The MPPDA’s “Central Switchboard”

Although the coming of WWII would precipitate intense criticisms of the Hays Office, the public relations work of the MPPDA had long been a point of pride within the association, and it had garnered rave reviews from the broader business community. In Fortune, the MPPDA’s work was favorably compared to the utility industry’s information campaign of the 1920s, recalled for the “crudity with which [it] had attempted to influence public opinion,” whereas the MPPDA, representing a much smaller industry, offered “the great example” of effective public relations.¹⁰ Fortune later expanded on this assessment in a feature on public relations, singling out the MPPDA as “easily the most successful of the long-established group efforts at public relations” and drawing particular attention to its success in converting “public spirited groups that were harrying the industry” into not merely “allies” but a “a vast army of voluntary workers to fight its battles for it.”¹¹ When criticisms from Hollywood-based publicity executives began to mount, Hays’s staff authored a report for studio executives that highlighted its coordination of this network of influence. This report imagines the trade association as the “central switchboard of a great telephone system … [with] outgoing trunk lines which successively separate into a nation-wide and world-wide array of individual receivers.”¹² The rest of the twenty-page document enumerates the various lines–two dozen in all–through which the association conveyed an image of the industry to the public. These can usefully be divided into activities for which the association maintained standing committees or departments–that is, had a continuing program that was institutionally integrated into the association–and those activities that were handled in a more informal manner by top executives.

Two key departments were responsible for the association’s formalized interactions with the public. Since the film industry is first known through its products, the report trumpets the association’s regulation of content through the PCA as the centerpiece of the industry’s management of public opinion. The Code ensured films adhered to the broad standards of inoffensive entertainment, performing a generally defensive function, but the association also sought to create constructive relationships with interested groups. The second key department, the Community Service Department (CSD), functioned primarily to promote the industry to educators, librarians, and community groups. This work involved the preparation and circulation of newsletters and bulletins, as well as scripts for members of local film councils or library and museum displays to tout particular films identified as potentially beneficial to the industry’s prestige. Through such endeavors, the CSD sought to “widen and deepen love of pictures on the part of the best public in this country … that leads in standards, in thinking, in measuring.”¹³ The CSD operated through collaborations with reform organizations and public interest groups, those that Hays had organized under a Committee on Public Relations in 1922, in part to reach the “best public” and out of a conviction that “a prestige-building program … is most effective in proportion as it is implemented and carried on by disinterested cultural and educational opinion-forming leaders.”¹⁴ Because the association found that interfirm jealousy was inflamed when it chose to promote one studio’s film over another’s, the CSD’s work was dispersed among many partner organizations outside the industry.¹⁵

Despite the image of a comprehensive and successful program painted in the association’s report, the MPPDA’s existing departments were beginning to break down. As historians of the Code have noted, the PCA’s industry policy of apolitical, inoffensive entertainment was revised as moral guardians were superseded by outside observers who wondered why the nation’s dominant cultural form had so little to say about Axis belligerence.¹⁶ As the war approached, the CSD was increasingly under the strain of declining resources and the shifting priorities of the groups with which it worked. This existing structure, designed to coordinate with local film councils, was beginning to exhaust its usefulness–not in the eyes of the association but the film councils themselves. The MPPDA’s long-serving vice-president Carl E. Milliken, the former Maine governor who oversaw this department, recalled: “We began, even before the war broke out, to get clippings from newspapers where the local film council had gone out of business, feeling that progress had been made.”¹⁷ The volunteers who had been active in these councils shifted their attention to other social issues, primarily those relating to the impending war. On the supply side of the CSD, the outbreak of war in Europe led to a loss of revenue for the studios, which in turn “instituted very drastic economies” on the association’s work: “the roof fell in on our … ‘community service’.”¹⁸ As a result, the cultural elites and community leaders toward whom the MPPDA directed one of its most significant public relations programs became less easily reached and less valuable to Hollywood. The Hays Office’s more informal efforts were likewise proving less effective.

Beyond their standing departments, MPPDA executives provided counseling services to avert “damaging situations.” Through these informal, and largely unpublicized, means, the association defused situations that might lead to public controversy and government intervention. To take an example cited by the MPPDA staff, when Liberty magazine ran Congressman Martin Dies’s exposé of Hollywood Communism in its February 1940 issue, the association decided not to dignify the articles with a formal answer, but Hays and association staffers held several conferences with the publisher. The MPPDA declined an invitation to publish a rebuttal authored by Hays but instead ensured Dies’s article carried a disclaimer and demonstrated that the industry was deserving of compensating positive coverage. Hays’s staff recounted these efforts in a report to the board occasioned by mounting criticism from Hollywood publicity executives. This report dismissed its publicist critics’ view of public relations: The Hays Office avoided

sensational press releases, which tend to “fan the flames” rather than to limit and speedily subdue, the conflagration—sometimes to the chagrin of excellent directors of publicity who measure results by the size of headlines or the volume of newspaper space.¹⁹

That the MPPDA preferred to handle such matters quietly is no surprise; the majority of its high-level personnel were former political operatives (in the case of Hays and Milliken) and accustomed to addressing various interest groups in addition to the press that the publicists took as the sum total of public relations.

By the end of 1941, a Congressional investigation of Hollywood’s alleged propaganda exposed the inadequacy of the MPPDA’s public relations. During the fall of that year, isolationists in the Senate targeted Hollywood, charging that a handful of anti-Nazi films and newsreels supporting the passage of the Lend-Lease Bill to arm Britain made the industry a propaganda arm of the Roosevelt Administration. Hays had been aware of the looming crisis for nearly a year, but his typical method of operation–private correspondence and conferences–failed to avert the Senate inquiry. Once an investigatory subcommittee was formed, the studio heads appointed a committee of studio lawyers to strategize the industry’s response.²⁰ Hays was sidelined as the industry turned to former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, who mounted an aggressive and widely lauded defense of Hollywood’s interventionist advocacy.²¹ The hearings were a disaster for the isolationists and triumph for the organized industry–except, that is, for its trade association. The episode had shown that the MPPDA’s program–its switchboard to the cultural elite and “unostentatious” influencing of publishers and politicians–no longer functioned to vouchsafe Hollywood’s interests. After the embarrassment of the hearings, and with urgent new public relations demands and opportunities on the horizon, the committee of studio lawyers undertook an audit of the Hays Office and directed its staff to work with their critics, the studio publicity directors, to modernize the association’s public relations strategies.

Corporate Public Relations and WWII

In reorganizing its public relations programs, the MPPDA would look to strategies that were increasingly common in the broader US business community. Historians of corporate public relations identify the United States’ entry into WWII as a watershed event. Given the administration’s reformist and antitrust policies, the American business community was initially reluctant to partner with the government, but, as Roosevelt adopted increasingly business-friendly policies, corporate executives and managers began filling the staffs of war agencies such as the Office of Production Management and the War Production Board. This service was neither purely altruistic nor sentimentally patriotic. It provided an opportunity for American business leaders to recover the cultural authority that was thought lost during the Depression and to safeguard their interests for the postwar future. To convert their service into public opinion that private enterprise ought to operate free of government constraint, American businesses devoted considerable resources to a variety of public relations initiatives.

The War Advertising Council was a key institution in this regard. Founded in November 1941 by two major advertising trade associations and chaired by Young & Rubicam’s Chester J. LaRoche, the Advertising Council was conceived as a defensive measure against the possibility of tax rulings and defense contracts excluding advertising as a business expense. In addition, advertising executives, worried that the conversion to war production would leave their clients with nothing to sell and thus nothing to advertise, used the council to encourage advertising agencies find ways to “sell America to Americans.”²² When war broke out, the council was rechristened the War Advertising Council and absorbed within the Office of War Information (OWI). As a division of a wartime agency, it coordinated the (tax deductible) donation of newspaper and magazine space and broadcast airtime to sell war bonds, recruit manpower, and promote the government’s message of war-time sacrifice.²³ Although enlisted in a national project and part of a government office, the council never lost sight of its organizing mission. Through the council advertisers developed forms of address that sold ideas rather than products, and clients proved willing to fund such advertising after a May 1942 ruling from the Treasury Department that made corporate advertising a deductible expense.²⁴ As a result, spending on such advertising rose from $1 million in 1939 to $17 million in 1943.²⁵ During the war years, advertisers had “a state of the art laboratory where business could experiment with the tools of ideological command.”²⁶

Promoting the contributions of a company’s or industry’s own products to the war effort was one obvious form of nonconsumer advertising that would burnish its self-image, and to this end, companies compiled detailed lists of their war-related activities and commissioned handsomely illustrated, self-congratulatory war histories for distribution to employees. But such themes, when presented more broadly, could oversell an industry’s or company’s contributions and offend the public with, as one surveyed soldier put it, “sloppy, second-rate sentimentalizing.”²⁷ Campaigns were thus increasingly preceded by public opinion surveys to determine what messages corporations ought to sponsor. Discovering the limited utility of advertising to narrowly enhance their own images, large corporations sought broader themes and thus contributed to the American industry’s long search for a “new vocabulary” to promote the so-called fifth freedom–“free enterprise.”²⁸ Institutional advertising campaigns represented the corporation through such scaled-down figures as the G.I. Joe. In such ads, the “heroic but homesick” enlisted man was mobilized to articulate a vision of what America was fighting for that tolerated bureaucratic expansion as a wartime necessity to be rolled back once the peace was secured. Held up as ideals were small-town, local businesses–for example, a local repair shop that flourished without any “bureaucrat” telling the owner what to do, in a Republic Steel ad.²⁹

Institutional advertisements celebrating “the American way of life” activated the imagery of the idyllic small town. Decades earlier, AT&T, under vice-president of public relations Arthur W. Page, had innovated this formula of linking big business to such images of Americana to assuage public fears over the influence of large, distantly headquartered commercial enterprises. During WWII, many more industries flattered the small town for more diffuse purposes, to build a “sympathetic political constituency for the future.”³⁰ Reflecting the content of War Advertising Council messages disseminated for the OWI, many companies promoted the sales of war bonds (offering payroll deductions to facilitate their purchase), encouraged Victory Gardens, and coordinated care packages for servicemen overseas, among other forms of philanthropy. Through such means, Marchand notes, companies revivified the welfare capitalism of the previous decades and “meld[ed] loyalty to the corporation with war patriotism.”³¹ This turn toward employees, and interest in joining their wartime volunteerism with the corporation, aimed to convert workers into “ambassadors of good will” for the industry in the local community.³²

Hollywood’s own industry wartime organization originated much earlier than that of advertisers, with the Motion Picture Coordinating Committee for the Nation Defense (MPCCND) in June 1940. It was announced by Hays and formed by the five vertically integrated majors to produce and distribute films to train troops, an initiative to which Congress had recently appropriated a half-billion dollars. Like the Advertising Council, the MPCCND sought to find new uses and functions for an industry’s products as the nation readied for war, but Hollywood’s early participation was driven by another factor–the United States v. Paramount antitrust suit that had just gone to trial. Just as the MPCCND launched, the Department of Justice abruptly reversed course and entered into a consent decree, temporarily pausing the antitrust suit. Noting the timing of these two events, Mary Samuelson has characterized the MPCCND as initiating a period of “collective collaboration” between the film industry and government: Hollywood’s oligopoly would be tolerated to support the administration’s foreign policy. Days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the MPCCND became the War Activities Committee of the Motion Picture Industry. This change reflected geopolitical developments, but it was also accompanied by an administrative expansion of the group’s work. New divisions formed, including those devoted to theaters, distribution, and Hollywood.³³

Much of the work carried out by the WAC involved utilizing the movie industry’s resources to bring the government’s wartime messages–whether concerning recruitment, fundraising, or rationing–to the moviegoing public. Typified by star-studded bond rallies and propaganda shorts, wartime Hollywood, as Sue Collins has argued, worked with government agencies to mobilize the cultural authority of stars as “a crucial personification of state discourse in wartime” that functioned as an “ancillary of liberal governance to serve war mobilization, military financing, and soldier relief.”³⁴ In coordinating and financing these efforts, the WAC functioned as a public relations agency, but one that Hollywood publicity executives worried served national interests more effectively than those of the film industry itself. Given the nature of the industry’s product, its service–rallies and broadcasts featuring star appearances–would garner positive publicity, and, like General Motors, the WAC created attractive annuals that summarized the industry’s work. But the organized industry, as well as individual companies, also sought to shape public discourse about the industry itself, drawing attention to particular facets of its wartime contributions and controlling the ways in which they were understood.³⁵ In order to accomplish this, the MPPDA sought a public relations program for the industry that would make use of the new tools outlined above–institutional advertising, opinion and industry research, and the organization of employees’ wartime philanthropic service to advance corporate public relations goals. Not all these ideas would find purchase in the film industry’s revivified public relations program, and those that did were most easily adapted to the structure built in the MPPDA’s first decades.

The MPPDA’s New Program

To develop plans for the modernization of the Hays Office’s public relations, studio publicity and advertising executives on both coasts, along with MPPDA staffers, formed branches of a Public Relations Committee (PRC) in the spring of 1942. Through its efforts, the PRC sought to bring intra-industry public relations into line with trends taking hold throughout the US business community. Three hallmarks of WWII corporate public relations–the centralized collection of industry data, survey research into public attitudes, and institutional advertising campaigns crafted to address these attitudes–ultimately failed to be implemented. But the MPPDA did launch a national organization to unite the majors’ distribution and exhibition workers through an industry newsletter and speakers bureau; by turning local employees into local goodwill ambassadors, this organization would create a network of advocates for Hollywood outside the industry’s bicoastal centers.

Through the MPPDA, the film industry had twice before sought to promote moviegoing through industry-wide advertising campaigns–first, with the Greater Movie Season of 1925–1926 and then the 1938 Motion Pictures Are Your Best Entertainment (MPAYBE) campaign.³⁶ The PRC hoped to expand on these with a $3-million multimedia campaign to promote the value of not only moviegoing but also the industry itself. In so doing, Hollywood’s publicists sought to compel “industry leaders to recognize and study other industries and their efforts along similar public relations lines.”³⁷ Their proposals included several research reports as exhibits, indicating the extent to which the studios’ publicity staff were devoting resources to bolster the industry’s public relations operations. These included studies of advertising expenditures in magazines and analyses of possibilities for institutional radio advertising. The most important of these–advocated in the trade press by members of the PRC–was the report on opinion research prepared by MGM’s Howard Dietz, who MPPDA executives recognized as “the dean of the publicity fraternity.”³⁸ The research report Deitz authored distinguishes itself from the other exhibits in not presenting data supporting the PRC’s initiatives so much as mounting an argument in their favor: “It is becoming increasingly evident that all industries are on trial in time of national crisis. Each industry endeavors … to insure its destiny in a post-war period.”³⁹ In this important respect, the film industry was lagging behind other major industries, and Dietz interviewed several research firms such as the Audience Research Institute to obtain quotes for assessing the public’s misconceptions about and concern over “salaries … public responsibility, labor relations, political affiliations, domestic lives, economic waste, moral behavior, etc.”⁴⁰ Such opinion research, combined with a research bureau to compile accurate industry data, would be instrumental in marshaling support for the institutional advertising expenditure from the studio executives who sat on the MPPDA’s board of directors. These campaigns, Dietz recalled, were often regarded a good idea “in a vague sort of way” but, with the two exceptions noted above, were always rejected because of their expense: “Perhaps if we knew definitely what we wanted to say, meaning what we wanted to accomplish, meaning what we knew about the public, the expense would-not loom large.”⁴¹ The resources the PRC had hoped to marshal in coordinating this ambitious program were not forthcoming.

When presented with the plan for institutional advertising, opinion surveys, and research, the MPPDA’s board of directors balked.⁴² Proposals to establish a research bureau of “authentic industry statistics” ran aground, for not the first time, on the studios’ mutual fear of a rival gaining an advantage. As the MPPDA’s Arthur DeBra observed several years later, this had long been an ambition of the trade association, but each member was loathe to “allow data derived from its own business operation to become property of other companies.”⁴³ Dietz’s proposed survey of attitudes toward the industry was deferred owing to its cost, as was the institutional advertising campaign, even with a budget trimmed and made to coincide with the WAC’s Third War Loan Drive.⁴⁴ Although denying funding, the board of directors offered a general statement of support for a “carefully planned long-range campaign of institutional advertising,” but they were nonetheless unwilling to invest in such planning. Such contradictory stances had long hampered the MPPDA’s efforts. As Milliken observed to Hays during the MPAYBE campaign,

the constant dilemma preventing a consistent, expanding public relations program is that in times of prosperity the leaders of the industry regard such a program as surplusage and in times of adversity they feel that they can not [sic] afford to spend the money.⁴⁵

With the domestic box-office boom not yet making up for lost overseas markets, intra-industry research and advertising seemed extravagances; the exogenous pressures of Congressional investigation had passed. Once again, the changing economic fortunes of the studios militated against an ambitious program.

When the trade press reported that a new, broadened public relations program had been adopted by the MPPDA, articles omitted the program that was rejected and highlighted what the board had approved: the publication of a new weekly bulletin to keep the industry’s employees throughout the country informed of the film industry’s war contributions and “organization on a national basis” coordinating “prominent men in the field” such as circuit executives and branch personnel of distribution exchanges.⁴⁶ This idea had originated with the PRC, which envisioned publicists of each town’s largest chain acting as “liaisons between that community and Hollywood” by inviting prominent citizens, local industry employees, and presidents of fan clubs to a meeting addressed by a speaker from Hollywood.⁴⁷ This representative would acknowledge “certain weaknesses in the industry’s contact with the public because it is such a vast business” and ask their cooperation in “bind[ing] together the real friends of the business to protest against unfair and unfounded criticism and humiliation of the industry.”⁴⁸ These groups would then, “if Hollywood were unjustly attacked in a story or in legislation,” offer a protest that would carry weight locally.⁴⁹ This provided the framework of the public relations program that was finally implemented.

MPPDA staffers, most notably the association’s newly installed vice president Charles Francis Coe, took the lead in reworking the PRC’s plan, both expanding and redirecting it. The New York office would not only prepare the industry newsletter but also maintain “a graphic file which will carry the names of a thousand persons … broken down into various classifications,” representing key contacts in at least five cities, in each state.⁵⁰ Economies that would appeal to the board of directors were made possible by the growth of the WAC. Exchange publicists were now the “Light Brigade” or “noble 600” touted in the WAC’s annual review, Movies at War, and they provided a “network of skilled and enthusiastic campaigners, promoters and exploiteers” in every community of over 25,000.⁵¹ Instead of just supporting the sale of war bonds, the local publicists would be enlisted to promote the industry broadly.

In terms of refocusing the initial plan, the publicists and the MPPDA differed with respect to whom these efforts should be directed and what attitudes needed to be improved. The studio publicists understood this as a Hollywood-centered problem–“unfortunate misunderstandings” about aspirants coming to Hollywood and fans expecting their letters receive the personal attention of stars. As the plan developed, making use of a national organization to smooth relations between exhibitors and producer-distributors, to facilitate their “present[ing] a unified industry front to the public,” became a central goal. Through their collaboration on War Loan drives, a “structure of confidence” was being built between the majors’ exchange workers and independent exhibitors.⁵² By shifting the focus of the campaign from misconceptions about Hollywood to the role of the movie theater as a civic institution–a key component of the WAC’s stateside program–the public relations plan would flatter local exhibitors, perhaps even improve their business, without having to address what the press called “inter-industry problems such as clearance, percentages, playdates, etc.”⁵³ The theater would be an avenue through which the industry’s far-flung critics could be won over. Cultivating local theater owners would improve relations with local newspaper editors, the benefit of which would be in reaching “the rural communities where, after all, the vast majority of our legislators … reside.”⁵⁴ This national organization plan would thus allow the association to shift its public relations emphasis from moral critics, whose concerns about Hollywood’s products and its denizens’ lifestyles had previously threatened boycotts and government intervention, to the comparatively ignored independent exhibitors, small-town newspapers, and rural legislators who would have significant influence on the course of antitrust actions against the industry once the war crisis passed.

After successfully launching the program at the Advertising Club of Boston before a crowd of 1,000–equally mixing local business and community leaders and film industry workers–the MPPDA scheduled tours up the Pacific Coast, through the Midwest, and down into the South. Regional advance men preceded MPPDA staffers, coordinating local publicists who brought together notable citizens and industry workers in each exchange zone. Over the next 2 years, Coe and other MPPDA staffers would travel to twenty-two exchange cities, gathering a contact file of 15,000 community leaders not heretofore reached by the Better Films Councils. A popular author and orator before obtaining a law degree and starting a business career, Coe delivered rousing speeches extolling the industry’s war contributions, the advantages of entertainment over propaganda, and the educational potential of films in the postwar era. These events won favorable reviews in both the trade and local press, and in interviews discussing the program, Coe confidently predicted it would provide a basis on which to build a postwar “Peace Activities Association” that would bring “all elements of the industry together” to work “harmoniously for a common cause.”⁵⁵

But Coe may have been a more effective publicist for the MPPDA’s new public relations plan than he was for the Hollywood oligopoly. Exalting the community theater seemed little more than cheap flattery to exhibitors who wanted trade practices addressed. When discussion forums turned toward such matters, Coe tried to stress that the purpose of his presence was “advancing the good name of the motion picture industry.”⁵⁶ In San Francisco, when an independent exhibitor interrupted his speech wanting to “know what was being done to help prevent the small exhib from being squeezed out of business,” Coe replied that “this was not his province and also he was not prepared for discussion on the subject”–“and so began the free-for-all.”⁵⁷ The efforts of an MPPDA employee to conjure a united industry front were often unsuccessful. The exhibitor trade press was skeptical of Coe’s call for a continuation of the WAC as a peacetime “solid-front industry organization” that could combine all branches and skirt the economic relationships that set these factions against each other. Publisher Jay Emanuel editorialized:

As A MATTER OF FACT, at the same time as the WAC has been proceeding successfully, the same elements which make it up have been battling in other fields on trade problems … THE PICTURE Coe draws is a pretty one, but it is not likely to get support from those factions which believe that the exhibitor’s salvation rests with Government action.⁵⁸

Coe’s heckler in San Francisco, Rotus Harvey of the Pacific Coast Conference of Independent Theater Owners, traveled to Washington the month after Coe’s visit to lobby the Department of Justice to pursue divorcement.⁵⁹ Within the MPPDA, the studio publicists grew increasingly concerned that too many resources were devoted to Coe’s tour. They still preferred that the resources of the association be devoted to advertisements and published articles than “this new policy of barnstorming”: “One issue of THE [READERS] DIGEST reaches more people than Mr. Coe and his entourage of press-agents will encounter in a dozen years.”⁶⁰

In the end, the reorganization of the MPPDA’s public relations program was an internal institutional success but broader failure, one that was both characteristic of the trade association’s ability to coordinate its members and consequential for the resolution of the pending antitrust suit. The MPPDA averted the “stripping of functions” feared by its personnel in the wake of the propaganda hearings and redirected its public relations toward publics targeted by corporate public relations more broadly. But institutional advertising campaigns like those developed by members of the Advertising Council could not be mounted in the face of perennial MPPDA obstacles–the studios’ short-term thinking about investments and mistrust of each other. As a result, the MPPDA could not reach a mass public with a message that wedded the wartime service of cinema to the continuation of the vertically integrated majors and Hollywood oligopoly. The national organization and speaking tour both built on the existing MPPDA experience and structure of the CSD and expanded the wartime service of distribution employees into work on behalf of the studios in their communities, but in so doing it brought the competing sectors of the film industry into more direct contact and thus conflict. Winning over educators and moral reform groups through the CSD and Hays Code could deprive independent exhibitors of crucial allies, but touting wartime service directly to those exhibitors seems only to have provoked them. Thus, while the MPPDA’s status as the central public relations agency within the industry was preserved, its partial adoption of corporate public relations innovations failed to protect the interests of the majors from the forces that threatened the continuation of the studio system and which “would return with a vengeance immediately after the war.”⁶¹ Historical studies of media industry institutions can show us that the commercial media industries’ concentrated economic power is not without its internal weaknesses and may not be as imperishable as it may sometimes seem.