Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion Jonathan Auerbach. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivem, and American Public Opinion Jonathan Auerbach. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.In Weapons of Democracy, part of the publisher's series, "New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History," Jonathan Auerbach, professor of English at the University of Maryland-College Park and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (2013), presents the thesis that propaganda is a double-barreled affair, a message combined with some emotional, intellectual, or aesthetic appeal, but primarily emotional. But how exactly does one define "propaganda"? Merriam-Webster.com defines "propaganda" as "ideas or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, a government, etc." Propaganda is persuading public opinion in favor of, while disinformation persuades public opinion against something.In this thought-provoking book, the author traces the fate of American public opinion in theory and practice "from 1885, when [Woodrow] Wilson published a doctoral dissertation titled Congressional Government, to 1934, when public relations counsel [Ivy] Lee was investigated by a House of Representatives special committee (a forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HU AC), for helping to spread Nazi propaganda, including consulting directly with the ?minister of public enlightenment,' Joseph Goebbels" (12). Weapons of Democracy closely analyzes the work of prominent political leaders, journalists, intellectuals, novelists, and corporate publicists, including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, George Creel, John Dewey, Julia Lathrop, Ivy Lee, and Edward Be mays, who is considered to be the "father of modern public relations."Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society. During the 1920s and the 1930s, propaganda research was largely impressionistic, pacifist, and aimed at educating a broad public about the continuing dangers of the persuasion industries. For Auerbach, public opinion emerges as a topic of debate in the Progressive era which was increasingly subject to modes of management, organization, synchronization, persuasion, and coercion.The author focuses on the individual careers of famous public opinion makers, such as Edward Bernays, George Creel, and Ivy Lee then, with great persuasion, examines the work of their most profound critics, Lippmann and John Dewey. He explores how Lippmann gave voice to a set of misgivings that had troubled American social reformers since the late nineteenth century. Lippmann's pioneer work Public Opinion (1922) discussed themes that were revolutionary for its time but became standard later.Chapter 1, "Giving Direction to Opinion," "examines how various literary, political, commercial, and journalistic sources at the turn of the twentieth century began to entertain new ideas of a public" (13). …