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The big unions had announced that they had earmarked a war chest of several million
dollars for a campaign in Ohio to defeat Taft, because he was co-author of the
Taft-Hartley Act, which gives the federal government the power to halt strikes that
hurt the national interest. Senator Taft was a friend of De Witt Wallace, the head of
The Reader's Digest, and of Al Cole, who was then the Digest's general manager
They volunteered my services (I was then circulation director of the Digest) to do a
direct mail campaign to help get Senator Taft re-elected.
Senator Taft was convinced that he should take his stand on Taft-Hartley Law, and,
of course, we tried to talk him out of that because we knew that blue-collar workers
would be against him on the basis of the Taft-Hartley Act.
Fortunately, in direct mail you are able to test almost anything, including political
appeals. We mailed out, as I recall, a half-dozen different letters, each one putting
forth a different central idea on why the recipient of the letter should support Senator
Taft.
Since we needed some way to measure the effect of our different appeals, in each
mailing we included a contribution card, keyed to the letter it went with. Thus, we
were able to count returns from each letter and tell which pulled the best.
We sent out about 20,000 copies of each letter I was astounded when the letter which
was built around a positive presentation of the Taft-Hartley Act was far and away the
most successful.
We subsequently mailed hundreds of thousands of Taft-Hartley letters into the bluecollar
worker sections of the industrial cities of Ohio: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Akron,
and so on. The blue-collar workers responded by voting overwhelmingly for Taft
against the urging and advice and the three million dollar campaign fund of their
union leaders.
This same technique was used by Walter Weintz two years later for the Dwight D. Eisenhower
presidential campaign. Ten letters — each with a different theme — were mailed. Nine out of the
ten pulled almost exactly the same. But the tenth, which talked about the seemingly never-ending
war in Korea, outpulled the others by 250%. As a result, that became a key campaign theme for
General Eisenhower — "I shall go to Korea" — and played an important role in his victory the
following November.
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