Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda (review)

In his careful study of World War II–era U.S. Treasury bond campaigns, James J. Kimble contributes significantly to our understanding of both the context and the theory of wartime domestic propaganda. By focusing on the broad contours of a long-term undertaking by a U.S. government agency, Kimble transcends (to an extent) a number of familiar but unhelpful dualities in propaganda research. His approach helps bridge text versus context, message determinism versus audience response, insider machinations versus external appeals, the “we” (persuasion)/“they” (propaganda) dichotomy, and wartime versus peacetime social influence. Without fanfare, Kimble’s book also significantly informs propaganda studies’ most persistent dichotomy of all—its typical association with international ideological competition as distinct from an understanding that social influence of a massive, orchestrated but still covert nature remains a regular feature of domestic life.

In detailing the Treasury Department’s several war bond campaigns of 1940–45, Kimble employs an innovative construct for tracing the flow of symbolic action. Rather than merely laying out successive appeals and themes in eight bond campaigns, he juxtaposes a more microscopic framework to the macro-level messages. Here Kimble draws from studies of how soldiers are psychologically oriented to the experience of combat. Successive strategies and themes found in the Treasury’s several campaigns parallel (approximately) the stages by which GIs are mentally adapted to combat, through (1) early retraining of the civilian psyche toward military attitudes, (2) cultivating unit cohesion, (3) channeling the “apprehensive enthusiasm” of soldiers entering the combat zone, (4) mitigating the resignation of soldiers immersed in constant danger, and (5) transitioning soldiers back to civilian life.

Kimble’s approach is fundamentally a textual explication of Treasury Department posters and verbalism as augmented by archival research into the behind-the-scenes work of persuaders. Here it is no mean feat to lay out the somewhat overlapping persuasive campaigns that, first, militarized the public mind—while also minimizing the specter of governmental persuasion—and, later, adapted not only to the public’s inurement to wartime appeals but also to its general war weariness. Contrapuntal descriptions of the propagandists’ backstage and front-stage work assure that Kimble’s workmanlike focus on text does not lead to neglect of important broader lessons to be gleaned about large-scale social influence.

Yet, owing to Kimble’s recurrence to broad-scale conclusions from secondary historical sources, we find in the book relatively fewer significant insights into the relationship between propaganda and the overall politics and sociology of the period. A result—and not a useful one—of Kimble’s relatively tepid exploration of general wartime history is that he falls somewhat into the trap of symbolic determinism. Kimble is not the only one to connect the ideology of unconditional surrender to use of the atomic bomb. Nor is he the first, or the last, to infer that the more viscerally derogatory and racially toned anti-Japanese propaganda may have contributed to the selection of Japan (rather than Germany) as the bomb’s target. To be sure, Kimble recognizes that the causal link between public rhetoric and the bomb’s target is, at best, a somewhat speculative inference. But although he qualifies the claim (and backpedals in the obligatory ways) he comes back to the idea again and again. So we are left with the decided impression that—notwithstanding the conventional tonnage that wrecked German cities and the devotion of 85 percent of American military resources to the European Theater—the United States might have reserved the A-bomb for Japan even if the weapon had been available before VE Day. Here Kimble would have done well to have emphasized more the disjunction in U.S. leadership between the policy czars and the propaganda makers. Unlike German propagandists, who were included in the Nazi war counsels, the U.S. Treasury Department and the Office of War Information were kept at arm’s length and were left to guess about...