Advertizing man, religious writer, and United States Congressman, the name of Bruce Barton is synonymous with the advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne, the agency Barton helped found in 1919. The firm's clients, including U.S. Steel, General Electric, General Motors, and Dunlop, were among the most powerful businesses of the American 1920s. Barton is best remembered for his bestselling book The Man Nobody Knows (1925), a conduct manual for American businessmen whose subtitle proclaimed itself "a discovery of the real Jesus."

The son of a prominent Congregational Minister, Barton was in the vanguard of the new advertising culture of the 1920s. In a period where the shift into a "mass" consumption economy had spawned a new service and leisure economy, advertising became an industry in its own right and led the way in reshaping the traditional Protestant morality of Victorian America into something...