In 2006, Inger Stole wrote a very good book, Advertising on Trial, about the politics of advertising regulation during the New Deal. Her new book, Advertising at War, continues the story through World War II. The book's admirable goals are to “explore the political processes and maneuvers that … helped change advertising's image, transforming it from a scorned industry … into a necessary institution for the protection and promotion of political and economic freedom” (176). These goals are largely, if incompletely, met. Stole successfully traces debates about the place of advertising into the war years, and certainly shows how the advertising industry worked to solidify its place in mid-century political economy. But questions remain about exactly how and why advertising succeeded in its efforts.

In its broadest strokes, Stole's argument is convincing. In fact, it will be fairly familiar to those who have read Frank Fox's Madison Avenue Goes to War (1975) and Robert Griffith's 1983 article “The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics.” Like Fox, Stole shows that the war potentially threatened the advertising industry – in a more regimented defense economy structured around government contracts, consumer advertising could seem a redundancy, if not a wasteful drain on resources. Although the requirements of wartime efficiency thus threatened a reprise of New Deal arguments about the irrationality and waste of modern advertising, the advertising industry was able to organize itself as a private wing of the government propaganda effort and thus constitute itself as an essential part of the war effort. As a result, as both Fox and Griffith had earlier argued, the advertising industry emerged from the war with a new reputation for patriotic service, a cozy relationship with the US government, and a secure role in the political economy of the early Cold War.

To tell this story, Stole has made excellent use of advertising industry trade presses, as well as the records of the newly created Ad Council, the Office of War Information, and the private papers of some central actors. With such sources at her disposal, Stole is at her best in illuminating the anxieties and aspirations of advertising-industry elites and sketching the actual operations of the Ad Council. A case study of a controversial and failed VD awareness campaign, for instance, provides new insight into the Ad Council's efforts to coordinate the donation of advertising time and space to government campaigns, as well as the limits of those efforts. Thanks to Stole's research, we now know more about how the advertising industry acted during the war.

But reliance on such industry sources provides Stole with less of a base from which to make broader claims about how advertising's image among the public and politicians was transformed. Showing transformations in public attitudes is, of course, notoriously difficult, and it seems uncharitable to dwell on evidentiary shortcomings in this area. Nonetheless, beyond a couple of survey responses, there is little evidence in the book to document how the attitudes of everyday Americans changed, and little to suggest that the key transformations in attitudes occurred during the war. An interesting chapter on the anti-advertising efforts of the Consumers Union, for instance, suggests that the group had already lost its earlier popular support and was now waging a “frequently lonely fight” (72). If that's the case, one wonders whether meaningful public interest in advertising reform had eroded before the war began, perhaps as a result of the history that Stole narrated in Advertising on Trial.

Evidentiary questions also arise in Stole's efforts to deal with the changing attitudes of policymakers. As Stole observes, World War II debates about advertising took place less in public than in the private halls of power. But her method is better suited to addressing public debate and the actions of private lobby groups rather than bureaucratic maneuvering – Advertising on Trial was largely a story of legislative struggles, as are the strongest sections of this book. Many of the key wartime decisions about advertising, though, were not legislative. The most important decision was a Treasury Department determination that businesses would be able to claim advertising as a tax-deductible expense during the war. Had the decision gone the other way, the ad industry would have found itself starved of revenue. Stole provides us with plenty of evidence that advertisers were deeply worried about such a policy development. But how real were their fears? Were they more or less real than similar fears in the 1930s? To understand how close a decision this was – and more importantly, why the decision was made the way it was – it would be necessary to work with the Treasury records. Instead, Stole relies on public and secondary accounts of the decision, with the result that this key transformation happens offstage and remains something of a mystery.

In all, then, the book succeeds as an excellent case study of a business during the war. Behind the veil of patriotic consensus, Stole shows us that the advertising industry was carefully and craftily navigating the potentially hazardous waters of the war economy, and thus laying the groundwork for its postwar efflorescence. If questions remain – about exactly how and why the strategies of the ad industry were successful, or about whether the events of the 1930s or 1940s were more pivotal for advertising's postwar trajectory – Stole is uniquely equipped to answer them. One can only hope that she will continue to reconstruct the intriguingly contentious mid-century history of advertising, that classic purveyor of consensus.