Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1920 — HOME TOWN HELPS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HOME TOWN HELPS

GENERAL CLEANUP IN ORDER Patriotic Advertising la No Longer an Excuse for the Presence of Unsightly Billboard. Now that the orgy of war advertising is ended, where does It all leave YOU—as the posters said —and your future contributions to the maintenance of the advertiser’s paradise? You gladly saw patriotism written all over the beautiful buildings and places of the city—even though this writing was a kind of scribbling, so Incongruous were the papers and flimsinesses. Beauty was for the moment nothing-— nothing unless it, too, served. But now! Are we to be equally content to see Piffle’s Pickles emblazoned where we testified our Intention to save food and thus help win the war? Will not chewing gum and chicle be more than ever an impertinence when inflated to the dirgengrons df our fatherland, the liberty of the world and the sacrifices of our sons? Some have feared that the riot of outdoor war advertising would debase our taste and make the public still more heedless of the-Incongruousness and ugliness of the advertising nuisance. We think not In spite of everything, the war advertising truly expressed us. We looked at it and read It—and llk»d some nf tUmhersiwe it did. It expressed us best when it was most beautiful. And although much of it was small tn scale, It never was too big to express the great ideas. But now, ewlll not the apotheosis of the Insignificant seem more than ever cheap and tawdry? If so, the blatant advertisement has lost spine of its advertising value. If it could only lose it all, If. people would not patronize what is offensively advertised, it would disappear.—Bulletin of the Municipal Art Society of New York. \