How and why did public opinion—long cherished as a foundation of democratic government—become an increasing source of concern for American Progressives?
Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society. Lippmann dubbed this manipulative opinion-making process “the manufacture of consent.” A more familiar term for such large-scale persuasion would be propaganda. In Weapons of Democracy, Jonathan Auerbach explores how Lippmann’s stark critique gave voice to a set of misgivings that had troubled American social reformers since the late nineteenth century.
Progressives, social scientists, and muckrakers initially drew on mass persuasion as part of the effort to mobilize sentiment for their own cherished reforms, including regulating monopolies, protecting consumers, and promoting disinterested, efficient government. “Propaganda” was associated with public education and consciousness raising for the good of the whole. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the need to muster support for American involvement in the Great War produced the Committee on Public Information, which zealously spread the gospel of American democracy abroad and worked to stifle dissent at home. After the war, public relations firms—which treated publicity as an end in itself—proliferated.
Weapons of Democracy traces the fate of American public opinion in theory and practice from 1884 to 1934 and explains how propaganda continues to shape today’s public sphere. The book closely analyzes the work of prominent political leaders, journalists, intellectuals, novelists, and corporate publicists, including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, George Creel, John Dewey, Julia Lathrop, Ivy Lee, and Edward Bernays. Truly interdisciplinary in both scope and method, this book will appeal to students and scholars in American studies, history, political theory, media and communications, and rhetoric and literary studies.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Giving Direction to Opinion
2. Friend or Foe
3. The Conscription of Thought
4. Searching for a Public (to Educate)
5. Public Relations as Social Relations
6. Foreign Intelligence
Conclusion
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index
About the Author :
Jonathan Auerbach is a professor of English at the University of Maryland–College Park. He is the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies.
Review :
Weapons of Democracy has clear implications for contemporary politics . . . Recommended.
—Choice
Understanding the history of propaganda and public opinion presented in this stimulating and intelligent book offers one step in the right direction.
—The Journal of American History
. . . a captivating read.
—Journal of American Studies
. . . a bracing deep history of our present 'post-fact' moment.
—American Literary History
Weapons of Democracy will appeal to students and scholars in American studies, history, political theory, media and communications, and rhetoric and literary studies.
—Journal of American Culture
Weapons of Democracy reads as a remarkably relevant book today. As an exceptional and original interdisciplinary study on American intellectual history, drawing on an impressive body of research, and written in straightforward, impulsive prose, the monograph duly deserves the attention of scholars from various academic fields, such as history, media studies, political science, American Studies, as well as readers outside academia so that they can become more aware of the inclinations— the potentials as well as the dangers—inherent in the "weapons of democracy."
—Éva Mathey, University of Debrecen, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies
