Note 15 — APPENDIX Military PsyWar Operations, 1950-53

The literature in this field is carefully described in two volumes by a three-man team consisting of Harold D. Lasswell, Ralph D. Casey and Bruce Lannes Smith, the first being Propaganda and Promotional Activities, An Annotated Bibliography, Minneapolis, 1935, and the sequel being Propaganda, Communication and Public Opinion, A Comprehensive Reference Guide, Princeton, 1946. The booklists provide material in plenty for any academic-minded inquirer. The essays in the two volumes are well worth reading, although the authors have undergone the professorial delight of inventing a private language of their own. Parts of the latter book, especially, read like proceedings out of an unfamiliar lodge meeting; but there is sound sense and acute observation behind the vocabulary. It must, however, be parenthetically noted that during World War II the key propaganda jobs were held by a radio commentator, a dramatist, a newspaperman, a New York banker, and an absolutely astonishing number of men from commercial radio—along, of course, with a sprinkling of Army and Navy officers in Washington, and a heavy majority of non-specialist officers in the field. The propaganda experts were not, in most instances, called in to do the actual chore of propaganda. Among the exceptions were Leonard W. Doob, author of Propaganda, Its Psychology and Technique, New York, 1935, who served in the War Department's Psychological Warfare Branch and in the Washington propaganda center at OWI; C. A. H. Thomson, who served as a propaganda staff officer both in Washington and overseas after being a collaborator with the Lasswell group; and Drs. Edwin Guthrie and A. L. Edwards, whose chapter "Psychological Warfare" in [E. G. Boring, editor] Psychology for the Fighting Man, Washington, 1943, pp. 430-447, is a lucid epitome of the topic.