The Image (39 page)

The history of press agentry and public relations is still to be written. The best sources are fragmentary, like Edward L. Bernays’ pioneer handbook
Crystallizing Public Opinion
(1923) and his later writings,
Public Relations
(1952), and the collection of essays which he edited,
The Engineering of Consent
(1955); or topical, like the helpful article, “Public Relations Today,”
Business Week
(July 2, 1960), pp. 41–62, and occasional articles in
Fortune
. Bernays’ writings are among the most sophisticated, philosophically self-conscious, and literate works on public relations—the institution and the profession. See his valuable bibliography:
Public Relations, Edward L. Bernays and the American Scene: Annotated Bibliography … from 1917 to 1951
(1951; supplement, 1957). His autobiography, now in preparation, could be a major document in American social history. See Eric F. Goldman’s useful brief introduction to the history of this subject,
Two-Way Street
(1948); and David Finn’s effective brief article, “The Price of Corporate Vanity,”
Harvard Business Review
, XXXIX (July–August, 1961), 135–143, which
came to my attention just as this book was going to press. From his extensive experience in public relations Finn comes to conclusions very close to mine.

The relation of the rise of newspapers to American politics, perhaps because it is more obviously a matter of public interest, has been more adequately, though still fragmentarily, treated. Walter Lippmann early in this century produced succinct and prophetic books,
Public Opinion
(1922) and
The Phantom Public
(1925), which envisaged the out-reaching implications of changing news-gathering techniques for political theory and democratic institutions. Douglass Cater,
The Fourth Branch of Government
(1959) is a profound and fundamental book on which I have drawn freely; it deserves a large audience. The rise of the Washington press corps and the development of its techniques and protocol are traced in James E. Pollard,
The Presidents and the Press
(1947), a treasure house of neatly arranged information on the press-personalities of our Presidents; and Leo C. Rosten,
The Washington Correspondents
(1937), which gathers valuable statistical and sociological data on 127 correspondents who were in the capital between September, 1935, and December, 1936. The critical views expressed by magazine and newspapermen themselves can be sampled in T. S. Matthews,
The Sugar Pill: An Essay on Newspapers
(1959), which attacks the effort to make news into entertainment, from the point of view of an
ex-Time
editor, and Carl E. Lindstrom,
The Fading American Newspaper
(1960), which describes the technological, financial, and social forces which help explain the declining influence of the newspaper. Some interesting suggestions are found in Oswald Garrison Villard’s collection of essays,
The Disappearing Daily
(1944), especially in the title essay. On the first interview see George Turnbull, “Some Notes on the History of the Interview,”
Journalism Quarterly
, XIII (Sept., 1936), 272–279.

For the implications of changes in news-gathering techniques for American politics see my “Direct Democracy of Public Relations: Selling the President to the People,” in
America and the Image of Europe
(1960), pp. 97–117, and more generally, Walter Johnson,
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Presidents and the People, 1929–1959
(1960). Richard H. Rovere,
Senator Joe McCarthy
(1959) is an acute and knowledgeable interpretation supported by the personal insights and on-the-spot knowledge of one of the most literate reporters of our age. We can glimpse the techniques of the first master of modern Presidential press relations in the reminiscences of those close to F.D.R.: for example,

Robert Sherwood,
Roosevelt and Hopkins
(1948), Samuel I. Rosenman,
Working With Roosevelt
(1952), and in the several brilliant volumes of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
The Age of Roosevelt
(1957–).

A bright light on the uses of news-gathering, news-making, and news-disseminating techniques in Presidential politics is Theodore H. White,
The Making of the President: 1960
(1961). On the interrelation of the media, and on the television debates, see especially Chapter 11.

There is not, to my knowledge, an adequate history of the
Congressional Record
. To do it properly would require a Rabelaisian sense of humor and a Sophoclean sense of tragedy. A hint of the problems I mention can be found in Clarence Cannon,
Cannon’s Procedure in the House of Representatives
(4th ed., Washington, D.C., 1944). The speech of the reformer I refer to is that of Senator George Graham Vest of Missouri, delivered in the Senate, December 23, 1884 (found in
Congressional Record:
Senate, Vol. 16, Pt. 1, 48th Congress, 2d Session, p. 422); it is worth reading in full. A citizen with the curiosity, the time, and the stamina may secure a subscription to the
Record
through his Senator or Congressman. Before doing so, however, he should prepare himself to take the consequences. He should be thoroughly confident of his own devotion to democratic institutions; and there are other risks. It is harder to turn off the flood than to turn it on.

A few sociological studies have been made of the effect of the different media and their relation to one another. One of the best is the study of the MacArthur Parades in Chicago: Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, “The Unique Perspective of Television and Its Effect: A Pilot Study,”
American Sociological Review
, XVIII (1953), 3–12. In more extensive form this study is available as an unpublished doctoral dissertation (1953) in the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago. It won the 1952 prize of the Edward L. Bernays Foundation, and is a study of great subtlety and originality. See also, Reuben Mehling, “Attitude Changing Effect of News and Photo Combinations,”
Journalism Quarterly
, XXXVI (Spring, 1959), 189–198; and Elmer E. Cornwell, Jr., “Presidential News: The Expanding Public Image,” at pp. 275–283.

The great background changes in the Graphic Revolution still await their historians. Despite some valuable biographies like Carleton Mabee,
The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel
F.
B. Morse
(1943), Matthew Josephson,
Edison
(1959), and company histories, like Robert L. Thompson,
Wiring a
Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1886
(1947), the social history of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, radio, and television remains mostly untold. We may hope that the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, under the able direction of Gilbert Seldes, and with the assistance among others of Patrick D. Hazard, will fill some of these gaps. We can learn about the development of the typewriter and its pervasive significance for American life in Richard N. Current’s concise
The Typewriter and The Men Who Made It
(1954) and in Bruce Bliven, Jr.,
The Wonderful Writing Machine
(1954). The history of shorthand could reveal some neglected facets of our life; the history of penmanship and the decline of handwriting might also be suggestive. So far as I know, there is not yet an account of such influential techniques of duplication as the mimeograph, photoduplication (Thermofax, etc.), piano-graph, or photo-offset printing.

We have valuable and highly readable specialized books like James D. Horan,
Matthew Brady, Historian with a Camera
(1955) and Dorothy Norman,
Alfred Stieglitz
(1960); and “picture histories” galore—of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and everything else from plumbing to Presidents. But we still need more comprehensive and up-to-date histories of American photography worthy of this great subject. A book which sees in photography something of its full grandeur and philosophic importance is André Malraux’s magnificent
The Voices of Silence: Man and His Art
(trans. by Stuart Gilbert, 1953). For the broad outlines and large tendencies in the history of the subject, the reader unfortunately cannot do better than refer to the article “Photography” in
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(14th ed.).

Much of our great literature—the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid—is, of course, a chronicle of heroes and hero-worship. Biography as a genre is relatively recent; in England it does not date much back of the Renaissance—say the seventeenth century. Critical biography—which in English literature we may date from the happy coincidences which eventually produced James Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson
(1791)—appeared still later. The self-conscious study of the phenomenon of heroes and of the nature of biography is not much over a
century old. The most influential work has been Thomas Carlyle’s
Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
(1841). Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Representative Men
(1850) was probably suggested by Carlyle’s work; Emerson’s book, a compilation of popular lectures on such diverse figures as Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, is the best-known American statement of the “divine right” theory of the hero. Many old-time Fourth of July orations were variations on this theme of the heroism (that is, divine inspiration) of the founders of our nation. All these works usually asked the reader or listener to share the writer’s or speaker’s reverence for his hero’s greatness. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—with the rise of a cult of critical and scientific history, the growth of sociology and anthropology, the ascendancy of various forms of economic (“rationalizing”) interpretations of history, and the elaboration of Freudian and Jungian psychology—many writers in many new ways began inviting readers to look with a detached and suspicious eye on the “greatness” of all past heroes. The phenomenon of human greatness came to seem no expression of divinity (divinity itself had become a human figment), but some kind of collective social illusion. European works of world-wide influence (all delightfully readable and stimulating) which illustrated and re-enforced these tendencies were: Ernest Renan,
Life of Jesus
(1863), Sir James George Frazer,
The Golden Bough
(11 vols., 1890–1915), and Sigmund Freud,
Moses and Monotheism
(1939).

There is no quite satisfactory treatment of hero-worship as a phenomenon in American history. A brief general discussion is found in Sidney Hook,
The Hero in History
(1943). Dixon Wecter’s
The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-Worship
(1941), an elegantly written compilation of American Greats, with the story of their adulation, is very much in the old style. It aims “to look at a few of those great personalities in public life … from whom we have hewn our symbols of government, our ideas of what is most prizeworthy as ‘American.’ ” An admirable book which lies halfway between the older, symbolic, and the newer, critical, view of American heroes is Richard Hofstadter,
The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made it
(1948; Vintage paperback, 1954). A valuable specialized study is John W. Ward,
Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age
(1955). For a lively reinterpretation of the history of the making of our colonial heroes, see Wesley Frank Craven,
The Legend of the Founding Fathers
(1956). And for another view of the special place of the foresighted American hero in the
American political tradition, see my
Genius of American Politics
(1953; Phoenix paperback, 1958). Adolf Hitler’s doctrine that “The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone,” along with his dogma that “coalition successes” have never built anything great, is expounded in Chapter VIII of
Mein Kampf
.

Sophisticated applications of psychology, anthropology, and the techniques of critical history are found in Lord Raglan,
The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama
(1936; Vintage paperback, 1956), and Joseph Campbell,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
(1949; Meridian paperback, 1956).

More studies of the social history of American biography would be invaluable in helping us chronicle the history of American ideals. John A. Garraty,
The Nature of Biography
(1958), a useful book aiming at general definition, does not focus primarily on America. W. Burlie Brown,
The People’s Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography
(1960) surveys the virtues attributed to Presidential candidates by their campaign biographers. Catherine Drinker Bowen describes many of the problems of the biographer today in suggestive essays in
Adventures of a Biographer
(1959). Avenues into the literature of American biography can be found in Oscar Handlin and others,
The Harvard Guide to American History
(1954) and in relevant sections, well indexed in the admirable bibliographical Volume III, of Robert Spiller and others,
Literary History of the United States
(3 vols., 1948). Handy surveys are: Edward H. O’Neill,
A History of American Biography, 1800–1935
(1935),
Biography by Americans, 1658–1936
(a bibliography, 1939); and Marion Dargan,
Guide to American Biography, Part I: 1607–1815
(a classified bibliography, 1949). Raw materials for another approach to the American hero are listed in Louis Kaplan and others,
Bibliography of American Autobiographies
(1961). An introduction to the hero in American folklore is found in Richard Dorson,
American Folklore
(Chicago History of American Civilization Series, 1959).

The literature on the history of celebrities and of celebrity worship is meager. Few recent writers have had as delicate a sense of the transforming standards of social recognition as has Cleveland Amory. His
Celebrity Register
(1959), compiled with the collaboration of Earl Blackwell, is one of the most symbolic documents of our age: it is an index to the new categories of American society. The
Celebrity Register
is as expressive of our standards of social preference as was
Burke’s Peerage
(1826) or
Burke’s Landed Gentry
(1833–1838) for an earlier age in England. Cleveland Amory’s
Who Killed Society
(1960), a treasure
house of miscellaneous information on changing standards of admiration, describes itself with brilliant accuracy on its jacket: “The Warfare of Celebrity with Aristocracy in America—from the ‘First Families’ to the ‘Four Hundred’ to ‘Publi-ciety.’ ” On the endorsement business, see William M. Freeman,
The Big Name
(1957). Leo Lowenthal’s invaluable “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” is found in
American Social Patterns
(selected and edited by William Peterson; Anchor paperback, 1956). See also Jerome Ellison and Franklin T. Gosser, “Non-Fiction Magazine Articles: A Content Analysis,”
Journalism Quarterly
, XXXVI (Winter, 1959) 27–34.