The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism
Article Written by STS Affiliated Faculty, Fred Turner
"The political vision that brought us to this point emerged in the 1930s, as a response to fascism. In the years before the Second World War, Americans were mystified as to how Germany, one of the most sophisticated nations in Europe, had tumbled down the dark hole of National Socialism. Today we’d likely blame Hitler’s rise on the economic chaos and political infighting of the Weimar era. But at the time, many blamed mass media. When Hitler spoke to row upon row of Nazi soldiers at torch-lit rallies, the radio broadcast his voice into every German home. When he drove through adoring crowds, standing in his Volkswagen convertible, giving the Nazi salute, the newsreel cameras were there. In 1933, the New York Times described the predicament of the average German this way:
With coordinated newspaper headlines overpowering him, with radio voices beseeching him, with news reels and feature pictures arousing him, and with politicians and professors philosophizing for him, the individual German has been unable to salvage his identity and has been engulfed in a brown wave. . . . They are living in a Nazi dream and not in the reality of the world.
Toward the end of the decade, President Roosevelt began searching for ways to urge Americans to take a unified stand against fascism. Given the rise of right-wing fervor in the United States at the time, he had reason to worry. The racism and anti-Semitism that characterized Nazi Germany also characterized much of American life. By 1938, millions of Americans listened weekly as Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic demagogue, celebrated the rise of fascism and decried the existence of the Jews. Thousands of American fascists banded together in groups with names like the Silver Legion of America and the Crusader White Shirts. The Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, a 25,000-member pro-Nazi organization commonly known as the Bund, ran a summer camp on Long Island called Camp Siegfried, where young men marched in Nazi-style uniforms as their friends and families cheered. On February 20, 1939, the Bund brought more than 22,000 Americans to New York’s Madison Square Garden to welcome fascism to American shores. When they gathered, a huge banner hung over their heads: stop jewish domination of christian americans!
As the United States geared up for war, its leaders faced a quandary: they wanted to use media to unite Americans against their enemies, but many also feared that using mass media to do it would transform Americans into just the kind of authoritarians they were trying to defeat. Roosevelt’s cabinet sought advice from a group of intellectuals calling themselves the Committee for National Morale. The Committee had been founded in the summer of 1940 by a historian of Persian art named Arthur Upham Pope, who brought together a number of America’s leading thinkers, including the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, psychologists Gordon Allport and Kurt Lewin, and journalists Edmond Taylor and Ladislas Farago. Over the next two years, they would advise the Roosevelt Administration; produce pamphlets, news articles, and books; and set the cornerstone of our contemporary faith in decentralized media.
The Committee began by defining national morale in terms of what they called the democratic personality. Members of the Committee joined many American intellectuals in subscribing to the views of the anthropologist Franz Boas, who believed that cultures shape the personalities of their members in predictable ways. Germans, they thought, tended toward rigidity and an affection for authority, hence Hitler’s famously bureaucratic Nazi regime was a natural extension of the German character. Americans were more open, individualistic, expressive, collaborative, and tolerant, and so more at home in loose coalitions. Whatever kind of propaganda medium the Committee promoted would need to preserve the individuality of American citizens. Allport summed up the Committee’s vision in a 1942 essay. “In a democracy,” he wrote, “every personality can be a citadel of resistance to tyranny. In the co-ordination of the intelligences and wills of one hundred million ‘whole’ men and women lies the formula for an invincible American morale.”
As the Committee sought to coordinate rather than dominate American minds, its members turned to a kind of media system that we might now call a platform: the museum. These days we’re not used to the idea of buildings as media systems. But the Committee thought about museums in the same way many think about virtual reality today—as immersive visual environments where we can increase our empathy for one another. Mead, who was a student of Boas and worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, pointed out that in a museum, people could walk among images and objects distributed across the walls and around the floor, choosing to pay attention to those that seemed most meaningful to them. They could hone their individual tastes, they could reason about their individual places in the world, and they could do it together.
In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art in New York put the Committee’s vision into practice with a widely heralded propaganda exhibition entitled Road to Victory. Most American art shows at the time featured images of more or less identical sizes hung in a row at eye level, but this one mounted images of all sizes overhead, at the viewer’s feet, and everywhere in between. A path wound through the forest of photographs. The pictures were carefully chosen to spark patriotic fervor, but judging from reviews, it was the manner of their display that captivated the show’s audience. As one critic put it, the show did not seek to “mold” its visitors’ beliefs, “for that word smacks of the Fascist concept of dominating men’s minds.” It simply invited Americans to walk down the road to war, individually unique, yet collectively united. Another reviewer wrote: “It is this inescapable sense of identity—the individual spectator identifying himself with the whole—that makes the event so moving.”