In 2012, I published a large review essay in the journal
Istor of several books on the subject of war and public opinion (link
here, everything is available for free in PDF). Since it was published there in Spanish but written originally in English, I've decided to make the full text available here.
Manufacturing the
Manufacturing of Consent
Copyright 2012, by Patrick Iber
Books under review:
Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank, Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the
American Century, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
Alan Axelrod, Selling
the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Hugo García, The Truth
about Spain!: Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936-1939, Brighton;
Portland Or.: Sussex Academic Press, 2010.
José Luis Ortiz Garca, Ideas
en tormenta: la opinión pública en México y la segunda guerra, Naucalpan:
Ediciones Ruz, 2007.
Monica Rankin, ¡México,
la patria!: Propaganda and Production during World War II, Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
James T. Sparrow, Warfare
State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011.
Belmonte, Laura. Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda
and the Cold War, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
If it seems that the last few years have witnessed a
mini-boom in the publication of books about war and public opinion, I suspect
that is not an illusion. Some of the
books, especially those dealing with the United States, seem to have had their
origins in the run-up to the war in Iraq that began in 2003. It was a war that was widely considered
appalling throughout much of the world, and not merely appalling: next to
incomprehensible. Nearly seven in ten
Americans had somehow come to believe, seemingly prodded by the intimations and
framing of the administration of George W. Bush, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had
been directly involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Few others in the world shared that delusion. Faced with such an apparently successful
campaign of misinformation, historians, with all of the urgency they can
muster, began to look to past conflicts to examine the history of the
relationship between the politics of war and public opinion. Five to seven years later, we have, if not an
explanation for what the Bush Administration was able to accomplish with Iraq, then
at least some perspective on it. Taken together,
the books under review here show us that war has played a central role in the
creation of the idea of “public opinion,” and that the concept has been
transformed over time by new technologies of measurement and persuasion. But they also caution that the mutations of
war are not always predictable, and that “public opinion” is itself an invention
whose logic has changed with time.
The
broadest of the texts under review, Selling
War in a Media Age, is an edited volume coordinated by historians Kenneth
Osgood and Andrew K. Frank that attempts to offer a comprehensive picture of
how presidents sold war to the U.S. public over the course of the twentieth
century. The early essay by George C.
Herring argues that it was William McKinley (1897-1901) who established the
modern form of the U.S. presidency in both his care for public opinion and in
pioneering new techniques for directing it.
By modern standards, his methods were simple. McKinley read incoming mail to the White House
to judge public sentiment. To gain a
measure of influence over the press, he offered it special attention, inviting
reporters into the White House and selecting the information that he would give
to them. These modest attempts to shape
the views of the public grew more intense with the clamor for war with Spain in
1898. At first, McKinley attempted to
tamp down enthusiasm for war, which was then extremely popular and heavily
promoted by the powerful yellow press of the era. Yet once the war began, McKinley shifted his
approach, getting approval from Congress for broad powers to end the war in
Cuba, imposing censorship on the press and equating dissent with a lack of
patriotism. Because the war ended
quickly it did not generate much controversy, and McKinley’s greatest
challenge—at which he failed with both the public and with Congress—was to
build the case for the acquisition of a large, formal overseas empire. (The Platt Amendment which left Cuba a
semi-sovereign quasi-dependency of the United States was the result of his
failure to acquire it outright.)
McKinley may have inaugurated the modern presidency in the United States,
but public opinion functioned to set limits to his actions, and remained shaped
much more by private groups than by government officials.
The
public’s apparent appetite for war with Spain was only part of what made the
problem of “public opinion” emerge at the turn of the twentieth century. Technologies
such as inexpensive telegraphy made rapid communication and global coordination
more possible than ever. Expanding ranks
of literate citizens, living in cities with newspapers, could learn more about
what was happening in foreign affairs in ways that made them newly relevant to
politics. At the same time, those new
technologies also made possible new forms of mass advertising. Walter Lippman, one of the most important
American thinkers on the subject of the new “public opinion,” wrote in 1914
advertising now represented an effort by business to “take charge of
consumption as well as production… [not only] to supply a demand […] [but] to
educate the demand as well.”
Changes in forms of living in the first
decades of the twentieth century made it a time for thinking seriously about
whether democracy was compatible with these new efforts to shape and manipulate
a mass public.
Selling the Great War, was born in 1876
in Missouri. Early in his career, he did
work writing humorous pieces for the yellow press in Chicago and New York
before starting his own newspaper in Kansas City. His paper tried on a few left-wing ideologies
before Creel settled into an abiding belief in “Americanism,” the assumption
that the American form of democracy was the apotheosis of human political
achievement. Nevertheless, Creel became a crusader for progressive causes,
writing pamphlets in favor of women’s rights and against child labor. While he concocted many of the details for
his work on child labor, Creel generally came to believe that the best
propaganda would be based on facts, artfully presented in ways that would
convince the broader public to follow along.
What most
of the new thinkers on the problem of public opinion shared was an assumption
that the public was highly malleable and propaganda likely to be
successful. And with such techniques in
hand, there was little doubt that the state would eventually put them to use to
“educate the demand” for war. U.S.
participation in World War I required far greater levels of popular
mobilization and sacrifice than had the war with Spain in 1898, and it led to
innovation in the field of propaganda through the creation of the Committee on
Public Information in 1917, under the direction of George Creel. Creel, the subject of Alan Axelrod’s
Creel was
not simply a man of ideas; he was also a follower of political
personalities. He was an enthusiastic
supporter first of Theodore Roosevelt and then of Woodrow Wilson. Identifying with heads of state, Creel came
to believe that the management of public opinion was not incompatible with
democracy, but essential for its practice.
The public did not have the knowledge that would guide it to the right
decisions, and so it became the job of the propagandist to make the right
information available in ways that would lead the public to follow the
enlightened decisions of the government, giving it the public support to be
effective. In Creel’s mind, propaganda
made it possible to mobilize a public for war without destroying democracy, by
creating public support for necessities of state.
Fewer than
ten days after the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917, a Committee on
Public Information was created with Creel at its head. Creel described the CPI as an alternative to
censorship, although it was more of a companion: harsh laws were enacted to
punish those who would publish information useful to the enemy. But Creel thought that flooding the public
sphere with information provided by the government and relying on voluntary
cooperation of the news media would be sufficient to manage the information
that reached the public. The press was
given lists of the sorts of things that they should not publish, such as troop
and ship movements, but they were compensated by being allowed to embed
journalists with troops: as Creel saw it, bringing the press into government
service.
In an age preceding
even commercial radio, the mass media with which Creel and his committee had to
work were newspapers, magazines, and silent films. But one of the most important innovations that
came from the CPI was the group of so-called “Four-minute men,” thousands of volunteers
who spoke in public meetings in favor of the war. From April 1917 to November 1918 they
delivered 7,555,190 speeches, largely before movie screenings but also in
churches, union halls, social clubs, and so on.
Although he appreciated their enthusiasm, Creel grew concerned by the
anti-foreign intensity of some of the Four-minute men, and tried to correct
their messaging by having them trained along the same lines as door-to-door
brush salesmen: he wanted them to sell the benefits of the product rather than
the product itself. The benefits of the
war was, for Wilson and Creel, paradoxically, a world without war. Creel mixed faith in democracy and the
goodness of America with the approach of a businessman, relying on ideas in
advertising and sales that were entirely contemporary and intended to feel that
they were part of American culture.
Creel’s CPI
also developed techniques for reaching foreign audiences. It had programs targeted at the publics of
the Central Powers, for allied Europe, and for Latin America, especially
Mexico, where the principal aim was to counter the influence of German
propaganda. In Mexico, theaters had to
accept CPI-produced films, where messages were crafted to avoid offending
allies, or be cut off entirely from Hollywood supplies. While propaganda to allied nations aimed to
make them receptive for President Wilson’s goals for the postwar order, propaganda
aimed at the Central Powers was intended to undermine morale. When food became scarce there, the CPI
dropped leaflets referred to as “paper bullets” showing images of the plentiful
rations of the American soldier. Yet
though Creel believed that the management of public opinion was a permanent
feature of democracy, he thought of the CPI as a wartime measure, and began
dismantling it within twenty-four hours of the cessation of hostilities.
Though wartime propaganda is as old
as war itself, it is not surprising that the innovation of a public information
bureaucracy emerged in the context of a wartime democracy, where new
technologies and widespread literacy made mass propaganda possible, and
anxieties about the misalignment of elite interests and popular concerns led people
like Creel to imagine that there was democratic virtue in the management of
opinion by elites. If this vision bore
an uncanny resemblance to what Plato described as the ideal form of republican
aristocracy—in which the ruling class consisted of those with philosophical
truth and “souls of gold” which endowed them to manage the affairs of society
in a virtuous and enlightened fashion, this was perhaps because they responded
to a similar fantasy of elite rule for the benefit of the common people. That an ideal aristocracy and an existing
democracy were being described in roughly the same terms would be one source of
criticism of the elite enthusiasm for the management of public opinion in the
years to come. But it was also a clue
that the new propaganda would be by no means confined to democracies. Creel’s work was well-known to Hitler and
Goebbels, who considered it a model.
Neither war nor a democratic public were necessary to make mass propaganda
attractive.
Within the United States, the CPI
fascinated and repelled. At the level of ideas, it stirred new thinking on the
problem of the public and propaganda.
Never was the phrase “public opinion” more popular in the English
language than in the years surrounding U.S. participation in World War I.
Not everyone, of course, thought that the
development of mass propaganda was such a stirring development as did
Creel. Walter Lippmann, the author of
Public Opinion (1922), had probably
wanted Creel’s job, and criticized him from the outside as insufficiently
committed to freedom of expression to be entrusted to operate the machinery of
censorship. Lippmann came to share
Creel’s view that the democratic public required guidance—his famous phrase was
“the manufacture of consent”—but wanted to see it done by impartial,
technocratic experts advising the government. Lippmann wanted government by
statistician and engineer, who would be, like Plato’s souls of gold, “specially
trained […] to a wider system of truth.”
Others, like liberal philosopher John Dewey,
argued the Lippmann should not have given up so easily on the promise of public
deliberation and of an educated, engaged citizenry.
Still others embraced the apparent power of
the new techniques. Edward Bernays, who,
in
Propaganda (1928), wrote proudly
of a public manipulated by an “invisible government” of taste and opinion
makers, had been on staff in the Latin American division of CPI. Considered one of the founders of the
discipline of public relations, in the 1950s Bernays famously lobbied the U.S.
government on behalf of the United Fruit Company to portray the government of
Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala as a Communist threat to U.S. interests,
contributing to instigating a CIA-directed coup that overthrew it.
Outside of the realm of ideas, and
back in the realm of popular politics, Creel’s work represented a concrete
rather than an abstract threat. Appointed
by the executive, Creel was deeply unpopular with Congress, which kept his
budget restricted, seeing in him an unaccountable danger and a potentially
dangerous weapon of presidential authority.
(Republicans in Congress also didn’t want his CPI to propagandize for
Wilson’s planned League of Nations.) In
many ways, Creel set the standard for future U.S. propagandists: he had a brief
left-wing past, boundless faith in the idea of “America,” the forced optimism
of a commercial salesman, and was hated by Congress, in part, for representing
both the present and the future in ways that did not, in fact, represent
universally shared values or visions within the country.
But did his
propaganda work? Creel thought it did,
or at least said so in his retrospective,
How
we Advertised America, which he published in 1920 to defend his actions.
His critic Lippmann thought so too, saying
that public opinion had coalesced into a kind of Rousseauian “general will”
during World War I.
Emily S. Rosenberg’s essay on World War I in
Selling War in a Media Age, however,
notes that there remained significant resistance to American participation in
the war among rural Americans, especially in the South, as well as in ethnic
organizations and some labor unions.
Among elites, one needed to look no further than Congress to find
critics of Wilson’s plans for war. Rosenberg also observes that if Creel’s
propaganda had been more successful, then wartime surveillance might have been less
extensive. Finally, she observes that,
for as much as public relations had its origins in wartime propaganda, the same
advertising techniques were adopted by groups who, in the 1930s, sought to
discredit war and advertise peace.
Rosenberg’s
insight is compatible with much research in political science, which shows that
competitive political campaigns generally change few minds, though they often
teach people to adjust the intensity of their preferences. This seems to be so
not simply because of what no self-respecting political scientist of the
present age would describe as the material base determining beliefs in a
superstructure of opinion, but also because, in competitive circumstances such
a contested election, campaign messages tend to be met with other, equally
effective counter-messages.
Among the books under review here, the one
that does the most justice to this observation is Hugo García’s
The Truth about Spain!
Of all of
the wars under examination, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 has done the
most to retain its romance. This has
happened in part because of its importance as the great left-wing cause of its
era, and in part because, at least outside of Spain itself, its history has
been written, contra the general maxim, by its Republican losers, not the
Nationalist victors. (And beyond that,
because of the considerable sympathies that their anti-Communist story generated
in the atmosphere of the Cold War, by the losers of the losers: the independent
Marxists and anarchists who were persecuted on the Republican side by the
eventually dominant pro-Communist faction.)
The conflict was multilayered, the Republican and Nationalist coalitions
internally diverse, and both sides counted on an effective foreign policy for
their success, all the while the insisting on the essentially Spanish character
of their struggle.
Franco’s
Nationalist side received material support from Fascist Italy and Germany. The Republican government received the
material support of the Soviet Union and of the broader worldwide Communist
movement in the volunteers of its International Brigades. The Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas also
assisted the Republic. But it was the
powerful Western democracies—Great Britain, France, and the United States—whose
intervention might have altered the course of the conflict. Formally, all three were committed to a
policy of non-intervention (though France and probably even the United States
would violate strict neutrality in secret aid for the Republic when it was
already too late).
And though it was France where the policy of
non-intervention originated, it was Great Britain that became that policy’s
greatest champion. García’s book
examines the propaganda efforts of the Republicans to move British public
opinion to come to the aid of the Republic, and those of the Nationalists to
keep Britain neutral.
Both the
Republic and the Nationalist side adopted the basic models pioneered in World
War I: an authorized office of state propaganda and the imposition of
censorship. The offices were intimate: a
few officials, a few desks, a few foreign contacts in the right places. Although the Republic retained Madrid, and
therefore state foreign press offices and telephone and telegraph infrastructure,
and entrusted censorship to the sensitive and intelligent Arturo Barea, foreign
journalists found it relatively easy to get candid reports of what was
transpiring in the Republican zone through. The Nationalists’ mobile propaganda and
censorship office was rudimentary, but banning hostile journalists from
reporting from its zone eventually proved effective.
Still, the
Republic would seem to have had an almost insurmountable propaganda advantage
in the intellectuals who supported it and worked to produce Republican
propaganda: Pablo Picasso, writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Arthur Koestler, director
Luis Buñuel, the photographer Robert Capa, and even the historian Barbara Tuchman. The formidable propaganda apparatus of the
Soviet Union at work in Western Europe, consisting of multiple “front” groups,
was put at the disposal of the Republic, and, as García shows, the Communist
International footed a substantial part of the bill for Spain’s propaganda
operations. But this advantage was not
so great as it seemed. Contrary to
legend, many Spanish intellectuals fled Spain when the conflict erupted and
remained effectively neutral in the conflict.
Repression by Communists in the Republican ranks created defections of
other anti-fascist intellectuals, and even major works, like Picasso’s Guernica, took time to be recognized as
masterpieces.
More
broadly, attempts to enlist intellectuals were part of campaigns to claim the
mantle of “Western civilization” against the barbarism of the opponents. In its propaganda, Franco’s side described
itself as a national movement against Marxism, on the side of religion,
property, and order. The Republic
portrayed itself as defending a democratically constituted government against
military intervention and as the champion of progress over feudalism, before shifting
to the more enduring and apocalyptic message of the defense of democracy
against fascism. Each side publicized
the atrocities of the other: Nationalists focused on anticlerical murders in
the early days of the conflict, while the Republic publicized the relentless
murders taking place behind Nationalist lines. Republican propaganda, though necessarily
partial and often crude, was, García argues, in the main more honest: it
admitted early atrocities from its own side, for example, while trying to
stress that they had been stopped. The
Nationalists seem to have more frequently resorted to simply making up facts
and figures.
Perhaps Republican
propaganda had some effect. In the end, a solid majority of Britons favored the
Republican cause. They did so, however, without
the intensity that would have led them to support a change in the policy of
non-intervention. Partly this was
because the existence of competing Nationalist and Republican narratives made
both sides seem less than worthy of the risk of aid. The propaganda landed among a public whose
preconceptions of Spain were of general backwardness and barbarism; these
impressions may simply have been enhanced by brutal war photography, creating
repulsion from war rather than sympathy for one side or another. For the most part, only people on the
extremes of British politics felt that the consequences of what was happening in
Spain merited intervention. By going
beyond a history of propaganda institutions and including its impact, García’s
careful and sophisticated book cogently argues that the Spanish Civil War
showed that the new propaganda was beginning to prove less consequential than
its early practitioners had expected.
Still,
although the old tendency to describe the Spanish Civil War as a dress
rehearsal for World War II shifts attention from the very different coalitions
that fought in each, that coming conflict would fundamentally remake the world
of propaganda. Mobilization for World
War II was so thorough, and the bureaucracies that fought the war so powerful
(and so useful!) that they would prove difficult to dismantle. The Cold War that followed provided the state
of permanent emergency that served to justify maintaining operations whose use
was supposed to be restricted to wartime.
But, as three books under review show, the techniques of propaganda were
also transformed by the conflict. Both
Monica Rankin’s
¡México, la patria!
and José Luis Ortiz Garza’s
Ideas en
tormenta deal with aspects of the Mexican experience of World War II; Jim
Sparrow’s
Warfare State with the
United States.
In ¡México, la patria!, Rankin emphasizes the institutional
development of U.S. and Mexican propaganda apparatuses. The United States in the era of Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy pioneered new programs for cultural exchange
with Latin America, largely in response to Nazi efforts across the continent
that preached that Germans and Latin Americans shared a common
anti-Americanism. The U.S. countered
with a discourse of Pan-Americanism and the idea that the Americas had a common
history and destiny. Each of these
messages found some sympathetic audiences: at the dawn of World War II, Mexico
was internally divided with respect to the world situation and the path forward
for its own development. Resistance from
U.S. and British oil companies and their governments to the nationalization of
Mexico’s oil resources in 1938, for instance, left even the anti-fascist
government of Lázaro Cárdenas with a need to negotiate with Germany about oil
sales.
Both Rankin and Ortiz Garza cover
similar territory in describing the communities in Mexican society that were
receptive to pro- and anti-fascist messages. The mainstream Mexican press, with
its urban and upper-class readership, was accustomed to accepting paid editorial
content and in the late 1930s happily took subsidies from German propaganda
operations in Mexico to run pro-Nazi materials.
The pro-Soviet corners of the Mexican left, such as the artists of the
Taller de Gráfica Popular and the unions around Vicente Lombardo Toledano, were
the first to produce anti-fascist propaganda, although this was suspended after
the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939.
There is considerable evidence, however, that the majority of Mexicans,
including many in positions of power and authority, looked favorably on a
potential Nazi victory at the beginning of the war.
We know this because the demands of
World War II made the extension of new polling techniques routine—itself an
important transformation and the primary subject of Ortiz Garza’s Ideas en tormenta. The first quantitative studies of Mexican
public opinion were carried out by polling experts working for the Office of
the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the branch of the U.S. government
created for the purposes of unifying the hemisphere for wartime. The OCIAA first formed a joint venture with
the pioneers of polling in George Gallup’s firm to investigate the media
consumption patterns of people from Latin America. They collected the first scientific polling
data ever gathered in Latin America in Brazil and Argentina, but the
collaboration was short lived. In
Mexico, Harald J. Corson, a former employee of Standard Oil in Argentina then
working as an expert on public opinion in the OCIAA, began collecting data
about the feelings of Mexicans about their position in the world. Early polls, gathered in 1940, must have been
troubling for U.S. planners: a survey of the Mexican army showed that 90%
considered themselves anti-U.S. and 80% of them as pro-Nazi. Pro-Nazi feelings arose from admiration of
“Teutonic discipline,” anti-Communism, and shared anti-Americanism. Corson
collected data with increasing sophistication, breaking down responses by the
class of those who were interviewed.
When he asked : “¿Ha pensado
sobre los efectos de que una victoria Nazi tendría sobre usted personalmente?,”
in May 1941, 53% of poor Mexicans (versus only 22% of rich ones) thought that a
Nazi victory would have positive consequences for them personally.
Events
would bring changes in those sentiments.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the pro-Soviet left in Mexico
loudly clamored for a declaration of war against Fascism. New laws against subversion and “social
dissolution” targeted Nazi actions in the Mexico. Pro-Nazi material in the mainstream press
began to disappear, both because of changing feelings among the readers of the
newspapers and because of the actions of Allied propaganda agencies. British and French efforts to combat German
propaganda in 1940 had pressured the Mexican government to use its monopoly on
subsidized newsprint to get involved in censoring pro-Nazi material. With European budgets strained, the U.S.
picked up much of their work, and by the end of 1941, it became almost
impossible to find explicitly pro-Nazi news in Mexico.
As media
technologies changed, they required propaganda offices to work in new
forms. Newspapers primarily reached an
elite audience, but radio did not require literacy and had the potential to
reach a mass audience. Mexico’s most
important radio station by far was XEW, owned by Emilio Azcárraga, which had
the most powerful radio signal in the Western Hemisphere. Azcárraga’s trajectory, though not the
subject of much attention by either Rankin or Ortiz Garza, is broadly
suggestive of general trends in the Mexican media. There is evidence that Azcárraga, prior to
1941, contributed financially to Nazi causes and worked to keep British
propaganda films out of theaters.
But in mid-1941, when German submarines sank
Mexican tankers and Mexico drew closer to the Allied cause, the incentives for
a businessman like Azcárraga shifted.
All of the opportunities were suddenly in cooperation with the United
States, and the sophisticated operation for investigating the use of media of
the OCIAA could be put to new use.
As the data presented in Ortiz
Garza shows, as Mexican involvement with the Allies deepened, there was a
gradual but steady improvement in views of the United States and the United
Kingdom. Though there were many causes
for those changes; it was not something that was left to chance. In collaboration with a private advertising
agency, for example, the OCIAA collected data on radio use around Mexico. Because of low telephone penetration, people
could not simply be called and asked about their habits. OCIAA’s solution to that problem was to
purchase several portable radios and hire people to walk the streets of the
city. When they heard a radio in use,
they tuned the portable radio until the programming matched, marked down the
station in question, and gradually generated a thorough portrait of Mexicans’
listening habits. (One such worker is
pictured on the cover of this issue of
istor;
all in all more than one third of all radio sets in Mexico were sampled in the
years of research.
) The surveys showed the dominance of XEW: it
was about four to six times as popular as the next most popular station at all hours
of the day. The OCIAA learned more and
more about how to provide popular programming as the war went on, using the
data to shuffle around its pro-Allied news and variety programs until some of
them dominated their time slots. (The
Mexican government’s program, the
Hora nacional,
was broadcast simultaneously on all radio stations and thus had no
competition. As we will see, it promoted
themes consonant with those of the OCIAA.)
By the time the war ended, polling and public opinion research were
recognized by the media and private business in Mexico as fundamental tools in
understanding and “educating” demand.
Neither Rankin nor Ortiz Garza is
interested in deep theorizing about the nature of public opinion, and so it
seems to me that both might have said more about this fundamental
transformation in the understanding of the idea of public opinion. Before it could be quantified, public opinion
could only be a kind of mass sentiment understood—or misunderstood, perhaps—at
the level of intuition. When it came to
be measured, these Rousseau-ean qualities disappeared. Suddenly public opinion was reconfigured into
a mass of statistics: from that point onward, public opinion could only be
understood—or misunderstood, perhaps—in the language of science. This change was not value-neutral. During the Cold War many left-wing
sociologists in Latin America would declare polling a Yankee import that served
only to divide the “people.” Polling, of
course, did not create diverse views among diverse populations, but it
certainly made it more difficult to craft compelling populist narratives about
revolutionary transformation. The PRI,
at any rate, thought so, and more or less did away with public opinion polling
in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
But a new understanding
of the nature of public opinion was not the only outcome of Mexico’s
participation in World War II. Mexican
state propaganda during the war, which was institutionalized in 1941 in the
Oficina Federal de Propaganda, hit on
several themes. As described by Rankin,
its work employed themes of patriotism and national unity and defined good
citizenship as hard work in the national spirit. Both Mexican and U.S. propaganda focused on
the rhetoric of democracy. (Private
businesses echoed government campaigns, crafting popular messages that
coincided with the official line. I have
seen a magazine ad from 1944—surprisingly effective on me even at 70-odd years
remove—for
Victoria beer which read:
Victoria de las democracias. Victoria de México.
) For Rankin, the most significant theme of
Mexican wartime propaganda was that of industrialization. That subject papered over some of the
differences between left- and right-wing factions within the revolutionary
family, and between private business and the state. “Mexico’s weapon is production,” the slogan
became, to fit with the form of participation in the Allied cause common to
most of Latin America. Industrial
modernization seemed like it could solve both national and international
problems for Mexico at the same time.
For Rankin, World War II becomes the key to explain how the Mexican government
transformed a revolution, which had included an attention to the distribution
of wealth within the country, to the postwar “Mexican miracle,” focused on increased
production. Pushing her argument
further, she might have said that the PRI (as opposed to the PNR and PRM that
preceded it) was forged in the national and international conjuncture of World
War II. That would take a conflict which
has been considered relatively marginal to Mexican history and place it
squarely at the center.
Warfare State: World War II
Americans and the Age of Big Government asks many of the same questions
about the United States as Monica Rankin’s ¡México,
la patria! does of Mexico. How did
the transformations of war change the expectations that people had for their
lives and for their governments? And how
did the state manufacture consent for its priorities in a time of
conflict? If for Rankin, the
reorientation of revolutionary Mexico to the postwar “miracle” is the puzzle
that needs to be explained, for Sparrow it is the remarkable acquiescence of a
dominantly anti-statist political culture to the dramatic expansion of the powers
of the federal government. Sparrow
argues that U.S. citizens came to incorporate the messages that both government
and private business were using to articulate a form of ideal citizenship in
the image of the combat soldier. Making
the soldier the center of the national project made a form of nationalist,
militaristic, yet social democratic egalitarianism possible—and with it an
expansion of the powers of the government far beyond what the New Deal had ever
offered, and with far less controversy.
The inclusion of racial minorities, especially African- and
Mexican-Americans in combat service provided a platform on which they could
assert equal citizenship in the postwar period—though it would take a
generation of activism to begin to realize that promise.
Jim
Sparrow’s
Far more
than most of the other texts under review, Sparrow’s deeply-researched text
goes beyond presidential and institutional history and into the social history
of institutions. Some of his most
interesting sources were the products of sophisticated research that different
branches of the U.S. government performed on its own people. Most relevant to
the review here, this data generally shows the limits of state propaganda to
influence its intended audience. The
state, preparing for total war, needed to manage the morale of both citizen and
soldier. The Roosevelt administration
drew on the cultural and educational programs of the New Deal, repurposed with
new messages. This required changes from
the implicit compact of the New Deal. Big
business, the villains of much New Deal rhetoric, was (as in Mexico) equated
with production, and production with heroism.
Some programs cherished by New Deal liberals, like efforts to inspire
patriotism by collecting folk music (the music “of the people”) fell flat when
it was discovered that soldiers didn’t care for the music.
Messaging
for war, as ever, required both the production of information and the
surveillance of the population. The FBI
investigated and catalogued rumors which bubbled up from people seeking
explanations for transformations beyond their control. Many rumors drew on popular prejudices: in
the North, rumors of Jewish conspiracies and draft avoidance proliferated. In the South, where the war economy made the
African-American labor more expensive, gossip blamed northern agitators for
racial tensions. And in the West, some
snarled that the Japanese, confined to concentration camps, ate better than
anyone else. The government tried to use
“rumor clinics” to counter the accusations that some groups were receiving
preferential treatment, and therefore not making the same sacrifices as others
in the context of war, but found that “debunking” was counterproductive. A study of radio programming showed that
trying to debunk a rumor actually led to more people believing the falsehood. Sparrow argues that bringing rumor into the
legitimate attention of government strengthened the national security
bureaucracy at the expense of other parts of the government, helping to lay the
ground for the centrality of surveillance to governance during the Cold War.
Propaganda’s
power was limited, but the social transformations of wartime affected every
American. The economy grew rapidly; demand
for labor meant incomes grew at a healthy clip.
Inequality shrank – income tax rates were as progressive as they ever
would be – almost 70% for incomes over $100,000 and 90% above a million
dollars. (In 1942, Roosevelt even
proposed a 100% tax rate for incomes above $25,000 as a way of ensuring more
equal sacrifice and preventing war profiteering. It was popular but never enacted.) But as the economy expanded, so did the tax
base. Only about 7% of the labor force
had paid federal income tax as late as 1939, but by the end of the war the
obligation would extend down even into the working class. Tax collection relied largely on voluntary
cooperation, and people had to be educated both in how to do it, and why doing
so was a democratic duty. Beyond taxes,
the majority of American households purchased war bonds, casting the actions in
similar terms. Studies showed that
people bought bonds for reasons that independent of the government’s messages,
but they bought them anyway, whether from guilt, competition, or even,
occasionally, profit.
Similar
stories could be told across the social life of wartime America. The government endeavored to help society
make it victorious in war. Government
messages were sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected, and sometimes modified;
they were given individual, local, and regional inflections. To give two examples: workers were encouraged
to maintain production as a patriotic duty, but strikes still occurred. “Hate” strikes sometimes occurred when white
workers objected to being “forced” to work alongside African-Americans. The government tried some anti-racist
training, but often left implementation up to local officials, and so racial
tension and discrimination were the norm.
On another front, no rhetoric of patriotism was sufficient to put enough
pressure to get coal miners back underground under the terrible conditions and
low pay that they faced. One striking
miner, learning that his son had been killed in the Pacific theater, turned the
rhetoric of patriotism on its head: “I ain’t a traitor […] [My son] was
fighting for one thing, I’m fighting for another and they ain’t so far apart.”
Even the most revered of American
wartime propaganda, such as the Why We
Fight series of films directed by Frank Capra, were not well-liked or even
well-understood by the soldiers who saw them.
A new form of data collection, in which soldiers pressed “like” and
“dislike” buttons while watching propaganda films to respond to specific
moments in what they were seeing, showed preference for light
entertainment. In one cartoon, a
low-ranking everyman protagonist was magically promoted to boss, used his power
to decree two women for every man and an end to menial duties, but was caught
unawares when German bombers arrived…only to awake from his nightmare happy to
go back to his work in the kitchen. That
program successfully tapped into resentment of officers, sexual frustration,
and the valorization of duty, and was especially popular. Given all the evidence Sparrow has
accumulated of government messages mis- and badly understood, it is perhaps not
surprising that U.S. soldiers didn’t put much stock in propaganda as a weapon
of war either. As Alan Axelrod observes
at the end of Selling the Great War,
they referred to dropping leaflets over Germany during World War II as “controlled
littering.”
Selling the American Way is the latest
in a series of books to examine U.S. Cold War propaganda strategies and sites. Belmonte looks specifically at the United
States Information Agency, a civilian propaganda bureau established in 1953 to
do “public diplomacy” outside of the United States, though a bureau also with
an important prehistory.
But arguing
for the greatness of America and the moral inferiority of its enemies remained
an important priority in the new era of Cold War, even as the enemies
changed. Laura Belmonte’s
One of the
key architects of U.S. Cold War “public diplomacy” was William Benton, an ad
magnate who had made a fortune during the Depression and “retired” in his
thirties to the vice-presidency of the University of Chicago. (In 1943 he took over as publisher of the
Encyclopedia Britannica.) Like George
Creel in a different era, Benton was an idealist. A bit “pink” by the standards of the late
1940s, Benton was sympathetic to the idea of a world government, thought that
war was created by misunderstanding, and that the people of the world could be
brought together through cultural interchange.
Like Creel, Benton believed that the truth was the best form of
propaganda. He drew a distinction not
available to Creel between totalitarian “propaganda,” the purpose of which was
to conceal and mislead, and democratic “information,” which was honest. In the immediate aftermath of the war,
“information” services were under State Department control, and Benton, serving
as assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Truman administration,
was responsible for defending information programs before a skeptical Congress.
As they had
been during World War I, conservatives in Congress were the greatest enemies of
U.S. public diplomacy. Allocating
federal funds to project an image of the country created all sorts of
conflicts, as representatives from different parts of the country and with
different ideologies, did not value the same characteristics of American
society. Benton did not want to shy away
from presenting problems in American life, including, most obviously, racism. Many in Congress, however, objected to what
they saw as the use of taxpayer dollars to insult the United States. Similarly, to counteract stereotypes of
capitalism in the United States as under the control of ruthless monopolists
and plutocrats, information professionals wanted to champion features of U.S.
law such as anti-trust regulations. But
this too led conservatives in Congress to believe that U.S. information
programs abroad promoted the New Deal and liberal internationalism. Why were federal funds being spent to give
the U.S. a bad name? In 1946 Congress
cut Benton’s budget to a minimum.
The
greatest controversy of Benton’s tenure arrived that fall, when he announced
that the State Department would sponsor a tour of experimental and abstract
paintings known as “Advancing American Art.”
The exhibit was intended especially for exhibition in Europe, where it
was intended to challenge stereotypes held by both conservatives and the left
that the United States was culturally backward and derivative. It was among the first attempts to use
abstract art as a representation of American creativity and “freedom”—such
works could not have been produced under totalitarianism—even though many of
the artists saw themselves as critical of postwar conformism in U.S.
society. Still, the traveling show was a
success: it was so popular in Prague that the Soviet Union felt compelled to
send in a dueling exhibition of socialist realist art.
At home, however,
the exhibit generated a firestorm of controversy. American conservatives favored
representational works that created a positive image of the nation and that
could be easily understood by the public.
Abstract expressionism did none of that, and so it was called communist-inspired
and un-American by conservatives in Congress. Ironically, of course, the
official socialist realism of Communism used basically the same criteria to
judge the worthiness of art as did American conservatives. (So much so that Benton, many years later,
would accidentally make one of the most insightful comments about the similar
tastes of conservative collectors of Americana and of Soviet bureaucrats when
he recommend to the Sears Roebuck company that it sell Soviet paintings through
its mail-order catalogs, observing that the “Soviet tradition of Socialist
realism is very much in the spirit of the kind of paintings which will prove
popular with Sears, Roebuck customers.”
) But in 1946, the attack on “Advancing American
Art” was enough to derail it. The
Secretary of State had to promise that no more tax money would be used on
modern art. Benton was appointed to a
seat in Congress for a brief period, and then became the U.S. ambassador
Unesco, where he hoped would take on the qualities of world government to end war
“in the minds of men.” It was a hope,
but not an idea.
Pared down
to the least common denominator, the USIA, once formally established, relied on
the least controversial themes to represent the idea of America abroad:
cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility. Racism, sexism, and poverty, as Belmonte
demonstrates, were either absent from its publications or presented as existing
obstacles that could be easily overcome.
Largely unmentioned by Belmonte, but with considerably more controversy
that the open activities of the USIA, the CIA also conducted and supported a great
network of propaganda in that era. Its
support was channeled through false foundations, and went to groups that
appeared, even to their own membership, not to have any connections to the U.S.
government. (This was how support was
routed to labor, intellectual, student, and womens’ groups—just as it was on
the Soviet side.) That such funding should have been secret would seem to be an
obvious operational advantage, it was also a practical necessity. Secrecy served to blunt the problem of a lack
of consensus about the idea of America: if the State Department could not fund
a useful operation, it would be the CIA that could (and did), for instance, use
abstract expressionism to represent American freedom abroad. Belmonte’s description of conservative
objections to the “propaganda of truth” help explain that solution. As one
former CIA officer put it in defending the CIA’s actions as a necessary part of
the Cold War: “the idea that [the U.S.] Congress would have approved many of
our projects was almost as likely as the John Birch Society’s approving
Medicare.”
Belmonte’s history of the bureaucratic
problems of American information programming in the Cold War help make sense of
that comment. There were hidden costs
to, as Belmonte puts it, “sell[ing] the richest nation in the world in the
cheapest ways possible.”
One more
anecdote from the Eisenhower era will suffice to bring an end to our discussion
of the books under review. U.S.
information agencies operated lending libraries in many cities around the
world, where foreigners could come to learn about the U.S. through its
books. (Mail-order catalogs were among
the most popular items – people would sometimes flip through them in
astonishment at the affluence that they implied.) At the height of McCarthyist demagoguery, in
1952, McCarthy accused those libraries of carrying books by Communists and
fellow travelers. Secretary of State
Dulles ordered cooperation with McCarthy’s “investigations” and agreed that
such books should not on the shelves.
But who counted as a fellow traveler?
In the absence of guidance, a few panicked caretakers pulled material
from the shelves; a handful of books were even burned. Noted nineteenth-century fellow traveler of
the Soviet Union Henry David Thoreau was among those authors eventually banned,
as were Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain.
President Eisenhower, speaking to students at Dartmouth College, urged
them not to “join the book burners,” which seemed to set him apart from
McCarthy. But privately, he ordered the
retention of the prohibition on books “persuasive of Communism.” Though the number of books actually burned
was tiny, the episode was sufficiently redolent of Nazi actions that it seemed
to say more about the political culture in the United States than all of the
books that remained on the library shelves.
So where
does this all leave us? Perhaps we
should end where we began, with the premise that inspired at least a few of the
books under review here: the idea that the Bush Administration’s handling of
the Iraq war was a masterful piece of propaganda that required explanation. The premise, as it happens, is false. Careful examination of public opinion data reveals
that during the period of the Bush Administration’s push for war, support for
invasion actually decreased. Nor was the
false link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11 merely a product of
administration and media propaganda.
Immediately after the attacks, Americans overwhelmingly held Hussein
responsible, before administration efforts to direct opinion in that
direction. The percentage of Americans
believing the fiction decreased slowly from October 2001 forward. It seems possible that it could have
decreased much more quickly if Bush had not done so much to muddy the waters,
but it remains the case that the Bush Administration was not able to create a
false opinion: at best, it sustained one that already existed.
Furthermore,
public support for the war proved ephemeral.
When the U.S. invasion of Iraq uncovered none of the promised weapons of
mass destruction, and the loss of lives and resources mounted, new opinions
emerged. By 2006, about a third of
Americans believed that the Bush Administration itself was at least partially
responsible for the attacks on 9/11. So
did many in other countries. Surveys
from 2008 estimated that 30% of Mexican blamed the U.S. for those attacks, as
did 36% of Turks and 23% of Germans. 43%
of Egyptians blamed Israel.
These figures are not compatible with the portrait
of an administration skilled in the arts of persuasion, pulling on the strings
that control U.S. and world opinion. One media relations official in the State
Department resigned in 2007, saying that he was weary of trying to convince
others that the United States “should not be judged by our actions, only our
words.”
The Bush Administration set out to convince
its citizens and the world of one thing, and it ended by convincing them of something
altogether different: its own mendacity.
This is not to say, of course, that
propaganda campaigns always fail or backfire; simply that, like all human
communication, they are complicated. It
seems to me that one of the larger messages of these books is not simply about
the power of propaganda to mobilize action, but that action is, in some sense,
the most important form of propaganda.
Sparrow’s social history of the United States during World War II is
useful, though it is the least directly about propaganda of all of the books
under consideration here, because it shows that even though close examination
of the state’s messages reveals that they often did not have their intended
effects, people’s actions, in the main, were compatible with the war effort. New rituals, myths, and symbols emerged and
were effective because they were partially self-constructed, and thus
potentially durable. Fin-de-siècle
anarchists drew a distinction between propaganda by the word and propaganda by
the deed. By the latter, they meant that
a singular act of violence, such as an assassination, could spur the masses to
act in ways that language never could.
Their narrow definition of what constituted a meaningful “deed” aside, the
works here do suggest that deeds may well create a more successful campaign.
And what of public opinion? The challenge of war called forth the need
for states to try and harness the machines of the mass production of opinion,
and they tried. By the end of the
twentieth century, information bureaus were a normal part of government and
foreign relations. The idea of public
opinion was transformed over the course of the century by quantification from a
loose sentiment into a morass of data, and in that transformation the concept
was reinvented. Reading public opinion into existence now requires polling,
but, like a kind of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of opinion, asking
questions seems to change the result. In
any case it can project a false coherence onto a messy agglomeration of conflicting
interests and attitudes, and creates an artificial public commons in which
ignorance, expertise, and indifference all register with equal weight. The early artists in public relations
imagined themselves symphony conductors, controlling each instrument and
keeping the audience in thrall to the emotions they wished to summon. A more apt metaphor for their work might be a
street musician, eyed with suspicion by passersby, competing for attention with
the magician down the block, and struggling to be heard over the noise and
movement of the crowd and the city. Public
relations became part of the chaos of human experience. Propaganda proved not to make democracy possible,
or even better, but it did not make it impossible either.
