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Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review1
April 2021, Volume 2, Special Issue on Propaganda Analysis
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Reprints and permissions: misinforeview@hks.harvard.edu
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-63
Website: misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu
Research Article
Propaganda, obviously: How propaganda analysis fixates on
the hidden and misses the conspicuous
Propaganda analysis has long focused on revealing the rhetorical tricks and hidden special interests behind
persuasion campaigns. But what are critics to do when propaganda is obvious? In the late 1930s the
Institute for Propaganda Analysis faced this question while investigating the public politicking of A&P, then
the largest retailer in the United States. While contemporary critics lambasted A&P for their secretive
campaign, particularly their use of front groups, A&P used many relatively overt methods of propaganda
to win political victories. Propaganda analysis then, as now, fixated on the concealed, failing to adequately
critique conspicuous communicative power.
Author: Tim Wood
Affiliation: Department of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University, USA
How to cite: Wood, T. (2021). Propaganda, obviously: How propaganda analysis fixates on the hidden and misses the
conspicuous. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review, 2(2).
Received: February 14, 2021. Accepted: March 11, 2021. Published: April 8th, 2021.
Research question
• How did the public’s misrecognition of propaganda become a defining and enduring problem for
the field of propaganda analysis?
Essay summary
• U.S.-based propaganda analysis has plied exposé as a preferred critical maneuver for almost a
century. However, the presumption that audiences are fooled by propaganda mainly because
they fail to recognize its provenance, tactics, or intent is an inhibiting conceptual myopia.
• Drawing on archival research, this article examines the retailer A&P’s late-1930s publicity
campaign against chain store taxation. Led by the public relations firm of Carl Byoir & Associates,
the campaign used relatively blatant tactics. In fact, Byoir and his contemporaries emphasized the
dangers of unseen persuaders and touted their own work as a transparent alternative to that of
foreign agents, charlatans, and political provocateurs.
• Propaganda analysis today continues to largely overlook the ways propagandists have co-opted
transparency as a strategic tool. Critics must rein in their overreliance on exposé to craft policies
and activist practices capable of opposing propaganda in its most overt forms.
1
A publication of the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy, at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School
of Government.
Propaganda, obviously: How propaganda analysis fixates on the hidden and misses the conspicuous 2
Implications
“We are fooled by propaganda chiefly because we don’t recognize it when we see it.”
In November 1937 the above sentence opened the monthly pamphlet of the Institute for Propaganda
Analysis (IPA), a New York-based organization devoted to exposing the tactics of propagandists. For the
ensuing four years this coalition of educators, researchers, journalists, and benefactors provided an
institutional home for progressive thinkers to confront issues of mass persuasion (Sproule, 1997, p. 177).
The line quoted above was meant to give readers a sense of the fledgling Institute’s work but could just
as aptly summarize a core analytic framework of the intervening eight decades of propaganda studies.
2
Whether attending to the rhetoric of texts (Hobbs & McGee, 2014), psychology of audiences (Jowett &
O’Donnell, 2019), or political-economic contexts of propaganda (Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Silverstein,
1987), scholars have devoted themselves to uncovering the unseen interests and strategies of persuasive
campaigns. This focus is inscribed in the very titles of critical works in this tradition, with accounts of
Hidden Persuaders (Packard, 1957), The Unseen Power (Cutlip, 1994), Dark Money (J. Mayer, 2016), and
Stealth Communications (Jansen, 2017) resting on the IPA’s enduring premise: Propaganda works best
when its audiences don’t identify it as such.
Exposés of propaganda abide and abound because they have practical value. No audience is immune
to misdirection (Davis, 2013, p. 193), thus ferreting out the tactics and hidden interests of persuasive
campaigns helps the public evaluate information more lucidly. Furthermore, unveiling covert influence is
compatible with a host of aims at the heart of propaganda studies, as revealing opaque persuaders might
stoke collective pushes for media ownership reform, new norms of online platform governance, or even
strategic counterpropaganda. Exposing hidden propaganda can be a means towards these worthwhile
ends.
When it comes to deploying exposé, however, propaganda studies tend to suffer from too much of a
good thing. Strenuous attention to the public’s misrecognition of propaganda often acts as an inhibiting
myopia, one this field of study has proven largely unable to overcome. To illuminate this claim, I turn to
the IPA’s published exposés, specifically their account of the public relations efforts of The Great Atlantic
and Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, in the late 1930s. A&P, then the largest grocer in the
United States, sought to stymie proposed taxes on chain store ownership that would undermine their
profitability. Hiring the public relations firm of Carl Byoir & Associates to head their campaign, the
company forged partnerships with unions, farmers associations, consumer movement groups, and a host
of other allies (Levinson, 2011). The IPA, in response, published an analysis of A&P’s politicking, seeking
to unveil the behind-the-scenes interests backing the campaign.
The problem with the IPA’s critique, one often mirrored in today’s dominant approaches to the study
of propaganda, is that A&P’s work was largely “hidden” in plain sight. The partnerships A&P forged, the
professional communicators they hired, and the persuasive messages they crafted were typically matters
of public record. There were elements of misdirection in A&P’s campaign, to be sure, but claims that the
public was fooled by A&P’s messaging because they misrecognized the company’s propagandistic intent
do not hold up to empirical scrutiny.
2
The term “propaganda” carries hefty semantic baggage and has been subject to many competing definitions (L’Etang, 2006). For
the purposes of this essay, I use the term in a broad sense, considering propaganda as any large-scale, coordinated public
communication effort working towards pre-determined ends or interests. This sense of the term encompasses advertising, public
relations, and other communications industries, and thus includes professionals who would likely not define their own work as
propagandistic. I consider critical research taking these fields as objects of study to be “propaganda analysis.”
Wood 3
This insight is significant because propaganda analysis today continues to fixate on the unseen. This
preoccupation shows itself most noticeably in concerns over special interests’ appropriation of grassroots
political participation. Terms like “front group” and “astroturf organization” are mainstays in critics’
lexicons, fastening updated names to strategies common in A&P’s era. While this language offers sharp
rhetorical weaponry (R. N. Mayer, 2007), it also presumes that propagandists elicit public support by
concealing the interests behind their campaigns. This diagnosis has shaped proposed policy responses to
both front groups specifically (Durkee, 2017; Scott, 2019) and misinformation more broadly (Glaeser &
Ujhelyi, 2010), with critics touting tougher disclosure laws for funders of grassroots political organizations.
Because critics have diagnosed opacity as a key problem, they frame revelation as the prudent solution.
Just as A&P’s backing of “front groups” was often transparent, however, companies today commonly
sponsor citizen advocacy groups openly. If anything, this trend has become more pronounced, with oil
companies,
3
soda makers,
4
and pharmaceutical giants
5
candidly mentioning their sponsorship of citizen-
centered political organizations. Open grassroots advocacy by corporations was a common ad hoc
strategy in the era of A&P; today it is a full-fledged sub-industry (Walker, 2014). Policies demanding
greater financial exposure of advocacy will do little to rein in such efforts.
Likewise, unveiling the sources of propagandistic campaigns, even misleading ones, will not inherently
lessen their force. Studies show that emphasizing the original source of misinformation online does not
dissuade people from sharing or believing the content (Dias, Pennycook, & Rand, 2020). Research on anti-
vaccine advocates (Ortiz-Sánchez et al., 2020), climate change deniers (Krishna, 2021), and QAnon
conspiracy theorists (Zuckerman, 2019) demonstrates that exposing truths is not sufficient to dispel false
information.
Clandestine propaganda campaigns do dot the public sphere. The IPA’s impulse to raise public
awareness of such efforts is one the field of propaganda analysis rightfully continues to cultivate.
However, when advocacy campaigns are open about their tactics and finances, they render propaganda
studies’ longstanding reliance on exposé somewhat moot. Critics and policymakers must also oppose raw
forms of institutional power and exercises of propaganda that sit in plain sight.
Findings
In the late 1930s, A&P was both flourishing and fragile. While the grocer’s low prices had made it the
nation’s largest retailer, the company raised the ire of small business advocates, who viewed A&P’s
economies of scale as a threat to local mom and pop competitors (Levinson, 2011). These criticisms came
to a legislative head in 1936 with the passing of the Robinson-Patman Act,
6
crafted to counter the
monopolistic tendencies of chain stores. This legislation was a harbinger of things to come: By late 1938
nineteen states had enacted anti-chain store statutes and U.S. Representative Wright Patman of Texas,
3
Since 2009 the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S.-based oil and gas trade group, has run an advocacy organization
known as Energy Citizens. While the campaign was relatively tight-lipped about its sponsors initially, the Energy Citizens
homepage has for years announced that the campaign is “paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.”
4
Fighting proposed taxes on sugar-laden sodas in San Francisco, California, in 2014, beverage makers sponsored the Coalition for
an Affordable City, launching a campaign known variously as Stop Unfair Beverage Taxes and No San Francisco Beverage Tax.
The campaign’s homepage stated that their actions were “Paid for by the American Beverage Association,” the industry’s largest
trade group.
5
The Partnership for Safe Medicines is run by a coalition of pharmaceutical interests, including the industry’s largest U.S. trade
group, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America. Ostensibly aimed at combating trade in counterfeit
prescription drugs, the group has fought to block importation of inexpensive medications to the U.S. from foreign nations (Kopp
& Bluth, 2018). The organization’s website provides a full list of its members.
6
The bill was proposed as an amendment to the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.
Propaganda, obviously: How propaganda analysis fixates on the hidden and misses the conspicuous 4
co-sponsor of the earlier bill, was pushing to impose new federal taxes designed to drive large chains out
of business (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938, p. 7).
In response, A&P hired Carl Byoir & Associates in September 1937 to run a public relations campaign
against the proposed taxes. This effort leapt into the public eye in September of 1938 when A&P financed
a nationwide newspaper advertisement laying out the company’s position against chain store taxation
(Bennett, 1968, p. 203). This publicity drew critical scrutiny to the A&P’s campaign, in particular their
formation of third-party advocacy organizations—what would today be called front groups. These groups
figured prominently, for instance, in the IPA’s analysis of the A&P campaign, which was mailed to
subscribers in December of 1938. The IPA noted that
Mr. Byoir helped to set up the Emergency Consumers Tax Council of New Jersey, an organization
representing women shoppers in more than 100 communities. To help it get on its feet, he gave it $2,000
of A. & P.’s money. To keep it there, and feed it with fact and figures, he formed Business Organization, Inc.,
whose job it will be not only to advise the Tax Council but also to organize similar groups elsewhere.
(Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938, p. 10)
The IPA did not use the term front group, but their analysis was nonetheless framed as exposé, shining a
light on A&P’s sponsorship of citizen-centered advocacy.
Judges and politicians also inveighed against A&P’s front groups. In 1940, U.S. Representative Patman
decried A&P’s campaign to Congress, accusing Byoir of founding “dummy organizations” and “propaganda
outfits” (86 Cong. Rec. 6951, 1940).
7
Byoir also faced legal ramifications for his A&P work, convicted in
1945 under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of supporting monopolistic practices. The trial judge framed the
third-party organizations Byoir founded as ethically dubious, suggesting “the public could not have been
and was not aware of the full extent of their sponsorship or the A&P’s responsibility” for the groups.
8
It is not clear, however, who was fooled by Byoir’s efforts, as no empirical evidence of audiences’
confusion was offered by the judge or the IPA. More to the point, it does not seem that subterfuge was
the campaign’s main intention. After all, the advertisement A&P published to announce their campaign
explicitly mentioned the company’s hiring of Carl Byoir & Associates as public relations counsel (The Great
Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, 1938). Furthermore, the ad laid out the company’s strategy, avowing
A&P would invest in creating supportive “groups among consumers, farmers and workers.” While
sponsorship of particular groups was not acknowledged in the ad, A&P’s intention to run a grassroots
campaign was unmistakable.
Among the third-party groups Byoir formed, A&P supported many openly. The two groups named by
the IPA provide illustrative examples. Byoir & Associates announced the creation of the Emergency
Consumers Tax Council of New Jersey in a widely circulated press release, with full disclosure of A&P’s
status as benefactors. The announcement was picked up by journalists, with newspapers such as the Wall
Street Journal covering the story (“A&P gives $2,000,” 1938); Byoir’s role in Business Organization, Inc.,
created to undertake consumer research for A&P, was less publicized, but was sufficiently well-known to
receive laurels in the pages of Public Opinion Quarterly, with the group’s links to Byoir and A&P duly noted
(Roat, 1939). While the public at large were unlikely to subscribe to this specialist journal, this evidence
7
Patman, whose legislative agenda repeatedly pit him against A&P, went much further in his criticism. In the same address Patman
claimed that Carl Byoir was “the real brain trust of Nazi propaganda in America,” accusing Byoir of using his influence over A&P
to pursue a clandestine fascist agenda (86 Cong. Rec. 6951, 1940). Although Byoir would be fully exonerated of these claims after
an FBI investigation, Patman’s remarks were covered widely in the press, causing embarrassment to Byoir and A&P.
8
The crimes of which Byoir was convicted pertained narrowly to his role in organizing a monopolistic cooperative of agricultural
shippers. His founding of purported front groups was not a clear factor in his legal culpability. For an excellent review of the case,
see Bennett (1968, pp. 225–277).
Wood 5
suggests the success of the A&P campaign did not hinge entirely on the company’s sponsorship of
grassroots groups remaining secret.
To be clear, I am not arguing for the ethical bona fides of A&P’s approach. Their transparency was
both partial and strategic. I am suggesting, however, that the A&P campaign was both generally
discernable as propaganda and, by all accounts, succeeded despite this. The IPA’s conviction that “we are
fooled by propaganda chiefly because we don’t recognize it” seems ill-equipped to explain how A&P’s
conspicuous campaign earned backers and ultimately won legislative victories.
Why then was the IPA so committed to exposing the A&P campaign? Why reveal what is already
visible? In part, the IPA’s work played to public anxieties about propaganda lingering from WWI, which
saw even liberal free speech advocates tout increasingly illiberal measures to curb the supposed threat of
propaganda (Gary, 1999). By amplifying these anxieties, the IPA fueled interest in their own denunciatory
work and aimed to rouse their readers to be vigilant of persuasive campaigns.
The IPA were not alone in stoking fears of hidden persuaders, however. Public relations practitioners
used these same anxieties to validate their status as experts. The most infamous self-proclaimed
propagandists of the early 20th century such as Carl Byoir, Edward Bernays, and Ivy Lee promoted not only
clients, but also their nascent profession, combatting portrayals of public relations as a field “populated
by plaid-suited, megaphone-toting hacks […] or sweet young things who flirted their clients’ way onto the
news pages” (Zoch, Supa, & VanTuyll, 2014, p. 723). To do so, they framed their own work as a transparent
and rationalized alternative to the pernicious propaganda of foreign agents, charlatans, and others who
might have hidden interests.
9
While Byoir’s ilk often failed to meet the standards of openness they
extolled, they nonetheless fueled notions that revelation was the solution to the lurking peril of covert
influence. While the IPA clamored for exposés of propaganda, Byoir and his contemporaries trumpeted
propaganda as exposé.
It is striking that in the early 20th century both public relations’ most famous professionals and their
harshest critics petitioned with equal fervor for the need to make propaganda recognizable to the public.
This unanimity hints at an underlying ideological consensus which, amid the surface-level disagreement
of political battles, took exposé as a peerless method of mitigating harmful public persuasion. The core
tenet of early propaganda analysis—“we are fooled by propaganda chiefly because we don’t recognize it
when we see it”—served the very different normative visions of the IPA and public relations practitioners
equally well.
The case of the A&P, then, suggests at least two caveats that ought to accompany propaganda studies’
time-honored concern with public misrecognition of propaganda. First, propaganda is often strategically
overt, with persuaders using undisguised communication to lend legitimacy to their work. In these
instances, critical exposé is of little use. Second, the act of exposé does not necessarily lessen the
persuasive force of propaganda, as the public may maintain fealty to either particular propagandists or
the ideas they espouse.
Our media environment is a far cry from that navigated by Byoir, A&P, and the IPA almost a century
ago. Thus, studies of networked propaganda have much to show us about the ways transparency is
strategically deployed by today’s propagandists and the ways audiences respond to contemporary
9
Byoir, for instance, asserted “false propaganda can only temporarily mislead any great number of people and only then when the
other side is not fully and adequately presented” (quoted in Bennett, 1968, p. 418); Bernays suggested that while propaganda might
be produced “largely by men we have never heard of,” the proper response was exposé, the demand that all propaganda be “clearly
labeled as to source” (Bernays, 1928/2005, pp. 37, 70); Lee proposed that “the essential evil of propaganda […] is the failure to
disclose the source of the information,” waxing poetical to suggest “unseen assassins are dangerous, whether they use stilettos of
steel in the dark or seek to poison our minds with falsehoods and half-truths coming we know not whence and aimed at we know
not what” (Lee, 1934, pp. 10–11). All three professionals frequently framed their own work as an exercise in transparent public
discourse.
Propaganda, obviously: How propaganda analysis fixates on the hidden and misses the conspicuous 6
persuasion campaigns. The case of the A&P, however, offers a historical reminder that exposé is often a
necessary but not sufficient counter to propaganda. Reflecting upon the A&P campaign ought to prompt
those analyzing propaganda today to overcome reliance on revelation, instead crafting policies and
activist practices capable of offsetting the obvious communicative power of large companies and other
propagandists.
Methods
This article investigates how public misrecognition of propaganda became a defining and enduring
problem for the field of propaganda analysis. The A&P’s late-1930s campaign against chain store taxation
provides a useful case study for this exploration for two reasons. First, the contested nature of the
campaign demands thinking in relational terms about the power of propagandists and their critics. Too
often disciplinary divides coax scholars to study either public relations campaigns or activist advocacy in
relative isolation. The direct clash between A&P and the IPA makes such siloing untenable. Instead, this
case prompts us to view public relations as a “socially embedded profession,” whose strategies and
political efficacy are influenced by other fields of practice (Edwards, 2006, p. 229).
Second, A&P’s campaign against chain store taxation is a particularly productive object of analysis for
its notoriety. As Pooley (2008) has argued, the historiography of communications research has often
rehearsed Whiggish narratives of the early 20th century’s march towards scientistic studies of propaganda.
These accounts suppose that the era’s research evolved from naïve condemnations of propaganda’s
unfettered power towards more ostensibly measured empirical approaches. Subsequent scholarship has
done much to challenge this portrayal; however, communication studies, even more than other fields,
requires fresh appraisals of familiar historical objects. Byoir’s work for A&P is often taken as a watershed
moment in cultural and legal considerations of front groups and thus presents an opportune case for
rethinking basic presumptions about the power of exposé as a counter to propaganda.
This essay draws from archival records at the New York Historical Society Museum & Library, including
the Henry R. Luce papers; the Wisconsin Historical Society Division of Library, Archives, and Museum
Collections, particularly the Gerry Swinehart papers; and New York University’s Tamiment Library &
Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Historical research always relies on the wisdom of archivists, but I am
especially indebted to the staff at each of these institutions. The research for this project was conducted
during the COVID-19 pandemic and would not have been possible without their efforts to provide safe
access to archival materials.
This project also relied on electronic reproductions of newspapers from ProQuest, including The New
York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Materials were
collected using separate searches for the terms “Byoir,” “A&P,” “Emergency Consumers Tax Council of
New Jersey,” and “Business Organization, Inc.”
Research materials were intentionally chosen to scrutinize not only publicly circulated propaganda
texts, but also the processes through which propagandists and critics undertook their work. As Logan
(2014) argues, professional communicators mobilize dominant ideologies both to craft messages for their
clients and to buttress support for their profession. Because of this, public relations is not simply a tactical
reservoir for actors with political or economic agendas, but a field that has dramatically shaped the
contours of U.S. political discourse as such (Aronczyk & Espinoza, forthcoming). The archival sources from
which my research draws were selected to provide insight into how the rationales, ideologies, and
interests of communications practitioners in the late 1930s were inscribed into professional practice.
Wood 7
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Wood 9
Funding
The author received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.
Ethics
This research did not involve human subjects and thus was not subject to approval from an institutional
review board. The use and copyright restrictions of all archived and published materials were followed.
Copyright
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original
author and source are properly credited.
Data availability
All data was collected from the archives and sources outlined above. For details on data, please contact
the author at twood12@fordham.edu.
