WWI Propaganda Films and the Fight Against Isolationism

Introduction: Government Persuasion and Propaganda

While we may be shocked by the U.S. government's attempts to spread disinformation about the war on terrorism, we should not be. Governments have always been less than fully forthcoming with their citizens, although they rarely admit to lying. Rather, they tend to frame such efforts as a form of propaganda — and as thoroughly patriotic.

Moreover, while the term "propaganda" is almost always used in a pejorative sense, and as citizens of a democracy we are deeply troubled by the idea that our government is not always strictly truthful with us, we should perhaps reconsider our assumptions about the relationship between government and the public before condemning all federal attempts to shape opinion.

Certainly the government of a democracy should never lie to its people, and should keep secrets from the population at large only under the strictest criteria of national security. However, this is not the same thing as saying that the government should not attempt to encourage its citizens to act in a certain way or to embrace certain principles.

We can see the importance — and the moral rightness — of this policy in a number of cases. Looking at contemporary American society, we find nothing at all wrong with the government urging people not to smoke around children, not to drive under the influence of alcohol, or to give blood. We understand that in some ways the federal government has the job of acting in loco parentis, serving as a wise guardian to guide us toward acting as responsibly as we can.

But while few would object to the government urging us not to drink and drive, the persuasive goals of government are not always so clearly beneficial — at least not at the time. Few people today believe it is in the best interest of the nation for citizens to report their neighbors on suspicion of being communists. While that once seemed a sound policy to many, it now appears as a dark chapter in American history. Yet sometimes government attempts to persuade the public that seem questionable at the time later prove to have been wise and judicious. Such is certainly the case with the U.S. government's use of mass media during World War I to persuade Americans that rigid isolationism was neither politically expedient nor morally acceptable.

The Roots of American Isolationism

The tendency toward isolationism was indeed strong during the first years of the war, though the fact that few Americans wanted involvement in what they saw as a European conflict had relatively little to do with the specifics of World War I itself. Rather, it stemmed from a long isolationist tradition in American politics and culture — one that can be traced to the American Revolution, when the nation resolutely divorced itself from European allegiances.

When George Washington in his Farewell Address asserted that Europe had "a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation" and advised America "to steer clear of permanent alliances," he was advancing views that were already old and widely accepted. The United States ended its alliance with France in time for its third president, Thomas Jefferson, to warn against "entangling alliances." Given the nation's political history, isolationism — or at least a refusal to be dragged into internecine bloodshed in Europe — can be argued to have been a rational and even moral strategy for the United States.

The roots of isolationism extended back to the colonial period. Settlers had come to America to escape religious persecution, economic hardship, wars, and personal problems in Europe. From the beginning there was an assumption — or at least a hope — that the New World would be better than the Old. The long and dangerous journey across the Atlantic magnified the geographic and moral separateness of America. Despite the alliance with France during the Revolution, the attitudes undergirding isolationism were well established long before independence.

Although the United States did ultimately enter World War I, the essentially isolationist tone of American political discourse did not end with the Great War. It would in fact become more pronounced after 1918, as Americans counted their losses and — observing the ambiguous political results of the war in Europe — decided that intervention in European conflicts was not worth the cost in American lives, especially given that the Europeans seemed unable to move toward a real and lasting peace.

After World War I, and despite Woodrow Wilson's postwar efforts to engage the United States permanently in the international community, many Americans returned to the belief that the political and economic interests of the United States were essentially different from — and probably superior to — those of Europe, and that little good could come from entangling the country directly in European wars or peace negotiations.

This is not to say that even the most extreme isolationists ever advocated severing America entirely from the rest of the world. Even the most vocal among them believed that America should stand as a symbol to other nations, inspiring emulation of its democratic ideals. Furthermore, while American isolationists tended to argue for disengagement from Europe, this did not make them equally reluctant to engage in the Pacific, where the United States was behaving rather like a colonial power. The isolationists might turn their backs on Europe, but in doing so they found the Pacific and Asia directly in their sights.

World War I and the Challenge to Isolationism

This centuries-old inclination toward isolationism was fundamentally challenged by World War I. As much as Americans might like to consider themselves independent of Europe, they were, of course, still bound to Western Europe — and especially to England — by both historical and cultural ties.

As England's power began to be challenged by Germany, at least some Americans started to wonder whether Germany might therefore also pose a threat to the United States. This sense of American vulnerability to European aggression, combined with the growing urbanization and industrialization of the United States — both forces working against continued isolationism — inclined some Americans toward intervention in the European struggle.

Among those were many in the federal government. Their positions may have allowed them to see American vulnerability to European aggression far more clearly than most citizens, who tended to rely on the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean as an absolute guarantee of safety. That sense of security was not entirely illusory — the ocean was indeed an important buffer — but it depended in no small measure on ignoring the growing sophistication of weaponry, which was rapidly shrinking the effective distance between Germany and the United States.

Perhaps those in government were also simply less isolationist to begin with — a disposition that had drawn them into public service in the first place, and one that gave them a better vantage point from which to appreciate how the United States was linked ideologically, economically, and historically to the nations of Europe.

The Committee on Public Information

Those members of the U.S. government — led by President Woodrow Wilson himself — sought to use every tool at their disposal to convince the American people that isolationism was not a defensible policy as the war consumed more and more of Europe. It was only natural that they would enlist the mass media as one of those tools.

The government had access to the traditional media of the day — newspapers and magazines — and it certainly used these to best advantage through opinion pieces and by having anti-isolationist officials speak to reporters. But faced with the depth of isolationist feeling in the United States, Wilson and his administration understood that shifting public opinion toward entering the war would require more than editorial cartoons. They therefore directed much of their energy toward one of the bold new media of the era: the motion picture.

Overseeing the distribution of propaganda — both to Americans at home and to audiences abroad — was the Committee on Public Information, established by executive order by Wilson in April 1917. The committee included the secretaries of state, war, and the navy, along with George Creel, a journalist known more for his effectiveness than his subtlety. For the remainder of the war, the committee oversaw the publication of posters and pamphlets and the production of films.

Conclusion: Shifting Public Opinion

It is certainly possible that, given the direction of the war in 1917, Americans would have abandoned their isolationist attitudes without the nudging of propagandistic films created by the U.S. government. But it is difficult to believe that such films did not hasten a change in public opinion and, in some cases, fundamentally alter the views of Americans who would never afterward be able to maintain their belief in the virtues of isolation.