It didn’t start with Russian bots on Facebook or Donald Trump’s rampaging Twitter feed. Governments and politicians have been trying to shape public opinion ever since the opinions of common people began to matter. But it wasn’t until World War I — when the concern for mass appeal was married to modern communications and a new understanding of what moves people — that official propaganda really took off. So argues John Maxwell Hamilton in his well-researched, evenhanded Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda.
Although leaders as far back as Napoleon and Queen Elizabeth I took care to mold their public image, Hamilton holds that it was only in the early decades of the 20th century that the art became an industry. As is often true, war accelerated an existing process so that, by the Armistice in 1919, “publicity” and propaganda had become indispensable elements of statecraft.
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