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australasian journal
of american studies
volume 35 number 1 july 2016
The State and US

Culture Industries
Edited by Rodney Taveira and Aaron Nyerges
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES

AJAS (ISSN 0705-7113) is the official journal of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies
Association. It is published twice a year, in July and December, by the Australian and New Zealand
American Studies Association and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
EDITORS
Paul Giles, University of Sydney
David Goodman, University of Melbourne
Managing Editor
Lucas Thompson, University of Sydney
REVIEWS EDITORS
History and related disciplines: Timothy Verhoeven, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies,
Monash University
Literature and related disciplines: Heather Neilson, University of New South Wales, Canberra
EDITORIAL advisory BOARD

Chadwick Allen, University of Washington, USA
Dennis Altman, La Trobe University
Fitz Brundage, University of North Carolina, USA
Lisandro E. Claudio, Kyoto University, Japan
Clare Corbould, Monash University
Yasuo Endo, University of Tokyo, Japan
Jennifer Frost, University of Auckland
Ian Gordon, National University of Singapore
Marilyn Lake, University of Melbourne
Brendon OConnor, University of Sydney

Jane Park, University of Sydney
Barbara Ryan, University of Singapore
Lisa Samuels, University of Auckland
Paul Taillon, University of Auckland
Takayuki Tatsumi, Keio University, Japan
Ian Tyrrell, University of New South Wales
Shane White, University of Sydney
Design and Layout

Chris Rudge, University of Sydney
NOTES TO CONTRIBUTORS
Editorial correspondence should be addressed to:
Paul Giles (email: paul.giles@sydney.edu.au); or
David Goodman (email: d.goodman@unimelb.edu.au).
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically. Font should be Times New Roman 12 pt. for the text and
Times New Roman 10 pt. for the endnotes. Submissions should follow the conventions of The Chicago
Manual of Style, 16th edition (2010), and use American spelling. All articles are peer reviewed, and
should not normally exceed 6,000 words in length. Endnotes should be grouped at the end of the article.
Contributors are requested to include institutional affiliation, biographical details, and an abstract.
The Editorial Board is responsible for the selection and acceptance of all contributions; however, the
opinions expressed and the accuracy of statements made therein remain the responsibility of individual
authors. Papers are considered with the understanding that they have not been published and are not under
consideration elsewhere.
Articles appearing in this journal are indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life and
the MLA. The journal is part of JSTOR, where issues appear three years after publication. The journal is
also part of the EBSCO Australian/New Zealand Reference Centre database. All material published in
AJAS becomes the property of the Editors on behalf of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies
Association. AJAS is sent free to all members of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies
Association.
australasian journal
of american studies
contents
Editorial 1
Paul Giles and David Goodman

Introduction: Populism and
Propaganda in US Culture Industries
rodney Taveira and Aaron NyerGES
articles
Demagogic Populism and US Culture
Industries: A Long Tradition 11
Paul K. Jones
Spies Spying on Spies Spying: The Rive Noire,
the Paris Review, and the Specter of Surveillance in
Post-war American Literary Expatriate Paris, 19531958
29
Craig Lanier Allen

The Committee on Public Information
and the Birth of US State Propaganda
51
Nick Fischer
Selling America to the World: The Office of War
Informations The Town (1945) and the American Scene Series
79
Dean J. Kotlowski
Four Hundred Million Customers: Carl Crow
and the Legacy of 1930s Sino-American Trade 103
Elizabeth Ingleson
nORMAN hARPER pRIZE ESSAY

Laying Claim: Framing the Occupation of Alcatraz
in the Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter
125
Rhiannon Bertaud-Gander
Book Reviews
Carroll Pursell, From Playgrounds to PlayStation
143
Reviewed by Alexandra Dumitresco

Dean J. Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR 145
Reviewed by Douglas Craig

Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus, Enterprising Women:
Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic 148
Reviewed by Jennie Jeppesen

Teresa Shewry, Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature 149
Reviewed by Ruth Blair

Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels
152
Reviewed by Jedidiah Evans

Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus:
Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States 155
Reviewed by Claudia B. Haake

Ian Tyrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation:
Empire and Conversation in Theodor Roosevelts America 157
Reviewed by Ruth A. Morgan

Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir, eds. Bigger than Ben-Hur:
The Book, Its Adaptations, and their Audiences 159
Reviewed by Heather Neilson

Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls:
Memory and the Womens Suffrage Movement, 18481898 163
Reviewed by Ana Stevenson

notes on contributors 166
Editorial
This special issue of the Australasian Journal of American Studies, edited by
Rodney Taveira and Aaron Nyerges, arises out of a conference held at the US
Studies Centre in June 2015 on The State and US Culture Industries. While
questions of how state surveillance relates to issues of national security and
individual freedom have a long provenance, extending back through the Cold
War and earlier, they have been given sharper resolution in recent times by
political affairs involving Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks, as well as by
wide-ranging debates in the United States and elsewhere about the nature of
cybersecurity. The contributions to this special issue frame these controversies
within the context of American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, seeking to place charged conceptions of how cultural narratives relate
to state power within a broader historical framework.
We are also printing in this issue an article by Rhiannon Bertaud-Gander,
which was awarded the 2016 Norman Harper prize for the best undergraduate
essay in any American Studies topic or field. Bertaud-Ganders piece addresses
American Indian activism of the 1960s in the context of more recent scholarship
on Native American cultural politics, and the events it describes offer an
interesting precursor to current articulations of pan-Indigenous protest, a topic
that again resonates in Australia and New Zealand as well as in the United States.
This issue features a redesign of the journals cover and page layout by
Chris Rudge, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Sydney. While the
previous design for AJAS has seen stalwart service over many years, we believed
that now was a good time to update the journals visual appearance in the light
of its modulation into a production sponsored jointly by the Australia and
New Zealand American Studies Association and the US Studies Centre at the
University of Sydney.
Paul Giles
David Goodman
Australasian Journal of American Studies
Introduction
Populism and Propaganda in

the US Culture Industries
Rodney Taveira and Aaron Nyerges
Conditions prevailing in our society tend to transform neurosis and even mild
lunacy into a commodity which the afflicted can easily sell.
T heodor Adorno
The true theatre of a demagogue is a democracy.
James Fenimore Cooper
Ever since billionaire Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016
Republican presidential nomination in June 2015, politicians (both Democratic
and Republican), the media, and the global public have expressed an escalating
concern with what Adorno might have called the mild lunacy of the man. No
doubt the presumptive Republican nominee (at the time of writing) expresses
many of the traits of the anti-democratic demagogue that Adorno isolates:
he turns his personality into a commodity for sale; he has won supporters by
playing upon their unconscious mechanisms rather than by presenting them
with rational arguments; he has depended on the bogey men of Muslims and
Mexicans; and he has favored oratorical exhibitions (including those driven
home by his vulgarian fingers) rather than what Adorno calls discursive logic.1
Indeed, Trumps campaign success raises the crucial political quandary of
demagogy as Adorno describes it. For Adorno, the means of demagogues and
agitators are identical to their ends: the entire weight of [their] propaganda
is self-promotion, and thus propaganda itself becomes the ultimate content.2
Irrational propaganda in America is a cycle of agitation without motivation.
The entire question, the terrible question, therefore, that hovers over Trumps
run for President is how the institutionalization of his rhetoric might convert
the means of his self-promotion into a real political end. How might Trumps
australasian journal of american studies

Volume 35, No. 1, July 2016 The Australian and New Zealand
American Studies Association and The United States Studies Centre
demagogic populismto borrow a phrase from Paul K. Joness contribution

to this issuebecome (or, has it always been?) an institution of the American
state? All the authors collected in this issue offer answers to this question.
What, we cumulatively ask, is the interface between the populist energies of
propaganda, as it moves through the public sphere, and the organs and agencies
of the US State?
Conservatives have bristled at academic explanations of the Trump
phenomenon. Authoritarian Americans are the key to Trumps success,
declared political scientist Matthew MacWilliam in February 2016, after
surveying 358 South Carolinians likely to vote in the Republican primary.3 In
response, Samuel Goldman, writing in The American Conservative, expressed
misgivings about the scholarship on American authoritarianism by citing the
Frankfurt School provenance of the concept in the Institute for Social Research
(Frankfurt! Freud!), and the contemporary identification of authoritarianism by
surveys that ask questions about attitudes towards parenting such as, Please tell
me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate
or to be well-behaved? To be authoritarian, says Goldman, means little more
than endorsing the folk wisdom of a class and place that many academics find
alien.4 Following a similarly folksy route, Walter Russell Mead sidelines the
explanatory power of authoritarianism in favor of the return of a Jacksonian
populism: Combining a suspicion of Wall Street, a hatred of the cultural left, a
love of middle class entitlement programs, and a fear of free trade, Jacksonian
America has problems with both Republican and Democratic agendas.5
While previous Presidents have been able to harvest populist and demagogic
energiesFranklin D. Roosevelt from Huey Long; Richard Nixon from
George WallaceTrump presents himself as a strong leader above, or at least
unbeholden to, Washington and its polarized politics that has caused Americas
decline. His is not a state propaganda, though it is a populism and thus consequential for the history of the American state.
Indeed, the notion of a returned Jacksonian moment for America squares
with Michael Kazins definition of populism as a persistent yet mutable style of
political rhetoric with roots deep in the nineteenth century.6 Moreover, American
populism is distinctly anti-government, unlike, for example, populism in
Europe or the United Kingdom. Yet the local barbeques and newspapers that
fueled Jacksons Democratic machinery are a far cry from Trumps megalomaniacal self-indulgence on The Apprentice. The impulses of populism are only as
living or persuasive as the technologies with which populists transmit them. All
of which is simply to make the McLuhanesque point that a large part of political
4
meaning inheres in, not through, its communication. To quote Hannah Arendt:
Communication is not an expression of thoughts or feelings, which then could
only be secondary to them; truth itself is communicative and disappears outside
communication.7 As sound as this notion may seem, in the American context,
populist speech operates as a divisive bind on the national body, alienating even
as it converts. Its ability to do so, as Arendt observes, remains immanent to
communicative acts, but those acts take place in a shifting environment prone
to breakdown, malfunction, and misunderstanding.
It is no wonder, then, that the theory of communication as a method used
to manipulate or manage mass opinion emerges, as John Durham Peters notes,
amidst a host of other theories of communication in the 1920s (the time of the
maturation of the technologies of radio).8 As incorporated into our thinking
about media and populism as Kazins and Peterss works have become, there
remains the pressing scholarly business of charting the modulations of populism
and propaganda across different communicative forms and historical periods.
The authors included in this issue address that imperative, examining radio,
literature, film, advertisements and posters, business manuals, periodicals,
and television. They chart the development of populist communication from
the early-twentieth century to the present. At the core of the dividing bind that
makes up the populist knot are the intertwining and imagined figures of the
elite and the people: a phantom conversation manifested in what we might
call the modulating frequencies of propagandistic impulses.
In the opening piece, Paul K. Jones offers a synoptic historical analysis of the
relation between demagogy and various US culture industries. Beginning with
the recent attempt by the New York Times to take down Trump, Jones historicizes the links between political (and religious) demagogy, the professionalization of newspaper journalism, and the rise of broadcast demagogues such as
Father Charles Coughlin. The Fourth Estates role of holding-to-account finds
its paragon in the struggle between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy
(lionized in George Clooneys 2005 film, Good Night and Good Luck). But
perhaps this encounter exposes the shared techniques of propaganda more than
taking down the propagandist? Murrow gave McCarthy a prerecorded right of
reply, thus engineering the response to his television segment just as much as
McCarthy triggered desired responses by his use of down-home, populist, and
inflammatory rhetoric. A contemporary figure working in the same vein is
John Oliver, whose beginnings on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a satirical
television news program that ironically appropriated the techniques of Fox
News presenters (who themselves draw on the methods and tropes of right-wing
talk-back radio), demonstrates the openness or polarity of the sphere of propagandistic communications. In a segment that went viral, Oliver ridiculed
Trump by referring to his immigrant heritage, enjoining his viewers to refer to
Trump as Drumpf, his family name before it was Americanized by his German
grandfather. Oliver emblazoned Drumpf on the same red baseball caps and
t-shirts that Trump writes his campaign slogan on, and made them available for
purchase. This stunt is an example of what Jones argues is the commodification
of mediated demagogic speech, a uniquely American phenomenon within
Western democracies. Decommodification, Jones argues, is thus the most
plausible means of reducing US culture industry demagogy.
Jones notes, following Adorno, that the demagogue differs from his audience
primarily in his capacity for articulate succinctness and verbal aggression.
While this definition epitomizes Trumps tweets, five-second television news
grabs, and campaign slogans (which, interestingly, are longer than Australias
storied three-word slogans), we can trace a shift to this mode of communication
as the United States entered World War I. Nick Fischer, in The Committee on
Public Information and the Birth of US State Propaganda, analyses the simultaneous birth of total war and modern communications that began a new era of
state propaganda. Under the leadership of George Creel, a progressive and former
journalist, the US government established the Committee on Public Information
(CPI) within days of declaring war on Germany. Fischer argues that the CPI was
a world-first, an agency of state communication that sought to persuade the
public not only by censorship, but by co-opting the media. For example, Creel
claimed that he could call upon over 3000 historians to oversee the production
of posters, window cards, and similar material of pictorial publicity for the use
of various Government departments and patriotic societies. An apposite image
of the near-deterministic link between state propaganda, modern communications, and technology is the Four Minute Men (so called because of the amount
of time it took to change a reel of film). These community volunteers delivered
speeches crafted by the CPI. Creel claimed that by the end of the war, the Four
Minute Men had delivered more than 750,000 speeches to 315 million people
at lodges, fraternal organizations, unions, granges, churches, synagogues,
Sunday schools, womens clubs, and colleges. In this way, the rise of American
propaganda coincides with the rise of the progressive-cum-liberal US state,
grounded in notions of expertise, a scientific approach to social and economic
problems, and a new, intimate relation between citizen and government.
This development, in turn, led to a burgeoning managerialism buttressed by
advertising and the emerging field of public relations, a milieu in which Edward
6
Bernays could unselfconsciously declare in 1928: Propaganda is the executive

arm of the invisible government.9 Fischer interrogates the legacy of the CPI,
which came under contemporaneous charges of public manipulation, while
at the same time pioneering propaganda techniques that would be used by the
United States in World War II and the Cold War.
Drawing on the methods of the CPI, the US governments Office of War
Information (OWI) deployed the small farming town to sell America to the
world during World War II. Dean J. Kotlowski, in his contribution, gives
special attention to the short documentary The Town (1945) directed, perhaps
surprisingly, by the European emigre Josef von Sternberg. Part of The American
Scene, a thirteen-part series of short documentaries produced by OWIs overseas
branch, The Town showcased farmers and citizens of small towns to underscore
the effectiveness of American government, the diversity of American ethnic
cultures, and the blend of realism, idealism, piety, and diligence that marked
the American character. Reproducing the co-optation of media that began with
the CPI and continues into the present,10 The American Scene engaged in soft sell
advertising by sending the message to international audiences that Americans
were just like Europeans and that democracy had the capacity to solve pressing
problems. The series implies that the liberal policies initiated by Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and which coincided with the birth of US state propaganda, had
succeeded in enhancing security for a wide range of Americans.
It is not just the proselytization of democracy against fascism that provides
an argument for the use of US propaganda. Despite its conventionally pejorative
tone, the word propaganda, even before the rise of National Socialism, had not
solely been taken on anti-democratic terms. Ten years before Walter Benjamin
famously called on artists to politicize their aesthetics in answer to fascisms
aestheticization of politics, W.E.B. Du Bois celebrated the propagation of
political ideas through artistic effort. For Du Bois, all art was propaganda. In a
speech to the NAACP in 1926, he said:
I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has
been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love
and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is
stripped and silent.11
Du Boiss sense of a conflict between the written and the unwritten, the vocal
and the silenced, is somewhat complicated by recent research into the federal
governments involvement with and harassment of American writers. How,

for instance, is it possible to maintain a vocal/silent binary in light of the FBIs
surreptitious reading and even ghostwriting of American literature? In reference
to Richard Wrights poem of the same name, William J. Maxwells F.B.Eyes
reveals how federal agents not only carefully read and constructed a canon of
black leftist authors in the early-twentieth century, but also how those very same
agents ventriloquized those authors, speaking through and for them in disruptive
acts of subterfuge. It is precisely this dilemma that Craig Lanier Allen visits in
his contribution, turning his attention to the under-chronicled Gibson Affair of
1958, a major forgery case that French and American literary scholars have long
suspected was instigated by American intelligence agents. Allens view of the
forgery is richly contextualized by emergent scholarly literatures that prove the
collusion between the formation of American literature as a global institution
and the promotion of the US National Security agenda. Following studies such
as Frances Stonor Saunderss Cold War Culture and Louis Rubins Archives of
Authority, Allen illuminates the netherworld where The Paris Review merges
with the CIA, and the government forges letters by its citizens to harass its
expatriate literary celebrities (whose expatriation to the very Europe with which
the OWI was hoping to show affinity was, ironically, largely a result of the racial
segregation purposefully elided from The American Series in its attempt to sell
American democracy). This concurrence is imaged by the specter of surveillance that existed between the two principal groups of American writers living
and working in post-war Paris, namely the community of black American
writers known collectively as Pariss Rive Noire or Black Bank (Richard
Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes) and the founders of The Paris Review
(George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Harold L. Doc Humes). For Allen, the
history of American expatriation in post-World War II Paris encapsulates the
historical tension between freedom and citizenship. No doubt the US governments surveillance of American writers living and working in post-war Paris
infringed upon their freedoms and complicated their notions of civic responsibility to the United States.
The final contribution to this special issue sees US propaganda mobilized
across the nations other oceanic route of connection and desired (economic)
conquest. Trumps rise on the wave of what Mead sees as returned Jacksonianism
is again anticipated in the folksy rhetoric and imagery deployed by Carl Crows
Four Hundred Million Customers, first published in 1937. In the same way that much
of the scholarship on populism and propaganda (Kazin, Peters) coincides with
the (Bill) Clinton era and the dismantling of the liberal state, the republication
8
of Crows book in 2003 as a source of contemporary expertise on China demonstrates the persistently modulating frequencies of propagandistic impulses.
Elizabeth Inglesons essay examines the means by which Crows 76-year-old
book could hold contemporary relevance. Here, the language between elites
(experts or China hands, and business leaders) is refracted through a populist
discourse of folksy truism. If only, Crow laments, the Chinese would adopt the
adage that An apple a day keeps the doctor away, then Americas apple growers
would experience an unprecedented boon. The nexus of government, expertise,
industry, and diplomacythat is, the domain of elitesis made legible by
populist rhetoric that has, historically, given shape and content to American
propaganda. Further, Ingleson argues that this confluence illustrates the ways
in which Western-centric expectations of change in China continued to inform
American foreign policy in the post-Cold War period.
When the conference that produced this volume of essays was conceived
and organized by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney,
Trumps political fortunes appeared dim and, to be honest, nigh laughable. Yet
he has flummoxed his detractors and emerged as a politically viable candidate by
denouncing the very institutions representing the office he covets. A textbook
demagogue, he presents himself as the antithesis to the bureaucrat, selling
personality to the unconscious rather than policy to the conscious. If nothing
else, this collection helps to make sense of, and in part, to explain, the early
observation by Adorno, that American propaganda, as we are seeing in the case
of Trump, serves mainly as an excuse for itself. Our broad claim here is that
the circularity of US propaganda, which Adorno noticed replaced politics with
personality, is best explained through its special relationship to populism, the
outrage toward elites promulgated by, in many cases, those elites themselves.
This collection thus charts the rise and fall of US agencies as the sources of an
instrumentalized or institutionalized propaganda. If in an age before Saunderss
and Rubins scholarship, one could identify propaganda out of its obvious
difference from civil social communicationfrom its difference to the works of
George Orwell, Thomas Mann, or William Faulkner; from its difference to the
films of Frank Capra or Howard Hawks; to its difference from the bureaucratic
manuals of free trade business elitesincreasingly, the distinction between
the US state and the free communiques of the civil sphere appears illegible.
The disappearance or outmoding of agencies such as the CPI or OWI or CIAs
Congress of Cultural Freedom should not dispel this anxiety in any way.
The world over, commentators rush to single out the essential significance
of the Trump phenomenon. But the collection here assembled implies that if
the rise of Trump means anything, it means this: it is via American populism
that, in the US, propaganda emerges outside of public institutions and appears
as a commercial brand, a means of self-promotion hostile even to those conventional state-based organs of propaganda upon which it depends; thus, Trump,
while singular, is not special. He is wholly a part of the system that he decries;
he would be nothing without the propaganda on which both public institutions
and the private individual rely. In a land that pits the demagogic personality
against the faceless bureaucrat, each provide an alibi for the other, protesting,
unsuccessfully perhaps, against their essential sameness.
Notes
1. Theodor Adorno, Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda, in The Stars
Down to Earth (1946; repr. London: Routledge, 1994), 219, 222. For the source of the
infamous vulgarian description see Graydon Carter, see Steel Traps and Short
Fingers, Vanity Fair (November, 2015), http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/10/
graydon-carter-donald-trump.
2. Ibid., 220.
3. Matthew MacWilliams, The best predictor of Trump support isnt income,
education, or age. Its authoritarianism, Vox, February 23, 2016, http://www.vox.
com/2016/2/23/11099644/trump-support-authoritarianism.
4. Samuel Goldman, Are Trump Supporters Authoritarians? The American
Conservative, February, 24 2016, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/
are-trump-supporters-authoritarians/. Some of the questions are included in the
American National Election Study. See Stanley Feldman and Karen Stenner, Perceived
Threat and Authoritarianism, Political Psychology 18, no. 4 (1998).
5. Walter Russell Mead, Andrew Jackson, Revenant, The American Interest, Jan 16
2016, http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/17/andrew-jackson-revenant/.
6. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 5.
7. Hannah Arendt, Concern with Politics (1954), quoted in John Durham Peters,
Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), 280.
8. Peters, Speaking Into the Air, 1120.
9. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928; repr. New York: IG Publishing, 2005), 48.
10. For example, see Tricia Jenkinss The CIA in Hollywood for an account of the CIAs
history of influencing the content of film and television production.
11. W.E.B. Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art, The Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290297.
10
Demagogic Populism and

US Culture Industries
A Long Tradition
Paul K. Jones
abstract Frankfurt School conceptions of culture industry and demagogy are
employed in a synoptic historical analysis of the relation between demagogy and

US culture industries. A recent New York Times editorial critique of Donald Trumps
demagogy is placed in a tradition of tension between US high journalism and demagogy
dating from the 1920s. This period saw the near simultaneous codification of professional editorial newspaper ethics and the rise of broadcast demagogues like Father
Charles Coughlin. The tradition reaches its most famous conflict point in the now
heroicized struggle between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy. The state sought
to redress the rise of culture industry demagogy via communications regulation known
as The Fairness Doctrine. The latters demise enabled the 1990s return to prominence
of demagogic speech within the culture industries. The article argues, however, that
what was pivotal to this history was the facilitation of the commodification of mediated
demagogic speech at the advent of broadcasting, a path apparently unique to the USA
amongst the major democracies. Rather than a return to the contentious burden on
speech of a Fairness Doctrine, decommodification is thus the most plausible means of
reducing US culture industry demagogy.
Introduction: Demagogy, Propaganda, Populism

On November 24, 2015, the New York Times editorialized against presidential
aspirant Donald Trumps racist lies and related aggressive hyperbole.1 The Times
placed Trump in a tradition of US demagogues who arise every generation or
so. Precursors of Trump named and comparatively cited were Joseph McCarthy

11
and George Wallace. Passages of their speech were juxtaposed with similar
statements by Trump. In a summary subheader, the editorial board proclaimed,
Its up to the media to confront demagogy with the truth.2
Those familiar with the pantheon of heroicized US journalists would
undoubtedly recognize here an allusion to Edward R. Murrows exposure of
Joseph McCarthy on his See It Now television program in 1954. Murrows actions
in that instance have been widely celebrated as an exemplary slaying of the
dragon of demagogy, not least in the recent filmic recreation, Good Night and
Good Luck, and as a revered exemplary figure in Aaron Sorkins The Newsroom.3
However, like Murrow, the Times editorial did more than confront
demagogy with the truth by using orthodox journalistic fact-checking to
expose spurious assertions as such. That much had already been achieved by
its reporters in the days before the editorial. Murrow and the 2015 Times editorialists went further. Their exposure of demagogy required identifying and
demonstrating certain techniques of demagogic rhetoric. Famously, Murrow
did not confront McCarthy directly, but presented an analysis of archive footage
to his viewers that demonstrated McCarthys techniquessuch as unsub
stantiable innuendoas techniques. Murrow then provided McCarthy with
time for a prerecorded right of reply, which resulted in a set-piece demonstration
by McCarthy of the very techniques Murrow had detailed. Likewise, it is the
comparative identification of such rhetorical techniques that enabled the Times
to place Trump as a successor to McCarthy and Wallace.
In US academic traditions, notably the fields of communication and rhetoric,
such analysis and critique of demagogy is often articulated via a conception
of propaganda. This propaganda, however, is not restricted to actions of the
state nor to state actors and aspirants (like McCarthy and Trump); nor even
to wartime or war-like circumstances. Historically at least, this conception
of propaganda has been applied to advertising and other forms of commercial
content of the culture industries.4
So (demagogic) propaganda and culture industry do not stand in oppositional binary, as in the First Amendments binarization of state and free
speech. Rather, demagogic practice can be found on both sides of state/culture
industry. Indeed, crucial to this liminality is the self-positioning of professional
journalism within the culture industries, again exemplified by Murrow and the
New York Times.5 For the 2015 Times editorialists, part of Trumps success lies in
his usage of social media, where theres no need to respond to questions about
his fabrications. Accordingly, that makes it imperative that other forms of
media challenge him.
12
Journalism, or at least professional journalisms norm of accountability to

verified facts, thus marks a key point of self-differentiation from demagogy
within the culture industries. Of course the term culture industry dates from
the Horkheimer/Adorno usage in reference to cinema and radio broadcasting.6
It is the advent of audio-visual recording, editing, and broadcasting that culture
industry signals technically and those technical innovations, certainly for
Adorno, afford commodification.
The Timess current concern that social media provide a public space
devoid of journalistic accountability norms has an antecedent in the moment
of formation of US broadcasting as a new cultural industry in the 1920s. At
that time, not only did radio likewise pose a technologico-communicative
alternative to print publishing, its US regulatory configuration came to
foster broadcast demagogy. These radio demagogues, as we shall see, are
also routinely categorized today as populists, and their demagogy drew the
particular attention of Adorno and his colleagues, albeit primarily under the
sign of fascism.
Following the recent work of Nadia Urbinati, I classify such populism as
demagogic populism. Against the grain of many contemporary US historians
and analysts of populism, Urbinati considers demagogic disfiguration a real,
but not necessary, prospect for all populist movements. That is, demagogues
have the capacity to capture all or some of a populist movements momentum,
especially those that aim for legitimate governmental power.7
Opinion and the Rise of Demagogy within

the Early US Culture Industry
Journalistic techniques of fact-verification and the related investigative critical
exposure of nefarious political practices are usually traced to the canonical
American Society of Newspaper Editorss Code of Ethics of 192223.8 In that
text, US professional journalism borrowed from positivism a confidence in
objectivity as a means of differentiating itself from other practices, including
propagandists. As Schudson has put it:
Journalists not only sought to affiliate with the prestige of science,

efficiency, and Progressive reform but they sought to disaffiliate from
the public relations specialists and propagandists who were suddenly all
around them.9
Paul K. Jones
13
Journalisms self-differentiation from propagandists was more difficult in the

new medium of radio, where there was no comparable established tradition of
journalistic practice.10
The chaotic early years of US broadcasting were succeeded by a remarkable
organizational arrangement. The regulation of broadcasting had become
necessary in all nation-states due to a phenomenon known later as spectrum
scarcity. Since the analogue radio spectrum was a finite resource, frequencies
needed to be allocated by a regulator. In the USA, that regulator was the Federal
Radio (later Communications) Commission (FRC/FCC).11 This requirement in
turn necessitated licensing individual stations, a practice that had no parallel
in US newspapers. Different nation states attached different conditions to these
licences. Common European practice established monopoly public service broadcasters (PSBs) like the BBC, funded by a flat-tax-like universal licence fee that
enabled a ban on advertising content and revenue. These PSBs developed well-resourced news divisions with charters committed to editorial independence that
resembled those of the professionalization movement within US newspapers.
However, these PSB charters also routinely prohibited editorialization (in the
sense of newspaper leader-editorials) and required that broadcast opinion be
balanced and/or mediated by journalistic formats like panel discussions.12
In US terms, the PSB model enabled broadcast opinionated speech to achieve
circulationbut not via a literal understanding of a marketplace of ideas. It so
insulated opinionated speech from being rendered a commodity.
The USA, in contrast, did pursue a literalist understanding of a marketplace
of broadcast opinion. Unlike the broadcasting systems adopted in most
comparable democracies, the US approach from 1929 resolved the question of
public service requirements of broadcasters entirely via commercial general
public interest station licences. Not only would advertising be the chief
revenue source for these licensees, but diversity of opinion would be achieved
simply via the sale of airtime.13 Thus in the case of opinionrather than news
as suchUS broadcasting initially elided a central normative mediating role
for professional journalism. The path then lay open for raw opinion to be
shaped as a commodity.14
For Urbinati, a defining feature of demagogic populism, in political
theoretical terms, is its overvaluation of the opinion over the will of a
sovereign people as citizens within a democracy. Will here refers to the election
of governments and the configuration of representative institutions, often
as a separation of powers. Opinion refers to the extrainstitutional domain
of political opinions that broadly corresponds to most contemporary usage
14
of public sphere.15 In successful democracies, following Urbinatis normative

model, these two domains co-exist in balance. Demagogic invocations of the
people usually seek to elide or override the domain of will, claiming that the
latters mediating institutions and separations of powers are inauthentic.
We might then add to Urbinatis model a role for professional journalism
as an institution whose ideals speak to a comparable mediation within the
domain of opinion. Whatever its failings, including a conflation of proprietor/
publisher and editor/journalist, this was the intent of the various claims from
the mid-nineteenth century onwards that the press constitutes a fourth
estate that might itself represent opinion and so be considered the voice of
the people.16What was most unusual about the US culture industry configuration in this context was its effective institutional provision of a space, in the
hegemonic commercial public service stations, where (professional) journalisms oppositethe overvaluation of unmediated opinion as suchmight
flourish on a potentially national scale. Ironically, this regulatory approach
formally designated the weaker non-commercial educational and non-profit
stations as propaganda stations.17
US broadcasting had barely commenced when the most influential of US
radio demagogues, Father Charles Coughlin, launched his broadcasting career
in 1926. Coughlin soon rose to prominence by gathering a vast audience as his
weekly addresses became increasingly political. By the summer of 1930, he was
networked by CBS, and by the mid-1930s his regular radio audience was conservatively estimated at ten million and speculated to be the largest in the world.18
He was initially a supporter of FDR and the New Deal but became increasingly
critical of both. He was later reported to be considering an alliance with Senator
Huey Long, himself an accomplished (radio) demagogue. Each had established a
social movement-like organization of dedicated followers who gathered in large
rallies: Coughlins Social Justice Movement and Longs Share Our Wealth. Long
seemed a likely challenger to FDR in the 1936 election, but was assassinated in 1935.
Coughlin then led the formation of a Union Party that allied his own and Longs
former social movements.19 The Union Presidential candidate lost ignominiously
in 1936, and Coughlin briefly retired from broadcasting. A more overtly antiSemitic and fascistic Coughlin returned to the airwaves in 1938. In that year,
he even republished the notorious and long-discredited Protocols of the Elders
of Zion document in his newsletter, Social Justice.20 Increased self-regulatory
actions by commercial broadcasters, among other reasons, ended his broadcasting career in 1940.21 Coughlin then continued to publish his views beyond
his parish in his newsletter.
Paul K. Jones
15
Intellectual Responses to Emergent

Culture Industry Demagogy
Within critical scholarly analysis of propaganda, Coughlin, especially his
later broadcast phase, became a paradigmatic case. Alfred and Elizabeth
Lees now canonical The Fine Art of Propaganda (1939) pursued a strategy
of popular education of critical awareness of propaganda techniques that
they termed devices. Coughlin was found to employ seven key devices,
popular knowledge of which, the Lees thought, would alleviate the effects of
propaganda. Separating the device from the idea would reveal what the idea
amounts to on its own merits.22
The Lees even composed a rhyme, Snow White and the Seven Devices, to
be sung in schools to the melody of the dwarves Heigh Ho song from Disneys
1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves:
Oh, we are the seven devices,

We turn up in time of crisis;
We play upon your feeling,
We set your brains a-reeling,
We are seven active contrabanders,
We are seven clever propaganders.23
Significantly, the Lees decided to close their Institute for Propaganda Analysis
once the USA entered World War II since its remit to assess all propaganda
dispassionately would have conflicted with the war effort.
It is a surprisingly little known fact that among the admirers of the Lees
work were members of the migr Frankfurt School. Both Theodor Adorno and
Leo Lowenthal used The Fine Art of Propaganda as a model for handbook-like
studies of demagogues that they undertook within the Institute for Social
Researchs Studies in Prejudice Project (SIPP). Adorno also referred to the Lees
handbook frequently in related writings.24 Funded primarily by the American
Jewish Committee, SIPP aimed to identify and analyse domestic anti-Semitic
proto-fascism. Unlike the Lees work, SIPP continued its research on demagogy
after the USA went to war. Wider social prejudice was also its object.25 However,
the SIPP demagogy studies hardly considered the US public a Snow White like
that in the Lees rhyme. As Adorno put it: The devices pointed out in McLung
Lees book on Father Coughlin are only elements of a much farther-reaching
pattern of behavior.26
16
The Lees emphasis, as we have seen, was on techniques of propaganda, which

they evidently regarded as shared by nation-states at war, public relations, and
domestic demagogic figures like Coughlin, who were playing with fascism.27
This technicism usefully moved the discussion away from the still-prominent
essentialist conception of the demagogue as an exceptional figure driven by a
lust for power. As Adorno reflected in 1968:
The opinions of the demagogues are by no means as restricted to the lunatic

fringe as one may at first, optimistically, suppose. They occur in considerable measure in the utterances of so-called respectable people, only not as
succinctly and aggressively formulated.28
The Frankfurt analyses, in contrast to both the essentialist conception and the
Lees work, tied propaganda and demagogy together more closely, but then
tied both of these to the culture industry. The result, in Adornos words, was a
conception of demagogy as a kind of psycho-technics.29
SIPPs demagogue was a modern figure, not even necessarily a skillful
orator of the assembly. Heconsideration of the prospect of female demagogues
is a significant lacunadid not persuade by applying the classical techniques of
oratory to an issue of the day, or by developing an orthodox political programme.
Rather, he consistently worked with an amazing stereotypy of agitational
themes. The demagogue was thus a narcissistic opportunist who was best
understood psychoanalytically while the stereotypy of the techniques, as
initially identified by the Lees and extended by SIPP, lent themselves to culture
industry standardization.
As Adorno notes in the quotation above, the demagogue differs from his
audience primarily by degreein his capacity to articulate succinctly using
verbal aggression. Indeed, it is the performance of a mode of disinhibited
hysteria that elicits a rapport with the audience.30 This dynamic was assessed
within SIPP as irrational in that it did not operate cognitively, butin contrast
to essentialist models of the demagogueneither did it rest on a binarization
of a correspondingly essentialist conception of emotionalism to account for
demagogic success.
The key psychoanalytic dynamic of that rapport for Adorno, Horkheimer,
and Lowenthal was based in paranoia and projection. The psychotechnics of
demagogy relied on thematics that portrayed social relations as entirely interpersonal ones. In other words, and consistent with Urbinatis more recent
conception, demagogic speech so seeks to elide all forms of institutional
Paul K. Jones
17
mediation. Beyond this, and once institutional and systemic social relations
are elided, the paranoia/projection dynamic can fixate on the alleged
conspirators.
The complexity of this model may seem at odds with some of the titular
forms SIPP employed: Prophets of Deceit, Enlightenment as Mass Deception,
and so on. So, again, a risk arises of an overreliance on an unexamined notion
of rationality pitted against the irrationality of demagogic mobilization. There
is no question that the use of an irrationalism that exploits mood states forms
the core SIPP charge against the demagogues. However, their audiences are
typically regarded sympathetically as victimsalbeit potentially dangerous
victims if fully mobilizedrather than merely dismissed with elitist disdain.
Moreover, the titular deceit motif is also indicative, for Adorno at least, of
a sympathetic dialogue with American democratic norms. In later writings,
Adorno certainly stated this explicitly.31 It would seem that, to some degree, the
SIPP researchers were prepared to speak to, but not embrace, what I would call
a liberal exposure framework. Consistent with the Lees work, and indeed the
Times editorial regarding Trump, this framework posits a good cognitive citizen
who is susceptible to rational argument and always already capable of rational
judgement. Present this citizen with sufficient information, so this critical logic
goes, and demagogic power, understood as deceit, collapses.
For Adorno, there is a prominent counterexample to this liberal exposure
strategy (or truth propaganda, as he calls it): the case of The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion document. Its continuing survival and circulationincluding, as we have
seen, by Coughlindespite its exposure as a fake (by The Times of London) is
sufficient evidence for Adorno that truth propaganda is an inadequate counterdemagogic strategy.32
Pathological Tradition or Populist Dissidence?

Now, notwithstanding the Timess identification of Trumps demagogy as the
reiteration of a generational pattern, to suggest here that Coughlins demagogy
forms part of a long demagogic populist tradition within the culture industries
remains controversial.
For decades, American historians have debated a similar thesis, most
associated with the work of Richard Hofstadter. Drawing openly on the SIPP
research, Hofstadter and his collaborators argued in the 1950s and 1960s that
Coughlin had rearticulatedand so changed the emphasis ofkey thematics
from the US Populist movement. A line, albeit a crooked one, could thus be drawn
18
from the Populists to McCarthy.33 Hofstadter famously named this tendency the
paranoid style in US politics.34
Hostadters historian critics misinterpreted the chief target of his
suspicions (Coughlin) and mounted a defence of the Populist movement as
such.35 This defence of the legitimacy of Populismand its Progressivist legacy
was extended to Coughlin and Long who, in Alan Brinkleys much-lauded work,
were rechristened dissidents.36 Demagogy disappeared from the revisionist
vocabulary, and in what remains the definitive work on US populism, Kazins
The Populist Persuasion, even Coughlins anti-Semitic demagogy is relocated as
merely a populism of fools.37
This revisionist orthodoxy provides the background to Urbinatis 1998
observation that while European populism is routinely marked bad, mainly
due to its associations with fascism, US populism seems to endure as almost
necessarily good.38
Yet parallels between the two are certainly discernible. If recent European
developments are dominated by the rise of new formations that seek to render
proto-fascist positions respectable within multi-party electoral systems, the
US narrative is well known to be one of a steady shift towards the Right by the
Republican Party, driven in part by demagogic figures. Trump can be readily
located within such developments.
More recent revisionist research, still positioned against Hofstadter, has
emphasised the grassroots character of this Republican transformation from the
early 1960s through to the emergence of a Reaganite populist conservativism.39
In an important recent corrective to the terms of this enduring debate,
Heather Hendershot has highlighted the role of minor but influential post-McCarthy cold war demagogues who proliferated until the beginnings of the
Reaganite ascendancy in the 1970s.40 As in Europe, their positions were regarded
as too extreme for the respectable New Right. Yet they nonetheless contributed
to the rightward shift.
Hendershots key insight is the underestimation of the significance of
the role of broadcasting in all these developments.41 But this claim does not
refer to the routine acknowledgment of the rise and very gradual decline of
mainstream network televisions influence on political communication in
electoral politics since the televising of election debates. Rather, she refers
primarily to the curiously pivotal, but initially marginal, role of broadcast
radio in the rightward shift. Hendershots ultrasultraconservative or
extremist demagoguesresumed elements of Coughlins practices on a
smaller scale. While others of their ilk did not use radio, those researched
Paul K. Jones
19
by Hendershot used it in highly strategic ways and as a result were more

successful and enduring.42
Moreover, radio provided not just a forum but a consolidating form to what
appeared from a radio-blind perspective to be a disparate array of eccentric egoists.
Small, independently owned stations scheduled these figures in succession.
Even Hendershot does not draw out the full implications of her insight here.
For her ultras thus established a bridge between Coughlins solo purchases of
discrete packets of radio broadcast timefunded by listener donationsand the
contemporary format of aggressive talk radio.
My titular long tradition thus relies on the slow development of what
Adorno and Horkheimer saw as a two-sided merger of propaganda and cultural
industrial form. Arguing from the case of advertising in the 1940s, they
pointed to the US broadcast culture industrys dependence on advertising for
revenue but equally to advertisings role as propagandistic cultural form (in the
broad critical sense of this term introduced above).43 In the case of this tradition
of demagogic speech, a comparable convergence point was not reached until the
1990s when an important shift occurred in mediated demagogys other liberal
nemesis, regulation.
Culture-Industrial Demagogy Unbound?

The surfacing of Trumps demagogy vindicates a predictive warning issued
within the last writings of the First Amendment and media-regulation scholar,
C. Edwin Baker. Baker developed an entire democratic safeguard model
of democracy to address what he called the Berlusconi effect and its risk of
demagogic power. Unlike most theorists of populism, he saw definite risks for
US democracyindeed all democraciesin the precedent set by that European
case.44 Certainly Trump shares with Berlusconi not only a disinhibited mode of
demagogic rhetoric but also the willingness to convert vast reserves of economic
capital into a personal grasp for the highest political office.45
Yet such a model of demagogic media power is a somewhat limited one, even
if it does account for real threats. It relies on what is in many ways a nineteenthcentury model of the politically minded press owner: i.e., a proprietor-publisher baron who subordinates journalistic professionalism and editorial
autonomy to the use of publications for personally preferred political goals.46
Undoubtedly that figure has survived and meets the demagogic tradition in
Murdochs US Fox News.
20
The SIPP studies laid the ground for the recognition that demagogy could
also become a cultural industrial commodity administered by a shareholder
corporation, rather than the family businesses typical of nineteenth-century
press barons and their successors. The format of aggressive talk radio is, in
this context, economically self-sustaining in that its production costs are low.
As a result, it has tended to replace local news services. The rationale for its
expansion thus need not require a baron-like directive but merely the banality
of cost-effectiveness.
Moreover, the key figures in this culture-industrial demagogic tradition
from Coughlin to Limbaughhave tended not to pursue political power for
themselves but instead sought to move close to those in power while claiming to
act as a representative of popular opinion. To this extent they constitute a more
direct populist challenge to the fourth estate conception of opinion representation than to political office-holders as such. They also threaten the professionalist social responsibility ethic within US network broadcast journalism that,
as Baker reminds us, was one means of redressing the informational consequences of concentrated broadcast media markets, especially in television.47
Historically, such self-regulatory professionalization of broadcast
journalism was coupled with stuttering attempts to redress the rise of broadcast
demagogy more directly, including the use of overt content regulation. Coughlin
presented an ongoing problem to nascent US broadcasting corporations (notably
CBS and NBC) and to the FRC/FCC, whereby his notoriety continually presented
managements with spotfires of controversy.
The NBC network, dominant at first, moved early to delimit locally based
figures like Coughlin by refusing to sell airtime for discussion of controversial
issues religious or otherwise and by insisting, from 1928 onwards, on only
dealing with central or national agencies of major religions.48 The CBS network
could not afford to practise NBCs regulatory position on sale of airtime and
attracted many religious broadcasters, including Coughlin. As a result of its
battles over Coughlin, and following an attempt to delete objectionable material
from one of Coughlins speeches in 1931, CBS moved to the NBC policy regarding
the sale of airtime and canceled Coughlins contract.49 He then cobbled together
his own network from independent stations.50 Finally, in 1939, the National
Association of Broadcasters, which represented independent stations as well as
network affiliates, adopted a self-regulatory code requiring panel discussion of
all controversial matters. It was less an enforceable directive than a means of
giving squeamish stations a reason to deny contracts.51 Coughlins radio career
finished when his existing contracts expired in 1940.
Paul K. Jones
21
The FRC/FCC moved towards European regulatory practice by banning

all editorialization in 1940 and then shifting to its famous Fairness Doctrine,
whichlike the panel model adopted by the self-regulatorssought to achieve
balance across a schedule by guaranteeing a right of reply to contentious
opinion. Broadly, these were the same norms of balance that professionalizing newspaper editors advocated but were here applied to licensee-proprietors. Perhaps most notably, the right-of-reply principle was not only invoked
by Murrow in his conflict with McCarthy but was also one he knew from
his previous development work in broadcast editorial policies as a CBS news
executive.52
The Fairness Doctrine remained the dominant US regulatory framework
from 1949 to 1987. McCarthy exploited it and similar FCC rules to gain television
airtime.53 It was used, at times very cynically, by the Kennedy administration
to silence the ultras in the 1960s.54 The Reagan administration effectively ended
the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and, it is widely agreed, so opened the doors to the
rise of aggressive talk radio in the 1990s, leading to the 250 percent expansion
of this format in the USA between 1990 and 2006.55 Scholars now refer to the
echo chamber of a conservative media establishment, with talk radio at its
core, that arose during the 1990s as mainstream broadcasting of the Fairness
Doctrine era and its news programs lost hegemony. This formation continues
to define itself against the media elite of those who still practise the liberal
norms of professional neutrality.56 The commodification of demagogic speech
is thus complete.
My long tradition has thus been an episodic one. While regulation interrupted
its development, the crucial moment, in my view, was the early facilitation of
demagogic speech, not as the broadcast of speech as such but as an emergent
program form in a system that hegemonized the commodification of airtime.
Baker disagreed with the Fairness Doctrine on standard First Amendment
principles, but did more than most such scholars to recognize the contributing
role of a political economy of speech markets to such First Amendment deliberations. He also recognized that the replacement of spectrum scarcity with digital
abundance reconfigured, but did not solve, this dilemma.57 Indeed, contemporary demagogic ultras tend to be multi-platform practitioners.58
The New York Times is of course correct in seeking to revive the liberal
exposure strategy as each demagogue arises within electoral politics, and its
concern that such anti-demagogic journalistic norms are absent or weak in
the horizontal post-broadcast forms of digital media are pertinent. But cultural-industrial demagogy, as Adorno warned, is not always so susceptible to
22
truth propaganda. Horkheimer and Adorno saw an opportunity instead in

the differing industrial and regulatory configurations of the broadcasting and
cinema sectors of the culture industry. They planned to use the less consolidated
field of cinema for their own (unfulfilled) counter-demagogic action.59
Similarly nimble perspectives regarding the contemporary cultural
industries may become necessary to complement the approach of such
newspapers as the New York Times. The most pertinent general lesson this
tradition offers to those who seek to counter demagogic speech in the culture
industries is the need to find appropriate means to delimit it, not by censorship,
but by its decommodification.
Notes
1. The Editorial Board, Mr. Trumps Applause Lies, New York Times, November 24,
2015. This editorial came shortly after Trumps unverifiable claim that he had seen on
television thousands and thousands of people in an Arab community in New Jersey
cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11.
2. This byline was only used in the app edition of the Times.
3. George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Good Night, and Good Luck, Screenplay (New
York: Newmarket Press, 2006); Edward R. Murrow et al., The McCarthy Years (Edward R.
Murrow Collection) (United States: Docurama, 2005); Aaron Sorkin et al., The Newsroom.
The Complete First Season (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2013). The dragonslayer
metaphor is sourced from Thomas Patrick Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television,
Mccarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
4. J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media
and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Garth Jowett and
Victoria ODonnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 6th ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2015).
5. A measure of the complexity here is the fact that US State Department runs
an Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists, aimed at mentoring international
journalists, and has issued an illustrative pamphlet which highlights Murrows
challenge to McCarthy as one of his exemplary achievements. See http://eca.state.gov/
files/bureau/factsheet_edwardrmurrow-2014.pdf.
6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002); Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture
(London: Routledge, 1991).
7. Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). It is important to state at the outset that
Paul K. Jones
23
Urbinatis and the Frankfurt Schools conceptions of demagogy introduced below,

and indeed the critical propaganda analysis to which I connect it, are not completely
congruent. Crucially, unlike Adorno and Lowenthal, Urbinati insists on the relevance
of the classical analysis of demagogy because she sees the present as further marked by a
form of plebiscitory and spectatorial audience democracy, which resembles the role of
the crowd in ancient Rome. Audience democracy in turn derives from the influential
politico-theoretical work of Manin: Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative
Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
8. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 16901960, 3rd ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1962), 72627.
9. Michael Schudson, The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism, Journalism
2, no. 2 (2001): 163.
10. It is worth noting here how little continuity there is between scholarship on US
journalism and that on US broadcast journalism. The latter tends to be the domain of
historians of broadcasting rather than those of journalism per se. There is a decided
tendency, very notable for example in Michael Schudsons much-cited work, to equate
the history of journalismand its current crisiswith the history of newspaper
journalism. Another example would be Motts much-cited history which reduces broadcasting to an appendix-like final chapter outside its main linear narrative, even in its
1962 edition: Mott, American Journalism: A History, 16901960.
11. Paul K. Jones and David Holmes, Key Concepts in Media and Communications
(London: Sage, 2011), 8085.
12. T. Gibbons, Regulating the Media (Sweet & Maxwell, 1998).
13. Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United
States, 4th ed. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2014).
14. David Goodmans recent history of this period of US radio addresses both the
propaganda concerns of the 1930srightly emphasizing that such analyses rarely
regarded audiences as passiveand the regulatory framework I have begun to sketch
here and which is elaborated further below. Curiously, Goodmans emphasis on the civic
ambition of radio policieshere the presentation of diverse opinions to citizens via diverse
programmingoverlooks both the degree to which this policy facilitated the demagogues
entry into radio and how the later phase of FRC/FCC content regulation was an attempt to
contain those demagogues (see final section of this article). Likewise, journalistic professional norms play no major role in this narrative. Hilmes in contrast emphasizes those
demagogues but also regards the regulatory contraints placed on Coughlin as an inhibition
of the speech of an unwashed minority. David Goodman, Radios Civic Ambition: American
Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Hilmes,
Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 144.
24
15. I refer here to the Habermasian conception of the domain of opinion formation
via information and deliberation, ideally independent of market and state. See Jurgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
16. The fourth estate metaphor has impeccably British origins but there have been
significant attempts to tie it to First Amendment principles; cf. L.A. Scot Powe, The
Fourth Estate and the Constitution: Freedom of the Press in America (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991), 26.
17. Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States.
18. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great
Depression, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1982), 119.
19. David H. Bennett, Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union
Party, 19321936 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969).
20. Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse University Press,
1965), 193.
21. Donald I. Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio (New
York: Free Press, 1996), 224.
22. Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A
Study of Father Coughlins Speeches, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939), 24.
Some identified devices relate to the contemporary critique of advertising practices
(e.g., testimonial) while several anticipate formulations better known today via
semiotics. Transfer resembles Roland Barthess rhetoric of the image analysis, while
band wagon and just plain folks resemble semiotic analyses of modes of address.
See Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, in Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath
(London: Macmillan, 1978).
23. Lee and Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlins Speeches, x.
24. Theodor W. Adorno, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomass Radio
Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Theodor W. Adorno, Freudian
Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences 3 (1951);
Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the
American Agitator, Studies in Prejudice, 2nd ed. (California: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
25. Its most famous output was The Authoritarian Personality, which produced
a controversial F-scale predictor of susceptibility to fascist demagogy. Here I draw
primarily on the demagogy studies, which were mostly conducted earlier, but also rely
on some of Adornos related and later writings. On the controversial reception of The
Authoritarian Personality, see Martin Roiser and Carla Willig, The Strange Death of
the Authoritarian Personality: 50 Years of Psychological and Political Debate, History
of the Human Sciences 15, no. 4 (2002). Cf. Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian
Paul K. Jones
25
Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950).

26. Theodor W. Adorno, Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda, in Anti-Semitism: A
Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (Wisconsin: International Universities Press, 1946), 135.
27. Lee and Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda, ix.
28. Theodor W. Adorno, Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,
in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 19301960, ed. Donald Fleming and
Bernard Bailyn (1969; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 36465.
29. Adorno, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomass Radio Addresses,
8. Adorno certainly saw these psychotechnics (detailed below) operating within cinema,
popular song, and (radio) soap opera; but not universally so. The Frankfurt position
was decidely not, as Goodman has recently glossed it, that American mass culture was
indistinguishable from propaganda. Rather, with the exception of advertising, these
were noted only as tendencies within specific culture-industrial forms. Demagogic
speech was the core case from which Adorno developed such comparative comments
about particular instances within the culture industry. A more indicative contemporary example would be the comparison drawn by the Timess television critic between
Trump as demagogue and Trump as reality TV participant on The Apprentice. See ibid.,
44; Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda, 134, 31; Goodman, Radios Civic Ambition,
85; James Poniewozik, Trumps Campaign Classroom: Reality TV, New York Times,
October 10, 2015.
30. Adorno, Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda, 13132. Prophets of Deceit
included limited field notation of audience reactions in face-to-face demagogic public
addresses. Lowenthal and Guterman, Prophets of Deceit, xvi, 150, 28, 63, 78.
31. Adorno, Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America, 3678.
32. Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation, in Studies in Leadership:
Leadership and Democratic Action, ed. Alvin W. Gouldner (New York: Harper & Row,
1950), 42930.
33. The key text to which Hofstadter contributed is the collection edited by Daniel
Bell in 1955 and republished in a second edition in 1964: Daniel Bell, ed. The Radical Right:
The New American Right Expanded and Updated, 2nd ed. (Garden City, New York: Anchor,
1964).
34. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Harpers
Magazine 229, no. 1374 (1964); The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
(New York: Knopf, 1965). While another of Hofstadters categories, pseudo-conservative, is well known to have been derived from Adorno, paranoid curiously has
not been so recognized for its SIPP linkages. While Hofstadters SIPP source may have
been The Authoritarian Personality, another likely candidate was Prophets of Deceit,
which follows the paranoia/projection model closely, as it is that text that initially drew
26
Hofstadter to consider the rhetoric of some Populist figures in such terms. Cf. The Age
of Reform (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1955), 6093, esp. section 2, History as
Conspiracy, and its notes to pages 7273 and 80.
35. In an anticipation of Brinkleys and especially Kazins work, Canovans
much-cited book on populism blithely recounts that Hofstadters critique tried to tar
the Populists of the 1890s with the McCarthyite brush. Margaret Canovan, Populism
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 184.
36. Brinkley, Voices of Protest.
37. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998), 132.
38. Nadia Urbinati, Democracy and Populism, Constellations 5, no. 1 (1998).
Urbinati reprises this position into a more open disagreement with that body of work
that represents populism as reclaiming politics on the part of ordinary people against
an elected elite that concentrates power in Democracy Disfigured, 133.
39. See, for example, Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New
American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
40. Heather Hendershot, Whats Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting
and the Public Interest (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
41. Hendershots general complaint is that these figures were treated as propagandists rather than media producers. This is certainly the case with Hofstadter and his
colleagues but not so of SIPP (whose influence on Hofstadter she does not mention). Ibid., 13.
42. The key figures researched by Hendershot include H.L. Hunt, Dan Smoot, Carl
McIntire, and Billy James Hargis. For a contemporary analogue see: Jane Mayer, Bully
Pulpit: An Evangelist Talk-Show Hosts Campaign to Control the Republican Party, New
Yorker, June 18, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/18/bully-pulpit.
43. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,
13233. In tying advertising to propaganda in its demagogic sense, Horkheimer and
Adorno were still moving broadly within the empirical terrain of the US tradition of
liberal propaganda critique.
44. C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters
(Cambridge University Press, 2006); C. Edwin Baker, Viewpoint Diversity and Media
Ownership, Federal Communications Law Journal 61 (2008); Press Performance, Human
Rights, and Private Power as a Threat, Law & Ethics of Human Rights 5, no. 2 (2011);
Media Concentration: Giving up on Democracy, Florida Law Review 54 (2002): 906.
45. A key difference of course is that Berlusconis rise via a new party was partly
enabled by the collapse of both major established Italian political parties. Paolo Mancini,
Between Commodification and Lifestyle Politics: Does Silvio Berlusconi Provide a New Model
of Politics for the Twenty-First Century? (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism,
Paul K. Jones
27
University of Oxford, 2011).

46. Jean K. Chalaby, No Ordinary Press Owners: Press Barons as a Weberian Ideal
Type, Media, Culture & Society 19, no. 4 (1997).
47. Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy, 18.
48. L.M. Benjamin, The NBC Advisory Council and Radio Programming, 19261945
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 62. Stewart M. Hoover and
Douglas K. Wagner, History and Policy in American Broadcast Treatment of Religion,
Media, Culture & Society 19, no. 1 (1997).
49. L.M. Benjamin, Freedom of the Air and the Public Interest: First Amendment
Rights in Broadcasting to 1935 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 154; Hilmes,
Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 142.
50. Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 142.
51. Ibid., 144.
52. A.M. Sperber, Murrow, His Life and Times (Fordham University Press, 1986), 278.
53. E.R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 191.
54. Hendershot, Whats Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the
Public Interest, 14; Fred W. Friendly, The Good Guys, the Bad Guys, and the First Amendment:
Free Speech Vs. Fairness in Broadcasting, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1976).
55. Berry and Sobieraj mark another wave of content deregulation from 2000 which
has heightened this tendency. Hendershot, Whats Fair on the Air?; Jeffrey M. Berry
and Sarah Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 79. The 250 percent figure is derived from
the Project for Excellence in Journalism: The State of the News Media 2007, Talk
Radio, Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://stateofthemedia.org/2007/radio-intro/
talk-radio/.
56. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh
and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008);
Jonathan M. Ladd, Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012).
57. Baker, Viewpoint Diversity and Media Ownership.
58. Cf. Jane Mayers emphasis on the multi-platform presence of her talk radio
demagogue case study. Mayer, Bully Pulpit: An Evangelist Talk-Show Hosts Campaign
to Control the Republican Party.
59. On the planned SIPP film Below The Surface and its possible influence on
Hollywood portrayals of anti-Semitism, see David Jenemann, Adorno in America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 10648. On Adornos view of this
project as an alternative vaccine against authoritarianism to that of truth propaganda,
see Adorno, Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation, 43334.
28
Spies Spying on Spies Spying

The Rive Noire, the Paris Review, and the
Specter of Surveillance in Post-war American
Literary Expatriate Paris, 19531958
Craig Lanier Allen
abstractThe history of American expatriation in post-World War II Paris offers a
rich archive through which to explore historical tensions between notions of freedom
and citizenship. Less known is that this history offers a valuable lens through which
to explore national security and domestic intelligence-gathering practices in free,
democratic societies such as the United States. The American governments surveillance
of American writers living and working in post-war Paris infringed upon their freedoms
and complicated their notions of civic responsibility to and for the United States. This
article will use the Gibson Affair (Paris, 1958), a major forgery case that French and
American literary scholars have long suspected was instigated by American intelligence,
to explore the specter of surveillance that existed between the two principal groups
of American writers living and working in post-war Paris, namely the community of
black American writers known collectively as Pariss Rive Noire or Black Bank (Richard
Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes) and the founders of the Paris Review (George
Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Harold L. DocHumes).
In this Island of Hallucination, black men might have the illusion of freedomat
least as far as white women are concernedbut they are surrounded by informers.
Paris is a Cold War center, with UNESCO and NATO bases in the city. The drive
against Communism has created a huge, international spy business. Goddam!
This town crawls with serpents.
Richard Wright, Island of Hallucination (1958)

29
figure 1
Richard Wright with Peter Matthieson and Max Steele of the Paris Review,
ca. 1953. Photo courtesy Otto van Noppen and Dominique Berretty.
In the above photograph, three American writers stand before Notre Dame
Cathedral in 1953: Richard Wright, a black Chicagoan by way of Mississippi,
flanked by two white men, Peter Matthiessen, an Ivy League-educated New
Englander, and Max Steele, a southerner from North Carolina. Seen through the
popular historical lens by which we have come to understand American expatriation in Paris, the photograph affirms commonly held beliefs, namely of Paris as
a liberatory space in which higher value is placed in the cultivation of happiness
in everyday life.1 A literary historical lens might inform us of Wrights status
as the dean of post-war American Paris, imbuing our sense of this photograph
with the possibility of an interracial mentorship that would have been less likely
in post-war America. All told, the image evokes the promise of freedom often
associated with the historical American encounter with the city of Paris. This
30
article endeavors to provide an alternative to the commonplace lenses through

which the above photograph may be interpreted and articulate a story that
illuminates the extent of American government surveillance at mid-century.
In the end, this article questions the extent to which the above photograph
captures Richard Wright, not necessarily in the company of genuine friends or
colleagues, but with a man paid by the American government to surveil him,
and to that mans left, a man whose complicity warrants investigation.
Within the storied history of American exile and expatriation in Paris, the
groups of American writers living in post-war Paris represented a substantive
and stylistic rupture from the generations of American writers, artists, and
intellectuals who preceded them, as well as those who would arrive in Paris
in later years.2 This rupture consisted mainly in the politicization of these
American writers, in terms of both the motivations behind their decisions to
leave the United States for Paris and the more explicitly political content of their
literary and artistic production. The end of World War II gave rise to American
geopolitical primacy and an American desire for a return to domestic stability
and tranquility. The post-war American artists, writers, and intellectuals who
made their way to Paris were, by and large, skeptical of the presumed saliency
of American power and very sensitive to the price that the pursuit of American
social tranquility was exacting from their artistic freedom. Beyond this notion,
the particularities of each expatriate writers political motivations were nearly
as varied as their numbers. In the decade between 1950 and 1960, several
American literary circles emerged, each with its own intellectual, artistic, or
political focus and membership. The American expatriate groups over which
the black American writer Richard Wright (Native Son, 1942; Black Boy, 1945)
and Paris Review-founder Peter Mathiessen each presided were two of the most
important, both in terms of their cultural production and the political contours
of their groups.
The community of post-war African American writers became collectively
referred to as Pariss Rive Noire. Although quite diverse in their backgrounds,
socio-economic status, and politics, the community was treated by the American
government as a kind of antagonistic black-American-brains-trust-in-exile.3 As
such, its members, Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, William Gardner
(Bill) Smith, the cartoonist Oliver W. Ollie Harrington, and a rising young
writer, Richard Gibson, all came under the active suspicion of those charged
with safeguarding American interests against the explicit critique of American
racial politics often at the center of their expatriate writings and the implicit
critique of the American way of life suggested by their exile. In stark contrast,
Craig Lanier Allen
31
the founders of the Paris Review presented American national security policy
formulators with a potential ally in the American cultural Cold War.4 There is
limited scholarship regarding the specific American agencies, institutions, and
people responsible for clandestine activities within the cultural Cold War. The
notable exception is Frances Stonor Saunderss The Cultural Cold War: The CIA
and the World of Arts and Letters (1999), a history of the CIAs front organization
for such matters as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The core mission
of the CCF was to use intellectuals, artists, and the existing infrastructure of the
non-communist left to counter Soviet influence. To that end, Saunderss work
makes clear that there were few successful European writers who remained free
of the CCFs direct or tangential influence during the Cold War. What remains
unexplored is the CCFs relationships with and influence on American writers
living and working in the major European cities where the CCF was most
active. Paris was central to the cultural Cold War and, as Saunders points out,
the CCF encountered great difficulty in combating the sway of an intellectual
class that continued to extol Russia as the guardian of freedom while denying
the existence of the Gulags.5 From this environment emerged the perceived
necessity on the part of the American government to monitor, report on, and
influence individual American expatriate writers who were deemed to pose a
threat to American national security interests.
The CCF and its parent organization, the CIA, were both products of the
National Security Act of 1947. The Act broadly reorganized the American
defense and intelligence-gathering system and was specifically designed to
shore up systemic deficiencies made apparent during World War II. The Act
created several new intelligence agencies, and it required these agencies to
perform various coordinated functions within a bureaucratic construct known
as the Intelligence Cycle.6 Surveillance is the surreptitious observation and
gathering of information about a subject; it is the essential practice upon and
around which spycraft, or the intelligence collection part of the Intelligence
Cycle, is based. A specter of surveillance emerged within both the everyday
lives and literature of the post-war American literary expatriate community
in Paris that consisted of a pervasive, existential understanding among these
American expatriates that their actions were being observed and reported on by
various American intelligence agencies in Paris. Most important with regard to
American literary history, this specter of surveillance served as an expression
of post-war American literary expatriate anxieties in response to both real and
imagined surveillances. As such, this specter of surveillance became a defining
contour of Rive Noire narratives and the history of Paris Reviews founding,
32
serving alternatively as device, motivation, and backdrop in much of their

fiction and non-fiction.
While present within much of post-war American literary expatriate Paris,
manifestations of the specter of surveillance tended to differ significantly,
depending upon the particularities of the individual communities contained
within it. Historically, for instance, the specter of surveillance in Rive Noire
biographies posits an adversarial relationship between the African American
expatriate author and the American government. Biographies of Richard
Wright, from the late Addison Gayles Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son
(1980) to Hazel Rowleys Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001), are replete
with accounts of Wrights surveillance by various American intelligencegathering agencies, in the United States and abroad.7 Recent biographies of both
James Baldwin and Chester Himes document their respective surveillances by
the US government as well.8
For the founders of the Paris Review, the specter of surveillance manifested
in suspicions about the extent of CIA involvement within and influence upon
the Reviews content. Peter Matthiessen, the founder of the Paris Review, made
this suspicion more concrete with his admissions in 2006 and 2008 that he had
been sent to Paris in 1950 by the CIA. He further claimed that he invented the
Paris Review as a cover for his CIA activities.9 Given that many of the Rive Noire
writers were perceived as threats to American national security interests, explorations of the Paris Reviews origins should include questions about the potential
use of the journal by the CIA as a platform from which to monitor, report upon,
and perhaps even interfere with the activities of other American writers living
in Paris. Equally significant, the Rive Noire began to disband in 1958, an end
hastened, some believe, by what has become known as the Gibson Affair of
195758.10 In this scandal, Richard Gibson, the young Rive Noire journalist with
a history of writing political polemics, forged the name of fellow expatriate Ollie
Harrington on a widely published letter that criticized the French governments
stance in the French-Algerian War.11
The French-Algerian War began with a series of armed revolts by the
Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in November 1954, and ended with
the installation of Algerias first independent government in August 1962.12 By
the summer of 1958, the French in general and Parisians in particular were
growing weary of the bloody, largely urban guerrilla war that France was
waging to retain one of the last vestigesthe jewel actuallyof its prewar
empire.13 The French-Algerian War created a point of reckoning for post-war
French national identity and institutions. The work of French intellectuals was
Craig Lanier Allen
33
no longer considered in relationship to their respective positions on fascism or

their proximity to the vortex of communism, as Tony Judt put it, but rather la
question algrienne.14 Gibsons forgery led many French and American literary
scholars to believe that Gibson was working at the behest of the CIA, with the
aim to antagonize or destroy the Rive Noire.15
The question of Gibsons motivations notwithstanding, the affair that bears
his name serves as one of the few documented manifestations of suspected
American clandestine action taken against any of the American writers in
post-war Paris. Despite the centrality of several American literary luminaries
to the Gibson Affair, a definitive account that considers the broader post-war
American literary expatriate landscape in which it took place has not yet been
written.16 Inasmuch as one assumes the incident to have been orchestrated by
an American intelligence organization, the natural questions that follow are
by whom and why. For the scholar endeavoring to establish whom, there are
substantial methodological challenges to constructing a historical narrative
from human activity meant to obfuscate, deceive, and provide plausible
deniability. As to the why, it is important to trace the ideological trajectories of
the individual African American writers along the Rive Noire to their respective
positions on the Algerian struggle for independence from France in October 1957.
The Rive Noire, The Algerian War, and The Gibson Affair
Richard Gibsons arrival in Paris was more incidental than the other Rive Noire
members. From 1949 to 1951, Gibson attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio,
an institution famous for The Kenyon Review, one of the most influential journals
in the history of American letters. Founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, the
review was among the first to publish authors such as Robert Penn Warren,
Flannery OConnor, and Delmore Schwartz. Gibson was published twice in The
Kenyon Review. His 1951 essay A No to Nothing attacked what he decried as the
artistic and literary deficiencies of all Negro literature published to that time.17
His subsequent acclaim led to his being awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship
with which he spent 1951 and 1952 at the American Academy in Rome. In 1954,
Gibson journeyed to Paris at the invitation of his fellow Philadelphian, Bill
Smith. Upon arriving, he enrolled at the Sorbonne to study French literature,
courtesy of the GI Bill. Later that same year, Bill Smith was hired on at the
English desk of the French newswire service, Agence France-Presse (AFP). On
Smiths recommendation, Gibson was hired there as well.18
34
October 1957 represented a watershed month in the Algerian struggle for

independence. On the seventeenth, the French Algerian author Albert Camus
was notified that he would be awarded that years Nobel Prize in Literature for a
body of work that was deeply serious, stressed action and nobility and demonstrated authentic moral commitment.19 In that same month, an incendiary essay
exposing the systematic torture of Algerian FLN members by French counterintelligence agents in Paris was published in several French newspapers.20 In Life
magazines October 21, 1957 Letters to the Editor, there appeared a rebuttal to
an earlier issues editorial professing the virtues of a new round of negotiations
between the French government and the FLN. The letter blasted the notion that
the talks were anything more than a ruse by the French; it ended by stating that:
Any American who thinks that France of her own free will, will grant
Algeria, if not independence, at least some liberal status where seven million
Algerians will not be crushed politically and economically by a million
Europeans is mad.
Ollie Harrington, Paris, France
The letter went virtually unnoticed except by members of the Rive Noire. Further
details were provided in an unpublished letter to Jet magazine dated June 4, 1958:
The story stretches all the way from a charming apartment on the romantic
left bank of Paris to the austere hall of the French Ministry of the Interior ...
The case involves forged notes to many world known [sic] publications such
as Life Magazine, The London Sunday Observer and Sunday Times attempting
to involve Negro personalities living in Paris with the Algerian Rebel
Organization, just two weeks coincidentally before this explosive issue was
to be debated in the halls of the United Nations.
The personalities involved in this real cloak and dagger drama are three
well known Negro authors The Surete Nationale, the French equivalent of
the FBI, in brilliantly unmasking the case, rank it as infamous as LAffaire
Dreyfus, it is, as a matter of fact, called LAffaire Gibson. This story has been
hushed up for many reasons as you can well imagine, not the least of being
the present crisis in French political life. However, also as you can imagine, a
story of this magnitude will not stay buried for long.21
The event to which the letter rather breathlessly referred did indeed become
known among scholars of African American literature as the Gibson Affair
Craig Lanier Allen
35
(19571958). Its root causes remain one of the enduring mysteries in American
post- and early-Cold War literary history. What is known is that with the onset
of the Algerian struggle for independence from France in 1954, differences
emerged among members of the Rive Noire about whatif anythingto do,
say, or write about it. Richard Gibson used the occasion of these divisions to
forge a letter to Life magazine and the London Observer that was highly critical
of French policy.
The purported author of the Life letter, Ollie Harrington, was a foreign
correspondent and cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Courier and a central figure
within the Rive Noire. Harrington had arrived in Paris from Germany in May
1951. He had a contentious personal relationship with Gibson and was known
to have Communist sympathies.22 Sensing that he was being set up by Gibson,
he retained the noted French criminal defense attorney Jacques Mercier and
through him immediately proclaimed his innocence to Frances internal
security agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST). Gibson was
subsequently investigated by the DST for forgery and ordered to write a formal
letter of apology to Harrington, admitting his guilt. Gibson was asked to
leave his post at the Agence France-Presse (AFP) and was offered a substantial
severance.23 Contrary to a few early historical accounts of the affair, Gibson was
not deported from France.24 Taken together, the facts of his subsidized exit from
AFP and his having being allowed to remain in France lent weight to the widely
held belief that Gibsons actions were in the service of the American government
and sanctioned on some level by French officials.
Wright, whose surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI)
and various other American intelligence organizations was even then a matter
of record, felt that the Gibson Affair had actually been an American government
plot to discredit him and justify his deportation from France. As such, Wright
questioned Gibson about the incident over a period of several weeks. Gibson
explained to Wright that the plan had actually been Bill Smiths, and was
designed to give moral support to the Algerian liberation cause while providing
him and Bill Smith a measure of plausible deniability. Gibson further claimed
that the plan called for Smith to write several additional letters to prominent
foreign news publications supporting the FLN, while forging other Rive
Noire members names as cover. Smith did not write the additional letters and
was the primary source for the DSTs case against him, evenaccording to
Gibsonproviding the DST with the typewriter Gibson used to type the forged
letter to Life magazine. Gibson protested to Wright that he had been inexplicably
double-crossed by Smith.25
36
Wright also figures prominently in the Gibson Affair because of his own
evolution from early membership in the Communist Party of the United
States of America (CPUSA) to a rather vocal critic of CPUSA and, ultimately, a
Pan-Africanist skeptical of anything that had traces of rebranded communism.
He held Maoism and Trotskyism in equal contempt. Such were Wrights
anti-Communist credentials by 1950 that he contributed an article to a
CCF-sponsored compilation of anti-Communist works entitled The God That
Failed: Why Six Great Writers Rejected Communism (1950).26 He was also deemed
by the CCF and the American State Department to be a suitable American envoy
to the 1955 Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which
served as the basis for his book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung
Conference (1955).
Wrights deafening silence on the Algerian question was seemingly inconsistent with his professed ideological commitment to anti-colonialism. This
detail casts Gibsons decision to act on behalf of the Algerians in much sharper
relief. Wright could be very pragmatic when he needed to be, he remarked,
adding that Richard Wright, when I knew him in the 50s, was an homme moyen,
a man with a family and a social position he wanted to protect.27 Gibson
recalled that in 1954 he had just begun work as an English copy editor with
Agence France-Presse. Like most people living in France, at the time he was led
to believe that FLN actions in the Algerian countryside on November 1, 1954,
were mere acts of banditry and minor manifestations of unrest: We thought
the whole thing was just some incident, a glorified, if violent protest that would
die out or be resolved in due time.28 According to Gibson, the catalyst for his
personal empathy for the Algerian cause was personal rather than political: I
was frequently stopped by various and sundry French police and asked for my
papers. You see, I was a light-skinned black man and they just assumed I was
North African and therefore, up to no good.29 Gibson also claimed that the politicization of his personal empathy for the Algerian cause was the direct result of
a friendship he cultivated with two Algerian colleagues at AFP, Mhamed Yazi
and Jean Chanderli, each of whom would go on to hold very high-level positions
within the independent Algerian government.30
Aside from Smith, Gibson recalled that few of his fellow Rive Noire members
were in any way committed to the Algerian cause. Of Wright, the dean of
post-war American expatriate Paris, Gibson offered the following:
Wright remained very pro-American in many ways and was always, when I
knew him, quite anti-Soviet. He did not even support the Vietnamese struggle
Craig Lanier Allen
37
against French imperialism or the Algerians that I know of. However, he did
understand the significance of Bandung, even if his fare there to cover the
conference was paid for by the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom,
into which Ruth Fischer had brought him. He occasionally harangued
Joshua Leslie and myself on the terrace of the Caf Tournon about young
boys not learning from his bitter experience with the CP (Communist
Party). Anyway, he maintained after Bandung, that the world was no longer
divided between left and right but black and white. Ironically, this did not
increase his solidarity with the Asians and North Africans fighting French
imperialism.
Wright was a committed American race man in the traditional mold. He also
understood that the younger black writers within the Rive Noire brought with
them different political perspectives that did not presume the saliency of the race
nor the internationalization of the American racial discourse. By 1957, it was
apparent in Wrights writing that he had taken to heart his own admonition to the
Rive Noire that it was no longer a matter of left of right but black or white.31 The
it to which Wright referred was the question of where and how to expend the
Rive Noires collective intellectual energies. With specific regard to the Gibson
Affair, Wright failed to appreciate that his burgeoning estrangement from the
Rive Noire was due to the manner in which the ideological diversity amidst them
began to mirror the struggle for primacy within the global left. The ideologies
in competition for said primacy were Soviet (Stalinist) Communism and
Trotskyism. Both had their supporters along the Rive Noire, in Harrington and
Smith, respectively. The French-Algerian War therefore served as a flashpoint
within the battle for ideological primacy within the Rive Noire. Gibson explains
that In fact the question of whether to support the Algerian cause had become a
major source of conflict with Ollie Harrington, who followed loyally the French
Communist line of that period that the Algerian people were not a nation and
their national struggle not legitimate.32
The French Communist Party, led by Party Secretary Maurice Thorez,
held the position that the FLN did not meet the precondition of nationhood
and was therefore unworthy of its support, even rhetorically. Gibson points
to Harringtons close personal relationship with Thorez and his wife Jeanette
Vermeesch, together with his silence on the Algerian question, as evidence of
Harringtons Stalinist leanings.33 For the Rive Noire writers at the center of the
Gibson Affair, namely Smith, Gibson, Harrington, and Wright, the question
was not one of ideological purity, but rather the extent to which each understood
38
the FrenchAlgerian War as an extension of a broader global struggle between

black and white from their respective ideological positions. For any American
intelligence operative charged with reporting upon the thoughts and actions of
this group of black American writers, the key question now concerns the extent
to which the intricacies of their positions were understood or mattered.
The Paris Review

Perhaps nowhere is the adage that success has many fathers while failure remains
an orphan more apt than in parsing exactly which of the Paris Reviews founders
came up with the idea for its creation.34 However, current narratives about
the Paris Reviews founding have tended to focus almost exclusively on George
Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen. The reasons for this are ostensibly uncontroversial. First, Plimptons tenure as managing editor spanned nearly fifty years,
and his life was inextricably linked to the Review from the publication of its first
issue in the spring of 1953. Matthiessens tenure with the Paris Review lasted only
from 1951 to 1954, but he is credited with having recruited Plimpton to replace
him as managing editor. However, it was Doc Humes who hired Matthiessen as
literary editor in 1951 and it is with Humes that the earliest traceable kernel of
an idea for a literary review based in Paris during this period is found. Humess
friend and fellow expatriate Russ Hemenway, recalled that, as early as 1948
or 1949, Humes had been working on creating the Paris Reviews predecessor,
a magazine called the Paris News Post. Humes credited the idea for the review
to a conversation he had with Rive Noire member James Baldwin in or around
1949, prior to the arrival of either Matthiessen or Plimpton in Paris. According
to Humess daughter Immy,35
He says that they [Humes and Baldwin] talked about how great it would be
if there were an outlet, a safe place for writers by writers. Doc always talked
about the Paris Review as an anti-anxiety measure. In other words, it was
going to be this protected space, and it was going to be criticism free; there
would be no academic jargon, just fiction, and this was going to be a measure
against this age of anxiety.36
The Age of Anxiety to which Humes was referring was a twist on the name
given to the post-war literary period out of which the Paris Review emerged. The
founders of the Paris Review sought to wrest popular focus away from literary
criticism and direct it back on both the writers themselves and the craft of
Craig Lanier Allen
39
writing.37 As another founding editor, John Train, quipped in a Paris Review

retrospective, to deflect ones gazein ones all too limited timefrom art
itself to forms of words about art was a big step down from the juicy reality
toward the dry and derivative.38
Scholarship on the Paris Review has seldom veered from discussions of its
founding, at the center of which is the most famous of the founders, George
Plimpton. A notable exception is journalist James Campbells Paris Interzone:
Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and Others on the Left Bank, 19461960 (1994)
whose major contribution to this scholarship lies in the authors decision to
present the Paris Review from a perspective other than Plimptons.39 Campbells
change in perspective is not inconsequential in that it has since become widely
understood that Matthiessen was employed by the CIA at the time of the Paris
Reviews founding and that it is possible that Plimpton knew little or nothing
about this relationship. Most accounts of the Paris Reviews founding tend to
posit Plimpton as the principal founder, aided in various ways by a rather loose
confederation of like-minded, would-be American writers who happened to be
living in Paris at the time, namely Matthiessen and Humes.
By shifting the focus away from Plimpton, the man whose name is indelibly
fixed to the Paris Review, to a now-barely remembered writer with an actual
claim to having created this seminal cultural product, provides us with two
critical insights. The first is a furtherance of our understanding of the Paris
Review, which from its very inception staked out territory very much in countervalence to the literary moment between 1950 and 1960. Second, this shift in focus
from the Plimpton-Matthiessen relationship to that of Humes and Matthiessen
brings to the fore questions about precisely when and how Matthiessen began
to manoeuvre to assume leadership of an idea that had been Humess. Current
declassified documents clearly indicate that Doc Humes was under surveillance
by the American Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) from as early as 1947
and continued to be an active target of surveillance by various American intelligence and counterintelligence organizations until 1972. Matthiessen had been
recruited into the CIA upon his graduation from Yale University in 1950 by his
mentor, Professor Norman Holmes Pearson.40 His first assignment for the CIA
was to travel to Paris and assume the cover of a writer. Recalling this assignment,
Matthiessen said that Pearson recruited a lot of people for the CIA, including
me. My main reason for signing on was that I could insist on being sent to Paris
when I graduated ... I was beginning to publish short stories, and I wanted to
write my first novel. So here was the CIA offering to send me to Paris for its
own reasons.41 His cover as a Paris-based writer and the common intelligence
40
security practice of compartmentalization notwithstanding, it is unlikely that

Matthiessen arrived in Paris in 1950 without having been briefed on the names
of those American writers in Paris under active surveillance. This notion places
the evolution of the HumesMatthiessen relationship in a different light. This
is especially true regarding the particularities of Matthiessens account of the
evolution from Humess Paris News Post to the Paris Review. In a 2006 interview,
Matthiessen recalled the following:
Sometime in the winter of 19511952, in the cafs, I ran into Harold L. Humes,
Jr. who was running a magazine called The Paris News Posta restaurant and
theatre guide, like the old Cue magazine. He wanted me to get fiction for it,
which I would not have done except that I needed more cover for my nefarious
activities, the worst of which was checking up on certain Americans in Paris
to see what they were up to. My cover, officially, was my first novel, but my
contact man (who met me in Jeu de Paume of all places) had said, Anything
else you can do while youre here? I could now say, Well, yes, Im editor on
a magazine.42
Humess daughter and the director of a documentary film chronicling Doc
Humess life recalled the Paris News Post differently:
Matthiessen and George tell the same story: that The Paris News Post was
a Cue-like magazineor sometimes a fourth-rate New Yorker. So it was
quite a shock for me to see the Paris News Post when I was researching the
documentary on Doc. It wasnt terrible, it really wasnt; but over the years
their story became ossified.43
In isolation, Immy Humess comment on the merits of her fathers maligned
early attempt at a magazine seem trivial. However, when considered against
Matthiessens admitted need for the cover provided by an editorial position with a
literary magazine, it seems possible that Matthiessen would have had very good
professional reasons for denigrating Humess magazine, while setting himself
up as the magazines rescuer. Seen in this light, his actions foreshadow later
instances of Matthiessens manoeuvring within the Paris Review with questions
of managerial efficacy or literary merit as leitmotifs.
Craig Lanier Allen
41
The Specter of Surveillance,

The Rive Noire, and the Paris Review
What emerges from this exploration of the Rive Noire and the founding of the
Paris Review through the prism of the specter of surveillance are two ways in
which the lives and works of each were influenced by it. First, reactions to real
and imagined surveillances amidst the American writers in post-war Paris
can be seen within the literature produced by both Rive Noire members and
Paris Review founders. Second, the exploration of the specter of surveillance in
post-war American expatriate Paris allows us to better understand the weaponization of the Paris Review at the height of the Cold War.
There are two principal literary works containing responses to the specter
or surveillance written in 1958. Richard Wright wrote a yet-unpublished
roman clef based upon the Gibson Affair called Island of Hallucination (1958,
unpublished) in which the chief villain and architect of the forged letter
incident is not the spy who spies on spies named Bill Hart (Gibson), but a
composite character nicknamed Mechanical, who bears uncanny resemblances to both William Gardner Smith and James Baldwin. It is impossible
to know whether Wright intended to settle personal scores with the two men
(for separate reasons) or whether he truly believed Gibsons claim that Smith
had been the mastermind behind the Gibson Affair. What is certain is that
Wright would have known that Baldwin had nothing to do with the incident
at all. In a similar vein, albeit a far more literary one, Doc Humes published
The Underground City (1958), an espionage novel at the center of which are tales
of Americans reporting on the activity of other Americans in the months
immediately following the liberation of Paris.
The cover of the CIAs involvement with the Paris Review was blown, for all
intents and purposes, in 1977. In that year, an article appeared in the New York
Times containing what would become the first of Matthiessens many and varied
public admissions about his employment with the CIA. From the time of these
revelations until his death in April 2014, Matthiessens story of his relationship
with the CIA varied greatly. His flat denials of any relationship with the CIA are
understandable, given the obvious requirements for secrecy inherent in such an
association. His most recentand by far most expansiverevelations came to
light in a 2008 interview by fellow Paris Review alumnus, Nelson Aldrich. In
that interview, Matthiessen noted that,
For many years I have stated flatly that the chronic rumors that the Paris
Review was founded or influenced by the CIA are simply untrue. Though I
42
still believe that, it now appears that some of our start-up funding may have
come from an acquaintance of Georges and mine, Julius Fleischmann, a
rich cultured Chicagoan living in Paris who, many years later, around
1966, turned out to have been associated with a CIA-sponsored outfit called
Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Matthiessen then went on to claim that he and Plimpton had no idea of
Fleischmanns connection to the CCF and that perhaps they had confused Julius
Fleischmann with his bother Raoul, the publisher of the New Yorker in the 1950s
and 60s, as the source of their funding. Matthiessen added that the CIA would
have had little interest in the then-fledgling Paris Review beyond its use for his
cover as a writer and editor, ending his recollection with a statement of regret,
claiming that,
I was becoming disillusioned with the CIA. Anticommunism was breeding

witch hunts in the States; [Roy] Cohn and [David] Schine were snuffling
through our embassies in Europe, and Paris itself was seething with international ideological conflictsall of which was politicizing me leftward, as
happened to many Americans living in Paris in those days. By the winter of
1953, I was ready to quit, and did.
To the untrained eye, Matthiessens statements may seem sufficiently plausible.
To the eye of someone trainedas Matthiessen would certainly have beenin
the discipline of counterintelligence, his statements contain the requisite
amount of plausible deniability and purposeful obfuscation.44 Seen through
the prism of place and the specter of surveillance, what seems quite clear is that
Matthiessens recruitment of George Plimpton as the first managing editor of
the Paris Review was both fateful and calculated. Central to those who operate
within the collection sphere of the Intelligence Cycle is the core mission to spot,
assess, and recruit people with access to the information desired or with the
talent or relationships to acquire it. It is quite likely that Matthiessen would
have recruited Plimpton based upon an assessment of him as someone capable
of effectively navigating the contours of both Pariss banks and the divergent
demographics of the Caf Tournon.
The nature of the CIAs cultural Cold War in post-WWII Europe has come
into much sharper relief thanks to Saunderss groundbreaking scholarship. It
is against this backdrop that the Paris Review emerged in 1952, and it is upon
its linkages to the CCF that most current discussion about the extent of CIA
Craig Lanier Allen
43
influence within the Paris Review are based.45 Most of these linkages took the
form of financial support and various forms of cross pollination between the
staffs of the CCF and Paris Review from 1958 to 1961. By 1961, former Paris Review
editor Nelson Aldrich appears to have concretized the relationship between
the CCF and the Paris Review. In January of that year, Aldrich accepted a job
with the Paris office of the CCF. In a March 15 letter from Aldrich to his former
Paris Review co-editor Bob Fuller, Aldrich suggests that a man named Roger
Klein, an editor at Harpers, would be well suited to replace him as the editor of
the Review. Tellingly, Aldrich suggests that prior to arriving in France, Klein
should meet with a man named Dan Bell, or some other friend of the Congress
in New York. He continues, Having passed that test, I dont believe there will
be any objection on this side either to hiring him or to sharing him with the
Paris Review.46
Both the Gibson Affair and the final phases of the Paris Reviews weaponization by the Congress for Cultural Freedom took place in Paris in 1957. Yet
there has been no scholarly exploration of the relationship between them. To
understand the events of that eventful fall of 1957, we must return to the equally
eventful year of 1953. It is the year of our opening photograph and the year
that Matthiessen left Paris and, according to him, ended his association with
the CIA. It is also the year in which, despite his contribution of I Tried to be a
Communist to the CCF-sponsored compilation The God That Failed, Wright was,
as Saunders points out, Americas first casualty in the Kulturkampf and was
the only member of the The God That Failed group to lose his membership of that
group of apostles.47 It was believed by those assessing him that his rejection of
communism was personal and therefore not deeply held. It was also the case that
Wrights devotion to causes of decolonization and African liberation ran counter
to the broader worldview favored by many within the CCF. Nevertheless, what
is clear is that Wright was under the constant eye of the American government
during the entirety of his life in Paris.
Matthiessens ultimate admission, just before his death in 2014, that the CIA
asked him to keep his eye on communist enemies, places the photograph of
him and Wright, standing smiling before the Notre Dame Cathedral in 1953, in
sharper relief.48
The difference between the clinical definitions of imagination and hallucination turn on the question of delusion. There is no evidence linking the
CIA to the Gibson Affair. The belief that the CIA instigated the forgery at the
heart of the Gibson Affair, however widely held, is at best circumstantial. At
worst, the propagation of this belief, in the absence of evidence, is a product
44
of imaginings fueled by the specter of surveillance. The specter was itself a

product of actual CIA involvement within the founding of the Paris Review,
and specifically the activities of its co-founder, Peter Matthiessen. If we are to
imagine that the Gibson Affair in 1957 was in fact a CIA operation, then it is
likely that information collected by Matthiessen between 1950 and 1953 would
almost certainly have formed some basis for its planning and execution. At
the very least, Richard Wright, the man whose hallucinations proferred a
post-war Paris full of spies spying on spies spying, was wary enough of the
company he kept to imagine as much. Seeing all of this through the specter
of surveillance provides us with the proper lens through which to reconcile
the myth and reality of a defining contour of post-war American literary
expatriate Paris.
notes
1. For a more expansive description of the specific aspects of everyday life that
attracted historical Americans to Paris see the introduction to Adam Gopniks Americans
in Paris: A Literary Anthology (New York: Library of America, 2004).
2. The terms expatriate and exile, while used interchangeably to describe the
historical tenures and/or residences of American writers and artists in Paris, are both
misnomers. See Nancy L. Greens Americans Abroad and the Uses of Citizenship: Paris,
19141940, Journal of American Ethnic History 31, no. 3 (2012), 532; also Expatriation,
Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept, American
Historical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 307328. Greens groundbreaking scholarship
points out the insufficiency of these terms and argues for greater precision with regard to
our use and understanding of American expatriatism. I have chosen to term the periodization of this article as post-war, which extends into the early stages of the Cold War.
The years between 1945 and 1958 are defined by attempts on the part of the United States,
the Soviet Union, and Great Britain to reshape Europe in the aftermath of World War II.
As such, post-war Europe was defined by quests for European identity and security. At
the center of this was the question of German Unification as well as resurgent European
nationalism of empire embodied in French Gaullism, and Portuguese Lusotropicalism
under Salazar. Within the post-war European setting of my research, these
mattersand the corresponding processes of decolonization in places such as Algeria,
Indochina and Sub-Saharan Africawere of primary geopolitical concern, and not the
freezing of USSoviet relations.
3. See Michel Fabres The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Urbana-Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1993) and La Rive Noire de Harlem la Seine (Paris: Lieu
Craig Lanier Allen
45
Commun, 1985). See also James Campbells Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris
Vian and Others on the Left Bank, 19461960 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994) for the
most detailed account of American government concern for the racial politics at play
within the writings of Black Bank writers.
4. The term cultural Cold War entered into popular American Cold War historiography with the US publication of Frances Stonor Sunderss The Cultural Cold War:
The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999; repr. New York: The New Press, 2000).
5. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 70.
6. The National Security Act of 1947 reorganized the American defense and national
security structure. It called for the establishment of the Department of Defense and for
the establishment of several new intelligence agencies. Among these were the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and several Military
Criminal Investigative organizations (MCIOs) including Army Criminal Investigations
Division (CID), the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and the Naval
Investigative Service (NIS). These MCIOs were chartered to perform functions, within
the Department of Defense, identical to those of the Federal Bureau of Investigations
(FBI). This included the conduct of counterintelligence and counterespionage operations
domestically and abroad. The Intelligence Cycle codified the means by which these
agencies: (1) established requirements for intelligence information and planned for
its acquisition (planning and direction); (2) acquired the intelligence information
(collection); (3) transformed this raw intelligence information into an analyzable form
(processing); (4) analyzed the raw intelligence (analysis); and, lastly, (5) made this
now-analyzed, -contextualized, or -finished intelligence available to decision-makers
at the appropriate levels of government (dissemination).
7. The accounts come from Wrights FBI file, parts of which were first released in
1978, at the time Gayle wrote. Additional parts were later declassified under Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) requests by Rowley and other Wright scholars (1995). Wrights
FBI file contains intelligence reports and other source reporting from US agencies other
than the FBI, including the US Army Counterintelligence Corps and the US Department
of State, among others.
8. For descriptions of the contents of declassified surveillance reports on Baldwin
and Himes see, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin by James Campbell (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991) and Chester Himes: A Life by James Sallis (New York:
Walker and Company, 2000).
9. Matthiessen admitted his association with the CIA in the 2006 biographical
documentary Doc, which chronicled the life of another Paris Review founder, Harold
L Doc Humes. Matthiessen has to date declined to say what his specific role for the CIA
was in Paris.
46
10. Rive Noire writers had differing opinions on what, if anything, to do concerning
the FrenchAlgerian crisis in 1957. Richard Gibson used the occasion of these divisions
to forge a letter to Life magazine that was highly critical of French policy in Algeria
(Rowley). Gibson forged the name of fellow expatriate Oliver Harrington to the letters.
Gibson was subsequently investigated by various French police agencies and left Paris
abruptly in the fall of 1958.
11. I will refer to the Algerian war for independence from France as the French
Algerian War.
12. The Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria (GPRA).
13. See Alistair Hornes A Savage War of Peace (1977; repr. New York: New York
Review of Books, 2006).
14. Term coined by Tony Judt, in Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 19441956
(Berkely: University of California Press, 1992), 301.
15. See Fabres La Rive Noire.
16. The first attempt at a definitive account of the Gibson Affair was written by the
late French scholar of African American expatriatism in France, Michel Fabre, in his
The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Although exhaustive, it offers little beyond the
notion of Gibson as provocateur. Addison Gayles Ordeal of a Native Son (Gloucester, MA:
Peter Smith Publisher, 1980), Tyler Stovalls Harlem-Sur-Seine: Building an African
American Diasporic Community in Paris, Stanford Electronic Humanities Review 5,
no. 2 (1997), http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-2/stoval.html, and Hazel Rowleys
Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) extend
upon Fabres foundational narrative and are both, correspondingly, Wright-centred.
Subsequent journalistic and less scholarly accounts have tended to repackage the facts
of the Gibson Affair. A notable exception is journalist James Campbells Paris Interzone,
whose major contribution to this scholarship is the authors decision to present the
Gibson Affair from a perspective other than Wrights.
17. In a No to Nothing, Gibson criticized some of the most successful black writers
of the period, among them Richard Wright and Chester Himes, for their unwillingness
to write about anything other than the so-called Negro problem. He also charged white
American publishers with insisting that Negro authors limit themselves to stories of
protest. Gibsons critique came on the heels of a similar attack by a young essayist named
James Baldwin, author of the essay Everybodys Protest Novel (1949).
18. Richard Gibson, interview by author, London, March 14, 2012.
19. Patrick McCarthy, Camus: The Stranger (New York: Random House, 1982), 293.
20. James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the
Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 204.
21. Leroy S. Hodges, Portrait of an Expatriate: William Gardner Smith, Writer
Craig Lanier Allen
47
(Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985), see chapter 4, notes 5 and 59 .

22. Rowley, Richard Wright, 487.
23. Gibson, interview by author.
24. For a more detailed summary of Wrights role in the Gibson Affair, see Fabre,
The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright.
25. Ironically, in view of Gibsons allegations concerning Smiths role in the Gibson
Affair, he posits Smith as a dyed-in-the-wool Trotskyite with a true ambivalence about
the political aims of the FLN. Two passages from his correspondence with the French
historian Michel Fabre illustrate where Gibson believes Smiths proverbial heart and
head lay. He begins by making clear that, while Smith was a devout man of the Left, he
was highly critical of the CPUSA. Smith took great exception to the CPUSAs dismissal
of racial issues generally. And on Algeria specifically, Gibson writes that, Bill Smith
held no strong pro-Algerian views that I knew of until I spoke to him of my contacts with
Algerian patriots. He was at first horrified and warned me against continuing them.
Moreover, he claimed to disapprove of the simple nationalism of the FLN and said
he found the Trotskyite-inclined MNA of Messali Hadj more progressive. He strongly
disapproved of FLN attacks on MNA supporters in Algeria and France.
26. Wrights essay I Tried to Be A Communist originally appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly 159, August, 1944, 6170.
28. Michel Fabre Papers. Collection no. 932, box 6, folder 18, Emory University,
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Manuscript and Rare Book Library (MARBL), Atlanta,
Georgia.
30. Mhamed Yazi worked from Agence France-Presse from 1951 to 1954. In 1954
he formally joined the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Cairo. In 1955 Yazi
was appointed as the FLN representative the United States, a position he held until
replaced by Jean (later Abdelkader) Chanderli in 1956. From 1956 to 1962 Yazi served as
the Minster of Information for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic
(GPRA). In 1962 Yazi was on the lead Algerian participants in the 1962 Evian Accords
that brought an end the French-Algerian War.
31. Gibson, interview by author. Wrights last three works of non-fiction, The
Colour Curtain, Black Power, and White Man Listen, all spoke to what could be generally
considered an internationalization of the race question as he experienced it as an
American negro.
32. Gibson, interview by author. In a subsequent paragraph in the same letter,
Gibson repeats his disbelief in the claim by Wright that the affair was a Trotskyist plot,
inspired by C.L.R James, to discredit Wright and his Pan-Africanist friend George
48
Padmore. Padmore was a former Communist and he left the party and began espousing
a Pan-Africanist ideology as the basis for liberating African nations from colonial rule.
33. See Nelson W. Aldrichs George Being George: George Plimptons Life (New York:
Random House, 2008). In this compendium of anecdotes about the life of Paris Review
founder George Plimpton, Aldrich titles the section pertaining to Plimptons tenure in
Paris Creation Myths of the Paris Review (19521955). The Paris Review currently lists
as founding editors William Pene duBois, Thomas H. Ginzburg, Harold L. Doc Humes,
Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and John Train.
34. Humess daughter, Immy Humes, produced and directed a biographical
documentary film on her father, Harold Doc Humes, but the film experienced great
difficulty in finding distribution beyond its initial broadcast on the American Public
Broadcast System (PBS) in 2006: Immy Humes (dir.), Doc (2006).
35. Aldrich, George Being George, 90.
36. See Usha Wilbers The Author Resurrected: The Paris Reviews Answer to the
Age of Criticism, American Periodicals 18, no. 2 (2008): 192212.
38. The etymology of Wrightcentered narratives about the Gibson Affair actually
began with an account in the incident in Constance Webbs biography on Richard
Wright, Richard Wright: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1968).
40. Ibid., 86.
41. Ibid., 94.
42. Ibid.
43. The author served as a counterintelligence officer with the United States Air
Force from 1992 to 2010. The specific tactics he believes Matthiessen engages, regarding
his involvement with the CIA, will be explored as part of a more expansive research
project in the future.
44. The linkages between the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Paris Review
have been extensively written about since 1977, most notably (and recently) in a May 27,
2012, article in online magazine Salon. In it, author Joel Whitney makes a compelling
circumstantial case suggesting that the linkages between the CCF and the Paris Review
were all but certain. Nearly all of the instances occurred within the tenure of Nelson
Aldrich who was the Paris editor of the Review from 1958 to 1961, a period referred to
as the weaponization of the Paris Review. The earliest evidence of Aldrichs desire to
part from the Paris Reviews mantra of celebrating artistic merit devoid of politics is
contained in a letter from Aldrich to a Morris Graves dated February 26, 1958.
45. The Paris Review Archive, J.P. Morgan Library, New York City, box 1, folder 17.
46. Wrights
alleged
loss
of
apostleship
among
the
anti-Communists
Craig Lanier Allen
49
notwithstanding, he would be called upon as an anti-Communist American voice by

the CCF and State Department at various times from 1953 to 1958. As Richard Gibson
correctly points out in his commentary Richard Wrights Island of Hallucination and
the Gibson Affair, Wright would go on to secure State Department funding for trips to
Bandung (195455) and a Conference of African and African American Writers in Paris
in 1956: Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 896920.
47. Matthiessen, interview with Nelson Aldrich, January 8, 2008.
50

Nick Fischer
abstractAs combatant nations commemorate the centenary of the Great War, it is
important to acknowledge the role of the war ushering in a new era of state propaganda.
The technological advent both of total war and of modern communications media
encouraged governments to attend as much to the morale of civilians as enlisted men.
While all combatant governments invested heavily in propaganda, US government
propaganda was recognized as being distinctive, both for the quality and breadth of its
operations and for having brought all such activity under the control of a purpose-built
official agency, the Committee on Public Information. The committee was not only
an American but a world first. Its legacy was profound and complex. Its ingenuity is
disputed, as are its goals and the methods it used to achieve them. The sense of many
Americans in the 1920s and 30s that they had been manipulated by the committee
strengthened isolationist sentiment and made more difficult Franklin Roosevelts task
of persuading the electorate to support war against the fascist powers of Europe and Asia.
Although the CPIs tainted reputation influenced Roosevelts decision not to revive the
committee, the messages and techniques it pioneered were widely used to help wage the
Second World War and also the Cold War.
The Origins of State Propaganda

Propaganda is as old as the concept of the state itself. More than 3,000 years
before the Common Era, the first Egyptian king, Narmer, was depicted smiting
his captured enemies, beginning a tradition of propaganda in which the virtues
and strength of the state and its rulers were juxtaposed with portrayals of weak
and perfidious enemies.
The ancient Greeks were arguably the first to appreciate the need for
propaganda to galvanize and inspire their citizen-soldiers, as well as the need

51
for censorship and propaganda campaigns to promote public support for specific
military campaigns.1 Such propaganda was produced not only for immediate
purposes but also took the form of history. When the Athenian general
Thucydides declared that his account of the Peloponnesian war (published ca.
400 BCE) was not a piece of writing designed to meet the needs of an immediate
public, but was done to last for ever, he began a practice of laying claim to
the truth for posterity that was embraced by countless future propagandists,
including Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.2
The urgency of controlling immediate impressions of state policy, and
especially the conduct of war, grew exponentially with the advent of mass
circulation newspapers and journals. The historian Philip M. Taylor argues that
the Crimean War (18531856) marked the irrevocable moment when the needs
of military secrecy could no longer be detached from the demands of media
publicity. Thus the battle to control the flow of information which might have
an adverse effect on military and civilian morale made modern censorship
and propaganda [permanent] institutional responses to the communications
revolution that continues to this day.3
Propaganda in the US: the American

Revolution to the First World War
Although a relatively new polity, the US has had a long and globally significant
association with state propaganda. The American colonies were products of fierce
political, military, and religious conflict, and they were important subjects of
and producers of propaganda as soon as they were established. The first political
symbol for the colonies that would form the US was conceived by Benjamin
Franklin: the native rattlesnake, divided into eight sections, called upon
Americans to Join, or Die, in 1754 against the twin threats of native tribes and
the French, and then in 1765 against the government of George III ( figure 1).4
Rapidly rising literacy rates and the increasing availability of printed
material made literary propaganda even more important to the American
Revolution than pictorial banners. No less an authority than John Adams
declared that the revolution had been won as a war of ideas in the minds and
hearts of colonists before armed hostilities began. And though he was anything
but an admirer, Adams believed that history would credit the revolution to the
English-born pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose tract Common Sense (1776),
perhaps the most radical and eloquent appeal for American independence, is
thought to have reached one sixth of the colonial population.5
52
Australasian Journal of american Studies
figure 1
Join, or Die (Library of Congress).
The American Civil War, like the Crimean War, coincided with technological developments that fostered an exponential growth of propaganda.
Lithographing and engraving industries had made mass market journalism
possible, and illustrated papers gave readers images and reports of events within
ten to fourteen days of their occurrence, an amazing speed in comparison with
what had previously been possible.6 When fighting began, both the Union
and the Confederacy lost little time attempting to win a propaganda war. Each
government sent lecturers to Europe and placed stories in foreign newspapers.
The Union Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, also wrote copy but acted more
as a censor, barring correspondents from the battlefront, suspending some
newspapers, and even threatening one correspondent with execution. But in
both North and South, propaganda was produced more by enthusiastic citizens
rather than governments. While Northern activists organized Union League
clubs and the Loyal Publication Society, the professional media was the most
crucial field of battle. In the South, journals organized into the Press Association
of the Confederated States to amplify the Rebel message. The North enjoyed a
decisive propaganda advantage in the cartoons of Thomas Nast, the star artist
of Harpers Weekly.7
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53
With a weekly readership of between 750,000 and 1.25 million, Harpers

commanded the largest audience of any paper on the continent. Working under
close editorial direction, Nast and other illustrators helped establish the main
themes of pictorial propaganda not only for the Civil War but for every American
war to follow. Initially printing 45 inch comics, by 1864, Harpers was
publishing full-page cartoons opposite editorial columns. As one historian writes,
several decades of abolitionist propaganda had prepared many Northerners
to believe the very worst about Southern slaveholders and Northern publishers
constantly told their readers that there was a vast conspiracy of slaveholders and
military chieftains dedicated not only to treason, but to the commission also
of degenerate atrocities against Northern prisoners of war. For much of the
war, a vast number of Northern-produced pictures, based on alleged eye-witness
reports, depicted brutal Southern prison conditions, pushing ancient notions of
the perfidious enemy into a modern technological age.8
Yet although there was a great upsurge in propaganda during the Civil War,
the issue of state propaganda remained fleeting for the rest of the nineteenth
century, and continued to be associated almost exclusively with war.9 And the
term propaganda itself had yet to acquire a pejorative meaning. First used in
1622, by Pope Gregory XV when he formed the Office for the Propagation of the
Faith to supervise missionary activity, propaganda had remained a neutral
concept, deriving meaning from its authors and their aim. The era of massand continuing state propaganda, and of the associational evolution of the word
propaganda into a synonym for big black lies, began abruptly during the First
World War.10
The First World War and the Founding of

the Committee on Public Information
The Great War, as it was soon named, was the first war in history where both
the ideology and the practical resources existed for governments to mobilize
entire industrial societies for warfare.11 While the US did not enter the war for
two and a half years, the administration of President Woodrow Wilson was
perhaps uniquely prepared for a propaganda war. Within days of Congresss
declaration of war on Germany on April 6, 1917, the federal governments
propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), commenced
operations. Until its dissolution in June 1919, the CPI issued a vast body of
propaganda, in an unprecedented range of media. Its innovative use of the
printed and spoken word, and of graphic images in poster and motion picture
54
formats, won the admiration of contemporary and future observers, and helped
usher in a new era of truly professional propaganda. And while there is some
disagreement whether the propaganda of the British government or the CPI was
most innovative and influential, the CPIs status as the first agency not only in
the US but in the world to fully control a national governments propaganda
policy and resources is universally accepted.12
The British government could boast of many propaganda achievements
during the war. Arguably its great achievement was to secure American
sympathies in the conflict, well before the US joined the war. This task had been
assigned to Wellington House, a Foreign Office unit whose operations were kept
secret, not only from the British public but even most members of parliament,
in order to prevent Americans from learning that most of the material they
were receiving about the war was being produced by the British government. Yet
the effort of President Wilson and the CPI to convince a deeply skeptical public
that it was necessary to enter a war of choice, and then support the war effort
with what Wilson termed national unity of counsel, was no less formidable.
And unlike Wellington House, which worked in tandem with the Ministry of
Information and the Department of Enemy Propaganda, the CPI carried the
burden of producing and distributing US propaganda alone.13
Wilson had only barely secured a second term by promising to keep America
out of the war. But within weeks of his second inauguration, Congress acceded
to the presidents request to declare war on Germany. To fight and sell the war
to an electorate that felt at best dismayed and at worst betrayed, the administration took the extraordinary steps first of instituting a universal draft, and
second of founding the CPI, to fill the information void left by its strict control
on the expression and distribution of fact and opinion. The committee was
created by executive order of the president just one week after war was declared.
Yet in spite of appearances, it did not spring from Wilsons ear, like the goddess
Athena. It had in fact been contemplated by the president and his close adviser,
Colonel Edward M. House, for several months, as they determined how best to
control and guide public opinion. Rejecting the advice of the War Departments
censor, Major Douglas MacArthur, who proposed a British-style regime of
strict military censorship, Wilson and House were persuaded by prominent
journalists including Walter Lippman, David Lawrence, Arthur Bullard, and
George Creel to co-opt rather than merely censor mainstream media.14 Thus
when war came, the administration appointed Creel, an ardent and useful
supporter, to head up the CPI and battle (as Creel put it) for the verdict of
mankind. Although the committees board included the secretaries of state,
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55
war and the Navy, these men played only a small part in the efforts of the CPI,
which was dominated for its entire career by its chairman, Creel.15
George Creel
George Edward Creel (born December 1, 1876) was raised in small-town
Missouri and as a young man settled in Kansas City, where he began a career
in journalism. Joining the Kansas City World in 1894, Creel soon left to work
for Hearsts Evening Journal and American comic supplement, before returning to
Kansas City in 1899, where he became sole owner and editor of the Independent.
In many ways a typical fin de sicle Progressive, Creel strongly supported public
ownership of essential resources and services, the single tax, and womens rights.
He had a puritanical streak that was expressed in campaigns against prostitution
and drunkenness, and his brief stint in politics as Commissioner of Police in
Denver, Colorado came to an abrupt end in 1912, when his efforts to ban city
officials from drinking in public bars prompted the mayor to dismiss him.16
Creel believed his Progressive ideals were most likely to be achieved through
the agency of a major political party. He took up with the Democrats because,
he later wrote, he was wholeheartedly convinced that they were closer to the
people than the Republican plunderbund, and more likely to stand for human
rights rather than property rights. Creel was also particularly enamored
of Woodrow Wilson, whom he first encountered when the then professor of
political science spoke to school students in Kansas City. Creel read Wilsons
books, urged his nomination as president when he became the governor of
New Jersey, and eventually toiled for Wilsons reelection as president, writing
newspaper features for the Democratic National Committee and a book titled
Wilson and the Issues. He was rewarded with control of the administrations news
agenda not just for historical loyalty but also for the zeal the president expected
he would bring to the job. Known for being, as historian Stephen Vaughn writes,
flamboyant, temperamental, and thin skinned, Creel nonetheless impressed
Wilson as a man with a passion for adjectives and a prodigious work ethic.17
The Domestic Work of the CPI

As soon as Congress declared war on Germany, the federal government amassed
great repressive power. Much of that power was used to suppress both opinion
and physical demonstrations of protest against the war. In this task, the CPI
played an important role in concert with other government agencies, under
56
the authority of a steadily growing body of legislation. The declaration of war

itself brought the government immediate authority to censor and monitor
telegraphic and telephonic communication. The Espionage Act of June 1917
expanded these controls and gave the government near-total capacity to define
and proscribe conduct or opinion that prejudiced the war effort or aided the
enemy. The October 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act empowered the president
to censor subversive literature and monitor mail, and required editors of foreign
language material to file any copy dealing with government policy and the war
with official translators.18
During its twenty-six months of operation, the CPI functioned not just as a
substitute for but as an abettor of government censorship. The president himself
believed firmly that in war it is legitimate to regard things which would in
ordinary circumstances be innocent as very dangerous to the public welfare.
Creel essentially agreed, but suggested a regime of rigid censorship of cable
communications, coupled with voluntary agreement on the part of every
newspaper to make itself its own censor in the protection of military secrets
and the promotion of government policies.19 By the time the CPI was dissolved,
Creel had succeeded in these aims on a scale and across a range of media and
continents that even he had probably never imagined possible.
The CPI possessed both hard and soft power. Its hard power included the
authority to edit newspaper copy, furnish its own advertisements and notices,
and limit the distribution of information. The Committee thus buttressed
other agencies that controlled cables and radio: the Censorship Board and the
postmaster. Creel was a member of the Censorship Board, the advisory body
that coordinated the administrations censorship regime, examining imported
material and material for export, calling on the Department of Justice to prosecute
errant editors, enlisting the War Trade Board to deprive suspect publications
of newsprint and alerting the postmaster of undesirable publications.20 The
postmaster took the lead in stamping out printed criticism of government policy,
but arguably more important censorship and propaganda duties were performed
by the major organs of news, opinion, and popular entertainment under the
supervision of the CPI. And while the CPI relied heavily on citizens patriotism
and cooperation (as governments had during the American Revolution and the
Civil War) in order to spread and control its messages, it possessed unprecedented resources for a government propaganda organization. Indeed, it might
properly have been termed the Public Information Administration. Organizing
the propaganda output of the most powerful and wealthy nation-state ever
known, it comprised fourteen departments, employing artists, cartoonists,
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57
graphic designers, filmmakers, journalists novelists, short-story writers,

and essayists who collaborated with 18,000 newspapers, 11,000 national
advertisers and advertising agencies, 10,000 chambers of commerce 30,000
manufacturers associations, 22,000 labor unions, 10,000 public libraries,
32,000 banks, 58,000 general stores 3,500 Young Mens Christian Association
branches, 10,000 members of the Council of National Defense, 56,000 post
offices 5,000 draft boards [and] 100,000 Red Cross chapters. The Speaking
Division conducted 45 war conferences. The pamphlet division, Creel breathlessly claimed, enlisted over 3,000 of the leading historians of the country,
who directed the production of posters, window cards, and similar material of
pictorial publicity for the use of various Government departments and patriotic
societies. A weekly Bulletin for Cartoonists contained from all the chief
departments of the Government the announcements which they particularly
wanted to transmit to the public. And the Division of Films carried images of
Americas war progress, as well as what Creel described as the meanings and
purposes of democracy to every community in the United States and to every
corner of the world.21
By taking advantage of all available media and means of communication,
the CPI was able to reach deep into the heart of remote and rural communities,
as well as great cities. Whether residing in Los Angeles or in a small community,
citizens were almost certain to be regaled by a representative of the CPIs Four
Minute Men, community volunteers who gave pithy speeches prepared by CPI
staff to public assemblies across the nation. Named after the minute men of the
Revolutionary War and for the four minute period that elapsed as a projectionist
changed reels in a movie theater, the program had absorbed a patriotic speakers
committee founded by a group of Chicago businessmen. With 2,500 speakers by
July 1917 and 15,000 four months later, speakers became so ubiquitous that it
became difficult, the journalist Mark Sullivan wrote, for half a dozen persons
to come together without having a Four Minute Man descend upon them.22
By wars end, Creel estimated that around seventy-five thousand Four Minute
Men had delivered more than 750,000 speeches to 315 million people at lodges,
fraternal organizations, unions, granges, churches, synagogues, Sunday
schools, womens clubs, and colleges. No American was too young to carry the
CPIs message. A youth branch of Junior Four Minute Men distributed more
than 1.5 million copies of a War Savings stamp bulletin, and the Committee
organized prizes for the Junior Fourth Liberty Loan contest and Junior Red Cross
Christmas roll call. It also published a School Service bulletin and special publications, such as The Battle Line of Democracy: Prose and Poetry of the World War,
58
filled with speeches by presidents Wilson, Lincoln, Monroe, and Cleveland, and
contributions from popular writers including Whitman, Emerson, and Julia
Ward Howe to inspire the children of America to think about the meaning of
their beloved country in this the hour of her trial.23
The CPIs ability to mobilize such vast numbers of civilian auxiliaries was
one of its most important contributions to the war effort. Like the American
Protective League, a volunteer organization of 250,000 members that was
authorized by the federal government to help round up draft dodgers and police
community loyalty, the CPI was an ingenious means of economizing on the
business of war.24 But the efforts of the Four Minute Men, for example, would
have been for naught if the product they were selling had been inadequate.
It was anything but. The speeches given by the Minute Men were supervised
by a team of rhetoricians and historians led by Guy Stanton Ford, professor
of history and later president of the University of Minnesota, who had taken
leave from the academy to head up the CPIs Division of Civic and Educational
Publications.25 Fords team issued Minute Men with more than forty information
bulletins during the war, outlining approved topics, appropriate quotations and
figure 2
Four Minute Men posters (ca. 1917) heralding

A Message from
Washington, both
by H. Devitt Walsh
(Library of Congress).
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59
figure 3
Perishings Crusaders
(1918) and Americas
Answer (1918)
(Library of Congress).
catch phrases, sample speeches, and suggestions for timing and organization
of each presentation. Almost fifty percent of Minute Men material mentioned,
discussed, or directly quoted the president, giving him unprecedented publicity
and, just as important, the means to communicate his ideas directly to the
public, bypassing the press entirely. In effect, the administration through
the Minute Men came as close to approximating a presidential radio speech as
was possible before network radio.26 And the Minute Mens advertising posters
(figure 2), designed by leading graphic designers including Charles Dana Gibson,
the editor of Life magazine, explicitly associated speakers with town criers of
the Revolutionary era, and the grandeur of the Capitol in Washington, DC.27
The movie moguls of Hollywood also made motion pictures a glamorous
tool of government. The Division of Films, headed by Charles S. Hart, an
advertising manager for Hearsts Magazine, collaborated with studio bosses,
directors (notably D.W. Griffith), and stars (Charlie Chaplin and Douglas
Fairbanks), to produce and distribute pictures such as Pershings Crusaders and
Americas Answer (figure 3), which both depicted American troops advancing
through German-inflicted carnage to carry the values of Christian civilization,
like modern-day Knights Templar, into the benighted Old World.28
60
The CPIs support of the war extended far beyond rousing community spirit
and encouraging enlistment. It was also committed to raising funds through
Liberty Loan drives, and to stamping out political opposition to the war. Creel
and his senior staff constantly described the CPIs ultimate purpose as popularizing the tremendous truth that the fight against Germany was a fight for all
that life has taught decent human beings to hold dear, particularly the splendid
democracy [and] industrial and social progress of the United States.29 Yet Creels
rhetoric and the content of the CPIs propaganda often betrayed a darker truth.
In less guarded moments, Creel confessed that his objective was to make all
Americans, and particularly foreign-language groups, feel nothing less than
a compulsion from within to support government policy. For all that Creel
spoke of providing citizens with co-operation supervision [and] counsel, his
ultimate purpose was to generate in the American public
no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of Americas cause
that [could] weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass
instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.30
This white-hot mass instinct was expressed in the forced establishment by
minority groups of their own loyalty leagues, under the supervision of the CPIs
ten foreign language bureaus. In this way, Creel averred, the foreign-born,
feared with respect to their ignorances [sic] and prejudices, were brought
into closer touch with our national life than ever before. Yet by pressuring
immigrants and minorities into mass political censorship and conformism,
the CPI helped, by Creels own admission, to obscure the consequences of
prolonged utter neglect of their needs. For although Creel acknowledged that
the melting pot [had] not melted for twenty-five years, the conscription of
myriad ethnic communities into flag-waving exercises, and the pressure many
(indigent) immigrants felt to subscribe to Liberty Loans, hardly represented the
outstretched hand the CPI claimed to provide.31
The harm done to immigrant communities by the CPI was great enough,
but Creels desire to generate white-hot mass instinct was also expressed in
the destruction of legitimate challengers to the duopoly of the Republican and
Democratic parties, such as the Nonpartisan League, an agrarian political
party that had won gubernatorial and legislative assembly elections in North
Dakota. The League emerged from the Republican Party in 1915, after a decade
of poor harvests and substantial profits for big business convinced its members
that their condition could be improved only by establishing state-owned
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61
banks, grain elevators, flour mills, and packing plants, as well as not-for-profit
credit and insurance agencies. Many of these objectives were not obnoxious
to Progressives like George Creel. They were, however, heretical to the
powerbrokers of the major parties, who set about obliterating the League by
associating it with socialism, degenerate free love and, perhaps most damningly,
conspiracy to defeat the success of the Liberty Loan campaign in the northwest.
This last charge stuck fast in part because many League members had German
and Scandinavian heritage. Creel directly contributed to the destruction of the
League, alleging that it, more than any other [organization], was impregnated
with the lie about a rich mans war by reason of well-established lies and
certain fundamental ignorances. The federal government in turn ignored
vigilante violence committed against League members and raised no objection
to a coup by a Republican front group that brought about the early dismissal of
the governor and the leagues assembly members. In 1920, when it no longer
mattered, Creel conceded that North Dakota had in fact heavily oversubscribed
[its] liberty loan allotments, in spite of prolonged drought and crop failure.
Worse, he affirmed that there was no doubt as to the [party] political nature of
the [leagues] persecution.32
The Transnational Work of the CPI

The pursuit of narrow organizational objectives also characterized the CPIs
international conduct. Its propaganda reached millions of people across all
points of the globe. CPI offices were established in Mexico, France, Holland,
Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, China, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay,
Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Sweden, Norway, and Russia. India, Egypt, and the
Balkans were also reached, as was Australasia, where, Creel claimed, CPI
material sent to newspapers had the noticeable effect of supplying editors
with the basis for favorable editorial comment and for a number of articles on
[the USs] part in the war. The CPIs Speaking Division also paid for a number
of foreign luminaries to travel to the US and address American citizens on the
importance of their contribution to the war. Distant Australia, for example,
contributed the services of Crawford Vaughan, a recently retired Labor Premier
of South Australia, who gave in all 22 addresses under the auspices of the
division until he became connected with the United States Shipping Board.33
The CPIs Russian bureau was unquestionably its most complex and
important foreign operation. Run out of Moscow, Petrograd, Arkhangelsk, and
Siberia, the final reckoning of the bureaus activity took up more than twenty
62
percent of the Committees closing report to Congress. The US had been the
first major power to recognize the provisional government established after
the overthrow of Tsar Nikolai II in March 1917, and the CPIs Russian bureau
was established well before the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917. When
the Wilson administration decided to wage war against Bolshevik Russia, the
services of the CPIs central and local representatives became indispensable. The
manufacture of anti-Bolshevik propaganda had been government policy since
July 1917, and the administration spent $5 million dollars acquiring and distributing information in the US and in Russia despite knowing that the information
was false. The most notable canard spread by the government was the accusation
that the Bolsheviks had been paid by the Kaiser to foment instability in Russia and
take it out of the war. The administrations principal evidence supporting this
claim were the Sisson Papers, purchased in early 1918 by the presidents envoy,
Edgar Sisson, one of the committees three associate chairs, who, like Creel,
was a former Hearst employee. The publisher of a Petrograd scandal sheet had
conned Sisson, selling him documents purportedly showing that the Bolshevik
revolution was arranged for by the German Great General Staff, and financed by
the German Imperial Bank and other German financial institutions. They also
purported to show that the Russian commissar for foreign affairs, Leon Trotsky,
and Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, were working for German intelligence;
that the treaty of Brest-Litovsk taking Russia out of the war in March 1918 was
a betrayal of the Russian people by the German agents Lenin and Trotsky; and
that the Bolshevik government was not a Russian government at all, but a
German government acting solely in the interests of Germany and betraying
the Russian people, as well as Russias natural allies (meaning principally the
US), for the benefit of the Imperial German Government alone. The British
government determined that the documents had been written on a single
typewriter and were fraudulent, but President Wilson nevertheless decided to
leak them to the press.34
The claim that Russian Bolsheviks were controlled by Germany was
hugely influential. Mainstream media overwhelmingly accepted the claims,
denouncing Bolshevism as well as German meddling in Russia. Some papers,
among them the New York Globe, admitted their inability to verify the Bolsheviks
treachery but nevertheless suggested that the Bolsheviks would transform both
Russia and Germany into a cauldron of hellbroth. Newspapers then began to
urge the government to take immediate military action in Russia. A policy of
containment was thought to be inadvisable, as the Bolsheviks would be easier
to defeat sooner rather than later. And the US would play an essential role in
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63
combating Bolshevism: the future of the world, according to the New York Post,
depended on American (moral) leadership.35
Creel consistently claimed that the CPIs external activity could never be
considered propaganda because it pursued its agenda openly, and because its
work was educational and informative only. Indeed, Creel professed himself
so confident in the justness of Americas cause that the CPI needed only to
make a fair presentation of facts in order to win foreign support. Creels
claim that the CPI was open about its work was generally accurate, though this
did not mean that it could not be confrontational and even incendiary. Edgar
Sissons account of the Russian bureaus activity illustrates this point. By midDecember 1917, Sisson had become convinced that the streets of Petrograd
offered excellent billboard possibilities for spreading President Wilsons
Russian messages. Every street in the capital, he wrote, was papered up and
down with placards and proclamations, mostly emanating from the Soviet.
And as President Wilsons messages were being misused and misinterpreted
when they appeared in Russian periodicals, Sisson resolved to put the messages
on the billboard. Although he was advised that this would be regarded as a
challenge by the Bolshevik Government, this view did not appear reasonable
to him; he simply disregarded it. The outrage this caused was not lessened for
having been done openly and the Petrograd and Moscow offices of the CPI were
forcibly closed, though not until two months after American troops invaded
Russia in the Allied offensive against the Bolshevik government. Meanwhile,
Sisson screened motion pictures under false titles and distributed a reprint of
the Sisson Papers across swaths of Russian territory. And while the CPI printed
twenty-four thousand handbills to combat a typhus pandemic in Siberia, it
produced millions of copies of The German Plot to Control Russia, Letters of an
American Friend, and President Wilsons January 8, 1918 message.36
Legacies of the CPI

The CPI was dissolved on June 30, 1919. In its short life it could lay claim to
revolutionizing state propaganda. And its founders and managers could also lay
claim to having done more to change the relationship between the American
people and the concept of propaganda than had anyone before them.
However, almost as soon as it was disbanded, the CPI and the role of
propaganda in the war more broadly became the subject of fierce and ongoing
controversy. In the face of this criticism, Committee officials insisted their
actions had been motivated by altruistic notions of serving democracy and
64
promoting the civilizing values of the US. The CPI was indeed staffed by
hundreds of prominent progressives and even the odd admirer of Lenin and
Trotsky. They and many other intelligent, sincere peoplejournalists,
scholars, educational leaders, orators, artists, even advertising men had
great, if nave, faith in the integrity of the American government and its
leaders and in the power of ideas to transform men and society. Some professionals, notably academics, had been particularly keen to serve the CPI to
showcase their eagerness to speak to all types and groups of people and to
promote service-oriented views. Yet, as Vaughn notes, many CPI officials and
volunteers only dimly perceived the consequences for democratic government
of the propaganda they had produced.37
This cannot be said of at least one of the CPIs principal staff, Edward L.
Bernays, who was better placed than most to assess the significance of the
committee and its work. Remembered now as the father of public relations,
Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, who specialized in analyzing the
needs and drives of the average American citizen. He joined the CPI early in its
existence and represented the committee at the Peace Conference at Versailles.
After the war he worked for the War Department finding employment for
ex-service men and was a member of President Hoovers Emergency Committee
of Employment. But his principal occupation was helping the giant corporations of America with their various sales and image problems, in which
capacity he served as Counsel on Public Relations, a term he himself coined.
At that sort of effort, one historian has written, Bernays was in a class all
by himself.38
As a public relations professional, Bernays provided a more sober and
technical assessment of the CPI than its chairman. To begin with, he did not
shy from the term propaganda. In his view, honest education and honest
propaganda [had] much in common, but with this dissimilarity: Education
attempts to be disinterested, while propaganda is frankly partisan.39 Such
frankness was beyond Creel, who always insisted that his committee operated
on a different moral plane than foreign governments propaganda agencies. For
example, in July 1918, Creel wrote,
From the first our policy has been to find out what the Germans are doing,
and then not do it. Rottenness and corruption and deceit and trickery may
win for awhile [sic], but in the long run it always brings about its own
inevitable reaction.40
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65
Similarly, in his 1920 account of the work of the committee, Creel claimed that
the CPI could not be considered to have spread propaganda because that word, in
German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption.41
For Bernays, this was nonsense. Not only was the CPI responsible for
propaganda, but it should be applauded for it. Bernays did not mean that
governments had the right to manipulate people for any ends; far from it. But
he did believe that society had become so enlarged and unwieldy that it was
necessary for governments and other religious, corporate, educational, private,
and social entities and associations to issue guidance material or propaganda,
to help the average citizen to make rational decisions about how they should
vote, spend their money, think, worship, and use their leisure time. Hence
Bernays called the first part of his 1928 book Propaganda Organizing Chaos,
and proclaimed the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized
habits of the masses to be an important element in democratic society. To
make his point, Bernays drew on the example of the rise in America of political
parties. These parties performed an essential service by rationalizing the
number of candidates voters could support, making democratic elections
workable. Similar processes were now required in almost every field of endeavor
for modern society to function. In practice, Bernays argued, it was impossible
for every citizen to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and
ethical data involved in every question. Instead, the common man or woman
relied on societys invisible governors, who constituted the true ruling power
of the US. It was they who molded minds and formed tastes, through their
qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and their
key position in the social structure. Propaganda, the advice these leaders
dispensed, thus constituted the executive arm of the invisible government.
What saved the nation from being led into tyranny by this executive was its
anonymity and the free competition of ideas. Different leaders in different fields
were generally unknown to one another and so could not combine dangerously.
And in concert, by helping to teach the public how to ask for what it wants,
they simultaneously taught that public how to safeguard itself against tyranny
from both without and within.42
Fifteen years later, Bernays reviewed the CPIs performance, with a view to
strengthening Americas capacity to combat the Nazi propaganda machine. The
First World War, in Bernays view, was the first time in history that governments
recognized in varying degree the importance of a scientific approach to the
marketing of national aims and policies. Such an approach necessitated the
sophisticated use of psychology, including the propaganda of despair to break
66
down the morale of the enemy, as well as the propaganda of hope to present
to the enemy a picture of the promised land, if they [would] only lay down
their arms. On this score, the German government had performed miserably.
It paid little attention to morale on the home front and its foreign propaganda
was too tactless, too open, too obvious, [and] lacking in enthusiasm. Similarly,
the British government at no time harnessed the intellectual civilian resources
of their country to master the problem of psychological warfare on a broad
and integrated basis.43 In the US, by contrast, while psychological activity
evolved slowly rather than from advance planned activity undertaken as part
of a program of national defense, the CPI still did a splendid job within these
limitations. It used some of the available knowledge of psychology and sociology,
and its fourteen divisions had worked in more or less coordinated fashion. The
Four Minute Men had anticipated the function of radio, spearheading the assault
on indifference and apathy [on] 400 million listeners. But it was still a pioneer
effort with trial and error, too little planned activity, and too much reliance on
enthusiasm for the cause, in the place of training and experience.44
Bernayss analysis of the merits and defects of the CPI and comparable
foreign agencies was perceptive but perhaps overinfluenced by professional
pride. German propaganda had indeed been uncoordinated and sometimes
gormless. But Bernays was inclined to dismiss the considerable propaganda
achievements of the British government. One particular incident illustrates
both these points. In 1916, a German artist struck a medal commemorating the
anniversary of the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania, an incident that resulted
in the loss of 1,200 lives, including 125 Americans. The German government did
nothing to suppress or discourage distribution of the medal and one fell into the
hands of the British Foreign Office, which sent photographs of the medal to the
US. The photos caused such outrage that the British government immediately
produced a replica edition of the medal with an explanatory leaflet that was
purchased by hundreds of thousands of Americans. This was but one of the most
dramatic British propaganda coups of the war.45
Bernayss sanguine assessment of the role of propaganda also belied the
considerable damage the CPI wrought in the US itself. On face value, its demonization of the Hun had been enormously successful. For a time, the portrayal
of the war as a clash between Atlantic civilization and Prussian barbarism
held. Propaganda had been so obviously valuable in the war that it revolutionized the standing of advertising and marketing experts among corporate
leaders. Advertising agents were no longer regarded as charlatans but rather,
historian Mark Miller writes, as a reborn generation of professionals [who]
Nick Fischer
67
figure 4
68
Liberty Loan (1917) (Library of Congress).
figure 5
Beat Back the Hun and They Give Their Lives (Library of Congress).
went right to work massaging or exciting various publics on behalf of General

Motors, Proctor & Gamble, [and] General Electric. In the Roaring Twenties,
propaganda taught immigrants and other folks of modest means how to
transform themselves, through smart consumption, into happy and presentable
Americans. Yet propaganda was not just a faux-progressive influence,
privileging consumerism above arguably more meaningful pursuits. It was also
associated, as never before, with cynical manipulation and outright lies.46
While George Creel acknowledged that the CPI had given the advertising
trade the dignity of a profession, he was loath to admit that the CPI had ever
preached any message of hate or made any appeal to the emotions.47 This was
fatuous. The balance of Liberty Loan advertising, for example, mongered fear
and induced guilt. For every sunny CPI image of new migrants experiencing
their First Thrill of AMERICAN LIBERTY (figure 4), there were more bloodsoaked Huns and forlorn American servicemens graveyards (figure 5). The
head of the Division of Pictorial Publicity, Charles Gibson, was said by contemporaries to drip with venom and he was determined that CPI art use violent
images to appeal to the heart of the American citizen, to startle him or her out
of indifference.48
Nick Fischer
69
While the war raged, these images did sterling work. But shortly after the
armistice, isolationalists seized upon revelations about the extent of British
propaganda foisted upon Americans prior to April 1917. The Wilson administration had, they asserted, been duped into joining the Allies.49 These
revelations drew fresh attention to the CPI and its deception of the populace.
Thus, Miller notes, the great war drive had the effect not only of making the
alien term propaganda commonplace, but also of making a previously neutral
term pejorative. And throughout the 1920s, a gradual, disorienting revelation
of just how systematically, and ingeniously the CPI had manipulated public
opinion led to propaganda being universally decried as a cancer on the body
politic.50 The CPIs co-opting of patriotism and fear in the service of crude and
oversold political goals had not only changed the American publics relationship
with the concept of propaganda, but also permanently diminished public trust
in government.
It also showed extremist and vigilante organizations how to propagate their
own sectional messages more effectively. Right-wing patriotic societies, such
as the National Security League, established their own Flying Squadrons of
speakers during the war.51 But it was the American Legion that most effectively
and lastingly adopted the techniques of the CPI to engender a conservative
and conformist interpretation of 100% Americanism. Through its National
Americanism Commission (which is still in service), the Legion continued
the CPI practice of developing a corpus of propaganda in organizational
headquarters and distributing that propaganda through tens of thousands of
ground-level volunteers. Across the nation, legionnaires engaged in political,
economic and social repression.52 The Legion orchestrated the dismissal of
ideologically unreliable teachers, joining the federal Board of Education
to jointly sponsor American Education Week 1924 and ensure that federal
education guidelines encouraged compulsory patriotism. By 1925, more
teachers were being dismissed for unpatriotic utterances and opinions than
during any previous period. Several states required educators to provide daily
patriotic exercises for schools. Educational decrees in Washington, New York,
and Colorado mandated participation in patriotic activities. In the early 1930s,
Washington, Michigan, Montana, and Delaware passed laws, formulated by
the Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, requiring teachers
to swear oaths of loyalty. The Legion also stifled students freedom of expression.
At the University of Minnesota, dozens of students were expelled for objecting
to military drills, while the University of Virginia barred from its campus any
speaker not approved by the Daughters or the Legion.53
70
World War II and the Example of the CPI

By the Second World War the technical means for spreading ideas had improved
greatly, as Edward Bernays observed, and he became concerned that the Nazi
regime had most heeded the lessons of World War I and the pioneering efforts
of the CPI. Its National Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
controlled the press, broadcasting, films, music, art and the theatre general
information on home policy tourist and economic propaganda, as well as
all State and Party meetings. The Nazi government had in fact assembled the
totalitarian apotheosis of offensive and defensive morale building carried
on in total psychological warfare. While Bernays wanted nothing of the sort for
America, he worried that the US had no master plan of psychological approaches
to help it defeat the Nazi menace.54
Whether he was motivated by pride in the work of the CPI or was no longer
so closely associated with government propaganda, Bernays underestimated
the scope and sophistication of the Roosevelt administrations propaganda effort.
He also understated the political complexity of the task it faced in combating
isolationism and then mobilizing the nations conscripts and workers. And
he misread the degree to which it followed and advanced the work of the CPI.
He also seems to have misjudged the extent and significance of propaganda
produced by the radio and motion picture industries, which had been so integral
to the domestic policy successes of the Roosevelt administration and would be
equally so during the war.
When Germany invaded Poland in August 1939, interest in propaganda
techniques and analysis increased dramatically, according to Richard W. Steele,
a historian of the relationship between the media and the Roosevelt administration. Elements in American society and indeed in Roosevelts cabinet were
deeply concerned about the potential for isolationist sentiment to impede the
assistance the US might afford European democracies, as well as Americas own
defense. They urged the president to create an organization to coordinate federal
government propaganda. Some even thought that this organization should have
an intelligence-gathering function. Roosevelt and his principal media advisers
had all served in the Wilson administration and observed the work of the CPI at
close quarters, and they seriously considered reviving the CPI and even inviting
a now-elderly Creel to run it.55
Ultimately, however, the administration took a different course. This was
in part because senior officials felt that the government still lacked an accepted
national policy and because they were uncertain how enmeshed the US would
become in the war. Mindful also of the persistent taint of propaganda on
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71
Americas involvement in the First World War, as well as the Nazi governments
enthrallment to propaganda, the administration decided it would be better
served by harnessing the input and power of the existing communications
media, as well as the voluntarist tradition that had previously so animated the
CPI; and the Union, Secessionist, and Revolutionary causes before that. Acutely
sensitive to the limitations of the presidential bully pulpit, Roosevelt and his
key advisers understood that in radio, the perfect informational medium,
and motion pictures, the administration had the means to undertake a vast
educational campaign that would be substantially immune from criticism
and more likely to reach the mass of the American people.56
The radio and motion picture industries, much more than print media, were
easily co-opted into the federal governments designs. Very short license periods,
in the case of radio, and an overwhelming concentration of market control in
both industries made the major wireless networks and motion picture studios
sensitive to the threat of anti-trust regulation and hence eager to cooperate with
the government. This cooperation took the form of censorship, as well as the
distribution of approved government material, and the production of superior
material advancing government interests. Irritants such as the pro-fascist
pastor Charles Coughlin and isolationist politicians were simply deprived by
network bosses of radio and film coverage. Meanwhile, government agencies
such as the Office of War Information issued guidelines to networks and studios
about the key issues the government wanted covered.57
President Roosevelt himself was an exceptionally able radio performer who
wisely limited his appearances to maximize their impact. He and his cabinet
were able regularly to issue material direct to the public over the airwaves,
advancing President Wilsons similar use of the Four Minute Men. In the
nations cinemas, where more than 80 million Americans were entertained each
week, approved newsreels were screened. Studios also began to produce popular
pictures that undermined isolationist sentiment and aroused indignation about
Nazi and Japanese behavior. In September 1941, for example, Warner Bros.
released Sergeant York. Starring Gary Cooper, the film depicted the adventures of
a young American pacifist drafted into the First World War where he performs
heroic feats, and returns to be feted and decorated. And just as D.W. Griffith
had during the Great War, leading directors including John Ford, John Huston,
William Wyler, and Frank Capra offered their services to the US Armed Forces,
which spent $50 million per annum during the first years of the war producing
documentary films; its budget alone dwarfed that of the CPI. Capras seven films
for the USAF are still regarded as masterpieces of film propaganda. President
72
Roosevelt ordered them to be released commercially and the Soviet dictator

Joseph Stalin released one, The Battle of Russia, in parts of the USSR. By 1943,
isolationism had ceased to be a factor in American political life. And although
the Roosevelt administrations efforts to publicize the great national defense
story never gained the notoriety of the Creel Committee, they were arguably
even more effectivenot least for having been less obvious.58
State Propaganda in the Cold War and Beyond

During the Cold War, propaganda became a permanent and major element of
US government activity. From 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency covertly
sponsored the anticommunist propaganda of an astounding number of US
citizen groups, including the American Federation of Labor, university
professors, journalists, aid workers, missionaries, [and] civil rights activists.
These activities were subsidized from 1950 to 1967 through the Congress for
Cultural Freedom and its affiliates in the US, Western Europe, Australasia,
Latin America, and the Third World, and resulted in publications such as
Encounter and Quadrant.59 In 1948, the Smith-Mundt Act authorized expenditure
to promote a better understanding of the US in other countries. These funds
were spent on literature, speaking tours, films, international radio broadcasting,
traveling theatrical and musical groups, English language teaching, and student
exchanges. President Truman launched his Campaign for Truth in 1950,
appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars for the psychological component
of a massive rearmament program aimed at containing and repulsing Soviet
aggression. And in 1953, the Eisenhower administration vested control of
domestic information programs in a new US Information Agency, which by the
mid-1960s had an annual budget of $100 million.60
As it had done during both world wars, Hollywood joined the government in
promoting anticommunism through such films as I Married a Communist (1949)
and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), as well as (less overtly) High Noon (1952),
On the Waterfront (1954), and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1953), in which
aliens seize control of the bodies and minds of small-town citizens who thereafter
start behaving mechanically and collectively in what is a suspiciously American
perception of what a communist society would look like.61 US government
propaganda continued to achieve its goals without serious challenge until the Tet
Offensive in 1968, when images of the US embassy in Saigon being stormed finally
concluded a five-year period in which the Joint US Public Affairs Office had easily
managed the inexperienced journalists sent to cover Americas Asian war.62
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73
In the post-Soviet, post-9/11 era, CIA agents continue to consult on the

production of major motion pictures such as Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, shaping
perceptions of both the agencys and the federal governments activity and
competence. And the US Armed Forces embedded journalists within combat
units in the second Iraq war, to gain correspondents and in turn their audiences
respect and confidence.63 Such practices are little removed from the CPIs
massive spoon feeding of various media with information and perspectives
that the government wants them to absorb and share.
Conclusion
Nearly a century after it was formed, the CPI should be recognized for having
revolutionized the role and production of state propaganda, and for beginning
the manufacture and distribution of state soft power. The CPIs innovative
use of media, professional communicators, community leaders and public
volunteers was crucial in professionalizing both its communications techniques
and products, enabling the US to promote its war policies and aims with far
greater effectiveness than Germany and arguably Great Britain. Its example was
followed not only by successive federal governments, but also by civil associations and especially corporations, as they strove to harness mass communications to win political support and consumer loyalty.
George Creel, a committed Progressive, had earnestly hoped that the CPI
would enlighten millions of citizens not only of the US but also of other nations,
by showing them the virtues of American democracy and industry. Yet his efforts
led directly to the promotion of crass consumerism and to equally crass political
crusades, often with tremendously bloody consequences. The CPI also demonstrated, as no other organization had before, how citizens in a mass polity could
be mobilized and coaxed into censoring thought and conduct. In this way, the
CPI subverted the contrivances of state and society that the liberal imagination
prizes and recommends as an antidote to state exploitation of civil society. It
also demonstrated, with hitherto unparalleled success, the paradoxical capacity
of propaganda to seduce even those whom it most horrifies.64
notes
1. P. M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient
World to the Present Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 34.
2. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London:
74
Penguin, 1972), 48.

3. Ibid., 11.
4. Ironically, the rattlesnake was the only native element of the symbol and its
accompanying motto. The phrase Join or Die had been translated from a French
source, while an Italian iconography book advised that snakes symbolized democracy.
See Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/us.capitol/s1.html; Richard
Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1996), 2.
5. Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: His Life, His Time, and the Birth of Modern Nations
(London: Profile Books, 2007) 9, 2628.
6. William Fletcher Thompson Jr., Pictorial Propaganda and the Civil War, The
Wisconsin Magazine of History 46, no. 1 (Autumn 1962): 21.
7. Karen M. Ford, American Revolution and the War of Independence: 17641783,
in Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present, eds.
Nicholas J. Cull et al. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 34447.
8. Thompson, Pictorial Propaganda, 2223, 26 and 31.
9. For example, the US Army provided daily bulletins to reporters during the
Spanish American War. See Nelson, Chronology, 28.
10. Mark Crispin Miller, Introduction, in Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Brooklyn:
IG Publishing 2005), 9, 11.
11. Stephen Badsey, World War I (19141918), in Cull, Propaganda and Mass
Persuasion, 437.
12. Badsey and Taylor respectively argue that the wars most successful propagandists were the British who set the standard in modern propaganda for others to
follow. Edward Bernays, a public relations professional who served the CPI, disagreed,
rating the CPIs performance as superior. See Badsey, World War I, 439; Taylor,
Munitions, 3; and Edward L. Bernays, The Marketing of National Policies: A Study of
War Propaganda, Journal of Marketing 6, no. 3 (January 1942): 23644.
13. Taylor, Munitions, 177, 187. On Wilsons national unity of counsel, see H.
C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 19171918 (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1971), 145.
14. Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the
Committee on Public Information (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980),
514.
15. Nelson, Chronology, 39; Warren T. Francke, George Creel, American Newspaper
Journalists, 19011925, vol. 25, ed. Perry J. Ashley (Ann Arbor: Gale Research Company,
1984), 70.
16. George Creel, Rebel At Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York: G.
Nick Fischer
75
G. Putnams Sons, 1947), 4, 17, 25, 3840, 11317; Francke, Creel, 6669.
17. Creel, Rebel, 48 and 15658; Vaughn, Holding Fast, 17, 19, 2122.
18. Alfred W. McCoy, Policing Americas Empire: The United States, the Philippines,
and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009),
299300; H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality,
19141917 (Port Washington: Kennikat, 1968), 230.
19. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 101; Creel, Rebel, 157.
20. Vaughn, Holding Fast, 22124.
21. Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation, 2010), 76; US
Committee on Public Information, Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on
Public Information, 1917, 1918, 1919 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office,
1920) 24, 46.
22. Vaughn, Holding Fast, 11617; Lisa Mastrangelo, World War I, Public
Intellectuals, and the Four Minute Men: Convergent Ideals of Public Speaking and Civic
Participation, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 60910.
23. George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing
Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to
Every Corner of the Globe (New York: Harper, 1920),8597, 184; Committee on Public
Information, Complete Report, 23, 29; and The Battle Line of Democracy: Prose and Poetry
of the World War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), 3, 56.
24. For more on the American Protective League, see Nick Fischer, The American
Protective League and the Australian Protective League: Two Responses to the Threat of
Communism, c. 19171920, American Communist History 10, no. 2 (August 2011): 13349.
25. See University of Minnesota, Guy Stanton Ford, 19381941, http://president.
umn.edu/about/presidential-history/guy-stanton-ford.html.
26. Mastrangelo, World War I, 61012, 615. The last quotation is from Katherine
Adams, Progressive Politics and the Training of Americas Persuaders (Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999).
27. George Creel, Public Opinion in War Time, in Mobilizing Americas Resources
for the War, ed. Clyde L. King, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 78 (July 1918): 187.
28. Vaughn, Holding Fast, 2047; Taylor, Munitions, 18586.
29. Creel, How We Advertised America, 184; Public Opinion, 186, 188, 190.
30. Creel, How We Advertised America, 5, 17.
31. Committee on Public Information, Complete Report, 7, 85103; Creel, Public
Opinion, 188.
32. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 6466, 156, 189; Creel, How We Advertised
America, 17980. The CPI regularly abused its position to pursue partisan politics. The
76
former Socialist Party member and journalist Charles Edward Russell, for example,
who gave more than fifty public addresses representing the CPI, called for the prominent
anti-war Republican, Robert M. La Follette, to be removed from the US Senate. See
Vaughn, Holding Fast, 130.
33. Creel, Public Opinion, 190; US Committee on Public Information, Complete
Report, 1, 5, 38, 113, 138.
34. US Committee on Public Information, German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, 3; US
Committee on Public Information, Complete Report, 108; Chicago Tribune, 15 September
1918; Vaughn, Holding Fast, 2526; Kennan, Soviet-American Relations, 5052,41619,
44750.
35. New York Globe, January, 1919 (clipping), New York Post, 22 January, 1919: all in
Egbert Papers, Hoover Institution. On the prior release of papers describing German
plans to reward Mexico, see Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars
which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic, 18901920 (New York:
Franklin Square Press, 2003), 296.
36. Creel, How We Advertised America, 243, 37678, 39395; US Committee on
Public Information, Complete Report, 212, 21618, 25152.
37. Vaughn, Holding Fast, xii, 2; Mastrangelo, World War I, 61213.
38. Edward L. Bernays, Molding Public Opinion, Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, Vol. 179, May 1935, 87; Miller, Introduction, 1819.
39. Bernays, Manipulating Public Opinion, American Journal of Sociology 33, no. 6
(May 1928): 959.
40. Creel, Public Opinion, 190.
41. Creel, How We Advertised America, 4.
42. Bernays, Propaganda, 3738, 40; Manipulating Public Opinion, 960.
43. Edward L. Bernays, The Marketing of National Policies: A Study of War
Propaganda, Journal of Marketing 6, no. 3 (January 1942): 23638.
44. Ibid., 23940.
46. Miller, Introduction, 1213.
47. Creel, Public Opinion, 185.
49. Taylor, Munitions, 3.
50. Miller, Introduction, 14, 28.
51. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 18601925
(New York: Atheneum, 1963), 256.
52. For an extensive survey of the American Legions political and cultural
influence between the world wars see Nick Fischer, Spider Web: The Birth of American
Nick Fischer
77
Anticommunism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

53. American Civil Liberties Union, Free Speech in 1924, 2728; American Civil
Liberties Union, Free Speech 19251926, 22; American Civil Liberties Union, Free
Speech, 1926, 20; American Civil Liberties Union, Fight for Civil Liberty, 192728, 2628;
American Civil Liberties Union, Fight for Civil Liberty 19301931, 13.
54. Bernays, Marketing National Policies, 240, 242.
55. Richard W. Steele, Propaganda in an Open Society: The Roosevelt Administration
and the Media, 19331941 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), 4, 910, 8588.
56. Ibid., 84, 8995, 125.
57. Ibid., 1725, 14950, 15556; Taylor, Munitions, 230.
58. Taylor, Munitions, 22732; Steele, Propaganda, 73, 163.
59. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts
and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the
CIA Played America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 34, 10.
60. Taylor, Munitions, 25658, 266.
61. Ibid., 26061.
62. Ibid., 26970.
63. Tricia Jenkins, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television
(University of Texas Press, 2012); Michael Pfau et al., Embedding Journalists in
Military Combat Units: Impact on Newspaper Story Frames and Tone Journalism &
Mass Communication Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2004): 7488.
64. Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 14; Miller, Introduction, 30.
78
Selling America to the World

The Office of War Informations
The Town (1945) and the American Scene Series
Dean J. Kotlowski
abstractDuring World War II, the United States governments Office of War
Information (OWI) used the small farming town to sell America to the world. The short
documentary The Town (1945) is one example. Part of The American Scene, a thirteen-part
series of short documentaries produced by OWIs overseas branch, The Town showcased
farmers and small townspeople to underscore the effectiveness of American government,
the diversity of American ethnic cultures, and the blend of realism, idealism, piety, and
diligence that marked the American character. Overall, the American Scene engaged in
soft sell advertising by sending the message to international audiences that Americans
were just like Europeans and that democracy had the means to solve pressing problems.
Utilizing talent from Hollywood, The Town and its director (Josef von Sternberg) honed
in on healthy children at play, on an African American reading in the local library, and
on happy, hardworking, and prosperous people. The film thus implied that the policies
initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt had succeeded in enhancing security for a wide
range of Americans. Yet racial discrimination, a blemish barely addressed by the New
Deal State, received scant mention in either The Town or the wider American Scene.
During World War ii, the United States governments Office of War Information
(OWI) sought to sell America to the world. The film The Town (1945) is a prime
example. Part of the American Scene series of short documentary films and
produced by the OWIs overseas branch, The Town sought to present to foreign
audiences a true picture of American life.1 Directed by Hollywood veteran Josef
von Sternberg, the film showcased farmers and townspeople to underscore
the effectiveness of American government, the diversity of American ethnic
cultures, and the blend of realism, idealism, piety, and diligence that marked

79
the national character. As the historian Ian Scott has argued, the Office of War
Information crafted the most ambitious collection of propaganda shorts that
any government agency produced at any time during the war. The American
Scene became the centerpiece of the OWIs documentary project, and according
to Scott, The Town was perhaps the most cinematically accomplished film of
the whole series.2 For that reason alone, The Town merits scrutiny. Yet until
recently the American Scene and The Town have received scant attention from
both scholars and the general public. Both the series and the short have been
eclipsed by Frank Capras acclaimed Why We Fight anthology, comprising seven
documentary films produced under the auspices of the Department of War.3
The Town is significant for four reasons. First, the film illustrates some of
the purposes behind American overseas propaganda during World War II: to
stress US achievements in science, technology, and government; to play down
problems afflicting American society; and to depict Americans as benevolent
people with strong ties to the wider world, especially Europe. As one OWI
official noted, the agencys overseas branch employed soft sell advertising to
tell international audiences that Americans basically are you, transplanted
to another continent.4 That comment identified the second reason why The
Town is important. The film exemplified the OWIs preferred form of overseas
propaganda during World War II: subtle messaging fashioned by skilled experts.
Many Americans opposed using hard-sell propaganda to vilify the enemy or to
promote exuberantly the United States and its war aims. Even Capras Manichean
Why We Fight series sought to expose the enemys ambitions, build empathy
for Americas embattled allies, and educate the public about the importance of
achieving victory, rather than to fan racial hatred against the peoples of the
Axis countries. Officials at the OWI had learned a lesson from the overstated
propaganda disseminated by the Committee on Public Information (CPI)
during the First World War.5 For large numbers of Americans between 1939
and 1945, the historians Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black have written,
the World War I legacy reinforced the sense of propaganda as something alien
and sinister.6 The Town used no images of foreign foes, battles, or troopsnor
even GIsuntil the films end. Instead, the documentary featured wholesome,
industrious, ethnically diverse residents in Madison, Indiana, working and
playing amid European-style buildings and European-inspired traditions.
The rural, small-town Midwest proved useful, even essential, as OWI made
its casethe third reason why The Town deserves attention. The film examines
a particular place and time: Madison, a town on the Ohio River, during the
1940s. Von Sternbergs depiction of democracy, with its blend of bickering and
80
reconciliation, was thoroughly, though not uniquely, Indiana. The films setting
was understandable, for several contemporary observers, including the authors
Robert and Helen Lynd and such journalists as Mark Sullivan and John Martin
Bartlow, considered Indiana, with its mixture of industry, agriculture, small
towns, and politically-engaged citizenry, to be the archetypical American state.7
Von Sternbergs camera also depicted a familiar theme at a specific moment. The
Towns populist motif easily could be found in Capras commercial films of the
1930s and 1940s. Moreover, von Sternbergs stress on healthy children at play,
on an African-American man reading in a library, and on happy, hardworking
folks hinted at the success of liberalism in achieving greater security for many
Americans without directly challenging racial discrimination and segregation.8
The Town and the American Scene epitomized the concept of a New Deal
warthe fourth reason for the films significance.9 The short and the series
originated in the OWIs overseas division, which employed a number of liberals.
These included the playwright and presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood,
who headed the overseas division; the screenwriter Robert Riskin, who ran
the overseas divisions Motion Picture Bureau; and the writer/director Philip
Dunne, who served as Riskins deputy and oversaw the production of documentaries. Joining them were other people of great talent and experience who, like
Riskin and Dunne, hailed from Hollywood.10 This tethering of public-sector
tasks with private-sector talent typified Franklin D. Roosevelts mobilization
of the American home-front.11 In the end, echoes of the New Deal resounded in
the OWIs overseas propaganda. The Roosevelt administration promoted liberal
principles internationally, via the Atlantic Charter, and at home as well as
abroad, through FDRs Four FreedomsFreedom of Speech and Religion, and
Freedom from Want and Fear. In recent years, scholars have emphasized human
rights and security, both national and economic, as American war aims, and
the present article does so as well.12 The last line uttered by the narrator of The
Town proclaims that Americans were fighting on distant battlefields to make
this town and all towns like it, wherever they may be, free and secure forever.13
The Town, then, is a remarkably integrative historical artifact. The film, and
the series in which appeareda major topic of this article as wellcombined
favorable depictions of America and Americans, soft-sell advertising, regional
locations/culture, and New Dealstyle messaging to improve the countrys
international image, defeat the Axis powers, and achieve a postwar order
favorable to US interests. It reflects the perspectives and calculus of liberals at
the OWI, particularly in terms of the films racial omissions. Yet, The Town
also represented a culmination in US propaganda. By wars end, as the historian
Dean J. Kotlowski
81
Allan M. Winkler has observed, the OWI had arrived at a composite picture
of America that was overwhelmingly optimistic about democratic governance
and matter-of-fact on the problem of racial inequality.14 Such themes abound in
the American Scene and The Town.
The Evolution of American Propaganda

and the Origins of the American Scene
The Town and the American Scene emerged from the US governments uneasy,
mercurial approach to propaganda during World War II. The evolution of US
information policy, and the agencies having charge over it, led to two crucial
phenomena for the makers of The Town and the American Scene. The first was
the rise of OWIs overseas branch, which proved more consistently and skillfully
liberal than its domestic counterpart, as the agencys principal division for
propaganda and film regulation/production. The second was the drafting of
OWI guidelines on how to make films helpful to the war effort. The prescriptions in those guidelines found their way into the American Scene.
It might seem odd that the US government needed to use propaganda
during a popular war in which few Americans questioned the righteousness
of the cause.15 Yet, recent characterizations of World War II as the Good
War have been overstated. The US government interned Japanese Americans
and abandoned European Jewry. On the home front, Americans often paid
lip service to the ideal of shared sacrifice, engaged in intense partisanship,
exhibited crass materialism, and pursued their economic self-interest following
a decade of depression.16 A number of troubles beset wartime America, including
inflation, worsening race relations, battles between the president and Congress,
and pangs of war weariness.17 What frequently struck FDR, the historian
Steven Casey explained, was not the high levels of support for the war, but the
constant mutterings of discontent.18 To rally support for the war and his policies,
Roosevelt established various agencies to disseminate information. Such improvisation reflected both the presidents penchant for forming new government
bodies with overlapping responsibilities and the countrys discomfort with war
propaganda.19 Mindful of the calculated hysteria embedded in the propaganda
of fear and hate of Woodrow Wilsons Committee on Public Information, the
historian John Morton Blum has stressed, Roosevelt shunned another public
adventure in hyperbole.20
The most important of these early agencies was the Office of Facts and Figures
(OFF), established two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and
82
headed by the poet Archibald MacLeish. According to Roosevelt, OFFs purpose

was to facilitate a widespread and accurate understanding of ... the national
defense effort. It would do so, MacLeish proclaimed, through a strategy of
truth in which the government would provide sufficient information to enable
citizens to form judgments of their own.21 But purely factual reportage proved
difficult to separate from aspirational commentary, especially after the United
States entered the war and when many of FDRs subordinates retained their
liberal ideals.22 By 1942, MacLeishs critics insisted that Americans needed to be
motivated to think and act in unison, to fight the enemy, and to achieve specific
ends. Partly as a result, a new agency, the Office of War Information, replaced
the Office of Facts and Figures in June 1942.23
A number of troubles bedeviled the OWI, which was led by the journalist and
radio commentator Elmer Davis.24 Davis found himself shackled by a limited
mandate and bureaucratic infighting. Not unlike a parallel wartime agency,
the War Manpower Commission, the OWI merely coordinated the existing
information projects across various federal agencies, and it lacked authority
over the armed services.25 Davis, for his part, organized OWI into overseas and
domestic divisions and hired representatives of different fields, interests, and
ideologies. The OWIs domestic branch included intellectuals favorable toward
the New Deal, such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. who worked for the Bureau of
Publications, and specialists from the news and advertising industries such as
Gardener Cowles Jr., a Republican and the publisher of Look magazine. Fissures
emerged between Cowles and liberal idealists such as MacLeish, an assistant
director at OWI, and Robert Sherwood, the head of the OWIs overseas branch.
MacLeish and Sherwood believed that Americans, equipped with proper
evidence, were capable of making informed decisions.26 But Cowles preferred
[to use] public relations types to sell the war to the American people.27 A Cowlesapproved reorganization of the domestic branch prompted several writers to
resign in protest.28 In 1943, an increasingly conservative Congress, tired of the
liberal-leaning tracts released by the Bureau of Publications, slashed almost all
funding for the OWIs domestic branch.29
The demise of OWIs domestic branch left its overseas branch in charge
of film. The result was a concerted effort to rally Hollywood to make warrelevant movies. At the start of the war, the Bureau of Motion Pictures, located
in the domestic branch and led by the journalist and former FDR aide Lowell
Mellett, relied on the studios to respond with patriotic enthusiasm to wartime
needs. Some did. Plenty of actors and directors eager to help, Davis jotted in his
diary, just after the OWI came into existence.30 Nevertheless, many films lacked
Dean J. Kotlowski
83
serious treatment of war issues.31 To coax cooperation, the OWI threatened the
studios with the club of censorship but preferred instead to dangle the carrot of
unconquered markets by permitting US-made movies into countries liberated
by Allied armies.32 Yet even with such incentives, the OWIs authority over the
industry remained limited. The best that the agency could do was to withhold
foreign licenses from films deemed harmful to the cause of the United Nations.33
What was harmful, or helpful, to the war effort? The OWIs overseas branch
specified how America and its war aims should be depicted on the screen. The
OWI, according to Davis, sought to provide allied and neutral nations with
information about the American war effort and an understanding about
what America is like. Such understanding would promote closer cooperation
among the United Nations, enhance the good will felt toward this country
abroad, and advance American interests not only in the war but in the peace
that will follow.34 The OWI impressed upon filmmakers that Americans were
fighting for a more decent world in which countries were free from force
and militarism and people enjoyed the right to build a new and better life.
Most importantly, the agency wanted the world to know that Americans were
virtuous people. The OWI thus urged Hollywood to trumpet the idea of America
as a melting pot of many races and creeds who live together and progress.35
Hollywood executives claimed to understand the governments expectations.
William Goetz, the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, ordered his underlings to
make real the cause of democracy by stressing the Four Freedoms and showing
Americans of all races and backgrounds working together. To cast World War II
as a peoples war, filmmakers were instructed to refrain from depicting lavish
banquets or scenes of rich extravaganza and avoid stereotyping people from
different lands.36
Since propaganda was too important to be left solely to Hollywood, the
OWIs overseas branch produced a series of documentary films which included
the American Scene series. The agency developed specific guidelines for these
films. It did so knowing that they would bear the seal of the United States
and represent one of the most direct ways of conveying images of America
and its war aims. The guidelines warned against overemphasizing Americas
good intentions, since doing so might breed suspicion in an audience already
friendly toward us. Themes to emphasize included the American Character,
especially the blending of realism and idealism; the US government, including
its operations; and the countrys progress in science, industry, social reform,
and modern agricultural techniques. Films should also depict the free library
system and widespread access to education.37
84
The OWI also identified topics for documentarians to avoid. The guidelines
stressed that films dealing with American social problems should not over-emphasize the evil at the expense of the measures taken to correct it, a preview of the
sin-and-redemption motif present in US overseas propaganda on race following
World War II.38 Films in which there is a reference to racial minorities, the
OWI advised, should avoid showing segregation ... and not deal too lengthily
with sharp contrasts between the conditions of majority and minority peoples.
Instead, scenes should show mixed groups, but without self-consciousness.
Moreover, documentaries produced by the OWI should not boast of American
opulence or suggest crass American materialism. And they must not convey
an impression of American political or economic imperialism or exaggerate
the part played by Americans in the present war.39
Although the authorship of these guidelines remains uncertain, they could
not have been drafted without the approval of Robert Riskin, the head of the
overseas divisions Motion Picture Bureau. Riskin was a remarkable figure who
possessed business acumen, liberal ideals, and wide experience in Hollywood. He
wrote for Frank Capra during the 1930s, when his screenplays earned five Academy
Award nominations. In 1941, Riskin left Hollywood for London, where he helped
the British government make propaganda films. According to Riskins biographer,
Ian Scott, the Second World War gave Riskin something tangible to fight for.40 In
1942, he accepted an invitation from Sherwood to run the OWIs overseas motion
picture bureau. There, he enjoyed considerable freedom, including the power to
decide which Hollywood films were suitable for export.41 He also oversaw the
making of documentary films. Unlike Capra who beat a drum for the Allies
against the obdurate fanaticism of the enemy, Riskins films, according to Scott,
marketed American liberty and democracy to a changing world in calm and
measured tones largely by extolling the virtues of American life.42
The OWI guidelines for documentary films are significant for two reasons.
First, they were part of a broader campaign to mobilize American and its allies
without vilifying the peoples of Germany, Italy, and Japan.43 The US government
could provide such messaging as this in the films that it manufactured, which is
the second reason why the OWIs guidelines for documentaries were important.
Rather than concentrate on the enemy, the OWIs documentarians focused on
Americas character, values, and war aims in a manner that people overseas
could find credible, if not compelling. Davis also vowed to use film to identify
what Americans were fighting for, The Four Freedoms ... The Atlantic Charter
... Our democratic heritage, and who was doing the fighting: The American
farmer, the American workman, [and] the American businessman. For him,
Dean J. Kotlowski
85
the present conflict was a Peoples War for a Peoples Peace.44 Many of the
themes mentioned by Davis and specified in the guidelines for documentary
filmsfreedom, security, democracy, and populismappeared in the American
Scene series and The Town.
The American Scene

A full understanding of The Town requires a thorough exploration of the series
in which it originated. The OWIs overseas branch acted as a state-run studio
that tapped into Hollywoods talent: producers, directors, screenwriters, editors,
and actors who played a part in making the documentaries of the American
Scene. Aside from Riskin, the most important person in the overseas Motion
Picture Bureau was its head of production, Philip Dunne. Like Riskin, Dunne
was a screenwriter in Hollywood and supporter of FDRs policies.45 Although he
claimed that the war represented a time-out from his regular work, he was
being modest.46 At the OWI, Dunne worked diligently with a talented group of
people who at one point or another included the directors Josef von Sternberg,
John Houseman, and Alexandr Hackenschmied; the actors Ingrid Bergman
and Ralph Bellamy; the photographer and documentarian Willard Van Dyke;
the writer Joseph Krumgold; and the editor Irving Lerner. As Scott has noted,
Riskin and Dunne built an unprecedented team whose films followed no
comprehensive pattern as they pursued a common aim, to make friends
for America.47
That last comment requires further explanation, for the improvisational
approach of Riskin and Dunne helped spawn several mysteries about the
American Scene. The films in the series are hard to trace, and the OWI records
at the National Archives contain few documents on how and why the agency
made specific documentaries. Moreover, the series originated under the title
Projections of America, a fact that has stirred further confusion.48 Inspired by this
earlier label, Scott wrapped a number of Riskin-supervised, OWI documentary
shorts under the moniker Projections of America. Some of the films were part
of the American Scene, but others were not. Falling into the latter category was
The Autobiography of a Jeep (1943), a wry look at a new kind of Army mule
on wheels. Directed by Joseph Krumgold, the nine-minute short fit with the
American Scene and the OWIs guidelines for documentary films by celebrating
American ingenuity in developing new military vehicles.49 Overseas screenings
drew rave reviews, with Italian audiences exclaiming Viva la jeep!50 Yet The
Autobiography of a Jeep focused on battlefields, soldiers, generals, and wartime
86
leadersRoosevelt, Winston Churchill, and King George VI rode in jeeps while

surveying war zones. Unlike the documentaries in the American Scene, this
short revealed little about American society.
The number and dates of films in The American Scene are difficult to pinpoint.
The National Archives identified at least fourteen documentaries in this series.
Ranging between ten and thirty minutes in length, they include Swedes in
America, Cowboys, The Town, A Journey, Valley of the Tennessee, Steel Town,
Northwest USA, Library of Congress, Tuesday in November, and The Cummington
Story.51 The incomplete listing and documentation of the films may have
stemmed from inadequate record-keeping by either the OWI or its filmmakers
who, with the exception of writing or editing scripts, apparently committed
few words to paper.52 There is no reason to suspect a conspiracy of silence.
The press mentioned American Scene films, and two installments, Swedes in
America (1943) and Library of Congress (1945), earned Academy Awards for best
short documentary.53 The reading public thus knew of the American Scene and
other OWI documentaries, all of which offered scant criticism of American life
or institutions.
The American Scene showcased the countrys ethnic diversity, as would The
Town. The theme of Americans cooperating across cultural lines received a big
boost in Swedes in America, the first installment in the series. Hosted and narrated
by Swedish-born Ingrid Bergman, the seventeen-minute short explored the ties
that bound Swedes and Americans. The film identified a common history and
values, especially concern for the rights of others and practical ingenuity. Yet,
the chief connection between the United States and Sweden was immigration.
Traveling to Minneapolis, a center of Swedish culture, Bergman observed that
the Swedes came and made this country their own. They worked hard, became
citizens, participated in government, and maintained the traditional ways of
their youth. They also infused their new country with a habit for community
action and a spirit of cooperation evident in co-ops, large government
enterprises such as Boulder Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and
the spirit of sacrifice in the present war. The films message thus evolved from a
celebration of ethnic pride and shared democratic ideals to an advertisement for
public power and a reminder that the United States was at war. The concept of a
New Deal war emerged in the final scenes, when Bergman quoted the SwedishAmerican poet/author Carl Sandburg on the right of the individual to be free
from want. Swedes in America closed with images of Swedish-American farmers
singing Christmas hymns. Having acknowledged two of FDRs Four Freedoms,
the narrator proclaimed that life can be good today and tomorrow still better.54
Dean J. Kotlowski
87
Similar motifs abound in Northwest USA. (1945), a later installment of the

American Scene. The film stressed regionalism, a theme easily discerned in
The Town, by beginning with vistas of verdant mountains, rocky coastlines,
inland lakes, and the Columbia River, and closing with images of the areas
emergence as a hub of wartime production. The middle part of the documentary
discussed how the Northwest Citizen, aided by FDRs administration, had
irrigated deserts and brought electrical power to millions of people via the
Grand Coulee Dam.55 Both Grand Coulee and the Tennessee Valley Authority,
the subject of another American Scene film, underscored that democratic nations
solved problems without turning to totalitarian methods.56 Yet Northwest USA
mentioned race only in passing, in a shot of an African American war worker
retrieving her child from a nursery.57 One problem we had not solved was
racism, Dunne admitted. We werent going to make a picture about a problem
we hadnt solved.58 New Dealinspired economic security was another matter,
along with the global war against fascism. Northwest USA thus closed by anticipating a more secure world in which the Northwests airplanes and ships could
soar and sail without fear.59
Themes of regionalism, populism, and democracy emerged both in the
manner by which OWI made the American Scene and in the series messaging.
Planning for films flowed freely, so much so that Dunne could not recall with
whom particular ideas had originated.60 After a topic and director had been
selected, OWIs production crews traveled all over the country shooting
footage. The editing was done in New York, where filmmakers added narration
and a score.61 The pace of these films was snappy because, as Dunne explained,
We had first rate cutters.62 Aiming for authenticity, the American Scene
featured non-actors. In Valley of the Tennessee (1944), for example, the director
Alexandr Hackenschmied included local farmers as he made the case for FDRs
Tennessee Valley Authority. Hackenschmieds artistic hand became evident in a
prolonged scene during which a fair-haired, barefoot lad in coveralls surmounts
a hill and then gazes in wonderment at a dam under construction.63 Valley of the
Tennessee extolled democracy on the march, to borrow a phrase popularized
by TVA chairman David E. Lilienthal. Modern machinery, dams, fertilizers,
and cultivation transformed the regions farmers who meet, learn of, and later
use these innovations to improve their livelihood. All of the farmers are white;
the only African Americans in the film are a few solitary construction workers.
Nevertheless, the dams built exemplify the nations constructive energy, for
they are owned by the people of the United States. As with many American
Scene shorts, Valley of the Tennessee mentions the war briefly by showing an
88
airborne bomber, presumably built in a factory powered by TVAs electricity.

And New Dealstyle security remains a strong motif. As the camera focuses on
youngsters, the narrator proclaims that the TVA exemplifies a new and better
world into which a child can walk.64
The American Scene also extolled the countrys institutions, such as the
free library systema topic addressed in the OWIs guidelines and explored
in Library of Congress (1945). In this twenty-minute short, the narrator Ralph
Bellamy hailed the Library of Congress as the nations reading room, open to
every man. The film explained how the Library used modern techniques to
preserve and make accessible books and documents essential to understanding
American culture. Its treasures tie the United States to the world: the works of
European authors; medieval manuscripts; a Gutenberg Bible; the sheet-music of
Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; and an oriental collection dubbed the largest
of its kind outside of Asia. As in other American Scene filmsincluding The
TownAfrican Americans appear in cameos; to highlight the Librarys diverse
phonographic recordings, black and white folksingers perform separately and
in successive vignettes. Overall, the film lauded an institution that embodied
ideals at stake in the present war: freedom of thought and expression, and the
principle that democracy rested on the foundation of an enlightened people.65
Praise of democratic governance, as enjoyed by white Americans at least, was
repeated so much throughout this series that Dunne thought that the American
Scene could have been retitled the Democratic Scene.66
The American Scene used cities and towns to tell various tales about the
countrys democratic heritage. The theme of a democracy at war received
treatment in A Journey (1943), which showed people working and solving
war-related problems in Norfolk, Mobile, Detroit, and Ogden, Utah. The
films cross-country excursion explored Americas diversity, since different
European groups initially settled in each locale, and stressed Americans ties
to war workers in London, Moscow, and Chungking.67 Similarly, in Steel Town
(1944), the American Scene visited Youngstown, Ohio, where people, many of
them immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, make steel and talk
steel in peace and war, not unlike the British in Sheffield and the Russians
in Magnitogorsk. Directed by Willard van Dyke, the documentary observed
that steel mills provided employment and free education, affording added
opportunities for citizens to thrive in this democratic, globally-connected
community.68 The Cummington Story (1945), another American Scene short,
depicted cosmopolitanism in a Massachusetts town. The film showed European
refugees arriving in Cummington where they befriend residents, enter familiar
Dean J. Kotlowski
89
trades, and find homes in a farming village not unlike those they came from
in Europe. Scored by Aaron Copland and narrated by a local minister, The
Cummington Story stressed that the strangeness of people breaks down when
they live and work and meet together. Indeed, scenes of a town meeting
something also present in The Townimply that democratic lands provide
havens to oppressed peoples.69 Tuesday in November (1945), the director John
Housemans contribution to the American Scene, went further by explaining the
mechanics of democracy in one California town. In the film, men and women
of various professions and partisan allegiances cast ballots in the presidential
election of 1944. Soldiers vote too, as do African Americans, a right they were
able to exercise more easily outside the South. The films upbeat tone culminates
with FDRs victory, when the narrator proclaims that Americans have elected
a government.70
The documentaries mentioned above fit within two larger themes. The first
was what the film scholar John C. Tibbetts has called the small-town paradigm:
Hollywoods use of a specific locale with enough farmers, workers, men, women,
and cultural pluralism to embody the essence of the American experience and
contemporary American life. Such shorts as Swedes in America, Northwest USA,
Valley of the Tennessee, and Library of Congress exuded a sense of place, while A
Journey, Steel Town, The Cummington Story, Tuesday in November, and, of course,
The Town, used communities to tell a representative anecdote about the nation
at large.71 Second, the stories conveyed in these films often diverged from the
reality of everyday life. Racial and class cleavages received no attention in the
American Scene, nor did the temporary shift in gender roles brought about by
the wartime need for female factory workers. The Cunnington Story evaded the
US governments restrictive policy towards Jewish refugees. And according to
the film scholar Peter C. Rollins, Steel Town neglected the industrial evolution
of Youngstown in favor of celebrating [its] cultural diversity and economic
prosperity. As another scholar, Hans Borchers, has explained, filmmakers
looked to the rural farming community as the storehouse of all those venerable
legends surrounding the founding of American democracy.72 So it was with
The Town.
The Town
The origins of The Town are easy to trace. In January 1942, Ned Bayne of the
Office of Emergency Management at the White House recommended making
a short film about a town awakening to its responsibilities in a nation at war.
90
Bayne suggested a setting in Northern Ohio, meaning that Steel Town also may
have originated with his memorandum. Yet he proposed using a commentators voice as the personification of the town itself and exalting the community
as a microcosm of democracy, tactics and themes present in The Town. To
direct the film, Bayne suggested Joseph Krumgold, who had scripted The
Autobiography of a Jeep and would script The Town.73 Others involved in making
The Town included von Sternberg, whom either Riskin or Dunne tapped for the
project.74
In many ways, von Sternberg proved an excellent fit for The Town. The
Viennese-born, New York-bred filmmaker had a feel for the ties that bound
the United States to Europe. He was an accomplished director whose career
flourished between 1927 and 1935 when he made seven films with the actress
Marlene Dietrich, including The Blue Angel (1930).75 Attention to detail, skillful
lighting, artistic set designs, and a preference to explore psychological moods
rather than to tell stories all marked von Sternbergs visual signature. Yet in
other respects, his style and interests appeared ill-suited to making a wartime
short. Von Sternbergs films lacked the action and the animation of contemporaries like Capra,76 According to one critic, his plots seem far-fetched, his
backgrounds bizarre, and his character motivations obscure.77 Exoticism
and ambiguityrather than realism, an attachment to place, or patriotic
enthusiasmranked among von Sternbergs best-known motifs. As one critic
explained, There is nothing in his films to parallel the spine-tingling play with
national symbols that we see, for example, in the montage sequence that conveys
the innocent wonder of the heros first sight of capital in Capras Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington.78 But The Town was not a solitary effort. Von Sternberg had help
from Krumgolds writing and OWIs guidelines, which annoyed him. Years
later, the director complained that while working on The Town he had been told
what to say and what to do.79
The finished product reflected adept filmmaking. The score proved moving,
as it should have been, for its melody echoed that of the Academy Award-winning
Swedes in America. One scholar praised The Town as gracefully photographed
and skillfully edited, adding: There is not an ugly frame or an awkward cut
or an unnecessary movement in the entire film.80 During an interview with
Philip Dunne, Douglas Bell remarked that The Town seems almost artificially
good.81 To be sure, this genre was not von Sternbergs forte. At one point, he shot
footage for The Town in sunshine, only to learn later that documentaries were
shot only on rainy days.82 Despite such frustrations, heightened perhaps by von
Sternbergs notorious irascibility, the finished product drew praise.83 The Town,
Dean J. Kotlowski
91
the film scholar John Baxter has written, is the work of a man reacting without
bitterness to a project considerably beneath his abilities.84
The Town opens elegantly, with emphasis on the ties between America and
Europe. As the camera glances at an Italian campanile, a Palladian portico, a
Renaissance fountain, the film scholar Peter Baxter observed, the commentary
asks rhetorically in what town such a mixture of features could be found.85
The buildings are in Madison, an Indiana town on the Ohio River. Among this
architectural hodgepodge, as Dunne labeled it, resides a mosaic of European
ethnic groups.86 The films narrator identifies representative townspeople: a
Greek-born confectioner, an Irish-American reporter, and a county agent
descended from Dutch settlers. Audiences see an elderly German-born man
chatting with a longtime friend and an Italian-American family enjoying
spaghetti. The Town suggested a populist sensibility with von Sternberg focusing
on individuals, then institutions.87 Nevertheless, folks live in or near a hamlet
named for the countrys fourth president, who is known as the Father of the
American Constitution.88 A bust of James Madison underscores the longevity
and durability of the system of government under which these EuropeanAmericans thrive.
The Town is pleasantly pastoral. Vignettes of a farmers market continue the
theme of ethnic diversity, especially when the film shows a farmer weighing
produce as his forefathers [did] at a market square in central Europe. Scenes of
barns, livestock, field hands, crops ready to harvest, and milk cans on a truck
suggest abundanceand freedom from want. And although not one of FDRs
Four Freedoms, freedom of association also receives attention when The Town
travels to Main Street, where people bowl, dance, shoot pool, play checkers,
watch movies, and socialize at the drug store, the American equivalent of a
pub or caf or rathskeller. Such are the diversions of Saturday night. Sunday is
reserved for worship, at least for practicing Christians, who dominate religious
life. At the same time, glimpses of churches used by various denominations
underscore the towns pluralism and commitment to freedom of religion. No
one interferes with the others journey to heaven or to hell, the narrator quips,
as the camera spies a farmer carrying a fishing pole. Now heres a fellow who
thinks hes not going to one destination or the other. Hes going fishing.89 In
America, freedom of religion also meant freedom from religion.
The Town celebrated aspects of American democracy, from civics education
in schools to voting in elections. Schoolchildren learn the history of Mans
struggle to govern himself, from the Magna Carta to Frances Bill of Rights
to the US Declaration of Independence. They also study foreign languages so
92
that they might become better citizens of the world. And lifelong learning is
available to all at Madisons public library. To emphasize this point, a succession
of scenes in a library feature young and old people, men and women, and white
and black individuals.90 Citizens, the narrator continues, engage with public
issues via a free press. The local newspaper, whose editor appears on screen,
often disagrees with the current administration in Washington and speaks its
mind. As in other towns, the people of Madison reign supreme, for they have
the power to hire and fire the mayor, judge, and public prosecutor. According to
The Town, trial by jury, broad suffrage, closely contested elections, and public
service all exemplify American self-government. And intensely partisan
campaigns, coupled with bipartisan cooperation following elections, typify
the political culture of Indiana.91 In making its wider point about the virtues
of democracy, The Town alludes to the ongoing global conflict. As the camera
focuses on votersall of them whitethe narrator draws a contrast with totalitarian regimes: In free counties, the only thing thats secret is the ballot.92
The Town promoted the idea of state-sponsored security. In Madison,
European cultures coexist and people of all political persuasions and social
classes cooperate, in the spirit of the early New Deal and in tune with the other
installments in the American Scene. Average folks work hard and want for little,
while a benevolent government maintains the library, funds free education, and
provides community swimming pools for youngsters. Not unlike the closing
scene in Valley of the Tennessee, Madisons youth embody the innocence and
vulnerability that the New Deal state seeks to protect from economic privation
and predatory dictatorships. In The Town, children study in a modern classroom
with a globe and portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. As the
camera shows kids splashing in a municipal pool, followed by close-ups of their
healthy, happy faces, the narrator proclaims: In towns such as these a great
part of the community budget is devoted to the children, the chief interest is in
human beings. The pool is not racially integrated, and the children featured are
female, white, and mostly blonde. Like other American Scene films, The Town
focused on white people, save for a vignette of an African American man leafing
through a book at the library.93 By showing the man alone, the film, not unlike
the wider New Deal, evaded the issue of racial segregation in public areas. But by
featuring him in a librarythe college of the agesThe Town implies that all
Americans enjoy access to education and the means of self-improvement.
The Town emblemized the mission and motifs of the American Scene.
Consistent with Dunnes soft sell approach, the series itself aimed to demystify
Hollywoods America of penthouses, [private] swimming pools, gangsters,
Dean J. Kotlowski
93
straight-shooting cowboys, and underclad bathing beauties.94 None of those

things appeared in The Town, which sought to portray America as it was, or
at least how the OWIs filmmakers wanted it to be. As in other American Scene
films, a specific community served as a microcosm of the nation and its history,
democratic traditions, ethnic diversity, economic prosperity, state-sponsored
security, and virtuous people. The Town differed slightly from other documentaries by celebrating a rural, riverside hamlet where one found, perhaps
unexpectedly, farmers and townsfolk of various ancestries living in harmony.
Difficulties related to race, or to shifting gender roles caused by the demand for
war workers, received little attention, for both The Town and the American Scene
sought to market a benevolent America, rather than a Good War, to the world.
Indeed, GIs appear only in the final frames. As soldiers march triumphantly
through European villages, the narrator explains that the sons of American
towns are returning to liberate and make secure the towns of the Old World.95
Reflections
Popular responses to The Town and the American Scene can only be conjectured.
The OWI translated the films into forty languages, and there is no record of
where they were shown or how they were received. Nevertheless, some generalizations are possible. A few US officials found it odd for a wartime agency to
commission propaganda films that often downplayed the war. For that reason,
The Farmer at War, another OWI documentary (but not part of the American
Scene), puzzled a worker at the Board of Economic Warfare, who regretted the
films evasion of the need for female agricultural workers and its celebration
of the status quo: Mr. Farmer starts his day by milking the cows, feeding the
chickens and the hogs, and collecting the eggs. This is exactly what was done
before the war. The big turkey served for a small family on Thanksgiving Day
also does not remind one of big war sacrifices.96 The American Scene shunned
images of opulence, lest they offend foreign nationals in need. Yet removing
a sense of glamour from American life carried a price. Cowboys, another
installment in the series, portrayed cattle ranchers toiling at mundane chores
rather than gunning down outlaws.97 The film thus found little favor with
audiences accustomed to the action-oriented westerns of Gary Cooper and John
Wayne. The only time they got any interest in the picture was when they had
one [cowboy] shoot a rattlesnake! Dunne recalled. I thought this was exactly
the wrong approach ... Foreigners loved American cowboys just as they were.98
94
Overall, however, the American Scene earned acclaim. Swedes in America

impressed Great Britains Ministry of Information, which made 400 prints of
the short.99 The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther praised OWIs documentaries for portraying America in a friendly, wholesome light, singling out The
Autobiography of a Jeep and Arturo Toscanini, which were not part of the American
Scene, and Cowboys and The Town, which were. According to Crowther, The
Town showed the simplicity of the lives of the people of a small American river
town, and in so doing revealed an America that was not generally noised abroad
before the war.100 The OWI deemed The Town, Steel Town, and Valley of the
Tennessee of sufficient quality to screen them at the United Nations conference
on international organization, which met in San Francisco in April 1945.101 And
the US government distributed American Scene films to various federal agencies
for educational, non-theatrical use following the war.102 Some of these films
apparently made their way overseas.103
The Town and the American Scene signified a unique cultural and political
moment in American history. During World War II, many Americans saw
themselves, their institutions, and their way of life as matching the goodness
and purity of the American Scene. Yet the reality of an innocent countryor
ageremains elusive. The OWIs documentaries stemmed from hard-headed
thinking about the message to convey, the topics to feature, and the subjects
to avoid as the US government sought to sway overseas audiences. Most
importantly, these films reflected the intention of policymakers to tether the
American state, and its international aims, to a major sector of the nations
culture industry. Notwithstanding von Sternbergs complaint about being told
what to do, many of Hollywoods most talented figures readily fell in line.
notes
1. Bureau of Motion Pictures, Office of War Information, Report on Film Activities
of Washington Film Agencies of the American Government and Semi-Governmental
Nature, September 24, 1943, box 1, Records of Associate Chief Arch Mercey 19421945,
Records of the Office of War Information (OWI), Record Group (RG) 208, Motion Picture,
Sound, and Video Research Room, National Archives at College Park, Maryland (NACP).
2. Ian Scott, In Capras Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 175 (both quotations).
3. Ian S. Scott, Why We Fight and Projections of America: Frank Capra, Robert
Riskin, and the Making of World War II Propaganda, in Why We Fought: Americas
Wars in Film and History, ed. Peter Rollins and John OConnor (Lexington: University
Dean J. Kotlowski
95
Press of Kentucky, 2008), 24258. The American Scene series apparently will be
discussed in Projections of America, a forthcoming 52-minute-long documentary film
directed by Peter Miller, produced by Christian Popp and Antje Boehmert, and narrated
by John Lithgow, that is scheduled air on PBS during the 20152016 season. Ian Scott is a
consultant on the film.
4. Philip Dunne, Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1980), 166.
5. Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information,
19421945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 3.
6. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: Patriotism,
Movies, and the Second World War from Ninotchka to Mrs. Miniver (New York: Tauris
Parke Paperbacks, 2000), 48.
7. John Bartlow Martin, Indiana: An Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), xviii. For a brief overview of Indianas political tradition and the
states politics in the 1930s and 1940s, see Dean J. Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of
FDR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 1617, 127201.
8. For the importance of the concept of security to the New Deal, see David M.
Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 365; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World:
Americas Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005);
Dean J. Kotlowski, The First Cold War Liberal? Paul V. McNutt and the Idea of Security
from the 1920s to the 1940s, Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011): 54085.
9. Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin D. Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and
Their War (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 3; Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes
to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997), 62.
10. Dunne, Take Two, 166.
11. Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR, 322338; John W. Jeffries, Wartime
America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 1721.
12. Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 111; Harvey J. Kaye, The Fight for the Four
Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2014), 72147; Jeffries, Wartime America, 17677.
13. The Town, under Bonus Materials on the DVD Our Town (1940) (Scarborough,
ME: Focus Films Entertainment, 2012). The film is also available online at https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=38XspG2i6l8 (accessed May 17, 2015).
14. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 158 (all quotations).
15. Kaye, The Fight for the Four Freedoms, 5.
16. Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New
96
York: Hill and Wang, 2004); David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America
and the Holocaust, 19411945 (New York: The New Press, 1998); Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt
and the Age of FDR, 34142.
17. John Morton Blum, V Was For Victory: Politics and American Culture during
World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1976), 9, 11.
18. Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion,
and the War Against Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), xviii.
19. The Office of Government Reports, formed in 1939, came first, followed by the
Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in 1940. During 1941, three additional offices
came into existence: (1) the Division of Information in the White House Office of
Emergency Management; (2) the Office of the Coordinator of Information; and (3) the
Office of Facts and Figures (OFF). Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 5056.
20. Blum, V Was For Victory, 21.
21. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 23.
22. Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 59.
23. Blum, V Was For Victory, 2631.
24. Philip Dunne, interview with Douglas Bell, 1991, 66, Oral History Collection,
Margaret Herrick Library (MHL), Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Beverly Hills, California.
25. George Creel, the head of Wilsons CPI, regretted the OWIs lack of authority
over the Army and Navy. George Creel to Elmer Davis, August 4, 1940, folder titled
Correspondence 19401942, box 1, Elmer Davis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library
of Congress (LC), Washington, DC.
26. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 40.
27. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings,
19171950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 290.
28. In addition to differences over turf, outlook, and strategy, the basic issue,
according to Schlesinger, was whether OWI should have a domestic publications
program, as agency liberals preferred, or confine itself to established media channels,
as Cowles wanted. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to family, ca. April 20, 1943, folder 4, box
297, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Papers, New York Public Library (NYPL), New York.
29. Schlesinger, A Life in the Twentieth Century, 293; Blum, V Was For Victory, 41.
Davis later lamented that no wartime information agency can ever escape the partisan
hostility of opponents of the administration. Elmer Davis, Report to the President: The
Office of War Information 13 June 194215, September 1945, no date, 94, folder titled
Office of War Information 19411944, box 10, Davis Papers, LC.
30. Elmer Davis Diary, June 16, 1942, no date, folder titled Office of War Information
19411944, box 10, Davis Papers, LC.
Dean J. Kotlowski
97
31. Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 63, 105. The columnist James Reston
wondered why Hollywood put across, day in and day out, the most outrageous caricature
of the American character.
32. Ibid., 107112, 139 (quotations). The government, as Nelson Poynter, Melletts
deputy at BMP, observed, does have the power to forbid the export of a print of a picture.
Nelson Poynter to Lowell Mellett, February 25, 1943, folder titled Motion Picture Bureau
Misc. 194243, box 3, Records Relating to the Domestic Branch of the OWI 19421945,
RG 208, NACP.
33. Office of War Information, Overseas Branch, Operational Guidance for Motion
Pictures, April 21, 1944, folder titled Louis Lober, box 3509, entry 566, OWI Records,
RG 208, NACP.
34. Remarks by Elmer Davis before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco,
November 19, 1943, folder titled Progress Reports 1943, box 3510, entry 566, OWI
Records, RG 208, NACP.
35. Office of War Information, Government Information Manual for the Motion
Picture Industry, no date, folder titled Government Information Manuel for the Motion
Picture Industry, box 3, Records of the Historian Relating to the Domestic Branch of the
OWI 194245, RG 208, NACP (all quotations).
36. William Goetz to All Producers, Directors, Writers, and Heads of All
Departments, March 5, 1943, folder titled Bureau Motion Pictures, box 3, Records of
the Historian Relating to the Domestic Branch of the OWI 194245, RG 208, NACP.
37. Office of War Information, Overseas Branch, Operational Guidelines on OWI
Documentary Films, November 24, 1944, folder titled OWI Documentaries, box 3509,
entry 566, OWI Records, RG 208, NACP (all quotations).
entry 566, OWI Records, RG 208, NACP. Also see Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights:
Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2000), 47114.
entry 566, OWI Records, RG 208, NACP (all quotations).
40. Scott, In Capras Shadow, 154.
41. Ibid., 164.
42. Scott, Why We Fight and Projections of America, 244 (all quotations).
43. The power, cruelty, and complete cynicism of the enemy should be pictured,
the government advised. But it is dangerous to portray all Germans, all Italians, and all
Japanese as bestial barbarians. The American people know that this is not true. Office of
98
War Information, Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry,
no date, folder titled Government Information Manuel for the Motion Picture Industry,
box 3, Records of the Historian Relating to the Domestic Branch of the OWI 194245, RG
208, NACP.
44. Elmer Davis speech, no date, folder titled Democracy, box 1537, entry 289,
OWI Records, RG 208, NACP.
45. Philip Dunne Oral History with Thomas H. Arthur, February 25, 1977, 610,
Center for the Study of History and Memory (CSHM), Indiana University.
46. Philip Dunne interview with J.D. Marshall, 1978, call no. RYA8280, Recorded
Sound Reference Center, LC.
47. Scott, Why We Fight and Projections of America, 256 (all subsequent quotations
are also from this source; although the final one is from Philip Dunne).
48. Scott, Why We Fight and Projections of America, 256257; Thomas M. Pryor,
Dispelling a Harmful Illusion, New York Times, March 7, 1943, X3.
49. The Autobiography of a Jeep (1943), accessed June 22, 2015, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=Ff3rJTzi488.
50. Thomas M. Pryor, By Way of Report, New York Times, August 13, 1944, X3.
51. All of the films mentioned in the text are part of The American Scene. See Card
Catalogue, Motion Picture Sound and Video Research Room, NACP. Films also are
identified as being part of the series in their credits. See Tuesday in November (1945), https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yicxx8FocOk, and The Library of Congress (1945), https://
archive.org/details/TheAmericanSceneNumber11LibraryOfCongress, both accessed
June 22, 2015, and Northwest USA (1945), accessed September 12, 2015, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=0-ibcG-obSs.
52. Officials at the OWI added to the confusion by grouping all of the overseas
divisions documentaries together without distinguishing which of them was part of the
American Scene. See W. S. Cunningham to William Gahagan, April 17, 1945; Louis Lober
to Cunningham, April 17, 1945; and Ed to Bill, May 6, 1945: all in folder titled San
Francisco Correspondence, box 3510, entry 566, OWI Records, RG 208, NACP.
53.US Life Depicted in 22 Films, Washington Post, May 28, 1944, S5; Bosley
Crowther, Speaking Up For America, New York Times, May 21, 1944, X3; Academy
Award nominations, February 9, 1944, folder titled 1944 Jan.Feb. Correspondence,
box 4, John Ford Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University,.
54. Swedes in America (1943), accessed September 8, 2015, http://collections.libraries.
indiana.edu/IULMIA/items/show/1423 (all previous quotations).
55. See Northwest USA.
56. Dunne, interview with Bell, 1991, 174175, MHL.
57. See Northwest USA.
Dean J. Kotlowski
99

59. Northwest USA.
63. Valley of the Tennessee (1944), accessed September 14, 2015, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=r8BUUdX6k30; Dunne, interview with Bell, 1991, 17677, MHL.
64. David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1944) (first quotation); and Valley of the Tennessee (subsequent quotation).
65. Library of Congress (1945), https://archive.org/details/
TheAmericanSceneNumber11LibraryOfCongress.
67. A Journey (1943), accessed September 15, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=gBaFsYISovg.
68. Steel Town (1944), accessed September 15, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=gBaFsYISovg.
69. The Cummington Story (1945), accessed September 16, 2015, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=t08gQ7IBa4A&spfreload=10.
70. Tuesday in November (1945), accessed on September 16, 2015, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=yicxx8FocOk.
71. John C. Tibbetts, The Small Town, in The Columbia Companion to American
History on Film, ed. Peter C. Rollins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 457
(all previous quotations).
72. Peter C. Rollins, World War II: Documentaries, in The Columbia Companion to
American History on Film, ed. Rollins, 121 (quotations).
73. Ned Bayne to George Barnes, January 26, 1942, folder titled Ideas for Movies/
Inflation, box 1555, entry 295, OWI Records, RG 208, NACP (all quotations).
75. Andrew Sarris, The Films of Josef von Sternberg (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1996), 5.
76. John Baxter, The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1971), 19.
77. Sarris, The Films of Josef von Sternberg, 8.
78. Peter Baxter, Just Watch! Sternberg, Paramount and America (London: British
Film Institute, 1993), 3334.
79. John Baxter, Von Sternberg (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010),
238.
100

83. See, for example, Herman G. Weinberg, Josef von Sternberg (New York: Arno
Press, 1978), 12333.
84. Baxter, Von Sternberg, 238.
85. Baxter, The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg, 159.
87. Baxter, The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg, 159.
88. The Town (1945), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFLarB3d-Mg, accessed
on October 9, 2015.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR, 1617.
92. The Town.
93. Ibid.
95. The Town.
96. Naum Jasny to Gentlemen, no date (ca. April 1943), folder titled The Famer at
War, box 1549, entry 291, OWI Records, RG 208, NACP.
97. Cowboys (United Films, 1943), Card Catalogue, Motion Picture Sound and
Video Research Room, NACP.
98. Dunne interview with Bell, 1991, 63, MHL.
99.British to see OWI Film Short, New York Times, October 8, 1943, 14.
100.Speaking Up For America, New York Times, May 21, 1944, X3.
101.San Francisco Documentaries attached to W.S. Cunningham to William
Gahagan, April 17, 1945, folder titled San Francisco Correspondence, box 3510, entry
566, OWI Records, RG 208, NACP.
102. See the opening to Swedes in America, http://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/
IULMIA/items/show/1423, accessed October 24, 2015.
103. A colleague of the present author remembered seeing The Town while growing
up in Australia.
Dean J. Kotlowski
101
102
Four Hundred Million Customers

Carl Crow and the Legacy of
1930s Sino-American Trade
Elizabeth Ingleson
abstractCarl Crows Four Hundred Million Customers, providing first-hand advice
on how to trade with China, was first published in 1937. Widely popular, the book won
the National Book Award and went through multiple editions throughout the twentieth
century. Most recently, in 2003, EastBridge publishers reprinted Crows work. Even
though nearly eight decades had elapsed since Crow first penned the book, EastBridge
framed it as a source of contemporary expertise. This paper explores Crows work and
its recent republication. The notion that Crows 1937 book held any relevance in 2003
illustrates much deeper ways in which Western-centric expectations of change in China
continued to inform American foreign policy in the post-Cold War period.
Trade advice manuals, written by one businessperson to others, tend to have

a limited shelf life. Technological innovations, domestic politics, warseven
weather eventscan dramatically alter trade and economic contexts, in the
process rendering a manuals ideas outdated. In the wake of these changes a new
authoritative guru updates the collective wisdom, providing new information
on how to trade with a particular country. Not so with Carl Crows Four Hundred
Million Customers. First published in 1937, Customers has had a lifespan of close
to eighty years. By the end of its first year alone the book had won the National
Book Award and gone through four editions. During World War II, a small
pocket edition was printed for American soldiers stationed in China.1 After
the Communist Party came to power, the book seemed to pass forever into
irrelevance, Gordon Chang, a Professor at Stanford, notes in his history of
USChinese relations. Yet most recently, EastBridge publishers reprinted

103
Customers in 2003. Chang approvingly described this republication as bringing

new life to Crows ideas.2 This new edition was part of EastBridges punningly
titled DAsia vu series. According to its website, DAsia vu republishes classic
works relating to Asia. A special focus, the site explains, is on books that
are effective in the classroom, books that make their many Asias vivid and
personal. In depicting the many Asias of the past to students of the present,
Customers was not simply marketed as a primary source illustrative of an earlier
set of cultural and economic assumptions. The publishers website noted that
Crows work had lost none of its still perceptive insights into China, which is
now more than triple four hundred million.3
EastBridge solicited an opening essay introducing Crows work from Ezra
Vogel, who, like Chang, is a prominent American scholar of China. Vogel told
readers, the paradox is that many illustrations sound so quaint and yet the
spirit of the book, beginning with the title, rings so true today. The frustrations
in trying to fulfill the dream of selling to an almost unlimited market remain
just as poignant, he wrote. Vogel concluded with an anecdote recounted to him
by a former student at Harvard University, where he taught in the social science
department.4 Now a businessman in Shanghai, this former student kept a copy
of Customers on his shelf. No book, he told Vogel, provides as much insight
into the business environment I face.5 Indeed DAsia vus website claimed that
Crows book had been featured on the reading list at Harvard Business School in
recent years.6
Customerss ongoing appeal is derived partly from Crows engaging tone.
He is self-deprecating and peppers his chapters with evocative imagery. Crow
was enthusiastic about China and its people: reading Customers, it is clear that
he held a lot of appreciation for Chinese culture. It is not hard to imagine that
contemporary businesspeople trading with China would read Customers and
relate to his awe, fascination, and excitement. While there are elements of
his writing that may warm readers to Crows work, it is precisely what Vogel
deemed the spirit of the bookits framework of assumptionsthat make its
continued use so problematic.
Crow wrote within a paradigm that saw inherent difference between
so-called Chinese traditionalism and American modernity. He drew a binary
that ultimately reinforced the notion of Western-influenced change.7 Modernity
in China was the consequence of an external Western presence, Crow argued.8
His was part of a broader set of assumptions amongst American missionaries,
policymakers, and businessmen in China in the first decades of the twentieth
century who operated on the idea that Chinas leaders were responding to
104
externally derived ideas.9 The notion that an American and European presence
in China couldand shouldinstigate change in Chinese society and politics
has long antecedents. Since the seventeenth century, American and European
travelers and advisors have expressed desires to remake China in their own
image.10 The 2003 republication and framing of Crows 1937 book as a source
of contemporary expertise illustrated much deeper ways in which Westerncentric expectations of change in China have continued to inform American
foreign policy in the post-Cold War period.
In this article I begin with a brief introduction of Customers before exploring
Crows work in the 1937 context in which he wrote. Crow depicted his experience
of trade with China as necessitating a frontier masculinity that could be forged
through the challenge itself of profiting in the elusive China market. Part of this
challenge lay in overcoming Chinese traditionalism, he claimed. Drawing a
binary between tradition and modernity, Crow reinforced the notion of Westerninfluenced change. I conclude by discussing the post-Cold War treatment of
Customers, at a time when many American companies were making huge profits
in China. In so doing, I show how Crows normative assumptions continued to
inform many parts of American political and economic policies towards China.
China Hands and China Markets

Crow spent twenty-five years living in Shanghai. No trifling sojourn, the length
of his stay provided impetus to his self-declared authority about China. Indeed,
a few months after returning to the United States, he published a book entitled
I Speak for the Chinese, explicitly laying claim to this expertise.11 Crow was
one of a number of Americans deemed China hands, a term used to refer to
those who moved within the revolving door of government and academia, as
experts on Chinese history, politics, and culture.12 Crow, for example, served
on US government committees during both the First and Second World War.13
However the relationship between China hands and the US state has a turbulent
history. After the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, conservative members of Congress including Joseph McCarthy accused China experts
of providing information that had led America to lose China to communism.14
The question of who lost China subsequently became a potent political weapon.
As a consequence, the vast majority of Foreign Service officers who specialized
in China were fired or significantly marginalised.15 Crow had worked with some
of these China hands at the Office of War Information, but he died in 1945 and
did not live to see their public vilification.16 The language of loss that imbued
Elizabeth Ingleson
105
the congressional inquiries reflected an assumption of ownership. It not only

suggested that China had once belonged to the United States, but also that it
should be returned. McCarthyisms devastating politicization of knowledge
operated out of very different motivations to Crow and other China hands. Yet
Crows claims to know China and speak on its behalf revealed an imperialism
of a different kind. Distilling his experiences into a few hundred pages, he
claimed a knowledge-based ownership of China.17
Four Hundred Million Customers was a swashbuckling tale that mingled
adventure with instruction. Written on the eve of his departure from China
in 1937, as the Sino-Japanese war developed, Crows account drew on his own
experiences and provided readers with advice about trading with China. Crow
began working as a journalist and newspaper editor in China before moving to
advertising. He arrived in Shanghai in 1911, just over a decade after Congress
renewed the Chinese Exclusion Act indefinitely, rendering Chinese laborers
migration to the United States illegal. The Act continued until 1943, when it was
replaced with a tokenistic quota in the context of the Second World War. Crow
wrote, then, as a beneficiary of the one-way flow of migration and two-way flow
of trade.18 In Shanghai, Crow lived in a milieu of foreign missionaries, traders,
and journalists. With its bustling streets lined with neon lights and filled with
theaters, cinemas, bars, and restaurants, the Shanghai that most foreigners
knew was a vibrant, cosmopolitan hub of cultural and economic activity.
During the Republican period, from 1912 to 1949, the city was also a hotbed of
political activity: the center of anticolonial mass demonstrations, the site of
economic nationalism expressed through foreign boycotts, and the birthplace of
the Chinese Communist Party.19
Crows was an influential voice among the foreigners living in China. In
1913 he began publishing A Travel Handbook for China, which he updated and
revised multiple times. It was widely read among foreign tourists visiting
China in the early twentieth century.20 While Crow directly addressed business
executives, he also sought to engage readers who had a general interest in China
through his broader discussions of Chinese culture and history. His was one
of hundreds of books produced by Americans who had lived in China and he
opened Customers by asking why he was audacious enough to attempt it too.21
My justification is found in my profession, he argued. Advertising represents
a branch, if not of specialized knowledge, at least of specialized effort, which
has not yet been represented by the many authors of books on China.22 The turn
of the twentieth century saw advertising become a self-consciously professionalized industry in the United States. The rise of consumerism, managerialism,
106
and commodification of the therapeutic mind converged in the burgeoning

industry of corporate advertising.23 One of our vanities, Crow wrote of
American advertisers, is to insist that we enjoy a professional standing. For
Crow, the emphasis on professionalism meant that if we do our work efficiently,
we should be able to give our clients expert advice on all manner of things,
including, he argued, the process of selling to China.24 Efficiency and professionalism were key concepts in the recently professionalized advertising industry.25
Yet Crow, the consummate advertiser, ultimately sold himselfas an expert on
China and as an advertising executive. Following Customerss success, Crow was
in high demand to speak to American audiences on China and the unfolding
Sino-Japanese war. Crow had big dreams: he even wrote a film adaptation of
Customers, which was never produced but now sits amid his archival papers at
the Missouri Historical Society.26
The Golden Illusion

No matter what you may be selling, your business in China should be enormous,
if the Chinese who should buy your goods would only do so. So wrote Crow in
what has become the most cited quotation from Four Hundred Million Customers.
The phrase expressed both the dreams of wealth and the challenge of its
achievement in trade with China. The contingencies of encouraging Chinese
consumers to only do so were numerous, according to Crow. Illustrating his
point, he speculated on the profit that would be made if we could convince the
400 million potential Chinese customers that an apple a day would keep the
doctor away. But calculating the amount of apples that would be needed and the
logistics involved in transporting the apples, Crow concluded: gosh, when you
get down to details, the scheme is not practical.27
While he cautioned his readers about the difficulties involved, Crow noted
that the golden illusion of selling to China would always be an intriguing one.
Crow did not condemn those who believed in this golden illusion. Indeed, he
concluded his book musing on his and his colleagues own dreams of profiting
in China. In spite of our years of disillusionment all of us secretly cherish the
thought that a reasonable number of the 400 million may buy our goods next
year. Contrary to his earlier warnings, Crow wrote that, for him, the China
trade has not only been a fascinating one in theory, but has also been, in the
main, a profitable one.28 In tempering expectations yet describing his and his
fellow business peoples own economic dreams, Crow paradoxically fueled the
idea of a lucrative China market. The very fact that he framed the trade with
Elizabeth Ingleson
107
China in cautionary terms added gravitas to his claim to authority. This claim
was compounded by the books evocative title, in which four hundred million
customers became a metonym for the potential of profitable China trade.
The allure of the China market has long been a feature of American and
European imaginings. Since Marco Polos thirteenth-century account of his
voyage to China, the promise of wealth more than its reality has compelled
business people to trade with China.29 By 1899 Americas Open Door policy,
initiated under the McKinley administration, reinforced the idea that trade
with China would yield huge profit.30 Despite the Open Doors rhetorical
exuberance, trade with China at the turn of the twentieth century never grew to
more than a fraction of Americas total foreign trade.31 As John Fairbank argued,
the small trade in aggregate terms revealed that the American approach to
China was a phenomenon of the mind and spirit more than of the pocketbook.32
But the idea itself remained strong, partly because some American companies
did accumulate vast amounts of wealth. In the case of British American Tobacco,
which traded with China between 1890 and 1915, China was indeed a site of
enormous profit. It was the exceptions of companies such as BAT that reinforced
the phenomenon of the mind and spirit.33
The difficulty of trade that Crow described was also a central component of
Chinas appeal. Crow was one of a number of journalists who had been educated
at the University of Missouriwhere the countrys first journalism school was
establishedbefore moving to China. Thomas Millard, J.B. Powell, and Edgar
Snow were all Missouri graduates who lived in China around the same time
as Crow. Snow recounted how these journalists operated as an old boys club,
hiring one another in China. Their competitors dubbed them the Missouri news
monopoly.34 For Crow and the approximately forty Missouri graduates who
worked in China, this was a new frontier.35 Living in China was, in the depiction
of these China hands, a challenge. The process of writing about what they had
learned from that challenge and containing that experience through fiction,
advice manuals, or academic scholarship was in itself a means of overcoming
that challenge and asserting dominance. Through the very construction of a
narrative of who the Chinese were, these China hands exercised and reinforced
an imperial power that was manifested in gendered terms.36 American
masculinity itself was forged in the process of going to China and conquering
it through knowledge. A 1994 biography of Crow is subtitled a tough old China
hand, reinforcing rather than critiquing the rugged cowboy masculinity that
these journalists cultivated.37 Indeed, Customers, which included illustrations
throughout its pages, included an image depicting China as a beautiful young
108
woman. In one image, Miss China was depicted standing between two men:
John Bull and Uncle Sam. Both men were described as attempting to woo her.
Yet Miss China, with her impenetrable economic market, was won by neither
man, the description noted. The desire to conquer Chinas market was deeply
and in this image overtlyinfused with masculine imperialism.38
Chinas feminization allowed for a degree of flexibility in how this cowboy
masculinity was forged.39 And it provided a space for women, as well as men, to
assert claims of expertise. Pearl Buck, the daughter of American missionaries
in China and author of the bestselling 1931 novel The Good Earth, was one of
the most widely read American writers on China. Fluent in mandarin, Buck
established an image of herself as more Chinese than American. Her portrayals
of China seemed to gain more validity as a consequence of her presenting herself
as an inhabitant of rural China who knew very little about America. Yet her
work perpetuated the idea amongst her American readers that they could, in
the words of historian Karen Leong, possess an intimate understanding of
China and the Chinese. One contemporary critic wrote that her novel makes us
belong to the Chinese family as if they were cousins and neighbors.40
Like Crow and other China hands, Buck depicted the experience of living
in China as challenging. However, unlike the tough male China hand, Buck,
in describing the experiences of missionary wives, depicted isolation. These
women were in exile from their lives in America, she claimed.41 Yet at the turn
of the twentieth century, women constituted over half the number of American
missionaries in China.42 Within the constraints of the missionary compounds
and patriarchal missionary leadership, many women carved out spaces of
empowerment.43 Agents of cultural transfer, these women were, as Carol Chin
describes them, central to the American imperial project in China, part of a
beneficent imperialism.44
In Alice Tisdale Hobarts 1934 novel Oil for the Lamps of China, which was
nonetheless based on Hobarts own experiences, readers encountered a scene in
which China is described as a God-forsaken place for a woman.45 One character
proclaimed that the wife of a company man needed to prove up and stick it if
they were to withstand the experience of living in China.46 Hobart portrayed
a woman who thrived in China by adopting these characteristics steeped in
phallic imagery. Even as Hobart critiqued the idea of China being a hostile
locale for women, she operated within the parameters of China as necessitating
a frontier masculine toughness. Living in a foreign country would have been
difficult, but the process of overcoming that challenge was framed in masculine
terms. Crow reformulated this trope of difficulty through his assertion of the
Elizabeth Ingleson
109
challenge of trading with China. The result, in Customers, was that a masculine
culture of penetrating Chinas marketor wooing Miss Chinawas akin
to overcoming the challenge of living in China. Both conceptions of difficulty
relied upon a frontier ideology. And in Crows case, his depiction of the difficulty
of China trade served to increase its appeal.
Pills for the Ills of China

One of the challenges of trading with China lay in overcoming Chinese
consumers preference for traditional Chinese medicine, Crow argued. In
a chapter entitled Pills for the Ills of Chinaperhaps an irreverent nod
to Hobarts Oil for the Lamps of China, published three years earlierCrow
turned his attention to the sale of Western medicine in China. He opened the
chapter by asserting that all medicine manufacturers of importance in any
part of the world would have at least once envisaged the wealth they might
accumulate from trading with China. Far from judging the fictional male
medicine executive, Crow empathized with him, writing that it is easy for him
to conjure up rosy day-dreams of profit, and that, theoretically, these dreams
were perfectly sound, given Chinas millions who must, according to the laws
of average, be suffering from some kind of an ache at any given moment. Indeed,
Crow reflected, I used to be enthusiastic myself about the possibilities of this
business until I learned better. Crow had learned this lesson the hard way, he
told his readers, through attempting to advertise his European and American
clients medicines, which never found a sale of profitable proportions. Crow not
only established a rapport with his readers through associative sympathy but
also fostered a desire within them in his passing description that all important
medicine manufacturers would want to sell to China. The implicit challenge to
his readers was that, if they were not already, they should pay attention to the
China market in order to be important themselves.47
In the remainder of the chapter, Crow did not disabuse his readers of the
idea that Western medicine was unprofitable in China. Rather, he provided
various explanations as to why he thought this was so. The Chinese are a very
healthy race, he began. With this as his first explanation for the lackluster sale
of Western medicine in China, Crow continued with reasons that were infused
with similarly essentialist claims. The chances were a good deal more than ten
to one that Chinese consumers would go to a Chinese doctor and use Chinese
medicine when they did become sickeven graduates of American universities,
Crow was quick to assert. Chinese consumers had a preference for herbal
110
remedies, which had been hallowed by centuries of use. In his own way, Crow
asked his readers to respect Chinese medicine: crude and imperfect as their
methods may be, they have held the faith of millions of their fellow countrymen
for a staggering number of centuries. However his appreciation had limits.
When he himself was sick he would turn to my old friend, Dr. Tom Dunn.48
While calling on his readers to be respectful of Chinese medicine, his own use
of services from Dr. Dunn suggested his difference and implicit superiority.
American modernity was defined in binary opposition to Chinese medicine.
The latter was dismissed not only as crude, but as requiring faith and therefore
at odds with post-Enlightenment scientific rigors. One of the effects of Crows
diminishment of Chinese culture into an essentialized form was the creation of
cultural boundaries that rendered Chinese customers as inherently different to
American customers.49
Crow concluded the chapter optimistically. Having established the exoticism
and difference of the Chinese, who, according to him, were disinterested in
Western medicine, Crow showed that wealth and profit could nonetheless be
attained from trade with China. But this wealth lay in other areas: in the cocoa
industry. Crow argued that cocoa could be marketed as part of a health campaign.
Sleeplessness could be cured through hot cocoa drinks, largely as a result of its
being a substitution for green tea. The China market, with its promise of wealth,
did exist, Crow suggested, but it was an existence that necessitated guidance
from experts such as him. American medicine manufacturers may not have
realized their dreams of wealth but this did not preclude other industries, such
as cocoa manufacturing, from profiting. In this way, Crow simultaneously
dampened and encouraged American expectations of the China market. Crow
presented Chinese consumers as inherently different to Americansusing
cocoa for sleep at a time when Americans were using it for virility. In the process
he sold his own expertise as a China hand.
Crow wrote at a time when Western and Chinese medicine became politically
fraught tools of the newly established Republican Chinese state. In 1929 the
Republican government tried to abolish the practice of Chinese medicine. In the
struggle to create a modern nation state, Western medicine was aligned with
modernity and Chinese medical practitioners were deemed incompatible with
this project. But Western and traditional medicines were not monolithic
entities, as Crow claimed and the attempted ban on Chinese medicine suggested.
In the first decades of the twentieth century many Chinese medicine reformers
incorporated scientific ideas in their own Chinese medical practice, creating a
new Chinese medicine that was neither donkey nor horse as one (originally
Elizabeth Ingleson
111
derogatory) idiom put it. The fluidity of traditional and Western medicine
helped create a new, modern Chinese medicine.50
Indeed tradition itself was a nebulous concept. Some Chinese purveyors of
Chinese medicine invented tradition as a marketing ploy: feigning centuries of
imperial use as a means of selling what were in fact recently created medical
products. And while Western pharmaceutical companies may have found it
harder to sell their goods in China, this was not because of an absence of Chinese
demand for scientific medicine per se, as Crow argued. Chinese purveyors
of patent medicine were more successful than Western medicine companies.
This was partly due to trade networks amongst Chinese entrepreneurs, which
allowed them to expand sales beyond the major cities: selling in mountainous
regions and during times of conflict.51
Crows binary vision of medical sales also overlooked the stickiness of
so-called Western medicine. The development of European science and medicine
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drew upon global knowledge
systems, including those from East Asia. In the early 1700s, for example, English
physician Sir John Floyer propounded the importance of taking a patients pulse,
which he appropriated from Chinese medicine. As Harold Cook shows, Floyers
understanding of Chinese pulse taking was actually based upon an amalgam of
Chinese treatises that had been translated, and at points, mistranslated, into
Latin. Chinese medicineeven through creative misunderstandings, as Cook
put itthus played an important role in the development of Western medicine.52
Miss China discovered her legs

The effect of Crows depictions of discrete Chinese and American cultures
allowed him to assert that the American and Western presence in China was the
source of change, and that this change was a positive one.53 In one chapter, Crow
recounted his experiences selling cosmetics and soap in Shanghai. He argued
that both Western companies and Western expatriates had inspired modernity
among Chinese women. In 1920 his company began advertising campaigns for
Pears Vanishing Cream and Colgates clat toiletry products, including Three
Stars face cream.54 Crow explained how a good many Chinese girls had been
taught to use vanishing cream due to his companys efforts. This was a chapter
of success, an example of the promise of the mythical China market becoming
a reality. One of the reasons for his success was that the cosmetics business has
always flourished in China. Throughout the chapter, Crow referred to a vaguely
defined span of many centuries in which Chinese women had developed beauty
112
regimes. Crow capitalized on what he deemed Chinese womens preexisting

predilection for cosmetics. Yet his role was to teach Chinese women about using
modern products. Before his advertisements for rouge, for example, Chinese
women used rubber bags filled with hot water. When applied to their cheeks,
these bags would produce a natural rosy glow, Crow explained.55 It was through
his own products, then, that Chinese women were exposed to modern cosmetics.
But Crow did not see himself as simply introducing new products into
the Chinese cosmetics industry. The net result of his and other Western
companies advertisements was, in his estimation, to change the attitude and
to a certain extent the psychology of Chinese women. His advertisements were
plastered among the billboards of Shanghais changing visual landscape.56 As
a consequence of their display, the public sphere was now a space in which the
application of cosmetics was not only visible, but had also become genteel and
respectable. Women in China had been kept in seclusion for several thousand
centuries, applying cosmetics privately in their homes. But with the advertisements legitimization, their horizons immediately broadened, Crow asserted.
Chinese girls, for the first time, began to powder their noses in public with no
sense of shame.57
These changing ideas of respectable cosmetics application led to the great
revolution in womens dress. According to Crow, Chinese women began turning
their attention to other aspects of their physical appearance in the wake of the
newfound freedoms to powder their noses in public. Women began wearing new
Western-style clothing including short skirts. For forty centuries womens
legs had not been considered part of Chinese fashion, Crow asserted. Yet, the
normative changes brought by his and other Western companies advertising
meant that Miss China discovered her legs. This was a logical and unavoidable
sequence. He triumphantly declared: the Chinese woman has broken out of the
inner courtyards of the Chinese home and nothing will ever put her back again.58
Western women living in Shanghai also played a role in this change, Crow
argued. Chinese women observed the passable legs of French women, the
generally unattractive legs of British and American women, and the atrociously
ugly legs of Japanese women. Depicted as passive onlookers, Chinese women
came to the centuries belated realization that fashion could include the display of
legs. According to Crows narrative, women were prompted by external Western
factors and decided that legs had been neglected entirely too long and that they
would put them into circulation without any further delay. Musing on his own
companys efforts, Crow wrote, I am rather proud of the fact that we played
our small part in revealing the most beautiful legs the world has ever seen.59
Elizabeth Ingleson
113
These logical leaps painted a trajectory of change prompted by Crow and

other Western companies. While Chinese women did, in Crows estimation,
discover and decide to dress differently, the parameters within which
Chinese women could make these decisions were externally defined. And
the impetus for change came from Crows advertisements and observations
of foreign women. The white malein his second marriage to an American
woman named Helenreduced Miss China to a titillating object over whose
legs he claimed ownership: Crow was the one with the power to reveal them. In
constructing this narrative, Crow removed and silenced Chinese womens own
role in Republican Chinas modernity.
This was a period during which Chinese leaders and intellectuals negotiated
how to modernize Chinas society and what modernization meant for them.
Masculinity became central to the construction of Chinese modernity, and
clothing and leisure activities were deeply entwined in this process. Indeed, one
of the first acts passed by the Republican government was to order Chinese men
to remove their queues.60 Nationalist politics had largely confined womens contribution to Chinas modernization to the domestic sphere.61 Yet Chinese womens
movements actively sought to carve out their own space in the newly emerged
Republic, seeking to reconcile the New Chinese Woman with nationalism.62 Theirs
was not a modernity attributed to the presence of Westerners, as Crow suggested.
Crows depiction of the changes in Chinese womens experiences reflected a
broader context of American economic imperialism in China. Americas Open
Door policy ostensibly sought to protect China from being carved into spheres
of influence by the European powers and Japan. The policy was framed in
terms of American benevolence and an assumed wealth that would come from
retaining international access to Chinas ports.63 Many American missionaries,
diplomats, and businesspeople who lived in China believed the social changes
to be a consequence of their presence. What one historian has dubbed the
missionary mind, this worldview assumed that Western ideas and institutions
were the instigating force for change in Chinese society.64 And, moreover, that
this change was beneficial for China.
Four Hundred Million Customers in

the Post-Cold War World
By 2003, the wealth that trade with China had once promised was rapidly
materializing for many American companies. Despite the significant changes
in the bilateral trade since 1937, the assumptive frameworks upon which
114
Crow operatedthat of an inherent difference between Chinese tradition and

American modernity and of a Western presence as being a positive force for
changecontinued to shape trade and political relations between the United
States and China.
This was a context of the post-Cold War victory of capitalist democracy
over communism. In 1989 Francis Fukuyamas thesis proclaiming the end of
history crystallized an ideological moment of the inevitability of democracy.65
Two years later, US Secretary of State James Baker claimed that China is in a
time of transition and its anachronistic regime would soon change. This
would be a consequence of economic liberalization, because no nation has yet
discovered a way to import the worlds goods and services while stopping foreign
ideas at the border.66 The arguments linking an American economic presence
in China with political reform unfolded in a heated political context when
Congress debated whether to grant Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading status
to China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre. At issue was whether
continued MFN trade would be more effective in encouraging Chinese human
rights and political reform compared to economic retribution.67 The assumption
in these debates was that American actions could be a precipitating factor for
change in China.68 The logical reasoning for those encouraging trade was that,
with deepening economic ties, a growing middle class would emerge within
China and eventually demand political reforms of Chinas political system.69
DAsia vus 2003 framing of Customers as holding contemporary relevance
was not an isolated example. In 2007, American National Public Radio produced
a segment on the endurance of Crows work. Many of his insights about Chinese
customers and doing business in the Middle Kingdom still hold true today
despite a half-century of communist rule, NPRs listeners were told.70 In the
same year, Time magazine did not pose any objections when it recounted that
Crows work was regarded as a minor classic by the commercial cognoscenti.
Time noted that portions of his account remain startlingly fresh to readers
in 2007.71 In his introductory chapter to DAsia vus republication, Vogel wrote,
a few years ago a Far Eastern Economic Review book editor reviewed the book
as if it just came out and only at the end of the review confessed that the book
was really published more than a half century ago.72 Vogel did not critique the
ahistorical treatment of Crows work. At a time when Chinas economy became
increasingly integrated into the global economy, Crows relevance was implicitly
derived from the fact that many American companies were profiting from the
proverbial four hundred million. By this time, however, the vast majority
of wealth from the China market stemmed not from Chinese customers but
Elizabeth Ingleson
115
from Chinese labor. Yet to assert Customerss continued relevance in 2003 was
to perpetuate an essentialist view that China and the Chinese had inherent
qualities that were timeless.
The rapidly expanding Sino-American trade in the 1990s and 2000s was
accompanied by a proliferation in the number of English-language books within
a genre explaining how to trade with China. Many adopted Crow-inflected
rhetoric. Jim McGregors 2005 book spoke of one billion customers, which, as
the subtitle explained, provided lessons from the front lines of doing business
in China.73 The idea that trade with China involved warlike front lines was
indicative of the ongoing imagery of frontier masculinity. Similarly, in 1998,
Crows biographer, Paul French, coauthored a book about trading with China
with a nod to Crow, entitled One Billion Shoppers.74 Joe Studwell wrote in his
2003 book The China Dream that 1.2 billion customers became the commercial
poetry of the 1990s.75 Reflecting an attendant sense of ownership, Studwell also
published a book explaining How Asia Works.76 The genre of advice literature
was not only a phenomenon of the American maleJim, Paul, and Joe. It was
also a symptom of the patriarchal frameworks that continued, defined by an
imperial to claim ownership of knowledge of a country, or in Studwells case, an
entire region.
After the global financial crisis the relevance of Crows work was reframed
along terms of difficulty. Crows dual arguments about the challenge of trading
with China alongside the myth of its lucrativeness meant that his work was sufficiently malleable to serve whatever purpose those citing him wanted. Paul French,
Crows biographer, reflected on the post-recession relevance of Crows work.
French felt that American trade with China was a more risky and challenging
affair and it was this difficulty that made Crow instructive for the new international economic environment. Now hes back and more relevant than ever in
these recessionary times, French declared. Evangelical Christians in America
apparently wear wristbands that ask them WWJDWhat Would Jesus Do?
Id advocate all China consultants get a wristband asking WWCDWhat
Would Carl Do?77 French entwined the corporate and the religious.
In 2004, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof proclaimed
communism is fading, in part because of Western engagement with China. In
Kristofs view, Americas soft power imperialism would bring political change.78
Trade, investment, Avon ladies, M.
B.
A.s, Michael Jordan and Vogue
magazines have triumphed over Marx, Kristof declared. With reference to the
debate about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Kristof wrote that our most
potent weapons of mass destruction were potbellied business executives and
116
bare-bellied Britney Spears.79 Imagery of American abdomens reinforced the

idea that trade occurred in a paradigm of masculinity and that womens power
in this corporate world was reduced to a sphere of voyeurism and entertainment.
Writing in the influential Foreign Affairs in the same year, businessman George
Gilboy described the U.S. as being in a long-term, patient battle to promote
liberalism in Asia.80 Gilboy was a modern-day Carl Crow: living in Beijing, he
worked for a multinational corporation, and authoritatively provided his views
on Chinas society to an influential sector of the American elite. The patient
battle that Gilboy described required America to encourage change through its
economic and political engagement. Once again, the rhetoric of war tapped into
the idea of challenge.
Ultimately the issue here is not about judging the merits or otherwise of
Chinas political system. Rather, I have been concerned with the assumption
that an American presence through capitalist enterprise could beand should
bethe instigating factor for change. In the first few years of the twentieth
century, when Carl Crow wrote about China, he did so using assumptions of
ownership: that China could be known. With the 1950s inquiries as to who lost
China, this proprietary mindset was reinforced. In the 1970s and 80s American
foreign policy operated upon a desire to hold Chinas hand, as its economy
modernized, through various efforts to teach China about capitalism. In the
post-Cold War context, it was considered merely a matter of time before these
lessons were enacted. The China hand, then, both as a symbol and in practice,
has operated through a prism of Western-centric change. The republication of
Customers illustrates how these much larger political assumptions continue to
inform American foreign policy thinking on China.
notes
1. Paul French, Carl CrowA Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times and Adventures
of an American in Shanghai (Aberdeen: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 110.
2. Gordon H. Chang, Fateful Ties: A History of Americas Preoccupation with China
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 155.
3. See East Bridge Books, http://www.eastbridgebooks.org/imprints.html; http://
www.eastbridgebooks.org/400_info.html.
4. Vogel also worked for the National Intelligence Council during the Clinton
Administration. In 2011 he published a biography of Deng Xiaoping that garnered
considerable attention, in part due to its omission of any discussion of human rights,
but also due to the length of analysis it devoted to some issues over others. Perry
Elizabeth Ingleson
117
Anderson wrote of the biography that anything in Dengs career that might seriously
mar the general encomium is sponged away. Anderson described it as part of a newly
reemerging Sino-Americanaworks written by American scholar-cum-statesmen
who have as their underlying question: Chinawhats in it for us? See Ezra F. Vogel,
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2011); Perry Anderson, Sino-Americana, London Review of Books,
February 9, 2012.
5. Carl Crow, 400 Million Customers: The Experiences - Some Happy, Some Sad of an
American in China, and What They Taught Him (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2003), xvi.
6.East Bridge Books, http://www.eastbridgebooks.org/400_info.html
7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
8. In her study of 1940s and 1950s American Asia experts, Masami Kimura argues
that while these advisers had different policy prescriptions, they were united by a
broader ideology. They were, in Kimuras words, essentially modernization theorists
and liberal internationalists of various kinds. They sought to build a demilitarized
and democratized Japan, she argues. Modernization theory, with its attendant belief
in Western-imposed change, has deep roots in twentieth century American foreign
policy. Masami Kimura, American Asia Experts, Liberal Internationalism, and the
Occupation of Japan: Transcending Cold War Politics and Historiography, Journal of
American-East Asian Relations 21, no. 3 (2014): 24677.
9. T. Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China, 19311949 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996); James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy:
19111915 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Jerry Israel, Progressivism and
the Open Door: America and China, 19051921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1971).
10. Jonathan D. Spence, To Change China: Western Advisors in China, 16201960
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).
11. Crows book was written in the context of the developing Sino-Japanese war. In
speaking for the Chinese, Crow expressed deep concern about Japanese expansion and
pleaded for American political support for China. The Japanese believe that they are
the chosen people, the American warned without a hint of irony. The world would be
a better place if it were a world ruled by Japan. Fantastical as this idea may sound, it is
the dream which inspires the Japanese militarists and moves them to such superhuman
efforts and sacrifices. Carl Crow, I Speak for the Chinese (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1937), 81.
12. The term China hand has been used in multiple contexts to describe foreigners
laying claim to expertise on China. From eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European
118
and American merchants and diplomats, to the Cold War context in which it became a
pejorative label for those within the 1940s State Department who were accused of losing
China to communism. In this article I adopt a broad definition to encompass American
scholars, businessmen, journalists, and novelists who lay claim to truths about China.
13. Chang, Fateful Ties: A History of Americas Preoccupation with China, 155.
14. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1998); Ely Jacques Kahn Jr., China Hands: Americas Foreign Service Officers and
What Befell Them (New York: Viking, 1975).
15. Hannah Gurman, Learn to Write Well: The China Hands and the CommunistIfication of Diplomatic Reporting, Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 2 (April 2010):
430.
16. French, Carl CrowA Tough Old China Hand, 25660.
17. Gayatri Spivak explores the attendant power that comes through knowledge
creation. In constructing a narrative of reality it ultimately becomes established
as the normative one. This form of narration is what she deems an epistemic
imperialism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak, in Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke:
Macmillan Education, 1988), 281, 289; See also: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, History,
in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 198311.
18. Recent histories have shown the ways in which Chinese and Chinese Americans
circumnavigated Americas exclusionary policies, often at great personal cost. See for
example, Sucheng Chan, ed., Chinese American Transnationalism: The Flow of People,
Resources, and Ideas between China and America during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2006).
19. Frederic Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai, 19271937 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), 207; Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Richard Louis Edmonds, eds.,
Reappraising Republican China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Peter Gue
Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 18951949 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 24870.
20. Jerry Israel, Carl Crow, Edgar Snow, and Shifting American Journalistic
Perceptions of China, in America Views China: American Images of China Then and Now
(Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1991), 150; Ezra F. Vogel, Introduction, in 400
Million Customers: The ExperiencesSome Happy, Some Sad of an American in China and
What They Taught Him (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2003), xii.
21. See for example, Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (New York: The John Daycompany,
1932); Emily Hahn, China to Me (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1944); J. P. O. Bland, China:
The Pity of It (Garden City, NY: Double Day, Doran and Company, 1932).
22. Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers: The ExperiencesSome Happy, Some
Elizabeth Ingleson
119
Sad of an American in China and What They Taught Him (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1937), 11.
23. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America
(New York: BasicBooks, 1994); on the therapeutic mind and its relation to consumption,
see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American
Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
24. Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers, 11.
25. Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, 138.
26. Folders 97102, box C41, Carl Crow Papers, Missouri History Museum Archives,
St. Louis.
28. Ibid., 304; 308.
29. Jonathan D. Spence, The Chans Great Continent: China in Western Minds, 1620-1960
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 118; Robert A. Kapp, The Matter of Business, in
China in the American Political Imagination (Washington: CSIS Press, 2003), 8292.
30. The extent to which Americas Open Door policy was motivated by economic
concerns became the source of considerable debate during the 1960s, in the contexts of
both the Vietnam War and the Cold War. Some argued that the policy was a product
of American capitalisms ongoing necessity for new economic markets. American
imperialism necessitated new economic frontiers, this line of argument claimed.
Others saw the Open Door policy as motivated by geopolitical concerns, arguing that
the promise of the China market was simply used as a rhetorical justification for these
strategic interests. For more on the former ideas see: William Appleman Williams, The
Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing, 1959); Thomas J. McCormick,
China Market: Americas Quest for Informal Empire, 18931901 (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1967); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion,
18601898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974); for scholars arguing the latter, see
Paul A. Varg, The Making of a Myth: The United States and China, 18971912 (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 1968); Marilyn B. Young, The Rhetoric of Empire:
American China Policy, 18951901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).
31. In 1890 Sino-American trade accounted for 0.3 percent of total American trade.
In 1910, this proportion stood at 1 percent, and in 1930, American trade with China still
comprised only 2 percent of its total trade. See Michael H. Hunt, Americans in the
China Market: Economic Opportunities and Economic Nationalism, 1890s1931, The
Business History Review 51, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 278.
32. Ernest R. May and John King Fairbank, eds., Americas China Trade in Historical
Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 7.
120
33. Sherman Cochran, Commercial Penetration and Economic Imperialism in

China: An American Cigarette Companys Entrance into the Market, in Americas China
Trade in Historical Perspective, eds. Ernest R. May and John King Fairbank (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1986), 153.
34. Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 31.
35. John Maxwell Hamilton, The Missouri News Monopoly and American
Altruism in China: Thomas F.F. Millard, J. B. Powell, and Edgar Snow, Pacific Historical
Review 55, no. 1 (1986): 29.
36. On the power to narrate, and accompanying assertion of imperial projections of
power see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994),
especially 1931; 11132.
37. French, Carl CrowA Tough Old China Hand.
38. Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences, 283; The relationship
between gender and imperialism has been a rich source of scholarly inquiry. See, for
example, two recent edited collections: Stephen F. Miescher, Michele Mitchell, and
Naoko Shibusawa, eds., Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges (West Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2015); Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrich, eds., Body and Nation: The
Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2014).
39. For more on the differences amongst these men, see Hamilton, The Missouri
News Monopoly and American Altruism in China.
40. Critics quotation cited in Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna
May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 2427.
41. In November 1932 Pearl Buck gave a speech to 2000 Presbyterian women in New
York in which she provided a scathing critique of American missionaries in China. Buck
depicted the experiences of American men and women in a binary form: missionary
men, in Bucks portrayal, were patriarchal zealots detached from the experiences of
Chinese people while American women lived with their husbands in exile. For analysis
on Bucks political motivations for providing this simplistic dualism, see: Vanessa
Kunnemann, Following with Bleeding Footsteps? American Missions in China and
the (gendered) Critique of Pearl S. Buck, in Trans-Pacific Interactions: The United States
and China, 18801950, ed. Vanessa Kunnemann and Ruth Mayer (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 16184.
42. Jane Hunter, Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-theCentury China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 3.
43. See, for example, Sue Gronewold, New Life, New Faith, New Nation, New
Women: Competing Models at the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai, in Competing
Elizabeth Ingleson
121
Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 18121960, ed.
Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 195217; For a discussion of the relationship between female
missionaries and American empire more broadly, see Ian Tyrrells essay in the same
collection: Ian Tyrrell, Women, Missions, and Empire: New Approaches to American
Cultural Expansion, in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American
Protestant Empire, 1812-1960, ed. Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and
Connie A. Shemo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 4366.
44. Carol C. Chin, Beneficent Imperialists: American Women Missionaries in
China at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Diplomatic History 27, no. 3 (June 2003):
32752.
45. Alice Tisdale Hobart, Oil for the Lamps of China (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2003), 47.
46. Ibid., 48.
48. Ibid., 206209.
49. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routlege, 2004).
50. Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over
Chinas Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 101109; 13840; Bridie
Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850-1960 (Vancouver: UBC Press,
2014), 12.
51. Sherman Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and
Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 11; 2732.
52. Harold J. Cook, Creative Misunderstandings: Chinese Medicine in SeventeenthCentury Europe, in Cultures in Motion, ed. Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, and
Helmut Reimitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 237.
53. Paul Cohen critiques and contextualizes this model of analysis, see especially
chapter one: Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing
on the Recent Chinese Past, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 955.
54. French, Carl CrowA Tough Old China Hand, 96; Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling
Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 144.
56. On the use of the New Woman in Chinese advertisements, see for example:
Shu-mei Shih, Shanghai Women of 1939: Visuality and the Limits of Feminine
Modernity, in Visual Culture in Shanghai: 1850s-1930s, ed. Jason C. Kuo (Washington:
New Academic Publishing, 2007), 20540; Carol C. Chin, Modernity and National
Identity in the United States and East Asia, 18951919 (Kent: Kent State University Press,
2010), 10432.
122

58. Ibid., 38.
59. Ibid., 3841.
60. Karl Gerth, Shanghai Fashion: Merchants and Business as Agents of Urban
Vision, in Cities in Motion: Interior, Coast, and Diaspora in Transnational China, ed.
Sherman Cochran and David Strand (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2007),
155; see also Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
61. On the ways in which womens domestic roles were defined in nationalist terms,
see Helen Schneider, Keeping the Nations House: Domestic Management and the Making of
Modern China (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011).
62. Joan Judge, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese
Periodical Press (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Chin, Modernity and
National Identity in the United States and East Asia, 10432.
63. For more on the Open Door economic imperialism see, for example, Williams,
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy; McCormick, China Market: Americas Quest for
Informal Empire, 18931901; for a critique of the New Left historiography on the Open
Door see Paul A. Varg, The Making of a Myth: The United States and China, 18971912 (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1968).
64. Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy: 19111915.
65. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History?, The National Interest 16 (Summer
1989): 318; Francis Fukuyama, The End Of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
1992).
66. James A. Baker III, America in Asia: Emerging Architecture for a Pacific
Community, Foreign Affairs 70, no. 5 (Winter 1991): 1617.
67. Cohen, Americas Response to China, 241.
68. James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese
Repression (New York: Viking, 2007), 4968.
69. These ideas, referred to as modernization theory, had significant influence
on American foreign policy during the early Cold War period. This particular line
of argument, regarding the role of the middle class in assisting the development of
democracy was propounded in particular by Seymour Martin Lipset. See: Seymour
Martin Lipset, Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and
Political Legitimacy 53, no. 1 (March 1959): 69105; For the intellectual history
of modernization theory more broadly, see: Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future:
Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2007); David C. Engerman, ed., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the
Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
Elizabeth Ingleson
123
70. NPR All Things Considered, Cracking the China Market: Then
and
Now,
February
21,
2007,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.
php?storyId=7530424&ft=1&f=1032.
71.400 million customers (back then) Time, February 12, 2007, http://world.time.
com/2007/02/12/400_million_customers_back_the/.
72. Crow, 400 Million Customers: The Experiences, xvi.
73. James McGregor, One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing
Business in China (New York: Free Press, 2005).
74. Paul French and Matthew Crabbe, One Billion Shoppers: Accessing Asias
Consuming Passions and Fast-Moving MarketsAfter the Meltdown (Boston: Nicholas
Brealey Publishing, 1998).
75. Joe Studwell, The China Dream: The Quest for the Last Great Untapped Market on
Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 25.
76. Joe Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the Worlds Most Dynamic
Region (New York: Grove Press, 2013).
77. See
Obama
Recommendations:
IV,
http://www.thechinabeat.
org/?cat=6&paged=17.
78. In the same context, Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye popularized the
notion of soft power as a way of explaining co-opted rather than coerced power. See:
Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public
Affairs, 2004).
79. Nicholas D. Kristof, The Tiananmen Victory, New York Times, June 2, 2004.
80. George J. Gilboy, The Myth behind Chinas Miracle, Foreign Affairs 83, no. 4
(August 2004): 37.
124
norman harper prize essay
Laying Claim
Framing the Occupation of Alcatraz in the
Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter
On November 20, 1969, a group of American Indian activists calling themselves

Indians of All Tribes (IOAT) occupied the former penitentiary on Alcatraz Island
in the San Francisco Bay to protest against and raise awareness about federal
policies towards American Indians. Media attention, along with their own publications, gave IOAT a platform from which to bring attention to the grievances of
the Indian communities in the Bay area and beyond. The media strategy IOAT used
to communicate their message was the most innovative aspect of the occupation,
and is arguably its most successful achievement. IOAT solicited attention from
news media, which reported the occupation to American and international
audiences. In addition to providing access for mainstream media, TV cameras,
and journalists, IOAT produced its own media, such as open letters, pamphlets,
and a broadcast radio program called Radio Free Alcatraz.1 IOAT also produced the
Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter (also known as the Alcatraz Newsletter).2
Published over the course of the nineteen-month occupation, the newsletter gives
clear, contemporary insight into the intentions and attitudes of the occupiers. Yet
few historians have afforded it attention, relying instead on contemporaneous
outsider reports, retrospective memoirs, and oral histories. This essay addresses
that deficiency by examining the ways in which IOAT represented the occupation
of Alcatraz Island in the Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter.
Background
Most early histories of American Indian protest movements were written by and for
non-Indians, and sought to persuade readers that government policies were cruel

125
and misguided. They also attempted to convince the broader public of the validity
of the occupiers grievances.3 Such histories were written to refute the popular
non-Indian perception, particularly in the wake of militant protestssuch
as the 1972 occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the 1973
occupation of Wounded Kneethat Indian protests were the dangerous,
destructive actions of hot-headed, irresponsible extremists.4 Instead,
historians argued that protests were direct responses to genuine grievances.
For example, Richard DeLuca discussed the occupation in the context of the
declining population of California Indians since the 1700s as a result of colonial
violence, the past history of Indians incarcerated on Alcatraz island in the
1800s. He also argued that the occupation was the result of official termination
policies in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, federal initiatives that sought to abolish reservations and tribal sovereignty, and to assimilate Indians into White American
culture by relocating them to urban environments.5
In the 1990s, a new wave of scholarship began to emphasize instead the
significance of Alcatraz for Indians, and the role the occupation played in the
American Indian movement for self-determination. Historians such as Troy
R. Johnson, Paul Chaat Smith, and Robert Allen Warrior viewed Alcatraz as
an event that inspired American Indians to undertake more and greater protest
actions.6 Occupations, along with pan-tribal and inter-tribal movements, had all
occurred before IOAT landed on Alcatraz Island in November 1969.7 However,
the Alcatraz occupation was the first American Indian protest to receive
widespread national media attention. Media attention allowed the occupation
to become a powerful symbol and example for the nascent American Indian
protest movement, and to inspire many other instances of American Indian
civil disobedience nationwide. Smith and Warrior pointed out that while other
issues had united Indians across tribal lines in the past, these had mostly been
cultural issues. By contrast, Alcatraz was uniquely political.8 Johansen argues
that Alcatraz marked a shift in Indian activism away from issues that affected
single tribes to supra-tribal issues.9 Certainly, the years after Alcatraz showed
evidence of many more intertribal protest actions. David Milner described the
Alcatraz occupation as the clarion call that began the era of Native American
protests in the 1970s, and an event that stirred the imaginations of Indians
throughout America.10
If, as Smith, Warrior, Johnson, and Milner have argued, the greatest
significance of the Alcatraz occupation was in the media attention it received
and the protests it inspired, the relative absence of discussion of contemporary
insider sources such as the Alcatraz Newsletter is a serious omission. But it can
126
be explained, at least in part, by access restrictions. Prior to its digitization,

the Alcatraz Newsletter was only available in archives and in the collections
of former protesters. Outsider coverage in mainstream newspaperssuch as
the San Francisco Observer, the New York Times, and the Washington Postis
far more readily accessible, and, since it reached larger audiences, reflects
mainstream responses to the occupation. However, the statements reported in
these sources have been interpreted, reframed, and mediated by non-Indians,
and are written for non-Indian audiences. Similarly, retrospective sources, such
as memoirs and oral histories, do not reflect the image IOAT presented of itself
at the time of the occupation, but an image colored by hindsight and subsequent
events. In order to assess the impact of IOATs impact on the imagination of
American Indians, this essay takes the Alcatraz Newsletter as media produced
and framed by Indians, aimed primarily at Indian audiences.11 It was intended to
provide a platform for the publication of uncensored Indian opinion.12
Cultural and literary scholars have done most of the work on self-representation of American Indians involved in the occupation. For example, Chadwick
Allen discussed the Alcatraz Proclamation as an example of post-colonial
hybridity, a process by which indigenous minorities appropriate the authority
of particular colonial discourses, such as treaties, for their own gain. Allen
argued that by re-deploying treaty discourse, IOAT reminded both Federal and
state governments of agreements forged with Indian nations during previous
eras. Such redeployments served to re-centre the discourse of treaties, to reestablish treaty documents as powerful, authoritative, and binding on the
contemporary settler nation, making discourse into a form of resistance.13
Casey Ryan Kelly refers to the process as dtournement, or a subversive misappropriation of dominant discourse that disassembles and imitates texts until
they clearly display their oppressive qualities.14 Similarly, Seonghoon Kim has
identified central themes of unity and the collective image of pan-Indian culture
presented and contested in American Indian protest poetry newspapers such as
Americans Before Columbus, Akwesasne Notes, and The Warpath.15
This essay examines six frameworks within which IOAT framed the
occupation of Alcatraz Island in Alcatraz Newsletter: unity, leadership, history,
symbolism, legal and treaty rights, and conservation. The newsletter promoted
a united identity and sense of purpose for all indigenous Americans, including
those in Canada and Central and South America. It promoted the occupation
as a cause that could provide a positive example and leadership for Indians. It
demonstrated a historical consciousness that often ran in direct opposition to
patriotic US histories promoted in schools. The newsletter drew upon the rich
Rhiannon Bertaud-Gandar
127
figure 1
Masthead from the Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 1 (January 1970).
symbolism of Alcatrazs history as a military base and penitentiary, and its

location in the San Francisco Bay. It published reports by IOAT and their lawyers
drawing upon legislation and treaties governing land purchases, reservations,
and the status of Indians to justify the occupation of Alcatraz. The newsletter
also discussed Indian claims to Alcatraz and the broader claims of the American
Indian Movement in terms of their spiritual and moral roles as custodians of
the land, drawing on the language of environmentalism and conservation to
criticize pollution, corporate and government exploitation, and land alienation.
IAOT initially conceived of a twice-monthly English-language publication,
including photographs, articles, illustrations, and poems submitted by Indians
throughout North America. Four issues of the Alcatraz Newsletter were
produced between January and July 1970, before high costs forced its discontinuation. It may also have fallen victim to the disorganization of the latter part of
the occupation. This essay only examines the first three issues, as the fourth
has not been digitized.16 Subscription rates were set at $3.00 for the year 1970,
but creating a newsletter proved expensive, and subscription was raised first to
$3.00 for Indians and $6.00 for Non-Indians, then to a flat rate of $6.00.17 The
first three issues were 16 to 20 pages long. Two were published in January and
February 1970 under the title Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter (figure 1,
above). The third issue, dated simply 1970, was probably published in April
1970.18 This issue also lost the word Alcatraz from its masthead, which may
have been a deliberate reflection of the more national character of its content,
which included articles about protests outside of Alcatraz, organized by IOAT
and other groups in several locations in California, Nevada, and Washington.
Another magazine has also been attributed to IOAT and the Alcatraz
occupation.19 This magazine, probably published in February 1971, had no
128
figure 2
Left: Illustration from the Indians of All Tribes Newsletter 1, no. 3 (April 1970);
Right: Illustration from Indian Magazine (February 1971).
masthead, and gave a contact address for Indian Magazine, with a postal
address in Healdsburg, California, over one hundred kilometers from the San
Francisco Bay Area. Indian Magazine differed significantly from the Alcatraz
Newsletter. At 50 pages, it was over twice as long as each issue of the Alcatraz
Newsletter, and it documented Indian protests across the USA, focusing
primarily on American Indian protests outside of Alcatraz, in California
and Washington State. It credited no editorial team, stating that the articles
had been put together by Indians and non-Indian friends for the purpose of
making just a few of our problems known to our people and other peoples who
support our cause and still believe in truth and justice. The issue was free and
not to be sold, and the editors asked that it be passed on to interested parties
hand to hand and tribe to tribe.20 However, the magazine also displayed some
continuity with the Alcatraz Newsletter, including duplicating illustrations
(figure 2, above).
Many activists contributed to the content and production of the Alcatraz
Newsletter. The editorial team included prominent figures within the Bay Area
Indian community, such as Earl Livermore, a member of the Montana Blackfeet
Nation who was director of the San Francisco Indian Centre, member of the
San Francisco Human Rights Commission, and member of the Alcatraz Island
Council in addition to his role in the editorial staff.21 Several members of the staff
lived and worked off the island, in the office that managed occupation funding,
donations, and supplies for the Occupation.22 Most items in the newsletter were
anonymous or published under pseudonyms.
129
Unity and Leadership

The newsletters stated goal was always to include the voices of the multitude. We
want YOU to be the reporter! the first issue announced: Indians of All Tribes
must be just thata means of communicating information and ideas between
all of our people.23 The Alcatraz Newsletter also signaled an intention to provide
leadership for American Indians. No longer is it necessary for the Indian to look
up to the non-Indian, a guest editorial announced, for in the occupation it is
entirely possible to see qualified leadership in the Indian world.24 IOAT itself
stated that those on the island, by being here, have expressed our willingness
to lead.25 The Alcatraz Newsletters emphasis on unity and leadership supports
those historians who have argued that the occupation of Alcatraz was notable for
its display of pan-Indianism.26
Articles, poems, and manifestos in the newsletter propounded a unity of
identity and purpose as aspirations of the occupiers. IOAT included members
from throughout the USA, and claimed to represent not only the many tribes of
the United States, but also those in Canada and Central and South America. One
article briefly described the reasons behind the occupation, then condensed the
complex motivations and intentions of IOAT into three simple slogans: We are
Indians, We are Indians of All Tribes, and We hold the Rock.27 It presented
the occupiers as united firstly through their identity as Indians, and secondly
as participants in the ongoing occupation of Alcatraz Island. The two declarations served as slogans, condensing the essence and purpose of the occupation
into simple, memorable expressions of unified purpose. IOATs idea of unity
influenced other groups. For example, United Indians of All Tribes (UIAT), a
group formed in Seattle, stated in their manifesto (published in the Alcatraz
Newsletter) that the occupation of Alcatraz had seen the beginnings of a concept
of unity long dreamed of by all our people.28
An anonymous guest editorial in the second issue elaborated on the ideas
of unity. The name Indians of All Tribes, the writer felt, demonstrated IOATs
willingness to represent American Indians from state reservations, federal
reservations, urban and rural communities as well as the indigenous populations
across the borders. Alcatraz was not an island, it stated, but an idea: the idea
of Indian unity, Indian power, and Indian leadership. The Alcatraz Newsletter
argued that IOAT, not the government, worked for the betterment of American
Indians. It described in detail the productive steps IOAT had taken towards
making Alcatraz habitable, including short articles about the school, kindergarten, health clinic, kitchen, and stores that had been set up, emphasizing the
130
organization, cooperation, communication, and goodwill that allowed them to

create a positive, productive community.29
In some instances, however, such as Alcatraz Newsletters coverage of the
ambitious Pan-Indian Conference planned for December 23, 1969, the positive
spin the newsletter tended to put on IOAT actions concealed negative aspects of
the occupation. IOAT invited delegations from each Indian nation, tribe or band
from throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico to attend the meeting
on December 23, 1969, and form a Confederation of American Indian Nations.
Fewer than one hundred people attended, and the matters discussed were far
removed from the reality of the island. Even the meeting place, the prisons
main dining room, was a cold and dark place surrounded by prison cells.30 The
Alcatraz Newsletter, on the other hand, reported that IOAT had been encouraged
by the enthusiastic response of Indians throughout the USA and Canada.
The meeting room was shiningly neat and humming with the life of the
conference.31 The discussion of admission policies for the proposed Thunderbird
University ignored the actual circumstances of the occupation and the potential
for success.32 The newsletters account of the conference, however, does suggest
that IOAT paid some attention to practical difficulties. The Conference dealt
with matters of urgency, discussing maintenance, the need for electricians,
plumbers, and other workers to better the living conditions on the island for the
sake of safety and health of its member residents.33 It seems that the newsletter,
in trying to portray the occupation in a good light, played down the effect of poor
sanitation and complex logistics.
History and Symbolism

As well as symbolizing IOATs hope for Indian unity, the metaphoric significance of Alcatraz Island extended to its representation as a symbol of confiscated
land, stolen or unlawfully taken from Indian nations throughout the fivehundred-year history of European colonization, and the Indian Reservation
as a form of concentration camp or outdoor prison. Discussion of the unity of
identity and purpose conflated the physical land and symbolic significance of
Alcatraz Island with the united Indian identity, a conflation also visible in the
poem Alcatraz by Coyote 2, which stated that a tribe is an island and a tribe is
a people, making land and people interchangeable.34
The Alcatraz Proclamation, prepared before the November 9, 1969
occupation, also contained these two core concepts. The Proclamation, possibly
the most well-known text from the occupation, had already been read out on
131
figure 3
Illustration from the Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 2 (February 1970), 2.
multiple occasions, including to journalists and at a fundraising concert in

December 1969 before it was featured in the first issue of the Alcatraz Newsletter.35
The Proclamation claimed that Alcatraz was suitable as an Indian reservation
as determined by the white mans own standards, because it was, in essence,
waste land. Like most other Indian reservations, Alcatraz Island was unable
to support large groups of people, since it lacked running water, health care,
educational facilities, along with mineral wealth or industry.
Yet at the same time as it symbolized the worst consequences of settler
colonialism, Alcatraz was a symbol of hope. The tiny island, if given to IOAT,
would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians,
standing in as a synecdoche for the continent from which they had been dispossessed. The location of Alcatraz Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay
meant that IOAT could compare it to Manhattan and the lighthouse to the Statue
of Liberty.36 An illustration of the rock carved with the faces of Indian leaders
(figure 3, above) evokes Mt Rushmore, with its carved portraits of famous
American Presidents.
Articles in the Newsletter also displayed a strong historical consciousness,
drawing on past events, and on written and oral traditions to provide context
for the present situation. In Alcatraz Visions, Coyote 2 repeated the line I am
only five hundred years old. He knows his father hunted giant mammoth, he
remembers the blood of Montezuma, and was yesterday herded on the Trail of
Tears.37 By compressing the five hundred years since contact, the speaker made
132
the Alcatraz occupation a response to these important historical events.38 IOAT

proposed transforming the buildings on the island into a museum, which would
include exhibits about the Trail of Tears, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, the
Battle of Little Bighorn, and other important events in the colonial history of
the Americas to demonstrate their continued relevance. IOAT insisted that it
create and maintain the museum, rejecting a governmental offer to transform
the island into a park with a museum and statues of famous Indians.39 A
government-sponsored museum would transform Indians into museum pieces,
tourist attractions, and politicians playthings. We do not need statues to our dead,
IOAT wrote, because our dead never die. They are always here with us.40 Insisting
on the contemporary relevance of historical events, IOAT opposed the popular
historical narrative that conveniently forgot atrocities against Indian peoples.
In the view of IOAT, the treatment of American Indians in the 1960s was
equivalent to past policies. The proposed museum would retain penitentiary cells
because of their historical link to Indian captives incarcerated for challenging
white authority, and their symbolic resonance with Indians imprisoned on
reservations.41 The Seattle UIAT manifesto described governmental policies
such as termination, relocation, and assimilation towards Indians as genocide
by sophisticated means, or merely the continuation in a different form of
colonial genocide.42 In We Hold the Rock! IOAT used similar terminology to
accuse the federal government of continuing a program to annihilate the many
Indian Tribes of this land by outright murder, which even now continues by the
methods of theft, suppression, prejudice, termination, and so-called relocation
and assimilation.43 The UIAT Seattle manifesto displayed a similar historical
consciousness, drawing on historical causes while also invoking Katharine Lee
Batess poem America the Beautiful by stating that From sea to shiny sea lie
the graveyards of military massacres against our people. The surface of America
is etched forever with the scars of countless Trails of Tears.44 A letter from the
Western Shoshone Nation expressed support for what it described as an historic
and just cause that has inspired you to occupy the island known as Alcatraz.45 A
guest editorial brutally excoriated the Bureau of Indian Affairss (BIA) top heavy
bureaucratic structure and its subtle (and not so subtle) manoeuvres of cultural
genocide. The BIA carried out these manoeuvres through health, education,
and welfare policy, and especially through traumatic instances of kidnapping
our children from rural areas for educational purposes of questionable value.46
IOAT consistently framed their own occupation in comparison to historical
and contemporary violence directed at Indians. In essence, the Alcatraz
Newsletter placed the occupation of Alcatraz and the broader Red Power
133
movement within five centuries of conflict and dispossession.47 The Alcatraz

Proclamation conflated the Dutch purchase of Manhattan Island in 1626, the
creation of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1832, and nearly 400 treaties
negotiated between the United States and various American Indian nations
between 1788 and 1868.48 As was the case in the snide reference to the purchase
of Manhattan Island in 1626, IOAT reinterpreted other events and concepts
from American history in an example of dtournement. In February, a guest
editorial argued for the legitimacy of the Alcatraz Occupation in the terms of
the Declaration of Independence, taking issue with its famous pledge but substituting the mythical and not-yet-created Uncle Sam for Thomas Jefferson, as it
declared, Uncle Sam, you are not my uncle! We are not even related! Damn your
interference with my rights of life, liberty, and happiness!49 The Declaration of
Independence famously argued that all men were created equal and endowed
with unalienable rights, describing governments as deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed. The editorialist argued that Uncle Sam had
denied the very rights the United States was supposed to protect.
A close analysis of the Alcatraz Newsletter points to several contemporary
sources of inspiration. Terms used would not have been out of place at Berkeley
during the Free Speech movement, the Sorbonne of May 68, or the uprising at
San Francisco State. We are still holding the Island of Alcatraz in the true names
of Freedom, Justice and Equality, IOAT wrote in January 1970.50 Like many
contemporary protests, such as the San Francisco State College strike in 196869,
IOAT sought to illustrate the racism and authoritarianism that formed a major
tenet of the A merican way of life.51 Johnson argued that IOAT drew inspiration
from the San Francisco Beat Generation, the Civil Rights Movement, the Free
Speech Movement, and the Haight-Ashbury Counterculture.52
IOATs use of Alcatraz to symbolize confiscated Indian land allowed them to
ridicule the General Services Administration (GSA) officials who argued IOAT
were on the land as trespassers, in violation of Federal law. Each repetition of
this statement at public meetings on 4 and 5 January 1970 elicited laughter from
the Indians, according to the Newsletters account.53 Alvin Willies block-cut
print of Alcatraz against the San Francisco skyline and the words this is my
land / all of it with a silhouette of the USA (figure 4) accompanied the text I
must therefore again advise you that you are here as trespassers. I must further
advise you , which came from the GSA rations Statement to Indians on
Alcatraz, printed in full on the preceding page.54 Implicit here was the IOAT
view, expressed on behalf of all Indians, that it was the European colonizers and
then American settlers who had trespassed on Indian land.
134
figure 4
A block-cut print by Alvin Willie in the Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz

Newsletter 1, no. 1 (January 1970), 5.
Treaties, Legalities, and Moral Suasion

A core message that the occupation sought to communicate to the public and to
state authorities was the historical and contemporary use of Federal and state
law to enforce injustices such as land confiscation. IOAT repeatedly pointed to
broken treaties for their justification. One of the reasons cited by the Western
Shoshone for supporting the occupation was that it might persuade the White
Man and his government to keep even some small part of the hundreds of
treaties.55 By evoking treaties in which the federal government had recognized
indigenous sovereignty, IOAT pointed to precedents for the legality of its claims
135
to sovereignty over Alcatraz Island. Furthermore, since the United States had
failed to honor the treaties, IOAT used them as a powerful moral argument for
the justice of its cause.
Invoking treaties gave IOAT legal justification for the occupation. Leftist
activist and lawyer Aubrey Grossman, who represented IOAT in the legal
battle for Alcatraz, wrote an extensive article for the Alcatraz Newsletter about
the legality of the occupation. Grossman drew on the legal principles of right
to property, right to recompense, and morality to argue that Indians deserved
far more than they had historically received from the government. Since
the government recognized that Indian title to land could be lost only if the
Indians voluntarily ceded the land to the United States, Grossman argued that
treaties confirmed Indian rights to land. Even in instances where Indians had
ceded title legally, fraud and governmental breaking of treaty obligations could
void the treaties. If the Government did not carry out its obligations, Indians
could not be held to their side of the bargain. Grossman found the methods used
by California to confiscate Indian land especially outrageous.56
IOAT advocated for the legal right of American Indians to land, water, and
fisheries in a series of protests, mostly on the East Coast of the US. Notable
protests reported in the Alcatraz Newsletter in mid-1970 were those that occurred
at Pitt River and Round Valley in California, Pyramid Lake in Nevada, and
the Nisqually River in Washington State. These protests occurred as popular
media attention began to turn away from Alcatraz and IOAT settled in for the
long-haul work of occupation. The second issue of the Alcatraz Newsletter began
with a challenge from Turtles Son to protest water depletion at Pyramid
Lake, Nevada, by carrying gallons of water to the lake and pouring it in. The
action would be an act of Indian unity; it would also be the first action of the
cultural and educational center on Alcatraz, which Turtles Son envisioned as a
traveling college.57 The third issue contained an article about the protest, which
had occurred as planned. Turtles Son described it as a spiritually charged action.
According to Turtles Son, when the water bearers walked into the lake to pour
their gifts, a magic is born, as all watchers feel the chill of the icy water, and a
strange joy at this great event in Indian unity occurs.58
IOAT protested against the construction of a dam that would, if built, flood
a significant portion of the Round Valley Reservation in California. It cited
many previous dams built on Indian land, such as the Lake Perfidy dam built
on Seneca land in Pennsylvania. By building that dam, the United States had
broken the oldest Indian treaty, the Pickering treaty of 1794, and violated
Indian rights to land. Engaging in ironic reversal, IOAT put itself in the place
136
of a federal official who knew that Honoring treaties is no way to get promoted.
Patriotism doesnt produce results. Progress is more important than honoring
the word of the nation. It then switched to indignation, asking its readers to
consider the Kinzua dam, which flooded the Seneca reservation and the sacred
burial grounds of the Cornplanter, and other dams built on Indian land in
violation of treaties.59
IOAT argued that Indians could use the island far better than the GSA.
They referred not only to their plans for the islands future as a cultural and
educational center, but also as a center for ecology, in contrast to state and
big business exploitation of natural resources and creation of pollution. IOAT
positioned themselves as custodians of the land, as opposed to white settlers,
who had systematically destroyed a once-beautiful and natural landscape,
killed-off the creatures of nature, polluted air and water, ripped open the
very bowels of our earth in senseless greed.60 The Western Shoshone Nation
supported the Occupation because it had demonstrated that we [Indians] can
make better use of the land than the White Man has done.61 Environmental
activism became increasingly common at this time, and in April 1970 the
first Earth Day was held. Environmental concern also surfaced in the Indian
Magazine, which discussed the January 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill. As
speakers from the Iroquois Confederacy stood before an audience of Indians
from Alcatraz, California and other western states, activists brought seabirds
covered with oil from the collision of two Standard Oil tankers in San Francisco
Bay into the hall to be cleaned. The message of mans need to live in harmony
with Mother Earth was shown in a very real and tragic way.62
Inspiration and Impact

During the first few months of the occupation, IOAT and the US Government
negotiated the future of Alcatraz Island. IOAT demanded legal title to the
island, which the government refused to offer. IOAT was not willing to
compromise: the protesters wanted Alcatraz to remain as a symbol of Indian
self-determination, which it could not do if IOAT received it on conditions or
with government supervision.63 The Alcatraz Newsletter printed many of the
letters sent and received by IOAT regarding legal title of the island, in addition to
reports of meetings. Neither IOAT nor the GSA were prepared to make sufficient
concessions to reach an agreement. Prominent Native American activist Vine
Deloria Jr. was skeptical about the likelihood of a settlement being reached.
IOAT was not prepared to negotiate with federal officials, and that negotiation
137
was necessary for long-lasting change: If youre out front shouting all the time,
you cant be in the background doing what has to be done to change policy.64
Later events proved Delorias pessimistic prediction correct.
In January 1970, LaNada Means, a member of the Alcatraz committee,
prepared and submitted a proposal for an Indian Cultural Centre on Alcatraz
Island. Two months later, US Government representative Robert Robertson
returned a counterproposal, the last, best offer IOAT would receive. Under
this proposal, Alcatraz would be the site of an Indian museum and cultural
center, run by the National Park Service, staffed by Indians, and overseen by a
board of directors made up of elected tribal officials from around the country.65
IOAT published the Government proposal and their response in the third issue
of the Alcatraz Newsletter, rejecting the governments plan. IOAT argued that it
was acting in good faith and that the Government, not IOAT, needed to make
concessions. This proposal of the governments, the third issue of the Alcatraz
Newsletter proclaimed, would turn Alcatraz into just another government
park: We are willing to negotiate on money and the time and day that they
will turn over the deed to the island. That is all that is negotiable.66 IOAT set
a deadline for another counterproposal on May 31, 1970, but federal officials
did not respond. By then, public sentiment had turned against the occupation,
which was now seen as tedious and possibly dangerous. The government cut off
electricity and water supplies to the island in late May 1970 and living conditions
deteriorated. Several fires broke out on the island in the summer of 1970, and
the unusually harsh winter of 197071 further whittled down numbers of
occupiers.67 No further issues of Alcatraz Newsletter were published. Federal
marshals removed the last fifteen occupiers from Alcatraz on June 11, 1971.
Historians have debated the significance of the occupation of Alcatraz
Island. Some historians remain unconvinced of the long-term significance of the
occupation. Jack D. Forbes argued that it was very unlikely that the occupation
led to any marked change in the general direction of the Indian movement,
although Forbes did credit the occupation with creating a new sense of optimism
and pride among activists.68 IOAT did not succeed in gaining legal title to
Alcatraz, and the positive attention IOAT garnered from non-Indians was offset
by a backlash against the perceived dangerous and destructive aspects of the
occupation, which grew more vocal during the 1970s in the face of other militant
Indian protests in the following years. Similarly, many non-Indians found the
rhetoric of Red Power comic, or felt it perpetuated particular stereotypes of
Native Americans.69
138
Despite its shortcomings, the occupation succeeded on two fronts. Firstly,

it drew national and international attention to the experiences and grievances
of American Indians; and secondly, it fostered and popularized a new rhetoric
of Indian self-determination. It thus inspired a generation of young American
Indians. Smith and Warrior, who were students at the time of the occupation,
described Alcatraz and the movements it inspired in glowing terms: it was
a brief and exhilarating time for young American Indians, every bit as
significant as the counterculture was for young whites, or the civil rights
movement for blacks.70 This impact was only made possible by IOATs ability
to spread its message through media. The Alcatraz Newsletter, though it may
not have had the audience of mainstream media outlets, contains clear and unadulterated examples of the messages, language, and frameworks that IOAT
used to promote their occupation.
The occupiers did not achieve concrete material successes. However, through
the Alcatraz Newsletter, IOAT developed a mode of communication. They
promoted Indian unity and leadership, as well as discussed the legal and moral
responsibilities of the US Government. IOAT also advocated for treaty rights,
legal rights, and environmental conservation, as well as promoting Indian
culture, education, and a distinctly non-conformist historical consciousness.
The Alcatraz Newsletter promoted American Indian unity through reports on
a variety of pan-Indigenous protests. It also drew on the colonial history of the
Americas, the legal language of treaties, and the moral and religious responsibilities of environmental conservation to lend legitimacy to the occupation, and
to critique and delegitimize government actions and policies. IOAT used many
different rhetorical strategies, including legal language, moral persuasion,
satire, and ironic reversals. Ultimately, IOATs communication strategies, rather
than its material successes, were its greatest influence. Close examination of the
Alcatraz Newsletter would allow historians to better assess this important aspect
of the occupation.
notes
1. Troy R. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination, and
the Rise of Indian Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 9697.
2. Some scholars have called the newsletter Rock Talk. See Native American
Resistance, and Revitalization in the Era of Self-Determination, in Cultural
Representation in Native America, ed. Andrew Jolivtte (New York: Altamira, 2006).
However, Rock Talk is the name of an article in the first issue of Alcatraz Newsletter;
139
not the name of the newsletter itself.

3. Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian
Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996), iiiii.
4. Randall A. Lake, Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native
American Protest Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 127128.
5. Richard DeLuca, We Hold the Rock!: The Indian Attempt to Reclaim Alcatraz
Island, California History 62, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 8.
6. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island; Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane.
7. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 36.
8. Ibid., 2627, 4252.
9. Bruce E. Johansen, Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement (Oxford:
Greenwood, 2013), 21.
10. David Milner, By Right of Discovery: The Media and the Native American
Occupation of Alcatraz, 19691971, Australasian Journal of American Studies 33, no. 1
(2014): 74.
11. The oversight stems in part from the difficulty of accessing the newsletter, which
has previously been available only in archives. However, three issues of the newsletter
have been digitized under a creative commons license and made available by the Ohlone
Profiles Project at http://www.warmcove.org/alcatraz/.
12. Earl Livermore, A Message from Our Co-ordinator, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz
Newsletter 1, no. 2 (February 1970): 5; Alcatraz: The Idea, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz
Newsletter 1, no. 2 (February 1970): 3.
13. Chadwick Allen, Postcolonial Theory and the Discourse of Treaties, American
Quarterly 52, no. 1 (March 2000): 62.
14. Casey Ryan Kelly, Dtournement, Decolonization, and the American Indian
Occupation of Alcatraz Island (19691971), Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014):
168.
15. Seonghoon Kim, We Have Always Had These Many Voices: Red Power
Newspapers and a Community of Poetic Resistance, American Indian Quarterly 39, no.
3 (Summer 2015): 271301.
16. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 86. For the existence of the July issue,
see ibid., 94n20, 239n18.
17. Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1 no. 1 (January 1970): 15; Indians of All
Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 2 (February 1970): 18; Indians Of All Tribes Graphics
Center, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1 no. 3 (ca. April 1970): 14.
18. See Indians of All Tribes, Inc., Reply to Counter-Proposal of Robert Robertson
for the USA, April 3, 1970; Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 3, 6.
19. For notes to the digitized editions of the Indians of All Tribes Newsletters, see
140
http://www.warmcove.org/alcatraz/indexnewsletter.htm (accessed September 2015).

20. Indian Magazine, inside front cover.
22. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 80.
23. Newsletter Plans, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 1 (January
1970): 15.
24. Alcatraz: The Idea, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 2 (February
1970): 2.
25. Ibid., 3.
26. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 13; Smith and Warrior, Like a
Hurricane, 512.
27. We Hold the Rock!, 1.
28. UIAT Seattle, Manifesto, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1 no. 33 (ca.
(April 1970): no page number.
29. Education in Progress, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 1 (January
1970): 8; Health Clinic and Kitchen and Stores, ibid., 9.
31. Indians of All Tribes Conference, 7.
33. Indians of All Tribes Conference, 7.
34. Coyote 2, Alcatraz Visions, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 1
(February 1970): 11.
35. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 14, 2830.
36. Alcatraz Proclamation, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 1 (January
1970): 23.
37. Coyote 2, Alcatraz Visions, 1011.
38. Kim, We Have Always Had These Many Voices, 280.
39. Alcatraz Proclamation, 23.
40. Indians of All Tribes, Inc., Reply to Counter-Proposal of Robert Robertson for
the USA, April 3, 1970, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newletter 1 no. 3 (ca. April 1970): 6.
41. Alcatraz Proclamation, 23.
42. UIAT Seattle, Manifesto, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1 no. 3 (ca.
April 1970): i.
43. We Hold the Rock!, 1.
44. UIAT Seattle, Manifesto.
45. Letter, Western Shoshone Nation of Indians to IOAT, Indians of All Tribes
Alcatraz Newsletter, 1, no. 1 (January 1970):14.
46. Alcatraz: The Idea, 2.
141
47. Troy R. Johnson drew attention to the fact that Alcatraz Island, before it became a
prison in the 1930s, had been a military outpost since the 1850s: Johnson, The Occupation
of Alcatraz Island, 25.
48. Allen, Postcolonial Theory and the Discourse of Treaties, 60.
49. Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter, 1, no. 2 (February 1970): 2.
50. Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter, 1, no. 1 (January 1970): 1.
51. Helene Whitson, The San Francisco State College Strike Collection:
Introductory Essay, http://www.library.sfsu.edu/about/collections/strike/essay.html.
52. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 2830.
53. NCIO meets with Island Council, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no.
1 (January 1970): 4.
54. National Council on Indian Opportunity, Statement to the Indians on Alcatraz,
January 12, 1970, Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 1 (January 1970): 67.
55. Letter, Western Shoshone Nation of Indians to IOAT. Indians of All Tribes
Alcatraz Newsletter, 1, no. 1 (January 1970): 14.
56. Aubrey Grossman, Is the Occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes
Legal? Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter, 1, no. 3, 4.
57. Pyramid Lake, Nevada: A Challenge to Indians of All Tribes, Indians of All
Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 2, 1.
58. Pyramid Lake: All Tribes Caravan to Support Paiutes, Indians of All Tribes
Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 3, 9.
59. Round Valley: Are Army Engineers & B.I.A. a Conspiracy?, 10.
60. We Hold the Rock! Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 1, 1.
61. Letter from the Western Shoshone Nation of Indians, Indians of All Tribes
Alcatraz Newsletter 1, no. 1 (ca. April 1970) 14.
62. Spears and Arrows, Indian Magazine, 48.
63. Smith and Warrior argued, the purpose of the occupation was simply to occupy,
not the achievement of concrete goals. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 79.
64. Vine Deloria Jr., quoted in Frederick E. Hoxie, This Indian Country: American
Indian Political Activists and the Place They Made (New York: Penguin Press 2012),
367368.
66. Indians of All Tribes, Inc., Reply to Counter-Proposal of Robert Robertson for
the USA, 6.
67. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 83; DeLuca, We Hold the Rock!, 1819.
68. Jack D. Forbes, Alcatraz: Symbol & Reality, California History 62, no. 1 1983): 25.
69. Lake, Enacting Red Power, 127128.
70. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, viii.
142
Book Reviews
Carroll Pursell, From Playgrounds to PlayStation. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2015, 201 pages.
Carroll Pursell is the author of several important studies on the history of
technology. His latest book, From Playgrounds to PlayStation, explores play
and its social significance in determining or reinforcing values, establishing
identities, and contributing to the cohesion of the social canvas. Organized in
seven chapters that span the social history of play from the nineteenth century
to the twenty-first, the study has an American focus, but pays due credit to the
European origins of games and implements (such as Lego, Mechano, or the
Ferris wheels). The ideologies of modernity and their effect on the collective
psyche, especially the insistence on the rationalrational play and use of time,
or rational exploitation of mass psychologyare discussed alongside a history
of how popular sports such as baseball or basketball were codified and affected
the masses. The book seduces through its clear and engaging prose, which is as
informative, easy to follow, and as concise as encyclopedia entries. The design
and the illustrations captionsstories in themselves, vignettes that condense
the main themes of the studycontribute to the books accessibility and
aesthetic appeal.
The author takes obvious pleasure in both exhaustive research and storytelling. Anecdotes and curious details are interspersed among historical
development accounts and meditations on the impact and meaning of technological progress. Through a compelling narrative of changing practices and
values as technology advances, Pursell presents games as having the power
to capture and reflect identity and identity construction. On the one hand, he
analyses the motivation of sportsmen to exercise, improve, and demonstrate
the prowess of the human body: to achieve the maximum speed, strength, or
other attribute (103), while on the other hand he notes the parallel attempt to
augment the human with the technological. Interestingly, competitive sports
are supported by apparently unrelated developments in technology, such as the

143
expansion of railroads at the turn of the nineteenth century, followed by the

progress of air travel and telecommunications. By the 1890s, railroads became
arteries of urban sports rivalry (103) along which baseball players traveled
to games and competitions, while after World War II, commercial air travel
contributed to making the National League truly national (104). The rising
interest in baseball (which quickly supersedes football, tennis, cycling, and
roller skating in popular support) is mapped from the home-manufactured ball
to the addition of the glove and the development of parks.
Pursell then shows how the development in sports, the introduction of
regulations, and the increasing public appeal of competitions fostered the
growth of companies that manufacture and sell equipment. Companies such
as Spalding, Nike, and Dunlop increased their sales and turned into multinationals, at the same time as the lost idealism of sports was found in seemingly
peripheral activities such as surfing, skateboarding, and gaming. Some of these
latter pursuits preserved for a while a romantic notion of the community of
interest and close collaboration between producer and consumer (131). Pursell
also cites non-competitive sports such as parkour or freerunning as examples
of activities than have an altruistic core of self-development (143). Surprising
observations are sprinkled throughout, such as the idea that accumulating
specialized equipment may sometimes be the aim rather than the means when
it comes to hobbies like gardening (101).
The chapter on Electronic Games is perhaps the most intriguing for a
non-gamer, due to the stubbornness with which prejudice and sexism invade
and persist in any new domain, even one dedicated to squeezing profit or
useful forces from each moment. Occurring in real life and face-to-face interactions, sexist attitudes find a home in cyberspace. Gaming heroines, for example,
are appreciated for their exaggeratedly pronounced feminine forms, whereas
female gamers are looked down upon because of their gender in a predominantly
male environment. Equally intriguing is the addictiveness of gaming and the
related concept of the zonea kind of trance in which the object becomes not
winning but continuing to play (154). Once drawn into the game through its
graphics and the promise of a good story, the gamers engagement is no longer
dependent upon the pleasure derived from the aesthetics of the game. Play
becomes an end in itself.
From Playgrounds to Playstations is a most engaging read. The strength of the
study lies in its use of primary sources, especially patent documents, journals,
magazines, as well as sports and other gear users reports and testimonials. At
times, the presentation of facts and historical details overwhelms interpretation,
144
but subsequent studies might integrate these facts into their own narratives and
networks of meanings. It is certainly a book to which I am going to return, both
for the pleasure that a well-articulated text gives, and also for its richness of facts
woven into a convincing narrative.
While being a valuable resource for gender and cultural studies, Pursells
book is primarily a fundamental text for the study of technology and play,
one that no scholar or layperson interested in the parallel development and
interplay of technology and leisure activities can ignore without missing out on
a significant contribution.
ALEXANDRA DUMITRESCU
Auckland University of Technology
Dean J. Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR. Bloomington

and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015, 580 pages.
Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR is a handsome tome: 428 pages of text, 25 illustrations, more than a hundred pages of notes, and an included bibliography. It
rests on 315 manuscript collections in 75 archives and took ten years to research
and write. Dean J. Kotlowski and Indiana University Press have invested heavily
in the writing and production of a modern biography of Paul V. McNutt and his
contributions to American life, both at home and abroad, from his birth in 1891
until his death in 1955. Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR will surely stand as
the definitive account of McNutts life and career, but prospective readers might
wonder why we need to know so much about a man who, in Kotlowskis own
estimation, has been almost entirely forgotten. Will this massive and meticulously researched biography rescue McNutt from obscurity?
A native of Franklin, Indiana, and a graduate of Indiana University (IU) and
then Harvard Law School, McNutt enlisted in the Army when the US entered
World War I. He did not serve in Europe, but remained in the Reserves after
the war and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. After the war, McNutt was
appointed to IUs Law School, where he became Dean in 1925. By then, however, a
public career beckoned, and McNutt focused on the American Legion as a vehicle
to political power. He became the Legions Indiana State Commander in 1926 and
its National Commander in 1929. At each step, McNutt grew more politically
ambitious, and in 1932, even dreamed of the Democratic presidential or vice-presidential nomination. He settled for the Indiana gubernatorial nomination
instead, and won office handsomely. Thereafter, McNutt hitched his star to FDRs,
Book Reviews
145
devoting his (constitutionally limited) single term as Governor of Indiana to

enact a little New Deal in the Hoosier State. After finishing his term in January
1937, McNutt hoped to be appointed to FDRs cabinet, but was appointed High
Commissioner to the Philippines instead. He served there for nearly two years
before returning home as head of the Federal Security Agency (FSA).
Still bitten by the presidential bug, McNutt angled for the presidential
nomination in 1940, in the expectation that Roosevelt would not seek a third
term. Once the president had decided otherwise, McNutt hoped to become his
running mate. He was again frustrated by FDRs suspicion of his ambition
and disdain for his political skills. McNutt was kept at arms length from the
president and his inner circle, but continued to serve at the helm of the FSA
and as the head of the War Manpower Commission during World War II. Still
hankering for higher office, McNutt failed again to join FDRs ticket in 1944, and,
in 1945, President Harry Truman sent him back to the Philippines, this time
to preside over the archipelagos independence. By then, McNutt had fallen in
status from ambitious New Dealer to has-been office holder; when he returned
to the US in 1947 he left politics for a New York legal career that continued until
his death in 1955.
Although denied his presidential and vice-presidential dreams, Paul
McNutts curriculum vitae was impressive. Dean J. Kotlowski has produced
a magnificently detailed and contextualized account and assessment of his
subjects public and private achievements and tribulations. In Paul V. McNutt
and the Age of FDR, we learn much about his academic career (McNutt was an
undistinguished scholar but an adept academic politician), his leadership of the
American Legion (McNutt used this powerful lobby group not only to advance the
cause of veterans welfare but also to establish his own national political profile),
his family life, and his two periods in the Philippines. In the first of these (1937
1938), McNutt worked to ensure that the archipelago remained subservient to
the demands of American empire and continued to provide refuge to more than
a thousand Jewish refugees from Germany. In his second stint, McNutt secured
valuable military bases for the US in its newly independent colony and worked,
less earnestly, to protect the Philippines long-term economic security. In all
this, Kotlowski demonstrates archival rigor, historiographical awareness, and
reasoned judgment.
Paul McNutt came closest to national prominence during his term as
Governor of Indiana. Yet while Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR is chronologically organized, it is not proportionately weighted; Kotlowski devotes only two
of his fifteen chapters to McNutts tenure as Governor, despite knowing, with
146
a biographers hindsight, that his gubernatorial term would be the high-point

of his political career. Despite alienating labor in July 1935 by dispatching the
Indiana State Militia to break up a general strike in Terre Haute, and by keeping
it there for seven months, McNutt proved in other ways to be an enlightened
and effective governor who worked closely with the federal government to bring
relief to Indiana during the Great Depression. Another chapter, with more detail
on Nutts gubernatorial career, would have given greater weight to this critical
phase of his career and provided more evidence to substantiate his historical and
political significance.
In keeping with the books subtitle, Kotlowski portrays McNutts political
career as increasingly influenced, and then captured, by FDR. Early in the book,
Kotlowskis parallels between McNutt and FDR seem strained: the two men had
little in common in their backgrounds and upbringing and did not meet until the
1920s. From then on, their lives intersected often, but always with McNutt as the
lesser figure. For a man obsessed by political ambition, McNutt made bad choices
regarding FDR: he opposed him throughout the 1932 Democratic nomination
process and was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by him in 1940, as Roosevelt
strung McNutt along over his renomination plans. In between, McNutt failed to
convince FDRs inner circle that he was either a loyal Rooseveltian or a committed
New Dealer. In an insightful chapter devoted to the relationship between McNutt
and FDR, Kotlowski concludes that McNutt had tons of ambition but scarcely
an ounce of rebellion (267). Consequently, he allowed himself to be exiled to the
Philippines and bought off by appointments at the Presidents pleasure, all the
time believing that he would one day be admitted to the inner circle.
Was [McNutt] a catalyst for change or a follower of larger trends? Kotlowski
asks at the end of the book. He was, in truth, a bit of both (425). Despite its
many virtues as a work of deep scholarship and biographical rigor, Paul V.
McNutt and the Age of FDR stands as an account of a busy and constructive public
career overshadowed by unfulfilled ambition. That McNutts disappointments
stemmed often from his overestimation of his own qualities and political
acumen makes his present-day obscurity both understandable and melancholic.
Dean J. Kotlowski has produced a fine biography that meticulously reveals the
weaknesses and limitations of its subject.
DOUGLAS CRAIG
Australian National University
Book Reviews
147
Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus, Enterprising Women: Gender,

Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic. Athens and London:
University of Georgia Press, 2015, 241 pages.
Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus have combined their research strengths to
write this painstakingly investigated and important book. Enterprising Women
is focused on the free women of color in the southern Caribbean who, in the
period 1763 to 1840, managed to thrive and prosper in roles other than that of
the madam or mistress. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, including
wills, tax records, petitions, and court proceedings, Candlin and Pybus reveal
an extraordinary set of women who skilfully navigated an incredibly complex
set of power relations.
The book is structured around a series of micro-histories. Chapter 1 paints
a picture of the tumultuous world in which these women lived and thrived,
and the challenges they faced for their own and their familys freedom and
success. Each subsequent chapter uses a micro-biography to flesh out the
complex and intertwined lives of these women and their families in islands
such as Grenada, Trinidad, and Demerara, in the process turning the notion
of all white control on its head (173). One of the most refreshing aspects of
these stories is the way they upend conventional stereotypes of free women
of color, notably those of the mistress or concubine and the infamous boardinghouse keeper. Instead, we see women who use a range of strategies to
attain positions of prominence in societies undergoing rapid and destabilising
change. Bringing together all of the families discussed, the final chapter
follows the descendants of these women and their quest for legitimacy within
the Atlantic world and the British Empire.
One of the most fascinating and important arguments in the book relates to
the marriage practices of these women. The evidence shows that English legal
and religious requirements meant that marriage between free women of color
and white men could not be recognized as legal or valid in England, a fact that
accounts for the historical stereotype of these women as mistresses rather than
wives. The authors convincingly demonstrate that this perspective was not the
case for the colonists themselves, who recognized both common law and Catholic
marriage socially and politically. By shifting the lens away from established
English narratives to that of the colonial understanding, Candlin and Pybus
demonstrate that marriage was a strategic move that allowed these women to
retain control of their land, slaves, and moneywithout having to relinquish
them to an officially recognized husbandwhile still maintaining social
148
respectability. Some, the authors argue, might also have entered non-binding
liaisons for the business opportunities that such relationships offered.
One point of criticism concerns a lack of consistency in writing style. At
times, the narrative is linear and easy to follow, but at other points there is a
circularity which can be slightly frustrating. The interweaving of the stories of
these women also produces elements of repetition. The end of chapter four and
beginning of chapter five is one such moment, as both repeat the same tale of
local rebellion and the subsequent discriminatory tax on free women of color.
A heavier editorial hand might have smoothed out some of these repetitions
and improved the flow between the two authors. Like any rich study, the book
also raises many additional questions. How, for example, does the experience of
these women in the south Caribbean compare to women in Haiti for instance, or
in the French- and Spanish-controlled islands?
These reservations aside, Enterprising Women is a significant contribution to our understanding of the Revolutionary Atlantic. The authors
successfully challenge the view that free women of color were dependent on
white men for their wealth and demonstrate both the successes that these
women achieved and the complicated set of strategies that allowed them to
do so. Each micro-biography allows us to glimpse a world that is not rigidly
delineated along race, class, or gender lines. We see a world, for example,
in which black women owned slaves and in which white men relied on the
generosity of black mothers-in-law. In uncovering the lives of these historically marginalized women and their descendants, the book reminds us that
there is still much to be discovered about the American and Atlantic worlds
in the Revolutionary age.
JENNIE JEPPESEN
University of Melbourne
Teresa Shewry, Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature.

Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2015, 247 pages.
Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, wrote Emily
Dickinson. Ive heard it, she continues, in the chillest land / And on the
strangest Sea, evoking the paradox that Teresa Shewrys timely book addresses:
that hope exists only in a binary relationship with danger, disaster, darkness.
In the context of contemporary environmental crises and concerns, hope often
gets bad press, its comforts suspect. Shewry acknowledges the discomfort
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that flickers and flares around hope (6) and boldly takes it on as an analytical
category (2) in the study of environmental literatures, arguing that hope does
not necessarily signal an effort to undermine bleak narrative (16).
Shewry takes the Pacific Ocean and its islandsthis markedly amphibious
area of the world (60)as her ecological space because the island life of those
who live within rather than around it enables a dissolving of the land/sea
dichotomy and, further, of the human/non-human animal distinction. There
is a shading of transnationalism about the book; perspectives tangential to
major axes of influence enable different approaches to environmental crisis.
The book indirectly comments on how continental peoples can respect the
ocean but still count it as somewhat less significant than land, or existing only
in relation to land. Attending, as Shewry puts it, to a different archive reveals
textures in peoples relationships with the sea (17) that have not always been
apprehended (16). This attention brings the reader towards an awareness that
not only do humans depend, as we often say, on the ocean for life, but rather,
that the sea may become a classroom for a broader understanding that at the
root of all current problems is the way in which the developed world configures
the relationship between human and non-human. The key to the islander
(and in many cases in the book also the indigenous) perspective is a mode of
engagement that is more closely attuned to this unsettled world, and to the long
durations in which people have sought to live within it (178). The literary works
studied here all foreground the value of continuity over disruption, so that the
future is implicated in the past and the present.
Shewry develops her argument through the study of mainly literary texts,
but also some other forms of artistic texts (including visual arts and film) from
Hawaii, New Zealand, and Tasmania. A chapter on the dark ecology of the
nuclear Pacific ranges more widely. Her book is an exemplary piece of ecocriticism in that it articulates the capacity of creative texts to offer imaginaries of
what might be, not as blueprints but to clear a space for a relationship with a
present world and future that includes possibility and experimentation (9). But
the strength of the book lies, too, in the way in which it enriches the reading
of the chosen texts. There is a fine line to tread in ecocriticism. While teasing
out the work that texts are capable of doing in the world, agenda readings
can easily diminish the openness and the capacity of creative works to speak
to the receiver in multiple ways. Shewry never for a moment betrays the work
under consideration through simplistic assumptions. The best place to see her
approach in operation is in the study of two well-known novels: Keri Hulmes
great New Zealand novel The Bone People (1984) and Richard Flanagans rich
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and challenging story of Van Diemens Land (now Tasmania), Goulds Book of
Fish (2001). The readings open up some new ways of seeing these stories that
produce subtle and enriching adjustments in how the reader might view the
texts, without, as it were, colonizing them.
For the islands of the Pacific, colonization is not a remote history, and it is
with that history that indigenous and many settler creative texts are in implicit
and sometimes explicit dialogue. Shewry takes up this dialogue as her major
philosophical purchase on her chosen texts. In each chapter, her investigation of
the role of hope develops through contrasts between early utopian visions of the
South Seas and contemporary ways of envisioning an ecological future. Utopias,
as she and others have suggested, famously associate promising modes of
being with islands (88). Works that place their imagined futures in unexplored
southern regions are invoked: Thomas Mores Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacons
New Atlantis (1627); but also early European settler imaginaries such as Samuel
Butlers Erewhon (1872) and the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainvilles
Pacific Journal 17671768, from which ideas of a New Cythera form a counterpoint
text to writings about the nuclear Pacific. The approach to hope in these texts of
pre- and early colonization is one that dissociates the future from the present
and the past, whereas the works Shewry examines emphasize a porous border
between the actual world and a world that might one day exist (13). Attention
to endurance, she argues, cuts across the imaginative divide that sometimes
opens up between change and continuity (12). This is a hugely important point,
and one that is relevant in the context of contemporary Western rhetoric in
which the social value of agility is paired with disruption.
One of the pleasures of this book, besides the rediscovery of authors well
known outside the Pacific regionKeri Hulme, Richard Flanagan, and Albert
Wendt (Samoa and New Zealand)is the range of lesser-known writers: the
remarkable stories, for example, of the Hawaiian writer Gary Pak. Shewrys
analysis of his story Language of the Geckos (animals that are also water
spirits and ancestors) is one of the most brilliant studies I can think of about
the role of water in our liveshow it is gathered up from the ocean, falls into
rivers, and inhabit[s] pipelines, houses, and life forms (60). Both sustaining
and dangerous in this bioregion, water has a reality tinged with magic and Paks
story is an illustration of the power of the creative imagination to express and
make intelligible the multiple meanings of water. It is interesting that both Paks
story and the poems of another Hawaiian writer, Cathy Song, make imaginable
a way of life that breaks with the capitalist mode of production (65). And
Shewrys argumentation through counterpoint with early texts is mirrored in
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the connection of Paks text with the long-term struggles of local and Hawaiian
communities for justice in relation to the removal of water from rivers for sugar
plantations (184). The New Zealand poets Cilla McQueen, Hone Tuwhare, and
Ian Wedde, too, are alive to histories in which institutions have sought to speak
for and control vast swathes of life through the waters and beyond (87).
The depth of scientific and literary research that underpins Hope at Sea,
the integrity of its commitment to the interconnectedness of the animate and
inanimate forms of the earth and to a future for human and all other forms of
life, and the convincing argument for the role of the imagination and its creative
endeavors in sustaining life, make this a book of great significance. It offers an
argument, especially in the context of the belated awakening of the Western
world to the realities of climate change, that the value of hope lies in its very
uncertainty in the context of experiences that are unstable, but always being
reworked by the living (11).
RUTH BLAIR
University of Queensland
Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, 344 pages.
Taking E.M. Hulls wildly successful The Sheik (1919) as its starting point,
Hsu-Ming Teos wide-ranging Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels
traces the evolution of the sheikand the broader world of Orientalist
romances this evolving figure both engenders and symbolisesfrom the early
imaginative production of the romantic East, to the modern-day sheik novel.
Desert Passions sets itself several formidable tasks: aligning critiques of
Orientalism and sexuality with the historical context in which the supposedly
barbarous Orient came to be constructed as a locus sensualis (6); highlighting the
role of Western women in feminiz[ing] the genre (8) of the Orientalist romance,
particularly as they represent white womens desires to promote liberal and multicultural agendas (25); and offering a far-reaching and historically contextualizing
reading of this particular branch of romance fiction. This project thus contributes,
as Teo points out, to a burgeoning scholarly conversation about womens popular
culture (14). In this ambitious undertaking, Desert Passions is roundly successful,
in part because Teos even-handed approach to this mass-market form of popular
culture regularly revisits a key claimthat modern-day sheik novels have
the ability to temper negative stereotypes of Arab and Muslim culturewith
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a mixture of rigour and playfulness. I dont want to claim too much on behalf
of these novels (303), Teo writes at the end of Desert Passions, having already
elucidated the significant potential of a much-maligned form.
Desert Passions begins with a survey of feminist Orientalism, feminist
scholarship on imperialism, and critical scholarship about womens popular
culture. This introduction is one of Teos most important offerings, rigorously
positioning her work within a surprisingly largeand growingfield of
scholarship that takes popular romance fiction seriously. Although Teos prose is
always livelyshe is also an accomplished novelistDesert Passion is primarily
a cultural history, and so methodology and critical justifications abound,
scattered throughout the book as regular reminders of impartiality. I am
neither interested in condemning nor defending romance novels and romance
readers, Teo tells us at one point. I simply approach my subject as a fascinating
historical and cultural phenomenon, and with a feminist respect for the women
who write and read these works (17).
This veil of critical detachment belies the fact that Teos work builds to
a conclusion that readers could hardly call dispassionate: a genuine hope in
the capacity of the sheik novelheld accountable by the exuberant online
community of romance readers who are aware of [its] Orientalist implications
(304)to reform itself, and to continue challenging prevailing attitudes toward
Middle Eastern or Muslim cultures. At least one recent book, An Imperialist Love
Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (2015) by Amira Jarmakani, reads
Teos insistence on ameliorative representations of Arab and Muslim masculinities in these desert romances in terms of an exceptionalist logic. Jarmakani
argues that Teos belief in the subgenres ability to moderate Western stereotyping is read through a liberal multiculturalist lens, where representations
coded as positive are understood as the antidote to negative representations (20).
While Teo nowhere argues that these narratives are antidotes to the stereotyping Desert Passions frequently condemns, Jarmakanis spirited critique is
evidence of what is at stake in such representational battles, and illuminates the
value of Teos sanguine conclusion.
What unfolds between these two critical bookends is a series of chapters
which Teo characterises as scholarly conversations (11)that seek to
interrogate the various historical and cultural realities that lead to the proliferation of desert romances. The first half asks questions such as: What made
the Orient romantic during the era of courtly love? What led to the rise of the
desert romance novel during the Victorian era? How does knowing the specific
imperial, national, and racial histories of Britain and the United States (108)
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153
help us understand E.M. Hulls influential The Sheik? And why does the writing
of romantic orientalism shift to the United States, reimagined in the form of
the 1970s historical harem bodice ripper (143)? These chapters tend to be
convincing in direct proportion to the amount of space Teo devotes to a specific
text: although she acknowledges that Desert Passions is not a work of literary
theoryit is instead a historical contextualization and reading of Orientalist
interracial love stories (16)it is when Teo homes in on texts such as The Sheik
that Desert Passions is most suggestive. Consider, for instance, her take on the
social and sexual context of postwar Britain and its influence on Hulls novel:
In The Sheik, to be aware of and express her passionate, sexual nature at the start
of the novel would declass the aristocratic Lady Diana Mayo immediately, since
wartime anxieties about female sexual behavior mainly concerned workingand lower-middle-class women (100). By contrast, and despite all its strenuous
referencing, Teos opening chapter reads like a compendiumalbeit an erudite
oneof other scholars insights on High Middle Ages romantic culture.
The second half of Desert Passions reveals a particular strength of Teos:
namely, integrating the insights of non-academic readersfrom forums, blogs,
and review sites, including Amazonwithout undercutting her own critical
framework. This grafting of popular response and scholarly research offers
some of the most stimulating insights of Desert Passions, and Teo performs a
masterful legitimization of these forms of popular inquiry. Reflecting on a
forum hosted by the popular romance readers website, Smart Bitches Trashy
Books, Teo writes: The Smart Bitches discussion of Orientalism, American
assumptions, Middle Eastern culture, and the problems of the sheik subgenre
is one of the most insightful that I have read, and it provides a very clear
picture of the different ways readers consume the romance genre, as well as
showcasing their own critical voices (280). Again, when Desert Passions
elucidates Teos broader cultural history through specific attention to text
particularly her reading of Elizabeth Maynes The Sheik and the Vixen (1996),
which Teo sees as upending the white Western heroine narrative, revealing
it to be an Orientalist and neo-imperialist topos (268)the argument of the
book is most persuasive.
While Teo never forgets that the popularity of sheik romance novels in the
age of Islamist terrorism and American-led wars in the Middle East must owe
some of its appeal to the fact that it is great inane fun (294), her work offers
convincing reasons for reconsidering the subgenre in light of Orientalism,
the feminization of the discourse, and the potential of this form of womens
popular culture to rethink negative stereotypes ingrained in this tradition.
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Desert Passions is a welcome, absorbing investigation of Orientalisms role in

romance novels. It is also an excellent example of a scholarly work that investigates popular forms of writing and response with historical rigor, treating what
Teo has elsewhere memorably called the opiate of the missus with refreshing
seriousness.
Jedidiah Evans
University of Sydney
Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the

Borders of Settler States. Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2014, 260 pages.
Audra Simpsons book about the Kahnaw:ke Mohawk political sovereignty
has already received a great deal of acclaim, having been nominated for several
prestigious awards. In 2014, it received an Honorable Mention for the Delmos
Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize, presented by the Critical Study of
North America from the Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA)
section of the American Anthropological Association. In 2015, it won both the
Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize (awarded by the American Studies
Association) and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Associations
Best First Book Prize. (At NAISA, the award was greeted by a standing ovation
and loud cheers from the audience.) These awards are well deserved, as the book
provides insights into some aspects of life for indigenous peoples in a settler
colony that have thus far received scant analysis.
Herself a member of this community, Simpson provides a concise background
of the Kahnaw:ke and their origins. She then tackles a number of topics that
all speak to the theme of indigenous sovereignty in its broadest sense. Central
to this discussion is the matter of membership. Whereas formerly membership
had largely been premised on kinship, formal recognition at Kahnaw:ke has
become affected by problems arising from foreign authorities. This shift has
impacted on everyone in the community, but especially the women who under
Canadian law for a long time stood to lose their status as Indians by marrying
out. But changing laws and criteria deriving from the Canadian government
and also from within Kahnaw:ke, the latter often constituting a reaction to
the former, have led to a new distinction being made between membership and
citizenship. As a consequence, Simpson argues, currently membership is a
social, historical, and narrated process that references personal and collective
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pasts while making itself over in a lived present (171). Here as elsewhere,
Simpson, while always sympathetic, is not uncritical of her own community,
without claiming to have all the answers.
Aside from her discussion of the intricate and multi-layered issues
surrounding membership, Simpson is especially compelling when she
describes and explains the difficulties of border crossings and the attitudes
which Kahnaw:ke Mohawksand othersencounter when making such
crossings. Here she uses interviews to great effect. She analyses layer after layer
of Indian and non-Indian attitudes and misconceptions, and traces their origins.
Simpson also covers other topics very admirably. For instance, she compellingly
discusses the other side of the cigarette smuggling case close up, in which
cigarettes were transported through reservations to avoid taxes, and the Oka
crisis, when Kanehsat:ke Mohawks defended burial sites and trees of spiritual
importance againstand this boggles the mindthe proposed extension of a
golf course. (The planned expansion was later canceled.)
In her fourth chapter, Simpson discusses what she refers to as ethnographic
refusal, a section that has probably been, at least in some circles, the most
referenced portion of the book. Yet at times it seems as if the message of the
book has been rather crudely reduced to a warning against sharing aspects of
ones research that the indigenous community may not want to be shared. This
reduction of the meaning or contribution of the book to one, however important
(if not altogether new), concept or catch phrase does not do this work justice, nor
does it encompass the complexities of Simpsons use of the word refusal. While
Simpson herself regards her book as a cartography of refusal, one that takes
shape in the invocation of the prior experience of sovereignty and nationhood,
and their labor in the present, clearly this one type of refusal is not the only one
this work achieves (33).
In some ways, among the many astute criticisms that Simpson levels at a
number of communitiesher own, the Canadian, the US, and the scholarly
communityher critique of the latter may be the most important. While reading
this important book would be a beneficial experience for many Canadians,
Americans, and other members of settler societies (regardless of race), its most
likely audience will comprise scholars, be they anthropologists, social scientists,
or historians like me. (I fear that a more mainstream audience, and perhaps
even some scholars, might struggle with some very challengingand not
always necessarytheoretico-philosophical aspects of the study.) Throughout
Mohawk Interruptus Simpson asks this scholarly community to prevent what
Simpson calls a fetishized authenticity from setting the (dominant) research
156
agenda. This, she holds, is especially detrimental because of the ways in which
tradition has been handled by scholars as opposed to (Kahnaw:ke) Mohawks.
She explains that there is a disjuncture between the tradition and culture of
Iroquois people and the tradition at work in the canon of Iroquois studies, with
the latter being narrow and procedural (74). This, crucially, is the tradition
against which the Kahnaw:ke Mohawks and other Iroquois are often being
measured, and at least part of the responsibility for this can beand is being
laid upon scholars.
Simpson states in her conclusion that she makes three central claims
in her book: that one sovereignty can be embedded in another; that refusal
is an alternative to recognition; and that Indigenous politics require a deep
historical accounting to contextualize the processes that appear anomalous,
illiberal, or illogical, and get conflated with pathology, economic desperation,
and depredation in the public eye (177). I consider that it is the last of these
claims that constitutes the most important of her assertions.
History has created the situation in which the Kahnaw:ke Mohawks find
themselves , and only an awareness of all or at least of most what has happened
to the community can help us understand it and, hopefully, find better ways
forward.
Claudia B. Haake
La Trobe University
Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation

in Theodore Roosevelts America. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015, 351 pages.
Since the early 1990s, Ian Tyrrell has emphasized the importance of widening
the scope of historical analysis beyond the political boundaries of the nationstate. His particular focus has been to overcome the prevailing exceptionalism
that characterized American historiography. In his seminal environmental
history, True Gardens of the Gods (1999), Tyrrell put his transnational agenda
to work, demonstrating the ecological and cultural importance of the environmental exchanges between California and Victoria in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. What Tyrrell showed was not only the potential for understanding the history of the United States in transnational ways, but also that
such an approach transcended human boundaries and was especially relevant
to the field of environmental history.
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In Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, Tyrrell returns to the Progressive Era to

examine the global context of domestic conservation efforts during the term
of Theodore Roosevelt. Tyrrells title is drawn from a 1908 book on the subject
of conservation, Our Wasteful Nation: the Story of American Prodigality and the
Abuse of Our National Resources, by German-American journalist and artist,
Rudolf Cronau. Cronaus critique of the environmental impact of AngloAmerican settlement was one of many at the turn of the twentieth century,
which historian Samuel P. Hays explored in his masterful Conservation and
the Gospel of Efficiency (1959). Almost sixty years later, Tyrrell has fleshed
out the global context of Hayss analysis, showing how TR concentrated on
problems which would not raise issues of internal conflictforeign policy and
conservation. In Hayss formulation, these were largely separate spheres of
political endeavor, but Tyrrell demonstrates how global concerns of resource
exhaustion influenced the protagonists of the nascent conservation movement
in the United States.
By the eve of Roosevelts presidency, there had been only incremental
progress towards the conservation of the nations forests, despite George Perkins
Marsh having fostered concerns about resource scarcity in the United States and
elsewhere decades earlier in Man and Nature (1864). The future of the nations
fuel, water, soil, and forests all occupied Roosevelt and his cadre of conservationists, including forester Gifford Pinchot and botanist David Fairchild, who
saw in their steady depletion the making of a fin-de-sicle crisis that extended to
the physical and moral health of the nation. The conservation of these resources,
both human and environmental, was necessary to achieve TRs vision for the
global protection of (national) power (113). Tyrrells cast of internationally
minded characters looked to Western Europe, northern Africa, South and
Southeast Asia, Russia, Latin America, Australia, and Canada for lessons that
they could apply back home. Their contributions reinforce Tyrrells depiction of
the Progressive era conservation movement as shaped by, if not a product of, a
shrinking world.
While situating TRs utilitarian approach to conservation in its geopolitical
context, Tyrrell also tackles the contradictions of Roosevelt as a nature-loving
president and great advocate of saving nature for its own sake (145). As an
expression of conservationist impulses, the creation of forest reserves, national
monuments, and wildlife areas protected areas of scenic beauty that would
preserve particular species and places, while benefiting the moral and physical
efficiency of the American people. Rather than merely being an exception, in
Tyrrells re-telling Americas best idea was symptomatic of wider trends that
158
shaped the creation of national parks around the world. Recognizing that the
United States was neither the first nor alone in its efforts to protect wildlife and
to set aside areas for protection is necessary to make sense of the movement
towards environmental diplomacy that recognized shared concerns across
state borders.
In light of the Spanish-American War, which gave the United States access
to foreign raw materials to supplement its inland empire, Tyrrells turn to the
literature of imperial environmental history makes clear analytical sense.
After all, he notes, Because American leaders swam in the same intellectual sea,
conservation became inseparable from geopolitical competition in an imperial
world (15). The global concerns that Tyrrell sees as central to Roosevelts era of
conservation were the focus of environmental historian Richard Groves account
of the origins of environmentalism in European colonies in Green Imperialism
(1995). Most recently, environmental historian James Beattie (2011) has framed
these concerns as environmental anxieties that arose from critiques of the
unbridled exploitation of colonial environments in South Asia and Australasia.
Tyrrells engagement with this imperial historiography extends its relevance
not only geopolitically, but also temporally, into the twentieth century as he
reflects on the legacy of Progressive-Era conservation.
Having advanced Hayss study of conservation in the Progressive Era,
Tyrrell has opened new opportunities for closer study, such as the place of
non-Anglo cultures in the domestic conservation movement and the international reception of Roosevelts geopolitical conservation agenda. In Crisis of the
Wasteful Nation, Tyrrell provides a deeply researched and insightful environmental history that is analytically valuable to historians of the United States
and elsewhere in their efforts to make sense of our entangled pasts.
RUTH A. MORGAN
Monash University
Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir, eds., Bigger than Ben-Hur: The
Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences. New York: Syracuse
University Press, 2016, 269 pages.
Before reading this new collection of essays, a volume in Syracuse University
Presss series on television and popular culture, I knew very little about the
various versions of the story of Judah Ben-Hur. I was familiar with the MGM
epic of 1959, which can be relied on to appear on our television screens whenever
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Easter or Christmas approaches. I was also aware that Gore Vidal had been
persuaded to contribute to the script for this film after the efforts of several
previous writers were deemed unsatisfactory by the producer and director,
Sam Zimbalist and William Wyler respectively. In his first memoir, Palimpsest,
Vidal wrote dismissively of this episode in his career, referring to his inherited
material (presumably both Lew Wallaces novel of 1880 and the rejected scripts)
as the infantile story I had been stuck with. Nor was he an admirer of the films
star, Charlton Heston, remarking that Chuck had all the charm of a wooden
Indian. Having hitherto taken at face value Vidals disparagement of the film
and his own part in it, I am grateful to Ryan and Shamir for directing me back to
the original Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which may well have influenced some
of Vidals historical novels in ways he did not acknowledge.
Lew Wallace was born in Indiana, attained the rank of brigadier general
in the Union army during the Civil War, and was serving as governor of the
New Mexico territory when he wrote Ben-Hur. As the editors note, Wallace was
offered a diplomatic position in Turkey, which he filled from 1881 to 1885, because
President James Garfield had been enthralled by the novel (8). As Neil Sinyard
observes in the Foreword, whatever faults one might find with Wallaces Ben-Hur
or any of its adaptations, the impact of the novel upon American culture and
beyond cannot be denied: by the end of the nineteenth century, it had sold more
copies than any other novel ever written (xi). Ryan and Shamir have brought
together a diverse range of essays which collectively elucidate the sources of the
storys enduring appeal.
In their introduction, The Ben-Hur Tradition, Ryan and Shamir assert that
Wallaces merger of secular aesthetics and sacred myth was integral to the success
of Ben-Hur (9). The novel also works because of Wallaces innovative blending of
several familiar elements. These include echoes of the romance novels of Victor
Hugo and Alexandre Dumas(xii), narrative techniques from [William H.]
Prescott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Sir Walter Scott (5) and, as the editors
observe, tropes common to the plethora of fiction on biblical themes that was
published in the second half of the nineteenth century (10). As Hilton Obenzinger
notes in his chapter Holy Lands, Restoration, and Zionism in Ben-Hur, there
are also echoes of Indian captivity tales and slave narratives in the novel.
Still, it is the Western dime novel that resonates most powerfully with
Ben-Hur In the formula Western, the honest citizens of a small town are
set upon by a large landholder or by bandits; typically, the hero saves them
through reluctant though regenerative violence. The hero is drawn to the
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schoolmarm-type woman represented in Ben-Hur by Esther He is tempted

by the saloon seductress: in Ben-Hur, the worldly Egyptian Iras. (8182)
With a plot centered on a respectable protagonist who is unjustly convicted
and exiled, motivated by a highly developed sense of chivalry, and eventually
redeemed through his eschewing of vengeance, Ben-Hur also resembles
narratives as seemingly disparate as Marcus Clarkes His Natural Life (1874) and
Zane Greys The Lone Star Ranger (1915). Howeverand one would not perceive
this from the 1959 filmBen-Hur is also a thoroughly researched work of
comparative theology, in which Christianity is represented as the culmination
of all belief systems.
After the Foreword and Introduction, Bigger than Ben-Hur comprises ten
chapters, ending with a Coda: A Timeline of Ben-Hur Companies, Brands,
and Products, by Jon Solomon. This coda alone is worth the books purchase
pricethe extraordinary range of Ben Hur-branded merchandise listed here
underscores just how pervasive the influence of Wallaces creation has been.
Nothing, it seems, is too incongruous: Ben Hur Shoe Polish Ben Hur Perfume
Ben Hur Superior Aviation Ethyl Gasoline Ben Hur Advance Tooth Powder
Ben Hur Catsup Ben Hur Chameleon Sunglasses, and so on (199, 202, 203,
204, 207, 208).
Evan Shalevs Ben-Hurs and Americas Rome: From Virtuous Republic
to Tyrannous Empire is the first chapter, situating Ben-Hur within the
broad context of the changing perceptions of ancient Rome in the American
imagination. Powerful, brutal, vengeful, and in turn hated and feared by its
subjects, Ben-Hurs Rome shares no qualities with the founders revered republic.
In Wallaces conspicuously corrupt and decayed Rome, the virtues that made
possible the empires rise are crumbling. The cynical and hedonistic Messala
serves, as Shalev remarks, as Romes metonym (26, 27). M ilette Shamirs chapter,
Ben-Hurs Mother: Narrative Time, Nostalgia, and Progress in the Protestant
Historical Romance, explores Ben-Hur from a number of perspectives, including
the model of the Bildungsroman, Wallaces early interest in the story of the
nativity, and the novels emphasis on Judahs unnamed mother as the custodian
of his heritage, whose teachings never allow her son to forget who he really is.
Jefferson J.A. Gatralls chapter, Retelling and Untelling the Christmas Story:
Ben-Hur, Uncle Midas, and the Sunday-School Movement, follows, elaborating
the role of the American Sunday-School Union (ASSU) in the promulgation of
religious literature and approved Jesus novels.
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Hilton Obenzinger, cited above, reads Ben-Hur as reflective of American

preoccupations and anxieties at the time of the novels inscription. I argue that
Wallaces identification of the United States with ancient Palestine, and the
US citizen with the restored Jew, functions as justification of US nationalist
expansion (75). In his chapter entitled In the service of Christianity: Ben-Hur
and the Redemption of the American Theater, 18991920, Howard Miller
analyses the enormous success of the stage play of Ben-Hur, produced by Marc
Klaw and Abraham Erlanger, and the ways in which Christians were persuaded to
reconsider a presumed association of theatre with irreverence. In June Mathiss
Ben-Hur: A Tale of Corporate Change and the Decline of Womens Influence in
Hollywood, Thomas Slater foregrounds the story of a version of Ben-Hur that
was not made and is hence little known, examining its significance within
the history of women in the cinema industry. Richard Walsh then discusses
the representations of Jesus in the various adaptations of Wallaces novel, and
the parallels between Judah Ben-Hur and Jesus (a discussion continued by Ina
Rae Hark later in the collection), in his chapter Getting Judas Right: The 1925
Ben-Hur as Jesus Film and Biblical Epic.
Barbara Ryan reads John Buchans Sick Heart River (1941) as a coded
critique of Ben-Hur in her chapter entitled Take Up the White Mans Burden:
Race and Resistance to Ben-Hur. Ina Rae Harks chapter, The Erotics of the
Galley Slave: Male Desire and Christian Sacrifice in the 1959 Film Version of
Ben-Hur, continues the theme of coded subtexts, starting with a discussion
of homoeroticism and sadomasochism in relation to visual representations
of the Crucifixion (164). Gore Vidal claimed to have introduced an implied
homosexual backstory for the 1959 film of Ben-Hur in order to explain the depth
of the Roman Messalas hatred for his former childhood friend, Stephen Boyd
(Messala), allegedly being in the know, whereas Charlton Heston was carefully
kept oblivious. As Hark suggests, Vidal, himself gay, probably did not plan on
having such a subtext become shorthand for all that is not Christian in the film.
Yet that is essentially what happened (170). David Mayers concluding chapter,
Challenging a Default Ben-Hur: A Wishlist, gives an overview of the elements
of Wallaces novel that have been omitted from the various adaptations, and
laments the cost of some of those cuts. Just two examples are the considerable
attention that Wallace pays to the acquisition, possession, use, and power of
money, and the most misunderstood character in Ben-Hur (181), the gloriously
malevolent Iras. She is the daughter of the magus Balthasar, as evil as he is good.
As Mayer argues, distinctive as Iras is, she is also recognizable as a type from
nineteenth-century melodramathe adventuress (186). My wish, he states,
162
is that a future adaptor will turn to the novel to recognize what additional or
alternative materials lay at his or her disposal (190).
The publication of this collection is indeed timely. As this review is being
written, a new version of Ben-Hur is scheduled for release later this year, with
Morgan Freeman as Sheik Ilderim and Rodrigo Santoro as Jesus. In this remake,
apparently, Judah and Messala are foster-brothersBen-Hur meets Prince of
Egypt? In conclusion, Bigger Than Ben-Hur makes a useful, engaging contribution to scholarship in several fields, such as American literature, cultural
studies, reception studies, and religious history.
HEATHER NEILSON
University of New South Wales
Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Womens
Suffrage Movement, 18481898. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2014, 199 pages.
Soon after arriving in the United States in 2012, I came across the Susan
B. Anthony one-dollar coin, minted between 1979 and 1981 and during 1999.
From the 1970s onwards, feminist historians of American social movements
have situated Elizabeth Cady Stantonwith her legal knowledge, prodigious
oratory and writing, and frequently racist rhetoricas a leading figure in
the nineteenth-century womens rights movement. Surely, for better or worse,
Stanton was the most famous suffragist, so why was Anthony the first woman
on the one-dollar coin?
Lisa Tetraults first monograph, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the
Womens Suffrage Movement, 18481898, provides a framework for understanding
the contradictions behind this very question. The book explores the history,
history-making, and memory-making that occupied the late-nineteenth-century
womens movement. Tetrault, an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon
University, won the Organization of American Historians inaugural Mary
Jurich Nickliss Prize in US Womens History for this publication in April 2015.
The books first chapter shows that when womens rights reformers began
recalling the history of their movement in the wake of the Civil War they
found many different beginnings. By the 1870s and 1880s, however, these many
preludes were beginning to coalesce into a single origin story. Tetrault, in
asking how and when the meeting at Seneca Falls became the myth of Seneca
Falls, demonstrates the process whereby Stanton and Anthony actively used
Book Reviews
163
the history of the womens rights movement to create a usable past (16). Their
efforts had widespread repercussions for the womens suffrage movement.
The key question, then, is: In what ways did that story, and that origins
myth, serve as a collective political resource for post-Civil War feminists?
(16). In fact, this myth stemmed from a disagreement between womens rights
reformers over the parameters of the Fifteenth Amendment. Where Lucy
Stone, Henry Blackwell, and others prioritized the voting rights of AfricanAmerican men over that of all women, Stanton and Anthonys camp did not.
The subsequent fallout between prominent suffragists led to the development
of two distinct organizations: Stanton and Anthonys National Woman Suffrage
Association (NWSA) and Stone and Blackwells American Woman Suffrage
Association (AWSA).
The Myth of Seneca Falls thus traces a particular facet of this organizational
split, one that has been previously overlooked. As Tetrault shows in chapter 2,
for the NWSA to gain precedence as the leading suffrage organization, Stanton
and Anthony co-opted nascent attempts to institutionalize the history and
memory of the womens rights movement. It was at this juncture that the 1848
Seneca Falls Womens Rights Conventionwhere Stantons contribution had
been instrumentalbegan to take center stage.
Tetraults research speaks to the historical treatment of the friendship and
collaboration between these women, but takes her analysis a step further. For
it was Anthony, not Stanton, who spearheaded the Seneca Falls anniversary
celebrations that took place from 1873 onwards. Where Stantons commemorative
participation waned toward the end of the century, Anthonys only increased. A
larger paradox looms: Anthony was not even present for the original convention.
By constantly peddling the Seneca Falls story as the narrator and historian of a
nascent myth (72), Anthony became intrinsic to its retelling.
During the 1870s, many women were aware of the groundbreaking nature
of their suffrage activism. As Tetrault amusingly relates, when Anthony and a
group of rogue suffragists protested at the official 1876 Philadelphia centennial
celebrations, co-conspirator Phoebe Couzins uttered the understatement of the
century: We were about to commit an overt act (100). The difference was that
Stanton and Anthony put the history of womens rights to a specific activist
purpose. As chapter 3 demonstrates, Stanton and Anthony developed the Seneca
Falls myth more fully through the multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage,
initially published in 1881 and edited with their colleague Matilda Joslyn Gage.
The framework Tetrault uses to situate the History should be especially
compelling for historians. Chapter 4 outlines how Stanton and Anthony
164
became groundbreaking social historians whose work provided the foundations

for the discipline of womens history. The process whereby the editors collated
sources and reflections from womens rights reformers and suffragists, Tetrault
argues, was highly innovative. These efforts preempted those of the celebrated
male historians who helped professionalize the discipline in the 1890s. This
collection, and the subsequent creation of a womens rights archive, was work
largely undertaken by Anthony.
Since many of Stanton and Anthonys colleagues questioned their activist
politics and condemned their racism, they were equally cautious of the History.
Stone in particular contributed little and approached their historical project
with aversion. When disinterest and malaise inevitably occurred amongst the
Historys collaborators, Anthony did not let her historical vision waver. Anthony
possessed the dual instincts of an activist and an archivist, whose visionary
and organizational energies had fostered the movement and its memory in
equal measure (181). Still, as Tetrault suggests in chapter 5, the degree to which
Anthony curatedand censoredwhat was included in the History and its
archives, may well have been to the detriment of future generations of scholars.
One of the greatest strengths of The Myth of Seneca Falls is its ability to
outline significant shifts in suffrage organizational history. These shifts can
be dry, and are perhaps more ambiguous in the important works that focus on
the racism and respectability politics that plagued suffrage movements in the
United States. Rescuing these developments from murkiness, Tetrault provides
a framework that renders them palpable. In so doing, she acknowledges the
fact that, collectively, the majority of these white women did not prioritise
the historical contribution of African-American women and people of colour.
Ultimately, Tetrault presents Stones resistance to making historical memory
and Stantons deepening political radicalism as detrimental to their legacies,
whereas Anthony emerges as an astute and historically savvy activist.
The richness of the six volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage meant it
subsequently became the official record of the movement (143), paving the
way for the celebrated historian-activist of the twentieth century (182). In
conclusion, Anthonys archival instincts and political maneuverings shaped
the way she approached the creation of a usable past. As a result, she was briefly
etched into the United States one-dollar coin.
ANA STEVENSON
University of the Free State, South Africa
Book Reviews
165
Contributors
Paul K. jones is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The Australian National
University. He works at the intersection of sociology, critical theory, and political
communication. He has published widely on the relations between media policy,
political communication, and the public sphere in Australia and increasingly within
the international comparative media systems. Paul has been a Visiting Fellow at the
London School of Economics, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Yale
Center for Cultural Sociology.
Nick Fischer is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Philosophical, Historical,
and International Studies at Monash University. He is the author of The Spider Web:
The Birth of American Anti-Communism. His articles have appeared in Labour History,
American Communist History, Eras, Overland, and the Journal of Australian Studies.
Dean J. kotlowski is a Professor of History at Salisbury University in Maryland,
USA. He has published numerous articles and chapters on US political and diplomatic
history. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar: at De La Salle University in Manila
(2008) and at the University of Salzburg, Austria (2016).
Craig Lanier allen holds a BA in Political Science from The Citadel and an MA in
Latin American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a former
French and Latin American Foreign Area Specialist with military and diplomatic
postings in Paris, Sarajevo, Panama, and Seoul. His dissertation explores American
government surveillance of American literary circles in early Cold War Paris. Craig is
a recipient of Frances Chateaubriand Fellowship for 2016 and a Loughran Foundation
Endowment Dissertation Research Grant for research at Oxford University in 2015.
Elizabeth Ingleson is a Miller Centre Fellow at the University of Virginia and a
history PhD student at both the University of Sydney and the United States Studies
Centre. Her research examines the origins of the contemporary trade relationship
between the United States and China. Beginning in 1972when President Nixon
and Chairman Mao ended over twenty years of economic and political isolationshe
explores how the new trade relationship was re-established and became part of the
politics of rapprochement.
Rhiannon Bertaud-Gandar is a recent graduate of Victoria University of
Wellington. She majored in History and German.
166
AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION

The purpose of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA) is to encourage
study and research in all aspects of US culture and society. In addition to publishing this Journal, the
Association holds scholarly biennial conferences, supports postgraduate seminars, publishes occasional
papers, supports research travel to the United States for postgraduate research candidates, and encourages
scholarly exchanges between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
OFFICERS OF THE ASSOCIATION

President
Timothy Minchin
La Trobe University
Vice President (Australia)
Paul Giles
University of Sydney
Vice President (New Zealand)
Russell Johnson
University of Otago
Secretary
Barbara Ryan
National University of Singapore
Demagogic Populism and US Culture

Industries: A Long Tradition
Paul K. Jones
Spies Spying on Spies Spying: The Rive Noire,
the Paris Review, and the Specter of Surveillance in
Post-war American Literary Expatriate Paris, 19531958
Craig Lanier Allen

Nick Fischer
Selling America to the World: The Office of War
Informations The Town (1945) and the American Scene Series
Dean J. Kotlowski
Four Hundred Million Customers: Carl Crow
and the Legacy of 1930s Sino-American Trade
Elizabeth Ingleson
Laying Claim: Framing the Occupation of Alcatraz
in the Indians of All Tribes Alcatraz Newsletter
issn 0705-7113
Published by the Australian and New Zealand
American Studies Association and the United States Studies Centre

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australasian journal

volume 35 number 1 july 2016

The State and US

AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES

EDITORIAL advisory BOARD

Brendon OConnor, University of Sydney

Design and Layout

volume 35 number 1 july 2016

Paul Giles and David Goodman

rodney Taveira and Aaron NyerGES

Craig Lanier Allen

nORMAN hARPER pRIZE ESSAY

Reviewed by Alexandra Dumitresco

Reviewed by Douglas Craig

Reviewed by Jennie Jeppesen

Reviewed by Ruth Blair

Reviewed by Jedidiah Evans

Reviewed by Claudia B. Haake

Reviewed by Ruth A. Morgan

Reviewed by Heather Neilson

Reviewed by Ana Stevenson

Australasian Journal of American Studies

Populism and Propaganda in

australasian journal of american studies

demagogic populismto borrow a phrase from Paul K. Joness contribution

Australasian Journal of American Studies

Australasian Journal of American Studies

Bernays could unselfconsciously declare in 1928: Propaganda is the executive

governments involvement with and harassment of American writers. How,

Australasian Journal of American Studies

Australasian Journal of American Studies

Demagogic Populism and

abstract Frankfurt School conceptions of culture industry and demagogy are

employed in a synoptic historical analysis of the relation between demagogy and

Introduction: Demagogy, Propaganda, Populism

australasian journal of american studies

Australasian Journal of American Studies

Journalism, or at least professional journalisms norm of accountability to

Opinion and the Rise of Demagogy within

Journalists not only sought to affiliate with the prestige of science,

Journalisms self-differentiation from propagandists was more difficult in the

Australasian Journal of American Studies

of public sphere.15 In successful democracies, following Urbinatis normative

Intellectual Responses to Emergent

Oh, we are the seven devices,

Australasian Journal of American Studies

The Lees emphasis, as we have seen, was on techniques of propaganda, which

The opinions of the demagogues are by no means as restricted to the lunatic

Pathological Tradition or Populist Dissidence?

Australasian Journal of American Studies

by Hendershot used it in highly strategic ways and as a result were more

Culture-Industrial Demagogy Unbound?

Australasian Journal of American Studies

The FRC/FCC moved towards European regulatory practice by banning

Australasian Journal of American Studies

truth propaganda. Horkheimer and Adorno saw an opportunity instead in

Urbinatis and the Frankfurt Schools conceptions of demagogy introduced below,

Australasian Journal of American Studies

Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950).

Australasian Journal of American Studies