100-Year-Old Propaganda Lessons


I have spent most of my career shaping persuasive messages in business, nonprofit communications and fundraising, and a large federal agency. Over time, I became curious about where the modern playbook came from. Most of it traces back to two campaigns, launched about a century ago and twelve years apart, by people who didn't see themselves as propagandists. What stands out most is how little the basic mechanics have changed.
 
It's worth drawing a line here between propaganda and good public relations, since the two get confused constantly and the difference isn't the tools, it's the intent. Public relations, done honestly, gets accurate information to the right audience faster, in a form they can use. Propaganda produces a feeling or a conclusion regardless of what the facts support, and it depends on the audience not seeing clearly who's talking or why. Most communicators use the same tools, framing, timing, repetition, storytelling, in service of the first goal. The six techniques below are what happens when those tools get pointed at the second one instead.
 
Case one, a hundred years ago: selling a war
 
In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany despite a public that, by most accounts, had little appetite for fighting. Within a week, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), led by former muckraking journalist George Creel. Creel insisted the CPI dealt only in facts, calling its work "expression, not suppression."
 
In practice, the CPI built a saturation machine. It produced pamphlets, posters, newsreels, and press releases, and organized volunteer speakers known as the Four-Minute Men. By the CPI's own count, they delivered more than 750,000 short talks in movie theaters and town halls, reaching hundreds of millions of listeners during the war. Messages were tailored to each audience: ethnic newspapers received one version, women's clubs another, and church groups a third. The same themes were repeated constantly, everywhere.
 
Working inside that operation, running its Latin American news service, was a young man named Edward Bernays.
 
Case two, ninety-seven years ago: selling a cigarette
 
Bernays is often called the father of public relations. He is worth knowing on his own terms too, because his own book, titled simply Propaganda and published in 1928, argued openly that "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses" wasn't just possible but necessary in a modern democracy. He wrote it as a practitioner's manual, drawing directly on what he had learned at the CPI a decade earlier.
 
A year later he proved his point. The American Tobacco Company hired him to solve a marketing problem: women were smoking, but only in private, because a woman smoking on the street was still a social taboo. Bernays didn't write an ad. He staged an event. His secretary, presented to the press as an independent young woman, sent invitations to a group of debutantes asking them to light "torches of freedom" on Fifth Avenue during the 1929 Easter Parade, framing a cigarette as a feminist statement against a "sex taboo." Reporters were tipped off in advance. Newspapers across the country covered it the next day as a spontaneous act of women's liberation. The sponsor was never mentioned.
 
The grievance was real. Women did face real restrictions on public behavior. Bernays didn't invent that feeling. He found it, attached a product to it, and let the press carry it for him.
 
Six techniques, a century old and still working
 
Pull these two campaigns apart, and add a hundred years of refinement since, and you get six techniques that show up again and again, in politics, in advocacy, and in plenty of corporate messaging I have sat in the room for.
 
1. The repeated, unfalsifiable claim. The CPI's wartime messaging leaned heavily on atrocity stories about "the Hun" that were rarely tied to verifiable specifics. Repetition did the work that evidence was supposed to do. You see the same mechanism today whenever a claim, about fraud, about a competitor's safety record, about who's responsible for a crime wave, about a public health rumor, gets repeated across enough channels that its familiarity starts to feel like proof, regardless of which side of an issue is doing the repeating.
 
2. Manufactured threat and scapegoating. Wartime posters gave Americans a face for the enemy and a reason to fear it. The technique doesn't require the threat to be invented from nothing. It usually starts with something real and then outruns the evidence. Modern debates over security, whether cyber, border-related, or geopolitical, often contain a genuine kernel, a real vulnerability researchers across the political spectrum agree on, that gets stretched further than the underlying assessment supports. The real dispute, in almost every case, is whether the response is proportionate to the documented risk, or whether the threat narrative has outrun the evidence. That's exactly the question scapegoating rhetoric is built to shortcut, not answer.
 
3. Appeal to a besieged national identity. Wilson's own language, "to make the world safe for democracy," did double duty. It gave Americans a cause bigger than the war itself, and it made opposing the war feel like opposing the country. The same era produced a related move worth naming on its own: the CPI's messaging sat alongside a broader "100% Americanism" campaign that pressured German-language newspapers and schools to shut down, treating divided identity as a mark of divided loyalty. The besieged-identity appeal wasn't just about the war. It was also an appeal to a narrower, more homogeneous idea of who counted as fully American.
 
That second layer has its own long history, separate from the war footing that produced it, and it shows up again whenever a national appeal leans on nostalgia for an earlier era rather than a forward-looking argument. You've heard some version of it in nearly every election cycle of your lifetime: a call to restore a lost greatness, a shared confidence, a simpler time. Framing a policy preference as a restoration of the past is a more effective appeal than framing it as a straightforward trade-off, whoever is doing the framing and whatever they actually mean by it. It borrows the same emotional register the CPI used a hundred years earlier.
 
I have seen a milder version of this in the nonprofit world my whole career. Urgency appeals that frame a mission as under existential threat raise money effectively because they work the same way, even when the underlying need hasn't actually changed that week.
 
4. Institutional capture dressed as institutional protection. The CPI itself is a good example. It was built and defended as a body that would protect public understanding, while functioning as a centralized government messaging operation with enormous reach. That tension, protecting an institution versus consolidating control over it, shows up any time a reorganization, executive order, or new oversight body is framed purely as strengthening a process. Sometimes it is exactly that. Sometimes the framing is doing more work than the mechanism justifies, and the only way to tell the difference is to look past the stated goal to what the mechanism does.
 
A few recent examples make that label-versus-mechanism gap easy to see, even without naming names. One long-standing federal overseas aid agency was dissolved and folded into another department, announced as "efficiency" and "consolidation," language that describes trimming overhead, not eliminating an agency Congress created and funded. An independent, congressionally chartered peace institute was taken over by outside staff who removed its board and leadership, with law enforcement present, framed publicly as oversight of a "bloated, useless entity." Months later, the same building was renamed after a political leader, reform language giving way to something closer to a trophy. A financial watchdog agency, built specifically to sit outside ordinary budget pressure, was defunded by an appointed official under the banner of routine budget management. In each case, the public label, efficiency, oversight, budget management, described something far more modest than what was actually attempted. That gap between the label and what happened is the tell worth training ourselves to notice.
 
A reported internal memo at a federal enforcement agency, from early this year, offers another example worth watching. According to those reports, the memo instructed officers that they could enter a home to make an arrest without a judicial warrant. I have seen this only in a small number of sources, at least one openly critical of the administration involved, so I would treat the details as reported rather than fully independently confirmed. Still, the pattern fits this technique: expanding enforcement authority framed as routine procedure.
 
5. Flooding and fatigue. The CPI's real innovation was volume. It used every available medium at once, so a citizen in 1917 could hardly go a day without encountering its message. The same tactic, being everywhere constantly rather than making one argument, works even better today. A 24-hour news cycle and social media feeds never stop running and always need new material. A flood of simultaneous claims, announcements, or actions, whether from a government office, a campaign, or a company in crisis, makes it difficult for the public or the press to evaluate one before the next arrives. It may be deliberate strategy, or simply the result of an organization moving too fast. Either way, audiences feel the same fatigue. One policy area I follow closely (immigration) saw more federal actions in a single recent year than in the prior four combined, according to a nonpartisan research group that tracks it. Whatever one thinks of the underlying policy, that volume alone makes it hard for any single action, or any court ruling on one, to hold public attention before the next one arrives.
 
6. Manufactured chaos and diminished trust. This has a newer name, but it is really flooding taken one step further. Flooding overwhelms the audience with volume. Manufactured chaos does more: it lets the content contradict itself, turning confusion from a side effect into the point. The goal isn't to win the argument, but to make the argument feel unwinnable, so people stop trying to separate fact from fiction and either follow the most confident-sounding side or tune out altogether. RAND Corporation researchers formalized this in 2016 as the "firehose of falsehood," a model of high-volume, multichannel messaging that doesn't need to be consistent, or even plausible, to work. In this model, contradiction isn't a liability; it is close to the point. Once an audience gives up on holding every claim to account, trust in referees, courts, the press, regulators, career civil servants, erodes along with trust in any individual claim. I see hints of this dynamic in more than one federal policy area right now: overlapping, shifting rationales for the same actions, offered faster than any one of them can be fact-checked to a conclusion. Whether that is deliberate strategy or the natural result of moving fast and loose, the effect on public trust looks much the same. It is worth watching regardless of which administration or era produces it.
 
The responsibility of knowing how this works
 
None of these techniques require bad faith. Plenty of the Four-Minute Men believed sincerely in the war. Plenty of the women on Fifth Avenue likely felt real relief at a loosened restriction. The techniques work whether the person using them is cynical or genuinely convinced of the cause, which is exactly why they are worth studying on their own terms rather than only reaching for them as an accusation against whichever side of an issue we disagree with. I see versions of all six at work in more than one live policy debate right now, and I also see them in plenty of corporate and nonprofit messaging that never makes the news.
 
A hundred years of refinement hasn't changed what these techniques are for. They shortcut the slow work of earning belief. What has changed is who has access to them. In 1917, running a saturation campaign took a federal agency with tens of thousands of people. In 1929, it took a well-connected practitioner and a handful of newspaper contacts he could tip off in advance. Today it takes a phone and a social media account, and the message can reach more people before lunch than the Four-Minute Men reached in a year. The tools got faster and cheaper. The judgment required to use them responsibly didn't get any easier to come by.
 
That's really the argument for professional communicators knowing this history at all. Most of the audience we work with hasn't studied these techniques and has no reason to. We have. Understanding how they work isn't permission to use them carefully. It's the reason we're the ones responsible for choosing not to, and for building influence the slower, more honest way instead.
 
Building trust instead
 
Everything above describes what erodes trust, whether it's a government agency, a political campaign, or a company managing a bad quarter. Trust rarely disappears all at once. It goes a little at a time: a claim that turns out to be thinner than it sounded, a threat that turns out to be smaller than advertised, an explanation that doesn't quite match what happened once people look closer. Any single instance is forgivable. By the time an audience notices the pattern, though, they usually stop extending the benefit of the doubt entirely, and at that point almost nothing you say lands the way it used to, true or not. Earning it back from there costs far more, in time and in credibility, than it would have cost to keep it in the first place.
 
The more useful question for a working communicator, then, isn't just how to spot the technique when someone else is using it. It's what builds trust and keeps it, account by account, over years rather than one news cycle. A few things I've come to rely on, in order and roughly matched to the techniques above.
 
Say it once and let the source carry it. A claim that needs to be repeated three times to feel true probably isn't ready to publish. Say it once, cite it plainly, and move on. Audiences remember which sources held up over time far more than which ones showed up most often.
 
Size the response to the evidence, not the moment. It's tempting to reach for the most urgent framing available, especially in fundraising or crisis response. Resist it. State the actual scope of the problem. Overstate it once, and people will start discounting everything you say after, including the things that were true.
 
Give people something to evaluate, not just something to feel loyal to. Pair every mission or identity appeal with a specific, visible ask. People trust organizations that show their work, the actual decision, the actual trade-off, more than ones that only ask for belief.
 
Explain the mechanism before you reach for the label. Before you call something a reform, a protection, a reorganization, or a modernization, be able to explain in plain language what it does. If the explanation is harder to give than the label, your audience will eventually notice.
 
Say less, more often verified. One well-sourced statement outperforms five repeated announcements. Volume feels like momentum in the moment, but the thing audiences remember is whether what you said held up, not how many times they heard it.
 
Get ahead of your own contradictions. If a number changes, a claim turns out to be wrong, or your position shifts, say so before someone else points it out. People forgive being wrong. They remember feeling misled about it.
 
Say plainly who you are and what you have at stake. Bernays' cigarette campaign worked because nobody watching knew American Tobacco was behind it. That kind of undisclosed interest still shows up constantly, in sponsored content, astroturf grassroots campaigns, and quotes from "independent experts" who are actually paid consultants. Disclosing your own interest costs you something in the moment. It is also the fastest way to be believed the next time you ask for trust.
 
I don't think knowing this history makes anyone immune to using these techniques or falling for them, but it makes both easier to catch. What separates the organizations that keep their credibility over time from the ones that burn through it isn't whether they can name these techniques. It's whether they treat trust as the thing they're intentionally building, rather than a resource to spend down for this quarter's results or to win an election.