Race and the Propaganda Wars

This was a short piece I wrote for my students last year as part of a lesson that analyzed civil rights within a global context.  I couldn't find a way to make the poster below readable; but the point is to describe the successes of Carver, to portray the United States as a place where people of color can succeed, and to express the thankfulness the US feels for Carver's contributions.   

The lesson helped me to understand that most students only recognized propaganda when the focus was either to demonize people or had an explicit government message, such as Uncle Sam's "I Want You!" or Rosy the Riveter's "We Can Do It!"  They also assumed that because the image portrayed African American's in a positive light that it must have been created by people who supported civil rights.  Because of this, in our discussion about the image before the reading I asked them how different groups of people could USE this image for their own ends: could even racist groups benefit from using this image?      

The poster applauding George Washington Carver shown below was created by the US government during World War II.  How could distributing posters like this internationally have benefited the United States?   

  

The answer to this question is an important but little discussed part of civil rights.  In 1943, when the poster was created, the Japanese were creating propaganda showing the United States as an extremely racist nation towards all people of color.  They spread this propaganda across the world, hoping to convince people of color - or "countries of color" - not to ally with the United States. 

This propaganda was a major threat to the United States.  If Japan could convince the world's “countries of color” to side with it because of racism in the United States, America would obviously have a major problem.  In fact, for a time, many people in the world thought that a war between white countries and the “colored people of the world” was entirely possible.

After World War II ended, the global propaganda wars about race increased.  During the “Cold War,” the Soviet Union and the United States tried to gain allegiance from all the other nations of the world.  The Soviet Union tried to gain this allegiance by creating propaganda revealing the racism of the United States, and asking the nations of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America why they would side with a country like the United States that looked at them as inferior.  In fact, the Soviet Union once invited Langston Hughes to travel to Russia and make a film depicting the horrors of slavery.  Their hope was that the movie would help reveal to the rest of the world the brutal faults about the “land of freedom.”  Hughes did go to Russia, but the film was never made.   

As time went on, the United States felt more and more of a need to convince the rest of the world that its ideals were not hollow, and that it truly was a land of freedom.  In order to do this, the US created a "counter-propaganda" campaign, flooding the world with images and stories about successful people of color in the United States.  But the US understood it had to go farther than mere images and words: Starting in the 1960’s, American politicians felt more and more of a need to support civil rights in order to gain the support of the rest of the world. 

  

For more on the international context of the civil rights movement, see: The international context of Brown vs. Board and the dialog between George Washington Carver and Gandhi.

Thomas Jefferson's Theory of the Super Lion, and a Different Sort of Environmental Racism

Most people would likely be surprised to hear that 18^th century European Americans did not think of Africans, African Americans, or Native Americans as innately inferior.  The concept of innate inferiority was actually a later development, beginning around the time of Jefferson’s presidency in 1800, and brought on partly by the need to justify slavery in a post-Revolutionary age obsessed with independence and equality.    

Prior to this, the imagined inferiority of people of color was considered an environmental problem: because all people had sprung from the same source – i.e., Genesis – people were innately equal.  However, according to Enlightenment thinking and to popular culture, as people spread across the globe, they were deeply and often negatively affected by their environments.  An average European American prior to the Revolution would have considered everything from perceived savagery to dark skin to be a deleterious effect of a harmful, non-European environment. 

Many Europeans worried that Americans would gradually succumb to the environmental pressures that caused Native American savagery; they took the wildness and violence of Western settlement as evidence of this.  Jefferson, always ready to argue for the superiority of everything American, argued that while the African environment certainly had led to inferiority amongst Africans, that Native Americans were not inferior at all.  To claim Native American inferiority would have meant admitting  the inferiority of the American environment.  In his own words, the Native American was “in body and mind the equal of the white man.”  However, rather than leading him to value the existing cultures of the indigenous peoples, this belief led Jefferson and his followers to more fervently engage in the colonial project of proving that Native Americans could be converted to European American ways.  Towards this end, Jefferson studied Native Americans passionately: he spent thirty years studying indigenous languages, although after his presidency, his work on Native American languages was stolen as his library was shipped back to Monticello. 

The inferiority of the American climate was also the subject of much European scientific literature.  The great French naturalist of the Western world, Buffon, influentially wrote that the life forms of the New World were underdeveloped, pointing out that the New World had no lions or elephants because the weak American environment could not support such rigorous life forms.  He apparently didn’t see the irony that these animals lived in Africa but not Europe.

The only book that Jefferson ever wrote, Notes on the State of Virginia, took Buffon to task.  In charts that are often edited out of current editions, Jefferson weighed American animals against European ones, finding that while the average European bear weighed 153.7 pounds, the American weighed 400; that the American cow weighed 2,500 pounds to the European 763.  Jefferson sent Buffon enormous moose antlers and numerous specimens, forcing Buffon to revise his work.  

Jefferson wasn’t done with Buffon though.  The following quote is straight from the book Empire of Liberty, the second volume of the Oxford History of the United States: “In the mid-1790s on the basis of some fossil remains, probably belonging to a prehistoric sloth, he [Jefferson] concocted the existence of a huge super-lion, three times bigger than the African lion, and presented his imagined beast to the scientific world as the Megalonyx, ‘The Great Claw.’”  It gets even better: when Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition to chart the West, he did so expecting that Megalonyx’s and Mammoths were still walking the Western earth, and hoped that specimens of these super creatures would demolish the Old World notions of New World inferiority once and for all.  

Jefferson's Megalonyx presentation to the American Philosophical Society initiated vertebrate paleontology in the United States.  The great prehistoric sloth remains known as the Megalonyx Jeffersonii.