S1, Ep6 | How a Standard Oil PR Guy Shaped Post-War America

Amy Westervelt [00:00:00] Over the course of this series, we've looked at the early days of PR, a new profession created to stem the looming threat of democracy, the expansion of the vote, the emergence of labor unions and regulations. The critical eye of journalists, journalists like Upton Sinclair.

Upton Sinclair archival [00:00:20] Henry told me his ideas about the fact that it all problems in America and all over the world depended upon men like Henry Ford. Well, once in a while I got a few sentences and I told him that I thought industry was becoming more and more dominant in the world, and I miss America gradually move into industrial democracy. America would find itself in some horror, like the Russian Revolution, and assume

Amy Westervelt [00:01:00] that Sinclair late in life talking about a meeting he once had with Henry Ford. We've also looked at how early PR guys like Abby Lee helped American industrialists like the Rockefellers maintain their stranglehold on democracy.

Ivy Lee archival [00:01:17] Mr. Rockefeller listened to me patiently, pleasantly and calmly until I'd finished my eloquent presentation of why he should do what we recommended. And then he turned to me and whether bland smiles at Mr Lee. Now tell me all the reasons you can thank God why I should not do what you recommend.

Amy Westervelt [00:01:37] But the journalists and activists and artists didn't just give up the fight when PR came on the scene. This tug of war between industrialists and the public has continued throughout American history, with wave after wave of battles for the truth. After World War Two, industrialists and their PR teams once again felt their existence was under threat, and they mobilized for another fight to protect American free enterprise or really to make the connection between free enterprise and freedom itself much stronger in the minds of the American public

Destination Earth clip [00:02:15] and using the magic of research, oil companies compete with each other in taking the petroleum molecule apart and rearranging it into, well, you name it. Fabrics, toothbrushes, tires, insecticides and cosmetics. We gillers our home galaxy of things that make a better life on Earth. And you know, it isn't just oil companies that try to outdo each other competing for the customers dollars. The same story is true of almost every successful business enterprise in America. The result is a higher standard of living in the USA than in any other country on the whole planet at last. The secret was mine.

Amy Westervelt [00:03:07] This is from a filmstrip commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute in the 1950s. It's animated, and it kind of looks like something we'd eventually see in The Jetsons in the 60s and 70s. It's called Destination Earth, and it follows a group of Martians who apparently are communists as they discover the wonders of free market capitalism. This sort of thing was rampant during this period of time. The oil industry was not alone in putting out these kinds of films. It started almost as soon as World War Two ended and rolled right into the Cold War. Although most other campaigns didn't lean so heavily into commie Martians. But wouldn't you know our projects were the standard bearers and flag wavers for this new push to rebrand American industry, too? And that's the story you will be digging into today. Welcome back to record a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and identity right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today's trick educational propaganda. Earlier this year, I found an archive that housed all the old papers and files of a PR guy I'd heard mentioned a lot. Earl Newsome, he was more of a behind the scenes Ivy League or John W Hill type, so there's not a lot out there on him or by him. But I'd seen his name mentioned by other PR people in this kind of awestruck way, like they all looked up to him. So I'd been trying to find out more about him, and I saw that all of his papers had been donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society. So off I went to Madison. Traveling two thousand miles to poke around a PR guy's old dusty archives might not sound like your idea of a birthday trip, but it was for me and I hit the mother lode that day in Madison. When I got home, I had to call up my partner in crime writer Mary A. Hagler to process it all. So, all right, this is the thing that is probably blown my mind the most in the last, like 10 years. Like when I oh wow, 10 years, that's a long time. Yeah, it's really like I was really like, Holy crap. So I went to this archive in Wisconsin. As you know, this was my birthday present.

Magic barrell clip [00:05:48] Yeah. Tell me you're a nerd

Amy Westervelt [00:05:51] without telling me you're a nerd. I know, I know. And because I had, I had seen this one guy's name mentioned by other PR people. But like, you know, they would just be like, Oh, Earl Newsom was a genius. But then I couldn't find that much about him in particular. And so I thought, Oh, this guy must have been really interesting because he's being name checked by all these people. But he, like, kept a low profile. And those are those are the ones that usually like, you know, did the most M.C. Lady

Magic barrell clip [00:06:22] Kert and certainly exactly is the one who leaves the

Amy Westervelt [00:06:26] Kert. That's right. That's right. Mm hmm. That's right. Yeah, I found him and I realized that, oh, like, he worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey, which is now ExxonMobil. He worked for, you know, he did some stuff for a couple of different petroleum trade groups. He worked for Ford GM Campbell's Soup, Eli Lilly like a ton of massive American companies. And in his Don Draper totally Don Draper. Yes. I mean, he worked with Standard Oil from the late 30s to the late 60s. So a really long time there were like, I mean, I don't even know, like maybe a hundred boxes of standard oil things. And in one of them, there was a bunch of folders marked confidential and all these like strategy documents and stuff. And I found this thing where he had pulled together all of his big corporate clients, and he had basically warned them as World War Two was coming to a close. And he was like, You guys, there's a big problem coming down the pipeline for you. And it's not, you know, us losing the war and it's not, you know, all these government contracts going away. It is the fact that the American public has spent the last few years getting very used to the government being extremely competent and actually making their lives run well. And that's not good for you because you don't want the American public turning away from free enterprise. And so like, we need to get ahead of this. We need to remind Americans that free enterprise and competitive capitalism are like what makes America unique and what gives them their freedom? And I mean, he lays out this whole strategy of like, OK, we're going to focus on all of the innovative things our research departments are doing and how we offer higher wages than other places in the world and how we're coming up with all these really cool gadgets that people can buy and how we're taking America into the future and we're going to coordinate. But it's not going to look coordinated. We're not going to use like, you know, the US Chamber of Commerce or anything like that. We're not even going to say the phrase free enterprise in any of these things. We're just going to like make sure that we sort of highlight this throughout. I mean, maybe there were some there was some amount of like, you know, organic reaction to the war or something. But but like it's I don't know. It was surprising to me just how much these companies had sort of strategized and also like how freaked out they were about the American public getting used to the government, like doing stuff for them. Oh my God, this is still so pernicious today, right? Where people are like, it's why so many people hate the Green New Deal, because the government in a position of giving you things and they're like, No, that's the corporations job, but they don't do that. Yeah, they never have. In digging through the URL, Newsom archives some more. I found that one way a standard oil in particular invested in spreading the gospel of free enterprise was via donations to universities. And they weren't alone in that. In the 1950s, various lawsuits in state courts had paved the way for corporations to make tax deductible donations to universities. Newsom's files mention a guy named Frank Abrams. He was a VP on Standard Oil in the 1950s. They found a speech that Abrams gave and that Newsom's team wrote in New York. The title was education and industry and in it. Abrams quotes the chairman of the board of one of Newsom's. Other clients probably also a quote that Newsom wrote, saying if

Speaker 4 [00:10:26] corporations do not intervene with generous donations, the federal government will by default be given this responsibility. Government aid will mean increase taxes with the final result that business will in effect, be aiding but without any freedom of choice.

Amy Westervelt [00:10:43] In other words, if you donate, at least you get some say in how your donation is used at universities. If you just pay taxes well, then the government decides new society as a whole will decide how it wants to be organized. They might make decisions that don't benefit. Your business can't have that. Abrams goes on to emphasize certain indirect benefits of corporations donating to universities education.

Speaker 4 [00:11:12] More and better education is needed if we are to maintain that most cherished of man's works a free society.

Amy Westervelt [00:11:20] Later on, he really hits the free enterprise message

Speaker 4 [00:11:24] as an example. There is a tendency on the part of some people to call on the government to take over more and more functions and responsibilities, born previously by citizens acting as individuals or voluntary associations. In each case, the claim is that private or voluntary group initiative has failed, but the public can be better served by a new government bureau. My observation of political history both here and abroad during 40 years was Standard Oil Company provides evidence of how this thinking can develop even in a swill like ours, where the tradition of democracy and free enterprise is well developed. Each time government takes over a new function, a free society shrinks by that much. A step has been taken toward statism, a system holding great dangers for the general well-being of this country and incidentally, for stockholders investment in corporations. This is a problem with great dimension, in my view, but I think finally, we can rely on a prudent and mature people that is an educated people to deal properly with it.

Amy Westervelt [00:12:41] Again, he's framing a healthy civil society supported by a functional government. That's something that happened during the World War as a dangerous threat to freedom. Newsom had recommended various ad campaigns highlighting the benefits of free enterprise without ever using the words free enterprise, of course.

Ivy Lee archival [00:13:03] Markets are people with incomes and demand. In the past two years alone, our population has increased by five million. Kind of personal freedom, which creates the greatest incentive for individual achievement incentives that inspire free to action that fire the spirit of great accomplishments that enable all of us to put our whole hearts into hard work because of the personal satisfactions and benefits that we know will be our reward. In America, our free, privately owned competitive enterprise system never stops with rewards, but just a few people. The freedom, the opportunities, the rewards for achievement have directly enabled all of us to live on a scale and dreamed of in any other country of the world.

Magic barrell clip [00:13:43] Socialism has spread the shadow of human regimentation over most of the nations of the Earth, and the shadow is encroaching upon our own liberty. Now, let's be practical for a moment, is the American way of life worth bothering about. That is where the viewpoint of self-interest. Well, let's see. Our freedom stems from the fact that America is a republic founded on a constitution and dedicated to the principle of democracy and the worth of the individual.

Amy Westervelt [00:14:17] Our old friend Eddie Bernays, was big on corporate America, protecting free enterprise too. Around the same time that Newsom was cautioning his clients about the threat of statism, Bernays was giving speeches to industrialists about that very same threat and advising them on how they should handle the postwar era to ensure that free enterprise survived between the two of them. Bernays and NewsOne would have been bending the ear of almost every top CEO in the country on this subject. But something even more terrifying than a functional government was looming on the horizon could throw a spanner in the works of the finely tuned PR machine the 1960s. More on that after this break. We heard in the first half how PR spent the 1940s and 1950s selling the American public on the restorative and invigorating qualities of free enterprise. But even the fear and paranoia of the Cold War couldn't keep the 1960s from rushing on in. Suddenly, it looked like the early 20th century again, you had social movements everywhere, arguing for civil rights, gender equity, LGBTQ rights and then the antiwar movement responding to Vietnam. Here's Reverend Lennox Yearwood, founder of the Hip Hop Caucus. Talking about those days

Speaker 5 [00:15:45] was also important is that the people were in the streets, so you had the black people with the Black Power movement was in the streets

Amy Westervelt [00:15:52] and that was the most famous actors.

Speaker 5 [00:15:55] You had the women's movement that was emerging, the gay rights movement that was that was powerful and in New York City and throughout the world was just moving forth. You had all of the even had the the anti-Vietnam movements, even young white kids who were putting out street heat.

Amy Westervelt [00:16:12] Then at the same time, you also had the emergence of the environmental and consumer protection movements with Rachel Carson.

Magic barrell clip [00:16:20] We have to remember the children born today are exposed to these chemicals from birth, perhaps even before birth. Now what is going to happen to them in adult life as a result of that exposure?

Amy Westervelt [00:16:34] And Ralph Nader,

Speaker 5 [00:16:36] the business is not so much opposed to Marxism or communism as they are to good old, free enterprise, competitive business and consumer sovereignty. That's what really gets them all worried. One can imagine what would happen if people could see what goes into their food, processed food products where they could see what frauds so many of the so-called cleaners and cleaning agents are and the kind of harm that's involved. Or they could see the enormous price fixing that goes on in the petroleum industry.

Amy Westervelt [00:17:07] Wealthy and powerful Americans were once again caught flat footed and once again really freaked out about regaining control of the narrative and the importance of free enterprise and, well, their own power with it all nighter in particular, had a real target on his back. He was Public Enemy number one. Companies were hiring investigators to follow him. I'm sure more than one had staff dedicated to digging up dirt on Nader. They tried to entrap him with women. Catch him getting paid off. Corporate America really wanted to take this guy down, in part because he was really good at framing the way corporations behaved as what was actually un-American, undemocratic, counter to freedom. Here he is doing just that in an interview with the British TV show Money Go Round in the 1970s.

Ivy Lee archival [00:18:03] You're accused of being anti-business. You are, you know,

Speaker 6 [00:18:09] basically the accusation is a mixture of of terminology we're against are illegal, deceptive, fraudulent, collusive behavior. And if they want to associate that with the term business, that's their own terminology, not ours. We'd like to separate you two.

Magic barrell clip [00:18:28] And do you think it's a conspiracy against people?

Speaker 6 [00:18:31] Actually, it can be. That's incidental to them. They're not interested conspiring against people. They're interested in maximizing their own power and their own sales and their own profits and their own prestige. If the people get into the way, that's secondary, but that's not their primary purpose.

Ivy Lee archival [00:18:48] Would you describe yourself as a revolutionary?

Speaker 6 [00:18:51] No, actually. I describe the corporations as the revolutionaries. I mean, they're basically the institutions who are trying to upset our basic value systems. And I mean that very, very seriously. If we if you say our basic value systems, our compliance with the law are arm's length relationship with the government, our competitive quality competition, our concern for the neighbors are the avoidance of violent impacts on people and who are in effect, perpetuating all these injustices. Corporations produce most of the violence in terms of pollution and hazardous products. They corrupt governments. They, in effect, make a mockery out of competition and quality in the marketplace as they concentrate the economy in hands of larger and larger corporations.

Amy Westervelt [00:19:39] Again, for a while there, people power won. The civil rights movement saw some big wins. Women got access to birth control, the workforce and their own credit cards. Journalists shone a light on the corruption of war and politics, but it didn't take long for the corporate titans to recalibrate and for their PR geniuses to come up with new strategies. In 1971, attorney Lewis Powell appeared on the scene. He was a lobbyist for the tobacco industry and sat on the board of Philip Morris for years, basically like a Richard Berman type, but quiet and soft spoken. So Paul writes this memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that reads a lot like Newsome's 1944 a fever dream about free enterprise. He says the American free enterprise system is under attack from those who prefer socialism or some form of statism. And then he particularly calls out universities and the media as problems for giving these attackers a platform, especially Nader, who Powell names specifically in this memo and describes as the quote single most effective antagonist of American business. Then, he says, the time has come. Indeed, it is long overdue for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it. Paul proposes that the Chamber of Commerce coordinate this battle for business, which is funny because back in the 1940s, Newsome was like, Don't use the chamber. That's too obvious. By the 1970s, they were desperate enough to act in plain sight. One of the first things that Paul suggests is to target university campuses. He pinpoints the university as ground zero for all this anti-free enterprise thought and goes on for many, many pages about it. He thinks the business community needs to get more pro-business faculty speakers and textbooks onto campuses for a start. He says wealthy businessmen should think about starting centers on university campuses focused on free enterprise. And he mentions the importance of getting into high schools with a pro free enterprise message, too. Now we've seen throughout this series how PR men have fought their propaganda battles in the press, on TV and even in train carriages. But this marks a shift to target people a bit earlier. It moved the battleground to schools and universities. And now, look, I'm not saying that there's one PR guy Earl Newsome or this one lobbyist, Lewis Powell, and his memo single handedly changed the course of American society. But all of those things that Newsom suggested back in the 40s and what Powell is laying out in his memo, they all actually happened. There was a huge increase in corporate funded curricula in high schools and universities. Here's one of my favorite examples American Enterprise, a five part film series about the American economy hosted by William Shatner and commissioned by Phillips Petroleum in the 1970s. It was used by high schools all over the country

Ivy Lee archival [00:23:09] when we needed petroleum. We had it black gold in Pennsylvania and the Southwest when we needed uranium for nuclear power. We had our hills old enough to last for centuries. The land has provided on a grand scale. Most of us are optimistic and we have faith in our manifest destiny. Our land has fed that faith. It gave us the strength to make good our independence. It gave us room and time to grow in and things to grow on. Rich soil, immense forests, navigable rivers, water power, fossil fuels, minerals, the building blocks of agriculture and industry, it never disappointed us.

Amy Westervelt [00:24:06] Something else happened in the wake of the Powell memo, a sudden and rapid increase in the cost of college tuition. Here's Noam Chomsky, someone both Earl Newsome and Lewis Powell probably would have hated talking about that increase and the correlation between skyrocketing college tuition prices and the Powell memo. A few decades after that memo was sent,

Speaker 7 [00:24:30] Powell was a corporate lobbyist, later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, and he wrote a very important memorandum, very influential memorandum, I think 1971. The only choices, he said, are between freedom, free enterprise or bureaucratic regulation of our lives by the state. And they're winning. They've taken over everything. They're destroying free enterprise. He said the businessmen, he said, are the group that have the least influence in the country and government and the economy and everything else. And then he said, we've got to do something to mobilize, and the cure for it is the universities, the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. He said after all, we the business world have the resources. We have the money, we fund them, we pay them. We're what's now called job creators, profit creators. And so we have the money. So we've got to mobilize and organize and do something about it. And right at that point, this kind of common conception across the spectrum did lead to many significant changes which you're living in right now. So it takes a student debt that is now, as you probably know, over over a trillion dollars, that's more than credit card debt. It's phenomenal. Well, that's a crucial way of dealing with the failure of the institutions responsible for indoctrination of the young. You come out of college with a heavy debt, you're trapped, but the rest of your life. Maybe you wanted to be, say, a public interest lawyer when you went to Harvard, but come out with tens of thousands of dollars of debt just going to have to go into a corporation to pay off your debt. You get trapped in the corporate culture. See any end of that.

Amy Westervelt [00:26:35] Making your message into school curricula, taking over universities, making college more expensive so the youth stop turning on business so much. There are some real guerrilla tactics right there. It's not a mad campaign or a TV interview. It's a large scale psychological manipulation. Here's Carroll Muffett, who heads up the Center for International Environmental Law and has been studying how oil companies in particular have contributed to this over the past few decades.

Speaker 8 [00:27:05] What the industry is doing is making the teacher, making educators the messengers for their message. And when you do that, when you take your message and you put it in the mouth of someone who is teaching your children who is told, you know who children are told to believe and to trust, it is among the most insidious and among the most effective forms of propaganda.

Amy Westervelt [00:27:32] Today, we're at another one of these inflection points where there's a real wrestling for the story, for truth. Once again, we're seeing these cries of absolutely any form of government support being socialism. And we're seeing politicians and business leaders again point to universities and the media as a problem, as the enemy trying to take down American free enterprise. Here's one of several recent examples on Fox and Friends.

Speaker 5 [00:28:06] Almost 50 percent of students coming out of university today believe that socialism is the answer. That's frightening to me. 50 percent. Home Depot's co-founder calling out the rise in socialism on college campuses across the country. How did we get here? Retired professor of liberal arts at NYU and author of Springtime for Snowflakes, Dr. Michael Rectangle, joins us live in the studio. Good morning to you, sir. Morning, Steve. You know, when you look at the rise of socialism, you think, Oh, this is something new. This isn't something new. This all started back in the 1920s. That's right. Well, yes, because you had professors going over to the Soviet Union, you know, from America going over to the Soviet Union, learning about the Soviet system of education and being convinced that they should bring it to the US and re-engineer the entire education system after it. OK, so that was decades ago. And then you combine that, which was ingrained in college campuses over the decades with, for instance, Bernie Sanders running for president two years ago. And it's like, Hey, why not? I'm an idealistic kid. I want everybody to get everything, but that's socialism.

Amy Westervelt [00:29:12] Everybody getting everything. That's socialism. The cycle is repeating itself yet again. And here's where I think that knowing about this history, knowing about the specific tactics and stories that have been told over and over and over again over the past century or more, and the specific people who've told them and why, maybe it helps us to spot these patterns in today's news cycle and to pause and think, Hmm, who does this story serve? What's being promoted here and by whom and for what? What are people trying to get me to think or do? And then, you know, decide for yourself, your decision may not match mine, but that's OK. That's freedom. We've heard about this handful of rich men who've used mountains of cash to manipulate the American public. Smooth talking bully her experts train spotter Ivy Ledbetter, Lee, Richard Dick, Evil Berman, Eduard Pina, Snake Bernays, the silent but deadly John Hill, the Edelman Dynasty of Disinfo and the PR man's PR man Earl New Song. But it's important to remember that there are also people working to dispel the mountain of bullshit these guys have dumped into the living room of American society. These guys don't always win. It was editorials unmasking of standard oil that first made the Rockefellers realize they were not above the law or untouchable. And today we remember Woody Guthrie's version of the Ludlow Massacre, not Ivy leads the Edelman's have been dragged into public scandals again and again and again. And Richard Berman's own son was on the record, calling him a despicable motherfucking sob a bitch. But above and beyond holding any one company or person accountable, it's important to think about the system that enables all these folks to do these things, how it came about and how we might fix it or scrap it altogether. That's it for this episode and for this series. I hope you've enjoyed our little tour of the PR Nether World for a whole lot more. Please check out our online archive at Rigged Dot Media. If you've enjoyed the show, let us know. Ratings and reviews help us find new listeners and decide whether to make more episodes. You can also find me on Twitter at Amy Westervelt or Drop Me a line at Amy Critical Frequency dot org. Rigged is an original Critical Frequency production. Our producer is Martin's Elswick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Broad. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment project. Big thanks to Mary Anais Hagler, who you've heard throughout this series. You can get more of me and Mary on our podcast Hot Take, which also has a newsletter. Archival tape in this episode is courtesy of the Library of Congress, the Wisconsin Historical Society, CBS News and the Vanderbilt University TV Archive. The show is reported by me, Amy Westervelt. Thanks again for joining us.