so the class today is woodrow

wilson. in the origins of government propaganda and the book we're reading. what's a book published? right.

and we're reading this book in connection with propaganda, because propaganda is what walter lippmann was reacting to. this is a photo of walter lippmann who looks like a quite buttoned down guy, which he was became one of our great public intellectuals. but we'll get to him in a minute. when he wrote public opinion in 1922, he said, persuade john has become self-conscious a self art and a regular organ of popular government. what happened at the end of world war two? world war one is that propaganda became established in all developed countries and clearly in the united states that we're going to get. we're going to talk about that on. he he was an ardent propagandist at the beginning of the war. and then became disillusioned at the end. so first, let's do a little of the bio. so emily, jacob, do you got. so, walter.

from 1889 german-jewish family in new york that we lived until 1974 and he attended harvard for his bachelor's degree where he studied mostly philosophy but also languages. and he was majorly influenced by george toyama and that's a critical philosophical lesson that harvard, in his early career linden, never saw himself as a reporter that worked as one, but as a commentator on or a political philosopher. he was a founding editor of the new republic as a newspaper in 1913, during war one, which happened shortly after that, he worked on propaganda as a captain in military intelligence in the american expeditionary force. colonel edward house. i was through his work under house that men had an advisory role on woodrow wilson's 14 point speech, which would outline the principles for potential peace during world war one and would be used in that way. it would be highly influential while working as a propaganda, he is quoted to have said he had

no doctrinaire belief and free speech but was later in the war. also said to have advised president wilson against censorship. he returned from the war in 90 and was discharged right after he published liberty the news in 1920, which focused on how the press, threatens democracy whenever it has agenda other than the free flow of ideas. and he published the book that we're studying public opinion in 1922. one of the other major works of his career was is today and tomorrow, which most focused on news and current banks. he wrote that column for 35 years and was widely syndicated. then he also wrote the book cold war in 1947. his to the poor, bringing the popularity term to the public. he ordered two pulitzer prizes in 1962 for an interview with the soviet leader, khrushchev. and then one in 1958 for his wisdom perception. i think the response, which is committed for many years on national and international

affairs, he also received presidential medal of freedom by lyndon johnson in 1960. more for his impact on journalism political thought in public life later in life. some of the other things that is known for. he wrote columns against white imperialism in east asia by western powers, and it was in the washington post he promoted respecting the soviet sphere of influence, which wasn't necessarily at the time, and disapproved of the containment strategy that was used at the time. he retired from his home in 1967 and he passed away, as you said, in 1974. we do have a quote that someone that a professor of journalism at boston university gave about lippman saying that he may have been the most influential american of the 20th century to never have held elected office. so he's something to keep in mind. so he credited with the term cold, but he didn't invent it. it was invented by a guy named swope, who was a journalist in

that during world war one, actually, and was the editor of the new york world where where? lippmann worked for a while as an editorial page writer. so what's the main point of the book? always ask that question. what's the main point, gena you saying that the public is equipped to form sufficient and realistic opinion? it often struggles to raise opinions because of internal limitations and are certain limitations which the limitation biases shrink stereotypes then expert on subjects and tactics employed by harper. so appalachia that concern right now wants us to similar so it doesn't seem events in a way because it's just a distorted reality. it's like an example that i

think is anytime that we go on social media, it's, you know, reality is awesome. so that's like the advantage that we it's kind of a cheap trick and got a big quote from the book that sums it up. yes. i mean, for the most we do not see the foreign fighters advancing in the great war, only by the confusion over the our world. we pick out where our has already evaporates. and we tend to it, which we have picked out in the form stereotype of america. that's good. that's a great quote. in fact, we're going to come back to that quote exactly on that quote later. it's for anybody else that quote. i see what i mean. like that quote. i have one that he talks about, the pictures inside of our heads and says the pictures inside. of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs purposes and relationship are their

public opinions. those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people or by individual acting in the name of groups, are public opinion, capitalized with capital letters. yeah. good. all right. yes. i like this for the folks of have news is to think the lies of their the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to fit them into the relation with each other and make a picture reality on which men can act only at those points where social conditions take recognizable images will stay in the body of truth and the body of news coins. yeah, that's good. that's a good. and is what is walter lippmann? think about democracy? he says it's built on a foundation sound. he doesn't think that in its current state, the public equipped to be making all the decisions to have the opinions

needed on complex and to make make consistently be informed this issue. but we're going get we're going to we're going to dig into that. but clearly, one of the things he also sees that or sees as part of that is that propaganda gets in the way of people making good decisions because they can be because people can appeal to their bias or lie to them or in some way get them emotional about idea rather than intellectually come to grips with it. so we're going to do a couple of things today when we when we go through the book. the first was we're going to look at why propaganda became and then second of all, we're going to look at the committee public infon. in fact, this logo here is the logo for the committee that was created. the committee was created at the beginning of world war. our beginning, world war one in april 1917, when the united states entered. the war. the war started in 1914. and we're going to discuss how

that committee came about. it is the first and only ministry of propaganda the united states has ever had. can still see its offices, one of its main offices right. lafayette square, 245 feet away from white house, because the head of the committee on public used to walk over there to see the president all the time. so we're going to get to that and then we're going to look at lippmann concern, which is really an old one, for why the average citizen shouldn't be involved in governance. this is not a new idea. it's actually a very old problem. when he wrote the book, it seemed like new problem for because of because have now systematic, pervasive propaganda. but at the time even even though the time he wrote this book, it seemed that way fact it's a very old problem. we're going to go back to the 17th century to see how that's the case. and then fourth, we're going to look at how the legacy of the cpa, what happened afterwards, how what the cpa did, even though it out of business, its

ideas on. all right so propaganda is old. we've always had every time a king put an ermine robe or put a crown his head or if it's a queen, a queen put a crown on her head that propaganda. it was a way to aggrandize yourself. look and look powerful and important to your constituents, the public. one example i like particularly excuse me, is when richard the third managed to get the crown of and he was master propagandist. and by the way, you know, or you should know that he was called richard the lionheart, which is the name he gave himself. he liked to call himself richard the lionheart because it sounds good, right? it's nice little nickname when he when he crowned, he had a hated who had been in the privy under the previous king. he had him put in chains and, taken with him in his party as he went in to be crowned, because he wanted everybody to that those old days were gone

and was going to be a reformed king. actually, he wasn't great. again, to be honest. and he wasn't around england much. he spent most of his time in normandy. but leaving that aside, the point and fighting wars, far flung wars. but the point is, that's propaganda. that's all propaganda. but what changed with world war two? what changes with world one is that the conditions around which propaganda can be made have changed dramatically. what are those changes? well, we've talked about some of them in previous classes, growing literacy, both production and printing newspaper production of magazine and distribution systems for information. so all of a sudden, you have a world in which you have lots of information circulating. you have a public square in which people can form opinions, public opinions. and when that happens, then the public starts to be important. let me just go through some of the things that happened in the mid-19th century to understand

how the world changed. we had the steam powered press, which was invented in germany and later perfected in england, and it promised permitted mass production of cheap books, pamphlets magazines when world war one started, paris itself had 57 newspapers. think that 57 newspapers were here in baton rouge. many newspapers we have we have one daily and one business report weekly. that's it. germany had more than 4200 daily and weekly newspapers when world war one started. and the whole country. i'm looking at vivian, because that's country in britain approach nearly 100% at that time. members of parliament actually, a member of parliament once got up and said with all of this opinion being formed and all of this news being out there, we don't even have a job anymore. why do why? why do we need a parliament when

we have all of these people being empowered with ideas? but of course, it doesn't quite work out that way. there's a famous philosopher named today and. he was he was kind of a founder. the idea of sociology. he was also the late 19th century. he said the work of and he said all kinds of people were getting information. but he was particularly on journalism. he said the work of journalism has been to nationalize more more and even to internationalize the public mind. and he also said one pen suffices to set off a million tongues. and his idea that society was being held together by this public opinion and we've talked about this how how people come to cities, how newspapers start how newspapers become the glue for what becomes the the way people relate to one another. it provide it provides a context for living, especially in a city

in cities where people are often anonymous in a village, everybody knows everybody else. but in a city you don't. and so the newspaper becomes this way of of getting a larger sense of who you. and it's not surprising the way that sociology rises in parallel with not only the of cities, but the growth of journalism. you don't think about this much, but the idea of male, male that you get something in the mail, take that for granted. but there was a time in the 19th century where male was a brand new thing. the idea of having something delivered to your house. and by the way the british had to like devise a postal system they had a very advanced postal system and they had to actually give houses, street numbers because you can't deliver mail if you don't have street. i remember street numbers. i remember how we talked on in this class about how the government, the first real writing we have is by governments right to control population to monitor what's going on and what what is male

to female allows you now to do much better surveillance by the way which is a very important function of propaganda because now you know where people live and you can monitor where they are. so we have mail, we have telegrams, we have theater, we have reading clubs. and then pretty soon, by the time get to world war when we have telephones and soon after that we're going to get radio. of course. so all of a sudden we have proliferation of things that are happening and the state reacts by trying to figure out how it's going to push back against it. parliament doesn't go of business, right? parliament stays in business. but now they're thinking if we have all this public opinion out there, we have to find a way to manipulate it. governments have become bigger because once you become a big, important industrial nation, then government's doing more things, regulating things and at the same time they also then

develop the equipment to try to shape public opinion. all of those things happen at the same time. we know from what we read in poetry in, the police, that people at first often thought that it was a really good deal that we had the printing press and public opinion. i remember mercia in the book and the police and this quote, which which i love. he says, public now has in europe a preponderant against which one cannot resist in estimating the progress of enlightenment and the change it must. we can thus reasonably, that it will bring the greatest good to the world and the tyrants of all kinds will tremble before the universal cry, the reverberates through fills and awakens europe. that's very positive thing. public opinions here. everything's going to get better. it's kind of like you think about what happened to the internet. wow. the internet here, everything's going to get better. we're going to be all to find out all this information. we're going to know so much. and now what happens? well, it didn't exactly work out that way, right? we know a lot of stuff.

that's not true. and who can use internet than anybody? people who have special. and so that's what happens in the case of the turning point as far as propaganda goes. you know during the spanish-american war mckinley who actually didn't really to go to war but we did. he would have newspaper clippings in every day so he could look at them. that's how he judged public opinion. in fact, this is an interesting finding in many many research studies that actually public officials sometimes think they need to have a better idea of what public opinion is about by reading newspapers than they do by looking at polls. because newspapers are considered a reflection. the a reflection of what people know and what they're thinking. of course, kind of backwards. right. because in fact people are always trying to influence newspapers do so it's a little confused and the god can say that you read today which we won't talk about in this class but we'll talk about a

substantive subject in class. that was godwin's point that newspapers were a mirror of public opinion. so did it right before world war one. kaiser wilhelm did it. he he would look at press clippings. french ministers did it all the time. the french also, by the way, had and lots of officials who had been journalists, clemenceau, who was the great world war one leader, had been journalist and had been huge critic of the government. in fact, his newspaper was put out of business. this is when france entered the war in 1914, and he had a newspaper column that was called in french. it was called unchain wind. but then when he when he when his paper was put out of business, he started a new one and called it chained. but the point was, he had he was a critic and as soon as he becomes prime, what does he do? somebody says, well, you must really believe in free press. this is absolutely not. we're going to censor.

it's fine if you're the critic, but if you're in charge, you don't want anybody on your. the example i like best because i think it's i think it's amusing and it shows you how concerned people were the prussian prince who thought that they should outlaw all coffee shops except people titled nobility. and the reason for that was, they go to coffee shops. and what would they do they talk to each other. you know, one of the places the newspapers circulated a lot was in coffee shops. they'd be sometimes put on the wall and the idea was people go and talk, well, we don't want all those average people talking because they get ideas and they start and they might get enough ideas that they can band together to do something. of course, it's impossible to keep coffee shops only for the upper class. and then, of course, political leaders co-opted journalists. they they would bribe them. the french were particularly good at this. they would bribe them. they would put they would plant

false information in this paper. all the time the political the political parties. so when you read the paper, if go back and look at what happened during world war one, you can't really tell a lot of times what people were thinking because the news in it was was so tainted, so fake. all right. so government pushes back. i this but i want to underline it again. part of when the government is pushing back is because the state has become much bigger. and if you think about that, in the case of the united states, let's think of teddy roosevelt, who's and then right before right when the war starts, woodrow wilson both of those people were, major advocates of the idea of big, important government, powerful government with, the president being more than just an executive, but the originator of policies. when woodrow wilson, who was called the high priest of propaganda because he was so good at it when he went to capitol to give the state of the

union address, which we watched, that was the first time it had been done since george washington. that was the first time a a president gone to capitol hill. congress not feel presidents should stand in congress and tell them anything. they were supposed to pass laws and then the president was supposed to carry them out. woodrow wilson, a different view. he thought that he should lead the public. and we're going to come back to some of his on that point. and it was a view he actually established a philosophy established when was a professor of government at princeton. and so all of a sudden the government, the finds themselves with chief executive putting out information that gets letters that are written to members of congress to tell them how to vote. and they were really about that because they didn't like idea that the president was going to the public and getting the public then to lobby them. and they actually started. they passed a bill at one point.

we at today it's kind of crazy which you couldn't. no. no. a government no government office. no executive office could a pr person, a press agent? well, what's the problem with that? you hire somebody and call them your executive assistant, and they do the same thing, right? it's impossible to control it. and we're going to get to that at the end. but they they would put these in bills all the time in a way of hoping to make. sure. the president didn't have that power. the president does get that power. one of the places that woodrow that teddy roosevelt did, it was in with regard to forests and forest preservation, which was something he cared a lot about creating national parks. and he had a guy named pinchot who later became governor of pennsylvania, who had a huge press operation to get laws passed to support conservation and. that's really if you think about the first government press releases really come from from there. the important part is not just

the press release, though, right? is the fact that the executive now trying to get national parks, that they're involved every facet of our life. what is wilson what woodrow wilson do? he starts the federal reserve. he starts what is teddy roosevelt do? he creates an organization to check food to make sure they're healthy. what do we start doing with big monopolies and trusts like railroads that were had too much control? we break them up. what do we do about people who are maybe sick and living in cities. we get them health. we get them health because. we have public health officials. so the government starts have lots more power. all ready before world war one. but then something happens and that is world war one. and so at that point, the government decides in a kind of amazing change of the way that the way they operate, the government decides is going to have a large propaganda arm. that's the committee on public information. so here's what's interesting about the committee. this committee, just as a general way to look at it, it is

that the idea behind it was to do what progressives had done as private citizens to to carry out reform. so does anybody here know what a progressive like a progressive journalist was? a thought about that? we haven't talked about much, so i'm not surprised. well, progressive journalists like muckrakers, you heard that term right? they would go out and find corruption. they'd write stories about how standard oil had too much power and needed to be broken up, which it was. they those issues. i just mentioned about health and the fact that the senate wasn't elected those days or it was elected by legislatures it wasn't elected by popular vote, that that was a change in the law, constitutional change in our constitution. and that change was driven to a large extent by journalists who were exposing corruption in the senate, which was being bought and sold all the time. there are all kinds of people who are engaged in this. lawyers one of the famous was louis famous was louis brandeis, who said that sunshine is the

great by which he met we need to get lots of information out so the public knows what's going on because the public knows what's going on. they will come to the right decision. that's what he's trying to tell us. now, i think if you think about it, it's kind of naive, but it was deeply believed, progressives, that this was true. one journalist who i particularly like raised, standard baker, a great journalist who is now not remembered as well as he should. that was one of the one of the great muckrakers, one of the great progressive journalists. he wrote on all kinds of things, but he also did something on railroads and how railroads were corrupting public opinion. well, how first of all, how they were doing things that were disadvantageous economically to the citizen. but he also did in a series of articles from a clear one piece on how railroads were buying newspapers and putting out bogus information. and he said and they call that

publicity. by the way. but but here's the thing. what progressives did, they what they did publicity. today, no journalist would say, i publicity. but in those days would go out and say, i'm going to do some publicity, but by which they meant was something very benign. i'm going to go out and find out a lot of the public needs to know. and i'm going to publicize these problems. it goes back a long, long way in in british history where the idea was, you you publicity was could be a positive. so anyway, here's what baker says about the railroads buying newspapers and doing this bad publicity. he says the more true publicity there is, the better. for the public mind, should not only be made up, it should be made up right right. so there's this naive view. we give people this. we're going to come back to this. we give people information and they're going to know what to do. now, what we have is some good

information. they're going to figure it all out. well, we'll talk about that later. but there was a consensus among elites at that point. and, you know, we now talk today about elites. and a lot of times in our political discourse, we talk about elites being like, how come elites are telling us what to do? and is that really right? we should be using common sense, that credible moment. i incredible moment we talked about in class when j.d. vance, who was running for president, says we too many experts. we shouldn't have experts. we should use common sense. that's an old trope. that's an old idea. and and it resonates with many people because elites are making decisions us. so as i said, some of these people were most of these people were journalists. many of them were journalists. they were also lawyers. they were educators. they were people in public health. they were they were people who were trying to get rid of saloons because they they thought prohibition was a bad prohibition was needed because there were too people drinking. and by the way, there were lots

of people drinking at the end of the 19th, early 20th century. i mean, we had we were we consume vast amounts of alcohol. there were people who were interested in the suffrage movement, right. that women should get the vote. that's a kind of progressive. and they would write about those things. so they're kinds of people who are progressives, but they had this common idea, which was they would bring to light social problems and help us understand. and if we understand then we will be able to come to the right decision. so what happens? the committee on public information. that run by progressives who had the idea the public should be. that's kind of interesting because now they're not on the outside critiquing. they're on the inside and being advocates for a policy a government set policies. this is very important change the progressive the committee on public information which we'll

get into presently was was a who's who of progressive journalists. so i think before we go to the committee, we should look at this particular. definition of propaganda. so i'm going to read it and you can read, too, on the screen. but here's here's what i want you to know about this. the encyclopedia britannica, which is a very important important dictionary, effectively had been out for, you know, a decade in decades. and in 1911, the 9011 edition did not have a definition for propaganda. imagine that no definition, for propaganda. that tells you something. the propaganda was not considered a thing at that time. it wasn't a big, important. the only way you really saw propaganda used regularly was in one way the catholic church, which had an office of

propaganda. you could still see it in. rome and the idea of propaganda was to go out and propagandize the faith. occasionally use the word propaganda, but not very often. so at the end of the war, they had decided they weren't going to put out another encyclopedia britannica for until like 1930, but they realized that the war had changed. so in our society, and particularly on the issue of censorship, war bias and so forth, and so the of the encyclopedia said that the war, the perversion of facts, had cut a grand canyon gash in the hole structure of the world world. and so they decided they had to put out a supplement and supplement was a ten page lots, tiny small type defining this definition is you have to read

it a couple of times but it's actually an excellent definition and it was written by a guy who guess what a military gadget for the british and he nailed it he it perfectly. those engaged in the propaganda i know that seems quite but you'll get it. those engaged in a propaganda may genuinely believe that success will be an advantage to those whom they address, but the stimulus to their action is their own. the differential propaganda is that it's self-seeking whether the object be worthy or, unworthy, intrinsically, or in the minds of its promoters. in other words propagandists are not in the business of enlightening. you. they're in the business of persuading. that's what they're doing. so i have a couple of rules about propaganda. one is propagandists never do propaganda. only the enemy does propaganda. now, you might think that's kind

of funny, like that really be so. but it is. when i was doing some research on this, i went to the archives, the q archives in outside of london to look at foreign office memoranda about propaganda because they were in fact, they were better propaganda. they're probably the best propaganda since world war one, way back in the germans. and in some ways better than us. and if you look at their memos, they write to each other, they say things, like those germans, they're really a lot of propaganda. it's a good we're not doing propaganda. we're not we're not good at this at all. and that's something we would ever do. and in fact, they were doing it all the time when the war started, within days of the war, starting started, they created their own propaganda agency, kept it secret, even from parliament. it had no it had no financial, you know, there was there was no appropriation parliament. they were they were secretly for a long time.

they were secretly in the united states. they had a huge branch in the united states, worked here and around the world and in britain. and it was made up by some of the greatest writers in you kingdom at the time. but they believed they were not doing propaganda. and the second thing the propagandists always believed, even if they don't call themselves propaganda, is that everything they're telling you is for your good. we tend to think of propaganda oftentimes as they're always evil. i think there's a different way to think about it. there are propagandists who are evil, you know, gerbil said the great propaganda nazi propagandists said, you know what? the great thing about is? it's so easy to subvert the. part of that was the use of information to subvert it. but the is propagandists don't have to be evil in in the sense that they can think they're doing something good.

but i think what's is that the act of doing propaganda may be intrinsically. because if we're going discuss it's undemocratic. you can't have those held together at the same time. so those are two rules. propaganda is never do propaganda. the enemy does. and we're always it for your best in your interest. okay, so now we'll talk the committee on public information as i say, it started in april 1917. there been very little planning for it, as a matter of fact, but it was one of the very first things that woodrow wilson, after he created it, which was within a couple of days of the declaration of war. but even though there had not been real planning of it woodrow wilson, had thinking about it a lot. and in fact, here's a good, i think, to tell us what he was

thinking. in 1887, a long time before the he wrote whoever would affect a change in modern constitutional must make public willing to listen and then see to it that it listens to the right thing. what does that sound like? raise standard baker. write 30 years later. very thing he was saying about the railroads. get the public opinion. get the public to think about right things. he had a vision of the presidency being even more predominant than teddy roosevelt. he had thought about it. i mean, he had a philosophical view. he'd actually preferred the british system where, the parliament, the majority parliament gets the prime minister, and they don't have to worry about whether the you know, the becomes much less important in congress because there's always by by design a majority the majority in parliament is also from prime minister's party. he liked better because he wanted to be in charge and even though he liked to be, he was a

good propagandist. one sense he didn't like to the retail of dealing with reporters and things like that. he liked to be on a podium and he liked to speak that and he was good at it and he was effective when he ran for president. he used this phrase over and over again, pitiless publicity. used that actually when he ran for governor, when he left the presidency of president and ran for governor of new jersey, and he would always have a pitiless publicity, meaning we're going to find all those things that are wrong. you with the bosses and trenton. and so forth, all the things that are going wrong. and we're going to find who they are, find out what they're doing, and we're going to clean it up later on. when it turned out that woodrow wilson was, using these tools to aggrandize, there were lots of jokes about publicity used against him. okay. cpi, so where walter lippmann comes back in the picture first, though, i want to watch it. look at an image of wilson and creel. this is an image of them

actuallyn europe during the trty negotiations, the they, as you can see, they're talking rather jocularly together. and they were close. creel one of the most important popular, not popular, sorry, most powerful people in washington, d.c., which i will get into with you. but there was but and he and he had he had thought lot about publicity. and i'm going to talk about that, too but as much as see that photo is a wonderful photo and was a very animated guy and he's good at telling and telling stories, even though he's hated by all kinds people, the people who were a certain other class of people loved because he was he was just a real person. so his his big opponent to try to take charge of public opinion of propaganda in the war was walter lippmann. walter lippmann wanted the job.

walter lippmann does not talk about this and it's very good jacob brought it. but it's not normal for for that, for his name to be attached to it. this is a picture of him when he actually then went to work for the american expeditionary doing propaganda. that picture is from his papers of. the university of uh, at yale. but the interesting thing is you hardly ever that you hardly ever see this picture anyway. he had an idea of how he thought propaganda should be done, and it's an astonishing today when you think about it. he came up with the idea that as soon as the war started, this is he he does this about a month, two months before we go to war. but when is becoming inevitable, we will go to war. he came up with the idea that the center of propaganda should be the journalism school at columbia university. think about that. the journalism school at columbia university that spring semester, the journalism school had said, you don't have to go to class anymore if you don't

want to. you can just start doing pre-war propaganda arguing for the war. and we'll give you credit credit pretty right. pretty amazing. the pulitzer prizes, it just started at this point and they gave a prize. they decide to give a prize for an academic of academic writing. it's the only time they ever gave one. and that year they gave a pulitzer prize to two scholars at columbia who argued that the press was doing a very good because it was being partizan and supporting war. that's that's amazing. that's amazing. can you imagine a journalism school today saying, okay, our job is to spend all classes. our job is to turn out propaganda. i mean, that's just the opposite of what a journalism school should do. well, that was idea and his way of making the case was through colonel house, whom you mentioned, who was the the never, never appointed to a position. he was a very wealthy texan but

was very close to woodrow wilson and a very important adviser to him up through and through through the end of the war, although relationship deteriorated after that. but he saw wilson all the time and he had a lot of power and littman had an entree to the white house. littman and malcolm cowley, who was the editor of the new republic, had a lot of entree, the white house through house, and they courted and house was very good, according people. and so they had this little relationship. so house was making the case that the job should go to lippman. creel, also desperately wanted the job of being a propagandist. he was a very aggressive over the top muckraker and. he was often unfair and he was often just wrote like a sledgehammer. he was a pretty good writer. he was a very good writer, but he was very aggressive. he had been in government once. he had been in government in in

kent and in in denver. he stopped he stayed on the newspaper because to write while was while he was while he was the police chief, he was eventually forced to resign because. he started attacking the other commissioners. and they they told him that he had had to step down. that's also a very interesting right. that the press somebody could be an editorial writer for a newspaper and also be in government, something would also not happen to today. these two guys hated each other. at one point, early, before lippman and creel got into an argument about something, a girl said, you know the problem with you? you're like a house cat and i'm a junkyard dog. that was the. well, creel won. the reason krill won is. first of all, he had been working with the publicity bureau for the democratic national committee in, the 1916 election. that was the election. woodrow wilson was reelected in. by by most accounts at the time it happened.

everybody thought that charles evans hughes would win the election was a it was a famous well-established republican leader former governor of new york and. also he was the, uh, he was then on the supreme court. he left the supreme court to run. we're gonna talk about him more later to. most people thought he's going to win, but he did a terrible job. publicity. he was. he ran a bad campaign. i think you could argue that one of the reasons was you could really argue that one of the reasons woodrow wilson won is because he had had such an amazing publicity bureau and creel, one of the top people in that publicity bureau and a lot of the techniques they use in their publicity bureau were used in the committee on public. creel was 100% in for wilson. he was also 100% in for a guy named joseph daniels, who was also a journalist. and a newspaper in raleigh and was also a very big deal in democratic politics. and he to be the secretary of

navy and the secretary of navy had a very important reason to care about propaganda. because the navy controlled cable lines. and so as a result of that because they thought they were going to have british style censorship, which was absolute, where the press could be censored. daniels realized that he wanted somebody who would be in that job that would do what he wanted them to do. and creel kept carting daniels and. daniels, by the way, had been heavily criticized for being a little too puritanical, like not wanting. he used to be in the navy. you could get you could get a you got a little alcohol every day if you're at sea. he took that away. he believed in temperance and a lot of the old navy people didn't like him who worked for him. creel defended in the press. and so he gets the job instead of instead of litman.

litman then goes on and gets a job. various parts of the government in the war department, which is what the army had been and which today would be the department of the army, but then was the war department. and he did a little kept trying to do propaganda from time to time in that job and helped out. he had various jobs. i won't get into that right now because don't have time. but then he eventually got a commission to go to europe and commissioned as a as a captain in the army to do propaganda over the line's propaganda with the army conducted. supposedly it supposed to be under the cbi, but the cbi never got around to really doing very good job on over the line's propaganda. we'll come back to that cpi only existed during the time we were during the war, but it was built up to an amazing level. and i'm going to go through some of the things the cpi did because i think it's so to understand the magnitude of what

they did. creel was a terrible manager. he was a terrible manager. trying to get away with real was ry difficult. and the reason want this picture remember i td u is t lobby is where this is one of the office. they had some of the offices. the decision is not a very good picture quality, but it's a wonderful picture in terms of two things. look at all the people. they went nothing to all kinds of staff doing all kinds of things. but what i really like is look, the window you see in the window, the guy with his back turned you. that's cruel. and you know what the was so hyperkinetic that it's so perfect. somebody says something to him and he just turns around. they're supposed to be taking a picture it. oh no, you can't get him to sit still. he can't even sit still for one picture. i love this picture. so creel was a whirlwind. he started out with an office in the in the there's a building

called the army. navy state building. he went and worked in the in that building for a couple of weeks. and then eventually he got this this office and he had offices in other places in new york. they spread out all over washington dc. there was small office in chicago and then they had branches overseas, which i'll talk about in a minute. but here are some of the things they did. i want you to a sense of this. they were publishing conglomerate pamphlets news services at home and abroad. in fact, the first united states news service was by the committee on public information abroad. the ap could never do its sent its own news abroad, american news abroad. i can only it's a complicated story but they never they never they never really had american news sent abroad until after the war. they had thousands of press releases. they they found all kinds of ways to prepackaged news. and today, what we think of is press release being a norm in government. they made the norm all throughout government. they had a division of pictorial

publicity. it produced 1500 poster designs by some of the artists commercial artists in the country, cards, advertisements, seals for 98 agencies and committees. the letter range from the federation neighborhood associations to the salvation army. they distributed of thousands of slides taken the military. all right. so this is a very first poster that they did is the great mother. of course, it kind of looks like the virgin mary. it was done, the ymca. and the idea i'm sorry for the red cross. and the idea was to show how the the how the red cross was out there helping with our soldiers and so forth. and and to not only advertise them, but course the red cross needed donations. it also reached the universities. so here's a picture of guy stanford. he was this he was the head of the graduate school at university of minnesota. after the war he went back and

became president of the university he was in charge of the committee on public information's work in education. and he had, uh, uh, by the time he got going, he had 116 professors not on staff full time, although many were working the committee on public information changing how curriculum should be done in the united states, then working on what should be done in grade schools and high schools, putting out pamphlets and you had this wonderful statement very, good statement about how lippmann said, you know, the free press didn't care about the free press. read that again. you have there it's forgotten statement. jacob was a great statement. he said he had no doctrinaire belief in free speech. think about that. you say, how could that be? well, in fact, first amendment. the first amendment had not really been taken up any serious way by the supreme court yet. and so it was kind of unresolved how free it could be. and during the war, woodrow wilson and discuss that a little

bit. woodrow wilson tried to suppress speech speech. guy ford's office created something called the war, which is full of propaganda. you know, it would say something like there'd be a definition for germany enemy. i mean. that's not exactly what it would be like that it was just it was it was a very tendentious but they had a definition for freedom of the press you know, the definition was it's at the discretion of congress pretty amazing, right? pretty amazing. so cpi piggybacked on advertising association and other professional groups. it worked with the boy traveling salesman and corporate titans who would give money and resources to help them disseminate their information. now, the one i want to focus on is the four minute minute. the four minute. what's a man you remember from american history? what's a minute man?

oh come on. the guy in boston who runs around the minute men tell you the british are coming, the british are coming. sums up this idea, people alerting you right. so these guys and gals but most of the guys were for minutemen here are just like in boston they're there right right there. there are a lot of posters. this is one of the cpi posters says committee on public information under it. and the four minutemen there, their job was to go to movie theaters and deliver a speech between the changing of the reels because. in those days, the reels was the old fashioned way of doing things. the reels had to be changed. it took 4 minutes and they had 4 minutes to deliver a message. this idea was brought creel within a day or of him being in charge of the committee on public information, a guy from chicago came in and said, we've been some of us guys that was wealthy people, people in chicago. we've been going around doing this movie theaters to try to get people to go war. how about if we do something like this? and typical, it really said, great idea. we'll do it right then.

that guy is it turns out went into the war and a named blair william blair came chicago he was an investment banker and he ran it and he was a very, very good manager. and it was a brilliant job of managing. and at the end of the war, there, 75,000 foreign minutemen, 75,000 people who went out to give messages. now, we need to remember that some these people only maybe gave one, but there's little cards in the archives for the cpi. and you can see there'd be a name and the name might have 40 or 50 places they went. so some people were going all over delivering multiple messages and they were managed by blair in washington to the point of every week. they were given a new message like turn in binoculars. the navy doesn't have binoculars. don't donate your binoculars to the navy or buy war bonds or look out for spies spies.

spies or make sure, you use canned food or reserve fuel. different message every week. and they were organized. there would be a state head of the cpi, then they'd be set in his city. there would be a head of cpi. they would they would meet they'd meet communist cells. actually, they all get together. they'd have their little messages. they figure out what they're supposed to do. or if you want a piece of art, benign way of thinking, well, they meet the way we do campaigns in politics today from roots to grass tops right. get everybody down there. give their message. tell them what their role is. is rules out, and make sure you only talk for minutes. very important talk for a minute. they would monitor. and so this was one of the instructions they gave once in their bulletin sent out regularly standing before this is what's supposed to be a sample speech standiore you today i feel a soldier who after battle assembles with his mpany mates, we for minutemen are d to an enemy at home. our most in-city enemy, the unseen, the masked foe, because

their german enemies over america, all over america. that's not the truth. it's thesage to oppose a lie with the truth. so who's got the truth the wilson administration? who's got the lie? the person who's on the who disagrees with policy. that iso arouse the enthusiasm of, the apathetic, to instruct those do not unnd and to throw the limelight anti-americanism. b b the form of that and anti-americanism. it may be what it may. so where do these guys go? well, of all, it's movie theaters. but by the end of the war, it was grange halls, picnics, logging camps, a village pool hall in north dakota when they couldn't get a church they couldn't the church wasn't open. there were native american four minutemen who spoke on

reservations. there were four minutemen in the southwest, spoke spanish, and other people in big who spoke germans, polish, polish, lithuanian, hungarian, russian, ukrainian, armenian, yiddish and italian when no theaters admitted blacks in georgia, they started a black for minutemen operation. women generally do it. but in birmingham, alabama they had a women's auxiliary for minutemen operation. the four minutemen. in minnesota, a contest in which students prepared speeches buying war stamps. this led to the creation of a junior for minutemen and these little orators all over. and they were told to advise younger friends to earn extra money in order to buy a war bond and to tell their parents to to the limit to their government. think about that. going to children, telling them to go home and propagandize their parents that's what we're doing for programs propped up

popped up on campuses including this one at louisiana state university in 44 states, wounded veterans had their own division in new mexico they had 1500 motor four minutemen who drove around the state with musicians singing. they also had singing for minutemen because people the people want to exercise their in moments of patriotism. and again, these songs were had instructions and they said, make sure you do these songs. make sure you use very patriotic ones like dixie and when johnny comes marching home, and also will be well, to warn the musician, not to use low time. so this is quite feat. and the reason i concentrate on it is it shows you a lot of what the thinking of the propagandists were in the committee on public information. first of all, detailed organization in this case making it look like it was your local, your neighbor who was propagating, advising you. so it's not some who just gave

not some elite who came in from washington it's your local newspaper editor or lawyer or police chief or mayor or baker it could be anybody. it's your own friends. so it looks like it's coming from the ground up even though it's being from the top down. and of course, it kind of has a parallel with social media today, right? think about it. you go to the movie theater and you're sitting there, you want to watch some movie and, all of a sudden somebody gets and tells, starts telling you to buy war bonds is it's like when you look at your telephone and all of a sudden you're getting messages from people you never to have messages from telling you something it's not consensual. it's not you didn't invite it? but you're subjected to it. okay. cpi did good things and it's important to know what they were. they started federal register, which you probably wouldn't be familiar with, but was an organization where the cpi had

to publish with the cpi, publish all the all documents, everything the government is doing. if they if they if they get a shoe company to make shoes for the military and it's $1,000,000 contract, it has to be listed in the federal register or in this case in in the official bulletin. it's called official bulletin. initially, they call the official board and what happened was all this, when the president issued a proclamation it had to go in this bulletin. so it was transparent and that's a good thing and that's a democratic government should be transparent. you want to know who gets contracts. you want to know what the president's policies are. that's that's fair. that's fair. and and so it's a very useful it was very useful and carried on when. the war was over as the federal register and there are many other publications, the federal government uses where they also explain what they're doing. they did public service advertising. you see it sometimes where they'll pick up the the triple a

the group of triple j they will decide that this year they're going to work on polio are black lung disease or whatever they decide the issue is and they'll put ads they'll the ads together and as a result of that they do the advertisements for free. they're put the air television for free or in magazines. that's a good thing. the cpi had the best advertising people in the country working for it for nothing. the head of the advertising division who lived in new york was was a was an ad executive and he worked for a dollar a year. so they could multiply their budget that way and and decided when the war was over. one of the reasons advertising people to do this was because it looked really good for advertising. look how good advertisers they're really patriotic. it gave them a better image. at the same time, they gave they gave the propaganda that the government wanted them to give. they also public diplomacy. it wasn't called that then, but they sent people one of the

great heroes of the committee on information is this woman. she's an amazing woman by, the way she's from new orleans. she married a very wealthy financier, new york, and she became leader of the new york suffrage movement. and though nobody thought that suffrage pass in 1917, in new york, women's suffrage, it did. and she was the leader she was formidable. and then she went to korea and said, i want a job overseas. and he sent her to switzerland. she probably was the first woman foreign service officer, although the diplomats didn't want her around because they didn't think they didn't think that propaganda was a good thing. they didn't want to propagandize average. they were very elitist and hands off about this. so she got it's a wonderful story. she gets she gets to burn she's she's there they won't let her do anything the embassy won't let her do anything. she gets so angry, she goes back to new york to washington, goes to see woodrow wilson and gets letters from him telling, the

embassy. they have to let him do his work. it was she was amazing. she was really amazing. when she went back on the way back, she had picture taken with the dog because when she was in london, she had to take and she said she wanted a picture of what will probably my only friend in switzerland she was very good and then by the way when the war is over she bought it. she bought a and made it very successful made a lot of money is she's a great hero another who was involved was a woman named josephine roach, who was a social worker in denver. that's where creel met her. and she worked closely to help immigrant groups work with groups to make them while to propagandize them, but also to them get so they could learn languages over the air. what was the first lady's name again? bureau by. uh, and yeah, so. and she was also good and also leader in the suffrage movement. okay. but the cpi also did bad things

as you can. you've already discovered. and i'm going to we're going to go through a couple of them. george creole always liked to say first of all, i just say this. i've written about george grill, obviously. and one of the things about george creole is he's of the most difficult people to write about because whatever he says, there's a very low probability be accurate because so he is so cavalier, he's more interested in being remember our argument from frankford about being a --, he's more interested in -- and getting you to feel certain way than he is to get you to actually know a real fact. and so this is one. this is one of frankford could use this is a moment of uh as a moment to think what -- is for people in television audience that's a very good book is called on --. you ought to it. so here's what he said. his job at the cpa was to emphasize his. the committee is an information service for the germans. head grimm the propaganda until

the word stood for and deceit. i however was to spend no dollar on a errand or to try to camouflage a single activity. above all, i must against appeals to hate he did all of those things, all the things he said he didn't do. he did. every one of them. he had front organizations. in fact. one of the things rosa being roach did as good as she was, is she used front organizations to work with immigrants groups that looked like they were immigrant groups, but they were set up by the cpi to give getting immigrants together, propagandize them. and they didn't even know the government was paying for those organizations to be. they did the same thing with labor, which was a very important because labor many elements in labor against the war and they did the same thing overseas creole always denied they did these things they did them. they had they had limited censorship in the united states. i you in the beginning they

thought the creole would be in charge of censorship. in fact, censorship was and wilson tried to pass a law that was exactly like the law that the british defense of the realm act law which allowed the government to make anything secret they wanted to. in fact, they could make food and they did food served in the canteen at ten downing street a secret get get tell with bureaucrats eating they could and wilson wanted do that and even his own party wouldn't pass it so had to pass a more limited and he said would he said i won't do anything bad i just want to have the power so there was no direct censorship and creole did not have direct censorship but there were some places where censorship existed. the post office could censor mail. foreign language press, which there was considerable foreign language press. the united states, they had to use the mail. so they could be censored because they couldn't as and magazines they could use the

mail could be censored by the post office creole and the post office censorship board and was influential in it. creel also sat on the board, decide how much newspaper print newspapers could get movies movies couldn't be directly censored, but as the movie industry grows. one of the things they wanted to do was to be able to sell the movie overseas. well, the way cpi would deal with that was they were on the board that decided, well, a movie could go overseas and movie would be judged unfit to go overseas if it had said things they didn't want it said. so you wouldn't want to produce a movie that you couldn't export. so it was a form of censorship. there are other things like this. you get the idea also because creole was considered so powerful when you got a call from creole you know you took notice of it when he said he objected to something and creole would write letters object like some tiny little paper in duluth, minnesota. he'd write the editor letter and say, i can't believe you just published this article. i mean, that he would even pay attention. it is outlandish, but creole was

very, very aggressive and he was hated by who? although the journalist manager didn't like him at all. and republicans hated him in congress. they hated because he's also very even journalists were willing to be propagandist. as we've seen they were in favor of the war. i mean with a few exceptions, the press was very supportive. but they just didn't like the way creel did things and the fact he was so. then the question of hate. consider, i want you to look at this poster. you got it there, grace. this is a poster done by a british born. a british born artist, joseph parnell. so this this poster is quite amazing. first of all, for many years,

people that this was done by by parnell for somebody else, but it actually was done for the committee on public information. and he went to a meeting and they said, we want to sell war. but this was to sell liberty bonds. there's there's in there if looked at the the original art it has it's telling you to go buy liberty bonds but of all this is germans bombing new york. there is no chance under any circumstance since the german the german government was going to bomb new york. how would they get here? planes with bombs? i mean, is that possible? and statue of liberty can't see it very well. the statue of liberty had just been blown off and is lying in the and so you're meant to think the the germans could attack me right here in the united states. that's what you're meant. think that i'm directly under attack. and remember, the problem for the united states is they can say, well, let stop my war. why am i that's their problem

didn't start this. nothing's going to happen over there. it has an on me and by the way, maybe the germans have a point but we don't get their side of the argument and they did have they did have a side of the argument but they were so inept to delivering it that it was overwhelmed the british and so you look at this that's that's the subtext of this message here's another one that is also pretty so germans were very important the development of the american higher education system lots and lots of people including people who were who were who worked at the committee on public information went to germany to get their doctorates. that was a very important thing to do. and germans actually great citizens, they were prosperous, they were responsive well, they were you know, their communities were tidy i mean, they were they were actually just they were they were they were model citizens. they did have their own

organizations. they did tend to speak german. they went to their own churches. i mean, you could see them being a little separate sometimes, but they were very good citizens. then all of a sudden there we have to portray them as not being good citizens. now remember says we don't promote hate. so is a headline from don't put it on yet. white men say here is the beginning of headline of this ad that's for college students. remember, i just made the point the germans are very good at higher education. this is for college students. and it was ad to get them to buy liberty loans and it out. this isn't in the quote if it starts out this way in the vicious guttural language of culture, what's what's that mean? vivian oh, yeah, culture. the degree a, b means bachelor of atrocities.

are you going let the prussian python strike at your alma mater by the way? that's quite a metaphor, right? because python's actually, strangely enough, they don't bite you to death. butnyway, and now here's the rest of the quote, the holes, our whole ds are in fangs strikes at every element of decency and culture and taste that our colleges stand f. it leaves a track so terrible that only whispered fragments may be recorded. it has ripped all the world old romance out of war and it to the dead black depths of muck and and bitterness. i mean that is amazing. that guy got carried away serves at that cpi headquarters and wrote that they got away. they weren't all that bad. but you get the you get the point cpi was also tendentious

meaning they only give you one side one opinion. and by the way it's good for me to stop and say something important. propaganda has two sides it actually kriel says it in the public opinion. you not have noticed it because it's a big book. maybe anybody remember what he said. there's two ways to look at. one is censorship and the other is the provision of information probably. the goal of a propagandist is to get to think something. and there's two ways to get you to think it to information or to give you information that want you to get cpi. obviously those of those. so they had a they had a kind of a slogan they put out all the time, which was you needed. listen to official facts. official facts means facts that the government is telling you because they're official. they're facts. they said it and they and set out a column that was syndicated. it was written by a playwright.

very good writer called official facts. and it would be it would be published in newspapers, a syndicated column like dear abby or something or like a columnist would write, like george orwell, wilson, others in the cpi to when they saw something, they heard something that went against their policy. they called it enemy talk enemy. what would be the equivalent of that today. huh? well, hate speech. well, or how about something else? fake news, right? when we say something is fake news, a lot of times not fake at all. it's just something that's inconvenient to the narrative that we're trying to convince you of so called enemy talk. think about how slippery that is anything anybody says. we don't know how that happened. how did the enemy tell us this? i mean, who who told you this? this tell me that. i mean, is he the enemy?

i where would he have gotten that? who told him? right. it's a very way to think about how how you can begin to be paranoia. paranoia, paranoid about going on, because you've got these people lurking around, by the way, anybody want to guess how many spies all this about spies? how many spies? you think we're caught? the war, huh? one, one, one spy. only one spy. a stupid guy who tried to cross over with crappy passport to come into mexico and he got caught. and he was going to see if he can get all the people in from mexico, the southwest, united states, to create a band to rise up against the united states. one guy, and they didn't kill him. they put in jail for a while and they let him out. when the war was over. i mean, it was a threat to nobody once by all of this talk. we know the espionage act. we've heard people talk about the espionage act even now. right the espionage act was a way you could people in jail because you could say they were doing to impede the war effort, that you could do espionage.

it wasn't really directed at spies it was called the espionage act. but they weren't spies it was directed at people who were doing enemy talk. there were a lot of provisions in the espionage, but that's part of it. and and what the cpi did was non this is very you not avoid hearing or seeing something the cpi put out if you went to a movie theater it there there were posters everywhere. you saw it in your newspapers. they would oftentimes just publish cpi. not only the column i just mentioned you but they cpi. press releases. uh, i'll stop and give you a story about this. white russians, the bolsheviks over through russia, the red russians. we were against that.

the united states were against that because russians took the the communists took russia out of the war, which there was no longer a second front. and so we not recognize russia and we supported the white russians, which we hoped would overthrow all the bolshevik government. some white russians got together and up with these series of fake documents. they're called the system papers. after a cpi official was working in russia, cpi official thought he had gotten this trove of documents that were mind blowing because they showed that lenin was being controlled by germans like. secret meetings and things like that. and and they were all fake. and the idea was the germans took really, you know, the aren't even really russians. they're really just germans. they took them out of the war because they're not even they're not even patriotic russians. they were bogus. kirill brought them back to the united system, brought it back to the united states, and they publish them over a period of a

week. and many newspaper is, including the new york times, published them verbatim verbatim, the whole the whole reports just put them all in the paper and were all they were all fake. we think about disinformation today, right. how how is our our elections influenced by foreign powers? i mean, that wasn't the case of our election being influenced. it was it was a case of trying to influence our public opinion and the wilson administration wanted to publish because it was confirmation bias. they wanted them to be true. at the end of the war will. erwin, one of the great journalists of his day and a himself who worked for the cpi, said, we never told the truth, not by any manner of means. we told that part which served national purpose. and then i want to say one more thing about consensual the guy

who was in charge of all cpi advertising was a guy named william johns, and he said a postcard back it's in the file cpi files when was driving out in the west and he sent this postcard back and it's a really good of how you couldn't avoid cpi propaganda, he says he was marveling that he had seen the famous red cross poster of the great his mother, the one you saw here a couple minutes ago. he said, i saw it in the windows of towns on the prairies towns hardly as big as this postcard out in the flat arid. so that's the cpi. i think we have a pretty good picture of what they there's some good things. there are some good things and they were well-meaning. one of the interesting things about the cpi is there really isn't anybody that i could identify in the cpi who i would say was trying to do something they thought was they all thought they were doing the right thing, taking us into the war and maintaining our

willingness to cause you to fight at the end and not accept a negotiated peace. and i think many historians today would argue that a negotiated peace would have been much better than an absolute victory because world one produced such an unfair peace to germans, to the losers that it gave them, a foundation on which to start another war. but but wilson did not want such a peace. he did not want to negotiate because he wanted to he wanted to use the peace process to establish the league of nations. but what he had done the same time is he had built up such expectations overseas and in the united states for what would happen. and when he couldn't meet those expectations, for example, by instead of liberating china from the from the germans giving concessions in china to the japanese and other things did that was seen as unfair

sacrifices he made to get the league of nations. and because the victors the european victors, the western europeans had their own agenda of things they wanted to extract in that peace that were unfair, i would argue were unfair. i think many would agree with that. and in the end, expectations were high and they weren't met. and that led to profound disappointment. we never joined the league of nations fact. we never signed the peace treaty. this peace treaty was never signed. it's several later in a kind of tricky little way, acknowledge that there was a peace treaty. but we never signed it after all of it. okay, so. now we're going to go back to lippmann. as i said, this seems like an urgent problem and it all like a new problem. the press is doing what it's doing to the war. the government is propagandizing much more effectively than the third did, but there's actually

an older problem here. and i want to go back to the early 17th century, and i want to go back to a guy named nathaniel butter. he is responsible responsible for the first regularly appearing newspaper, printed newspaper in england, 1622, as soon as he published that paper. the term butter appeared fake news because he published kinds of stuff that was wrong. they had no standards in those days and they were still trying to figure out what news was. but he published this material and so did a whole lot of other people in due course. and so butter news became the term that was often used and it would be ridiculed. they would talk about how news was buttered on latrine walls, on, you know, toilet walls, things like that.

and then we have our first press critic, ben johnson, the famous playwright. some of his plays were about news like ones a hoax that people live on the moon. and in one play, he has a character. and the character. and this is a quotes from the play. the character wants to laugh and be fat like butter. the news is as good yet as butter can it. in a word, they are basically buttered when his paper finally goes broke, it melts into butter. these were plays were put on at the court court. his concern, johnson's concern, wasn't about and this is where we getting to where walter lippmann in was it just about the fact the news was fake? his concern was there was news at all that there was what was called news that people could hardly wait to go to get news. they go to st paul's cathedral, which in those days you could go

in the nave at certain times during the year, during the day, and people would be in there spreading gossip, butter sold his paper in the courtyard of a of st paul's. so st paul's was actually called, i think it's called the mint of all lies, which john. but johnson's concern wasn't just that it was concerned they were getting any news. there can be there cannot be a greater disease in nature or, a follower, score, follower or follower or. fowler scorn upon the times than, news. so what was the solution? well, we know some of these from our books we read, right? you can you can put people out of business. in the case of bacon, he went to jail a number of times and died very poor. uh, and sometimes he was just they told he couldn't publish anymore, but now, i want to get

to the third character that becomes very much like walter lippmann. and this and this character hardly ever a fact i've never him associated with lippmann, but he should be all the time. and this is francis bacon. so francis bacon is considered the founder, the scientific method or the first to write about it, in which he's talking about not that we're going to deduct news, deduct truth from some, in fact, we're going to induct. right. in other words, if god made the earth, the earth is really important. then everything must go around it, right? the sun must around the earth. that sort of deductive. and he said, no, we have to have inductive reasoning. and he became a very, very important figure in. the idea of scientific thinking, objective, scientific thinking based on facts. but here's the thing. there's two things about bacon that are very interesting.

he was one of the most brilliant philosophers in history. he was lionized in britain and abroad because of his writing. he was the first essayist, by the way, to first person to write. that's considered the first british essayist. but he also another job he worked for the court and he was a big climber. he really wanted to be powerful and when he was on the job at court, he dissembled. and even wrote at times that sometimes know you shouldn't dissemble, but in certain cases you just need to and some famous cases where he actually had a mentor and he supported and then the mentor got in trouble with the queen and they put bacon in charge a prosecuting him and. bacon went after him. it was the earl of ethics. and during the trial the earl of essex says, i call to the witness stand, francis bacon to

talk francis bacon. basically, he's such a bad guy. let's bring him in here and to find out what kind of guy is anyway essex lost his head got off though and bacon did right away at the end of his career as a matter of he lost it. he was in charge of the whole judicial system. at one point, the end of his career, he lost it you lost out because he had been giving treatment to certain people and he had made a lot of enemies, a lot of favorable treatment was given but he they it was excuse to get rid of. all right. but here's what i want. here's what i might say about bacon. now you're bacon talk about the truth. bacon wrote about what can go wrong. now, i want you to listen to what he says. first of all, he says, by the way, he doesn't care about people much. right. he in he even says at one point says, i do not love people. i don't love people. i love elites. they're the ones who just decide

stuff. he talked, by the way, he didn't like public discourse with partizan songs, false news, news. they were all signs of trouble. so he wrote a book called the new organon, and in he outlined problems with public opinion. now, remember, there's no democracy, but there are still people. they're getting ideas. and ideas can be a problem. and of course, what happens later on in the in the 17th century, there is a revolution in england. the the the they reinstall the king later on. but for a brief period there is a revolution and that requires public opinion. and so hits all the main points that lippmann does in public opinion. by the way, the term organon is derived from a title of something that aristotle wrote who believed in deductive reasoning as opposed to inductive reasoning, and he calls these idols into our word idols sounds funny, but what he was meaning false ideas or fictions, phantoms, delusions.

so he these idols of the mind. okay, here we are, idol idols of the tribe. these are quotes, the human understanding, when it is once adopted an opinion either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself draws all other things, support it and agree with it. in other words, confirmation. the idols, the cave people live in a cave, a den of their own people's understanding is limited by their personality. this isn't the quote, their personality, their education their acquaintance with whom they regard as authorities as well as by the incidents in their lives. that's unlike, well, the 11. exactly. and then idols of the marketplace. this is a quote. it by discourse that many associate and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. can remember what lippmann says

about that coast it's that he talks about. yeah and also that language is imprecise language is imprecise we don't have a good enough vocabulary to be able to describe complicated things. so all of these things are here words are stereotypes what is what was what is limited say about stereotypes and what does he say about stereotypes created and they're created in our heads and they tend to simplify like complex ideas whenever we're separated from the reality of those ideas right. we have to find ways to simplify reality. so if we stereotype, we we have we have a we have one way of thinking about that that that we try to work against, which is like stereotype people. right. but we also can talk, you know, when you come into a kitchen, just don't put your hand on the stove without checking to see if it's on because it's kind of a stereotypical idea. suppose those can be dangerous. so i better always about it. there's lots of ways we fact if

we didn't some are terrible, but if we didn't stereotype would hard to live because if we didn't have certain general about how things worked be a problem but that's right stereotypes people arrive at decisions that are in their. let me talk that yeah and they look to false authorities that they can easily manipulate them. lippmann talks about that so. here are two quotes. one is the one that jacob gave us. that's terrific for what a man had. oh, sorry. this is lippmann we do not first see and then define. we define first and then see. it's a great quote. here's what bacon says for what a man had rather were true, he more believes it's the same effectively. but for hundred years, 402 years earlier is this is written so what does that tell us?

it tells us there's a problem, what with the public being involved in decision making so. okay what's lippmann solution solution your. all right. go ahead explain. yeah you the bureau of intelligence essentially he appreciated the really although he didn't a few things that were issues he felt like in public if we are on the same page and getting the information then that would put society in better state collectively. also change public opinion if. all right so we these people who are like progressives, right experts in health, in education,

in law and we in mechanics, whatever it is, and they should be these decisions on how an economist and sociologists all of these people they be making helping us make decisions because they are trained to do it now just kind think about it. what kind of guy do you think lippmann is? i he's an elite. he's an elite. he's absolutely incredible elite, right. here's a story about how he became a journalist when he's at harvard. but when at harvard, studying a famous muckraking journalist named lincoln steffens comes to harvard and says that the president i'm going to conduct an experiment everybody in my newsroom the only way you can be a good journalist is you have to go out and cover, you know, fires and stuff like that. but i don't think that's true. i think you'd be a good journalist. you just get somebody smart and just send him out. start covering big stories. so i interviewed two people and.

when he's done, he takes the one guy he picked, it takes it back to his magazine and the guy he's working with a little bit. and then he has a guy go write a magazine article and he turns it in with his own name like a stefan says his name on it. and of course the editors look at it like, oh, okay, that's fine. and this is about to go to the press. they change it, he says, as walter lippmann. that's how walter got it. he had worked at a small paper while in college. that's how i got to start. he was an elite. i mean, he was hanging around with santayana like said. and you're thinking like when he was at as a kid and and he comes from a wealthy family and he goes to work right away for. the new republic, which is like the top, top. i mean, one of the great magazines of his time, and he's a he's a progressive. he's a progressive. he becomes less of a progressive as he gets older, although he still could be a very i certainly could criticize a government and one of the reasons when he retired was an unhappy retirement is because he

fought against the war in vietnam and so angered lbj and others who were favor of the war is life became rather at that point it was very courageous at the end of the war but he's an elite and he's very happy is an to have a lead to make decisions and he's very happy by the way if he could be making the decisions but yeah the quote the quote he was like the most powerful public official or non-elected official. oh, that was from christopher david. yes i mean, that's a great quote, right? he would love that. and he often continued even later when he was a journalist, to work behind the scenes with government officials, he'd like to be in touch with. you'd like to be like to be a player. it was very important to him. he related to those people. the reason he didn't like creel is exactly what real said creel was not anything like lippmann. he was walter lippmann was there was a little bow tie and very

together. so now let's talk about bureaus of intelligence that also is not a new idea in some ways. of course, we can see it in bacon right? bacon. the idea that this group of people make decisions that's that's important. but at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, progressives got together and they started creating organizations like the brookings institution, carnegie when he made as many gifts like carnegie endowment and so forth, carnegie endowment for peace, these were created as institutions filled with experts on topics. that's what they were. there for, to help us come up with good ideas. and since then, we now washington is full. these so-called think tanks. okay, so what's wrong with the solution, vivian?

those experts are biased themselves, and they could cause tremendous power, public opinion in florence that because if they have sole control for exactly and where do they get their money you know the heritage foundation gets his money from people who expect certain kinds of outcomes right and people who are in left wing organizations think tanks, they get their money from people who expect certain outcome. they don't expect the outcome to look what would be at the heritage foundation at all. and there have been other foundations like a think tank like brookings, which has gotten some money from. oil, i think was oil interests. you know, should they be getting money from somebody who has a special a special interest in the outcome? maybe not. yeah. and also, like in expert can be an expert on a few topics. like i said in the book, it's not like an expert be a member of everything, but they might be specifically good at three things, but not everything.

that's a really good point, because sometimes you don't just solve a problem by looking at the problem itself. you have to solve it in another way, right? and then there are consequences that beyond just being an expert on pipelines, there's a lot of other issues that they get that become involved. yeah, there's also the issue of agenda setting an agenda framing. if you are a lead or if you're part of one of these organizations, then that by its definition that there's a group of the that's being excluded or, doesn't have access to the information in its raw form meaning that there is a altering manipulation, that is that mediated. yeah, that's right. that's a that's a great point. that's also the case. so and we know today, you know, people are writing books about it. we know today that think tanks are are themselves extreme of a point of view.

oftentimes that means that experts can't help us. i actually am a big in experts helping us but. we also have to understand that experts don't agree and we have to see the broader connection this. so let me ask you a question. he does have this point at the end about bureaus of intelligence. he says it's a really good idea it's just as his book appears at a time when propaganda is an issue and the press is being subverted as an issue and so forth, even though it old roots. so does his think it does think tank idea or bureau of intelligence idea speaks to what was happening at the same time it's just that he was able to write a classic because he brought it all together in a brilliant i mean the books. you may not agree. i think the book is beautifully written. i mean some of the some of the allusions maybe get away from you like for example what does he mean that people sketch in the post coastline bohemia.

whereas bohemia. vivian whereas bohemia. oh well now in poland oh he's in czech republic. oh yeah right. and and how many options are around bohemia. so people get the idea. i love this line. people get the of something, they start thinking about bohemia. there must be a coast to bohemia. so they start thinking about, yeah, i know bohemia is like this place, but it doesn't have a coast. you thought it had a coast. it's great line because it shows us how we sketch it in, but we don't have any basis for fact. we have any real experience. we've never been to bohemia. we have no idea. so some of these i know could be lost on you because the book is 100 years old. but and the illusions, i mean, bohemia has never had a coastline in knowable time. i mean, there may have been one,

but but the book captures something very important. this happened, brings all those things together. but now i want to just go to the very end. he tells you about bureaus of intelligence. but what happens at the very end? you know what happens at the very end? what does he where does he end up? what does he say? does he say what does he say. anyway? remember, it's easy. it's easy to overlook it. what does he say? he's kind of telling you, okay, we got we've got we've we've gone on this whole trip here. we've told you all of these things, and now we're here and so do you. yeah so interesting. he says the here i politics have more future before him than there's recorded history behind. yeah and he's saying have to kind of get along and figure it out right so i think a little bit is like driving this car and he's driving driving, driving. and he tells you, oh yeah, well, you know, public opinion people forces can tell you things and manipulate you have a time to do things and and then there's internal problems your biases

over. and as he's driving his his he picks up speed he's going faster and faster and all a sudden he looks in front of him and says, oh, there's a cliff. and he puts on the brakes because if he took the book to its logical conclusion, he'd be saying we're screwed. it doesn't work. we got people look at how people vote they just vote. they make terrible decisions. how can we have a situation like this, we elites to figure this out but that's going to really work and so he just says, okay, but people have figured out people figured out now there's something very all-american that like, you know, there's got to be a solution. every problem. and in fact, he to wrestle with this problem and his next book he does drive over the cliff. it's a short little book called the public. then later in life, he kind of comes to learn to live with it. and he also becomes so important that he's one of those is telling people what to think all the time. so maybe he feels better about it that's kind of a joke.

but point i'm trying to make is it's a very and he can't bring himself to drive over the cliff but he's built his incredible case of why democracy can't work and and of course what's the problem the problem is that what's the alternative. that's the problem just as we can say you know sure we could have a different system, but it's not that we're ever going to get a perfect. the quick question is, is a relatively better system and and lippman doesn't have a problem that an answer for that problem. okay now we're going to bring this to a close by going over some of the issues that tell us about what happened after the cpi. so it goes out of business actually in some ways, too bad it went out of business. it would have been good if. it stayed in business a little longer because. it could have helped wilson sell the treaty. but creel made so many people so

mad and congress had finally gotten control of its budget. initially, its budget had been in wilson's wartime budget, which had no controls over it. but the congress got the budget back and. they just wanted real gun and lot of democrats to do it because he was just he was just too incendiary. he would just do all kinds of things would make people angry. but what happened course was the cpi's functions carry on. we never again had a centralized ministry of propaganda. there was some thought about doing it. world war two, but we didn't. and one of the reasons we didn't do it was because everybody still remembers what the cpi was like under creel and they didn't want to have to deal with that anymore. the memories were still too fresh, but also it is true that decentralized propaganda can work better because it each unit that knows what it's trying to do and you have to have some coordination on major policy issues in the white house. but all of the things that happened from the cpi that they did are done today just done in a different managerial

configuration. so. one of the things that happened after the war was concern, of course, and the the the development, public relations and advertising the war. was it carl bayer who was at the cpi? very interesting. he is considered one of the founding fathers of public. the other founding father, edward bernays. you probably all know that edward bernays worked at epa. he's the one who invented the term public relations. there were there were also people out there, of course, who were very concerned about public relations being invented or carrying on becoming very big business and one of those was frank cobb, who was the editor, the new york world, but also at the same time, he's working for the new york world was very supportive, the wilson administration, and very supportive of the war behind the scenes. he was also very respected.

but in those days, these roles were a lot fluid than they are today. and we didn't have rules like we do today. this is a this is from a speech he gave after the war at a club in in new york. and he said he the fact that government propaganda had and he was involved with it, this is most important had goose step public opinion and the private propagate of that is private companies doing propaganda were also proliferating before the war, he said number of publicity agents could be counted. how how many are now? i do not pretend to know, but what i do know is that many of the direct channels of news have been closed and the information for the public is filtered through publicity agents. so remember when the shuts down book, when you read the citizen book. remember that tension between the fact that all of a sudden said, wait a minute, we provide information and public relations, people provide information. so the difference and it's at

this time that journalists start to be ethics and an idea that their job is to be fact based. that's where this is a very professional, a moment of professionalization of the of media. so another another thing carries on. remember how i creole was involved with the publicity bureau during the campaign the guy who was the head of that bureau was a very interesting guy game robert wooley robert wilkins in the back there he was a journalist for many years came from kentucky came from a democratic family family democrats actually started a newspaper in lake charles at one point in the when he started favor because of business. he then up working in government. he worked for publicity and publicity for creoles. for wilson's first campaign.

and then he headed bureau of publicity for the 1916 campaign. he the lead guy and he was a even the republicans said he ran the best publicity that had ever been run, not he was just creative, but he was so well organized and he got information to all the people he needed to get into. and, you know, we have a presidential just behind us. a few days ago and we can think about what that means to get information to the voters and reach them. and he was a genius at it. he had all kinds of mechanisms and he had some dirty tricks. he played and so forth and he had creole who would write bombastic stuff attacking the opposition and just over the top things well the point i want to make is that sometimes people say you know in campaigns people talk about things, but that never really matters when you get to be president because you have other things to deal with. the famous case is during the

kennedy nixon race. there was a big, big issue about quemoy matsu, these two tiny islands off of taiwan would defend them. and all this they got all kinds of press, they bring it up in debates. it was never an issue after the election we might matsu was this wasn't on the agenda but in one way it is true that what happens in a campaign on and that is how the campaign communicates how the katz campaign communicates has a lot to do with how the president up communicating. think of barack obama. he was a master at using social media. when he comes into office he creates an office of social media that has more people in it than the press think about. donald trump's 1960 2016 campaign, where he used twitter and all kinds of techniques to directly reach voters. how you communicate in one place determines how you communicate in the the case of the committee on public information, how much

of what they learned do they learned from doing the publicity work? did the detailed management publicity work they did under bully? i personally think just an opinion. well, he would have been a much better choice to actually have headed the committee because he wouldn't have maybe been quite as creative but he would have actually together more. i think with the republicans in a better way. i think he would have he would have made it a less toxic perceived to be a less toxic organization in the next picture. we have here is a guy named charles merriman so merriman is also an interesting character. merriman. was a political scientist, specialized in government. he was at the university of chicago. he ran for alderman at one point, didn't win. i don't think. but he was very good at using data to think about how

government should run in campaigns. he was sent and we talked about very white house going to switzerland. he went to italy he had a rather grand impression of himself, so much so that he would run around and tell people that they really shouldn't pay attention to. the ambassadors his just come and talk to him which made him persona non with the ambassador. he also had had a very lovely mistress he took up with and he was very flamboyant. he actually ran a pretty good bureau of of a propaganda bureau there, but he was eventually sent home because he was just the ambassador just got sick of them. that aside he is considered the author, the pioneer of data driven modern political campaigns and. here is a quote from him. it is clear in evidence that the science of creating and transmitting public opinion under thenfluence of

collective emotion is about to becomehe principle. scnce civilization to the mastery of which all governments and all instruments a interests in the future will address themselves with every resource in their command. can anybody think of a presidential campaign that will not be doing exactly that or hasn't exactly done that? we've become better at it all the time, you know, slicing and dicing the trying to figure out who they are, tracking you know, this group, this demographic group going to be different than the other. yeah. yeah, yeah. we were actually talking about that yesterday in our and i want to bring it up earlier when you said getting the public to think about the right things we're talking about how cambridge analytica used big data and 16 campaigns for opponent are they the other republican candidate ted cruz and how they developed

this notion model about to. or that that kind of blatantly appears clusters people according to their different personality traits so this that i can i can propose direct messages for voters in the united states according to the personality and they to carry the amendment like two messages for the second amendment carrying carrying a gun for a period i'm sorry and. one was portraying i mean essentially the same message playing into their into their personality, one for like an erotic person that says vote for or they don't like the second amendment banned because. it's your security, insurance or security or something like that.

and the other one was for like a very person that is very traditional, that shows a father and the son up in the back of the picture it's like it tells like i'm going for the second amendment and pass it on from like a father to your son or something like that. so i found that very, very interesting how they use data to to run a campaign and to target people never i mean apart from the site that they leaked facebook accounts to get to that data but you know i just yeah well that's great that's a good point and that's all merriman right. the idea of not just going out and getting writing a really good speech. you know, i mean, how does this one speech do much? but it's more figuring out how to analyze the electorate so you can persuade them using highly scientific data. it's almost like you know, this, you know, lawyers spend a lot of

time when they're when they're selecting a jury, looking at all the juries, you know the their backgrounds of each juror and deciding which ones they want to challenge because want to get a court that they think will be made up of people who are more likely to agree with them, not just this naive idea, but our peers up there and they're to decide. we're thinking, which peers do we want? and we're just we don't just care if if they we're not just saying. one of the one of the jurors that i've already made up my mind obviously try to challenge that jury. but we're saying something much more profound than that. that person comes from this socioeconomic background. they're more likely to respond to these arguments in this way, only now magnify that when we think about how you run a whole campaign and air is going to just magnify this even more. so i want to reiterate another point about what's going forward, which is good people do bad things, good people do bad things. that's when woodrow wilson said, i'll never use, you know, this

this defense of the realm act. if i had it, i would never use it for ill. when when you really want to get something it's pretty hard not to resort to using all the levers you can resort. here's what creel said in speech after he was after or after the cpa was put out of business right. he said, you might put up their grace. that's that's cruel. uh, well, i guess, you know, okay, i don't have i don't have a quote if they're really good with the existence of democracy at stake. he said there was no time to think about the details of democracy. with the existence of democracy at stake, there no time to think about the details of democracy as a very that was one statement he made that he was he was he was telling us absolutely what he was thinking.

okay. what else? well, what happens in in vivian's example is a good evidence. this what happens with with propaganda is it becomes accumulated, becomes cumulative. it becomes an arms race. i use social media, he uses twitter, we use i is constantly trying to advance ways using new techniques often what you learn from the past based campaigns to do a better job and of course now globally propaganda has become an arms race not just in putting out your own propaganda like. we know the soviet union would send out a magazine called soviet life. it looked like life magazine. we could read it. and maybe you think something nice about soviet union now they use bots and disinformation and we too, we don't like to talk about what we do, but we it to everybody does it. it's weapon of war. it's a weapon of war. the the pentagon used to think war was important, know i'm

sorry. information was important to find out what the enemy was doing. and you drop some leaflets. they now think the strategic communication is as important as what arms have because those weapons have become so effective are those the propaganda have become so effective. as a result of this. we are we in a kind of dilemma that's very important one for democracy, even when we're not thinking about it in terms of just a specific kind of propaganda at a specific moment, like in a war. but when we're thinking about how our government works and is very, very important. a good a good democratic government is obliged to provide wide lots of information. that's what that's what a democratic government does at many different levels. candidates need to stand and say

what they stand for. they need to they they need to stand up and say what their agenda is. that's good at the at the more routine bureaucratic level of government. we need all kinds of data from government. we want to know what trade statistics are. we want to know what health statistics are. we want to know we want agriculture department to tell us that kinds of foods may be bad for us. they've done surveys. we want the department of health to or the, you know, center for disease to be doing investigate organs to acquire information that we need to know how to deal with it. i mean, some people may be upset that certain times and during the pandemic, the cdc put out information that wasn't quite right. but but their motives were always good. and the fact is that was very important to us in terms of creating vaccines. and we need them to that. and if we didn't have the government didn't do it, it wouldn't get done. the government, the resources. in fact, government really is the only one that has resources to give us trade data.

right. or monitor whether all around the country. i mean, you're not going to get every little city to have its own advanced weather station democracy information. but all of that apparatus can be used also to us. that's the problem and. so then you say, oh, well, we should draw a line, but how do you draw a line? i go and give a speech. i'm from the department of labor department and i go out to give a speech and. i'm telling you about what's going on in the labor force. these days. and you know what? some of the issues that people labor force are up to and i end it during that i say, you know what, and also members of congress really need to pass a higher minimum wage law. that's not a that's not a statement of truth that's a statement of opinion. so i'm using taxpayer dollars to

go out and tell you not only, but to tell you what to think. we're paying the government to tell us what in that case to tell us what to think or as happens sometimes the department health goes out and goes and pay somebody to pretend they're a journalist and do public service announcements that support the department of health agenda where a journalist actually faked it's not really a fake is a fake. that's clearly out of bounds, by the way, there are laws that forbid that. but the problem is it's very hard to where you draw the line, how you draw the line. and how are you going to enforce that? well, first of all, if for it to be enforced, what would have to happen. two things. first of all, somebody have bring it to the department of justice. it's somebody in your administration who just went out, did this. do you think the department of justice is going to go and start policing everything, says, oh, they're no good, but now

congress could do it. but there's another problem with that. when when your side is saying something, even if they're using taxpayer dollars, your side is president, your party, you don't i mean, you're fine with it. if you're in the minority, you can complain about it, but you never get to get enough votes to actually do anything about it. and in any case writing, the law is very difficult because this is a very blurry line. we do have rules that say if you're going give a campaign speech for your boss and you're the assistant secretary of treasury you can't use that. can't use government money. okay, fine. that's fine. but what does that you know, that doesn't cover these other cases that could exist and just think about this as an example. during the pandemic, we sent out checks pandemic to people. what did the president insist on doing those.

he insisted that he signed them himself? that's propaganda. generally. it gets signed by somebody in the bureaucracy, right. why do you think we have so many military bands? you know, military bands used to exist, right? we talked about this class warrior bands exist to get people to go to war. but now they're used to entertain people. we spend a lot of money getting people all excited about. listen to the military bands we don't really them so much to offer parades. so the government has there's this huge power that resides with the incumbent and with the administration to make a case for their point of view. and we have limited capacity to rein it in first because it's hard to draw a line. and second of all, if you draw the line how do you really enforce it. that's a problem and we should be mindful of it when we watch what our leaders do. and just so i can be clear, yes.

donald trump, those pandemic checks, every president does this. they all it it's a bipartisan activity. okay. then finally, we get cynicism when when feel you're being propagandized all the time. you start to become cynical cynical. you start asking yourself what's true, what's not true. you lose trust in the institutions as the institutions become more partizan, as they become more propagandistic, as they find new ways to trick you. i mean, my is not the term of art, but it's a term. right new ways to manipulate you. you even if you find yourself believing what they say at any moment. the subtext of that is you become cynical and very corrosive to democracy. harold lacewell, who one of the

first great students of he didn't for the cpi, but he wrote a book in the mid 1920s that talked about propaganda during world war one. it was one of the first in english to be done. and he's a sociologist and we've talked in class about how sociologist spent a lot of time studying mass media. that's one of the things they do. and he was one of the great and a whole new field in many ways. the study of what we'd study here in mass communication, all that comes out of world war two. world war one. and the fact that all of a sudden these issues of how the media and how public information works start to become more urgent and more complex. it wasn't just we believe in the libertarian. if the press does a job, everything will be okay. it's not that simple, right, as we've learned, which is why we the hutchins commission report and all of that. so here's that last well said at the end the and in this in his famous book he said that all the discussion of the ways and means of controlling public opinion

testified to the collapse of democratic that utopianism had in many minds given way to cynicism and disenchantment. it's a good it's a good quote. he's basically saying at the end of the war, just like the encyclopedia britannica said, a big gash, a grand canyon gash had taken place in our society. truth and how it could be manipulated. so i want to end with a guy who i think is an exemplar, and that's charles evans, who's is sometimes called the human for reasons you can tell by looking at him. he's a very formidable character. he was a brilliant corporate. he was brought in because nobody else would do it to investigate trusts, both an insurance trust and utilities in york. and he was he was brilliant.

and he utterly scrupulous. and when it turned that teddy roosevelt, who he was, was a republican, when teddy roosevelt had been involved, one of these things not because was unscrupulous, but he had been involved and. people came to him and said, you can't go, you can't bring this up in court today or during the investigation during the panel because it'll just look terrible. he said, i'm bringing it up. he went on to be governor of new york. then he went to the supreme court associate justice, and then he ran wilson and if he had just won california. we had just gotten like 3000 more votes in california would have been president. but his campaign staff so stupid they they wouldn't go and meet hiram johnson, who was the former governor of california, was running for the senate, who was a very important figure in california, but was a progressive in a lot of he was people in california weren't. and they didn't tell hughes that he was at the same hotel that

hiram johnson in. and hiram johnson was really. and hiram johnson sort of helped him. but if hiring johnson had gone behind him, he would have been the president. united states instead of woodrow wilson. he then wentpopopopopopopopopopo

it's my pleasure today, this afternoon to introduce the panelists for our conversation on abraham lincoln and race. and i'm going to start on my far right and i'm going to be which would be your far left. i'm going to be very, very brief in my introduction so we can get right to it. we have ron white. ron white, you heard last night, he spoke on his most recent book on joshua chamberlain. i am in all of dr. white's, but he told me at lunch today he's now working on john adams years

in congress. did i get that right? john quincy and john quincy adams, thank you so much. there is a different set. believe it's just a slight white. next to ron is harold holzer. harold spoke to us last night on his new book on lincoln and immigration. he is the jonathan fenton director of the roosevelt house public policy institute at hunter college. this is, again a staggering fact. i don't believe it's a typo. author, coeditor or editor of how many books? harold? a 55. 55. he's right. 55 books on lincoln and the civil war next to harold. there we have is elizabeth leonard. she is the gibson professor of history at colby college, or she's recently retired from colby. she is the author of a number of books, the most recent. you heard her speak about it last night. benjamin butler.