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Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, presidents have been using tools like photo ops, speechwriting and polling—and often for their biggest achievements
ENLARGE
Since Theodore Roosevelt’s day, when candidates began campaigning for votes and presidents started regularly courting the public, politicians have been refining the tools and techniques of what we now call spin.ILLUSTRATION: PETER OUMANSKI
As the 2016 election starts for real next month, one complaint that unites Americans left and right—and helps to explain the rise of outsiders like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—is that our political process has become shallow and scripted, manipulated at every turn. We gripe about the suffocating presence of “spin”: the policies tested by pollsters and focus groups, the slogans and laugh lines penned by speechwriters, the staged photo ops and town-hall meetings. To find examples of a nobler, more authentic politics, we can only look to the past: the irrepressible Theodore Roosevelt, the austereCalvin Coolidge, the jaunty Franklin Roosevelt, the unrehearsed Harry Truman, the unprepossessing Dwight Eisenhower.
But the spin that we find so pervasive today is nothing new. It actually goes back more than a century. In fact, all those revered past presidents were pioneers in honing the modern methods of image-making and message-craft that we now so often denounce.
Since Theodore Roosevelt’s day, when candidates began campaigning for votes and presidents started regularly courting the public, politicians have been refining the tools and techniques of what we now call spin. Spin turns out to be woven into the fabric of American politics, and though it is hardly an unmixed good, it is inseparable from many of the signature achievements of our greatest leaders.
Consider the presidential press conference, an institution so familiar today that no one thinks twice about it. But it began as a political gambit.
When he became president in 1901, the spotlight-loving Teddy Roosevelt realized that news coverage was changing. Newspapers had once targeted elite audiences loyal to a paper’s editorial line; now big-city dailies claimed millions of readers hungry for news. TR realized that by providing the news, he could shape it.
Roosevelt cultivated journalists relentlessly. He befriended them, learned details about their families and sent personal notes that dripped with flattery. But Roosevelt’s main vehicle was the press conference—“séances,” as they came to be called.
Typically Roosevelt would ask a half-dozen reporters to join him in the afternoon in a small room off his office. There, a Treasury Department messenger would shave the president as he served up a mix of politics, policy and gossip. The excitable Roosevelt would often spring out of his armchair, lather flying off his face, to lecture the newsmen, who were barely able to squeeze in a word, let alone a question. The muckraking reporter Lincoln Steffens, a regular guest, would let Roosevelt ramble until the barber’s razor skimmed his lower lip, forcing it shut; then the journalist would fire his queries as the wriggling president was stilled by the barber’s admonition, “Steady, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt’s successors institutionalized this practice, albeit without the personal grooming. William Howard Taft, though much more press-shy than TR, held press conferences on occasion, and Woodrow Wilson opened them to anyone with credentials. Soon they were widely regarded as an essential part of American democracy.
For more than a century, presidents we revere as authentic and unscripted have exploited the tools and techniques of image-making and message-craft.
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President Dwight Eisenhower (center right), who made avid use of the emerging medium of television, is directed before a speech by former actor Robert Montgomery (center), 1959. ED CLARK/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Photographers on the White House lawn, circa 1920s. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
President Theodore Roosevelt, a spotlight-loving leader who pioneered the news conference, drives a point home during an interview with journalists in the mid-1900s.PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES
President Woodrow Wilson, a former academic who relished speechwriting, is surrounded by reporters. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The mild-mannered Calvin Coolidge, one of the first presidents to use photo ops, put on a headdress as he was named ‘Chief Leading Eagle’ by the Sioux tribe, 1927. BETTMANN/CORBIS
President Harry Truman tries out a miniature movie camera presented to him by the White House press corps, 1948. POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
President Dwight Eisenhower (center right), who made avid use of the emerging medium of television, is directed before a speech by former actor Robert Montgomery (center), 1959. ED CLARK/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Photographers on the White House lawn, circa 1920s. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
By the 1920s, presidents were touring the country to push their agendas, and their routine activities started to be covered regularly by newspapers, magazines and newsreels. All of this meant delivering many more speeches.
Speechwriting had come easily to Roosevelt and Wilson—Wilson kept a typewriter at his desk—but not to Warren Harding, who was renowned for his windiness. ( H.L. Menckenwrote that Harding’s speaking style “reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.”) So Harding turned to an Iowa newspaperman named Judson Welliver who became—in reality if not in formal title—the first White House speechwriter.
A round-faced, snub-nosed man with arched eyebrows, Welliver learned his trade at the Sioux City Journal and the Des Moines Register. After joining the Washington press corps, he started going to Roosevelt’s séances in 1906. In 1920, Welliver joined Harding’s presidential campaign. After the election, the writer represented Harding on Capitol Hill and kept him updated on public opinion.
But Welliver’s key job was speechwriting. Harding drafted major presidential addresses himself, including his bombastic inaugural. But for routine talks, Welliver did the heavy lifting. When Harding toured the country to sell his programs, Welliver rode in the secretarial car.
Welliver left no immortal words (not even the phrase “Founding Fathers,” which Harding is sometimes credited with having coined, but while he was a senator). But even the dyspeptic Mencken conceded that the speechwriter made a difference: Welliver “knows how to write simply and charmingly, but he is also a fellow with a sense of humor.” Harding’s successors followed this model, relying on a stable of hired pens to perfect the presidential message. No politician today who takes to the podium dares go at it alone.
With well-chosen words came well-chosen images. In the 1920s, photography was assuming a larger, splashier place in the papers, and photographers’ tripods and boxes became fixtures on the White House lawn. Surprisingly, it was the seemingly guileless, mild-mannered Calvin Coolidge who helped turn the photo op into a regular tool in the image-makers’ kit.
“It was a joke among the photographers that Mr. Coolidge would don any attire or assume any pose that would produce an interesting picture,” one Washington reporter noted. One summer vacation in the Black Hills, Coolidge donned an Indian headdress to address 10,000 members of the Sioux tribe. Another time, he dressed up in garish cowboy regalia—from chaps and silver spurs to a flaming red shirt and blue bandanna—while being feted by local South Dakotans.
The shutters always clicked during Coolidge’s trips to his homestead in Vermont, which provided camera-ready settings to catch him wielding a scythe or riding a tractor—decades before Ronald Reagan chopped wood at Santa Barbara or George W. Bush cleared brush in Texas. Coolidge was filmed felling trees and pitching hay, sometimes wearing a business suit.
Another time in Vermont, the president hosted Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone—longtime “camping pals,” the papers said. They sang Coolidge’s praises on his veranda as he gave Ford a sap bucket that had belonged to the president’s great-great-grandfather. Coolidge’s more photogenic successors soon made the photo op a staple.
By the 1930s, politicians were realizing that to decide which words and pictures worked best, they needed to gauge public opinion. They turned to another practice that has since become a core part of the White House spin machine: scientific polling.
Franklin Roosevelt led the way this time. Hunting for a public-opinion guru, he ended up with a Finnish-American geologist and self-taught polling expert named Emil Hurja.Through his studies of rocks and minerals, Hurja had figured out techniques of weighting and sampling that allowed him to make better forecasts than the big national polls.
“You apply the same test to public opinion that you do to ore,” he explained. “In mining, you take several samples from the face of the ore, pulverize them and find out what the average pay per ton will be. In politics, you take sections of voters.” Then, he said, “you can accurately predict an election result.”
In 1932, Hurja walked into the offices of the Democratic National Committee and offered his services. With his charts and graphs, he showed how the party had wasted funds in 1928 by advertising in states like Pennsylvania that he could have predicted would go Republican. He promised instead to use “a definite method of statistical control and analysis of political sentiment during the coming campaign.”
Hurja set up a color-coded map of the U.S. in his office, with counties shaded in dark blue (strongly Democratic), light blue (leaning Democratic), dark red (strongly Republican) and light red (leaning Republican). To color each state, Hurja drew on a battery of polls—from newspaper surveys to bookies’ door-to-door canvasses—correcting for bias as best he could. Delighted, DNC Chairman James Farley let Hurja write press releases prophesying victory.
Roosevelt, then the governor of New York and the Democratic presidential nominee, summoned Hurja to Albany and peppered him with state-by-state questions. The candidate was especially fascinated by Hurja’s “trend analysis”—the changing responses to the same questions over time.
On the Friday before Election Day 1932, Hurja forecast “a revolution at the ballot box” that would leave the GOP weaker than at any point since the Civil War. He was right. That accuracy won him a plum job in Washington, dispensing official jobs and favors. Nicknamed the “Wizard of Washington,” Hurja worked for the DNC for several more years, but even after he left, FDR was hooked on his regular fix of public-opinion data.
So were Roosevelt’s successors—even those who claimed otherwise. Harry Truman, for instance, loved to belittle pollsters. “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?” he asked. But when the underdog president hit the hustings in 1948 on his whistle-stop tour, his staff had dutifully reviewed survey data showing how he might follow a path to victory.
Dwight Eisenhower also professed scorn for image-craft even as he made canny use of it. He became the first president to bring spin into the television era.
In 1953, when Ike took office, television was the hot new medium. But Eisenhower was hardly a TV natural. During the 1952 race, his televised campaign debut in his hometown of Abilene, Kan., had bombed. Amid a downpour, Ike had struggled to read his speech through fogged-up glasses, while people had traipsed back and forth on the emptied-out bleachers behind him “as though nothing important was happening,” said his friendHenry Cabot Lodge.
Robert Montgomery, an Oscar-nominated former actor and Hollywood producer, made what he recalled as a “frantic long-distance phone call” to the campaign, urging repairs. A year into his presidency, Eisenhower hired Montgomery to help him master the new medium. Youthful-looking, dark-haired and dapper, Montgomery had reached the limits of his box-office potential by the 1950s. He’d fallen back on hosting a weekly TV program on NBC, “Robert Montgomery Presents” (which also featured the debut of his bewitching daughter, Elizabeth).
Over the course of Eisenhower’s two terms in the White House, Montgomery gave the president a new look, trading dark gray suits for light ones and striped shirts for blues. Banishing Eisenhower’s black horn-rimmed glasses, Montgomery instructed the former general to read his cue cards without them.
Montgomery also made use of softer lights and liberally applied makeup to eliminate what one critic called Eisenhower’s “washed-out look.” A three-inch base under the president’s lectern kept the bald Eisenhower from bending his neck while reading—which had shown off Ike’s glistening pate. Montgomery pulled the president out from behind his desk while speaking and urged him to flash his bright smile.
With these cosmetic changes in place, Eisenhower and Montgomery turned the televised Oval Office address into a staple of presidential communication. During national crises, Eisenhower took to the airwaves to calm the public. In September 1957, he assured the nation that federal troops would safeguard the orderly integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. That November, he promised a resolute U.S. response to the Soviets’ Sputnik launch. These speeches gave Ike a platform for framing the issues and mobilizing the public—and unlike press conferences, they allowed him to avoid reporters’ pesky questions at delicate times.
From behind-the-scenes operatives to before-the-cameras stagecraft, the pillars of today’s towering edifice of spin have long been integral to presidential leadership. Seeing the past as a spin-free zone turns out to be not just a factual error but an act of deceptive nostalgia. The story of modern American politics isn’t a steady decline from authenticity to artifice. Rather, it is a story of the refinement of tools and techniques that presidents—pretty much all of them—have cannily exploited from the moment they became available.
Nor does the long history of spin mean that our politics have always been an empty spectacle. Of course, in massaging the press and crafting their words and images, politicians have overpromised, misrepresented their opponents and inflated their own accomplishments. But our leaders have also used these same tools to produce moments of lasting inspiration.
Theodore Roosevelt’s crusades for fairer regulation, Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a just international order, FDR’s gallant wartime leadership, Eisenhower’s rallying the nation to the space race, Reagan’s challenge to tear down the wall of Soviet oppression—many of the greatest moments of presidential leadership have been forged not by lone statesmen but by teams of savvy speechwriters, pollsters and image crafters. Spin has often helped modern presidents to mislead, but it has been just as essential, at crucial junctures in our history, in helping them to lead.
Dr. Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. This essay is adapted from “Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency,” to be published Monday by W.W. Norton.
