Sherry Chandler

A passage from Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995) that seems to me somewhat relevant to my post earlier to day about Woodrow Wilson’s CPI:

[Political activists] will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise in leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Viet Nam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

Such countervailing gestures frustrate the common expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force. (pp. 2-3)

I’ve meandered my way back to the story of Eugene V. Debs as told by Ernest Freeberg in Democracy’s Prisoner (Harvard, 2008). I see certain irony in the way the same domestic policies failed in the early 20^th that are failing in the early 21^st. For example:

In the face of [opposition to the war], the Wilson administration developed a two-pronged strategy to impose unity where there was none. A week after declaring war, the government created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed by the energetic progressive journalist George Creel. Mobilizing powerful tools of mass persuasion, Creel hired thousands of writers, scholars, artists, and filmmakers to make the government’s case for war. As Creel later put it, the CPI embarked on a grand experiment in “advertising America,” at home and around the world. This publicity bureau churned out pamphlets, press releases, films, and talking points for a volunteer arum of “Four Minute Men,” cataloging the atrocities of the German army and extolling Wilson’s war crusade. Though Creel insisted that his agency fought foreign propaganda with the power of truth, many of his employees conceded that much of the CPI’s work was badly biased, and in some cases entirely fabricated. Whatever the committee’s value as a source of information about the causes and prosecution of the war, Creel turned the CPI into a megaphone that for the next eighteen months gave the government the loudest voice in the marketplace of ideas. (pp. 45-45)

The other prong of this strategy was repression of dissent. More on that later. Right now, I’ll observe only that unity may be harder than politicians would have us believe, especially when the policies of the government don’t match the desires of the governed.