"War is A Racket"
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." • Smedley D. Butler
“In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money from mass human suffering.”*
“War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book, by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient.
Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit, such as war profiteering from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the United States occupation of Haiti, which lasted from 1915 to 1934. After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. ” • Wikipedia
War is a Racket by Smedley Butler
WAR: Who Pays The Ultimate Price and Who Reaps Unlimited Profit?
“At the start of the 20th century, while the Europeans were bogged down in World War I, Europe’s film industry was at a standstill. But across the Atlantic, it was starting to take off. Film professionals, who were based in New York and Chicago, were moving to Los Angeles to expand their production. With its sunshine, wide open spaces and the diversity of its landscapes, the Californian metropolis was the perfect setting to welcome ambitious entrepreneurs and artists in search of fame and inspiration.
At the time, Hollywood was a small rural community that had just become part of Los Angeles. Filmmakers were starting to build the first open-air sets. Filming was expanding, production techniques were evolving and the first blockbusters were born.
The conflict in Europe (1914-1918) soon became a source of inspiration for Hollywood. At first, from 1914 to 1915, films made the case for peace, relaying the US policy of non-intervention. The tone began to change from 1916, with heroes who were clearly taking the side of democracy and the Allied powers. In 1917, when the United States entered the war after three years of neutrality, popular actors – such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford – joined forces with Washington to encourage Americans to sign up for war bonds. Finally, 1918 marked the year of anti-German propaganda, nationalism and victory.” • The birth of a film industry: Hollywood and World War I – France 24
Hollywood - Ep 4 : Hollywood Goes to War
It’s About Wall Street: It’s About Getting The Public To Participate
Uncle Sam Wants You To Give Him A Loan
“A Liberty bond (or liberty loan) was a war bond that was sold in the United States to support the Allied cause in World War I. Subscribing to the bonds became a symbol of patriotic duty in the United States and introduced the idea of financial securities to many citizens for the first time. The Act of Congress which authorized the Liberty Bonds is still used today as the authority under which all U.S. Treasury bonds are issued.* ... The response to the first Liberty Bond was unenthusiastic and although the $2 billion issue reportedly sold out, it probably had to be done below par because the notes traded consistently below par. One reaction to this was to attack bond traders as "unpatriotic" if they sold below par. The Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange conducted an investigation of brokerage firms who sold below par to determine if "pro-German influences" were at work. The board forced one such broker to buy the bonds back at par and make a $100,000 donation to the Red Cross. Various explanations were offered for the weakness of the bonds ranging from German sabotage to the rich not buying the bonds because it would give an appearance of tax dodging (the bonds were exempt from some taxes).” • Wikipedia
See also: Turning Citizens into Investors: Promoting Savings with Liberty Bonds During World War I.
A United States poster advertising World War I Liberty Bonds – 1918 – Artist: Winsor McCay • Wikimedia Commons
World War One Generated More Than Profit, World War One Generated Modern American Identity
“The entry of the United States into World War I changed the course of the war, and the war, in turn, changed America. Yet World War I receives short shrift in the American consciousness.
The American Expeditionary Forces arrived in Europe in 1917 and helped turn the tide in favor of Britain and France, leading to an Allied victory over Germany and Austria in November 1918. By the time of the armistice, more than four million Americans had served in the armed forces and 116,708 had lost their lives. The war shaped the writings of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. It helped forge the military careers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and George C. Marshall. On the home front, millions of women went to work, replacing the men who had shipped off to war, while others knitted socks and made bandages. For African-American soldiers, the war opened up a world not bound by America’s formal and informal racial codes.”*
“The war touched everything around the globe. Our entire world was shaped by it, even if we do not always make the connections,” Neiberg says. Historian and writer A. Scott Berg emphatically agrees. “I think World War I is the most underrecognized significant event of the last several centuries. The stories from this global drama—and its larger-than-life characters—are truly the stuff of Greek tragedy and are of Biblical proportion; and modern America’s very identity was forged during this war.”
World War I poster by Howard Chandler Christy (1873-1952). "Fight or buy bonds. Third Liberty Loan." –1917 • Wikimedia
Selling War Bonds: United Artists
“A common consensus was that more needed to be done to sell the bonds to small investors and the common man, rather than large concerns. The poor reception of the first issue resulted in a convertible re-issue five months later at the higher interest rate of 4% and with more favorable tax terms. Even so, when the new issue arrived it also sold below par. This weakness continued with subsequent issues, the 4.25% bond priced as low as 94 cents upon arrival.
Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo reacted to the sales problems by creating an aggressive campaign to popularize the bonds. The government used a division of the Committee on Public Information called the Four Minute Men to help sell Liberty Bonds and Thrift Stamps. Famous artists helped to make posters and movie stars hosted bond rallies. Al Jolson, Elsie Janis, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin were among the celebrities that made public appearances promoting the idea that purchasing a liberty bond was "the patriotic thing to do" during the era. Chaplin also made a short film, The Bond, at his own expense for the drive. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts sold the bonds, using the slogan "Every Scout to Save a Soldier".
Beyond these effective efforts, in 1917 the Aviation Section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps established an elite group of Army pilots assigned to the Liberty Bond campaign. The plan for selling bonds was for the pilots to crisscross the country in their Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" training aircraft in flights of 3 to 5 aircraft. When they arrived over a town, they would perform acrobatic stunts, and put on mock dog fights for the populace.
After performing their air show, they would land on a road, a golf course, or a pasture nearby. By the time they shut down their engines, most of the townspeople, attracted by their performance, would have gathered. At that point, most people had never seen an airplane, nor ridden in one. Routinely each pilot stood in the rear cockpit of his craft and told the assemblage that every person who purchased a Liberty Bond would be taken for a ride in one of the airplanes. The program was successful in raising a substantial amount of money which was used to pay for the war effort. The methodology developed and practiced by the Army was later followed by numerous entrepreneurial flyers known as Barnstormers, who purchased war surplus Jenny airplanes and flew across the country selling airplane rides.” • Wikipedia
Douglas Fairbanks, movie star, speaking to a large crowd in front of the Sub-Treasury building, New York City, to aid the third Liberty Loan, in April 1918 • Wikipedia
World War One Propaganda: Celebrity Influencer Marketing
“With the United States in World War I, Chaplin, Fairbanks and Pickford toured the country to support Liberty Bonds.
When they arrived in Washington, a press agent noted the impressive collection of stars and suggested, "Why don't you fellows get together and distribute your own pictures?"
Meanwhile, Hiram Abrams and B.P. Schulberg, two associates of Zukor, became frustrated with their lack of influence and wanted a company of their own, not one controlled by businessmen.
What they had in mind was a studio financed by the artists themselves. Names were needed, the biggest in Hollywood: Chaplin, who used a hat, a cane and some tattered clothes to earn millions of dollars; the exuberant, dynamic Fairbanks; Pickford, the curly haired "America's Sweetheart"; Thomas Hart, the stone-faced cowboy; and Griffith, the industry's most acclaimed director.
By the beginning of 1919, Schulberg had put together a manifesto called "89 Reasons for United Artists" and went to work on the idea.
He started with Chaplin, who needed little convincing. Unable to get First National to advance him more money for films, the comedian was intrigued by the idea and discussed it with his close friend, Fairbanks, who in turn talked to Pickford, his future wife.
Within days the stars, joined by Hart and Griffith, were seated around a table at Hollywood's Alexandria Hotel. It was all talk at first, but the idea was as exciting to the artists as it was to outsiders, and they quickly put a plan together.
On Feb. 5, 1919, the formation of the United Artists Distributing Association was announced, with each of the principals owning equal shares of stock in the company and agreeing to make three films a year (Hart had already dropped out).” • Desert News: “Rise & Fall of United Artists”
See also: United Artists – The Early Years
Revealing The Power of Cinema
“Nations were new to cinema and its capability to spread and influence mass sentiment at the start of World War I. The early years of the war were experimental in regard to using films as a propaganda tool, but eventually became a central instrument for what George Mosse has called the "nationalization of the masses" as nations learned to manipulate emotions to mobilize the people for a national cause against the imagined or real enemy.
British efforts in pro-war film production took some time to find their stride as it, unlike Germany, did not realize the potential of film as a means of projecting the nation's official point of view. The British recognized early in the war that they needed to target neutral audiences, specifically America, to either get them to join the war or further support the war effort in Britain.
… The U.S. entered the war in April 1917, which achieved Wellington House's primary objective. The DOI increased its production of war films, but did not know what would play most effectively in the U.S., leading to nearly every British war film being sent to the States thereafter, including The Tanks in Action at the Battle of the Ancre and The Retreat of the Germans at the Battle of Arras, both of which were eventually released as serials. It also turned away from feature-length films because they took longer to produce, leaving greater gaps between releases. The DOI found it better to constantly release films and shorts of varying lengths and topics, including newsreels, to increase the market saturation. Newsreels became increasingly popular and a part of the standard war propaganda policy with the DOI and its successor, the Ministry of Information.
The U.S. developed its own propaganda organization, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), days after the declaration of war. Originally wary of film as a propaganda medium, it created the Division of Films on 25 September 1917 to handle films taken by army Signal Corps cameramen. It did not release commercial films. Urban's Kineto Company of America edited, processed, and printed the CPI's films, including Pershing’s Crusaders, America’s Answer, and Under Four Flags. Similar to Britain, American interest in feature-length films waned, in favor of newsreels and shorts. This also proved to be more profitable though even American audiences came to prefer British war films.
Charlie Chaplin produced and starred in multiple pro-US propaganda films. One film, Zepped, which contains the only known scenes of a Zeppelin bombing raid over London, was designed to be used on a morale mission for the troops in Egypt and to defuse the terror inspired by the frequent Zeppelin raids. In 1918, Chaplin made, at his own expense, The Bond, and produced short clips in which he beat up Kaiser Wilhelm with a hammer bearing the inscription "War Bonds". ” • Wikipedia
"The Navy Needs You! Don't READ American History, MAKE IT!" First World War US propaganda poster. US Navy sailor addresses civilian reading about the war in a newspaper. In the sky above them Columbia holds a sword and flag. A battle ship is in the distance. • Wikimedia Commons
The “Astounding Success” of Propaganda During World War One Changes Everything
“It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach—visual, graphic, and auditory—to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group —persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental cliches and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.” • Edward Bernays, The Father of PR (Year: 1928)
Propaganda Is Here To Stay – It’s Now Called Public Relations
“Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world. Even if this be unduly pessimistic—and that remains to be proved—the opinion reflects a tendency that is undoubtedly real. In fact, its use is growing as its efficiency in gaining public support is recognized. This then, evidently indicates the fact that any one with sufficient influence can lead sections of the public at least for a time and for a given purpose. Formerly the rulers were the leaders. They laid out the course of history, by the simple process of doing what they wanted. And if nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position or ability gives them power, can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses, they find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. Therefore, propaganda is here to stay.” • Edward Bernays, The Father of Public Relations (Year: 1928)
Noam Chomsky on Propaganda, Edward Bernays, & The Public Relations Industry
Who Was Edward Bernays?
“There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller's image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.
This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.
His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn't smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.” • Noam Chomsky
Edward Bernays Weaponized Ideas To Engineer Consent
Edward L. Bernays Interview, October 23, 1983
“Interview with public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays on the occasion of his visit to Ball State University in 1986. Bernays discusses his career, the importance of public relations, and his pioneering use of public relations techniques following World War I.” • Ball State University Libraries
Edward L. Bernays interview, 1986-10-23
Edward Bernays Coined The Term”Public Relations”
“A nephew of Freud, Edward Bernays (1891-1995) “invented” modern PR and coined the term “public relations.” He used a blend of psychology and media savvy to influence public opinion. Like other PR men who would follow, he started by doing propaganda work for the U.S. government, but Bernays’ era was World War I. In addition to the brilliant but now-dubious “torches of freedom” campaign that advanced social acceptance of women smoking in public, his work convinced Americans to eat bacon for breakfast. Bernays surveyed thousands of doctors (the original third-party influencers), and most said that a large breakfast was conducive to good health. The published results trumpeted bacon and eggs as the “All-American breakfast” and bacon sales soared. Today, statistically valid surveys like his are still used to create news and build credibility.” • 5 “Founding Fathers” of PR – Crenshaw Communications
Uncle Sam, half-length portrait, pointing at viewer as part of the United States government effort to recruit soldiers during World War I, with the famous legend "I want you for U.S. Army". • Wikimedia Commons
World War One Changed Washington D.C.
The Great War Minted A New American Identity
“America has a real capital at last,” wrote journalist Harrison Rhodes in March 1918, in the thick of World War I. Although the United States had only joined the war raging in Europe less than a year earlier, those 11 months were enough to transform American politics and its capital city. Gone was the sleepy crossroads capital with its swampy southern feel, and in its place stood something bigger, faster-paced and heftier—a city commensurate with America’s capacity to govern at home and wage war abroad.
One hundred years ago, in the summer of 1914, Washington was already a relatively big city of 350,000, but it still had small-town ways of getting things done. Politicians wrote their own speeches, hired only a handful of staffers and still had time for horseback riding in Rock Creek Park. Tourists and politicians alike could enter the White House by walking right up to the front door, and its primary resident could walk out just as easily: President Woodrow Wilson sometimes ambled across Lafayette Square just to run errands at the local bank.”*
“For most Washingtonians, the most noticeable change was how crowded—and how expensive—the city became. The District’s population soared from about 350,000 in 1914 to 526,000 by the war’s end, as job seekers, eager civilian volunteers and drafted soldiers made their way to the wartime capital. Also among the influx was a new addition to the Washington landscape, “dollar-a-year men,” business executives who arrived to advise the Wilson administration on wartime mobilization for token salaries. They often suggested policies that favored their own industries, causing an outcry from progressives and also from Wilson’s Cabinet members, who fumed that corporate execs were getting more of the president’s attention than they were. Big business had always known its way around Washington, but by giving corporations a seat at the table, Wilson made them partners in power and brought the previous generation’s Progressive movement crashing to a halt.” • Politico Magazine
James Montgomery Flagg 1917 poster: "Boys and girls! You can help your Uncle Sam win the war - save your quarters, buy War Savings Stamps" / James Montgomery Flagg .• Wikimedia Commons
The War To End War Shaped American Culture
“It redefined women’s rights, race relations, civil liberties and America’s role in the world. It caused twice as many American deaths as the Vietnam war. But there is no national memorial to it in Washington DC and, on Thursday, its centenary will pass with little fanfare.
On 6 April 1917, America declared war on Germany and charged into the first world war. After nearly three years of reluctance, its hand was forced by the sinking of neutral US ships by German submarines, and by Britain’s interception of the so-called Zimmerman telegram revealing a German plot to persuade Mexico to wage war on the US.
America mustered more than 4.7 million service members with astonishing speed and suffered 53,402 battle deaths and 63,114 other deaths in service, many from Spanish flu. America’s involvement was crucial to the Germans’ defeat in 1918, profoundly shaping what came to be known as “the American century”. Yet in contrast to the extensive centenary commemorations in Britain three years ago – a memorial at the Tower of London featured 888,246 red poppies to represent each soldier who died – this has for many Americans become a forgotten war.
“America didn’t suffer the way Great Britain did, certainly,” historian A Scott Berg said during a panel discussion hosted by PBS in Washington on Monday. “Woodrow Wilson kept us out of the war for three years; we really only fought for about six months. Britain lost a generation. We lost a lot comparatively speaking, but nothing compared to what Britain lost.”
But Jennifer Keene, a historian specialising in the first world war at Chapman University in Orange, California, disagreed: “I hate comparisons like that. I feel like they’re really unuseful in terms of understanding our different experiences of war. We lost 52,000 casualties in six months. If 52,000 Americans had come back [dead] from Iraq in the first six months of fighting there I don’t think that anybody would say that that was insignificant, or that America wouldn’t feel it.”
Along with the huge loss of life, the war had seismic implications for the US economically, socially and culturally. Women played an outsized role in the mobilisation effort and seized the opportunity to demand the vote, staging protests outside the White House and hunger strikes in jail; Wilson eventually persuaded Congress that suffrage was a war measure.
The war was a catalyst for the great migration of African Americans, and those who returned from the war, finding inequality intact, demanded civil rights. In addition, the conflict heralded the rise of conscription, mass propaganda, the national security state and the FBI. It accelerated income tax and urbanisation and helped make America the pre-eminent economic and military power in the world.”
• The first world war helped shape modern America. Why is it so forgotten? – The Guardian
Step into your place. English propaganda poster by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, London, shows a column of soldiers marching into the distance, while being joined in the foreground by men in a variety of civilian attires. • Wikimedia Commons
”On the Road to Modern War”
“The Great War was never considered the “war to end all wars” by the states and armed forces in conflict. The war’s legacies were processed in a wide variety of ways depending on forms of government, geostrategic situations, moral/material capacities, and public will. Their common denominator was recognition that successful future war-making depended on a synergy between an effective government and a strong citizenry. … To understand how the Great War looks forward to developments in future conflicts, it is necessary to understand four defining aspects of the war itself. First, it was the last war to prioritize the concept of mass. Since the Napoleonic era, war across the globe had been increasingly an affair of numbers and numerical calculation. The exponential growth in the size of armies and fleets was only the tip of an iceberg that included the consideration of economic statistics, votes in parliaments, and citizens working in fields and factories. The aphorism that amateurs discuss strategy while professionals talk logistics had its birth in the 19th century. The heroic vitalism of earlier eras did not disappear but was seen more as the cutting edge of a massive blade, built from the entire material and moral resources of a state and its people. In this context, professional military literature stressed the inexorability of statistics and the need to understand their importance in a conflict that would not end quickly.” • Dennis Showalter – International Encyclopedia of The First World War
"U.S. Official War Pictures", {CPI} propaganda poster by Louis D. Fancher • Wikimedia Commons
“Documents expose how Hollywood promotes war on behalf of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA”
“Tom Secker and Matthew Alford report on their astonishing findings from trawling through thousands of new US military and intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents reveal for the first time the vast scale of US government control in Hollywood, including the ability to manipulate scripts or even prevent films too critical of the Pentagon from being made — not to mention influencing some of the most popular film franchises in recent years.
This raises new questions not only about the way censorship works in the modern entertainment industry, but also about Hollywood’s little known role as a propaganda machine for the US national security apparatus.
When we first looked at the relationship between politics, film and television at the turn of the 21st century, we accepted the consensus opinion that a small office at the Pentagon had, on request, assisted the production of around 200 movies throughout the history of modern media, with minimal input on the scripts.
How ignorant we were. More appropriately, how misled we had been.
We have recently acquired 4,000 new pages of documents from the Pentagon and CIA through the Freedom of Information Act. For us, these documents were the final nail in the coffin. These documents for the first time demonstrate that the US government has worked behind the scenes on over 800 major movies and more than 1,000 TV titles." • Tom Secker and Matthew Alford – Medium.com
“Alongside the massive scale of these operations, our new book National Security Cinema details how US government involvement also includes script rewrites on some of the biggest and most popular films, including James Bond, the Transformers franchise, and movies from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes.” • Tom Secker and Matthew Alford – Medium.com
LEARN MORE:
How WW I helped entrench the art of mass persuasion – CBC • 5 “Founding Fathers” of PR • The Creel “Commission” (CPI)
WWI History • FBI History • Conscription History • World War I and Postwar Society • Treasures of American History
United States Army Signal Corps – World War I History • War Profiteering • H.G. Wells & The War That Will End War
Bernays, Propaganda & the Federal Income Tax
How Hollywood Agencies Are Finding Their Political Footing in Trump World
