IV. The Art And Industry Of Make-Up

It is interesting to note, that in the very dawn of civilization, in ancient Egypt, when men were just beginning to learn the difficult business of living together, the art of make-up was much in use by the monarch and the ruling groups that surrounded him.

It is also worth noting that this, the oldest of the luxury industries, is the one that has persisted and grown so extensively that in our age it becomes at once a prop of our economic life and the chief weapon of our ruling figures for continuing their dominion over the minds of men.

The world is now and has always been ruled by men of wealth, and the most important instruments in the stratagems by which this is achieved are the rouge pot, the haberdasher, the builders and decorators, the dramatist and the showman, and, as we shall presently see, that oldest of functionaries—the shirt stuffer.

Plato’s sovereignty of the philosopher will never come until the philosopher puts aside the humility of the scholar and assumes the air of the conqueror, arranges the necessary pageantry, hires publicity men, and proceeds to sell himself to his fellows, in which very moment he will cease to be a philosopher.

This is the trick the ruler and the rich man knew when we discover the first traces of him in the ancient monuments and which, doubtless, he brought with him out of the jungle.

We are all bank notes, observes Thomas Carlyle, representing gold. But alas! he laments, many of us are forgeries. On this point, however, he consoles himself with the thought that, after all, men, in all times, especially in earnest times, have a talent for detecting quacks and, indeed, for detesting quacks.

The sour old Scotch philosopher, who believed in the authenticity of heroes and the necessity for them, had a theory to which this reliance on man’s perception in detecting quacks was essential. Woe to the times, he said, which, calling loudly for its great man, finds him not there.

Carlyle overstates the disaster. The times, in all ages, have had a way of inventing their great men. The machinery and means of producing men and women to our taste—and great ones, too—have always been ready to hand. We have always been equipped to make beautiful women, to hold back the wrinkles of age, to banish the silver threads from among the gold, to simulate youth and loveliness. But also we have been able to simulate intelligence and power, to make great scientists out of little pill mixers, to transmogrify bewildered little businessmen into great captains, and to inflate to the proportions of statesmen the meanest little spirits in our towns.

Somehow the hero worship that flourished in the ancient world still persists, despite education and newspapers and books. We have had a gargantuan spree of debunking, of stripping the wrappings and labels from our spurious miracle men, our pyramid builders, our treasure hunters and statesmen. We have seen a good many of the bank notes go to protest and—to mix the metaphor—to jail. But the equipment for turning out fresh forgeries seems to be inexhaustible.

These deceptions are achieved through that same more or less harmless theatricality by which men and women mitigate the errors of nature. No doubt originally devised to add to grace and charm, it has been cultivated extensively to give to cheapness and fraud the aspect of quality and authority and even greatness.

Civilization, as it moves slowly away from primitive barbarism, seeks to dress itself up for the part it would like to play.

This art of make-up probably was cultivated by remote tribes fifteen to twenty thousand years before it appeared on the banks of the Nile. And as it was one of the most important industries in the wealthiest of early nations—Egypt—so it continues to flourish as one of the most important of the great industries in the wealthiest of modern nations. It is doubtful if any single industry can match it in the number of persons employed and the sums expended in the vast business of dressing and beautifying the American man and woman.

Along the Nile and the Red Sea and across the Arabian Desert boats and camels transported the materials for ministering to Egyptian vanity, and this constituted the bulk of that country’s trade. Today in America it is said the American woman’s cosmetic bill is two billions a year. This is in addition to what she spends on clothes, furs, millinery, and jewelry. A thoughtful gentleman of my acquaintance who loves to toy with novel ideas has advanced the not wholly fantastic proposal that this nation, groping about frantically but futilely for a new industry to pull itself out of its depression, might accomplish this by merely extending the area of the oldest industry and inducing men to go in for beauty as women have done.

Oddly enough, man has never felt sure of himself in the nude. This in itself has made an end of the struggling cult of nudism. Men and women will never trust themselves to the opinions of their fellows, based on their unadorned bodies. People do not dress for modesty. Modesty, like many other excuses in our moral codes, serves a better reason.

Human beings wear clothes to shield their nakedness, to keep them warm, and to adorn themselves. But a woman can hide her nakedness in fifty cents’ worth of cotton cloth. She can keep herself warm in six dollars’ worth of wool. Nevertheless she spends fifty dollars for her coat and five thousand if she can afford it. This will serve as a measure of the relative importance of these three influences in feminine attire. People dress to conceal the defects of the body, to neutralize the onset of age, to hide the effects of gluttony and sloth.

The sums expended every year upon the mitigation of female defects and deformities is so great that were the sex as a whole to agree to suspend their make-up for a single year they would utterly wreck the economic machine of the world. Some wag with a flare for statistics has estimated that her ladyship dabs on her face 4000 tons of powder, 52,000 tons of cleansing cream, 7500 tons of nourishing cream, 25,000 tons of skin lotion, and 24,000 tons of rouge, all of which must be produced by workers, processed by factories, sold and dispensed and applied at beauty counters and salons, involving the expenditure of billions in production and distribution costs. Which leads to the observation that while vanity is vanity it is also big business and indispensable to the continued functioning of our economic world.

A German artist of the last generation made a devastating series of drawings representing groups of important people in their most admired and favored surroundings, posturing in their salons, strutting in their ballrooms, posing in all their pretension and hauteur, looking wise and profound, staring through lorgnettes, loaded with jewelry—but minus their clothes. The spectacle of withered old men and women, with hanging paunches and drooping breasts, wrinkled, flatulent, stooped, made an impression that would wring from the most irascible hater of mockery and deception in dress a cry for a return to those tons of creams and lotions and rouge and layers of lace and fur and silk and wool. Let us expose their sins, let us have at them with ink and jest and invective, but for God’s sake, let us not undress them!

Carlyle, in the opening chapter of his French Revolution, refers to Louis XV being pictured to the French as leading his victorious armies, winning battles, planning new campaigns and victories, and charging the enemy when in fact he was a gouty, scrofulous cripple being carted around with the army like so much baggage.

It is the way of the world with so many of its leaders. They are invented; fictitious beings created for us out of the masculine imagination of the shirt stuffer operating upon the pliant feminine imagination of the masses. It is one of the least pretty of our social mechanisms.

Go about Italy, and wherever there is a plaza to hold it you will see, mounted on a monstrous charger, a colossal warrior in bronze or marble, with uplifted sword and a countenance of majesty and power—the figure of Umberto Primo or Vittorio Emmanuele Secondo, thus advertising to the Italian mass mind the great leadership of these two mighty sovereigns who were, in fact, just two little fellows whose capacities could have been duplicated among the lesser bureau chiefs of any town in Italy.

But kings must be great men. They must be wise, courageous, full of nobility and power. As they seldom have these qualities in larger measure than is to be found in the members of the local chamber of commerce, the political promoter has collaborated with the military promoter for centuries to invest these small fellows with the missing royal attributes. They have drawn upon the age-old arts of pageantry, costume, feathers, flags, and music. The populace, prepared by the proper prologue, sees a bewildered and sometimes blundering fool encrusted in gold and other metals, crowned with a towering shako, upon a richly caparisoned horse capering between lines of saluting privates, and attended by the brass of the band and the cheers of the people—it sees not the little man at all but the fictitious figure who does not exist. Of course, a philosopher, a statesman, and a priest may be counted on to write learnedly that all this is essential to the stability of the society, as the king, after all, is merely a symbol, a spiritual nucleus essential to the well-being of the multitude of moronic protons who revolve around him.

The church knows this. The great cardinal, heavy with crimson robes and flowing trains, mitered in gold, surrounded by surplus monsignori against a background of marble and brass, stained-glass windows, and the dim glow of candlelight and incense, and with the incidental emotional tremors of the organ—the cardinal thus made up can pretend with success to powers no one would credit if he lived in a cottage or dressed in a smock of cheap wool.

And, of course, presidents, politicians, businessmen with products to sell, bankers with securities to distribute understand this principle. All of the stratagems of make-up, of shirt stuffing, are employed to fill the imagination of the people with fictitious images of the men who must be sold to the public. Selling merchandise often depends first upon selling to the buyers the man who produces it. The priceless ingredient, proclaims one advertiser, is the reputation of the maker for integrity. Therefore, it is important to erect the manufacturer of things—drugs, foods, stocks, and ideas—into a being of purity and intelligence. Half the job of selling a bottle of ineffectual jalap for rheumatism is done if the great Mr. Bunkus, its maker, miracle man of the drug world, jalap king, great philanthropist, eloquent speaker at commercial banquets, doctor of law and of humane letters at Yale and Harvard, is behind the product. It is easy to sell the voters a bill of goods embracing the “abolition of poverty” or “the abundant life” if some “great” engineer or the great radio crooner is behind these respective emulsions. Throughout history we shall see that the great rulers, dictators, oil kings, steel kings, and money kings have employed the techniques of shirt stuffing to build themselves up to the proportions of heroes of one sort or another in the common mind. Once a man has made a million dollars, it is promptly assumed that because he knew how to make a million he knows also how to run a college, a church, a government. Presence on the board of the college, the vestry, or the cabinet of the government gave to the businessman a character that aided him in getting what he called “consumer acceptance” for his products. It has been easy to convince people affected with an abiding appetite for wealth that the man who has succeeded in accumulating it is capable of ruling them. Hence the rich man has tended to move into all the places of power—to dominate our education, to mold our theology, to form our culture, to modify our social thinking.

A definite technique has been perfected for creating any kind of character out of almost any man with enough money to hire the professional help. His name and picture are repeated over and over in the press until he becomes a member of our performing celebrities, his benefactions artfully and opportunely contrived and announced, with pictures, encomiums, editorials heralding his public spirit. Articles about him appear in the success magazines. Men are hired to write speeches for him to deliver at conventions, banquets, public gatherings, at colleges, and over the radio. He issues statements upon all sorts of subjects, has opinions about everything, all worked up and happily phrased for him by his hired shirt stuffers. It is an old stratagem. We have already seen Dr. Peutinger acting as apologist for Jacob Fugger. We shall see how other men of wealth have utilized the resources of religion, the press, the platform to build up their reputations for wisdom and patriotism as a prelude to exercising a dominating influence over the public mind. It is quite possible that the free society has no greater enemy than the shirt stuffer and that men will never be wholly free, in that higher and finer sense to which they aspire, until their minds shall be emancipated from the power of the rich to possess and control the instrumentalities by which opinion is made.