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.
The Brewers and Public Relations History, 1909–1919
In 1909, the American brewing industry's trade association, the United States Brewers' Association, launched its first year book to serve as an educational resource for those concerned about temperance and prohibition. Over the next 10 years, these year books revealed communication efforts that more closely resembled a modern approach to influencing public sentiment, such as the consistent use of 4 key messages, research on local option persuasion campaigns, and a relationship-building outreach program in the form of the Barley Campaign. This study, then, not only contributes to the historical scholarship concerning the role of trade associations in public relations history, but, in its departure from the timeline approach to understanding the field's development, it also contributes to the ongoing theory building in public relations history.
“Excellent Ammunition”: Suffrage Newspaper Strategies During World War I
Suffrage Newspaper Strategies During World War I The difference between me covers of the two national suffrage orgaiizations' weekly publications that appeared just days apart in 1917 demonstrates their disparate strategies during World War I. A lone woman carrying a suffrage banner fends off a mob of leering men on the cover of The Suffragist, published by the radical, newly organized National Woman's Party. A few days later, a heroic young soldier dashing across a battlefield dominated the cover of The Woman Citizen, organ of the larger, more conservative National American Woman Suffrage Association; an inset showed a female munitions worker dutifully bent over a factory line. "Behind the Man Behind the Gun," read the caption. 1 These contrasting approaches to winning the vote reflected in Suffragist and Woman Citizen informed not only the suffrage movement but carried consequences for women after they won the vote. The editorial contents and tactics of the NWP and NAWSA weeklies help illuminate the political and cultural implications of the organizations' differing tactics and outlooks. First, they demonstrate the pulls between nationalism and feminism during wartime experienced by women whose sex rendered them secondclass citizens. The publications reveal much about the role women would play-or fail to play-in politics after they gained the ballot Differences on their pages show a split in the women's movement that raised questions about whether women could function as a unified political power after they won the vote. This analysis also shows the important role the dissident press plays in giving a voice to marginalized groups and helping effect change in their favor. Woman Citizen and Suffragist were key tools in their publishers' contrasting campaigns. This inquiry hopes to fill a gap in the history of women's periodicals because nothing has been published comparing their strategies during World War I.2 Woman Citizen urged and supported women's war work as part of NAWSA's strategy to impress upon male politicians women's worthiness of the vote. One striking observation in reading the Citizen today is how it reinforced gender restrictions and stereotypes by embracing the dominant war discourse that women should serve their country and not themselves. That discourse, wrote scholar Margaret Randolph Hig,gonet, "discouraged expressions of women's rights and needs, labeling them selfish, divisive, or even treasonous."3 Treasonous was a term often flung at Suffragist. It rejected patriarchal politics by pledging allegiance to women over nationalism. It ignored the war and focused solely on passage of a federal suffrage amendment. Reading it leaves the impression that the only war raging in 1917 was between NWP pickets at the White House and Washington, D.C., police. Suffragists had agonized over what course to take in wartime. NAWSA President Carrie Chapman Catt was an avowed pacifist, as was NWP Chair Alice Paul, who also was a Quaker. They knew reluctance to support the war would brand suffragists as unpatriotic and be cited as more evidence that women were unfit for citizenship. Yet the suffrage movement was snowballing after a half century of snail-paced progress; women voted in twelve states by 1916.4 They were loathe to put votes for women on the back burner, knowing the war would shove news of their movement off mainstream newspaper pages and preoccupy politicians whose votes they needed. British suffragists already had wrestled with this dilemma. Militant leader Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, who previously warred with British officials in the suffragettes' battle for the ballot, threw themselves as passionately into war work. Emmeline peremptorily suspended activities of the Women's Social and Political Union in August 1914; Christabel, declaring pacifism a luxury, drew upon her speaking talents in a new incarnation as a recruiting sergeant. …