Word: baxter
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...Education: Dr. Frank Baxter on station KNXT (Los Angeles), with a citation to CBS's Omnibus for the series on the Adams family...
Clem and Leone agreed to run the campaign together for a frugal $40,000. Bearing down on the farmers and making heavy use of small-town newspapers and the relatively uncultivated medium of radio, they defeated the referendum handily. The astonished Pacific Gas & Electric Co. promptly signed Whitaker & Baxter to an annual retainer, has employed them ever since. Incorporating themselves as Campaigns, Inc., they became the acknowledged originals in the field of political public relations (they are still the world's only permanent specialists in the field). In 1938 they made it a full-time partnership by getting married...
Between them, Whitaker & Baxter have elected two governors, a gaggle of lieutenant governors, mayors and assorted lesser officials. The political climate of California is exactly right for an operation such as Whitaker & Baxter's. The state has no real political machine, and California voters have little party loyalty. California's "modern" constitution gives the people the power to initiate legislation by ballot, to pass on acts of the legislature by referendum and to recall elected officeholders by popular vote before their terms have expired. All this puts a high premium on public sentiment and on shifts...
...consistency. They refuse to take a campaign, at any price, unless they believe in it. "There is too much personal breakage in this business to do it any other way," says Clem. "You give too much of yourself during a campaign." After they signed up with P.G. & E., Whitaker & Baxter were suspected of selling out to the private power interests. Not at all, says Clem: "The Central Valley Project was not conceived as a power project, but it began to turn into one when the Federal Government stepped in. We were against that, but not the original purpose of C.V.P...
Whitaker & Baxter are deeper than the cliches of liberals and conservatives. When schoolteachers came to them with a mammoth program for increasing school salaries, the teachers told them that big business would oppose the plan because it would increase taxes. Whitaker & Baxter did not agree, and succeeded in lining up the business community behind the teachers. Accosting one corporation president, Clem says, "We asked what his receptionist earned. He said $300 a month. We showed him that the minimum teacher salary at that time was just over $100 a month. He was a man who was always complaining about radicals...