ABSTRACT
Though through the years the battle lines in the billboard war tended to be drawn between aesthetics and business, the billboard advocates were not without their share of aesthetes, some of whom were quite illustrious. One journalist recounted a story of art critic Seldon Rodman: “Riding along Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway one day . . . [Rodman] told architect Philip Johnson about New Jersey’s Routes 4 and 17: ‘Not a tree, not a blade of grass; nothing but billboards and gas pumps.’ Replied Johnson: ‘I’d prefer that to this green tunnel! . . . It’s a nightmare of monotony. A nurseryman’s bonanza.”1 Far from the realm of high art, Ruth Knight, of the Kiwanis magazine (and “a farmer’s school-teachin’ daughter” and amateur naturalist), shared Johnson’s taste, looking for billboards to spice up not just the repeating green parkway tunnels but also the “monotonous super-highway treks where there’s nothing to see but scenery.” Surely there existed “a big contented majority who believe that the billboard is a satisfying and colorful illustration of the American way of life,” she exclaimed. For her the “young gods and goddesses” that “wave from billboards . . . with laughter in their eyes, toasting me in magic CocaCola,” were reminders of a “lusty” life beyond the driver’s seat, where people “trade and advertise and buy things.” “They dress up the plain old world,” Knight wrote, and become memory markers of place and time, starting in the days of Mail Pouch tobacco through to Burma-Shave.2 A writer for Life had a less lofty explanation for his billboard preferences, calling them “a kind of Benzedrine pick-up to keep the drivers from dozing.”3 Even the New York Times jumped into the fray, pairing Ogden Nash’s 1932 rephrasing of a Joyce Kilmer poem (and a favorite quotation of roadside reformers); “I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree. / Perhaps unless the billboards
fall / I’ll never see a tree at all” with the rejoinder, “You cannot unleash our liberty / Unless you do it locally. / And if you want to stay alive / Read ‘poster panels’ as you drive.”4
