Page 90 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Roots of Pluralism 10:39
mailing list of half a million citizens, which it used to good effect in the
successful pursuit of prohibition. 104
The new practices of lobbying constituted more than just a political
strategy; it was an orientation toward the public sphere. As groups cre-
ated press offices of their own, engaged in public education campaigns
and publicity drives, and provided information directly to government
officials, they institutionalized the idea that to be in politics was to engage
with information and communication on one’s own terms. 105 As Aileen
Kraditor writes about women’s groups, “the women had meetings, pub-
lished manifestoes, testified at legislative hearings, edited newspapers,
anddistributedleaflets”intheefforttopersuadementoprovidethemthe
vote. 106 By the turn of the century, the General Federation of Women’s
Clubs had opened in addition to a “Press Bureau” its own “Bureau of
Information”– a symbol of the new decentralized, specialized infor-
mation environment in politics. 107 Democracy had become a game of
information, not merely one of party loyalty.
Lobbying by groups and associations like this proved reliably suc-
cessful in a comparatively short time. The new civic and professional
associations proved perfectly adapted to take up the flow of political in-
formation under conditions of complexity, which in turn facilitated their
incursions into the parties’ old domain of communication. They could
provide targeted information about specific policy problems and link
constituencies with the appropriate decision makers. In a 1911 address
to Congress, President Taft recognized the role of groups as information
intermediaries in at least one domain of activity: “In the dissemination
of useful information and in the coordination of effort certain unoffi-
cial associations have done good work toward the promotion of foreign
commerce.” 108 Taft’s blessing symbolizes how the informational terms of

104
Kenneth M. Goldstein, Interest Groups, Lobbying, and Participation in America
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
105
Pendleton Herring, Group Representation before Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1929).
106
Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 226.
107
Clemens, The People’s Lobby, p. 216. Certainly, not all associations were ag-
gressive about the strategic use of information like this. In civil rights, the
NAACP eschewed public information and political persuasion in favor of legal
action, while labor groups such as the Knights of Labor, the American Federa-
tion of Labor, and the International Workers of the World focused on economic
actions.
108
President Taft, Dec. 7, 1911, message to Congress, cited in Truman, The Governmental
Process,p.85.
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