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.

To meet the challenge of mobilizing the nation for war in Europe, the Wilson administration took steps to silence dissent on the home front. In addition to a massive propaganda campaign to rouse public enthusiasm for the war, the government used the Espionage Act (1917) to silence anti-war publications and to arrest pacifists, political radicals, and others accused of making disloyal statements. The government’s campaign against dissenters was upheld in landmark decisions by the Supreme Court, supporting the imprisonment of hundreds of anti-war speakers, most notably the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. While federal government repression encouraged similar laws at the state level as well as a wave of vigilante violence against pacifists and anti-war radicals, the arrests also led some free speech advocates to form the American Civil Liberties Union, one part of a wider campaign that sought amnesty for imprisoned dissenters.