Tom Caldwell Philosophy Column

Book Review

By Tom Caldwell
Posted August 4, 1999

Stuart Ewen is a liberal and a supporter of the welfare state. He gives a history of the activities since 1910 of a small group of people who aimed to create a welfare state to do good (to protect themselves from the economically rising lower classes). The purpose of his story is to lament the changes that have and are taking place in the U.S. culture. He tells of the "good guys" (the welfare statists) as a lead to telling how the "bad guys" have taken over using the same techniques and have turned the culture to a direction favoring less welfare, less government, deregulation, etc. According to Ewen, the nefarious conspirators undoing the "good intentions" of the liberals are: The N.A.M.. Ewen has a "conspiracy theory" -- the well meaning good guys and their socialism are being undermined by the sinister N.A.M.. For those who don't recognize the acronym, it stands for the National Association of Manufacturers -- ROTFL.

Nevertheless, the book has a very good history of media manipulation and ideological activity against the American people pursued by the U.S. Government.

Ewen starts his story of media and social manipulation with the story of AT&T in 1903 and how it manipulated the media to generate the idea that only a "natural monopoly" could properly
provide telephone service. He explains how the people involved in such media and social manipulation moved to government to develop support for entry to WWI -- the U.S. Committee on Public Information, the vast propaganda ministry established by President Wilson (via Executive Order nationalizing the advertising industry) to get public support for American participation in the war -- the "four minute men" -- (the first "office of Morale Conditioner"), etc..

The aim of the whole system was to manipulate the emotions by getting people to suspend reason. It was based on the belief that a large-scale society could only survive by having an elite to manipulate the people and leave the experts alone to govern society for the common good, by detaching emotions from ideas and by intensifying feeling and degrading significance.

Walter Lippman was one of the intellectual leaders of manipulation, but Edward Bernays was an equal and is more interesting if less known. He was for 60 to 70 years one of molders of "the public mind." He developed his skills in CPI and after the war wrote of seeing the success of propaganda for regimenting the public mind," -- naturally, for the needs of the elite -- and proclaiming that it was possible to control and regiment the masses without their knowing it.

Ewen covers Franklin D. Roosevelt, the creation of the phony publicity of the Depression by New Deal government departments -- used to create the idea of economic rights tied to political
rights -- and by the various and sundry propaganda arms of each New Deal agency. Almost all the public pictures that exist of the depression were made by such agencies and conformed to or
were fabricated to conform to their requirements of falsely showing how terrible things were. This provided the foundation for claiming that only the government could solve the problems
and that it required a more equitable distribution of wealth.

But that is in the past, right? It is not done any more, right? Do you remember the story of the 15 year-old girl, Nayirah, the eye-witness hospital worker who testified before the U.S.
Congressional Human Rights Caucus about the Iraqi invaders who had dumped hundreds of premature babies out of incubators onto cold hospital floors to die, and took the incubators home? Did you catch that she was really Nayirah al-Sabah, the daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the United States and that she had not been anywhere near Kuwait at the time, that it was a publicity
stunt set up by Hill and Knowlton, which was on the Kuwait payroll to get the United States into the war?

Did you know that after the (what I think was phony) story about the starving-to-death unwanted children in Shanghai orphanage hospitals, Communist China hired Hill and Knowlton to spin things
their way?

Ewen even includes photos of Adolf Hitler practicing his postures for maximum dramatic effect on a future audience -- another example of manipulation of "the masses."

James T. Ellsworth, Walter Lippman, Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays, Raymond Moley, Gustave le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, the Progressive movement, George Creel ("... people do not live by bread alone;
they live mostly by catch phrases."), Harold Lasswell, Wilfred Trotter, SA, FSA, NRA, Lowell Thomas, The government's Office of War Information for WWII, the making of Ronald Reagan, etc., etc., etc.. They are all there.

If you want to read about how the present state of affairs came about in the United States and what techniques were used, This book "PR!: The Social History of Spin" is a very good start.

If you want to understand the means of manipulation of the people of Hong Kong, this is a good introduction.

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