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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Faith in government “to do the right thing” languishes; money perverts our elections; policies favor the rich and big business over the average person. Scandals and political one-upmanship receive more play in the press than legislation and policy. Winning elections and tanking propositions take precedence over policies and positive change.
All this is not new. And like so much else, it started here in California.
Clem Whitaker was a newspaper writer who established the Capitol News Bureau in Sacramento in 1921, distributing political news to 80 papers in the state.
Around the time he sold out to United Press in 1930, a friend approached him about a problem barbers had in obtaining regulatory support through the state legislature. Whitaker helped organize them into a lobbying group that led to the creation of the State Board of Barber Examiners.
Leone Baxter was the manager of the Redding Chamber of Commerce.
In 1933, the lawyer for Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) recruited her in their fight to place Proposition 1 on the ballot for California's December 1933 special election to defeat recent legislation creating the Central Valley Project, America's largest water irrigation project. A project which would ensure the future of non-privatized power and put a dent in PG&E’s profits.
Paired with Whitaker’s organizing and lobbying skills, Baxter helped defeat the measure by 33,000 votes. And so impressed PG&E, that the utility put them on retainer.
This led to them to form Campaigns, Inc., a company dedicated to campaign management. Eventually incorporated as Whitaker & Baxter, Inc., it became the first political consulting firm in the United States dedicated exclusively to politics, and established full service campaign management as de rigueur for political campaigns.
Clem and Leone married in the late 1930s, and were lauded for stage-managing their candidates to keep them on message, analyzing polling data to identify voter concerns and creating direct-mail campaigns and producing speeches to effectively sell their clients, using extensive radio advertising with strategic buys, and other tactics that are still used today.
Not only did they transform how politics was played, their personal conservative convictions helped shape many political issues that still affect our lives.
Their smear campaign against popular writer Upton Sinclair, best known for The Jungle, his 1906 indictment of the meat-packing industry, in the 1934 gubernatorial election is a classic example of dirty tricks politicking that works.
Sinclair saw American history as a battle between business and democracy, where Big Business had won every skirmish. He registered as a Democrat in order to seek and win the Democratic nomination, on a platform known as EPIC: End Poverty in California.
Incumbent Republican Frank Merriam had gained office after the elected Governor succumbed to a heart attack and promptly embroiled the state in a labor dispute at the Port of San Francisco which quickly devolved into violence, and then a general strike. Not a good look for winning a contested election.
Like most California Republicans, Baxter and Whitaker were appalled by the possibility of Sinclair as Governor.
Two months before the election, they locked themselves in a room for three days with everything Sinclair had ever written. With the backing of the California establishment, they persuaded the Los Angeles Times to run a box on its front page with a scurrilously selected Upton Sinclair quotation every day for the six weeks up until Election Day.
Although they relied on quotes from fictitious characters, Whitaker & Baxter were able to so inflame ordinary Californians that the vote went to Merriam, 1,138,000 to Sinclair’s 879,000.
There was very little Sinclair could do. Baxter later admitted “Sure, those quotations were irrelevant but we had one objective: to keep him from becoming Governor.”
Sinclair rechristened Campaigns, Inc. the Lie Factory, political consultants who sucked in money and spat out half-truths and innuendo, forever changing the seduction of the American voter. And that voter’s perception of reality.
Campaigns, Inc., and their emulators in chasing political funds and manipulating the electorate, took the dirty politics of earlier centuries and refined them into pure poison. They took the arc of the moral universe and twisted it towards greed.
As with earlier eras, the ones with the deep pockets were people pursuing personal profit and maintenance of the status quo. They put their preferred advocates in State Senates, in the White House, and on the Supreme Court.
Campaigns, Inc., with its decidedly conservative bent, helped. And stymied reform of social programs, union protections, control of the financial markets, pension security, progressive taxation, and legislative reapportionment.
FDR’s proposed healthcare reforms, taken up after his death by Harry Truman, were tanked by the self-interest of the American Medical Association who gave Whitaker & Baxter $100,000 ($1.29 million in today's dollars) as a retainer supported by a budget of a cool $1 million (almost $13 million today).
Their “CONFIDENTIAL: NOT FOR PUBLICATION" Plan of Campaign, Inc. spelled out how Whitaker & Baxter would trounce Truman's proposal, and detailed an overall proposition to permanently “stop to the agitation for socialized medicine in this country” by:
- awakening the people to the danger of a politically-controlled, government-regulated health system;
- convincing the people ... of the superior advantages of private medicine, as practiced in America, over the State-dominated medical systems of other countries;
- stimulating the growth of voluntary health insurance systems to take the economic shock out of illness and increase the availability of medical care to the American people.
It took over three years and almost $5 million of AMA members’ dues, but the campaign did its dirty job and universal health care was eliminated from Truman’s Fair Deal.
The president angrily pointed out that “nothing in this bill that came any closer to socialism than the payments the American Medical Association makes to the advertising firm of Whitaker & Baxter to misrepresent my health program.”
In claiming that “the issue is whether we are to remain a free Nation, in which the individual can work out his own destiny, or whether we are to take one of the final steps toward becoming a Socialist or Communist State,” the consultants latched on to the histrionics of Nixon, McCarthy and the conspiracy theorists of the House Un-American Activities Committee giving birth to all the negative connotations that have allowed the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to keep Americans suffering and debt-ridden ever since.
Polling for politics and the American public opinion industry claims to owe its birth to conservatives desires to counter the fascist propaganda of Hitler and then Stalin, but it has become something far worse, a cudgel that is beating American democracy to death.
Other adages Whitaker & Baxter invoked included:
- Never wage a campaign defensively! The only successful defense is a spectacular, hard-hitting, crushing offensive. You can't wage a defensive campaign and win.
- Attempt to create actual news instead of merely sending out publicity.
- More Americans like corn than caviar.
- The average American 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.
- [M]ost every American likes to be entertained. He likes the movies; he likes the mysteries; he likes the fireworks and parades…so if you can't fight, put on a show!
- The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support.
Another dirty trick was to create releases to mimic news content so editors in their rush to fill empty space would slot them in without recognizing the forebears of today’s advertorials. Whitaker & Baxter’s side business, California Feature Service, routinely wired these to 300 local papers statewide as part of their full-service packaging.
What, why, and how Whitaker & Baxter chose and ran their campaigns shook the foundations of egalitarian political power. Keeping their plans simple and effective, they developed the strategies used by advertising and publicity firms ever since.
They would choose a theme and avoid anything complicated or that required their target audience to think. They used rhyming and repetition. As Whitaker opined, “We assume we have to get a voter's attention seven times to make a sale.” And, according to Baxter, “Words that lean on the mind are no good, they must dent it.”
They practiced the art of the obvious and skirted the pitfalls of subtlety.
If there wasn’t a clear opponent to their campaign, Whitaker & Baxter created one to make issues personal and rouse the passions of John and Jane Q. Public, using emotions more than reason to sway voters to the perspective of whoever was paying the bills.
Their quintessential focus was to help manipulate America’s political landscape through their campaigns as a path for increasingly conservative constitutional amendments.
American political scientist V.O. Key, best known for his empirical study of American elections and voting behavior, described the changes wrought by Campaigns Inc. as moving politics beyond rational discussion and grassroots person-to-person communication to a “reliance on mass propaganda techniques” advancing agendas of the most powerful over the interests of ordinary people.
In 1956, Whitaker & Baxter helped pass a ballot measure in California written by attorneys for Standard Oil to grant the industry unfettered license to drill. In 2022, we voted to overturn some of those giveaways to Big Oil, and Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1137 into law.
This new law established safety zone regulations to slow climate change and protect people from toxic emissions, especially in economically disadvantaged communities, as well as mandating operators to provide analyses of chemicals in wastewater – proprietary secrecy protocols had hindered effective treatment of those exposed for decades – and to implement rapid detection and repair of leaks, particularly of methane.
The forces of the fossil fuel industry immediately challenged its implementation and the California Independent Petroleum Association is campaigning ruthlessly to overturn it this year, capitalizing on voters fears of escalating fuel prices by calling their deep-pocket funded campaign one to ‘Stop the Energy Shutdown’.
Between now and November, Californians will be inundated with propaganda to put aside self-interest vis-a-vis health impacts and global warming in order to guarantee oil companies and their executives continued profits.
Will the sophisticated heirs of Whitaker & Baxter with their increasingly effectively publicity and polling tools deployed by the money-is-no-object forces of Big Oil, and backed by their connections in corporate America and a conservative Supreme Court prevail?
In a country where dissent has too often been declared un-American and political campaigns are run mostly by advertising firms so skilled in manipulating hearts and minds that it has become difficult to separate truth from reality, who knows?
The basis for the foregoing was inspired by portions of Jill Lepore’s recent book, These Truths: A History of the United States, and her article “The Lie Factory” which was published by The New Yorker in 2012.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
