This is the first of 2 book reviews I will be posting. This book covers the history of political direct mail from the 1950s through the 1980s. The other is Politics Inc. It covers the madcap world of political fundraising post-Citizens United. The 2 books pair well together.
Amazon: Empire of Direct Mail
KU ScholarWorks: Empire of Direct Mail Free PDF download
Years ago while I was sitting in my living room surrounded by hundreds of pieces of junk mail, all I could think about was “How did this happen?” How did we get here?” “How do I make it stop?” At the time only book I could find about the history of direct mail was by Richard Viguerie. It was like reading about how the fox was the best fox and was the best at getting into the hen house. Except for a few articles here and there over the years, there was no overall arching history of modern political direct mail. That is until Takahito Moriyama published Empire of Direct Mail: How Conservative Marketing Persuaded Voters and Transformed the Grassroots. He has gone back to the beginning of targeted mail. Trips to dusty archives all over the US, digging through boxes of paper long forgotten. This book is incredibly dense. Almost every paragraph had a footnote, that could lead you down a merry path of more information. Sadly many of the works cited have not been digitized yet. If you see me cite a source in my summary it is because I want to read it.
Everyone in this book is a bad guy. There are no good guys. There is no hero arc, no one saves the day. It is bad all the way down. The book ends with Cambridge Analytica which is a door opening onto a whole new nightmarish world. Every page is 2 trains smashing into the Keystone Pipeline. Everyone is evil and has evil intentions. You may think I am saying nice things about these monsters in my summary but I am not. They are all jackals and ghouls trying their best to drain the pockets of the middle class and petite bourgeoisie to fill their own. The real review of this book is me running around the room with my hair on fire, yelling MAKE THEM STOP! MAKE THEM STOP!!!!
1950s start of direct mail becoming personal targeted advertising. The start of using emotions to make sales/donations.
The 1950s was the period when political consultants centralized the process of national campaigning, creating a new, institutional relationship between politicians and the public.
Grassroots tactics start to be used. In 1954 a “Centennial Conference,” for Republican women was held. Each of the Republican women went back to her local club with a neat fourteen-pound leatherette case containing a 35 mm film projector, which the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee provided for free. Then female volunteers were able to hold political meetings in their living rooms over coffee for an intimate group by showing campaign films. Besides organizing the “coffee hours,” women brought the projectors and films into service clubs, women’s clubs, civic organization meetings, libraries, and churches. These tactics will later be used by the John Birch Society and Phillis Schlafly. California Federation of Republican Women 1954. Chances are at least one of the women in that photo went to the conference.
Mailing a solicitation was another new dimension of grassroots campaigning throughout the 1950s. TV was a new way to get out your message, but TV time is expensive and made for a wide audience. With direct mail, you can raise money for TV ads and at the same time target the message to the people you want to vote for your candidate. Ike for President TV ad
In the 1952 presidential election, Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency, who was among the most influential advertisers of the 1950s, decided which political issue was most crucial for American voters through mailing polls. After he obtained the mailing lists of Reader’s Digest, the Eisenhower campaign sent different fundraising letters to ten groups of ten thousand individuals with each mail stressing a different issue. Then Rosser discovered that Americans overwhelmingly saw the Korean War as the most serious matter. This direct mail operation not only raised funds but also showed that voters would endorse General Eisenhower as the war hero who claimed he would bring peace to America. Example of a Reeves’s TV ad for Ike
In the 1954 congressional campaigns, RNC targeted donors who had given money to the Eisenhower campaign.
The National Citizens for Eisenhower Congressional Committee sent seven letters to 47,000 people on their mailing lists. The 1954 finance report showed that Citizens received $85,830.73 through direct mail solicitation with the cost of approximately $10,000 to $12,000, while they received $798,801.51 from all other fundraising methods. After the election was over a report said that “those who had contributed over $100 in 1952 should be solicited personally by members of the Finance Committees, but that a mail appeal should be made to those who had contributed less than $100.”
$100 is about $1000 in today’s money. Notice how they are already splitting up people and putting them in different buckets. The $100 and over donors are getting personal phone calls and the under $100 donors are getting junk mail.
There was a little backlash to the use of direct mail using “emotional and irrational methods” and “subliminal advertising” This wasn’t subliminal. The people at the time had never seen candidates and political platforms sold to them like they were soda or a car.
Lester Wunderman the father of “direct marketing” lamented the lack of tools at the time “[in] an age of mass production, mass media, mass marketing, and mass consumption, mail for a time was wrongfully positioned as a mass medium.”
He could see a future in which direct marketing “where the advertising and buying become a single action.”
Harold Leon Oram was a pioneer of political direct mail on Madison Avenue. After he came back from military service in 1946, Oram continued to involve himself with refugee relief and liberal activism. Oram’s attention shifted from antifascism to anticommunism with his interests extending to East Asia. He advocated for post-war refugees.
He liked to have his fundraising letter signed by prominent people to add name recognition and respectability to his charities. He likes to use both an intimate approach and a sense of urgency in his solicitations. Emphasizing the menace of the Cold War and the rapid transformations of the modern age, Oram’s mailings impelled readers to take action, claiming that their choices were crucial for the world.
Political scientists have pointed out, threatening language is important for direct mail because it effectively urges readers to take immediate action. Emotion, researchers have argued, is a key element. “The message has to be extreme, has to be overblown; it really has to be kind of rough.”
Oram hired Marvin Liebman around 1951. Liebman was also anti-communist but he was a conservative.
Liebman not only learned Oram’s solicitation methods but also improved them. Understanding that personalization was the key to successful direct mailing, Liebman came up with two ideas to make envelopes look more personal. He had volunteers at the office handwrite the addresses so that recipients would pay special attention to the appeals, and also affixed a first-class stamp instead of a Pitney-Bowes postage imprint. Because of tactics like this Oram promoted Liebman to vice president of Harold L. Oram, Inc.
The hallmark of an Oram/Liebman fundraising campaign was a broad base of appeal. “[W]henever I organized a ‘conservative’ or ‘anti-communist’ group, I followed Oram’s example and tried to include as many ‘liberals’ as I could on the letterhead to create the broadest possible base of support.”
1955 William F. Buckley Jr and Willi Schlamm found the National Review. Orem sent Liebman to talk to the founders about helping them fundraise for their new venture. Liebman was impressed with them but Liebman thought that the idea of publishing a new conservative journal would be unsuccessful due to the scarcity of a conservative audience in the mid-1950s.
1957 Marvin Liebman starts his own public reactions firm. One of his first clients is the National Review. He and Buckly start a few conservative “charities”, then they hit on the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). It was youth for Goldwater themed. They ran ads in the National Review for old people to send in money to help out the young plucky conservatives.
1961 Richard Viguerie answers a job ad for the National Review. He started as a secretary for YAF, Liebman takes Viguerie under his wing and shows him how to really make money.
The YAF was a financial mess. He made sure to clean up the books and make people pay their dues. Next, he needed more members to get more money for the group.
“Plenty of young conservatives were boning up on conservative philosophy, and many others were studying the technique of political organization. Nobody . . . was studying how to sell conservatism to the American people.”
Viguerie, Franke, “America’s Right Turn” pg94
He started reading up on marketing and psychology. He quickly figured out that direct mail was a key to raising money. He sent out more solicitations, and he made sure to use “upselling” in them. He would plug the National Review and other publications that were related to the YAF. He taught YAF members how to sell themselves and how to sell conservative ideas to the general public.
Computers!!
Before computers mailing lists were hand-typed, and envelopes were sometimes handwritten. Individual people had a 3×5 data card in a box that a person had to pull to put them on a new list. It was very time-consuming. Then came the new generation of IBM mainframes. They were “affordable” and “compact” compared to the previous generation of mainframes. Film of the IBM 360 the IRS used in the 1960s
Zip Codes!!
Introduced in 1963 the Zip Code enabled a direct marketer to target a geographical area with ease.
Before 1963 it was more time-consuming and expensive to target people through direct mail. Between the marketing strategies developed in the 1950s and the technological advances developed at the same time, it was the perfect storm to try them all out to try to get people to vote for Berry Goldwater.
I read up a little on Berry Goldwater while reading this book. He loved technology, he had a ham radio in his house, and other modern tech for the time. If he were alive today he would be a crypto bro. He would have loved the possibility of the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs. It should be no surprise that the campaign that surrounded him was the first use of modern computers for direct mail. For the first time, all the 3×5 cards were taken out of their boxes and typed onto punchcards, and fed into a computer. Those names were put on mailing lists that divided them up into targeted groups. Large Donors over $100, Small business owners, and so on.
Goldwater had his own mailing list that he had been cultivating since 1952. His people did 2 important things, they had every local conservative group send them leads, and they “digitized” all the data. After Goldwater lost the presidential race all those names were the base of Richard Viguerie’s and many other conservative mailing lists. Because of computers, the fundraisers could tailor a mailing list for any topic they wanted.
In the 50’s team, Goldwater didn’t only target conservative voters. They send out mailers to Democrats who were “stay-at-homes” and “indifferents”. They targeted people who only voted only in response to an emotional appeal. Tactics like this got him elected to the Senate.
In 1963 they sent out appeals that encouraged people to send in a list of friends that they thought would like the message that Goldwater had. Replying to this appeal, a person in Cleveland, Ohio, sent back a check for $25 and a list of names of people who were expected to be interested in supporting Goldwater. This is how team Goldwater gathered up new voters to target.
During the Goldwater campaign Marvin Liebman Associates, Inc. sent out a solicitation from the “Fighting Aces for Goldwater” undersigned by E. V. Rickenbacker he was a famous WWI pilot, Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and former chairman of the board of Eastern Airlines. The solicitation had the usual conservative pro-military, pro-veteran rhetoric we are used to today. At the time it was shocking. There was a problem, “Fighting Aces for Goldwater” was a sound-a-like charity name. Members of the “Fighter Aces Association” were livid that people might get their veteran’s organization confused with Goldwater’s extremist views.
Mr. Moriyama found multiple examples of people getting addicted to donating to the Goldwater campaign. This is one of them:
William Morris of Tuscumbia, Alabama, also highlighted the support of “ordinary men” for Goldwater. Noting that he had a conversation with another person about governmental fiscal policies, Morris endorsed Goldwater’s attack on the federal government because the conservative did “bring the notice of the common man that the continual depreciation of the buying power of the dollar is being a strictly governmental mismanagement.”
Morris donated funds to Goldwater so frequently that the campaign staff said, “Your money is coming in faster than my Gal Friday can keep track of it!”
Letter from Harry Rosenzweig to William C. Morris, July 28, 1964, Papers of
Goldwater.
Letter from William C. Morris to Harry Rosenzweig, May 4, 1963, box 119, folder 19 “Finance Committee: Contributors K–M, 1963–1964,” Papers of Goldwater.
LOL He is sending in so many checks they can’t process them fast enough. Not Bro we are fine, chill out with the donos, instead of sending money right now the best thing you can do tell your friends to vote for Berry. This is an ongoing problem in the political fundraising world. A political campaign is more than happy to drain a person’s bank account without a thought about the ethics of doing it. I have seen so many refunds in FEC documents after an election because a person maxed out their $2000 to a campaign. FEC Contribution limits
Goldwater would go on to lose to LBJ. The real winners were the political consultants that perfected their methods of marketing a candidate to people through direct mail. They used personalization, and emotion to drive people to pull out their checkbooks and send money in.
William Rusher remarked, “It sensitized large numbers of previously dormant conservatives, turned them into political activists, and introduced them to each other through direct-mail techniques.”
Goldwater’s list of 221,000 names would become the core of the conservative revolution that was about to happen.
While the GOP was licking its wounds after its loss, they began recognizing the party to make sure there were no traces of Team Goldwater to be found. In October 1964 Robert Bauman, chairman of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), called political consultant Marvin Liebman telling him they knew Goldwater was going to lose so they started planning American Conservative Union (ACU) aka CPAC. By December they had founded the new organization and had a big party to celebrate. ACU was supposed to be the “respectable conservative organization’. One of the first big decisions that Buckly made was to have no connections between ACU and the John Birch Society. They didn’t like the kind of attention that the JBS attracted from mainstream media. JBS was considered the “radical right”, and the ACU was a classy group that did classy conservativism.
After the 1964 election, the number of conservative groups exploded. In 1965 the ACU estimated that there were 2,700 groups fighting for the conservative dollar. The ACU did classy fundraising like $100-a-plate dinners ($100 is about $1000 in today’s money), but direct mail under the guidance of Liebman and Viguerie is what really paid the bills. Between Viguerie harvesting Goldwarer’s donors of $50 and above, and his tactics of turning direct mail into “ideological” direct mail by stressing partisanship and highlighting emotion most effectively, they pulled in a lot of money.
In June 1965, the chairmen of the RNC Raymond Bliss called on conservative splinter organizations, including the ACU, for a moratorium on fundraising. Bliss said, “We will never have a strong, united party until our fund-raising efforts are also united and coordinated.”
In the 1960s the topic of campaign finance reforms had been bubbling under the surface of American politics. There was Long’s Presidential Campaign Fund Act of 1966, which allowed people to donate $1 to a presidential election campaign fund for the purpose of defraying expenses incurred by political parties in running candidates for President. But nothing got the ball rolling like Watergate. The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 Nixon signed into law on February 7, 1972. But it was extensively amended after he resigned. It established the Federal Election Commission (FEC) 😍 And set a limit of $1,000 in contributions to a candidate’s committee in each election, and an aggregate limitation of $25,000. The amendments also limited individual donations up to $5,000 to a political action committee, and $20,000 to a national committee. Candidates were not allowed to use more than $50,000 from their personal funds. The FEC would enforce these new rules.
Political consultants hated the new rules and used junk mail to tell everyone how unhappy they were.
American Conservative Union (ACU) aka CPAC whined in one mailpiece:
“Liberals say private contributions are a corrupting influence and that we can remove this evil through taxpayer subsidy.” However, the mailing asserted that a public financing of presidential election would not eliminate political corruption. Rather, the ACU claimed, the public subsidies would “create many new ills” by violating “your First Amendment right of freedom of expression—by using your tax funds to support political candidates with whom you disagree.” The message opposed the liberal campaign reform measures, such as the creation of the FEC, and the ACU instead maintained that “citizens ought to be allowed to give money to candidates or parties of their own choosing, and not have that decision made for them by federal planners.”
John Quincy Adams of the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) quickly figured out the real impact on political consultants and their clients:
In political consultants’ view, the limits on individual contribution and expenditure set by the laws were too low. Fundraisers knew that most contributions ordinarily came from a few large donors, and if the campaign finance laws imposed a low maximum, fundraisers would need to spend more time, effort, and money on obtaining small contributions. Thus, Adams was worried, political consultants were required to allocate additional funds from the limited regular campaign budget for fundraising, and that would cause fewer dollars to be available for television, radio, and other media messages.
When the new campaign laws went into effect, all of a sudden, campaigners had to build a base of contributors. Although they relied partly on telemarketing, political direct mail emerged as the best way to amass small money in the post–Federal Election Campaign Act years. It turned out that the progressive reform, which was designed to reduce the influence of fat cat money, accelerated direct mail fundraising of conservatives, particularly Richard Viguerie’s ideological direct mail. As a conservative said, the “real effect of the Watergate campaign reforms has been to increase the power of one man—Viguerie.”
Warning I will be quoting this 1977 report from the ALF-CIO forever. You will get sick of it. I am already sick of it and I haven’t even quoted it yet.
In 1977, the AFL-CIO issued two special reports on the emergence of conservatism in US politics with particular emphasis on Richard Viguerie’s direct mail fundraising. The labor union’s reports spelled out how Viguerie and other conservatives elaborately amassed funds with direct mail, which was premised on big data, ideological conflict, and offensive rhetoric.
“Their language is always extreme, literally shrieking: Doomsday is imminent, right around the corner,”
“The Right Wing,” AFL-CIO Special Report, n.d., box 2, folder “AFL-CIO,” Group Research, Inc. Records, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University; “The Right Wing: Part II,” AFL-CIO Special Report, n.d., Group Research, Inc. Records.
I need to make a graphic of shrieking eels with mailpieces in their hands? Tails? Something. This is also called “arousing, high-dominance emotions” Article on the topic The Emotional Combinations That Make Stories Go Viral
[The] “hate merchants of the ’70s” who were “not little old ladies in tennis shoes.” The 1970s conservative activists were instead “Madison Avenue types, trained in mass psychology and propaganda techniques, who have a computerized mailing list, a printing press, and a government-subsidized mailing permit.”
AFL-CIO President George Meany
After Goldwater’s loss and campaign finance reforms something truly disastrous happened to Richard Viguerie, Richard Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford named Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. In Viguerie’s mind, this was the end of the world. Rockefeller was a blue-blood liberal Republican who wanted to do things like spend money on infrastructure and the poor. Viguerie would have none of that in his conservative world. He pulled together a rouges gallery of conservatives Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Terry Dolan, Phil Crane, and Senators Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond. This group formed the core of “The New Right”. “The New Right” liked to claim they were a “grassroots” movement. But all the players were longtime members of the Beltway scene. The formation of this group is what directly leads to the election of Ronald Regan in 1980.
Paul Weyrich was a conservative organizer in the D.C. Beltway in the 1970s. He was a reporter that went to the dark side to become a political consultant. He was funded by Joseph Coors of the Coors beer family. Mr. Coors was an ardent follower of the John Birch Society. Coors founded the Heritage Foundation and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC).
Terry Dolan formed the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) He devoted the NCPAC to defeating liberals in any possible way, ranging from slander and blackmail to attacks on their private life.
“As Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee told me, his organization’s fund-raising letters try to “make them angry” and “stir up hostilities.” The “shriller you are,” he said, the easier it is to raise funds. “That’s the nature of our beast,” he explained. The fund-raising letters of the New Right groups depict a world gone haywire, with liberal villains poised to destroy the American Way of Life.
Crawford, “Thunder on the Right“
There were other conservative right-wing groups forming at this time. What set “The New Right” apart from the pack was their ability to raise money. A lot of money, from small donors. They did not rely on traditional corporate donors. They took their agenda to the people and took their money along the way.
Richard Viguerie had a 10-year start on his competitors. He had access to the OG Goldwater donors that dated back to the 1950s. He was king of the conservative fundraising world.
“From his company with a staff of 250 nonunion employees in Falls Church, Virginia, Viguerie mailed out 50 million appeals every year from 250 mailing lists including the information of 10 million Americans.“
Viguerie didn’t only take on Republicans as clients. He didn’t care about party affiliation, he cared about his agenda and vision of America. The big one is the former Governor of Alabama George Wallace. This is a link to a campaign brochure for Mr. Wallace. He does not sound like a democrat to me. He does however sound like someone who shares the same agenda as “The New Right” By taking on Wallace as a client Viguerie now had access to Wallace’s democratic donors. They were fed a steady stream of junk mail from other Viguerie clients.
“Yet the marriage of Viguerie with Wallace concluded unhappily because of the expensive direct mail operation. The Wallace campaign committee paid nearly $800,000 to the RAVCO between August 1973 and September 1974. Snider noted Viguerie’s fundraising was “totally satisfactory,” but also complained that “he made a hell of a lot of money off us.”
Jaroslovsky, “New-Right Cashier”
Soon other clients began to complain about the costs of running a robust direct mail campaign.
“Tom Winter of the ACU claimed that Viguerie’s direct mail was too costly, adding that there was also an ethical question about Viguerie’s fundraising as his direct mail firm leased its mailing lists to clients, which other direct mail companies usually did not.” Perry,
“The Right Wing Got Plucked,”
“Much of the money is literally being wasted—and is making Viguerie a millionaire.”
“Why the ‘New Right’ Isn’t Doing Well at the Polls,” Business Week, October 30, 1978
“We spent money to recruit candidates to train campaign managers, to analyze every vote cast in the House and the Senate, to publish newspaper and weekly reports, and none of this is reflected in the financial reports.”
However, when asked if the contributors comprehended that most of the funds would not be sent to the candidates, Weyrich answered no. “I don’t think they did.”
Perry, “The Right Wing Got Plucked”
Daniel Joy, legal counsel to Republican Senator James Buckley of New York, said, “The Viguerie people address only those issues which tend to stir up hostilities among lower-middle-class whites,” focusing on busing, abortion, and gun control. Joy argued that New Right activists dismissed more important problems to the majority of Americans, such as a stagnant economy, turning public attention to sensational but narrower single issues.
Perry, “The Right Wing Got Plucked”
“If an American citizen answered Viguerie’s solicitation letter, the recipient’s name would be recorded on Viguerie’s master list, then would receive appeals for other causes. Furthermore, as Viguerie leased his lists to other organizations and candidates, the contributor would face a torrent of direct mailings from these groups. Bruce W. Eberle, another leading fundraiser in conservative politics, was seriously concerned over the future of political direct mail. As duplication among the mailing lists of right-wing organizations ran at “about 30 percent,” Eberle said that conservative fundraisers needed to reach out beyond the closed circle.”
“Conservative Fund-Raisers: New Hope for 1974” Congressional Quarterly Magazine Sept. 7, 1974
Republican fundraiser Wyatt Stewart suggested the market was being saturated, supposing that “probably the same names get mailed 35 to 40 times a year.” He added that “this system won’t work forever”
Jaroslovsky, “New-Right Cashier”
And there it is everyone. The whole reason I am here. Massive amounts of junk mail sent to the elderly is not a bug in the system. The system is working perfectly and as designed. For anyone not familiar with the volume of junk mail my relative was getting, I present the week of May 4, 2014 154 mailpieces. Highlights include 15 mailpieces from “Policy Issues Institute”, and 16 mailpieces from “Federation Of Responsible Citizens”.
I’m going to skip a lot of shenanigans and tomfoolery and cut ahead to the 1980 presidential election. Much like Berry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan was a darling of “The New Right” But the Reagan team was smart enough to keep them at arm’s length. They didn’t hire Viguerie for direct mail. Nor did they appoint Phyllis Schlafly to any position in the Reagan administration.
Like other big presidential campaigns, the Reagan team used direct mail to raise funds for TV ads. They took a positive approach. They wanted people to learn why they should vote for Reagan. They used what are now very common tactics. They sent out a glossy photo of Ronny. They name-dropped other republicans that the donors knew and identified with. Peace Through Strength TV ad
“The New Right” however whet full screeching eels. Attacking Ted Kennedy with the lowest blows possible. “Do you think he lied about Chappaquiddick? Do you think America can afford Kennedy as President? Do you think he is qualified to be President?” Each candidate received similar treatment from various groups. They wanted you to vote against a candidate instead of for one.
As much as they backed Reagan “The New Right” was not 100% in agreement with all of his policies and they really didn’t like George HW Bush. But they wanted to push their movement forward and that path went through Ronald Reagan.
After Reagan was elected Viguerie did a victory dance and declared that direct mail had gotten Reagan elected.
“Few people realize how much of this great conservative victory is due to direct mail,” he emphasized. Viguerie claimed that over 75 percent of the funds Reagan raised in his 1976 and 1980 campaigns came from direct mail, and over 90 percent of the money collected by Reagan’s PAC was the result of direct mail drives. These figures were probably exaggerated, but the enormous number of direct mailings surely played a part in raising funds and sending Reagan’s messages to conservatives. Viguerie wrote that conservatives had sent out one billion pieces of advertising mail directly to voters after 1974. He stressed that the new technology enabled conservatives to bypass the liberal ascendancy in mass media including television, radio, newspapers, and magazines.
“What is the new technology? It’s computers, direct mail, telephone marketing, TV (including cable TV), and radio that asks for contributions, cassette tapes, and the use of toll-free phone numbers, among other things,” he boasted.
Richard A. Viguerie, “Conservatives Owe Much to Reagan, Direct Mail,” Conservative Digest 6, no. 11 (November 1980): 39–40.
After the victorious win by Reagan, Richard Viguerie had a serious problem. He had no enemy for his donors to fight against. He didn’t know it at the time but for the next 12 years, the Republican party would be in charge. What happens when a dog catches its tail? Viguerie had no battles to fight. And his donations dropped. Worse than that the Reagan administration greatly distanced themselves from the radicals that got him elected. Viguerie tried to turn on Reagan but America was in love with Ronny. Viguerie fell on hard times, selling off parts of his business, laying off staff, and moving to a smaller office. While Viguerie’s business was failing direct mail as a whole was more popular than ever. Richard Viguerie had helped pave the road for the political direct mail industry. The techniques he honed trickled down into mainstream charity direct mail.
Democrats took a page out of the Viguerie handbook way back in 1969 and started a donor database of their own. They started a company called Demographics Inc. That database would turn into Acxiom one of the largest data brokers in the world. Opt out here
The book goes on to discuss Cambridge Analytica and its effect on the 2016 election. But there is no junk mail involved so I don’t care about Bob Mercer, Rebekah Mercer, and Steve Bannon manipulating an election using Facebook.
Yuck. I need a hot shower with bleach after going through all of that.
I was hoping for more about the relationship between Richard Viguerie and Phyllis Schlafly. They truly were a match made in hell. I am biased on this subject. I genuinely believe that Phyllis Schlafly is a feminist icon who gets pushed to the side in the direct mail story because she was a woman and focused on issues that “aroused, high-dominance emotions” (anger, control) in women.
The printed edition is lovely. I wish the font was bigger or my eyes were 20 years younger. I wish the free download was more interactive with hyperlinks. Mr. Moriyama talks a lot about presidential elections and the most famous politicians of the mid-century. I wish the PDF linked to Wiki articles and photos of ephemera like I did in my summary of the book. But that takes things like “money” and “time”. And the download of the book is free.
Who is this book for? Political nerds, Marketing nerds, and fans of podcasts like Behind the Bastards, and The Dollop. It is complementary to “The Brainwashing of My Dad” book, movie. It should be used in a class for Political Science and Marketing majors. I don’t know what class. Is there a “Don’t Be Evil” class?
If you are interested in the psychology of all of this The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking. It uses Richard Hofstadter’s essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics from 1964 as a jumping-off point.
I give this book 5 pens with random charities embossed on them. It is the best book on the topic. 🖋️🖋️🖋️🖋️🖋️
FTC stuff: I received this book for free. Getting it for free did not change my opinion of this book. I tried to pay for the book but the University Press of Kansas didn’t charge me. Please charge me, you have all of my info on file.
Drowning in Junk Mail 