Part of a poster advertising the musical show, Ham Tree, with black-face actors James McIntylre and Thomas Kurton Heath. These individuals were named in an ad for Thomas L. Hensel, clothier of Lykens, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. The Hensel store was on the northeast corner of Main Street and Market Street.
The Hensel ad, which appeared in the Lykens Standard, September 17, 1909, was a letter from Hart Schaffner & Marx, noting that its most recent Style Book was sent to Hensel who was an official local supplier of the company’s mass-market men’s suits.
The story of the company’s style books is told in Wikipedia as follows:
In 1897, the company began running national advertisements for its products and began selling off-the-rack suits through a variety of distributors. Hart Schaffner & Marx commissioned well-known illustrators, such as John E. Sheridan, to paint pictures for style books and retail posters. These ads portrayed the company’s latest fashions in rich surroundings, establishing Hart Schaffner & Marx as a premium brand.
By 1906 the company had branched into sizes for men who were unusually tall, short, or overweight. Hart Schaffner & Marx thus became a mass-market brand, enabling virtually any man to have a fine quality suit at a lower price than a custom tailored suit.
Below is a copy of the ad for the Fall Style Book:
Notable in the ad of September 17, 1909, was the statement from the manufacturer that “a great many of our friends undoubtedly, who admire the Style Book as a work of art, and value it as a great power in advertising, don’t fully appreciate the real merits of the illustrations in it, nor the faithfulness to artistic fact and detail which they show.”
The “No. 1” illustration is described as follows:
No. 1 shows a box in one of the leading New York theaters, with McIntyre and Heath, famous black-face comedians in “The Ham Tree.”
While many of the illustrations in these Style Books are available on-line, the actual illustration of the black-face actors was not one of them.
The letter finished with the following:
These facts about the illustrations may interest you. They show the care we take with this book, in other thangs than simply to show clothes. It is such work as this that makes the Style Book so powerful an agency in trade promotion.
A conclusion that can be drawn here is that powerful companies, through their advertising, reinforced stereotypes about Black people, all of which led to those stereotypes becoming the norm in the communities that their advertising reached,
The prevalence of black-face in the Lykens Valley area has been documented up through the early 1960s on this blog.
Hensel had another ad in the same Lykens Standard of September 17, 1909:
Wherever men of fashion are seen in the metropolitan centers where style in dress is a matter of importance, you’ll find Hart Schaffner & Marx clothes recognized as a standard of correct dress. Young men especially appreciate the smart models created by these greatest of style makers.
We feel that we’re doing you all a great service in bringing these clothes to you. The advantages of all-wool fabrics alone, in the midst of so much cheap cotton-mixed stuff, is enough to warrant us in claiming your attention.
But we’ll show you some of the most stunning styles you’ve ever seen; and the finest fabrics. Ready now.
Suits $18,00 to $30.00
Overcoats $16.50 to $60.00
This store if the home of Hart Schaffner & Marx clothes.
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Ads from Newspapers.com.