37.1 Theme 2 - Attempts to influence the public response to war

Breadth Frame

This is a Paper 3 breadth theme. You need the whole period, not six disconnected war
stories. Track three actors in every case:

At the start of the period, around 1859, there was no modern national propaganda
bureau. The specification's named case studies begin with the US Civil War, so use
1859 as the baseline world of proclamations, speeches, patriotic ceremonies, official
communiques, control of military information, telegraph restrictions and sympathetic
newspapers. By 1991, the state-media relationship involved televised briefings,
satellite communication, public opinion polling, carefully managed press access and
global twenty-four-hour news.

Use this chronology as the spine of the lesson:

The key word is response, not just "opinion". Governments wanted behaviour as well
as belief: men joining armies, civilians buying war bonds, workers maintaining production,
families accepting casualties, voters supporting leaders, and minorities proving loyalty.
That is why the impact of propaganda and news control must be judged by both mobilisation
and its side effects.

Civil War and Conscription

The US Civil War, 1861-65, belongs near the beginning of this theme because it shows a
state trying to mobilise public support before the age of modern mass propaganda. The
Union government needed to preserve loyalty in the northern states, hold the border
states, sustain armies in the field, defeat Confederate arguments for independence and
explain why the war's human cost was justified. The Confederacy also shaped public
response, but the official Edexcel key developments focus especially on Union public
opinion, Lincoln and conscription hostility.

Information control was improvised but real. Telegraph lines mattered because they sped
war news and military information. The Union government brought key telegraph routes
under official supervision, monitored messages and sometimes restricted information that
might assist the enemy. The administration also acted against newspapers judged disloyal
or militarily dangerous, especially in sensitive border areas. Some anti-administration
or pro-Confederate newspapers were denied use of the mails, suppressed by military
authorities or threatened with closure. This was not the total censorship system of
1917-18 or 1941-45, but it set an important precedent: in wartime, the US state claimed
power to limit normal press freedoms in the name of security and loyalty.

Lincoln's most famous attempt to shape public perception was the Gettysburg Address,
delivered on 19 November 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in
Pennsylvania. The context matters. Gettysburg in July 1863 had been a major Union victory,
but also a battlefield of terrible loss. Vicksburg had fallen at almost the same time,
yet the war was not over. Lincoln used the cemetery dedication to transform the meaning
of sacrifice. He did not give a detailed battle report. He framed the Civil War as a test
of whether democratic self-government could survive and as a struggle connected to liberty
and equality.

That made the speech a form of official influence, but not a crude poster slogan. Its
power lay in compression and moral framing. Lincoln made the dead into witnesses for a
larger cause. He asked the living to continue the work for which soldiers had died. This
is why the speech matters for public response: it tried to turn grief into renewed
commitment.

Yet the same year exposed the limits of patriotic persuasion. The Enrollment Act of
March 1863 created the first effective national conscription system in the United States.
It applied to men aged twenty to forty-five, but it allowed drafted men to pay a
commutation fee of $300 or hire a substitute. To many poorer northerners, this looked
like a rich man's escape clause. The phrase "rich man's war, poor man's fight" captured
the resentment. The draft was also entangled with racism. Some white workers feared that
emancipated Black people would compete for jobs, and many rejected the idea that they
should be forced to fight a war increasingly associated with emancipation.

The most violent expression of this hostility was the New York City Draft Riots of
13-16 July 1863. The riots began as resistance to the draft but became a broader explosion
of class anger, Democratic opposition to Republican war policy and racist violence against
Black New Yorkers. Federal troops were eventually used to restore order. The impact was
important. The Union war effort survived, and conscription continued, but the riots showed
that official rhetoric could not erase the social costs of coercion.

So the Civil War gives you a balanced starting judgement:

The lesson is clear: the early modern state could influence public meaning, but the public
response depended on lived burdens as much as official words.

Spanish-American War and Press

The Spanish-American War of 1898 shows a different relationship between official influence
and the media. There was no American equivalent of the First World War's Committee on
Public Information. Instead, public response grew out of a powerful interaction between
commercial newspapers, humanitarian concern, strategic interests and presidential framing.

The background was the Cuban struggle against Spanish rule. Reports of Spanish repression,
especially the reconcentration policy that forced Cuban civilians into camps, created
sympathy in the United States. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbour on
15 February 1898 then became a public turning point. The cause of the explosion was
uncertain, but newspapers could make uncertainty emotionally simple.

This is where yellow journalism matters. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and
William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal competed for readers with dramatic headlines,
emotional illustrations and anti-Spanish stories. The yellow press did not single-handedly
cause the war. That is too simple. US economic interests in Cuba, concern for American
citizens and property, Cuban nationalism, McKinley's choices, Spanish weakness and the
politics of great-power status all mattered. But sensational newspapers helped turn Cuba
into a moral drama for American readers: Spain could be imagined as cruel, Cuba as a victim,
and US intervention as honourable.

President William McKinley then gave this public mood an official frame. His message to
Congress on 11 April 1898 did not present the war as conquest for its own sake. It stressed
humanitarian suffering, disorder in Cuba, the protection of American interests and the
need to end the conflict. Congress's Teller Amendment declared that the United States did
not intend to annex Cuba. That mattered for public response because it allowed intervention
to be presented as liberation and order, not naked imperial expansion.

The difficulty is that 1898 also shows how public influence could outrun official caution.
McKinley had tried to negotiate, and many business leaders feared war. Once the press,
Congress and public anger moved towards intervention, official leadership became partly
responsive rather than wholly controlling. The state shaped the war's meaning, but it did
not manufacture public feeling from nothing.

The war itself was short and successful for the United States. That made management of
public response easier. The quick defeat of Spain, the image of victorious volunteers,
the naval victories and the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines helped
turn the war into a moment of national confidence. Yet this also complicates the Teller
Amendment's moral language. The United States did not annex Cuba, but it did emerge as an
imperial power. In other words, official framing could simplify a war while its consequences
were more complicated.

For comparison with the Civil War, the change is important:

The Spanish-American War therefore marks a stage between nineteenth-century partisan
print culture and twentieth-century state propaganda. It shows that mass newspapers could
become engines of public emotion, even before government had built a modern propaganda
apparatus.

First World War Propaganda

The First World War was a turning point because the American state built a much more
systematic machinery for shaping public response. The United States entered the war in
April 1917 after years of neutrality. That made persuasion urgent. Wilson had to explain
why a European war now required American lives, money and industrial effort.

Wilson's public language framed the war as a moral crusade. He presented American entry
as a defence of democracy, rights and international order against German militarism,
unrestricted submarine warfare and threats such as the Zimmermann Telegram. This language
was not just decoration. It was meant to convert a divided neutral public into a mobilised
war public.

The main institution was the Committee on Public Information, created in April 1917
and chaired by George Creel. It became the first large-scale federal propaganda agency in
the United States. Its work used many channels at once:

The specification names demonising the enemy in 1917-18 as a key development. Allied
and American propaganda often presented Germany as the brutal "Hun", a figure of savagery,
bloodshed and threat to women, children and civilisation. Posters such as "Beat Back the
Hun" used the possibility of German danger to make Liberty Bond buying or military service
feel personally urgent. Stories of German atrocities in Belgium, submarine warfare and the
sinking of ships such as the Lusitania fed this image, even though atrocity claims could
be selected, exaggerated or emotionally simplified.

Propaganda was reinforced by news control and law. The Espionage Act of June 1917 and
the Sedition Act of May 1918 made it dangerous to obstruct recruitment, encourage
disloyalty or attack the war effort in language judged abusive or disloyal. The Postmaster
General could exclude some anti-war publications from the mails. The army used press
censorship and voluntary censorship rules to prevent information judged damaging to morale
or useful to the enemy. This did not create a total dictatorship, but it narrowed the space
for dissent. Socialist, pacifist, radical and immigrant voices were especially vulnerable.