Background
David Schull Hinshaw was born on November 4, 1882 on a farm near Emporia, Kansas, United States. He was the son of Stephen Curtis and Hannah Lee Brickell Hinshaw.
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David Schull Hinshaw was born on November 4, 1882 on a farm near Emporia, Kansas, United States. He was the son of Stephen Curtis and Hannah Lee Brickell Hinshaw.
Hinshaw received his primary and secondary education in the one-room Quaker Valley school. In 1897 Hinshaw began his long association with William Allen White when he became a correspondent for White's Emporia Gazette. (Hinshaw later wrote that White was the person who had the greatest influence on his life. ) Hinshaw's work on the Gazette and his reading of the Kansas City Star were important stimulants in his development and, as he stated, afforded the "only interesting and important contact with the great world beyond Lyon County [Kansas]. " In 1904 he left the farm for the Philadelphia area, where he remained for the rest of his life.
From 1904 to 1907 Hinshaw attended the Westtown Boarding School. He entered Haverford College in 1907 and completed the Bachelor of Science degree in 1911. While at Haverford he met the great Quaker teacher Rufus Jones, who also had an abiding effect on his life.
Hinshaw's concern for charitable causes was evident at Haverford, where as founder and editor of the school newspaper he undertook a successful fund-raising drive to establish the school's infirmary. In the World War I era he directed publicity for the War Camp Community Service, the National Catholic War Council, the Armenian and Syrian Relief, and the American Committee for Devastated France. These concerns and his interest in public-relations in general may be traced to Hinshaw's deeply felt Quakerism, so manifest in his biography Rufus Jones, Master Quaker (1951) and in a 1930 article for Century Magazine in which he wrote of his sect: "The great influence of the Quakers has come from their direct but powerful use of public opinion. The simple but effective formula for crystallizing public opinion is to mix common sense, plain justice and spiritual aspiration and apply these with hands made ready for the cause. " The humanitarian and political tendencies of his career were also influenced by his relationship with White, whose impact as a crusading editor Hinshaw celebrated in his biography A Man from Kansas: The Story of William Allen White (1945).
As a corporate public relations counsel in the 1930s, Hinshaw had such powerful clients as the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Standard Oil Company, for whom he was director of Latin American public relations. In his book Stop, Look, and Listen (1932), sponsored by the American Bankers Association, Hinshaw analyzed the economic problems of the railroad industry in order to create a more favorable public opinion for the railroads and to achieve more sympathetic regulation by governmental agencies. From 1942 to 1948 he served as vice-president of the Institute for Public Relations.
During the years immediately after World War II, Hinshaw publicized the relief work of the American Friends Service Committee in Finland in his book An Experiment in Friendship (1947). His study Take Up Thy Bed and Walk (1948) brought to public notice the pioneering rehabilitation work with crippled and disabled people--both civilian and military--undertaken by New York City's Institute for the Crippled and Disabled. Hinshaw's "interest in the peaceful way of life, which grows out of a Quaker inheritance" was the motivation behind another project of this period, his book Sweden: Champion of Peace (1949). Writing against the backdrop of intensifying Russian-American hostility, he hoped to elucidate how the "peaceful ways of the Scandinavians" had emerged as a result of Sweden's successful handling of both foreign and internal issues, for example, labor-management problems.
While working as a fund-raiser and publicist for Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Alfred M. Landon, and Dewey, he occasionally lectured and wrote critically of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, sounding the Republican tocsin against a meddling, inefficient, and demoralizing federal bureaucracy. His book The Home Front (1943), a survey of the wartime political economy, attacked the Roosevelt mobilization policies as often unnecessarily regimental.
In 1927, when Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, Hinshaw joined his staff and worked skillfully for his presidential nomination in 1928. But Hinshaw's public relations efforts to preserve Hoover's reputation during the Great Depression, most notably his launching, in 1930, of Washington, an administration propaganda sheet, were dismal failures. For Hinshaw, as for White, Hoover's inability to dramatize his programs, so unlike their other cherished "practical idealist, " Theodore Roosevelt, was a source of deep frustration. This did not, however, affect Hinshaw's abiding respect and affection for his "Chief. " In fact Hinshaw played a significant role in the revival of the former president's popularity.
In 1949, on Hoover's seventy-fifth birthday, he elicited a nationwide outpouring of laudatory editorial comment about Hoover's forgotten achievements. In his admiring biography of Hoover, Herbert Hoover: American Quaker (1950), he further celebrated these achievements, analyzing both Hoover's humanitarianism and his failure as a politician in terms of his Quakerism. Hinshaw died in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
As a political publicist, Hinshaw, with two exceptions, identified himself with the cause of the Republican party. His activism in national politics began in 1912 when he collaborated with White in Kansas to support Theodore Roosevelt's bid for the presidency. The "glorious experience" of the Bull Moose campaign remained a vivid memory for Hinshaw throughout his life. He refused to endorse Warren G. Harding in 1920, but thereafter backed every Republican candidate from Calvin Coolidge in 1924 to Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.
Hinshaw is best remembered politically for his friendship with Herbert Hoover, with whom he had much in common; both were Quakers who had risen from provincial backgrounds. As early as the 1890s Hinshaw was aware, through Midwestern Quaker circles, of Hoover's unique abilities. With White he followed Hoover's World War I relief activities with admiration.
On July 1, 1916, Hinshaw married Agusta C. Wiggam; they had two children.