These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  154.Walter Lippmann, American Inquisitors: A Commentary on Dayton and Chicago (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 11–12, 14.

  155.Ibid., 39.

  156.Ibid., 105.

  157.Clarence Darrow, The Woodworkers’ Conspiracy Case (Chicago, 1898), 79.

  Eleven: A CONSTITUTION OF THE AIR

  1.Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 38.

  2.David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 14–15; Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 140.

  3.Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1951–52), 2:144. And see also Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, 112–13; Mark Goodman and Mark Gring, “The Radio Act of 1927: Progressive Ideology, Epistemology, and Praxis,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3 (2000): 397–418.

  4.Hoover, Memoirs, 2:146; J. G. Harbord, “Radio and Democracy,” Forum 81 (April 1929): 214.

  5.Hoover, Memoirs, 2:184; Klein, Rainbow’s End, 4, 5, 11.

  6.Quoted in Whyte, Hoover, 371.

  7.Whyte, Hoover, 377–82, 405–6.

  8.Tye, The Father of Spin, 63–69.

  9.Phillip G. Payne, Crash!: How the Economic Boom and Bust of the 1920s Worked (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41; Michael A. Bernstein, “Why the Great Depression Was Great: Toward a New Understanding of the Interwar Economic Crisis in the United States,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 32–54.

  10.Quoted in Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal, 32.

  11.Quoted in ibid., 28–33; John E. Moser, The Global Great Depression and the Coming of World War II (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2015), 50; Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York: Perseus, 2004), 36–37.

  12.“The Press vs. The Public,” TNR 90 (March 17, 1937), 178–91; Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 105.

  13.Frankfurter: Schudson, Discovering the News, 125; Toynbee: Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 43; Laski: Schudson, Discovering the News, 125.

  14.Moser, The Global Great Depression, 77; Mussolini quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 5.

  15.Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” San Bernardino Sun, March 24, 1933.

  16.Charles A. Beard, “The Historical Approach to the New Deal,” American Political Science Review [hereafter APSR] 28 (1934): 11–15; Katznelson, Fear Itself, 114, quoting Reinhold Niebuhr, Reflections on the End of an Era (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934).

  17.Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, 139–41; Herbert Hoover, Radio Address to the Nation on Unemployment Relief, October 18, 1931.

  18.Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 160; Robert J. Brown, Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988), 28–29.

  19.Alan Brinkley, “Roosevelt, Franklin Delano,” American National Biography Online.

  20.Franklin Delano Roosevelt quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 373.

  21.Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, July 2, 1932.

  22.Republican: Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 27; Hoover: Kazin, A Godly Hero, xix; Roosevelt: Degler, Out of Our Past, 349.

  23.Audio from Stephen Drury Smith, “The First Family of Radio: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Historic Broadcasts,” American Radio Works, November 2014, http://www.americanradioworks.org/documentaries/roosevelts/.

  24.Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “A Woman’s Party,” The Suffragist 8 (1920): 8–9.

  25.Freeman, A Room at a Time, 125; Susan Ware, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 148.

  26.Stephen Drury Smith, ed., First Lady of Radio: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Historic Broadcasts (New York: The New Press, 2014), 33.

  27.Gustafson et al., We Have Come to Stay, 179.

  28.“Mrs. Roosevelt Going to Write Book Now,” Boston Globe, January 4, 1933.

  29.Eleanor Roosevelt, It’s Up to the Women (1933; New York: The Nation Press, 2017), 173. More about the publication of the book, and its reception, can be found in my introduction to this edition.

  30.Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.

  31.Quoted in Steel, Walter Lippmann, 300.

  32.Gabriel over the White House (MGM, 1933).

  33.Quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 118–19.

  34.Dorothy Thompson, I Saw Hitler! (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932), 14; Peter Kurth, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 163. And see Daly, Covering America, 227–31. By 1939, Thompson’s columns appeared in 196 newspapers. She also spoke every week on NBC Radio.

  35.Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 3–6; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 383–84, 412–13.

  36.Quoted in Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1995), 65.

  37.Leila A. Sussmann, Dear FDR: A Study of Political Letter-Writing (Totowa, NJ: The Bedminster Press, 1963), 10; Brandon Rottinghaus, “‘Dear Mr. President’: The Institutionalization and Politicization of Public Opinion Mail in the White House,” Political Science Quarterly 121 (2006): 456–58.

  38.Hoover’s mail had been “tremendously big,” people said at the time; FDR’s mail was, even on a quiet day, an order of magnitude bigger. Leila A. Sussmann, “FDR and the White House Mail,” Public Opinion Quarterly 20 (1956): 5.

  39.Lowell Thomas, Fan Mail (New York: Dodge, 1935), x; Jeanette Sayre, “Progress in Radio Fan-Mail Analysis,” Public Opinion Quarterly 3 (1939): 272–78; Leila A. Sussmann, “Mass Political Letter Writing in America: The Growth of an Institution,” Public Opinion Quarterly 23 (1959): 203–12.

  40.Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking, 1946), 113.

  41.Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Fireside Chat (“The Banking Crisis”), March 12, 1933.

  42.Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 5, 11, 16, 18–19.

  43.Perkins quoted in Steve Fraser, “The ‘Labor Question,’” in Fraser and Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 68–69.

  44.Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 61; FDR quoted in Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.

  45.Beard, “The Historical Approach to the New Deal,” 11–12; George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 77; Ronald L. Numbers, “The Third Party: Health Insurance in America,” in Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 273; Morris Fishbein, Editorial, Journal of the American Medical Association 99 (1932).

  46.Franklin D. Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Own Story: Told in His Own Words from His Private and Public Papers, selected by Donald Day (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 202; Molly C. Michelmore, Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 5, 6, 10.

  47.William Downs Jr., comp., Stories of Survival: Arkansas Farmers during the Great Depression (Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, 2015), 183, 218–19, 226–27.

&nb
sp; 48.Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 23–36; Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK, 93–94; The Portable Malcolm X Reader, ed. Manning Marable and Garrett Felber (New York: Penguin, 2013), 3–33; Erik S. McDuffie, “The Diasporic Journeys of Louise Little: Grassroots Garveyism, the Midwest, and Community Feminism,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4 (2016): 146–70.

  49.Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 2–3.

  50.David A. Taylor, Soul of a People: the WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (New York: Wiley, 2009), 12. And see Monty Noam Penkower, The Federal Writers’ Project: A Study in Government Patronage of the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

  51.James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, with an introduction by Howard Schneiderman (1931; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012), xx; Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–4, 191–92; Allan Nevins, James Truslow Adams: Historian of the American Dream (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 66–72. For the radio play, see WPA Radio Scripts, 1936–1940, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division, Series XXV: The Epic of America; and Federal Theatre Project Collection, Library of Congress, Music Division, Containers 873–74.

  52.“Introduction: American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940,” Library of Congress. And see Federal Writers’ Project, These Are Our Lives, as Told by the People and Written by Members of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939). Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: Norton, 2010), 201.

  53.Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 5–18; Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 37.

  54.Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 151–69.

  55.Lidia Ceriani and Paolo Verme, “The Origins of the Gini Index: Extracts from Variabilità e Mutabilità (1912) by Corrado Gini,” Journal of Economic Inequality 10 (2012): 421–43. And see Anthony B. Atkinson and Andrea Brandolini, “Unveiling the Ethics behind Inequality Measurement,” The Economic Journal 125 (2015): 1–12.

  56.Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (2003): 1–39; see table 2.

  57.Jean-Guy Prévost, A Total Science: Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2009), 204–7, 224–25, 250–51.

  58.Katznelson, Fear Itself, 14; Kurth, American Cassandra, 285; Richard Wright, “The FB eye blues” (1949), Harris Broadsides, Brown Digital Repository, Brown University Library, https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:294360/. And see William J. Maxwell, F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

  59.Joshua Polster, Stages of Engagement: U.S. Theatre and Performance, 1898–1949 (New York: Routledge, 2015) 220–21.

  60.Historians have long debated whether the New Deal order marked a continuation of the American experiment or a temporary departure from it. Arguments that it was an exception include Cowie, The Great Exception. For an excellent introduction to the debate, see Fraser and Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. The terms of this debate derive from the idea that American politics cycles between eras of liberalism and eras of conservatism, a view that many scholars have lately disregarded, insisting, instead, that “the liberal and the conservative are always and essentially intertwined” (Bruce J. Schulman, ed., Making the American Century: Essays on the Political Culture of Twentieth-Century America [New York: Oxford University Press, 2014], 5).

  61.Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), especially the introduction and “The Problem of American Conservatism.”

  62.Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (New York: Norton, 2011), 165–73.

  63.Winkler, Gunfight, 63–65, 215–16; U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939).

  64.James Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 22–24; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009), 5.

  65.Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 14; Wendy Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 55.

  66.Sharon Beder, Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values (London: Routledge, 2006), 20; Richard S. Tedlow, “The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations during the New Deal,” Business History Review 50 (1976): 25–45.

  67.Beder, Free Market Missionaries, 20.

  68.Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 13–22.

  69.Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 9–10.

  70.Stanley Kelley Jr., Professional Public Relations and Political Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 44, 12–13.

  71.Ben Proctor, William Randolph Hearst, Final Edition, 1911–1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), vii., 5, 195; Howard K. Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 245–46.

  72.Orson Welles, Deposition taken in Casablanca, May 4, 1949, Ferdinand Lundberg v. Orson Welles, Herman J Mankiewicz, and R.K.O. Radio Pictures, Inc., U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Civil Case Files-Docket No. Civ. 44-62, Boxes: 700780A and 700781A, National Archives, New York. In an essay published in TNY in 1971, Pauline Kael argued that Welles’s contributions to the screenplay were minimal: Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” TNY, February 20 and 27, 1971. But the film scholar Robert L. Carringer, working with the RKO archives, demonstrated, in The Making of Citizen Kane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 21–22, 153n12, that Welles really did deserve the writing credit. See also Robert L. Carringer, “The Scripts of ‘Citizen Kane,’” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 369–400.

  73.The two best sources on the early history of the firm are the Whitaker & Baxter Campaigns, Inc., Records, California State Archives, Sacramento, California; and Carey McWilliams, “Government by Whitaker and Baxter,” The Nation, April 14 and 21 and May 5, 1951, 346–48, 366–69, 419–21.

  74.Upton Sinclair, “I, Governor of California: And How I Ended Poverty—A True Story of the Future,” 4, https://depts.washington.edu/epic34/docs/I_governor_1934.pdf.

  75.Possibly out of loyalty to Robert Whitaker (Clem Whitaker’s uncle and a friend of Upton Sinclair’s), Sinclair never named Whitaker and Baxter as the authors of his political doom; he leaves the name of the firm out of all of his accounts of the race. See, for example, Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), 272.

  76.The fullest accounts of this campaign can be found in Sinclair’s writing, but for Whitaker and Baxter’s end of it, see Irwin Ross, “The Supersalesmen of California Politics: Whitaker and Baxter,” Harper’s, 1959, 56–57; Kelley, Professional Public Relations and Political Power, ch. 4; and especially Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992).

  77.Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century, 128; Sinclair, “I, Candidate,” 145–46.

  78.Upton Sinclair, Love’s Pilgrimage: A Novel (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911), 650.

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sp; 79.Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934), 144; on the serialization: James N. Gregory, introduction to a 1994 reprint edition of the book (Berkeley: University of California Press), x–xi. Sinclair actually also explained how he was losing while he was losing, in Upton Sinclair, The Lie Factory Starts (Los Angeles: End Poverty League, 1934).

  80.Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor, 144; Sinclair, Autobiography, 272.

  81.Ross, “Supersalesmen,” 56–57; Carey McWilliams, “The Politics of Utopia [1946],” in Fool’s Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader, ed. Dean Stewart and Jeannine Gendar (Santa Clara and Berkeley: Santa Clara University and Heyday Books, 2001), 65.

  82.James Harding, Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 64.

  83.“The Partners,” Time, December 26, 1955: “In nearly 25 years, the firm of Whitaker & Baxter has managed 75 political campaigns (all but two confined to California) and has lost only five.” And see Dan Nimmo, The Political Persuaders: The Techniques of the Modern Election Campaign (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 36.

  84.McWilliams, “Government by Whitaker and Baxter,” May 5, 1951, 419; Ross, “Super-salesmen,” 57; Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, “What Will We Do with the Doctor’s $25.00?,” Dallas Medical Journal, April 1949, 57.

  85.Kelley, Professional Public Relations and Political Power, 51; Ross, “Supersalesmen,” 58; McWilliams, “Government by Whitaker and Baxter,” May 5, 1951, 419; Whitaker, speech before the Los Angeles Area Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, July 13, 1948, quoted in Kelley, Professional Public Relations and Political Power, 50.

  86.Transcripts of separate oral histories of Clem Whitaker Jr. and Leone Baxter (hers is entitled “Mother of Political Public Relations”), conducted in 1988 and 1972, respectively, by Gabrielle Morris, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 57, 15; Kelley, Professional Public Relations and Political Power, 48–49; Whitaker, speech before the Los Angeles Area Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, July 13, 1948; Leone Baxter, “Public Relations Precocious Baby,” Public Relations Journal 6 (1950): 22.