The Origins of Modern Propaganda
Which continue to present day: A look at the executive arm of the invisible government.
On a personal level, I became suspicious of mainstream media decades ago. However, it wasn’t until I began to dig and conduct my own research that I realized how truly entrenched propaganda exists in our day to day lives. This extends far beyond what we recognize as traditional media outlets. Presently, there are social media accounts with tens of thousands, and in some cases, over 1,000,000 followers.
These are not organic, but rather, propelled by nefarious purposes on behalf of different entities. Most often than not these are of a political nature. Almost all are in some way connected to the intelligence community.
In my on-going research I came upon the following description of “modern propaganda” — created by President Woodrow Wilson (28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921) with an organization named Committee on Public Information CPI (1917-1919). Its purpose? To sell World War I to the American people.
CPI was headed by George Creel who enlisted the help of the United States Post Office (long before the days of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) in stopping delivery of mail that contained information opposing the war. Meaning, regular mail was inspected before it was sent or not sent to intended recipients. We’ve been led to believe this didn’t happen until the time of COINTELPRO (1956-1971)—but facts prove this illegal practice was already commonplace.
President Wilson’s CPI reminded me of Leslie Wexner’s efforts, with the help of President George W. Bush, to sell the Iraq war to U.S. citizens. Wexner (an intelligence operative, not a victim of blackmail) did this via the Wexner Analysis: Israeli Communication Priorities 2003. Frank Luntz, the Republican Party pollster and spin doctor, prepared the Wexner Analysis. Luntz’s report essentially outlines a political PR campaign “as the post-war dust settles over the Iraqi desert.”
The Origins of Modern Propaganda
By the late 1910s, propaganda had become a “self-conscience art and a regular organ of popular government.” Britain pioneered the field with the creation of the Ministry of Information, which sought “to direct the thoughts of much of the world.” Its central purpose was to persuade the American government to enter WWI. Woodrow Wilson had campaigned on staying out of the war and a majority of Americans were in favor of remaining neutral. In response to the anti-war sentiment, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI or Creel Commission) to “fight for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions” by “spreading the gospel of Americanism to every corner of the globe.” The Institute for Propaganda Analysis notes:
The CPI blended advertising techniques with a sophisticated understanding of human psychology and its efforts represented the first time that a modern government disseminated propaganda on such a large scale. It is fascinating that this phenomenon, often linked with totalitarian regimes, emerged in a democratic state
Under the direction of George Creel, the CPI was instructed to “sell the war to America.” Liberal intellectuals were enlisted from the business, media, academic, entertainment and art industries. Will Irwin, an ex-CPI member, would later confess, “We never told the whole truth–not by any manner of means” and cited an intelligence officer as stating “you can’t tell them the truth.” The US war time environment was frighteningly similar to a totalitarian state. “With the aid of Roosevelt,” Randolph Bourne wrote during the war, “the murmurs became a monotonous chant.” According to Creel, 20,000 different newspapers were publishing CPI propaganda every day. The CPI organized 75,000 Four Minute Men (public speakers who could be ready in 4 minutes notice) who gave 755,190 speeches to over 300 million people. Weekly magazines and journals were given to over 600,000 teachers and 200,000 slides were created for detailed lectures. 1,438 different designs were produced for posters, window cards, newspaper advertisements, cartoons, seals, and buttons.
Congressional attempts to suppress Creel’s book How We Advertised America (1920) failed. “In all things, from first to last, without halt or change,” Creel wrote, “it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.” The CPI’s success established the “standard marketing strategies for all future wars” by selling the war as one that would “make the world safe for democracy." Congress would end the CPI’s funding on November 12, 1918. Two years later, however, the director of the CPI’s Foreign Division stated that propaganda had continued unabated in the postwar world.
The history of propaganda in the war would scarcely be worthy of consideration here, but for one fact– it did not stop with the armistice. No indeed! The methods invented and tried out in the war were too valuable for the uses of governments, factions, and special interests.
The CPI’s success inspired leading ‘democratic’ theorists like Walter Lippmann (who worked for the CIA), Edward Bernays (also worked for the CIA), and Harold Lasswell. Lippmann’s bombshell, Public Opinion (1922) and its sequel The Phantom Public (1927) developed a highly detailed theory which he called the “manufacture of consent.” The term propaganda entered the Encyclopedia Britannica the same year that Lippmann published Public Opinion. Regarded as the Dean of US Journalism, he practically invented the serious newspaper column while writing for the New Republic. “Millions of readers,” Lippmann’s biographer Ronald Steele explains, were “relying on him to explain and interpret the great issues of the day.” Lippmann believed that the chief goal of news was not objective reporting but to “signalize an event.” Behind the scenes he worked with the CIA writing propaganda leaflets, interrogating prisoners, and coordinating government intelligence. Lippmann worked with every American president from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon and is commonly regarded as “the most influential commentator of the 20th century.” In Public Opinion, he explains that American democracy had reached a new paradigm.
That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. …the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. …As a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy…
This is a natural development because “the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class.” Lippmann expounded on these ideas in the Phantom Public arguing that “the public must be put in its place” so that “responsible men” can “live free of the trampling and roar of a bewildered herd.” These “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” do have a “function.” They are to be “spectators, not participants.” According to Lippmann, the public’s highest ideal is to align with a member of the business class during a symbolic election. Taking the phenomenon a step further, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays (ex-CPI member) turned Lippmann’s theories into practical step-by-step manuals – Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), Public Relations (1952), and Engineering Consent (1969). Bernays writes:
It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach—visual, graphic, and auditory—to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group —persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers.
They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.
Some of Bernays’ more notable clients included: Proctor and Gamble, CBS, the American Tobacco Company, General Electric, Dodge Motors, the Public Health Service along with every American president from Woodrow Wilson to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Corporations turned to Bernays and others to fight the “hazard facing industrialists” which is “the newly realized political power of the masses.” Propaganda “in its sum total,” Bernays wrote at the time, “is regimenting the public mind, every bit as much as an army regiments the body of its soldiers.” In his study published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science (March 1947) Bernays refers to the “engineering of consent” as the “very essence of democracy.” The term propaganda acquired negative connotations during WWII and was replaced with “public relations” and “communications.” Accordingly, Bernays is often regarded as the “Father of Public Relations” (some historians give the title to Ivy Lee) and Life magazine has listed him among the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century.
The term propaganda entered the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in 1933, when Harold Lasswell explained that elites must abandon “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.” The “ignorance and superstition” of “the masses,” Lasswell explains, led to “the development of a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda.” In his dissertation, Propaganda Technique in WWI (1927), he outlines strategies which have become standard operating procedure in modern geopolitical strategy.
So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about who the public is to hate. …A handy rule for arousing hate is if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity. …When the public believes that the enemy began the War and blocks a permanent, profitable and godly peace, the propagandist has achieved his purpose. …No doubt that, in the future, the propagandist may count upon a battalion of honest professors to rewrite history, to serve the exigencies of the moment.
Laswell went on to help found the fields of political science and communications. He invented the famous communication theory: who says what to whom with what effect in which medium. For further reading see Lasswell’s annotated bibliography Propaganda and Promotional Activities (1935) which sources thousands of books and studies on early American propaganda.
Great article and some of the Dates are more interesting 🙂! TY Kirby.
Thank you, Kirby. I'm relatively new here, but really appreciating your content. Coincidentally for me, I just posted a piece myself examining, among other things, the origins and effects of propaganda. "Unfortunately, propaganda is something that most of us think only works on OTHER people. That misguided belief is in no small part what makes propaganda so effective, making it child’s play for Power to divide and control us all." Your insights here are really helpful. I will share them with my small readership community. Meanwhile, if anyone here is interested:
Italy 2020 - The Preposterous Pandemic: Dr Sam Bailey and a review of what really went on in Italy. Plus, a more in depth look at Covid 19's best friend, Propaganda.
https://powerversuspeople.substack.com/p/italy-2020-the-preposterous-pandemic