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 squabble showed that Jenkins, McIntyre, and others had felt secure enough in the bureau's position that they could take on the bureaucratic behemoth that was the CPI.

Daniels certainly empowered the Navy News Bureau and took many critical steps forward for navy public relations, but he made two additional crucial decisions during the war that led to significant problems after the war's end. First, Daniels prohibited filming aboard navy ships and at shore installations in most circumstances, arguing that wartime security prevented the navy from cooperating in the production of feature films. Given that the navy's primary mission of convoy protection during the war lacked the glamour of major surface engagements and lessened the attractiveness of navy-themed films, Daniels's decision did not result in much immediate harm.

Daniels's second important wartime decision involved the banning of the Navy League from official ties with the service from 1917 until the end of his tenure as secretary of the navy. Dating back to Daniels's initial appointment, the Navy League had disagreed with some of his policy recommendations, such as the scaling back of the 1914 ship authorizations, but American entry into the war created new tensions between the two parties. At first, Daniels blocked the Navy League from engaging in some types of relief work for sailors and their families and turned over such duties to the government and the Red Cross. The final break between Daniels and the Navy League, though, occurred after the July 1917 explosion at Mare Island that killed five individuals. The Navy League believed saboteurs aided by labor unions caused the explosion and that Daniels hid evidence to this effect. Daniels and the head of the Navy League, Col. Robert Thompson, both issued calls for the other to resign due to their handling of the crisis. In response, Daniels issued an order in August 1917 banning the league and its representatives from all navy ships and installations. The report of the initial inquiry released a week after the ban supported the claim of a deliberate explosion but disproved the other allegations, and the Navy League attempted to apologize to Daniels. Unfortunately for the league, the damage had been done and Daniels left the ban in place. This order would remain in effect until Edwin Denby became the secretary of the navy in Warren G. Harding's administration. The league remained active in efforts to support naval personnel for the duration of the conflict, but the organization faced several serious problems when it lacked any official recognition by the navy. The navy itself suffered few immediate consequences from the ban, but it devastated the league's finances and status.

The conduct of the war itself also proved problematic for the navy because the large and expensive battleships that constituted the core of the fleet did not see any meaningful action during the war. In fact, the Mahanian fleet engagement that most participants anticipated occurred at Jutland in 1916, nearly a year prior to American entry into the conflict. The inconclusive battle between the German High Seas Fleet and the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet may have confirmed British strategic supremacy in the North Sea, but it did not prove the climactic naval duel that contemporary naval doctrine promised. Even worse, perhaps, a lack of fuel oil in the British Isles forced the U.S. Navy to send its older, coal- fired battleships to serve alongside the British Grand Fleet, relegating America's most modern battleships to patrolling or lying in reserve in coastal waters. Given the devastating impact of German submarines on the Allied war effort, modern capital ships appeared superfluous.

The severity of the U-boat threat to Allied shipping brought capital ship construction to a halt as demands for escort vessels took priority. A majority of the larger vessels authorized in the 1916 Naval Act sat unfinished on the ways at war's end when the inevitable public demand for demobilization endangered plans for their completion. Naval leaders, oblivious to the possibility that the public might reject further naval construction, continued to press for an ever larger expansion of the fleet. In 1918, the General Board called for the construction of twenty-eight capital ships in addition to the sixteen previously authorized in 1916. Although Secretary Daniels and President Wilson eventually pared the board's new request down to sixteen additional ships, the newly proposed construction program would give the United States a navy superior to all others in both quality and quantity.

These complications were momentarily forgotten in the immediate wake of the armistice. Just six weeks after the Germans sued for peace, the U.S. Fleet entered New York Harbor for public review in a seeming moment of triumph. The war's end brought a sense of elation that the Navy News Bureau quickly capitalized on. Reverting to peacetime tendencies when major movements of the fleet became fodder for public relations, the bureau worked in the weeks leading up to the fleet's arrival to issue press releases, coordinate visits to vessels of the fleet, and make other arrangements to facilitate reportage of the event. Reporters added their own flourishes to coverage, with one editorial labeling the review a "spectacle of sea power." A one-day postponement caused by bad weather did little to tamp down the enthusiasm over the fleet's arrival. Even Secretary Daniels participated in the festivities by helping to drum up press coverage and reviewing the incoming ships from the presidential yacht Mayflower. Ten thousand sailors soon paraded through the streets of New York, attracting tens of thousands of local spectators. In the days that followed, the press chronicled the fleet's commander, Adm. Hugh Rodman, and the activities of the sailors as they took full advantage of their time in the city.

By spring, the CPI had wound down its domestic operations, leaving the Navy News Bureau to operate on its own. Soon afterward, Director of Information Jenkins left his position and was replaced by his deputy, Marvin McIntyre. These changes both internal and external to the Navy News Bureau seemingly did little to hinder its ability to generate publicity for the service. That April, another publicity opportunity presented itself when the navy launched the battleship Tennessee from the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn. As it had done during the fleet review five months earlier, the bureau encouraged press coverage and public attendance at the event. The navy issued more than 75,000 tickets for what was billed as the launching of the "largest battle unit in the world." A newspaper reporter described the crowd of at least fifty thousand as a varied lot in which "the banker and the merchant rubbed elbows with the mechanic and the carpenter." A dozen bands hired specifically for the occasion played "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the ship slid down the ways in perfect weather; the scene prompted siren calls from the battleship New Mexico and other vessels in the harbor. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt watched as Helen Roberts, the daughter of the governor of Tennessee and the sponsor of the new ship, christened the vessel.

These highly effective public spectacles masked the difficulties Daniels encountered in convincing Congress to fund the proposed construction program. Congress had passed the Naval Act of 1916 with great enthusiasm, but the request for an additional $2.46 billion for construction in the fiscal year 1919 proved a much tougher sell. In testimony before the House Naval Affairs Committee in December 1918, Daniels not only pressed resuming construction on the 1916 program ships but argued that American naval expansion could also serve as a hedge against the possible breakdown of the postwar peace process. If the League of Nations failed to materialize, Daniels argued, the enlarged fleet could ensure hemispheric security and enforce the Monroe Doctrine; if the peace process succeeded, however, the navy could help enforce League policy and act as a deterrent against aggressive states. In this manner, the United States Navy and those of its fellow League members could serve as a naval policeman for the world. Several newspapers accepted this reasoning and printed favorable editorials on the matter well into 1919 arguing that an enlarged navy would strengthen the role of the United States within the League of Nations. The bill eventually passed through the House at the reduced but still staggering sum of $1.1 billion.

When members of Congress questioned the wisdom of passing such a bill while peace negotiations were under way, Wilson assured them that the new construction would be terminated if any potential disarmament conference came about. While Daniels's motives remained somewhat less clear, Wilson viewed the fleet as potential leverage in negotiations involving any number of issues between the United States and the remaining Great Powers. Still, the bill stood little chance of passage in the Senate, and, in a harbinger of the coming naval arms limitation movement, newspapers in the Midwest ran editorials against the program's cost. In the end, though, the 1919 program served Wilson's intended purpose. In April, British diplomats agreed to support the League Covenant in exchange for American cancellation of the building program contained in the bill. Thus the proposed building plan played a crucial role in securing Wilson's League of Nations.

The end of the 1919 program did not deter Daniels from continuing to press for completion of the 1916 program in the months that followed, but constructing a convincing messaging strategy that he and the bureau could propagate proved difficult. In his own statements, Daniels argued that the failure of either the peace negotiations in Paris or the League of Nations would force the United States to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and defend the Western Hemisphere from outside aggression. Only by constructing a fleet capable of deterring or repelling any potential aggressor could the United States guarantee the safety and sovereignty of neighboring nations. Therefore, Daniels reasoned, the United States needed to choose between accepting membership and participation in the League of Nations or building up its fleet to unprecedented strength. Some prominent newspapers accepted Daniels's view, while others remained unconvinced by his logic and opposed it. Perhaps more troubling for Daniels, editorials in the Baltimore Sun and other newspapers questioned whether American foreign and naval policy could be boiled down in such stark terms.