PRESIDENT HOPKINS POINTS TO GREAT DANGER IN PROPAGANDA
[Editor's Note: — The following is a part of an article by President Ernest Martin Hopkins in the January issue of The Nation'sBusiness.]
Propaganda, though marked with the bar sinister, is not without its reason for pride in ancestry, nor without its respectability in associations. It is an illegitimate child in the Publicity family, born of Education as a mother and begotten by Special Interest as a father. Its half brothers are advertising and news.
Its " newly acquired and blatant prominence raises unfortunate questions concerning its mother and impresses embarrassment and casts suspicion upon the respectability of the other children in the family. It is the most insidious influence in the world's affairs at the present time, disturbing to business, dangerous to international relations, and hostile to all that makes for social righteousness!
Consideration of the subject of propaganda ought to be commended to any committee investigating the subject of waste at the present time, and at no point is this truer than in the field of business. Propaganda wastes the time and mental acumen of innumerable committees and individuals responsible for devising it. It wastes the talents of a group, capable of better things, in formulating and publishing it. It wastes the time of numberless people upon whom it is foisted. And finally, and perhaps worse, it impairs the value of much publicity that is meritorious and worthwhile, by the doubt which it inculcates in men's minds about the authority of bona fide material and authenticity of the sources from which this has been derived.
As a matter of fact, propaganda ought to be held anathema, as a deadly enemy by every newspaper or periodical which lives by the public confidence in the accuracy of its news columns or by the support of its advertising pages, by every publicity house which is interested in maintaining the enlightened standards of its profession, and by every business or industry the vitamines o whose daily sales are dependent upon public belief in the integrity of advertising. Reputation for honesty and trust is all essential to each of these, and if dishonesty and untruth are to be allowed to masquerade in the garments of veracity and to counterfeit legitimate publicity, the reputation of business is impunged by the discredit which falls upon its agent, and it will of necessity have to cease its intimacy of relations with the agent.
There lies before me a metropolitan newspaper in which violent attack is made by a reputable citizen on the work of able and conscientious writers in the field of history because, forsooth, they have not been sufficiently antagonistic to a cause he hates. Elsewhere, some more interested in emphasizing sectional hostilities than in enhancing the spirit of mutual respect and co-operation urge the rewriting of histories of the Civil War with the idea of establishing doubtful contentions as facts.
I have recently been discussing the subject of labels, as related to truth and propaganda, with men of our Dartmouth undergraduate body. I have tried to show that neither in business or other walks of life are we safe in ascribing characteristics according to labels, without investigation of their validity and without knowledge of the 'motives and the responsibility of those by whom the labels, are affixed.
Some writers, have sought to find a word which should indicate the whole content of meaning in the phrase "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," and it is the idea which would be in such a word that is most needed as the dominating factor in the thinking men of today. Nothing is more misleading than the implication of an isolated fact; nothing is less a verity than an incomplete truth; nothing is more false than the truth with something added to it. But these are among the most familiar manifestations of propaganda.. Herein lies the fundamental objection to: the use of propaganda in a . world . wherein restoration . of health and strength cannot be expected until men are militantly consecrated as never before to knowing the truth and doing it!
