I picked up Dear FDR: A Study of Political Letter-writing at the library without any particular reason. Well, except that I’m interested in letter-writing, in FDR and in politics. Which I guess is a good reason, come to think of it.
The book seems to me to be a dissertation turned into a book, which is a fine thing for it to be, even if it’s short by what I think of as dissertation standards. But then, things were different in 1963.
Things were very different in 1932, and even earlier when FDR really put together a fascinating operation to write, receive, respond to and elicit gazillions of letters from an unimaginably wide range of people. He used the mails as a sort of mass media, but with individual letters, putting together a huge staff to deal with it. The thing about labor having been much, much cheaper keeps turning up in different ways.
The thing I found really interesting was the way FDR used bulk mail to set up relationships that would later prove useful to him. For instance, after the (I think, I may be wrong here) the 1924 Democratic National Convention, he sent every single delegate a letter saying how important it was to keep the Party connected and prepared for future elections, and asking for comments and suggestions to that end. Every person who responded to the letter got a response, and every response was unique (although few of them were written by FDR himself). Most of those people felt that they had a relationship with him, and were not only inclined to support him in the future but to volunteer for him and put him in touch with other people who would be useful to him. There’s a sense in which that was all incredibly cynical, and a sense in which it was valuable and communitarian, and provided him with the relationships and information paths that made him able to govern well. I’ll have more to say about that, and the idea behind it, in a separate note (because I know lots of people quite sensibly don’t read these Book Reports unless they’ve read the book, because of spoilers, and nobody has read this book) (he gets polio! And is crippled! But becomes President anyway! And then dies in office!), but it’s interesting how badly that idea has been mangled as it was copied and made normal.
Another thing that struck me as totally different from These Latter Days is that the act of writing to the President, or to a candidate for the Presidency, doesn’t seem to have been anything like it is now. If I were to write to the President, or even a Senator, I would not imagine that the office-holder would read the note himself; I would be deliberately trying to add my voice to the tally on one side or the other of a particular topic. At best, I might hope for a particularly clever phrase to make it to some flunkie covering that topic, and then back up to a speechwriter or analyst who might get it back up, not to the President or the Senator, but to somebody who would be making a speech on the issue and need a clever phrase.
Part of that is that I’m just some schmuck with a blog. But I don’t think that very many people think of themselves as important enough to expect the President or the candidate to personally read a letter. If, for instance, the head of the University that employs me had an opinion on some matter of higher education policy, I don’t think it would occur to him to write to one of the candidates. Write to a Representative, perhaps. Have an association send out a broadside, sure. Attend a fund-raiser for a chance to corner the candidate for three minutes, OK. But a letter?
I think it’s sad, in a way, that we the people are sufficiently clued-in to what the world is like that we no longer expect the President to read his own mail.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Was it not Lincoln who used to hold open office hours, like a graduate student teaching assistant, during which time any citizen of the United States could come and speak with him? Another world long lost.
I have met a surprising number of people who think that mail to a national political campaign office will reach the desk of the candidate or office-holder. Those people have hyperactive and paranoid imaginations which manifest in many troubling ways.
Were there lessons learned in the book about how to write such a letter in a way that would be more or less effective relative to the letter’s content? As opposed to simply establishing a correspondence that signifies a relationship but does not advance any policy goal. There are several issues I care about being debated on the state level right now, and I’ve never been sure whether writing about more than one of them (either in one letter or in separate letters) will make my expressing a position on any single one less effective. When we were lobbying the state legislature in high school, we’d usually push two issues at a time, but both were environmental issues.
open office hours
Yeah, that whole business about the right to petition government turns out to be kinda like the right to peaceably assemble: it’s great individually but it works as long as only a very small percentage of people want to do it. You can’t fit three hundred million people onto the Mall, and the President can’t read three hundred million letters.
hyperactive and paranoid imaginations
Who told you I had a hyperactive and paranoid imagination? Was it Dick Cheney? Seriously, I’m leaving out the people who still think that David Letterman is talking to them personally; there are millions of them, but they’re a small minority (particularly when compared to people who think that, oh, UFOs built the Pyramids).
how to write such a letter
No, sorry, the book was a sociological study of letter-writing, who did it, how it was used politically, etc. In the introduction, Robert K. Merton writes about how this is filling in the gap between what the public wants and what the representatives of the public think the public wants, but Ms. Sussman is very circumspect about that idea. Certainly, the only claims she makes about how letter-writing, even in those days, affected policy was in quantity, rather than quality, although she points out that more people on the losing side write, since the people on the winning side don’t feel they have to. The book is more focused on the question of why people write. From a policy point of view, the Ms. Sussman I think views the letters as tools for the office-holders to achieve policy (and electoral) goals, not as tools for the constituents.
But (and it occurs to me that I was cryptic up there), she is writing in the early sixties, and it is a very different world now; any advice she would have about constituents achieving policy goals would be useless anyway.
Thanks,
-V.
Man! FDR DIES!?!? There you go again…
Also, I don’t think anyone actually believes UFOs built the Pyramids. Everyone knows it was the Sphinx they built!
peace
Matt
Yeah, everyone know that it would be physically impossible for UFOs to have built the Pyramids. The stones are far too large, even in the lower gravity back then, and the aliens simply aren’t strong enough.
Puh-lease. I am an art historian and we know that all of these things were built by the lost people of Atlantis…right before they were taken up into the stars by the aliens…
Sorry to hijack your letter writing discussion, dear…
even in the lower gravity back then
But Egypt was underwater, so they could use their alien flotation devices. Duh!
they were taken up into the stars
That’s what the Atlanteans want you to believe. But it isn’t true; the lost people of Atlantis are all among us, breathing out CO2 in an insidious plot to destroy the world…
Thanks,
-V.
Is this the tentative beginnings of slash co2 fiction?
Maybe if it were fiction. 8-|
peace
Matt