Tapping into War: Leveraging World War I in the Drive for a Dry Nation
Abstract This study examines the communication efforts of the Anti-Saloon League of America in the years leading up to National Prohibition. The ASLA has been studied in the context of the Progressive Era, but it has not been examined in the context of its role in public relations history even though its efforts, along with those of the suffrage movement, have been said to have contributed to the postwar boom in publicity/public relations firms. Thus, it will be shown that the ASLA employed a multitiered approach in its own fight for a dry nation via national legislation and congressional hearings, its publishing partner, the Scientific Temperance Federation, and its own American Issue. And that it did so by weaving elements of emotion and cognition through messages arising from war-related issues such as anti-German sentiment, patriotism, and rationing. Such an approach might not be so unusual today, nor were elements of its efforts new to advocacy groups at the time, but the League demonstrated that, for better or worse, a Midwest, church-based social reform movement grounded in the Progressive Era could successfully harness persuasive strategies and tactics to fulfill its agenda for a dry nation.
Reconsidering early U.S. public relations institutions: An analysis of publicity and information bureaux 1891–1918
Abstract This paper examines the United States popular press’ representation of publicity and information bureaux from 1891 to 1918. Specifically this study discusses these bureaux’ relationship with the press, use by governments, role in political campaigns, and function within non-profit organizations. Publicity and information bureaux are an important part of public relations history and identity because they represent the departmentalization of PR within organizations. Implications for PR historiography are discussed.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.