In Advertising at War, Inger L. Stole examines “the political maneuverings of the American advertising industry during World War II,” that is, “the use of advertising to bolster the corporate system behind the products” (p. 2). The main contours of this story have already been explored in Frank Fox's Madison Avenue Goes to War: The Strange Military Career of American Advertising, 1941–45 (1975) and in two seminal articles, by Robert Griffith (“The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942–1960,” Business History Review [Autumn 1983]) and Mark H. Leff (“The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II,” Journal of American History [Mar. 1991]). This literature chronicles the rise and growth of the Advertising Council, or War Advertising Council (WAC), as it was renamed in 1943, one year after its creation. Linking for the first time organically the advertisers, advertising agencies, and media, this private organization came to play a crucial role in the public propaganda machinery and contributed to creating an atmosphere of goodwill toward the advertising industry and more generally the business world, refurbishing the images of both, which had been seriously tarnished by the Great Depression.

The in-depth analysis carried out by Stole fully warrants her opening claim that, compared to the existing literature, the book casts “a wider net, mapping the ongoing tensions between advertisers, regulators, and consumer activists” (p. 2). Advertising at War adds significantly to our knowledge of the Advertising Council's day-to-day activities and the complex relations that it developed with the business community, the Office of War Information (OWI)—the federal agency created in June 1942 to coordinate the U.S. propaganda machine—and other branches of the Roosevelt administration, as well as with the public at large. Based on a vast array of sources, ranging from the records of the Council, the OWI, and other public agencies to advertising industry journals and legislative records, Stole imbues her reconstruction with a strong sense of contingency and tension. Problematizing a picture that earlier accounts had simply sketched in broad strokes, she shows with unprecedented accuracy and insight the tortuous paths that admen and their agencies navigated in their lobbying and public relations efforts. The core of the book's seven tightly woven chapters are the fourth, fifth, and sixth. They are devoted, respectively, to how the Council successfully opposed and contained the return of the consumer movement in the war period and its insistence on the need for the government to establish stricter standards for goods, the early activities of the renamed WAC, and the latter's increasing pressures on individual advertisers to show their patriotism and insinuate “A War Message in Every Ad” (p. 122).

Always attentive to the polls on the public reaction elicited by the growing overlap between ordinary commercial advertising and patriotic issues, and fearful that its initiatives might backfire, the Council took a leading role in an increasing number of campaigns directly and indirectly associated with the war mobilization. Stole does an especially fine job of showing not only the achievements of the advertising community but also the problems that ensued in some of the Council's campaigns that met with resistance and difficulty on the part of one or more segments of the public. Such was the case with the programs against venereal diseases that drew strong opposition from the Catholic Church. No less efficacious is the portrayal of the Council's transition to the postwar phase in the last chapter. Stole shows that a thematic and institutional continuity exists between the “good war” and the Cold War in the underpinning private-public mobilization networks, a continuity that sits well with the current findings on the cultural diplomacy and international propaganda of that era.

A few points remain unresolved. The first is a lack of an explicit examination of the overall narratives underlying the activities of the Council and their real impact on American public discourse. Stole briefly mentions the “free enterprise” ideology and hints at the “better living” theme permeating much commercial advertising and public propaganda during the war, but she fails to engage thoroughly with these discursive practices, nor does she pursue their actual penetration into the inner fibers of American society. Similarly, for all the commendable efforts of the author to gauge the impact of the Council's lobbying and public relations efforts aimed at assuaging the federal administration, her treatment leaves ample room for further research. In this respect, Dawn Spring suggests exploring whether and how the familiarity with international issues that arose from long experience with foreign markets raised the standing of individual agencies and admen in their dealings with the Army and Navy or other branches of government (see her Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America, 1941–1961 [2011]). Speaking of agencies and admen, a third issue that calls for further investigation is Stole's cursory references to the concrete process through which campaigns were assigned to volunteer advertising agencies, the way they were developed by such agencies, and the matching of the campaigns to specific corporate sponsors with the collaboration of the latter's in-house departments. These limitations hardly detract from the remarkable merits of a well-researched, highly stimulating, and in many ways convincing book.