American Empire and the Arsenal of Entertainment

Soft Power and Cultural Weaponization

E. Fattor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137387257
• eBook ISBN: 9781137382238
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Movies, television, and American culture permeates even the most remote reaches of the globe in unprecedented levels. What affect does the spread of the American zeitgeist have on global perceptions of the US? This book analyzes the complex role entertainment plays in foreign policy - weighing its benefits and setbacks to national interests abroad.

1

Legitimacy through Popular Entertainment: Bringing the British Empire to Life (1815–1945)

Introduction

Despite the restoration of hereditary aristocratic rule at the Congress of Vienna, the beginning of the nineteenth century was a time of social turbulence and political change. The Industrial Revolution was moving Europe away from an agricultural economy lorded over by nobility and toward a machine economy presided over by manufacturers, merchants, and financiers. This shift in the location of social power accompanied the rise of new political ideologies and value systems like utilitarianism and nationalism. Concrete expressions of such novel ideas were visible in 1830 as popular revolts took place in France, Belgium, Poland, and Switzerland, and then again in 1848 when widespread nationalism brought an even larger outbreak of revolt to the aforementioned states plus principalities in what is today Italy, Germany, Denmark, and Hungary. Toward the end of the century, in 1870, the Paris Commune represented yet another attempt by disenfranchised and exploited urban poor to take over the ruling institutions of France.¹

Curiously, however, Great Britain managed to avoid much of this revolutionary activity—a rather unexpected development since Great Britain was the birthplace of industrial production and few states were more deeply impacted by the effects of industrialization. To be sure, there was much social strife in Great Britain as aristocrats with their traditions of paternalism and sovereign right confronted a bourgeoisie bearing the marks of utilitarian thought and republican reforms while a mass working class demanding full enfranchisement and labor rights also joined the fray. However, by 1848, when the rest of Europe was ablaze with nationalist fervor, the bourgeoisie of Britain enjoyed a largely uncontested hegemony. Their control over British political institutions enabled the rapid and extensive expansion of the British Empire around the world with only moderate domestic social dissent. Even in later years, when the British Empire began to wither and collapse, this loss of power took place, at least domestically, without catastrophic social unrest.²

Why did Great Britain endure the tribulations of industrialization with so much more poise? Conventional explanations argue that activist movements, including those calling for the abolition of slavery, the reform of Parliament, and universal suffrage, and most especially nonconformist religious principles, created a more democratic Britain that cooled the forces of revolutionary change in British society.³ Other explanations point to the wealth and prosperity unleashed by a rapidly liberalizing economy. Once the growing pains of early marketization were removed, including the enclosure of the commons and the removal of protectionist trade barriers erected to promote the interests of landed nobility, an abundance of cheap food and other goods flowed into the country to alleviate the poverty and hunger of the masses.⁴ Still others suggest that as the century wore on, a more interventionist government that pursued policies of mass literacy, universal education, and the provision of certain welfare services created a social safety net that removed the precariousness of working-class life and dulled the impulse to revolt.⁵ All these explanations no doubt tell an important part of the story, but they also overlook other factors that are only now getting a more thorough examination.

Chapter 1 provides just such an examination to one of these variables—the rise of mass communications technologies and their ability to inform, persuade, and ultimately, entertain the masses of Great Britain. Beginning with early forms of broadsheets and newspapers like The Times and The Guardian, running through the era of music hall performances and early motion pictures, and ending with the development of the broadcasting capabilities managed by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), this chapter examines how Great Britain and those social groups that controlled or influenced its political institutions utilized ever-more advanced forms of communications technology to shape the popular narrative of British public life, capture the imaginations of the national (and later global) audience, and eventually, co-opt or neutralize much (but by no means all) of the dissent to British rule at home and abroad. The evidence for this account comes from taking a long historical view of the British Empire and identifying key stages in the rise and fall of British power where new information capabilities combined with shifting justifications and legitimizing discourses for British rule confront the various domestic and foreign challengers to British power.

This chapter will detail three stages—the rise of British imperial power between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the opening of the outbreak of the Indian Rebellion in 1857, the maturity of the British Empire between 1857 and the end of the South African War in 1902, and the decline of British imperial power from 1902 to the end of World War II in 1945. During the first phase of British power between 1815 and 1857, the key innovations in media capabilities included the widespread use of broadsheets, periodicals, and public exhibition. The application of these technologies began with the publicity campaigns advocating the abolition of slavery before showcasing the abundance of British industry at the Great Exhibition and other subsequent “world’s fairs.” In the latter half of the nineteenth century amid the mature phase of British imperial power, innovations in printing such as the tabloid newspaper and the staged music hall performance shifted some of the focus of British media away from activist spectacle to mass entertainment with a more nationalist tone. This included using newspapers to glorify the heroism of British military officers during the crisis in Egypt and Sudan and capturing the emotions of the populations through multiple forms of music hall reviews during the crisis and war in South Africa. The final part of the chapter examines how the state becomes the primary organizer and innovator of information technologies that assisted in allowing Great Britain to survive World War I through the organization of overseas media campaigns, the utilization of film technology to encourage consumer spending before and during the Great Depression, and the use of innovations in radio technology to keep the British Empire together long enough to defeat Nazi Germany.

After examining this rich history of communications technology and its connection to fluctuating levels of British imperial power, the importance of media spectacle and entertainment as a form of power begins to surface. The ability of British propaganda to not just persuade its domestic population (and at times, a significant foreign audience) of the virtues of British rule but also provide a moderately entertaining media product for the disinterested enabled the British Empire to neutralize and co-opt many of the challengers to British dominance.

In the end, however, the ugly side of imperial rule—racism, colonial occupation, and peripheral underdevelopment—negated the positive benefits of British power celebrated in sympathetic media outlets. No amount of compelling stories or patriotic songs could overcome the fact that a state claiming to be a defender of civilization and human rights was a habitual violator of these same standards. Nevertheless, the stirring narratives disseminated to an ever-growing mass audience enabled the British Empire to sustain its legitimacy for a longer period of time than it might otherwise have done—especially considering the challenges posed by its European rivals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More importantly, the lessons revealed by Britain’s mastery of print and early broadcasting technologies revealed an approach to exercising power at the global level that the United States would later show enormous interest in when it would take Britain’s place as the world’s most powerful empire after World War II.

From Activism to Spectacle: Printing and Exhibition amid the Rise of the British Empire (1815–1857)

The existence of simple printed text on unbound paper produced and distributed to a wide readership for a particular issue or cause goes back to at least the twelfth century in Europe.⁶ Since those early days, pamphlets, handbills, newsletters, and other print ephemera were a common sight in cities or towns where a modest literate population resided, especially during times of political crisis, such as the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. As the struggles between elite factions in society subsided after the establishment of Great Britain in 1707, British politics shifted toward the acquisition and maintenance of overseas colonies and the struggle to protect these colonies and their bounty from European rivals. This meant protecting Britain’s lucrative Caribbean plantations, the shipments of sugar and other agricultural consumer products cultivated on them, and most controversially, the cargoes of African slaves sent to work on them. On this issue of slavery and their transport, the tradition of mass printing through pamphlets and other reading material reached an important moment when, “amid flatbed presses, wooden trays of type, and large sheets of freshly printed book pages, [there began] one of the most ambitious and brilliantly organized citizens’ movements of all time.”⁷

The movement to abolish slavery in Great Britain was a central tenet of much religious agitation in the aftermath of the Restoration and the Act of Union. By the late eighteenth century, the movement began to gather genuine momentum thanks in large part to a clever publicity drive organized by a small group of antislavery campaigners meeting in a small house in London.⁸ In 1807, they succeeded in persuading Parliament to ban slave trading within the British Empire. However, slave trafficking continued throughout much of the world by other states and rogue British merchants while slaves in British colonies remained in bondage. Seeing the act of Parliament as only a partial victory, William Wilberforce, the movement’s most famous figure insisted,

Never will we desist, till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name; till we have released from the load of guilt under which we at present labor; and till we have extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarcely believe to have been suffered to exist so long, a disgrace and a dishonor to our country.⁹

These fiery words were dramatic in their resolve to see the barbarity of the slave trade end throughout the world and served as a call to arms that would rally public support toward the cause.

In 1807, however, the British population had its gaze transfixed on the emerging threat from France and the successes of Napoleon in his bid to conquer the continent. For the likes of William Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists like Zachary Macaulay and Henry Thornton, the effort to win the support of the public to persuade the British state to actively intervene in the Atlantic slave trade had to wait until more pressing problems in Europe were neutralized.

In the meantime, abolitionists began using all the means of publicity available to them to communicate their abhorrence with the institution of slavery. A multitude of journals, pamphlets, and newssheets were printed in small presses throughout Britain and tacked up on public walls, read at abolitionist meetings, and discussed in local coffee and tobacco shops. For example, between 1807 and 1833, the British Anti-Slavery Society published almost three million copies of newssheets and pamphlets.¹⁰ The most important of these publications was The Anti-Slavery Reporter. Begun in 1825 by Zachary Macaulay, it became the primary medium through which the struggle for emancipation found a public audience. The journal’s primary function was publishing the minutes of the meetings as well as the activities of the members of the British Anti-Slavery Society in order to keep large numbers of sympathetic readers across Britain informed of the activities of the organization. The Anti-Slavery Reporter also served as a precursor to the kind of online chat forums familiar to the Internet age in its role as a platform where approaches to dealing with the problems of enacting abolition could be debated and the critiques of abolition’s opponents could be rejoined.¹¹

Printed material was not the only medium available to antislavery activists. Many among the abolitionist movement or those sympathetic to it sought to express their sentiments through artistic platforms. Antislavery poems like Thomas Day’s The Dying Negro or Hannah More’s Slavery were representative of an outpouring of material designed to raise the awareness of the practice.¹² In addition to textual material, small drawings and images were widely produced to serve as logos for the movement. The most famous of these was Josiah Wedgewood’s sketch of a kneeling African slave surrounded by the by phrase, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” So popular and powerful was the image that the present-day American historian Adam Hochschild concludes, “Wedgewood’s kneeling African . . . was probably the first widespread use of a logo design for a political cause.”¹³ In the succeeding years after the prohibition of the slave trade, these words and pictures made a return appearance in the effort to effect total abolition.¹⁴

Hinting at a future time when visual images would overtake text as the preferred platform of propagandistic messages, numerous painted and drawn pictures played a role in the antislavery campaign as well. Drawings and etchings were a central part of the campaign to eliminate the slave trade, especially those depicting the nightmarishly cramped conditions on slave ships. Indeed, these visual images were perhaps the most effective pieces of propaganda in that they depicted in a brutally honest manner the realities of the slave industry, and would hint at the power of visual images to arouse popular outrage to justify aggressive imperial activities. Around the time of emancipation in 1833, these simple drawings were accompanied by full-sized paintings, with several works taking their place among the best works of art of their time. The French painter Auguste Biard enjoyed the greatest notoriety, with works painted in the 1830s titled Scene on the African Coast and The Slave Trade, the latter of which was bought and displayed in the home of famous antislave crusader Thomas Fowell Buxton. British painters made their mark on this subject when J. M. W. Turner debuted his haunting Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon Coming On. In that same year, 1840, Benjamin Robert Haydon attempted to glamorize the antislavery movement with a depiction of a famous antislavery meeting titled The Anti-Slavery Society, though the latter work pales i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   The American Empire and the Weaponization of Entertainment
• 1   Legitimacy through Popular Entertainment: Bringing the British Empire to Life (1815–1945)
• 2   Overcoming Isolationism: Film, Radio, and the Rise of the American Empire (1898–1945)
• 3   Spreading Liberalism: Broadcasting, Consumerism, and the Maturity of the American Empire (1945–1968)
• 4   The Postindustrial Renewal: Guerillas, Partisans, and the Triumph of the American Empire (1965–1989)
• Conclusion   America Overexposed? Globalization, Digital Communications, and the Fate of the American Empire (1989–Present)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index