Liberalism and the Problem of Publicity in the Progressive Era

In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the practice of publicity posed a dilemma. At first, liberals seeking to change self-dealing business practices and crooked political arrangements fastened on the notion of making things public: shining a light into backrooms and boardrooms would expose corrupt power-brokers to popular judgment, generating pressure for change. In presidential politics, Theodore Roosevelt espoused and embodied this ideal, using publicity to lay bare the practices of meat-packers and railroad barons and mobilize popular opinion behind legislation. With TR, however, and with the advent of professional public relations officers, the meaning of publicity changed. No longer just a synonym for transparency—an objective presentation of previously secluded facts—it morphed into something like an antonym, a term for selective, self-serving disclosure and the self-aggrandizing pursuit of attention. In this sense, too, TR mastered publicity, promoting himself through press conferences, bully pulpit speeches, and media stunts. But with the World War, publicity—and particularly its close cousin, propaganda (another word that originally possessed benign connotations)—became suspect to liberals, who saw how presidential control and presentation of information, as well as the ministrations of hired press agents, could mislead disastrously. Liberals thus ended the Progressive Era on a profoundly ambivalent note toward publicity, clinging to a faith in the virtues of exposure while cynical about the growing role of publicity modern life.