Whitaker and Baxter

---

see uber TheBrain

new book lie factory lapore

uber1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-4518

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NO PREVIEW

The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of ... - Greg Mitchell - Google Books

REVIEW

1298115498?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals&imgSeq=2

Gentry, Curt

. Columbia Journalism Review

; New York, N. Y.Vol. 31, Iss. 3, (Sep 1, 1992): 57.

The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics by Greg Mitchell (Book Review)

EPIC IDLE FACTORIES, public own utilities, spl tax on large landowners, state income tAX ON CORPS; schlesinger calls 1st all out PR blitzkrieg in Am pol"

olig cd not depend on feeble gop, hired C&W, defensive camp not enough, so just trashed uppie; "i expect `1/2 of U S unemployed to flock to CA if i am elected;"

so cal ad aGY lord ND THOMAS --> FOOTE CONE & BELDING; pioneer: out of state $, direct mail targeted to eg Dr; catholics, stanford grads; soap operas, amos & andy; hired scum of the streets to carry EPIC placards; LBM MGM march of time like newsreels, irving thalberg maN ON STR AND CA ELECTION NEWS; OUTTAKES FROM MOVIES BUMS

HEARST uppie richest publisher mistress in pvt city of palaces and cathedrals, junk form eu, acres for giraffes..." Heasrt actually fait to uppie except the edit pg; LA exmer boxcar foto, scene from Wild Boys on the Road;

#1 rival LAT kyle palmer pol editor raised $ and wrote sp for Merriam; chester Rowell SF chron drafted M platform; pol edit 40 yrs earl"squire" behrens ~ uppie quotes from leading dems as straight news. LAT daily has sinclairisms, quotes out of context or from novels; am legion riot dept of plutocracy, conductors of drunken orgies"

no daily paper supported him; clem w had ad agency in sacto had deals with lots of 700 weeklies, placed small ads and got free coverage of M (gt dep so desperate for small $)

NYT sent turner catledge; LAT ed said forget NY = time crap; we are going to beatthat sob any way we can; we are gonna kill him" lost by 200k votes vs 1.1q m 900K; EPIV meld w. Dems; 1943 Pulizer, remaried at 83 yo; d 1968 at 90; end of press lords 1934 tho palmer and behrens and successors wd give us gop another 20 years, incl nixon; dirty tricks changed camps forever.

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kpfa 7 am 4/1/24

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-april-1-2024/

Two repeats on this Cesar Chavez day:

00:08 Bruce Neuburger,longtime radical activist who spent most of the 1970s working in California’s vegetable fields during the heyday of the United Farm Workers. His book is called _Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California_ [interview originally aired in 2014]

00:33 Kathryn S. Olmsted,history professor at UC Davis, discussing her book Right out of California: the 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism

interview originally aired in 2015]

insurance corp, oil corps and ---- bought farmland

hoover beat, brooded, boosted dick nixon

agribiz biggest sector; hired W&B

2017 talk 1 hr

aclu talk imp valley cops gas, goons grabbed him from restaurant beaten, fire threat to brand; wrecked car, took shoes and wallet in desert; aclu sent 5 layers, all beaten, fled 1934.

ca farms bigger than rest of us; sf la corps hired local mgr hire labor contractor, hire workers, CW called factories in the fields;

In a major reassessment of modern conservatism, noted historian Kathryn S. Olmsted reexamines the explosive labor disputes in the agricultural fields of Depression-era California, the cauldron that inspired a generation of artists and writers and that triggered the intervention of FDR's New Deal. Right Out of California tells how this brief moment of upheaval terrified business leaders into rethinking their relationship to American politics - a narrative that pits a ruthless generation of growers against a passionate cast of reformers, writers, and revolutionaries.

Olmsted reveals how California's businessmen learned the language of populism with the help of allies in the media and entertainment industries, and in the process created a new style of politics: corporate funding of grassroots groups, military-style intelligence gathering against political enemies, professional campaign consultants, and alliances between religious and economic conservatives.

The business leaders who battled for the hearts and minds of Depression-era California, moreover, would go on to create the organizations that launched the careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. A riveting history in its own right, Right Out of California is also a vital chapter in our nation's political transformation whose echoes are still felt today.

avg wage 10c/hr kids at 7 10 hr/day 6-7 days/wk. march 1933 start new deal; 1933 NIRA sect 7a rt to organize and bargain collectively , govt will protect Const rt; nothing in law mention farm, but So Dems cotton goes to seed; fdr needed so dems to pass bills, so clarification only factory; they are union mad and led to believe the govt upholds them in their stand” bureaucrat; FDR told all to join unions, but ppl did not know about carve-outs;

1933 50k farmworkers CA go out on strike and wait for gov’t help; commie org scramble to help; cotton harvest in san joaquin vly asked for nat’l min wage NIRA; 2oK central vly; caravan to where pickers worked, blew bugles; herbert hoover 4 farms ctl valley,insur co, bank, RR utilities... growers controlled ciops, vigilantes; disarmrichfrmer DL; evicted so set up camp on small farmer land; 5k bakersfield; after 10 days rally vigilantes, fired into crowd 2 kia, many wounded oct 1933;

George Creel W coast NRA head; strikes ~ recovery; visalia pat chambers jailed after shootings; growrs get lot of gov’t money (canals) corps had been pro new deal, dams, irrigation canal, roads, airports; agroc adjust act subsidy to not grow cotton; govt invest millions in this crop; gotta talk to famers not the commies; arbitration asked for 1 dollar per 100 lbs 60 compromise at 75 cents; still growers po. by all that is fair and just, have the am farmersd no rights over Communists and aliens? [mex] visalia times delta;

see govt as enemy, organize; creel ets death threats; wwi hero general imp vly fail; did not threat to take subsidies as creel had; govt in league w/ commies and aliens; crim syndicalism post WWI bolshevik panic used ~ IWW cannot advocate for new sys of property owning; commie fameworkers in scato hq, DA refused, but got AG? to appt spec prosecutor; 18 leaders = sedition paid for by growers, paid for witness, evidence, 8 convicted to state prison (long but got after a few years, union collapsed; PR campaign ~ ND radical, Ca in danger of takeover, worked w/ newspapers consev then is there a red menace 1930’ in LA LAT; james cagney gave money to caroline decker sacto bee, had to refute; pol camp W&B 1933 sacto, gov ~ Uppie 1st statewide campaign; 1934 --> dem, won primary; common prop ownership; pioneered techniques dark $ corps and olig 10 to 1 $; cannot beat him on econ ideas, so cultural threat lib dem = soc= commie, so threat to home, fam, church; mobilized MC and conserv women; backs against waLL NOW must fight, one woman in each town; gun pix DAR 1935 ~ commie invasion Am Women Inc dinner dance and target practice; commies from Mex invade; [penetrator pulp fiction?]

corocoran steinbeck dubious battle apple, but actually cotton; guy actually survived by ostracized by big guys;

Nixon, HH one of richest in CA; HH liked redbait in 1934, looked for cands, discover and encourage dick, got biz backing in 1946, letters for decades; nixon hired W&B; thier guys trained RR camp workers; QA lapore lie factory; uppie; ww2 killed farm unions --> Braceros; end 1964 --> UFW

congress invest labor CA relate bc D lange pix white --> ww2; okies did not want to eat w/ filipino and blks; problem for IWW; when crop done, the groups split to new crops; fear of illegals voting, challenged in LA; failed but if uppie won wd have been used ~; chehapachie prison out early b/c taught piano, 4 kids in marin married a atty; pat chambers when out also stopped being labor organizer [instruction to jury wrong, out early vs 20 yrs] 1939 hitler pact; years lawyer delano old guy wants to meet; why wait, redbait; 51 min; sf strike led to ladies target practice; nixon and HH quakers; HH did not think govt2 shd help social justice, prot nat’lism; 1960’s scotus tossed ca sedition act? crim syn ACT ~ FREE SP BC REQ NO ACTION vs incite to riot, vs advocate collective ownership; imp vly most concentrated, more over time not quite as bad ctrl vly; cotton plantation 100k acres; lots were southerners worker and owner; 1886 did not know; commie HQ SJ --> sacto, to get attn of lawmakers;

fed govt orig limited acreage for cheap water, overturned in late 50’s?;

many langs, unions did not want to live in shacks, so commies 1%, biggest out side of NY; pat chambers oil worker, wobbly; caroline decker 21 yo in 1934, harlan cty kty coal petite blonde so seemed American parents russ immigr;

RR // cannery [counts as factory new deal?]

hearst owns 5 pprs, 1:3 C chandler LAT ~ ND

army forming in WA wil invade, blow up bridges, take over fields ...all commie HQ attacked after SF gen’l strike;

Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California - Carey McWilliams - Google Books preview

https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/121/4/1304/2581688?login=false

Extract

Drawing on historian Richard White’s idea that the West represents the “kindergarten of the American state,” Kathryn S. Olmsted has authored a deeply researched and illuminating account of the origins of modern conservatism (3). Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism complicates the historiography about the conservative movement by tracing the movement’s birth to the big business campaign to repel the farmworker strikes in California’s fields during the early- and mid-1930s.

Rather than focusing on defense workers and suburban housewives, social turbulence, the moral majority, and the tax revolt in the decades following World War II, Olmsted argues that California’s agribusiness leaders, with aid from newspaper publishers, the judicial system, and Republican operatives, constructed a formidable bulwark against the early New Deal—providing a winning formula for the Right for decades to come.

Olmsted’s book, a deep history of modern conservatism, illuminates some previously missing links between the prewar and postwar Right. The author explains how California’s business leaders campaigned effectively “to persuade people that Franklin Roosevelt’s administration imperiled their religion, their liberty, and their family—their very way of life as they knew it.”

Businessmen, Olmsted asserts, “manipulated fears of cultural change” by portraying organized labor’s struggle to win better wages and working conditions as fundamental threats to gender relations and white privilege (7).

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10 million bucks to beat uppie?! rt terrified

uppie aND FDR were egghead elite who did not know real ppl, a threat to religion (mobilized apoltical conserv woman before passive) b/c socialism threat to your homes.

dem party did backrm deal with merriam b/c they scared too?!

history roots

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-march-19-2019/

Ca farm, steinbeck (cotton strike dubious battle woman and ppl of color but --> wht men)

hoover born iowa but came to ca stanford, built party picked rmn, helped beat uppie (donors, consultants ) eventually 1966 RR gov

What are the origins of modern conservatism? The failed Goldwater campaign? Or the Cold War era discontent of midwestern small capitalists? Historian Kathryn Olmstead argues that it should be located even earlier, in the intense and massive labor unrest that took place in the fields of California in the 1930s. The response by growers and other elites pioneered methods that have become familiar today, from deploying populist rhetoric in the interests of big business to funding ostensibly grassroots organizations. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Kathryn Olmstead, Right Out of California: The Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism The New Press, 2015

pioneers

put on a fight or a show

if you have to explain, you've lost

defense = lose

big lie

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Speaks_Out_Against_Socialized_Medicine

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine is a 1961 LP featuring Ronald Reagan. In this more than ten-minute recording, Reagan "criticized Social Security for supplanting* private savings and warned that subsidized medicine would curtail Americans' freedom" and that "pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him."^[1] Roger Lowenstein called the LP part of a "stealth program" conducted by the American Medical Association (see Operation Coffee Cup).^[1]

Summary

Reagan opens by saying that in 1927 socialist Norman Thomas said that the American people would never vote for socialism, but "under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program." Snopes.com calls this attribution probably false, arguing that "no one has ever been able to turn up a source".^[2]

Reagan says that "Government has invaded the free precincts of private citizens," stating that the U.S. government owns "1/5 of the total industrial capacity of the United States." Reagan says "One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it." Reagan cites the failure of president Harry Truman's national health insurance proposal as evidence of the American people's rejection of socialized medicine.

Reagan describes Representative Aime Forand as having introduced a bill which would institute "compulsory health insurance" for all people of social security age. Forand is quoted as having said, “If we can only break through and get our foot inside the door, then we can extend the program after that." Forand is likened to labor union leader Walter Reuther, who is quoted as having said, "It’s no secret that the United Automobile Workers is officially on record of backing a program of national health insurance." The Forand bill is described as being praised by socialists: "They say once the Forand bill is passed this nation will be provided with a mechanism for socialized medicine capable of indefinite expansion in every direction until it includes the entire population. Now we can’t say we haven’t been warned."

Reagan describes Representative Cecil R. King of California as the successor to Congressman Forand in his support for a bill that would provide senior citizens with medical care. (The 1962 King-Anderson bill is often described as a precursor to the Social Security Act of 1965, which established Medicare.) Reagan cites the expansion of private health insurance and the passage of the 1960 Kerr-Mills Act, which provided federal funds to states to cover the "medically needy," as evidence that King's legislation is unnecessary. Reagan concludes that the new bill is "simply an excuse to bring about what they wanted all the time: socialized medicine." Reagan warns against the danger of encroaching on the relationship between patients and doctors, and of an attack on doctors' freedoms.

Reagan encourages his listeners to join a letter-writing campaign to Congress with the message, "We do not want socialized medicine." Reagan quotes Representative Charles A. Halleck of Indiana as having said, "When the American people wants something from Congress, regardless of its political complexion, if they make their wants known, Congress does what the people want." Reagan warns that if his listeners do not stop the proposed medical program, "behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Norman Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism." Under this scenario, Reagan says, "We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

Criticism

In 1966 Governor Pat Brown, campaigning for re-election against Reagan, said of Reagan's speech about socialized medicine, that Reagan was "an enemy of social progress," who had "hired" out to the American Medical Association.^[3] In response, Reagan accused him of "pure demagoguery" in suggesting that California's elderly had reason to fear a Reagan victory in the race for governor.^[4]

In 1980 President Jimmy Carter, campaigning for re-election against Reagan, told crowds that: "As a traveling salesman for the American Medical Association campaign against Medicare, [Reagan] sowed the fear that Medicare would mean socialism and that it would lead to the destruction of our freedom." When the subject arose in a televised debate in late October, Reagan responded: "When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought it would be better for the senior citizens. ... I was not opposing the principle of providing care for them..." Carter's campaign accused Reagan of "rewriting history", saying that there was no such alternative legislation.^[5]

Biographical History

Whitaker & Baxter Campaigns Inc., the country's first political campaign management firm, was founded in 1933 by business partners (later husband and wife) Clem Whitaker, Sr. and Leone Baxter. Although operating under the name Campaigns Inc., the company was not actually incorporated until 1950. Corporate filings at that time show Clem Whitaker, Sr., Leone Baxter and Howard Hassard (the firm's attorney) as Directors of the company. The company's principal office was located in San Francisco but temporary offices were opened in other cities as required including Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

While the company's primary activity was managing campaigns for candidates and ballot measures, they also handled public relations for various corporate clients such as Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Western Pacific Railroad, and Utah Construction Co. among others. Whitaker & Baxter Campaigns Inc. also included under its umbrella the California Feature Service and the Whitaker & Baxter Advertising Agency. The Feature Service was a newspaper wire service and public relations vehicle providing articles, editorials and cartoons to about 300 California newspapers.

With Clem Whitaker, Sr. in failing health, he and Leone Baxter sold the firm to son Clem Whitaker, Jr. and partners James Dorais and Newton Stearns in 1958. The elder Whitaker and his wife then founded Whitaker & Baxter International, a public relations consulting firm headquartered in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Leone Baxter continued to run this company after her husband's death in 1961.

Whitaker & Baxter Campaigns Inc. was most closely associated with Republican candidates and conservative political issues. A few measures like their very first campaign against P.G.& E. (Prop. 1, 1933), a ballot measure to establish the civil service system (Prop. 1, 1936), and a measure to increase teacher salaries (Prop. 3, 1946) are among the few exceptions.

The firm handled many ballot measure campaigns (most of them initiatives) including the well-known Ham and Eggs pension plans from the 1930s through the 1950s, efforts to redraw State Senate district boundaries on the basis of population, anti-labor union measuressuch as those prohibiting picketing and "featherbedding", and several propositions favoring large oil companies.

Among the candidates whose political campaigns were managed by Whitaker & Baxter, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Richard Nixon are probably the most significant. The firm helped elect Earl Warren to his first term as Governor but had a falling out with him late in the campaign and never worked with him again. They ran Goodwin Knight's successful campaigns for Lieutenant Governor and Governor, and were involved in his failed run for the U.S. Senate. Whitaker & Baxter were also in charge of Richard Nixon's presidential campaign in his home state of California where he prevailed despite losing the overall election to Kennedy.

Whitaker & Baxter were well established and successful at the state level when they were tapped in 1949 for their first national campaign representing the American Medical Association in their fight against President Harry Truman's national health insurance plan. Later in 1965, the firm again became involved in a campaign at the national level, this one in support of efforts to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution in response to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring that state legislative districts be based on population ("one man, one vote").

Throughout all this, the firm was continuously involved with local politics in San Francisco - both candidates and ballot measures. Mayoral campaigns included those of Roger Lapham, Elmer Robinson, and Harold Dobbs. Their ballot measure work included an anti-picketing ordinance (for), efforts by the city to create a public power system (against), a bond measure to fund expansion of the de Young Museum (for), and numerous measures relating to city garbage collection (for). They also represented the interests of local developers - in particular, the Utah Construction Company in their campaigns to develop tideland areas of the San Francisco Bay.

Clem Whitaker, Sr.

Born in Tempe, Arizona on May 1, 1899, Clement Sherman Whitaker was the son of a Baptist minister.His uncle, Robert Whitaker, was also a Baptist minister as well as a well-known socialist who was active in the American Civil Liberties Union and a friend of Upton Sinclair.

Clem Whitaker's career as a journalist began with a brief stint at the Willits News at age 13. Later he moved to Sacramento and began writing for the Sacramento Union before he reached 18. He spent a short period serving in the Army during World War I and returned to journalism at the Sacramento Union where at 19 he became city editor. By age 21 he was a political writer for the San Francisco Examiner. In 1921, hefounded the Capitol News Bureau providing political news to about 80 newspapers statewide. By 1930, he had sold this business to United Press.

His experience as a political reporter led to his involvement in lobbying activities; he lobbied successfully for legislation to establish the State Board of Barber Examiners and unsuccessfully to pass legislation banning capital punishment. His lobbying efforts brought him to the attention of lawyer Sheridan Downey (later U.S. Senator from California) who was organizing a campaign to defeat a referendum concerning the Central Valley Project. Downey invited both Whitaker and Leone Baxter to take part, which led to the creation of their campaign management firm in 1933.

Clem Whitaker was married twice - first to Harriet Reynolds in Sacramento with whom he had three children, Clem, Jr., Milton and Patricia. He was separated from his first wife in 1935 and married his second wife, Leone Baxter, in 1938. In 1961, he died in San Francisco of a respiratory ailment at age 62.

Leone Baxter

Much less is known about Leone Baxter. She was born November 20, 1906, in Kelso, Washington according to her Social Security application. She wrote for the Portland Oregonian and was married and widowed before the age of 28. At some point, she moved to Redding, California, where she got a job promoting a water carnival for theChamber of Commerce. She became manager of the Chamber in 1929, and it was in this capacity that she became involved in the Central Valley Projectreferendum campaign. Because of its proximity and potential economic impact, the CVP (including the Shasta Dam) was of particular interest to the City of Redding and its Chamber of Commerce. Baxter was co-founder of Whitaker & Baxter Campaigns Inc. in 1933; she and Clem Whitaker were married in 1938. She died near San Francisco in 2001 at the age of 95.

Clem Whitaker, Jr.

Clem Whitaker, Jr. was born Aug. 30, 1922, in Sacramento. He was Clem Whitaker, Sr.'s oldest son by his first wife, Harriet Reynolds Whitaker and grew up in Sacramento attending local public schools. His parents separated when he was 13. While still in high school, he worked for both the Sacramento Union and Sacramento Bee.

He attended the University of California, Berkeley majoring in Economics but did not graduate. In 1943, his education was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Air Corp as a fighter pilot. He joined his father's firm in 1946 after he was discharged becoming a partner in the business by 1950. He purchased the company from his father in 1958.

Later he was chairman of the board of the Wye Energy Group, president of the San Francisco Opera Foundation, a wine connoisseur, and active in many charitable causes. He was married twice and had a daughter and stepdaughter. He died at age 77 in 1999.

From the finding aid for Whitaker & Baxter Campaigns, Inc. Records 1933-1974 (California State Archives ) http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=whitaker--baxter-campaigns-inc-cr.xml

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on the media 10/14/12 http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/oct/12/worlds-first-political-consulting-firm/

American Chronicles

The Lie Factory

How politics became a business.

by Jill Lepore September 24, 2012

The field of political consulting was unknown before Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker founded Campaigns, Inc., in 1933.

“I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty,” by Upton Sinclair, is probably the most thrilling piece of campaign literature ever written. Instead of the usual flummery, Sinclair, the author of forty-seven books, including, most famously, “The Jungle,” wrote a work of fiction. “I, Governor of California,” published in 1933, announced Sinclair’s gubernatorial bid in the form of a history of the future, in which Sinclair is elected governor in 1934, and by 1938 has eradicated poverty. “So far as I know,” the author remarked, “this is the first time an historian has set out to make his history true.”

It was only sixty-four pages, but it sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies in four months. Chapter 1: “On an evening in August, 1933, there took place a conference attended by five members of the County Central Committee of the Democratic party, Sixtieth Assembly District of the State of California.” That might not sound like a page-turner, unless you remember that at the time California was a one-party state: in 1931, almost all of the hundred and twenty seats in the state legislature were held by Republicans; not a single Democrat held a statewide office. Also useful to recall: the unemployment rate in the state was twenty-nine per cent. Back to that meeting in August, 1933: “The purpose was to consider with Upton Sinclair the possibility of his registering as a Democrat and becoming the candidate of the party for Governor of California.” What if Sinclair, a lifelong socialist, ran as a Democrat? That’s one nifty plot twist.

The pace really picks up after Sinclair adopts an acronymic campaign slogan, “END POVERTY IN CALIFORNIA” (“It was pointed out that the initials of these words spell ‘EPIC’ ”); picks a campaign emblem, passing over the eagle and the hawk (“I personally can get up no enthusiasm for any kind of bird of prey,” the candidate says) in favor of the busy bee (“she not only works hard but has means to defend herself”); explains a program of coöperative factories and farms that would implement his philosophy of “production for use” rather than for profit; proposes killing the sales tax while levying something like a thirty-per-cent income tax on anyone earning more than fifty thousand dollars a year; and promises not only to raise hell but also, preposterously, to win.

All the same, it was a shock to pretty much everyone that, in August of 1934, Sinclair won the Democratic nomination, with more votes than any primary candidate in California had ever won before. That happens in the novel, too, which is what made reading it so thrilling (or, for many people, so terrifying): watching what Sinclair imagined coming to pass. Chapter 4: “The news that the Democratic voters of California had committed their party to the EPIC plan caused a sensation throughout the country.” True! “It resulted in wide discussion of the plan in the magazines, and the formation of an EPIC Committee for the Nation.” Sort of! “A statement endorsing Sinclair for Governor was signed by a hundred leading writers, and college groups were formed everywhere throughout the country to recommend the plan for their cities and states. A group of forward-looking economists endorsed the plan, and letters of support were received from a score of United States senators and some fifty congressmen.” O.K., that part never happened.

In 1934, Sinclair explained what did happen that election year, in a nonfiction sequel called “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked.” “When I was a boy, the President of Harvard University wrote about ‘the scholar in politics,’ ” Sinclair began. “Here is set forth how a scholar went into politics, and what happened to him.” “How I Got Licked” was published in daily installments in fifty newspapers. In it, Sinclair described how, immediately after the Democratic Convention, the Los Angeles Times began running on its front page a box with an Upton Sinclair quotation in it, a practice that the paper continued, every day, for six weeks, until the opening of the polls. “Reading these boxes day after day,” Sinclair wrote, “I made up my mind that the election was lost.”

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. OPPOsition RES

Campaigns, Inc., the first political-consulting firm in the history of the world, was founded, in 1933, by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter.Whitaker, thirty-four, had started out as a newspaperman, or, really, a newspaper boy; he was working as a reporter at the age of thirteen. By nineteen, he was city editor for the Sacramento Union and, a couple of years later, a political writer for the San Francisco Examiner. He was friendly and gangly, and had big ears, and smoked, and never stopped talking, and typed with two fingers. He started a newspaper wire service, the Capitol News Bureau, distributing stories to eighty papers. In 1930, he sold that business to the United Press. Three years later, he was, for his political ingenuity, hired by, among others, Sheridan Downey, a prominent Democrat, to help defeat a referendum sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric.Downey also hired Baxter, a twenty-six-year-old widow who had been a writer for the Portland Oregonian, and suggested that she and Whitaker join forces.

Baxter was small, fine-featured, red-headed, and elegant. “Oh, he was such a dear,” she would say, about someone she liked. Whitaker’s suits never looked like they fit him; Baxter’s looked like they’d fit Audrey Hepburn. Whitaker and Baxter started doing business as Campaigns, Inc. The referendum was defeated. Whitaker separated from his wife. In 1938, he and Baxter married. They lived in Marin County, in a house with a heated swimming pool.They began every day with a two-hour breakfast to plan the day. She sometimes called him Clem; he only ever called her Baxter.

In 1934, when Sinclair won the Democratic nomination, he chose Downey as his running mate. (“Uppie and Downey,” the ticket was called.) Working for Downey had been an aberration for Whitaker and Baxter, people who, it was said, “work the Right side of the street.” Campaigns, Inc., specialized in running political campaigns for businesses, especially monopolies like Standard Oil and Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Pacific Gas and Electric was so impressed that it put Campaigns, Inc., on retainer.

Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting. As the political scientist Stanley Kelley once explained, when modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, “So far,” he wrote, “Big Business has won every skirmish.”

Like most California Republicans, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who were the publicists for the California League Against Sinclairism, were horrified at the prospect of Sinclair in the governor’s office.* They had to work fast. They were hired just two months before the election by George Hatfield, the candidate for lieutenant governor on a Republican ticket headed by the incumbent governor, Frank Merriam, but, mostly, they were hired to destroy Sinclair. They began by locking themselves in a room for three days with everything he had ever written. “Upton was beaten,” Whitaker later said, “because he had written books.” And, so, those boxes in the L.A. Times:

SINCLAIR ON MARRIAGE:

The sanctity of marriage. . . . I have had such a belief . . . I have it no longer.

The excerpt, as Sinclair explained in “How I Got Licked,” was taken from a passage in his 1911 novel, “Love’s Pilgrimage,” in which one character writes a heartbroken letter to a man having an affair with his wife. (The novel, which Sinclair later found greatly embarrassing, is an autobiographical account of his disastrous first marriage, which ended in 1912 when, citing his wife’s adultery, he divorced her; he married his second wife in 1913; their marriage lasted until her death, in 1961.) “Sure, those quotations were irrelevant,” Baxter later said. “But we had one objective: to keep him from becoming Governor.”

Sinclair lost. He probably would have been a terrible governor. That, though, wasn’t really what was at stake.

No single development has altered the workings of American democracy in the last century so much as political consulting, an industry unknown before Campaigns, Inc. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, political consultants replaced party bosses as the wielders of political power gained not by votes but by money. Whitaker and Baxter were the first people to make politics a business. “Every voter, a consumer” was the mantra of a latter-day consulting firm, but that idea came from Campaigns, Inc. Political management is now a diversified, multibillion-dollar industry of managers, speechwriters, pollsters, and advertisers who play a role in everything from this year’s Presidential race to the campaigns of the candidates for your local school committee. (Campaigns, now, never end. And consultants not only run campaigns; they govern. Mitt Romney, asked by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board how he would choose his Cabinet, said that he’d probably bring in McKinsey to sort that out.)

But for years Whitaker and Baxter had no competition, which is one reason that, between 1933 and 1955, they won seventy out of seventy-five campaigns. The campaigns they chose to run, and the way they decided to run them, shaped the history of California, and of the country. Campaigns, Inc., is shaping American politics still.

In 1934, Upton Sinclair got licked, but a great many End Poverty in California candidates got elected, as Democrats. California became a two-party state. Twenty-four EPIC candidates, among them a Los Angeles lawyer named Culbert Olson, took their seats in the state legislature, and, four years later, Olson, the leader of the state’s EPIC caucus, was elected governor. Olson named Carey McWilliams, a Los Angeles attorney, writer, and reporter, as his chief of the California State Division of Immigration and Housing.

In 1938, McWilliams, a friend of Sinclair’s, had campaigned for Olson while writing “Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California.” It reads like a nonfiction version of “The Grapes of Wrath.” Both books were published in 1939. Steinbeck’s was banned, and Republicans in the state legislature attempted to abolish the Division of Immigration and Housing, just to get McWilliams fired.

In 1942, Republicans backing the state’s attorney general, Earl Warren, in a bid to replace Olson in the governor’s office urged him to hire Whitaker and Baxter to run his campaign. Warren agreed, somewhat reluctantly. In the years since defeating Sinclairism, Whitaker and Baxter had put a few more items in their campaign tool kit. In 1939, with pamphlets like “Hoaxing the Hungry,” Campaigns, Inc., had led the effort to defeat California’s Proposition 1, the “Ham and Eggs” referendum, which would have instituted a three-per-cent income tax to provide a thirty-dollar-a-week pension to every citizen over fifty: ham and eggs every Thursday. (Harper’s later reported, “In a typical campaign they employed ten million pamphlets and leaf-lets; 50,000 letters to ‘key individuals and officers of organizations’; 70,000 inches of advertising in 700 newspapers; 3,000 spot announcements on 109 radio stations; theater slides and trailers in 160 theaters; 1,000 large billboards and 18,000 or 20,000 smaller posters.”)

In 1940, they produced materials for the Republican Wendell Willkie’s Presidential campaign, including a speaker’s manual that offered advice about how to handle Democrats in the audience: “rather than refer to the opponent as the ‘Democratic Party’ or ‘New Deal Administration’ refer to the Candidate by name only.”

Whitaker and Baxter worked together flawlessly. They answered the telephone together. They read each other’s mail. They swapped jobs every year: one year, Whitaker was president and Baxter vice-president; the next year, the reverse. They made heaps of money. For, say, a referendum campaign, they charged between twenty-five thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars. They required complete control of the budget for campaign expenses. (One of their rules: save seventy-five per cent of your budget for the month before Election Day.) The firm grossed about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

Campaigns, Inc., was only one part of the empire. Whitaker and Baxter also ran the Clem Whitaker Advertising Agency, which charged a fifteen-per-cent commission from clients for every ad. They ran a newspaper wire service, the California Feature Service, which sent a political clipsheet every week, to fifteen hundred “thought leaders,” and cartoons, editorials, and articles to three hundred newspapers. Rural newspapers were so desperate for copy that many printed whatever the California Feature Service sent them, including documents that were basically press releases disguised as editorials endorsing whatever political position Campaigns, Inc., was being paid to advocate. The trick was to send out clippings so sly that a tired editor might not notice that they were written by an advertising outfit. One California newspaper editor used to play a game with his staff, while reading the stuff. It was called “Where’s the Plug?”

Whitaker and Baxter weren’t just inventing new techniques; they were writing a rule book. Never lobby; woo voters instead. “Our conception of practical politics is that if you have a sound enough case to convince the folks back home, you don’t have to buttonhole the Senator,” Baxter explained. Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one. Once, when fighting an attempt to recall the mayor of San Francisco, Whitaker and Baxter waged a campaign against the Faceless Man—the idea was Baxter’s—who might end up replacing him. Baxter drew a picture, on a tablecloth, of a fat man with a cigar poking out from beneath a face hidden by a hat, and then had him plastered on billboards all over the city, with the question “Who’s Behind the Recall?” Pretend that you are the Voice of the People. Whitaker and Baxter bought radio ads, sponsored by “the Citizens Committee Against the Recall,” in which an ominous voice said, “The real issue is whether the City Hall is to be turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to an unholy alliance fronting for a faceless man.” (The recall was defeated.) Attack, attack, attack. Whitaker said,“You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win!”

Never underestimate the opposition. The first thing Whitaker and Baxter always did, when they took on a campaign, was to “hibernate” for a week, to write a Plan of Campaign. Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them. Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good. (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3.”) Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”

Fan flames. “We need more partisanship in this country,” Whitaker said. Never shy from controversy; instead, win the controversy. “The average American doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen,” Whitaker advised. “But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two that we have ever found successful.” You can put on a fight (“he likes a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”), or you can put on a show (“he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”): “So if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see it.”

Winner takes all. “If you launch a campaign for a new car, your client doesn’t expect you to lead the field necessarily in the first year, or even the tenth year,” Whitaker once said. “But in politics, they don’t pay off for PLACE OR SHOW! You have to win, if you want to stay in business.”

In 1942, the problem with Earl Warren was that he was grim. Baxter said that, to get women to vote for him, he and his wife had to agree to have a picture of their family taken, and publicized. Warren’s wife, Nina, objected. “She didn’t want to exploit her family,” Baxter said. “But we knew that he had to get that family.” They took a picture—Earl, Nina, and their six children. They look like the Von Trapp Family Singers. Campaigns, Inc., distributed three million copies.

Still, there was no denying that Warren was solemn, and unsmiling. Turn your liabilities into assets! Baxter said that a grave, resolute man was just the kind of man California needed, in time of war. “War-time voters live at an emotional pitch that is anything but normal,” Whitaker wrote. “This must be a campaign that makes people hear the beat of drums and the thunder of bombs. . . . This must be A CALL TO ARMS IN DEFENSE OF CALIFORNIA!”

Warren looked strong on defense partly because, as attorney general, he had advocated for the internment of Japanese-Americans. “If the Japs are released,” he warned, “no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap.” (Warren later publicly expressed great remorse about this policy and, in a 1972 interview, wept over it.) Carey McWilliams was one of the few people in public office to oppose internment. Warren vowed that his first public act as governor would be to fire McWilliams.

In the last thirty days before the election, Whitaker and Baxter advertised in four hundred newspapers and on five hundred billboards. They flooded the airwaves. They sent out sound trucks, to drive around and honk and blast. They attacked Olson’s economic policies. They wrote a speakers’ manual, for anyone giving a speech in support of Warren; it included drafts of a “Six-Minute Talk” and a “Fifteen-Minute Talk.” (Their stock advice: Try not to speak for more than fifteen minutes—people get bored—and never for more than half an hour.)

Warren won, but he didn’t like the way he had won. Just before the election, after Whitaker and Baxter issued a press release without his approval, he fired them.They never forgave him.

In the fall of 1944, Warren got a serious kidney infection. This set him thinking about the rising costs of medical care, and the catastrophic effects that sudden illness could have on a family less well provided for than his own. “I came to the conclusion that the only way to remedy this situation was to spread the cost through insurance,” he wrote in his memoirs. He asked his staff to develop a proposal. “We concluded that health insurance should be collected through the Social Security System. After some studies, it was determined that the employers and employees in that system should each contribute one and one half per cent of wages paid by or to them.” After conferring with the California Medical Association, he anticipated no objections from doctors. And so, in January of 1945, during his State of the State address, he announced his proposal for comprehensive, compulsory health insurance for the state of California.

Earl Warren began his political career as a conservative and ended it as one of the most hated liberals in American history. What happened to him? One answer is: Whitaker and Baxter.

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.”

They lobbied newspaper editors. Whitaker boasted that “our people have personally called at more than 500 newspaper offices,” to persuade editors to change their positions. Many of these newspapers did a vast amount of advertising business with Campaigns, Inc., and received hundreds of words of free copy, each week, from the California Feature Service. “In three years,” Whitaker reported, “the number of newspapers supporting socialized medicine has dwindled from fifty to about twenty. The number of papers opposing compulsory health insurance has jumped from about 100 to 432.”

They invented an enemy. They sent out twenty-seven thousand copies of a pamphlet called “The Health Question,” which featured a picture of a man, a woman, and a child in the woods—“a forest of fear”—menaced by skeletons who have in their mouths, instead of teeth, the word “BILL.” Whitaker and Baxter sent out two and a half million copies of another pamphlet, called “Politically-Controlled Medicine.” They printed postcards, for voters to stick in the mail:

Dear Senator:

Please vote against all Compulsory Health Insurance Bills pending before the Legislature. We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don’t want to be forced to go to “A State doctor,” or to pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not.That system was born in Germany [under fricking Iron Chancellor Bismarck]—and is part and parcel of what our boys are fighting overseas. Let’s not adopt it here

:{In 1945, Warren’s billfailed to pass by just one vote. As Warren’s biographer G. Edward White remarked, “The scuttling of his health insurance plan was a confirmation for Warren of the nature of the political process, in which advocates of programs based on humanity and common sense were pitted against selfish, vindictive special interests.”}: Warren reintroduced the bill. And again Whitaker and Baxter defeated it. “They stormed the Legislature with their invective,” Warren later wrote, “and my bill was not even accorded a decent burial.” It was the greatest legislative victory at the hands of admen the country had ever seen. It was not, of course, the last.

In 1945, months after Earl Warren proposed compulsory health insurance in California, Harry Truman proposed a national program. “The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility,” the President said. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1946, Truman’s proposed federal health-insurance program, which, like Warren’s, was funded by a payroll tax, stalled. In his State of the Union address in 1948, an election year, Truman urged passage of his plan, which enjoyed widespread popular support. In November, Truman won the election. Days afterward, the American Medical Association called up the San Francisco offices of Campaigns, Inc. The A.M.A. retained Whitaker and Baxter at a fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, and with an annual budget of more than a million dollars, to thwart Truman’s plan. The A.M.A. raised the money by assessing twenty-five dollars a year from every one of its members.

At the beginning of 1949, Whitaker and Baxter, the directors of the A.M.A.’s National Education Campaign, entered national politics, setting up headquarters in Chicago, with a staff of thirty-seven. “This must be a campaign to arouse and alert the American people in every walk of life, until it generates a great public crusade and a fundamental fight for freedom,” their Plan of Campaign began. “Any other plan of action, in view of the drift toward socialization and despotism all over the world, would invite disaster.” But when Whitaker told the Washington press corps, at a luncheon, that the F.B.I. was terrorizing the A.M.A., the Washington Post offered that maybe the A.M.A., at the hands of Whitaker and Baxter, ought to stop “whipping itself into a neurosis and attempting to terrorize the whole American public every time the Administration proposes a Welfare Department or a health program.”

Whitaker and Baxter went to Washington and persuaded a hundred congressmen to let them read their constituent mail. At the start of the campaign, Whitaker reported, mail from voters “was running four and half to one in favor” of Truman’s plan. Whitaker and Baxter went to work. “Nine months later it was running four to one against.”

By then, Campaigns, Inc., had come to seem, at least to a handful of critics, nefarious and mysterious. “There isn’t any mystery about it,” Whitaker insisted. In a brilliant maneuver, Whitaker had “A Simplified Blueprint of the Campaign Against Compulsory Health Insurance” distributed, by the hundreds of thousands, to reporters and editors, among others, and to every member of Congress.

Meanwhile, inside Campaigns, Inc., a much more detailed Plan of Campaign circulated, in typescript, marked “CONFIDENTIAL:— NOT FOR PUBLICATION.” (It can be found with the firm’s papers, which are housed at the California State Archives, in Sacramento.) It reads, in part:

The immediate objective is the defeat of the compulsory health insurance program pending in Congress. 2. The long-termobjective is to put a permanent stop to the agitation for socialized medicine in this country by (a) awakening the people to the danger of a politically-controlled, government-regulated health system; (b) convincing the people, through a Nation wide campaign of education, of the superior advantages of private medicine, as practiced in America, over the State-dominated medical systems of other countries; (c) stimulating the growth of voluntary health insurance systems to take the economic shock out of illness and increase the availability of medical care to the American people.

As Whitaker and Baxter put it, in an earlier version of the plan, “Basically, the issue is whether we are to remain a free Nation, in which the individual can work out his own destiny, or whether we are to take one of the final steps toward becoming a Socialist or Communist State. We have to paint the picture, in vivid verbiage that no one can misunderstand, of Germany, Russia—and finally, England.” They settled on a slogan: “KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MEDICINE.” And they settled on a smear, one that they had used against Warren’s plan: they called Truman’s plan “socialized medicine.”

In an attempt to educate every doctor, nurse, and druggist in the United States about the dangers of socialized medicine, they went on the road. Whitaker, speaking to two hundred doctors at a meeting of the Council of the New England Medical Societies, said:

Hitler and Stalin and the socialist government of Great Britain all have used the opiate of socialized medicine to deaden the pain of lost liberty and lull the people into non-resistance. Old World contagion of compulsory health insurance, if allowed to spread to our New World, will mark the beginning of the end of free institutions in America. It will only be a question of time until the railroads, the steel mills, the power industry, the banks and the farming industry are nationalized.

Political advertising, he said, was the last best hope of democracy: “We’re going to put the foes of American medicine on trial before the bar of public opinion, and let the people decide.”

To that end, the National Education Campaign sent out millions of pieces of mail. It wasn’t always well met. “RECEIVED YOUR SCARE LETTER. AND HOW PITYFUL,” an angry pharmacist wrote from Stamford, New York. “I DO HOPE PRESIDENT TRUMAN HAS HIS WAY. GOOD LUCK TO HIM.”

Whitaker and Baxter liked to talk about their work as “grass roots” campaigning. The fight against socialized medicine was a case in point: “The A.M.A. in its campaign is carrying its case to the people of America in a grass roots crusade which we hope, with your help, and the help of tens of thousands of others, will reach every corner of this country.” Not everyone was convinced that a lavishly paid advertising agency distributing 7.5 million copies of a pamphlet called “The Voluntary Way Is the American Way” to doctors’ offices constituted a “grass roots” movement. “Dear Sirs,” one doctor wrote them. “Is it 2 ½ or 3 ½ million dollars you have allotted for your ‘grass roots lobby’?”

Whitaker and Baxter’s campaign against Harry Truman’s national-health-insurance proposal cost the A.M.A. nearly five million dollars, and it took more than three years. But they turned the President’s sensible, popular, and urgently needed legislative reform into a bogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of Americans are still scared.

Truman was furious. As to what in his plan could possibly be construed as “socialized medicine,” he told the press in 1952, he didn’t know what in the Sam Hill that could be. He had one more thing to say: there was “nothing in this bill that came any closer to socialism than the payments the American Medical Association makes to the advertising firm of Whitaker and Baxter to misrepresent my health program.”

Carey McWilliams had kept an eye on Whitaker and Baxter since Uppie and Downey, since Ham and Eggs, since Earl Warren and the C.M.A. He pitched to The Nation a story about Whitaker and Baxter. His editor, Harold Field, wanted it straightaway, but McWilliams put him off. He said that he needed to go to San Francisco and “dig out the facts.”

He wrote Whitaker and Baxter, requesting an interview. “The questions are serious and they are neither barbed nor loaded,” he promised. “I really am not captious: I’m simply curious.” He met them. He liked them. He just happened to disagree with their political agenda, and, more, he thought that their business was bad for democracy. He wrote the piece and, in May of 1950, sent Whitaker and Baxter a draft. They read it and sent changes, correcting a few small matters of fact. But they were disappointed by a revised draft.

“We are not quite the diabolical characters you have portrayed,” Whitaker wrote McWilliams. “I am disappointed that you were disappointed,” McWilliams replied. “Don’t you agree that about the best we can hope for or expect on this score is the maximum good will, factual accuracy, and the observance of some fundamentals of fair play?”

“Government by Whitaker and Baxter” appeared in The Nation in three parts, in April and May of 1951. Whitaker and Baxter wrote McWilliams, “It seems to both of us that while you have not spared the spurs where you feel they will do the most good, you certainly have not done anything to injure Whitaker and Baxter personally. Everything considered, that may have been quite a strain. We are deeply grateful, Carey.”

McWilliams, as Whitaker and Baxter must have very well understood, had played by different rules from theirs. He hadn’t been simple. He hadn’t attacked them. He had taken time to explain. He hadn’t invented an enemy. He hadn’t taken remarks out of context. He hadn’t made anything up. He hadn’t lied.

“In labor and liberal circles in California people hiss when Whitaker and Baxter are mentioned,” he reported in The Nation, “but it must be acknowledged that they know how to reach the people. True, they have had lots of money to spend; but their opponents have not always been broke, either.” He talked about how much money unions had, for instance. McWilliams did, however, believe that Whitaker and Baxter had too much power. For the A.M.A., they had written, he said, “a political script in which doctors, originally cast as special-interest heavies, emerge as crusaders for the people’s health.” It was incredible. And it was dangerous. “This is expert political management; this is government by Whitaker and Baxter.” This is how we live now.

The piece was not without effect. By 1952, a number of doctors had resigned from the A.M.A.

James H. Means, Jackson professor of Medicine at Harvard and the chief of medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, explained that he was no longer willing to pay dues that had been used to support an activity that he considered “contrary to public welfare and unworthy of a learned profession.”

That fall, the A.M.A. let Whitaker and Baxter go, explaining that it had decided that keeping the agency on retainer would compromise its nonpartisan status. Whitaker and Baxter were untroubled. They went to work for Eisenhower-Nixon.

In 1952, television was used, for the first time, in a Presidential campaign. In 1948, less than three per cent of American homes had a television; by 1952, that figure was fast approaching fifty per cent. That year, Republicans spent $1.5 million on television advertising; Democrats spent seventy-seven thousand dollars. On television, spots for Eisenhower—“I Like Ike” and “The Man from Abilene”—whose themes were based on George Gallup’s polling, masqueraded as documentaries; they looked like the March of Time newsreels.

Eisenhower was so unfamiliar with recording equipment that once, in front of a microphone, which was on, he grumbled, “How the hell does this thing work?” But, like everyone running for office after him, he was coached, and groomed, and buffed, and polished. And made up. In a TV spot called “Eisenhower Answers America,” a young black man says, “General, the Democrats are telling me I never had it so good.” Eisenhower replies, “Can that be true, when America is billions in debt, when prices have doubled, when taxes break our backs, and we are still fighting in Korea? It’s tragic.”

Then he looks, sternly, straight into the camera. “It’s time for a change.”

In 1953, Earl Warren became Chief Justice of the United States. The “Impeach Earl Warren” campaign began not long after Warren wrote the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, declaring school segregation unconstitutional. In 1955, Carey McWilliams became the editor of The Nation. In 1956, Whitaker and Baxter did P.R. for the G.O.P. Nominating Convention, in San Francisco. Meanwhile, they were interviewed by a Special Senate Committee to Investigate Political Activities, Lobbying, and Campaign Contributions. Whitaker told the committee he opposed government funding of campaigns and favored lifting restrictions on corporate campaign donations. The committee’s investigators puzzled over campaign consultants. Should they be classed as lobbyists? As political-action committees? Shouldn’t they be regulated? Whitaker insisted that the work his firm did constituted grassroots organizing, and should not to be subject to any regulation.

Later that year[1955], Whitaker and Baxter, working with the California firm of Baus and Ross, campaigned on behalf of Proposition 4, a ballot measure favoring the oil industry and giving it more license to drill. The measure was written by attorneys for Standard Oil. Whitaker and Baxter prevailed, mainly by getting the referendum’s name changed to the Oil and Gas Conservation Act.

In 1958, Whitaker’s oldest son by his first marriage, Clem Whitaker, Jr., bought Campaigns, Inc., with two partners. In 1960, when Nixon ran for President, Campaigns, Inc., organized his campaign in California. “The great need is to go on the offensive—and to attack,” one of Whitaker’s partners advised. Best to forget “the liberal Democrats who wouldn’t vote for Nixon if he received the joint personal endorsement of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx via a séance with Eleanor Roosevelt.”

Nixon won California but lost the election. He was terrible on television. “It was TV more than anything else that turned the tide,” Kennedy said. By now, Democrats were beginning to hire political-consulting firms, too. Everyone did. It was an arms race.

Clem Whitaker, Sr., died of emphysema in 1961. Four years later, when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, he hired the California firm of Spencer-Roberts. Spencer-Roberts used the Whitaker and Baxter rule book. “You know something, Stu?” Reagan said to Stuart Spencer in 1966. “Politics is just like show business. . . . You begin with a hell of an opening, you coast for a while, and you end with a hell of a closing.”

Upton Sinclair died in a nursing home in New Jersey in1968.That year, H. R. Haldemanleft his job as manager of the Los Angeles office of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency to run Nixon’s Presidential campaign. Haldeman had offered his services to Eisenhower-Nixon in 1952, and worked for the Vice-President’s campaign in 1956. He had learned the tools of the trade from the best of them. “Whitaker and Baxter was the great old campaign,” he once said, remembering the old days, “the granddaddy.”

“Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we’re talking about,” the Nixon adviser William Gavin wrote in a memo. “Reason requires a higher degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier,” he wrote in another memo. “Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand. . . . When we argue with him we demand that he make the effort of replying. We seek to engage his intellect, and for most people this is the most difficult work of all. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

The Nixon campaign studied the tapes of its candidate on television. Insufficient emotion. “He still uses his arms a little too ‘predictably’ and a little too often,”Roger Ailes,Richard Nixon’s chief television adviser, said in 1968. “But at this point it is better not to inhibit him.” Ailes is now the president of Fox News.

:{After Clem Whitaker died, Leone Baxter continued to run a firm of her own, Whitaker and Baxter International.}: She lived in a penthouse apartment at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. She liked to work behind the scenes. In all her long life—she died in 2001, at the age of ninety-five—she rarely gave interviews. She made an exception in the nineteen-sixties. She was asked, “Do the procedures you designed early in the game and utilized so successfully over the years, Leone, still work today, or have you found it necessary to change them?”

“The basic rules I would say are wholly unchanged,” she said. “The strategies are unchanged.” There was television, of course. “But I would say that the philosophy of political campaigning hasn’t changed a whit. The tools have changed, the philosophy has not.”

She was also asked, “Does political public relations actually transfer political power into the hands of those who exercise it?”

“It certainly could and has in some instances,” she said, carefully. “In this profession of leading men’s minds, this is the reason I feel it must be in the hands of the most ethical, principled people—people with real concern for the world around them, for people around them—or else it will erode into the hands of people who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very destructive thing.” ♦

*Whitaker and Baxter were publicists for the California League Against Sinclairism, not heads, as originally reported.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitaker_and_Baxter

Rampton, Sheldon and John Stauber. Banana Republicans. Available online
"A.M.A. COORDINATING committee disbands Whitaker and Baxter resigns." Journal of the Florida Medical Association. (1952 Nov) 39(5):358-9.
Baker, Paula. "Campaigns and Potato Chips; or Some Causes and Consequences of Political Spending" Journal of Policy History. (2002) 14(1):4-29.
Stuart Ewen. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York, Basic Books, 1997. See pp. 339–372, 389.
Clem Whitaker, "Professional Political Campaign Management," Public Relations Journal. Number 6 (January 1950), pp. 19, 21.

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Reading two new biographies of Sinclair—one intimate and intellectually astute,

“Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair,” by Anthony Arthur (Random House; $27.95), and

one political and anecdotal, “Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century,” by

Kevin Mattson (John Wiley & Sons; $25.95)

all of E&P. His book on the campaign won the Goldsmith Book Prize in 1993.

The campaign of the century : Upton Sinclair's E.P.I.C. race for governor of

California and the birth of media politics / Greg Mitchell

Mitchell, Greg.

- McH Stacks - F866.M65 1992

land of orange and jails:

http://books.google.com/books?id=EN7nQVa6E0wC&dq=upton+sinclair+governor+california

&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=qQJJSr-CKo_isQPz_Yko&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct

=result&resnum=13

His other books include Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady and, this year,

So Wrong for So Long. on Iraq and the media, [gulf 2]

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/24/so_wrong_for_so_long_greg

http://books.google.com/books?id=WAZNHKWqAbIC&dq=so+wrong+for+so+long&source=gbs_na

vlinks_s

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady : Richard Nixon vs... by Greg Mitchell

NOT CHECKD OUT - McH Stacks - E856 .M57 1998

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Golden dreams: California in an age of abundance, 1950-1963

By Kevin Starr

http://books.google.com/books?id=kvkNf-HZTt4C&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=whitaker+and+baxter&source=bl&ots=gvlGxY96i2&sig=GYjnlpa2Y9Fsg8rbF8YU0ssocCE&hl=en&ei=BAuVTMyHA4q2sAP685jlCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CC8Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=whitaker%20and%20baxter&f=false

pg&e hired to block central valley pjt

clipping service, extensive cand research = oppo

warren, CTA

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FROM PR: ...

Banana Rep: R&S

http://www.counterpunch.org/stauber05272004.html

It is no accident that several of the names on the list above came from California. The

first political-campaign firm in the United States, Campaigns Inc., was also established in

California in the 1930s by the husband-and-wife team of Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter.

Whitaker and Baxter drew on the culture of nearby Hollywood as they developed techniques for

"selling" candidates through the mass media. Incumbent California governor Frank Merriam

hired Whitaker and Baxter to defeat a 1934 election challenge by muckraking journalist and

social reformer Upton Sinclair. Whitaker and Baxter developed a smear campaign to defeat

Sinclair, arranging to have false stories printed in newspapers about Sinclair seducing

young girls. To combat Sinclair's Depression-era populism, they worked with Hollywood

studios, which controlled movie theaters throughout the state, to place phony newsreels in

cinemas featuring fictional "Sinclair supporters" in rags advocating a Soviet-style

takeover.

After their victory, Whitaker and Baxter explained the cynical philosophy behind their

success: "The average American doesn't want to be educated, he doesn't want to improve his

mind, he doesn't even want to work consciously at being a good citizen. But every American

likes to be entertained. He likes the movies, he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and

parades. So, if you can't put on a fight, put on a show." In Whitaker's words, they

transformed elections from "a hit or miss business, directed by broken-down politicians"

into "a mature, well-managed business founded on sound public relations principles, and

using every technique of modern advertising."

W&B

It is no accident that several of the names on the list above came from California. The first political-campaign firm in the United States, Campaigns Inc., was also established in California in the 1930s by the husband-and-wife team of Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter. Whitaker and Baxter drew on the culture of nearby Hollywood as they developed techniques for "selling" candidates through the mass media. Incumbent California governor Frank Merriam hired Whitaker and Baxter to defeat a 1934 election challenge by muckraking journalist and social reformer Upton Sinclair. Whitaker and Baxter developed a smear campaign to defeat Sinclair, arranging to have false stories printed in newspapers about Sinclair seducing young girls.

To combat Sinclair's Depression-era populism, they worked with Hollywood studios, which controlled movie theaters throughout the state, to place phony newsreels in cinemas featuring fictional "Sinclair supporters" in rags advocating a Soviet-style takeover.

After their victory, Whitaker and Baxter explained the cynical philosophy behind their success: "The average American doesn't want to be educated, he doesn't want to improve his mind, he doesn't even want to work consciously at being a good citizen. But every American likes to be entertained. He likes the movies, he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades. So, if you can't put on a fight, put on a show." In Whitaker's words, they transformed elections from "a hit or miss business, directed by broken-down politicians" into "a mature, well-managed business founded on sound public relations principles, and using every technique of modern advertising."

[begat Spencer/Roberts co, worked for Ford and RR]

Whitaker and Baxter were in turn succeeded by another Californian, Murray Chotiner, who took Richard Nixon under his wing in 1945 and groomed him in the techniques of political campaigning. Nixon's career spanned the rise of television as a new medium that transformed both entertainment and politics.

"It was Nixon's television performance in his Checkers speech that saved his place as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate in 1952," notes historian David Greenberg, the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image. "In a historic piece of image-craft, Nixon talked earnestly about his onerous childhood and his struggles upon returning from the Navy--and adorned his speech with folksy touches about his wife's cloth coat and his daughters' cocker spaniel. So effective was his self-portrait that telegrams flooded in to the studio praising his sincerity, forcing Eisenhower to retain him. Only a handful of liberal critics dissented, warning that Nixon was using insidious new techniques to misrepresent himself--and endanger democracy.

But Nixon innovated further." Following his defeat in the 1960s election against John F. Kennedy, Nixon set out to reinvent himself, hiring professional image manipulators including William Safire, then a New York public relations executive; advertising executives H.R. Haldeman and Harry Treleaven; and television producer Roger Ailes (currently the head of Fox News). Long before Bill Clinton played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show or Arnold Schwarzenegger traded quips with Jay Leno, Nixon paved the way by appearing on the comedy show Laugh-In to say "Sock it to me" as part of his 1968 campaign strategy for overcoming his humorless image.

Before Roger Ailes met Nixon, he was an executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show, a popular TV talk and variety program. They met in 1967, while Nixon was waiting to appear as a guest on the show. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected," Nixon said.

"Television is not a gimmick," Ailes replied, and Nixon hired him....