"Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor"
About this Quote
A playwright’s instinct is to look for the hidden stage machinery behind public feeling, and Clare Boothe Luce targets the loudest, brightest contraption of the 20th century: advertising. Her claim isn’t just that ads annoy or deceive; it’s that they reorganize desire on a mass scale, then leave real life unable to keep up. The unrest she points to is the friction between promise and paycheck, between the gleaming montage of what you’re told you could be and the stubborn limits of class, race, gender, and geography.
The line works because it inverts the usual scapegoats. Instead of blaming radicals, unions, immigrants, or foreign ideologies, she pins social volatility on the most “normal” civic wallpaper: the persuasive images you absorb while waiting for the radio program to return. That’s shrewdly theatrical. Advertising becomes a kind of national script supervisor, cutting and recutting the story of happiness until everyone feels miscast in their own life.
Context matters: Luce lived through the rise of mass media, consumer culture, and the postwar boom, when marketing didn’t merely sell soap; it sold identity, status, and modernity. Her subtext is moral and political: if the economy depends on perpetual dissatisfaction, then citizens are trained to experience their lives as shortages. Unrest follows not from scarcity alone, but from manufactured expectations - a permanent audition for a lifestyle always just out of reach.
The line works because it inverts the usual scapegoats. Instead of blaming radicals, unions, immigrants, or foreign ideologies, she pins social volatility on the most “normal” civic wallpaper: the persuasive images you absorb while waiting for the radio program to return. That’s shrewdly theatrical. Advertising becomes a kind of national script supervisor, cutting and recutting the story of happiness until everyone feels miscast in their own life.
Context matters: Luce lived through the rise of mass media, consumer culture, and the postwar boom, when marketing didn’t merely sell soap; it sold identity, status, and modernity. Her subtext is moral and political: if the economy depends on perpetual dissatisfaction, then citizens are trained to experience their lives as shortages. Unrest follows not from scarcity alone, but from manufactured expectations - a permanent audition for a lifestyle always just out of reach.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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