Propaganda and the Truth
Late last September, in something of a fury, I wrote an email to a group of colleagues, including Stephanie Plunkett at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Ryan Standfest at Rotland Press, and the great Steven Heller at Print Magazine. What, I asked, can we do in the waning months of the most perilous presidential campaign since 1932? 1864? to contribute, in some small way, to a public sense of the stakes? All three responded with dispatch, and from there began the planning for a symposium that was initially planned for the weekend before the election, titled Freedom versus Fear, in homage to Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, then hanging (again, after a long absence for a traveling show devoted to that very subject) in at NRM in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We planned to collaborate between the museum and the Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University in St. Louis, my home institution. We envisioned a digital exhibition and more. But as it happened, the timeline proved too short, and we kicked the can down the road to January. Though I understood, I was bitterly disappointed by that result, thinking that January would be anticlimactic, a missed boat.
Boy was I wrong!
Scheduled for January 15-16, the symposium (by year’s end, due to be sponsored by the plucky Berkshire Eagle, a local daily) was rendered unexpectedly urgent by Trump’s refusal to admit defeat, fed by a specious “Stop the Steal” campaign which came to a frenzied, seditious crescendo by the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Over the weekend of January 2-3, by arrangement, I composed an op-ed on the subject of propaganda in the Age of Trump, which cuts both ways: on one hand, political argumentation with pointed rhetoric based on factual support; on the other, bogus claims inflated by bad faith actors. To be sure, the difference between the two might often be assigned to the eye of the beholder, but seldom has the contrast been so stark as from that 2015 escalator ride to today.
Then the Capitol was overrun, and events moved quickly. I revised the op-ed to keep up, but a certain anxiety set in. Details aside, the piece never ran in the Eagle. For posterity, I am publishing it here, as it would have run on the weekend of January 9-10, 2021. I’ll post on the symposium separately, but my opening remarks on the morning of January 16 included some of this material—particularly, the observations about the pamphlets of Martin Luther.
FOUR LONG YEARS AGO, at the Western entrance to the U.S. Capitol, Donald J. Trump perfunctorily recited an oath to defend the Constitution. He then launched his term with the memorably alarming “American Carnage” speech, a declaration of injury and malice unlike any other presidential address in American history.
So it began, and thus it continued. DJT spewed lies and grievances throughout his time in office. Last week those lies reached a crescendo, with insurrectionists rioting in the Capitol building a fortnight before Joseph R. Biden, Jr. replaces Trump in the Oval Office.
This shameful ugliness has led some, including President-elect Biden, to call for a cooling off, for a rhetorical de-escalation, in the name of national unity. But the deepening crisis in our democracy, abetted by Republican senators Hawley and Cruz, and House Minority Leader McCarthy, cannot be waited out. A desire for civility—and bogus cries for “unity”—must not suppress plain speech about damage to our polity.
Some hesitation may be understandable. During the Cold War, certain areas of national policy enjoyed bipartisan consensus. Norms of governance were well established. And tightly controlled broadcast licenses compressed the acceptable range of U.S. media reporting. Joe Biden remembers all of that. But today’s world is different. Toxic ideas are loose in the national bloodstream. And the answer to objectionable speech, including bigoted and seditious talk, is not politesse, but more speech—counter argument, that is––as Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in Whitney v. California (1927).
Today the forms of such speech are notably fluid, from tweets and memes and Tik Toks to op-eds like this one. Most exploit text (or audio) and image relationships. Here too, the past offers useful examples. Martin Luther invented the social media of the 1520s by creating a new form, the printed pamphlet (flugshriften, or “flying writings”) to advance his religious reforms. These hybrid publications, bristling with woodcut illustrations, were written in German, not Latin. Subsequent pamphleteers included Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense (1776), that wildly influential work in support of the American Revolution and opposition to monarchy. The Berkshires’ own Norman Rockwell gave visual form, and pictorial argument, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s concept of the Four Freedoms, which FDR articulated in his 1941 State of the Union address (ironically, delivered on January 6).
Late last summer I proudly joined the ranks of the pamphleteers, publishing A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated (Spartan Holiday Books, 2020). Modeled on a form intended for children, Autocrat uses direct language and visual metaphor to indict President Trump and his circle. The book employs letters and brief texts to capture examples of presidential malfeasance and, in a few cases, to isolate important American ideals.
All of these projects, including my own, are works of propaganda––attempts to persuade the public to adopt a given premise, to accept a certain view. But I also believe them to be fundamentally honorable. The key is audience trust. Are you working in good faith or bad?
Certainly we have seen propagandists who lie constantly, compulsively, about everything—crowd sizes, Covid-19 tests, imaginary voter fraud. But truth is armor. If you are scrupulous about what is true, you can make effective propaganda against a backdrop of unremitting falsehood. For this reason, I’m pleased to note, Autocrat is to my knowledge the only ABC book ever published with endnotes.
We are a clever people. Our writers, editors, illustrators, cartoonists, filmmakers, performers, and others have pushed back against emerging authoritarianism in American life. But our publishing ecosystem is in need of attention, as local journalism falters, media consolidation intensifies, and social media contribute to the spread of disinformation, collectively undermining the factual bases upon which argument depends.
The veracity of online organs can be hard to establish; the cultural filtration systems we rely on to evaluate sources will develop, but they will take time. Banning our liar-in-chief from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may be a good start, but existing platforms, publications and institutions must do more to underscore and support our shared democratic values.
The future viability of American democracy is at stake. Donald Trump has been shamed, and if we are lucky he will be prematurely dismissed. But his ugliness has had a purpose. The battle remains joined, between the diverse, multiracial and polyglot future America, and the exhausted patriarchal Anglo-Saxon one. The former complicates and freshens our national ideals; the latter increasingly retreats to cramped, antidemocratic schemes of minority rule.
Let the TikToks and flugshriften, grounded in truth, lead the way forward.
Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear, painted 1942 and published in the Saturday Evening Post as interior illustrations in 1943, subsequently repurposed as war bond posters to great effect later that year. I wrote about these images in a catalogue essay for Enduring Ideals: Roosevelt, Rockwell, and the Four Freedoms (Abbeville Press, 2018.)
A preposterous slogan—”Stop the Steal”—worked for a segment of the population living in a sealed bubble of information. On Planet Earth, more than 60 court proceedings—many presided over by federal judges appointed by Donald Trump—set aside the president’s claims, finding them without merit. “The Steal” was a cynical fantasy, designed to stir up a mob.
Lucas Cranach, woodcut illustrations Passional Christ und Antichrist 1521. This wildly successful pamphlet worked on a simple scheme. At left, a scene from the the life of Jesus: here, overturning the tables of the money changers. On the right, the pope selling indulgences. The texts below amplify the pictures. Cranach’s illustrations served Luther’s argument, and the package hit home. But only because the underlying truth of the early modern Church was laid bare in the process. The Catholic Church had grown corrupt. The propaganda worked largely because it was true.
D.B. Dowd, Pages 2-3 from A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated. Spartan Holiday Books, 2020. Graphic design by Scott Gericke.
D.B. Dowd, A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated. Spartan Holiday Books, 2020. Graphic design by Scott Gericke.
