US political propaganda in World War I

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The United States entered World War I only in 1917. Therefore, they learned military propaganda from their "cousins" - the British. Nevertheless, it was the American agitators of those years who are considered the founders of modern PR, sociology and political science. RIA Novosti tells how the Americans, having discovered the propaganda mechanism for themselves, began to use it to "turn over" the world.

Ministry of Information and four minutes

First of all, it was required to explain to the population why it was necessary to get involved in a distant overseas carnage - isolationist sentiments were strong in the country. Why give up the seemingly most advantageous position of the "third rejoicing"? This difficult task was entrusted to the Committee of Public Information, created in April 1917. It was headed by professional journalist George Creel, who got his hand in the election campaign of US President Woodrow Wilson.

The committee quickly became the Ministry of Information. The department was responsible for propaganda within the country and abroad, distribution of news on behalf of the state, in general - for maintaining the necessary political and moral tone among the population, as well as for "voluntary" censorship in the press.

Creel created several dozen departments - for example, censorship, illustrative propaganda, including the so-called Four Minute Men

Volunteers gave short - four minutes - speeches in various public places on the topic approved by the committee. The propagandists spoke in churches, cinemas (during the break, when we changed the film in the projector), in factories, city squares, logging … war ).

The committee distributed leaflets with instructions and advice to the four-minute children, and propagandists attended preparatory seminars at universities. Agitators were recruited from local residents: the fact that familiar people spoke in front of the audience strengthened the credibility of what they heard.

This would later be called viral marketing

“The Committee of Public Information has hired hundreds of leading scholars, writers and artists to create works that explain America's war goals, awaken patriotism, call for support for allies and hatred of the German Huns. Most of these writings gave a distorted picture,”says Professor Ernst Friberg, Dean of the Department of History at the University of Tennessee.

“But it certainly wasn't an American invention,” he continues. "The Committee of Public Information drew on the experience of the British, whose propaganda did a lot to shape American perceptions of the war and create sympathy for the Allies."

By the way, the image of Uncle Sam, familiar to the whole world - Uncle Sam, a symbol of the United States, values and foreign policy of the country - was given precisely by military propaganda

And he is also of British origin. Artist James Flagg echoed an English poster with Lord Kitchener pointing his finger at the viewer: “Join the army! Lord save the king!"

Flagg replaced the character, gave him his own face - an elderly gentleman with a beard and wearing a top hat looked from the poster at the future soldiers. Uncle Sam was known before, but his canon appearance emerged just then.

Americans have surpassed themselves

Kirill Kopylov, a Russian expert on the First World War, explains that the British experience was copied in the United States due to the similarity of situations.

“The Americans in 1917, even less than the British in 1914, understood why they needed to go to war. And in general, in the United States they repeated what the British said earlier. But in the war loans campaign - in a marketing area close to them - the Americans have surpassed themselves. It was a touring show, with crowds of people, street vendors, the drive was added by the city and county councils on the ground,”he says.

Also attracted by Hollywood. The National Film Industry Association has mobilized leading film producers.

They cooperated with all departments responsible for the state's defense capability.

The authors of the International Encyclopedia of the First World War note that film distribution was relatively little affected by propaganda

“The audience watched the same full-length feature films to which they were accustomed, military stories or documentaries were usually not shown,” the book says.

True, the most famous incident of military propaganda, and at the same time censorship, is associated with cinema. In 1917, the film The Spirit of 1776, about the American struggle against British rule, was banned.

The producer of the tape, Robert Goldstein, was charged with … espionage and sentenced to ten years in prison

A cross was put on his career. According to officials, the film posed a threat to national security, since the British were shown in it as enemies at a time when the Americans were fighting the British on one side of the front.

Psychology of the masses

American political scientist William Engdahl believes that American propaganda in that era was distinguished by another feature - the use of the latest psychological techniques. The Committee of Public Information called in its ranks and Edward Bernays - the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

A former Austro-Hungarian citizen, he moved to the United States, was engaged in journalism and PR

“Bernays brought with him an intimate knowledge of a new branch of human psychology that had not yet been translated into English. He was the American literary agent of Sigmund Freud,”says Engdahl.

According to him, Bernays was "a kind of perverse genius who used mass psychology and media techniques to manipulate emotions." The propagandists skillfully took advantage of the peculiarities of the American mentality. “After the war, in psychological and sociological research on the role of propaganda, Harold Lasswell of the University of Chicago (also one of the founders of modern propaganda. - Ed.) Noted that German propaganda focused on logic, not feelings, and therefore failed in America.

It is not for nothing that Count von Bernstorff, a German diplomat, said: "The characteristic trait that distinguishes the average American is strong, albeit superficial, sentimentality," writes Engdahl in The Money Gods: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century

Edward Bernays later wrote the fundamental work "Propaganda", setting out the basic psychological methods of influencing public opinion. He explains why modern society is so prone to manipulation of consciousness and subconsciousness.

American state propaganda was criticized by journalist Walter Lippmann, adviser to President Wilson. As a media employee, he monitored what filters the information overcomes on its way to the reader, and formulated one of the conditions for influencing public opinion: "Without any kind of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible."

In addition to Creel, Bernays and Lippmann, WWI raised another mass communication guru - Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of the Chicago School of Sociology.

In the 1920s, he wrote The Technique of Propaganda in World War II, a work also recognized as a classic

“What the Americans stopped at in November 1918, when the war ended, they continued into World War II. But by the 1940s, regular radio broadcasting, sound films appeared, and the theater of propaganda military operations looked completely different, Kopylov sums up.

Having discovered the mechanisms of control of the human unconscious, American engineers of public opinion went far beyond the scope of military propaganda. Russian culturologist Vladimir Mozhegov explains: “After the war, Bernays’s associates and followers created all these Madison Avenue PR offices to sell anything. In the 1920s, Bernays shaped the fashion for female smoking by order of the tobacco corporations, in the 1950s he organized revolutions in the banana republics, in the 1960s the same technologies served to explode the sexual revolution."