Sherry Chandler

Deja vu all over again

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.

1. The nature of the short story revisited
2. A New Generation?
3. The war to end wars
4. Turning the Place Over
5. Unintended Consequences

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