ABSTRACT
The newly expanding highways were the logical place for outdoor advertising to develop since, as one industry commentator put it, the job of outdoor advertising was to go “‘where the people are,’ which used to be assumed to be
at home. But now we are out of doors.” Audiences went outdoors not just for weekend expeditions, movies, golf, and football. The outdoors also included larger patterns of migration, such as “during the World War,” as one industry commentator explained, when “there was a vast movement of Negroes from the south to the industrial plants of the cities of the north.”4 Another industry booster agreed that “We do not have to go far to find the underlying causes of . . . this national sense of transience. The World War had much to do with it.” Soldiers with an enhanced taste for travel lost their provincialism and experienced “a new sense of personal independence.” Their wives also experienced new independence that granted them modern mobility. “They too went everywhere and lost their age-old repressions and limitations and now take part in all these movements and excursions into the outdoor world.”5
