In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

O n the eve of the American intervention into World War I, promising experiments in creating a deliberative public raised democratic hopes. Reviewing the latest study of the mob mind in 1915, Walter Weyl, editor of The New Republic, admitted that “the crowd-like actions of ignorant and irresponsible constituencies” cast doubts on democracy. But such doubts only “compel us to justify our faith” in “a people capable of clumsily looking out for its own interests in politics.” As more and more citizens gained “a measure of political independence and of political skepticism,” Weyl concluded, the “‘sovereign crowd’ is becoming a public.”1 The emerging faith in a deliberative public did not survive the American intervention into World War I. “Can democracy be efficient?” a civic reformer impatiently asked just weeks after the American declaration of war in April 1917. Are “the democratic masses capable of intelligent self-direction, or must they in self-defense surrender the control of government to the superior ability of the trained and exceptionally gifted few?” Perhaps in “the long run laws cannot be enforced without the convinced support of public opinion,” but in the present emergency, what “reason is there for supposing that the mass mind can be permeated by the light of science?” The time had come, he suggested, for “public opinion . . . to humble itself in voluntary subjection to the scientific expert and expert opinion.”2 Sophisticated techniques of propaganda flourished on all sides in World War I, as the belligerents struggled to maintain popular support for continued slaughter. In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson assigned the leading role in mobilizing public opinion in support of the war to the federal Committee on Public Information (CPI). The CPI promised to inform the public rather than CHAPTER 8 The Public Goes to War but Does Not Come Back B Requiem for a Participatory Democracy THE PUBLIC GOES TO WAR BUT DOES NOT COME BACK • 171 censor or repress dissent. But once caught up in the war spirit, the CPI churned out propaganda and discouraged open debate. Eventually, federal repression of dissent supplemented propaganda in maintaining support for the war. As the passions aroused spilled out across the United States, vigilantes assaulted dissenters and labor radicals as well as ethnic and racial minorities.3 In 1919, American cities exploded in violence due to labor conflicts combined with ethnic and racial tensions. With news arriving of revolutionary ferment in Europe and four million American workers engaged in strikes and lockouts, industrialists inflamed the public with dire warnings of foreign radicals while importing black strikebreakers from the South. A red summer of violence against labor radicals and African Americans followed in dozens of cities. Mobs beat and mutilated radicals in New York and Cleveland. In Chicago, gangs terrorized African Americans for thirteen days, killing or injuring scores and burning thousands out of their housing. Nationwide, a series of bomb scares led to mass arrests and deportations of suspected foreign radicals. So recently the site of an emerging democratic public, the cities now appeared as cauldrons of irrational hatreds.4 The ease with which propaganda swayed the public and the intolerance and violence it unleashed shattered the faith in public opinion. A 1919 survey of “The Crowd in Action” found the danger of the mob mind “far more pressing than ever before.” Even a once-ardent democrat, a director of New York City’s most successful civic forum, feared that “society is becoming a veritable babel of gibbering crowds.” With “mob outbreaks and riots increasing in number,” he lamented, public opinion fell “into a confusion of propagandist tongues,” forcing all to “speak as the crowd, think as the crowd, understand as the crowd.”5 In its effort to win public opinion over to the war effort, the Wilson administration and the CPI enlisted and compromised all the Progressive Era urban experiments in deliberative democracy, from university extensions and social settlements to social centers and movie theaters. None of those civic experiments survived the war intact. The mobilization of public opinion compromised many one-time civic reformers as well. A group known as the “war intellectuals ” turned away from a city-based democratic public to court federal power and implement their vision of national planning and international order from above. The war intellectuals gained little, becoming glorified public relations agents for policies determined by the Wilson administration.6 After the war, disillusioned war intellectuals argued that the public could not be trusted to act wisely or responsibly.These...

Share