Abstract
Publicity practices adopted by the White House to promote public support for the president’s policies spread widely in the executive branch in the 1920s. Cabinet officers and agency directors applied many of the promotional techniques used during World War I to try to increase public and congressional support for their programs. Press conferences, press bureaus, handouts, and other tactics of publicity were used to promote news coverage of agency activities in much the same way that the presidents since McKinley appealed for public support for themselves and their policies through the news at the White House.
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Notes
T. Swann Harding, “Genesis of One ‘Government Propaganda Mill,’“ Public Opinion Quarterly 10 (Summer 1947): 227—35.
The quotation is from Richard Barry, “Mr. Hughes Humanized: A Study of the Secretary of State,” Outlook 128 (6 July 1921): 412–3.
For overviews of Hughes’s service as secretary of state, see Mario J. Pusey Charles Evans Hughes, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1951),
and Charles Cheney Hyde, “Charles Evans Hughes,” in Samuel F. Bemis, ed., The American Secretaries of State, 20 vols. (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1929), 10:232–401.
The primary single-volume biographies of Hoover are Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life, and Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975).
J. R.Williams, “Hoover, Harding and the Harding Image,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 45 (Winter/Spring 1972—73): 4—20, and Henry, Presidential Transitions, 161–2,182–90.
Peri E. Arnold, “The ‘Great Engineer’ as Administrator: Herbert Hoover and Modern Bureaucracy,” Review of Politics 42 (July 1980): 331—3.
Peri E. Arnold, “Ambivalent Leviathan: Herbert Hoover and the Positive State,” in David J. Greenstone, ed., Public Values and Private Power in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 114. Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive, 80–3.
Robert K. Murray, “Herbert Hoover and the Harding Cabinet,” in Ellis W Hawley ed., Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice (Iowa City, Ia.: University of Iowa Press, 1981), 21—3. Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive, 80–6.
See, generally, William R. Tanner, “Secretary Hoover’s War on Waste,” 1–235; David E. Lee, “Herbert Hoover and the Development of Commercial Aviation, 1921–26,” 36–65; and Carl E. Krog, “Organizing the Production of Leisure,” 66–94, all in Carl E. Krog and William R. Tanner, eds., Herbert Hoover and the Republican Era: A Reconsideration (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1984). Essary “Uncle Sam’s Ballyhoo Men,” 425.
The quotation is from Herbert Corey, “The Presidents and the Press,” Saturday Evening Post 204 (9 January 1932): 25, 96–104.
The quotation is from Paul Y. Anderson, “Hoover and the Press,” Nation 133 (14 October 1931): 382–4.
Alfred Pearce Dennis, “Humanizing the Department of Commerce,” Saturday Evening Post 197 (6 June 1925), 8–9, 181–2, 184, and 186.
A. H. Ulm, “Hoover Emerges as a One-Man Cabinet,” New York Times Magazine, 19 September 1926, 1.
The quotation is from Louis Rothschild to Wayne R. Whitaker, 5 March 1972, cited in Whitaker, “Warren G. Harding and the Press,” 131. Clinton Gilbert, The Mirrors of Washington (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 120–1.
Hoover’s most recent biographer, George H. Nash, describes relations between Hoover and Coolidge as correct but tense. See Nash, “The ‘Great Enigma’ and the ‘Great Engineer’: The Political Relationship of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover,” in John Earl Haynes, ed. Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era (Washington, D. C: Library of Congress, 1998), 132—48.
Louis W Liebovich, Bylines in Despair: Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression, and the U.S. News Media (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1994), 46—9, describes the press coverage of Hoover’s flood relief efforts.
The phrase is from Harper Leech and John C. Carroll, What’s the News? (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1926), 160.
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© 1998 Stephen Ponder
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Ponder, S. (1998). Herbert Hoover and Cabinet Publicity in the 1920s. In: Managing the Press. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63048-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63048-6_9
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