Dictionary:

propaganda

  (prŏp'ə-găn'də)

1. The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
2. Material disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause: wartime propaganda.
3. Propaganda Roman Catholic Church. A division of the Roman Curia that has authority in the matter of preaching the gospel, of establishing the Church in non-Christian countries, and of administering Church missions in territories where there is no properly organized hierarchy.

[Short for New Latin Sacra Congregātiō dē Prōpagandā Fidē, Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith (established 1622), from ablative feminine gerundive of Latin prōpāgāre, to propagate. See propagate.]

Message conveyed in order to support and spread a particular opinion or point of view, engaging both the intellect and the emotions of the audience. Propaganda may consist of an overt appeal such as most advertising copy or be non-overt such as the seller's participation in community events, company slogans and logos, special employee benefits and so forth. Ben & Jerry's ice cream has benefited from public knowledge of their corporate commitment to environmental causes and employee empowerment, despite the lack of any direct relevance of those things to their products. Tobacco companies use sponsorships of sporting events to counter their unhealthy image. See also one-sided message.

Definition: information which is false or twisted
Antonyms: truth

Propaganda is a word derived from the Vatican's establishment of the Sacre Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in 1622. It is a process of persuasion designed to induce ideas, opinions, or actions beneficial to the source. As a process, it is value-neutral although the word has acquired pejorative meaning. Analysis of propaganda would more profitably benefit by examination of intentions. In, for example, the case of combat propaganda, more usually termed psychological warfare, the intention is to persuade enemy soldiers to defect, desert, surrender, or otherwise influence their behaviour on the battlefield with a view to defeating them. As such, these ‘munitions of the mind’ have become increasingly more sophisticated with advances in psychology and communications, especially during the course of the 20th century.

Before 1914, propaganda was usually associated with religion and the implanting of ideas to be cultivated in support of existing beliefs and ‘faith’. Its wartime applications, in the Napoleonic or the American independence wars, were confined largely to calls to arms, lampooning the enemy, glorifying victory, and sustaining morale. The intention by the few to impress the many can be traced back to the ancient world in art, architecture, and symbolism. The advent of printing in the 14th century shifted the emphasis from script to print. In wars of religion, propaganda from the pulpit remained a potent method of swaying emotions, hence the Vatican's Sacre Congregatio. Massive advances in communications technologies in the 19th century, the development of a global cable network, and the arrival of the mass media by the end of the century extended propaganda to a global audience.

The Great War of 1914-18, a total war which industrialized warfare and made the home front as important as the fighting front, altered the nature of popular involvement and introduced domestic morale as a military asset. It also discredited the word ‘propaganda’ which henceforth came to be associated with the manipulation of opinion, by foul means rather than fair, with lies or half-truths, and with deceit. In particular, the popularization of atrocity propaganda through the relatively new mass-circulation press and the increasingly popular silent cinema discredited the relationship between propaganda and ‘truth’. It was this manipulative power over human emotions which Hitler identified as being a weapon that could be of enormous value for his purposes.

In the new USSR also, propaganda was seized upon as a device that could serve the state, by extending revolutionary ideas to the illiterate masses and, more innovatively, into the international class struggle. With the advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, the ability to transmit propaganda across frontiers and appeal directly to foreign audiences undermined traditional notions about non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. A series of radio ‘wars’ prompted the League of Nations in 1936 to pass a convention attempting to outlaw the use of broadcasting for these purposes. More honoured in the breach as the Nazi and Fascist regimes positioned propaganda as a central feature of their domestic and foreign policies, the BBC ideal that ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’ fell victim to the ideological conflict that was to produce both WW II and the subsequent Cold War.

By the outbreak of WW II, the sound cinema had also become an important medium for disseminating propaganda. The British Ministry of Information (the choice of words reflecting the nervousness of democratic countries in eschewing propaganda) recognized that ‘for the film to be good propaganda it must also be good entertainment’. Once the USA entered the war, the formidable American motion-picture industry (‘Hollywood’) was mobilized in support of wartime propaganda themes: ‘why we fight’, ‘know your enemy’, ‘unity is strength’, and so on. The wartime democratic alliance evolved a ‘Strategy of Truth’ towards their propaganda, which did not mean that the whole truth was told. But the reputation for credibility which organizations like the BBC were able to develop in their broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Europe was a serious corrective to the propaganda output of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment encapsulated by the phrase the ‘Big Lie’.

While propaganda by press, poster, radio, and film was used extensively on the domestic fronts to sustain popular morale through the harsh realities of war, bombing, rationing, victories, and defeats, on the fighting fronts it was used as an adjunct to military tactics. Millions of leaflets were dropped over enemy lines, mobile loudspeaker teams shouted out messages, and radio transmissions attempted to sow seeds of confusion, doubt, and defeatism. It is axiomatic that successful propaganda must go hand in hand with policy. The Allies in this respect shot themselves in the foot with the insistence on unconditional surrender following the Casablanca Conference of 1942. By announcing that all Germans in defeat would be treated in exactly the same way, this policy fused the fate of the German people with that of the Nazi Party in a way undreamed of by a grateful Goebbels. It enabled him to launch his own drive for total war, it pre-empted the Allied use of such inducements as ‘surrender or die’ since any German soldier would be treated as a war criminal, and it partly helps to explain why the German people kept fighting to the bitter end.

Words by themselves did not win the war. But in the ideological confrontation between the USSR and the USA in the years that followed, they were to become significant weapons in the Cold War. Overt propaganda by the US Information Agency or by Radio Moscow was supplemented by covert activity and disinformation by the CIA and KGB. Propaganda continued to be employed in the low-intensity conflicts of Korea or in the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign in the Malayan emergency, but it was its escalation into a strategic weapon in the global battle for allegiances in disputes over nuclear weapons, the space race, even medical advances or the Olympic Games, which made it an all-pervasive feature of the Cold War.

With the advent of television in the 1950s and 1960s, a new medium of enormous propaganda potential was quickly recognized. The Vietnam war was fought out nightly in the living rooms of middle America and, as the ‘first television war’, raised the spectre of whether democracies would be able to sustain popular support in wartime under its prying lens. A myth emerged that the US military lost the Vietnam war not due to military incompetence but because it had been stabbed in the back by a hostile media on the home front. It is important to remember that Vietnam was the most uncensored war of recent military history and, in light of the lack of restrictions imposed on journalists, the tendency was to shoot the messenger for the bad news it carried.

Nonetheless, the belief that the media could become (to use Churchill's phrase about the BBC) an ‘enemy within the gates’ for democracies, which would always therefore be at a disadvantage in conflicts against authoritarian regimes, gave rise to the belief that restrictions on reporting were essential in wartime. In the 1980s, as the system of media ‘pools’ was being developed, the British showed the way during the Falklands war. Only 30 journalists (all British) were allowed to accompany the Task Force and they were dependent on the military not only for transportation to the combat theatre but also for communications from it. Indeed, it took longer for one Independent Television News despatch to reach London than it had taken one of William Howard Russell's despatches for The Times 150 years earlier during the Crimean war.

Developments in new communications technologies during the 1980s, such as the portable satellite phone, the laptop computer, and digital data transmission meant that such military control of the information environment would never be possible again. However, as the Gulf war of 1991 indicated, propaganda had not been confined to the dustbin of history. An increasingly sophisticated US military information policy was able to secure a desired view of warfare through the release of videotapes showing missiles hitting (not missing) their targets with unprecedented accuracy, and through live television press conferences which bypassed the traditional role of the media as mediator. Despite the unprecedented effort by the Iraqis to counter this propaganda of a ‘clean’ and ‘smart’ high-tech war by permitting correspondents from Coalition countries to stay behind in the enemy capital under fire, the military information agenda succeeded in dominating the media coverage. Democracies had indeed demonstrated that they could wage war in the presence of more than 1, 500 journalists, and thereby sustain public support in the process.

The Gulf war has been described as the first ‘information war’. Indeed, the emphasis in contemporary military thinking on ‘Command and Control Warfare’ places great emphasis on information warfare or ‘information operations’. As such, propaganda is redefined as a non-lethal weapon, a combat force multiplier which saves lives and empowers the individual to make decisions he/she might not otherwise have done—all to the benefit of the source.

Bibliography

• Ellul, J., Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (New York, 1965).
• Pratkanis, A., and Aronson, E., Age of Propaganda (New York, 1991).
• Taylor, Philip M., Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era (Manchester, 1995)

— Philip M. Taylor

n. any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Originating in an office of the Roman Catholic Church charged with propagation of the faith (de propaganda fidei), the word entered common usage in the second quarter of the twentieth century to describe attempts by totalitarian regimes to achieve comprehensive subordination of knowledge to state policy. Based in the desire of fascists, Nazis, and Bolsheviks to develop legitimacy and social control by overcoming the broadly based cultural hegemony of antecedent regimes, propaganda soon came to be directed toward the populations of other states, provoking reactions from the industrialized democracies. As war approached in the late 1930s Britain established its own Ministry, not of Propaganda but of Information, its very title an exercise in rhetoric. This employed print, radio, film, and the spoken word to put the best gloss on state policy and the fortunes of British arms (white propaganda) while also running down and misrepresenting the Axis powers (black propaganda). Still important in international relations during the Cold War through radio stations such as Voice of America, propaganda both at home and abroad was frequently crude and ineffective, especially in communist states lacking the technical skills of advertising, marketing, and communications developed within the private sectors of a consumerist Western culture with largely unrestricted media. It has, however, been brought to a fine art in the advanced industrial economies in recent years, where the presentation of state policy and legislation has often received as much attention as its content and drafting.

— Charles Jones

For more information on propaganda, visit Britannica.com.

Propaganda can be defined as any message intended to modify the attitudes and behaviour of people at whom it is directed, primarily by appealing to their emotions. Its use is not confined to dictatorships and authoritarian organizations. Democracies have employed it extensively in wartime. In peacetime it plays a significant role in electoral politics, and in public-service campaigns relating to social problems. Messages may range from simple verbal texts to elaborate combinations of aural and visual signals (e.g. television commercials). The media used have included print, graphic art, film, radio, television, and architecture, from baroque palaces to fascist monuments.

Photographs have also featured widely in modern propaganda, because of their reproducibility, manipulability, and, undoubtedly, because of the popular assumption that ‘the camera never lies’.

The promotion of photography by Napoleon III and his government as a means of publicizing the achievements of the Second Empire (1852-70) can be described as propagandistic. But more explicitly so was use of the camera in France after the empire's collapse. Early examples related to the Paris Commune, most notably the efforts of Eugène Appert (1830-91) to recreate Communard atrocities by means of elaborate photomontages. Later, photographic propaganda was used on a large scale by right-wing opponents of the Third Republic, including Bonapartists, royalists, and the military demagogue General Boulanger, and, at the turn of the century, by both sides in the Dreyfus Affair.

In the First World War propaganda was used extensively by all belligerents. Although graphic art and, increasingly, motion pictures probably had greater impact, huge numbers of war photographs were exhibited and published. However, the war's greatest contribution to the history of propaganda was the emergence of large organizations with the task of bombarding soldiers, civilians, the enemy, and neutrals with carefully designed, emotive messages over long periods of time. Government-sponsored mass communication, using sophisticated methods, was to play a major role in left-and right-wing dictatorships, and the war efforts of democratic states, over the next several decades.

Visual communication was at a premium in Soviet Russia, given the country's high level of illiteracy and multitude of linguistic groups. In the 1920s, before the consolidation of Stalin's dictatorship and the imposition of Socialist Realism, the new regime mobilized many talented photographers and designers—including Max Alpert, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Arkadi Shaikhet, and Gyorgy Zelma—who shared its utopian vision and created dynamic, modernistic images of industrialization and social renewal. Western imports like the photo-essay, exemplified by A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker (1931) and Rodchenko's images of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1933), were adapted for Russia's urban public and sympathizers abroad. Even after the suppression of avant-garde styles as ‘bourgeois deviationism’ in the 1930s, photography continued to play a major role in the visual rhetoric of ‘democratic centralism’, collectivism, and ‘Socialism in one country’.

Leadership imagery became increasingly important. Portraitist-in-chief to Lenin was Pyotr Otsup, whose photographs were still circulating in their millions at the end of the 1920s. A range of photographers depicted Lenin's unphotogenic and camera-shy successor Stalin, who by the 1930s was shown with declining frequency alongside Vladimir Ilyich (or a bust or statue of him), and in monumental isolation from other Politburo members. Every medium and format was used to project his image, from postcards to gigantic posters. On 1 May 1932 Sverdlov Square in Moscow was decorated with matching photo posters of Lenin and Stalin, each 25 m high by 9 wide (82 × 29 1/2 ft), and copious information about the problems overcome and the quantities of materials used appeared in the press. Other techniques included the conversion of photographs of Stalin into paintings, and the superimposition of his image on pictures of industrial or military subjects or, in 1949, of crowds celebrating his 70th birthday.

Long before Stalin's death in 1953 a comprehensive technical and iconographical repertoire had developed that continued to be used in other communist states, including China. There were variations from country to country. Whereas Stalin, for example, was rarely photographed interacting with ordinary people, Walter Ulbricht in the GDR was regularly depicted playing volleyball or eating in factory canteens. In general, however, photographers had to work with a palette of approved images: low-angle shots of Red Army soldiers, high-angle ones of applauding crowds, lyrical views of the homeland, and suitably impressive (but not avant-gardistic) pictures of mills, dams, power stations, and naval manoeuvres. Physical manipulation was used to rejuvenate geriatric leaders, eliminate bottles and cigarette butts from official meetings, and, as with Trotsky in the 1920s, weed ‘unpersons’ out of leadership photographs. Particularly sinister and surreal in this regard was a picture, c. 1968, of the Czech reformer Alexander Dubček and President Svoboda surrounded by enthusiastic, camera-wielding youth. In a second version, Svoboda appears larger and more prominent, but Dubček has been eliminated (but not, presumably, from the onlookers' family albums).

The balance between official and grass-roots photography was more interesting in Nazi Germany (1933-45), which had a richer photographic culture than other large totalitarian states. Germany in the 1920s had a major photographic industry, a mature illustrated press, and a large camera-owning population. By 1933 both Nazis and communists were adept at photographic propaganda, from photomontage to the recycling of historical images (e.g. of the German Revolution (1918-19)). During the Third Reich, notwithstanding the establishment of a Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Hoffmann, as Hitler's long-standing crony and personal photographer, remained the leading figure in the photographic firmament, and maintained a near-monopoly of Führer images until 1945. He helped to form the ‘Hitler myth’ that was one of the unequivocal successes of Nazi propaganda. Hitler pictures were distributed in saturation quantities as postage stamps, postcards, cigarette cards, posters, press illustrations, and in the albums published by Hoffmann. Two of the most successful of these, Hitler wie ihn keiner kennt (The Hitler Nobody Knows; 1932) and Hitler in seinen Bergen (Hitler in his Mountains; 1935), which presented their subject as reassuringly benign and ordinary, continued to sell well even after Hitler's official image, from c. 1936, became that of an increasingly remote ‘man of destiny’. Other branches of photographic propaganda were handled by the Propaganda Ministry. Like press coverage generally, photojournalism was ‘tuned’ and regulated according to political needs, with shifting emphases (e.g. on anti-Semitism, Soviet Russia) and predictable taboos (train crashes, indiscretions by Party bosses). Prestige photographic exhibitions such as Deutschland (1936) and Gebt uns vier Jahre Zeit (Give Us Four Years; 1937) were also organized by the Ministry, as was coverage of propaganda events like the 1936 Olympics. In photography, as in other media, only those deemed politically and racially sound could belong to professional organizations and, therefore, work.

Amateur photography was another matter. Although all clubs were ideologically ‘coordinated’, individuals could generally be relied upon to convey a positive impression of life in the new Germany. Pets, babies, holidays, and landscapes continued to dominate exhibitions and family albums. Notable from this perspective were the photographic courses organized on the vacation cruises sponsored by the official leisure organization, Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), which evidently aimed to spread the practice of self-generating photographic propaganda among the working class. Amateur activity continued to be encouraged in the first half of the war, but dwindled from 1943 as materials became scarce and wartime reality more grim.

Germany's democratic opponents made extensive use of photographic propaganda in the Second World War. Much more than in 1914-18, photography was the basis for posters, designed by advertising experts like the American Victor Keppler. Accredited press photographers, subject to censorship and other pressures, fed the illustrated press, whose role was both to inform and encourage. Official photographers supplied vast numbers of images (some staged) for use in the innumerable publications of the US Office of War Information and British Ministry of Information, covering every aspect of the Allied war effort. Commercial publishers illustrated their books with pictures by civilian photographers—men like John Hinde—whose wartime work can be described as propagandistic.

In peacetime democratic politics, management of photographic coverage is as important as the production of images. Politicians, whether in office or candidates for office, must not only disseminate photographs to convey a chosen message but endeavour to head off negative representation. (Frank Capra's 1939 comedy about a political ingénu on Capitol Hill, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, satirized the perils of photography.) Ulrich Keller and others have argued that photography became important in American politics during the successful presidential campaigns of William McKinley in 1896 and 1900, when large-scale process reproduction became a reality. It was subsequently used to good effect by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. However, systematic image management came of age under Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45). Although by this time radio and newsreels were probably perceived as more important, Roosevelt's press secretary Stephen Early successfully imposed ‘unwritten rules’ on White House photographers in order to get favourable pictures (and, among other things, avoid depiction of the President's disability). This system was continually refined later on, so that by Ronald Reagan's presidency (1981-9) White House photo opportunities were governed, on pain of exclusion, by detailed rules about photographers' pecking order, the functional separation of photographers and reporters, and the kinds of pictures that could be taken. Yet even in this controlled environment embarrassing images were made, notably during the Iran-contra scandal in late 1986. (Richard Nixon had suffered similar mishaps). Outside the White House, and other controlled venues like Downing Street or the Élysée Palace, meticulous planning is needed to maximize positive coverage. An interesting 21st-century example was President George W. Bush's Iraq War victory speech aboard USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003. In fact the carrier was reachable from southern California by helicopter, from which Bush would have emerged in civilian clothes. However, he was flown in a fixed-wing aircraft, a decision that allowed him to appear before the cameras in a military flying suit, a warrior among warriors. Such calculations, using the media's known habits to generate suitable pictures, are fundamental to modern political management.

— Rolf Sachsse/Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• English, D. E., Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914 (1984).
• Jaubert, A., Le Commissariat aux archives (1986).
• Winfield, B., FDR and the News Media (1990).
• Squiers, C., “‘Picturing Scandal: Iranscam, the Reagan White House, and the Photo Opportunity’”, in C. Squiers (ed.), The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography (1990).
• Herz, R., Loiperdinger, M., and Pohlmann, U. (eds.), Führerbilder: Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin in Fotografie und Film (1995).
• King, D., The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia (1997)

The active manipulation of opinion by means that include distortion or concealment of the truth. It is useful to distinguish agitation propaganda, that seeks to change attitudes, from integration propaganda, that seeks to reinforce already existing attitudes. The borderline between education and indoctrination, or objective statement and political speech, can be hard to define both in practice and theory.

The deliberate use of information, images, and ideas to affect public opinion, propaganda is a policy tool deployed by all governments, although its effectiveness is widely debated by scholars. The term acquired a pejorative connotation because of the exaggerated atrocity stories peddled by all sides fighting in World War I, and the horrifying accomplishments of the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda of Nazi Germany's Joseph Goebbels. Since then, most Western governments have eschewed the term in favor of "public information," "public diplomacy," and other similar euphemisms when discussing their own practices of attempted persuasion, and have applied the word exclusively to the statements of rival regimes.

Information analysts often classify propaganda into three categories: black, gray, and white. Black or covert propaganda consists of outright falsehoods or material falsely attributed to a source. Gray propaganda is unattributed material of questionable validity. White propaganda is the overt spreading of true information in the service of a cause. During the twentieth century, the U.S. government engaged in all three types of propaganda at various times.

The first official U.S. agency charged with developing and distributing propaganda was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), created by order of President Woodrow Wilson on April 6, 1917, within a week of American entry into World War I. George Creel, a journalist who had written pamphlets for Wilson's 1916 re-election campaign, was made chairman. Creel hired reporters, novelists, and advertising copywriters for his sprawling organization that produced a daily newspaper, the Official Bulletin, with a circulation of 100,000, as well as press releases and editorials distributed to regular newspapers throughout the United States. The CPI printed millions of pamphlets for worldwide distribution of messages favorable to the United States, and sent 75,000 volunteers dubbed "Four Minute Men" to give patriotic speeches in movie houses. Other divisions of the CPI produced cartoons, drawings, and films, all designed to recruit soldiers, sell war bonds, and foster support for the war effort. In a military counterpart to the CPI, the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Division created a unit for psychological warfare, dropping leaflets behind German lines to demoralize enemy troops.

World War II

Postwar disillusionment soured the public on government sponsored information programs, and it was not until World War II that a successor agency to the CPI was created. On June 13, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Office of War Information (OWI) to present government policies to the public both at home and abroad. The OWI engaged in activities similar to the CPI, producing printed materials, films, and newspapers; but it went beyond the CPI's legacy to introduce regular broadcasts over the government radio station, the Voice of America (VOA), and worked with Hollywood to ensure that privately produced movies were in harmony with government aims in the war. The OWI soon had twenty-six overseas posts known as the U.S. Information Service (USIS). On the military side, psychological warfare was the purview of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by William D. ("Wild Bill") Donovan. In addition to sabotage and intelligence work, the OSS engaged in propaganda in support of military operations, including spreading disinformation. In Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller directed an ambitious information campaign to shore up support for the Allies, placing articles in U.S. and Latin American periodicals and distributing approved films through the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA).

The end of the war again brought about severe cutbacks in these agencies, and President Harry S. Truman eliminated OWI altogether, placing the VOA under the State Department. But the anti-Communist campaign of the Cold War required a continuing government information program. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), successor to the OSS, took over covert propaganda efforts, using black and gray propaganda to undermine the appeal of the French and Italian Communist Parties in elections. CIA funds supported the British magazines Encounter and New Leader, the French Preuves, the Spanish Cuadernos, the Italian Tempo Presente, and the Austrian Forum. A CIA front organization, the National Committee for a Free Europe, created Radio Free Europe (RFE) in 1949 for broadcasting to Eastern Europe; another CIA front set up Radio Liberty (RL) two years later. The Agency also funded Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) directed at East Germany, and created a covert radio station as part of its successful operation to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954.

Domestic Propaganda

Despite its mandate not to engage in domestic intelligence work, from the late 1940s at least until the mid-1970s, the CIA also placed propaganda in the American media, either directly or by sponsoring research and paying publication costs. CIA material was delivered, wittingly or unwittingly, by major television networks, wire service agencies, and major newspapers. Between 1947 and 1967, more than 1,000 books were written on behalf of the CIA, and published by reputable houses both in America and abroad.

In 1950, President Truman persuaded Congress to back a "Campaign of Truth" to wage psychological warfare against the Soviet bloc. He created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) within the National Security Council (NSC) to coordinate propaganda efforts from the Departments of State and Defense as well as CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although the PSB's struggles for bureaucratic control were resisted by the individual departments, government information programs grew in scope. The VOA broadcast radio programs to one hundred countries in forty-six languages, and ten thousand foreign newspapers received daily materials from the U.S. press service.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the United States Information Agency (USIA) on June 1, 1953, as an independent agency controlling the VOA and other overt information programs formerly in the State Department. The USIA touted some of Eisenhower's favorite programs, such as Atoms for Peace, Food for Peace, and the People-to-People exchange programs, which brought private citizens into contact with foreigners. In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy invited famed CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow to head the USIA.

Controversial Outcomes

Foreign propaganda work sometimes provoked controversy, as when Radio Liberty exhorted the people of Eastern Europe to overthrow their governments. When Hungarians revolted in 1956, many counted on help from the United States and complained bitterly that Radio Liberty had raised their expectations. The station's broadcasts grew more cautious after Soviet tanks crushed the revolt.

In the 1980s, with the sharpening of the Cold War, the USIA received a billion-dollar budget to support new programs such as Worldnet television broadcasts. From 1983 to 1986, the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean was directed by Otto J. Reich, who reported to the National Security Council. Reich used white, gray, and black propaganda techniques to try to reverse the negative media coverage of the Reagan administration's policies in Central America, where Washington supported regimes with poor human rights records in El Salvador and Guatemala and underwrote the counterrevolutionary Contra forces seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. His staff of psychological warfare specialists from the CIA and the Pentagon claimed credit for placing ghost-written op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post and intervening with editorial offices at CBS and NBC News and National Public Radio to alter their coverage of Central America. Reich's office spread the rumor that reporters who wrote articles critical of the Contras had been bribed by Sandinista agents with sexual favors, and his staff orchestrated a smear campaign linking the Sandinistas to anti-Semitism. The nonpartisan General Accounting Office later found that Reich's office "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities."

Since 1985, radio and later television broadcasts have been beamed to Cuba by a government station named after nineteenth-century Cuban independence hero José Martí. Radio Martí and TV Martí largely adhered to VOA standards of objectivity until 1998, when pressure from Cuban exile political organizations led VOA to move the station from Washington to Miami, where it came under the influence of hard-line exile activists. The subsequent change in tone of the broadcasts led Senate critics to call the program an embarrassment to the United States, and listenership inside Cuba fell to an estimated level of eight percent.

The Gulf War

The end of the Cold War reduced the emphasis on propaganda broadcasts to Eastern Europe, but the military continued to apply psychological warfare during armed conflicts. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. military dropped some 29 million leaflets over Iraqi lines, and used radio and loudspeaker teams to urge enemy soldiers to surrender. Army officers tightly restricted access to the battlefield, guiding "pools" of journalists to approved sites for supervised reporting. The Pentagon provided compelling video footage to news organizations, famously demonstrating the capabilities of "smart bombs" that accurately hit their targets without causing collateral damage. Only after the war was it revealed that "smart" weapons made up a small fraction of the bombs dropped on Iraq. Covert CIA broadcasts to Iraq urged the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south to rise up against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but drew criticism when the revolts took place and were swiftly crushed without U.S. interference.

Bibliography

Green, Fitzhugh. American Propaganda Abroad. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988.

Hixson, Walter L. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Jackall, Robert, ed. Propaganda. New York: New York University, 1995.

Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982.

Shulman, Holly Cowan. The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Translated by Diana M. Wolf. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1994.

The United States has utilized propaganda techniques repeatedly through its history, particularly during periods of war and international crisis. As early as the revolutionary period, Americans evinced a shrewd grasp of the utility of propaganda as an instrument of foreign policy. The total wars of the early twentieth century led the U.S. government to employ propaganda on a massive scale as an accessory to military operations, but the Cold War institutionalized propaganda as a central component of American foreign policy. The governmental use of propaganda continued to expand in the twenty-first century, largely due to the harnessing of the revolution in communications. But for most Americans, propaganda has a negative connotation as a treacherous, deceitful, and manipulative practice. Americans have generally thought of propaganda as something "other" people and nations do, while they themselves merely persuade, inform, or educate. Americans have employed numerous euphemisms for their propaganda in order to distinguish it from its totalitarian applications and wicked connotations. The most common of these has been "information," a designation that has adorned all of the official propaganda agencies of the government—from the Committee on Public Information (1917–1919) and the Office of War Information (1942–1945) to the U.S. Information Agency (1953–1999) and its successor, the Office of International Information Programs in the Department of State.

For a brief period during the 1940s and early 1950s, the terms "psychological warfare" and "political warfare" were openly espoused by propaganda specialists and politicians alike. Increasingly, they turned to euphemisms like "international communication" and "public communication" to make the idea of propaganda more palatable to domestic audiences. During the Cold War, common phrases also included "the war of ideas," "battle for hearts and minds," "struggle for the minds and wills of men," "thought war," "ideological warfare," "nerve warfare," "campaign of truth," "war of words," and others. Even the term "Cold War" was used to refer to propaganda techniques and strategy (as in "Cold War tactics"). Later, the terms "communication," "public diplomacy," "psychological operations" (or "psyops"), "special operations," and "information warfare" became fashionable. Political propaganda and measures to influence media coverage were likewise labeled "spin," and political propagandists were "spin doctors" or, more imaginatively, "media consultants" and "image advisers."

The term "propaganda" has spawned as many definitions as it has euphemisms. Harold Lass well, a pioneer of propaganda studies in the United States, defined it as "the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols." Like other social scientists in the 1930s, he emphasized its psychological elements: propaganda was a subconscious manipulation of psychological symbols to accomplish secret objectives. Subsequent analysts stressed that propaganda was a planned and deliberate act of opinion management. A 1958 study prepared for the U.S. Army, for example, defined propaganda as "the planned dissemination of news, information, special arguments, and appeals designed to influence the beliefs, thoughts, and actions of a specific group." In the 1990s the historian Oliver Thomson defined propaganda broadly to include both deliberate and unintentional means of behavior modification, describing it as "the use of communication skills of all kinds to achieve attitudinal or behavioural changes among one group by another." Numerous communication specialists have stressed that propaganda is a neutral activity concerned only with persuasion, in order to free propagandists (and their profession) from pejorative associations. Some social scientists have abandoned the term altogether because it cannot be defined with any degree of precision; and others, like the influential French philosopher Jacques Ellul, have used the term but refused to define it because any definition would inevitably leave something out.

As these examples indicate, propaganda is notoriously difficult to define. Does one identify propaganda by the intentions of the sponsor, by the effect on the recipients, or by the techniques used? Is something propaganda because it is deliberate and planned? How does propaganda differ from advertising, public relations, education, information, or, for that matter, politics? At its core, propaganda refers to any technique or action that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, or behavior of a group, in order to benefit the sponsor. Propaganda is usually, but not exclusively, concerned with public opinion and mass attitudes. The purpose of propaganda is to persuade—either to change or reinforce existing attitudes and opinions. Yet propaganda is also a manipulative activity. It often disguises the secret intentions and goals of the sponsor; it seeks to inculcate ideas rather than to explain them; and it aspires to modify or control opinions and actions primarily to benefit the sponsor rather than the recipient.

Although manipulative, propaganda is not necessarily untruthful, as is commonly believed. In fact, many specialists believe that the most effective propaganda operates with different layers of truth—from half-truths and the truth torn out of context to the just plain truth. Propagandists have on many occasions employed lies, misrepresentations, or deceptions, but propaganda that is based on fact and that rings true to the intended audience is bound to be more persuasive than bald-faced lies.

Another common misconception identifies propaganda narrowly by its most obvious manifestations—radio broadcasts, posters, leaflets, and so on. But propaganda experts employ a range of symbols, ideas, and activities to influence the thoughts, attitudes, opinions, and actions of various audiences—including such disparate modes of communication and human interaction as educational and cultural exchanges, books and scholarly publications, the adoption of slogans and buzzwords, monuments and museums, spectacles and media events, press releases, speeches, policy initiatives, and person-to-person contacts. Diplomacy, too, has been connected to the practice of propaganda. Communication techniques have been employed by government agents to cultivate public opinion so as to put pressure on governments to pursue certain policies, while traditional diplomatic activities—negotiations, treaties—have been planned, implemented, and presented in whole or in part for the effects they would have on public opinion, both international and domestic.

Types of Propaganda

Modern practitioners of propaganda utilize various schema to classify different types of propaganda activities. One such categorization classifies propaganda as white, gray, or black according to the degree to which the sponsor conceals or acknowledges its involvement. White propaganda is correctly attributed to the sponsor and the source is truthfully identified. (The U.S. government's international broadcast service Voice of America, for example, broadcasts white propaganda.) Gray propaganda, on the other hand, is unattributed to the sponsor and conceals the real source of the propaganda. The objective of gray propaganda is to advance viewpoints that are in the interest of the originator but that would be more acceptable to target audiences than official statements. The reasoning is that avowedly propagandistic materials from a foreign government or identified propaganda agency might convince few, but the same ideas presented by seemingly neutral outlets would be more persuasive. Unattributed publications, such as articles in newspapers written by a disguised source, are staples of gray propaganda. Other tactics involve wide dissemination of ideas put forth by others—by foreign governments, by national and international media outlets, or by private groups, individuals, and institutions. Gray propaganda also includes material assistance provided to groups that put forth views deemed useful to the propagandist.

Like its gray cousin, black propaganda also camouflages the sponsor's participation. But while gray propaganda is unattributed, black propaganda is falsely attributed. Black propaganda is subversive and provocative; it is usually designed to appear to have originated from a hostile source, in order to cause that source embarrassment, to damage its prestige, to undermine its credibility, or to get it to take actions that it might not otherwise. Black propaganda is usually prepared by secret agents or an intelligence service because it would be damaging to the originating government if it were discovered. It routinely employs underground newspapers, forged documents, planted gossip or rumors, jokes, slogans, and visual symbols.

Another categorization distinguishes between "fast" and "slow" propaganda operations, based on the type of media employed and the immediacy of the effect desired. Fast media are designed to exert a short-term impact on public opinion, while the use of slow media cultivates public opinion over the long haul. Fast media typically include radio, newspapers, speeches, television, moving pictures, and, since the 1990s, e-mail and the Internet. These forms of communication are able to exert an almost instantaneous effect on select audiences. Books, cultural exhibitions, and educational exchanges and activities, on the other hand, are slow media that seek to inculcate ideas and attitudes over time.

An additional category of propaganda might be termed "propaganda of the deed," or actions taken for the psychological effects they would have on various publics. The famous Doolittle Raid of April 1942 is a classic example. After months of negative news from the Pacific during World War II, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle of the U.S. Army Air Corps led a force of sixteen planes on a bombing raid of Japan. The mission was pointless from a military point of view, but psychologically it was significant. For Americans, it provided a morale boost and evidence that the United States was "doing something" to strike at the enemy directly; for the Japanese, it was a warning that the United States possessed the capability to reach their homeland with strategic bombers and a reminder that the attack at Pearl Harbor had not completely destroyed the U.S. fleet. "Propaganda of the deed" can also include such disparate actions as educational or cultural exchanges, economic aid, disaster relief, disarmament initiatives, international agreements, the appointment of investigating commissions, legislation, and other policy initiatives when employed primarily for the effects they would have on public opinion.

Revolution, War, and Propaganda to 1917

By whatever name we call it, propaganda has a long history. War propaganda is as ancient as war itself. Anthropologists have unearthed evidence that primitive peoples used pictures and symbols to impress others with their hunting and fighting capabilities. The Assyrian, Greek, and Roman empires employed storytelling, poems, religious symbols, monuments, speeches, documents, and other means of communication to mobilize their armed forces or demoralize those of their enemies. As early as the fifth century B.C., the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu advocated various techniques to maintain fighting morale and to destroy the enemy's will to fight. The nineteenth-century German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz identified psychological forces as decisive elements of modern war.

Thus, propaganda is not, as it is sometimes believed, a twentieth-century phenomenon born of the electronic communications revolution. Throughout history the governors have attempted to influence the ways the governed see the world, just as critics and revolutionaries have aspired to change that view. The word itself originated during the Reformation, when the Roman Catholic Church created a commission of cardinals to "propagate" the faith in non-Catholic lands. The principle differences between modern and ancient propaganda are the use of new techniques and technologies, greater awareness of the utility of propaganda, and perhaps also the sheer pervasiveness and volume of modern propaganda.

Although the concept is often associated with dictatorship, propaganda has figured prominently in American life and history. Political propaganda has been an essential ingredient of the democratic process, as politicians and political parties have employed a range of communication techniques to win public support for their ideas and policies. Similarly, countless private groups—from early antislavery societies to modern political action committees—have turned to propaganda techniques to push their agendas. Advertising and public relations, fields that came into fruition during the early twentieth century, have made commercial propaganda a permanent feature of the cultural landscape. War propaganda has been utilized by both government agencies and private groups to win the support of neutrals, demoralize enemies, and energize domestic populations. The pluralistic nature of American life and the existence of a free press has prevented the emergence of a monolithic propaganda apparatus, but it could be argued that these factors have in fact made American democracy better equipped than totalitarian societies for effective propaganda, if only because the free marketplace of ideas has required would-be propagandists to develop ever more sophisticated means of persuasion.

As far back as the colonial period, influential Americans exhibited a remarkable grasp of propaganda techniques. Propaganda and agitation were essential components of the American Revolution. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, propaganda played a pivotal role in creating the intellectual and psychological climate of the Revolution itself.

Philip Davidson, in his history of the propaganda of the American Revolution, documented a remarkably sophisticated grasp of propaganda techniques among the leading organizers of the Revolution. Although the Founders are rarely recognized as propagandists—probably because of propaganda's pejorative associations—the evidence of a conscious, systematic effort by colonial leaders to gain public support for their ideas is unmistakable. Benjamin Franklin admitted to exposing "in as striking a light as I could, to the nation, the absurdity of the [British] measures towards America"; Thomas Jefferson spoke of "arousing our people from…lethargy"; and George Washington advocated the release of information "in a manner calculated to attract the attention and impress the minds of the people." Thomas Paine was the Revolution's most famous (and radical) propagandist. He wrote numerous pamphlets articulating with rhetorical flourish the ideological justification for the Revolution, including the influential Common Sense and the poetic Crisis, which began with the memorable words, "These are the times that try men's souls."

These men were keenly sensitive to the importance of public opinion, and they employed a wide variety of techniques to arouse public sentiment against the British. Through town meetings, assemblies, churches, legal documents, resolutions, demonstrations, songs, plays, oratory, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and letters they agitated relentlessly against the policies of the British government. Newspapers such as the Providence Gazette and the Boston Gazette were crucial in organizing opposition to the Stamp Act and in exploiting such incidents as the Boston Massacre. Powerful slogans such as "No Taxation Without Representation" and "Liberty or Death" were utilized to mobilize colonists for revolution, as were such rituals as effigy burning and the planting of "liberty trees."

Several revolutionaries employed the tactics that would later be known as gray propaganda. They wrote articles, letters, and pamphlets under pseudonyms to disguise their identities and to create the impression that opposition to British policies was much greater than it was. Samuel Adams, for example, wrote under twenty-five different pseudonyms in numerous publications. Benjamin Franklin articulated a shrewd understanding of the techniques of propaganda, including the use of gray and black materials. He remarked: "The facility with which the same truths may be repeatedly enforced by placing them daily in different lights in newspapers…gives a great chance of establishing them. And we now find that it is not only right to strike while the iron is hot but that it may be very practicable to heat it by continually striking." The tactics Franklin was referring to—incessant repetition of propaganda themes and the transmitting of ideas through local media outlets in the form of news—described core techniques of modern propaganda and are an indication of the sophistication of revolutionary war propaganda.

The Revolution also saw the utilization of these and other propaganda techniques as instruments of diplomacy. Franklin worked assiduously to mold European views of the conflict and he especially cultivated French opinion to secure France's assistance in the war. To isolate the British diplomatically and to encourage domestic opposition to the war in Britain, Franklin widely publicized British war atrocities, even resorting to black propaganda to exaggerate and fabricate crimes. In 1777 he distributed a phony letter, purportedly written by a German commander of Hessian mercenaries, indicating that the British government advised him to let wounded soldiers die. The letter caused a sensation in France and also induced numerous desertions by the Hessian mercenaries. Franklin also forged an entire issue of the Boston Independent, which contained a fabricated account of British scalp hunting. The story touched off a public uproar in Britain and was used by opposition politicians to attack the conduct of the war. The historian Oliver Thomson described these efforts as "one of the most thorough campaigns of diplomatic isolation by propaganda ever mounted."

The revolutionary war itself promoted themes common to most war propaganda: the righteousness of the cause, the savageness of the enemy, and the necessity and certainty of victory. Although no theme received greater treatment than the depravity of the enemy, it was the Revolution's appeal to high moral purpose that had the most lasting impact on American life. The Declaration of Independence was a brilliant document on the rights of man, but, at the same time, it was a brilliant document that employed emotive rhetoric to justify the Revolution and to rally public opinion to the cause. The war itself was portrayed as a struggle for liberty against tyranny, freedom against slavery. In this, the Revolution provided the model for the themes and ideas that would animate many subsequent propaganda campaigns (and much of the political rhetoric) of the United States. From the planting of liberty trees during the Revolution, to the cultivation of liberty gardens during World War II, symbolic appeals to freedom and liberty were staples of wartime mobilization efforts.

During the American Civil War both the Union and Confederate governments utilized propaganda abroad to influence foreign sentiment. The Union sent propaganda commissions to Europe to influence the governments and people of England and France. President Abraham Lincoln personally appealed to British opinion by writing directly to labor unions and textile industrialists to press the Union case. Lincoln, who had a strong appreciation of public relations techniques, was perhaps the Union's best propagandist. His "house divided" metaphor was one of the most powerful images of the 1860s, and his public addresses—most notably the Gettysburg Address—were calculated to unite Northerners behind the cause. The Emancipation Proclamation was deliberately timed to encourage defections from the Confederacy by border states and was skillfully exploited by Union representatives abroad to win European sentiment.

The Confederate government sponsored a meagerly funded, but relatively sophisticated, propaganda operation in Britain under the direction of Henry Hotze. Hotze successfully placed numerous articles in British newspapers by giving them gratis to journalists, who in turn sold them to newspapers in their own names for personal profit. In this manner he both courted the goodwill of a select company of journalists and concealed his own sponsorship of the articles—a classic tactic of gray propaganda. He also developed a scheme whereby he paid several journalists to work for a weekly paper he produced, The Index. While earning their salaries as Hotze's editors, they also continued writing for influential London dailies. The Index thus provided Hotze with a mechanism for articulating pro-Confederate viewpoints and for subtle bribery of the press.

The Confederacy also sent a representative to France, Edwin De Leon, who openly bribed French newspapers to print favorable editorials on the Confederate cause. De Leon also penned a fervid defense of slavery that probably did more harm than good; few hated the "peculiar institution" as much as the French, and his arguments merely reinforced French hostility to Southern slavery. Despite some successful operations, Confederate propagandists in Europe failed in their ultimate objective of securing recognition by foreign governments. Above all else, this was due to the existence of slavery in the South, which isolated the Confederacy from British and French public opinion.

Propaganda accompanied other pre–twentieth century conflicts in which the United States participated, but it was conducted primarily by private groups and news organizations. Propaganda during the War of 1812 reiterated many of the themes of the revolutionary period by portraying the British as tyrannical opponents of American liberty. American westward expansion in the nineteenth century was justified by appealing to the "manifest destiny" of the United States to colonize North America, while the Indian wars and the Mexican-American War were bolstered by racist and bigoted portrayals of Native Americans and Mexicans. At the end of the nineteenth century, the infamous "yellow press" incited U.S. participation in the Spanish-American War by portraying the Spaniards as monsters, by sensationally reporting and fabricating Spanish atrocities, and by emphasizing the noble and enlightened intentions of the United States. Similarly, during the American-Filipino Wars, U.S. advocates of imperialism portrayed the Filipinos as uncivilized monkeys and as children in need of American tutelage. Much of this propaganda was private, but it reflected popular sentiment and official attitudes, if not direct policy.

Total War, 1917–1945

Notwithstanding this early experience with propaganda, it was primarily the age of total war that inducted the U.S. government into the business of propaganda. During World War I, national governments employed propaganda on an unprecedented scale. The arrival of the modern mass media together with the requirements of total war made propaganda an indispensable element of wartime mobilization. All of the major belligerents turned to propaganda to woo neutrals, demoralize enemies, boost the morale of their troops, and mobilize the support of civilians.

One of the most vital of all World War I propaganda battles was the struggle between Germany and Britain for the sympathy of the American people. The German government organized a program of propaganda in the United States that was so heavy-handed it did more to alienate American public opinion than to win it. The British government, on the other hand, conducted most of its propaganda in the United States covertly, through a secret propaganda bureau directed by the Foreign Office. The British adopted a low-key approach that selectively released news and information to win American sympathies. The publication of the Zimmerman telegram in 1917 (in which Germany sought to enlist Mexico in a war with the United States) was undoubtedly the most important propaganda achievement of the British, and it helped to bring the Americans into the war on the Allied side.

A week after declaring war, President Woodrow Wilson established the first official propaganda agency of the U.S. government to manage public opinion at home and abroad—the Committee on Public Information. Headed by the muckraking journalist George Creel, the committee was responsible for censorship, propaganda, and general information about the war effort. The Creel committee focused on mobilizing support on the home front, but it also conducted an extensive campaign of propaganda abroad, overseeing operations in more than thirty overseas countries.

The committee bombarded foreign media outlets with news, official statements, and features on the war effort and on American life, using leaflets, motion pictures, photographs, cartoons, posters, and signboards to promote its messages. The committee established reading rooms abroad, brought foreign journalists to the United States, crafted special appeals for teachers and labor groups, and sponsored lectures and seminars. In its international propaganda, the committee advertised American strength and commitment to victory in order to curb defeatism among Allied troops and to demoralize enemy soldiers. Stressing the unselfish, anti-imperialistic war aims of the United States, it put forth an idealistic message that reflected the idealism of the Progressive Era, the tone of the Wilson presidency, and long-standing traditions in American ideology. Creel himself spoke excitedly about using the committee to spread the "gospel of democracy" around the world, and staff members pursued that objective with religious fervor. Taking its cue from the president (and British propaganda), the Creel committee stressed that the war was fought for freedom, self-determination, and democracy.

Despite the many successes Creel attributed to the Committee on Public Information, Congress swiftly abolished it in June 1919—a decision that reflected both the natural American distrust of propaganda and Congress's fear that the president would utilize the committee for domestic political purposes. The Creel committee had a short life but a lasting impact. It established the principle that government-sponsored propaganda was a necessity in times of war or national emergency. It also demonstrated the utility of propaganda as a tool of national policy and became the basic model for subsequent U.S. propaganda agencies.

The years that followed nurtured a popular fascination with, and revulsion toward, the practice of propaganda. A series of investigations in the 1920s exposed the nature and scope of Britain's propaganda campaign in the United States, including revelations that the British had fabricated numerous stories about German atrocities. Many Americans came to blame British propaganda for bringing the United States into a wasteful and ruinous war, and the practice of propaganda became associated with deceit and trickery. It was thus in the aftermath of World War I that propaganda acquired its negative connotations—a development that stemmed from the employment of propaganda by a democracy, not, as is generally supposed, from that of a dictatorship. Although British propaganda was probably more effective than Germany's because of military and political blunders by the Germans—such as unrestricted submarine warfare—many observers took from the war a legendary belief in the power of propaganda.

These propaganda campaigns affected the United States in other ways as well. The belief that Americans had been tricked into participating in the first world war delayed U.S. intervention in the second. Moreover, news of Nazi atrocities connected to the Holocaust were greeted incredulously by the American public in part because of the exaggerated and fabricated atrocity propaganda released by the British two decades earlier.

At the same time, the social science revolution and Freudian psychology brought about a public fascination with ideas about subconscious psychological manipulation and mind control. The science of persuasion, in the form of advertising and public relations, came into vogue in the 1920s, and advertising became a large-scale national industry. These developments created a skilled group of professionals with expertise in the employment of symbols, images, and techniques to interpret and to manipulate perceptions.

The development of radio revolutionized the practice of propaganda by making it possible to reach audiences of unprecedented size instantaneously. A short-wave propaganda battle began in the mid-1920s as the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, and Britain developed international broadcasting capabilities. American suspicion of foreign propaganda was sufficiently aroused that in 1938 Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required foreign propagandists to register with the U.S. government. The same year, Nazi propaganda in Central and South America led the Roosevelt administration to create the first peacetime propaganda agency of the U.S. government, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), headed by Nelson Rockefeller.

Initially, the CIAA focused on cultural and educational activities designed to improve relations between the United States and Latin America. The CIAA inaugurated a new tradition in U.S. foreign policy: government sponsorship of educational and cultural exchanges. It sponsored tours by ballet, theater, and music groups, archaeological expeditions, art exhibits, comic books, and academic conferences. Publicly, the CIAA's cultural programs were defended for their reciprocal benefits in promoting "international understanding." Behind closed doors, however, the agency frankly emphasized propaganda motives. It attached far greater importance to interpreting the United States to Latin America than vice versa. The principle theme promoted by the coordinator's office was "Pan-Americanism," stressing that the key to defense of the region lay in hemispheric solidarity. After the United States entered World War II, Rockefeller's CIAA became a full-blown propaganda agency, utilizing film, publications, and radio to "combat the Nazi lie." By 1943, the CIAA had become a large federal agency with a generous budget and nearly 1,500 employees.

In the early part of 1941, as war appeared imminent, Roosevelt created several additional agencies to disseminate propaganda at home and abroad. In 1942 these various information programs were combined into the Office of War Information (OWI) under the direction of the well-known journalist and broadcaster Elmer Davis. Roosevelt also established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, and authorized it to engage in black and gray propaganda abroad, mostly in connection with military operations.

The OWI was a sprawling organization that conducted domestic and international propaganda on a truly massive scale. In addition to millions of leaflets, it produced entire newspapers, which were dropped by airplane to France, Norway, Spain, Ireland, and Germany. One newspaper distributed by the OWI in France achieved a circulation of 7 million per week, compared to a grand total of 3 million leaflets distributed in Europe through all of World War I. The OWI established posts attached to U.S. diplomatic missions overseas, known as the U.S. Information Service, and it operated reading rooms and libraries in more than twenty countries. Radio was the most crucial medium in the overseas propaganda war, and in 1942 the Voice of America was established under OWI jurisdiction. By the end of the war, the Voice of America was broadcasting around the world in forty different languages.

Combat propaganda, or what began to be called "psychological warfare," was utilized by all the belligerents, including the United States. These operations focused on breaking enemy morale, encouraging enemy troops to surrender, publicizing U.S. military victories, positively projecting U.S. war aims, providing aid and encouragement to partisans in occupied territories, and stiffening the resolve of American and Allied troops. Initially, these operations were conducted by OWI personnel, but the idealistic outlook of many of the agency's propagandists clashed with the more conservative mindset of many U.S. military officers who believed it was more interested in advertising Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal than in promoting military objectives. In December 1942, General Dwight D. Eisenhower created a separate psychological warfare branch of the army to participate in the Allied invasion of North Africa. In 1944 he created an even larger organization, the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, to prepare propaganda for the DDay invasion. Psychological warfare was especially important in the Pacific theater, where U.S. propaganda sought to convince Japanese soldiers—who had been taught by their army that to surrender meant relinquishing their place as members of Japanese society—to cease resistance.

Cold War

Despite the importance of propaganda and psychological warfare to the war effort, the United States moved quickly to dismantle the propaganda apparatus it had constructed during World War II. Within weeks of Japan's surrender, President Harry Truman liquidated the Office of War Information, transferring only the bare bones of an information service to the Department of State. Although the OWI was abolished and the budget of its successor was slashed, Truman insisted that the United States maintain at least a modest information program to support U.S. foreign policy. This was a remarkable step, since prior to the 1940s no one seriously considered an organized, government-sponsored effort to influence foreign peoples except during a national emergency.

While Truman acknowledged the importance of propaganda as a peacetime instrument of foreign policy, it was primarily the Cold War that institutionalized propaganda as a permanent instrument of U.S. foreign policy. A widespread belief developed that the United States was losing the "war of ideas" to the Soviet Union's supposedly superior propaganda apparatus. As Cold War tensions intensified, the United States gradually expanded its propaganda capabilities.

In 1948, the information program received permanent legislative sanction with the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act—the first legislative charter for a peacetime propaganda program. The act gave the State Department jurisdiction over both international information operations and cultural and educational exchange programs. Additional propaganda activities were conducted by the newly created Central Intelligence Agency, the economic assistance agencies (forerunners to the Agency for International Development), and the armed forces, especially the army.

In 1950, Truman called for an intensified program of propaganda known as the Campaign of Truth. In a speech delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Truman articulated the perennial domestic justification for official U.S. propaganda: in order to combat enemy lies, the U.S. needed to promote the truth. Under the Campaign of Truth, the State Department's budget for information activities jumped from around $20 million in 1948 to $115 million in 1952—a development aided by the outbreak of the Korean War a few weeks after Truman's speech. The Campaign of Truth also brought a change in the style and content of U.S. propaganda output, which shifted from objective-sounding news and information to hard-hitting propaganda in its most obvious form—cartoons depicting bloodthirsty communists, vituperative anticommunist polemics, and sensational commentary.

In April 1951, Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board to coordinate the American psychological warfare effort. The board acted as a coordinating body for all nonmilitary Cold War activities, including covert operations. It supervised programs for aggressive clandestine warfare and propaganda measures against the Soviet bloc and it developed "psychological strategy" plans for dozens of countries in western Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. By the time Truman left office, the U.S. government had established a far-reaching apparatus for influencing public opinion in both friendly and hostile countries.

During these years, the practice of propaganda became inextricably tied to the practices of psychological warfare and covert action. During World War II, psychological warfare was largely seen as an accessory to military operations, but with the onset of the Cold War, psychological warfare specialists defined the concept broadly to include any nonmilitary actions taken to influence public opinion or to advance foreign policy interests. Psychological warfare was transformed into a catchall formula that went beyond mere propaganda to embrace covert operations, trade and economic aid, diplomacy, the threat of force, cultural and educational exchange programs, and a wide range of clandestine activities. Psychological warfare became, in essence, a synonym for Cold War. It reflected the belief of many politicians and foreign policy analysts that the Cold War was an ideological, psychological, and cultural contest for hearts and minds that would be won or lost on the plain of public opinion rather than by blood shed on the battlefield.

Psychological warfare in the Cold War context was also associated with the policy of "rollback," or the employment of nonmilitary means to force the retraction of Soviet power and the "liberation" of Eastern Europe. Rollback was openly espoused by the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, which campaigned in 1952 against the "immoral" and "futile" policy of containment. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the policies of liberation and rollback did not originate with the Eisenhower administration. Scholarship in the late 1990s by Gregory Mitrovich, Scott Lucas, and others reveals that Truman's Democratic administration inaugurated a muscular form of rollback years earlier. To these scholars, U.S. efforts to liberate areas under Moscow's control indicate that American foreign policy in the early Cold War was not as defensive and fundamentally nonaggressive as the term "containment" implies or as earlier historiography suggested.

Indeed, the "father of containment," George F. Kennan, was also the driving force behind an aggressive program of psychological warfare and covert action