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.
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