by Tim Wu
Murrow’s broadcasts revealed the medium’s matchless power of immediacy. Giving his listeners a visceral, emotional sense of being there, it was as if he had created a means of teleportation. Every broadcast he began with “This…is London” and then simply described what he had seen that day. “Tonight, as on every other night, the rooftop watchers are peering out across the fantastic forest of London’s chimney pots. The anti-aircraft gunners stand ready. I have been walking tonight—there is a full moon, and the dirty-gray buildings appear white. The stars, the empty windows, are hidden. It’s a beautiful and lonesome city where men and women and children are trying to snatch a few hours sleep underground.”9
Murrow had a novelist’s sense for telling details; here’s how he described London after the evacuation of children to the countryside. “For six days I’ve not heard a child’s voice. And that’s a strange feeling. No youngster shouting their way home from school. And that’s the way it is in most of Europe’s big cities now. One needs the eloquence of the ancients to convey the full meaning of it. There just aren’t any more children.”10
The journalistic approach, while objective, was not neutral. The war was not a subject that he thought deserved a balanced presentation of both sides. His aim was to convey the experience of the British, and he insisted on knowing it firsthand; while most reporters retreated to bunkers during Nazi bombardments, Murrow, despite the obvious peril, stood on the roof to capture the sounds and feeling of London under attack. Later, when the tide of war was turning and the RAF began to bomb Berlin, he would join the British on bombing missions. His first flight, in 1943, was aboard a British Lancaster bomber named D-Dog, part of a force of 660. Here he describes the terror of being caught in a German spotlight:
And then, with no warning at all, D-Dog was filled with an unhealthy white light. I was standing just behind Jock and could see all the seams on the wings. His quiet Scots voice beat into my ears. “Steady lads, we’ve been coned.” His slender body lifted half out of his seat as he jammed the control column forward and to the left. We were going down. D-Dog was corkscrewing. As we rolled down on the other side, I began to see what was happening to Berlin.11
By then Berlin was getting its own back from the Allies. But for years it had been under a different kind of bombardment, one entirely invisible from the ground or the air, and even more relentless. The assault was perpetrated by a demagogue whose mesmerizing oratory had been propagated in measures beyond any the world had seen, capturing more human attention than NBC or CBS could dream of, and indeed holding it captive. And so did this demagogue seize his own nation before his mad attempt to seize all the rest.
* * *
*1 From the 1920s, NBC ran two networks: the Red and the Blue. The Red had previously been AT&T’s network, until 1926 when AT&T effectively exited the industry, as described in The Master Switch, pp. 78–81. In 1942, American antitrust officials ordered NBC to divest the Blue network, which became a third network, the American Broadcasting Company, or ABC.
*2 It is worth remembering that we, who now swim in a sea of voices transmitted, recorded, and even synthesized, are conditioned to exhibit less of this reflex.
*3 Sarnoff’s astonishing career is chronicled in The Master Switch, chapters 5, 9, and 10.
*4 By the 1940s, the critics, who remained unappeased, briefly took over the Federal Communications Commission and published a report (known as the Blue Book) that condemned the commercialization of radio and demanded that stations failing to serve the public interest have their licenses revoked.
*5 There is some disagreement on the extent of panic. See Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow, “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate, October 28, 2013 (panic exaggerated); Radiolab, War of the Worlds, season 4, episode 3 (panic chronicled).
*6 Print news did not welcome the competition and used various means to attack radio newscasting throughout the early 1920s. In 1933, Paley brokered a treaty with the major newspapers and wire services (the Biltmore Agreement) that limited radio news to certain times to ensure radio did not compete with morning and evening newspapers.
*7 One might argue that FDR’s fireside chats, which garnered audiences as large as any of the most successful entertainments, were an indication to the contrary. But for all the attention they captured, these were perceived less as news than moral uplift, and at any rate, sui generis.
CHAPTER 9
TOTAL ATTENTION CONTROL, OR THE MADNESS OF CROWDS
On March 17, 1935, the opening notes of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony filled the air across the German Reich. The sound emerged from millions of radio sets in private homes, many of them the Volksempfänger, or “people’s receiver,” a low-priced product designed for the masses. Also blaring were the giant loudspeakers set up by the volunteer Funkwarte (Radio Guard), so that the notes drifted over public squares, factory yards, restaurants, and offices. The stirring strains of heroism likewise found their way into three thousand designated “listening rooms”: meeting halls, courtrooms, and schools outfitted with chairs arranged like pews, into which the Radio Guards had herded citizens. All this for the sake of replacing “the anarchic intellectualism of the individual with the organically developed spirituality of the community.”
As the orchestra faded, there was a crackling silence, and then a voice announced, “Now speaks the Führer!” Then came another voice, the voice, intimately familiar to every German. On this day, Adolf Hitler announced the reintroduction of military conscription, and with it the rebuilding of a standing German army. His words reached an estimated 70 percent of German households, some 56 million people, more than any fireside chat had reached, almost certainly the largest broadcast audience to that point in human history. It seemed literally true, as a Nazi poster put it, that “All of Germany hears the Führer.”1
Here was the crowning achievement of the Reichsfunk-Gesellschaft, the National Radio Division of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda of the Third Reich. Its reach and power had caused Minister Joseph Goebbels to declare German radio the “towering herald of National Socialism,” a force equal to creating a nation with “one public opinion.” His broadcast chief bragged that “with the radio we have destroyed the spirit of rebellion.” By means of this attention infrastructure, one man could at will reach the minds of the entire nation, whether they cared to hear him or not. As architect Albert Speer said at his war crimes trial, the Third Reich was the first dictatorship “which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.”2
The Reichsfunk-Gesellschaft, with the rest of the ministry’s apparatus, was designed to smelt an entire people into a single mass consciousness. Other governments—fascist, communist, democratic—had also experimented with efforts to form, in Creel’s expression, this “white hot mass.” And after the war, both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China would conduct vigorously biased and sustained programs of state broadcasting, ultimately reaching more people. But the Third Reich remains unrivaled in its reach into daily life and its power of coercion.
Early in the twentieth century, the Nazis had developed an advanced understanding of how to gain and use access to the minds of the public. It is a fact no less fascinating and relevant for being so depressing to contemplate. For by testing the extremes of what attention capture could accomplish, the Third Reich obliges us to confront directly the relationship between what we pay attention to and our individual freedom. In producing the “people’s community” that the Nazis referred to as Volksgemeinschaft, the Nazis effected a shutdown of free thought in the land of Kant, Schiller, and Goethe.
It all began in 1924, in a small prison in southwestern Bavaria, where Hitler described to his lieutenant his great admiration for British propaganda during the First World War. Britain, he mused, had mustered
“unheard-of skill and ingenious deliberation”; and “by introducing the German as a barbarian and a Hun to its own people, it thus prepared the individual soldier for the terrors of war and helped guard him against disappointment” and also “increased his fury and hatred against the atrocious enemy.”
In short, Britain, he felt, had much to teach Germany, which he considered a complete failure at public relations. He faulted the German Empire, with its “mania for objectivity,” for failing to capture the necessary attention. “It was hardly probable that [German efforts] would make the necessary impression on the masses. Only our brainless ‘statesmen’ were able to hope that with this stale pacifistic dishwater one could succeed in arousing men to die voluntarily.”
There is, needless to say, good reason to take Hitler’s pronouncements about British and American message control with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it is true that German propaganda in the First World War tended toward the legalistic, officious, and convoluted. Take Germany’s defense of its invasion of Belgium, as articulated by its propaganda official in America in 1914. The main point in his Saturday Evening Post commentary is that the relevant peace treaty between Germany and Belgium had, technically, expired. “We were sincerely sorry that Belgium, a country that in fact had nothing to do with the question at issue and might wish to stay neutral, had to be overrun.” He goes on to blame the Belgians for not surrendering more quickly—“it would have been entirely possible for Belgium to avoid all the devastation under which she is now suffering.” In general, German war propaganda made the elementary error—common among clever people and experts, and familiar to the great ancient orators—of jumping into the complex merits of an issue before having engaged the listener. With their reductive messages and vivid imagery, the British and Americans handily avoided that blunder.
Hitler’s entire approach to propaganda might be understood as a reaction to the rationalism for which German thinkers were known. Instead, he had an alarmingly intuitive understanding of how to appeal to a mass audience and to the reptilian core. In Mein Kampf, he asks, “To whom has propaganda to appeal? To the scientific intelligentsia, or to the less educated masses? It has to appeal forever and only to the masses!” The strong leader, by “understanding the great masses’ world of ideas and feelings, finds, by a correct psychological form, the way to the attention, and further to the heart, of the great masses.” Propaganda must “be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent….Therefore its spiritual level has to be screwed the lower, the greater the mass of people which one wants to attract.”
It can also be understood as a reflection of his time working for the advertising industry. In the early 1910s, while living in Vienna, Hitler made money as a freelancer, drawing advertising posters for products like hair tonic, soap, and “Teddy Antiperspirant foot powder.” In Mein Kampf he suggests that propaganda need be like advertising, and seek first to attract attention: “A poster’s art lies in the designer’s ability to catch the masses’ attention by outline and color,” he writes. It must give “an idea of the importance of the exhibition, but it is in no way to be a substitute for the art represented by the exhibition.” Similarly “the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses towards certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses’ field of vision.” Those who are “already scientifically experienced or…striving towards education and knowledge” are not the subject.
Hitler also intuited a few other basic truths about how we process information: since everything can be ignored, imprinting information in the memory requires a constant repetition of simple ideas. “The great masses’ receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great. As a consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans until even the very last man is able to imagine what is intended by such a word.” Nuance was nonsense; complexity was a risk: “As soon as one sacrifices this basic principle and tries to become versatile, the effect will fritter away, as the masses are neither able to digest the material offered nor to retain it.” One couldn’t overstate the intensity of the effort required, for the masses “with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousandfold repetition of the most simple ideas.”
Finally, Hitler understood the demagogue’s most essential principle: to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion. And far less welcome: what the audience most wants is an excuse to experience fully the powerful feelings already lurking within them but which their better selves might lead them to suppress.
“The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak. Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine, tolerating no other beside itself.”
Hitler may have dabbled in advertising, but his real understanding of how to command and use attention came from his career as a popular public speaker in Munich. That career began on October 16, 1919, when the former corporal, now age thirty, gave his first scheduled address, in the basement of a beer hall. At the time, amidst great unrest, the city’s many beer halls had become popular venues for political speeches and even rallies of various sizes and political affiliations. Every evening, aspiring polemicists would test their mettle on the bibulous crowd.
Hitler had thrown his lot in with the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or DAP), a small and somewhat inept organization with only fifty-five members. The DAP was a völkisch party, meaning it subscribed to a brand of populism based on a mystical, folkloric link between the Germans and their land. The group’s ideal of blood and soil was virulently anti-Semitic. But the DAP was just one of dozens of parties with a similar völkisch message and hardly the most prominent one.
Hitler was the little known, second speaker in the evening’s lineup, which had attracted a crowd of about one hundred (still more than the organizers had expected). The lengthy opening speech hadn’t gotten much of a rise. Then it was Hitler’s turn. He had not yet perfected his art, but this would, nevertheless, be a break-out performance—the first time a group of any size had been exposed to his intense, emotionally charged style, punctuated by unwavering certainty and unremitting bile. Hitler later wrote, “I spoke for thirty minutes, and what formerly I had felt in my mind, without knowing it somehow, was now proved by reality. I could speak.” After his modestly successful debut, Hitler was invited back, taking his act to larger beer halls, attracting larger crowds, and recruiting more members to the DAP. Finally, in February 1920, he gained headliner status in a large hall, the Hofbräuhaus, with an audience of more than two thousand. Overcoming interruptions by communists, he had by the end gotten the audience shouting and whooping, enraptured by his words. He would return in August to deliver a speech entitled “Why We Are Anti-Semites,” which, over the course of its two hours, was interrupted fifty-eight times by wild cheering.
Over the next few years, Hitler would give hundreds of similar speeches, perfecting his performance method. Over time, he developed a winning and invariant structure. He always stood in the same, upright, and serious way, and made the same gestures. His speeches began with a long silence, broken by a soft, almost intimate tone of great personal pain and vulnerability, in which he described his difficult upbringing, service in the war, and despair at Germany’s defeat. In a bridge section, he would, with rising fury, begin to assign blame, and denounce all that was wrong in the present. In an incredibly intense finish, he bellowed a flood of unrestrained hatred for Jews, plan
s for renewed greatness, and, finally, one more great call for German unity.
It was during the Munich years, too, that Hitler first began to conclude his speeches by leading his audiences in a rousing and angry chant. A confidant from those years, Ernst Hanfstaengl, had gone to Harvard, and been impressed with the fight songs used at football games. With Hanfstaengl’s guidance, “Fight, Harvard, Fight” thus became “Sieg…Heil! Sieg…Heil! Sieg…Heil!…Heil Hitler!”
Even without being Nazis, most of us know the experience of being part of a crowd wild with excitement, and have an intuitive sense that the way our minds process information might change under such circumstances, even to the point that we might come to do something or begin to believe something different. If to pay attention is to open the mind to information, to do so in an animated crowd is to fling the doors wide open. To be exposed to any information is to be influenced, but in crowds the possibilities go well beyond everyday experience. Gustave Le Bon, the first theorist of crowd psychology, held that it is loss of individual responsibility that makes the individual in the crowd more malleable. Freud would say that the superego was supplanted by the will of the crowd, as unconscious wishes rise to the surface and are shared. In any case, we know it when we see it.3
Among the most famous American examples is the reaction to William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896. A thirty-six-year-old former Nebraska congressman, with no following going into the convention, Bryan managed to win the nomination by delivering a plea for pegging the dollar to silver as well as gold in order to increase the monetary supply and broaden economic opportunity. But Bryan brought the house down not merely with what he said but how he said it. “Upon which side will the Democratic Party fight; upon the side of ‘the idle holders of idle capital’ or upon the side of ‘the struggling masses’?” He ended the speech, famously, with a pantomime of a crown and a cross, saying, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.”