Ernest Gruening's 1931 article, "Power and Propaganda", summarized the
11,258 page record of the Federal Trade Commission's investigation of
privately-owned public utility company propaganda. Slightly less than
half of the forty-page article (pages 206-223) were devoted to the
utilities' activities to influence the curricula of schools and
universities.
"Early in 1919, Samuel Insull called together the executives of
companies under his direction for discussion of public relations. . .
. The meeting was short. It came to a close with Mr. Insull's
instruction, 'Get busy and do something.'"
"In April of that same year, the Illinois Committee on Public Utility
Information was organized. B. J. Mullaney, Mr. Insull's right hand man
in public relations matters, became director of the committee and took
charge of the work....
"The Illinois Committee has made good from the start. Today the
Illinois Committee is acknowledged to be the progenitor of a
nation-wide movement consisting of a total of twenty-eight states and
regional committees covering thirty-six states of the union.
"Now just what this Illinois Committee did, this committee which is
the "progenitor of a nation-wide movement," is to be found in a most
illuminating speech by the same Mr. Mullaney in 1921, two years after
Mr. Insull had told him to "get busy and do something." Said he:
"'When the committee celebrated its second anniversary last April, it
had passed the five million mark in pieces of literature distributed.
Those five million pieces of literature, all helpful to the utility
industry, were not merely scattered broadcast, but were definitely
placed: With newspaper editors for themselves and their readers; with
customers of public utilities; with business men, bankers, lawyers,
employers (for their employees), teachers, preachers, librarians,
students in colleges and high schools, mayors, members of city
councils and village boards, public officials of all kinds, and
candidates for public office. Members of the legislature, for example,
received informative matter on public utility questions, not after
they were elected, but before they were even nominated.'"
...And who paid for these far-ranging propaganda activities?...
"'Don't be afraid of the expense. The public pays the expenses,'
declared Mr. M. H. Aylesworth, Managing Director of the N.E.L.A
[National Electric Light Association]. His advice was greeted by
applause from the assembled public relations experts of the
Southeastern Utilities gathered in Birmingham in convention.
"The same wisdom was also emphasized by Mr. John B. Sheridan, who gave
the executive secretary of the Missouri Press Association an
explanation of how the utilities could afford it without cutting down
their profits 'simply by charging their advertising to operating
expenses
and making the consumer pay."
The Insull public utilities propaganda campaign was minutely
documented because there was a three-year FTC investigation into those
activities. At the same moment as the utility companies were attacking
the spectre of public ownership -- 1919 -- the National Association of
Manufacturers was positioning itself as leader of a nation-wide,
anti-union "open shop" drive. From it's public pronouncements, there
is no reason to suspect that the NAM pursued its education program any
differently than did the NELA.
National Association of Manufacturers President John Edgerton
introduced Noel Sargent, manager of the Open Shop Publicity Bureau
(subsequently renamed the Industrial Relations Department) at the
NAM's 1923 convention with the following encomium:
"Mr. Sargent has been getting out letters, collecting data, making
addresses, and holding debates with eminent representatives of the
other side of the question, making addresses in our colleges and
universities, and he has attracted a great deal of favorable attention
from our seats of learning in this country. He is teaching the
teachers. He is teaching the professors and college presidents."
Did the NAM campaign in the schools and universities in the 1920s
rival or exceed the documented NELA activities in scope and fervor? We
may never know the exact answer. Pre-1935 NAM records "were
destroyed". (I'm trying to ascertain the circumstances of that
destruction of records.) But I'm convinced the circumstantial evidence
is strong that they did. The extent of the NAM's post World War II
"free enterprise" propaganda campaign was prodigious. Educational
historian Alexander Rippa called it "probably the most elaborate and
costly public relations project in American history." Similarly, the
LaFollette hearings found the NAM propaganda campaign of the 1930s to
be both "lavish" and secretive. While NAM activities may have been
restrained somewhat following the Congressional investigations into
its lobbying activities in 1913, its open shop campaign of the 1920s
marked a resurgence of the organization.
On 6/11/08, Sandwichman <
lumpoflabor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The article misses the key innovation of business/university interaction in the first half of the 20th century. It was not individual critics whose impact depended on the persuasiveness or popularity of their arguments but organized pressure groups -- like the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce -- who called the tune because they could bring to bear substantial budgets and a bureaucratized operation.
The academic discipline of economics was indelibly shaped by the millions upon millions of pieces of "educational literature" distributed by the free enterprise tub-thumpers, by the elaborate campaigns of textbook suppression and subscription and through revolving door recruitment of right-thinkng professors.
On 6/11/08, Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This article titled "The Uneasy Relationship between Business and the Humanities" became chapter one of Frank Donoghue's "The Last Professors":
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_academic/issues/june04/Donoghue.qxp.pdf
Early Criticism of the Liberal Arts from Corporate Critics
--
Sandwichman
--
Sandwichman
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