Share-the-Meat Campaign: Letter to All State Extension Directors
A four-page letter dated October 23, 1942, from the Director of Extension Work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to every State extension director, setting out how the voluntary Share-the-Meat campaign will run before formal rationing.
What it is
A four-page letter dated October 23, 1942, from the Director of Extension Work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to every State extension director, setting out how the voluntary Share-the-Meat campaign will run before formal rationing. The Office of War Information's Bureau of Campaigns informs the public on three points: why the program is needed, a limit of 2½ pounds of meat per person per week, and the alternative foods that keep diets up to standard. The message itself travels face to face. Block leaders in cities and Extension neighborhood leaders in farm areas visit every household and leave a one-page "leave-at-home" sheet (about 20,000,000 copies), backed by a handbook of about 1.5 million. A calendar runs from a St. Louis meeting on October 23 to household visits in the week of November 23. Directors are asked to lend staff and to survey the questions farmers will ask.
Why read it now
The letter is logistics, not copy, and that is why it is worth reading. It sequences the channels on purpose: national publicity tells people who the neighborhood leaders are and that they carry an important message, but the message itself reaches the door first, and community events wait until the following week. The stated reason still holds: a messenger who repeats what the papers already printed loses standing. Research on personal influence, from Katz and Lazarsfeld's 1955 study onward, supports the weight it gives to a known local contact. In the Gulf, where a majlis or a trusted dealer often carries more weight than an ad, the sequence applies directly. The letter also asks for a pretest of the questions farmers will raise before the leaders are trained, which is FAQ research done early. What has dated: the voluntary quota lasted only months; meat went on formal point rationing in 1943. Use: when launching through a field team, dealers or community figures, let them deliver the news first, keep mass media to announcing who they are, and collect customer questions before writing their script.
Passages worth keeping
The campaign is to be unique in one respect in that an effort is going to be made to have complete coordination of all agencies involved and with as little duplication as possible.
ما يميز هذه الحملة أنها تحاول تنسيق كل الجهات المشاركة تنسيقًا كاملًا، مع أقل قدر ممكن من تكرار الجهود.
Limitation of meat to 2½ pounds per person per week
هذه هي النقطة الثانية في رسالة الحملة: لا يتجاوز نصيب الفرد من اللحم رطلين ونصفًا في الأسبوع.
which will contain the information on the program in the simplest and briefest form
الورقة التي تبقى في البيت تحمل معلومات البرنامج بأبسط شكل وأقصره، لأنها ما يبقى بعد رحيل الزائر.
we want the message to go first through the block and neighborhood leaders to individual families in the community.
الرسالة تصل أولًا عبر قادة الأحياء والجوار إلى كل أسرة، قبل أي نشاط عام في المجتمع.
This is to avoid having people say that the neighborhood leaders and block leaders merely carry information which has already been given wide publicity.
الغرض ألا يقول الناس إن القادة ينقلون كلامًا سبق نشره على نطاق واسع، فيفقدون قيمتهم مصدرًا للخبر.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
If this library is useful, leave an email
We send new patterns, ads, and notes when we add them. Name and phone are optional.
You are on the list
We will write when we add more library material.