This may be the only book in the world to discuss the role of the mimeograph machine in government. Certainly it is the only one I have come upon.

Congress vs. the Bureaucracy is an honest piece of historical craftsmanship, perhaps too much so for its own good, since very quickly governmental affairs professor Mordecai Lee lets the reader know that the subject of this study – a century of Congressional efforts to curtail executive agencies from publicizing or propagandizing for their own programs either with the general public or with the Congress itself – has had almost no impact. Congressional efforts, including the several Acts it passed that became law, made “a modicum of difference,” Lee writes (188) or – over the past half-century – have had “a minor to negligible effect” (188). So why bother to read this book, despite its lucid prose, its occasional flashes of humor, its exhaustive research, and its appropriately modest length (232 pages)?

Well, let's return to the mimeograph machine. It was as feared and condemned and legislated against in 1920 as the video news release would be in 2004. Senator Reed Smoot's campaign against executive mimeographing passed the Congress and went to President Woodrow Wilson to be signed into law. Wilson vetoed the bill and explained that Congress should not have “power to determine what information shall be given to the people of the country by the executive departments” (139). Smoot unsuccessfully urged overriding the veto because uncontrolled mimeographing had “swamped the mails and the newspaper offices.”

The use of new technology to promote the work of executive agencies was, as Lee puts it, “waving a red cape in front of a bull” (156). And so there was predictable Congressional outrage in 1939 when Harold Ickes, Secretary of Agriculture, who had already installed a radio studio at the Department of Agriculture, used theatrical dramatizations to convey to millions information that they never would have seen if it had been left buried in an annual departmental report. The Congress passed completely ineffectual legislation that banned radio programs “designed for or calculated to influence the passage or defeat of any legislation pending before the Congress” (156). There was another technological to-do about video news releases in 2004–5 that, in the end, amounted to about as little as the mimeograph flap. The advantage, in these cases, is that identifying a technology as a thing that can be controlled or curtailed gave legislative efforts a kind of specificity that was not attained in attempts to control personnel (specifically identified publicity officers whose function was named in their job titles) or to control an activity (of illegitimate propaganda rather than legitimate public education). Even so, actual Congressional control proved elusive.

So what do we learn from this book besides the fact that a lot of Congressional storming about comes to naught? The one thing I see – and Lee suggests this himself without fully naming it – is that Congress sometimes asserts its influence in Washington in ways more symbolic than substantive, but that symbols can make a difference. Unwanted publicity generated by Congressional hearings or even the noisy outcry from individual legislators can make executive agencies, singly or collectively, cringe – and even make them temporarily place their publicists deeper into the shadows. It may even lead them to identify on their video news releases that this information originated with the government and not with the viewer's local television station.

The second point that Lee makes consistently is that while members of Congress may indeed have concerns about Congressional control of the burgeoning executive branch of government, this constitutional concern is rarely aroused except when it is aligned with partisan advantage. The threats of Congressional legislation to muzzle executive agency public relations arises from members of the party that does not control the White House.

In 1905, Democratic senator Ben Tillman (South Carolina) urged passage of a law to limit the hiring of press agents. He said, “We do not think that it is the business of any department of this Government to take public money to undertake to bamboozle us” (19). What Lee documents is that pretty much the same notion has repeatedly found voice for a century, invariably to little or no avail, and almost always as part of a partisan effort to challenge a White House controlled by a rival party.