ABSTRACT
Gottlieb, Friendly, and Ball organized a campaign which got some New England protectionist congressmen to vote against the Simpson bill in 1953. The CNTP helped Senator Gore come close to pulling off a genuine coup. The National Coal Association formed the Foreign Oil Policy Committee to speak for itself, railroads, and independent oil producers, itself no mean feat, and may possibly be given credit for the eventual imposition of quotas on oil imports. The League of Women Voters, at the very least, generated a good deal of publicity for the liberal-trade point of view. The stereotype notion of omnipotent pressure groups becomes completely untenable once there are groups aligned on both sides. The result of opposing equipotent forces is stalemate. A number of the campaigns we have described show clearly that a pressure group's function is frequently to define the interest of its partisans.
