by Jill Lepore
Not long into FDR’s first term, businessmen who had supported him began to question his agenda. The du Pont brothers—Pierre, Irénée, and Lammot—belonged to a family that had made its fortune in paints, plastics, and munitions. In 1934, Merchants of Death, a bestseller that blamed arms manufacturers for the First World War, led to a congressional investigation, headed by North Dakota Republican senator Gerald P. Nye, who’d flouted his party to support Roosevelt. At the time, concern about munitions manufacturers crossed party lines, and so did a related concern about guns.
Americans had always owned guns, but states had also always regulated their manufacture, ownership, and storage. Carrying concealed weapons was prohibited by laws in Kentucky and Louisiana (1813), Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma passed similar laws. The “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder,” said one governor of Texas. “To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law abiding man.” Different rules obtained in the city and in the country. In western cities and towns, sheriffs routinely collected the guns of visitors, like checked baggage. In 1873, a sign in Wichita, Kansas read: “Leave Your Revolvers at Police Headquarters, and Get a Check.” On the road into Dodge, a billboard read, “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited.” The shootout at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Arizona, happened when Wyatt Earp confronted a man violating an 1879 city ordinance by failing to leave his gun at the sheriff’s office.62
The National Rifle Association had been founded in 1871 by a former reporter from the New York Times, as a sporting and hunting association; most of its business consisted of sponsoring target-shooting competitions. Not only did the NRA not oppose firearms regulation, it supported and even sponsored it. In the 1920s and 1930s—the era of Nye’s Munitions Committee—the NRA endorsed gun control legislation, lobbying for new state laws in the 1920s and 1930s. Concern about urban crime led to federal legislation in the 1930s. Public-safety-minded firearms regulation was uncontroversial. The NRA supported both the uniform 1934 National Firearms Act—the first federal gun control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”), mandated licensing for handgun dealers, introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers, required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon, and created a licensing system for dealers. In 1939, in a unanimous decision in U.S. v. Miller, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld these measures after FDR’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” The text of the amendment, Jackson argued, makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.”63
The 1934 and 1938 firearms legislation enjoyed bipartisan support, but the regulation of munitions manufacturing was more usually promoted by conservatives who were isolationists. For two years, Nye, railing against “merchants of death,” led the most rigorous inquiry into the arms industry that any branch of the federal government has ever conducted. He convened ninety-three hearings. He thought that the ability to manufacture weapons should be restricted to the government. “The removal of the element of profit from war would materially remove the danger of more war,” he said. From the vantage of the du Ponts, the prospect of handing the manufacture of weapons over to the government represented the worst possible instance of laissez-faire economics yielding to a planned economy. The du Ponts were concerned, too, about the growing strength of labor unions, the number of strikes, and the establishment of the Securities Exchange Commission. Irénée du Pont wrote: “It must have now become clear to every thinking man that the so-called ‘New Deal,’ advocated by the Administration, is nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name.”64
To make this case to the American public, the du Ponts turned to the National Association of Manufacturers, whose president said, “The public does not understand industry, largely because industry itself has made no real effort to tell its story; to show the people of this country that our high living standards have risen almost altogether from the civilization which industrial activity has set up.” To that end, the association hired a publicist named Walter W. Weisenberger, appointing him executive vice president. Weisenberger used the tools of radio and paid advertisement to oppose both labor agitation and government regulation by arguing that peace and prosperity were best assured by the leadership of businessmen and a free market. One campaign motto: “Prosperity dwells where harmony reigns.”65 The Association insisted that its efforts were educational, but a congressional investigation led by Wisconsin Progressive Robert M. La Follette concluded otherwise. Business leaders, the La Follette Committee reported, “asked not what the weaknesses and abuses of the economic structure had been, and how they could be corrected, but instead paid millions to tell the public that nothing was wrong and that grave dangers lurked in the proposed remedies.”66
Other corporate leaders pursued similar aims. In July 1934, the du Ponts gathered fellow businessmen in the offices of General Motors in New York, where they founded a “propertyholders’ association” to oppose the New Deal; by August, this association had been incorporated as the American Liberty League. In pamphlets and in speeches, the league argued that the voice of business was being drowned out by the “ravenous madness” of the New Deal. Leaguers particularly objected to Social Security, described as the “taking of property without due process of law.” The majority of the league’s funding came from only thirty very wealthy men; Democrats dubbed it the “Millionaires Union.”67 It went by other names, too. In the U.S. presidential election of 1936, the Liberty League supported the Republican nominee, Alf M. Landon, an oil executive and governor of Kansas, through the efforts of an organization called the Farmers’ Independence Council. But the Farmer’s Independence Council had the same mailing address as the Liberty League and a membership that consisted, not of any farmers, but instead of Chicago meatpackers. Most of its funding came from Lammot du Pont, who defended his lobbying as a “farmer” by insisting that his ownership of a 4,000-acre estate made him one.68
Many kinds of conservatism coexisted in the United States in the 1930s, not yet sharing an ideology. Businessmen who opposed the New Deal generally had little in common with conservative intellectuals. like Albert Jay Nock, editor of a magazine called The Freeman and author of Our Enemy, the State (1935). While he complained about a centralized state, Nock was chiefly concerned with the rise of mass democracy and mass culture as harbingers of the decline of Western civilization, believing that radical egalitarianism had produced a world of mediocrity and blandness. American conservative intellectuals were opposed to socialism; they were isolationists; many tended to be anti-Semitic. In 1941, Nock wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly called “The Jewish Problem in America.”69
Only after the war would the conservative movement find its base, and its direction. Meanwhile, the leftward drift of American politics in the 1930s was kept in check by the new businesses of political consulting and public opinion polling, the single most important forces in American democracy since the rise of the party system.
CAMPAIGNS, INC., the first political consulting firm in the history of the world, was founded by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter in California in 1933. Critics called it the Lie Factory.
Political consulting, when it started, had one foot in advertising and one foot in journalism. Political consulting is often thought of as a product of the advertising industry, but the reverse is closer to the truth. When modern advertising began, in the 1920s, the industry’s big clients were interested in advancing a political agenda as much as, if not more than, a commercial one. Muckrakers and congressional investigations tended to make Standard Oil
look greedy and Du Pont, for making munitions, sinister. Large corporations hired advertising firms to make themselves look better and to advance pro-business legislation.70
Political consulting’s origins in journalism lie with William Randolph Hearst. Whitaker, thirty-four, started out as a newspaperman, or, really, a newspaper boy; he was already working as a reporter at the age of thirteen. By nineteen, he was city editor for the Sacramento Union and, two years later, a political writer for the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper. In the 1930s, one in four Americans got their news from Hearst, who owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities. Hearst’s papers were all alike: hot-blooded, with leggy headlines. Page one was supposed to make a reader blurt out, “Gee whiz!” Page two: “Holy Moses!” Page three: “God Almighty!” Hearst used his newspapers to advance his politics. In 1934, he ordered his editors to send reporters to college campuses, posing as students, to find out which members of the faculty were Reds. People Hearst thought were communists not infrequently thought Hearst was a fascist; he’d professed his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. Hearst didn’t mind; he silenced his critics by attacking them in his papers relentlessly and ferociously. Some fought back. “Only cowards are intimated by Hearst,” Charles Beard said. In February 1935, Beard addressed an audience of a thousand schoolteachers in Atlantic City and said, of Hearst, “No person with intellectual honesty or moral integrity will touch him with a ten-foot pole.” The crowd gave Beard a standing ovation.71
Hearst endures, in American culture, in Citizen Kane, a film by Orson Welles released in 1941. The film bears so uncanny a resemblance to Imperial Hearst, a biography of Hearst published in 1936—with a preface by Beard—that the biographer sued the filmmakers. “I had never seen or heard of the book Imperial Hearst,” Welles insisted in a deposition for a case that was eventually settled out of court. Welles argued that his Citizen Kane wasn’t a character; he was a type: an American sultan. (The film was originally titled American.) If Kane, like Hearst, was a newspaper tycoon who turned to politics, that’s because, according to Welles, “such men as Kane always tend toward the newspaper and entertainment world,” despite hating the audience they crave, combining “a morbid preoccupation with the public with a devastatingly low opinion of the public mentality and moral character.” A man like Kane, Welles said, believes that “politics as the means of communication, and indeed the nation itself, is all there for his personal pleasuring.”72 Hearst would not be the last American sultan.
Clem Whitaker, having been trained by Hearst, left the San Francisco Examiner to start a newspaper wire service, the Capitol News Bureau, distributing stories to over eighty papers. In 1933, Sheridan Downey, a progressive California lawyer originally from Wyoming, hired Whitaker to help him defeat a referendum sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric. Downey also hired Leone Baxter, a twenty-six-year-old widow who had been a writer for the Portland Oregonian, and suggested that she and Whitaker join forces. When Whitaker and Baxter defeated the referendum, Pacific Gas and Electric was so impressed that it put the two on retainer, and Whitaker and Baxter, who later married, started doing business as Campaigns, Inc.73
Campaigns, Inc., specialized in running political campaigns for businesses, especially monopolies like Standard Oil and Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Working for the left-wing Downey had been an aberration. As a friend said, they liked to “work the Right side of the street.” In 1933, Upton Sinclair, an eccentric and dizzyingly prolific writer still best known for The Jungle, his 1906 muckraking indictment of the meat-packing industry, decided to run for governor of California. Sinclair, a longtime socialist, registered as a Democrat in order to seek the Democratic nomination, on a platform known as EPIC: End Poverty in California. After he unexpectedly won the nomination, he chose Downey as his running mate. (Their ticket was called “Uppie and Downey.”) Sinclair saw American history as a battle between business and democracy, and, “so far,” he wrote, “Big Business has won every skirmish.”74
Emboldened by Roosevelt’s winning of the White House, Sinclair decided to take a shot at the governor’s office. Whitaker and Baxter, like most California Republicans, were horrified at the prospect of a Sinclair governorship.75 Two months before the election, they began working for George Hatfield, a candidate for lieutenant governor on a Republican ticket headed by the incumbent governor, Frank Merriam. They locked themselves in a room for three days with everything Sinclair had ever written. “Upton was beaten,” Whitaker later said, “because he had written books.”76 The Los Angeles Times began running on its front page a box with an Upton Sinclair quotation in it, a practice the paper continued every day for six weeks, right up until Election Day. For instance:
SINCLAIR ON MARRIAGE:
THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE. . . . I HAVE HAD SUCH A BELIEF . . .
I HAVE IT NO LONGER.77
The passage, as Sinclair explained in a book called I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, was taken from his novel Love’s Pilgrimage (1911), in which a fictional character writes a heartbroken letter to a man having an affair with his wife.78 “Reading these boxes day after day,” Sinclair wrote, “I made up my mind that the election was lost.”79
The nation was founded on self-evident truths. But, as Sinclair argued, voters were now being led by a Lie Factory. “I was told they had a dozen men searching the libraries and reading every word I had ever published,” he wrote. They’d find lines he’d written, speeches of fictional characters in novels, and stick them in the paper as if Sinclair had said them. “They had an especially happy time with The Profits of Religion,” Sinclair said, referring to his 1917 polemic about institutionalized religion. “I received many letters from agitated old ladies and gentlemen on the subject of my blasphemy. ‘Do you believe in God?’ asked one.” There was very little he could do about it. “They had a staff of political chemists at work, preparing poisons to be let loose in the California atmosphere on every one of a hundred mornings.”80
“Sure, those quotations were irrelevant,” Baxter later said. “But we had one objective: to keep him from becoming Governor.” They succeeded. The final vote was Merriam, 1,138,000; Sinclair, 879,000.81 No single development altered the workings of American democracy so wholly as the industry Whitaker and Baxter founded. “Every voter, a consumer; every consumer, a voter” became its mantra.82 They succeeded best by being noticed least. Progressive reformers dismantled the party machine. But New Dealers barely noticed when political consultants replaced party bosses as the wielders of political power gained not by votes but by money.
Whitaker and Baxter won nearly every campaign they waged.83 The campaigns they chose to run, and the way they decided to run them, shaped the history of California and of the country. They drafted the rules by which campaigns would be waged for decades afterward. The first thing they did, when they took on a campaign, was to “hibernate” for a week to write a Plan of Campaign. Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them. Every campaign needs a theme.84 Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3”). Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”85
Make it personal, Whitaker and Baxter always advised: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one. Once, when fighting an attempt to recall the mayor of San Francisco, Whitaker and Baxter waged a campaign against the Faceless Man—the idea was Baxter’s—who might end up replacing him. Baxter drew a picture, on a tablecloth, of a fat man with a cigar poki
ng out from beneath a face hidden by a hat, and then had him plastered on billboards all over the city, with the question “Who’s Behind the Recall?” Pretend that you are the Voice of the People. Whitaker and Baxter bought radio ads, sponsored by “the Citizens Committee Against the Recall,” in which an ominous voice said: “The real issue is whether the City Hall is to be turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to an unholy alliance fronting for a faceless man.” (The recall was defeated.) Attack, attack, attack. Said Whitaker: “You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win!” Never underestimate the opposition.86
Never shy from controversy, they advised; instead, win the controversy. “The average American,” Whitaker wrote, “doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen. But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two that we have ever found successful.” You can put on a fight (“he likes a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”), or you can put on a show (“he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”): “So if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see it.”87
Whitaker and Baxter, more effectively than any politician, addressed the problem of mass democracy with an elegant solution: they turned politics into a business. But their very success depended, in part, on the rise of another political industry: public opinion polling.
THE AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION industry began as democracy’s answer to fascist propaganda. By the end of 1933, Joseph Goebbels had established a Broadcasting Division within his Ministry of Propaganda and had undertaken production of cheap radio sets, the Volksempfanger, or “people’s set,” with the aim of ensuring that the government could reach every household, in a practice Goebbels liked to describe as “mind-bombing.”88 Fascists told the people what to believe; democrats asked them. But the scientific measurement of public opinion would come to rest on its ability to accurately predict the outcome of national elections. From the start, the industry embraced a paradox. Publicly and reliably predicting the outcome of an election would seem to undercut democracy, not promote it. Notwithstanding this paradox, polling proceeded.