Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were a husband-and-wife team that started Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting firm in the United States.
During the 1934 California gubernatorial election, they engineered a smear campaign against socialist Upton Sinclair in an effort to prevent him from unseating incumbent Republican Frank Merriam.
Leone Baxter accepted the position of office manager of the State Water Plan Association in Sacramento in October 1933.
[6] Alex D. Baxter tragically lost his life in a car accident on December 14, 1933,[7] on Hoopa Road near Willow Creek, California.
He had just visited Leone in Sacramento and was on his way back to work in Humboldt County when his vehicle veered off the road and fell 100 feet to the riverbed below.
After selling his business to United Press in 1930, a barber friend whose trade association was having trouble lobbying the state legislature caught Whitaker's attention.
[1] In 1933, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) lobbied to place Proposition 1 on the ballot for California's December 1933 special election.
[12] Over the next 25 years, the firm handled over 75 campaigns and initiatives, spanning topics such as taxation and finance, pensions, and legislative reapportionment, as well as teacher's salaries and railroad crew issues.
Fearing political ruin if he sent the Guard in to subdue the strikers, Merriam is rumored to have worked a deal with state Republicans to the party's gubernatorial nominee in exchange for the deployment.
A known Socialist, Sinclair had been able to win a surprise victory in the primary due to his EPIC Project, which stood for "End Poverty in California."
In their first major election, Whitaker and Baxter were able to lead Merriam to a victory over Sinclair, 48% to 37%, with a third-party candidate taking 13%.
The basic scenario of the book was that Sinclair had been elected governor, and his EPIC plan had succeeded in one-hundred percent employment for California.
Sinclair ultimately attributed his loss to Whitaker & Baxter, who were named only as "The Lie Factory" in his post-election book, "I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked.
They pursued earned media, meaning that they encourage candidates like Merriam to create news rather than simply sending in press releases.
[18] The ad was meant to look like the newsreels of the day, although the true purpose is to create the perception that people who support Sinclar are pro-Communism and Socialism.
[1] In their usual style, Whitaker & Baxter began an all out media war against the healthcare plan, distributing over 100 million pieces of literature.
As part of their messaging, they began calling the president's healthcare plan "socialized medicine,"[1] ushering in the same negative connotations and allusions to communism that they had brought upon Sinclair.
The term would fuel the so-called Operation Coffee Cup of the 1960s, in which doctors' wives would invite friends over and speak to them about the evils of "socialized medicine," after which they would encourage them to write to their congressmen about the issue.
After the onset of the Korean War, Congress and the president no longer had time to fight lobbying efforts against the measure, resulting in the legislation failing to pass.
The duo formed Whitaker and Baxter International, a smaller public relations consulting firm, which they would run from a San Francisco hotel room.
[17] Generally, Whitaker and Baxter worked on political and policy questions, though they also aided firms with corporate public relations, such as improving the image of cottonseed oil or imitation ice cream.
Though Whitaker and Baxter ostensibly helped all those who approached their firm, in practice they were committed to small-government conservatism and forestalling or rolling back the New Deal.
[citation needed] One of their most influential campaigns was helping the American Medical Association fight off the national health insurance plans of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
They included adages such as:[1] Unlike the parties of the day, Whitaker and Baxter could and insisted on emphasizing pace, control, and rhythm in a campaign.They did not trust enthusiastic local volunteers to run an effective campaign, and thus made judgments for themselves on how to allocate resources, relying also on their employed Field Men to check up on district offices.
They were not above dirty tricks, as seen in their work for the 1934 re-election campaign of Governor Frank Merriam in his push to defeat social reformer Upton Sinclair.
[20] More specifically, they revolutionized the PR media tactics of the day, putting a heavy emphasis on television and radio advertising rather than simple word of mouth or grassroots efforts.
Whitaker and Baxter showed for the first time the magnitude of power that strategic political communication can have over public opinion.
This political team was able to use effective advertising and messaging to not only halt the progress of healthcare reform for their client, but to hasten this process so much that it is still being debated today.
Theodore White, the famous American journalist and novelist, made the following remarks about the legacy of Whitaker and Baxter: Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter are now gone, but their kind of politics, professional image-making, has not only persisted, but thrived; and, in thriving, swept East, where politics industry has grown up—a gathering of professionals who merchandise control of voter reactions.
[21]Whitaker and Baxter, and their work on the 1934 election involving Upton Sinclair, is the basis for the play "Campaigns, Inc." by Will Allan, which premiered at TimeLine Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois on August 11, 2022.