Monkeys Doing Business

I continually finding advertising, particularly vintage advertising, a fascinating subject for exploration.  After it occurred to me that a number of ads, particularly for alcoholic beverages, employed monkeys and apes to sell products, I began to collect their images in an effort to understand why the primate humans were using their genetic cousins in the process of doing business.

The Brown Thompson distillers of Louisville issued a trade card, now more than a century old, that depicted three monkeys, all with long tails, climbing up a bottle of their “Old Forester” whiskey.  One has a corkscrew and presumably will be opening the whiskey with an eye to drinking it.  Unaccountably, the artist has dressed these monkeys in human garments, shirt and pants but no shoes.

The issuing distillery had been founded by George Garvin Brown who had been joined by his cousin from Northern Ireland, James Thompson.  They named their flagship brand after a well-known Louisville physician, Dr. William Forrester.   When Thompson decamped to start his own distillery,  Brown added George Foreman as his partner and the firm became Brown-Foreman.  The monkeys persisted in the advertising in the company’s “Bottom’s Up” Kentucky straight bourbon.  

The Roxbury Distilling Company used the face of a menacing monkey for its celluloid score keeping card, advertising “Roxbury Rye” as America’s purest whiskey.  Its offices were in Baltimore and its distillery in Roxbury, Maryland.  This outfit was owned by George T. Gambrill, a man frequently in trouble with the law. Convicted of fraud, through his own cleverness, he avoided going to jail for years and died without ever spending a day behind bars.

Monkeys and alcohol are not just an American phenomenon. Anisetta Evangelisti is a very sweet anise flavored liquor that is made in a Santelpidio, a small town in Southeastern Italy.  As noted on the trade card here, it is meant to be drunk in small glasses as a dessert liqueur.  The monkey on the shipping crate apparently had no glass and is taking it wholesale.

Pabst Beer had a reputation for unusual advertising and this trade card qualifies.  It purports to show a dog and money act in which the simian loads a barrel of beer on a car being pulled by a dog.   In vain I have sought to find more about 

Dekkin’s pantomime act, likely a vaudeville attraction appropriated by Pabst for its merchandising purposes.

Another brewery, this one the Norwich Brewing Co. of Norwich, New York, has given us a studious looking monkey who is carrying a sign suggesting that the reader not “monkey” with inferior beers but drink “White’s Sparkling Ale.  This brew claims to be “Good for Bad Health and Not Bad for Good Health.”   The brewery opened in 1904 and operated for eleven years until shut down in 1915.

Spoofing Darwin’s for theory of evolution was common everywhere  Merchant’s Gargling Oil, sold as fit for man and beast, found a natural foil in the English scientist and his ideas.   Its Victorian trade card shows a mandrill-like beast pouring the gargling oil on his leg while intoning a quatrain:   “If I am Darwin’s grandpa, It follows, don’t you see, That what is going for man and beast, Is doubly good for me.”  

Monkey Brand soap was introduced in the 1880s as a household scouring and polishing soap, in bar form, the product of Sidney and Henry Gross of Philadelphia.  Pumice was its primary ingredient.  After Lever bought the company in 1899. The name ‘Brooke” was used to promote the Monkey Brand soap both in the States and in Britain.  In George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion”(“My Fair Lady”) Henry Higgins tells his housekeeper to take Eliza Doolittle upstairs and clean her up, and to use "...Monkey Brand, if it won't come off any other way.”

In a riffle on the “dogs playing cards” theme, the Star Shoe Store of Coalinga, California, issued a glass paperweight with two dogs in a card game with a monkey.  The canines seem annoyed at the antics of the rhesus and the admonition is twice repeated on the weight:  “No Monkeying.”

The last two examples appear linked.  The first is a modern ad for “Gorilla Tape” featuring the face of a formidable looking ape holding a box of the product, said to be “incredibly strong.”  A second tape ad is from “Bear Tape Brand.”  Instead of showing us a bear, however, it features a cartoonish gorilla bending a pipe.  

The ad, it seems evident, is a spoof on Gorilla Tape as it describes this simian as a native of West Africa and the Congo, gives its dimensions and ends by saying:  “It beats its chest when excited and can be extremely dangerous when aroused.”   Bear Tape was an Australian-made line that featured a “teddy bear”  figure in its advertising.  While the Aussie boardroom may have been chuckling at this joke,  Gorilla Tape executives likely were not laughing.

There they are — eleven examples of the monkeys in advertising.  Everything from whiskey and beer to gargling oil, pumice soap, and tape. “Monkey business” is defined in the dictionary as “frivolous or mischievous behavior, trickery.”  But “monkeys IN business” — that is something else again.

Charles Darwin and “The Monkey’s Uncle”

     

My father was a confirmed believer in evolution, often referring to “our ancestors the fish.” By contrast my father-in-law found the idea of a primate ancestor thoroughly disgusting and rejected it, unwilling to believe he descended from “a monkey’s uncle.”  We have a son who is an evolutionary biologist.  Because evolution is a frequent topic of conversation in our household, it seems appropriate to devote a post to Charles Darwin, shown above, whose 206th birthday the world celebrates on February 12.

Although Darwin was a thoughtful, serious scientist who made a monumental breakthrough in human thinking,  his revolutionary ideas were often ridiculed by skeptics and, at the time, made the subject of satirical cartoons and other illustrations.  In many cases, the monkey was at the center of such lampoons.  Darwin himself frequently was depicted as a monkey by cartoonists and illustrators.  

Because, through horrific circumstances, a French satirical magazine has been much in the news of late, I thought it appropriate to begin with a picture of Darwin as a monkey that appeared in 19th Century French publication “La Petite Lune” (The Little Moon).  It shows the scientist as a monkey wearing shorts, a tail over one hairy arm, hanging from a tree labeled “Tree of Science.”  It is believed that this image by artist Andre’ Gill was published about 1871, not long after Darwin had published a major work, “The Descent of Man.”

In that book, Darwin had argued that humans and monkeys share a common ancestors, a conclusion that many found hard to swallow.  The cartoon left portrays Darwin as a monkey, again with his human head.  He is shown holding up a mirror to a monkey sitting next to him and apparently showing the animal how much they look alike.  Appearing in Figaro’s London Sketch Book of Celebrities in 1874, the caricature was accompanied by two quotations from Shakespeare:  “This is the ape of form,” from Love’s Labor Lost and “Some four or five descents since…” from All’s Well That Ends Well.  Some have seen this as particularly demeaning to Darwin on the grounds that the monkey should be showing the mirror to the scientist, not the other way around.

The next cartoon at left is in the same vein,  Darwin’s head on a monkey body, apparently researching the large and protruding bustle on a tall woman whom he seems to be addressing.  While the message conveyed there is somewhat cloudy, the intent once again is ridicule the British biologist and his theories of human evolution.  Although the cartoons shown above have shown him with more or less human hands and feet, the image right has endowed him with chimpanzee-like digits.  Note that he appears to be grasping in one paw, a scroll.  This is apparently a reference to his writings on the “descent of man.”

Earlier, after the publication of “Origin of Species” by Darwin in 1859 and more particularly an article entitled, “Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observation of their Habits,”  Punch, the satirical London magazine, in 1882 published on its cover a cartoon that depicts the scientist as ancient sage watching as worms evolved into lizards, lizards into monkeys,  monkeys into sprites and cavemen, culminating in the figure of a British dandy.  Even though the figure of Darwin himself is human and not monkey, the purpose of Linley Tambourine’s cartoon clearly is to ridicule his theory of evolution.

A satire on Darwin could be made into a cartoon puzzle.  Shown here is a picture that contains no fewer than 13 animals in a illustration that accompanied an advertisement for British manufacturer of  boots and shoes. Call the “Monkey’s Tea Party,” the viewer is challenged to find a portrait of Darwin amidst the tumult.  It is not hard.  He can be found upside down on the right center of the picture.  

Spoofing Darwin could be put to mercantile purposes beyond the boot trade in England.  Merchant’s Gargling Oil, sold as fit for man and beast, found a natural foil in Darwin and his theories.   Its Victorian trade card shows a gorilla-like beast pouring the gargling oil on his leg while intoning a quatrain:   “If I am Darwin’s grandpa, It follows, don’t you see, That what is going for man and beast, Is doubly good for me.”  I say old chap, devilishly clever advertising, don’t you think?”

The final cartoon here is a satire on the satires.  It was penned by Chris Madden, a cartoonist whose work is frequently found in the pages of Philosophy Now magazine.  He has copied almost exactly the image of Darwin shown above, put him into tree and added a second figure behind asking “What about me?”  The other man-monkey would appear to be Alfred Russel Wallace, the British scientist who jointly deserves credit with Darwin for conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection.  Wallace did not face the same level of ridicule as the elder scientist.

We cannot be sure what Darwin’s responses were to these images in his lifetime, but from the perspective of our times we know that the last laugh truly is from the scientist, not his detractors.  Although some elements of his theories of the origins of humankind have been challenged, shown to be flawed, or corrected,  Charles Darwin (with Wallace) were on the right track and he deserves to be ranked among the great thinkers of historical time.