VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 64

luctantly postponed their plans for a massive postwar advertising blitz focused on the health-building
benefits of enriched bread and aimed at consumers, medical professionals, and nutritionists. 51
Then in 1948 and 1949, with the immediate global food crisis over, bakers mobilized to pick up
where they had left off during the war. Advertising images of war industry workers and soldiers segued
smoothly into images of children—mostly boys—engaged in competitive striving for physical and men-
tal superiority. In these ads, boys lunged at fleeing girls, wrestled each other, triumphantly waved
straight-A report cards, supported enormous weights, and grew bones, teeth, muscle, and brain cells at
explosive rates. Mrs. Bohnet's Bread in San Antonio helped a skinny boy drive railroad spikes with a
toy hammer while burly tracklayers looked on in amazement. Hol-sum enriched bread gave “Johnny”
the energy to swing from chandeliers over his listless, non-bread-eating sister, and a Town Talk bread
poster showed a tiny bruiser tackling his grandfather on the football field. Even the Schneider Bak-
ing Company's “Little Miss Sunbeam” reminded consumers that Uncle Sam wanted them to “reach for
energy-packed bread.”
Sometimes ads made the competitive message painfully clear— “Winners Eat Ward's” and ads fea-
turing running races come to mind. Other times it was less obvious, as in the widespread presence of
scientific-looking charts and graphs against which parents could measure their child's growth achieve-
ments against others'. “Most youngsters today are taller, healthier than children were a generation ago.
… What about your children?” asked a Jane Parker ad from 1954.
The message that bread was a weapons delivery system grew less explicit after the war, but it was
still there. Under the title “Reach! Mom … It's loaded!” a 1953 ad for Jane Parker enriched white
bread, portraying a cowboy-hat-wearing, pistol-wielding boy reminded readers that bread was “loaded.”
Most bread companies, it seemed, wanted to have their loaves associated with gunslinging cowboys in
some way. Wonder, Wheatty, Merita, Jaeger, and Bond, to name a few, all hawked bread with images of
Western action. Bread was for fighting, as one of the very last ad series in this genre—a 1970 Wonder
bread ad featuring a discouraged boy with a black eye—made clear. That ad packed a stiff punch with
the text “Bigger than Kevin. That's how big I want to be” over the head of the beaten boy.
With the country's burgeoning fertility rates, the shift in focus from soldiers and war workers to chil-
dren made sense. Baking industry advertising had focused on children in the past, of course. Before
the war, however, it typically portrayed them as innocents to be protected through scientific hygiene,
as cuddly objects symbolizing purity and wholesomeness, or as fragile objects of care. What changed
after World War II was not the focus on children in bread advertising; it was the ubiquitous language of
competitive striving used in that effort.
Baby boomer nostalgia paints early Cold War childhood as an age of play and plenty. And it was,
for many Americans, at least. 52 But anxiety and competition underpinned play and plenty. Boys' toys
took an emphatically bellicose form and the new media of television served up a steady stream of ag-
gressive masculinity and Manichean struggle. Of the top twenty-five TV shows in the late 1950s, nearly
half featured cowboys. “In an era marked by anxiety over masculinity and intense hostility toward ho-
mosexuality, boy culture emphasized toughness and aggression,” the renowned historian of childhood
Steven Mintz argues. And this could not be separated from the larger political culture: “During the Cold
War there was a symbolic connection between the struggle with the Soviet Union and the battles boys
acted out at recess and in backyards.” 53
By 1948, the jubilant optimism felt after V-J Day had been battered by one crisis after another, and
was about to disappear for good. Although historians disagree avidly about just how actively afraid
ordinary folks felt as they went about their daily business in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a strong
current of anxiety clearly flowed beneath the shiny surfaces of the time. George Kennan defined the