Mather and Company History

I've been writing about these posters for a while, mostly trying to highlight their cultural importance - things like, the demographics of the people Mather and Company intended to speak to, the situation of unions during the period, and the state of a US economy that would have allowed these pieces to become so wide-spread. I've also had a fascination with how text and the image interacted with each other, especially when they were at odds. . .

What I lacked though was the real blow-by-blow history of the development of Mather and Company posters and how they were produced. This past summer I travelled to Chicago, where my mom and I (this has always been a family event) dug through the archives at the University of Chicago and uncovered some pretty interesting stuff:

Mather and Company produced work incentive posters to motivate employees in factories and businesses across the United States from 1923-1929. Led by entrepreneur Seth Seiders, the privately owned Mather and Company ran a Chicago-based operation that sold products to managers and foremen to mold their workers into the ideal workforce.

Every week, a new 44 x 36 in. poster was displayed in a central location in a factory or a business for all workers to see. Each included a colorful image along with a somewhat concise message. Selling ideas rather than products, Mather and Company posters set out to improve productivity and eliminate waste within each company. Mather salesmen highlighted the idea that each poster could stop a "10cent leak per worker per day," potentially saving businesses hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per week.

Taking advantage of a visual format, they touted that their posters could transcend language or literacy barriers, getting each lesson across to a workforce that was radically changing during the 1920s, as immigrants to the U.S., African-Americans, and women became a true mainstay of the American factory workforce. Although these marginalized groups were largely absent from the images of the posters themselves, the text and images of each piece acted as a guide for the worker, with a weekly explanation of how to not only survive, but also succeed within his or her work-life. Mather and Company provided a product through which institutionalized modes of behavior could be taught. The posters repeatedly extol the virtues of hard work, efficiency, and—representative of their time—proper American behavior.

Attention-grabbing - especially in dull, monotone work environments - Mather and Company posters found their niche and soon became a popular instructional tool for thousands of companies nationwide. Their sales lists include big names such as General Motors, the Kellogg Company, and Kodak, and the company ultimately extended its reaches across the US into Canada, and even to England during the latter part of the 1920s.

The Catalog: How Mather and Company Sold Posters

Every year, salesmen were sent out across the country to sell a collection of seventy-eight posters. Armed with a full-color catalogue of images and a lengthy handbook of talking points, they had to first identify to whom exactly they were selling. This figure became known as the “Pivot Man,”—otherwise known as the foreman or the manager—and it was he, and not the average worker, to whom the catalogue catered. Including a scaled-down illustrated listing of the seventy-eight posters, the catalogue began with an introduction that outlined the effects of the incentive posters on workers, entitled Hints and Helps for the Pivot Man, written by the President of the company, Seth Seiders himself.

Thinking in terms of Frederick Taylor’s wildly popular theory of scientific management, Mather and Company’s catalogue marketed itself to a new class of middle management and assured them their goals could be met with the use of these posters—goals that were no longer applicable to factory owners. Sections with subheadings such as Group Leaders Are Responsible speak directly to a management that is sub-divided into departments, and the catalogue’s language plays on the imperative of success to each one of these individual departments. The catalogue clearly makes this distinction and speaks of the average worker as malleable being: “Equipment doesn’t think – a man does think … Therefore, Workers must be taught to think right.” 

In order to achieve this, the catalogue numbered each poster and titled it with the specific “destructive work practice” that each particular poster would eliminate. Take for example No. 3 “Backsliding” with text reading “Know Your Goal…Keep On – Keeping On” and an image of a football player being tackled as he reaches the goal line, or No. 6  “Ignorance,” reading “Ask Look Listen Learn…Ask the Man Who Knows,” depicting a well dressed man presumably reading a map and asking a group of dock workers for directions.

Once a salesman had the Pivot Man’s signature, the posters were sent out, and employers were instructed to hang a new one each week. Several other supplementary pieces were included for national holidays, and even these set out to cure destructive thinking, including “No. 75 Neglect” for Mother’s Day or the Fourth of July’s “No. 76 Unappreciativeness.”