Socialism and Print Culture in America, 1897–1920 by Jason D Martinek

Author:Jason D Martinek [Martinek, Jason D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9781317320760
Google: 6Y5ECgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06T01:26:06+00:00

5 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND THE SOCIALIST PARTY’S INFORMATION DEPARTMENT AND RESEARCH BUREAU

In 1913, the Socialist Party created the Information Department and Research Bureau to serve the burgeoning movement’s information needs. Compared to the hierarchical information management protocols of major corporations and universities, the Information Department represented a profoundly democratic foray into this area. Carl D. Thompson, the director of the Information Department, sought to use his position to turn the class struggle into a struggle over facts. Indeed, in his effort to push socialist theory into the realm of praxis, he relied on facts to demonstrate the efficacy of socialist propositions. Facts, he argued, proved the benefits of public ownership over private, socialism over capitalism. In his work, Thompson eschewed the emotional appeals that sought to win readers over through epiphany and revelation. Instead, he looked to help socialists win the class struggle through reason and rationality. Though his fact-based initiatives never eclipsed the emotional appeals that proved so instrumental in building the movement, Thompsons efforts were nonetheless significant in their attempt to better ground socialism in real world politics. Ultimately, however, a lack of financial resources ended this experiment in information management and served as a harbinger for the decline of the Socialist Party in the late 1910s.1

Since Thompsons information came from an avowedly pro-socialist position, it is easy to dismiss him as a propagandist and the Information Department as the party’s chief propaganda arm. To do so, however, would imply the existence of an alternative in which neither one’s ideology nor ulterior motives played a hand in the making or use of information. No such alternative existed. Socialists were no different from capitalists or their servants of power in seeking to use information to regulate and control America’s social, political, economic and cultural institutions. Even though information came to denote detachment, disinterestedness and objectivity in the late nineteenth century did not mean that its makers and users applied it that way. By reifying information as the search for objective knowledge, capitalists’ servants of power obscured its real purpose, that of serving a larger objective. Indeed, information, then as now, has an inherently purposive element.

The veil of objectivity was just that, a veil, albeit a highly effective one. It gave pro-capitalist information analysts an advantage in the struggle over information in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America by allowing them to make their conclusions appear impartial and apolitical. Even the most partisan of these seemingly non-partisan managers could place themselves above partisanship. Perhaps none was more successful in this endeavour than George Creel, whom President Woodrow Wilson named to head the Committee on Public Information, created during World War I to succour pro-war sentiment. Despite the overt propagandistic elements of his work, he argued that he was not a propagandist, a manipulator of public opinion, but one whose job it was to put the ‘facts’ before the public and let them draw their own conclusions. As Creel wrote in his autobiography, ‘proceeded on the theory that before a sound, steadfast public opinion to be formed, it had to be informed.

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