---
title: The Results of Propaganda
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/09-the-results-of-propaganda/
description: The Results of Propaganda, from Propaganda Technique in the World War by Harold D. Lasswell.
section: FRAME
---

![Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-interwar.jpg)

[Library](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/) · Book · [Propaganda Technique in the World War](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/)

# The Results of Propaganda

This text

- **Work:** [Propaganda Technique in the World War](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/)
- **Author:** Harold D. Lasswell
- **Published:** 1927

Full details

- **Rights:** Published in London and New York in 1927, more than 95 years ago, so in the public domain in the United States (works published in 1930 or earlier). Lasswell died in 1978, so the text may still be protected in countries that count the author's life plus 70 years; readers outside the United States should check their own law.

Chapters

1. [The Matter in Hand](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/01-the-matter-in-hand/)
2. [Propaganda Organization](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/02-propaganda-organization/)
3. [War Guilt and War Aims](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/03-war-guilt-and-war-aims/)
4. [Satanism](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/04-satanism/)
5. [The Illusion of Victory](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/05-the-illusion-of-victory/)
6. [Preserving Friendship](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/06-preserving-friendship/)
7. [Demoralizing the Enemy](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/07-demoralizing-the-enemy/)
8. [Conditions and Methods of Propaganda: A Summary](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/08-conditions-and-methods-of-propaganda-a-summary/)
9. [The Results of Propaganda](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/09-the-results-of-propaganda/)
10. [Note on Bibliography](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/10-note-on-bibliography/)

[← Conditions and Methods of Propaganda: A Summary](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/08-conditions-and-methods-of-propaganda-a-summary/) [Note on Bibliography →](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/10-note-on-bibliography/)

**Content note:** Quotes First World War atrocity stories and abusive wartime language about the enemy, including "Hun", and period terms for racial groups, as examples of propaganda. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was)

After this rapid review of the means and conditions of war propaganda we are in a position to undertake an appraisal of its results. The history of the late War shows that “ moderi^war must be fought on three fronts : the military front, the economic front, and the propaganda front. The economic blockade strangles, the propaganda confuses, and the armed force delivers the coup de grace. Employed in conjunction with the other arms of offence, propaganda saps the stamina of the armed and civilian forces of the enemy, and smoothes the path for the mailed fist of men and metal. The economic blockade slowly squeezes the vitality out of a nation, and depends for its maximum effect upon a prolonged struggle. Propaganda is hkewise a passive and contributory weapon, whose chief function is to demolish the enemy’s will to fight by intensifying depression, disillusionment and disagreement.

As the U.S. Military Intelligence described the function of propaganda, it attacks the whole army at its base ; threatens to cut it off from its base, to stop the flow of reinforcements, supplies, ammunition, equipment, food, comforts, and above all, to weaken the moral support that sustains the troops in the hardships and cruelties of war far from home.

“ Armies fight as the people think ” was the wise epigram of the British General Applin. It might be extended to say that armies fight as armies think, for, as George William Notable successes in which propaganda had an important and pefhaps a decisive part were scored in the last War. In common with every other weapon of attack, propaganda has a surprise value, which the Central Powers realized to the full, in the ingenious propaganda offensive, which preceded their attack upon the Italians in 1917 at Caporetto. The spirit of the Italian armies was dissipated, and their lines cracked and broken. In reply, the Allies won a striking success in 1918, when they forced the postponement of the Austro-Hungarian offensive against Italy, from April until June, by sowing demoralization among the troops of the subject nationalities. Mutinous troops blew up ammunition dumps behind the lines, and sabotaged the whole military plan.

> / Curtis said : " Thoughts are Bullets. ^

> ^ Propaganda in its Military and Legal Aspects, Introduction,)

One of the gravest triumphs of the War was won when the Germans put the Russians out of the running. They strained every muscle to complete the disintegration which culminated in the second Revolution. They permitted the famous '' sealed car to convey Lenin and forty associates from Switzerland, across Germany on their way to Russia. The ruthless Bolshevists accepted aid from any quarter and completed the job, in spite of all the frantic work of the American Red Cross and the special propaganda services of the Entente group.

But the crowning victory of the War was at the expense of the Germans. German moral depended upon the hope that the victory which had been so many times within their grasp, was just over the horizon. Strained to the breaking point by the inexorable clutch of the economic blockade, their great hopes of the spring and summer of 1918 crumpled into rubbish, the German army and the German people were ready to lend an ear to the seductive voice of Mr. Wilson.

If the great generalissimo on the military front was Foch, the great generalissimo on the propaganda front was Wilson. His monumental rhetoric, epitomizing the aspirations of all humanity in periods at once lucid and persuasive, was scattered far and wide over Germany. He declared war upon autocracies everywhere, and solemnly adhered to his distinction between the German people and the German rulers. His speeches were one prolonged instigation to revolt. He and Lenin were the champion revolutionists of the age. Throughout the entire War his pronouncements had won a substantial measure of confidence and respect in the minds of that minority of democratically-minded men, who longed to transform the pre-war Germany of class discrimination and special privilege. And when the clouds of adversity darkened the sky in 1918, they were joined by immense numbers of their compatriots, pinched by privation and despair, anxiously searching the heavens for portents of a soft peace. They turned, not to Clemenceau — hard, relentless vulture, poised like an avenging conscience, to tear at the vitals of a fallen adversary, nor to Lloyd George — ^nimble, unstable and uncertain, but to this mysterious figute in the White House, aloof from the ordinary passions of petty men, who spoke in elegiac prose of a better world, when wars should be no more and a brotherhood of democratic peoples should bury their heritage of ancestral rancour, and march toward a world of fellowship and reconciliation. It was to this man, mercilessly ridiculed and caricatured from one end of Germany to another through long years of hesitation and then of belligerency, that the Germans turned in their extremity.

Could it be that at last a statesman had arisen to lead the peoples of the world in the path of friendship and peace ? Had a great prophet at last soared above vindictiveness and animosity to bring understanding to a harassed universe ? This butt of ribald jest was transformed at a stroke in those closing months of hunger, insecurity, foreboding and hallucination into a saviour. The people grasped at straws and saw deliverers where they had seen but pedantic fools before.

Such matchless skill as Wilson showed in propaganda has never been equalled in the world’s history. He spoke to the heart of the people as no statesman has ever done. For a few brief months he embodied the faith of the idealists in a better world, and the last desperate hope of the defeated peoples for a soft peace. He was raised to a matchless pinnacle of prestige and power, and his name was spoken with reverence in varied accents in the remotest comers of the earth.

Just how much of Wilsonism was rhetorical exhibitionism and how much was the sound fruit of sober reflection will be in debate until the World War is a feeble memory. From a propaganda point of view it was a matchless performance, for Wilson brewed the subtle poison, which industrious men injected into the veins of a staggering people, until the smashing powers of the Allied armies knocked them into submission. While he fomented discord abroad, Wilson fostered unity at home. A nation of one hundred million people, sprung from many alien and antagonistic stocks, was welded into a fighting whole, " to make the world safe for democracy.” And the magic of his eloquence soothed the suspicions which Central and South America cherished toward the mighty colossus of the North, and brought most of them into the War on the Allied side.

The propaganda of disintegration which was directed against the tottering realm of the Hapsburgs bore fruit in disaffection and ultimate secession among the Czechs, Slovaks* Rumanians, Croats, Poles and Italians. The Balfour Declaration hastened the reversal of Jewish sympathies in 1917.

Some of the triumphs of propaganda were in the field of recruiting. In the race for Allies, the Germans won in Bulgaria and Turkey, but the honours went to the Allies in the United States, Italy, Rumania, Greece and in a wide array of lesser countries, and Germany stood isolated in sympathy, except for Spain and Sweden. The hand of the whole world was raised against the Teuton. The great tug of war in America was only won by the British and the French after a desperate struggle against the German propaganda. The French were admirable in the very simplicity of their appeal. They invoked the sacred name of Lafayette, implored the gods of democracy, blackguarded the Germans and advertised the Americans who had enlisted on the side of the French. The British had less traditional affection to draw upon, and much more to explain away, but they had the powerful asset of the cables and the good sense to work, not secretly, but just outside the glare of pubhcity. And neither the British nor the French were severely handicapped by a military-diplomatic programme, which hurled all their fine pretensions in their teeth. ^

Now a formidable list could be drawn up of the propaganda drives which failed or which accomplished their objective after a long period of waiting. Not all the propagandas to instigate defeat, Revolution, or secession and to preserve friendship succeeded. After all, India, Egypt, Ireland and Morocco did not respond to the proddings of German agents to rise up as one man to cast off the yoke of the Englishman and the Frenchman ; Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and Turkey did hold out for four long years. France, Great Britain, and most of the Allies persisted through all discouragement to victory, in spite of the dangerous German peace offensive of 1916-17. But before regarding these negative results as a defeat for propaganda, it must be remembered that propaganda was not only an offensive weapon ; it was a powerful means of defence as well. Unity could be preserved just as it could be demolished by propaganda. Indeed, propaganda was present on both sides of every hotly-contested sector, and though it is one of those weapons whose precise effect is largely a matter of surmise, it is one which it would be foolhardy to neglect.

A defeated country naturally exaggerates the influence of propaganda. The Italians sought to save their faces after the Caporetto disaster^ by complaining of the terrible and insidious German propaganda, and Ludendorff devotes a great many pages to explaining just how it was that he did not lose the War, and how the Alien and Radical riff-raff in the population collapsed behind the lines, leaving a sort of vacuum, in which the German troops fell, victorious to the end.

> ^ The importance of propaganda in neutral countries has been illustrated, of course, in many other wars before the last one. President Lincoln tried every expedient to stimulate the pro-North sentiment in England's industrial wage earners during the Civil War: He sent Henry Ward Beecher and perhaps a hundred other agents to England to plead the cause of the anti -slavery side. One of the most effective and original stunts was to send a ship loaded with foodstuffs, to relieve the suffering in the cities.

> * The report of the special commission of inquiry into the Caporetto disaster which was appointed by the Italian Government is not now available, and complete judgment cannot be made upon the whole affair.

It is especially difficult to extricate the strands of propaganda influence from the means of control which are closely allied to it. When the Nivelle offensive drowned in a sea of blood in 1917, no less than twelve army corps were tainted by mutinous demonstrations. Soldiers began to start home, infuriated by the insensate butchery of their comrades. It was the remarkable work of General Petain which restored orderly enthusiasm to the front and thwarted the ominous diversion of hatred which threatened to turn the French soldiery against their own leaders and away from the enemy. He relied by no means exclusively upon propaganda.*

But when all allowances have been made, and all extravagant estimates pared to the bone, the fact remains that propaganda is one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modem world. * It has arisen to its present eminence in response to a complex of changed circumstances which have altered the nature of society. Small, primitive tribes can weld their heterogeneous members into a fighting whole by the beat of the tom-tom and the tempestuous rhythm of the dance. It is in orgies of physical exuberance that young men are brought to the boiling point of war, and that old and young, men and women, are caught in the suction of tribal purpose.

> ^ For a description of his methods, see Mayer, La psychologie du com^ mandement, and, in general, the reference in the section upon moral and military psychology in the bibliography.

> * Sir Thomas More foreshadows the extensive use of propaganda in Utopia. He records how the Utopians spread distrust among their enemies by offering a reward for the capture or the voluntary surrender of prominent enemy leaders, and how they seek to divide the enemy by fostering the ambition of a rival to the reigning prince.

In the Great Society it is no longer possible to fuse the waywardness of individuals in the furnace of the war dance ; a new and subtler instrument must weld thousands and even millions of human beings into one amalgamated mass of hate and will and hope. A new flame must burn out the canker of dissent and temper the steel of bellicose enthusiasm. The name of this new hammer and anvil of social solidarity is propaganda. Talk must take the place of drill ; print must supplant the dance. War dances live in literature and at the fringes of the modern earth ; war propaganda breathes and fumes in the capitals and provinces of the world

Propaganda is a concession to the rationality of the modern world. A literate world, a reading world, a schooled world prefers to thrive on argument and news. It is sophisticated to the extent of using print ; and he that takes to print shall live or perish by the Press. All the apparatus of diffused erudition popularizes the symbols and forms of pseudorational appeal ; the wolf of propaganda does not hesitate to masquerade in the sheepskin. All the voluble men of the day — writers, reporters, editors, preachers, lecturers, teachers, politicians— are drawn into the service of propaganda to amplify a master voice. All is conducted with the decorum and the trappery of intelligence, for this is a rational epoch, and demands its raw meat cooked and garnished by adroit and skilful chefs.

Propaganda is a concession to the wilfulness of the age. The bonds of personal loyalty and affection which bound a man to his chief have long since dissolved. Monarchy and class privilege have gone the way of all flesh, and the idolatry of the individual passes for the official reUgion of democracy. It is an atomized world, in which individual whims have wider play than ever before, and it requires more strenuous exertions to co-ordinate and unify than formerly. The new antidote to wilfulness is propaganda. If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver. If it will not love, honour and obey, it must not expect to escape seduction.

Propaganda is a reflex to the immensity, the rationality and wilfulness of the modem world. It is the new dynamic of society, for power is subdivided and diffused, and more can be won by illusion than by coercion. It has aU the prestige of the new and provokes all the animosity of the baffled. To illuminate the mechanisms of propaganda is to reveal the secret springs of social action, and to expose to the most searching criticism our prevailing dogmas of sovereignty, of democracy, of honesty, and of the sanctity of individual opinion. The study of propaganda will bring into the open much that is obscure, until, indeed, it may no longer be possible for an Anatole France to observe with truth that ” Democracy (and, indeed, all society) is run by an unseen engineer.”

[← Conditions and Methods of Propaganda: A Summary](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/08-conditions-and-methods-of-propaganda-a-summary/) [Note on Bibliography →](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/10-note-on-bibliography/)

Propaganda Technique in the World War, Harold D. Lasswell. Published in London and New York in 1927, more than 95 years ago, so in the public domain in the United States (works published in 1930 or earlier). Lasswell died in 1978, so the text may still be protected in countries that count the author's life plus 70 years; readers outside the United States should check their own law. [Provenance and rights](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lasswell-propaganda-technique-1927/).