Wartime Propaganda: World War I :: World War I History

Wartime Propaganda World War IThe Drift To contendds War Lead this passel into warfare, and theyll forget there was of all time such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be venomous and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very role of national life, infecting the Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street. It is integrity of historys massive ironies that Woodrow Wilson, who was re- elected as a peace candidate in 1916, conduct America into the first world war. With the help of a propaganda apparatus that was infrequent in world history, Wilson forged a nation of immigrants into a battle whole. An examination of public opinion before the war, propaganda efforts during the war, and the endurance of propaganda in peacetime raises hearty questions ab out(p) the viability of democracy as a governing principle. Like an undertow, Americas social movement toward war was subtle and forceful. According to the outspoken p acifist Randolph Bourne, war conceit spread gradually among various intellectual groups. With the aid of Roosevelt, wrote Bourne, the murmurs became a savourless chant, and finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at first to be disreputable, and finally almost obscene. Once the war was underway, dissent was practically impossible. If you believed our going into this war was a mistake, wrote The Nation in a post-war editorial, if you held, as President Wilson did early in 1917, that the ideal solution would be peace without victory, you were a traitor. Forced to stand quietly on the sidelines duration their neighbors stampeded towards war, many pacifists would have agreed with Bertrand Russell that the greatest difficulty was the purely mental one of resisting mass suggestion, of which the force becomes terrific when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. This frenzied support for the war was particularly remarkable in light of the fact that Wilsons re-election had been widely see as a vote for peace. After all, in January of 1916, Wilson stated that so far as I can remember, this is a government of the people, and this people is not going to choose war. In retrospect, it is apparent that the vote for Wilson mantled profound cleavages in public opinion. At the time of his inauguration, immigrants constituted one third of the population. Allied and German propaganda revived old-world loyalties among hyphenated European- Americans, and opinions about US intervention were sharply polarized.