CHAPTER 3
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
Shortly after noon on August 3, 1914, Lord Herbert Kitchener was pacing the decks and working himself into a rage. He was anxious to return home to colonial Egypt, but the steamer meant to take him there was still docked in Dover, its departure already delayed an hour, when a man from Downing Street scrambled aboard. That messenger was clutching a letter from the prime minister, a letter that would not only postpone Kitchener’s trip home but also set him on an unexpected course to become one of the pivotal figures in the story of mass attention capture.1
Kitchener was himself no stranger to attention. In 1911, he’d been appointed the king’s vice-consul in Egypt, becoming de facto ruler of the land of the pharaohs. By then he was already Britain’s best known military officer, a living embodiment of colonial rule. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of him, “He was in a very special sense a King-Man, one who was born to fashion and control the Great Affairs of Mankind.” And with his erect posture, large mustache, and taste for full dress uniform, he very much looked the part.2
The message from Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ordered the indispensable Kitchener back to London for a meeting of the War Council. The next day, Britain would declare war on the German Empire. There wasn’t much choice, since Germany had defied a British ultimatum to end its occupation of Belgium. Unfortunately, however, the United Kingdom’s military was in no shape for a major ground war. “No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous,” said Lord Kitchener later. “They have no Army and they declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world.” It was with some misgivings, then, that Kitchener accepted the appointment as secretary of state for war.3
In August 1914, the British had an able, professional fighting force of just eighty thousand regulars—small enough, the late German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had once joked, to be arrested by the German police. With reserves, the army numbered a few hundred thousand, many of whom were stationed overseas, mainly in India. Germany, meanwhile, had been on a war footing for years. Its Imperial Army of nearly 4.5 million (including reserves) was undefeated, with numerous impressive victories over the last several decades. Having just overrun Belgium, it was on its way into France and seemed unstoppable.4
Foreseeing a much longer war than his colleagues did, one with heavy losses, Kitchener took the highly realistic view that Britain needed to do something it had never done before: raise a huge army of a million men at least. With conscription ruled out by tradition and policy, however, Kitchener had the idea to make a direct and personal appeal to the British public. And thus began the first state-run attention harvest, or what historians would later call the “first systematic propaganda campaign directed at the civilian population.”5
In our times, the idea of a government-run mass recruiting campaign does not sound especially controversial. Recently, the Affordable Care Act was made workable by just such an effort. But in 1914 it was unprecedented, not just in Britain, but anywhere. “That the State should advertise itself was an idea which occurred to few before the war,” concluded an official British history, “and which, had it been brought before the notice of the general public, would have seemed to them repellent.”6
Remember that, for much of human history, rulers did not feel any particular need for public attention, and, indeed, usually tried to avoid it. Apart from rituals such as triumphal entry into the lands of a new subject people, dating back to the Romans, and the Royal Progress, the jaunt first undertaken in medieval times to “show the sacred body of the prince,” kings and queens once depended on the mystique of inaccessibility as an expression of power.
Before the democratic age, only the Church, as discussed, systematically sought and used access to the mind of the people. In fact, the very word “propaganda” originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith. As Mark Crispin Miller writes, “It was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their population to fanatical assent.” The entry of the State into the game—with its vast resources and monopoly on force—would be spectacularly consequential.7
Kitchener was aware of his own celebrity as a living icon of British imperial power. Within a week of his new appointment, every newspaper carried an appeal from him that also appeared on posters across the nation:
Your King and Country Need You
A CALL TO ARMS
An addition of 100,000 men to His Majesty’s Regular Army
is immediately necessary in the present grave National Emergency.
Lord Kitchener is confident
that this appeal will be at once responded to
by all those who have the safety of our Empire at heart.
Whether the trick was provoking a sense of duty or subtle fears of German invasion or simply presenting the image of the great man himself, the initial August appeal was extraordinarily successful. Within a month, an astonishing 30,000 men a day were signing up at recruitment offices. By October, over 750,000 had joined the British Army, creating, in two months, an infantry larger than America’s current active force. Lord Kitchener now had his army.
But just as soon as they’d raised an army, Kitchener and the Recruiting Committee realized that they still had a problem. Facing an enemy of over six million and the prospect of heavy losses, Britain would need a steady stream of new recruits as hostilities progressed.8 Yet the drive, which had been so successful initially, seemed to be losing steam. Those intimate personal appeals of Lord Kitchener’s, which had proved so compelling at first, were now apparently being ignored. Something more was needed to keep recruitment in the minds of the public.
The answer was a transition from Kitchener’s occasional appeals to a more systematic, and totalizing approach to government propaganda. A special Parliamentary Recruiting Committee was created in the fall of 1914 to run a “permanent ‘information’ campaign”—an institutionalized effort to develop ways of keeping the recruitment emergency foremost in the minds of Britons. The campaign’s most useful tool turned out to be a French invention we have seen before, the giant illustrated advertisement. Beginning in the final months of 1914, the country was blanketed in government war posters, and by 1916, the recruitment authority would calculate that it had printed nearly 12.5 million of them. By the war’s end, it would print some 54 million. The London Times reported on January 3, 1915, that these posters were to be seen “on every hoarding, in most windows, in omnibuses, tramcars and commercial vans. The great base of Nelson’s Column is covered with them. Their number and variety are remarkable. Everywhere Lord Kitchener sternly points a monstrously big finger, exclaiming ‘I Want You.’ ”9
The finger reference is to the most famous of the ubiquitous posters, in which the field marshal points directly at the viewer, with the caption “Your country needs YOU.” In the words of one recruit, who doubtless spoke for many, “It was seeing the picture of Kitchener and his finger pointing at you—any position that you took up, the finger was always pointing to you.” Like all effective posters, this one proved nearly impossible to ignore.10
Also in the fall, the authorities began to conduct what they called “aggressive open-air propaganda” in the form of massive parades and rallies. One staged in the fall of 1914 in Brighton was perhaps typical. There, the military paraded through the seaside town, with horses dragging giant artillery guns through the streets, and the band whipping up the crowd with martial tunes. The ensuing rally culminated in a stirring speech by Rudyard Kipling, who, deploying rhetoric for its original ancient purpose, played upon deep-seated fears of German domination:11
Have no illusions. We are dealing with a strong and magnificently equipped enemy, whose avowed aim is our complete destruction. The violation of Belgium, the attack on France and the defense against Russia, are only steps by the way. The German’s real objective, as she always has told us, is England, and England’s wealth, trade and worldwide possessions.
If you assume, for an instant, that the attack will be successful, England will not be reduced, as some people say, to the rank of a second-rate power, but we shall cease to exist as a nation. We shall become an outlying province of Germany, to be administered with that severity German safety and interest require.
If we are to win the right for ourselves and for freedom to exist on earth, every man must offer himself for that service and that sacrifice.12
George Coppard, whose wartime diaries would later be published, described how he signed up at age sixteen following much the same sort of rally at Croydon. “This was too much for me to resist, and as if drawn by a magnet, I knew I had to enlist right away.”13
Seeing the necessity to keep innovating, the government did have a few more inspired ideas. For example, it built a small fleet of specialized “cine-motor vans,” which were equipped to screen films conducive to enlistment on large walls around the country—the drive-in movie was thus born not of romance but existential threat. In 1918, on the fourth anniversary of the war, the government would distribute a special, sealed message from the prime minister to be read aloud at 9 p.m. sharp at more than four thousand cinemas, music halls, and theaters. By such means—at a time when “broadcast” still referred to a crop sowing technique—the prime minister reached an estimated 2.5 million people at once, an unheard of audience at the time.14
Mainly, though, it was no single invention that marked the government’s effort so much as its massive scale and organization.15 In this, the British anticipated an insight that would be expressed by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul halfway through the twentieth century: to succeed, propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means and media available in his time—movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing in one century, social media in another, as the rise of ISIS attests. Where there is only sporadic or random effort—a planted newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, a few slogans sprayed on walls—this modern form of attention capture does not bear its once unimagined fruit.16
Even the most successful and adaptive efforts to harvest attention can come up short. In fact, by the nature of the crop, most do. Ultimately the military would have to resort to conscription to meet its manpower needs. Still, Kitchener’s recruitment drive was almost certainly the most successful in history. Out of 5.5 million men of military age at the start of the war, about half had enlisted voluntarily by late September of 1915, this despite staggeringly high casualties in the early years. To heed the call was to accept a great chance of death or serious injury, a roughly 50/50 chance. That Lord Kitchener’s campaign managed to achieve by persuasion what other countries achieved by legal coercion was a lesson lost on no one. Just as the patent medicine advertisements had demonstrated that attention could be converted into cash, the first propaganda drives showed it was also convertible into other forms of value, like compliant service even unto death. The British example would come to be copied by others for the rest of the century: by governments in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany; and elsewhere, as we’ll see, by commercial actors. As the historians M. L. Sanders and Philip Taylor wrote, “The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world.”17
As for Lord Kitchener, who started things, he would never make it back to his beloved Egypt or even see the end of the war. In June 1916, en route to a diplomatic summit in Russia, his armored cruiser hit a series of mines laid by a German submarine possibly tipped off by a spy in the war secretary’s office. Kitchener perished with his staff and more than six hundred crewmen. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by then also part of the British propaganda effort, wrote in memoriam: “Amid the desolate waters of the Orkneys, he left behind him the memory of something vast and elemental, coming suddenly and going strangely, a mighty spirit leaving great traces of its earthly passage.”18
The very first country to try out the British propaganda techniques was not one synonymous with mind control, but rather the Land of the Free, which, in 1917, would abandon its neutrality to enter the war. Long before Americans began borrowing British television shows, they were borrowing propaganda techniques. However, like nearly every American imitation of a British original, the American version would be much bigger.
George Creel was a newspaperman and a devout Wilson supporter who had played a key role in the messaging of Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 reelection campaign. He was a partisan who was never anything but passionate and energetic; one journalist wrote of him, “What Sunday is to religion, Creel is to politics. Creel is a crusader, a bearer of the fiery cross.” In 1917, as Wilson prepared to declare war on the German Empire (breaking his campaign promise), Creel proposed to Wilson that the administration should adopt a “progressive” alternative to wartime press censorship. He argued that the United States could use modern scientific advertising techniques to “arouse ardor and enthusiasm” for the war.
Wilson, who felt indebted to Creel anyway, was so taken with Creel’s idea that, about a week after asking Congress to declare war, he placed Creel in charge of a new “Committee on Public Information,” the first institutionalized federal propaganda agency in American history. Animated by his new role, Creel, the true believer, would never seem to be afflicted by any qualms about the use of propaganda. He cheerfully called the job “a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”19 To run America’s first propaganda campaign, Wilson, by executive order, granted him a broad and unspecified authority. In his sunny way, Creel would take that authority and run with it, going to extremes that must be described as alarming.
In 1917, the United States remained intensely divided over the merits of entering a war that had already claimed millions of lives and enormous resources, with no end in sight. To many it also seemed, essentially, a contest between European powers for European territory. And so many Americans, especially those of German or Irish descent, saw no particular reason for their country to take the side of the British. Wilson and Creel were both all too familiar with these objections. Indeed, Wilson had just won reelection on a neutrality platform, which Creel had explained and justified in a bestseller published during the campaign entitled Wilson and the Issues.20 There was no stronger case for staying out than the one these two men had made.
Nonetheless, when Wilson changed his view, George Creel underwent the kind of abrupt reversal that only certain men infinitely glad to be of use could manage. There was no longer room for divided opinion, he declared, for America was now endangering itself with “voices of anger and confusion” and “the pull and haul of opposed interests.” For Creel, it would not be enough to achieve a “mere surface unity.” Rather the entire citizenry now needed to share “a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause.”
A “war-will”—a concept borrowed from nationalist writers, denoting a surrender of the individual to the greater will of the nation—was the new necessity. Creel wrote that this “war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends on the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice.” If the language sounds familiar, it should. Benito Mussolini would later describe his own project as the creation of “an objective Will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.”21 Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) would likewise glorify a collective will in spiritual terms. But for the time being, Creel was alone in hailing the fascist virtue of “weld[ing] the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.”
To be fair, Creel’s nationalism and his conception of a “war-will” was a far cry from the more malevolent strain that would arise later. “In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression,” he insisted. “Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive.” But if he was a second-rate fascist, as a propagandist he was of the first rank. For, as he averred, what he practiced was “Propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the ‘propagation of faith.’ ”22
Following the British example, Creel sought a massive and totalizing seizure of the nation’s attention. For this, a flood of government communication was necessary, for he understood that “to conduct as well as accommodate this torrent he needed to command every possible sluice, the broader the better.”23 Toward this end there was “no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board—all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms.”
Within a year of its founding, Creel’s committee had twenty domestic subdivisions, and reported staff of 150,000; it may have been the fastest-growing government bureaucracy in world history. It did more of everything, faster, channeling the age’s spirit of mass production. The committee produced more posters, speeches, pamphlets, press releases than any other entity. “In addition to newspapers and magazines, county fairs, movies, classrooms, post office walls, churches, synagogues, union halls—virtually every physical interface with the public—was a venue for a CPI message.” The argument for war was made “overwhelmingly powerful by dint of sheer volume, repetition, and ubiquity.” In the burgeoning battle for human attention, Creel’s approach was the equivalent of carpet-bombing.
Because Creel’s committee kept meticulous records, we have some measure of how many people he reached. The U.S. government printed 75 million pamphlets and books (compare with USA Today, which has a subscription of 1.6 million). It introduced the “Four Minute Man” program, in which ordinary citizens were asked to give pro-war speeches, four minutes in length, at movie theaters while the reels were being changed. The more than 75,000 volunteers delivered a total of 755,190 speeches, reaching a very precisely estimated 134,454,514 people.24
Under Creel, too, the American government joined forces with the movie business to screen some of the first American propaganda films. A special division of the committee produced features like Pershing’s Crusaders and America’s Answer to the Hun, both of which enjoyed solid ticket sales. Early on, Creel had made clear to the private film industry, just then in the midst of relocating to Hollywood, that any productions “prejudicial” to the war effort would be suppressed. After some prodding, the studios began to see both the patriotic and commercial potential of patriotic “hate” films, like Wolves of Kultur, which came out in fifteen episodes. But the greatest hit of all was The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. Sadly, no prints survive, but we do have this news report on the reaction to the film in the Midwest:
Fourteen thousand people the largest number that ever saw a motion picture in Omaha in one week saw The Kaiser [The Beast of Berlin] at the Auditorium in that city last week….Wild cheering marked every show when the young captain socked the Kaiser on the jaw. Patriotic societies boosted the picture because of its aid in stirring up the country to war. Street car signs were used; huge street banners swung over the crowds in the downtown district, and a truck paraded the streets with the Kaiser hanging in effigy and a big sign “All pro-Germans will be admitted free.” None availed himself of the invitation.25
Finally, there was the American version of the giant Kitchener poster that had been so important to the British effort. Lacking a living personification of the cause, however, the Pictorial Arts Division substituted the allegorical Uncle Sam pointing his finger and declaring “I want YOU for the U.S. Army,” for what would surely be the most indelible instance of the recruitment genre.26 In another poster reading “Destroy This Mad Brute,” Germany appears as a giant crazed gorilla; this King Kong avant la lettre, clutches in one arm a beautiful woman naked to the waist—the ravaged Belgium—and in the other hand, a club emblazoned with the word Kultur. The appeal is right to the male amygdala, the brain’s seat of violent emotions, shown in functional MRI to light up at such primal horrors.
Some 700,000 Americans volunteered for the armed forces, even though, unlike the British, the American army, from nearly the beginning, relied on conscription. Not all of Creel’s success, however, is owing to its superb attention capture and effective messaging. Acting under the authority of the new Espionage and Sedition Acts, federal prosecutors removed, silenced, or scared off the committee’s natural competitors, namely, antiwar dissenters. In the summer of 1918, Eugene Debs, founder of the Socialist Party, tried to expose what he called a campaign to apply “the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition” to the war. At a speech in Canton, Ohio, he told the crowd, “You are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain.” Afterward, the U.S. attorney for Northern Ohio charged him with ten counts of violating the Espionage Act, for which Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. In an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great progressive hero, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Debs’s conviction without dissent.27
The outlandish success of the British and American propaganda campaigns left their mark on the rest of the century, setting a new standard for what was possible in manipulating the public to adopt a strong viewpoint about a matter where opinion had been divided before. The effect on those who lived through it seemed to depend very much on something deep within one’s character. Some who found the experience alarming determined never to let such a thing happen again. Others found the wild success of British and American propagandizing nothing less than inspiring.
Walter Lippmann, a progressive journalist, co-founder of The New Republic, and a power within the Wilson administration, had been among those who pressured Wilson to take the nation to war. During the war he worked at the Creel Committee, and witnessed firsthand its power to whip the country into a fanatical assent. Despite his own initial support for the war, the ease with which the Creel Committee had succeeded turned him into something of a lifelong cynic.
What Lippmann took from the war—as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—the rough “stereotypes” (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the “consent” of the governed had been, in his phrase, “manufactured.” Hence, as he wrote, “It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.”28
Any communication, Lippmann came to see, is potentially propagandistic, in the sense of propagating a view. For it presents one set of facts, or one perspective, fostering or weakening some “stereotype” held by the mind. It is fair to say, then, that any and all information that one consumes—pays attention to—will have some influence, even if just forcing a reaction. That idea, in turn, has a very radical implication, for it suggests that sometimes we overestimate our own capacity for truly independent thought. In most areas of life, we necessarily rely on others for the presentation of facts and ultimately choose between manufactured alternatives, whether it is our evaluation of a product or a political proposition. And if that is true, in the battle for our attention, there is a particular importance in who gets there first or most often. The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.
All this, in Lippmann’s view, helped explain why the British and American governments were able, with such surprising speed, to create a “war-will.” They presented a simple, black-and-white stereotype by which to understand the war, used every resource of the state to thoroughly propagate that view, and then prevented any dissenting analysis from reaching anyone with a sympathetic stereotype as to what the war was about. That “public opinion” had been so easy to manufacture left Lippmann an abiding pessimist about democracy’s dependence on it.
Lippmann’s orientation was shared by prominent progressives in the American judiciary, who, witnessing the rough treatment of dissenters like Debs, began to think twice about what had been done in the name of progressivism. Among the first to express himself was the famed lower-court jurist Judge Learned Hand, who’d been among the few during the war to squash an indictment under the Espionage Act.29 After the War, as prosecutors continued to arrest and jail socialists and anarchists for their views, the most prominent progressives on the Supreme Court, Justices Holmes and Louis Brandeis, underwent a transformation. In a series of dissents and concurrences, renowned for their eloquence, the two outlined the case for stronger speech protections in the Constitution. Justice Brandeis, as if in apology for the Court’s behavior during the war, would in 1927 write a memorable paean to the value of liberty of speech in his famous concurring opinion in Whitney v. California:
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.30
Yet others had nearly the opposite reaction, responding to propaganda’s dramatic success not with dismay but enthusiasm, in the sense of glimpsing a grand opportunity. Among them was the young, Vienna-born Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Residing in the United States, and just twenty-four at the start of the war, he was making his living as a journalist turned press agent. To create publicity for his clients, Bernays was already employing his uncle’s idea of a human nature driven by unconscious desires. (According to legend, Sigmund Freud gave him his General Lectures in exchange for a box of cigars.) During the war Bernays worked, like many journalists, on the Creel Committee, and like Lippmann, he emerged with a sense of the futility of democracy. But unlike Lippmann, Bernays drew from the experience a belief in the necessity of enlightened manipulation. Otherwise, he wrote, the public “could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above.” As he saw it, “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
But Bernays’s real passion was for manipulation on behalf of business interests. As he later recalled, “I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.” He would devote the rest of his influential career as the self-described “father of public relations” to the use of propaganda techniques on behalf of commercial clients. In his words, the wartime triumph had “opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.”31 And that “business offers graphic examples of the effect that may be produced upon the public by interested groups.”
With the government campaigns as proof-of-concept for what a mass advertising campaign might achieve, corporate America soon caught Bernays’s enthusiasm. There was something about the British and American use of advertising for official purposes that cleansed the practice of its tainted reputation. Applied to a high common purpose it could no longer be deemed a mere prop of charlatanry. “Advertising has earned its credentials,” concluded Printer’s Ink, the advertising trade magazine, “as an important implement of war.”32
The losers of the war were also important witnesses to British and American propaganda efforts, from which they too sought to learn. Erich Ludendorff, a lead German general during the attack on Belgium, reflected that “before the enemy propaganda we were like a rabbit before a snake.” Another German war veteran, while in prison, wrote a tract admiring British propaganda as “marvelous,” praising its simple presentation of “negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood,” thereby allowing “no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt.” The fan was Adolf Hitler, and given his chance, he thought he could do even better.