This Week: Special Issue on the History of Wartime Propaganda

Quote of the Week

“Nothing Less Than Complete Solidarity” The Story of the Committee on Public Information

“A Burning Eagerness to Believe” Propaganda Parallels: 1917 to 2002

Union Update from Last Week (an odd little bonus)

Greetings,

This issue of Nygaard Notes is the first of at least two issues that will look at the history and theory of modern war propaganda. You’ll see that in these days, as we are asked to consent to still another war, many of the things to which we are routinely subjected were developed—pretty much in their current forms—during World War I under President Wilson. If we actually had a system of education in this country that helped us know our history, we would likely be far less susceptible to the propaganda and manipulation that have now become such a central part of our “modern” lives.

This week I look at the history of war propaganda in World War I, and highlight some direct parallels between that war and the current war hysteria. Next week’s installment will be a little more theoretical, with lots of examples of how the decades-old techniques play out in today’s world. After reading it you should be much better able to recognize it—and defend yourself against it!

My friend Sherry said this week that, although she wholeheartedly opposes the war, she realized that she hadn’t done anything yet to make her voice heard, so she was dismayed that she was starting to feel like part of the “silent majority.” I’ll bet there are lots of people who feel that way, too, so another thing I will do next week is to give a fairly comprehensive listing, with appropriate contact information, of as many ways of contributing to the new anti-war movement as I can find. Believe me, there are lots—it may take a double issue to accommodate them all! If you have any ideas, please send them in during the coming week.

More new subscribers this week. Welcome! Send me mail if you have something to say. I love that.

Peacefully yours,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

This week’s “Quote” of the Week was actually written in 1927, but could have been written this week. The author is Harold Lasswell, writing in his classic book “Propaganda Technique in the World War.” The war about which he was writing was the European war we call World War I, and the book is considered by scholars to be one of the “outstanding contributions, in any language, to the history of the subject” of propaganda.

“Both literacy and the Press are offspring of the machine age. The Press lives by advertising; advertising follows circulation, and circulation depends upon excitement. ‘What sells a newspaper?’ A former associate of Lord Northcliffe [World War I British propaganda minister] answers: ‘The first answer is “war.” War not only creates a supply of news but a demand for it. So deep-rooted is the fascination in war and all things pertaining to it that...a paper only has to be able to put up on its placard ‘A Great Battle’ for its sales to mount up.”

Some things never change.

“Nothing Less Than Complete Solidarity” The Story of the Committee on Public Information

Had you decided to go see the movie “The Poor Little Rich Girl” in August of 1917, perhaps you would have had nothing more in mind than to enjoy the “beautiful blond girl with the golden curls,” America’s sweetheart, Mary Pickford. In the audience you may have seen some young maidens sporting their “Mary Pickford curls” which, according to the New Republic of the day, girls wore “to the university classes, unless spoken to by the dean of women.”

Whatever your motivation, however, and however much you enjoyed the movie, after the screen had gone dark, you likely would have stayed in your seat as a patriotic slide appeared on the screen, the pianist shifted from “Hearts and Flowers” to “Over There,” and a Four Minute Man scrambled up on the stage to speak on the subject of “What Our Enemy Really Is” or “Unmasking German Propaganda.”

The Four Minute Men were a corps of 75,000 individuals operating under the auspices of the “Committee on Public Information,” President Wilson’s wartime “propaganda ministry.” In the CPI’s two short years of existence—starting one week after the U.S. entered the war in April of 1917 and ending in June of 1919 —the CPI pursued its agenda of “holding fast the inner lines” by operating “a gargantuan advertising agency the like of which the country had never known.”

President Wilson was aware that, when the U.S. entered the war, the nation was not unified. This was a problem for the hawks of the time. In their excellent 1939 book “Words That Won The War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information 1917-1919,” authors James R. Mock and Cedric Larson noted the belief on the part of the nation’s leaders that “widespread cooperation” on the part of the population would not be enough, and that “even a rather small minority” of dissidents “could bring disaster” to the war effort. The charge of the CPI, then, was to engender “nothing less than complete solidarity” among Americans around the war.

“Mobilizing Scattered Cartoon Power”

In pursuit of this ambitious goal, the CPI cranked up a massive apparatus that eventually touched all United Statesians in one way or another. One month after its creation, for example, the CPI published the first official daily newspaper in the history of the U.S. (unimaginatively named “Official Bulletin.”) CPI’s Advertising Division coordinated efforts to “sell” the war and, incidentally, various commercial products like those of the Aluminum Cooking Utensil Company. In a typical issue, that company’s Wear-Ever Magazine started off with a war poem (“The Service Flag”), proceeded through an article called “How Wear-Ever Utensils Are Helping to Win the War,” and then came to an article entitled “Patriotism and Profit.”

The CPI’s Division of Pictorial Publicity was in charge of poster-making, billboards, and hawkish public art. The Bureau of Cartoons was directed to “mobilize and direct the scattered cartoon power of the country for constructive war work.” The CPI recognized that “many Americans are not habitually careful readers of news columns, [so] their closest approach to knowledge and understanding of the forces behind current events came through Sunday supplements and similar feature material.” Thus was created the Division of Syndicate Features, which recruited famous and well-regarded U.S. writers to pump up the war fever with their writing.

It cannot be said that the illiterate or non-literate parts of the population were neglected by the CPI. I’ve mentioned the Four Minute Men, who made oral presentations to the movie-going public. The CPI also had a program that involved “a little pamphlet, which the Committee had designed especially for traveling men, enabling him to speak with the exciting authority of inside information, and everyone assumed that the stories must be true because salesmen who stopped at the general store brought with them the same thrilling narrative. Uniformity of testimony is convincing.”

“The Fight For The Mind of Mankind”

In addition to “holding fast the inner lines,” the CPI functioned widely overseas, often using covert and illegal methods. As Mock and Larson put it, “In spite of uniform instructions to all CPI agents that they were to spend no money on bribery, subsidizing newspapers, or other secret activities, the files show that this rule was not strictly enforced. Sometimes Washington merely winked at the transgressions, but in a few cases the CPI headquarters gave specific permission to break its own rules. In more than one case our agents also broke the laws of neutral countries.”

A military intelligence report at the time insisted that “to be effective the psychologic effort must be worldwide, continuous, and...adapted to our war aims.”

The overall result of the work of the Committee on Public Information was that “Unless a person chanced upon one of the rare ‘disloyal’ publications, any news story, feature, picture, cartoon, poster, book, short story dealing with the war either carried the official seal of the CPI, or carried no less clearly...the stamp of CPI influence.”

Scholars Mock and Larson claimed in 1939 that “The problem boils down to this: Can any wartime compromise [of democratic ideals] be ‘temporary’? Can modern war, a war of populations, be waged without permanent loss of some of the things for which America entered the war in 1917?” The questions are still relevant in 2002 as the nation—yet again—prepares for a foreign war.

“A Burning Eagerness to Believe” Propaganda Parallels: 1917 to 2002

As I was reading about propaganda during World War I, I was constantly struck by the parallels between propaganda then and now. In this article I’ll just share a few of these comments, all taken from the 1939 book “Words That Won The War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information 1917-1919,” by James R. Mock and Cedric Larson. See if you don’t agree that history is repeating itself.

On the contrast between the level of public opposition to the current plans for war with Iraq and the invisibility of that opposition in the media, consider that many citizens in 1917 were similarly opposed to U.S. entry into World War I, many condemning it as a “capitalist war.” Mock and Larson remind us that “Scholars will long discuss the precise division of ‘real opinion’ in America when war [WWI] was declared, but there can be no uncertainty regarding articulate opinion as it was expressed in newspapers, books, pamphlets, cartoons, and public addresses—it was overwhelmingly and wholeheartedly on the side of the Allies and in favor of our belligerence.” This was due in no small part to the work of the CPI and it’s charismatic civilian chairman, George Creel.

So far in the 21st century we don’t have any official have any formal “Censorship Board,” or other direct government control of our “free” media, although it may not be far away. What we do have is what we had in 1917, as Mock and Larson explain:

“Two methods of handling public opinion were available to the United States. An ironclad censorship could be established, with a great bureaucracy attempting to judge the ‘loyalty’ of every item in every newspaper, every work in every conversation—to probe, in fact, into the innermost thoughts of every citizen. On the other hand, a policy could be adopted whereby the hand of censorship was held back but the channels of communication were literally choked with official, approved news and opinion, leaving little freeway for rumor or disloyal reports. George Creel took the affirmative line.”

The overwhelming flood of “approved” information had it’s desired effect then, and it’s arguably the same now: “It was illegal to express dissent of certain kinds, but for most people no law was necessary. The CPI had done its work so well that there was a burning eagerness to believe, to conform, to feel the exaltation of joining in a great and selfless enterprise.”

Walter Shapiro, political columnist for the USA Today newspaper, commented this past September that “[The Bush] administration, more than any I can recall, believes in the Washington gospel of message discipline. There are no discordant voices on almost any issue. That fact diminishes one’s passion for obtaining interviews because when you do, like as not, the Bush official will be mentally reading from a public relations script.”

Shapiro is unknowingly pointing to another Creel tactic. During WWI, say Mock and Larson, “Every item of war news [American families] saw...was not merely officially approved information but precisely the same kind that millions of their fellow citizens were getting at the same moment. Every war story had been censored somewhere along the line—at the source, in transit, or in the newspaper office in accordance with ‘voluntary’ rules issued by the CPI. The same mimeograph machines furnished most of the Washington news, and the same cable censorship had passed all items from abroad.”

Defenders of today’s press like to point out that much important criticism of official policy does get published in the mainstream (somewhere or other), proving that our Free Press is really free. Mock and Larson respond eloquently:

“[Creel] could afford to overlook unimportant details in a small number of papers because all the rest of the press was pounding out an anvil chorus of patriotism under the direction of the CPI. Nearly all the papers were publishing the stories streaming out from the Committee’s News Division in such a flood that obstructions were swept along with it.”

Our political leaders today are again trying to sweep away any obstructions to war, and their efforts are no doubt more advanced and better-funded now than in the days of Woodrow Wilson. Despite that reality, there is a sizable and growing opposition among “regular people” in this country to the latest war drive.

Frederic L. Paxson, president of the American Historical Association, spoke about the work of the Committee on Public Information in his address delivered before the Association in Chicago on December 29, 1938. He said, “It is still to be determined how far this harnessing of good will advanced victory [in World War I]; at the very least it occupied the mind, made dissent more uncomfortable than it would otherwise have been, and made war-loyalty self-enforcing.”

It is still to be determined, today, whether the call for peace can turn the nation back from the brink of war. It is up to us to keep our minds “occupied” with opposition to the war, to keep dissenting no matter how “uncomfortable” it gets, and to pledge our loyalty not to war, but to higher ideals. Now is the time.

Union Update from Last Week

Unbeknownst to all of you electronic recipients of Nygaard Notes, last week’s paper version included a little post-script to the story about the recent success of the workers at Dakota Premium Foods. I don’t want to be accused of favoring the users of paper over the denizens of cyberspace—Heaven forbid!—so here is what you missed:

In a related note, three days after the [Dakota Premium] meatworkers ratified their contract, workers at a local Borders Bookstore chain voted to unionize, by a 15-6 margin. It’s a small vote and, like the meatworkers, there is no guarantee that they will actually get a contract. But it could be a big symbolic victory for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, long known for representing grocery store workers in the area. The local has been working to organize non-grocery retail workers, a huge and growing segment of the underpaid workforce in this country.

As this goes to press, I’ve just learned that workers at the Borders Books in Ann Arbor Michigan have just voted to unionize, too. There’s something happening here. For some fascinating reading on the UFCW’s campaign to organize retail workers—if you’re a retail worker, this could change your life!—visit this website: www.youareworthmore.org/.