Manipulating the Masses: The Roots of the Modern Government Propaganda Machine

Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (LSU Press, 2020), exploring the Great War origins of one of the most profound and enduring threats to American democracy: the systematic production and dissemination of propaganda to advance administration aims. Through its Committee on Public Information (CPI) the United States government exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of the citizens it was supposed to serve. Nothing like it had existed before, and it would be dismantled at the end of the war. But the CPI endured as a “blueprint” for the Information State that exists today - in times of peace as well as times of war.