Pandering to the Crowd

Abstract

This generational study investigates how upper- and middle-class Americans first rejected and then somewhat reluctantly accepted the use of public relations-like strategies to govern the masses during the Gilded Age. While the first generation of politically minded elites after the Civil War had used proto-public relations in their benevolent and reform work and had advanced their position in high society by getting their names on the newspaper society page, they were reluctant to advertise themselves to lower-class voters through the popular press. By the 1880s, however, their children began to recognize the growing power of mass media to sell candidates to the lower classes. Theodore Roosevelt, John Jay Chapman, William Travers Jerome, and other young, politically minded members of the governing elite adopted practices that mirrored the recommendations of late nineteenth-century crowd psychologists who advocated managing the masses through self-promotions and heroic imagery.