Page 89 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
government about policies dealing with food, drugs, occupational safety,
and so on. As its membership grew from 8,400 in 1900 to 83,000 in 1920,
the AMA became one of the central distributors of public information
about health in the United States. 102 The National Education Association
followed a pattern not unlike that of the AMA. It emerged from an old,
quiet organization into a modernized, politicized group situated for
engagement in policy and the marshaling of information about public
policy.
It is interesting to note that the new forms of communication led
to changes in understandings of what was legitimate in politics, not
unlike some of the changes of the first information revolution. Perhaps
the most important involved formal “lobbying.” As late as 1874, the
Supreme Court had ruled on nonconstitutional grounds in Trist v. Child
that contracts for attorneys or other agents to represent clients before
Congress were void. The Court’srejectionof “lobby” services reflected
what had long been a widespread perception of the unacceptability of a
professional relationship intervening between citizens and government,
other than that offered by political parties. The implicit premise of Trist
was that the flow of information and communication in the process
of representation should not be professionally mediated. As contracts
with a “base purpose,” the Court held that lobbying contracts were not
binding. 103
This view of lobbying changed rapidly as the Gilded Age passed into
the Progressive Era. Businesses wanted lobbyists to do what parties could
not,andso,increasingly,didmembersofCongress.Bytheturnofthecen-
tury, many private nonbusiness associations would take the same view.
Following Trist, members of Congress in both chambers took up bills
to recognize lobbyists. Such a nonbinding resolution passed the House
two years after the Trist decision, and while no other formal recognition
was forthcoming, by the 1890s and 1900s, lobbying had become an ac-
cepted professional practice and was not impeded again by the Court.
What would later be called “grassroots lobbying” also increased during
this period. Businesses first experimented with it in the 1870s, and other
groups later incorporated it as part of their efforts to manage political
information. In 1919, for example, the Anti-Saloon League developed a

102
James G. Burrows, AMA: Voice of American Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1963); Morris Fishbein, A History of the American Medical Association,
1847–1947 (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969).
103
See Margaret Susan Thompson, The “Spider Web”: Congress and Lobbying in the Age
of Grant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
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