Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [37]
Arthur Bullard was a former history student of Wilson’s at Princeton who went on to work as a reporter and foreign correspondent, including in Russia. He was typical of the intellectuals and activists who embraced the war and shifted their energy from social reform to state propaganda. Bullard, who often wrote under the pseudonym Albert Edwards for the pro-Bolshevik publication The Masses as well as Harper’s, had sterling credentials as a muckraker and social activist. He had left Hamilton College after two years to serve as a probation officer for the New York Prison Association, spurred by the muckrackers’ reports of the squalid conditions of the working class, and moved into University House on the Lower East Side. University House when he arrived was filled with radical writers as well as settlement house workers. It included the socialist writer William English Walling (a founder of the NAACP); Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Poole; Howard Brubaker, who later became a columnist for the New Yorker; journalist Hamilton Hold, the editor of the weekly Independent, and author Walter Weyl, a founding editor of the New Republic. These writers produced articles and books on the housing and employment situation of workers on the Lower East Side, particularly the effects of inhuman working conditions and poverty on women and children. They were avowed socialists and fellow travelers with the revolutionaries seeking to topple the Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Poole, Walling, and Bullard, who was a press agent for the Friends of Russian Freedom in America, traveled to Russia in 1905 to cover the abortive revolution and its aftermath. They established contacts with radical Russian intellectuals, writers, artists, and revolutionaries. Bullard contributed a series of articles on Russia—he spoke some Russian—to Harper’s and Collier’s. In a report he wrote for Collier’s in April 1906 under the pseudonym Albert Edwards, he told readers:My object in making this trip was to see how well the Russian troops could succeed in suppressing a revolutionary movement by sheer terrorism. I am convinced they cannot do it. They have failed to capture the leaders. They have failed to disarm the people. They have not succeeded in stamping out the revolutionary fire among the mass of the peasants. The indiscriminate executions, floggings, and burnings have only poured oil on the fire; it has turned the indignation into a personal determination for vengeance for murdered kindred; it has turned discontent into desperation, and hostility into hatred.
“General Orloff is a military man,” he concluded, “and he was given orders to suppress the rebellion in these provinces. He did, and is doing it, as far as he can, but he has not enough soldiers, nor enough cartridges to do it thoroughly. The position of the Government has been perfectly logical—except for its premise, which is that this is the middle of the Dark Ages and that a state exists by the fear of its subjects.”6
Bullard, who witnessed the power of revolutionary idealism and propaganda, believed that heavy censorship and secrecy laws that Wilson advocated would backfire, especially with many Americans viewing the war as one pushed down the throats of the nation by bankers and industrialists. The bankers and industrialists wanted to ensure that the massive loans to the European powers would be repaid, something that would not happen if Germany won the war. He grasped that a more potent weapon than overt repression could be found in mass propaganda. Propaganda could, he understood, feed the dark sentiments of nationalism and the lust for violence that made war possible. The public, he grasped, would, with the right kind of guidance, become enthusiastic war supporters. He sent a copy of his book Mobilizing America to Wilson in early 1917 in an effort to influence the president’s management of the war. In it he argued that if the government controlled all the mechanisms of information, and used the creative arts to bolster its