When the ’Fifties Went Fiduciary

Late Spring, 1956: G.I.'s returning from two years in Korea board a troop train in Seattle. The train, heading east, pauses for a rest stop in Butte. A few of the soldiers wander into a luncheonette, where two burly women in jeans sit at the counter. Montana girls sure ain't dainty, the G.I.'s think as they move toward a table. They turn to take a closer look. Yikes! Those two women are not women. They are men – men who have let their hair grow girly-girl long!

That memory – my first encounter with the Age of Aquarius –popped into mind when I reread Merrill Anderson's 1954 history of trust advertising. Even the most contemporary of the ads shown (sample at right) looked primitive compared with the trust ads that appeared only a couple of years later. We tend to forget how fast American life and culture was changing in the 1950s. Yes, the Greatest Generation moved to the suburbs and quietly prospered. But the 1950s also was the decade that began with Doris Day and rushed ahead to Elvis. In '56 I came home with a Japanese cover recording of "Rock Around the Clock"!

The October 13, 1956 issue of The New Yorker contained three examples of the new wave of trust ads. Take a look . . .

Bank of New York usually tended toward the traditional in its advertising, as befitted an institution that traced its roots to Alexander Hamilton. In this ad, they clearly decided to liven up.


This U.S. Trust ad created by Merrill Anderson is unusual on two counts. First, while most ads in the campaign pitched investment management, this one featured the breadth of personal services offered by top trust companies of that era. Today we'd call it "wealth management." Second, the logo lists a temporary address. Wonder what displaced U.S. Trust from 45 Wall?


This nestegg ad must have been one of the earlier Chase efforts. (We showed you another early example here.) In later ads Chase's Mad men wisely depicted the idle rich doing something, rather than just idling.