A History of Propaganda

Story

A sign on a door, a word: Rome, 1622

6 January 1622, Rome. Pope Gregory XV gathers thirteen cardinals and two prelates and tells them he wants to set up a permanent, well-organised body for the spread of Catholicism. On 22 June of the same year the bull Inscrutabili Divinae appears, and the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the “congregation for propagating the faith”, is officially born.

Stop for a moment and look: the word that today often works as an insult is here the sign on an institution’s door. It comes from the Latin verb propagare (to spread, to set forward). Its recorded sense from 1718 is “the committee of cardinals in charge of foreign missions”; around 1790 it widens to any movement or organisation that tries to spread a doctrine or practice. The sense of information meant to promote a political view settles in during the First World War, and at first it is neither contemptuous nor does it imply deceit.

So the “manipulation” ring did not arrive with the word; it was added later. This lesson is the story of that adding: who, when, and through which events?

Story

A fake newspaper, a fake captain: Paris, 1782

In those years the word still lived mostly in church language (its political sense would settle only in the First World War); but we would recognise a trick from 1782 at once. In the spring, while peace talks were going on in Paris, Benjamin Franklin had a counterfeit supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle printed: dated “Boston, March 12”, numbered “Numb. 705”, a single sheet that looked in every respect like the real thing. It carried a supposed letter from “Captain Samuel Gerrish”, a militia officer who never existed; the letter accused the British side of terrible cruelties.

Franklin sent copies of the supplement to John Adams, John Jay and others; the letter was printed in London’s General Advertiser on 29 June 1782. An American newspaper first called it a Franklin hoax in 1854.

Look at the list: a false source, an invented witness, a distant public, reprinting from paper to paper. It had no name, but it had a job. What separates modern propaganda from this, in our reading, is not the tricks themselves but the scale, the organisation and the knowledge of psychology added to them. For the role of print, go back to A History of Mass Media; for a much older state inscription, jump to the Turkey section.

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Who is who, and which year?

The story comes in three waves. The years are the backbone of this lesson.

From word to institution (1622–1914)

• Pope Gregory XV: 1622, the Propaganda Fide congregation.

War machines (1914–1919)

• Britain: Wellington House (1914), headed by Charles Masterman.
• James Bryce: chair of the committee whose report appeared in 1915.
• George Creel: the American Committee on Public Information, 1917.

After the war (1920–1962)

• The Department of Agitation and Propaganda in the Soviet Communist Party, 1920.
• Walter Lippmann: Public Opinion, 1922.
• Harold Lasswell: Propaganda Technique in the World War, 1927.
• Arthur Ponsonby: Falsehood in War-Time, 1928.
• Edward Bernays: Propaganda, 1928.
• The propaganda ministry in Germany, 13 March 1933.
• Jacques Ellul: Propagandes, 1962.

A memory hook: sign 1622, war machines 1914–17, “confession and study” the 1920s, a regime’s ministry 1933, the sociological analysis 1962.

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The core claim: the thing came first, the theory later

The argument of this lesson comes in four steps.

1. The effort to influence the masses is very old; “propaganda” was the name of a church body.
2. In the First World War states organised this work: in Britain a bureau for the world abroad (cabinet approval 5 September 1914), in the United States a committee (13 April 1917).
3. After the war the methods used, including invented atrocity stories, came out, and the word acquired an association with deceit.
4. Then two reactions followed: hiding or renaming the word (Creel, Goebbels, public relations) and studying it (Lasswell, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Ellul).

In short, what we call “propaganda theory” is an analysis written after a phenomenon: the thing first, the theory later.

Wartime intelligence games such as the Zimmermann telegram were covered in The Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver Models; we do not repeat them here. For the intellectual ground of crowds and mass society, see Mass Society and Mass Culture Theory.

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Glossary of concepts

• Propaganda propaganda: according to Lasswell (1927), the management of views and attitudes by meaningful symbols such as stories, rumours, reports and pictures, rather than by changing physical conditions such as the cigarette supply or the composition of food. In his account propaganda is one of three chief instruments against an enemy: military pressure, economic pressure and propaganda.
• Agitation and propaganda agitprop: according to Plekhanov and Lenin, the propagandist presents many ideas to a few people, the agitator presents one or a few ideas to the masses.
• White, grey, black propaganda white, grey and black propaganda: the source is shown correctly, hidden, or falsely shown.
• Atrocity propaganda atrocity propaganda: arousing anger through stories of the enemy’s cruelty, some true and some unverifiable.
• Public relations public relations: the profession of managing an organisation’s relations with the public; in Bernays’s 1928 book, the “public relations counsel”.
• Committee on Public Information Committee on Public Information (Creel Committee): the United States’ 1917 war propaganda and information agency; the Creel Committee.
• Public opinion public opinion: the field propaganda aims at; treated in detail in Propaganda and Public Opinion: Lippmann and Lasswell.

Myth check

Myth: “Propaganda is lies”

What people assume. Propaganda consists of lies; a true news item cannot be propaganda.

What the documents say. The introduction to the English translation of Ellul names this very belief as one reason why people fall easy prey to propaganda: they think propaganda consists only of lies and tall stories. Modern propaganda works with many kinds of truth: half-truth, limited truth, truth out of context.

The First World War material shows it in both directions. In 1927 Lasswell finds “impracticable” the maxim of a British official who said that only truthful statements should be used in propaganda; he writes that in the war a good deal of material was invented out of whole cloth. But on the same pages he also explains why invented material could stay plausible: in war plenty of horrors occur, and a “mustard seed of truth” can blossom. In Belgium there were both real massacres and unverified stories; the details are in the Evidence section.

Conclusion: what marks propaganda is not that it is a lie, but that it is an organised, targeted effort at influence, often with a steered source. A true piece of information can enter its service; so can an invention.

Step by step

How it worked: the five steps of Wellington House

Let us follow the method of Britain’s bureau for propaganda abroad, step by step, as far as it is documented.

1. The decision. At the end of August the cabinet discusses an organisation that would inform and influence opinion abroad and counter Germany’s false news; on 5 September 1914 it approves the creation of an organisation to last for the whole war. There was no peacetime precedent.
2. The cover. The bureau worked at Wellington House, the building of the National Insurance Commission, with Charles Masterman at its head. According to Lasswell, most of the material was put out as though it came not from an official body but from a private source.
3. The target. Opinion abroad; the priority was American opinion.
4. The evidence package. Wellington House started a report on German cruelty: the 1915 Bryce Report. Lasswell writes that this was done with the device of setting up a commission of men with international reputations for truthfulness, and calls it a “stroke of genius”.
5. The result. The report is judged to have been very influential in turning international opinion against Germany, especially in the United States; after the war it became a disputed legacy. The details are in the Evidence section.

Hiding the source and borrowing the standing of a respected source are two faces of the same plan.

Story

13 April 1917: “We did not call it propaganda”

Soon after America enters the war, on 13 April 1917, President Wilson signs Executive Order 2594: alongside the Secretaries of State, War and the Navy, a civilian chairman, the journalist George Creel. Lasswell compares this to appointing a separate cabinet member for propaganda.

Years later Creel describes the work as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising” and adds that they did not call it propaganda, because in German hands the word had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. The tools included print, speech, film, the telegraph, wireless, the poster and the signboard; the best known was a network of volunteer speakers, the “Four Minute Men”. By Creel’s own count, 75,000 speakers in about 5,200 communities gave more than seven and a half million speeches. Abroad the committee worked in more than thirty countries; it fed foreign newspapers with news and official statements, opened reading rooms, brought foreign journalists to America and prepared special appeals for teachers and labour groups. Congress closed the committee in 1919; Osgood ties that decision to a natural American distrust of propaganda and to the fear that the president might use the committee for domestic political ends.

Treat these numbers with caution: they come from the committee’s own records and from its chairman’s own book.

Step by step

Painting a message: three questions

To classify a propaganda example by colour, ask three questions in turn.

1. Is the source openly shown and correct? Then it is white. The American government’s broadcasting service, Voice of America, is the standard example.
2. Is the source unstated or hidden? Then it is grey. Newspaper pieces of unknown authorship that nevertheless serve a government are the typical case.
3. Is the source that is shown false? Then it is black: the message is presented as coming from someone else, often from a source that looks like the enemy, to embarrass it.

Examples from history: in the Second World War Britain’s Political Warfare Executive ran supposed German “secret” radio stations; the American OSS was authorised to conduct black and grey propaganda. Franklin’s 1782 fake newspaper supplement is, in our reading, an early “black” example: the identity of a real newspaper is imitated.

Two warnings. The colours concern how the source is shown, not whether the content is true. And we could not confirm who first made the naming; the Turkish Language Association’s dictionary has entries for “beyaz” and “gri” but not for “kara”.

Story

Belgium, 1914: the real and the unverifiable side by side

The hardest thing about war propaganda is this: part of what it says may be true.

In 1914, as the German army invaded Belgium and northern France, civilians were killed. The historians John Horne and Alan Kramer document, from archival work, the deaths of about 6,500 Belgian and French civilians; they trace the German soldiers’ belief in “civilian resistance” to a collective delusion.

On 15 December 1914 Britain appointed a committee under Bryce; the report of 1915 rests on more than 1,200 depositions. The report is judged to have been very influential in turning international opinion against Germany, especially in the United States. After the war it was argued that the atrocity claims had been exaggerated, and the report was often spoken of as war propaganda; some historians, however, judge it “substantially accurate”, and the argument has still not fully closed.

Some other accounts of the same period did not pass the test. Lasswell reports that the journalist Will Irwin looked into various versions of the story that Belgian babies had their hands cut off and found them all unproved and wildly improbable. Ponsonby’s 1928 book also gives that story a chapter of its own.

So the picture holds real suffering and unverified stories, and the two circulated inside the same propaganda.

Step by step

How a story enters circulation: the “corpse factory”

Read this case as a timeline. The same steps will be familiar from other stories.

1. 10 April 1917. According to what the Secretary for War reported in 1925, the claim that the Germans had set up an establishment to process their dead first appeared in Berlin’s Lokalanzeiger and in two Belgian newspapers.
2. 17 April 1917. The Times and the Daily Mail set a supposed eyewitness account, translated from a French-language Belgian newspaper, beside a text translated from the Berlin paper; side by side, the two look like independent sources.
3. The argument. Does “Kadaver” mean only an animal carcass, or a human body as well? The War Office, relying on dictionaries and on a captured German army order, had found the story supported.
4. 24 November 1925. The Secretary for War tells the House of Commons what they had relied on in 1917 and admits that no corroboration has come since.
5. 2 December 1925. The Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, reports that the German Chancellor has authorised him to say, on the authority of the German Government, that there was never any foundation for the story, and accepts that denial on behalf of the British Government.

In 1927 Lasswell calls it “a plain lie” but adds why it stayed plausible: war produces plenty of horrors. In 1928 Ponsonby gave the story a chapter.

Story

Two men, one hesitation

Scene one: the United States, 1920. In the book that tells the story of his committee, Creel writes: we did not call it propaganda.

Scene two: Germany, 1933. The name of the new ministry is “Public Enlightenment and Propaganda”, and the words “enlightenment and propaganda” appear in the text of the decree too. But according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, Goebbels was at first against the word “propaganda”, because in popular usage, in Germany and abroad, it was associated with lies. After the ministry had existed for a year he proposed changing its name to “Ministry of Culture and Public Enlightenment”; Hitler vetoed it.

Two opposed political orders shy away from the same word for the same reason. This suggests that the word’s burden did not belong to one regime; it was a shared legacy of the post-war period. A later card in this lesson will open this up with Osgood’s analysis.

A note: a regime hiding a word and what that regime does are separate questions. Shying away from a word does not show that the work done was innocent; it only shows what the word suggested in those days.

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1928: a defence of Propaganda and a new profession

In 1928 Bernays gave his book the title Propaganda. It opens by saying that the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society; those who work this unseen mechanism he calls an “invisible government”.

He also thinks about the word’s standing: he quotes a defence from a magazine which says that the word is a “fine old word” and that its meaning turned sinister during the war. His own definition is this: modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events so as to influence the public’s relations to an enterprise, idea or group. And a new professional name appears: the “public relations counsel”.

Biographical sources say that Bernays noticed the negative association of the word propaganda and used the name “public relations”. The book itself carries the two names side by side. So saying “he defended the word and introduced the profession under a new name” is more faithful to the text than “he changed the word”. Bernays had worked with the Committee on Public Information during the war; the book can be read as that experience carried into civilian life. That last sentence is our reading.

Lab

A small exercise: agitator or propagandist?

Lenin in 1902 reports and illustrates Plekhanov’s distinction: the propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; the agitator presents one or a few ideas to a mass of people. Lenin’s own example is unemployment: the propagandist explains the capitalist cause and the inevitability of crises; the agitator takes a glaring event everyone knows, such as an unemployed worker’s family dying of starvation, and presents a single idea to “the masses”.

Now try it yourself (two hypothetical speeches):

• Speech A: A speaker who, for two hours, explains the causes of inflation in five dimensions to a reading group of forty people.
• Speech B: A speaker in a square who tells of a child in the neighbourhood left without school and says in a single sentence, “this order must change”.

Answer: A is a propagandist, B an agitator. Know the organisational history too: in 1920 the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party set up the Department of Agitation and Propaganda; agitprop is its contraction. In the civil-war years agitation trains carried acting troupes, pamphlets and musicians to a largely illiterate peasantry.

A small trap: Ellul uses the word “agitation” in another sense (see the deep-dive card).

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1933: a propaganda ministry in peacetime

On 13 March 1933 a decree signed by Reich President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler created a Reich ministry for “enlightenment and propaganda” among the population about the government’s policy; Joseph Goebbels was put at its head.

The Holocaust Encyclopedia writes that this was a novel idea for a country at peace: until then, governments’ propaganda bodies had been temporary committees needed by war, or information ministries in disguise. The ministry’s aim was to communicate the Nazi message through art, music, theatre, film, books, radio, educational material and the press. One face of this for the press was that the Editors Law of 4 October 1933 excluded Jews and those married to Jews from journalism.

The museum’s assessment is clear: Nazi propaganda played an integral role in the persecution and destruction of Europe’s Jews; it incited hatred and fostered indifference to their fate. We do not go into detail here; our point is historical: propaganda turned from a war committee into a permanent state ministry.

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Ellul: propaganda as a form of society, not a regime’s weapon

Ellul’s 1962 book ties propaganda less to who produces it than to how society works. According to the introduction to the book’s translation, Ellul treats propaganda not as something made by certain people for certain purposes but as a social phenomenon; in his view propaganda is the Siamese twin of technological society. Its aim is often not to change opinions but to sharpen existing trends and to lead people to action.

The best-known distinction in the book is a pair. Agitation propaganda is short-lived and explosive; it sets energy in motion, often rests on hatred of an enemy, and can be done with simple means such as the pamphlet, the speech, the poster and the rumour. Integration propaganda is slow; it shapes a person in depth and needs mass media; in Ellul’s view it is the truly important kind of our age.

A point that is often misreported: Ellul does not accept that education protects against propaganda. Integration propaganda works better in comfortable, cultivated and informed milieus; intellectuals are more sensitive to it than peasants, because they share a society’s stereotypes even when they oppose it. Agitation propaganda, by contrast, is easier with the less educated and informed.

A fair limit: these claims rest on observation and theoretical reasoning; this lesson presents no study that tests them. Read Ellul not as a “proven law” but as a strong hypothesis.

Myth check

Myth: “Dictatorships gave propaganda its bad name”

What people assume. The word propaganda was soiled by the propaganda of the Nazi and Soviet regimes; democracies “inform”.

What the documents say. According to Kenneth Osgood, the word acquired its negative charge right after the First World War, from a democracy’s propaganda: investigations in the 1920s exposed Britain’s campaign in America and the invented German atrocity stories, and many Americans came to think their country had been dragged into the war by British propaganda. This order agrees with other documents too: Creel shies away from the word in 1920; the piece Bernays quotes in 1928 says the meaning turned sinister “during the war”; the etymology dictionary ties the negative charge to the period of the First World War.

Two additions. According to Osgood, observers came out of the war with a legendary belief in the power of propaganda; for how this was treated in textbook form, see The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model. And Osgood, and Neander and Marlin, argue that the exposure of the atrocity stories invented in 1917 played a part in the disbelief that met the first reports of the Holocaust twenty years later. This is an argument of historians; how large the part was is hard to measure.

Conclusion: the word’s burden is not “one regime’s sin” but the result of even democracies being caught in their own propaganda.

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Today: inventories of “computational propaganda”

A research team at the Oxford Internet Institute tried to count, country by country, organised social media manipulation for political ends. Its 2019 inventory found 70 countries using tactics such as bots, data harvesting and trolls. The 2020 inventory says it found evidence of 81 countries using social media to spread computational propaganda and disinformation about politics, up from 70 in the previous report.

Three questions from this lesson can be carried to today. They are our own reasoning, not a documented research finding:

1. Who is speaking, and is this openly shown? (white, grey, black)
2. Where did this story first appear, and is there an independent second source? (the corpse story)
3. What does this content want me to do? (Ellul: action)

A warning about scale: the figure “81 countries” depends on how the phenomenon is defined and how it is detected. “In 81 countries an organised effort of this kind was found” and “there is propaganda in 81 countries” are not the same sentence. Also, what was counted is the existence of the effort; measuring its effect is a separate question and needs separate evidence.

Lab

Lab: classify two real posters (1915 and 1917)

Try it yourself first. I describe two real posters in words; which of the seven devices (Institute for Propaganda Analysis) fits, what is the colour, and which emotion is targeted?

Poster 1: “Destroy this mad brute — Enlist” (Harry R. Hopps, U.S. Army, 1917). A huge ape-like creature coming ashore; on its pointed German helmet is written “militarism”, on the club in its hand “Kultur”; in its other arm a fainting woman’s figure; ruins behind it.

Poster 2: “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?” (Savile Lumley, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 1915). A father seated in an armchair; a small boy on the floor playing with toy soldiers; a small girl on his knee holding an open book.

Now compare. According to the Institute for Propaganda Analysis’s definition, Name Calling is giving an idea a bad label so that we reject it without examining the evidence. Poster 1 fits: the enemy is a “brute”, and the club and helmet are labels. But the poster’s real force is the image that arouses fear and disgust; the list of seven devices has no name for that. Poster 2 has no enemy; the nearest device is Band Wagon, but the real weapon is shame: the V&A record calls it a tone of “emotional blackmail” and adds that conscription began only in 1916.

Colour: both show the publisher, so white. The lesson: checklists help but do not catch everything.

Lab

Lab: persuasion or propaganda?

Imagine you meet three texts on the same day (hypothetical examples).

• A. The municipal library puts up, in its own name, a poster: “This month’s reading campaign: free membership”.
• B. An account with no stated name circulates unverified “witness” stories about a rival neighbourhood association.
• C. A ministry defends a policy, without putting its own name forward, through volunteers who speak like “ordinary citizens”.

Ask five questions. This is our own framework; scholars draw the line between persuasion and propaganda differently, and this is not an absolute law:

1. Is the source visible?
2. Can the receiver hear another voice and check?
3. Can the claims be tested?
4. Who benefits, and does the sender say so?
5. Does emotion or information weigh more?

A: the source is visible and the claim can be checked; white, and an example of persuasion. B: the source is hidden and the claim cannot be tested; at least grey, and black if it is invented; the propaganda side. C: stays in the middle: because the identity is not fully shown, it slides towards grey.

A note on Turkish: the Turkish Language Association’s dictionary defines ikna as “convincing” and also as “deceiving”. So the dictionary itself leaves the border between the two words blurred; that is why it is safer to write the criteria out.

Story

A two-thousand-year-old wall in Ankara

In Ankara, in the city the Romans called Ancyra, the walls of a temple built for Augustus carry a text: the emperor’s own summary of his deeds, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. The text was to be engraved on bronze tablets and set up before Augustus’s mausoleum in Rome; the tablets have not survived. But the text had been copied on the walls of many temples of Augustus across the empire; the copy at Ancyra is the most complete.

In Ankara the Latin original was written on the inner walls of the temple’s vestibule and the Greek translation on the outer wall; Turkish houses built against the temple made the Greek part hard to read for a long time. The first to make the inscription known to the West was Busbecq, sent in 1555 as Ferdinand’s ambassador to Sultan Süleyman at Amasya; he read and identified the inscription and published a copy of part of it.

Why here? Because it shows that state communication, long before the word “propaganda”, was worked onto a lasting surface, with a plan for copying. That the text was written not only in Latin but also in Greek is, in our reading, a sign of reckoning with different readerships; the sources do not say why there are two languages. Whether this text counts as “propaganda”, and how accurate its content is, are separate questions; here we document only the place and the method.

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This is how exams ask it

Typical question patterns

• “The origin of the word propaganda?” → Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, 1622, Pope Gregory XV; Latin propagare.
• “Wellington House / the Creel Committee?” → Britain (1914) and the United States (1917); “Creel Committee” is the name used after the chairman of the Committee on Public Information (CPI).
• “The corpse factory / the Bryce Report?” → examples of atrocity propaganda: one invented (withdrawn in 1925), the other with the real and the unverifiable together.
• “White, grey, black propaganda?” → classification by how the source is shown.
• “Agitation and propaganda” → Plekhanov and Lenin; “agitation and integration” → Ellul.

Tempting distractors

• Mixing up 1622 and 1627; mixing up Lasswell (1927) and Bernays (1928); mixing up Creel and Bryce.
• “Propaganda is always a lie.” The introduction to Ellul’s translation and Lasswell argue against it.
• “The negative charge began with the Nazis.” According to Osgood it began after the war.

Alternative names used in Turkish sources: propaganda (in the Turkish Language Association’s dictionary with the equivalent yaymaca); ajitasyon; halkla ilişkiler; vahşet (zulüm) propagandası; the Creel Committee. “Kamuyu Bilgilendirme Komitesi” and “Halkı Aydınlatma ve Propaganda Bakanlığı” are this lesson’s renderings; sources may use other equivalents.

Step by step

An open-ended answer: a five-step skeleton

For a question like “Explain the historical development of propaganda”, use this skeleton.

1. Give the word. 1622, Propaganda Fide, “to spread”; not negative at first.
2. Name the turning point. The First World War: Wellington House (1914), the Committee on Public Information (1917).
3. Give two examples. The Bryce Report (the real and the unverifiable side by side) and the corpse factory (invented; withdrawn in 1925).
4. Explain the burden. The post-war exposure; Creel’s hesitation in 1920, Bernays’s defence in 1928 and Goebbels’s hesitation.
5. Tie it to theories. Lasswell 1927, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis 1937, Ellul 1962; the white, grey, black distinction.

A one-sentence opening as an example: “Propaganda was the name of a church body in 1622; in the First World War it turned into the organised effort of states to inform and influence, and after the war, through the exposure of invented atrocity stories, it acquired the association with deceit.”

Summary

Summary card

• The word: Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (1622), Latin “to spread”; its political sense settled in the First World War, and at first it was not judgemental.
• The thing first, the theory later: tricks like Franklin’s 1782 fake newspaper supplement come before the word’s political sense; scale and organisation come from 1914 (Wellington House) and 1917 (the Creel Committee).
• Atrocity propaganda: real massacres in Belgium (about 6,500 civilians) stand beside unverifiable stories; the corpse factory was invented and was withdrawn in 1925.
• The burden: Creel (1920) and Goebbels shied away from the word; according to Osgood the negative association arose after the war, from the exposure of a democracy’s propaganda.
• Bernays (1928): defended the word and introduced the profession of “public relations counsel”.
• Regimes: Soviet agitprop (1920) and the propaganda ministry in Germany (13 March 1933).
• Ellul (1962): propaganda is a social phenomenon; agitation and integration; integration works better in cultivated milieus.
• Colours: white, grey, black concern how the source is shown; do not confuse them with truth.
• Exam: do not mix up 1622 and 1627, or Lasswell 1927 and Bernays 1928; keep apart the “agitation” vocabularies of Ellul and Lenin.