"Information Men"

As managing editor of the defunct Chicago Post, swart, husky Michael Wolf Straus used to "raise merry hell" with the furious but futile efforts of Reformer Harold L. Ickes to clean up Chicago politics. A reformer himself, Editor Straus also raised hell with other local celebrities like Al Capone. Later he went to Washington as a Hearst correspondent and in June 1933, when Secretary of the Interior Ickes wanted a "director of information" (i. e., head pressagent) for Interior and PWA, he chose hell-raising Mike Straus. Since then the nation has heard plenty from him about Honest Harold Ickes.

Pressagent Straus runs his crew of ex-newsmen in PWA-Interior like a well-organized city staff, spurs them to dig up the kind of feature stories that newspapers are glad to get. Last week Mike Straus was pleased as punch over his latest job of pressagentry. From the slick, birch-lined radio studio atop the new Interior Building--only studio owned by any Government department--Mr. Ickes and assorted "Voices," hoofbeats, Indian drums, and aides broadcast a dramatization of Interior's 1938 report. Title of script was "My Dear Mr. President." Excerpt:

VOICE: (DRAMATICALLY) My dear Mr. President. . . .

MUSIC : HEROIC AND MAJESTIC . . . SUCH AS CODA OR FINALE OF BEETHOVEN'S EROICA.

2ND VOICE: (DRAMATICALLY) Listen, America!

3RD VOICE: You who are part of America at work; part of its muscles stiffening under gigantic tasks; part of its eyes and ears alive to new problems we must solve --listen to this saga of democratic progress! . . .

To Republicans like Herbert Hoover this kind of thing is blatant propaganda, in which Government money is squandered to keep the Government in the hands of one regime. New Dealers defend it as an up-to-date and effective way of letting the people know how their money is spent. Just how much expense and ballyhoo is justifiable in passing out such information is the main point at issue. There is another point: since 1913 there has been a U. S. law forbidding any Federal agency to hire a "publicity expert" without a specific appropriation.

Despite Republicans and the law, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt has hired many more publicity experts (without asking for special appropriations) than any other in U. S. history.* Their titles and pay range from "Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury" at $10,000 a year to a "WPA writer" at $1,200. Most of them appear in the official register as "information chiefs" or "assistants," and they do not like to be called pressagents.

In Washington alone they number around 300, with salaries totaling close to $1,000,000 a year. Mimeographs whir endlessly with their press handouts, which are sorted and clipped together at electrical revolving tables, rushed by messenger to a battered table in the lobby of the National Press Club. There, any afternoon, correspondents hurrying in for a 5 o'clock whiskey & soda can run through an assortment like this:

WPA EMPLOYMENT SHOWS DECLINE (WPA) . . . TEACHING TOLERANCE A MAJOR PROBLEM IN 1939 (Office of Education) . . . ELECTION SCHEDULED AT ARAGON-BALDWIN COTTON MILLS (NLRB) . . . IMPORTANCE OF RIBOFLAVIN IN HUMAN DIET (Public Health Service.)

Propaganda Men. The propaganda content in this tonnage of Government publicity usually runs at the proportion of less than one gram per pound. Occasionally it assays much higher. Last February the Bituminous Coal Commission issued one famous release in which a Cleveland city official was described as "coloring deeply" when replying to a Commissioner's question at a hearing. Washington correspondents stirred up such a row that the author of the release was fired.

Biggest and one of the least criticized publicity staffs in Washington is Agriculture's (72 men). Second biggest and most often on the pan is WPA's (28 in Washington, 30 more throughout the U. S.). Since almost anything WPA might say about its putting the jobless to work cannot help being propaganda of a sort, it tries these days not to say too much.* No WPA movie, radio transcription or "special report" is sent to anyone who does not submit a written, signed request.

Frank propaganda is engaged in by Rural Electrification Administration, which is lending $140,000,000 this year to build farmers' cooperative power systems. REA organizes "energizing" celebrations with bands, games, electrical displays and fireworks on the day current is turned on for a new project. Most frequent stunt: selection of a pretty local miss as "Polly Power," to preside over the burial of a kerosene lamp.

As a sort of super-press bureau, the New Deal has its so-called National Emergency Council, headed by aggressive Lowell Mellett, ex-editor of the Washington News. NEC does some ticklish inside jobs: e.g., before Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black accepted a medal from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare last November, he phoned Low Mellett to ascertain if public reaction would be favorable. This week Congressman Bruce Barton, Manhattan adman who knows a pressagent when he sees one, introduced a bill to abolish the whole NEC, charging "Its distinguished membership is only a front for a band of 290 pressagents. . . ."

Don't Tell Men. Since Munich there has been a phenomenal increase in newspaper columnage about airplanes, big guns, gas masks, defense problems, industrial mobilization. They range from the expert military reporting of New York Timesman Hanson Baldwin to the jingoistic sloganeering ("Two Ships For One") of the tabloid New York News, but their effect is the same: stirring up a war psychology in the nation. That psychology has been on the rise in Washington since Franklin Roosevelt's "quarantine" speech in 1937. Publishers, editors, correspondents produce more & more newspaper stories about it, abetted by Roosevelt advisers like Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson and Bernard Baruch. As in the years leading up to 1917, it is becoming difficult to tell where legitimate news stops and jingoism begins.

To make sure that what they write is reasonably accurate and true, even when it might be propaganda, Washington newsmen these days rely heavily on three top-notch careerists who are among the ablest "information men" in Washington-- Michael James McDermott of State, Lieut. Colonel Alexander Day Surles of War, Lieut. Commander Leland P. Lovette of Navy.

Washington correspondents invariably name genial, 44-year-old "Mac" McDermott as the best-liked "pressagent" in the Capital, though his duties as chief of the Division of Current Information go far beyond that. An Army clerk during the War, he has been confidant and adviser to every Secretary from Bainbridge Colby to Cordell Hull (with whom he returned this week from Lima), sits in on all important policy conferences. He supervises a daily short-wave broadcast of State Department information to diplomats abroad. He goes in and out of the offices of high State functionaries unannounced when trying to verify a reporter's tip, never betrays a confidence. The phone beside his bed jingles a dozen times a night as morning newspapermen ring him up for "background." When he knows but cannot tell, he says so frankly.

Big, brown-eyed Commander Lovette talks easily and explosively to newsmen because he has seen a lot of them. His brother edited the Elizabethton, Tenn. Star. He has written two books, Naval Customs, Traditions and Usage and Naval Officers in Diplomacy. When he got his present post last year, Editor H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun gave him a big party at which hock, Moselle and German beer flowed briskly. New laws and regulations have clamped down heavily on Navy information in the last three years, making Lovette's job a tough one, but he is highly popular with Washington newsmen, greets them often at the Press Club bar.

The Army will get a new publicist next June, when leathery Colonel Surles will go back to active duty in the cavalry. Now that the Army is counted in again on the heavy Federal spending, Colonel Surles's biggest public relations jobs have been: 1) to keep on the best possible terms with scrappy pacifist organizations, and 2) to advise correspondents against going off half-cocked on fantastic rearmament stories lately afloat in Washington. When talk of Army prospective plane-building soared to an all-time high of 13,000 recently, Colonel Surles wryly advised newspapermen to don parachutes.

*Herbert Hoover hired good publicity experts too. One of them, Ben Allen, invented the word "hooverize" during the War. Another, George Akerson, dramatized the Department of Commerce during the last years of Hoover's term as Secretary, helped wangle the 1928 Republican nomination for his chief by timely news releases. *Morton Milford, who headed WPA publicity in its palmier days, died last July. When Harry Hopkins held his first press conference as Secretary of Commerce last week, he introduced his new official pressagent: curly-haired, youthful Victor Sholis, former Chicago Times reporter.

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