КОРПОРАТИВНА ОФАНЗИВА
Депресија и Пропаганда
THE POST-WAR TRIUMPH OF CORPORATE PROPAGANDA
It is impossible at less than
book length adequately to describe the propaganda onslaught by which, at the
cost of the McCarthy period, business first beat back the unions with the
Taft-Hartley act and then secured a shift to conservatism in American politics
similar to the shift which followed its campaigns of 1919-1820. However, I
shall provide an indicative sampling.
In December 1945 the NAM
Every day one or more news stories about the NAM NAM NAM
A Harvard
University thesis described the NAM ’s
propaganda activities during 1946:
All available media were used ‘to arouse the general public to insist
that the country replace bureaucratic control with free competition’. A series
of four full page advertisements in more than 400 daily and 2,000 weekly
newspapers carried the opening message… For each advertisement a corresponding
booklet was printed and distributed by the hundred of thousands. Special
articles were written for magazines, business periodicals and farm papers; the
Association’s Industrial Press Service carried a steady stream of statements and
answers to 4,200 editions of weekly papers, 500 editors of metropolitan dailies
and 2,700 editors of trade publications and employee magazines; ‘Brief for
broadcasters’ told the story to 700 radio commentators and ‘Industry’s views’
channeled the Association’s beliefs to more than 1,300 editorial writers and
columnists (Cleveland, 1947: 341).
In the four years from 1946 to
1950 the NAM
distributed 18,640,270 pamphlets. Of this number, 41% went to employees, 53% to
high school and college students, and 6% (i.e. still more than one million) to
community leaders, including ministers of religion and women’s club leader
throughout the entire nation. The NAM reported that the most popular propaganda
weapon ‘to reach masses of people in both the employee and student market, with
broad messages’ was the full color ‘comic type’ booklet (‘NAM Propaganda’,
1951:0). Dramatizing the scale of its activities the NAM reported:
If all NAM produced pamphlets ordered for distribution to employees,
students and community leaders in 1950 had been stacked on the top of the
other, they would have reached nearly four miles into the sky… the height of sixteen
Empire State Buildings…; a record … distribution (of) 7,838,039 copies (‘NAM’s
Propaganda, 1951:9).
By 1946 the NAM was only
one of a great number of business-sponsored organizations that were cooperating
to drench the country with anticommunist, anti-socialist, anti-union and
anti-New Deal Propaganda. An Annual Report of the US Chamber of Commerce
summarizes one very specific part of its proselytizing activities during
1946/47, the distribution of large pamphlets of some 50 pages each:
1946. More than a million copies of the Chamber pamphlet ‘Communist
infiltration in US’ were distributed and received with shocked surprise in many
quarters.
1947. ‘Communists within the Government’, a Chamber publication,
brought screams of anguish not only from known Communists, but from others. A
Cabinet officer sought his withdrawal. However, the government’s Loyalty
program – inadequate, but still a loyalty program – was begun. 1947 –
‘Communists within the Labor Movement’ was similarly greeted…’ (Chamber of
Commerce of the US, 1952:31).
In the pamphlet about Communists
in Government, published in January 1947, the Chambers officers an estimate
that ‘about 400’ communists ‘hold positions of importance’ in government
service in Washington
alone. In particular, ‘Soviet sympathizers’ have, the Chamber reports,
infiltrated the State Department ‘in important numbers’. The Chamber specially
recommends a program for dealing with the alleged situation that foreshadowed
the worst of the tactics adopted by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Committee three
years later, after McCarthy claimed to posses a list of 150 communists employed
in the State Department (Chamber of Commerce of the Us, 1947:14).
Pamphlets of the above character
were classified as part of Chamber’s ‘Economic Education’ and ‘Economic
Research’ programs. These publications were ‘reported to Congress, to the
public via radio and television, and widely circulated among writers, speakers,
students and teachers’ (Chamber of Commerce of the US, 1952:5).
Corporations realized they could
use captive audiences of employees for proselytizing process. ‘Many of the
country’s largest firms - Fortune magazine observed in 1950 - have started
extensive programs to indoctrinate employees’. These programs consisted of
so-called ‘Courses in Economic Education’. They were given to employees during
working hours in groups of ten or twenty, with tests to measure increase to the
free enterprise system (Viteles 1954:424-36; Williams and Peterfreund, 1954). Sears
Roebuck, for example, took three years to produce its own economic education
program, which included a series of films and the training of 2,600 ‘meeting
leaders’. In 1952 these leaders conducted 71,000 meetings to put Sears’ 200.000
employees through the course at a total cost of $6.000.000 (Cellier,
1953:29-40).
The two leading economic
education programs, both ‘evangelistic’ in temper, were produced by DuPont and
Inland Steel. By 1953, they had been used with some 9 million employees (Cooke,
1954:105).
A survey of corporations by the
American Management Association (AMA) found ‘a good number of respondents
actually stated that “propaganda” and “economic duration” are synonymous in
their companies. “We want our people to think right”’. ‘Communism, socialism,
particular political parties and unions’ the AMA reported, ‘are often common
targets of such campaigns’, which ‘some employees view… as a sort of ‘battle of
loyalties” with the unions’ (Williams and Peterfreund, 1954:31,14,29).
The American Advertising Council
represents large corporations and large advertising companies. In April 1947,
the Council announced a $100 million advertising program which, over the next
twelve months, would use all media to “sell” the American economic system to
the American people. The program was officially described as a ‘mayor project
of educating the American people about the economic facts of life’ (McDougall,
1952:568-9).
Daniel Bell, than an editor of
Fortune, provides a perspective on both the scale and the anti-union and
anti-New Deal purposes of these campaigns:
It has been industry’s prime concern, in the past war years, to change
the climate of opinion ushered in by… the depression. This “free enterprise”
campaign has two essential aims: to re-win the loyalty of the worker which now
goes to the union and to halt creeping socialism (i.e. New Deal)… In short, the
campaign has had the definite aim of seeking to shift the Democratic majority
of the last 20 years into the Republican camp…
Bell sketches some of the resources
created to sell goods, but now used in an overwhelming campaign to sell ideas:
‘The apparatus itself is prodigious: 1,600 business periodicals, 577 commercial
and finance digests, 2,500 agencies, 500 public relation counselors, 4,000
corporate public relations departments and more than 6,500 “house organs” with
a combined circulation of more than 70 million’. Of the opinion-shaping product
Bell observes:
The output is staggering. The Advertising council alone, in 1950
inspired 7 million lines of newspaper advertising stressing free enterprise, 400.000
car cards, 2,500.000 million radio impressions… By all odds, it adds up to the
most intensive ‘sales’ campaign in history of industry (Bell, 1954:254).
American business’ pre- and
postwar assaults on public opinion had a double objective: to turn the public
against the Democratic administration of Roosevelt and Truman and their liberal
supporters, and to turn it against the growing power of the trade union
movement that resulted from the Wagner Act of 1935. The first objective was
achieved with the McCarthy period and the election of Eisenhower in 1952.
Progress toward the second
objective began in 1937. There was in that year an unprecedented number of
strikes, chiefly over demands for recognition of the unions provided by Wagner
Act. From 1937 onwards, the high level of strikes, suspicion of union power and
internal union problems ‘all contributed to a shift in public attitudes’. As
did corporate propagandists, who ‘using all the device of modern communication
did everything they could to encourage this shift’ (Wilcock, 1961:308).
During the war, business made
unprecedented profits while wages remained controlled. When the war ended,
business had – in addition to its long term objective of weakening the union movement
– two immediate concerns: to minimize wage rises and maximizes prize rises. It
will be instructive to consider the methods by which all of these results were
sought. Daniel Bell has described the circumstances:
Wage rates during the war had been tethered by The Little Steel
Formula, although income had risen because of extra-time work. Now, as the
work-week fell, labor opened a drive to maintain take-home pay. Industry …
decided to sit right. The result (in 1946) was the greatest strike year in American
history…
In none of (the strikes)… did industry attempt the violence and
back-to-work measures of the late thirties. The counter action came through the
legislator… The fact that the labor was powerful enough to shut down a whole
industry lent color to middle class fears that Big Labor was running the
country. Each national strike … with the attendant publicity about the economic
effect, had given rise to outcries for action (Bell, 1954:250-1).
At the 1946 elections ‘labor
problems was one of the chief political issues’, on which Republicans won
control of Congress. The NAM
shortly drafted a new labor law and arranged for its submission to the new
Congress. ‘Except for a ban on industry wide bargaining’, Bell
observes ‘the Taft-Hartley Act passed (in 1947) embodied (NAM ’s
proposals) completely’. Not surprisingly, ‘it placed tremendous obstacles in
the way of new organization’ of workers (Brandies, 1957:232). ‘Public opinion,
however muddled’, Bell
concludes, ‘was the force which backed the new curbs on unions enacted in the
post-war years’ (Bell, 1954:250-1). Bell ’s
judgment is supported by Jack Barbash, who observed that ‘the General Motors
strike, like most of the other important strikes in 1946-7 upsurge were fought
not on the picket line… but in Washington
and in the press, and over the radio (Barbash, 1948:198). The outcome was,
while unions won the strikes, business won the public relations battle with
Taft-Hartley Act as its prize. Apart from years affected by the Korean War, the
American labor movement was never again able to increase the (low) proportion
of the work force it had organized. Thirty years later, in the face of a
renewed propaganda and public relations onslaught by business in the 1970’s,
organized labor in the US
went into a steep and possibly terminal decline. It will be therefore be
worthwhile to look more closely at the public relations aspects of 1945-46
strikes.
…
(изв. MANAGING PUBLIC OPINION: The
Corporate Offensive – Part I; Alex Carey, University of New South
Wales
No comments:
Post a Comment