Excerpt from a 1995 letter to Covert Action Quarterly
by Noam Chomsky
... Independence Day was designed by the first state
propaganda agency, Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information (CPI),
created during World War I to whip a pacifist country into anti-German frenzy
and, incidentally, to beat down the threat of labor
which frightened respectable people a 23523j921x fter such events as the IWW (Industrial
Workers of the World) victory in the Lawrence, Mass., strike of 1912. The CPI's successes greatly impressed the business world; one
of its members, Edward Bernays, became the leading
figure in the vastly expanding public relations industry. Also much impressed
was Adolf Hitler, who attributed
This particular propaganda exercise began with business-government initiatives to Americanize immigrants, to inculcate loyalty and obedience and expel from their minds alien notions about the rights of working people. Such programs would turn immigrants into the natural foe of the IWW and other destructive forces that undermine the country's ideals and institutions, the CPI founding document read. At a major conference of civic organizations (organized labour excluded), government and private organizations of all kinds and creeds had pledged themselves to cooperate in carrying out Americanization as a national endeavour, the organizers reported, while issuing plans for a successful Americanization program for the coming Fourth of July. The CPI took up the cudgels, now using the wartime fanaticism it had helped engender as another weapon against pacifists, agitators and other anti-American groups, notably the hated Wobblies. The Generalissimo joined in with a May 1918 endorsement. The title of the indoctrination ceremonies was to be Americanization Day; on reflection, Independence Day seemed preferable.
Labor leaders were aware of what was happening. A United Mine Workers (UMW) official objected that the business-government project was
attempting to set up a paternalism that will bring the workers of this country even more absolutely under the control of the employers, ... strengthening the chain of industrial tyranny in this country. ... [That is what lies behind these efforts] to sanctify and confirm oppression by waving the American flag in the face of its victims and by insidiously stigmatizing as unpatriotic any attempts they may make to throw off the yoke of the exploiting interests [that the organizers] represent.
But labour could not compete with state-corporate power,
and lost this battle just as it failed to save May Day. (A jingoist holiday in
the
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