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on walkouts. They conceived of themselves not simply as a union but a revolutionary movement. The Wobblies, unlike most other unions, included women, immigrants, and African Americans. They preached an uncompromising class struggle, as the movement’s legendary leader, Bill Haywood, told delegates at the founding convention in 1905:Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism. . . . The aims and objects of this organization should be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.24

Socialism had wide appeal. Debs pulled a million votes in 1912. The Socialist Party printed twenty-nine English and twenty-two foreign-language weeklies, serving immigrant communities that diligently protected their languages and cultures. The party also published three English and six foreign language dailies. The United Mine Workers was primarily socialist. And Socialists were elected to Congress and became mayors in about a dozen major cities. The Socialists came close to defeating Samuel Gompers for the presidency of the American Federation of Labor.

And then, with war declared, it was over. Dwight Macdonald noted gloomily that “American radicalism was making great strides right up to 1914; the war was the rock on which it shattered.”25

The cultural and social transformation, captured in E.P. Thompson’s essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” following the war was much more than the embrace of an economic system or the triumph of undiluted nationalism. It was, as Thompson pointed out, part of a revolutionary reinterpretation of reality. It marked the ascendancy of mass propaganda and mass culture. Richard Sennet, in The Fall of the Public Man, targeted the rise of mass culture as one of the prime forces behind what he termed a new “collective personality . . . generated by a common fantasy.” And the century’s great propagandists would not only agree, but add to Sennet’s argument that those who could manipulate and disseminate those fantasies could determine the directions taken and the opinions embraced by the “collective personality.”

The suicidal impulses and industrial slaughter of World War I mocked the utopian vision of a heaven on earth and the inevitability of human progress embraced by the Social Gospel. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth, in The Epistle to the Romans (Der Römerbrief), published in 1918, tore apart the Social Gospel’s naïve belief that human beings could link the will of God to human endeavors. Christians, Barth argued, could neither envision nor create the kingdom of heaven on earth. The liberal church never found an adequate response to Barth’s critique. It retreated into a vague embrace of humanism and self-absorbed forms of spirituality.

After the war, as Stuart Ewen told me when we met in New York, all systems of public discourse, communication and expression were “systematically designed to avoid including any information or knowledge that might encourage people to evaluate the situation.” Mass propaganda obliterated an informed public. “Except for those who seek out information internationally or through nontraditional sources,” Ewen lamented, “the entire picture of the universe that is provided to people is one reduced to a comic strip.”

“By the late 1920s, for example, you have the emergence of a fairly elaborate social psychological apparatus designed to take the temperature of public emotions, not for the purpose of reporting on what people feel but for the purpose for shaping what people feel,” Ewen said:That institution, which starts out with the Psychological Corporation in the 1920s, grows into a major polling and survey research industry, which not only permeates the commercial world but begins to permeate academia. On that level, it has become