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

War epoch Propaganda population War IThe Drift Towards War Lead this people into war, and theyll go away there was ever such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will encrypt into the very fiber of populational life, infecting the Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street. It is one of historys great ironies that Woodrow Wilson, who was re- elected as a peace expectation in 1916, led America into the first world war. With the help of a propaganda apparatus that was unparalleled in world history, Wilson forged a nation of immigrants into a fighting integral. An examination of public opinion before the war, propaganda efforts during the war, and the endurance of propaganda in peacetime raises significant questions about the viability of democracy as a authorities principle. Like an undertow, Americas drift toward war was subtle and forceful. According to the outspoken pacifist Randolp h Bourne, war sentiment spread gradually among various intellectual groups. With the attend to of Roosevelt, wrote Bourne, the murmurs became a monotonous chant, and finally a chorus so right on that to be out of it was at first to be disreputable, and finally roughly 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 outcome would be peace without victory, you were a traitor. Forced to stand softly on the sidelines while their neighbors stampeded towards war, many pacifists would have agreed with Bertrand Russell that the greatest trouble was the purely psychological one of resisting mass suggestion, of which the force becomes terrific when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. This delirious support for the war was particularly remarkable in light of the incident th at Wilsons re-election had been widely interpreted 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 unembellished that the vote for Wilson cloaked 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.