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Propaganda Studies

The US Interwar Years

Sue Collins

No interim period other than the one between World War I (1914–1918) and the onset of World War II (1941–1945) more critically illustrates the discursive struggle over evolving conceptions of propaganda in the modern age. The word “propaganda” derives from a relatively benign designation in its Latin root, propagare, “to propagate,” as in to germinate, or to spread the seeds of the Catholic faith by proclamation of the Congregatio de propaganda fide (Office for the Propagation of the Faith) in the seventeenth century. The practice of propaganda as a political concept is much older, of course, than the word used to describe it, dating back to techniques of persuasion characterized by ancient Greece and the beginnings of mass communication systems employed by the Roman Empire (Taylor, 1990). The “idea” of propaganda, as opposed to the actual workings of the phenomenon itself, is the primary focus of this chapter during the interwar years when critics, scholars, practitioners, and ordinary people alike considered what this ostensibly new form of mass persuasion meant for US capitalism, democracy, and world peace. Propaganda as a political tool or technique predates World War I, but what matters about this context is that people became aware of it in a new light for the first time during the war and, more saliently, during the interwar years. In other words, propaganda itself was not new, but public awareness of its ostensible impacts was.¹

In the postwar context, propaganda meant different things to different observers, but for the most part, everyone agreed that its conditions were worth debating, and most people believed that, left unchecked, it posed some kind of threat to democracy's health. In intellectual, political, and social senses, propaganda became the subject of protracted study and deliberation concerning how best to understand its various incarnations in relation to relative conceptions of democratic capitalism. This question came under fire at the end of World War I when progressive intellectuals deeply troubled by the apparent manipulability of public opinion by special interests confronted competing perspectives about what propaganda's utility was and what its impacts were or could be in relation to a host of positions: practitioners of free enterprise, positivist social scientists, government bureaucrats, and advocates for a pragmatics of better and ethical communication. Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, the common connotation of the word “propaganda” was pejorative, and the idea of propaganda generally was considered disturbing, even as it was subject to dissections of its modus operandi. However, discourses generating stringent critiques of propaganda's dangers to democracy gradually shifted toward a new focus on mass persuasion and social influence informed by scientific behavioralism and quantitative methodology in relation to media effects (Sproule 1987, 1997). In some ways, as the field of communication took hold, propaganda's political significance was overshadowed by more apolitical projects, such as public opinion and marketing research, which contributed to a distinction between political propaganda and social influence and the eventual subsumption of propaganda to mass persuasion. The objective in this chapter is not to uncover some “true” or definitive definition of the word “propaganda” but rather to highlight the historically specific struggle that ensued over claims about what propaganda was and how it operated and, more significantly, assertions over what should have been both the popular and the policy response to propaganda in the interwar years. But to understand the ideological import of propaganda during this time, we must make a brief foray to the critical prewar years and World War I.

Progressivism, Publicity, and the Committee on Public Information

The stakes over the uses of propaganda became especially clear in the immediate postwar context when its raison d'être was subject to intense scrutiny and debate. The critical paradigm, as Sproule (1987) refers to it, began when the progressive faith in the faculties of the intellect to resist human folly was displaced by widespread disillusionment over world war and the possibility of rationality acting as an antidote to stop it. But the roots of propaganda's postwar angst lay in the social and political critiques of the muckrakers and the Progressive movement; the intellectual currents of crowd psychology and Freudian theory; and the appropriation of the Progressives' beloved concept of publicity, first by industry, then by the US government's campaign to wage support for war.

From the late nineteenth century and through the great reforms of the early twentieth century, urban liberal reformers made productive use of publicity, a mechanism that could hold up the inequities and injustices of a chaotic and unstable industrializing nation to shameful illumination. The idea of publicity, Ewen (1996) points out, held a historically specific connotation, “understood as a crystalline light by which an unraveling society and its toxic contradictions might be illuminated and brought to order” (p. 48). Relying on the idea that an enlightened bourgeois public would be activated given verifiable material facts, muckraking journalists thus put to task their investigative and narrative skills in great national exposés of social documentation to incite what they hoped would be a reform-minded response worthy of a great democracy. Progressives held faith in the rational individual, whose actions were dictated less by impetuousness than by reasoned argument facilitated by knowledge carried on the wings of publicity. One only needed to make the facts widely known to effect social change on behalf of the poor and working class. This aggregate of individuals and beneficiaries of the paternal bourgeois public was conceptually positioned between the poles of a potentially dangerous crowd prone to mob-like incitement and a fragmented mass susceptible to social persuasion. In this light, publicity, along with a new-found conviction in the powers of social engineering, compelled several intellectuals, social scientists, and reform workers to “indulge the illusion of progressive fulfillment” as they valorized the new bureaucratic structure in search of a means for social control and order (Wiebe, 1967, p. 222).

This thinking became tenuous as the rise of mass communications challenged the progressive project with an increasingly commercial agenda and as progressives re-evaluated social class and human behavior in light of competing formulations of crowd psychology. On the one hand, the power of publicity as a muckraking tool used to galvanize a national public around vital social issues was immense. In the process, the new journalism gave rise to propaganda analysis, which Carey (1995) describes as “the unmasking of attempts by interests groups to control and manipulate the press [. . .] aimed at provoking public action rather than theoretical reflection” (p. 388). On the other hand, the public became the problem of the mass, defined “increasingly by its vulnerable condition of isolation and spectatorship” produced by the new mass media, which put it at risk of ideological manipulation (Ewen, 1996, p. 56). The public, then more broadly defined, seemed potentially unruly under the strain and uncertainties of modernity, yet it could be rendered passive by its fragmentation and diffusion. Social institutions of communication such as the burgeoning professions of public relations and advertising recognized that strategies for managing Le Bons irrational crowd, Trotter's herd, or Freud's unconscious desire were needed to rationalize public opinion, which, so it seemed, could also be put to work to “make the world safe for democracy.”

When the European powers entered into the Great War in 1914, the idea of propaganda had not yet been linked with these seemingly benign civilian professions. Rather, propaganda had been the political currency of government. But as publicity could be deployed to make known the horrors and abuses of modern living under the dominance of the trusts, so too could individuals sympathetic to the needs of big business appropriate its vigor to amplify their cases. Increasingly, publicity became an institutionally organized apparatus defending the interests of the powerful in the tug for public opinion. Upon entrance into world war, belligerent governments were not remiss in seeing the advantages of having well-organized information bureaus to disseminate their propaganda, but initially, at least, clear distinctions between publicity and propaganda were not pronounced. Propaganda as a form of “geopolitical name-calling” came during and after the war when for the first time people became aware of and alarmed by its efficacy in the service of state power (Gary, 1999, p. 9). In the US public mind's eye during the war, however, propaganda was primarily associated with Germany and German violence because British and US propagandists made it so.

Mark's (1957) work, for example, shows how a negative perception of propaganda came to be associated with underhanded activities by Germany to win US public opinion during US neutrality. Early in the European war, US journalists vociferously countered the propaganda of German—US alliances and worked to link the activities of such groups to US neutrality law violations by the German government. The release of the so-called “Albert letters” contributed in no small measure to the intensity with which the public became interested in propaganda and would summarily adopt its negative connotation. Having fallen into the hands of a US agent, these papers were published in the New York World with sensational headlines promising to expose the extent of “German propaganda,” which readers undoubtedly found shocking. Marks (1957, pp. 5–8) argues that alleged German offenses such as buying newspapers to control news, agitating for strikes in munitions plants, lobbying for arms embargos, and setting bombs on ships and destroying canals surely contributed to war propaganda hysteria and successfully linked German propaganda with conspiracy, espionage, and violent sabotage in the public's mind for the duration of the war and long after. Moreover, anti-German US writers and political elites actively infused the public with the idea that German propaganda was not only insidious but covertly invasive, having targeted US citizens before the war through the “psychology of suggestion” (Marks, 1957, p. 10). Thus, the association of propaganda with Germany alone and the linking of the term with acts of criminal violence as well as the attempt to influence public opinion “were both reasons for not liking Germany and for not liking propaganda” (Marks, 1957, p. 15).

Britain, of course, was also competing over winning US public opinion at the start of the Great War in Europe. The British, however, were largely successful because they had targeted and won the support of US opinion leaders well before the United States entered the war (Lavine & Wechsler, 1940). The Wellington House War Propaganda Bureau intended its propaganda campaign to reach foreign elites not through the overt and mass methods characteristic of the German propaganda ministry but through a disguised and indirect campaign that targeted important people in positions to influence others. The British policymaking elite was accustomed to the personal appeal in British diplomacy with foreign elites and generally was not familiar with or skilled at the business of manipulating mass popular opinion. It also was assumed that political elites would resent the efforts of any foreign government in trying to sway the thoughts and behavior of its populace without its sanction. For the first three years of the war, the British strategy cautiously avoided overt propaganda in its overseas campaigns,² which “was not simply a device to prevent clean hands from getting dirty but the product of a genuine belief in the value of disguised and indirect propaganda” (Sanders & Taylor, 1982, pp. 101–102). Pamphlets and articles written by famous British writers, for instance, were attractive to US publishers and were less likely to be traced back to the British government as its source.

In the United States, the extensive use of propaganda as an instrument and strategy of state power is explained, in part, by the marshaling of the liberal thinkers who had conceived of publicity as a progressive tool (Vaughn, 1980). When President Wilson was faced with the task of persuading a reluctant public to support an interventionist war, progressive intellectuals wrote him about the need for an infrastructure to mobilize public opinion on a widespread scale. In 1917, Arthur Bullard wrote a treatise arguing that the United States should avoid the errors of the European nations' decision to censor war propaganda. Rather, the United States needed to provide an open statement as to why isolationism was to be abandoned and an infrastructure for mobilizing public opinion in the government's favor should be instituted. What was needed was a publicity campaign that would make the call to arms “definite and explicit” and would serve as “a ringing inspiration” to the average US citizen asking, “What can I do?” (Bullard, 1917, p. 35). In this appeal to Wilson, Bullard suggested setting up a non-partisan publicity bureau. Relying on the benevolence of publicity, the idea would be to relentlessly publicize the needs of the nation and the activities proffered by US citizens serving their country by requisitioning space on the front page of the newspapers, thus calling to service a “draft” of trained writers to feed “army stories” to the public and to enlist a corps of press agents, poets, and publicists at home and abroad to aid the campaign (pp. 42–43). It was imperative to stimulate robust public opinion, Walter Lippmann also argued, by controlling deceit while also not suppressing truth. War could achieve the objectives of peace if done so properly, which was to say that the question of censorship should be handled not by the military but by civilians whose democratic proclivities would have the insight to disseminate information wisely (Vaughn, 1980, pp. 5–6). In March 1917, Lippmann submitted a memorandum to presidential advisor Col. Edward House offering a rationale for abandoning neutrality and a set of ideas for how to mobilize public opinion.³

On the heels of advice from progressive intellectuals and his war secretaries, Wilson instituted the Committee on Public Information (CPI) in April 1917, one week after Congress declared war on Germany. He appointed former muckraking journalist George Creel to head the bureau (which also came to be known as the Creel Committee). Despite its improvisational start,⁴ the scope of the CPI rendered it into an unprecedented ministry of propaganda to sell war, “a gargantuan advertising agency the like of which the country had never known,” comprising an array of activities unparalleled “until the rise of totalitarian dictatorships after the war” (Mock & Larson, 1939, p. 4). Despite what became the CPI's questionable means to an end, it was able to attract leading progressives who sincerely felt that the European war threatened democracy; thus, they aligned themselves with the state publicity bureau while holding a “naïve faith in the integrity of the American government and its leaders and in the power of ideas to transform men and society” (Vaughn, 1980, p. xii). It was also the case, Vaughn points out, that “propaganda” did not yet have the negative connotation that it earned from the fervor with which the CPI did its work, nor did the intelligentsia of the time witness the abuses of later propagandists. As well, Kennedy (2004) notes, a number of nationally known socialist intellectuals may have anticipated the setbacks pro-war sentiments would afflict on the party⁵ and so they “sought refuge in the Wilson administration's welcoming embrace,” hoping they might also “use the war emergency to further the socialist cause” (p. 27). Yet, by condoning the paradox of what became his administration's legacy in the manipulation of public opinion, Wilson adopted policies that would enforce loyalty through repressive measures on the one hand and would enact state censorship without seeming to do so on the other.

In charging Creel with the task of galvanizing public support for war, Wilson put his faith in Creel's determination to implement policy in which censorship and publicity could coexist in such a way that the former would be “voluntary” and the latter would, as Mock and Larson (1939) put it, choke all channels of communication with officially approved information, “leaving little freeway for rumor or disloyal reports” (p. 11). Creel believed that some policy of censorship would be needed, but he resolved it could be attained without the heavy price of formal law; rather the bureau would rely on the “aroused patriotism” of his professional colleagues (Creel, 1920, p. 16). In his unabashed postwar memoir of CPI history, Creel (1920) called the committee's mission “the world's greatest adventure in advertising” (p. 4) as he praised the stockpile of notable contributors: renowned scholars, journalists, writers, and novelists for writing pamphlets, news articles, and stories; famous artists and cartoonists for designing posters and other artwork; film professionals for their work with the Signal Corps, the CPI film division, and the commercial industry; prominent national figures in politics, the military, and foreign relations for their speaking contributions; and an army of some 75,000 Four Minute Men speakers for saturating local communities nationwide with upwards of a quarter of a million patriotic speeches.⁶ These materials, Creel (1920) wrote, “became an arsenal from which speakers and newspapers drew whole batteries of speeches and editorials and special articles,” filling the pages of “privately published patriotic collections” and “widely used text-books in history and civics” (p. 109).

Linking the CPI with publicity and the German campaign with an increasingly vile perception of propaganda – that is, the domain of lies and deceit, but especially violent misdeeds – crystallized the distinctions among white, black, and gray propaganda that were well recognized by the time of World War II.⁷ Writing in the Scientific American in April 1918, Creel (1918a) devoted an article to the German “campaign of lies.” Three months later, in The Annals of the American Academy, Creel (1918b) explicitly distinguished the US approach from its adversary by positioning US propaganda as if it were a form of public diplomacy (on the basis of its openness) rather than psychological warfare:

In sharp contrast to the transparent magnanimity of the CPI's foreign and domestic campaign, Creel alleged that Germany and Austria promised imprisonment and execution for their citizens if caught in possession of CPI literature that had been smuggled across enemy lines (Creel, 1918b, p. 185). On the home front, Creel insisted, the CPI's efforts relied on direct presentation of educational and informative facts. This strategy, Creel boasted, worked to fight intolerance, indifference, and ignorance without concealment or repression. It relied on inspirational appeals to the intellect that would move people “through their minds, rather than their emotions” and with “unanswerable arguments that would make every man and woman know that the war was a war of self-defense that had to be waged if free institutions were not to perish” (Creel, 1920, p. 100).

Notwithstanding Creel's imagined sense of the CPI's mission, the repressive impacts of the committee's patriotic zealousness spread far and wide, and it was dogged with controversy throughout its tenure, prompting Henderson (1969) to call the CPI the “irue progenitor of the USIA” (pp. 23–24). The patriotic fervor with which the CPI instituted its objectives worked to squelch dissenting opinions through emotional appeals designed to foster a climate of fear and hatred. Opponents of war, voices of conscientious objection, and pacifists became subject to the severe local harassment of vigilante groups or more formal punitive measures ensured by the Espionage and Sedition Acts. US citizens who openly objected to war or those who did not vigorously support the war were subject to intense scrutiny and made to prove their loyalty. Some cases of vigilantism were state-sanctioned, such as the unruly surveillance activities of the American Protective League, whose members, with the tacit approval of Attorney General Thomas Gregory, conducted “slacker raids” involving physical assaults on people deemed to be dissenters. To speak up for the rights of immigrants and labor in this atmosphere of patriotic fervor was “to risk being persecuted for disloyalty” and “to criticize the course of the war, or to question American or Allied peace aims, was to risk outright prosecution for treason” (Vaughn, 1980. pp. 88–89). The committee's view toward labor, Ross (1996) argues, was the catalyst to “an exploding national intolerance of political dissent” that left an indelible mark on the Cold War sentiment starting in 1918, not 1945” (p. 23). Combined with the “l oose” interpretation of the Espionage Act, the labor movement was conveniently crushed and domestic dissent was subsumed by a jingoistic national mood. The “majority's acquiescence to the draft and the war,” Zinn (2005) argues, “was achieved by shrewd public relations and by intimidation – an effort organized with all the power of the federal government and the money of big business behind it” (p. 368).

In the wartime climate of fear and recklessness, the US Justice Department actively complied to keep dissenting opinions out of the public sphere. In retrospect, Gary (1999) notes, this had to do with the emerging recognition of propaganda as invasively dangerous to democracy, requiring some measure of inoculation. People, it seemed, needed to be protected from German propaganda or any speech that could be conveniently deemed “un-American” during a time of national crisis. By the war's end, the Justice Department successfully convicted about 900 prosecutions out of the 1,956 cases brought before it. Almost all of the convictions rested on evidence that treated opinions about the war as statements of facts that were condemned as false because, as First Amendment scholar Zechariah Chafee noted, “they differed from the President's speech or the resolution of Congress declaring war” (Gary, 1999, p. 186). Hostile discussion to the idea of war was hence unprotected by the Constitution. In trying to explain the climate of excess during the Great War when looking back on the eve of the next one, Chafee, along with other postwar scholars and intellectuals, blamed “propaganda as the chief culprit” (Gary, 1999, p. 186).

Postwar Discourses: From Critique to Application

The idea of propaganda decidedly shifted in the postwar public imaginary. Although the CPI and the British propaganda apparatuses had successfully convinced a nation of US citizens that Germany and the Central Powers had committed war crimes, the discovery that the US public had been the target of British propaganda – and that all the combatants had used and abused propaganda to suit their interests – forced the purview on propaganda to change; it was now popularly conceptualized as “all lies.” Postwar publications such as Will Irwin's “An Age of Lies” (1919) reassessed the distorted arguments leading to war, Sir Campbell Stuart's Secrets of Crewe House (1920) detailed the scope of British propaganda operations, and Charles Hunter Hamlin's Propaganda and Myth in Time of War (1927) revealed the entangled financial relationships among US bankers, industry, and Allied governments. Hamlin's indictment of the CPI was unequivocal, calling it “the greatest fraud ever sold to the public in the name of patriotism and religion” (Hamlin, 1973a, p. 92). Similarly, Arthur Ponsonby's Falsehood in Wartime (1928) exposed such widely circulated atrocity stories as the German “corpse factories” and the “Belgium babies” of the British Bryce Report as either patently false or simply unsubstantiated in any credible way. Even the German U-boat sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania, which was used in part to justify the US entrance into the war, turned out to be an armed ship carrying munitions and other contraband. Indeed, the atrocity story “became a piece of evidence in the belief that ‘propaganda’ was synonymous with ‘lie,’ a further evidence that the American public had been terribly deceived, as well as the explanation of how and why Allied propaganda had been so shockingly effective” (Marks, 1957 p. 44). The discovery of British and other Allied propaganda consequently focused the spotlight on US propaganda. But, Marks (1957) argues, the issue was much less about the casualty of truth than it was the “shock” that hit when “it became clear that propaganda was a force capable of conquering the learned with as much ease as it conquered the average man” (p. 45). To be sure, war hysteria left few educators⁸ outside its path (Angoff, 1927; Grattan, 1927; Hamlin, 1973b). Consequently, propaganda was perceived as a new kind of omnipotent and insidious force.

Critical suppositions about propaganda's effects in the war's immediate aftermath attached themselves to a new perception of the public as a modern mass incapable of discerning rational argument, or at least rendered defenseless when victimized by nefarious machinations of propaganda. “The cruelest damage,” Kennedy (1980) argues in relation to the progressives' postwar change of attitude, “was visited on their very social philosophy, their most cherished assumption about the reasonableness of mankind, the malleability of society, and the value of education and publicity as the tools of progress” (p. 90). The irrationality once ascribed to the working class, to Le Bon's irrational crowd at the turn of the century, appeared to be “the habitual filter through which human nature, in its most general terms, was understood” (Ewen, 1996, p. 144). This formulation, as Ewen (1996) shows, involved multiple renditions. Gabriel Tarde, for example, had suggested that the crowd, when dispersed through the mechanisms of modern communication, lost the contagion that made it unruly and thus could be controlled. The association of people in mobs and the “herd instinct” that governed them was inevitable, claimed Wilfred Trotter, making people susceptible to leadership. Following Le Bon's understanding of the crowd as a productive part of the cyclical rise and decline of civilizations, US sociologist Robert Ezra Park argued that the crowd was a necessary phase in the evolution of institutions and in the birth of social movements, in particular (Leach, 1986). The crowd also held out the promise of its manageability because it lacked culture and a stable social structure (p. 105). The public was theorized as dispersed and anonymous, united not by physical proximity or interaction but by an imagined sense of community, which made it interesting from the perspectives of both psychology and business marketing.

As collective behavior underwent conceptual transformations (involving crowd, mass, market, and public), so too did viewpoints on the best way to understand propaganda. In the 1920s, the progressive critique dominated the discourses on propaganda, which characterized it writ large as a menace to society. However, social scientists who took an interest in the study of social influence and public opinion formation more broadly construed began to shift the emphasis of inquiry from humanistic critique to scientific analysis. All the while, the problem of whether the public could protect itself from the authority of propaganda remained at the forefront of concern.

For Walter Lippmann, the answer to this question was, categorically, no. Having been disturbed by the successes of war propaganda and by his role in the “engineering” of public opinion during the war, Lippmann decried propaganda's abuses in a democratic state. For Lippmann (1920), propaganda was an “increasingly disserviceable mechanism” with few virtues, which had been separated out and given another name such as “advertisement” or “advocacy” (pp. 49–50). The focus for Lippmann, however, was on what he identified as the problem of democracy and its relation to public opinion in the modern age of communication. This had to do, in large part, with the unreliability of the press to inform the public, particularly when the stakes for winning public opinion had become critical to institutional power. Lippmann made this case in three essays published in Liberty and the News (1920).⁹ The project of liberty in a democracy required the uninhibited flow of information. In the first place, the news functioned to ensure the veracity of information, but it was also necessary to make it comprehensible to people because most people live in the “pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses,” what Lippmann (1920) considered the detritus of second-, third-, and even fourth-hand information, preying off comfortable “prepossessions” in the face of unmanageable complexities of “assertion and propaganda” (p. 55). Taking up the question of propaganda directly, Lippmann argued that because journalists had turned to their consciences to decide what to publish during the war, news had consequently become confused with propaganda. Lippmann conceived of liberty, in contradistinction to propaganda, as a robust environment conducive to inquiry and judgment, optimally in service to society. “Without protection against propaganda,” Lippmann (1920) insisted, “without standards of evidence, without certain criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation” (p. 63). Thus, “there can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies” (p. 64).

The press, however, was only part of a bigger problem. In his influential book Public Opinion, Lippmann (1922) framed the issue epistemologically: people, including journalists, know the world not as it is but as the “pictures in our heads” represent it. In the struggle to make sense of reality, imagination precedes experience. The inescapable human propensity to stereotype combines with a store of cultural preconceptions and prejudices, intentional censorship, and the compression of complex information to digestible messages, to limit access to the facts of the world outside the pseudo-environment. The intentions of self-interested parties complicate this relationship to the point of risking representative government, given the public's perceptual cognitive deficit in deciphering politically motivated distortions. In short, the public was too easily incapacitated by propaganda's quotidian exploits, and thus susceptible to the “manufacture of consent” (Lippmann, 1949, p. 248). In effect, Lippmann debunked the very premise of the omnicompetent citizen central to a functioning democracy and called for the institution of an expert class – equipped with specialized knowledge to operate on behalf of the public – to wade through and clean up the muck obscuring perception and access to facts.

Herein lay the solution to propaganda's threat to democracy: “the ‘technic’ employed by scientifically trained and disciplined policy experts” (Gary, 1999, p. 31). Only it wasn't so clear, as Gary (1999, pp. 31, 33) suggests, whether Lippmann thought the technocratic elite itself would be exempt from propaganda's mesmerizing effects. In any case, Lippmann's instrumentalist theory of expert-driven democracy lent legitimacy and credence to the imminent paradigm shift to positivist social science, despite what Jansen (2008) refers to as Lippmann's “cosmopolitanism” and his deep commitment to the ideals of his mentor, Graham Wallas, and his “Great Society.”¹⁰

Propaganda was a threat to rationality, the prerequisite to a functional democracy, but it also had utility as an instrument of manipulation expedient to government, especially when the managing of consent was construed as necessary, as in crisis: “The necessity is often imagined, the peril manufactured. But when quick results are imperative,” Lippmann (1922) proposed, “the manipulation of the masses through symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing done” (p. 236). Propaganda warranted study to dissect its mechanisms so that it could be made to work for society. Underscoring its radicalness, Gary (1999) notes that Lippmann's position was “a powerful and profoundly elitist idea, one that argued for expert-driven politics, a politics of manipulation, a politics of empty symbols, a politics bereft of an active and self-interested public” (p. 33). Similarly, Carey (1995) argues that Lippmann's expert-centered policymaking apparatus “took the public out of politics and politics out of public life, depoliticizing the public sphere” (p. 390).¹¹ Indeed, by the time he wrote The Phantom Public in 1925, Lippmann's estimation of the public diminished to the point of referring it to as a “mere phantom,” that is, to an abstraction residing outside political activity as bystander or spectator, unable to anticipate or comprehend the critical issues of a democratic state.

Lippmann's instrumentalist prescription for salvaging democracy in the age of modern communications prompted John Dewey to challenge his indictment of the public. “It is not that there is no public,” Dewey wrote in The Public and Its Problems (1927), but that the public was “too diffused and scattered,” easily distracted by rival interests, and disposed to habits of thought that were conditioned by culture and society (pp. 137, 158). Although Dewey agreed that propaganda was problematic for democracy, he argued that the problem was less the fact of propaganda than the “emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the mass of men [that create] the conditions of which the exploiters of sentiment and opinion only take advantage” (p. 169). The state of mass society warranted concern because the public was kept scattered by the diversions of mass entertainment and consumerism, fodder for the ad men and public relations specialists. Indeed, he agreed that hired hands for publicity in the service of government was antithetical to democracy, but the solution was not expert paternalism; rather, it was “the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion” (p. 208). Dewey thought Lippmann's expert class could not be counted on in lieu of the public; what was needed was for intellectuals to bring the public back into the project of democracy. The best way to do this involved better communication through education and inquiry, combined with unfettered flows of ethical uses of publicity. Thus, for Lippmann, “democracy rose and fell with the intelligence of the masses,” while Dewey insisted that “the widespread debunking of popular intellectual capacities by democratic realists was not a conclusive sign of the innate incompetence of the masses but a failure to achieve meaningful forms of public participation” (Peters, 1989, p. 212). Lippmann treated postwar publicity and propaganda as companion adjuncts to political power, but Dewey held on to publicity as the early progressives imagined it – as the free flow of expression and information, which, if employed at the local level of community, could be part of the solution to propaganda.

The flipside of the progressive critique belonged to the public relations professionals, who forwarded arguments in defense of the field in the wake of the Great War. One such apostle was former CPI official Edward Bernays, who in 1923 published Crystallizing Public Opinion, a practitioner's perspective on the growing profession of public relations and management of public opinion. Influenced by Trotter's ideas on the malleable crowd and Lippmann's thoughts on managing public opinion, Bernays's exposition was a clear attempt to neutralize the profession's association with “that vaguely defined evil, ‘propaganda1’” (Bernays, 1923, p. 12). Recalling the prewar progressive enunciation of publicity, Bernays resituated the publicity man as the “public relations counsel” whose talent included honed intuition and the application of a wide range of psychological measures to assess the public mind. In short, the public relations consultant was an indispensable service to US capitalism and democracy, “ideally a constructive force in the community” whose work was derived out of responsibility to the public of individuals and institutions (p. 57).

Bernays (1923) agreed with the progressive critique insofar as he thought mass society posed new challenges to social organization requiring social engineering by experts. Propaganda was necessary to combat the predispositions of the common mind. Ideas did not exist in isolation but were formed by “precedent authority, habit, and all the other human motivations” (p. 97). Stereotypes could be reinforced or contested, or new ones could be created as a means to desirable ends. Moreover, people were subject to the herd mentality, so propaganda used effectively worked to overcome “the censorship of the group mind and herd reaction” (p. 122). On this point, Bernays took issue with Lippmann's assertion that propaganda relied on censorship by equivocating on the term. Bernays claimed that from his professional perspective the opposite was true. Propaganda was a purposeful attempt to get the individuals to surpass the censorship of their own minds – their “logic-proof compartments” that precluded them from “seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction” (p. 122). The PR counsel's important function was to “understand and analyze obscure tendencies of the public's mind” and to create the symbols that appeal to “instinct and universal desires,” which will bring about the desired response (p. 173). Thus, knowledge of individual and group psychology was imperative to the business of public relations.

Bernays (1923) declared propaganda a neutral mechanism by reducing the question of whether it was good or bad to a dependency on the merit of the cause and the accuracy of the information used to further it. One person's notion of the public conscience was another's ascription of sinister propaganda, depending upon whether one's disposition was in or out of “sympathy with the accepted point of view” (p. 70). “The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’ really is the point of view,” Bernays claimed. “The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don't believe in is propaganda.” (p. 212) Nothing prevented propaganda from serving the demagogue's intent on pulling the wool over the public's eyes. But, if the industry held itself up to the moral standards proposed by Bernays, if the public relations counsel scrutinized his actions, if he premised his actions with truthfulness and accuracy, then he would avoid propagating harmful or “unsocial” ideas (p. 215).¹²

Many of the assertions made in Crystallizing Public Opinion are repeated in Propaganda (1928), but here Bernays took on the word “propaganda” directly in an attempt to normalize the concept in the public's mind and to win approbation of its routine use. As Miller (2005) points out, “Propaganda is primarily a sales pitch, not an exercise in social theory” (p. 17); consequently, its goal was to reach potential corporate clientele. In this volume, Bernays distanced “the new propaganda” from wartime propaganda gone awry and justified its employment as a natural technique amenable to the development of peace.¹³ An apologist for capitalism, Bernays detailed propaganda's wonders when put to work servicing business, but he also included sections on political leadership, women's activities, education, social service, and art and science.¹⁴

Neutralizing the Menace: Social Science and the Behavioral Approach

Bernays's supposition declaring propaganda's neutrality was famously reiterated by social scientist Harold Lasswell, who at one point compared the morality (or immorality) of propaganda to a “pump handle” (Lasswell, 1928). His first book, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927a), decidedly sharpened the focus of propaganda with a social scientific lens, and his name became most notably associated with propaganda as an object of study within political science, although his background with the Chicago School of sociology reflected broader interests. Having been influenced during his doctoral work by political scientist and former CPI official Charles Merriam, Lasswell wrote his dissertation on the content and techniques employed by the major belligerents of the Great War, which “seemed to place him at the driving center of the social and intellectual movement to study mass persuasion” (Sproule, 1997, p. 49). Lasswell's book may have seemed in some ways like an addendum to the progressive critique because he was critical of the abuses of propaganda to serve self-interest from all sides, but his larger treatment is framed more as a disinterested, if not prescriptive, account of the necessity of propaganda in modern large-scale warfare. In fact, Gary (1999) argues, the most distinctive aspect of Lasswell's work was his “insistent distancing of his objective analysis from the war generation's moral outrage about propaganda” (p. 61).

In the first place, Lasswell (1927a) showed how all the belligerents used propaganda in ways that would mobilize their civilian populations to their own ends, most egregiously using atrocity stories to instill hatred for the enemy and outright lies to demoralize the enemy. But he also rejected the predominant contemporary critique of propaganda. He argued that propaganda was not inherently mysterious, cunning, or noxious. Rather, when considered systematically, which he did, propaganda could be shown to be a rational and expedient endeavor in the measurement and formation of public opinion, which during wartime “calls forth the most strenuous exertions” (p. 8). Defined as the “direct manipulation of social suggestion” using “significant symbols” such as “stories, rumors, reports, pictures and other social communication” (p. 9), Lasswell maintained that propaganda's success depended on mobilizing the civilian population with particular uses of propaganda which, in turn, depended on the extent to which the propagandist understood the limits of the targets' predispositions in perception and behavior. Although he did not use the term, later communication scholars associated Lasswell's attribution of propaganda's power with the so-called “hypodermic needle” model of direct media effects (Chaffee & Hochheimer, 1985; Lubken, 2008), against which “limited effects” experimental research would take shape (see Chapter 29, this volume). Lasswell's (1927a) comment that “propaganda is one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world” (p. 220) overshadowed his attention to the social forces circumscribing its success given the large body of critical and empirical work on propaganda to which Lasswell contributed and the uncertain implications of the new media environment dominated by mass media.¹⁵

Pushing conceptions of its hazards aside, Lasswell (1927a) positioned propaganda as but one of three critical elements to be used by any country interested in winning a war, alongside the coercive pressure of the military and the economic pressure of access to war resources. Illusion, however, was better than coercion and this could be accomplished most efficaciously through social manipulation, so great were the “psychological resistances to war in modern nations” (p. 47). As a technique of warfare, propaganda held no privileged purview; it could be used to lie and all historians and “seekers of truth” wrote respective histories blaming the enemy (p. 53). Accordingly, Lasswell refused to blame the medium for the ends to which propaganda might be put. Rather, his treatment justified its various uses (and abuses) as unavoidable or inevitable and with a certain agency of its own: “the wolf of propaganda does not hesitate to masquerade in the sheepskin. All the voluble men of the day – writers, reporters, editors, preachers, lecturers, teachers, politicians – are drawn into the service of propaganda to amplify a master voice” (p. 221).

This argument was equally if not more salient with respect to peacetime. In an article for the American Political Science Review, Lasswell (1927b) defended propaganda as a necessary adjunct to the Faustian bargain of democracy: “Most of that which formerly could be done by violence and intimidation must now be done by argument and persuasion. Democracy has proclaimed the dictatorship of palaver, and the technique of dictating to the dictator is named propaganda” (p. 631). Selectively borrowing from Lippmann, Lasswell considered the manipulation of symbols as imperative to social control and the inhibition of violence. Expanding on this idea in “The Function of the Propagandist,” written for the International Journal of Ethics a year later (this also appeared in Democracy Through Public Opinion in 1941), Lasswell (1928) proposed that the need in a democratic society for propaganda was structural and that this could be reconciled within a system of ethics. The propagandist was better thought of as a “species of advocate” whose work, if vigorously pursued from all sides, would keep people interested in public affairs and bring social harmony to society in lieu of violence. It was “possible to make out a case for the idea that the long-run interests of society may be served by adjudicators and propagandists at the sacrifice of conformity between private and public convictions on their part” (p. 263). Propaganda was the weapon by which social scientists and ruling elites could also peacefully win stability.

For better or for worse, propaganda was here to stay, and with such conviction Lasswell heralded an intensification of propaganda analysis and the broader enterprise of public opinion research from the social scientific standpoint. Lasswell's interest in psychoanalysis and politics landed him a fellowship with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 1928, which marked the beginnings of a long-standing relationship with institutional funding. From 1930 to 1934, Lasswell's service on the SSRC's Committee on Pressure Groups and Propaganda resulted in a bibliographic project that included annotative references to works that spanned the terrain from cultural critiques to experimental and quantitative approaches (Lasswell, Casey, & Smith, 1935). In the introductory essay to the project, Lasswell (1935) summarized his case:

He reiterates the symbolic significance of propaganda as part of a “politics of prevention” (Lasswell, 1930). Distinguishing propaganda from a slew of words muddling its scope – education, pedagogy, information, news, publicity, public relations, and advertising – Lasswell (1935) introduced the idea of process and clarified the process of propaganda as “the transmission of attitudes that are recognized as controversial within a given community” (p. 3). Lasswell's accent on controversy is noteworthy because it reflected his interest in the management of political power by elites in world politics, which continued to separate out his understanding of propaganda qua politics from other analyses associated with social influence and behavioralism more broadly construed.¹⁶

The less politically charged language of empiricism characterized the behavioral approach, which would become the dominant paradigm for propaganda analysis and communications research in the United States for the next 50 years. Psychologists and sociologists had already begun to examine propaganda systemically, to classify it and identify its working mechanisms within the context of crowd psychology or the mass society thesis, but for some the dividing line between science and critique was not so clear-cut. For example, in his 1925 book Means of Social Control, Frederick Lumley devoted a chapter to propaganda alongside persuasion and advertising, noting its neutral Latin etymology and its modern-day analogous relation to dishonest publicity. Refusing the predominant public classification as “all lies,” Lumley suggested that while propaganda might sometimes be truthful, an important feature defining it is its de facto flight from the very label “propaganda” (p. 188). In an article for Sociology and Social Research, Lumley (1929) more emphatically stated his standpoint: propaganda is “almost wholly bad” because it is “inimical to intellectual development” (p. 324). In The Propaganda Menace, Lumley (1933) noted in the preface that he had been remiss in his earlier “superficial” treatment of propaganda and that “Professor Dewey's estimate of the dangers involved in propaganda was not exaggerated” (p. vii). In social scientific fashion, Lumley analyzed propaganda in terms of its content, its method (mechanical, literary, artistic), its affiliations, and its results and limitations, in order to detect it but also, in turn, to condemn it.

The progressive critique did not go ignored, but others such as Leonard Doob and Edward Robinson problematized propaganda's utility in light of the turn to scientific inquiry. In particular, they argued for a clear distinction between the value of scientific study and the “naïve” view of propaganda dominated by critique that identified it as “false, unwholesome, or subversive” (Doob & Robinson, 1935, p. 88). The disinterested or neutral analysis of the social scientist warranted defending, given contemporary pressures to condemn the practice of propaganda. Doob and Robinson agreed with Lasswell: Propaganda was “neither invariably better nor worse than ‘rational’ discourse” (Doob & Robinson, 1935, p. 89). These were relative ideas. What mattered was the end to which an appeal was put, whether it was intentional or unintentional, and how propaganda actually worked on people's perceptions and attitudes toward specific actions, which depended on the psychological predisposition of the targets, the nature of the suggestion, and the setting within which the propagandist worked. Important for Doob (1935) was to highlight both the unpredictability of success for the propagandist and the possibility and implications for propaganda as an unintentional endeavor, a point which he criticized Lumley for neglecting. In Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique (1935), Doob laid out the mechanisms underlying the “principles of propaganda,” which he illustrated with contemporary examples and through communications media such as the press, radio, motion pictures, stage, art, and other printed materials. The idea was to provide readers with an understanding and ability to recognize any and all propaganda, in all its manifestations, whether good or bad. Underlying Doob's project was the hope that people will “puncture the lies in the ‘truths’ which they accept, and appreciate the truths in the ‘lies’ which they reject” (p. 412). Only this way, Doob insisted, would people choose leaders wisely and inoculate themselves from fascism.

Propaganda and Media Effects

Consistent with broader trends in the social sciences, the inchoate body of scholarship soon to be identified as communication research lent itself to more pointed questions about the empirical effects of mediated messages in the 1930s and 1940s. The idea of the neutral observer informed by an array of quantitative tools (e.g., sampling, content analysis, survey questionnaires, interviews, measures and rating scales, experimental methods) began to push to the forefront of widely respectable (and more amply funded) inquiry and investigation. Propaganda critique did not entirely evaporate, but the appearance of positivist social science on the scene reshaped attention to Lasswell's definition of propaganda – the manipulation of significant symbols to influence collective attitudes – in the direction of an apolitical interest in the behavioral science of attitude change and media effects. Whereas Lasswell continued to think about propaganda as a political construct, intending to counter anti-democratic propaganda, other social scientists relegated propaganda to empirical study as uncontroversial mass persuasion.

One area of study still oscillating between critique and media effects, however, concerned the possible impacts of movie-going on early audiences of motion pictures, particularly children and adolescents. The motion picture, like all other facets of communication, had been enlisted to serve the war effort, which called attention to its possible illusion-generating properties, socializing influences, and insidious effects as a mechanism of propaganda (Jacobs, 1939; Johnston, 1939; Peet, 1936). Even before US entrance into the war, the moving picture as a new medium of communication was scrutinized for how its visual grammar might influence emotion, cognition, and the imagination (Lindsay, 1915; Münsterberg, 1916). In addition, the motion picture was vulnerable to attack on a morality front because it was feared that its content could contribute to delinquent, criminal, or immoral behavior of youth. Despite attempts to identify direct effects between the movies and crime in the 1920s, the research yielded inconclusive results, suggesting that wider social experiences of movie-going were important factors in shaping behavior. Yet discourses on the motion picture industry were controversial, and in a sense, they contributed to a shift of attention from the reputed harmful effects of propaganda to the idea that reform-minded counterpropaganda was itself a kind of propaganda.

In the late 1920s, an unprecedented nationwide effort was launched by what would become the Motion Picture Research Council – under the auspices of the Payne Fund – to study the influence of motion pictures on children and adults. Initially the impetus for the studies was split between reformist impulses emanating from the Rev. William Short, who had secured the funding in order to substantiate his calls for policy reform, and W. W. Charters, head of the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State University, who as director of the research team had intended an objective account of the motion picture underwritten by the protocols of social scientific methodology (Jowett, 1999, pp. 217–223). Short's intention was to compile a stockpile of scientifically based evidence detailing the offenses of movies and the movie industry, and then to launch, in his own words, a “program of propaganda and action” (Jowett, 1999, p. 217).

Over a four-year period (1929–1933), the council released an extensive series of selfcontained studies, the significant results of which were published in Motion Pictures and Youth (Charters, 1933). The Payne research did not expressly query the effects of propaganda vis-à-vis motion pictures on audiences. Rather, the studies concentrated more broadly on the effects of motion pictures on emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and conduct, in addition to measuring frequency of attendance and taste preferences. Most notably, the Payne studies indicated that movies exerted quantitatively measurable influences, but “individual differences,” such as age, sex, experience, and cultural background, were critical factors contributing to how children responded to motion pictures, as well as frequency of attendance (Jowett, 1976, pp. 222–223; Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996, pp. 83, 91). Moreover, consistent with Lasswell's suppositions on propaganda, the studies suggested that movies tended to reinforce already existing prejudices, attitudes, and behaviors rather than change them. Of the most controversial of the findings was Blumer's (1933) study on motion pictures and conduct, in part because it drifted from the quantitative methodology that dominated the bulk of the research and because Blumer's findings tended to support the criticisms that had been dogging the industry for a decade, or at least they could be interpreted that way.

Despite the Payne Studies' conscious attempts to present the interpretations as objectively as possible, the studies indicated “an underlying but subtle hostility toward the immense socializing influences of the movies” (Jowett, 1976, p. 225). The publication of Henry James Forman's Our Movie Made Children (1933), a popularized version of the study, represented an unabashed indictment of the industry backed by cherry-picked evidence from the Payne research. Forman had been employed to write the book with the express purpose of winning public officials' support for the establishment of a film censorship board. The Payne researchers defended their work in the face of Forman's efforts to link the studies' findings with a propaganda campaign. The internal controversy that ensued worked to obscure the importance of the studies' findings, which Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller (1996) argue had to do with a methodological paradigm shift that would influence future communications research (pp. 120–121). According to Lowery and DeFleur (1995), the pioneering efforts of Payne Fund studies reinforced “the legacy of fear that had been kept alive by strident denunciations of the evils of propaganda” while they also shifted concern from propaganda criticism toward the establishment of “the field of media research within the perspectives of science” (pp. 41–42).

A body of scholars increasingly coalesced around an emerging interdisciplinary field in the 1930s, making use of quantifiable data and funding awarded by foundations and the media industries to research attitude and behavioral change. The “agencies of mass impression,” as the 1933 President's Research Committee on Recent Social Trends called them, involved the one-to-many modes of communication that in the 1940s would be referred to as “mass media”: newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, and radio broadcasting (Czitrom, 1982, p. 126). In addition to propaganda analysis, research under other names began to define the nascent field of communications such as public opinion research, social psychology, and the emerging field of marketing research. The advertising field in the 1920s had already enlisted the behavioral science of psychology to assist in the influencing of consumer choices. Radio broadcasting's commercialization led the charge of integrating marketing with communication research. Broadcasters and advertisers alike stood to gain from measurements of their programming and advertising effectiveness. More than any other figure, social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld promoted this integration while establishing “the theoretical relevance of communication research based on applied problems” (Delia, 1987, p. 51). Lazarsfeld's establishment of an Austrian research center in 1925 that combined market research (and its funding opportunities) with social scientific inquiry was the template from which he would work institutionally in the United States (Morrison, 2008). In this way, Lazarsfeld's work shaped the direction of communication research for the next decade.

Lazarsfeld believed that marketing research could provide sound strategy and methodology in applied research for both predicting and controlling consumer behavior and, at the same time, the data by which psychologists could mine theory “to illuminate the subtleties of psychological processes, particularly in the area of motivation” (Czitrom, 1982, p. 128). In 1937, Lazarsfeld was appointed director of a new project, the Princeton Office of Radio Research (ORR), the full name of which was The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners (Rogers, 1994, p. 265). According to Buxton (2003), the Rockefeller Foundation initially supported the project because officials hoped it could yield insight into how commercial broadcasting might integrate educational, artistic, and public interest programming into its mandate. Radio, it was thought by the foundation's humanities division, “could be used as a vehicle for enhancing the cultural levels of the mass public” (Buxton, 2003, p. 301). However, under Lazarsfeld's direction, the project shifted away from the possible reconciliation between broadcasters and educators and instead moved toward methodological concerns in answering effects-related questions about radio listening.

A central focus of the work became the generation of hypotheses about measurable effects of persuasion, such as attitude changes in getting people to buy something. Despite its shift in focus, Lazarsfeld's radio research was enormously productive. In collaboration with Hadley Cantril, Herta Herzog, and CBS executive Frank Stanton, the radio project published four books and more than 40 articles (Lazarsfeld, 1940; Lazarsfeld, Cantril, & Stanton, 1939; Lazarsfeld & Stanton, 1941, 1979). The project pushed beyond the laboratory or experimental approach to radio taken by Cantril and Allport (1935) by using survey research, polling data, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and content analysis in examining all sorts of radio programming, such as daytime soap operas and popular music, as well as the panicked reaction to Orson Welles's broadcast, Invasion from Mars (Cantril, Wells, Koch, Gaudet, & Herzog, 1940).¹⁷ In 1939, Lazarsfeld and his project moved to Columbia University where he became a professor of sociology, and his radio research was administered through the newly developed Bureau of Applied Social Research, of which he appointed himself the director. Having made use of market research funding to pursue his larger research agenda,¹⁸ Lazarsfeld's scholarship would eventually crystallize around behavioral communications research and be linked most notably to a body of empirical work subsequently described as media effects, or “the limited effects model” (see Chapter 29, this volume).

Lasswell also was moving in this direction, but he remained true to his focus on propaganda as a means to exert and maintain political control, which he thought could be best achieved by integrating political propaganda with all other forms of social control. The late 1930s raised new concerns that would provide opportunities for scholars at the forefront of communications research. The question of what to do about propaganda in relation to the public held its ground, but the arrival of “antidemocratic propaganda” (Gary, 1999) onto the scene propelled Lasswell's expertise to the apex of policy work on communication and national security.

Propaganda, Education, and Policy

Two main strands of thought concerning the public's ability to protect itself against propaganda dominated the 1930s. Progressives and social scientists alike agreed that the public was psychologically vulnerable to the irrational, that it could be fooled at least some of the time, and that some measures were needed to counteract propaganda, or at minimum, to militate against mass persuasion directed at questionable ends. One response was to promote education as a defense against propaganda; the other was to counter propaganda with expert-directed propaganda. The former was the approach taken by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. The latter included the policy work sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. The roots of the tension over how to best protect the public lay in Dewey and Lippmann's respective stances on public and participatory democracy.

Dewey's thinking had stimulated others to consider propaganda more directly in relation to education. But the suggestion that education was the antidote to propaganda was not without its Lippmann-inspired skeptics. As several progressive critics had pointed out, educators seemed too easily swept away with the tide of war propaganda during the CPI campaign. New concerns included the infiltration of propaganda into school curricula during peacetime, and more alarming, the idea that educators and researchers themselves could be persuaded to lend their expertise to pseudo- or quasi-scientific projects sponsored and funded by private interests for commercial gain.¹⁹ At lower levels of education, fears of propaganda's dangers in everyday life resonated, prompting the National Education Association in 1929 to caution educators through an informational campaign against the possibility of propaganda infiltrating the school curriculum. In 1937, the National Council for Social Studies put out a yearbook entitled Education Against Propaganda that advocated for teachers to learn about public opinion research in order to aid their students in recognizing propaganda “disguised as information or entertainment” (Ellis, 1937, p. iii). Journalists, educators, and social scientists (including Lasswell and Hadley Cantril) wrote its articles.

One main culprit in the battle for clarity and rationality in knowledge over propaganda was the problem of language. If thinking could be understood scientifically, and if better thinking could be taught as Dewey maintained, then language was not to be neglected in the arsenal of double-sided weapons. The field of general semantics saw itself as the solution to obfuscation in language. People could be taught to think about language scientifically, they could be shown that language was distinct from reality (e.g., as in Hayakawa's [1941] map/territory distinction), and that it could be used to manipulate how one thinks. The way to protect oneself from loaded abstractions and vacant meaning was to deconstruct the machinations of language. In this way, semanticists such Alfred Korzybski, I. A. Richard, S. I. Hayakawa, and Stuart Chase argued that general semantics could inoculate people from the illogic and abuses inherent in word play on which propagandists depended. This line of thinking buttressed the call for education as a practical but imperative endeavor, which was taken up by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), an initiative for adult education started in 1937 by faculty and anti-propaganda progressives associated with Columbia University Teacher's College. The rationale underpinning the need for the IPA was the contention that propaganda worked because people failed to see it when it was in operation. Word play and logical fallacies were the grist for propaganda's emotional and irrational appeals, so the way to combat it was to teach people to detect its devices.

At the start, the IPA operated like a movement interested in advancing the propaganda critique, even as it called itself a non-partisan organization conducting objective research guided by scientific method. Its mission had two prongs: first, to formulate an anti-propaganda praxis that could provide adults with a model to analyze propaganda, and, second, to expose case studies or examples of propaganda by which an analysis could be walked through with lay readers using the model. The institute was successful on the first count, enough so to attract sufficient attention and funding to keep it going for another four years after the first publication of its volume, Propaganda Analysis: A Bulletin to Help the Intelligent Citizen Detect and Analyze Propaganda, in 1937. The second bulletin, “How to Detect Propaganda,” introduced to the general public a framework of strategies developed by Columbia University professor Clyde Miller, which he entitled, “Seven Propaganda Devices.”²⁰ As Sproule (1997) argues, neat “gimmicks” such as this and the “ABCs of Propaganda Analysis” gained widespread popularity because they satisfied a material need to do something for the public's benefit about the problem of propaganda. Book treatments such as Group Leader's Guide to Propaganda Analysis (Edwards, 1938), for example, offered a kind of hands-on practicum for educators to adopt. But the institute soon ran into trouble when the novelty of its atheoretical framework wore out and when it could not sustain the second part of its self-mandate in a timely fashion – to provide actual analyses of propaganda, especially contemporary examples. The institute's reliance on generalities and naïve analysis began to wear thin as its subscribers demanded more substantive research on actual controversies. More to the point for Sproule (1997), the culminating predicament for the IPA involved an untenable balancing act between foreign and domestic anti-propaganda at the crossroads of international crisis.

With nativist anti-Semitic propaganda on the rise in the United States and the likelihood of another world war around the corner, the stakes around the IPA's utility changed. The IPA's objective was to teach the layperson to identify propaganda content across an array of mediated formats, whether print journalism, photojournalism, radio, or motion pictures. The IPA bulletin topics ranged from domestic case studies in politics and industry to foreign war propaganda. Given that the institute tried to situate itself as a neutral enterprise, any and all propaganda was fodder for analysis, whether fascist, communist, corporate, or New Deal.²¹ An effort such as The Fine Art of Propaganda (Lee & Lee, 1939), a book-length study of Father Coughlin's incendiary radio rhetoric, provided a much-needed exposé on domestic anti-Semitism that garnered more support for the IPA in the short term. But the decision to publish War Propaganda and the United States (Lavine & Wechsler, 1940) pitted the institute against the pro-intervention movement because it treated all propaganda more or less as worthy of dissection and condemnation. US opinion leaders began to grumble that anti-propaganda was anti-democratic, and the institute's work came under increased scrutiny. Sproule (1997) explains the IPA's eventual demise in late 1940 as chiefly a conflict in theory versus praxis.

The IPA was never able to win the support of grantors interested in underwriting the kind of scientific research that could be wedded with policy concerns such as the work conducted by Lazarsfeld and Lasswell. The growing fascist movement in the United States, in combination with a consensus among political opinion leaders that Nazi propaganda was formidably extensive and demanded immediate response, brought new opportunities for communications research, particularly with respect to Lasswell's expertise. Lasswell's proposition that propaganda was a necessary instrument of modern warfare set up an argument for what should be the policy response to the Nazi menace. The question of whether democracy could endure anti-democratic propaganda had been raised by political scientist George E. Gordon Catlin in 1936. Catlin argued that the problem for a democratic government was not propaganda per se but rather a monopoly over expression. A democracy needed to use propaganda to promote its interests, but it must also permit the existence of competing propagandas. “This dilemma of tolerating but not being vulnerable to anti-democratic ideas,” Gary (1999) notes, “was the problem of propaganda for late 1930s liberals” (pp. 75–76). In effect, propaganda had to be met with better, more successful propaganda. Against this backdrop, Lasswell would be a central figure in a normative approach to communication policy and national security.

In 1939, John Marshall organized a “communications group” to begin a series of seminars with the intention of forwarding Lazarsfeld's research but “along more systematic lines” (Buxton, 2003, p. 308). The group was to undertake the study of “mass communication.”²² Having funded projects concerning educational uses of media, including Cantril's and Lazarsfeld's radio research, under Marshall's lead the Rockefeller Foundation recognized the utility in working with educators, broadcasters, related non-profits, and government agencies to forward the agenda of its humanities division. Marshall intended that the Communication Group bring theoretical and empirical coherency to bear on the rather disparate and insufficient state of communication research. From this seminar transpired the general framework that would become the dominant paradigm for several decades of communication research – who said what to whom with what effect?²³ The four-question scheme provided researchers with a model for analysis that could coordinate specific questions with appropriate research strategies, and that would underscore the empirical validity of effects. Although the framework was enormously valuable for its heuristic property, as Czitrom (1982) and other communication historians have noted, the omission of the “why” question in combination with the framework's reliance on behavioral science and empiricism effectively narrowed the scope of communication research and its explanation to “a process of persuasion” (p. 132). The broader questions of media power and long-standing rhetorical critique were pushed out of the picture at the same time that the view of propaganda as a neutral mechanism of mass influence began to crystallize under the group's influence.

Hitler's invasion of Poland and the threat of war, particularly the critical lack of preparation by the United States in relation to the problem of managing public opinion in the event of war, preoccupied the group at its onset. This at once produced consensus over the importance of a line of inquiry concerning propaganda analysis, but it also affirmed the group's incongruence over the instrumental use of counterpropaganda in service to national security and over what should be their role as intellectuals in preserving the democracy on the eve of crisis. Nevertheless, under Lasswell's guidance and Marshall's support, the group nearly immediately aligned its research program with the security needs of the state through the creation of what Gary (1999) calls a “propaganda prophylaxis” that would involve “both offensive and defensive propaganda intelligence work” (pp. 89–91).

The piercingly anti-democratic implications of the prophylaxis was not lost on the group but was for the most part overridden by several factors. The idea of propaganda in association with the state and warfare recalled bad memories in the public imaginary, as it did for some of the group members themselves, and its negative connotations undoubtedly fueled the isolationist platform in Congress that inhibited Roosevelt. Because the government was not yet supporting the communications research deemed by the group as necessary to national security, the foundation provided sanction for the group to robustly hash out any controversial questions framing its inquiry. The July 1940 seminar report, “Research in Mass Communications,” was in Gary's (1999) words “a crucial document in the intellectual history of communications research, in part because it was an ideological manifesto, intended to move scholars into the trenches of propaganda warfare” (p. 102) by justification of the imperative to control public opinion to save democracy.

Ironically, skepticism among social scientists over propaganda's omnipotence – which explained the group's insistence that effects be empiricized – also coincided with genuine fears over the government's unpreparedness in the increasingly pervasive face of effective Nazi propaganda. Thus, as Gary (1999) shows, by the time the US Justice Department signaled its formation of a “propaganda defense unit” in spring 1940, the foundation's humanities division “had already erected an extensive, coordinated network of propaganda research projects, and listening posts to monitor, document, and analyze the international traffic in propaganda, especially the Fascist variety” (p. 109). To be sure, Lasswell's expertise proved expedient to the government's wartime needs, as it would also solidify his stature as a “founding father” (Schramm, 1954) of the field of communication research.

Conclusion

By the eve of World War II, the idea of propaganda could not be relegated to the enemy alone. At the start of the Great War, progressive thinkers could make the case that the benign publicity apparatus they had in mind would achieve peace in democratic stride. But the atmosphere of intolerance generated from abuses of propagandists during the CPI's tenure at home and abroad overwhelmed attempts to bifurcate propaganda by national associations. During the interwar years, the idea of propaganda and the public's capacity to critically engage it underwent new-found scrutiny. If propaganda and publicity had been equivocal notions before the war, the postwar environment sharpened distinctions. At best, propaganda promoted the economic growth and stability of commercial enterprise as it managed public opinion accordingly. At worst, propaganda was the hangman's noose strangling the free flow of information vital to a functioning democracy. Despite the efforts of public relations practitioners to neutralize propaganda's vigor, the progressive critique held ground, visible through adult education initiatives and the civic-minded work of the IPA, until giving way to the administrative research agenda dominated by Lazarsfeld and his colleagues. As Wahl-Jorgensen explains in Chapter 26 of this volume, although the normative project of the Chicago School was well suited to address the wider sociocultural questions concerning cohesion, conflict, and control, “their tools were much less use in tapping into emerging agendas of propaganda and psychological warfare.” In the late 1930s when another war loomed, intellectuals, acutely aware of propaganda's viral-like propensity, worried over how to direct its potency toward democratic ends while also shielding the public from the possibility of contamination from foreign propaganda. For those scholars at the forefront of communication research as it intersected with national security policy, the solution could only be “democratic propaganda” as they, the experts, would engineer it.

NOTES

1 I am indebted to Barry Marks (1957), whose unpublished dissertation is central to this chapter's argument.

2 Brownlow (1978) claims that the secrecy of the British campaign stems from the fact that they found the need for propaganda “somewhat embarrassing” (p. 6.).

3 Vaughn (1980) suggests that Lippmann had a hand in setting up what became the Committee on Public Information (CPI), although former muckraking journalist George Creel was appointed to head it. Lippmann, who criticized Creel during the war's tenure, served in Europe as a military officer in an intelligence unit whose function was to disseminate propaganda across enemy lines. Vaughn (1980, p. 336, n. 9) notes that although the unit was separate from the CPI, its efforts were often coordinated with the committee's. See also Weingast (1949) and Cary (1967).

4 According to Mock and Larson (1939), the CPI was initially established for the purpose of managing the problem of censorship with the dissemination of war news.

5 At the same time, many pacifist progressives and the American Socialist Party were deeply cynical of the motives for US participation in the war. Increasingly, a rift grew on the left between those who deemed the war opportunism for US imperialism and expansion of capitalist domination and those who imagined that the war might provide an opportunity to pursue progressive policies.

6 Also see The Creel Report: Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (United States Committee on Public Information, 1972) for a detailed account of the strategies used to reach the nation and international community.

7 The origins of these distinctions is not decisively known, but all three terms were in use in the 1940s, especially black propaganda, which was associated with the Nazis, although all belligerent governments employ black propaganda. The distinction among them refers primarily to sourcing: white is known, gray is unknown or ambiguous, and black is hidden, distorted, or misattributed. See Cull, Culbert, and Welch (2003).

8 For a more complex account of the context in which academics worked, see Gruber (1975). In the context of public intellectuals, see Dewey (1917) and Bourne (1917).

9 Two of the essays, “What Modern Liberty Means” and “Liberty and the News,” were originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1919.

10 Revisiting dominant interpretations of Lippmann, Jansen (2008) argues that the causal linking of Lippmann's “non-positivist understanding of the nature and limits of scientific inquiry” to the effects traditions of mass communication is an “epistemological incongruity,” or misreading of Lippmann's corpus of work (p. 83).

11 Jansen strongly disputes this reading of Lippmann, arguing that Carey neglects to give recognition to the full weight of Lippmann's philosophical position, which would complicate Lippmann's understanding of how to activate democracy in a large-scale complex society. Jansen charges Carey with the most responsibility in framing the debate between Lippmann and Dewey as dichotomous, which has had the effect of subsequent scholarship largely overlooking their philosophical commonality

12 In kindred spirit to defend publicity work, public relations man Ivy Lee (1925) insisted that propaganda, as opposed to publicity, was bad only insofar as it failed to disclose the source behind it. As far as Lee was concerned, this was the chief distinction between propaganda and publicity, the latter being desirable as a strategy of “getting out the facts” because it could be held accountable.

13 A short time later, Lee (1934) addressed the uses of propaganda in an international context, forwarding the idea, in quick step with Bernays, that “legitimate international propaganda” could be used to win and keep the peace.

14 Notably, Bernays was among the first to attend to the idea of the group leader along the lines of opinion leadership, a concept that was examined academically some 20 years later. Bernays (1923) had touched on the subject in Crystallizing Public Opinion, suggesting that the leader held sway according to the judgment of the herd but that such potential power need not be associated with the leader's initial qualifications for leadership (p. 159). In Propaganda, Bernays (2005) expands on the idea, attributing his inspiration for its use as a PR technique to the CPI's successful enlistment of “key men” whose “mere words carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers” (p. 54).

15 Sproule (1997) situates the hypodermic needle model's history within the problematic of a paradigm shift in which the spokespeople for the new paradigm “misremember the preceding research tradition and its contributions” (p. 234). The emerging communication scientists erroneously charged the progressive critics of propaganda with assuming media effects rather than recognizing that their critique emphasized the relationship of propaganda to the larger sociocultural environment, which could resist propaganda and invite participatory democracy given the appropriate tools for exposing propaganda to the public. Lasswell's introduction to later editions of Propaganda Technique, written in 1970, more clearly couches his analysis in a wider sociocultural frame.

16 In the updated volume of Propaganda and Promotional Activities, entitled Propaganda, Communication, and Public Opinion (Smith, Lasswell, & Casey 1946), the authors suggested that “the usefulness of the present volume will be greatest if special attention is directed toward the structure of the emerging science of communication” (p. 3), which reflected the fragmentation of propaganda analysis from wider processes that included the progressive critique. Sproule (1997) argues that the original project conceptualized as a heterogeneous amalgam of cultural critique, disinterested experimentation, and case studies only “proved tenable” because the imminent split between the humanities and social sciences was still “relatively unobtrusive in 1931 when the project was initiated” (p. 51). In 1937, Public Opinion Quarterly was founded in the spirit of continuing the annotative bibliographic project.

17 The significance of the radio research would have an important impact on securing the funding for Robert King Merton and his team's study of singer Kate Smith's radio bond drive during World War II (Merton, Lowenthal, & Curtis, 1946).

18 Referring to David Morrison's early work on Lazarsfeld, Rogers (1994) writes that Lazarsfeld's interest was not mass communication per se but rather methodology. Rogers argues Lazarsfeld was a “diffident pioneer in studying the effects of mass communication. He saw himself as a methodologist, and communication was just a convenient bathtub in which to float his research boats” (p. 270).

19 In 1927, for example, it was discovered that the National Electric Light Association had sponsored academic research on electric power and commissioned educators to write textbooks in support of industry privatization (Gruening, 1931).

20 The seven propaganda devices identified were name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking, and bandwagon.

21 Because the institute had devoted much attention to fascist and pro-business propaganda, however, it opened itself up to the criticism that it was left wing, pro-New Deal, procommunist, or anti-business, which it tried to address directly (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1939, p. 106).

22 According to Rogers (1994, p. 222, footnote), Marshall's correspondence suggests he may have been the first to use the term mass communication in 1939.

23 Gary (1999, p. 88) contends that the original four-question scheme, widely attributed only to Lasswell, was actually the result of months of exchanges among the members of the seminar. The group's 1940 paper, “Research in Mass Communication,” identified the first question as who said what “with what intention” (p. 100). When Lasswell published the scheme, it became: “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect?” (Lasswell 1948). Buxton (2003) claims that the initial formulation of the “charting” of the questions belongs to Marshall.

24 One important outcome of the Communications Group driven by the historical moment was University of Chicago professor Douglas Waples's proposal to create a permanent institute for communications research that would train individuals to work as administrators and propagandists. What resulted was a two-year degree-bearing master's program to study communications, public opinion, and mass persuasion more broadly construed (see Chapter 26, this volume).

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