Ralph Donald - Hollywood Enlists!: Propaganda Films of World War II

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Donald, Ralph, author.

Title: Hollywood enlists! : propaganda films of World War II / Ralph Donald.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2017] | Series: Film and history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Includes annotated filmography.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016039956 (print) | LCCN 2016057266 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442277267 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442277274 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945Motion pictures and the war. | Motion pictures in propagandaUnited StatesHistory. | War filmsUnited StatesHistory and criticism. | Motion picturesUnited StatesHistory.

Classification: LCC D743.23 D66 2017 (print) | LCC D743.23 (ebook) | DDC 303.3/75dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039956

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To journalist, author, and editor Elizabeth Donald, my daughter, who kindly gave this manuscript a highly skilled second look

American Propaganda

To many Americans, propaganda is a dirty word.

Because of common usage, the word evokes visions of an artless, tasteless, untruthful practice used only by totalitarian countries to achieve thought control over their populations.

The popular belief is that Americans are not propagandists, and have not engaged in its use. But thats far from the truth.

In the climax of Casablanca (1942), Ricks plan to get Victor and Ilsa safely out of Casablanca depends on whether Maj. Renault is more loyal to France and his friend, Rick, than to the Nazis.

Those few Americans who have seen the 1938 Nazi hate documentary The Eternal Jew would undoubtedly call it propaganda. That insidious film was designed to prepare the German people to accept the Nazis eventual slaughter of six million Jews. Most Americans would be comfortable describing a North Korean newscast as propaganda, as we believe the citizens of that country receive only their governments altered version of the facts. The reality has been filtered and edited through their closed media system to serve the interests of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Basically, most Americans believe that propaganda is only practiced by evil people bent on circulating antiAmerican thought. And because its antiAmerican, such messages are also assumed to be a pack of lies.

But these very attitudes might well have been learned through what can be called American propaganda.

Much of the world certainly thinks so. When they are inundated with the flood of intentional and unintentional messages about American culture, thought, and values in the media products that America exports to them, folks in other countries have a name for this phenomenon: they call it cultural imperialism. Because the United States is by far the worlds biggest exporter of media, Americanism penetrates and affects most media markets around the world. Even in countries like Iran where consumption of American media is officially discouraged, bootleg American films, TV shows, and music find their way to the people. Add to that ongoing Voice of America broadcasts into Iran telling the American story in their native Farsi. Third-world nations in particular have good reason to fear that the huge amount of US media that they import could result in the Americanization of their countries.

So what about this American propaganda? If Americans do engage in propaganda, how did this obviously decent, acceptable American practice earn such a bad name for itself?

Originally, the term propaganda carried no negative connotation. The horticultural verb to propagate means to cause something to grow, expand, or to reproduce by sexual or asexual means. The Roman Catholic Church, which centuries ago created their Society for the Propagation of the Faith as its evangelistic arm, is responsible for one of the first uses of the term in the marketplace of ideas.

Most propaganda scholars agree that the basic term has a valueneutral definition. Propaganda is, simply put, persuasion via mass communication that keys on two important goals: first, forming new or adjusted attitudes in the minds of audiences, and second, urging them to action, to do something about these newly acquired attitudes. Albert Banduras work on modeling demonstrated how the media to which individuals are exposed can persuade them to mimic the behaviors seen on the screen. Regular American commercial advertising believed in Banduras ideas to the tune of $171 billion worth of propaganda in 2013 (eMarketer). Especially in an election year, American political ads overwhelm media, and the entertainment programs we listen to or watch certainly contain wholesome and not-so-wholesome American values for worldwide audiences to adopt as models for their behavior. At least $3.67 billion was spent on the 2014 midterm elections, an increase over the last four years of $40 million (Center for Responsive Politics). Someone in America believes in modeling and propaganda and puts up big money to get it working for them.