WAR DEPARTMENT
RECRUITING

PUBLICITY BUREAU
GOVERNORS ISLAND, NY.
OFFICIAL BUSINESS

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thanks to the Col. Beverley Boho's Powdered Duckboard Tonic. I was weak, underweight, anæmic and almost useless when a friend of mine asked me if I had ever tried the Duckboard treatment. He said the Army had discov ered that Duckboards had great medicinal properties, and that he had taken a Duckboard before retiring every night for a week, after which he felt like a new man. He told me the Army was making them in powdered form, and I went to the nearest Army post and bought a case at once. In two weeks I put on more than 125 pounds and I am now a professional strong man with a circus. Hoping you are the same. OSCAR ZILCH.

DEPARTMENT OF THE EAST:

U. S. A.:

GENTLEMEN-I am glad to recommend Gen. Briggs Concentrated Essence of Sword Polish to all victims of chronic hay fever and hives. The Army did a great thing for humanity when it salvaged all the sword polish left over from the World War and converted it into a liniment. For years I had been barely able to walk, due to rheumatism and progressive laziness. I heard about Briggs Concentrated Essence of Sword Polish and gave three bottles of it to my oldest boy. I now walk without the slightest difficulty.

JEREMY JENKS.

P. S.-How about this Reserve Corps Nuxurated Shrapnel I hear is being sold as a sure cure for Rigg's disease?

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LL planned publicity or advertising aims to get people thinking as you wish them to think. And it is accomplishing this most successfully every day of the year in a thousand different directions. It is moulding the thought of the nationour habits, customs and beliefs-far beyond the average conception. It determines our choice of food, clothing, automobiles, amusements, homes and practically every human activity. Yet so subtle is its working that few of us realize this. The average man will deny it. He knows that seldom does he rush out to buy something because he sees it advertised. Hence he believes that, however much it may influence another, it did not reach him. What he fails to appreciate is the cumulative effect of these slight impressions persistently repeated. These eventually result in crystallizing his faith or belief into a conviction. Then he is sold on the idea.

Taking the largest activity as an example, if the country is at war the wholehearted cooperation of the public is imperative for the successful. prosecution of its hundreds of different activities. The people must be taught to see the Government's point of view-that its course is for their best interests. In other words, to think as the Government wishes them to think

and act accordingly. But as a thought must precede every act, the first course is to start them thinking right. This is the mission of publicity.

Or if you are selling flour or cigarettes, for instance, you want the people to believe that your brand is the best value on the market. Your success or failure will be proved by the figures on your sales sheet. These, in turn, will depend very largely upon the effectiveness of your advertising. Naturally the quality of your product will be most important. Ad

forms of advertising and publicity are the only means of shaping public opinion along a given line. And in accomplishing this result, a slogan and a trademark are the punch of the campaign.

In the Army our publicity problem is not analogous to any other, but still it partakes of the basic principles of all. We are a Government activity and we have something to "sell."

Our general problem deals with the entire population sort of "good will" proposition in which we seek to justify the Army's existence and proper maintenance, not only as national insurance, but as a distinctly constructive factor in the economic life of the United States. Our cue here is along the line of the "institutional" publicity so effectively used by the leading public service and other large corporations. For years they have not sold insurance and telephones, etc., in their advertisements, but service; not the commodity itself directly, but indirectly, by showing what their company and its inventions have done for the public by raising. its standards of living, etc. Yet with a much more imposing array of facts (Other Things the Army Does Besides Fight) extending over a greater period of time than any of these, we have done little to develop this line of thought in its own defense.

Our specific problem deals with procuring our personnel. In this instance our appeal is more direct, but also more limited. We seek to sell our service to men eligible to one or another of the various grades or components of the Army. This also implies the successful selling of the idea to members of their immediate families and close friends, for without approval in this inner circle recruiting of any kind would be difficult. As (Continued on Page Twelve)

methods of old when the recruiter's greatest friend and asset was the corner saloon, to the modern, efficient salesman-like tactics of the young man who stands in his country's uniform and sells the Service to keen-eyed young America, who enlists because he believes in the Army as a career or sees in it a chance for useful training and education.

The idea that the military service is primarily the refuge for the down-andouts, for the unfit and inefficient, has slowly but surely been eradicated from the civilian mind. The War did much to change the public's view-point when so many Americans were brought either in direct contact with the Army or learned of it at first hand from members of their families who had worn the O. D.'s. The Army is today a career, primarily projected as a means of training soldiers for the country's defense, but actually giving to thousands opportunity and leisure for training and study which otherwise would have been impossible to them. It is essentially the poor man's school.

Already Sold, But it Takes a Star

to Land One Antagonistic

cruiting Service into the position it occupies today. A man may no longer qualify as a recruit-getter simply because he shaves daily and owns a tailor-made serge. He has to be adapted to his job both by natural qualities and by training. He is the salesman of the Army-the man who alone produces in the sense in which that word is understood in the business world.

That, of course, is actually what the Recruiting Service is to the Army. It produces the human material without which the military service could not exist and, like the sales and advertising depart

of the salesmen and sales policy.

Comprehending this, the Recruiting News wrote to a number of the most successful recruiting officers and asked them for short summaries of their meth ods. All of the answers exhibit we thought out plans; definite principles o which campaigns have been conducted and complete knowledge of the sort of men canvassers should be and the way they should be trained.

The opinion is unanimous that a canvasser, to be successful, must be a man of prepossessing appearance, well dressed and groomed to the minute, and not too young. Inwardly his equipment is just as important. His manner must be pleasant yet self-assured. He must not be backward, but must have no hesitancy in approaching a likely looking prospect. He must be able to answer all of the questions lucidly and truthfully, that may be put to him. In other words, he should be a walking compendium of up-to-the minute information about the Army, and skillful enough so that, while he is apparently only answering questions, he is finding out all about the man in front of him. What he wants to do; his capabilities where he will fit in best in the Army; his strength; his weaknesses; and his soft spots.

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Second

New York City

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7

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Detroit, Mich.

There is a requirement that a man live for a certain length of time within the actual precincts of Oxford and Cambridge before he can be graduated. The atmosphere of the place is in itself considered cultural; the contact with other young men and with the instructors and tutors; the medieval aura which clings about old, gray, ivy-covered walls and emanates from the hoary rooms and lecture halls instills in the student a sense of refinement, of the worthiness of education. In the Army a man may spend three years and learn nothing formally but drill; actually, every day he is imbibing a self-reliance and an American point of view which makes of him a better, brainier, more capable citizen when he returns to civilian life. He may be of blue-blooded colonial stock from the back-woods of Maine, Virginia, or Kentucky, or his name may sound like a Bolshevist battle-cry, but when he has done his hitch he is as uniform in his mental slant on most things as the clothing he wears. He rejoices in a deep-seated sense of the honor of his country, of its importance in the world, and of the opportunities it can give. He may not be over-pious, but he is bound to be manly.

It is this consciousness of the real function of the Army that has put the Re

ments of a big corporation with a saleable commodity, it has to spend money to bring the good qualities of what it has to offer to that part of the public interested in buying that particular thing. In 1923, for instance, in the Sixth Corps Area, of which Chicago is the headquarters, the average cost of getting one recruit and sending him to his proper station was $83.59. When one realizes that some seven thousand recruits were enlisted during the year in that one corps area alone, the expense entailed in obtaining new material for the service can readily be estimated.

Haphazard methods obviously cannot be followed when both the importance of the work and the expense involved are considered. The recruiting officer of a district is the sales manager, and he has to be as alert, as ingenious and varied in his methods, as tactful and resourceful, as the very important and necessary executive in big business who has charge

Colonel Woodson, commanding the District of West Virginia and sta tioned at Charleston, makes some interesting contributions to the psychology of the subject. He says:

"Every small town has a gang. Wait until you find out who the leader is; convert him first, because youth is sheep-like.

"An ugly canvasser is more successful in country towns because the prospective applicant is not jealous of him, but throws out his chest and says, 'Aw, hell! I can make a better looking soldier than that feller' and enlists to prove it.

"Corollary to the above-let the girls alone."

The Colonel's suggestions bring up a very important point mentioned in almost every answer to the queries placed by the News-relations with the civilians. Just as too assiduous attention to the young women of the community may arouse not only ill-feeling, but positive antagonism, especially among the class which it is the canvasser's aim to conciliate, young men of Army age, so tact and the ability to mix with dignity and reserve among the (Continued on Page Eleven)

BARNEY DIB

REGT HDQ
114TH

10-20-13