Presidency and the Press: Harding to Hoover. Encyclopedia of American Journalism

PRESIDENCY AND THE PRESS:
HARDING TO HOOVER
The Republican administrations between Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s terms in office are considered transitional presidencies. Warren Harding, Calvin
Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover are not remembered as
outstanding chief executives. A part of their failures may
have been their inabilities to communicate through the
press. In the cases of Harding and Hoover, one might not
have expected such weaknesses. Harding was a newspaper
publisher from Ohio and should have thrived in journalistic circles, while Hoover, as secretary of commerce under
Harding and Coolidge, had built a solid reputation partly
because he had worked well with the few reporters who
covered his office. Hoover also had directed a well-organized, modern, public relations-oriented campaign against
Al Smith in the 1928 election. Coolidge, a taciturn, hardworking Yankee, concentrated on his duties in office and
was direct in his statements to reporters. His stinginess
with words has been exaggerated, but nonetheless he did
not like answering questions and his weak press relations
were predictable.
The Progressive Era, a time of idealistic reform, was
coming to an end as Harding took office. A generation earlier, he had purchased the Marion Daily Star, a newspaper
near his boyhood home, for $300 and had built it into a
success with the help of his wife, Florence. She was more
ambitious than he and, at her urging, he entered politics.
He served in the Ohio Senate and then as lieutenant governor before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1914. The
Ohio Republican polled 60 percent of the vote in the 1920
presidential election over James Cox, another newspaper
publisher and the governor of Ohio. Harding’s election represented a rejection of Wilson’s hope for U.S. participation
in the League of Nations and he promised an era of “normalcy” unencumbered by foreign entanglements, and an
end to Progressive politics.
Harding had only personal secretaries, who dealt with
reporters, not a formal press secretary. He usually took
care of his own press relations, meeting with reporters
informally. A handsome man, Harding was one of the first
presidents to use newsreels and photo opportunities successfully. He posed and joked at press conferences, because
that was how he was most effective, so silent newsreels fit
his approach. By the time he took office, newsreels had
been in use for twenty-five years with five major companies producing clips viewed in theaters between feature
presentations. Newsreels were silent until late 1926. Early,
presidential newsreel shots were difficult because cameras
were bulky and heavy and setting up was time-consuming
and expensive. Indoor newsreel footage required several
bright, hot lights. The room temperature could exceed 100
degrees. Despite the 1920s prohibition on the sale and consumption of alcohol, Harding kept a stocked liquor cabinet
in the White House and liked to play poker, sometimes with
reporters, in the evening. He appointed many strong cabinet officers including Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes,
Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, Secretary of
Agriculture Henry C. Wallace, and Hoover. With these men
in place, Harding preferred to leave policy decisions to them
and others. Some in his cabinet and “the Ohio Gang,” who
were informal advisors, took advantage of Harding’s lack of
interest. His Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted
bribes in return for government oil leases in New Mexico
and Wyoming. The Teapot Dome scandal began to break
as Harding left for a tour of the West Coast in the summer
of 1923. Under stress and suffering from high blood pressure, he wanted to get away from the poisoned atmosphere
in Washington where once friendly reporters had begun to
hound him. He traveled to Alaska by train and then down
the coast to San Francisco, where he died of a heart attack.
Stephen Early, who later became Franklin Roosevelt’s press
secretary, was working for the Associated Press and was
one of the first correspondents to report Harding’s death.
Early was suspicious of rosy press reports handed out when
Harding was first stricken and stayed up all night waiting
for the latest word. Harding was mourned as a hero immediately after his death, but reports of the oil scandal and
Harding’s adulterous affair with the daughter of a friend in
Marion soon sullied his reputation.
Coolidge Sworn In
Vacationing in Plymouth, Vermont, at the time of Harding’s
death, Coolidge was sworn in as president at his parents’
home by his father, a justice of the peace. Coolidge was
perhaps the most conservative president of the twentieth
century. As governor of Massachusetts, he had used heavyhanded tactics to end a Boston police strike in 1919. He
was an honest, straight-forward president whose pro-business attitude and laissez-faire philosophy fit the prosperous
1920s. Voters soon forgot about the Harding scandals to
which Coolidge had no connection and Coolidge easily won
reelection over John W. Davis in 1924.
Headline writers coined the phrase “Silent Cal” to
describe Coolidge’s economy of words, but Coolidge held
regular press conferences twice weekly and the moniker
was an exaggeration. It was not the practice of presidents to
field questions extemporaneously in the 1920s. Questions
had to be submitted in writing and the president could not
be quoted directly. When questions were posed orally, he
either answered with a few words or did not respond, but
that was typical of the times. As with Harding, no one in
the Coolidge White House was designated to be a press
secretary. Coolidge understood the need to accommodate
newsreel teams and photographers, but did not like posing
for shots nor did he appear particularly presidential during
photo opportunities. He was a slight man who was usually
self-conscious about picture taking.
Not much news emanated from the White House during Coolidge’s tenure, but, like the electorate, newspaper
publishers tended to be Republican, so Coolidge gained
favorable coverage and the support of the preponderance
of the nation’s newspapers. Harding was the first president
to speak over the radio, but because Coolidge was in office
three years longer, he had more radio addresses. In the judgment of many historians, neither man used the new medium
effectively.
Nothing typified Coolidge’s understated press relations more than his announcement that he would not seek
reelection in 1928. While vacationing in Rapid City, South
Dakota, in August 1927, almost exactly four years after
Harding’s death, Coolidge lined up reporters in a classroom
of a local high school and handed out slips of paper. Printed
on each slip was the statement, “I do not choose to run for
President in 1928.” He barely elaborated on that statement
during the rest of his life.
Coolidge’s withdrawal set up one of the classic elections
of the twentieth century. Hoover easily won the Republican nomination and Al Smith, the Democratic nod. Hoover
was originally from Iowa, though he lived much of his boyhood with his uncle and aunt in Oregon and traveled the
world as a mining engineer. Still, voters thought of him as
“small town” and Smith, governor of New York, as “big
city.” Hoover favored Prohibition and Smith opposed it.
More importantly to voters of the time, Smith was a Roman
Catholic and Hoover a Protestant. Journalists touted the
contrasts throughout the election and bigots worried that
the Pope would be running the country, if Smith were
elected. Moreover, Hoover had been an able food administrator during World War I and an extremely competent secretary of commerce for seven years under two presidents.
He had gained the admiration of the public and reporters
in 1927 when flooding along the Mississippi River had
left thousands homeless. He organized rescue efforts and
food distribution flawlessly. He was known as the “Great
Organizer.” The emphasis on Smith’s Catholicism in 1928
ignored the outstanding record Hoover had achieved prior
to his election and his immense popularity after World War
I. Hoover’s inauguration in March 1929 appeared on sound
newsreel. More like a home movie, the twenty-minute production had no narrator, so most sound was crowd noise. At
the podium the microphone caught Hoover’s speech erratically, his voice sounding far away and tinny. Hoover tolerated newsreels at first, but later refused to appear in them
when wife Lou Henry told him they made him look much
older.
Hoover, Reporters Meet
Three days after taking office, Hoover asked a committee
of reporters to have dinner with him and discuss press conference rules. He insisted on retaining the requirement that
questions be submitted in writing beforehand with answers
given at twice-weekly press conferences, but, in what he
considered a generous concession, he agreed to allow
reporters to quote him directly. He added the stipulation
that any direct quotation be followed by the phrase “in reply
to a question from representatives of the press the president stated today.” He wanted to make it clear to the public
that opinions were being elicited and that he was not just
commenting on every issue that came before him. Hoover returned to the practice of specifying a staff member as
press secretary, as Wilson had done. George Akerson, an
editor from Minnesota, served for two years, and then was
replaced by a White House correspondent from Boston,
Theodore Joslin. Neither man handled reporters well.
More than two hundred journalists attended Hoover’s
first press conferences, but, when it became clear that there
would be no extemporaneous give-and-take, they stopped
appearing. They could pick up a copy of Hoover’s written
statements later. The press conference, itself, was superfluous. Worse, Hoover favored certain reporters who wrote
only positively about him and regarded any reporter who
wrote negatively as an enemy. His favoritism rankled.
On October 29, 1929, the stock market convulsed for a
second time in a week and by the end of November had lost
60 percent of its value. Fear swept the nation and Hoover did
not know how to react. Within a year of the crash, unemployment nationwide reached record levels. Hoover was an
ineffective radio speaker and could not reassure the public
through the press, because he did not know what to say. He
was an organizer, not a speaker. His policies for direct relief
to the unemployed relied on voluntarism from the private
sector and that effort failed, too.
Reporters, who had been unhappy with his press conferences and his favoritism, were inclined to write negative stories and found willing audiences. Hoover sulked
and remained aloof from most of the press, so journalists
found other venues for quotations, usually Hoover’s political opponents. Hoover was a nineteenth-century man living
in a twentieth-century White House. He felt that, as with
the journalism with which he grew up in the 1880s and
1890s, reporters either favored a political office holder or
wholeheartedly opposed him. There was no such thing as
objectivity, in Hoover’s estimation, so when criticism was
published, he decided that nearly the entire press corps had
come to despise him.
Bonus March
When World War I veterans marched on Washington in
the spring and summer of 1932 seeking early payment of
a bonus they were promised in 1924, they were routed by
armed soldiers with bayonets and tear gas and driven from
their shanties outside Washington. The Bonus Rout seemed
to epitomize the perceived heartlessness of the Hoover
Administration. Ironically, because the ex-soldiers erroneously had been labeled Communists by the government and
the press, nearly all newspapers supported Hoover for routing the marchers. Actually, General Douglas MacArthur
had exceeded his orders in driving the men from Washington, but Hoover never explained MacArthur’s actions to the
public.
The White House rejoiced when the Democrats nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Hoover remarked privately that Roosevelt, who had suffered an attack of infantile
paralysis eleven years earlier, would not be a worthy candidate because of his infirmity. Hoover was so isolated from
the press and public that, until late October 1932, he still
thought he would win the election. Only after meeting hostile crowds around the country did Hoover realize that he
would lose.
Newspapers, which had endorsed Hoover in overwhelming numbers in 1928, remained aloof. Hoover commanded
the support of barely 50 percent of the nation’s editorial
boards. Many had sent staffers to work on his campaign
in 1928, but said they could not spare their people in 1932.
Hoover, who had always been adored by the public until
1929, could not understand the change of heart. In truth, the
Depression was not his doing. He had been in office only
seven months, when the crash occurred, but he could not
stem the panic that ensued and so he bore the brunt of the
ill will of the public and the press. In all likelihood, good
press relations would not have saved Hoover in 1932, but his
inability to gain favor with reporters drove him into isolation and made the criticism all the more hurtful.
Not only did Franklin Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 change
the political and ideological balance in the country, but it
also changed press-presidential relations. No longer would
a president be able to control information flow by requiring
written questions in advance and passing out a few statements to reporters. Radio (and later television) became
regular tools for dissemination of presidential comments.
Press conferences became major productions. Harding,
Coolidge, and Hoover represented the last of the presidents
who relied on old-fashioned press relations. They did not
spend much time worrying about the reporters and imagery. Their policy failures and their lack of rapport with the
press corps would only look worse when matched against
the performance of their successor, the master of the media,
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Further Reading
Best, Gary D. The Dollar Decade: Mammon and the Machine in
1920s America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Dean, John W. Warren G. Harding. New York: Times Books,
2004.
Ferrell. Robert H. The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Lawrence:
University of Kansas, 1998.
——. The Strange Deaths of President Harding. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
Liebovich, Louis W. Bylines in Despair: Herbert Hoover, the
Great Depression, and the U.S. News Media. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1994.
Walch, Timothy, ed. Uncommon Americans: The Lives and Legacies of Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover. Westport, CT: Praeger 2003.
Louis W. Liebovich

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