This article is a gift that shines a bright light on the swelling activities and influences of public opinion makers and their minions. It’s loaded with interesting and important historical information.
Just think what they can do 125 years later…oh right… making public opinion for a world-wide virus!!!
Get out the earbuds
Learn about the controversy of Associated Press being a monopoly and why
Learn whether the Associated Press was fair to the various progressive movements that permeated the culture at the turn of the century or whether they stood fast for business.
Learn how public opinion was made against municipal ownership
Learn how public opinion was made for the insurance companies
Learn how public opinion was made for the Standard Oil Company
Learn how public opinion was made for the Aldrich Currency bill
Learn how public opinion was made against tariff revision
Learn how public opinion was made for the railroad companies
Learn how public opinion was made for local special interests
Find out the names of the public opinion forming magazines 1901-1908
Learn how public opinion was formed from the platform
The Predicament
…the reactionary and conservative forces are in possession of unlimited resources, financial, political, and social. They have regular bureaus to form public opinion. They are the natural allies of the Associated Press and of every leading daily newspaper. The purchase of every progressive magazine would be but an item in their expenses. It is easily conceivable that they may organize a system of bureaus over the entire country to furnish articles to every local paper in defense of the three allied special interests — the railroads, the city utility companies and certain industrial combinations, like the Steel Trust and the Standard Oil Co.
The economic interests of one class and the exploitation of another, nationality, partisanship and even patriotism itself are all appealed to in forming public opinion for special privileged classes. But for a long term of years, Lincoln's statement is probably true: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of of the people some of the time; but you can't fool all the people all the time."
Listen up so you won’t be fooled
Mr. Kittle was an administrator, educator and writer.
He attended Winona (Minn.) state normal school and graduated from the Univ. of Wisconsin (Ph.D., 1899; Ph.M., 1906). In 1905 he became secretary of the Wisconsin state board of normal regents, a position that he held until 1927. During his tenure he helped draft many of the advancements in the normal school program. After traveling and studying in Europe (1927-1929), he settled in Washington, D.C. He was the author of two books dealing with aspects of Wisconsin normal schools, and after leaving Wisconsin wrote numerous monographs on Elizabethan literature.
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