Name: John Maxwell Hamilton
University Affiliation and Position: Louisiana State University, Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor of Journalism
Book Title: Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda
- Describe the focus of your book.
This book is about the profound and enduring threat to American democracy that rose out of the Great War – the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state. That horrific conflict required the mobilization of entire nations, no less in the United States than in Europe. The government in Washington exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of the citizens it was supposed to serve. Its agent for this was the Committee on Public Information, the first and only time the United States government had a ministry of propaganda. Nothing like it had existed before, and it would be dismantled at the end of the war. But the CPI endured as a “blueprint” for the Information State that exists today in peace time as well as during war.
- How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
The story of the CPI is a sprawling one that had not been told fully. It deserved to be. The few histories of it that have been written passed over congressional inquiries into its practices, its failures in field propaganda, its heavy-handed promotion of White Russian disinformation, and its bizarre (there is no better word) end-of-war mission to Central Europe, to name a few episodes. Not well understood or documented was the CPI’s connection to intelligence agencies, its use of front organizations, or its imaginative and chaotic way of doing business. No connection had been made between political campaigning in Wilson’s election of 1916 and the birth of the CPI in 1917, a connection that shows how campaigns are test kitchens for presidents’ use of their propaganda powers after their secure the White House. No attention had been given to the constitutional irregularly of Wilson’s creation of the CPI by executive order, rather than with congressional authorization, a lapse that put it on uncertain footing from the beginning.
3.What archives or research materials did you use? The full story cannot be found in the CPI records in the National Archives. The archives of organizations with which the CPI interacted, the personal papers of individuals whom it touched, and the records of other countries that waged propaganda at the same time contain invaluable information on what the CPI did to shape views and provide context for reconstructing the conditions shaped it. Altogether I consulted more than 150 collections in the United States and Europe.
- How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
Presidents enjoy enormous power to shape public opinion. In some cases this is a matter of bypassing he press. In some cases a matter of using the press. This book looks at both aspects. I was surprised, by the way, by the extent to which journalists were willing to be used, even if they resented the CPI. I would call this a major finding of the book. The dynamic that existed in the Great War exists today. The Trump administration’s excessive use of is propaganda power added to the relevance of the book, something I had not anticipated when I began to write it.
5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects
The same advice that every reporter gets from editors. Always make one more call, if you have time. I sought to turn over every rock – read that as sought to peer into every archive – that I could identify. That is why the book took so long to write.
