naïve and impressionable, unsophisticated lad in the campaign hat has returned sophisticated, impressed upon and set with ideas and convictions under that double-peaked overseas cap o which he clings as if they were fundamental facts discovered, as indeed some of them are. Harassed, tired, skin-sticky, hungry and laden with equipment, he lands at Le Havre, with the expression, "So this is France!" After three more days of travel on two days' rations, he arrives, in his "forty hommes" standard car, somewhere about four hundred miles from where he started, somewhat more tired, dirty, harassed and hungry than ever before. During those three days he has formed a hasty kaleidoscopic impression of France that may cling to him until he embarks for home again, for this is typical of the traveling education the doughboy is destined to repeat as long as he is a member of the A. E. F. proof, more Hinky, Dinky, Parley Voo" During the three days he sees some of the countryside of France and is still liberal enough to compare it favorably with home country. Generally this is the first and last time any favorable comparisons are made. He sees many villages, typical of rural France, that impress him at once as being "way behind the times." (He never does quite catch the meaning of the "Old World.") He sees many old men, women and children, and some poorly uniformed, quite unromantic looking French soldiers. He throws chunks of bread from the train and watches children scramble for them in the mud. He philosophizes on that to the extent of expressing his opinion that it is a "helluva note." He may get some wine aboard his car-he generally does; sour nasty stuff, he thinks; but he drinks it, and being all out of sorts physically he gets sick, or a bit drunk, or quite drunk, as the case may be. He is quick to note that the M. P.s posted at the stations call Frenchmen "frogs," in a very condescending, superior and often acrimonious manner. That seems to him the real dope. He has not learned to hate the M. P.s yet or to sing "Hinky, Dinky, Parley Voo." Anyone who is already in France and wear- The conventional thing in fact that has four a young one. But most of the young ones are away working at munitions factories. drinks, writes letters, cusses the heat or the cold, the sun or the rain, becomes a bit mean-tempered on his daily beef ration, involves himself in a fight or two, perhaps gets an inside view of the guardhouse and then one day when it looks as if company will fight company and the whole regiment land in the brig, it is announced that this meatfed division is ready to move. Toward the Front, of course. "Thank God we're getting out of this hole!" "Oh, where do we go from here?" It is always so with him. Always "Thank God" to go, and forever arriving at a worse place, until he treads the deck of the ship that is heading west. Now follows a period of marching, bivouac, marching, boxcars, marching, bivouac, marching-night after night on foot, the days drowsed off in wet woods, both days and nights in rain. Mud, water, shoes run down, shoddy uniforms quickly wearing out, grub halfNo fires by night, no smoke by day, as he approaches the Front. Oh, for the old billets again! Blankets wet and muddy, overcoats drenched and steaming, reserve rations soggy-on goes the march. After the first few "Say! who won the war?" cooked. "Don't fall out.' Canteen too small. "Keep closed up." Stumbling in mud holes, "not a damned mule," worst pack in Europe, laden with ammunition. "My God, lieutenant, I can't go another step. Inspectors in automobiles taking notes on march discipline. "Thanks, buddy, that's a big help." Officer at the rear of each company. So it goes. pass it "Uncle Sam's Rich!" Then comes a pay-day, and he draws a Stone bruises on feet, pack cutting pocketful of that flimsy French paper, shoulders, hard to step easy in the dark, and as he looks at a twenty-franc note, ammunition belt skinning hips, and he exclaims, "Hell! "Damn those trucks!" "Captain, why and they call that aren't those packs rolled uniformly!" money!" That typi- "Sergeant, how often must I tell you fies his attitude to Tempers getting lost and passing the ward the franc in buck. Automatic rifle squads staggering France. At once he under worthless chauchats that don't proceeds to spend function and bulging musette bags. it. There is nothing "Halted again-why the hell-first batto buy except a few talion on wrong road-forward, cheap souvenirs or along-yeh, always one more K, ain't it? postcards, unless he -Say, bud, pull out them blanketsvisits the estami sure, drop 'em-whatell I care, Uncle nets. Often he does Sam's rich-into the woods here both, and does them dammit, keep up my head, you-! To brown. He spends, the right of my wrist-watch-move on, and he says "Keep for God's sake-Unload kitchens herethe change," bash- No smoking-What the hell you doing fully the first time, with that flash-light-No fires while dark, grandly the second, no smoke after daybreak-How the devil boisterously at the can I help it if the wood is wet-Cook, we third bottle, angrily mess at five-thirty-Don't give a damn at the fourth, de- if it is five-Colonel's orders. Slum! mands cognac at the fifth- It is raining and cold. Most of the men then the proprietor calls the sleep on the saturated ground in their overcoats. Not enough energy is left to He drills, maneuvres, sa- unstrap packs. Filth lies on the ground, lutes officers, trucks, colors occupied the night before by another outand what-nots, sleeps, eats, fit. Cooks try madly to create a meal You, all of you, who thumped heavily on through the dark and rain and mud-great-hearted, common men who would have made those marches on your hands and knees because you were going to the Front-you know! out of raw food and hard bread, without fire by night, without smoke by day (see inspector's report) out of water-soaked wood. An old-timer is muttering in his sleep, "This is a helluva war." Five-thirty A. M. "The colonel wants to see all officers." Assembly at church, half a kilo away. The general has given the colonel hell. The colonel gets the majors and captains. It is the grand army game. "No discipline. By God, won't have it!-ammunition in road-overcoats thrown away-men fell out-will bust you all-now in the Regular Army, we— keep them in line-use bayonets on them-government property in road officers asleep at five o'clock-get results or new officers-discipline-new noncoms -never stand for it again-I'll-" This may be from an officer "relieved" later in the field of battle. Some officers take it out on the men. Most of them swallow the lump and say nothing. Some regiments are different. Many are the same. You doughboys, you know, don't you? You who finished the march that night, and the next night, and many nights thereafter, and fell, numb in sleep and fatigue on the wet ground, careless of rain and mud-you who finished but were compelled by your human necessity to throw away that blanket, or that overcoat, or that extra pair of shoes that never fit anyhow, in order to do that last kilometer-you whose heart was nearly bursting your blouse as you dropped exhausted Sublime Patience I have used the word "patient" in describing the line soldier. It is of that trait, or virtue, rarely seen in him except in the immediate proximity of the Front, that I most often think when telling of the doughboy. It is not of result-getting that I speak when I mention the patience of the doughboy. The Lord knows he had little enough of patience when he thought in terms of results. Rather is it of the fortitude of character and of nerves, that hardship, misery, neglect, danger and death developed within him. Nor was it ever the supine resignation of the downhearted, for never was he genuinely downhearted. It was patience of a sublime sort, one of those wonders that war brings forth, camouflaged perhaps beneath the coarsened demeanor and rough speech of the fighting man, least of all suspected by him, but there whenever the test of physical and moral strength pressed him mostclosely. You who saw the soldiers in training here do not know it, nor do you who visited his billets, his leave areas, or his replacement camps. It was on the night after night marches, the on the battlefields of France, among seriously wounded in the aid stations and the field hospitals that this latent virtue of the average American was revealed. It is so I would have you see this boy until the eve of his first battle. He may be twenty-one or thirty-one years of age but until the day he went over the top he was a boy. Mentally unprepared, as most American men were, he had been picked up by war and hurried into training. Provincial, credulous, home-loving, and with a hard-boiled veneer, he was jammed into a harassed, weltering mass of humanity on board some vessel, landed (Continued on page 68) How the Propagandist Attacks the Foundation of Public Opinion Y ESTERDAY'S newspapers reported without reservation that Lenine was about to retire in favor of a Socialist government. To-day's newspapers deny this statement upon the authority of the Bolsheviki. Last week's newspapers carried the flat statement that pestilence, evacuation and executions had reduced the population of Petrograd from two million and a quarter to 800,000. In the same week, the same newspapers published interviews from persons just out of Petrograd saying that everything there is going nicely, thank you. Who is lying? To be brief and succinct, both sides. Then what is happening, really, in Russia? Also, what is happening in Budapest, in Fiume, in Cork and in the labor circles of London? No plain private citizen knows. Why? Becausebut to answer that question is the purpose of this article. By Will Irwin Author of: The American Newspaper any scholarly attention to the printers of Ave Maria Lane, who founded modern journalism. Their very names live only on the criminal records, where one or the other was condemned for seditious utterance. As it was in the beginning, so it is now. Here, in the past two centuries, we have a force which has overthrown kings, created nations; the very nerve-system of modern democracy. Yet the people who gather the permanent facts about this, our world, together with those who draw philosophy from the facts, have treated it with silent indifference. Journalism is the with silent indifference. Journalism is the little sister of literature, and this attitude proceeds probably from intellectual snobbery. But no curiosity of snobbery is more striking than this. However, the journalist, picking from European history the scattered facts about his craft, traces a struggle at times heroic, WILL To answer it fully I must begin very remotely, in time and place, from Russia in 1919-with London in the merry if tyrannical rule of good King James. During that period a gentleman of a free and open nature worked mightily over on Bankside, across the river, rehearsing cheap comedians. and female impersonators in comedies and melodramas of his own composition. They were designed, as he wrote himself, to tickle the ears of the groundlings-apprentices, servants, boatmen, and the sporting element of the gentry, visiting the theatres on the edge of the Bankside stews somewhat in the spirit of San Francisco society people taking a whirl at the Barbary Coast. In the same town and at the same period, certain journeyman printers, so obscure that kill this new political and social force, they bent themselves to control it. The retained journalist, employed to serve some master or interest, made his appearance. Then, as journalism surged on, as newspapers and periodicals from the luxury of the few became the necessity of the many, they found other means—such as the control of policies by advertisers. Yet, take it in the mass, nothing ever served to check the tendency of the newspaper to be a popular force-a tribunate of the people. When, on August 1, 1914, an era of the world ended, journalism as a whole was free and in the main honest. The American newspaper, especially, had a freedom beyond anything known to Europe. The very founders of the Republic had seen to that. Lawyers will tell you that the libel law, in most of our states, is just as stiff as the British libel law. That may be true in theory; it is not in practice. As things work out with us, the truth may always be published without fear of punishment. British law proceeds ILL IRWIN, keenest of students of world affairs, most interesting of the writers who analyze world and American conditions, shows in this article how the most important battles are not fought with powder and shells, but with printer's ink, cables and censorships. Nobody in America knows so well as Irwin the inside workings of propaganda, the modern force that is used so effectively to "educate" the public in the things that special interests want it to believe. This article reveals facts heretofore unpublished. even their names are unpreserved, were publishing extremely cheap pamphlets, embellished with grotesque cuts hacked out of boxwood, describing the latest alluring crimes or discussing popular issues. Both the manager-playwright of Bankside and the printers of Ave Maria Lane lived and died generally unnoticed by the exalted and intellectual of their times. The 'playwright was creating the chiefest glory of English literature; was giving the final polish to the mould of English speech. The printers were creating a force equal, in the end, to the might of kings and armies. In a generation or so after his death, Shakespere, the playwright of Bankside, came into his own; and the further it was carried down the path of the generations, the brighter burned his light. Ponderous scholars spent lifetimes speculating on the true meaning of his garbled text. Investigators gained a reflected immortality by discovering and patching together the scant records of his life. But no one, even to this day, has given on the theory that any damaging statement is libelous, and the "greater the truth the greater the libel." Then it exempts specifically a few classes of damaging statement which may be published if true. Further, the British have a curious, complex and hampering contempt of court law which works, if not against the freedom of the press, at least against its free expression. French and German laws for the regulation of the press proceed on a different theory from those of the British but they are, on the whole, almost equally strict. No other country grants such liberty to the newspaper press as the United States. The conservative would call it not liberty but license-that, however, is aside from the mark. -THE EDITORS. at times merely sordid, for the right to print. Kings, potentates and vested interests seemed dimly to perceive in this new force a tribunate of the people, dangerous to those in established power; wherefore, they set themselves to suppress it by major force. For a century, when ever a journalist breaks into formal history we usually find him in the stocks. For example, Daniel De Foe, the author of "Robinson Crusoe" and parent of the Sunday Supplement, stood for a day in a wooden collar while the apprentices of London threw dead cats at his head. The Growth of a Popular Force Yet journalism would not be denied. In the course of a century and a half it wriggled loose from its fetters; we established fully in the United States and fully enough for all useful purposes in Europe, the right to print. When journalism became too strong for suppression, those same kings, powers, potentates and special interests changed their tactics. Having failed to Now, having this extraordinary freedom, we alone have occupied a position to make experiments, to try new methods. Nowhere had our journalism the finish of the London leaders, the artistic quality of the Parisian "specials"; but since the beginning of the nineteenth century every change in the method of journalismwhat I may call its strategy arose on this side of the water, to be copied years later by a reluctant Europe. Until the thirties and forties of the last century, the newspaper was not a news paper. It was an editorial organ, where some man or faction expressed partisan politics. In 1814 the London Times published in about twenty lines, vaguely expressed, the story of the Battle of Waterloo, adjoining two and a half columns of editorial opinion. James Gordon Bennett the elder, with the old New York Herald, made the daily newspaper a news organ. Europe held up shocked hands; within a decade American newspapers began to fight their "WHILE or so, she followed. We first, and Europe afterward, adopted the press bureau method of getting and distributing worldnews. We first, and Europe afterward, put illustrations into daily journalism and, going further, photographic illustrations. We first, and Europe afterward, developed advertising and established the business principle that advertisers, not subscribers, should in the future be the main source of revenue. Even in the field of mechanical invention we expressed this tendency to push journalism to the limits of the unknown. The rotary press, the linotype machine, the stereotype process, the adaptation of photo-engraving to fast presses -all these were American inventions. Except in literary quality, America was always first; the rest a decade or two behind. Of that we have seen a humorous example since the war. Regarding the newspaper mainly as a news paper, we learned long ago that the busy American subscriber upon picking up his favorite journal wishes to be informed at once of the one to six or seven biggest and most startling events which have occurred that day. Therefore the American editor plucked the stories of those events from the mass of the day's news, put them in a preferred position-usually the front page and pointed them up with headlines in big type so that he who ran might read. Europeans, and especially the British, seemed to hate this method. Whenever a Briton criticized the American press, he jumped with especial vigor on our "garish headlines." He seemed to feel that there was in the process something immoral. The war came. Every Englishman, with his sons fighting at the Yser and the Aisne, with his house nightly imperilled by Zeppelin or Gotha, with his cherished empire trembling in the balance, wanted to know immediately how things were coming out. The British newspapers took at once to headlines as big, as condensed, as "garish" as our own. The war is over but the headlines remain. American Innovations tise, and that regular publications were, on the whole, the best medium, we carried advertising to an importance and an art which Great Britain and the Continent knew not. The business of soliciting and preparing advertisements grew so profitable as to attract exceptionally good minds. These men proceeded from hitand-miss methods to accurate ones. They studied the psychology of persuasion. During the last twenty years there has appeared in America-and in America alone-a whole literature of the subject, varying from flippant and shallow to profound and original. Our experts in advertising knew by the book on what larger principles to proceed in any campaign to influence the public mind." Third, we had bred on the fringes of journalism a new profession-that of publicity agent. Somewhere along in the past generation, actresses and then plays be WHILE they work with many tools, the main object of the propagandists whether political or industrial, is always the same-to slant, to bias, to color the news. The gentlemen who serve special interests-reactionary or radical-have ceased to skim the surface and have got down to the foundation of public opinion. We may have for a decade or a generation an age of lies, whereof the honest editor or reporter will be as much the victim as the public." Three advances in American newspaper method are pertinent to the present situation. First, we learned how, in a modern democracy, the public mind may best be influenced. From the days of the pamphleteers to those of the London Times leader-writers, the partisan presented his case and strove for converts through the expression of individual opinion. So, for a century or two, did our newspaper partisans. Only in the last generation have our editors and publishers, expressing their own peculiar spirit of originality, inquired into this process and discovered its flaws. This is an age of universal education; it is also a critical age. The average reader had sense and education enough to perceive, instinctively if not consciously, that the fulmination of a partisan leader-writer was tarred from its birth with the black stick of prejudice. He wanted to know the facts, and from them to make up his own mind-or at least to think that he made up his own mind. Suddenly, in the sighties and nineties of the past century, or the "carnival of muckraking"-name it according to your individual opinions and wrote its name into Amercian history. Now Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker and Samuel Hopkins Adams presented, in the articles which stirred the nation, not obvious opinions, but news. All this, of course, was news written from a point of view; more or less subtly, the news was colored. However, we found other methods. The Associated Press declares that its aim is to present the news entirely without color; yet it became possible so to edit this colorless news as to tinge public opinion. For example, there is a great coal strike in Pennsylvania; you are editor of an anti-labor newspaper on the Pacific Coast. From the colorless, impersonal report of the Associated Press, you choose that part which describes a murderous riot of the strikers, and "play it up"-give it preferred position on the front page, with a headline describing its atrocity. In the same report there may be an account of rough work by the State Constabulary. "Play it down"-print it on the second page with an obscure headline. Of course, if yours is a labor organ you will reverse the process. The attack of the State Constabulary goes on the front page under a hot headline; the riot, with a small headline, is tacked onto the end of the story. All this, until recently, was a peculiarly American method. Before the Great War the editorial page in Great Britain, the signed special article on the Continent, were the battlefields of public opinion. Second, we worked out "advertising psychology," Having taught the business man that it really did pay to adver gan to hire specialists whose agent was long merely a pic- of advertising expert. These men know how to lay out and put through nation-wide campaign; and they use the news columns, not the editorial page. a So there we were when the war began. American journalism, as usual, had pushed its strategy one era in advance of European. British and French journalists used to tell us before the war that the American type of journalism would never succeed in Europe, notwithstanding the fact that Northcliffe, the outstanding figure of London journalism, owed much of his success to a study of American method. They were wrong; the striking thing about the Indo-European mind is not its differences between races, but its universal resemblance. The war was to demonstrate that. Early Propaganda In all the ages of journalism, governments, parties and special interests had employed propaganda. They hired or subsidized editorial writers or pamphleteers to attack the opposition cause, to praise their own. Such literary lights as Dr. Johnson in England and Balzac in France worked in their time on this form of propaganda. Not until the era of commercial imperialism which preceded the great war did the powers of Europe begin to take a leaf from the American notebook and to slant or color the news. It was long an axiom in journalism that you could believe little that came out of China. That was because the imperialist governments, struggling for "spheres of influence," all had their propaganda at work on China-suppressing this fact, enlarging on that; subtly coloring and even inventing. In the light of what we know now, we shall some day have to revise our |