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

paganda that persists to this day. In reviewing how journalism developed its own peculiar cognitive dissonance about such persuasive information, it is important to realize that press attitudes about propaganda did not develop in a linear and uniform manner. Rather, news worker stances toward domestic propaganda, greatly influenced by the shifting context of the interwar years, acclimated gradually.

From a wide-angle view of the period, two factors contributed to press accommodation of domestic propaganda and the PR industry. First, as the years progressed, press resentments about World War I’s domestic propaganda faded, to be replaced, in the years shortly before World War II, by concerns about recovery from the economic downturns that stemmed from the Great Depression. Within this restoration narrative, the American press, often isolationist, articulated national unity in the face of economic adversity at home and public vigilance about propaganda from abroad. Second, by the late 1930s, the U.S. public relations industry had greatly distanced itself from the palpable World War I manipulations of the CPI. Instead, the emerging PR industry, through its increasing ability to package information, market events, and brand authoritative sources, made itself pragmatically useful to journalists.

The interwar decades, therefore, featured ongoing disillusionment about the legacy of World War I, the domestic turmoil of the Great Depression and its lingering aftereffects, and increasing anxiety about the specter of America’s involvement in new wars in Europe. From the perspective of the times, these traumatic factors had no clear demarcation lines; these elements buffeted the American public sphere throughout these decades. As the country struggled to make sense of the legacies of war and recent economic upheavals, it progressed through national narratives that attempted to resonate with the majority of Americans. The World War I propaganda in the United States sold many in the nation on bringing democracy to the world, a notion that quickly subsided. In the 1920s, a rising postwar prosperity tended to promote a focus on the marketplace of ideas and domestic wealth creation. After the depression, New Deal orientations promoted the idea that government should intervene to help foster economic recovery. To counteract that perspective,