The Worth of War (14 page)

Rulers saw propaganda as a potential source of disorder and discontent and preferred to employ censorship at home and propaganda abroad. An echo of this idea can be found in the policies of the Soviet Union before World War II. The USSR relied on censorship and brute force at home while using many forms of propaganda to trumpet its achievements abroad. For decades, the Soviet Union sponsored the Communist International and a host of cultural and political institutions designed to promote Communist ideology and the idea of the USSR as a utopian society deserving of respect and support throughout the world. This effort was enormously successful for a number of decades. Everywhere in the world, dedicated Communists worked vigorously to promote the interests of the Soviet Union, in some cases committing acts of espionage and treason against their own nations for what they saw as a higher purpose.

In Western Europe during the late eighteenth century, the advent of the citizen soldier led regimes to direct more of their propaganda efforts toward domestic rather than foreign audiences. This new direction in propaganda was first manifest in America, whose colonial governments relied exclusively on volunteer militia forces before, during,
and after the Revolutionary War. Militiamen could not be compelled to fight and had to be persuaded. As a result, with the beginnings of the revolt against Britain, colonial pamphleteers, newspaper editors, and others were long-accustomed to the idea of appealing to public opinion to advance their cause.

Virtually every action of the Royal Government was presented in a negative light, and its significance exaggerated by colonial publicists, to inflame popular sentiment and bring recruits flocking to the revolutionary cause. Paul Revere's inflammatory cartoons of the Boston Massacre, a minor event in which British troops fired on rioters, were circulated throughout the colonies to exemplify British brutality. Samuel Adams earned the title “master of the puppets” for his anti-British propaganda in the
Boston Gazette
. In the aftermath of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, Adams worked through the Boston Committee of Correspondence to flood the colonies with distorted news stories portraying the British as cruel occupiers of the helpless city of Boston. During the war itself, virtually every colonist read Tom Paine's propaganda treatises, “Common Sense,” “American Crisis,” and “Rights of Man.” “These are the times that try men's souls,” Paine wrote. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis shrink from the service of his country…Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph.”
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These American efforts prefigured the propaganda efforts of France's post-revolutionary regimes. Besieged on all sides by the armies of the anti-French coalitions, and with the old royal army in disarray, the National Assembly called upon the French nation to come to the defense of the fatherland. The National Assembly created a Committee on Public Instruction, later replaced by the Committee on Public Safety, to rally the nation on behalf of the revolution and the French nation. This committee issued posters and pamphlets and chose the iconic figure of “Marianne” as the symbol of French liberty, to be displayed on statues and posters throughout the nation. Propaganda agents were instructed to distribute patriotic pamphlets and
journals, particularly the
Soiree de camp
, aimed at military units, and the
Bulletin
, an official government mass-circulation daily newspaper. The
Bulletin
was posted throughout the nation to present the regime's view of domestic and international events. The result of these efforts was a “nation in arms.” As one observer put it, “A force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of 30 million, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens.”
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Propaganda efforts continued under Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon made use of publications, art, theater, and music to rally the nation to his rule and to fight in his imperial wars. The artist David became the regime's chief visual propagandist, providing paintings and statues of Napoleon. Great architectural works were commissioned to celebrate the regime's achievements. The
Moniteur
became the official government newspaper, distributed free to the army. Festivals and public ceremonies reminded the French of the nation's grandeur and Napoleon's achievements. “Miss no opportunity to give the ceremonies a solemn, inspirational character,” Napoleon told organizers.
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In 1810, Napoleon established the “Direction General de l'Imprimerie et de la Librarie” to oversee French cultural and literary activity. Books, plays, and lectures were scrutinized to make certain that their content was favorable to the regime. Works of history were commissioned that placed the government and—especially—the emperor in a favorable light.

This enormous propaganda effort, like the earlier and more modest effort of the National Assembly, demonstrated not so much the French regime's power as its dependence upon favorable popular opinion. Napoleon governed with a light hand at home, never subjecting the French citizenry to the terror of the revolutionary days. He was fond of asserting that newspapers could be more effective than bayonets and claimed that without an ability to control and shape information, “I wouldn't last more than three months.”
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The chief goal of Napoleonic propaganda was to ensure the popular support that would produce a continuing flow of recruits and conscripts into France's armies. Napoleon presented himself as the soldier–emperor, had history books
rewritten to emphasize French martial glory, and organized a host of festivals and public ceremonies emphasizing military themes. To make certain of the popular support—and recruits—that would provide the hard power for his military efforts abroad, Napoleon made use of soft power at home.

In time, Napoleon's chief antagonist, Great Britain, followed this example. The British government sponsored new publications such as the
Anti-Jacobin
to promote the patriotism needed to raise the money and armies that would be required to resist the French nation-at-arms. Cartoons, popular songs, pamphlets, and even nursery rhymes were commissioned to convince all classes of British society to contribute to the war against France. A new “British War Song,” was published that called upon all Englishmen to quit their rustic labors and change their scythes to sabers. This British propaganda effort was accompanied by a campaign to suppress pro-French newspapers, publicists, and politicians. For most Englishmen, however, this was an era when their government and king called upon them for support more than it sought to compel their obedience. Generally, the government used the press at home and turned its bayonets abroad. Indeed, because of the press, the regime hoped to have more bayonets to turn toward the Channel.

This same pattern was manifest during the First World War. All the major combatants, of course, sought to silence antiwar media and political groups. The United States, for example, instituted wartime censorship of the mail and enacted the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act aimed at silencing opponents of the war effort. But in Britain and America, as well as France and Germany, governments focused mainly on maintaining support at home in order to increase the force they would be able to project abroad. In this war, not only would soldiers be needed, but factory workers and farmers, too, in order to provide the military equipment and food needed to sustain a modern war effort. Citizens would have to be asked to redouble their efforts with both scythes and sabers.

In Britain, initial enthusiasm for the war led to a rush of volunteers for the armed forces. Popular enthusiasm, however, waned as the war
dragged on, producing hundreds of thousands of casualties as well as hardships and shortages at home. To cope with the morale problem, the British government created the National War Aims Committee (NWAC) to develop a domestic propaganda campaign. The NWAC commissioned news stories, posters, rallies, and films to promote patriotism and present the Germans as despicable and brutal figures.

Films, in particular, were aimed at working class audiences whose members were expected to provide most of the workers and troops needed in the war—and whose Labour Party leaders had been least ardent in their commitment to the necessity of military action. Films such as
Britain Prepared
,
The Battle of the Somme
, and
Hearts of the World
were commissioned by the NWAC to tout the heroism of British soldiers and to present the Germans as murderous occupiers of French and Belgian villages. Posters and news stories glamorized wartime factory work and extolled the heroism of the tens of thousands of women who volunteered to work in munitions plants.

In the United States, the Wilson administration made a major effort to mobilize popular support for the war and for the civilian factory production that would be needed to sustain the war effort. The chief instrument for eliciting popular support was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), chaired by journalist and publicist George Creel. The CPI launched a massive public information and news management program aimed at promoting popular enthusiasm for the war effort. This program included the dissemination of news favorable to the Allied cause; the publication of patriotic pamphlets, films, photos, cartoons, bulletins, and periodicals; and the organization of war expositions and speakers' tours. Special labor programs were aimed at maintaining the loyalty and productivity of the work force. Much of the CPI's staff was drawn from the major advertising agencies. According to Creel, the work of the committee “was distinctly in the nature of an advertising campaign…our object was to sell the war.”
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The CPI's program was a temporary wartime effort. Within several months of the armistice, much of the government's opinion management apparatus was disbanded. The work of the CPI, however, demonstrated
the value of persuasion as a tool of governance and led to a permanent expansion of government opinion management efforts during the New Deal. The enlargement of the scope of governmental activity that began during the Roosevelt era was accompanied by an explosion of official public relations efforts to convince the public of the value of these new programs. Each new governmental department, agency, bureau, office, or committee created a public relations arm to persuade the citizenry to cooperate with its programs and support its objectives. Perhaps the government could not force Americans to accept every new program, but they might be persuaded.

This idea was articulated by Chester Bowles, then-director of the new Office of Price Administration (OPA). Under Bowles's leadership, the OPA had developed an extensive public relations program whose budget drew congressional scrutiny. Bowles's defense of the program is recalled in his memoirs:

At one point Congress threatened to cut our information budget. I testified that if they deprived us of the means of explaining our programs to the people, our requirements for investigators and inspectors to enforce our regulations would be greatly increased. With a $5 million annual budget for information, I said I could keep the American people reasonably informed about our regulations and their own obligations and rights as citizens. But if Congress cuts this $5 million, I would have no alternative but to make a public request for $15 million to hire law enforcement inspectors to prosecute the many people who, often through their own ignorance and lack of information, had acted illegally. If Congress preferred this, it was their prerogative. I myself preferred persuasion to police-state tactics.
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During the Second World War, of course, each of the major combatants devoted considerable attention to the manipulation of public opinion and the maintenance of popular support for the war effort. The government of Nazi Germany, one of the most savage regimes in modern history, focused its brutality upon Jews, Russians, and others it deemed to be its enemies. Ordinary Germans were quite well treated by the Nazi state, and one manifestation of that relatively
benign treatment was the fact that the government relied much more upon persuasion than force to impel Germans to support the war effort. The
Gestapo
and other police forces employed only a handful of agents to monitor the activities of ordinary Germans. These selfsame Germans, however, were subjected to a barrage of propaganda to ensure their support for the regime. The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, under the leadership of Joseph Goebbels, was charged with what Goebbels termed the “mental mobilization” of the German people for war. The ministry made use of film, newsreels, and especially the radio to persuade the German people to support the government, to accept the hardships of war and to fight to the last. Goebbels believed that radio was a particularly important propaganda instrument. Radio manufacturers were provided with government subsidies to build inexpensive receivers so that every German home would have a radio with which to receive the regime's propaganda broadcasts.

In Great Britain, the Ministry of Information (MOI) was charged with administering wartime censorship of the press and aiming a steady stream of propaganda at the public. The MOI made some use of radio and posters and print propaganda, but its officials believed that, given the public's general propensity to disbelieve what it read or heard on the radio, film was a far more potent instrument than any of the others. With MOI backing, the British film industry produced hundreds of feature films dealing with the war. Many of these films, viewed every week by tens of millions of citizens in Britain's 4,000 cinemas, depicted the heroic efforts of ordinary working-class English men and women to survive the hardships facing them as a result of the German attack and, of course, to defend their nation. Thus, British films not only depicted the heroic efforts of British troops, fighting against overwhelming odds, but also focused on the daily struggles of the British people. And films, along with posters, urged citizens at home to do their utmost for the war effort. One poster declared in bold letters, “Women of Britain, Come into the Factories and Back Them Up.”
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