Page 104 - Wish Stream Year of 2016

sador to Washington, Johannes von Bernstorff, which are just as apt today:
“It all turns on which side gets the news rst; for the rst impression sticks. Corrections are gen- erally vain, especially as they appear as a rule in small print in inconspicuous places.”
The Germans were at a disadvantage when try- ing to in uence the American public, with the British controlling what was published in the American press. The Germans had to pub- lish their own magazines and had to set up a press agency who tried to buy existing papers. The public perception of this approach worked against them, with the general belief being that the only country trying to subvert public opinion in America was Germany.
It was a month after the outbreak of war that the Prime Minister appointed Charles Masterman to create a propaganda bureau. An author and journalist before becoming an MP and under- secretary of the Home Of ce and chair of the National Insurance Joint Committee, Masterman set up his new organisation in the Insurance of ces in Wellington House. At his rst meeting he called in a number of authors and journalists including Arthur Conan Doyle, John Mase eld, G. K. Chesterton, Henry Newbolt, John Gals- worthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, G. M. Trevelyan and H. G. Wells. John Buchan was employed to write a series of monthly magazine articles documenting the history of the war and went on to become the Director of Intelligence in 1918, tasked with running MI7 and overseeing propaganda in military zones. The members of the bureau were warned that their work would be secret and thankless, and we must be aware of their involvement when reading their work of the time, especially when, for example, Wells went on to write:
“This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war – it is the last war!”
Over the next few years it would be mainly news- papermen and writers who would work from Washington house, culminating in the appoint- ments, in February of 1918, of Lord Beaver- brook, owner of the Daily Express, as Minister of Information, and Lord Northcliffe, the owner of The Times and the Daily Mail, who oversaw propaganda aimed at foreign nations.
The main effort was to in uence neutral coun- tries with special focus on persuading the US to support Britain and her allies. One approach was to justify the war against Germany and Austria- Hungary, painting the Kaiser and Imperial Ger- many as the aggressors and solely to blame for the need for the allies to go to war against them. Writers like Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a number of articles and pamphlets illustrating the long- standing aggressiveness of the Germans. The alleged aggressiveness of the Germans also had the American fear of German expansionism on their side of the Atlantic. With the Monroe Doc- trine still rmly in place, it was easy for the British to persuade the American people that Germany would look to cross the Atlantic if it was suc- cessful in the war in Europe – a tactic that was to be used again in the Second World War. The US needed to be persuaded that there could be no negotiation for peace with Germany, and what better way to suggest this than to dehu- manise the Germans with the use of atrocity propaganda. As Harold Lasswell comments in his 1927 book “Propaganda Techniques in the Great War”:
“When the public believes that the enemy began the War and blocks a permanent, pro t- able and godly peace, the propagandist has achieved his purpose. But best to make assur- ance doubly sure, it is safe to fortify the mind of the nation with examples of the insolence and depravity of the enemy.”
The rst formal atrocity reports came from the Belgians. A Belgian delegation to the US spent two days in London presenting a dossier of “facts” that they had gathered on German out- rages to a special commission. These included stories of cruci xions, a mother and young daughter being shot, and a young man being tied to a tree and burned alive. Despite Ameri- can journalists denying the truth of such stories, by the time that the delegation had presented their dossier to President Wilson, the percep- tion of the German soldiers was that of inhuman animals who constantly broke the rules of war and common decency. The British effort was led by the distinguished scholar James Bryce who headed up the Committee on Alleged Ger- man Outrages, producing a report that bears his name. The report was translated into every major European language and documented a number of sensationalist accounts of atrocities. This was something that the British propagan- dist at Wellington House exploited ruthlessly, as
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