Bruce Fairchild Barton (August 5, 1886 – July 5, 1967) was an American author, advertising executive, and Republican politician.

Barton was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, ten miles from downtown Chicago on the rail line.

Barton also helped run his uncle's maple syrup business, which became successful with his contributions.

As a staunch opponent of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Barton offered his public relations services to many Republican candidates over the years.

Barton won a special election to fill the unexpired term of U.S. Representative Democrat Theodore A. Peyser, who died on August 8, 1937.

As the author of many bestselling guidebooks, Barton also wrote literally hundreds of popular magazines articles and syndicated newspaper columns, offering his readers advice and inspiration for attaining Barton's own idealization of the American Dream, based largely upon Barton's meshing of his own life as a "small town boy" and sectarian Christian beliefs in with his admiration of certain American business and industry leaders ("Service").

Barton had projected many Christian Biblical themes throughout his works completed within his varied writing career, due in part to his own strong religious convictions.

[7] One historian writes: "Barton believed incurably in material progress, in self-improvement, in individualism, and in the Judeo-Christian ethic, and none of the profound crises through which his generation lived appreciably changed the tenor of his writings or their capacity to reflect what masses of Americans, optimists in the progressive tradition, apparently continued to want to hear."

Barton's most famous book was, The Man Nobody Knows (1925), a "boosterish melding of religion with business" that coupled with "new communication and advertising media", provided the "cultural shift that encouraged the public display of spiritual allegiances that once belonged to the realm of private life", while amplifying the widely perceived public adoration of American business during the 1920s.

[12] In his autobiography, William L. Shirer characterizes the book's asseverations about Jesus as "a great executive .

whose parables were the most powerful advertisements of his time" as "idiotic ramblings" that in the U.S. in the 1920s were nevertheless "hailed by the country as gospel.

"[13] In the much later 1956 edition of The Man Nobody Knows, editors at Bobbs-Merrill "heavily amended" Barton's text with his permission, cutting out such references to business and advertising along with excerpts featuring popular celebrities of the 1920s, such as Henry Ford, George Perkins, and Jim Jeffries.

[14] According to historian Otis Pease, through his careers in advertising, popular writing and Republican activism:[15] Pease disagreed with that hostile portrayal and instead argued that Barton was a leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party, urging that it broaden its appeal to reach the working man in the average voter.

However, Pease argued, the book was:[16] Public attention was drawn to a sexual affair that Barton secretly conducted from 1928 to 1932 with BBDO employee Frances Wagner King.

A couple of years ago I said: "I'd like to discover the one place in the United States where a dollar does more net good than anywhere else."

It was a rather thrilling idea, and I went at it in the same spirit in which our advertising agency conducts a market investigation for a manufacturer.

I honestly believe that it offers an opportunity to get a maximum amount of satisfaction for a minimum sum.

Later, under Andy Jackson, they fought and won the only land victory that we managed to pull off in the War of 1812.

Take one of them out of her two-roomed log cabin home, give her a stylish dress and a permanent wave, and she'd be a hit on Fifth Avenue.

Take one of the boys, who maybe never saw a railroad train until he was 21: give him a few years of education and he goes back into the mountains as a teacher or doctor or lawyer or carpenter, and changes the life of a town or county.

Clean, sound timber – no knots, no wormholes; a great contrast to the imported stuff with which our social settlements have to work in New York and other cities.

Yet today it has accumulated, by little gifts picked up by passing the hat, a plant that takes care of 3000 students a year.

They are of the same stuff as Lincoln and Daniel Boone and Henry Clay; they are the very best raw material that can be found in the United States.

Let me pick out ten boys, who are as sure blooded Americans as your own sons, and just as deserving of a chance.

You write me, using the enclosed envelope, that, if and when I get my other twenty-three men, you will send President Hutchins your check for $1,000.