• Mr. Arnold: What is a lobby?

  Senator Minton: I am asking you. You ought to know.

  Mr. Arnold: I am asking the chairman to define a lobby. We would all like to know what it is.

  Senator Minton: You have some definite ideas about it, haven’t you?

  Mr. Arnold: No, I don’t think I have; I have never been able to find out. We talk about lobbyists and about laws against them and for them. But what is lobbying?

When James Arnold entered into this tense exchange with Indiana Democrat Sherman Minton in 1936, it was the third time in twenty years that the U.S. Senate had called Arnold to account for his political activities.Footnote ¹ Minton’s interrogation was not an isolated incident. Legislators, journalists, and scholars all made numerous attempts during the first half of the twentieth century to uncover the identity of the lobbyists, the nature of their craft, and their impact on American democracy. While Gilded Age commentators had expressed suspicions about lobbyists’ corrupting influence on the people’s elected representatives, during the early years of the new century the focus of apprehension moved to lobbyists’ relationship with the people themselves. This shift reflected anxieties about the emergence of interest-group politics, and in particular the way that lobbyists leveraged public opinion for political gain. As men and women like Arnold came to serve as intermediaries between citizens and their leaders—communicating voters’ preferences to those in power and alerting constituents to important public issues—many questioned whether lobbyists were honest brokers of such intelligence. Did lobbyists simply translate voters’ preferences, or did they actively shape their attitudes and beliefs? Did they educate citizens or manipulate them? In short, could lobbyists be trusted with public opinion? Decades of debate on these questions left lobbyists like Arnold relatively unscathed, but ultimately they weakened confidence in the public’s ability to make informed decisions.

The controversy over lobbying was catalyzed by the rise of interest groups during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often cutting across traditional attachments to party and locality, these associations represented not only the corporations and trusts that dominated the nation’s economic life but also industrial workers, farmers, women, and other demographics. Within this system, lobbyists offered legislators both technical expertise and feedback on constituents’ views in return for favorable treatment of their organization’s policy agenda.Footnote ²

In assessing this transformation, historians have argued that interest groups functioned much as theorists of pluralism such as Arthur Bentley and David Truman said they ought to work, which is to say rather well. While the system was not without its problems—the occasional scandal, as well as the often disproportionate power of big business—scholars have concluded that interest groups efficiently interpreted public opinion, offered underrepresented constituencies improved access to the political process, and helped policymakers to manage the complex affairs of the modern state.Footnote ³

Yet historians have largely missed how changes in the practice of lobbying during this period created widespread distress and unease among policymakers. In addition to the long-established strategies of conferencing with legislators and testifying before committees in the capital, lobbyists now took their causes directly to the citizenry, mobilizing public opinion and in turn using this support to pressure officials. Although lobbyists did not invent such techniques, the combination of innovative communications technologies, marketing strategies, and industrial modes of production and distribution meant that organized appeals to public opinion could reach wider audiences more rapidly than ever before. During the early twentieth century, these methods of mass persuasion became more commonly known as propaganda.Footnote ⁴ Judging propaganda to be effective, lawmakers gradually adjusted to the new style of interest-group politics. Many observers, however, also suspected that lobbyists influenced public opinion through misinformation and deception, employing propaganda to dupe rather than inform their audience. These same misgivings diminished faith in the people themselves, who too often appeared to have fallen for lobbyists’ tricks. By calling into question whether citizens could obtain reliable information about their interests, lobbying propaganda thus fostered concerns about the public’s ability to engage in rational, intelligent deliberation on political issues.

In practicing the art of propaganda, James Arnold exemplified the transformation of lobbying during the early twentieth century. Arnold sought to mold public opinion through newspaper articles, direct canvassing, and later, the radio—a process he referred to as “developing sentiment.”Footnote ⁵ While politicians and journalists were only beginning to connect developing sentiment with lobbying when Arnold began his career at the turn of the century, by the 1930s such techniques were widely regarded as an essential part of a lobbyist’s repertoire. Arnold’s ability to mobilize constituents played a significant role in what he claimed as his principal success: securing higher rates for southern agricultural products in the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, but even when he advocated for losing causes—including challenges to southern Democrats during the 1920s and the New Deal in the 1930s—his opponents did not regard his talents lightly. Although successive congressional investigations exposed Arnold’s failures, the fury of the senators’ attacks implies that they took Arnold—and propaganda—seriously.

Arnold’s case, however, also shows how lobbyists’ use of propaganda infused new uncertainties into the democratic process. While Arnold successfully rallied supporters to his causes, he often did so by spreading false or misleading information. Evidence also indicates that Arnold used his skills to reap pecuniary, as well as political, benefits. The issue, however, was not simply whether Arnold was a legitimate petitioner or a corrupt lobbyist, or whether the opinions he activated were based on good or bad information, but that legislators and other elites had a hard time telling the difference. Indeed, lawmakers’ encounters with Arnold and other lobbyists during these years demonstrated that the answers to these questions could be highly ambiguous. If there was a modicum of sincerity behind Arnold’s more unsavory activities, then perhaps there was a bit of Arnold in even the most earnest lobbyist.Footnote ⁶ In sum, James Arnold’s story reveals the ironies of early interest-group politics, as well as the roots of our continued ambivalence toward lobbying. Even as Arnold and his cohorts employed propaganda to assert a more prominent role in the policymaking process, these same tactics called into question their profession’s legitimacy. Similarly, while lobbyists aspired to amplify their constituents’ power and influence, the methods they employed cast doubt on the ordinary citizen’s capacity to participate in democratic politics.

THE USUAL ARNOLD PUBLICITY

James Arnold was born in Illinois in 1869 and began his career as a white-collar worker, serving as a clerk and a stenographer for railroads throughout the Midwest. By 1906, Arnold had established himself in Beaumont, Texas, where he became involved in the local chamber of commerce, as well as a statewide booster club called the Texas Business Men’s Association (also known as the Commercial Secretaries’ Association).Footnote ⁷

Rising quickly through the ranks at the TBMA, Arnold soon helped to steer the association toward politics. In 1912, the TBMA set up a joint venture with the populist Farmers’ Union known as the Farm Life Commission, ostensibly to aid embattled Texas farmers. But as state investigators would later allege, Arnold and the association operated the commission as a clandestine publicity bureau designed to turn public opinion against progressive reforms within the state, most notably prohibition. Arnold wrote pro-business articles for the commission, then had them signed by Farmers’ Union officials, whom he bribed using secret corporate contributions. He subsequently distributed the articles for free on ready-to-use “boiler” plates to hundreds of rural newspapers, many of which needed the copy to fill their pages. Local subscribers reading these pieces saw no evidence of the commission’s corporate backers—only the imprimatur of the Farmers’ Union—and Arnold hoped this purloined endorsement would sway citizens against reform.Footnote ⁸

Arnold’s patrons could not have been more pleased with his skillful infiltration of the Farmers’ Union. In a 1914 telegram, one official from the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association wrote: “Am come from an interesting conference with Arnold, behind closed doors. Parenthetically, I will put in here—even at the risk of an I-told-you-so attitude—it is no small gratification to find him and the commercial secretaries everything—and more—that I tried to insist they would be years ago, when nobody but you would listen to me. The enclosed pamphlet was given the usual ‘Arnold publicity.’”Footnote ⁹ Despite Arnold’s best efforts to maintain secrecy, Texas officials eventually caught on to the scheme, and in 1914 the attorney general brought a lawsuit against the TBMA for illegally using corporate money for political purposes.Footnote ¹⁰ The TBMA quickly dissolved without contesting the suit, although Arnold and a small cadre from the association mounted a brief smear campaign against the meddling attorney general.Footnote ¹¹

The TBMA scandal left Arnold undeterred. The Farm Life Commission had been a grand success before it was found out, and Arnold determined to try the same strategy again—this time at the national level. He rapidly established a second plate service, announcing that the organization would “promote and protect the interests of the men who feed and clothe the world.”Footnote ¹² In order to put some weight behind this declaration, the new publicity bureau also claimed affiliation with the Farmers’ Union and its 6 million members. All of this was a pretense that Arnold fabricated. Much like the earlier publicity bureau, Arnold’s real patrons were railroads and breweries, and he continued to pay Farmers’ Union officials for their support. The new press bureau operated until 1917, sending out articles opposing prohibition, women’s suffrage, and business regulation—none of which revealed their true sponsors. At one point, Arnold’s plates were circulated to an estimated six thousand newspapers around the country.Footnote ¹³

Once again, Arnold was caught. Under intense questioning from a Senate committee in 1919, Arnold was forced to admit that corporations had poured tens of thousands of dollars into his outfit. But idiosyncratic business practices, as well as Arnold’s evasive testimony, made it difficult to know exactly what he and his backers were up to. Much of the money was handled by a third party—a wealthy Texas rancher—and Arnold’s own office kept spotty books. The bureau also destroyed most of its correspondence, but even had the authorities managed to retrieve this material, they would have found that many of the telegrams were written in code. When even these extensive precautions failed to stymie investigators, Arnold relied on his own selective memory to obscure the facts.Footnote ¹⁴

The available evidence, however, overwhelmingly pointed to a massive deception, and the Senate committee’s counsel labeled Arnold’s work as propaganda of the “most subtle sort.”Footnote ¹⁵ The New Republic wholeheartedly concurred and castigated Arnold’s tactics in a 1915 exposé. As the editors opined:

While the journal did not object to brewers and other businesses openly advocating for their political interests, Arnold’s machinations menaced unsuspecting citizens by actively concealing the source of biased information. Only the belated discovery of the plot offered some solace to the outraged editors, who speculated that the episode might indirectly strengthen support for the progressive causes that Arnold’s publicity targeted.Footnote ¹⁷

The scandals surrounding James Arnold’s early career illuminate both continuity and change in perceptions of lobbying during the early twentieth century. In part, the backlash against Arnold’s work with the railroads and breweries denoted a long-standing association between business and political corruption. During the late nineteenth century, scandals such as Crédit Mobilier regularly exposed illicit ties between politicians and big business. Lobbyists, generally defined at the time as agents paid to influence legislation or elections, often played an instrumental role in forging these relationships by channeling campaign contributions, bribes, and other boodle to public officials. Although accounts at the time probably overestimated the scope of corruption, the growing perception that business—and especially large corporations like the railroads—posed a dire threat to the public interest sparked a wave of governmental reforms during the 1890s and early 1900s.Footnote ¹⁸

In dealing with lobbyists themselves, reformers focused on their interactions with lawmakers. In this regard, the integrity of individual politicians represented the final line of defense against corruption. As one House committee reported after a 1913 investigation, “The man who enters public life in a representative government assumes grave responsibilities, and most largely upon his own judgment, his own firmness of will, and his own sense of honor must he rely in meeting the constant pressure from conflicting interests that are ever pleading and appealing, ever enticing and threatening him.”Footnote ¹⁹ Greater transparency, many policymakers concluded, was the best way to hold elected leaders to their duty. Only when exchanges between lobbyists and legislators took place in the open could lawmakers ascertain whose interests the lobbyists truly represented, and only then could the public determine whether the transaction had been on the level. Although Congress failed to adopt any permanent regulations, during the first decade of the 1900s about a dozen states enacted statutes requiring lobbyists to register at the capital.Footnote ²⁰

Changes in the way that lobbyists actually operated, however, would render the honor of public officials increasingly irrelevant. In addition to trade associations like the TBMA, large segments of the body politic, including farmers, labor, women, and professionals, had begun to form extrapartisan political organizations around the turn of the century, and many hired professionals to represent their demands to policymakers at the state and national levels.Footnote ²¹ Just 256 such groups appeared before congressional committees between 1890 and 1899; 1,301 would offer testimony between 1910 and 1917.Footnote ²² The new style of interest-group politics changed not only who lobbyists represented but also the nature of their work. In order to exert influence, interest groups generally required large blocs of voters, and their agents relied on various media, including editorials, newsletters, and pamphlets, to mobilize their constituents. As the Washington Post noted in 1912, these shifts fundamentally changed the source of lobbyists’ power. “The old-fashioned lobbyist went out when the publicity agent came in. Practically all the lobbying done now is conducted by press agents, working away from Washington,” the editors mused. “The new method is not to bribe statesmen, but to create a public sentiment in their districts which will impel or compel them to vote this way or that.”Footnote ²³ In other words, the new brand of lobbyist looked a lot like James Arnold.

While the development of interest-group politics may have softened fears of bribery and other overt acts of corruption, Arnold’s case also contributed to a whole new set of anxieties—with these misgivings focused on lobbyists’ efforts to affect public opinion. Anyone with a cause, a skilled copywriter, and the requisite cash might reach a large audience through the newspapers, and it seemed as though there was little to stop them from distorting, manipulating, or concealing the truth. Muckraking journalists reported that public utilities, life insurance companies, Standard Oil, and the railroads all retained publicity bureaus during these years. Similar to Arnold’s operation, these corporate-funded news agencies produced stories friendly to their patrons, then supplied the articles to newspapers, which either received advertising fees or, if they needed the copy badly enough, took the stories for free. The newspapers ran the articles as straight news or editorials without any mention of their sponsor.Footnote ²⁴ The threat of exposure always made this strategy a dicey proposition, and many business interests hewed to more conventional approaches to public opinion, retaining public relations agents and sponsoring clearly labeled advertisements.Footnote ²⁵ On the other hand, publicity bureaus could also yield impressive results. In a 1906 article for McClure’s, Ray Stannard Baker reported that in the space of just eleven weeks, corporate-funded news bureaus transformed local newspaper coverage of the railroads in Nebraska from almost unanimously hostile to nearly wholly positive.Footnote ²⁶

Lawmakers were keenly aware of these media campaigns, as well as the pressure they generated. Congress did require clear labeling of printed advertisements in its 1912 appropriation to the post office, but the measure apparently lacked teeth. By the following year, Illinois Representative Clyde H. Tavenner was complaining on the floor of the House that newspapers were being “filled with paid advertisements calculated to create an artificial public opinion against certain items on the tariff bill.”Footnote ²⁷ Such opinion, however, was not always entirely “artificial,” and as Baker’s account noted, the railroads supplemented their publicity by organizing telegram and letter-writing campaigns to legislators and bringing delegations to testify before Congress.Footnote ²⁸

The public relations schemes described by Baker and other journalists, however, would soon seem amateurish in comparison to the U.S. government’s propaganda efforts during World War I. Under the leadership of George Creel, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) used stump speakers, print advertising, and movies in what was widely viewed as a successful effort to rally the public around the flag. The CPI was unique in its utilization of the new medium of motion pictures, as well as in its ability to disseminate information on an unprecedented scale. The committee’s 75,000 “Four-Minute Men” alone, for example, gave speeches to an estimated 400 million Americans.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, the CPI’s centralized coordination of a national propaganda campaign seemed to underscore the modern media’s ability to persuade and further amplified misgivings that such instruments might fall into the wrong hands.

Thus, when the Senate Judiciary committee convened its investigation of propaganda in 1919, it had initially sought to determine whether foreign governments or subversive elements might employ the same strategies to influence American public opinion. In stumbling upon Arnold, however, they found a home-grown propagandist. If German spies and Bolshevik agents posed a clear threat to the republic, then Arnold presented a more ambiguous dilemma, and one that would grow more complex in the years that followed. As lobbyists adopted Arnold’s tactics as standard operating procedure during the 1920s, it would become nearly impossible to distinguish Arnold from any other petitioner, and yet more difficult for politicians to judge the meaning of their constituents’ opinions.

BLUFF GROUPS

By the 1920s, interest groups had matured into a dominant force in American politics. A survey by social scientist Pendleton Herring identified more than five hundred organizations maintaining permanent representation in Washington, D.C., but hundreds more might descend on the capital for an important piece of legislation such as the tariff.Footnote ³⁰ Surmising the situation at the end of the 1920s, one scholar quipped that “two Americans cannot agree on anything without founding an organization and hiring a lobbyist.”Footnote ³¹

These interest groups drew influence from their ability to harness public opinion. “These associations,” Herring wrote, “have taken to themselves two of the most important functions in a democracy; namely, the creation of public opinion and the use of this opinion in the promotion of specific legislative measures.”Footnote ³² Linking public opinion to political power was a complicated process, and one that continued to raise both practical and normative questions during the interwar years. For politicians, trusting interest groups was a gamble. Elections provided the surest measure of an organization’s viability, but they were a blunt instrument—if a legislator chose poorly, they could very well be out of office. Consequently, it could take years even for well-known organizations to establish relationships with policymakers.Footnote ³³ At the same time, Herring and other scholars, journalists, and policymakers wondered how interest groups obtained these votes, and in particular whether their methods of persuasion were open and honest.

Attempting to resolve these uncertainties, Herring broke down interest groups and their agents into a two-part typology. He estimated that between sixty and one hundred Washington-based interest groups boasted the large, loyal, and financially committed memberships necessary to be “consistently effective.”Footnote ³⁴ These associations functioned like modern corporations—constructing “magnificent buildings” and hiring “elaborate and skilled staffs of experts”—and operated in the open without shame.Footnote ³⁵ At the other end of the spectrum were what Herring called “bluff groups.” Such organizations might be founded by a sincere “crusader” or a charlatan working for personal gain. They endeavored to keep up the appearance of being a “great national association,” and made false claims to “speak for the great masses of the voters.” Most of the time, bluff groups remained pretenders to power, with the crusaders reduced to “writing form letters in dingy offices, begging money from indifferent supporters, and trying to remake society.” Meanwhile, the frauds eked out a living from gullible contributors.Footnote ³⁶

James Arnold was pegged as just such a fraud. In 1929, Arkansas Democrat Thaddeus Caraway and his Senate subcommittee grilled Arnold for nine days, questioning him on his management of the American Taxpayers’ League (ATL) and the Southern Tariff Association (STA).Footnote ³⁷ For Arnold, by then nearly sixty years old, the ordeal was physically grueling, and following one especially difficult session the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that he “left the stand today limp and almost exhausted after the pounding cross-examination to which he was subjected.”Footnote ³⁸ In the end, Caraway and his colleagues concluded, these groups were mere “aliases,” which Arnold used “for the purpose of making a living for him and a small group associated with him.”Footnote ³⁹ As the committee report stated: “He has had no training or experience either as an economist, a statistician, or a tax expert that would fit him to be of service in any capacity in connection with revenue legislation. He is on terms of intimacy with no Member of Congress so far as your committee has been able to learn. He has contributed nothing toward the preparation of briefs to be presented to committees of either House, nor has he been a witness before any such, yet he gets the money.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Caraway’s characterization of Arnold matched Herring’s taxonomy almost perfectly, and Herring even made what appear to be thinly veiled references to the “League of Southern Bankers” and the “National Taxpayers’ Society” in his discussion of bluff groups.Footnote ⁴¹

Caraway’s accusations may well have carried some merit. Arnold and a cadre of field agents had collected more than $1 million for both the STA and ATL since 1925, including $209,586 for the ATL alone between 1928 and 1929.Footnote ⁴² Their success was attributed to a fund-raising program that included a 40,000- to 50,000-person mailing list, thousands of “sight drafts” mailed to banks around the country, and personal solicitations.Footnote ⁴³ As to how Arnold used this money, the press and the committee described his testimony as “hazy” and “evasive.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The activities of the ATL—by far Arnold’s most lucrative source of revenue—remained especially suspect. Much of the work consisted of disseminating literature advocating lower personal and corporate income taxes as well as the abolition of the estate tax. This platform mirrored Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s own tax plan, much of which had already been enacted. The national organization had not held a general meeting since 1925, and while Arnold claimed to be developing organizations at the state level, he conceded that those associations were “not so very active.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Echoing his work during the 1910s, Arnold had destroyed much of his office correspondence, as well as his account books. All that remained were the audits, and those had been performed by an accountant with a prior conviction for fraud.Footnote ⁴⁶ Surviving records, however, showed that during the previous year, the STA and ATL had paid Arnold $22,619.45, as well as $55,317.09 to his three associates. Combined with the over $27,000 paid to other solicitors and office staff, these disbursements accounted for half of the two organizations’ revenue for the year. By Herring’s account, such figures would have made Arnold and his assistants some of the highest-paid lobbyists in the country.Footnote ⁴⁷ Arnold contended that these salaries included expenses incurred while organizing local chapters and conventions, and that the STA and the ATL actually paid him a combined annual salary of $12,000.Footnote ⁴⁸ Of course, he had little evidence for his claim, and it did not help that at least two of Arnold’s workers had been with him during the TBMA scandal, or that investigators found a contract (which Arnold claimed to be invalid) pledging 40 percent commissions to his top assistants.Footnote ⁴⁹

Yet while Arnold’s testimony cast well-founded suspicions on his ethics, other evidence contradicts Caraway’s assertion that Arnold’s organizations were mere “aliases.” If Arnold was a con man, then he also may well have been a crusader. Additionally, although some aspects of Arnold’s work point to a gigantic boondoggle, he also appears to have had very real political objectives, goals that he made a concerted—and sometimes effective—effort to achieve. Taken as a whole, Arnold’s resume thus undermined attempts by Herring, Caraway, and others to fit him and his organizations into a dualistic framework of honest versus fraudulent lobbying.

During the early 1920s, Arnold and the STA played an important role in the passage of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff. The STA was originally constituted in 1920 under John H. Kirby, a Texas lumber and oil magnate who claimed that a high tariff was the best way to protect southern farmers.Footnote ⁵⁰ Kirby had probably met Arnold through the TBMA, of which he had also been a member, and immediately brought the lobbyist on to run the STA’s Washington office.Footnote ⁵¹ From the capital, Arnold set about the ambitious task of reversing southern Democrats’ long-standing opposition to protectionism. He managed a public relations campaign in the press, organized conferences, brought delegations to meet with elected officials, built alliances with other farm organizations, and developed contacts with legislators, tariff commission officers, and even President Harding’s private secretary.Footnote ⁵² A later study of roll-call votes on the Fordney-McCumber bill showed that the STA may have successfully persuaded a small group of southern senators to break away from the Democratic bloc, thereby helping to push through the bill’s high duties.Footnote ⁵³

The passage of the tariff bill left the STA with little to do, and the association struggled to maintain cohesion. It was unable to make inroads among cotton and tobacco interests, both of which remained committed to low duties. Nor did the STA gain a constituency among farmers themselves, relying instead on the support of bankers, chambers of commerce, and agricultural businesses such as manufacturers of cottonseed crushers. Despite the STA’s diminished strength, Arnold approached the tariff debates of 1929–30 with a bold, even brash, style.Footnote ⁵⁴ It must have seemed to Caraway and his colleagues that Arnold would do anything to secure protectionist rates for the South, even if that meant bringing pressure to bear on the president himself. Writing to an associate during the summer of 1929, Arnold argued that Herbert Hoover sympathized with a high duty on sugar from an “economic standpoint,” but political considerations—and in particular the opposition of Senator Pat Harrison of Mississippi—prevented the president from taking the stance he would have “naturally” supported. In order to bring Harrison to heel, Arnold proposed sending agents into Mississippi to stir up “strong protective-tariff sentiment” and engineer a telegram and letter-writing campaign against the senator. Although Arnold later told the committee that such a campaign would allow Harrison to “vote according to the sentiment if he wanted to,” the implicit threat was that such sentiment would ultimately count at the polls.Footnote ⁵⁵

Finally, even as the STA was harassing Harrison, Arnold hatched a scheme that would directly challenge southern Democrats’ political power in their home region. Although still in the planning stages at the time of the Caraway hearings, Arnold’s Southern Republican Council was intended to revive the GOP in the South. In what was by far Arnold’s most ambitious venture, the council fused the goals of both the ATL and the STA into a comprehensive vision that included a protective tariff, lower taxes, flood control, managerial governments at the municipal and county levels, and, of course, Republican representation in Congress. To achieve these ends, Arnold not only proposed to expunge African Americans from the southern GOP but also to engineer the election of black Democrats in the North.Footnote ⁵⁶ In a move that suggested his commitment to this program, Arnold had recently made an unsuccessful attempt to recruit a Republican candidate to challenge Texas Democrat John Nance Garner, who was then the House Minority Leader.Footnote ⁵⁷

In light of these various schemes, Caraway and his colleagues concluded that Arnold and his crew ought to be reined in: “On the whole, the committee is of the opinion that the operations here reported are reprehensible in the highest degree, even though no specific statute, penal in nature, may have been violated. Certainly it is a type of lobbying against which the public ought to be protected by appropriate legislation.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As during the prewar years, however, reformers like Caraway failed in their efforts to enact lobbying regulations during the 1920s, and almost every proposed bill failed even to make it out of committee.Footnote ⁵⁹ The sources examined here do not offer insight into why the lobbying bills proposed during the 1920s failed to make headway in Congress. But public discourse pointed to the difficulty of separating the good lobbyists from the bad. “In attempting to regulate the lobby the inherent difficulty is finding some equitable rule which curbs the corrupt, the deceptive, and the predatory, and still leaves ample opportunity for the legitimate spokesman of a group to represent his organization unhampered by red tape,” Pendleton Herring reflected.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet defining the boundary between “legitimate” and “corrupt” lobbyists was so difficult because, as in Arnold’s case, they often appeared to be one and the same person.

Arnold’s tactics mirrored those employed by nearly every other interest group during the 1920s. Of these strategies, none was more important than what Arnold variously termed “developing sentiment” and “educational work.” Political scientist Peter Odegard put these same methods at the center of his 1928 analysis of the Anti-Saloon League, by his accounts one of the largest and most influential interest groups of the early twentieth century. As Odegard showed, the league launched a “deluge” of publicity during the 1910s, and the organization even went so far as to establish its own publishing company in order to get out its message. The league’s eight presses pumped out more than thirty state newsletters and a host of other journals, all aimed at activating public opinion against the nation’s saloons. In total, the organization produced more than 150 million books, pamphlets, leaflets, and other documents between 1909 and 1923, and at their peak the league’s journals boasted a total circulation of more than 550,000.Footnote ⁶¹ “That such a gigantic outpouring should have profoundly modified the behavior of the American people toward the liquor traffic is not surprising,” Odegard concluded.Footnote ⁶² Other pressure groups differed in scale from the Anti-Saloon League, but all relied on similar tactics. As Odegard later argued, “The pressure which these groups are able to exert depends in the final analysis upon the efficiency of their propaganda.”Footnote ⁶³

Yet even groups like the Anti-Saloon League—organizations with large constituencies that could reportedly unleash thousands of letters and telegrams at lawmakers virtually at will—occasionally resorted to questionable tactics in appealing to supporters. Finding the speaker of the New York state assembly difficult to get along with, the Anti-Saloon League’s New York state superintendent determined to establish the speaker’s connections with “wet” interests and thus discredit his public image. Since no such connections existed, the superintendent surreptitiously drafted letters on the letterhead of state liquor dealers that simultaneously criticized the league and lauded the speaker. He hired a detective to have these letters signed by liquor salesmen in the speaker’s district, and subsequently published the documents. Discovering the plot, the speaker forced the superintendent to admit his fraud, and the superintendent would later be imprisoned for larceny, extortion, and forgery.Footnote ⁶⁴

Odegard was fairly diffident about the Anti-Saloon League’s fallen crusader, who had been “recognized from the beginning as one of the ablest and most vigorous soldiers in the League’s legions.”Footnote ⁶⁵ He was skeptical of the worst charges leveled against the superintendent, and on the whole believed that the league “fought fairly and in the open, and usually with more success.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Nonetheless, the case of the Anti-Saloon League suggested that lobbyists with far more bona fides than Arnold were willing to manipulate public opinion, and similar accusations leveled at the American Legion, American Farm Bureau Federation, and other associations served to reinforce the idea that bluffs, subterfuge, and misdirection were an integral part of interest-group politics.Footnote ⁶⁷ As E. E. Schattschneider described the lobbying free-for-all surrounding tariff legislation, “It must be observed that it is almost the first law of behavior in pressure politics that groups seek to exaggerate their importance, to identify themselves with larger interests, and to speak for whole categories of loose aggregates, and even regions and great popular causes.” Trade associations, he continued, regularly ignored divisions among their supporters, and even went so far as to “invent constituencies.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Taken together, these allegations served to elide the difference between Arnold and his better-known colleagues, recasting him not as a charlatan but as a skilled operator.

Even as legislators proved unable or unwilling to pass laws to regulate such abuses, these scandals fostered doubts about the public’s ability to resist sharp dealing by Arnold and others. Here recent changes in the idea of citizenship only heightened concerns. Since the turn of the century, progressive reformers had enacted primary elections, secret ballots, the initiative, referendum, and recall, and the direct election of senators. Their principal objective was to supplant the partisan voter with the “informed citizen.” Under this model, progressives expected individuals to keep up on public affairs and to make political decisions based on the common good, rather than partisan or selfish interests.Footnote ⁶⁹

The propaganda problem, however, raised questions about just how citizens would obtain dependable information untainted by pressure groups or other sources. Columnist Walter Lippmann, himself a former officer with the Committee on Public Information, questioned whether even leading citizens were capable of deciphering complex public issues. In his 1925 book, The Phantom Public, he wrote:

Striking a more optimistic tone, John Dewey argued that while the average voter would never embody Lippmann’s “sovereign and omnicompetent citizen,” they might yet be capable of choosing intelligently among options provided by objective experts.Footnote ⁷¹ Still, both Dewey’s and Lippmann’s voter remained dependent on others for political information about the world beyond their town or neighborhood.

Was Arnold taking advantage of this dependency? Arnold asserted that his contributors were “just as smart as you or I, and they will take care of themselves in contributions and in service.”Footnote ⁷² But Arnold’s defense went deeper than simplistic assertions of individual responsibility. Returning to the question of Senator Harrison, Arnold emphasized preexisting sentiments among the people of Mississippi. In order to weaken Harrison’s position, the Mississippians’ “strong protective-tariff” needed only to be “assembled and expressed so that Pat Harrison could hear it.”Footnote ⁷³ In this sense, “developing sentiment” was a deceptively active euphemism—Arnold was merely articulating viewpoints already held by the people.

The senators obviously thought differently. “How business men of ordinary sagacity can be induced to contribute to Arnold’s purposes is entirely inexplicable to your committee,” Caraway wrote.Footnote ⁷⁴ What was worse, many of Arnold’s donors were in no way “ordinary.” To be sure, the list of contributors to the ATL included small and middling firms like the Dubuque Fire & Marine Insurance Company, Sauk River Lumber of Everett, Washington, and Peoria’s Premier Malt Products, but it also included some of the nation’s leading corporations. Westinghouse, Armour, Insull, Kellogg, and the Aluminum Company of America all landed on what Wisconsin senator James Blaine called the “sucker list.”Footnote ⁷⁵

More to the point, while Caraway had managed to identify Arnold and haul him before the committee, there was no way of telling how many others like him remained on the loose. For its part, the press conjured up visions of telegrams and letters bombarding a besieged Capitol from all directions. “Lobbying has grown to be disgraceful. Telegrams by the thousands pretending to represent public sentiment are sent to members, in almost every case misrepresenting the facts,” the Des Moines Capital decried in 1920.Footnote ⁷⁶ Such correspondence did not always say much for the public. For example, a 1928 article for the Independent reprinted what it claimed to be an actual letter written to a congressman by the Bayview Social and Sewing Club. Advocating the “June bill,” the women’s club urged the legislator to vote for the bill, adding that they would hold him “responsible” should he fail to do so. Despite his best efforts, however, the legislator could find no record of a “June bill,” and wrote the club back to this effect. In response, the ladies wrote, “We . . . have no idea of the origin or the context of the June bill. We were asked to write you by the American Society for Propagation of Virtue Among Unfortunates.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Far from the image Arnold presented of preexisting sentiments and benign “educational work,” this anecdote pointed toward a highly vulnerable, even ignorant public more closely resembling Blaine’s “suckers.”

By the end of the 1920s, such revelations eroded the distinctions between bluff groups and legitimate interests, and left lawmakers—as well as the people—uncertain of whom to trust. At the same time, however, interest groups had entrenched themselves as a central part of the modern state. Citizens needed lobbyists to articulate their concerns to the state and national governments, yet it was hard for groups like the Bayview Social and Sewing Club to tell just who these agents were, what they did, and what unseen forces moved in the background. Indeed, although the club women were portrayed as ignorant and foolish, it must be remembered that even a subcommittee of U.S. senators—armed with subpoena power and an investigative budget—ultimately proved unable to discover for certain just what James Arnold was up to. So while the lobbying scandals of the 1920s showed the people that they ought to be suspicious of all lobbyists—including those representing the Society for Propagation of Virtue Among Unfortunates, the ATL, and even the Anti-Saloon League—it seemed unlikely that citizens could detect the highly complex and sometimes devious tactics these agents employed.

A POLECAT COMMITTEE

When Senator Hugo Black called Arnold to testify before his special committee in 1936, the aging lobbyist was still at the helm of the ATL, where he continued to advocate for lower taxes and a general reduction in federal spending.Footnote ⁷⁸ His reputation permanently besmirched by the Caraway investigation, Arnold proved an easy target for Black, an Alabama Democrat who was fast establishing his own mark as “the Senate’s most persistent anti-lobbyist crusader.”Footnote ⁷⁹ That Arnold opposed the New Deal and continued to espouse the doctrine of former treasury secretary Mellon—a contributor to the league who had himself been charged with tax fraud—probably did not help his case.

Black’s committee found that Arnold had relied on a battery of methods in his efforts to make the nation “tax conscious.” Funded by a coterie of conservative businessmen, several of whom belonged to the Liberty League and other right-wing groups, Arnold distributed bulletins to his mailing lists, sent editorials to newspapers, circulated petitions, and distributed model state sales tax bills.Footnote ⁸⁰ Arnold’s crowning achievement, however, was securing seventy-seven weeks of free airtime on New York radio station WINS during the early 1930s.Footnote ⁸¹

Just how much Arnold’s publicity campaign had accomplished remained unclear. At the hearings themselves, Senator Lewis B. Schwellenbach revived Senator Caraway’s old allegations, accusing Arnold of assembling a “sucker list” of contributors from widely available directories. Arnold, who claimed credit for influencing tax legislation in Illinois and Mississippi, took extreme umbrage to Schwellenbach’s jab. Leaping to his feet and shaking his fist at the committee, Arnold called the senators a “polecat committee,” only backing down after Black threatened to cite him for contempt.Footnote ⁸² Writing for the New Republic, George Soule reluctantly sided with Arnold’s version of events. “Perhaps Senator Caraway was unjust in stigmatizing Mr. Arnold’s calling as merely an unimportant means of personal livelihood,” Soule wrote. “The tiny group of 3,000 taxpayers which constituted his membership has in recent months had an influence far outweighing its numerical importance in a democracy.”Footnote ⁸³

The confusion over Arnold’s effectiveness continued to reflect broader uncertainties over propaganda’s impact on the relationship between legislators and their constituents. In this regard, perhaps no episode gained greater notoriety than the passage of the Wheeler-Rayburn Act of 1935, which imposed strict regulations on public utility holding companies. As part of its opposition to the proposed bill, the industry paid Western Union employees to send congressmen thousands of telegrams, drawing the names of the senders from local phone directories. Describing the incident in his Emporia Gazette, William Allen White wrote, “There is no great excitement among the widows and orphans of the death sentence to holding companies. But a lot of telegrams and letters left the State and this town, indicating a general uprising. It was pure fake.”Footnote ⁸⁴ No one knew just how much the telegrams had influenced lawmakers’ opinions, but the creation of phantom constituencies, with lobbyists conjuring up public opinion using nothing more than a telegraph wire, came to represent the absolute extreme of lobbying tactics during the 1930s.Footnote ⁸⁵

Some may have wondered whether real citizens were any less malleable than the utility companies’ fictional voters. As journalist Kenneth Crawford claimed, “Any reasonably competent lobbyist can turn telegraphic barrages on and off as easily as he controls the flow of water in his bathtub. Any Senator or Congressman can be buried almost overnight in Western Union and Postal messages demanding that he do this or refrain from doing that.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This conception of public opinion was cemented in the popular imagination by Frank Capra’s 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which the whistle-blowing Senator Jefferson Smith (played by James Stewart) was nearly undone by one such blitz. Despite Smith’s heroic filibuster against the political machine in his home state, corrupt boss Jim Taylor took control of local newspapers and radio stations, mounting a smear campaign and successfully preventing Smith’s side of the story from reaching his constituents.Footnote ⁸⁷ As Taylor remarked on Smith’s naive stand, “He’ll never get started. I’ll make public opinion within 5 hours. I’ve done it all my life.” Inundated by a pile of hostile letters and telegrams hauled onto the floor of the Senate, Smith collapsed from exhaustion. Only the last-minute confession of Senator Joseph Paine, a Taylor ally overcome by guilt for his political sins, would vindicate Smith.Footnote ⁸⁸ While Capra cast a machine rather than a lobby as the central villain, the tactics differed little from ATL’s broadcasts over WINS. Additionally, while commentators remained divided on whether Arnold had successfully made the nation “tax conscious,” the story of Senator Smith did not equivocate in its judgment: the masses were easily swayed by what they read in the papers and heard over the radio.

Although lobbyists’ exploitation of the media did not lead to a lobbying law in the 1930s, Congress did finally pass a lobbying act in 1946.Footnote ⁸⁹ In explaining the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act to the Senate, Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette Jr. argued that the law would target in particular “those who do not visit the Capitol, but initiate propaganda from all over the country in the form of letters and telegrams, many of which have been based entirely upon misinformation as to the facts.”Footnote ⁹⁰ In addition to requiring lobbyists to register with both the Senate and the House, the law obligated them to disclose contributions and expenditures and, importantly, any articles they had published in the press.Footnote ⁹¹

With the passage of the 1946 act, Arnold finally had a legal answer to the questions with which he had taunted Senator Minton a decade earlier. The tactics he had helped to pioneer during the preceding decades were now squarely defined as lobbying, thus completing the transformation of Arnold’s profession. Lawmakers, however, had laid their trap too late to ensnare Arnold himself. Although he continued to agitate on tax issues into the 1940s, his health was failing, and he died in Chicago in 1948.Footnote ⁹²

While the 1946 act proved a weak regulatory tool, the law nonetheless signaled the maturation of interest-group politics.Footnote ⁹³ By the end of World War II, legislators and other officials had learned to deal with lobbyists and their interests as an integral part of the policymaking process. As Harvard political scientist V. O. Key Jr. wrote in 1958, pressure groups were a central component of democracy’s institutional “apparatus”: “At bottom, group interests are the animating forces in the political process; an understanding of American politics requires a knowledge of the chief interests and of their stake in public policy. The exercise of power of governance consists in large degree in the advancement of legitimate group objectives, in the reconciliation and mediation of conflicting group ambitions, and in the restraint of group tendencies judged to be socially destructive.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Indeed, many liberals even celebrated interest-group politics as a marker of American exceptionalism during the Cold War years. In contrast to the totalitarian Soviet regime, interest groups pointed to a pragmatic, pluralistic society in which everyone had a voice.Footnote ⁹⁵

But James Arnold and other lobbyists of the early twentieth century left an indelible mark on interest-group politics. They helped to construct and manage an enduring democratic system that, at its best, may indeed reconcile and mediate group conflict in a way that effectively expresses the public interest. But from the beginning, such pluralistic ideals have coexisted with a rough-and-tumble competition to claim the mandate of public opinion—a contest that has often involved exaggeration, misrepresentation, and other forms of deception. While Arnold’s case may represent an extreme example of such bare-knuckled tactics, he often appeared to be distinguishable from his colleagues mainly by differences of degree rather than kind.

Lobbyists of the present have done little to resolve our continued ambivalence toward their profession. In fact, while more reliable opinion polling now acts as a check against bluff groups, modern-day lobbyists are hardly above resorting to subterfuge in order to influence voters. For instance, in one of the many schemes hatched by Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist paid newspaper columnists and nonprofit organizations for editorials and press releases favorable to his clients. Stealing a page from Arnold’s old playbook, Abramoff effectively tried to launder his clients’ public image by bolstering their causes with respected conservative authorities—including a scholar from the Cato Institute and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform.Footnote ⁹⁶

Still, the distressing revelation of the Abramoff scandal is not that men like James Arnold persist in American politics. Rather, Abramoff’s activities suggest that lobbyists have internalized assumptions about their far-reaching ability to mold public opinion. This confidence is reflected not only in Abramoff’s attempt to manipulate the press but also in the many interest groups who have entirely eschewed the notion of local organization or even membership, instead relying on direct mail and other publicity to marshal potential supporters. Rather than active decision makers, constituents are now often mere names on a list, to be mobilized at the discretion of a professional cadre of lobbyists.Footnote ⁹⁷ This faith in the power of the media may be justified to some extent, but it is also often exaggerated, thus fostering a distorted picture of citizens as a passive mass.Footnote ⁹⁸ Finally, to the extent that policymakers buy into this conception of a swayable citizenry, they may undercut the value of communications between constituents and their elected representatives. Wary of Arnolds and Abramoffs, legislators are left to wonder whether citizens are using interest groups to voice their political viewpoints or whether they simply belong to another “sucker list.” In this regard, the uncertainty that accompanied the rise of interest-group politics has become embedded in the system.