“To those who have followed the political career of President Roosevelt, this unprecedented emphasis on public relations and publicity is no surprise. No president has ever been more alive to the potentialities of maintaining a ‘good press’, of gauging public reaction to his policies and of timing his announcements to obtain the widest and most sympathetic audience possible.”
“The newspaper, radio, camera, news reel platform, and every other device known to modern publicity have provided the means for telling the New Deal story. The major daily newspapers are, of course, the first consideration, because they cast the die which editors in small towns and rural countries utilize to formulate editorial policy. But the New Deal is also reaching out directly to the small town and rural newspapers with ‘clip sheets’ for lazy editors, to the magazines with signed articles by big names in the Roosevelt Administration, and to the people generally through radio which reaches into the American home. The Government Printing Office has turned out more than 1,000,000 pieces of printed matter in the last twelve months, a new high in government publication production, much of it prepared for direct mailing to citizens in every section of the country. The story of the men behind the scenes who are directing and carrying out this huge peacetime publicity program is a revealing one. It is the story of the largest and most efficient staff of public relations men ever retained by government.”
This article primarily concerns the 21 most effective publicists to have worked in FDR’s first term.
Even his First Lady held regular press conferences, Click here to read about it.
More magazine articles about FDR can be read here…
– from Amazon: Drunk Before Noon: The Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Washington Press Corps
