V Was For Victory.... (2)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (2). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“The President, confident that the public mood resembled his own, was comfortable in that confidence, and tough.” p. 13.

“…to use bonds to sell the war, rather than vice versa.”

“Sixty percent of the reason that I want…[the bond program] is…to give the people an opportunity to do something…to make the country war-minded.” p. 17.

“Advertisers had long maintained that they exposed demands rather than creating them.” p. 19.

“Advertisers traded upon basic human desires, upon appeals to sex, envy, anxiety and they related the satisfaction of those desires to the acquisition of commercial artifacts.” p. 19.

Ad campaign: “…War bonds…mean bullets in the bellies of Hitler’s hordes.”

The Office of Facts and Figures under the leadership of Archibald MacLeish: “Policy was to make public ‘the maximum of information on…matters concerning the war, which can be revealed without giving aid and comfort to the enemy.’ ”

To be continued.