In 1927, the Ford Motor Company created the first mass-produced bumpers. In 1935, the American inventor R. Stanton Avery produced the first self-adhesive labels, or stickers. And in the mid 1940s, as the legend goes, a Kansas City screenprinter named Forest P. Gill walked outside into the parking lot of his shop, crouched down to measure the bumper of a car, and then went back inside to his office and began creating the first ever bumper stickers.
When Gill printed those bumper stickers, he did so using a relatively new type of dyes called DayGlo. Developed in the late 1930s by brothers Joseph and Robert Switzer from Berkeley, California, DayGlo pigments were able to reflect invisible ultraviolet light into colors that fall just within the visible spectrum, making them appear almost unnaturally bright. Originally created to draw attention for movie posters in the late 1930s, DayGlo exploded in use during World War II, as the military found countless safety uses for an ultra high-visibility paint. After the war, printers like Gill who had been working on defense contracts ended up with stockpiles DayGlo, and so it began finding other uses, from commercial safety signage, to the work of artists like Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, to a sticker that’s easy to read even while driving 55 miles per hour down the interstate.
Gill’s first large commercial order came in the 1950s from Marine Gardens, a tourist attraction in Clearwater, Florida, wanting 25,000 bumper stickers. In fact, much of the early bumper sticker business was for various tourist attractions around the country. In the same way that old world travelers would decorate their suitcases with stickers from Paris or Rome, the rise in popularity of the American road trip in the 1950s led people to begin decorating their bumpers with stickers from various roadside attractions.
When the 1960s birthed a new era of political awareness and activism, bumper stickers became a primary outward symbol of political identity, and then soon expanded to being a way to express all aspects of personal identity, and that’s really the beauty of what bumper stickers came to represent.
America’s questionable traditions of industrial militarism and mass commercialism can provide the materials, the visual language, and the platforms, but regular people like Forest Gill can still repurpose those things into something that ultimately becomes a universal platform for individuality and self-expression, whether it be bumper stickers, graphic t-shirts, or any other part of American pop culture.
