Strategic Communication, Corporatism, and Eternal Crisis
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Strategic Communication, Corporatism, and Eternal Crisis

The Creel Century

Phil Graham

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Strategic Communication, Corporatism, and Eternal Crisis

The Creel Century

Phil Graham

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About This Book

This book traces a century of militarised communication that began in the United States in April, 1917, with the institution of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed by George Creel and tasked with persuading a divided US public to enter World War I. Creel achieved an historic feat of communication: a nationalising mass mediation event well before any instantaneous mass media technologies were available. The CPI's techniques and strategies have underpinned marketing, public relations, and public diplomacy practices ever since. The book argues that the CPI's influence extends unbroken into the present day, as it provided the communicative and attitudinal bases for a new form of political economy, a form of corporatism, that would come to its fullest flower in the "globalisation" project of the mid-1990s.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351795807

1 Introduction

This book describes the development of what has come to be called “strategic communication,” a catch-all term for persuasive communication on the part of military, corporate, and government organisations. The promotional patterns of strategic communication are evident almost everywhere, in the efforts of economists, scientists, and academics of all kinds; to those of journalists, business people, and politicians; to the millions of individuals trying every day to make a “name” for themselves as social media or blogosphere “stars”. Those patterns have their roots in one of the most extraordinary efforts of persuasion in human history by what became known as the Creel Committee, the official name of which was the Committee on Public Information (CPI).
The CPI was established on April 14, 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson. Its aim was to garner public support for United States involvement in WWI. That was no small challenge given that Wilson had been re-elected by a slim margin on an anti-war, neutrality platform the previous year. Wilson’s slogan was “He kept us out of war”. The United States was a mere 50 years out of its own Civil War, the war most destructive of human life in history up to WWI. There were no instantaneous mass media. The CPI did its work in a mostly mechanical, print-based media environment which was highly personal and localised. The results it achieved were nothing short of extraordinary. The sheer quantity of activity the CPI organised is remarkable. In 18 months, the committee generated 75 million copies of commissioned booklets; 1,438 drawings for posters and cards, including the famous Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster by James Montgomery Flagg; more than 40 movies, including Pershing’s Crusaders, America’s Answer, and Under Four Flags; over 200,000 stereopticon slides; 100,000 copies of its own newspaper every day of the campaign; 755,190 speeches by Creel’s Four Minute Men; and 700 photographs per day of military activities. The whole campaign cost $4,912,553 to reach a cumulative audience of over 300 million, again, without any instantaneous mass media (Creel, 1920, Ch. 2).
The CPI’s efforts were conducted amidst a throng of newly emerging “human” sciences, with Scientific Management (Taylor, 1911), Scientific Administration (Wilson, 1887), and Scientific Education (Dewey, 1903) beginning to take their place as technocratic forces. Taken together, they comprised a powerful array of new techniques aimed at shaping people’s actions, attitudes, and opinions in the context of quickly massifying and urbanising societies. They were to be greatly augmented by the CPI’s mass marketing of the war effort. And while the term “marketing” also first appears at the turn of the 20th century (Killebrew and Myrick, 1897), it had to wait for the CPI to make the raw power of its rhetorical potential recognisable once raised to an industrial scale.
In the face of a fractious polity, Wilson’s Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, put the immediate challenge like this:
Wars are sometimes fought for land, sometimes for dynastic aspiration, and sometimes for ideas and ideals. We were fighting for ideas and ideals, and somebody who realized that, and knew it, had to say it and keep on saying it until it was believed.
(1918, cited in Creel, 1920, p. xv)
Baker’s ‘somebody’ was George Creel, a former “muckraking” (“investigative” in today’s terms) journalist, publisher, and police commissioner. He was the architect of a communication program designed to ‘weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination’ (Creel, 1920, p. 5). His task was to talk the country into war. He therefore also had to talk it into unity, into a shared national identity, and into shared national principles. In almost every respect, the CPI’s work was the making of modern America, including its symbols, attitudes, and orientations. In aid of the committee’s work, there were high levels of literacy, with a mere 6 per cent illiteracy among all people above age 14 by 1910 (National Centre for Education Statistics, 2016).
My main argument in this book is that the CPI’s work is central to the development of our current political and economic circumstances. I contend that those circumstances are best understood as neofeudal corporatism and reject the idea that understanding the system as capitalist can lead to useful analysis. I use the term “neofeudal” to highlight the militarism upon which contemporary corporatism depends. In Chapter 5, I elaborate the concept of neofeudal corporatism in more detail, but for the moment, in summary, I define it as a system of political and economic relationships that are militarised, depersonalised, based in systems of extreme delegation, and motivated by an eternal sense of crisis.
From Creel to the time of writing this book runs a century-long arc that proceeds through the sudden integration of a formerly fragmented nation, to the heights of national mass mediations in the 1970s and 1980s, to the globalisation policies of the late 1990s following a “democratised” internet and a failed Eastern Bloc, to a state of rapid civic disintegration still accelerating in early 2017. The methods and strategies that Creel brought to bear upon the people of the United States have since been codified and systematised in various approaches to marketing, public relations, organisational communication, advertising, and public diplomacy that can be traced to post hoc scientistic analysis of the CPI’s activities.
The techniques developed by the CPI set the course for mass mediated nationalism. They became greatly amplified once applied through instantaneous mass media technologies, beginning with radio. Like most other techniques, they begin in rarefied, privileged realms, with plant and equipment, legalistic, labour, and skill demands that restrict the techniques to large-scale commercial or governmental entities. Today, though, anybody with access to a digital phone or a computer can become a “broadcaster” of influence, produce broadcast quality recordings and videos, reach an audience of billions, and conduct market research in almost any part of the world, all from the comfort of a lounge room, cafĂ©, or library. The implications of a global internet connecting 3.5 billion people in a hypercompetitive, ideologically fragmented, and hostile cultural environment, each armed in different degree with a militaristically derived set of techniques, and the production and distribution technologies to match, bear serious consideration. Given what Creel achieved, and what the world now faces by way of organised and random violence, the current cultural disintegration takes on a different hue. No more can we believe the childish admonition that comes with the “sticks and stones” doggerel. Words can kill. Language is material action, capable of quantitative and qualitative effects upon people, cultures, and nations.
We continue to feel the effects of the CPI’s efforts today, perhaps more obviously than at any time since it was disbanded in 1919. As we become more obsessed with problems of information, facts, and knowledge, the problems of action, and therefore of ethics, get carelessly backgrounded as mere derivative issues, or as issues beyond the realm of the rational and objective problem-solving techniques that the scientific mindset is restricted to addressing. It may well be that our collective dedication to the ‘scientistic’ mindset has brought us to the brink of a new world war. The method of the book addresses those problems directly. It synthesises elements of a discourse historical approach (Wodak, 2001) and Kenneth Burke’s (1966) ‘dramatistic’ analysis of language as symbolic action, with a particular emphasis on his rhetoric (1950/1969). It is designed to show up the rhetorical patterns that begin with Creel and continue through to Donald Trump, Brexit, the 2016 repeal of Smith-Mundt Act outlawing propaganda against American people by its own government, and the many ‘digital wildfires’ of ‘post-fact society’ (Pomerantsev, 2016). The word dramatistic means a focus on action and ethics, on the “do/do-nots” and “thou shalt nots” of language. It marks a contrast with the scientistic approach concerned with truth, facts, information, and the “is/is-nots” of language (Burke, 1966, pp. 38–39). That is not to suggest that facts and truth do not matter, but simply that a dramatistic approach prioritises action and thus considers facts only in so far as they change what people do.
The term “fact” here and throughout the book refers to truth claims and not truth per se. Facts are called ‘propositions’ in linguistics (Halliday, 1994). They have a distinct grammatical form and are distinguished by being testable in terms of truth. Propositions stand in distinction to the dramatistic categories of language that linguistics calls ‘proposals’ (Halliday, 1994). Proposals are not testable by truth and quite often take the form of commands, exhortations, or judgements, such as “Get out!”, “You probably shouldn’t be eating that”, or “That was the wrong thing to do”. Proposals can be evaluated along many lines, all of them socially and culturally grounded, most often through the semantics of obligation, desirability, and appropriateness (Graham, 2006). I hope to make clear as I proceed that the dramatistic is the most important yet least interrogated aspect of language, while the scientistic is necessarily secondary, both in importance and historically. Yet, as demonstrated by early reactions to the Trump presidency, issues of fact take up much of the oxygen where critical discussions of propaganda, media discourse, and communication are concerned.
Our ongoing failure to comprehend the dramatistic aspects of human communication now threatens our existence. However, the same accidents of history and technology that have brought us once again to the brink of self-destruction may also offer an historic opportunity to better comprehend how we might live together, engage in shared action, and learn to educate in a spirit that moderates ambition, competition, and the violent clatter of hubris-driven personal and cultural hostilities of every kind. A century after Creel, we have as much to learn from his unifying efforts as we do from his militarising motives, both being obverse aspects of the same task. A central thread of my argument is that we are suffering from the long-term effects of rhetoric being misrecognised and misunderstood as a primary, fundamental, and inseparable element of all human communication. We have in fact misunderstood rhetoric as pragmatic social science.
One of the most widely cited pieces in almost every influential social approach to the study of language is Malinowski’s (1923) Supplement I to Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning (1923/1989, pp. 296–396). It takes a central theoretical place in the work of scholars as diverse as M.A.K. Halliday (1994), Walter Ong (1971), James Carey (1989), Umberto Eco (1989), Jay Lemke (1995), and Kenneth Burke (1950/1969), among many others. The piece is most famous for the ‘context of situation’ concept, a rearticulation of the notion that the meaning of words depends on many non-verbal factors involved in where, when, how, and by whom they are said (1923, p. 306). It has proven an invaluable concept for both scientistic and dramatistic analyses of communication. But I think Malinowski’s piece offers an even richer vein to pursue in respect of problems that beset the contemporary situation. It can be found in his discussion of a child’s language acquisition:
[A] child’s action on the surrounding world is done through the parents, on whom the child acts again by its appeal, mainly its verbal appeal. When the child clamours for a person, it calls and he appears before it. When it wants food or an object or when it wishes some uncomfortable thing or arrangement to be removed, its only means of action is to clamour
 . To the child, words are therefore 
 efficient modes of action.
(1923, p. 320)
The astonishingly simple and unarguable observation is that, at least for most of us, our first actions upon the world are achieved through others by verbal means. The observation has far-reaching implications. It says that our first interactions are rhetorical, however primitive the rhetoric, because they are acts of persuasion that rely on moving our auditors to action. It is a commonplace of communication theory to recognise a persuasive element in any and all communication—that in communicating, one cannot fail to persuade. But Malinowski here draws our attention to the likelihood that rhetoric is in fact primary and precedes all other linguistic functions, that our first lessons in language are lessons in rhetoric aimed at moving others to action on our behalf, that language is our first means of acting upon the world, and that we first learn to act on the world through others. It also foregrounds a relatively underplayed, yet primary motivating tension between control and dependence in respect of relationships between individuals and their social scene.
To attribute infants with rhetorical skills is to somewhat stretch the concept. Yet it is entirely faithful to its social functions. Kenneth Burke’s (1950/1962) rhetoric is helpful in understanding how such tensions play out in ulterior terms as shapers of political economy. Burke bases his rhetoric on the concept of identification. He argues that from Aristotle to Augustine, all the major principles of rhetoric can be understood through the lens of identification. Whether we understand rhetoric to comprise appeals to logic, emotion, common sense, faith, nationality, reputation, religion, or anything else, if we are to persuade, we must first engage our audience in some act of identification. He summarises his position like this: ‘You persuade a man [sic] only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, identifying your way with his’ (1950/1969, p. 59). When we identify with others, we do so under different ‘headings’, whether they be “nationality”, “musical genre”, “the New York Mets”, “conservative politics”, “feminism”, “profession”, “class”, “opinion”, or whatever transcendent term allows diverse individuals to share in some form of partisan ‘consubstantiality’ (p. 21). The paradox is that when we unite along terministic lines of identification, we also engage in division, separating ourselves from others, sometimes to the point of outright hostility, persecution, and in the most extreme cases, mass murder.
Creel’s rhetoric had two primary identifications to achieve at a national level. The first was for people to identify as Americans. The second was for them to identify with the view that America should join a distant war against Germany. We will see the particularities associated with achieving those identifications in Chapter 3. At this point, though, the main thing to note is that the techniques Creel deployed were aimed at the level of the nation. The arc I trace here is about how those techniques have been bureaucratised, institutionalised, and “democratised” such that the social basis and function of rhetoric has been lost in a flood of departmentalised or “disciplinary” terms. Rhetoric to sell goods and ideas has been departmentalised as Advertising. Rhetoric to shape public opinion has been departmentalised as Public Relations (PR). Rhetoric designed to achieve political ends has been renamed public diplomacy or political communication. Rhetoric for the management of corporate behaviour is called management or organisational communication. Rhetoric for military ends is called information warfare or psychological operations. Rhetoric for international relations is called Public Diplomacy. The organs of the Entertainment Industries deploy a multitude of rhetorical forms designed to delight, engage, transform, and inform. There is even rhetoric for teaching (not to be confused with rhetoric about teaching).
Any student of rhetoric will notice that all those functions are named throughout the history of rhetorical theory as various “offices” (social duties, functions, and services) of rhetoric. Having been broken up and hived off into various academic “disciplines” during the 20th century, their rhetorical roots are today almost entirely obscured. That is especially evident in efforts to theorise ‘strategic communication’ (Hallahan, Holtzhausen, van Ruler, Verčič, and Sriramesh, 2007). Its definition as ‘the purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfil its mission’ is sufficiently broad to include any and all of the functions above and, in surveying the history and constitution of strategic communication, Hallahan et al. (2007) include all of them, with only a passing reference to rhetoric as a sub-discipline informing Organisational Communication and some ‘rhetorical schools’ of PR. The relatively recent attempts to reintegrate the departmentalised aspects of rhetoric have followed a path through Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) into strategic communication after the disintegration of mass media audiences and the failure of advertising revenues during the 1990s. That fracturing moment is most often slated to developments in communication technology, which is no doubt true to some significant extent. However, there is just as convincing an argument to understand the fracturing of audiences as a function of rhetorical techniques being addressed to ever-smaller groups of people under the heading of “market segmentation”. Such moves have advanced to the point at which a new online publication feels it expedient to launch under the following legend: ‘From cabbie to QC: We’re not journalists, we’re you. Your curated city of opinions, brands and culture’ (The Big Smoke, 2016). The ostensive “audience of one” has become a norm, as evidenced by iTunes, YouTube, MeVo, MySchool, Me Bank, and the innumerable brand names beginning with some permutation of personal pronoun or possessive adjectival, beginning with the iPod and MySpace.
When we foreground the dramatistic aspect of what has come to be called strategic communication, what we notice throughout the history that Creel set in motion is the social and cultural violence of the CPI’s techniques. Over the past century, that violence has been “democratised”, diffused, along with scientistic command of its techniques, both through education systems and through sheer osmosis in the presence of overwhelming amounts of industrialised rhetoric. The implications and effects of such an environment are everywhere in evidence. The notion of “sending a message” has taken on the most sinister tones. As I write, the outgoing vice president of the United States has declared his intention to ‘send a message’ to Russia over bombings in Syria by launching a cyberattack against the country (Robertson, 2017). Russia has sent its own message in return by moving its nuclear arms towards the Polish border. This in the same week as the United States accuses Russia of ‘posturing to the rest of the world by prepping civilians for potential war, instructing them to check on the availability of bomb shelters and gas masks’ (Robertson, 2017).
In India, we see the apotheosis of aggressive corporate pedagogy in the awkwardly named Amity College of Corporate Warfare, which is run by a retired Major General and which offers an MBA in Competitive Intelligence and Corporate Warfare (Amity Education, 2016). In an apparent irony, the eligibility to undertake the MBA includes having an ‘amicable personality’ and being ‘creative with exceptionally high level of soft skills’ (2016). Those attributes are entirely consistent when seen through the lens of the Creel century. Writing for Psychology Today, Judith Sills (2008) advises the ambitious individual that ‘just north of your reputation and east of your resume is yet another man-made mountain to which you might aspire. It’s your Brand, the identifying marks of You, Inc., and it can be created as consciously as Disney’s Matterhorn’. Tom Peters (1997) is credited with having launched the idea of the personal brand with The Brand Called You, although its general thrust can be traced back to Carnegie’s (1937) How To Win Friends and Influence People. The leading admonition in all such tracts, from Carnegie onwards, is “stand out from the crowd” by which is meant “elicit identification with success” or, in common parlance, “beat the others to the buck”.
Rhetoric assumes conflict. In most cases, it is conflict. In all cases, it assumes what Burke calls ‘the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, 
 the onus of ownership, the War of Nerves, the War’ (1950/1969, p. 50). He refers to systemic encouragements to continual bids for higher status, more power, more widespread recognition, more money, more fulsome praise, more everything. The long arc of industrialised rhetoric applied at national and international levels runs directly...

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