Propaganda. Manipulation. Spin. Control. It has ever been thus--or has it? On the eve of the 60th anniversary of George Orwell's classic essay on propaganda ("Politics and the English Language"), writers have been invited to explore what Orwell didn't--or couldn't--know. Their responses, framed in pithy, focused essays, range far and wide: from the effect of television and computing, to the vast expansion of knowledge about how our brains respond to symbolic messages, to the merger of journalism and entertainment, to lessons learned during and after a half-century of totalitarianism. Together, they paint a portrait of a political culture in which propaganda and mind control are alive and well (albeit in forms and places that would have surprised Orwell). The pieces in this anthology sound alarm bells about the manipulation and misinformation in today's politics, and offer guideposts for a journalism attuned to Orwellian tendencies in the 21st century.

The Thought War is the first book in English to examine the full extent of Japan's wartime propaganda. Based on a wide range of archival material and sources in Japanese, Chinese, and English, it explores the propaganda programs of the Japanese government from 1931 to 1945, demonstrating the true scope of imperial propaganda and its pervasive influence, an influence that is still felt today. Contrary to popular postwar rhetoric, it was not emperor worship or military authoritarianism that led an entire nation to war. Rather, it was the creation of a powerful image of Japan as the leader of modern Asia and the belief that the Japanese could and would guide Asia to a new, glorious period of reform that appealed to imperial subjects. Kushner analyzes the role of the police and military in defining socially acceptable belief and behavior by using their influence to root out malcontents. His research is the first of its kind to treat propaganda as a profession in wartime Japan. He shows that the leadership was not confined to the crude tools of sloganeering and government-sponsored demonstrations but was able instead to appropriate the expertise of the nation's advertising firms to "sell" the image of Japan as Asia's leader and modernizer. In his exploration of the propaganda war in popular culture and the entertainment industry, Kushner discloses how entertainers sought to bolster their careers by adopting as their own pro-war messages that then filtered down into society and took hold. Japanese propaganda frequently conflicted with Chinese and American visions of empire, and Kushner reveals the reactions of these two nations to Japan's efforts and the meaning of their responses.

" A History Book Club Alternative Selection No part of the Nazi movement contributed more to Hitler's success than the Sturmabteilung (SA) -- the notorious Brown Shirts. Bruce Campbell offers the first in-depth study in English of the men who held the three highest ranks in the SA. Organized on military lines and fired by radical nationalism, the Brown Shirts saw themselves as Germany's paramilitary saviors. Campbell reveals that the homogeneity of the SA leadership was based not on class or status, but on common experiences and training. Unlike other investigations of the Nazi party, The SA Generals and the Rise of Nazism focuses on the military and political activities of the Brown Shirts to show how they developed into SA Leaders. By tracing the activities, both individual and collective, of these men's adult lives through 1945, Campbell shows where members acquired the experience necessary to build, lead, and administer the SA. These men were instrumental in creating the Nazi concept of "political soldiering," combining military organization with political activism. Campbell's enlightening portrait of the SA, its history, and its relationship to the overall Nazi movement reveals how the organization's leaders reshaped the SA over time to adapt to Germany's changing political concerns.

" Among America's most unusual and successful weapons during the Cold War were Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. RFE-RL had its origins in a post-war America brimming with confidence and secure in its power. Unlike the Voice of America, which conveyed a distinctly American perspective on global events, RFE-RL served as surrogate home radio services and a vital alternative to the controlled, party-dominated domestic press in Eastern Europe. Over twenty stations featured programming tailored to individual countries. They reached millions of listeners ranging from industrial workers to dissident leaders such as Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. Broadcasting Freedom draws on rare archival material and offers a penetrating insider history of the radios that helped change the face of Europe. Arch Puddington reveals new information about the connections between RFE-RL and the CIA, which provided covert funding for the stations during the critical start-up years in the early 1950s. He relates in detail the efforts of Soviet and Eastern Bloc officials to thwart the stations; their tactics ranged from jamming attempts, assassinations of radio journalists, the infiltration of spies onto the radios' staffs, and the bombing of the radios' headquarters. Puddington addresses the controversies that engulfed the stations throughout the Cold War, most notably RFE broadcasts during the Hungarian Revolution that were described as inflammatory and irresponsible. He shows how RFE prevented the Communist authorities from establishing a monopoly on the dissemination of information in Poland and describes the crucial roles played by the stations as the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union broke apart. Broadcasting Freedom is also a portrait of the Cold War in America. Puddington offers insights into the strategic thinking of the RFE-RL leadership and those in the highest circles of American government, including CIA directors, secretaries of state, and even presidents.

Weapons of Mass Deception reveals:

• How the Iraq war was sold to the American public through professional P.R. strategies.

• "The First Casualty": Lies that were told related to the Iraq war.

• Euphemisms and jargon related to the Iraq war, e.g. "shock and awe," "Operation Iraqi Freedom," "axis of evil," "coalition of the willing," etc.

• "War as Opportunity": How the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq have been used as marketing hooks to sell products and policies that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism.

• "Brand America": The efforts of Charlotte Beers and other U.S. propaganda campaigns designed to win hearts overseas.

• "The Mass Media as Propaganda Vehicle": How news coverage followed Washington's lead and language.

The book includes a glossary — "Propaganda: A User's Guide" — and resources to help Americans sort through the deceptions to see the strings behind Washington's campaign to sell the Iraq war to the public.

In November 1918, German women gained the right to vote, and female suffrage would forever change the landscape of German political life. Women now constituted the majority of voters, and political parties were forced to address them for the first time. Analyzing written and visual propaganda aimed at, and frequently produced by, women across the political spectrum - including the Communists and Social Democrats; liberal, Catholic and conservative parties; and the Nazis - Julia Sneeringer shows how various groups struggled to reconcile traditional assumption about women's interests with the changing face of the family and female economic activity. Through propaganda, political parties addressed themes such as motherhood, fashion, religion, and abortion. But as Sneeringer demonstrates, their efforts to win women's votes by emphasizing ""women's issues"" had only limited success. The debates about women in propaganda were symptomatic of larger anxieties that gripped Germany during this era of unrest, Sneeringer says. Though Weimar political culture was ahead of it time in forcing even the enemies of women's rights to concede a public role for women, this horizon of possibility narrowed sharply in the face of political instability, economic crises, and the growing spectre of fascism.

"Strangely moving. . . . While in China, Schrift] discovered a subculture of people who collected buttons bearing portraits of the Great Helmsman: thousands of varieties had been manufactured from the Cultural Revolution, when they served as one of the few permitted forms of personal adornment or aesthetic display. . . . I found reading the book a surprisingly emotional experience."-Newsday; Newsday Long Island "A wonderfully rich and riveting account, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge represents an important contribution to our understanding of the Cultural Revolution and its place in Chinese culture. Schrift provides an informative examination of the Mao cult's recent transformation into its present form of pop cultural campiness." -William Jankowiak, author of Sex, Death, and Hierarchy in a Chinese City "An excellent study of symbolism and factionalism in Maoist China. Schrift shows how mundane objects were transformed into sacred icons of revolutionary ideology. This book offers new insights into the dynamics of the Cultural Revolution."- J. L. Watson, author of Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia With the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, the regime of Chairman Mao Zedong launched a propaganda campaign aimed at disseminating inspiring images of the chairman to a skeptical populace. Thus was born the "Mao badge," a political icon in the form of a pin that was widely distributed to create, sustain, and inflate the Mao personality cult during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Scholars estimate that over two billion Mao badges, featuring over fifty thousand different designs and themes, were produced. As China now enters an era in which people can more openly express their views about the Cultural Revolution, these icons have taken on new meanings, and people are wearing and talking about them in subversive ways. Melissa Schrift suggests that the badges developed "lives" that far surpass the intentions of their creators, as the Chinese ironically commodified them, both during the Cultural Revolution and today. During the Mao years, people wore the objects to symbolize their unquestioned loyalty to Mao. Yet even then many Chinese subverted the badges' symbolic meaning. Using them in socially approved rituals, they gained a measure of political credibility that masked their practice of prohibited customary rites. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge is a work of cultural history that contributes to our understanding not only of Chinese society but, more generally, of strategies people employ in responding to and transforming the meaning of propaganda campaigns and symbols. Melissa Schrift is an assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Marquette University.

Noted media pundit Douglas Rushkoff gives a devastating critique of the influence techniques behind our culture of rampant consumerism. With a skilled analysis of how experts in the fields of marketing, advertising, retail atmospherics, and hand-selling attempt to take away our ability to make rational decisions, Rushkoff delivers a bracing account of why we buy what we buy, and helps us recognize when we're being treated like consumers instead of human beings.

The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African-American activism against racial segregation and discrimination, especially as they were practised by the federal government itself. In this study, the author links these cultural and political forces by showing how African-American activists, public officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to influence a national debate about racial inequality. Drawing on a body of national public affairs programming about African-Americans and race relations, the author uses these radio shows to demonstrate the emergence of a new national discourse about race and ethnicity, racial hatred and injustice, and the contribution of racial and immigrant populations to the development of the United States. These programmes, Savage contends, challenged the nation to reconcile its professed egalitarian ideals with its unjust treatment of black Americans and other minorities. This examination of radio's treatment of race as a national political issue also provides important evidence that the campaigns for racial justice in the 1940s served as an essential, and still overlooked, precursor to the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Savage argues. The next battleground would be in the South, and on television.

This eye-opening book shows how Communist state and party authorities stage-managed the Soviets memory of World War II, transforming a national trauma into a heroic exploit that glorified the party while systematically concealing the disastrous mistakes and criminal cruelties committed by the Stalinist tyranny..

The French Religious Wars generated a large body of political propaganda from the Huguenots, the Politiques (a Huguenot-Catholic confederacy) and the Catholic League. Dr. Parmelee discusses how, in the last decades of the reign of Elizabeth I some 130 translated documents were imported into England, most of them - originating from the Politiques, written in support of the Protestant Henry of Navarre's accession to the French throne-advocating religious tolerance as a way to peace. She argues that while most English political thinkers did not openly embrace or articulate the absolutist ideas often expressed in these writings, they had a wide impact on political discourse in the late Elizabethan period. They were useful against foreign enemies, Catholic recusants and Presbyterians, but particularly, in a time of fear of civil war engendered by an unsettled succession, they helped to establish an intellectual climate conducive to the later development of Stuart absolutism. Dr. Lisa Ferraro Parmelee teaches in the Department of History at Villanova University.

Strategic public diplomacy, once commonly called propaganda, has existed since the twelfth century, when Richard I, crusading sovereign of England, plucked the eyes from his prisoners and returned them to his arch-rival Saladin--an unmistakable message intended to mold the image that Richard's foreign enemies had of him. Although their methods have grown more sophisticated and gentrified since the Middle Ages, the goal of governments employing strategic public diplomacy has remained essentially the same: to influence public or elite opinion in a foreign country for the purpose of turning the foreign policy of the target country to advantage.

The first systematic analysis of the growing foreign public relations industry in the U.S., this remarkable text traces the impact that the political "image management" of other nations has had on the American foreign policy agenda. Documenting the evolution of these campaigns in both scale and sophistication, this book includes an analysis of the Justice Department's foreign agent registration records, numerous interviews with journalists, consultants, and key government officials, and a systematic assessment of media content to gauge the effectiveness of these attempts at news management. The author presents and tests elements of a general model of agenda-related communication effects, presenting case studies that illustrate the extent to which the American media are saturated with foreign diplomatic messages, including the recent effort of the Kuwaiti government-in-exile to influence public opinion in the U.S. during the Gulf War, and concludes with an inventory and discussion of the issues raised by the "export" of the knowledge-base and skills underlying new, sophisticated communication strategies now being employed on behalf of foreign interests. Based on fifteen years of exhaustive research, this book is ideal for courses in foreign policy, media, and politics.

Early in World War II censors placed all photographs of dead and badly wounded Americans in a secret Pentagon file known to officials as the Chamber of Horrors. Later, as government leaders became concerned about public complacency brought on by Allied victories, they released some of these photographs of war's brutality. But to the war's end and after, they continued to censor photographs of mutilated or emotionally distressed American soldiers, of racial conflicts at American bases, and other visual evidence of disunity or disorder. In this book George H. Roeder, Jr., tells the intriguing story of how American opinions about World War II were manipulated both by the wartime images that citizens were allowed to see and by the images that were suppressed. His text is amplified by arresting visual essays that include many previously unpublished photographs from the army's censored files. Examining news photographs, movies, newsreels, posters, and advertisements, Roeder explores the different ways that civilian and military leaders used visual imagery to control the nation's perception of the war and to understate the war's complexities. He reveals how image makers tried to give minorities a sense of equal participation in the war while not alarming others who clung to the traditions of separate races, classes, and gender roles. He argues that the most pervasive feature of wartime visual imagery was its polarized depiction of the world as good or bad, and he discusses individuals-Margaret Bourke-White, Bill Mauldin, Elmer Davis, and others-who fought against these limitations. He shows that the polarized ways of viewing encouraged by World War II influenced American responses to political issues for decades to follow, particularly in the simplistic way that the Vietnam War was depicted by both official and antiwar forces.

The Berlin newspaper Der Angriff(The Attack), founded by Joseph Goebbels in 1927, was a significant instrument for arousing support for Nazi ideas. The paper not only secured National Socialism's continued existence, it also provided Goebbels, future propaganda chief of the Third Riech, a powerful new Weapon. Berlin was the center of the political life of the Weimar Republic. Goebbels became an actor upon this frenetic stage in 1926, upon becoming Gauleiter of Berlin's Nazis. He energized the movement, making the Nazi party a political force to be reckoned with, but a ban on the party in May 1927 left it in a state of disarray. His founding of Der Angriff enabled Goebbels to continue spreading his message of hate. Focusing on the period from 1927 to 1933, a time the Nazis later called "the blood years", Russel Lemmons examines how Der Angriff was used to promote support for Nazism. Violent anti-semitism permeated the pages of the newspaper, and the Jews became the scapegoat for all of Germany's, and the world's, problems. Some of the most important propaganda motifs of the Third Reich first appeared in the pages of Der Angriff. Horst Wessel, murdered by the German Communist Party in 1930, became the archetypal Nazi hero; much of his legend, a major chapter in Nazi mythology began on the pages of Der Angriff. Other Nazi propaganda themes - the "Unknown SA man" and the "myth of resurrection and return" - made their first appearances in this newspaper. How could the Germans, seemingly among the most cultured people in Europe, hand over their fate to the Nazis? As this book demonstrates, Der Angriff had much to do with the rise of National Socialism in Berlin and the cataclysmic results.

Conflicting interests and conflicting attitudes toward the war characterized the uneasy relationship between Washington and Hollywood during World War II. There was deep disagreement within the film-making community as to the stance towards the war that should be taken by one of America's most lucrative industries. Hollywood Goes to War reveals the powerful role played by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Office of War Information--staffed by some of America's most famous intellectuals including Elmer Davis, Robert Sherwood, and Archibald MacLeish--in shaping the films that were released during the war years. Ironically, it was the film industry's own self-censorship system, the Hays Office and the Production Code Administration, that paved the way for government censors to cut and shape movies to portray an idealized image of a harmonious American society united in the fight against a common enemy. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black reconstruct the power struggles between the legendary producers, writers, directors, stars and politicians all seeking to project their own visions onto the silver screen and thus to affect public perceptions and opinion.

In the first half of the twentieth century the possibility of flight opened up entirely new avenues of thought and exploration. In the age of H.G. Wells and Biggles, the opening up of the air to balloons and planes - the Royal Flying Corps was founded in 1912 - appealed to concepts of courage and bravery which would be both encouraged and undermined by the experiences of the First World War. The sky also held new terrors for everyday people who were now within reach of an airborne enemy; these fears included the possibilities of bombing, poison gas, surveillance and social control. This duality of fear and enthusiasm drove the Air Raid Precaution movement, while vocal elements in the press and in parliament called for radical plans to cope with apocalyptic scenarios. Addressing the key issues of interwar historiography, such as patriotism fear, masculinity and propaganda, Michele Haapamaki charts the history of flight and of war in the air in the early twentieth century.

The Blitz, the period of Nazi bombing campaigns on civilian Britain during the Second World War, was a formative period for British national identity. In this groundbreaking book, David Clampin looks at the images, campaigns and slogans which helped to form the fabled 'Blitz spirit', powerfully echoed in Winston Churchill's speeches. During the war, advertisers attempted to capitalise on war-time patriotism and, therefore, Clampin's unique focus on advertising provides a visually rich seam of new information on the everyday war and contributes to the debate on people's experiences of war and nationalism. Using a remarkable and hitherto unseen range of primary source material-advertisements in the press, slogans and posters, this work will reshape the contested meanings of the 'Home Front', opening up cultural history discourses on gender and nationalism. Advertising and Propaganda in World War II is essential reading for historians of World War II as well as students and scholars of Media Studies and Communication Studies.

The Social Programs of Sweden was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In his forward to this book, Marquis Childs, author of the classic work Sweden: The Middle Way,comments: "There has been a great deal of emotional writing about the effort of the labor government in Stockholm to regulate capitalism and provide a decent standard of living for every citizen. Much of this emotional writing has come from those who for one reason or another have sought to discredit the Swedish experiment ... The net result of much of this highly colored writing has been to ignore the real contribution that Sweden has made in a half dozen fields and particularly in the fields of social security and health. But now comes an author ideally equipped to appraise this contribution by reason of his background. This is the great virtue of this book. It is a careful and thorough examination of Sweden's achievement by a specialist familiar with our own social security, public health and welfare systems ... No subsequent appraisal of what Sweden has done can be made henceforth without this basic work." The author traces the development of the Swedish programs and provides detailed descriptions of the social security, health insurance, public health, and welfare programs, with case examples. He evaluates and compares the programs with their American counterparts, and, in conclusion, considers the effects of the Swedish system on personal freedom. The work is based on extensive research done in Sweden.

Professor Leith explores the growth of the idea of using art as one instrument of propaganda. This book analyses different contributions to the resurgence of the idea and probes the peculiar psychological assumptions which led eighteeneth-century thinkers to believe in the efficacy of visual propaganda.

Treating rhetoric and symbols as central rather than peripheral to politics, Lisa Wedeen's groundbreaking book offers a compelling counterargument to those who insist that politics is primarily about material interests and the groups advocating for them. During the thirty-year rule of President Hafiz al-Asad's regime, his image was everywhere. In newspapers, on television, and during orchestrated spectacles. Asad was praised as the "father," the "gallant knight," even the country's "premier pharmacist." Yet most Syrians, including those who create the official rhetoric, did not believe its claims. Why would a regime spend scarce resources on a personality cult whose content is patently spurious? Wedeen shows how such flagrantly fictitious claims were able to produce a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens acted as if they revered the leader. By inundating daily life with tired symbolism, the regime exercised a subtle, yet effective form of power. The cult worked to enforce obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians from one another, and set guidelines for public speech and behavior. Wedeen's ethnographic research demonstrates how Syrians recognized the disciplinary aspects of the cult and sought to undermine them. In a new preface, Wedeen discusses the uprising against the Syrian regime that began in 2011 and questions the usefulness of the concept of legitimacy in trying to analyze and understand authoritarian regimes.

When President Dwight Eisenhower spoke of waging "total cold war," he was proposing nothing less than a global, all-embracing battle for hearts and minds. His wide-ranging propaganda campaign challenged world communism at every turn and left a lasting mark on the American psyche.

Kenneth Osgood now chronicles the secret psychological warfare programs America developed at the height of the Cold War. These programs-which were often indistinguishable from CIA covert operations-went well beyond campaigns to foment unrest behind the Iron Curtain. The effort was global: U.S. propaganda campaigns targeted virtually every country in the free world.

"Total Cold War" also shows that Eisenhower waged his propaganda war not just abroad, but also at home. U.S. psychological warfare programs blurred the lines between foreign and domestic propaganda with campaigns that both targeted the American people and enlisted them as active participants in global contest for public opinion.

Osgood focuses on major campaigns such as Atoms for Peace, People-to-People, and cultural exchange programs. Drawing on recently declassified documents that record U.S. psychological operations in some three dozen countries, he tells how U.S. propaganda agencies presented everyday life in America to the world: its citizens living full, happy lives in a classless society where economic bounty was shared by all. Osgood further investigates the ways in which superpower disarmament negotiations were used as propaganda maneuvers in the battle for international public opinion. He also reexamines the early years of the space race, focusing especially on the challenge to American propagandists posed by the Soviet launch of Sputnik.

Perhaps most telling, Osgood takes a new look at President Eisenhower's leadership. Believing that psychological warfare was a potent weapon in America's arsenal, Ike appears in these pages not as a disinterested figurehead, as he's often been portrayed, but as an activist president who left a profound mark on national security affairs.

Osgood's distinctive interpretation places Cold War propaganda campaigns in the context of an international arena drastically changed by the communications revolution and the age of mass politics and total war. It provides a new perspective on the conduct of public diplomacy, even as Americans today continue to grapple with the challenges of winning other hearts and minds in another global struggle.

When Roald Dahl, a dashing young wounded RAF pilot, took up his post at the British Embassy in Washington in 1942, his assignment was to use his good looks, wit, and considerable charm to gain access to the most powerful figures in American political life. A patriot eager to do his part to save his country from a Nazi invasion, he invaded the upper reaches of the U.S. government and Georgetown society, winning over First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, Franklin; befriending wartime leaders from Henry Wallace to Henry Morgenthau; and seducing the glamorous freshman congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce.

Dahl would soon be caught up in a complex web of deception masterminded by William Stephenson, aka Intrepid, Churchill's legendary spy chief, who, with President Roosevelt's tacit permission, mounted a secret campaign of propaganda and political subversion to weaken American isolationist forces, bring the country into the war against Germany, and influence U.S. policy in favor of England. Known as the British Security Coordination (BSC) -- though the initiated preferred to think of themselves as the Baker Street Irregulars in honor of the amateurs who aided Sherlock Holmes -- these audacious agents planted British propaganda in American newspapers and radio programs, covertly influenced leading journalists -- including Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell, and Walter Lippmann -- harassed prominent isolationists and anti-New Dealers, and plotted against American corporations that did business with the Third Reich.

In an account better than spy fiction, Jennet Conant shows Dahl progressing from reluctant diplomat to sly man-about-town, parlaying his morale-boosting wartime propaganda work into a successful career as an author, which leads to his entree into the Roosevelt White House and Hyde Park and initiation into British intelligence's elite dirty tricks squad, all in less than three years. He and his colorful coconspirators -- David Ogilvy, Ian Fleming, and Ivar Bryce, recruited more for their imagination and dramatic flair than any experience in the spy business -- gossiped, bugged, and often hilariously bungled their way across Washington, doing their best to carry out their cloak-and-dagger assignments, support the fledgling American intelligence agency (the OSS), and see that Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented fourth term.

It is an extraordinary tale of deceit, double-dealing, and moral ambiguity -- all in the name of victory. Richly detailed and meticulously researched, Conant's compelling narrative draws on never-before-seen wartime letters, diaries, and interviews and provides a rare, and remarkably candid, insider's view of the counterintelligence game during the tumultuous days of World War II.

Manipulating the Masses tells the story of the enduring threat to American democracy that arose out of World War I: the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state. During the Great War, the federal government exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of American citizens. Its agent for this was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), established by President Woodrow Wilson one week after the United States entered the war in April 1917. Driven by its fiery chief, George Creel, the CPI reached every crevice of the nation, every day, and extended widely abroad. It established the first national newspaper, made prepackaged news a quotidian aspect of governing, and pioneered the concept of public diplomacy. It spread the Wilson administration's messages through articles, cartoons, books, and advertisements in newspapers and magazines; through feature films and volunteer Four Minute Men who spoke during intermission; through posters plastered on buildings and along highways; and through pamphlets distributed by the millions. It enlisted the nation's leading progressive journalists, advertising executives, and artists. It harnessed American universities and their professors to create propaganda and add legitimacy to its mission. Even as Creel insisted that the CPI was a conduit for reliable, fact-based information, the office regularly sanitized news, distorted facts, and played on emotions. Creel extolled transparency but established front organizations. Overseas, the CPI secretly subsidized news organs and bribed journalists. At home, it challenged the loyalty of those who occasionally questioned its tactics. Working closely with federal intelligence agencies eager to sniff out subversives and stifle dissent, the CPI was an accomplice to the Wilson administration's trampling of civil liberties. Until now, the full story of the CPI has never been told. John Maxwell Hamilton consulted over 150 archival collections in the United States and Europe to write this revealing history, which shows the shortcuts to open, honest debate that even well-meaning propagandists take to bend others to their views. Every element of contemporary government propaganda has antecedents in the CPI. It is the ideal vehicle for understanding the rise of propaganda, its methods of operation, and the threat it poses to democracy.

Absent Mandate develops the crucial concept of policy mandates, distinguished from other interpretations of election outcomes, and addresses the disconnect between election issues and government actions. Emphasizing Canadian federal elections between 1993 and 2015, the book examines the Chretien/Martin, Harper, and Trudeau governments and the campaigns that brought them to power. Using data from the Canadian Election Studies and other major surveys, Absent Mandate documents the longstanding volatility in Canadian voting behaviour. The failure of elections to provide genuine policy mandates stimulates public discontent with the political process and widens the gap between the promise and the performance of Canadian democracy.