A history of propaganda

Propaganda has a history because media have a history. Every time a new means of reaching a crowd has appeared, from the inscription to the printing press to the feed, someone has used it to move the crowd without informing it, and the techniques they used were mostly the old ones at a new scale. This is the story in eleven eras, each linked to the archive and to the case studies that show the posters and campaigns in detail.

Antiquity: the ruler's image

The oldest surviving propaganda is carved in rock. The Behistun inscription, cut into a cliff in western Iran around 520 BC on the orders of Darius I, records in three languages how the king defeated nine rebels and restored order with the favor of the god Ahura Mazda; it is five hundred feet up and could not be read from the road, which suggests its audience was the god and posterity rather than the passer-by. Egyptian temple reliefs showing Ramesses II's victory at Kadesh, a battle that was at best a draw, are propaganda in the plainer sense: a public account of events arranged to glorify the ruler, repeated on walls across the kingdom.

Rome made the form systematic. Coins carried the emperor's face and a slogan on every transaction; triumphal arches and columns narrated campaigns in stone; Augustus's Res Gestae, his own account of his deeds, was inscribed on bronze at his mausoleum and copied to temples across the empire. The techniques are the ones on this site's Visual family page: the ruler shown at heroic scale, the enemy shown small and foreign, the victory shown and the cost not. What antiquity lacked was not the method but the reach. A message that had to be carved could not be changed, and a message that had to be read could reach only the few who could read.

Printing and the Reformation

Gutenberg's press, from about 1450, was the first technology of mass persuasion, and the Reformation was its first campaign. Martin Luther's pamphlets, from 1517 onward, were short, vernacular, cheap, and illustrated, and they were printed in editions that no manuscript could match; by one estimate a third of all books printed in Germany between 1518 and 1525 were by Luther. The woodcuts that accompanied them, by Lucas Cranach and others, showed the Pope as the Antichrist and monks as wolves, and reached the majority who could not read the text. The Catholic response, slower and more learned, lost the opening decade.

It was the Catholic Church that gave the activity its name. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV founded the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, to organize missionary work and to coordinate the answer to Protestantism. The word meant organized spreading of a doctrine, with no suggestion of dishonesty, and kept that sense for three centuries. The techniques of the period are in the Language and Visual families: Name Calling and Dehumanization in the woodcuts, Slogan in the printed broadsides, Repetition through the sheer volume of the press.

Revolution and Napoleon

The eighteenth century's revolutions were fought in print as much as in the field. The American colonists' pamphlets, Thomas Paine's Common Sense above all, sold in numbers that made them the first political best-sellers; Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre, which showed British soldiers firing in a line on the orders of an officer into a peaceful crowd, misrepresented the event in every particular that mattered and was the most widely circulated image of the dispute. The French Revolution added the festival, the oath, the uniform, and the cockade: participation as propaganda, in which the citizen performed the regime's story rather than reading it.

Napoleon was the first ruler to run a modern apparatus. He controlled the press by closing most of it, wrote his own bulletins from the field, commissioned the paintings, by David and Gros, that fixed his image for two centuries, and understood the value of a defeat reported as a victory. The Bulletins de la Grande Armée were so reliably favorable that "to lie like a bulletin" entered French. His techniques were Cult Of Personality, Card Stacking, and Media Capture, and the last of these was the innovation: he did not merely use the press but owned it.

The First World War: the state builds a machine

Everything before 1914 was improvisation. The war that began that year was the first in which every belligerent built a permanent agency to manage opinion at home, among allies, in neutral countries, and behind enemy lines, with budgets, staffs, and a planning cycle. Britain's War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House, set up in September 1914 and kept secret even from Parliament, worked through writers, the press, and film; its Report on Alleged German Outrages, the Bryce Report of 1915, gave the Belgian atrocity stories an official imprimatur and was translated into thirty languages. The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee's posters raised the largest volunteer army in history before conscription; the case study on the recruitment posters shows how.

The United States entered the war in April 1917 and created the Committee on Public Information within a week. The Creel Committee, as it was known, ran the Official Bulletin, the Four Minute Men, the Division of Pictorial Publicity, and a film division, and reached, by its own count, every adult in the country many times over; the case study describes the machine. Germany's effort, run by the military, was blamed afterwards for having lost the war of words, and the lesson was learned by a corporal who wrote in Mein Kampf that enemy propaganda had been a weapon of the first order.

The war also produced the vocabulary. When it ended and the memoirs and official histories described what had been done, the public learned how thoroughly it had been managed, and propaganda turned from a neutral word to a dirty one within a decade. The archive's First World War section holds the posters.

Between the wars: Bernays and the Institute

The men who had run the democratic propaganda went into business. Edward Bernays, who had worked for the Creel Committee's foreign section, opened a public relations office in 1919 and spent the 1920s inventing the trade: the staged event reported as news, the authority arranged to say what the client needed, the product attached to a cause. The Torches of Freedom and the bacon-and-eggs survey are his method in two of its purest forms. Walter Lippmann described the manufacture of consent in 1922 and worried; Bernays described it in 1923 and 1928 and sold it. Advertising absorbed the committee's people and methods, and the decade's cigarette, soap, and motor-car campaigns are where most of the Classic family's techniques were refined.

The dictatorships built on the same foundation. Lenin's party had its Department of Agitation and Propaganda from 1920 and used posters, trains, and theater to reach a largely illiterate population; the Fascist state in Italy and, from 1933, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Goebbels made the management of opinion a department of government with its own minister. Radio gave a single voice access to every living room for the first time, and by the mid-1930s the voice was often a dictator's.

The alarm produced the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1937, and its seven devices, written to be taught to schoolchildren, are the first family on this site. The What is propaganda? article tells that story; the interwar section of the archive holds the posters and advertisements.

The Second World War: total war, total message

Every power that fought the Second World War had learned from the first. Britain's Ministry of Information, set up on the first day, ran a home-front campaign that ranged from Fougasse's cartoons to the "Dig for Victory" posters, and learned, after a bad start with the hectoring "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory", to speak to the public rather than at it. Its black propaganda arm, under Sefton Delmer, ran radio stations that posed as German. The United States' Office of War Information, from 1942, coordinated the posters, films, and broadcasts that are the best-known body of American propaganda, from the production-drive posters to Frank Capra's Why We Fight series; the loose lips case study follows one of its campaigns.

Germany's ministry controlled every medium in the Reich and the occupied territories and produced, in Der ewige Jude and Jud Süss, the most notorious propaganda films ever made, in which Dehumanization was not a device but the whole purpose. The Soviet Union's wartime posters, the Kukryniksy collective's caricatures of Hitler and Irakli Toidze's "The Motherland Calls", are among the strongest designs in the archive. Japan's Cabinet Information Bureau ran the home front and the Greater East Asia message abroad.

The war fixed the techniques in their modern form and gave the archive most of its material. The Second World War section is the largest, and the posters in it show every family at full strength: fear, the common enemy, the flag, the plain-folks worker, the slogan, and the omission of everything the public was not meant to know.

The Cold War: the long campaign

The war that followed was fought mostly in words, and both sides built institutions for it. The United States Information Agency, from 1953, ran libraries, exhibitions, the Voice of America, and a publishing program across the world; Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, nominally private and secretly funded by the CIA until 1971, broadcast into the Eastern bloc. The Soviet Union's answer was the apparatus it already had, plus the KGB's active measures: forgeries, front organizations, and planted stories run as long campaigns, of which Operation INFEKTION, the AIDS-origin story of the 1980s, is the best documented. The glossary entry describes the method.

At home, the American state ran civil defense as reassurance, the subject of Duck and Cover, and the Soviet state ran its space program as proof of the system, the subject of the space posters. Both campaigns were built on real events and both depended on what they left out. The Cold War section of the archive holds the posters, pamphlets, and film stills.

The period also produced the modern study of the subject. Jacques Ellul's Propaganda (1962) argued that propaganda was a condition of mass society rather than a set of messages; Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School read advertising as a form of social control; and the research tradition that began with Carl Hovland's wartime studies of persuasion grew into the social psychology on which this site's "exploits" lines depend.

Advertising's golden age

The same decades were the high period of commercial persuasion. Television advertising, from the early 1950s, put the techniques in every home every evening, and the agencies of Madison Avenue refined them with research: motivational studies, focus groups, and the first systematic use of the psychology of persuasion. The campaigns that defined the period, A Diamond Is Forever, the Marlboro cowboy, "Think Small", and the hundreds of cigarette, car, and appliance campaigns in the archive, are where the Classic family's devices were perfected and where the Visual family's techniques of scale, cropping, and juxtaposition became a craft.

The period also produced the modern front group. The tobacco industry's research council, from 1954, and the packaging industry's Keep America Beautiful, from 1953, are the cases this site uses for manufactured doubt and for the front group; both were run by public relations firms, both used the techniques of the Structural family, and both were exposed only decades later through documents. The pattern they established, the industry body with an independent-sounding name, is now the standard response of any industry whose product is found to harm.

Cable, talk radio, and the partisan channel

The end of the Cold War coincided with the breakup of the broadcast audience. Cable television multiplied channels, the repeal of the American Fairness Doctrine in 1987 freed broadcasters from the obligation to present opposing views, and talk radio and then cable news discovered that a partisan audience was loyal, cheap to serve, and profitable. The techniques of the period are those of the Framing and omission family at industrial scale: Agenda Setting, False Balance where balance served and its absence where it did not, Loaded Language as house style, and Repetition across a day's programming.

The period's innovation was the echo chamber, a media environment in which an audience could hear only its own side, and the emergence of spin as a recognized trade in political communication. The war room, the message of the day, and the rapid-response unit were the political campaign's answer to the twenty-four-hour channel, and Message Discipline became a profession.

Social platforms: the crowd as medium

The social platforms of the 2000s and 2010s changed the economics of propaganda more than any technology since the press. Reach that had required a broadcaster or a printing plant now required an account; the audience was also the distribution system; and the platforms' ranking systems rewarded exactly what propaganda had always sought, attention and reaction. The Digital-era family on this site is the catalog of what followed: Bot Amplification, Sock Puppets, Astroturfing at a scale no letter-writing campaign could match, Engagement Bait and Rage Farming built on the ranking signals, Microtargeting that let a campaign say different things to different people, and the Firehose Of Falsehood that overwhelmed the audience's capacity to check.

The state actors adapted their old methods. The Russian Internet Research Agency's operations against the 2016 American election, documented in the Mueller investigation and in platform reports, were active measures run through fake accounts, and the term influence operation was coined to describe them. Platforms responded with the enforcement category of coordinated inauthentic behavior, and researchers with the field of computational propaganda. The techniques were old; the scale, the speed, and the anonymity were new, and so was the discovery that a private company's ranking algorithm was now the most important propaganda institution in the world.

Generative AI: the synthetic voice

The latest shift is the newest and its history is short. Systems that generate text, images, voice, and video on demand, available to anyone from the early 2020s, removed the last cost from the production of persuasion. A campaign that once needed writers can now generate a thousand variants of a message; a black-propaganda station that once needed actors can clone a voice; and the deepfake, a synthetic video of a real person, has moved from a research curiosity to a tool used in elections and wars. The Synthetic Personas of the Digital-era family, fake people with generated faces and life histories, are its direct product.

The techniques, again, are old. A generated image of a leader surrendering is a forgery, and forgery is the oldest trick in the active-measures file. What has changed is that the cost of a convincing forgery is now near zero, that the volume of synthetic content can swamp the real, and that the audience's oldest defense, the evidence of its own eyes, is no longer reliable. The response, so far, has been provenance standards for images, detection tools that lag the generators, and the same remedy this site offers for every era: knowing the techniques, so that the method is recognized whatever the medium.

What changes and what does not

Reading the eras in sequence shows a pattern. Each new medium, the press, the poster, radio, film, television, the platform, the generator, has produced a burst of propaganda in its first decades, before the audience learned to read it, and each burst has been met, eventually, by a literacy: the Reformation's readers learned to weigh a pamphlet, the 1920s learned the word propaganda, the 1930s produced the Institute, and the 2010s produced the study of information disorder. The techniques themselves have barely changed since the Institute cataloged seven of them in 1937, and most of those would have been recognizable to a Roman. What changes is the reach, the speed, and the cost, and what has to be relearned each time is the reading.

Questions

When did propaganda begin?

With rulers who could afford to carve their version of events in stone: the Behistun inscription of about 520 BC and the Egyptian temple reliefs are the oldest surviving examples. Organized, mass propaganda begins with the printing press and the Reformation.

Where does the word propaganda come from?

From the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, founded by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. The word was neutral until the First World War, after which it meant manipulation.

Which war produced the most propaganda?

The Second World War, in volume; the First, in innovation. The First World War created the permanent state agencies and the vocabulary; the Second used them on every medium at once.

Did the techniques change with the internet?

The scale, speed, and cost changed; the techniques mostly did not. Bot amplification is astroturf, synthetic personas are black propaganda, and the firehose of falsehood is repetition. The genuinely new elements are the ranking algorithm and the generated image.

Is advertising part of the history of propaganda?

Yes. The people who ran the First World War's propaganda went into advertising and public relations, and most of the techniques in the Classic family were refined on cigarettes and soap before they were used again on wars.

Where can I see the posters?

The archive on this site holds annotated items from each era, organized by period, country, medium, and source. The Library of Congress, the Imperial War Museums, and the US National Archives hold the collections they come from.

Sources

1. Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
2. Cull, Nicholas J., David Culbert, and David Welch. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003. ISBN 978-1576078204
3. Welch, David. Propaganda: Power and Persuasion. London: British Library, 2013. ISBN 978-0712357005
4. Edwards, Mark U. Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
5. Holtman, Robert B. Napoleonic Propaganda. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950.
6. Sanders, M. L., and Philip M. Taylor. British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–18. London: Macmillan, 1982.
7. Creel, George. How We Advertised America. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920.
8. Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998. ISBN 978-0805067897
9. Welch, David. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 978-0415275088
10. Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0521819978
11. Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. ISBN 978-0374287269
12. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. New York: Knopf, 1965.
13. Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0190923631
14. Woolley, Samuel C., and Philip N. Howard, eds. Computational Propaganda. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0190931407