Herbert Hoover and Media

President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) had some encouraging words for discouraged citizens plagued by today’s one-sided approach to media. A Republican who rose from son of a blacksmith to become the president of the Unites States, his administration faced the Great Depression.

The former president warned of the dangers that a mass communication system controlled by one way of thinking would sway the nation into “untruth”. The 31st president wrote to the book The Challenge to Liberty in 1934 saying: “Bureaucracy has already developed a vast ramifying propaganda subtly designed to control thought and opinion…The constant use of the radio, the platform, and the press, by device of exposition, news and attack with one point of view, becomes a powerful force in transforming the nation’s [mentality] and in destroying its independent judgment” (pp. 135-136). ...He wrote in The Challenge to Liberty:

“Who may define Liberty?...It is far more than Independence of a nation…It is not a catalogue of political rights…Liberty is a thing of the spirit—to be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, and to speak without fear—free to challenge wrong and opposition with surety of justice…Liberty conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if the individual is free to choose his own calling, to develop his talents, to win and to keep a home sacred from intrusion, to rear children in ordered security…

“Liberty dies of the water from her own well—free speech-poisoned by untruth” (p. 17)...The former leader of the free world stood for fairness, balance, and accuracy in media. Americans should stand for nothing less today in their own day and age.

FDR masterfully exploited an ascendant mass media for his own political gain.

... The pace had been so slow before Roosevelt, so relaxed and genteel. Washington, after all, was not that big a dateline. ...
... When journalists visited President Hoover they submitted their questions for him in writing. On occasion he deigned to answer them. In writing, of course. ...
... Franklin Roosevelt changed all that. He was the greatest newsmaker that Washington had ever seen. He came at a time when the society was ready for vast political and economic change, all of it enhancing the power of the President and the federal government, and he accelerated that change. The old order had collapsed, old institutions and old myths had failed; he would create the new order. In the new order, government would enter the everyday existence of almost all its citizens, regulating and adjusting their lives. Under him Washington became the focal point, it determined how people worked, how much they made, what they ate, where they lived. Before his arrival, the federal government was small and timid; by the time he died it reached everywhere, and as the government was everywhere, so Washington became the great dateline; as it was the source of power, so it was the source of news. ...
... Power in the wake of the Depression was waiting to be taken, and Franklin Roosevelt was going to take it, and those in the media were going to be his prime instrument.
God, did he make news! Every day there were two or three stories coming out of the White House. He intended to make the whole federal government his, make it respond to his whim and vision, he did so, and in that struggle he became this century's prime manipulator of the new and increasingly powerful modem media. Thirty and forty years later, politicians like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would study how Franklin Roosevelt had handled the press, it was a textbook course in manipulation. ...
... All this began in the thirties, the arrival of new forces that were to make the American presidency for some forty years almost unchallenged in its power, and it all began under Franklin Roosevelt. A lesser man, a more modest man, might have shrunk from all these possibilities and implications as he took office, but Roosevelt welcomed them; he welcomed the chance to change things, to expand the powers of the government, and he knew immediately how to create his own new mandate.
He was, of course, subtly but quite consciously elevating the importance of the press. If he wanted direct access to their readers, then they had to have direct access to him. He was more often than not going directly to the media rather than to the Congress with information; and he put more energy into his press relations than into his congressional ones. There was a changing institutional balance. If on occasion print reporters were angered by his increased use of and chumminess with radio reporters, then people in the Congress and some Democratic Party politicians were irritated by the fact that he seemed to court media people in general more than he did them. He simply needed the Congress and the party structure less.
As he used the media more often and more directly, they became more influential; they became more and more architects of the national agenda, making more decisions on what the great issues were rather than just responding to the decisions of others. ...
... He was the first great American radio voice. For most Americans of this generation, their first memory of politics would be of sitting by a radio and hearing that voice, strong, confident, totally at ease. If he was going to speak, the idea of doing something else was unthinkable. If they did not yet have a radio, they walked the requisite several hundred yards to the home of a more fortunate neighbor who did. It was in the most direct sense the government reaching out and touching the citizen, bringing Americans into the political process and focusing their attention on the presidency as the source of good. Roosevelt was the first professional of the art. He had practiced for it as governor of New York. The first time he had used radio as President he had turned to Carleton Smith of NBC, the one radio man allowed in the room, and had said, "You'll never have any trouble with me, I'm an old hand at this." Which he was. Smith (whom NBC had chosen to replace Herluf Provenson because the Roosevelt people thought Provenson was too close to Hoover) had a stopwatch that Roosevelt always used to time himself. He called it "that famous watch." Smith was impressed by Roosevelt's ability to stay almost exactly within the prescribed time limits. When it was over he would always turn to Smith and ask: How did it go? Was I repetitious? Were there any lapses? There rarely were; it was a consummately professional performance.
Most Americans in the previous 160 years had never even seen a President; now almost all of them were hearing him, in their own homes. It was literally and figuratively electrifying. Because he was President he had access to the airwaves any time he wanted, when he wanted. Indeed, because he was such a good performer, because his messages so bound the nation, the networks wanted him on more often regularly, perhaps once a week (an offer he shrewdly turned down, aware of the danger of overexposure, telling a network official that people cannot stand the repetition of the highest note on the scale for very long). "You guys want him to do everything," Steve Early, Roosevelt's press secretary, once told Carleton Smith. "I don't want the Boss to do very much. We want to conserve him."
He spoke in an informal manner, his speeches were scripted not to be read in newspapers but to be heard aloud. He worked carefully on them in advance, often spending several days on a speech, reading the words aloud, working on the rhythm and the cadence, getting the feel of them down right. When aides questioned the immense amount of time he devoted to just one speech, Roosevelt said that it was probably the most important thing he would do all week. He had an intuitive sense of radio cadence. Unlike most people, who speeded up their normal speech pattern on radio, Roosevelt deliberately slowed his down. He was never in a rush. He had often memorized a speech before he began, and so he seemed infinitely confident, never seemed to stumble. The patterns of the speech were conversational. His very first words reflected his ease: "My friends," he began. My friends. That was it, they were his friends. Nor were they a passive audience. At that desperate moment in American history the American people were not cool, not aloof, they needed him and they wanted him to succeed; what could be more stirring than to be told by that man with that rich assured voice that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.
It was all so personal. This was not some distant government official talking in governmentese, this was a voice connected to a warm human being; he knew them, he had visited them. He spoke of his wife and his children, even his dog. Some thirty-five years later an astonishing number of Americans who did not remember the names of the dogs of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy, remembered the name of Franklin Roosevelt's dog because he had spoken with them about Fala, my little dog Fala, about Fala's Irish being up over Republican criticism. It was an awesome display of mastery. It was as if sitting in the studio he could visualize his audience sitting around their radios in their homes, and he spoke not to the microphone but to those homes. If it was very hot in Washington he might turn to an aide and ask, over the open mike, for a glass of water, and apologize to his audience, and that too humanized him, the President needed a glass of water. His touch was perfect. Often, when the speech was over, because newsreels were becoming a bigger and bigger factor in American life, Roosevelt would then repeat vital parts of the speech for a newsreel camera. But the camera was not allowed in to film the broadcast itself; it was simply too noisy in those days.
Nearly 50 million Americans listened to most of his speeches. They were in a real sense his own captive audience. Not by chance was he the first three-term and then four-term President in the nation's history, rising above tradition, above opposition party, above his own party's will. (No longer did politicians need the party to raise a crowd. Now the radio did it. Yet few professional politicians of the day understood radio or how to use it. Carleton Smith of NBC tried to do a program with members of Roosevelt's Cabinet and had a terrible problem. Jim Farley, the Postmaster General and ablest professional politician of his generation, simply could not pronounce the word "with." It always came out "wit," making Farley seem like a hack.) Thus did Franklin Roosevelt outdistance even his own party. He had changed the institutional balance and he changed the nature of the presidency; from now on it was a personalized office, less distant from the average American. Until March 1933, through a world war and a Great Depression, the White House had employed only one person to handle the incoming mail. Herbert Hoover had received, for example, some 40 letters a day. After Franklin Roosevelt arrived and began to make his radio speeches, the average was closer to 4,000 letters a day.

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