Press Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalisti ...

from the CPI, professional persuaders—commonly called “publicists” through the first part of the 1920s—began to integrate propaganda strategies and tactics into their domestic publicity efforts.³⁸ And, clearly by the later part of the interwar years, scholars often pointed to propaganda as an endemic part of the new public relations profession. In 1930 Peter Odegard commented that public relations counsels were “shirt stuffers for prominent persons and corporations.” PR people, he said, “are high-power propagandists.”³⁹ By 1933 Harold Lasswell noted, in an extensive definition and description of propaganda, that public relations practitioners were a significant part of “congeries of propaganda organizations and agents speaking for every conceivable vested interest.”⁴⁰ Similarly, Leonard Doob’s 1936 examination of propaganda tactics in American society identified public relations people as propagandists who discover “what the public wants and gives it, usually in a surreptitious fashion, what he wants to give it.”⁴¹ Complicating the association between propaganda and public relations further, Edward Bernays, a former CPI employee, attempted, through books, articles, and speeches, to establish that propaganda was the methodology that the new field of PR used to demonstrate that it made a unique contribution to the American marketplace of ideas. However, during the years right before America’s entry into World War II, understandings had shifted somewhat. During the late 1930s propaganda was described as the disinformation approaches that were being used among the nations at war in Europe. At the same time, the term “public relations” became more associated with an emerging persuasive, market-oriented industry that often worked in concert with advertising to sell goods and services to the public.⁴²

For the most part, however, the interwar period featured a conflation of the words “propaganda” and “public relations”—a blurring of terms that, even to this day, can complicate distinguishing the two. This work maintains that, since the interwar years, public relations as both theory and practice has progressed beyond the mass suasion imperative of propaganda that was readily apparent during and after World War I. As early as 1948 two prominent PR practitioners published a definition that situated public relations as a function that, ideally, attempts to achieve consensus