Between 1876 and 1900, large numbers of manufacturers began to advertise more widely in an effort to create national markets for their products. They commissioned lithographic firms to produce chromolithographed cards, booklets, calendars, and posters, which were then distributed to stores, stuffed into packages, or tacked up on bill-posting boards. The enormous increase in visual advertising in the late nineteenth century, then, must be understood in the context of the production, distribution, and consumption of chromolithography.While chromolithographic advertising may not have had the cultivating and democratizing influence on American society that reformers believed it could, it did blend in with other cultural forms, thus integrating the discourse of visual advertising into everyday life across class boundaries. Produced under a complex, irrational, and inefficient system by men and women from many walks of life, it was a crucial component in the development of consumer culture.Not only were individual brands developed largely through chromolithography, but also the very idea of the brand was made intelligible during the chromo era. Chromolithographic advertisements drew upon existing cultural forms and visual vernaculars to communicate an ideology of consumption by visually articulating consumption to whiteness and citizenshipand elevating it to a position as the most significant realm of activity.With a large number of firms vying for advertising work, lithographers desperate to compete turned to independent artists with original ideas in order to distinguish themselves and thus help them land contracts. As a result, watercolor and pastel artists from a range of social positions, both women and men, were brought into the process of visual-advertising design. The lithographic craftsmen who printed, and also sometimes designed, the advertisements identified as both consumers and workers, while expressing dismay that their trade had become little more than the humble handmaid of advertisers.
