Drink, Smoke, and Insure Your Life with Walt Whitman

Following Whitman’s death in 1892, a slew of industries used the poet’s image and legacy for a number of different products and advertising campaigns. Whitman had become ubiquitous in the American consciousness, and the lords of industry (cigar makers, insurance dealers, hotel owners, etc.) banked on this to different degrees of success. Often the product or campaign had very little to do with Whitman the poet. It was more often about Whitman the celebrity, the personality. “Given the poet’s notoriety (both in his own time and in continuing controversies about his work and its meaning in the twentieth century),” writes Donald D. Kummings in A Companion to Walt Whitman, “it is intriguing that advertisers blithely used Whitman as an innocuous famous figure.  The Whitman represented is the writer who will unsettle the fewest possible people in the marketplace.”

In 1962, Old Crow Whiskey released this glossy advertisement, one that many people likely stumbled on in the pages of Life Magazine. Here, Whitman looks like a cleanly Santa Clause in a fashionable little library. Pictures of himself (oddly) appear on the book shelf. He looks up glitteringly into the eyes of this domestic maid (indeed, he even has a bell on his desk to, presumably, call her), holding what might be a poem (written for her?) as she brings him a whiskey glass. Apparently, a bottle of Old Crow was sent to Whitman by an admirer, Francis Wilson, and the advertisement has capitalized on this story. Of course, we know that Whitman was not a drinker of Old Crow or any other whiskey. He was, to my knowledge, opposed to drink for the better part of his life. Old Crow, knowingly or unknowingly, neglected this fact. This is not Whitman at all. But such advertising campaigns were rarely about Walt Whitman.

Walt Whitman cigars, developed in the 1890s by Frank J. Hartmann, made slightly more sense, I suppose, than Old Crow using the poet’s image and legacy. The box had Walt Whitman’s face on the front. Interestingly, compared to the Old Crow ad, Whitman is represented as more of a backwoods figure. He’s iconized, but not necesarily as a man of letters. The slight background pictured is an outdoors scene. In 1901, the cigars were sold as “Whit Whitman Cigars: A Poetic Comfort.” It’s been suggested that the reason for Hartmann applying the Whitman image to his cigars had to do with his active involvement in unions. Whitman’s poems were often handed out to workers, so this is a possibility.

One of the most weird and fascinating advertisement I have seen comes from 1952 by the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. At the top of the ad, Whitman (deeply) saunters over this hillside, intoxicated, relishing the air and what have you. Under the illustration is what is ostensibly a meditation on Whitman, which asks “What’s a poet good for?” It includes biographical information, mention of Leaves of Grass, and how “he showed us that America itself is the greater poem to be written and each of us is its poet, adding our verse to the big book that never ends.” To be quite honest, the advertisement is pretty enthralling. There’s not one mention of life insurance, and yet, one walks away from the advertisement thinking life insurance from the John Hancock Mutual Life Company is reliable and, most importantly, American.

 What one gathers from these advertisements is that Whitman had different associations in the American consciousness, and industries could tweak each association for their own purposes. Old Crow turned Whitman into a tasteful man of letters to show how sophisticated and historic their whiskey is. By comparison, the Whitman of Whitman Cigars is represented rather like a frontiersman or explorer; while the Whitman of John Hancock Life Insurance is, more than anything else, depicted as a patriot, a true-blue American. Whitman's multi-faceted character, the fact that he embodied and represented many things to many different people, made his image perfect for businesses to exploit. Any industry at all could turn the poet into their poster boy.