From Analysis to Propaganda

America is beset by a confusion of conflicting propagandas, a Babel of voices. . ..

So said Columbia University's Professor Clyde R. Miller when he started his Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1937 on the fashionable wave of propaganda against propaganda. Last week the Institute itself was beset by conflicting propagandas. Its scholar-directors had a row.

The Institute has lately published many an analysis of war propaganda. Annoyed at the trend of these analyses, two of the Institute's directors last week announced that they had resigned. They were Professor Paul H. Douglas, of University of Chicago, and Professor Eduard C. Lindeman, of the New York School of Social Work.

Said Professor Douglas: "[The bulletins were] much more critical of many Administration policies than I wanted them to be." Said Professor Lindeman: "I am all-out for intervention. . . . [The Institute] did not seem to be."

Professor Lindeman objected particularly to the Institute's April bulletin: Strikes, Profits, and Defense. Protesting that it had more propaganda than analysis, he observed: "The word millionaire is twice used in a name-calling manner."

Dr. Miller declared that the Institute had reported on Nazi and Communist propaganda as well as democratic, wailed: "Everyone wants the other fellow's propaganda analyzed, but not his own."

Chief thing the row seemed to prove: every man is a propagandist, whether he knows it or not.

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