Propaganda Probe

There are three possible ways to deal with propaganda. You can suppress it, meet it with counter-propaganda or analyze it and try to see how much truth there is in it. We are going to analyze it.

With this explanation and with the help of $10,000 contributed by late Merchant Edward Albert Filene as his last gesture toward reforming the world, Professor Clyde Raymond Miller of Columbia University's Teachers College, one of the most skillful propagandists of his time this week began to help U. S. citizens to "detect and analyze propaganda" at $2 a year From their Manhattan "laboratory" a small basement room near Columbia on Morningside Heights, Professor Miller and 15 other scholars sent this week to more than 3,000 U. S. newspaper editors, Congressmen, Governors, educators, ministers leaders of labor and industry, a four-page folder, Volume I, Number 1 of Propaganda Analysis, a monthly letter to be distributed to members by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Inc.

Observing in their introduction that America is beset by a confusion of conflicting propagandas, a Babel of voices" coming from political parties, labor unions business organizations, patriotic societies' by word of mouth from millions of individuals, the analysts promised to give laymen a technique to test which current propagandas are good and which bad to examine the bias of channels through which they flow--press, radio, movies, churches, schools.

The institute withheld details of its method, reserving them for the second letter to be issued one month hence But Secretary Miller plainly indicated what the Institute's method is to be. Most common device of the propagandist, said he, is to pin a bad name" on his opposition. Worst name in the Middle Ages was "heretic " Today it is "Red." Thus in the last national election Publisher William Randolph Hearst called Candidate Roosevelt a Red Billed Propagandist Roosevelt countered with the label "Economic Royalists." To take emotionalism and prejudice out of labels, Analyst Miller proposes to study what the name means, whether it is truly applied, who uses it, why. Marked for early treatment by the institute are the Propagandas swirling about Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, Henry Ford Tom Mercer Girdler, the C. I. O, Spain '

Publicist Miller, 49, whose grandfather operated a station of the underground railway in Canal Winchester. Ohio, before the Civil War, is a Lincoln Republican, a Methodist, a Son of the American Revolution. He has been in the business of peddling propaganda almost since he could walk. His first work as a boy was selling newspapers. He taught school for a year after graduation from Ohio State University but dropped that to write advertising copy for a Columbus department store. Working as a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he asked for the assignment to cover education, within a year shifted the city's newsorgans' attention from political squabbles to constructive achievements of the schools. This won him a job as public relations man for the Cleveland school system. He was the chief witness against Eugene Debs when that celebrated pacifist was tried for violation of the Espionage Act as a result of a speech made in Canton, Ohio, in 1918 and given a 20-year sentence. Later he regretted the outcome, tried to obtain Debs's release

By 1928 Clyde Miller was installed as director of educational service at Columbia s Teachers College. In one year he skyrocketed the college's space in the metropolitan press from 400 to 5000 column inches, made it the best publicized educational institution (without a football team) in the world. He dislikes handouts prefers to chat with reporters, casually whet their curiosity so that they investigate tor themselves. For several years his activities livened conventions of the National Education Association. In 1935 he set the stage in Atlantic City for the sensational excoriation of Publisher William Randolph Hearst by Historian Charles A. Beard which gained for the N. E. A. more attention than it had ever received before.

Chief customers for Propaganda Analysis are expected to be teachers and students, for the Institute is mainly concerned with immunizing the coming generation against ignorance-by-propaganda. Its material will be used in study units on how to detect and analyze propaganda to be started this year in at least eight schools including public schools in Bronxville and Gloversville, N. Y., Rock Island, Ill. Newton, Mass.

The Institute, a non-profit corporation is forbidden by its charter to engage in propaganda or attempt to influence legislation, but it proudly claims one bias: that good propagandas are those which conform to American principles of democracy, i. e., political, economic, social, religious freedom.

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