by Tim Wu
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*1 In early advertising jargon, the technique of making convincing promises to the buyer is known as “reason-why” or “hard-sell” advertising.
*2 An exception was The Ladies’ Home Journal, which had stopped taking medicine ads by 1892. Its editor, Edward Bok, also revealed that the going rate for patent medicine endorsements in Washington, D.C., was seventy-five dollars for a senator and forty dollars for a congressman.
CHAPTER 3
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
Shortly after noon on August 3, 1914, Lord Herbert Kitchener was pacing the decks and working himself into a rage. He was anxious to return home to colonial Egypt, but the steamer meant to take him there was still docked in Dover, its departure already delayed an hour, when a man from Downing Street scrambled aboard. That messenger was clutching a letter from the prime minister, a letter that would not only postpone Kitchener’s trip home but also set him on an unexpected course to become one of the pivotal figures in the story of mass attention capture.1
Kitchener was himself no stranger to attention. In 1911, he’d been appointed the king’s vice-consul in Egypt, becoming de facto ruler of the land of the pharaohs. By then he was already Britain’s best known military officer, a living embodiment of colonial rule. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of him, “He was in a very special sense a King-Man, one who was born to fashion and control the Great Affairs of Mankind.” And with his erect posture, large mustache, and taste for full dress uniform, he very much looked the part.2
The message from Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ordered the indispensable Kitchener back to London for a meeting of the War Council. The next day, Britain would declare war on the German Empire. There wasn’t much choice, since Germany had defied a British ultimatum to end its occupation of Belgium. Unfortunately, however, the United Kingdom’s military was in no shape for a major ground war. “No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous,” said Lord Kitchener later. “They have no Army and they declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world.” It was with some misgivings, then, that Kitchener accepted the appointment as secretary of state for war.3
In August 1914, the British had an able, professional fighting force of just eighty thousand regulars—small enough, the late German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had once joked, to be arrested by the German police. With reserves, the army numbered a few hundred thousand, many of whom were stationed overseas, mainly in India. Germany, meanwhile, had been on a war footing for years. Its Imperial Army of nearly 4.5 million (including reserves) was undefeated, with numerous impressive victories over the last several decades. Having just overrun Belgium, it was on its way into France and seemed unstoppable.4
Foreseeing a much longer war than his colleagues did, one with heavy losses, Kitchener took the highly realistic view that Britain needed to do something it had never done before: raise a huge army of a million men at least. With conscription ruled out by tradition and policy, however, Kitchener had the idea to make a direct and personal appeal to the British public. And thus began the first state-run attention harvest, or what historians would later call the “first systematic propaganda campaign directed at the civilian population.”5
In our times, the idea of a government-run mass recruiting campaign does not sound especially controversial. Recently, the Affordable Care Act was made workable by just such an effort. But in 1914 it was unprecedented, not just in Britain, but anywhere. “That the State should advertise itself was an idea which occurred to few before the war,” concluded an official British history, “and which, had it been brought before the notice of the general public, would have seemed to them repellent.”6
Remember that, for much of human history, rulers did not feel any particular need for public attention, and, indeed, usually tried to avoid it. Apart from rituals such as triumphal entry into the lands of a new subject people, dating back to the Romans, and the Royal Progress, the jaunt first undertaken in medieval times to “show the sacred body of the prince,” kings and queens once depended on the mystique of inaccessibility as an expression of power.
Before the democratic age, only the Church, as discussed, systematically sought and used access to the mind of the people. In fact, the very word “propaganda” originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith. As Mark Crispin Miller writes, “It was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their population to fanatical assent.” The entry of the State into the game—with its vast resources and monopoly on force—would be spectacularly consequential.7
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Kitchener was aware of his own celebrity as a living icon of British imperial power. Within a week of his new appointment, every newspaper carried an appeal from him that also appeared on posters across the nation:
Your King and Country Need You
A CALL TO ARMS
An addition of 100,000 men to His Majesty’s Regular Army
is immediately necessary in the present grave National Emergency.
Lord Kitchener is confident
that this appeal will be at once responded to
by all those who have the safety of our Empire at heart.
Whether the trick was provoking a sense of duty or subtle fears of German invasion or simply presenting the image of the great man himself, the initial August appeal was extraordinarily successful. Within a month, an astonishing 30,000 men a day were signing up at recruitment offices. By October, over 750,000 had joined the British Army, creating, in two months, an infantry larger than America’s current active force. Lord Kitchener now had his army.
But just as soon as they’d raised an army, Kitchener and the Recruiting Committee realized that they still had a problem. Facing an enemy of over six million and the prospect of heavy losses, Britain would need a steady stream of new recruits as hostilities progressed.8 Yet the drive, which had been so successful initially, seemed to be losing steam. Those intimate personal appeals of Lord Kitchener’s, which had proved so compelling at first, were now apparently being ignored. Something more was needed to keep recruitment in the minds of the public.
The answer was a transition from Kitchener’s occasional appeals to a more systematic, and totalizing approach to government propaganda. A special Parliamentary Recruiting Committee was created in the fall of 1914 to run a “permanent ‘information’ campaign”—an institutionalized effort to develop ways of keeping the recruitment emergency foremost in the minds of Britons. The campaign’s most useful tool turned out to be a French invention we have seen before, the giant illustrated advertisement. Beginning in the final months of 1914, the country was blanketed in government war posters, and by 1916, the recruitment authority would calculate that it had printed nearly 12.5 million of them. By the war’s end, it would print some 54 million. The London Times reported on January 3, 1915, that these posters were to be seen “on every hoarding, in most windows, in omnibuses, tramcars and commercial vans. The great base of Nelson’s Column is covered with them. Their number and variety are remarkable. Everywhere Lord Kitchener sternly points a monstrously big finger, exclaiming ‘I Want You.’ ”9
The finger reference is to the most famous of the ubiquitous posters, in which the field marshal points directly at the viewer, with the caption “Your country needs YOU.” In the words of one recruit, who doubtless spoke for many, “It was seeing the picture of Kitchener and his finger pointing at you—any position that you took up, the finger was always pointing to you.” Like all effective posters, this one proved nearly impossible to ignore.10
Also in the fall, the authorities began to conduct what they called “aggressive open-air propaganda” in the form of massive parades and rallies. One staged in the fall of 1914 in Brighton was perhaps typical. There, the military paraded through the seaside town, with horses dragging giant artillery guns through the streets, and the band whipping up the crowd with martial tunes. The ensuing rally culminated in a stirring
speech by Rudyard Kipling, who, deploying rhetoric for its original ancient purpose, played upon deep-seated fears of German domination:11
Have no illusions. We are dealing with a strong and magnificently equipped enemy, whose avowed aim is our complete destruction. The violation of Belgium, the attack on France and the defense against Russia, are only steps by the way. The German’s real objective, as she always has told us, is England, and England’s wealth, trade and worldwide possessions.
If you assume, for an instant, that the attack will be successful, England will not be reduced, as some people say, to the rank of a second-rate power, but we shall cease to exist as a nation. We shall become an outlying province of Germany, to be administered with that severity German safety and interest require.
If we are to win the right for ourselves and for freedom to exist on earth, every man must offer himself for that service and that sacrifice.12
George Coppard, whose wartime diaries would later be published, described how he signed up at age sixteen following much the same sort of rally at Croydon. “This was too much for me to resist, and as if drawn by a magnet, I knew I had to enlist right away.”13
Seeing the necessity to keep innovating, the government did have a few more inspired ideas. For example, it built a small fleet of specialized “cine-motor vans,” which were equipped to screen films conducive to enlistment on large walls around the country—the drive-in movie was thus born not of romance but existential threat. In 1918, on the fourth anniversary of the war, the government would distribute a special, sealed message from the prime minister to be read aloud at 9 p.m. sharp at more than four thousand cinemas, music halls, and theaters. By such means—at a time when “broadcast” still referred to a crop sowing technique—the prime minister reached an estimated 2.5 million people at once, an unheard of audience at the time.14
Mainly, though, it was no single invention that marked the government’s effort so much as its massive scale and organization.15 In this, the British anticipated an insight that would be expressed by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul halfway through the twentieth century: to succeed, propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means and media available in his time—movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing in one century, social media in another, as the rise of ISIS attests. Where there is only sporadic or random effort—a planted newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, a few slogans sprayed on walls—this modern form of attention capture does not bear its once unimagined fruit.16
Even the most successful and adaptive efforts to harvest attention can come up short. In fact, by the nature of the crop, most do. Ultimately the military would have to resort to conscription to meet its manpower needs. Still, Kitchener’s recruitment drive was almost certainly the most successful in history. Out of 5.5 million men of military age at the start of the war, about half had enlisted voluntarily by late September of 1915, this despite staggeringly high casualties in the early years. To heed the call was to accept a great chance of death or serious injury, a roughly 50/50 chance. That Lord Kitchener’s campaign managed to achieve by persuasion what other countries achieved by legal coercion was a lesson lost on no one. Just as the patent medicine advertisements had demonstrated that attention could be converted into cash, the first propaganda drives showed it was also convertible into other forms of value, like compliant service even unto death. The British example would come to be copied by others for the rest of the century: by governments in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany; and elsewhere, as we’ll see, by commercial actors. As the historians M. L. Sanders and Philip Taylor wrote, “The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world.”17
As for Lord Kitchener, who started things, he would never make it back to his beloved Egypt or even see the end of the war. In June 1916, en route to a diplomatic summit in Russia, his armored cruiser hit a series of mines laid by a German submarine possibly tipped off by a spy in the war secretary’s office. Kitchener perished with his staff and more than six hundred crewmen. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by then also part of the British propaganda effort, wrote in memoriam: “Amid the desolate waters of the Orkneys, he left behind him the memory of something vast and elemental, coming suddenly and going strangely, a mighty spirit leaving great traces of its earthly passage.”18
The very first country to try out the British propaganda techniques was not one synonymous with mind control, but rather the Land of the Free, which, in 1917, would abandon its neutrality to enter the war. Long before Americans began borrowing British television shows, they were borrowing propaganda techniques. However, like nearly every American imitation of a British original, the American version would be much bigger.
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George Creel was a newspaperman and a devout Wilson supporter who had played a key role in the messaging of Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 reelection campaign. He was a partisan who was never anything but passionate and energetic; one journalist wrote of him, “What Sunday is to religion, Creel is to politics. Creel is a crusader, a bearer of the fiery cross.” In 1917, as Wilson prepared to declare war on the German Empire (breaking his campaign promise), Creel proposed to Wilson that the administration should adopt a “progressive” alternative to wartime press censorship. He argued that the United States could use modern scientific advertising techniques to “arouse ardor and enthusiasm” for the war.
Wilson, who felt indebted to Creel anyway, was so taken with Creel’s idea that, about a week after asking Congress to declare war, he placed Creel in charge of a new “Committee on Public Information,” the first institutionalized federal propaganda agency in American history. Animated by his new role, Creel, the true believer, would never seem to be afflicted by any qualms about the use of propaganda. He cheerfully called the job “a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”19 To run America’s first propaganda campaign, Wilson, by executive order, granted him a broad and unspecified authority. In his sunny way, Creel would take that authority and run with it, going to extremes that must be described as alarming.
In 1917, the United States remained intensely divided over the merits of entering a war that had already claimed millions of lives and enormous resources, with no end in sight. To many it also seemed, essentially, a contest between European powers for European territory. And so many Americans, especially those of German or Irish descent, saw no particular reason for their country to take the side of the British. Wilson and Creel were both all too familiar with these objections. Indeed, Wilson had just won reelection on a neutrality platform, which Creel had explained and justified in a bestseller published during the campaign entitled Wilson and the Issues.20 There was no stronger case for staying out than the one these two men had made.
Nonetheless, when Wilson changed his view, George Creel underwent the kind of abrupt reversal that only certain men infinitely glad to be of use could manage. There was no longer room for divided opinion, he declared, for America was now endangering itself with “voices of anger and confusion” and “the pull and haul of opposed interests.” For Creel, it would not be enough to achieve a “mere surface unity.” Rather the entire citizenry now needed to share “a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause.”
A “war-will”—a concept borrowed from nationalist writers, denoting a surrender of the individual to the greater will of the nation—was the new necessity. Creel wrote that this “war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends on the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice.” If the language sounds familiar, it should. Benito Mussolini would later describe his own project as the creation of “an objective Will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.”21 Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film
Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) would likewise glorify a collective will in spiritual terms. But for the time being, Creel was alone in hailing the fascist virtue of “weld[ing] the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.”
To be fair, Creel’s nationalism and his conception of a “war-will” was a far cry from the more malevolent strain that would arise later. “In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression,” he insisted. “Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive.” But if he was a second-rate fascist, as a propagandist he was of the first rank. For, as he averred, what he practiced was “Propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the ‘propagation of faith.’ ”22
Following the British example, Creel sought a massive and totalizing seizure of the nation’s attention. For this, a flood of government communication was necessary, for he understood that “to conduct as well as accommodate this torrent he needed to command every possible sluice, the broader the better.”23 Toward this end there was “no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board—all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms.”