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| 1851 logo for the Proctor & Gamble Company. |
Crazy conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, spread by followers of QAnon, are nothing new. They even pre-date the Internet. Here is one example from the 1980s.
Proctor and Gamble (P&G) is a very large American consumer goods company. It is also a very old company by American standards. It was founded in 1837, in Cincinnati, Ohio, by William Proctor, a candlemaker; and James Gamble, who made soap. They were also brothers-in-law.
Today, P&G is a gigantic international company that makes household-name products such as Bounty, Crest, and Tide.
As a 19th century company, they had a very 19th century logo. The thirteen stars represented the original thirteen states and the man in the moon was a popular decorative device. Pictorial 'brands' were important at a time when literacy was not universal.
Although deemphasized and simplified over time, the company continued to use the logo in small ways well into the modern era. Then the rumors started that the symbol was satanic, that the curls in moon man's beard were an inverted 666, the 'mark of the beast.' The curls at the top and bottom of the beard were Satan's horns. By playing connect-the-dots with the 13 stars you can make '666' emerge for a second time, and everyone knows the reference to the Beast's number in Revelation is in chapter 13.
This, of course, led to more rumors, such as the persistent one that the president of P&G pledged the company's profits to Satan on an episode of the Phil Donahue Show (he didn't).
P&G tried to debunk the rumors but it only fueled the fire. The corporate logo wasn't a very important part of the company's marketing, since all of their brands had strong individual identities, so they simply retired it.
That was, of course, a distant 40 years ago. People would never fall for something that ridiculous today.
1 comment:
History tends to repeat itself.
The opponents of Freemasonry formed a political movement [1828] after the Morgan affair convinced them the Masons were murdering men who spoke out against them...Because judges, businessmen, bankers and politicians were often Masons, ordinary citizens began to think of it as an elitist group. Moreover, many claimed that the lodges'secret oaths bound Masons to favor each other against outsiders in the courts and elsewhere...the Anti-Masons supplanted the National Republicans as the primary opposition to the Democrats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Masonic_Party
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