Mass Persuasion in History

Pruitt-Igoe

OLIVER THOMSON. Mass Persuasion in History: An Historical Analysis of the Development of Propaganda Techniques. New York: Crane, Russak; Co., 1977. $13.50.

The promise of historical perspective in media studies is always welcome. The genre suffers traditionally from too little diachronicity. The credentials of the writer in this instance also raise our expectations : a multinational graduate (from the college of J. Walter Thompson) who now heads a Scottish advertising agency and lectures on mass persuasion at Glasgow University. Alas, the high cost and low quality of the illustrations make this reader question the value of the book, intellectually and financially. But it does turn over the soil for the first time (in my reading) in a way that reveals a crucial turf that needs to be plowed by deeper, more controlled minds.

The book is divided into two parts of very divergent size: The Vocabulary of Leadership deals with an introduction, discussion of sources, a typology (objectives, media, message, inhibiting factors, intensifying factors, side effects), criteria of penetration, audience analysis, response analysis, access to media, and media development); and Historical Case Studies, including the Roman Empire, the Papacy, the Reformation, the Revolutionary Period, Nineteenth Century Propaganda, Lenin and Communism, Hitler and Fascism, Modem China, Democracy and the Western World, and Epilogue (which basically is sensible talk about how not to give into apocalyptical interpretations of what he bizarrely calls the octopoidal media).

The second section is by far the more entertaining. The first is mainly potted media sociology, probably in both the British and American senses of that adjective. The second is a tasty plum pudding, cultural history seen through the narrow perspective of a moviola, as if H. G. Wells were a student of Marshall McLuhan’s.

One original idea of Thomson’s deserves a very careful analysis. He argues very plausibly that political rhetoric, which he somewhat capriciously keeps calling social cybernetics, must include the study of things as well as the traditional study of words. Architecture should be included within the umbrella of graphic communication media.

Traditionally, it has been given little attention from the standpoint of its use as a medium of propaganda. It is, nevertheless, of great importance. Buildings are capable of communicating awe, size, assurance, power, or dynamism, and if in a central or imposing position, can do this to a fairly large audience over a long period. Inevitably, in political terms, it tends to be a medium for the establishment, not the revolution, although a rebel hideout or catacomb can become a symbol by contrast (p. 41).

Indeed, they can-as the public demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis announced the end of an era of complacency about welfare culture. But the same architect, Minoru Yamasaki, gave Manhattan the twin-towered World Trade Center. The folk hero who climbed it-because it was there-sends us one message; more likely, it will become in history the tallest mausoleum ever-to the memory of Robert Moses. I was amused in Cairo recently to read in the Egyptian Museum that Rameses I had his name carved covertly on the unseeable bottom of his granite likeness-to discourage Rameses II from converting it to his image!

And when you read line markers in the apse of St. Peter’s in Rome bragging that this is as far as St. Paul’s comes, you know that the Counter Reformation at least was using its buildings to bully its congregations. Thomson is right about the rhetoric of things. We need to become sophisticated in reading the man-made environments-as well as its degradations. Norman Mailer’s touting the defaced New York subway cars as great art is condescending, ignoble savagery. And the blackout looting in New York is a classic text we are only now trying to learn how to decipher.

What is missing from most of that analysis and what is missing from this book is a sense of dynamics. The media are the sum total of their contradictory messages. When Thomson says cinema proper had only a 50-year reign (p. 49), I wonder where that leaves Joan Micklin Silver, Fred Wiseman, and Judy Peiser of the Center for Southern Folklore-not to mention my own introduction to film course, which only a few of the students find dead! Atmospheric level generalizations about media are worse than no generalities at all, I guess.

And while I really enjoyed the anecdotes about media and propaganda over time (that Virgil’s Aeneid was commissioned by the Emperor, for example), I would always want to check Thompson’s stories out with standard histories, especially when I find allusions to Senator Joe McCarthy (p. 21)-does this new firm have no American proofreaders? Or see Dr. Johnson’s famous aphorism come out 180 degrees from where he left it: Patriotism may be the last refuge of a gentleman (p. 22). No matter, maybe it is just one Scotsperson’s way of getting even with another one who said mean things about the country he fled for London. Thomson has identified an important terrain, no small contribution to a field that sprawls and yawns erratically, leaving much of the past unconnected with contemporary media sociology.

PATRICK D. HAZARD
Beaver College
Glenside
Pennsylvania