A Brief History of Corporate America's Use of PR vs Unions - La Cueva
What has been Corporate America's most lethal weapon against unions over the years? It's not Ronald Reagan. It's neither anti-union detective companies like the Pinkertons nor vigilante groups like the the KKK. Union-busting firms? Nope. The answer is public relations, or "PR", formerly known as propaganda. According to the late Alex Carey, author of Taking The Risk Out of Democracy, unions are one of two things (besides governments) capable of confronting corporate power. The intense, relentless PR campaign that Corporate America is now waging on public employees' unions is not the first. They began nearly a century ago.
LUDLOW MASSACRE, 1913
Colorado Militiamen fired into the tent colony of striking miners at John D Rockefeller's Colorado Coal and Fuel company, causing a blaze which claimed the lives of two women and 11 children trying to avoid the gunfire. With each new photo of the charred bodies, Rockefeller's already besmirched reputation took another hit. He had to act quickly. So he hired young Ivy Lee to perform what is now referred to as "crisis management".
Lee already had credentials. He had written the first press release in history a decade earlier, worked in Grover Cleveland's presidential campaign and was the Pennsylvania Railroad's first "director of publicity". He operated from his "Declaration of Principles" to create a "two-way street" between reporters and companies. To accomplish this he granted them access to the plant and circulated pamphlets entitled, "Facts Concerning The Strike in Colorado for Industrial Freedom".
Lee also tried other tactics to try and resurrect Rockefeller's reputation like having him attend certain civic functions, getting his photo into as many local dailies as possible and handing out dimes to orphans in neighboring towns during the holiday season.
But most historical accounts say Rockefeller's reputation was too far gone for Lee's pioneering work to have anything but a negligible effect. Rockefeller's cutthroat, monopolistic practices with Standard Oil had made him a universally-reviled figure. At CC&F he was an absentee owner who had not visited the plant or attended a board of directors meeting in over a decade. The 1913 strike was the fourth in 30 years, and the strikers were scabs in 1903.
Lee did, however, establish the framework for the PR industry as it exists today and was one of its two most influential men until it was discovered he was on IG Farben's (Hitler's) payroll in the early 1930s.
| Excerpts from Ivy Lee's Declarations of Principles |
| "This is not a secret press bureau. All our work is done in the open. We aim to supply news. "This is not an advertising agency. If you think any of our matter ought properly to go to your business office, do not use it. "Our matter is accurate. Further details on any subject treated will be supplied promptly, and any editor will be assisted most carefully in verifying directly any statement of fact. ... "In brief, our plan is frankly, and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about." (Source: Michael Turney) |
COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION (CPI)/CREEL COMMISSION
President Woodrow Wilson had just won reelection campaigning on a pledge to keep the US out of WWI. Once in office, however, he reversed course. He needed a way to whip an isolationist-leaning public into a jingoistic frenzy. So he created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), or "Creel Commission", named after its chairman George Creel. It used an array of new tactics to accomplish this.
The CPI's strategy aimed to portray the Germans as inhuman and a threat to the American way of life. It's tactics included the Four Minute Men, an organization which employed volunteers as speakers in an array of languages--some Boy Scouts. They spoke in people's homes and at events throughout communities. The CPI planted articles, received millions of dollars worth of free advertising in all the print media of the day, held 45 War Conferences in various regions of the country and employed extensive artwork. Within six months universities and high schools dropeed German language classes and Daschunds were renamed "Liberty Pups". Public opinion shifted in favor of sending American troops to Europe.
Corporate America watched the success of the CPI with keen interest and wasted no time in adapting it for the Great Steel Strike in the fall of 1919. US Steel simply made the strikers out to be Bolsheviks, Reds or other radicals instead of Germans. Entering the strike the issues seemed to be favor the strikers. They worked 84-hour weeks under horrendous conditions and most received meager pay. But the employers hammered away at them with advertisements in the print media. The New York Times carried the headline "50,000 Aliens Here Spread Radicalism" in the fourth week of the strike. Judge Elbert Gary, US Steel's Chairman of the Board, told the press the strikers were, "trying to Sovietize the steel industry". Again, public opinion shifted in favor of the company and the strike was broken. Nationally 350,000 strikers returned to their jobs without winning a single issue.
First Red Scare depiction of a "European Anarchist" attempting to destroy the Statue of Liberty.(Source: Wikipedia)
Although the CPI disbanded the day after the war ended, the political climate it created lingered. Eugene Debs, the top labor leader of the day, had been jailed under the Sedition Act for speaking against the United States entry into the war at a rally in Ohio. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and a young J. Edgar Hoover continued to conduct raids on suspected Bolsheviks, radicals and especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Congress passed the Syndicalist Act, which made it illegal for two or more people to gather in public places, specifically for the IWW. Appeal to Reason, easily the largest pro-labor weekly in terms of circulation, folded in 1922. This had a chilling effect on organizing, and unions remained dormant until the Great Depression.
Now for a round-up," a political cartoon in support of the Sedition Act of 1918. (Credit: Library of Congress)
MOHAWK VALLEY FORMULA
In 1937 James Rand of the Remmington-Rand Corporation devised a more sophisticated method of breaking strikes by building on the successesful narratives of the Creel Commission and US Steel: link everything un-American to union leaders and radicals, link everything wholesome and American to the interests of business. This marked a turning point for breaking strikes. In the past corporations often resorted to violence and labor spies. At one point, in fact, US Steel had amassed more weapons than the entire Chicago Police Force. Thereafter corporations emphasized mobilizing public opinion, which proved to be both more economical as well as effective.
First: When a strike is threatened, label the union leaders as "agitators" to discredit them with the public and their own followers. Conduct balloting under the foremen to ascertain the strength of the union and to make possible misrepresentation of the strikers as a small minority. Exert economic pressure through threats to move the plant, align bankers, real estate owners and businessmen into a "Citizens' Committee."
Second: Raise high the banner of "law and order", thereby causing the community to mass legal and police weapons against imagined violence and to forget that employees have equal right with others in the community.
Third: Call a "mass meeting" to coordinate public sentiment against the strike and strengthen the Citizens' Committee.
Fifth: Convince the strikers their cause is hopeless with a "back-to-work" movement by a puppet association of so-called "loyal employees" secretly organized by the employer.
Sixth: When enough applications are on hand, set a date for opening the plant by having such opening requested by the puppet "back-to-work" association.
Seventh: Stage the "opening" theatrically by throwing open the gates and having the employees march in a mass protected by squads of armed police so as to dramatize and exaggerate the opening and heighten the demoralizing effect.
Eighth: Demoralize the strikers with a continuing show of force. If necessary turn the locality into a warlike camp and barricade it from the outside world.
Ninth: Close the publicity barrage on the theme that the plant is in full operation and the strikers are merely a minority attempting to interfere with the "right to work". With this, the campaign is over--the employer has broken the strike.
(Source: Wikipedia)
What did the Taft-Hartley Act do? It stacked the deck heavily in favor of management in both organizing campaigns and strikes. In a nutshell it:
- Outlawed a number of unions' successful tactics during the previous dozen years, including the secondary strike.
- Encouraged states to enact "right-to-work" laws outlawing the "union shop". Within a decade virtually all of the South (save for Louisiana) and Rocky Mountain States did just that. The term in itself is a something of a PR masterpiece since it involves neither rights nor work, only the outlawing of union membership as a condition of employment.
- Allowed management to deny union representatives access to the plant during organizing drives and easily obtain delays in NLRB elections.
- Require loyalty oaths from union leaders that they were not members of the Communist Party, which really impacted CIO unions like the ILWU.
ILWU President Harry Bridges (Source: Wikipedia)
The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act ranks as Corporate America's greatest anti-union legislative victory.
CIA-LED COUP IN GUATEMALA IN 1954
Edward Bernays had become the most influential person in the field of public relations . He had served with distinction on the Creel Commission. He had written Propaganda, the seminal book on techniques of public persuasion. And he made it fashionable for women to smoke while in the employ of Chesterfield, effectively doubling the tobacco industry's market.
So Sam Zemurray, United Fruit's CEO, hired Bernays in 1940 and asked him to perform a task similar to Ivy Lee's with John D. Rockefeller several decades earlier: improve the image of United Fruit, which had an international reputation as a brutal colonizer, and improve his (Zemurray's) image as a "seamy operator".
In 1950 things changed. Jacobo Arbenz won the presidency of Guatemala in a landslide running on a platform that included land reform. Two years into his term he began confiscating uncultivated land from large plantations and distributing it among families of the nations the nation's huge indigenous peasant population and paid United Fruit fair market value for its part (210,000 acres) of the total.
Jacobo Arebnz
(Source: Wikipedia)
United Fruit immediately went to Wasnington and warned that Arbenz would lead Guatemala down the path to Communism if allowed to complete his term. The Eisenhower Administration ultimately gave the OK for the CIA to assist in the ovethrow of its second government in as many years.
Bernays embarked on the yeoman task of shifting US opinion in favor of United Fruit. He engineered a multi-faceted campaign which included the following:
- Practicing what Noam Chomsky later termed "Treetops Propaganda". Bernays knew thousands of people in positions of influence in business, academia, labor and especially the media. So he set out to cultivate them, sending well-reasoned, well-written weekly circulars advocating United Fruit's position and warning of the danger Arbenz posed to the entire region.
- Taking groups of reporters from prominent publications on two-week, all-expense paid cruises to Guatemala during the dead of winter. Mesmerized by the five-star meals, strong drinks and balmy climes, none of the reporters bothered to ask who was funding the cruises or what their purpose was. Once in Guatemala Bernays and his staff took them on tightly-scripted tours where they did not even see anyone with a negative view of United Fruit, let alone interview them.
How did this effect labor? It ended the 10-year "Guatemalan Spring", which gave unions the legal right to organize and strike. It brought on a series of very repressive governments under which Guatemala became one of the most dangerous places in the world for union organizers and activists. And it created a haven for US companies to relocate. In the ensuing 20 years the CIA assisted in similar coups in Brazil, Indonesia, the Domincan Republic and Chile.
SS Abangarez, a United Fruit Company banana carrier, c. 1945
(Source: Wikipedia)
THINK TANKS
The anti-establishment mood of the 1960s caught Corporate America off-guard, much the way it did in the 1930s. In the early 1970s it began shifted its emphasis to think tanks. It revived some existing ones (American Enterprise Institute) and created some new ones like the Business Roundtable and American Economic Institute. These groups maintained a low public profile, and their primary PR function is to prepare position papers for members of Congess and others in positions of influence. In the late 1970s it scored its greatest legislative victory in 1978 by defeating labor law reform proposed by the Carter Administration, and in 1980 its greatest electoral victory with the election of Ronald Reagan, easily the nation's most anti-union president.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Taking The Risk Out of Democracy, Alex Carey
- PR! Stuart Ewen
- Labor's Untold Story, Richard Boyer and Herb Morais
- "Of Reds and Revolution", John Spencer
- Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky
- Necessary Illusions, Noam Chomsky
- Toxic Sludge is Good for You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
- The History of Labor in the United States, Philip Taft
- "A Banana Republic Again?", Brendan Fischer in PRWatch.org
- American Labor Struggles, 1877-1934, Samuel Yellen
- Exerpts from Father of Spin by Larry Tye
- The American Labor Movement, Leon Litwack
But the facts were actually "facts". He immediately built a reputation of stretching the truth if not outright lying. Poet Carl Sandburg called him a "paid liar" and the muckraking Upton Sinclair dubbed him "Poison Ivy Lee" in one of his novels. Lee,
- Failed to disclose that many of the surveys cited in the circulars were obtained from newspapers owned by coal interests.
- Referred to Mary "Mother" Jones, the legendary union organizer, as a "prostitute" despite the fact she was 82 years old.
- Greatly exaggerated the salaries of union organizers and leaders.
- Admitted in testimony before the US Senate that he made no effort to ascertain whether information given to him by coal operators was true.
Ruins of the Ludlow Colony in the direct aftermath of the massacre (Source: Wikipedia)
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(Source: Wikipedia)
(Source: Wikipedia)