The Classic Optimist

"When you're through changing, you're through," Bruce Barton once said. There was one thing about Barton himself that never changed -- his faith in spunk, selfhelp, salesmanship, sloganeering, America. That faith, given wide circulation through his uplift books, his catchy advertising copy, and his cheer fully uncomplicated politics, made Barton, son of a circuit-riding Tennessee preacher, one of the great evangelists of his day. From World War I until last week, when he died in Manhattan at 80, he remained an unspoiled and influential American optimist.

"I knew elegance of diction wasn't my long suit; it was having something to say and saying it with all the punch you could put into it," he remarked in 1925. As a founding member of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, now the nation's third largest advertising agency ($294.6 million in 1966 billings) after J. Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam, he said his piece with punch for such corporations as U.S. Steel and General Electric. In the process, he set a Madison Avenue fashion for spare and peppy prose. For Forest Lawn cemetery, he invented the phrase FIRST STEP UP TOWARD HEAVEN. Of U.S. Steel's Andrew Carnegie, he wrote: "He Came to a Land of Wooden Towns and Left a Nation of Steel."

Perhaps his best-known slogan was one that he composed gratis as a Salvation Army volunteer: "A man may be down, but he's never out."

No Sissified Lamb. Hard work and evangelism came readily to Barton. His father, an itinerant Congregationalist preacher before settling in an Oak Park, Ill, parish, raised his five children on the King James Bible. At 9, Barton was out delivering newspapers. He worked his way through Amherst by selling pots and pans, graduated in the midst of the 1907 panic and eventually turned to magazine writing and editing. A prolific contributor to such periodicals as Redbook and McCall's, he specialized in inspirational articles that were scorned by critics as simplistic pap but had enormous popular appeal.

Most famous of his works was his book-length 1925 study of Jesus Christ, The Man Nobody Knows. Upset that Sunday school teachers often reduced Jesus to a "sissified Mary's little lamb," Barton set out to prove that, in truth, he was a real get-up-and-go type. "He was the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem," wrote Barton. "A failure! He picked twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world." The Man topped the bestseller list for two years, inspired Barton to produce He Upset the World, a Biblical analysis meant to prove that had Paul lived in the 20th century, instead of being beheaded he would be heading a large corporation.

In 1919, Barton joined Roy S. Durstine to found the ad agency that later became B.B.D. & O., helped ensure its success with such snappy, to-the-point pitches as the one he wrote for G.E.: "Any woman who is doing any household task that a little electric motor can do is working for 3-c- an hour. Human life is too precious to be sold at the price of 3-c- an hour."

Wynken, Blynken and Nod. Turning his phrasemaking talents to politics, Barton won election to an unexpired term in the House of Representatives in 1937 from Manhattan's "silk-stocking district," was easily re-elected the following year. A moderate Republican, he often joined Massachusetts' Joe Martin and New York's Hamilton Fish in heckling Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Roosevelt retaliated massively during his 1940 bid for a third term. Borrowing the rhythm of the nursery-book poem, Wynken, Blynken and Nod, F.D.R. delighted audiences with his jocular condemnation of "Martin, Barton and Fish."*

So well known was Barton for his books and his ad copy that he was sometimes talked of as a presidential possibility. But after losing a 1940 New York senatorial race to Democrat James Mead, he returned to Madison Avenue to run his agency for another 20 years. Once, when someone criticized his profession, Barton replied in typical fashion--by coining a phrase. "If advertising has flaws," he replied, "so has marriage."

*Joe Martin, now 82, was upset by another Heckler--Margaret--in last September's G.O.P. primary after 42 years in the House, 20 of them as Republican leader. Fish, now 78, was defeated for re-election in 1944; he was married last month for the second time, is currently honeymooning.

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