"A Superb Example of the Common Man": J.C. Leyendecker and the Staging of Male Consumer Desire in American Commercial Illustration, 1907–1931

"A Superb Example of the Common Man":J.C. Leyendecker and the Staging of Male Consumer Desire in American Commercial Illustration, 1907–1931 Dan Guadagnolo (bio) In 1907, men's clothiers Cluett, Peabody, and Co. of Troy, New York, contracted the commercial advertising firm Calkins & Holden to produce a series of advertisements for their new Arrow-branded line of semisoft collars. Collars were a massive commercial market in the early twentieth century, and so the commercial illustrations would have to pique the interest of middle-class white men for whom the collar was a means of signifying class status and character.1 For the advertising campaign, Calkins & Holden commissioned illustrator Joseph Christian Leyendecker to create advertisements featuring young, white, professional men wearing the new collar. In Leyendecker's ads, men surveyed one another in close-knit looking circuits, offering a visual economy that captured the value of sartorial choice in an industrial society where outward presentation had become a critical signifier of one's status. Painting ideal American men wearing the ideal American collar, the 1907 campaign launched Leyendecker's career, creating some of the most famous commercial advertisements of the early twentieth century. The ads were so well known that even Teddy Roosevelt considered Leyendecker's models to be a "superb example of the common man."2 These Arrow Collar men, a name by which the models in all of Leyendecker's ads, for collars or otherwise, became popularly known, "wore . . . [their] clothes with an aplomb that was new to United States' advertising copy," remarked one critic in 1955. The Arrow Collar aesthetic "typified the ideal of 1907 American manhood. The broad brow, the frank eye, the strong nostrils, the bow lips filled out almost to a pout. . . . these features . . . [were] instantly recognized as the property of the American dream man."3 The success [End Page 5] of the campaign tied this muscular vision of white masculinity to Leyendecker's aesthetic approach.4 Like Charles Dana Gibson's iconic figure of early twentieth-century advertising, the Gibson Girl, Arrow Collar men signaled the emergence of a new commercial order built around middle-class white Americans and their commercial wants and desires. Historians of gender and sexuality have charted the importance of standardization, rationality, and efficiency to the construction of white masculinity during the early twentieth century. Under the cultural logic of white supremacy, white masculinity's racial and gender domination were tied to its perceived exacting efficiency and self-control.5 Historians of advertising, however, have tracked an alternate current during this same historical moment: they argue that the growing field of applied psychology framed the human mind as inherently irrational. Ordinary people, especially in the context of the consumer market, were not ruled by reason. Rather, they were driven by emotion and desire, susceptible to persuasion and easily manipulated.6 Together with the history of gay identity formation, these literatures frame the historical questions that this article addresses, one that is critical to understanding how masculinity and whiteness intersected with a burgeoning commercial culture built upon managing consumer desire: how, given the presumed dispassionate rationality of white masculinity, did commercial illustrators like J.C. Leyendecker bring the white male body into commercial display? And in doing so, how did these illustrations foster new kinds of gender expressions for men who experienced nonnormative sexual and erotic desires? To resolve the tension between the presumed rationality of white masculinity and the new "emotional sell" of advertising, this article argues that Leyendecker's illustrations opened up commercial possibilities among sexually normative and nonnormative white middle-class men as irrational consumers driven by desire. To do so, his work drew upon the signifiers of middle-class respectability alongside the built muscular form, itself adopted from working classes as well as communities of color. Furthermore, Leyendecker mapped Western conventions of the female nude onto these male forms and deployed close, tightly detailed looking circuits between the male models featured in the illustrations.7 More than simply offering the built muscular form to middle-class men, however, his illustrations also brought into circulation a new queer gender expression, what I identify as a queer white middle-class muscular masculinity. Adopting the muscular form of...