Manipulating the Masses: The Roots of the Modern Government Propaganda Machine

Join us for a discussion with Jack Hamilton, author of Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (LSU Press, 2020), exploring the Great War origins of one of the most profound and enduring threats to American democracy: the systematic production and dissemination of propaganda to advance administration aims. Through its Committee on Public Information (CPI) the United States government  exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of the citizens it was supposed to serve. Nothing like it had existed before, and it would be dismantled at the end of the war. But the CPI endured as a “blueprint” for the Information State that exists today - in times of peace as well as times of war.

Jack Hamilton is the Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor in LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. 

Trygve Throntveit is Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Minnesota Humanities Center and Global Fellow for History and Public Policy at the Wilson Center.

Consistent with its mission as a national memorial to the 28th U.S. president,  the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program is launching “Woodrow Wilson - Then and Now," a new series of scholarly conversations exploring the significant and complicated legacies of the man and his presidency for our own day. Moderated by Trygve Throntveit, Global Fellow for History and Public Policy, the series will be a platform for an inclusive and critical discussion of Wilson’s biography, his White House tenure and his long-term impact on US foreign and domestic politics.