THE LIMITS OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

DISARMAMENT, AIR POWER, AND THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE NAVY NEWS BUREAU, 1917–1922

In early 1917, Secretary Daniels made a small but significant change to the Navy Department. Throughout his first four years as secretary of the navy, Daniels had gradually assumed responsibility for the navy's public relations activities. He had issued press releases, held press conferences, and established policies to govern cooperation with commercial filmmakers. More so than any previous secretary of the navy, Daniels ensured that the peacetime navy could develop and maintain access to the mass media. This meant, however, that in addition to his own executive responsibilities of overseeing one of the world's largest fleets, Daniels operated as his own PR agent. By early 1917, he recognized that he could no longer assume the burden himself and must delegate someone whose sole responsibility was press relations. Thus, Daniels assigned Lt. Charles Belknap Jr. to review releases of public information and to respond to press inquiries. As F. Donald Scovel notes, "In deed, if not in name, the Navy had appointed its first public affairs officer."

This small but noteworthy assignment would soon be overshadowed by America's entry into World War I. The war was one of the most momentous events in human history, claiming the lives of more than sixteen million people and resulting in the destruction of four powerful empires. It became a total war with industry providing a staggering amount of matériel to each belligerent's vast war machine while giving rise to new weapons systems, including tanks, submarines, and aircraft. These same combatants also applied the principle of mass in the realm of information, using techniques of propaganda and persuasion on a hitherto unseen scale. The United States proved no different as the war finally forced the navy to take public relations seriously, even if only to coordinate with the larger domestic propaganda campaign. The incredible havoc that the war wreaked upon the world created a confused aftermath as the remaining powers sought to make sense of the new global order. As with virtually every other aspect of politics and policy, the navy underwent its own dramatic upheavals as the prewar consensus supporting naval construction suddenly collapsed in the face of political and public fears of a news arms race and the possibility that aircraft would supplant naval vessels as the first line of national defense. When combined with a number of additional distractions and complications for naval leaders, these factors created a problem too large for the navy's first nascent public relations office to solve. By the end of 1921, it seemed as if the public had turned its back on the navy.

Just days after the declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, President Wilson issued an executive order establishing the Committee for Public Information (CPI), headed by George Creel. This organization intended to promote the war effort throughout the country and used a variety of propaganda techniques for doing so. The CPI distributed films, many of them using footage shot by the Army Signal Corps, as well as posters and other materials. The CPI also employed public speakers known as "Four Minute Men" to extol the virtue of the American war effort against Germany. Individuals prominent in the fields of advertising and public relations worked for the CPI in some capacity, most notably public relations pioneer Edward Bernays.

The establishment of the CPI forced Secretary Daniels to further organize the navy's own public relations activities. On 17 April 1917, Daniels invited his friend and fellow newspaperman John Wilbur Jenkins to assume the post of civilian director of information and to manage the new Navy News Bureau, which Daniels placed directly under his own office. Daniels soon asked Marvin Hunter McIntyre to join the new public relations office as Jenkins's assistant. The Navy News Bureau filled out its staff positions with other men from the newspaper trade, but, at Jenkins's insistence, the office operated with as few employees as possible. Jenkins believed that a larger organization would cause unnecessary delays in the release of information to the public and could potentially harm the navy's image.

Given the predominance of civilians from the newspaper profession in the Navy News Bureau, its members had to work with naval officers to execute their duties effectively. The assistant chief of naval operations, Capt. William Veazie Pratt, and the aide to the secretary of the navy — a rotating position assigned to officers with the rank of commander — served as the naval advisers to the bureau and often helped shape the material released to the public. The Navy News Bureau issued press releases regarding the navy's activities during the war and also prepared transcripts of Daniels's press conferences. The releases and feature articles prepared for syndication by the bureau, and sometimes by Jenkins himself, typically concerned the fleet's antisubmarine and convoy missions.

Daniels's official purpose behind creating the Navy News Bureau had been to liaise with the CPI, and, in fact, the CPI paid the salaries of the bureau's civilian staffers. In practice, however, the two organizations may not have always cooperated well with each other. The inner workings of the Navy News Bureau remain somewhat obscure to this day, but a rare article about its work, written by Albert Fox, appeared in the Washington Post on 14 October 1917. Just weeks earlier, the bureau began releasing a series of feature articles to run in Sunday newspapers around the country. The first few entries in the series drew praise from editors who clamored for more content, but the CPI — believing it had primacy in releasing news to the public — blocked the bureau from continuing the feature articles. Newspaper editors, not surprisingly, disdained the CPI's decision to supplant the bureau's articles with its own inferior work that one of Fox's sources labeled as reminiscent of "unsuccessful efforts which often attend attempts of amateur fiction writers to break into the magazines." The article's appearance and tone suggests his sources likely worked in the bureau and sought to promote their work at the expense of the CPI, but it is not clear whether their attempt to shame the CPI succeeded in resolving the boundary dispute. In any case, the...