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the navy but had been rejected on medical grounds, was stripped, bound with an American flag, dragged barefoot and stumbling through the streets, and lynched as the mob cheered. At the trial of the leaders of the lynch mob, who appeared in court wearing red, white and blue ribbons, their defense counsel argued that the killing was justifiable “patriotic murder.” It took the jury twenty-five minutes to return a not guilty verdict. One jury member shouted out, “Well, I guess nobody can say we aren’t loyal now.” The Washington Post wrote of the trial that “in spite of the excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening of the interior of the country.” The explosives that Prager was alleged to be harboring were never found.

The severe weakening of populist forces during the war led to their obliteration when the war ended. The war propaganda, which used fear as its engine, instantly switched the target of its hatred from Germans to communists. During the Palmer Raids on November 7, 1919, carried out on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, more than ten thousand alleged communists and anarchists were arrested. Many were held for long periods without trial. When Russian-born émigrés such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Mollie Steimer, and 245 others were released from prison, they were deported to Russia. By November 1922 Appeal to Reason was shut down.

“By a campaign of publicity and advertising on a scale history had never witnessed before, by chicanery and lying, by exaggeration and misrepresentation, by persistent and long-continued appeals to the basest as well as the noblest traits of man, by every imaginable and unprecedented manner and method, the great financial interests, eager for war and aided by the international Junkers, thrust humanity into the world war,” wrote Berkman and Goldman in “Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace in 1919.”Hatred, intolerance, persecution and suppression—the efficient “education” factors in the preparedness and war campaign—are now permeating the very heart of this country and propagating its virulent poison into every phase of our social life. But there is no more “Hun” to be hated and lynched. . . . But the Frankenstein and intolerance and suppression cultivated by the war campaign is there, alive and vital, and must find some vent for his accumulated bitterness and misery. Oh, there, the radical, the Bolshevik! What better prey to be cast to the Frankenstein monster?”

“Many people had long supposed liberalism to be the freedom to know and say, not what was popular or convenient or even what was patriotic, but what they held to be true,” Addams wrote. “Now those very liberals came to realize that a distinct aftermath of the war was the dominance of the mass over the individual to such an extent that it constituted a veritable revolution in our social relationships.”20

The CPI was closed on November 12, 1918, one day after the war ended. The activities of the committee’s foreign division ended a few months later. The employees of the CPI, however, had no difficulty finding work. Political scientist Harold Lasswell, who wrote one of the best studies of the power of the new mass propaganda in his book Propaganda Technique in the World War, noted that most of the former CPI experts instantly gravitated to government and corporate offices in Washington and New York. The director of the CPI’s Foreign Division, two years later, wrote that “the history of propaganda in the war would scarcely be worthy of consideration here, but for one fact—it did not stop with the armistice. No indeed! The methods invented and tried out in the war were too valuable for the uses of governments, factions, and special interests.” Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the father of modern public relations, who had worked in Latin America for Creel, became a major figure on Madison Avenue and an advocate of mass propaganda as a tool for governmental and corporate control. “It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of