Political Geography 67 (2018) 32–45

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Political Geography

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“A new geography of defense”: The birth of psychological warfare T ∗ Jeffrey Whyte

Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada

1. A new geography of defense? which the term emerged in the United States, almost overnight, in the two years prior to American entry into the war. In this article I examine the emergence of “psychological warfare” in After the war, formal theory and doctrine attempted to insert and the United States in the years prior to American entry into the Second naturalize “psychological warfare” into conventional military history. World War. I detail the work of a concerted group of American inter- Written in partnership with Johns Hopkins University's School of ventionists in government, media and the academy who framed Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Office of War Information German psychological warfare as a new and unprecedented threat (OWI) veteran Paul Linebarger's (1948) Psychological Warfare became a purporting to alter the geography of war, and challenge the viability of foundational text, citing Gideon's ruse against the Midianites in the Old popular American isolationism. Drawing upon popular anxieties con- Testament as its first known instance. The text reimaged historical fig- cerning the threat of domestic and foreign “fifth columns,” psycholo- ures as “psychological warriors” including Athenian General Themis- gical warfare claimed to be a new and scientifically calibrated form of tocles (480 BC), Chinese Emperor Wang Mang (1 AD), Genghis Kahn propaganda working on unsuspecting civilian targets. Though (c1200), and Thomas Paine (1776). Beginning in 1953, The US Army American psychologists worked to articulate the threat, the construc- also contracted Johns Hopkins University's Operations Research Office tion of psychological warfare was nevertheless most directly tied to the (ORO)2 to produce three definitive volumes, beginning with The Nature spectre of German geopolitics. In this article, I detail these connections of Psychological Warfare by Wilbur Schramm, another OWI veteran and to demonstrate that psychological warfare in the United States pre- a pioneer of Communication Studies. Schramm (1953, 5) reproduced ceded itself: a propaganda campaign about German propaganda, Linebarger's vignettes on psychological warfare's ancient origins, “psychological warfare” gave birth to a new geopolitical imagination in claiming that “nations have been waging it since there have been na- which the circulation of news and information became a new terrain of tions.” war. This article opposes the post-war “search for origins” (Foucault, Political geographers have considered psychological warfare pri- 1977) by accounting for the specific and contingent circumstances marily in two contexts: its place within the broader militarization of the under which “psychological warfare” emerged in the United States Cold War social sciences (Farish, 2007, 2010; Pinkerton, Young, & between 1940–41.3 While deception, coercion, and persuasion may be Dodds, 2011; Whyte, 2017, pp. 1–29), and the revival of the Cold War “as old as nations,” the emergence of psychological warfare in these “battle for hearts and minds” during the 21st century's “war on terror” years was the result of concerted alarmism stressing the novelty of (Anderson, 2011; Belcher, 2012; Ek, 2000; Gregory, 2006).1 Outside “Hitler's frightful weapon” (Taylor, 1941). In a speech given the night geography, critical emphasis remains on the Cold War (Robin, 2003; before the Pearl Harbor attack, Nelson Rockefeller emphasized the Solovey, 2013), and students of both psychology (Herman, 1995) and unprecedentedness of the “new kind of psychological war” being waged communication (Simpson, 1994; Matellart 1994) have written accounts by Germany in the western hemisphere. The “new reality” of Germany's of their field's involvement in psychological war research and practice. “perfection of the methods of psychological warfare,” he claimed, had While it is generally accepted that “psychological warfare” coalesced created “a new geography of defense” (New York Times, Dec. 7, 1941). around the Second World War as the formalization of wartime propa- In the first half of this article I detail the construction of this “new ganda activities, little attention has been given to the specific ways in geography” as a project of individuals within the remit of William “Wild

∗ 1536 East Broadway, Vancouver, BC, V5N 1W1, Canada. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 Given the vagaries of “psychological warfare,” many cultural and political geographers address cognate themes (Cowen, 2004; Dittmer, 2005; Sharp, 2001). Similarly, psychological warfare is implicated in geographies of communication (Dittmer, Craine, & Adams, 2014) and what Pinkerton and Dodds (2009) have called “radio geopolitics.” Foucauldian and biopolitical research suggests psychological warfare's “population-centric” focus (Coleman & Grove, 2009; Elden, 2007). 2 On ORO, see Farish (2010, 136). 3 In his study of madness, Foucault (2014, 79) insisted upon “taking the practice of confinement in its historical singularity, that is to say in its contingency …; its essential non-necessity.” This opposed what he called an “ideological” analysis of madness which asked, “given the reality of madness … what are the grounds and conditions governing the system … that has led to a practice of confinement.” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.09.004 Received 21 February 2018; Received in revised form 24 July 2018; Accepted 10 September 2018 0962-6298/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. J. Whyte Political Geography 67 (2018) 32–45

Bill” Donovan's nascent Office of the Coordinator of Information (CoI). defeated by a “fifth column” that had sapped “national morale” through Following recent work in political geography exploring the relationship propaganda, rumor, and sabotage. Norway had not been captured by between geographers and the early American intelligence community armed force, he claimed, but “by means of a gigantic conspiracy” and a (Barnes, 2006, 2008; Barnes & Crampton, 2011; Barnes & Farish, 2006; “perfectly oiled political plot” (MacDonnell, 1995, 113). The explana- Crampton, 2014; Crampton, Roberts, & Poorthuis, 2014), I map Do- tion soon gained currency in the European and North American press, novan's network, analyze its primary literature in the popular and advancing the idea that fifth columnism could conquer nations “first academic presses, and show how “a new geography of defense” was and foremost from the inside.” constructed around the spectre of psychological warfare. In the process, Against popular isolationism, interventionists mobilized fifth I reveal how the construction of psychological warfare represented an column alarmism to imbue public opinion with urgent political sig- important moment in US-UK intelligence relations (Aldrich, 2004; nificance, not as a reflection of democratic will, but as a new kind of Dittmer, 2015). political-military front vulnerable to enemy attack. A full-page adver- In this article's second half, I detail the placement of the obscure tisement in the New York Times (June 10, 1940) from the Committee to German geographer Ewald Banse at the centre of Anglo-American Defend America was typical: under the large-type headline “STOP HI- alarmism over German psychological warfare. I show the role played by TLER NOW,” the ad's text instructed Americans to guard against the American geographers not only in propagating the Banse narrative, but Nazi “fifth column” which was “well trained in the dissemination of in linking psychological warfare to broader narratives surrounding poisonous propaganda,” and had as its objective “the destruction of German geopolitics (Crampton & Tuathail, 1996; Murphy, 2014; national unity.” The ad's copy was written by Roosevelt's close friend Tuathail, 1996). Arguing that popular disavowals of German geopolitics Robert Sherwood, soon to be a core member of the Office of War In- were tightly tied to the portrayal of German psychological warfare as a formation. It encapsulated interventionist strategy: emphasize the “strategy of terror,” I conclude by showing how the articulation of threat and sophistication of German propaganda while framing Amer- American psychological warfare as a liberal “strategy of truth” was ican public opinion as territory ceded by isolationists (Laurie, 1996,p. folded into a new American geopolitical imaginary underwriting the 38). Cold War “battle for hearts and minds.” Despite the Sturm und Drang, there was scarce evidence of a German fifth column in the United States. It was nonetheless a political ex- pedient: it obscured British intelligence failures in Norway (Knightley, 2. Fifth column lessons for America 2013), and in the United States isolationists were framed as either dupes or agents of German propaganda. As American historian and In the years following World War I there occurred in the belligerent isolationist Harry Elmer Barnes (1940, 560) noted in late 1940, “the nations what Philip Taylor (1980, 486) identifies as a “propaganda Fifth Column nonsense has taken the place of the atrocity stories in the boom” in literature discussing and debunking the excesses of wartime first World War.” Isolationism, he added, was increasingly branded as propaganda. “Vexed at the unknown cunning which seems to have unpatriotic “fifth column activity.” duped and degraded them,” as Harold Lasswell (1927, 2) put it, popular Isolationists rallied around the America First committee, founded in outrage was voiced against propaganda which “stood in relation to 1940 and drawing an incongruous constituency including anti-war ac- information as murder to killing” (Cull, 2008, p. 9). When tasked with tivists, communists, nativist fascists and pro-business conservatives selling intervention to isolationist and war-weary Americans by Pre- (MacDonald, 1941). Celebrity aviator and white supremacist Charles sident Roosevelt in the Summer of 1940,4 William Donovan's emphasis Lindbergh was its highest profile spokesman, though other members on psychological warfare as Germany's “new weapon” attempted to included Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy. Recriminations between harness this popular anxiety over propaganda, but was also confronted isolationists and interventionists intensified in the wake of the March by public apprehension toward efforts to bring the United States into 1941 Lend-Lease act, which drastically increased American material the war. Donovan was aided, however, by partnership with a secret support to the Allies. One interventionist committee — Friends of De- branch of British intelligence called the British Security Coordination mocracy, Inc. — accused America First of being a “Nazi transmission (BSC), led by William Stephenson (the storied spy “Intrepid”) and belt,” prompting Lindbergh to rejoin in an August 1941 radio address headquartered in New York at 30 Rockefeller Plaza (Conant, 2009; that Mahl, 1998). Together, Donovan and the BSC leveraged contacts in the the one-fifth who are for war call the four-fifths who are against war academy, radio, and press in support of several well-connected inter- the ‘fifth column.’ They know that the people of this country will not ventionist organizations, including the Committee to Defend America vote for war, and they therefore plan on involving us through sub- by Aiding the Allies, the Council for Democracy, and the Fight for terfuge (cited in Cole, 1953, 54). Freedom Committee.5 Prefiguring psychological warfare, interventionists publicized the It was not a baseless accusation. In addition to his work with the threat of a purported “fifth column”—subversives within the United BSC, concern over fifth columnism had been the ostensible purpose of States working on behalf of Germany. The Fifth Column had been the Wild Bill Donovan's fateful trip to London in the summer of 1940, title of Ernest Hemingway's only play in 1939, a political drama in- where the groundwork for his Office of the Coordinator of Information formed by his experience in the Spanish Civil War. The term gained was laid (Troy, 1981, p. 53). In London, Donovan was advised on the currency in the United States, however, primarily through the efforts of “problem” of fifth columnism by British intelligence, and though none interventionists like Chicago Daily News reporter Leland Stowe (1941), existed, constructing the threat was crucial to the establishment of his who in covering Germany's invasion of Norway – and later in his exposé- agency.6 The fabrication of a fifth column threat to countenance an style No Other Road to Freedom – claimed that Norway had been official response to it can therefore be understood as among Donovan's first and domestic intelligence operations as Coordinator of Informa-

4 tion. In the Summer of 1940, only 3% of Americans favored declaring war on Central to the effort was American journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Germany, though almost all desired British victory (Cantril, 1940). who worked as Donovan's fixer in London at the request of Frank Knox.7 5 Key figures included Council for Democracy founder Henry Luce and his Fortune magazine protégé C.D. Jackson, who would go on to occupy top posts in the new field of psychological war, first at the OWI, and later in the Eisenhower administration, see below. Other agents of the BSC are thought to include 6 The Associated Press reported that Donovan was “slated for a big post” as Walter Lippman, Dorothy Thompson, Walter Winchell, and Arthur Hayes head of a new anti-spy agency on the merit of his “investigations of the fifth Sulzbeger (Mahl, 1998). column” (New York Times, July 6, 1941).

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