Making and Circulating the News in an Illiberal Age

Nancy F. Cott

Author’s note: Rather than aiming to keep up with extraordinarily fast-changing news from and about the White House, I have kept this essay essentially as I delivered it during the early days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

Te 2017 Organization of American Historians conference theme of “circulation” had the virtue of capaciousness, evoking many diferent potential applications, tangible and intangible, natural and constructed, operating at various scales. Roads around a city, ideas around the world, blood through the body, rumors through a community—all of these circulate. So does news. Circulation is intrinsic to news. Tat is my topic tonight because we have been living through a transformation in the ways that news is made and promulgated. Digital platforms for breaking news, commentary, and scandal have multiplied—and their potential to propagate access to varied sources of information and misinformation is obvious. Te essential network aspect of the “web” means that any information easily reproduces itself and generates links that connect it to similar or related information. Te making and the promulgation of news are tied together perhaps more tightly than ever before, in that whatever becomes most intensely circulated and repli- cated through instantaneous media becomes the most pressing “news.” Tus circulation makes the news, more than simply transmitting it. We now face a proliferation—I might say a plague—of news sources and modes of circulation. Tis multiplication and fractionalization leads away from the creation of “common knowledge” and toward division of the populace into “niche” publics whose knowledge-worlds intentionally seek replenishment from sources that reinforce accus- tomed attitudes and partisan leanings. Tis is all quite recent; it has taken place over about twenty-fve years, in two phases. In the frst phase, in the 1990s, cable news chan- nels broke through the hold of the three major national networks. (Public tv and radio had begun to create alternatives much earlier, but their audiences were relatively small.) Te frst cable news network, cnn, was an outlier when it was founded in 1980. Te networks that changed the landscape—Fox News, msnbc, Bloomberg News, and cnbc—all started in the 1990s. Teir quick rise answered the swing to the right and the increased polarization of public opinion between left and right that had been developing at least

Nancy F. Cott is the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University. Tis article is the presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 8, 2017.

doi: 10.1093/jahist/jax310 © Te Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. December 2017 Te Journal of American History 599

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since the Reagan years. By the turn of the millennium, then, one could turn to one or another sources of news infected by contesting points of view. Te more recent second phase, since about 2004, began with the rise to prominence of the Google search engine and the founding of Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006), which intensifed network ability to circulate a given article or story exponentially in a few seconds. Very tailored sites for news and views popped up rapidly between 2004 and 2007, including Hufngton Post, Politico, Breitbart News, and Gateway Pundit. Facebook has become a major, possibly the major, force in circulating references to news and views produced on these sites. Even more recently, since 2010, came additional messaging apps (such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat), adding to means of circulation, and the in- vention of “bots”—robotized algorithms that can circulate tens of thousands of copies or links instantaneously, giving the impression of a frestorm of enthusiasm for a particular content, without revealing that sentient human beings are not involved.1 Before 2015, while these transformations were taking place, no one particularly an- ticipated the possible political success of Donald J. Trump. But since Trump became president, anyone attuned to American politics has had to recognize the connections between these shifts in modes of news circulation and his surprising election. Breitbart News, for example, was shockingly efective in creating, to candidate Trump’s advantage, a “distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper- partisan perspective to the world.” (Tis is the conclusion of a Columbia Journalism Review summary of a recent study of more than a million and a quarter stories published online between April 1 and the election).2 I am completing a book on an earlier era of reorientation in news media, in the 1920s and 1930s, and so am interested in parallels between that period and our own. Journalists in those decades experienced the transition to modern news gathering and circulation; we are seeing—or sufering—the takeof of postmodern news. Each era was transformative. Ten and now, thoughtful commentators often turned their attention to the close con- nection between the maintenance of democracy and the availability of public knowledge through a free press. Ten and now, transformations taking place in news media raised alarms when they seemed to constrain or direct public knowledge in unusual ways and thus threaten democratic voice. Trough the 1920s and most of the 1930s, getting the news meant reading the printed page. (Te newspaper industry fought to keep radio from broadcasting breaking news until the late 1930s). Newspapers were everywhere, various and numerous. Te aggregate circulation of daily papers—to say nothing of weekly papers and magazines—was about 35 million, exceeding the number of American households by 10 million. Most towns had a daily paper; large cities typically supported more than one; the largest had three,

1 Amanda Hesser, “On Twitter, a Battle among Political Bots,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2016, https://www .nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/on-twitter-a-battle-among-political-bots.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fama nda-hess&action=click&contentCollection=undefned®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest& contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection. 2 Te quotation is from a summary of a study of more than a million and a quarter stories published online between April 1, 2016, and the election. See Yochai Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Eco- system Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, http://www.cjr.org/analysis/ breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php. See also Sue Halpern, “How He Used Facebook to Win,” New York Re- view of Books, June 8, 2017, pp. 59–61. In May 2017 Evan Williams, who created Blogger (making it easy for individuals to establish their own blogs) and also founded Twitter, expressed profound regret that these tools of communication he imagined would improve the world had lent themselves to pernicious uses: “I think the Internet is broken,” he said. David Streitfeld, “‘Te Internet Is Broken,’” New York Times, May 21, 2017, business section, 1.

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four, fve, or ten morning and evening dailies. “No other institution approaches the newspaper in universality, persistence, continuity of infuence,” fretted a critic.3 Te modernization of newspapers in the early twentieth century showed up in news formats, in circulation wars and syndication, and in aggressive competition that led to chain consolidation. As advertising in newspapers boomed, newspapers became a big business; owners of one proftable paper bought up others, and news chains consolidated. In an economist’s terse phrasing, “News became a commodity and was sold in competition like any other commodity.” Chains created a nationally homogenizing trend, as did syndication, which sent the same features, cartoons, columns, star gossip, or political commentary to any paper that subscribed. (At the same time, urban locales might have many small newspapers addressing ethnic groups or other specialized communities.) Not until the 1920s and 1930s did newspaper design evolve into the format for presenting news that seems to us obvious and inevitable, giving readers the shape of their social and political world as soon as they began to look at the paper. Modern format placed the most important current items on the front page, subordinated lesser items farther back, varied headline size to indicate relative importance, and segregated columns and features to their own pages and eventually their own sections. (Earlier papers often used page one for classifed ads.) Besides the standard modern format in urban dailies, the tabloid arrived as an alternate modern format. Both formats meant to distill and sort the news, to provide guideposts for a mass readership because modern life was more complicated and intercon- nected over a larger geographical area, and communication capacity enabled a phenomenal onrush of news.4 Most important, journalists had to respond to a storm of controversy over newspapers misinforming and misleading the public. Scrutiny of the press arose in retrospective examination of the shaping of popular views during the Spanish-American War and the world war. Critics skewered newspapers’ ability to warp the horizons of their readers. A wide swath of intellectuals deplored journalistic overreach, highlighted how gullible the populace was, and lambasted publishers for caring mainly about the bottom line. News- papers looked highly authoritative to the reader, critics charged, while they printed items that were partisan, or haphazard, or purely beholden to advertisers. 3 Radio was principally an entertainment medium at frst, and broadcasting was only local until the early 1930s, by which time the United States had three national networks. On the newspaper industry’s battle against radio broadcasting news, see “Te Struggle between Press and Radio,” in Te Newspaper and Society, ed. George L. Bird and Frederic E. Merwin (New York, 1942), 538–58; and a survey in Fortune, 17 (April 1938), 104–9, reprinted “Struggle between Press and Radio,” 549–53. Te survey showed that as late as April 1938, 23.5% of respondents said they got their news mostly from radio, 45.2% from newspapers, and 28.2% said both. On the publishing industry’s battle against radio, see Lynn Gordon, “Why Dorothy Tompson Lost Her Job: Political Columnists and the Press Wars of the 1930s and 1940s,” History of Education Quarterly, 34 (Fall 1994), 281–303, esp. 293–95. John Macy, “Journalism,” in Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Tirty Americans, ed. Harold E. Stearns (New York, 1922), 35–50. Most secondary sources cite a fgure of about 40 million circulation in 1920, but for a source that puts reported aggregate circulation of all morning and evening dailies at 34,363,000, see N.W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory (Philadelphia, 1919), 13. Te number of households in 1920 was a little over 24 million. See “Table Ae1-28 - Households, by Race and Sex of Householder and Household Type: 1850–1990,” Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition Online, available at Historical Statistics of the United States. Macy, “Journalism,” 35. 4 Te number of daily newspapers in 1914 was 2,580; a decade later the number had diminished to 2,014 because of consolidation by owners who wished to minimize competition. For example, Frank Munsey bought and shut down 5 New York papers in the mid-1920s. Te trend continued downward, to 1,878 dailies in 1940, according to M.[oses] Koenigsberg, King News: An Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1941), 493–94. For the quotation, see Harold A. Innis, “Te Press, a Neglected Factor in the Economic History of the Twentieth Century,” in Changing Concepts of Time, by Harold A. Innis (1952; Lanham, 2004), 78. My account is indebted to Kevin C. Barnhurst and John Nerone, Te Form of News: A History (New York, 2001).

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Walter Lippmann, leading the pack of critics, warned in 1920, “In an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.” Te world war had generated a new awareness of government propaganda intended to manipulate the public; the press might swallow it hook, line, and sinker, as if the clear truth. President Woodrow Wilson’s wartime Committee on Public Information was admittedly a propaganda agency. Its vet- erans, and others who learned its techniques, fanned out into private enterprise—into advertising, and also into press agentry, a new occupation. In the 1920s the “p.a.”—press agent or publicity agent—cut a new fgure in the media scene, handing out press releases that blurred the line between news and marketing. How was the public to distinguish between news and “ballyhoo”? Te journalism feld then answered back by embracing standards of ethics. Journalistic objectivity became the stated ideal. Tis was clearly a pro- fessionalizing move, and it was new. Nineteenth-century newspapers had typically worn partisan identifcations openly. Readers knew which was a Democratic paper, a Republi- can paper, and so on to smaller parties, and expected partisanship to frame the news. In contrast, the modern standard dictated a clear distinction between “fact” and “opinion.” Tis move echoed the contemporaneous ascendancy of objectivity as the research standard in the human sciences. It meant no simple positivism for working reporters of good- will, however. Accepting objectivity as their ideal, reporters nonetheless acknowledged that it might be impossible to reach. Te reporter had limits. Real-world situations had many angles. Te best-intentioned reporter might have a hard road to establish what were “facts” and what were not.5 Te troublesomeness of “facts” was thus on the table in the 1920s and 1930s, in a potential forewarning of today’s alarm at the Trump administration sowing confusion about what is true and what is not. (Vladimir Putin has been accused of perfecting that strategy in Russia). Recent commentators on the Trump administration’s seeming disdain for “facts” have been looking back, as I am, to the interwar years—not to focus on news media then; rather, to point out ominous parallels between political gains on the far right in both eras. Eminent historians of Germany have given us plenty to ponder about the simi- larities between fascist appeals then, and candidate Trump’s willingness to stir up white hypernationalism and racism and his accusations against intellectual and political elites.6 Trump’s rhetoric as a candidate, especially his claims that other nations are crushing the United States unfairly, and his infated assertions of weaknesses in the American economy that only he would be able to fx, bore an uncanny likeness to Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric during his rise to power. Hitler focused on Germany’s terrible economic conditions, blamed other nations for Germany’s decline and for individuals’ economic sufering, and

5 Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York, 1920), 5. On the blurring of the line between news and marketing, see Michael Schudson, Te Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York, 1998), 188–232; and Simon Michael Bessie, Jazz Journalism: Te Story of the Tabloid Newspapers (New York, 1938). Ballyhoo got its meaning of extravagant or brash publicity in the 1920s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; earlier in the twentieth century it referred to a free show outside a carnival, meant to bring in paying viewers. My account relies heavily on Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York, 1978), esp. 122–45, 151–57. See also Barnhurst and Nerone, Form of News, esp. 203–4, 220–22, 243–46. 6 John Podesta, “Trump’s Dangerous Strategy to Undermine Reality,” Washington Post, Feb. 16, 2017, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-dangerous-attempts-to-undermine-reality/2017/02/16/f5d9b826 -f3ca-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html?utm_term=.e3565b3964ca, drawing on and quoting Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Te Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York, 2014). See also the editorial “Truth and Lies in the Age of Trump,” New York Times, Dec. 10, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/ opinion/truth-and-lies-in-the-age-of-trump.html?mcubz=3. Richard J. Evans, “A Warning from History,” Nation, Feb. 28, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/the-ways-to-destroy-democracy/.

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made a minority out-group (the Jews) the greatest devil—as President Trump did and still does with regard to Muslims and undocumented immigrants. Most important, Hitler’s rhetoric enabled German audiences to identify their own and their nation’s salvation and future with him alone. Candidate Trump’s success in awakening his followers’ willingness to wrench a settled system into chaos so that he could become their new savior, and his ability to convince them that he alone wielded the magic wand that would solve both national and individual woes, is uncannily similar to the way Hitler rose to power. Tese parallels weighed on my mind during the election season because I was research- ing American journalist Dorothy Tompson’s writing about Hitler’s rise in the early 1930s. Tompson had frst crossed the Atlantic in 1920, when she was in her twenties, and in short order established herself as a foreign correspondent in Vienna for a Philadel- phia newspaper with a syndicated foreign news service. By 1925 she was promoted to the more important post of bureau head in Berlin. She was deeply immersed in the politics of central Europe for most of the decade, until she met Sinclair Lewis, the most famous and successful American novelist at the time, and returned to the United States as his wife in 1928. She did not give up her sense of attachment to Austria and Germany, however, and welcomed the return to Europe that arrived with the news in 1930 that Sinclair Lewis was being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Before going to Stockholm with her husband, Tompson contracted with the Saturday Evening Post—the largest-selling weekly magazine in the United States—to publish her observations in Europe. After a week crammed with full-dress Nobel events in November, 1930, she went immediately to Ber- lin to reconnect with her old journalist circle. Soon her consternation at what she saw happening in Germany blazed on the pages of the Saturday Evening Post.7 Tompson was scrambling to puzzle out for herself as well as for her readers how the industrially advanced, modern, social democratic republic that she admired in Germany could make way for Adolf Hitler. Te Nazi party had won 107 seats in the federal par- liament in November 1930, up from a previous twelve. Hitler’s growing sway defed Tompson’s understanding of rationality, leadership, and German character, very much as Trump’s popular ascent fabbergasted me. Early in 1931 she squeezed into an overfow crowd in the Berlin Sportpalast, to see ffteen thousand people greet Joseph Goebbels, Hit- ler’s sidekick, by thrusting out their right arms and shouting “Heil!” in the Nazi salute. Military music and uniformed shock troops had already hopped up the crowd; swastikas swayed on fags above, and banners declared “Adolf Hitler Leads Us into a Better Future.” Goebbels declaimed for two hours on the single theme of Germany’s fnancial and spiri- tual ruin at the hands of the victors of the world war.8 Returning for a second visit in the fall of 1931, Tompson saw hundreds of thousands of people massing in “monster demonstrations” and knew that brown-shirted “Storm Troops” were battling Communists in the streets. She felt that revolutionary change was underway. Aiming to fgure it out, she secured an interview with Hitler—quite a journalistic coup, though the result she published early in 1932 proved to contain a phenomenal

7 On Dorothy Tompson’s conference with the Saturday Evening Post, see Peter Kurth, American Cassandra: Te Life of Dorothy Tompson (Boston, 1990), 154. Dorothy Tompson, “Poverty de Luxe” (part 1), Saturday Evening Post, May 2, 1931, pp. 6–7, 151–52; Dorothy Tompson, “Poverty de Luxe” (part 2), ibid., May 9, 193, p. 18; 1; Dorothy Tompson, “Something Must Happen,” ibid., May 23, 1932, pp. 18–19, 113. 8 On the Nazi party win in 1930, see “Poverty de Luxe” (part 1), 6; and Richard J. Evans, Te Coming of the Tird Reich (New York, 2004), 259, 261.

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error in judgment. She characterized Hitler as “the very prototype of the Little Man,” a person of such “startling insignifcance” that he would never become Germany’s dictator. He assumed power barely a year later.9 Despite that wrongheaded conclusion, Tompson observed Hitler’s modus operandi quite tellingly. Because he was a “Little Man,” she argued, hundreds of thousands who were likewise “Little Men,” resentful of their devastation by the war and the economic collapse, identifed with him. She highlighted immediately (and far more consistently than most American journalists) how central to Hitler’s intentions was his blaming of “the Jew” as the root of all problems. Without that, she wrote, “the whole thing, both the economic program and the racial, collapses.” She also saw the appeal in Hitler’s bluster. He set himself up “to be loved with fanaticism and emotional abandon,” she wrote. He gripped his followers in a “camp meeting atmosphere,” appealing to “invisible realities, to the emotions, to faith rather than to reason.” Logic did not matter. He did not care about gaining elites’ approval, she recognized, nor did he care about truth. Hitler “does not shrink from lying . . . nor from advocating the use of the lie” to his purpose, she wrote. Regretting her initial dismissal of Hitler’s capacities, Tompson saw that his claims “might be utter nonsense from an intellectual and rational viewpoint, and still overcome a whole world.”10 Well aware that the illiberal impulses fostering Hitler’s take-up were present in the United States too, Tompson tried to convey the phenomenon of Hitler’s appeal by sug- gesting American readers imagine “an orator with the tongue of the late Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan and the histrionic powers of Aimee McPherson [the wildly persuasive Los Angeles evangelist], combined with the publicity gifts of Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee” [the fathers of modern advertising and of publicity agentry]; she went on to say that this orator would manage to “unite all the farmers, with all the white collar unemployed, all the people with salaries under $3000 a year who have lost their savings in bank collapses and the stock market . . . [with] the louder evangelical preachers, the American Legion, the D.A.R., the Ku Klux Klan, the W.C.T.U., . . . Senator [William] Borah, and Henry Ford.”11 Just as Tompson was shocked and appalled by Hitler’s ability to mobilize Germans to believe that his leadership alone could address their personal miseries and renew national greatness, I was dumfounded that more than 40 percent of Americans wanted Trump 9 “Poverty de Luxe” (part 1), 6; Dorothy Tompson, “Will Gangs Rule the World?,” ibid., July 16, 1932, p. 65. Dorothy Tompson, “I Saw Hitler,” Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan, 92 (March 1932), 32–33, 160–64. Te article opened with a two-page spread of photographs of Adolf Hitler gesticulating while speaking. Tis article then became a short book, “I Saw Hitler!,” padded with photographs and her descriptions of numerous other German leaders. For the quotations, see Dorothy Tompson, “I Saw Hitler!” (New York, 1932), 14, 13. 10 “I Saw Hitler!,” 27–29, esp. 34. See also, for example, Dorothy Tompson, “Te Record of Persecution,” in Nazism: An Assault on Civilization, ed. Pierre Van Paassen and James Waterman Wise (New York, 1934), 1–24. In this essay, Tompson discussed persecution of numerous groups, and terrorization of the whole population by fear and threats of reprisal for any action perceived as against the state, including extraordinary treatment of Jews. For comparison, see Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: Te American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York, 1986). For the “to be loved” quotation, see Dorothy Tompson, “Back to Blood & Iron,” Saturday Eve- ning Post, May 6, 1933, p. 4. For the “camp meeting atmosphere,” “invisible realities,” and “does not shrink” quotations, see Tompson “I Saw Hitler!,” 30, 31. For the “might be utter nonsense” quotation, see Dorothy Tompson, “Room to Breathe In,” Saturday Evening Post, June 24, 1933, p. 54. 11 Tompson, “I Saw Hitler!,” esp. 34–35. Tree years later, when Sinclair Lewis wrote his deadly satirical novel, It Can’t Happen Here, he obviously borrowed from her. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (New York, 1935). See Beverly Gage, “Reading the Classic Novel Tat Predicted Trump,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2017, https://www .nytimes.com/2017/01/17/books/review/classic-novel-that-predicted-trump-sinclar-lewis-it-cant-happen-here .html?r=0.

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to be president. Although I see unnerving parallels between the style used by Hitler and by Trump to stir popular adherence, I am not saying Trump is “like” Hitler in an overall sense. Both Hitler and Trump aimed to become national leaders with supreme power, but what Hitler wanted to do with that power was unique to him. Trump’s ascension bore none of the marks of Hitler’s use of shock troops, street battles, and murder of hundreds of opponents. Te economic circumstances of the United States now difer immensely in scale and causation from those of Germany in 1930, even though economic resentments in both periods worked similarly to fuel a segment of the populace to welcome dramatic change. One needs to remain wary, nevertheless, and Tompson’s concerns are instructive. Tat Hitler had such devoted partisans in modern Germany—that he was voted into of- fce (after engineering many dirty tricks and false claims and murders)—especially dis- concerted and alarmed her. Hitler’s party arose within a representative government where “the people” had gained a voice. It is critical to recognize that the prologue to fascism was popular politics—mass politics. Hitler found ways to speak in the name of “the people” and mobilize favor—just as Trump astonishingly persuaded working-class and middle- class whites to believe “I am your voice.” Nor was Germany alone. Deteriorating economic conditions elsewhere, with extreme political contestation between left and right, led representative governments to fail, making space for right-wing dictators and military take-overs to arise in the name of public order. Eight European states saw their parliamentary forms of government fall to authoritarianism in the 1920s; nine more followed that route in the 1930s. Nine representative governments in Latin America, as well as Japan’s, had similarly succumbed by 1932, when Benito Mussolini comfortably proclaimed that “the liberal state is destined to perish.”12 Tese alarming shifts meant that by 1934 three-quarters of the inhabitants of Europe and Russia—over 300 million people—saw their world through the flters of state censorship and propaganda. Hitler’s government clamped down on the German press; the only German newspapers left standing took their orders from the Nazi leadership. Soon the foreign press was a target. Importation of 254 foreign newspapers and periodicals were banned in 1933, their possession criminalized. And when Dorothy Tompson came to Berlin the following summer she was summarily expelled, the frst American incriminated under a new retroactive law reserving the government’s right to deport anyone whose ac- tivities were deemed detrimental to Germany or disrespectful of its leaders.13

12 E. J. Hobsbawm, Te Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1994), 109–41; Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: Te New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York, 2013), esp. 3–18, 29–83, 103–17; Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1998), 3–41; Kiran Klaus Patel, Te New Deal: A Global History (Princeton, 2016), 45–47. For the Benito Mussolini quotation, see Katznelson, Fear Itself, 5. A talk by Professor Peter Gordon at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies on February 21, 2017, alerted me to the importance of the basic point that the prologue to fascism was popular politics. 13 Albin E. Johnson, “300 Million Citizens of Europe Living under Iron Rule of Censorship: Sixty Million More under Partial News Control,” Editor and Publisher, June 30, 1934, 1, 4, 38; Robert William Desmond, Te Press and World Afairs (New York, 1937), 138–69. Tompson’s good friend, newspaperman John Gunther, reported curtly, “Nazi Germany is a graveyard of newspapers.” See John Gunther, “Dateline Vienna,” Harper’s, 171 (July 1935), 199. John Elliott, “Nazis Eject Sinclair Lewis’s Wife for 1931 Article Criticizing Hitler,” New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 26, 1934, p. 1; and Frederick T. Birchall, “Dorothy Tompson Expelled by Reich for ‘Slur’ on Hitler,” New York Times, Aug. 26, 1934, p. 1. A few other American journalists had left in 1933 because of extreme informal pres- sures. See John Maxwell Hamilton, Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting (Baton Rouge, 2009), 262–82; and Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 21–23. On the importation ban, Robert W. Desmond, Crisis and Con- fict: World News Reporting between Two Wars, 1920–1940 (Iowa City, 1982), 419. In 1938, 77 more were banned. It was a crime for a German to have a copy or duplications or clippings thereof. See ibid.

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American foreign correspondents in Europe, frustrated and anxious, heightened their readers’ awareness of the tie between accurate public information and the survival of representative government. “Deprive the populace of real news—and you disarm it,” the well-known journalist Will Irwin summed up. Back in the United States, Tompson made the baneful efects of censorship and propaganda a major theme of hers in the mid- 1930s. Te instrumentality of information control in leading a populace to give their leaders willing assent, without any sense of compulsion, haunted her. “All dictatorships,” she declared in a speech, “although they rest their power in the last analysis on force, pre- fer to wield it by consent, and the propaganda power is the means of securing that consent.” Reading Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World early in 1933, she saw a strong analogy between Huxley’s dystopic projection and the burgeoning Nazi Reich, in that “Nobody will long for any other kind of life, because nobody will get reports of any other kind of life, except as they come through a strictly censored press.”14 She and other American journalists acknowledged that not only dictators but all governments, parliamentary ones included, used propaganda and censored information of state. Tey had a ready example in their own country, in the Committee on Public In- formation and punitive sedition laws during the world war. All the Allies (as well as the Central Powers) streamed propaganda to support their own people and demoralize the enemy. But without war, authoritarian states in Europe in the 1930s normalized the control of public information with precision and at unprecedented scale.15 To do so, they mobilized new technologies of mass communication, just as political voices today use our new forms. Te most important then was the radio. Tompson called the radio a “new revolutionary instrument,” when she analyzed a failed Nazi putsch that took place in July of 1934. Te plot included assassinating the Austrian chancellor, and it centered on a national radio broadcast falsely declaring a change in government. Te advantages of state-controlled radio for authoritarian purposes appeared obvious to Tompson: a broadcast from a central source arrived directly into the listener’s ears—and also leaked across borders easily, perhaps purposely. An authoritarian state could make a radio message “practically inescapable”—as Hitler vigorously did, once his party had seized the popular medium. “No channel of publicity,” Tompson wrote, “is being more exploited for propaganda purposes, both internally in separate countries, and interna- tionally.” She witnessed a stunning example of Nazi thought control during a plebiscite that Hitler called to confrm his supreme power and sole authority (just before she was ejected). Even though there was no chance that the plebiscite would go against Hitler— and he would have retained power regardless—the Reich put on an immense propaganda campaign. Te day of Hitler’s culminating speech was declared a national holiday so that everyone could hear the national broadcast of his words. Everyone owning a radio was instructed to turn it on and invite in any neighbors without radios. “In every restaurant, theatre, square and other public gathering place in every city,” loudspeakers were installed

14 Will Irwin, Propaganda and the News (New York, 1936), 10, 226. Dorothy Tompson, “Propaganda in the Modern World,” Vital Speeches of the Day, Nov. 4, 1935, p. 67. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London, 1932). Tompson, “Room to Breathe In,” 3–4. 15 See, for example, the much-cited and discussed Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Techniques in the World War (New York, 1927). “Te great war was the greatest piece of salesmanship in history,” Tompson acknowledged in a speech. “Publicity experts of all countries were put at the disposal of governments. For the frst time in the history of the world the total propaganda resources of nearly every nation were mobilized . . . and turned loose on the population.” See Tompson, “Propaganda in the Modern World,” 67.

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to boom his words everywhere—a broadcasting efort “unsurpassed anywhere,” the New York Times’s correspondent predicted, giving details of the plans.16 Potentially manipulative modes of shaping public opinion had the spotlight in the early 1930s in American politics as well as in Europe. Franklin D. Roosevelt began his whirlwind frst hundred days in the shadow of fascism and communism elsewhere, the same month that Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. If the majority of Americans took for granted the continuance of their democratic form of government, there were nonetheless constant reminders that it rested on an unstable point, like a spinning top: Why trust it to remain, except by some faith in American exceptionalism? fdr had swept the 1932 election, gaining close to 58 percent of the popular vote and nearly 90 percent of the electoral college. But American newspaper editorials, which refected the views of the industry owners, were not in synch. Only 41 percent of the dailies supported fdr in 1932, and his editorial support sank to 37 percent in 1936, when he won by 60 percent of the popular vote. Foreign correspondent John Gunther, usually in Vienna but visiting his home paper in Chicago in the fall of 1934 during the brief existence of the National Recovery Administration (nra), gave these reasons why conservative publishers in that newspaper-heavy city hated Roosevelt: “(a) they are Republicans, (b) they fear the bill of rights is being sabotaged, (c) they think Roosevelt is a communist, (d) they think he is a Fascist, (e) they disapprove of Mrs. Roosevelt talking on the radio.”17 Gunther was partly making fun, but it was not rare for fdr to be feared as a fascist, as well as to be blasted as a Red. Dorothy Tompson, with her political intelligence schooled in the German example, took the nra’s setting of wages and prices as a strong signal of Roosevelt’s impending fascism. She saw Germany’s descent into fascism as having started even before Hitler was in charge, with the government’s assumption of emer- gency powers over the economy. Tompson felt so leery of concentrated executive power that fdr’s charisma and mobilization of Congress to pass extraordinary measures quite alarmed her. She knew there was an American appetite for extreme executive action, because of the sinking economy at the time of fdr’s inauguration. Even the sober Walter Lippmann, for instance, in private conversation with the president, said to him, “Te situation is critical . . . You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.” A week or so after fdr’s inauguration, most reviewers were delighted with a sensational new Hollywood flm in which the president of the United States, elected as a corrupt- ible party hack, had a sudden accident that turned him into a visionary dictator. Review- ers—followed by large audiences—applauded as thrilling and wonderfully patriotic the screen president who dismissed his cabinet and the U.S. Congress, unilaterally solved the unemployment crisis by creating public works, eliminated Prohibition, created a federal police force that set gangsters before a fring squad to be executed, and, by putting on a belligerent display of American air power, forced European nations to pay their war debts and sign an international peace treaty. Only a few New York reviewers deplored

16 Dorothy Tompson, “Te Great War of Words,” Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 1, 1934, pp. 8–9, 68–70, esp. 8, 68. Frederick T. Birchall, “Hamburg to Greet Hitler as Hero at Key Talk of Campaign Today,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 1934, p. 1. See also Frederick T. Birchall, “Hitler Declares Hand Was Forced by Hostile World,” ibid., Aug. 18, 1934, p. 1; and Frederick T. Birchall, “Nazis See Treason in Hostile Ballots at Today’s Voting,” ibid., Aug. 19, 1934, p. 1. 17 Betty Houchin Winfeld, FDR and the News Media (Urbana, 1990), 127. John Gunther, typescript of usa log, Oct. 19, [1934], p. 4, John Gunther Addenda, box 2, John Gunther Papers (University of Chicago Special Collec- tions, Regenstein Library, Chicago, Ill.).

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it as an infantile and jingoistic fantasy, a “shamelessly dramatized editorial on behalf of Fascism.”18 Once in ofce, President Roosevelt showed his intention to lead the media rather than simply react to it. He went on the radio immediately, to give the frst of his carefully draft- ed “freside chats.” Taking that route around editorial antipathy, he proved his adeptness at using this new “revolutionary instrument,” as Tompson had called it, and projected his intelligence and charm and reassurance directly to the American people. Roosevelt also turned his immense talents on the Washington press corps, counting on their profes- sional principles to separate their news reports from the editorial views of the publishers. He was the frst president to hold frequent and regular press conferences (twice a week) and to allow correspondents to question him directly, rather than submitting written questions. (He did not permit them to quote what he said.) His charisma worked magic at frst. John Gunther, having an opportunity to observe, saw why: the president delivered every response with “the simplicity, elocution, and suspense-quality of a great actor.” fdr’s talent utterly charmed Gunther, who described how the president “twinkled” at an amus- ing question and the questioner felt satisfed; responded to something he did not wish to answer with “a long clever pause”; dodged another with “Laughter. Tilt of the head. Eyes snap like window panes with sun on them.” Tough telling the reporters very, very little, he put them in a marvelous humor, roaring with laughter.19 Tat honeymoon did not last: the president’s attempts to shape the news became news. By early 1935, the same traits that had charmed Washington correspondents irritated many of them. Tey scorned the administration’s ramped-up public relations eforts as press-agentry or propaganda. Newspaper publishers, who opposed fdr pretty solidly, weighed on White House reporters more heavily than did the principles of their trade. Many reporters gave in and wrote accordingly, aware that the boss would regard positive portrayals of the president as “biased” and fearing to be fred. Te frst-ever empirical study of the Washington press corps was published in 1937, one of a number of works then querying whether reportorial objectivity was possible at all.20 fdr avidly pursued his intents to make the news and have it circulate in the shape he preferred, but his methods look sane and mild indeed in retrospect. For example, when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst turned his large chain of newspapers against fdr in 1935, the president’s men learned from an intercepted telegram that Hearst told all his editorial writers to substitute the words Raw Deal for the words New Deal. Te way that fdr fought back was to make a public statement rebuking any “delib- erate coloring of so-called news stories, in accordance with orders,” and praising public- spirited newspaper owners who would tell their stafs that “facts must be presented as facts if the value of the news is to be saved.” Tus fnding ballast in the journalistic mandate to

18 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York, 1980), 300. For the “shamelessly dramatized” quotation, see Richard Watts Jr., “On the Screen,” New York Herald Tribune, April 1, 1933, p. 6. For a more typical review, see Mayme Ober Peak, “Reel Life in Hollywood,” Daily Boston Globe, March 20, 1933, p. 9. Gabriel over the White House, dir. Gregory La Cava (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1933). For more on the flm, see Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent (Berkeley, 1994), 82–87; Richard Brody, “Te Hollywood Movie Made for F.D.R.’s Inauguration,” New Yorker, Jan. 20, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/ the-hollywood-movie-made-for-f-d-r-s-inauguration; and David Nasaw, Te Chief: Te Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston, 2000), 464–66. 19 John Gunther, typescript of usa log, Dec. 7 [1934], John Gunther Addenda, box 2, Gunther Papers. 20 Winfeld, FDR and the News Media. George E. Reedy, “Te First Great Communicator,” Review of Politics, 54 (Winter 1992), 152–55. Rosten, “President Roosevelt and the Washington Correspondents.” Te empirical study was Leo C. Rosten, Te Washington Correspondents (New York, 1937).

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distinguish facts from opinions, fdr’s approach to his problems with the press operated a universe apart from President Trump’s rageful tweets, verbal abuse for respected news sources, and purposeful cultivation of news sites and journalists known to purvey lies.21 Te story of newsmaking and circulating remains fearsomely current: it is our con- temporary dilemma. Te postmodern cycle of speedy fractionalization of the news un- dermines any sense of security in public knowledge of our government’s dealings. Can we know for sure what we think we know? We historians are better fxed than most to resist the dangerous cynicism that can follow from such circumstances of indeterminacy. We are familiar with past uses of strategic manipulation. We have research skills. We are ac- customed to scrutinizing our sources. In other words, we have tools to use while refusing to succumb. Let’s be sure to use them.

21 Nasaw, Chief, 515. William Hearst had been a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 but turned sharply against him by 1935.

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