by Chris Hedges
The former socialists and activists were, perhaps, the most susceptible to Wilson’s utopian dreams of a democratic League of Nations that would end warfare forever. Wilson, after all, came from the ranks of the liberal class. He was articulate and literate, knew many of them and was comfortable in the world of political theory and abstract thought. He wrote his own speeches. He reflected their high ideals. These intellectuals, once on the margins of society, became trusted allies in Wilson’s crusade to recreate the world through violence. They were lauded and praised in public ways that were new and seductive. They no longer felt alienated from power but rather felt valued and appreciated by the elite. They lent their considerable skill to war propaganda and, in an intellectual and moral sense, committed suicide. Very few found the moral fortitude to resist. And their combined effort to sell the war fatally corrupted the liberal class.
“The intellectuals, in other words, have identified themselves with the least democratic forces in American life,” Bourne lamented.
They have assumed the leadership for war of those very classes whom the American democracy has been immemorially fighting. Only in a world where irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world liberalism and world democracy. No one is left to point out the undemocratic nature of this war liberalism. In a time of faith, skepticism is the most intolerable of all insults.
Arthur Bullard was a former history student of Wilson’s at Princeton who went on to work as a reporter and foreign correspondent, including in Russia. He was typical of the intellectuals and activists who embraced the war and shifted their energy from social reform to state propaganda. Bullard, who often wrote under the pseudonym Albert Edwards for the pro-Bolshevik publication The Masses as well as Harper’s, had sterling credentials as a muckraker and social activist. He had left Hamilton College after two years to serve as a probation officer for the New York Prison Association, spurred by the muckrackers’ reports of the squalid conditions of the working class, and moved into University House on the Lower East Side. University House when he arrived was filled with radical writers as well as settlement house workers. It included the socialist writer William English Walling (a founder of the NAACP); Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Poole; Howard Brubaker, who later became a columnist for the New Yorker; journalist Hamilton Hold, the editor of the weekly Independent, and author Walter Weyl, a founding editor of the New Republic. These writers produced articles and books on the housing and employment situation of workers on the Lower East Side, particularly the effects of inhuman working conditions and poverty on women and children. They were avowed socialists and fellow travelers with the revolutionaries seeking to topple the Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Poole, Walling, and Bullard, who was a press agent for the Friends of Russian Freedom in America, traveled to Russia in 1905 to cover the abortive revolution and its aftermath. They established contacts with radical Russian intellectuals, writers, artists, and revolutionaries. Bullard contributed a series of articles on Russia—he spoke some Russian—to Harper’s and Collier’s. In a report he wrote for Collier’s in April 1906 under the pseudonym Albert Edwards, he told readers:
My object in making this trip was to see how well the Russian troops could succeed in suppressing a revolutionary movement by sheer terrorism. I am convinced they cannot do it. They have failed to capture the leaders. They have failed to disarm the people. They have not succeeded in stamping out the revolutionary fire among the mass of the peasants. The indiscriminate executions, floggings, and burnings have only poured oil on the fire; it has turned the indignation into a personal determination for vengeance for murdered kindred; it has turned discontent into desperation, and hostility into hatred.
“General Orloff is a military man,” he concluded, “and he was given orders to suppress the rebellion in these provinces. He did, and is doing it, as far as he can, but he has not enough soldiers, nor enough cartridges to do it thoroughly. The position of the Government has been perfectly logical—except for its premise, which is that this is the middle of the Dark Ages and that a state exists by the fear of its subjects.”6
Bullard, who witnessed the power of revolutionary idealism and propaganda, believed that heavy censorship and secrecy laws that Wilson advocated would backfire, especially with many Americans viewing the war as one pushed down the throats of the nation by bankers and industrialists. The bankers and industrialists wanted to ensure that the massive loans to the European powers would be repaid, something that would not happen if Germany won the war. He grasped that a more potent weapon than overt repression could be found in mass propaganda. Propaganda could, he understood, feed the dark sentiments of nationalism and the lust for violence that made war possible. The public, he grasped, would, with the right kind of guidance, become enthusiastic war supporters. He sent a copy of his book Mobilizing America to Wilson in early 1917 in an effort to influence the president’s management of the war. In it he argued that if the government controlled all the mechanisms of information, and used the creative arts to bolster its message, the country could be indoctrinated to support the war without resorting to overt forms of control.
“Truth and Falsehood are arbitrary terms,” Bullard wrote. “There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other. . . . There are lifeless truths and vital lies. . . . The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.”
Bullard proposed to Wilson that the government form a large “publicity bureau, which would constantly keep before the public the importance of supporting the men at the front. It would requisition space on the front page of every newspaper; it would call for a ‘draft’ of trained writers to feed ‘army stories’ to the public; it would create a Corps of Press Agents. . . . In order to make democracy fight wholeheartedly,” he said, “it is necessary to make them understand the situation.”
Bullard, whose papers I sifted through one afternoon at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, argued strenuously against Wilson’s desire for overt censorship. Walter Lippmann, in a private letter to the president on March 11, reiterated Bullard’s call for a government publicity bureau. He told Wilson the war had to be sold to a skeptical public by fostering “a healthy public opinion.”7 Lippmann, especially in his 1922 book Public Opinion, emerges as perhaps the darkest figure of the period. He assumes the intellectual role of the Grand Inquisitor, fearful of popular rule and brilliant enough to know how to manipulate public opinion. The war would prove him to be extremely prescient, and Public Opinion became a bible to the new power elite.
Wilson got the message. He agreed to set up the bureau Lippmann and Bullard proposed and turn it over to progressives and artists. “It is not an army we must shape and train for war, it is a nation,” he stated.8 A week after the war was declared, the president established the Committee for Public Information (CPI). The CPI, headed by a former muckraker named George Creel, which became popularly known as the Creel Commission, would become the first modern mass propaganda machine. Its goal was not, as Creel confessed, simply to impart pro-war messages but to discredit those who attempted to challenge the nation’s involvement in the conflict. And Creel, who knew the world of journalism, set out to demolish decentralized and diverse systems of information. He recalled that during the period of neutrality before the war, the nation
had been torn by a thousand divisive prejudices, with public opinion stunned and muddled by the pull and haul of Allied and German propaganda. The sentiment in the West was still isolationist; the Northwest buzzed with talk of a “rich man’s war,” waged to salvage Wall Street loans; men and women of Irish stock were “neutral,” not caring who whipped England, and in every stage demagogues raved against “warmongers,” although the Du Ponts and other so-called “merchants of death” did not have enough powder on hand to arm squirrel hunters.9
News, which had previously grown out of local discourses and
public discussions, which reflected local public sentiment and concerns upward, would be dictated from above. It would have to deliver a consistent drumbeat of propaganda, a consistent pro-war narrative, and shut out or discredit dissenting views. It would have to leech off the news pages into every aspect of the nation’s cultural life, from theater to film to novels to advertisements. The wide diversity of newspapers, and with them the diversity of opinions, concerns, and outlooks, had to be managed and controlled. All information about the war would come from one source, a practice that in later generations would be codified as “staying on message.” There would be a total uniformity of ideas. Creel’s efforts—his bureau would employ thousands by the war’s end—had the twin effect of saturating the country with propaganda and dismantling the local, independent press. The committee would, by the time the war ended, see the president lionized by Secretary of State Robert Lansing as “the greatest propagandist the modern world has ever known.”10 No other president in American history did more to damage the independence and freedom of the press, or set back the cause of social reform, than Wilson.
The newspapers, with Creel feeding them propaganda packaged as news releases, began a relentless campaign of manipulation of public opinion thinly disguised as journalism. The papers not only published without protest the worst drivel handed to them by the CPI, including manufactured stories of German atrocities and war crimes, but in their news pages questioned the patriotism of dissenters.
“RADICALS AT WORK FOR GERMAN PEACE,” read a June 24, 1917, headline in the New York Times, with a subhead adding, “Well-Financed Propaganda Has Ample Quarters and Staff and Is Flooding Country. TAKES IDEAS FROM RUSSIA[.] Proposes Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates Here to Run the War.”
“A group of men and women, representing all shades of radical and pacifist opinion, have combined to carry on a campaign in this country to create sentiment in favor of peace along lines advocated by the most radical and visionary of Russia Revolutionists,” the article began.
In other words, the peace which they will agitate for in every part of the country will be just such a peace as persons best informed as to the views of the Kaiser and his absolutist followers say the German Government favors. It is not denied by some persons prominent in the new propaganda that if Germany should cease its submarine warfare they would advocate the United States deserting the Allies and concluding a separate peace with Berlin.
In this new peace-at-any-price organization are a number of Germans and a great many radicals of other origin. The organization is called the People’s Council of America and is said to have the support of various organizations, such as the Collegiate Anti-Militarist League, two members of which were convicted last week of conspiracy to obstruct the military laws of the nation; the Emergency Peace Federation, which was so busy in the days immediately preceding the declaration of war against Germany, and the so-called American Union against Militarism.
The People’s Council, as they call it, apparently has strong financial backing. It has a large suite of rooms in the Educational Building, at 70 Fifth Avenue, where a score of stenographers and secretaries are busy sending out letters and literature urging, among other things, the organization in the United States of a “Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Committee” such as now exists in Russia.
In one of the pamphlets now being mailed occurs this statement:
“It is hoped that our own People’s Council will voice the peace will of America as unmistakably and effectively as the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates in speaking for Russia.”
Another document which is being mailed says that the organization is working for “an early, general and democratic peace, to be secured through negotiation and in harmony with the principles outlined by the new Russia,” while in another place it denounces the President, by plain inference, when it is stated that “America has yielded the honor of leading in peace and is now a participant in the international carnage.”
“Every day,” another propaganda sheet issued in the name of the organization says, “the constitutional rights [of] free speech, free press and free assembly are being assaulted.”
At the offices of the council it was frankly stated that the intention of those behind the agitation was to flood the country with propaganda, and that speakers and agitators would be sent to every part of the country. Joseph D. Cannon, a labor leader, has been delegated to agitate among the miners of the West; A. W. Ricker, a magazine editor, will try to gain a foothold for the organization among the farmers of the Northwest; James D. Maurer, the Pennsylvania labor agitator, will devote his efforts to the great labor centres in the State, while Professor L. M. Keasbey of the University of Texas and an Australian preacher named Gordon will try to bring the South into line against President Wilson and in favor of a peace which it is generally admitted is such a peace as the Germans would now accept.
Some of the people who are listed as “hard workers” in the organization are David Starr Jordan, who is the Treasurer; L. P. Lochner, the man who is generally credited with having persuaded Henry Ford to back the peace ship venture; the Rev. Dr. Judah L. Magnes, Algernon Lee, and Morris Hillquit, the Socialists who failed to get passports to Europe recently, where they wanted to attend the so-called Stockholm conference; Max Eastman, editor of a radical pamphlet; J. Schlossberg, a labor leader; Fola La Follette, a daughter of the Wisconsin Senator; Professor W. L. Dana of Columbia University, who, it was said at the offices of the organization, is also a prominent member of the Collegiate Anti-Militarist League; Mrs. Emily Greene Balch, and a score of other persons of similar views, and all of them violent opponents of the military policies of the Wilson Administration.
Here is a sample of the letters which the council is scattering over the country.
Dear Friend: You will rejoice with us at the evidence of a powerful and rapidly growing sentiment for peace. The success of the First American Conference for Democracy and the Terms of Peace, and its remarkable climax at Madison Square Garden, have sent a ray of hope to hosts “that sat in darkness.”
You stood nobly by the Emergency Peace Federation, and I thank you again for your support. The federation is one of several organizations now being merged into the larger and more powerful movement represented by the People’s Council. I am sure your loyal support will continue into the new organization.
The Organizing Committee of the People’s Council is undertaking a tremendous task. The People’s Council meets on August 4. Before this time we must secure delegates to the People’s Council from which the thousands of organizations of workers, farmers, women, clergymen, anti-militarists, Socialists, single taxers, &c. We must send out organizers to explain the purpose of the council. We must arrange hundreds of public meetings, and flood the country with literature.
Fifty thousand dollars is needed before Aug. 1. We want 25,000 one dollar bills. A dollar contribution from 25,000 people means ten times more than the same amount from large contributors.
Will you not send us $1? Send more if you possibly can. Get your friends Interested—urge them to contribute—and do let us count on you.
Yours very sincerely,
REBECCA SHELLY
Financial Secretary.
That the activities of the organization will be closely watched by the Federal authorities can be stated on authority. Because of its evident strong financial backing and because it is out for the avowed purpose of attacking the policies of the Government and to stir up discontent over the conscription law, the proper authorities say the council “will bear watching,” although its activities will in no wise be interfered with so long as it stays “within the law.”
Members of the council admit that if they had their way France would not recover Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium would receive no indemnity for the destruction which the Germans have wrought, the Lusitania would be unavenged—in other words, the world would get a “German peace.”11
The mass propaganda established during t
he war, which included journalists, entertainers, artists, and novelists, became the model for twentieth-century corporate and governmental advertising and publicity. The selling of the Iraq war by the administration of George W. Bush was lifted from the playbook of the CPI, as was the tactic used by ExxonMobil to use $16 million to fund a network of forty-three “grassroots” organizations opposed to the science of climate change, recruit scientists to publish non-peer-reviewed articles challenging the scientific evidence, and repeated placement of these “experts” on the national airwaves to manufacture public confusion. The use of these propaganda techniques has permitted corporations to saturate the airwaves with images and slogans that deify mass consumer culture. And it has meant the death, by corporate hands, of news.
“In 1909-1910, 58 percent of American cities had a press that was varied both in ownership and perspective,” Stuart Ewen wrote in his classic Captains of Consciousness.
By 1920, the same percentage represented those cities in which the press was controlled by an information monopoly. By 1930, 80 percent of American cities had given way to a press monopoly. The role and influence of advertising revenues multiplied thirteen-fold (from $200 million to $2.6 billion), and it was the periodicals, both the dailies and others, which acted as a major vehicle for this growth.12
