"Useful Cinema," of What Use?: Assessing the Role of Motion Pictures in the Largest Public Relations Campaign of the 1920s
Using testimony and subpoenaed exhibits published in the seventy-two-volume record of a Federal Trade Commission investigation, this article traces the role of motion pictures in the private utility industry’s public relations campaign against municipal ownership and federal regulation in the 1920s. This article reconstructs the utility companies’ decision to employ films in its campaign; the production, distribution, and exhibition strategies for its motion pictures; and the relationship of producers to sponsoring organizations. Ultimately, the article argues that the use of film in this campaign was experimental and, relative to other media, limited, but by investigating such experiments with film, we can identify institutional agents struggling to find a “use” for cinema, thereby enabling media historians both to identify what determinants might cause an organization to find cinema more or less useful at different historical moments and to better assess cinema’s changing cultural status and social functions.
The “Light” of Publicity in the Progressive Era
This article examines the connotative evolution of the term “publicity.” An historical analysis of articles written in magazines, journals, and newspapers from 1890 to 1930 illustrates how corporations and government co-opted ideas of the progressive movement into self-serving practices. Progressives viewed publicity as a moral reform that would open politics and business to public scrutiny and help prevent corruption. Over time, publicity evolved into a communication strategy for corporations seeking public approval. This study found that the change from a “broad searchlight” of publicity to a “narrow flashlight” of positive information in the hands of public relations experts allowed business and government to shape public opinion rather than be influenced by it.
Education Through Official Publicity
The extra-curricular influence of schools is far wider than their extra-curricular activities. The influence of every strong teacher upon his pupil when teacher and child are separated is more important than the influence of direct contact with the child. It is the same with the school's official publicity. Its indirect effects are of wider range and deeper import than its direct effect. School publicity affects for good or ill all other official publicity. If it is lifeless, insincere, boastful, unconvincing, slovenly edited, it is a low-water mark with which every other city department will tend to find level. If, on the other hand, it is alive, informative, direct, frank-educative-other departments will tend to compete in these respects. A school superintendent told me recently that his report had been so different from the reports of other town officers that it was necessary for other official reporters to notice the difference. He had used blocked headings in effective black face type, interesting diagrams and photographs, the short paragraph method of listing achievements and recommendations, and the square facing of taxpayer doubt with school fact. Other reporters could not laugh him out of town meeting if they would. They decided to imitate instead.