In the September 24 issue of The New Yorker, historian Jill Lepore offers an informative and sobering account of the beginnings of big-money political consulting in the United States.
The Lie Factory
I won't go into too much detail because Lepore's piece is readable, comprehensive, and recommended, but here's a few blurry highlights:
According to Lepore, the sorry state we find ourselves in in respect to sponsored messaging (as opposed to civil discourse and debate grounded in critical thinking) originates in the ruthless and cynical machinations of ingenious husband and wife consultants Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter. We can thank Whitaker and Baxter for such odious truisms as, in Lepore's words, "Never explain anything," "Say the same thing over and over again," and "Never shy from controversy; instead, win the controversy."
Based in California, this couple was instrumental in kyboshing Sinclair Lewis's run for POTUS in 1934. Their success in creating and controlling the message about the candidate and their savvy if not crass manipulation of media outlets to promote their propaganda provided the foundation for the work that would solidify their status as the Adam and Eve of contemporary right-wing political consulting. Lepore:
Sinclair got licked, he said, because the opposition ran what he called a Lie Factory. “I was told they had a dozen men searching the libraries and reading every word I had ever published.” They’d find lines he’d written, speeches of fictional characters in novels, and stick them in the paper, as if Sinclair had said them. “They had a staff of political chemists at work, preparing poisons to be let loose in the California atmosphere on every one of a hundred mornings.” Actually, they had, at the time, a staff of only two, and the company wasn’t called the Lie Factory. It was called Campaigns, Inc.
Lepore's article is worth a read not only for her profile of Whitaker and Baxter, but even more significantly for her account of their nefarious influence on health care messaging that persists today. It turns out that the current hostility towards social medicine has twisted and thorny roots in California governor Earl Warren's 1944 bid to reform health insurance:
Retained by the California Medical Association for an annual fee of twenty-five thousand dollars to campaign against the Governor’s plan, Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that most people liked and taught them to hate it. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” they liked to say. They launched a drive for Californians to buy their own insurance, privately. Voluntary Health Insurance Week, driven by forty thousand inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: “Political medicine is bad medicine.”
Also, Whitaker and Baxter's early assessments and uses of emerging non-print media at the time, especially television, provided the boilerplate for how consultants of all stripes respond to new media.
In any case, The Lie Factory is a great article. It provides a relevant, thoughtful break from all the campaign frenzy commandeering the media markets right now, but still contributes to the larger conversation about political messaging and the propaganda industry in democratic societies. Interestingly, Lepore's article concludes with mention of Nixon's affiliation with Whitaker and Baxter, and though she doesn't even allude to it, she calls to mind the rat-fucking tactics Karl Rove would begin to develop in service to Nixon's 1968 run.