Old Bookaroo
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The Lie Factory;How politics became a business.
by Jill Lepore
In the fall of 1944, [Earl] Warren got a serious kidney infection. This set him thinking about the rising costs of medical care, and the catastrophic effects that sudden illness could have on a family less well provided for than his own. “I came to the conclusion that the only way to remedy this situation was to spread the cost through insurance,” he wrote in his memoirs.
He asked his staff to develop a proposal. “We concluded that health insurance should be collected through the Social Security System. After some studies, it was determined that the employers and employees in that system should each contribute one and one half per cent of wages paid by or to them.” After conferring with the California Medical Association, he anticipated no objections from doctors. And so, in January of 1945, during his State of the State address, he announced his proposal for comprehensive, compulsory health insurance for the state of California.
Earl Warren began his political career as a conservative and ended it as one of the most hated liberals in American history. What happened to him? One answer is: Whitaker and Baxter.
Retained by the California Medical Association for an annual fee of twenty-five thousand dollars to campaign against the Governor’s plan, Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that most people liked and taught them to hate it. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” they liked to say.
They launched a drive for Californians to buy their own insurance, privately. Voluntary Health Insurance Week, driven by forty thousand inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: “Political medicine is bad medicine.”
...
They invented an enemy. They sent out twenty-seven thousand copies of a pamphlet called “The Health Question,” which featured a picture of a man, a woman, and a child in the woods—“a forest of fear”—menaced by skeletons who have in their mouths, instead of teeth, the word “BILL.” Whitaker and Baxter sent out two and a half million copies of another pamphlet, called “Politically-Controlled Medicine.” They printed postcards, for voters to stick in the mail:
Dear Senator:
Please vote against all Compulsory Health Insurance Bills pending before the Legislature. We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don’t want to be forced to go to “A State doctor,” or to pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not. That system was born in Germany—and is part and parcel of what our boys are fighting overseas. Let’s not adopt it here.
In 1945, Warren’s bill failed to pass by just one vote. As Warren’s biographer G. Edward White remarked, “The scuttling of his health insurance plan was a confirmation for Warren of the nature of the political process, in which advocates of programs based on humanity and common sense were pitted against selfish, vindictive special interests.”
Warren reintroduced the bill. And again Whitaker and Baxter defeated it. “They stormed the Legislature with their invective,” Warren later wrote, “and my bill was not even accorded a decent burial.” It was the greatest legislative victory at the hands of admen the country had ever seen. It was not, of course, the last.
In 1945, months after Earl Warren proposed compulsory health insurance in California, Harry Truman proposed a national program. “The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility,” the President said. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1946, Truman’s proposed federal health-insurance program, which, like Warren’s, was funded by a payroll tax, stalled. In his State of the Union address in 1948, an election year, Truman urged passage of his plan, which enjoyed widespread popular support. In November, Truman won the election. Days afterward, the American Medical Association called up the San Francisco offices of Campaigns, Inc. The A.M.A. retained Whitaker and Baxter at a fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, and with an annual budget of more than a million dollars, to thwart Truman’s plan. The A.M.A. raised the money by assessing twenty-five dollars a year from every one of its members.
At the beginning of 1949, Whitaker and Baxter, the directors of the A.M.A.’s National Education Campaign, entered national politics, setting up headquarters in Chicago, with a staff of thirty-seven. “This must be a campaign to arouse and alert the American people in every walk of life, until it generates a great public crusade and a fundamental fight for freedom,” their Plan of Campaign began. “Any other plan of action, in view of the drift toward socialization and despotism all over the world, would invite disaster.” But when Whitaker told the Washington press corps, at a luncheon, that the F.B.I. was terrorizing the A.M.A., the Washington Post offered that maybe the A.M.A., at the hands of Whitaker and Baxter, ought to stop “whipping itself into a neurosis and attempting to terrorize the whole American public every time the Administration proposes a Welfare Department or a health program.”
...
Meanwhile, inside Campaigns, Inc., a much more detailed Plan of Campaign circulated, in typescript, marked “CONFIDENTIAL:— NOT FOR PUBLICATION.” (It can be found with the firm’s papers, which are housed at the California State Archives, in Sacramento.) It reads, in part:
1. The immediate objective is the defeat of the compulsory health insurance program pending in Congress. 2. The long-term objective is to put a permanent stop to the agitation for socialized medicine in this country by (a) awakening the people to the danger of a politically-controlled, government-regulated health system; (b) convincing the people, through a Nation wide campaign of education, of the superior advantages of private medicine, as practiced in America, over the State-dominated medical systems of other countries; (c) stimulating the growth of voluntary health insurance systems to take the economic shock out of illness and increase the availability of medical care to the American people.
As Whitaker and Baxter put it, in an earlier version of the plan, “Basically, the issue is whether we are to remain a free Nation, in which the individual can work out his own destiny, or whether we are to take one of the final steps toward becoming a Socialist or Communist State. We have to paint the picture, in vivid verbiage that no one can misunderstand, of Germany, Russia—and finally, England.” They settled on a slogan: “KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MEDICINE.” And they settled on a smear, one that they had used against Warren’s plan: they called Truman’s plan “socialized medicine.”
In an attempt to educate every doctor, nurse, and druggist in the United States about the dangers of socialized medicine, they went on the road. Whitaker, speaking to two hundred doctors at a meeting of the Council of the New England Medical Societies, said:
Hitler and Stalin and the socialist government of Great Britain all have used the opiate of socialized medicine to deaden the pain of lost liberty and lull the people into non-resistance. Old World contagion of compulsory health insurance, if allowed to spread to our New World, will mark the beginning of the end of free institutions in America. It will only be a question of time until the railroads, the steel mills, the power industry, the banks and the farming industry are nationalized.
...
Whitaker and Baxter liked to talk about their work as “grass roots” campaigning. The fight against socialized medicine was a case in point: “The A.M.A. in its campaign is carrying its case to the people of America in a grass roots crusade which we hope, with your help, and the help of tens of thousands of others, will reach every corner of this country.” Not everyone was convinced that a lavishly paid advertising agency distributing 7.5 million copies of a pamphlet called “The Voluntary Way Is the American Way” to doctors’ offices constituted a “grass roots” movement.
“Dear Sirs,” one doctor wrote them. “Is it 2 ½ or 3 ½ million dollars you have allotted for your ‘grass roots lobby’?”
Whitaker and Baxter’s campaign against Harry Truman’s national-health-insurance proposal cost the A.M.A. nearly five million dollars, and it took more than three years. But they turned the President’s sensible, popular, and urgently needed legislative reform into a bogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of Americans are still scared.
Truman was furious. As to what in his plan could possibly be construed as “socialized medicine,” he told the press in 1952, he didn’t know what in the Sam Hill that could be. He had one more thing to say: there was “nothing in this bill that came any closer to socialism than the payments the American Medical Association makes to the advertising firm of Whitaker and Baxter to misrepresent my health program.”
The Invention of Political Consulting : The New Yorker
Good luck to all,
~The Old Bookaroo
by Jill Lepore
In the fall of 1944, [Earl] Warren got a serious kidney infection. This set him thinking about the rising costs of medical care, and the catastrophic effects that sudden illness could have on a family less well provided for than his own. “I came to the conclusion that the only way to remedy this situation was to spread the cost through insurance,” he wrote in his memoirs.
He asked his staff to develop a proposal. “We concluded that health insurance should be collected through the Social Security System. After some studies, it was determined that the employers and employees in that system should each contribute one and one half per cent of wages paid by or to them.” After conferring with the California Medical Association, he anticipated no objections from doctors. And so, in January of 1945, during his State of the State address, he announced his proposal for comprehensive, compulsory health insurance for the state of California.
Earl Warren began his political career as a conservative and ended it as one of the most hated liberals in American history. What happened to him? One answer is: Whitaker and Baxter.
Retained by the California Medical Association for an annual fee of twenty-five thousand dollars to campaign against the Governor’s plan, Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that most people liked and taught them to hate it. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” they liked to say.
They launched a drive for Californians to buy their own insurance, privately. Voluntary Health Insurance Week, driven by forty thousand inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: “Political medicine is bad medicine.”
...
They invented an enemy. They sent out twenty-seven thousand copies of a pamphlet called “The Health Question,” which featured a picture of a man, a woman, and a child in the woods—“a forest of fear”—menaced by skeletons who have in their mouths, instead of teeth, the word “BILL.” Whitaker and Baxter sent out two and a half million copies of another pamphlet, called “Politically-Controlled Medicine.” They printed postcards, for voters to stick in the mail:
Dear Senator:
Please vote against all Compulsory Health Insurance Bills pending before the Legislature. We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don’t want to be forced to go to “A State doctor,” or to pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not. That system was born in Germany—and is part and parcel of what our boys are fighting overseas. Let’s not adopt it here.
In 1945, Warren’s bill failed to pass by just one vote. As Warren’s biographer G. Edward White remarked, “The scuttling of his health insurance plan was a confirmation for Warren of the nature of the political process, in which advocates of programs based on humanity and common sense were pitted against selfish, vindictive special interests.”
Warren reintroduced the bill. And again Whitaker and Baxter defeated it. “They stormed the Legislature with their invective,” Warren later wrote, “and my bill was not even accorded a decent burial.” It was the greatest legislative victory at the hands of admen the country had ever seen. It was not, of course, the last.
In 1945, months after Earl Warren proposed compulsory health insurance in California, Harry Truman proposed a national program. “The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility,” the President said. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1946, Truman’s proposed federal health-insurance program, which, like Warren’s, was funded by a payroll tax, stalled. In his State of the Union address in 1948, an election year, Truman urged passage of his plan, which enjoyed widespread popular support. In November, Truman won the election. Days afterward, the American Medical Association called up the San Francisco offices of Campaigns, Inc. The A.M.A. retained Whitaker and Baxter at a fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, and with an annual budget of more than a million dollars, to thwart Truman’s plan. The A.M.A. raised the money by assessing twenty-five dollars a year from every one of its members.
At the beginning of 1949, Whitaker and Baxter, the directors of the A.M.A.’s National Education Campaign, entered national politics, setting up headquarters in Chicago, with a staff of thirty-seven. “This must be a campaign to arouse and alert the American people in every walk of life, until it generates a great public crusade and a fundamental fight for freedom,” their Plan of Campaign began. “Any other plan of action, in view of the drift toward socialization and despotism all over the world, would invite disaster.” But when Whitaker told the Washington press corps, at a luncheon, that the F.B.I. was terrorizing the A.M.A., the Washington Post offered that maybe the A.M.A., at the hands of Whitaker and Baxter, ought to stop “whipping itself into a neurosis and attempting to terrorize the whole American public every time the Administration proposes a Welfare Department or a health program.”
...
Meanwhile, inside Campaigns, Inc., a much more detailed Plan of Campaign circulated, in typescript, marked “CONFIDENTIAL:— NOT FOR PUBLICATION.” (It can be found with the firm’s papers, which are housed at the California State Archives, in Sacramento.) It reads, in part:
1. The immediate objective is the defeat of the compulsory health insurance program pending in Congress. 2. The long-term objective is to put a permanent stop to the agitation for socialized medicine in this country by (a) awakening the people to the danger of a politically-controlled, government-regulated health system; (b) convincing the people, through a Nation wide campaign of education, of the superior advantages of private medicine, as practiced in America, over the State-dominated medical systems of other countries; (c) stimulating the growth of voluntary health insurance systems to take the economic shock out of illness and increase the availability of medical care to the American people.
As Whitaker and Baxter put it, in an earlier version of the plan, “Basically, the issue is whether we are to remain a free Nation, in which the individual can work out his own destiny, or whether we are to take one of the final steps toward becoming a Socialist or Communist State. We have to paint the picture, in vivid verbiage that no one can misunderstand, of Germany, Russia—and finally, England.” They settled on a slogan: “KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MEDICINE.” And they settled on a smear, one that they had used against Warren’s plan: they called Truman’s plan “socialized medicine.”
In an attempt to educate every doctor, nurse, and druggist in the United States about the dangers of socialized medicine, they went on the road. Whitaker, speaking to two hundred doctors at a meeting of the Council of the New England Medical Societies, said:
Hitler and Stalin and the socialist government of Great Britain all have used the opiate of socialized medicine to deaden the pain of lost liberty and lull the people into non-resistance. Old World contagion of compulsory health insurance, if allowed to spread to our New World, will mark the beginning of the end of free institutions in America. It will only be a question of time until the railroads, the steel mills, the power industry, the banks and the farming industry are nationalized.
...
Whitaker and Baxter liked to talk about their work as “grass roots” campaigning. The fight against socialized medicine was a case in point: “The A.M.A. in its campaign is carrying its case to the people of America in a grass roots crusade which we hope, with your help, and the help of tens of thousands of others, will reach every corner of this country.” Not everyone was convinced that a lavishly paid advertising agency distributing 7.5 million copies of a pamphlet called “The Voluntary Way Is the American Way” to doctors’ offices constituted a “grass roots” movement.
“Dear Sirs,” one doctor wrote them. “Is it 2 ½ or 3 ½ million dollars you have allotted for your ‘grass roots lobby’?”
Whitaker and Baxter’s campaign against Harry Truman’s national-health-insurance proposal cost the A.M.A. nearly five million dollars, and it took more than three years. But they turned the President’s sensible, popular, and urgently needed legislative reform into a bogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of Americans are still scared.
Truman was furious. As to what in his plan could possibly be construed as “socialized medicine,” he told the press in 1952, he didn’t know what in the Sam Hill that could be. He had one more thing to say: there was “nothing in this bill that came any closer to socialism than the payments the American Medical Association makes to the advertising firm of Whitaker and Baxter to misrepresent my health program.”
The Invention of Political Consulting : The New Yorker
Good luck to all,
~The Old Bookaroo
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