Self-Evident Subtlety

That every U. S. pressure group has its "publicity director" entrusted with the task of subtly influencing public opinion is a fact known to every sophisticated newspaper reader. Last week the subtle methods of a group of high-priced pressagents did not seem so subtle when illuminated by Senator Robert Marion La Follette's Civil Liberties Committee.

Since August 1933, John Wiley Hill and Donald Snow Knowlton, heads of a Cleveland publicity firm, have received $323,000 from the American Iron and Steel Institute and individual Little Steel companies. The La Follette committee produced "personal and confidential" documents revealing the efforts of Edgar S. Bowerfind, Hill & Knowlton representative in Birmingham, Ala., to make local newspapers see the rectitude of Republic Steel Corp.'s position on labor problems. The technique, involving no innovations, consisted of visits to local editors and pressure "judiciously exerted" through advertisers.

And subtlest performer for Hill & Knowlton was George Ephraim Sokolsky, author, lecturer, industrial consultant. Some of Mr. Sokolsky's lecturing was done at "civic progress meetings" arranged and paid for by local employers but publicly sponsored by "neutral" groups. Since his return seven years ago from a varied journalistic career in the Far East, able, intelligent Publicist Sokolsky has become a one-man intellectual front for conservative capital. His principal outlets are a weekly syndicated column which appears on the editorial page of the Republican New York Herald Tribune and a weekly radio program sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers. According to La Follette-committee evidence, Mr. Sokolsky has received nearly $40,000 in fees and expenses through Hill & Knowlton, chiefly for services to the Iron and Steel Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers. Mr. Sokolsky's philosophy: "I do not like coercion in any form. I prefer spontaneous enthusiasms."

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