Research Note: Recent Books on U.S. Government Propaganda
Should government serve the people? Or should people serve government? Or should people serve government so that government may serve the people? One enters this philosophical thicket whenever one speaks of government propaganda. I’ve caught word of these recent books on the topic, and hereby add them on my to-read list.
(1) James J. Kimble, Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds And Domestic Propaganda (College Station, TX: TAMU Press, 2006). Focuses on World War II. For one review of the book, see J. Michael Sproule, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, vol. 11, no. 1, 2008, pp. 167-169.
(2) Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The publisher describes this book on World War I propaganda thus:
Selling the Great War is the story of maverick journalist George Creel and the epoch-making government agency he built and led using the emerging industries of mass advertising and public relations to convince isolationist America to join World War I. Authorized by President Woodrow Wilson and created and run by Creel, the Committee on Public Information had one goal: to monopolize every medium and and avenue of communication in order to forge a nation of warriors for democracy.
(3) Susan A. Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The publisher describes this history of 2oth century U.S. propaganda thus:
On the evening of September 11, 2002, with the Statue of Liberty shimmering in the background, television cameras captured President George W. Bush as he advocated war against Iraq. This carefully stage-managed performance, writes Susan A. Brewer, was the culmination of a long tradition of sophisticated wartime propaganda in America. In Why America Fights, Brewer offers a fascinating history of how successive presidents have conducted what Donald Rumsfeld calls “perception management,” from McKinley’s war in the Philippines to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
