The Politics of Uncertainty: Lobbyists and Propaganda in Early Twentieth-Century America

Mr. Arnold: What is a lobby?

Senator Minton: I am asking you. You ought to know.

Mr. Arnold: I am asking the chairman to define a lobby. We would all like to know what it is.

Senator Minton: You have some definite ideas about it, haven’t you?

Mr. Arnold: No, I don’t think I have; I have never been able to find out. We talk about lobbyists and about laws against them and for them. But what is lobbying?

When James Arnold entered into this tense exchange with Indiana Democrat Sherman Minton in 1936, it was the third time in twenty years that the U.S. Senate had called Arnold to account for his political activities.¹ Minton’s interrogation was not an isolated incident. Legislators, journalists, and scholars all made numerous attempts during the first half of the twentieth century to uncover the identity of the lobbyists, the nature of their craft, and their impact on American democracy. While Gilded Age commentators had expressed suspicions about lobbyists’ corrupting influence on the people’s elected representatives, during the early years of the new century the focus of apprehension moved to lobbyists’ relationship with the people themselves. This shift reflected anxieties about the emergence of interest-group politics, and in particular the way that lobbyists leveraged public opinion for political gain. As men and women like Arnold came to serve as intermediaries between citizens and their leaders—communicating voters’ preferences to those in power and alerting constituents to important public issues—many questioned whether lobbyists were honest brokers of such intelligence. Did lobbyists simply translate voters’ preferences, or did they actively shape their attitudes and beliefs? Did they educate citizens or manipulate them? In short, could lobbyists be trusted with public opinion? Decades of debate on these questions left lobbyists like Arnold relatively unscathed, but ultimately they weakened confidence in the public’s ability to make informed decisions.

The controversy over lobbying was catalyzed by the rise of interest groups during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often cutting across traditional attachments to party and locality, these associations represented not only the corporations and trusts that dominated the nation’s economic life but also industrial workers, farmers, women, and other demographics. Within this system, lobbyists offered legislators both technical expertise and feedback on constituents’ views in return for favorable treatment of their organization’s policy agenda.²

In assessing this transformation, historians have argued that interest groups functioned much as theorists of pluralism such as Arthur Bentley and David Truman said they ought to work, which is to say rather well. While the system was not without its problems—the occasional scandal, as well as the often disproportionate power of big business—scholars have concluded that interest groups efficiently interpreted public opinion, offered underrepresented constituencies improved access to the political process, and helped policymakers to manage the complex affairs of the modern state.³

Yet historians have largely missed how changes in the practice of lobbying during this period created widespread distress and unease among policymakers. In addition to the long-established strategies of conferencing with legislators and testifying before committees in the capital, lobbyists now took their causes directly to the citizenry, mobilizing public opinion and in turn using this support to pressure officials. Although lobbyists did not invent such techniques, the combination of innovative communications technologies, marketing strategies, and industrial modes of production and distribution meant that organized appeals to public opinion could reach wider audiences more rapidly than ever before. During the early twentieth century, these methods of mass persuasion became more commonly known as propaganda.⁴ Judging propaganda to be effective, lawmakers gradually adjusted to the new style of interest-group politics. Many observers, however, also suspected that lobbyists influenced public opinion through misinformation and deception, employing propaganda to dupe rather than inform their audience. These same misgivings diminished faith in the people themselves, who too often appeared to have fallen for lobbyists’ tricks. By calling into question whether citizens could obtain reliable information about their interests, lobbying propaganda thus fostered concerns...