Making Motoring American: The Integration of the Working Class in Automobile Film Advertising of the 1930s
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This thesis examines a selection of automobile film advertisements from 1930 to America’s formal declaration of war in 1941 as a means of analyzing the cultural narrative associated with automobile promotion throughout the Great Depression. The films depict the white, working-class male as the model driver and the automobile as a bastion of safety, as well as the key to a prosperous economy. While this shift in the representation of the automobile and its driver can be attributed in part to the reported saturation of the automobile market through the latter part of the 1920s and the economic uncertainty of the 1930s, semiotic analysis of the films indicates that the change was more than an effort to attract prospective consumers. Rather, the films’ idealization of the working class was tailored to present a narrative of motoring that supported automakers and industrial capitalism in a period when both were being challenged.
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Copyright © 2015 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, research, scholarship, and teaching. Theses may only be shared by linking to Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be used without proper attribution to the author. No part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.
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