Wartime Propaganda

– World War I Essay, Research Paper

Wartime Propaganda: World War IThe Drift Towards War”Lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there was ever such athing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, andthe spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber ofnational life, infecting the Congress, the courts, the policeman onthe beat, the man in the street.”It is one of history’s great ironies that Woodrow Wilson, who was re- elected as apeace candidate in 1916, led America into the first world war. With the help of apropaganda apparatus that was unparalleled in world history, Wilson forged a nation ofimmigrants into a fighting whole. An examination of public opinion before the war,propaganda efforts during the war, and the endurance of propaganda in peacetime raisessignificant questions about the viability of democracy as a governing principle.Like an undertow, America’s drift toward war was subtle and forceful. Accordingto the outspoken pacifist Randolph Bourne, war sentiment spread gradually amongvarious intellectual groups. “With the aid of Roosevelt,” wrote Bourne, “the murmursbecame a monotonous chant, and finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at firstto be disreputable, and finally almost obscene.” Once the war was underway, dissent waspractically impossible. “If you believed our going into this war was a mistake,” wrote The Nation in a post-war editorial, “if you held, as President Wilson did early in 1917, that theideal outcome would be ‘peace without victory,’ you were a traitor.” Forced to stand quietly on the sidelines while their neighbors stampeded towards war, many pacifistswould have agreed with Bertrand Russell that “the greatest difficulty was the purely psychological one of resisting mass suggestion, of which the force becomes terrific whenthe whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement.”This frenzied support for the war was particularly remarkable in light of the factthat Wilson’s re-election had been widely interpreted as a vote for peace. After all, inJanuary of 1916, Wilson stated that “so far as I can remember, this is a government of thepeople, and this people is not going to choose war.” In retrospect, it is apparent that thevote for Wilson cloaked profound cleavages in public opinion. At the time of hisinauguration, immigrants constituted one third of the population. Allied and Germanpropaganda revived old-world loyalties among “hyphenated” European- Americans, andopinions about US intervention were sharply polarized. More than 8 millionGerman-Americans lived in this country, and many were sympathetic to the cause of theirhomeland. Meanwhile, anti-German feeling was strong among the upper classes on theAtlantic coast, and was particularly intense among those with social and businessconnections to Britain.The Committee on Public InformationThe absence of public unity was a primary concern when America entered the waron April 6, 1917. In Washington, unwavering public support was considered to be crucialto the entire wartime effort. On April 13, 1917, Wilson created the Committee on PublicInformation (CPI) to promote the war domestically while publicizing American war aims abroad. Under the leadership of a muckraking journalist named George Creel, the CPIrecruited heavily from business, media, academia, and the art world. The CPI blendedadvertising techniques with a sophisticated understanding of human psychology, and itsefforts represent the first time that a modern government disseminated propaganda onsuch a large scale. It is fascinating that this phenomenon, often linked with totalitarianregimes, emerged in a democratic state.Although George Creel was an outspoken critic of censorship at the hands ofpublic servants, the CPI took immediate steps to limit damaging information. Invoking the threat of German propaganda, the CPI implemented “voluntary guidelines” for the newsmedia and helped to pass the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The CPI did not have explicit enforcement power, but it nevertheless “enjoyed censorshippower which was tantamount to direct legal force.” Like modern reporters who participatein Pentagon press pools, journalists grudgingly complied with the official guidelines inorder to stay connected to the information loop. Radical newspapers, such as the socialistAppeal to Reason, were almost completely extinguished by wartime limitations on dissent. The CPI was not a censor in the strictest sense, but “it came as close to performing thatfunction as any government agency in the US has ever done.” Censorship was only oneelement of the CPI’s efforts. With all the sophistication of a modern advertising agency,the CPI examined the different ways that information flowed to the population andflooded these channels with pro-war material. The CPI’s domestic division was composedof 19 sub-divisions, and each focused on a particular type of propaganda. Acomprehensive survey is beyond the scope of this paper, but the use of newspapers,academics, artists, and filmmakers will be discussed. One of the most important elementsof the CPI was the Division of News, which distributed more than 6,000 press releases and acted as the primary conduit for war-related information. According to Creel,on any given week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns were filled with material gleaned from CPI handouts. Realizing that many Americans glided right past the frontpage and headed straight for th