Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (review)

The ongoing political and intellectual controversy around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan heightens the expectations attending a volume of this sort, resulting from both the urgency of international events as well as the hope that new scholarship will enable the resolution, or at least the understanding, of current and future conflicts. Selling War in a Media Age will unquestionably be a valuable resource for communication scholars, political scientists, and historians exploring the myriad ways in which U.S. presidents during the past hundred years have sought to influence, with varying degrees of success, public attitudes toward a host of military activities. However, the longstanding scholarly interest in this area sets the standard for novel inquiry quite high, and it is a challenge that the authors meet with mixed success.

George C. Herring's opening chapter on William McKinley as "Imperial Tutor" is most notable for the historical details of McKinley's emergence as one of the first modern U.S. presidents to develop technological and political apparatuses for the negotiation of public opinion. Herring confines his observations regarding McKinley's rhetorical arsenal largely to well-studied devices like strategic ambiguity and appeals to American exceptionalism. With an American public only recently attentive to international relations at the turn of the century, however, the analysis seems fresher than when we comment on U.S. presidents recycling these same techniques over a hundred years later. Emily S. Rosenberg's chapter, "War and the Health of the State," is by far the most extensive consideration of the manner by which the unique media features of a given historical period were exploited as part of presidential rhetorical strategy. Whether Woodrow Wilson's enlistment of academics writing propagandistic "histories," the delivery by "Four Minute Men" of carefully designed speeches echoing official war publicity while projectionists changed reels in movie theaters (51), or the Committee on Public Information's mobilization of gendered and anti-German ideologies in pro-WWI posters (52–54), Rosenberg's treatment is both thorough and theoretically grounded. These two chapters, perhaps more than any of the others, illustrate exactly how the medium matters in the selling of war.

Several other chapters provide intriguing analyses, albeit unfortunately with much less of the explicit theoretical foundation that would help to situate the insights drawn from a discrete historical moment within the larger continuum of public discourses about war. Mark Stoler acknowledges the confounding of historical methodology brought about by the relative lack of documentation of Franklin D. Roosevelt's own thoughts and even meeting minutes, such that the logic driving his decisions must be inferred largely from the president's actions and public statements (69). Moreover, Stoler's recognition that the types of war "sold" to the U.S. public (for example, aid to allies versus combat engagement by U.S. troops) were different in kind rather than degree holds great potential for exploring a host of instances where U.S. involvement in armed conflict was asymptotic rather than immediate. Although more could be said regarding the manner in which "the press, movies, [and] literature" represent measures of "how the public responded to the selling of a war" (114), the connections are easily discerned, and Marilyn B. Young's solid analysis of a diverse archive, from films and political texts to readers' letters to magazines, uncovers a surprisingly consistent ambivalence in representations of the Korean War. Young's juxtaposition of this ambiguity, in artifacts of popular culture to opinion polls reflecting a lack of public understanding regarding the Korean War's rationale, produces a coherent theoretical narrative.

Other chapters in this volume, while comprising compelling readings of the historical and rhetorical record, function more as modest extensions of extant scholarship than as new inquiry. For instance, whereas Paul S. Boyer sees appeals to cultural notions of American ingenuity in references to the...