Propaganda, Prenational Critique, and Early American Literature

Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) hardly overflows with optimism in its exploration of the information distortions that warp democratic society. But his classic study of propaganda does turn a wistful eye on the “the pioneer democrats” of the eighteenth century who shaped national consciousness (Lippmann 165). Spared the sophistication of film, photography, and corporate journalism, revolutionary writers did not have to hustle their message at the expense of “their illimitable faith in [the people’s] dignity” (Lippmann 165). The backwardness of these early agitators comprised their virtue since modern communications had not yet introduced a gap between their practices and the democratic principles that had “prevailed for two thousand years” ever since Athens (Lippmann 165). This view of propaganda as thoroughly modern intensified during the Cold War when Jacques Ellul claimed propaganda as the child of a technological society born at the start of World War I. Even more than Lippmann, Ellul argues for the distinctiveness of twentieth-century propaganda, which by the time of his Propaganda (1962), was battletested by two world wars and honed in the nuclear brinksmanship of the Soviet Union and the US. To understand modern propaganda as continuous with the propaganda of the nineteenth or eighteenth century “is to cling to an obsolete concept of man and of the means to influence him” (Ellul 25).¹

This essay departs from Lippmann and Ellul’s assumptions by reading the newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides of early America as propaganda. Not content to trust that “a reasoned righteousness welled up spontaneously out of the mass of men,” as America’s “early democrats” purportedly believed (Lippmann 163), Thomas Paine and other agitators felt the necessity of using print culture to impel that mass to defy an empire. But my point is not that eighteenth-century propaganda is as modern as the creation of the Creel Commission of 1917–19 or as postmodern as the “multimillion dollar covert campaign” of 2007 to foster an independent press in Iraq by seeding it with stories paid for by the Pentagon (Gerth and Shane A1). Rather than force such a convergence, I argue that the incommensurability of early American literature and modern propaganda is productive because its asymmetries suggest the anachronistic promise of a critique, which was simultaneously prenational and global.

The most significant propaganda is not the sort that screams for action in big red letters. Instead, Ellul prioritizes a form of mass communication that “did not exist before the twentieth century”: integration propaganda (74). The state requires this complex tool to weld individuals to the collective body of the state. Its allure is existential, proffering an end to modern alienation by incorporating isolated citizens into communities that affirm individual behaviors and attitudes. “Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” writes Ellul to explain why individuals crave a mindset that subtly adjusts inner thoughts to social norms (148). This deep-seated desire for belonging causes propaganda to flourish in democracies. Because the states of Western Europe and North America, from Ellul’s Cold-War perspective, are buoyed by notions of implicit consent, hegemony can be secured only by presenting the state as being already in alignment with individual feelings and shared beliefs. Propaganda “makes the people demand what was decided beforehand,” consolidating social and political order (Ellul 132). For modern democratic states whose legitimacy rests on consent of the governed, popular sovereignty and propaganda go hand in hand.

National integration was not effected automatically in early America because radicals labored first to inflame the public sphere with agitation propaganda and only later took up the matter of state stability. Unlike integration propaganda, agitation propaganda “unleashes an explosive moment” that seems fissile, too ready to burn itself out, to suit the purposes of a durable nationalism (Ellul 72). Yet the unsuitability of this propaganda for promoting long-lasting nationalism should not be read as a sign that American revolutionaries had retreated to a terrain that was somehow “less” than the state. The impetus to reimagine the geopolitical landscape gave temporary access to a global sensibility more capacious than the American nationalism that eventually took its place...