Officials of the Advertising Council are aware of their power as moulders of public opinion. Theodore S. Repplier, head of the Advertising Council, was quoted in a June, 1961, issue of Saturday Review, as saying:
"There are Washington officials hired to collect figures on about every known occupation, to worry about the oil and miners under the ground, the rain in the sky, the wildlife in the woods, and the fish in the streams–but it is nobody's job to worry about America's state of mind, or whether Americans misread a situation in a way that could be tragic.
"This is a dangerous vacuum. But it is also a vacuum which explains to a considerable degree the important position the Advertising Council holds in American life today."
Note, particularly, that the Advertising Council is responsible to no one. If a business firm should decide on its own to include some "public service" project in its advertising, and the project evoked public indignation, the business firm would lose customers. The Advertising Council has no customers to please. Yet, the Advertising Council is a private agency, beyond the reach of voter and taxpayer indignation which, theoretically, can exercise some control over public agencies.
Who are these autocrats who have become so powerful that they can condition, if not control, public opinion? They are the members of the Public Policy Committee of the Advertising Council. Here were the 19 members of the Advertising Council's Committee, on June 23, 1958:
Sarah Gibson Blanding, President of Vassar College; Ralph J. Bunche, United Nations Under Secretary; Benjamin J. Buttenwieser, partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; Olive Clapper, publicist; Evans Clark, member of the New York Times editorial board; Helen Hall, Director of Henry Street Settlement; Paul G. Hoffman, Chairman of this Public Policy Committee; Charles S. Jones, President of Richfield Oil Corporation; Lawrence A. Kimpton, Chancellor of University of Chicago; A. E. Lyon, Executive Secretary of the Railway Labor Executives Association; John J. McCloy, Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; Eugene Meyer, Chairman of the Washington Post & Times-Herald; William I. Myers, Dean of Agriculture at Cornell University; Elmo Roper, public opinion analyst; Howard A. Rusk, New York University Bellevue Medical Center; Boris Shishkin, Assistant to the President of AFL-CIO; George N. Shuster, President of Hunter College; Thomas J. Watson, Jr., President of International Business Machines Corporation; Henry M. Wriston, Executive Director of the American Assembly.
Of these 19, 8 are members of the Council on Foreign Relations–Bunche, Buttenwieser, Hoffman, McCloy, Roper, Shishkin, Shuster, Wriston. The remaining 11 are mostly "second level" affiliates of the CFR, or under the thumb of CFR members in the business world.
Some Advertising Council projects really are "in the public interest." The "Stop Accidents" campaign and the "Smokey Bear" campaign to prevent forest fires are among several which probably have done much good.
There has never been an Advertising Council project which insinuated anything to remind anyone of the basic American political idea written into our organic documents of government–the idea that men are endowed by God with inalienable rights; that the greatest threat to those rights is the government under which men live; and that government, while necessary to secure the God-given blessings of liberty, must be carefully limited in power by an inviolable Constitution. But there have been many Advertising Council projects which were vehicles for the propaganda of international socialism.