How the Grid was built (and why Energy companies are hustling us into paying for their Smart Grid)

Barton’s advertising agency was hired in 1922 by GE. The young adman’s assignment was to raise the “electrical consciousness” of the average housewife, who made the purchasing decisions about refrigerators, stoves, and washing machines.
For the first twenty-five years of Barton’s life, his father had been pastor of the First Congregational Church of Oak Park, Illinois. The standard biography recounts that at the age of nine Barton had marketed his uncle’s homemade maple syrup so successfully that the man was forced to buy extra supplies from neighbors in order to meet demand.
Barton graduated from Amherst College in 1907, and was voted most likely to succeed in his class. He did not, however, succeed much at first. He was hired to edit a succession of magazines, but they all suffered under his leadership. One was Housekeeper, a publication targeted at what were by then called housewives. So by the time he entered advertising, Barton was a deeply conventional—and religious—man who thoroughly understood housewives, and he felt that salesmanship was his calling. Years later, he wrote a book about Jesus, The Man Nobody Knows. It made the argument that Jesus was “the world’s greatest salesman.” He also wrote hundreds of articles for popular magazines, offering readers advice and inspiration for pursuing the American dream. Barton may have even seen himself as a modern Jesus figure, with electricity in the same miraculous role as the loaves of bread and fi sh, destined to feed, warm, and clothe so many for so little.

Barton’s pro-electricity campaigns were relentless. During the 1920s, GE’s annual advertising budget increased from two million to twelve million dollars a year, and Barton ensured that each family would see two hundred ads per year, mainly in magazines. One typical campaign used the slogan “Make your house a home,” a phrase that has survived to this day. (Barton once said, “We build of imperishable materials, we who work with words.”) The campaign advocated wiring of the entire house, and the ads showed a series of tableaux of happy American families sitting together, surrounded by electrical devices.
Barton is also credited with placing the GE logo, with its scroll lettering, at the center of the marketing strategy, ensuring it was used so often that housewives thought of it as the “initials of a friend.”

Historian Stuart Ewen spotted that GE’s advertising copywriters employed the rhetoric of women’s emancipation to sex up appeals for domestic consumption: vacuum cleaners gave women “new life”; toasters made them “free.” Rural housewives were a special target because they were the marketing route into the electrification of farms, which was stubbornly resisted for decades.