2.4 (October 2002): 363-367
© 2002 National Communication Association

 
Propaganda and Its Discontents

J. Michael Sproule

David F. Krugler. The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945-1953. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. xii + 246 pages. Appendix, bibliography, and index. $34.95.

Students of American propaganda attend more often to the overseas dimension rather than to the domestic consumption of this controversial form of symbolic inducement. So at the same time that David F. Krugler’s work enriches our understanding of how the U.S. Congress responded to the foreign programming of the Voice of America (VOA), his fine historical exegesis highlights the current limitations of propaganda study considered generally.

Following the lead of works treating the wartime Office of War Information (Winker, 1978) and the VOA during the war years (Shulman, 1990), Krugler adroitly shepherds us through the even more complicated posturing that surrounded the enterprise of government overseas propaganda during the early postwar/cold war years. Krugler’s review of the World War II agencies in which the VOA came to be located begins with Great War-era precursors of the U.S. propaganda apparatus. His eventual focus, however, is both political and institutional as he untangles the machinations in Washington that complicated the effort of the VOA to construct and project a strategic yet not unreasonable U.S. position vis-à-vis the Cold War.

In brief outline, the story is this. Responding to imperatives of a total world struggle, the Roosevelt Administration experimented with a variety of institutional frameworks, finally assigning most responsibilities for (nonmilitary) propaganda to an Office of War Information whose Overseas Branch included a radio outlet called The Voice of America. Service in the OWI/VOA attracted liberal internationalists who were prone to see their mission not only as shortening the war via adroit tactical symbolism but also as affirmatively contributing to a wider vector of world reform. In this connection, conservatives of both major parties interpreted America’s global communication regimen as an extension (and therefore a reinforcement) of the New Deal’s liberal activism. Republicans saw the VOA as variously promoting the Roosevelt and Truman administrations whereas conservative Democrats chiefly opposed the progressive social activism (for example, Negro equality, international cooperation) that cropped up in the VOA’s efforts to present America as an exemplar of a better postwar world.

Although we have available many excellent accounts of the wartime and cold-war propaganda agencies—not only agency administrators recounting their adventures but also thorough scholarly reviews—Krugler’s work adds value, and not only because of his having staked out a particular time period. He contributes a well nuanced understanding of the curious but fundamentally consistent politics of the anti-VOA crowd. By carefully explicating the intention of these “parochially minded” politicos to discredit and dismantle twenty years’ worth of New Deal programs and proselytizing, he adroitly clarifies the irony of ardent anti-communists impeding Washington’s anti-communist propaganda blitz. Krugler has a good sense for what Joseph McCarthy was up to and why the Wisconsin senator’s boisterous antics were tolerated, even encouraged, by responsible members of the Republican Party. It did strike me, however, that Krugler might have given more attention to the populist elements of the “parochial” camp in Congress, particularly as these ideological currents motivated the conservative Democrats. Also, more generally, I believe that review of the inter-world-war dialogue about propaganda would have provided helpful additional resources for interpreting the tensions that are inherent to government-sponsored propaganda in a relatively open and competitive political system.

Beyond the particulars of the VOA, Krugler’s work raises tantalizing issues of how current scholarship defines and locates propaganda. What is propaganda, anyway? Krugler provides a rather circumscribed definition of the phenomenon as being communication that presents itself as truth (3). Accordingly, Krugler demonstrates that the VOA clearly represented a problem for democracy because the organization’s invocation of a truth standard was complicated by, on the one hand, its mandate to explicitly oppose Soviet propaganda and, on the other, the suspicion of conservatives that it favored the interests of the Truman Administration (specifically) and liberal ideology (generally). Yet a more refined definition of propaganda would have aided Krugler in holding together the diverse strands of such a narrative. As I have argued elsewhere, definitions of propaganda typically focus on four dangers inherent to this communicative form: (1) covertness in how the message is delivered, (2) massiveness in the orchestration of communication, (3) tricky language that both obscures facts and misdirects attention, and (4) focus on special versus more general social interests. Krugler’s definition emphasizes item number three (tricky symbolism) because it invokes the ideological content inferable from language. However, Krugler’s comprehensive treatment of the VOA and its critics demonstrates that the other three commonly understood features of propaganda were directly relevant to the animus of the anti-VOA coalition. Apropos of covertness, opponents were little assuaged by assurances that the VOA’s messages were only for overseas audiences (because these messages could resonate back to the domestic scene); apropos of massiveness, opponents saw the size of the operation enhancing the risk for whatever faction did not control the apparatus; apropos of special interests, opponents were aroused by any indication, trivial or not, that their political and/or ideological opponents might be gaining advantage through the VOA’s program.

By focusing on the intra-governmental dimensions of official Washington’s major broadcasting organization, Krugler largely sidesteps the limitations of his definition of propaganda; but location proves to be as elusive as definition whenever current scholarship apprehends propagandistic symbolism. Krugler’s work indirectly raises the question of why during the last twenty years there has been so much interest in U.S. overseas communication during times of war and crisis. If propaganda’s chief problematic is its dubious connection to democracy—a danger well underscored in Krugler’s narrative as well as in other similar studies—then arguably the more vital story of propaganda is the impact on domestic audiences of special-interest communication that is also concealed, orchestrated, and tricky. Not only did this very concern supply the patina of legitimacy that nourished otherwise absurd forays by the House Un-American Activities Committee into Hollywood films and McCarthy’s lurid and flimsy investigations of subversives in government, but this anxiety has animated pathbreaking studies by Ellul (1965) and Qualter (1985), who have shown up the process by which propaganda supplies society’s background of common-sense political understandings; in other words, how propaganda persuades without seeming to do so.

In a time when cultural studies and rhetorical inquiry are seeking common ground (Rosteck, 1999), the framework of propaganda study offers a well-developed vernacular and method for understanding the political vectors of cultural communication. That the VOA purveyed propaganda, there can be no doubt—and, from the time of the organization’s inception, its self-serving character has been all too apparent (as Krugler makes clear in his review of how the pseudo-independent Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty came into being). But wider propaganda study not only confronts official agency action but also reveals how news, textbooks, film, art, and other media of cultural congress help coin the currency of social influence.

We may say that Krugler’s contribution to our understanding of propaganda is both concrete and suggestive. His careful historical analysis of the VOA adds greatly to our tangible knowledge of how American national politicians reacted to the idea and practice of official radio broadcasting. Beyond this, his pursuit of the problem of strategic governmental communication alerts us to what in the literature is less well developed, that is, expansive theorizing about the phenomenon of covert, massive, tricky, and self-interested communication along with related investigations of propaganda’s entry into ostensibly nonpolitical media.

J. Michael Sproule is Professor of Interpersonal Communication and Director of the School of Communication Studies, Bowling Green State University.

Bibliography

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.

Qualter, Terence H. Opinion Control in the Democracies. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.

Rosteck , Thomas, ed. At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. New York: Guilford, 1999.

Shulman, Holly C. The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941-1945. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Winkler, Allan M. The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.