In response to First World War propaganda campaigns and the emerging science of behaviorist psychology, which downplayed or even denied the existence of “mind” (understood as an agency directed by human cognition and will), American modernists performed the mind in and as writing: as a potentiating agent of mental plasticity to reshape habits, modifiy beliefs and behaviors, and dramatize the strategies by which consent is “manufactured.” An American modernist literary “aesthetics of exposure” sought to arrest habitual thought by exposing the behaviorist strategies of conditioning behavior and regimenting beliefs. The major works examined in this chapter – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and John Dos Passos’ the U.S.A trilogy (1936) – deploy strategies of psychological and textual fracture and fragmentation in order to make state-sponsored propaganda technique visible and available for critique.

Chapter 1 examines the origins of the relationship between American foreign relations and the public relations industry through an examination of the promotion of World War I. Key to this is an examination of the wartime government propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information. In particular, the chapter highlights five key individuals who went on to play significant roles in connecting the public relations industry to international affairs over the next half century: Edward Bernays, Carl Byoir, John Price Jones, Ivy Lee, and Arthur Page.

Chapter 7 explores a case study of how American PR interests, business interests, and government interests all aligned to help overthrow the elected government of Guatemala in 1954. Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz proposed land reforms that threatened the power of the US-owned United Fruit Company, the biggest employer and landowner in Guatemala. The United Fruit Company (UFCO) fought against the Arbenz regime, using PR and its connections in Washington to try and influence the Eisenhower administration and the public. The man in charge of UFCO’s PR strategy was Edward Bernays. While Bernays alone did not make the Eisenhower administration support a coup in Guatemala, his work to publicize events in Central America contributed to the governmental and elite opinion that the Arbenz regime was part of a global communist plot that threatened US interests.

Chapter 8 examines how, after 1945, a growing number of American PR firms took on foreign governments as clients. As the international PR business expanded through the 1950s, pretty much any country outside of the communist orbit was up for grabs. While there were numerous examples, the most notable was a government desperate to remain outside of the communist orbit: South Vietnam. Its leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, sought PR to strengthen his own image as well as that of his new nation. From the mid-1950s, Harold Oram’s firm provided PR counsel to South Vietnam in the United States as part of a wider “Vietnam Lobby.” For the most part, the PR firms in question believed they worked in the interests of the United States as much as the countries they represented. Yet it became increasingly clear that their own business interests were their priority. The fact that American PR firms worked for foreign governments at all caused controversy when news of the practice came to public attention in the 1960s. Through media reports and subsequent Congressional investigations, the role of PR firms in promoting foreign clients within the United States once again came under question.

Chapter 2 examines the evolution of the new public relations industry in the 1920s and examines how that industry’s leaders built upon their wartime experiences to make links to foreign affairs. It examines how industry pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee justified their roles by building upon the work of Walter Lippmann. It looks at the earliest private efforts to work on foreign relations matters, such as Bernays’s efforts to promote American recognition of an independent Lithuania in 1919. It also examines Lee’s efforts to encourage American engagement with world affairs through the promotion of loans to European nations and his efforts to open up a dialogue with Russia. The latter interest led to questions about his motivations and allegations that he was a Soviet agent. The 1920s revealed that unlike during the war years, American PR firms did not always support America’s own interests.

Faced with budgetary pressures, American universities have embraced propaganda within their athletics programs in order to maintain lucrative partnerships with global corporations. These university administrators become, in effect, educators-as-corporate-propagandists. This chapter examines the controversial relationship between Nike and the University of Oregon. Nike has constructed the University’s brand identity, taken control over its communications and public relations, and spread its habits and impulses to every facet of University operations. But private interests do not always overlap with public or educational ones – even to the point of violating state and federal law. The partnership between Nike and the University of Oregon casts two very different shadows over the question of usefulness of propaganda in a democratic society. On the one hand, its efficacy is unquestionable, especially in the realms of politics, business, activism, and education. On the other hand, propaganda’s utility for democracy is questionable, and in the realm of public education is often incompatible with democratic ends. America’s financially struggling public universities may need to reimagine their use of propaganda. Their success or failure may depend, ironically, on the effects of propaganda elsewhere in society: What use is a university, after all, in a society which has no use for truth?