# A private bulletin tried to teach Americans to spot the trick, then closed for the war

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  A private bulletin tried to teach Americans to spot the trick, then closed for the war
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  At a glance

From 1937 to 1942 a small group at Teachers College, funded by Edward Filene, published Propaganda Analysis and named seven devices. It was not a

When1937ActorInstitute for Propaganda Analysis, Inc.…Full record at propagandaarchive.org

## What it said

The monthly called itself, in the line the archive records, "a monthly letter to help the intelligent citizen detect and analyze propaganda." The devices were meant to be recognizable because they "appeal to our emotions rather than to our reason." On 31 October 1937 the New York Times headlined the launch "Propaganda Foes Expose Its Tricks: 7 Word-Tools to Fool Public Listed and Defined." The seven also appeared in the institute's second bulletin. Name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking, and bandwagon became the classroom list. FRAME still tags objects with that list. The list is a tool, not a constitution.

## Who made it and why

Clyde R. Miller, a former journalist and an associate professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia, founded the institute in 1937 with the Harvard geologist Kirtley Mather and the merchant Edward A. Filene. Filene's check for the first year was $10,000. His Good Will Fund later agreed to three more years. The staff numbered seven. In the first year Propaganda Analysis reached 5,900 subscriptions. In 1939 Harcourt, Brace published The Fine Art of Propaganda, a study of Father Coughlin's speeches edited by Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, with a second printing that October. From 1939 to 1940 the institute ran a series in Scholastic, "What Makes You Think So?"

This was philanthropy and a faculty, not the Office of War Information. Nobody had to subscribe. That is the fact that makes the project compatible with a free country.

## What it got right or wrong

It was right that ordinary readers can learn to name a move: a borrowed symbol, a stacked deck, a bandwagon. It was right to spend an early case study, in 1938, on German fascist technique, and to write a book on Coughlin, a domestic broadcaster with a huge audience and a record of attacking Jews. Naming a method does not require pretending the method's user is your political friend.

It was shakier as an institution once the war came close. Two directors resigned over the institute's analyses of war propaganda before the United States entered: the economist Paul H. Douglas and the social-work scholar Eduard C. Lindeman. In January 1941 Alfred M. Bingham of Common Sense warned Miller that the new editorial director, Clyde Beals, was likely a communist. Miller defended Beals and asked for evidence. The farewell bulletin of 9 January 1942, "We Say Au Revoir," said the board had voted to suspend. Critics later said the habit of analysis bred "attitudes of cynicism and defeatism," and one line associated with the institute's own later self-description, recorded by FRAME, is "We are Propagandists for Democracy." A group that teaches suspicion of propaganda and then announces it is propagandizing has walked into its own lesson. Whether that line was candor or a collapse is an open reading. The libertarian one is: a private bulletin may take a side, and it should say so, and it should not ask the state to make the lesson compulsory.

## When a literacy project shares sources with the Dies committee

Miller wrote to Martin Dies in May 1939, after the House set Dies to chair a special Committee on Un-American Activities, and shared sources the institute had gathered on domestic fascist groups. Sharing research with a congressional committee is legal and can be public-spirited. It is also how a literacy project starts to look like an auxiliary of an investigatory body that was already careless with reputations. The institute had no subpoena. Dies did. Keeping those powers distinct is the point.

Nothing in the subscription list was coerced. 5,900 is not a captive classroom unless a school board later made the pamphlet the only permitted text. Where schools did that, the liberty question moved from Miller's bulletin to the school board. The institute itself closed rather than become a war agency. That choice, whatever the mix of funding, internal fights, and patriotism behind it, left the field to the government's own information offices. Readers lost a critic. They did not lose a ministry, because this had never been one.

## Its legacy

The seven devices are still the fastest way to start an argument about a poster, including the posters on this site. They do not tell you whether the war was just or the speaker was lying about a fact. A glittering generality can be true. A plain-folks picture can be a crook. The institute's real bequest is the habit of asking "what makes you think so?" in public, without a badge. The moment that habit needs a bureau, it has become the thing it was built to read.

## Sources

- FRAME case study "The Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937-1942)," for the founders, the $10,000 check, the 5,900 subscriptions, the Times headline of 31 October 1937, the Coughlin book, the Dies letter, Bingham's warning, the directors' resignations, and the 9 January 1942 farewell.

- Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Propaganda Analysis, and Lee and Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda (Harcourt, Brace, 1939).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/institute-for-propaganda-analysis/