Death of the Liberal Class (14 page)
Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
Creel and his associates, which included artists, cartoonists, graphic designers, filmmakers, journalists, and public relations experts, saturated the cultural and intellectual life of the country with war propaganda. It did this by crossing the traditional boundaries of propaganda. It created the Division of Syndicated Features, one of nineteen divisions, which hired novelists, short-story writers, and essayists. These fiction writers masked the pro-war and pro-government message, in an example of social realism, in stories that reached an estimated twelve million people a month. Posters and ads in support of the war blanketed the country. Hollywood, which had a deserved reputation for sleaze, churned out war favourites such as
The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin
,
Wolves of Kultur
, and
Pershing’s Crusaders
. A movie titled
To Hell with the Kaiser
was so popular that Massachusetts riot police were summoned to deal with an angry mob denied admission. The film division nearly made enough money to pay for itself.
The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin
,
Wolves of Kultur
, and
Pershing’s Crusaders
. A movie titled
To Hell with the Kaiser
was so popular that Massachusetts riot police were summoned to deal with an angry mob denied admission. The film division nearly made enough money to pay for itself.
Creel’s committee established direct relationships with eighteen thousand newspapers, eleven thousand national advertisers and advertising agencies, ten thousand chambers of commerce, thirty thousand manufacturers’ associations, twenty-two thousand labor unions, ten thousand public libraries, thirty-two thousand banks, fifty-eight thousand general stores, 3,500 YMCA branches, ten thousand members of the Council of National Defense, one thousand advertising clubs, fifty-six thousand post offices, fifty-five thousand station agents, five thousand draft boards, one hundred thousand Red Cross chapters, and twelve thousand manufacturers’ agents.
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All were showered daily with war propaganda tailored specifically toward their interests and members. And the few institutions reluctant to spew out war propaganda were shut down.
16
All were showered daily with war propaganda tailored specifically toward their interests and members. And the few institutions reluctant to spew out war propaganda were shut down.
In a 1920 memoir titled
How We Advertised America
, Creel wrote that the “war was not fought in France alone”:
How We Advertised America
, Creel wrote that the “war was not fought in France alone”:
It was the fight for the minds of men, for the “conquest of their convictions,” and the battle-line ran through every home in every country.It was in this recognition of Public Opinion as a major force that the Great War differed most essentially from all previous conflicts. The trial of strength was not only between massed bodies of armed men, but between opposed ideals, and moral verdicts took on all the value of military decisions. . . . In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising. . . .There was no part of the great war machinery that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board—all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms. . . . What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.
The committee manufactured daily news stories through its news bureau that were run in the nation’s newspapers. It provided a syndicated news service to disseminate “facts” about the war. It had a foreign language division, with a large group of translators, to plant pro-American stories in the foreign press. It established a speaker’s bureau thanks to which speakers, known as “four-minute men,” would get up in crowded movie houses, in churches, at civic functions, or even on the street to deliver pro-war messages and raise money for Liberty Loan drives. By the war’s end Creel had some seventy-five thousand speakers who gave four-minute talks on topics prepared for them by the committee. Creel called them “the stentorian guard.” The CPI published “Red, White and Blue Books,” containing essays by prominent academics and historians, including John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, who argued for the war. Newspapers were never directly censored but were given guidelines and flooded with pro-war reports from the committee that were reprinted as news.
“CPI posters were in every post office,” Dos Passos wrote. “CPI information bulletins were on every bulletin board. Country weeklies and trade journals were nourished on Creel’s boilerplate. In an astonishing short time George Creel had the entire nation—except of course the disreputable minority who insisted on forming their own opinions—repeating every slogan which emanated from the President’s desk in the wordy war to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ ”
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The few figures who resisted, such as Bourne, Addams, Debs, Emma Goldman, or Bertrand Russell, became pariahs. The press accused them, with Creel’s help, of being disloyal and pro-German. Addams, the socialist founder of Hull House in Chicago, which provided aid to poor and working-class families, was booed when she spoke against the war at Carnegie Hall and branded by the
New York Times
as unpatriotic. She noted the shift in the press as early as 1915, when the papers began to “make pacifist activity or propaganda so absurd that it would be absolutely without influence and its authors so discredited that nothing they might say or do would be regarded as worthy of attention.” She went on to write, in
Peace and Bread in Time of War
, that “this concerted attempt at misrepresentation on the part of newspapers of all shades of opinion was quite new to my experience.”
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Voices of dissent were silenced under the onslaught.
Appeal to Reason
, a socialist journal founded in 1897 that provided an outlet for writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Mary “Mother” Jones, and Debs, had by 1902 the fourth highest circulation at 150,000 of any weekly in the nation. It opposed the war—not unusual for a publication at the start of the war—but its attempt to hold to its antiwar stance soon saw it come under tremendous pressure. The Espionage Act, making it an offence to publish material that undermined the war effort, effectively censored its content.
The Masses
, another left-wing journal, decided to cease publication for the duration of the war, but
Appeal to Reason
buckled and reluctantly agreed to back the war effort. The effect of Creel’s work on American debate and culture was cataclysmic.
New York Times
as unpatriotic. She noted the shift in the press as early as 1915, when the papers began to “make pacifist activity or propaganda so absurd that it would be absolutely without influence and its authors so discredited that nothing they might say or do would be regarded as worthy of attention.” She went on to write, in
Peace and Bread in Time of War
, that “this concerted attempt at misrepresentation on the part of newspapers of all shades of opinion was quite new to my experience.”
18
Voices of dissent were silenced under the onslaught.
Appeal to Reason
, a socialist journal founded in 1897 that provided an outlet for writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Mary “Mother” Jones, and Debs, had by 1902 the fourth highest circulation at 150,000 of any weekly in the nation. It opposed the war—not unusual for a publication at the start of the war—but its attempt to hold to its antiwar stance soon saw it come under tremendous pressure. The Espionage Act, making it an offence to publish material that undermined the war effort, effectively censored its content.
The Masses
, another left-wing journal, decided to cease publication for the duration of the war, but
Appeal to Reason
buckled and reluctantly agreed to back the war effort. The effect of Creel’s work on American debate and culture was cataclysmic.
“German courses were dropped from schools and colleges,” Dos Passos wrote.
German dishes disappeared from the bills of fare. Sauerkraut became known as liberty cabbage, German measles was renamed. German clover appeared in the seed catalogues as crimson or liberty clover. All manifestations of foreign culture became suspect. German operas were dropped from the repertory. The drive against German music culminated in the arrest of Dr. Carl Muck, the elderly and much admired conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
19
The virus of nationalism infected every aspect of society. Dachshunds were renamed liberty dogs. The City University of New York reduced by one credit every course in German. Fourteen states banned the speaking of German in public schools. German-Americans, like Japanese-Americans in World War II, provided convenient scapegoats. An angry mob in Van Houten, New Mexico, accused an immigrant miner of supporting Germany. The mob forced him to kneel before them, kiss the flag, and shout, “To hell with the Kaiser.” Robert Prager, a German-born coal miner, was accused in April 1918 by a crowd that swelled to 500 people of hoarding explosives outside of St. Louis. Prager, who had tried to enlist in the navy but had been rejected on medical grounds, was stripped, bound with an American flag, dragged barefoot and stumbling through the streets, and lynched as the mob cheered. At the trial of the leaders of the lynch mob, who appeared in court wearing red, white and blue ribbons, their defense counsel argued that the killing was justifiable “patriotic murder.” It took the jury twenty-five minutes to return a not guilty verdict. One jury member shouted out, “Well, I guess nobody can say we aren’t loyal now.” The
Washington Post
wrote of the trial that “in spite of the excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening of the interior of the country.” The explosives that Prager was alleged to be harboring were never found.
Washington Post
wrote of the trial that “in spite of the excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening of the interior of the country.” The explosives that Prager was alleged to be harboring were never found.
The severe weakening of populist forces during the war led to their obliteration when the war ended. The war propaganda, which used fear as its engine, instantly switched the target of its hatred from Germans to communists. During the Palmer Raids on November 7, 1919, carried out on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, more than ten thousand alleged communists and anarchists were arrested. Many were held for long periods without trial. When Russian-born émigrés such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Mollie Steimer, and 245 others were released from prison, they were deported to Russia. By November 1922
Appeal to Reason
was shut down.
Appeal to Reason
was shut down.
“By a campaign of publicity and advertising on a scale history had never witnessed before, by chicanery and lying, by exaggeration and misrepresentation, by persistent and long-continued appeals to the basest as well as the noblest traits of man, by every imaginable and unprecedented manner and method, the great financial interests, eager for war and aided by the international Junkers, thrust humanity into the world war,” wrote Berkman and Goldman in “Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace in 1919.”
Hatred, intolerance, persecution and suppression—the efficient “education” factors in the preparedness and war campaign—are now permeating the very heart of this country and propagating its virulent poison into every phase of our social life. But there is no more “Hun” to be hated and lynched. . . . But the Frankenstein and intolerance and suppression cultivated by the war campaign is there, alive and vital, and must find some vent for his accumulated bitterness and misery. Oh, there, the radical, the Bolshevik! What better prey to be cast to the Frankenstein monster?”
“Many people had long supposed liberalism to be the freedom to know and say, not what was popular or convenient or even what was patriotic, but what they held to be true,” Addams wrote. “Now those very liberals came to realize that a distinct aftermath of the war was the dominance of the mass over the individual to such an extent that it constituted a veritable revolution in our social relationships.”
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The CPI was closed on November 12, 1918, one day after the war ended. The activities of the committee’s foreign division ended a few months later. The employees of the CPI, however, had no difficulty finding work. Political scientist Harold Lasswell, who wrote one of the best studies of the power of the new mass propaganda in his book
Propaganda Technique in the World War,
noted that most of the former CPI experts instantly gravitated to government and corporate offices in Washington and New York. The director of the CPI’s Foreign Division, two years later, wrote that “the history of propaganda in the war would scarcely be worthy of consideration here, but for one fact—it did not stop with the armistice. No indeed! The methods invented and tried out in the war were too valuable for the uses of governments, factions, and special interests.” Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the father of modern public relations, who had worked in Latin America for Creel, became a major figure on Madison Avenue and an advocate of mass propaganda as a tool for governmental and corporate control. “It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind,” wrote Bernays in his 1928 book
Propaganda
. “It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.”
Propaganda Technique in the World War,
noted that most of the former CPI experts instantly gravitated to government and corporate offices in Washington and New York. The director of the CPI’s Foreign Division, two years later, wrote that “the history of propaganda in the war would scarcely be worthy of consideration here, but for one fact—it did not stop with the armistice. No indeed! The methods invented and tried out in the war were too valuable for the uses of governments, factions, and special interests.” Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the father of modern public relations, who had worked in Latin America for Creel, became a major figure on Madison Avenue and an advocate of mass propaganda as a tool for governmental and corporate control. “It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind,” wrote Bernays in his 1928 book
Propaganda
. “It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.”
There were critics of the new business of manufacturing public opinion. John Dewey challenged those who now routinely disguised propaganda as news. “There is uneasiness and solicitude about what men hear and learn,” wrote Dewey, and the “paternalistic care for the source of men’s beliefs, once generated by war, carries over to the troubles of peace.” Dewey noted that the manipulation of information was visible in coverage of post-revolutionary Russia. The
Nation
agreed in 1919, arguing that “what has happened in regard to Russia is the most striking case in point as showing what may be accomplished by Government propaganda . . . Bartholomew nights that never take place, together with the wildest rumours of communism in women, and of murder and bloodshed, taken from obscure Scandinavian newspapers, are hastily relayed to the U.S., while everything favorable to the Soviets, every bit of constructive accomplishment, is suppressed.”
Nation
agreed in 1919, arguing that “what has happened in regard to Russia is the most striking case in point as showing what may be accomplished by Government propaganda . . . Bartholomew nights that never take place, together with the wildest rumours of communism in women, and of murder and bloodshed, taken from obscure Scandinavian newspapers, are hastily relayed to the U.S., while everything favorable to the Soviets, every bit of constructive accomplishment, is suppressed.”
The Hun, the object of hatred and scorn during the war, was supplanted by the Bolshevik. Social manipulation through fear, which had consolidated the power of the elite during the war, was employed again and again to ferret out those attacked as “internal enemies” and ward off external ones. But it was corporate advertising, rather than government witch hunts, which would prove the most deadly. News had to do battle with huge, sophisticated and well-funded propaganda campaigns. It would also be denied the tools of emotional persuasion perfected by mass propaganda. News would be restricted to fact, to balance and objectivity. The powerful techniques of appealing to emotion, of creating pseudo-events that a public could confuse with reality, of constantly taking the pulse of the public through surveys and opinion polls to appear to give people what they desired, would be left in the hands of the enemies of truth. The public would be trained, as Bourne wrote, to communicate in a language in which “simple syllogisms are substituted for analysis, things are known by their labels, [and] our heart’s desire dictates what we shall see.”
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