Government by Mimeograph

‘It has been demonstrated by observation, and discovered by the innate sagacity of the pettiest as well as the greatest of despots, that the influence of a power is increased in proportion as its direction is rendered more central.’ — ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

I

IT is surprising how few people in the United States can tell you offhand the minimum measurements of an interstate potato. Indeed, a deplorable majority appear to be not aware of an official difference between interstate and intrastate potatoes. Is Washington’s vast and costly system of public information a failure?

A press release from AAA on October 19, 1937, made the matter quite clear: —

The potato orders prohibit interstate shipment of potatoes less than one and onehalf inches in diameter and grading less than U. S. No. 2. If recommended by the control committees, shipments of other small and low-grade potatoes may be limited.

Here is a departmental regulation pursuant, presumably, to a constitutional delegation of legislative powers. As such it carries the full authority of law. But on the day it was promulgated in Washington the New York stock market sold off badly in a 7,000,000share day; the Japanese bombed Chapei; Mussolini imposed a 10 per cent capital levy on corporate wealth; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor announced a proposed American itinerary; and President Roosevelt, in a Hyde Park press conference, again balanced the budget without new taxes. Amid all these arresting headlines next morning the potato orders were ignored shamefully in the free press — which, in turn, presented an ugly problem in administration. At best it is difficult enough to secure compliance with myriad rules, regulations, and executive orders. When practically nobody has heard of the order, Washington’s enforcement problem becomes all but impossible, and the whole structure of balanced abundance falls back into the inkpot. General Hugh S. Johnson was among the first to discover the problem, at about October 1933, when an important maker of salad dressing presented himself humbly at the bar of NRA to confess he never had heard of the Mayonnaise Code.

Such ghastly failures of public enlightenment, day after day and week after week for four years, stimulated at length in the higher councils of government a demand for some more effective system of national intelligence. If planned economy is to succeed, the theory runs, the news must do its work. When a condition prevails in which vital official decrees may be ignored, threatening thereby a breakdown of the entire potato system, does not a free press, in the old meaning of words, become an immediate impediment to progressive democratic government? As Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, states the problem: —

It would be unfair not to point out also, in concluding, that a steadfast national allegiance to any fixed course, international or intermediate, also requires a certain degree of regimented opinion. To lower or tear down certain tariff walls, and to keep them down, would require on the part of the general public great solidarity of opinion, and great resolution. The degree of education and of propaganda required to make the great body of American consumers, rural and urban, stand firmly together for lower tariffs would have to be rather intense.¹

In this conception of affairs the news, to do its work properly, must be ‘coordinated.’ On January 12, 1937, President Roosevelt endorsed to Congress the recommendation of his special Committee on Administrative Management for an all-embracing central bureau of official intelligence: —

A Division of Information should be established to serve as a central clearing house for the correlation and coördination of the administrative policies of the several departments in the operation of their own informational services, and to perform related duties. The United States Information Service might well be transferred to this division. It might also develop into a service which would supervise and foster regional associations of executive officers of the Government and other activities for coördination of the field services. The Director of the [Budget] Bureau has been authorized by law to approve the use of printing and binding appropriations for the periodicals and journals published by Government agencies; the chief of the Division of Information could assist him in carrying out this duty.²

This is the first proposal in American history for a permanent central bureau of public information. Briefly, it contemplates the unification, under singleheaded control immediately responsive to the White House, of the most elaborate, extensive, and costly system of official publicity ever established in peacetime under democratic forms.

In Washington to-day there are a few more than 300 general publicity writers in the Federal agencies.³ Salaries range from $3600 to $12,000 a year. Prior to 1933 the Capital’s roll of government publicists numbered 68.

During the fiscal year 1937, the Department of Agriculture carried 165 employees in its Office of Information.⁴ The Department of Agriculture, WPA, and several other agencies maintain press representatives in every state. HOLC, FHA, and the Social Security Board operate through regional press offices which encompass all the states. During the fiscal year 1936, WPA employed 33 persons in its Washington information section. The appropriation bill authorized salaries aggregating $75,500 for this service, plus $346,179 for ‘printing, binding, mimeographing, multigraphing, and engraving.’⁵ In addition, WPA reported, in October 1936, some 8860 persons engaged on writer’s relief projects throughout the country.⁶

From all these typewriters flows a mighty stream of material designed for public consumption. All of it is prepared with a view to presenting the originating agency, through the press, in the best possible light. Nor is it a reflection upon the integrity of any individual involved to say that the very scheme of organization in these publicity bureaus tends daily toward the suppression of matters which project departmental policies in other than a beneficent light.

In June 1937, the Brookings Institution reported to Congress that during a three-months period that year government press offices in Washington released 4794 newspaper articles, distributing a total of 7,139,457 copies, or an average of 95,102 copies for every working day. During a recent calendar year five agencies distributed news matrixes, one of them, the FHA, spending $32,716 for that service alone.⁷ During its first troubled year NRA issued 5991 press releases.⁸

Federal information offices have at their command some 3000 organized mailing lists, with a total of 2,280,900 names for direct-mail education.⁹ In addition, the AAA Soil Erosion Service, through its state extension agencies, maintains direct contact with roundly 3,500,000 farmers, or more than one half the individual farm plants in the United States.¹⁰

This development in government goodwill explains in part the tremendous increase in franked mail since 1933. Departmental free mail reported by the Post Office increased from an annual average of 43,131,503 pounds during the fiscal years 1930-1933 to an annual average of 87,167,631 pounds for the years 1934-1937.¹¹

Lost postal revenues on this franked mail, as reported to Congress by the Postmaster General, averaged $10,675,319 a year for the fiscal years 1930-1933, and $29,712,270 annually during the next four years.¹² The formal report of the Post Office shows 669,352,068 pieces of free mail handled during the fiscal year 1936, or an average of 22.3 pieces for every family enumerated in the 1935 Census estimate.

Motion pictures and radio also help in keeping the citizen abreast of the times. As of October 1936, there were 533 government films available for free exhibition in schools, churches, clubs, lodges, and civic associations.¹³ At that time the National Archives catalogued more than 15,000,000 feet of film controlled by 76 Federal agencies. The WPA production schedule for 1936 called for 30 pictures, at an average cost of $6000. At least one of these was produced by the costly Technicolor process.¹⁴

Since the spring of 1935 certain government films have been booked free, at the option of the local exhibitor, through the regular commercial exchanges. In July 1936, Professor Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration reported that its first three-reeler, The Plough That Broke the Plains, had been exhibited before 18,000,000 people.¹⁵ In August of the same year, We, the People, and Social Security, the first Hollywood venture of the Social Security Board, was reported in a leading trade journal to have figured in ‘the most extensive distribution of motion-picture films ever undertaken by a government agency.’¹⁶

Government education by radio is in a relative infancy, but its steady expansion is marked readily by the selective listener. At executive hearings before the House Committee on Appropriations on March 10,1937, a ranking officer of the Department of Agriculture reported that the Office of Information ‘ prepares annually 3000 separate manuscript radio programmes.’ The Department, he explained, supervises three daily network programmes and sends ‘ syndicate programmes to 370 individual stations.’¹⁷ The witness computed the Department’s regular feature radio time, not including casual ‘spots,’ during the fiscal year 1937 as valued, by going commercial rates, at something more than $2,000,000 — exclusive of chain speeches broadcast by the Secretary. He gave $29,140 as the total expense to the Department for the preparation of these programmes.¹⁸ During the summer of 1936, a presidential campaign year, WPA supplied weekly radio features to 209 stations.¹⁹ Regularly scheduled radio series of lesser scope are managed by the Departments of Interior, Commerce, and Labor.

All of this recent expansion of Federal activities bearing directly upon the formation of public opinion has excited wide discussion. In May 1935, months before the statistics here documented were available in the public record, Dr. E. Pendleton Herring, a member of the Department of Government faculty at Harvard, presented his studied conclusion: ‘Never before has the Federal Government undertaken on so vast a scale, and with such deliberate intent, the task of building a favorable public opinion toward its policies.’²⁰ At about the same time Mr. Elisha Hanson, Washington counsel to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, summarized his observations on the expanding New Deal information services with the statement: ‘For the first time in their history, the American people have seen their government turning to propaganda in myriad forms to win their favor and keep their support.’²¹ Reflecting the view of the active daily journalist in the Capital, Mr. Arthur Krock, chief of the New York Times bureau, wrote in April 1937: ‘The wish to hamper the American press in its conception of itself as the eyes and ears of the public has been so persistently revealed in New Deal Washington that the newspaper profession is acutely sensitive to any suggestion of restriction.’²²

Viewing the two facets of the discussion, which now has been gathering head for five years, we are confronted by a problem which reaches to the roots of democratic theory. ‘ Can one speak of government by consent,’ asks Professor Herring, ‘when this consent is manufactured by official press agents?’²³ Yet the New Deal suggests more effective coördination between government and the press. The press responds that the New Deal already misuses its vast informational facilities for partisan or institutional propaganda, and that, therefore, the traditional safeguards and protections of the free press must be buttressed rather than relaxed.

What, then, of the cry of propaganda, suppression, and censorship so widely aired nowadays? Is it political heatlightning, or does it warn of a new policy in American government, fashioned after the totalitarian pattern of managed opinion?

II

Two charges are to be made against government propaganda: the first, misstatement of fact; the second, constant use of emotional appeal and bitter invective against public criticism.

In the progress of European dictatorships since the twenties there has emerged a rather uniform pattern in the movement toward control of public opinion. In this sequence the policy normally develops through four overlapping phases. The first is distinguished by a redundance of strong supporting material extolling government policies and aims. As the natural resistance to regimentation mounts, the public clamor of opposition becomes more insistent; whereupon the second phase is characterized by a pronounced official resentment of all criticism. Next comes indirect censorship, whereby news is distorted and given a false emphasis. At this phase reports and surveys unfavorable to current policies simply are filed, and no questions answered. The last phase brings positive measures of formal governmental control over the channels of news dissemination, a step which marks the full flower of managed opinion. We have constantly before us the spectacle of what has happened in Germany. On June 25, 1934, Dr. Goebbels proclaimed: ‘The right to criticize belongs to the National Socialist Party. I deny anybody else such a right. The right to criticize is exercised by the National Socialist Party to a sufficient extent.’²⁴

The enormous historical significance of the world’s recent drift to canned news is summarized forcefully by Carl W. Ackerman, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism in Columbia University. Reporting in July 1937 on a sixmonths survey of public opinion in Europe, Dean Ackerman said: ‘The line of demarcation between nations dominated by a war psychology and those still subject to the psychological element of peaceful ideas is between managed public opinion and the free exchange of information. No one can cite a single exception.’²⁵

An illuminating example of misrepresentation in the prevailing system of public information from Washington is found in the routine White House and Treasury releases touching the budget and fiscal policies. Under the twobudget system, various accounts have been shifted between the ‘ordinary’ and ‘emergency’ classifications from year to year, until to-day no one outside the Treasury can arrange an accurate comparative table of expenditures for any two successive fiscal years since 1932.

The projection of this confusion into the news is illustrated by an Associated Press dispatch from Washington under date of December 28, 1933, which began:

High Democratic spokesmen described President Roosevelt as determined to-day to concentrate primary attention of the Seventythird Congress upon a budget designed to provide an $800,000,000 surplus above ordinary Federal operating costs in 1934-1935.

Although reconciled to a present-year deficit well above the billion mark because of emergency expenditures, the Administration was said to have set down tentative budget estimates reading: Income $3,400,000,000, ordinary outgo, $2,600,000,000, etc.

In the days before editors realized that national budget news turned on special — and shifting — official definitions of ‘ordinary’ and ‘emergency,’ this news was displayed prominently on the front page of one important metropolitan daily in the East²⁶ under the head:—

PRESIDENT AIMING
AT NEAR BILLION
SURPLUS FOR 1934

And a secondary headline continued:

Neither the White House nor the Treasury, of course, writes the headlines. But within reasonable limits the character of the news determines the import of the heads and the relative emphasis of display. Here is page-one news from the highest official source, which either was not true or had been so prepared for announcement as to present an entirely misleading public understanding of the subject at hand. As it turned out, the Treasury position at the end of the fiscal year 1934-1935 did not show a surplus of $800,000,000, but a deficit of $3,575,300,000.

Nor does the responsibility for such flagrant misrepresentation of policy rest with the Associated Press, which faithfully projected the official utterance from Washington. The indictment lodges rather against a system of planned confusion in Federal finances, which makes any official declaration the ultimate news on the subject. Nobody else possibly can have so much as a sentence of demonstrable news in the matter, for only the White House and Treasury can know next year’s definitions of such words as ‘ordinary,’ ‘emergency,’ and ‘trust fund.’

Four years after this remarkable headline surplus for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1935, Senator Harry F. Byrd, of Virginia, in an address before the Academy of Political Science ²⁷ touched upon misleading Treasury reports in this vein: —

I feel completely safe in saying that the credits and recoverable assets shown in the government reports have been grossly overestimated. Take, for example, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The government purchased $500,000,000 of stock and about $4,000,000,000 of notes of this corporation. The stocks and the notes are carried at face value, leaving the impression that the total assets represent sound values and will ultimately be recovered into the Treasury to reduce the public debt. This conclusion is accepted by the public by reason of the confidence in the soundness and efficiency of the Chairman, Mr. Jones.

However, the Brookings Institution, employed by the Senate Committee on Reorganization, recently disclosed that $2,500,000,000 of the assets of the RFC were diverted for relief expenditures, and to pay the regular expenses of other agencies, and for other expenditures, none of which are recoverable. So to-day the stock of the RFC is valueless and the notes are not worth more than fifty cents on the dollar in recoverable assets. Yet only recently the corporation issued a financial statement showing and claiming a surplus of $150,000,000 as of December 31, last [1936].

If one seeks to excuse this instance of official misinformation as merely an oversight on the part of very busy gentlemen in Washington, he must do so in full knowledge that the amount involved is $2,650,000,000 of public money.²⁸

These two examples in billions epitomize fairly a general condition affecting Treasury news from Washington to-day. As a result, every informed person now reads the budget reports in the manner of Mr. Stark Young’s sophisticated parrot — ‘turning his head this way and that, as if one eye had seen what the other had reason to doubt.’

The corollary device of misrepresentation by truthful evasion is illustrated by an announcement from AAA late in 1937 concerning the national vote on potato control. The Department of Agriculture’s referendum closed on October 2. The immediate official announcement of that date reported that 30,680 farmers had voted, with 82 per cent supporting the proposed programme. The Department’s own figures of 250,000 to 300,000 commercial potato growers in the United States show that the favorable vote for control was something less than 10 per cent of the whole number of potato farmers. The remaining 90 per cent either failed to vote or voted against the programme. Hear, then, the AAA press release of October 25: —

Growers in commercial potato-producing areas voted on the proposed acreage stabilization provisions in a referendum which ended October 2. More than 82 per cent favored the proposed potato programme. As a result, the potato goals will be included in the 1938 conservation programme.

To the lay reader this text imparts a clear impression that ‘more than 82 per cent’ of the potato growers voted for the programme, whereas the fact is that only about 10 per cent voted approval — and it was on that basis that the 1938 curtailment programme was inaugurated. As an example of news technique, this incident appears to square well with the dicta of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf: ‘It is not the task of propaganda to weigh the various rights. It must, on the contrary, exclusively underline the new position.’

Since 1933 every basic economic index of the Federal Government has been shifted in some degree to a new equation of computation. Some forty items have been added to the Labor Department’s commodity equation of living costs, and the comparative base shifted from the 1913 normal to the 1923 1925 average, with the result that the official cost-ofliving index now appears considerably lower on the comparative scale than would have been the case with the former equation.²⁹ The weekly business index of the Department of Commerce is on a new basis, adopted to give greater weight to retail trade in rural areas. By a mere cosmic coincidence, presumably, this shift was made in a period when Washington was distributing some $600,000,000 a year in farm bounties. The changed rural weight in the national weekly index of retail trade gave for a time a welcome fillip to the recovery statistics. It was like keeping warm in the Yukon by changing the spots on the thermometer.

Other changes of the same technical character were made in the Labor Department’s system of monthly reports on industrial employment and payrolls; in the Federal Reserve System’s weekly condition statement, in which the number of reporting cities was reduced from 125 to 90, and later increased to 101; in the Commerce Department’s monthly reports on foreign trade, to include the more specific classifications of ‘imports for immediate consumption’ and ‘imports for warehouse,’ as against the former single classification of mere ‘imports.’

As a result of this last change, effective in April 1934, the department’s routine monthly figures now must be read in the light of a footnote in very small type which runs: —

Import index numbers throughout this statement are based on general imports in 1929 and 1932, and on imports for consumption in 1936 and subsequent years.

Thus, we eliminate from the comparative index tables covering part of the period under the reciprocal trade treaties the imports to warehouses, which, when they later go into consumption, are no longer imports.

Doubtless many of these changes were justified on grounds of administrative economy or technical efficiency; but it is a fact that in the aggregate they operated uniformly toward two general results in the monthly and annual comparisons as projected to the nation: first, to present a better economic picture in the recovery period than would have been indicated by comparative tables based on the old equations; and, secondly, to make accurate annual comparisons utterly impossible in some of the fundamental economic indices.

In a few cases the most expensive private services were able to cut through all this jungle of technical adjustments and get to the real comparative results from month to month. But for the great body of public opinion the official picture stood, with all its distortions, as the honest measure of our relative economic position.

Neither press, radio, nor motion picture can ever prove a going policy ineffective so long as it is impossible to gain comparative figures from the only source equipped to compile them.

Another impressive device for enlivening official news came to light in North Dakota in August 1936, at a moment when President Roosevelt was on a non-political tour inspecting the drought devastation of the Dust Bowl. Pictures widely circulated through the daily press by the Resettlement Administration were proved, in at least two instances, to have been staged in advance. In one case a particularly depressing scene showed the sun-bleached skull of a steer, in the hot sands of a Dakota countryside literally crying for Federal relief funds. Inquiry by the press at Washington brought forth in a few days the official admission, from the Photographic Section of RA, that the skull was a picture property. It had been moved ‘about fifty feet’ for better light effect, and had been arranged in the heart-rending setting by the official photographer.

III

Political invective and bitter social incitement by government during the last five years mark a milestone in the development of the democratic theory in America. In other countries such resentment of criticism usually has signalized the second phase of the movement toward managed opinion.

The ‘money-changers,’ of course, were driven from the temple in President Roosevelt’s inaugural address of March 4, 1933; but hard names for the opposition did not emerge fully as a national policy until about October of that year. At that point, when NRA had begun to sag and there was much loose talk in Washington concerning the probability of Ford Motor Company’s being shut down the next week by Executive Order, General Johnson, brilliantly supported by the ever-alliterative Charles Michelson, took to the microphone coastto-coast in a last desperate effort to make democracy work. Big fellows who gagged in public over the Blue Eagle phantasmagoria were ‘economic Neanderthals,’ and the lesser fry, mine-run ‘chiselers.’ Between these front and rear ranks in the Army of Darkness moved vast regiments of ‘industrial dinosaurs,’ goose-stepping to the evil pipings of our ‘corporals of disaster.’

Since political emotionalism or social passion always feeds upon itself, it is not to be wondered at that within two years name calling had advanced to the status of an accepted instrument of the more abundant life. ‘Economic royalists,’ ‘princes of privilege,’ and ‘modern Macaulays’ are household words in the nation’s vocabulary.

When Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, then a resident of the United States, published early in 1934 a letter criticizing sharply the President’s summary cancellation of the air-mail contracts, he was denounced by a White House secretary as a publicity seeker — an incident which moved Mr. Walter Lippmann to sound the friendly warning: ‘The notion that you must not answer a critic, but must discredit him, is bad medicine anywhere at any time in any cause, however noble and however righteous.’³⁰

To-day NRA is dead and buried; but the new spirit in government marches on, now in the official observations of Mr. Aubrey Williams, Deputy Administrator of the WPA and Director of the National Youth Administration, before a group of some 850 school officials and PTA assistants in New York City, November 7, 1937: —

I often wonder why educators don’t spend more time discussing the national income and its division. But, of course, I know why. You know without me [sic] telling you. The way to advancement is to be silent about these things. Don’t stick your neck out. Don’t make statements that will get back to the school board. Don’t get into controversial subjects — that’s a crime. Don’t disturb the children. . . . I never meet a teacher who has the guts to teach these facts that I don’t feel like saying, ‘God bless him.’ He knows the risk he is running, and that the way to advancement lies in keeping quiet.³¹

The guiding attitude of mind which inspires this demoralizing class feeling throughout our government to-day is attributed by many informed Washington observers to the large influence of several younger advisers generally described as ‘the Georgetown Group.’ It was this inner circle of White House counselors whom Professor Raymond Moley described last October as ‘a group of zealots who dog the President’s heels at Washington, always pressing him to make more and more inflammatory declarations of class warfare.’³²

A few weeks later, in the New York Times for Sunday, November 14, 1937, Mr. Arthur Krock surveyed the prospect for the special session of the Congress to assemble on the morrow, concluding with the glad tidings: —

Meanwhile, it is heartening to report that at a reeent White House council adherence was duly sworn to the capitalist system when its future usefulness was called into question. This correspondent has reliably heard that when two conferees expressed doubt capitalism was worth giving another chance, or could be saved thereby, Harry L. Hopkins warmly denounced the viewpoint and the President showed the firmest sort of agreement with his Works Progress Administrator.³³

It is not possible to mark precisely the beginnings of the revolution pattern in Washington’s official thinking, but the mimeograph materials offer an illuminating timetable of its progress in propaganda. As early as May 1933, Anne O’Hare McCormick, in an appraisal of Mr. Roosevelt’s political philosophy, reported after an extended interview at the White House: ‘President Roosevelt intends to be the exponent of the New Mind in America, the open mind. . . . This search he recognizes as a revolutionary process. He thinks of himself as the leader of a revolution.’³⁴

Four months later we find an echo of the New Mind in a Knoxville press release of the TVA, under date of September 28. Outlining the Valley programme, Director David E. Lilienthal said it fell naturally into two parts. The first would be the immediate work of construction. ‘And then there is the long-range programme — the laying of plans for future economic and social objectives — plans which may take years to come to fruition, but which will have far-reaching consequences on the future course of our national life.’

In the same vein Mr. Frank C. Walker told the forty-eight state directors of the National Emergency Council at their first plenary conference in Washington, on January 31, 1934, that this new agency would assist the President’s programme ‘to bring immediate relief and recovery to the country, and to form a new and solid basis for a worth-while and social economic system.’³⁵

A profound note of hostility toward the whole system of tripartite government was heard in the memorable horscand-buggy press conference at the White House on May 31, 1935, in which the President commented at length, and with some feeling, on the NRA decision; and again in the radio address of Secretary Wallace on January 26, 1936, which described the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating AAA as ‘the greatest legalized steal in American history.’

Within two months of this latter observation, WPA was on the boards at the Biltmore Theatre, New York, with Triple-A Ploughed Under. In the finale the stage lights were dimmed while the players chanted Secretary Wallace’s characterization of the Supreme Court’s AAA decision. The curtain then was lowered upon a symbolic nation crying in anguish in the general direction of the already projected Soil Conservation Act, ‘We need you! We need you!’³⁶

On another occasion, in July 1937, the WPA Theatre applied the gentle balm of Federal entertainment to a CIO strike against the independent steels, moving a troupe of seventeen actors and singers from New York to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for a special performance of The Cradle Will Rock. This opera, by Mr. Marc Blitzstein, depicted with some power the unhappy lot of the citizens of Steeltown, U.S.A., should they fail to form a United Front. After the opera, a local reviewer reported, officials of the CIO remarked a striking resemblance between the stage character, Mr. Mister, portrayed as an influential citizen of Steeltown, and Mr. Eugene G. Grace, president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation.

‘We thought the best thing to give them would be a labor play,’ said Mr. John G. Ramsay, president of Bethlehem Lodge 1409, S. W. O. C. ‘We thought it would probably be far more educational than speakers.’

By accident or design, much of Washington’s social propaganda operates to discourage normal popular confidence in men and institutions. In turn, since 1933, every principal segment of our economic life has been subjected to concentrated attack — banks, railroads, utilities, air lines, the telephone system, merchant marine, stock and commodity exchanges.

So hopeless, when viewed in the worst possible light, did the whole panorama of American life under a Constitution appear at one point that the National Resources Committee found it advisable to bring the situation formally to the attention of the President. In a landuse survey published on July 9, 1936, the Committee declared its solemn conclusion that ‘most of the territory occupied by the United States is not naturally suited for a permanent civilization.’

Thus moves government by mimeograph, the official fever of uncharitable denunciation and unmeasured institutional smearing mounting steadily, in season and out, until it falls at length, on February 5, 1937, upon the Supreme Court of the United States.

President Roosevelt has denied many times that he seeks to exercise undue control over public opinion, but the open record to date appears to offer at least circumstantial evidence that, unwittingly perhaps, he has permitted an important segment of his Administration to fall into an attitude of mind and a pattern of conduct which in other countries have led ultimately to complete suppression of free speech and free press.

‘It is one of the characteristics of dictatorships,’ James Truslow Adams reminds us, ‘that, whatever aims or motives they start with, they feel impelled, by their very nature, to move from one danger to, and one deprivation of, the liberties of the people to another. If power becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of one man, that man has to get the backing of the people either by sheer force or by making the people want what he wants, which comes to mean control of the press, radio, and all organs of public opinion.’³⁷

That, in a word, is the verdict of all human history. If America is to escape this calamity she must attack Federal propaganda at the root. She must reestablish honest public documents and faithful public service in the field of governmental intelligence. She must open once more the normal avenues of orderly inquiry by responsible critics of politics and government. Democracy never can hope to find her way so long as she walks blindfolded.

The traditions of the free press are rooted deeply in American life. They promise to withstand the present movement toward government control of news and opinion. Press, radio, and camera, as institutions, are alive to the new tendencies in Washington. But the decision is yet to be made, the action defined. For the moment, public opinion in America is dominated decisively in the field of statecraft by the modern technique of propaganda — propaganda of the government, by the government, and for the government.