soap shavings,mixedwith a little water, could serve any number of herconsiderable housecleaning needs. A separate homeeconomics textbook of the same period called thisshaved-soap-and-water paste ‘‘soap jelly’’ and advised
Fig. 16. ‘‘Progressive Steps in Soap Carving.’’ From Soap Sculpture: A Digest of Soap Carving(New York: National Soap Sculpture Committee, ca. 1937). (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
72 Haswell, Little Book about Small Sculpture, 7.
73 Dyer et al., Rising Tide, 19.74 Ibid., 39; Herbert Feis, Labor Relations: A Study Made in the
Procter & Gamble Company (New York: Adelphi, 1928), 4, 7.75 Procter & Gamble, Elizabeth Harding, Bride (Cincinnati:
Procter & Gamble, 1910).
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women to supplement those ‘‘bits and ends of soapwhich have been left’’ in the bath, by ‘‘shav[ing] upas muchmore as is necessary’’ from a larger, unusedbar.76 Thus was carving soap, at the turn of thetwentieth century, a necessary part of keeping house.The P&G booklet helpfully provided recipes for avariety of such soap jelly concoctions, those appro-priate to cleaning silverware, floors, and linens, aswell as thoseuseful formaintainingElizabeth’s bridal
beauty. A little lemon added to the soap-and-waterpaste, for instance, would reduce the appearance offreckles got in the honeymoon sun.
By the time of the soap-carving contests,Mrs. Harding was no longer the blushing bride,and the habit of shaving soap tomake soap jelly wasquickly becoming a thing of the past. Prepackagedboxes of flaked soap, soap granules, and soap chipswere among themany threats to Ivory’s dominancein the 1920s, offering housewives another time-saving convenience to go alongwith that other loom-ing threat to old-fashioned laundering: the washing
Fig. 17. ‘‘First House Cleaning.’’ From Procter & Gamble, Elizabeth Harding,Bride (Cincinnati: Procter & Gamble, 1910). (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
76 Juniata L. Shepperd, Laundry Work for Use in Homes andSchools (St. Paul, MN: Webb, 1909), 18, 26.
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machine. P&G introduced its first product forwashing machines, Chipso, in 1921, which joinedIvory Flakes as the company’s only two boxedsoaps. But even these chips and flakes were fleetingmarketplace contenders. Eventually, it was granu-lated soap that took off as the most competitiveterrain for soapmanufacturers during the interwarperiod. While projecting a unified front of healthand hygiene to the American public through theirAssociation of Soap and Glycerine Producers, P&G,Lever Brothers, and Colgate were simultaneouslyembroiled in a fierce patent fight, each one at-tempting to corner the market for granulated soap,which was growing steadily in proportion to the ris-ing adoption of home washing appliances. Ulti-mately, each company clamored to market withtheir own slightly different formula: Chipso for P&G,Rinso for Lever Brothers, and Super Suds forColgate. By the first National Soap Sculpture Com-petition in White Soap in 1924, the days of carvinga bar of soap to get the wash done were only a dis-tant memory, if one perhaps not too happily re-called. P&G’s soap-carving contests thus introducedwhittling soap as ameans of artistic expression, onlyoncewhittling soap (much lessmaking it)hadceasedto be a practical domestic activity.
Just as Ivory had its Camay (a tinted, perfumedcake for more feminine tastes), Chipso had itsIvory Snow, a granulated boxed soap advertised as‘‘dainty pearls of Ivory’’ and ‘‘the newest, kindestway to take care offinewoolens anddelicate silks.’’77
The ironic connection between the end of soapshaving as a chore and the rise of soap carving as anart was made vividly apparent in the Ivory Snow adcampaign, which featured lively figurines carvedfrom Ivory but frolicking alongside depictions of in-dustrially (notmanually) producedpowder (fig. 18).The scenes were carved by Lester Gaba, who madea name for himself during the 1920s and 1930scarving soap sculptures for photo ads and in-storedisplays and even authoring his own lengthy tomeon the intricacies of the hobby.His works appearedin the pages ofMcCall’s andHouse and Garden, andhe fulfilled commissions for Saks Fifth Avenue,Bonwit Teller, and other prominent departmentstores, including a Mother’s Day miniature repro-ducingWhistler’sMother in soap (fig. 19).78All thesecommissions surely produced piles and piles ofsoap scraps. Unlike earlier days, when these shavingsconstituted an important product in themselves,
Fig. 18. Lester Gaba, ‘‘The Perfect Pair for WashingWoolens.’’ Soap carvings for Ivory Snow advertisingcampaign. From Good Housekeeping, May 1941, 13.(Procter & Gamble Archives.)
77 Procter & Gamble, Ivory Snow advertisement, Good House-keeping, December 1931, 122.
78 Gaba, Soap Carving, 49–50.
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Gaba was more likely to have tossed his in thedustbin. After all, products like Ivory Snow hadmade shaving soap an unnecessary task.
In the exhibitions P&G staged for their com-petitions, hundreds upon hundreds of palm-sized
figurineswereon view: devotional icons,mythologicalcharacters, nude torsos, sentimental genre groups,and portraits of illustrious Americans (figs. 20 and21). Each small piece, pure white in accordancewith the no-painting rule (andwith the soapmaker’sthoroughgoing emphasis on purity), was distin-guished only by a tiny number, pinned directly to itandcorresponding to the catalog’s long list of names,titles, and hometowns. Glass-topped vitrines andglass-frontedbookcases were full of diminutiveworksin soap, and although this plenitude served to dem-onstrate the relevance of soap carving through sheerproof of numbers, it also undermined carving’s op-positional rhetoric of singularity. After all, if theidiosyncrasies of carving by hand were alleged toproduce objects of matchless singularity, the P&Gdisplays embarrassed this very idea, presenting agoggle-eyedpublic with a limitlessmultitude of carv-ing after carving, each one claiming the same prideof individuality as the next.
The Art and Archaeology write-up of the soap-carving contest, replete with its illustration of a head-less, muscle-bound torso, offered explicit analogies
Fig. 19. Lester Gaba, Whistler’s Mother, second quarterof the twentieth century. Soap sculpture diorama.From his Soap Carving: Cinderella of Sculpture (1935;repr., New York: Studio Publications and the NationalSoap Sculpture Committee, 1940), 49.
Fig. 20. Installation of an exhibition for the National Soap Sculpture Committee Annual Competition, secondquarter of the twentieth century. (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
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between soap sculpture and classical sculpture. How-ever, even this praise—meant toflatter soap carving’spretensions to high art distinction—indicates soapcarving’s tendency toward self-contradiction. Whilethe similarity was no doubt intended by the artist, theanalogy also designated the piece of carved soap asnothing more than a copy. What made the workartistically remarkable was not its originality or its ir-reducible singularity but quite the opposite: its nota-ble success in replicating art history’s greatestmasterworks. Imitation, not originality, was whatearned these soap figures respect. Likewise, the pop-ularity of soap carving as a medium for renderingminiatures—all those department store displays—suggests how it was just as often simulation andmultiplication, rather than singularity and unique-ness, that contributed to the craft’s success.
As an elegy for simpler days made poignantlyironic both by its necessary reliance on machineproduction and by its simultaneous appearancewith mechanized household cleaning, Depression-era soap carving thus betrayed its collusionwith thevery processes it was imagined to counterbalance.
Nowhere was this more plainly in evidence than intwo of the special prizes offered to entrants of thesoap-carving contests. A few years into the contest,the National Soap Sculpture Committee began toadvertise an extra pair of awards, supplemental tothe usual string of first-, second-, and third-placeprizes doled out in each age category and open toany competing entrant. Named for their sponsors,the Gorham Prize and the Lenox Prize went tothose carvings that the judges deemed most ap-propriate for commercial duplication and sales.In addition to paying the winner a cash prize, theGorham and Lenox companies also extended con-tracts to the winners in order to secure reproductionrights.
One such soap-carving-turned-paperweight wasa piece by Margaret Postgate, a sculptor who alsowrote several how-to guides for P&G’s National SoapSculpture Committee. Her work, Conventional Ele-phant (so named for its abstract, schematic style) wasthe most unusual bronze offered in the Gorhamsales catalog of 1928 (fig. 22). A bit of prefatory textremarked that, while the small paperweight appeared
Fig. 21. Installation of an exhibition for the National Soap Sculpture Committee Annual Competition, secondquarter of the twentieth century. (Procter & Gamble Archives.)
74 Winterthur Portfolio 42:1
either like an ‘‘ultra-modern’’ invention or thework of ‘‘some artist of ancient Babylon,’’ its nota-ble ‘‘absence of detail’’ instead was more pragmati-cally explained: it had everything to do with the‘‘medium in which it was originally carved.’’79 Inthese comments, the Gorham Company upheld
much of the rhetoric surrounding carving: a sim-ple and simplifying means of expression, whichproduced works that were simultaneously ancientand modern in their formal straightforwardnessand loyalty to process and medium. However, bypromoting the tiny elephant as a commodity, andone ‘‘unusually decorative in its vivid blue patine’’(a superficial effect of age simulated in the processof casting), the catalog signaled just how far
Fig. 22. Margaret Postgate, Conventional Elephant, ca. 1928. Cast bronze from a soap sculp-ture original; H. 2 O1/2}, W. 4 H1/4}. From the Gorham Company, Famous Small Bronzes (New York:Bronze Division of the Gorham Company, 1928), 71. (Gorham Company Archive, John HayLibrary, Brown University.)
79 The Gorham Company, Famous Small Bronzes (New York:Bronze Division of the Gorham Company, 1928), 70.
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Gorham had removed carving from its erstwhileresistance to the multiplying effects of commercialmass production.80TheGorhamPrize and the LenoxPrize (the latter promised to reproduce winningworks in porcelain) were just more promotionalploys for P&G: more of Bernays’s legitimating artsymbols. Associating the competitionwith these lux-ury brand names also served to attract new contes-tants, enticed by the faint promise of national celeb-rity and the chance to see one’s modest little carvingtransformed into a lasting work of art. However,and ironically, the prize also necessarily submittedthe singleness and simplicity of carving—key termsin the craft’s antimodern lexicon—back to the com-mercial logic of mechanical duplication.
The Mingling of Soap and Art
Leo Lentelli, an academic sculptor and occasionaljuror for the P&G contests, celebrated soap carvingas a useful reminder that ‘‘the artistic spirit shouldnot dwell in towers of ivory’’ but should instead beallowed to suffuse all areas of human life: a nice punand one that points to the obvious appeal of soapcarving’s democratic populism.81 Indeed, soap carv-ing attracted so many enthusiasts precisely becauseit yielded remarkably satisfying artistic rewards forsuch a simple and tenaciously unpretentious hobby.Lester Gaba called this its ‘‘Cinderella’’ effect andpromised: ‘‘Without the aid of magic powers you,too, can change something drab and ordinary intoa thing of beauty.’’82 The democratizing effects ofthe ‘‘mingling of soap and art’’ served P&G’s pro-motional efforts well, as EdwardBernays was keenlyaware.83 Here, his art symbols worked in two di-rections: a quotidian product was elevated by itsassociation with artistic pursuits, while the art ofsculpture was popularized by its realization incheap household soap.
This funny reciprocity between artistic valuesand populist, democratic values, while certainly atimely gimmick for the era, also achieved some-thing else. In 1939, Fortune magazine commented
on thedifficulties of trading in ‘‘auniversal commod-ity like soap.’’84 Having achieved ubiquity throughmass production anddistribution, soap threatenedtobecome so cheapas tobecomeeconomically value-less. By cultivating art symbols in its advertising (andFortune cautioned that it was ‘‘death not to advertise’’in the soap business), P&G successfully linked soap’sprecarious economic value, its near valuelessness, tothe absolute value of art.85 By carving works of artfrom bars of soap—a fairly wasteful hobby, after all—enthusiasts transformed an essentially worthlessobject into a work of art and so also an object beyondthe pale of normal economic valuation. They tooksomething cheap andmade it priceless. For admenlike Bernays, this was a colossal success, markingsoap’s apotheosis as an unquestionable human needand achieved by associating the commodity with art’sseemingly extraeconomic (and so unimpeachable)value.
For those who championed carving as an anti-modern opposition to the means and effects ofcommercial mass production, this was soap carving’sunhappy irony. Although ostensibly an antimodernreturn to bygone modes of authentic, handcraftedproduction, soap carving actually accommodated—even aestheticized—the very procedures of mech-anization it appeared to abhor. It did this in threeways. First, soap carving relied on mass-producedsoap (and mass-market promotion) for its veryexistence and popularity. Second, soap carving wasan invented craft revival: a cultural innovation thatappeared only oncemodern technologies had ren-dered making soap, or cutting it up for domesticchores, obsolete. Finally, and most significantly,although the rhetoric of soap carving preached aline of subtractive simplicity, its official sponsorsrewarded this by offering its exemplars the apo-theosis of mechanical reproduction. Thus, whileharkening back to simpler times and pleasures inits small gestures of slow-paced subtraction, soapcarving ultimately served the demands of industrialmodernity, complicit both with the marketingschemes that promoted its popularity (and soapconsumption) and with the modern aesthetic offormal simplicity, an artistic ideal that transformedthe look of commercial standardization into a cul-tural virtue.
80 Ibid.81 LeoLentelli, as quoted inMary GrahamBonner, ‘‘Artistry in
Soap,’’ St. Nicholas Magazine, August 1927.82 Gaba, Soap Carving, 9.83 Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 344–45.
84 ‘‘99 44/%00
44/100% Pure Profit Record,’’ Fortune, April 1939, 154.85 Ibid.
