How Corporate Propaganda Targeted Unions and the New Deal

By the 1920s, US banking dynasties and

robber barons had spent decades steering

markets, breaking strikes, and lobbying to

weaken regulatory oversight. It was their behavior that

triggered that 1929 crash and caused the Great

Depression. This manufactured crisis cost millions of

Americans their jobs, but left the key players with more

capital and their networks intact.

US banking families got used to

steering markets to suit themselves.

They used speculation, price fixing, and lobbying to

corner whole sectors. The crash that tore through the

economy was the result of years of reckless finance and monopoly

power, and it gave them an opening to tighten

control.

Roosevelt's New Deal, the emerging trade

unions, and visible public anger was putting threaten to their

profits. And so in 1934, they create

the National Industrial Information Committee.

The entire goal of this committee was to turn public

opinion against trade unions and

regulation. The people who sat on this committee

were a

circle of corporate barons, and their entire day

job was to figure out how to propagandize people so that they

could keep making lots and lots of money.

This is Ernest T. Weir, and he was the

chairman of the NIIC committee. Despite

his Wikipedia entry, he was not a

self-made champion of free markets.

He got rich on government contracts.

He had a monopoly over steel production.

He was a businessman who built his wealth inside a state-protected

bubble while vocally opposing the New Deal

and fighting workers at every turn.

His company, National Steel, was actually a

merger, a consolidation of Great Lakes Steel,

Weirton Steel, and M.A. Hannah subsidiaries.

Despite Justice Department lawyers being very, very

against this and warning of dangerous

consolidation in a key sector, it went ahead, and

he got fat, stinking rich. His company benefited

directly from tariffs on steel. He had

priority railway access, and he got concessions on

cheap power from the Ohio River.

That is not the open market. That is a government-built

wealth shelter. His entire business model relied on

keeping labor protections weak. He fought unions with

intimidation and force while drawing from the public

coffers and leveraging public policy that kept

his competitors out. He was a hard-lined operator

inside a state-backed industrial oligopoly, and

he chaired this NIIC board. That

name is deliberately dull, National Industrial

Information Committee.

But behind the boring name and the boring paperwork was an

organized publicity campaign. The goal was to

make unregulated business look like patriotism.

They were backed by five thousand corporate subscribers, and their

headquarters were in Rockefeller Plaza.

They had five departments: mass media, group

relations, company participation, regional

offices, and fundraising. Three hundred and fifty million

dollars in today's money on print,

film,

education, clergy outreach, and

radio, and when it became available, TV also.

The boring suits with their National Industrial Council

spending a lot of money on ads. Their staff

ran mass media, school outreach,

clergy relations, regional fieldwork, and

fundraising all under one roof. Some stats:

forty-five thousand billboards, estimated

seen by sixty-five million people every day.

Millions of cartoons, newspaper columns,

employee leaflets, films that have been shown to an

estimated eighteen million viewers.

School kits and teaching aids that teach that

free enterprise and patriotism are one of the same.

They would send business-friendly materials to the houses of

pastors and priests and ministers, and they would pay for

radio slots and commentators. Everything

tied words like prosperity and personal

liberty to unregulated, ungovernable

big business.

NIIC was an organized attempt

by oligarchs to bend the democracy to their

interests. They poured money into advertising.

For years, they flooded the information ecosystem

with

one narrative: "Your personal freedom requires

you to submit to corporate rules." It was a

corporate propaganda bureau designed to make filthy

private power look like your national destiny.