Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1904-08-06
REACHING THE VOTERS
Campaign Hopes Through the
Printed Page.
PUBLICITY WORKERS
TO REACH THOSE WHO SPEAK
"MAGYAR" OR WORSE.
Running of Political Press Bureaus is
q Difficult and Respon-
sible Task.
PUBLICITY WORKERS

Written for The Evening Star by Osborn Spencer
The publicity work Of the executive cam
paign committee in a presidential year Is
complex, costly and delicate. Ftrst-class
political judgment, good news sense, plenty
of money and practical business ability are
prime requisites If it is to be done effective
~ and we'll.
Manufacturing and distributing the docu-
ments is highly important part OF the
executive committees publicity work 1t
involves the complete organization, conduct
and the final winding up of a business OF
from $2JO,OOO to $5OO,OOO in three months
at the outside. When the campaign starts
late, the work Is sometimes all done In
twelve weeks. One year there was only
ten weeks between the starting of the
document mill by one of the big parties and
the last week in October, after which, of
course, there Is little use trying to d1str1D-
ute documents.
That year the management OF the docu-
ment mill was given over to very amlaDle
gentleman, whose politics were irreproach-
able from the standpoint of his own party,
but who had mighty little practical knowl-
edge of printing, the prices of paper, or
any other of the things he ought TO nave
known about in order to do the work as II
should be DONE Also, he owned no print
ing office, while his executive ability was
a negligible quantity, and he had never
carried out big, brisk business operation
in his life.
first order from the committee was for
$50 600 copies of a four-page doc" and
further orders for 2, 4. 8, 16, "a and "
page docs came to him with beWildering
rapidity. At that time he hardly knew
what the printing facilities of New York
city WERE and, the orders from the COM
mittee being all of the hurry-up sort, ne
placed them whenever he could, sometimes
fI,o,, CT iro
few cases he forgot even to make memo
randa of the print shops where he left the
work, and in about two weeks, When. the
committee began to yell for docs he
was certainly in a tangle just as he was
beginning to get Strengthened out an order
for 100000 copies of the text book. vol
ume of 300 or 400 pages, was thrown AT
him He had felt that he was swamped
before but that order completely showed
him under. From that time till the end OF
the campaign he lived as one IN long,
hideous. complicated dream.
That same year the shipping bureau or
the Marty was conducted by another true
blue party man, who, like the campaign
printer, was novice at the task which ne
attempted In order to handle the loGo,-
600 documents a week put out by the
printer the shipper rented whole build
ing and engaged a young army OF en-
ployes-men, women, boys and girls-to
bundle and address the documents.
Showed All Under.
Meanwhile the printer finding 1t impos-
s:ble to get his work done on time at divers
job Offices was obliged to rent lofts ana
PUT in printing presses of his own, at rum
Gus expense. He also had to organize
big force under union rules. which, OF
course. were not softened because his was
political work and wanted in hurry.
When re finally got well under way, a con-
tnuous stream of heavily laden trucks " rs
delivering docs the whole twenty-four
hours through every day and Sundays 10
the establishment of the shipper, and II
vas only short time after that before the
shipper was as completely showed under
as the printer had been.
A week before the election the shipper
had ten or twelve millions of unshipped
docs of every shape and size in his lofts
with the certainty that there was no pos
sibility of getting them away to the distant
states. for which many of them were in
tended. in time for proper distribution.
AS a last resort, the shipper concluded
to distribute the surplus docs" in New
York and vicinity, and during the last week
of that campaign he had twenty trucks,
each accompanied by two or three men,
handing out leaflets, tracts and booklets,
each containing sound political doctrine as
his party understood 1t, from door to door
in New York, Brooklyn and Jersey City.
One of the humors of the situation arose
from the circumstance that one lot of so, 600
docs printed in Finnish parceed out
in a neighborhood where there no
Firms, while another lot Of 1900 docs -
printed in Hungarian, was dumped out In a
section of Brooklyn where practically all
the people read Scandinavian and nothing
else.
The Unknown Tongues.
This brings up that branch of an execu-
tive committees publicity work that has to
reach voters who read only the unknown
| tongues" such as Magyar, Russian, Swed-
ish, Yiddish. Polish and the like, not to
speak of the commoner of the foreign lam
guages, such as German. French. Spanish
and italian. These must be reached both
| through the medium of docs printed in
their various tongues and also through the
owspapers which are published regularly
for their peruSal
The necessity of orga nizing a bureau for
this purpose was discovered rather late In
the campaign one year. and Its organizati ton
was placed In the hands of a man who
spoke and read English only. He began by
advertising for expert translators. When
he reached his office next day he was fairly
overwhelmed by the long line of applicants.
There were specialized Germans who pro-
fessed to know all the European languages
| ever written or spoken we'll enough to re-
| produce in them all any political argument
ever devised; there were deeply brunette
| gentlemen and ladies from every part OF
| central and southern Europe who made
professions quite as sweeping; there were
| tall, washed-out blondes of both sexes
| from the north of Europe, with equally
| strong Recommendations Slavs Bo-
| hemians, Spaniards, Gauls Montenegr1ns
| and Poles-all Europe and part of Asia (for
| three Armenians showed themselves among
| the applfcants) were in line waiting to be
hired as tranSlators.
Must Know English.
| At first the man was utterly at a loss
what to do, but he recovered himself, and,
! forming them in line. received them in or
der. Those who could not speak fair Eng
fish he dismissed at once, reasoning that
no matter how perfect their knowledge OF
| their own tongues they could not get along
| without thorough knowledge Of English
Having thus sifted out about dozen
| from the 60 to 70. all told. he babe each In
| turn read paragraph from some docu-
| ment printed In English and then make an
| impromptu translation into the tongue he
| professed to understand best. If the i'm
promptu translation was managed with ap-
! parent confidence and certainty, the appli-
| cant accepted: otherwise not. By Il
O'Clock noon on that day, the translation OF
the documents into the unknown tongues
| was well under way. Getting 1t started
| was an easy task compared to the job OF
having the matter set in type after transla.
ton. but that Is another story.
The same man looked after the insertion
of sound political news and views ir
various newspapers printed in some eight
or ten different tongues Each of these