Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American "Neutrality" in World War II Revised Edition

by Nicholas J. Cull (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0195111507

ISBN-10: 0195111508

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"British propaganda brought America to the brink of war, and left it to the Japanese and Hitler to finish the job." So concludes Nicholas Cull in this absorbing study of how the United States was transformed from isolationism to belligerence in the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. From
the moment it realized that all was lost without American aid, the British Government employed a host of persuasive tactics to draw the US to its rescue. With the help of talents as varied as those of matinee idol Leslie Howard, Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and society photographer Cecil Beaton,
no section of America remained untouched and no method--from Secret Service intrigue to the publication of horrifying pictures of Nazi atrocities--remained untried. The British sought and won the support of key journalists and broadcasters, including Edward R. Murrow, Dorothy Thompson and Walter
Winchell; Hollywood film makers also played a willing part. Cull details these and other propaganda activities, covering the entire range of the British effort. A fascinating story of how a foreign country provoked America's involvement in its greatest war, Selling War will appeal to all those
interested in the modern cultural and political history of Britain and the United States.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Nicholas John Cull has made a major study of Britain's potent efforts to get a reluctant United States to fight."--International Herald Tribune

"[T]his is a sensible, thoughtful, and--in revealing the foibles of many key actors--an often amusing book."--Kirkus Reviews

"Cull writes with wit and zest about the efforts of Britons to help Roosevelt to bring the USA into the war....Based on careful research in many archives, this book provides a definitive account of important factors bearing on a decisive moment in world history."--Angus Calder, author of The
People's War and The Myth of the Blitz

"Dr. Cull has written a fascinatingly detailed, if triumphalist, account of how the Special Relationship worked, when it was vital for Britain that it should, with America's Anglophiles and Britain's Americophiles working together to bring American opinion to see where America's true interests
lay--in meeting tyranny on its own ground rather than sheltering behind a mythical Fortress America. This was as much America's finest hour as it was Britain's."--Donald Cameron Watt, London School of Economics and Political Science

"A valuable study of how British propaganda helped to bring the US into WW II...this is a sensible, thoughtful, and--in revealing the foibles of many key actors--an often amusing book."--Kirkus Reviews

"Well written and impressively researched, the book is a welcome addition to the literature on the "special relationship."--CHOICE

"Nick Cull has turned his important and original historical researches into a gripping read."--Fred Inglis, Institute of Education, University of Warwick

"[T]ells the story with wit and a suitably sceptical detachment...[A]n important tale and a fascinating book, underpinned from the archives on both sides of the Atlantic."--The International History Review

"By adopting an all-encompassing and yet detailed approach to the topic, Cull has bridged a serious gap in academic knowledge."--HISTORY

From the Back Cover

"British propaganda brought America to the brink of war, and left it to the Japanese and Hitler to finish the job". So concludes Nicholas Cull in this absorbing study of how the United States was transformed from isolation to belligerence in the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. From the moment it realized that all was lost without American aid, the British Government employed a host of persuasive tactics to draw the U.S. to its rescue. With the help of talents as varied as those of matinee idol Leslie Howard, Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and society photographer Cecil Beaton, no section of America remained untouched and no methodfrom Secret Service intrigue to the publication of horrifying pictures of Nazi atrocities - remained untried. The British sought and won the support of key journalists and broadcasters, including Edward R. Murrow, Dorothy Thompson, and Walter Winchell: Hollywood film makers also played a willing part. Cull details these and other propaganda activities, covering the entire range of the British effort. A fascinating story of how a foreign country promoted America's involvement in its greatest war, Selling War will appeal to all those interested in the modern cultural and political history of Britain and the United States.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; Revised edition (September 26, 1996)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195111508
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195111507
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1310L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.19 x 0.72 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,692,670 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,844 in Military History (Books)
- #3,896 in International Relations (Books)
- #8,297 in European History (Books)

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Robert A. Williams, PhD

American-powered British Empire

Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2005

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Sixty-five years ago, Americans believed that their government's renewed relations with the British Empire in support of the Queen's military effort in Europe's Great War had been a mistake. They believed that ignoring Thomas Jefferson's wisdom of "Friendship and trade with all nations; Entangling alliances with none", was a costly and deadly mistake. In the future, they said, Americans would leave the Europeans to settle their differences without American interference and the British Empire would have to tread without American brawn - "Burn everything British except their coal" said one Irish-American banner in 1921.

According to Prof Nicholas John Cull of Leicester Univ, American neutrality was contrary to British foreign policy so a British 'Fifth Column' was implemented to suck America back into her Mama's Empire. Winston Churchill, who held American and British citizenships, probably did more to suck America back into the British Empire than any other single British statesman. Churchill boasted that he had "dreamed of, aimed at, and worked for" American brawn to backup British Empire during WWII. Everywhere the Yanks are embroiled today are those quagmires originally created by the British, Iraq is just one good example (See also 'Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq' by C. Catherwood at www.amazon.co.uk).

Prof Nicholas John Cull at Leicester Univ did his PhD in 1991 at Leeds on British propaganda and information warfare aimed at getting America off her libertarian footing and back to providing the brawn to British Empire as was accomplished for the first world war. At the same time that Cull wrote his dissertation, Susan Brewer of Cornell Univ in New York wrote hers - 'Creating the Special Relationship: British Propaganda in America in World War Two', Cornell Univ, PhD 1991. Cull's book 'Selling War' is basically a 1995 rewrite of his PhD disseration, while he was teaching at the Univ of Birmingham in England.

The point to all this is that America, which had fought two wars against Britain and Empire in 1776 and 1812, was sucked back in by a deal between American elites and British elites who saw BIG oil money $$$ if they partnered up to do a snow job on the American public. That's why everywhere Bush goes today you see Blair whispering into his ear. I mean think about it - that dumb cowboy pulling the strings?!! If it isn't his British bosses calling the shots, then who?

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Philip Ufnowski

British propaganda in World War II

Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2011

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Book was, generally, 'okay'. There were some information errors. For instance, author says the British loss the Battleships "Nelson and Barham". The HMS Nelson was mined twice and scrapped in 1949. A second serror was saying the German heavy cruiser Priz Eugen was a German battleship. It was, as I wrote, a heavy cruiser with 8 inch naval rifles. A more important error was the author saying that Churchill proposed France and Britain amalgamate. He said it was a propaganda ploy. William Shirer in his book about the downfall of the French republic say it was a proposal to stop the French government from signing a separate treaty. Such a treaty was in violation of an earlier treaty under provisions said neither nation would sign a separate peace without mutual consent.

Author kept moving around from different events somewhat breaking cohesion of the premise. The British may have found sympathy in America but it did not get America to get into the war.

5 people found this helpful

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Arnold E. Bjorn

The Triumph of War Propaganda

Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2015

After World War I, the shouts of "Never Again!" resounded more powerfully in the United States than probably anywhere else. They did not grow meeker in the 1930s, when Britain and France defaulted on the billions of dollars in debts to US interests which they had amassed during the war, and railed at "Uncle Shylock" for questioning this economically convenient move. And while America had little love for the Nazi Germany which emerged during this eventful decade, she liked Joe Stalin's Communist USSR even less. Yet, by 1941 the Senate would approve an act that granted billions of dollars in civilian and military aid, no strings attached, to this same USSR, and a loud and somewhat sizable segment of US public opinion (though still a minority) would be clamoring for America to jump into history's second devastating World War with troops on the ground in order to bail out this same Uncle Joe and his "peace-loving" totalitarianism from his war with Hitler.

What was the reason for this remarkable change of heart? Many would say, the atrocities of Nazi Germany. And that is certainly part of the truth. But the fact remains that, when one examines the particulars, it is clear that the USSR caused more mass death, ethnic cleansing and overall suffering than the Nazis ever did, before, during and after World War II. It was widespread knowledge in 1941 that the gallows, execution squads, labor camps and man-made famines of Communism had claimed, at the very least, millions of victims. At this point, the Nazis had barely begun their own equally awful, if smaller, campaign of genocide. If atrocities alone were the explanation, the US would have said, "A plague on both your houses!" and stayed clean out of the dictators' brawl. (In fact, this was what many at the time, such as ex-President Herbert Hoover and future President Harry Truman, actually advocated doing.)

Rather, the true cause was another, one that seems startlingly obvious in hindsight and, indeed, was obvious to some of its contemporaries: A brilliantly directed campaign of pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi war propaganda, from sources domestic and foreign alike, expertly tailored to appeal to the American mind. Only through the mother of all PR campaigns could all of America's hereditary hostility to tyranny be redirected at merely one of the two great dictatorships of the age, while the other was, in truly Orwellian fashion, hailed as the beacon of freedom and democracy in Europe. After the war, as soon as that flood of propaganda receded, the public again at once realized that the USSR was no cozy little Euro-Socialist welfare state. But by then, of course, it was much too late.

This, however, is a story for another time; here, we are concerned with the propaganda itself. Nicholas John Cull's brief but very thoroughly researched account examines one particular propaganda lobby, that sponsored by the British government between 1939 and 1941 to bring America into the war on the Allied side. It is a remarkable story, to be sure, telling as it does of a momentous deception that subverted the news media nationwide, deployed a full-fledged foreign-run secret police on US soil, and even produced some of the most enduringly memorable movies of its day.

As Cull meticulously documents, from 1940 at the latest the British Secret Service had a finger in nearly every pie where American opinion-making was concerned. Famous media personalities were recruited for the cause; directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander Korda and Walter Wanger willingly agreed to include "suitable" messages in their films, and fanatically anti-Nazi star reporters like Dorothy Thompson and William Shirer were predictably eager to strike a blow at Hitler, even if this meant betraying the American public's trust in their journalistic integrity by knowingly spreading propaganda provided by a foreign intelligence agency. Even more ominously, powers within the government -- Up to the very top, in the Oval Office itself -- granted the British basically free reins, even where their operations were obviously illegal under US law, since they largely agreed with their goals. Thus, when Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, in charge of domestic counter-intelligence, tried to counter this large-scale penetration, he was cold-shouldered -- Even when what he had to report was quite alarming. As quoted by Cull (p. 145), he told Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles in March 1941 that:

"...a full size [British] secret police and intelligence service is rapidly evolving. There are, or are about to be, district officers at Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, Houston, San Francisco, Portland and probably Seattle. We know that to the existing offices there are now reporting a very considerable number of regularly employed secret agents and a much larger number of informers, etc."

In response to his opposition, the British spooks set about to "scour Washington in search of any 'dirt' on Berle -- dirt black enough to end his troublesome career once and for all" (p. 175) -- Which surely serves to confirm his fears. J. Edgar Hoover and others were also concerned with their activities, which included illegal wire taps and outright strong-arming of recalcitrants. But President Roosevelt and his intelligence czar, William Donovan, approved of all this, and indeed cooperated very closely with the British, to the point where Berle felt forced to complain that:

"...the really active head of the intelligence section in Donovan's group is Mr. Elliott, who is assistant to Mr. Stevenson. In other words, Stevenson's assistant in the British intelligence is running Donovan's intelligence service."

This was probably exaggerating somewhat; but British top agents William Stephenson and Dick Ellis (Berle's memo misspells the names) were certainly on an intimate basis with Donovan, and their agency was closely associated with his, in a way which should indeed concern a patriotically-minded man like Berle. That since available evidence strongly hints that Ellis was also a Soviet double agent would naturally tend further to validate those concerns.

This cloak-and-dagger business is, alas, largely skimmed over in this volume; a much better authority on these aspects of British activity in the wartime US is Thomas Mahl, in his magisterial study "Desperate Deception" (1998) -- Also a volume which is absolutely essential in order to understand the domestic political scene during these fateful years, and which is to be warmly recommended. What Cull does do very well is to chart the minutiae of British influence in the news and entertainment media, which extended down to influencing comic book artists in a suitable direction(!). His careful and conservative evaluation is based both on the extant records (limited as they are; the British destroyed most of their documents after the war) and on interviews with surviving members and associates of the propaganda agencies.

In all, this is a very interesting as well as important account. Interesting, because it shows a rarely seen aspect of the "Good War" and just how dirty the "good guys" could play when they needed to. And important, because in exposing the methods which have historically been used by a foreign power to influence and subvert US politics, it warns us of some of the ways in which others may still be doing so today. (For surely most of us are not so naive as to believe that propaganda died with Doctor Goebbels in Berlin in 1945.) It is therefore to be recommended to all readers -- Ideally along with Mahl's book, which provides more detail on the really dirty side of the dirty business that "Selling War" describes.

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Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American "Neutrality" in World War II Revised Edition

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