Milford chronicle., 1922-12-29
WAR OF PROPAGANDISTS
is DEVASTATING AMERICA
Highly Paid Agents Of Fanatical
Groups Have Taken Political Init
iatiVe Away From the People.

iatiVe Away From the People.
A great many earnest people are
wondering whether something isn't
seriously wrong with the heart and
mind of the Republic. President Hard
ing himself and Mr. Daugherty an6
Senator Reed and other public men
seem greatly distressed by what they
regard as omens of a decline in ma
tional morale and something like
spiritual disintegratiOn throughout the
country.
What is wrong in American may be
traced easily to very obvious case.
We are being organized out of our
rational senses by experts in propa-
ganda who labor not for principles but
for humping salaries. These people
may be said to be running the country
at the moment.
Up to 1914 all political, social and
moral initiative was in the hands of
the people or their representative
leaders voluntarily chosen. These
leaders were honorable spokesmen
for principles, parties, business, edu-
cation, religion, law and the like.
When the war came the United States
was introduced to a novel and eX-
tremely complex system devised for
the deliberate creation of opinion or
mass emotion. That was propaganda.
It has been making chaos of our pub
lie affairs for the simple reason that
there is not in Congress enough in
tellectual resistance to cope with it.
Organized propaganda as it ap-
peared in in this country during the
war years was imported from Europe.
1t was an instrument of the old diplo-
macy enormously elaborated ana op-
Grated for the first time in human
history in the open. It directs shrewd
and powerful appeals to hate, to fear,
to suspicion, to prejudice, to high
hopes, to faith, to bigotry-but never
to pure reason. 1t was a stupendous
experiment in the direction of col
lective emotionalism for particular
ends.
We in America trained innumerable
for the war. We provid-
ed them with the means TO create and
color opinion. Had these men been
deported to a faraWay island when
hostilities ended, had their machinery
been decently destroyed and forgotten,
we might not now be in state of
anxiety and unrest.
But the propagandists, trained at
public expense, were out of jobs. They
had lost the taste for real work. They
wanted money and easy times. They
were left like strayed guerrillas to |
hatch any sort of devilment that
would pay. They were masters of a
new science and all their equipment
was intact.
So all the terrible machinery, all the
devices for the manufacture of fear
and hate and violent suspicion which
lad been created to exert a crushing |
pressure upon militaristic Germany I
we're turned by Americans upon each
)ther.
Is it any wonder that as a people we
ire in way to become disunited or
hat we seem sometimes to be at the
center of storm of fanaticism?
If YOU were an expert prOpagandist
,ut of job you looked up some rich
v endowed group with a rational or
irrational purpose and put your emo
ional dynamite at its disposal. If no
uch group was handy you caused one
o be organized. You dug up old and
orgotten Causes and breathed the
,reath of crazy and destructive life
nto them. You hired out to do new
wonders for capital or labor, to dis
ort opinion, to poison it or to Oblit-
rate it altogether.
So it happens that many of the
ton r,f fhncn |
re kept alive seemingly for a great
heory of some sort, but actually for
he benefit of the professionals who
rganize and direct them.
The "wets" and the "drys," the Ku
lux Klan and some of the groups
hat have been most aggressive in
conomic reform or reaction were
rought into existence by propangan-
a.
A propagandist does nothing so I
rudely honest as the writing of real ]
r imaginary news like the old-fash-
,ned "press agents." He is, on the 1
ther hand, ga setter up of situations"
-e swarms in Washington, where he
Lbors to get snakes into the news. /
-e is your kleagle, dourishing in v
ED of suckers. He is the person who
as been working to rouse the devil t
fsectarian fanaticism in Americans 4
with the cry of patriotism!
When Washington finds way to a
leck the growing and enormously k
.pitalized business of propaganda
ere will be no need for President C,
Congress to worry about the state b
the Nation.-Evening Public Led
T. te
10