Who “ruled the air” in 1910? (and who rules it now?)

“We each have a signal. A stream of raw power that flows with us. A power. A superpower. A super communication power.” So proclaims Verizon Wireless’s innovative “Rule the Air” advertising campaign.

“Send your signal forth with luminous videos, glorious data, and sublime megapixels,” another Verizon ad urges consumers. “Transmit your latest brainstorm over the airwaves. You just might start a revolution.”

Indeed, the airwaves are fundamentally democratic, Verizon insists. “Air has no prejudice,” a procession of women declare in a Rule the Air video spot. “It does not care carry the opinions of a man faster than those of a woman. It does not filter out an idea because I’m 16 and not 30.”

Virtually unscathed

Revolutionary, democratic, unprejudicial—Verizon’s campaign comes as Americans debate whether the wireless broadband airwaves really represent any of these wonderful things. Who will really rule the air, consumer advocates wonder, smart phone users or the wireless carriers? Two mobile providers dominate the broadband airwaves and, thanks to a recent federal court decision, they enjoy unchecked power to limit or prioritize data, content, and features at their pleasure.

But this isn’t the first time a big carrier tried a charm offensive of this sort. A century ago, the insurgent phone company of the time—American Telephone and Telegraph—also found itself swimming in a sea of public worry. Consumers and independent providers feared (rightly as it turned out) that the corporation would prevail in its ultimate goal, the acquisition of almost all of the nation’s phone lines.

And so AT&T launched the Progressive Era equivalent of a “Rule the Air” campaign. Obviously there’s a difference between then and now. Verizon offers wireless service; AT&T leased out its land lines. But in terms of policy objectives, the historian Roland Marchand thought that AT&T’s crusade worked.

When the Federal Communications Commission launched its first probe into the company’s aggressive practices in the mid-1930s, AT&T emerged “virtually unscathed” from the ordeal, Marchand noted in his classic history, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business.

“When observers asked why investigations of the telephone monopoly had elicited almost no public support during the perilous mid-1930s, corporate analysts almost unanimously gave credit to AT&T’s thirty-year campaign of coordinated institutional advertising and public relations,” his study concluded.

Let’s go back to the first “Rule the Air” campaign and see how it plied its magic.

The Multiplication of Power

Besieged by critics who warned that AT&T was gradually pushing independents out of the market, the company responded with a slogan: “One Policy-One System-Universal Service.” The “curse of Bigness” would be countered with the argument that bigness was best for consumers, for the nation, and especially for businessmen.

AT&T technology represented the “Multiplication of Power,” an early magazine advertisement insisted. The word “power” became ubiquitous in Bell ads. “Has the increased ability of the American business man to bring people to him from every locality, far and near, over the Bell Telephone System, been the cause of the mulitiplication of his power and his principality?” an ad rhetorically asked

You bet it had, just about every AT&T/Bell pitch proclaimed. AT&T represented the “Triumph of Science: Making a Neighborhood a Nation.”

And so it went—the telephone represented the “annihilator of space,” another magazine ad announced. AT&T “beguiled men with talk of their personal power,” Marchand observed, then piled on statistics about subscribers or dollars or lines or miles “to brag of the company’s own magnitude and resources.”

The early ads exhibited a decided penchant for the recitation—to the point of incantation—of large figures. Over the first ten years, some 70 percent of the ads cited at least one figure in the thousands, millions, or billions. Sixty percent included one or more figures in millions or above. Between 1908 and 1912, texts of seven individual ads incorporated ‘million(s)’ and ‘billion(s)’ at least four times. In 1914 the corporation outdid itself by including figures in the millions or billions some fourteen times in its April advertisement and nine times in August.

Supreme and glorious

But note the presence of a woman stretching out the “Transcontinental Phone Line,” a clear reference to the transcontinental railroad built a generation earlier. AT&T was always ambivalent about how to deploy feminine images.

As Marchand noted, the Bell System consistently pitched to the business class first—the phone represented as essential to companies and professionals. Bell ads often drew the latter as square-jawed guys confidently clinching deals in their offices. AT&T marketers were far more ambivalent about touting the telephone as a venue for “female” gossip (as if men didn’t gossip as well).

AT&T’s “bias towards ultilitarianism and no-nonsense masculinity” had a purpose, Marchand argued. “A monopoly utility company, one charged with supplying a functional service, needed to assume a dignified civic stature; it had reasons to shun any association with frivolous indulgences.”

But the corporation was also anxious to emphasize the “democratic” nature of telephone service, especially during the First World War, as women’s suffrage became a national issue and, in 1920, a national reality.

“War gave woman her supreme and glorious opportunity to enlarge her field of service,” an AT&T institutional ad explained shortly after the conflict. “In the counting house and chemical laboratory she has loaned her brains to the cause.” And “in telephone service, also, a host of capable, loyal daughters” further the nation’s future, the pitch continued.

Indeed, AT&T itself represented the essence of democracy, a publicly owned corporation exemplifying the central phrase of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “Of the people, by the people, for the people.”

“People of every walk of life, in every state in the Union, are represented in the ownership of the Bell Telephone System,” another ad explained. “People from every class . . . “

And, of course, “Of all AT&T’s stockholders, the respectable, needy widow gained central station by virtue of her representation of the ‘many citizens of small means’ who depended on the company’s profits,” Marchand observed. “No plutocrats were visible here.”

Evading the worst

By the mid-20th century, these advertising campaigns had repeatedly helped AT&T to avoid anti-trust scrutiny, even as the company gradually gobbled up most of the nation’s phone carriers. In 1913, the corporation avoided breakup or nationalization by agreeing to connect with local carriers and to a more regulated approach to their acquisition. In 1919, the Bell System released itself from wartime government control.