War Propaganda and the United States

IN the annals of war few Great Campaigns rival the exploits of the British Army of Occupation which landed in America shortly after World War I began. Its landing was accomplished without a single casualty; not a shot was fired. In fact, the native populace turned out, in awe or in wonder, to welcome the expeditionary force that Sir Gilbert Parker commanded by remote control. If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the course of World War I was momentously influenced at luncheon tables and in private salons in America. There the British case was presented informally, inferentially, innocently. For two and a half years the great, and the near great, literary men of London advanced in single file through America.

And when the long procession of Allied lecturers, official emissaries, self-appointed envoys, and tea-table diplomats had returned to England, the memory of its deeds remained. Like most armies of occupation, whether at first they are greeted with laurel wreaths or rebellion, this one left a trail of disenchantment. By the time World War II started Americans had pondered the confessions of the propagandists themselves, read or heard about Sir Gilbert Parker's chronicles of British propaganda in this country. Whatever their thoughts about the war, they critically scrutinized the identity of lecturers and ambassadors at large who sought to tell them what to think.

Sensing the atmosphere, the British moved cautiously in the autumn of 1939. When they lifted the ban for

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