The public relations plot against labor

[From May 29. Reposted in honor of Labor Day.]

Last week, sane people everywhere celebrated the withdrawal of the
nomination of Michael Baroody as nominee to chair the Consumer Product
Safety Commission, because he had made his living fighting against the
commission of consumer product safety. This scion of the clan I've
called the Corleone family of the right did so as lobbyist for the
National Association of Manufacturers, which reacted thus: "The
withdrawal of Michael Baroody's nomination to chair the Consumer
Product Safety Commission is a sad day for consumers and everyone who
cares about good government."

Such public relations absurdities are par for the National Association
of Manufacturer's course. I'm glad, in fact, for this teachable
moment: There is nothing more fundamental to what NAM than hustling
the public about what is good for them. If you love E. coli
conservatism, lift a glass daily in honor of NAM.

Come with me, then, on a journey, courtesy of historian Elizabeth
Fones-Wolfe's outstanding Selling Free Enterprise: The Business
Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 [1]....

It starts in 1934.

In the second year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, NAM's
annual PR budget was already hefty at $360,000 (almost five and a half
million in today's dollars). It wasn't, though, hefty enough.
Americans, those silly souls, thought that the government should
assist them out of their Depression misery, and that unions and
regulation of business could help. So, after Roosevelt's landslide re-
election, they more than doubled their PR budget—making it over half the
organization's annual income.

"In the everlasting battle for the minds of men," NAM Public Relations
Advisory Committee chair J. Warren Kinsman boomed, only modern PR
techniques were "powerful enough to arouse public opinion sufficiently
to check the steady, insidious, and current drift toward
socialism." (That his PR budget resembled the most Orwellian aspects
of socialism in itself—if his ideas were, simply, true and persuasive,
why would he need millions to shove them down the public's throat?—was
an irony that escaped him.)

What were they buying? Press releases, pamphlets, speakers, radio
shows and full-page ads like this one, placed during World War II:
"I'm not playing for marbles. I'm fighting for freedom. I'm fighting
for the things that made American the greatest place in the world to
live in.... So don't anybody tell me I'll find America changed."

Schools were not slighted. In 1941 NAM proposed to the National
Education Association, the only union they liked (it represented a
potential vector with which to infect schoolchildren), joint
conferences to convey "the sincerity of American business"-and the
blight of federal aid to education. By 1950 NAM had circulated almost
4.5 million pamphlets to students. In 1953, two million children read
the B. F. Goodrich-sponsored comic book "Johnson Makes the
Team" ("Tommy Johnson, a son of a Goodrich tire dealer, learns about
the American free enterprise system through teamwork in football") and
saw the film "The Price of Freedom" ("the story of Fred Vollmer, a
young newspaper man who joins the staff of his father's paper. He
visits Germany and learns that public complacency to the exploding
powers of the state fostered Nazism. Returning home, he sees the same
threats to America's democratic institutions and resolves to expose
them in a series of 'stirring editorials'").

In 1954, Fones-Wolfe reports, "school superintendents estimated the
investment in free materials at $50 million, about half the amount
public schools spent annually on regular textbooks."

The clergy was not neglected; their Committee on Cooperation with
Churches drafted right-wing priests like Father Ferdinand Falque of
Minnesota and Edward A. Keller of Notre Dame, a point man in their
crusade against the guaranteed annual wage and for anti-union, right-
to-work legislation. The NAM brass was especially worried, one
internal memo revealed, about churches' "inherent sympathies" with the
weak.

In 1947, fighting to end holdover wartime business regulation and
against full-employment legislation, NAM pushed free material to 265
dailies and 1,876 small-town papers. As their vice president for PR
implored the membership, "The story of business economics and
philosophy needs to be told simply, understandably, repetitiously, and
without dilution or distortion-to broad masses of people."

That's freedom for you, folks. They juked up the circulation of
pamphlets from 2.5 million in 1948 to 6.5 million in 1949 to almost 8
million in 1950, adding a new, $1.4 million radio show. With the
election of Harry Truman, after all, NAM's president pointed out,
there was some question "whether we were so far down the road to
socialism that there was no return or whether freedom still existed."

What other kind of stories did NAM push? The argument, as the chairman
of their executive committee put it, that faith in government's role
in prosperity was "childlike." As he put it in 1942, "It is not
government that has wrought the miracle that is being accomplished
today in the production of war materials but the initiative, ingenuity
and organizing genius of private enterprise." As anyone who knows
anything about World War II defense production knows, this notion is a
childlike fairy tale in itself; America outproduced its enemies by a
factor of three to one, a process for which government-business
cooperation was responsible from start to finish. Good thing NAM had a
lot of money with which to push it. It was a lie that couldn't have
survived unless it was bought and paid for.

Harmless? Not if you consider the John Birch Society harmless. Several
NAM past presidents were among the founders. My favorite is Milwaukee
foundry-owner Bill Grede, whose name was pronounced like the word
Merriam-Webster defines as "having or showing a selfish desire for
wealth and possessions." So profoundly had their madness infested the
organization, historian Jonathan Soffer has discovered, the board
resolved it would "not knowingly be associated with any organization
that questions the loyalty and integrity of President Eisenhower."
That was one of the John Birch Society's principles: that Eisenhower
may have been a "conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." Grede
denounced this new "leftish trend" in the NAM board of directors
represented by the anti-Birch resolution.

So there you have it: Mike Baroody's people. And a demonstration, our
first, of a Big Con principle: there's no set of ideas so dangerous,
inhumane, antidemocratic, or stupid that a big enough right-wing
infusion of cash can't make look like it's sound.