The Detroit Evening Times
May 04, 1941.
Putting the Hooey in War Propaganda
by Lillian Gish
Famed Actress Is Attacked
for Exposing Tricks That
Drive America Into War
War is not merely a matter of arms and munitions; of guns and bullets and bombs and death. It is also a spiritual thing and requires spiritual as well as material preparation. The spiritual preparation for war is hatred.
Before you can lure a peace loving people into a war which they do not want, you must blind them with intolerance and spur them with hate. As factories turn out weapons and ammunition, so propaganda mills manufacture false causes and mass hatreds.
I know a little of how it is done. Twenty-four years ago I myself, unknowingly helped to sell the idea of hate to the American people. Now, for the second time within a quarter of a century, we are being hate-conditioned for entry into a war which is of no more our business than was that of 1917.
Again we are told that if Britain loses, we too shall fall.
Set Our Own Afire
We are told that our neighbor&apo;s house is afire and implored to save it by setting fire to our own. Once more we are offered slogans about democracy to obscure the fact that the real objectives of the war we are urged to enter have never been disclosed.
Only this time. alas, as the tide of hatred rises it is not confined to Britain’s military enemies. It is also being visited on every American who ventures to suggest that America can be better served by peace than by war … and this in spite of the fact that 82 per cent of our people are opposed to entering another of Europe's ruinous and futile struggles.
Since I made my recent talk before an America First rally I too have come in for my share of that hatred.
I have received many letters addressing me as, “You rat!” Others accuse me of being, not only a Nazi sympathizer, but a Nazi tool.
Miss Lillian Gish pictured in Chicago as she wrote the story which appears on this page.Some threaten my life. One of my anonymous correspondents wrote:
“When the time comes. I'll have you riddled with bullets.”
So we have the spectacle of certain Americans as a preliminary to a crusade to establish the four freedoms everywhere else in the world, abolishing them at home.
Many of my friends have shown incredulity and something bordering on dismay that I should, as one of them put it, “place myself in the same category as Lindbergh, Verne Marshall, Henry Ford and Cardinal O'Connell.” Well … in that case I am also in the same category as His Holiness Pope Pius XII and I consider his to be the only sane voice now coming out of Europe. He believes-that peace is better for the world today than peace next week, next month or next year.
Before I spoke, I realized what the result would be because I know what propaganda-engendered hate can do. I faced the fact that to make my convictions public might well mean the end of my career.
I told my story in the hope that it might help to prevent the American people from being fooled again. I told it not because I am proud of it but because, in these crucial days, I could no longer live with myself and be silent.
Back in 1917 when Mr. David Wark Griffith was in London with his picture “Intolerance.” he was approached by Lloyd George, Lord Beaverbrook and the heads of the British and French propaganda departments and asked to make films which would rouse the American people to fight.
He agreed and sent for my mother, my sister and myself. We spent six months in England and France … often at the front gathering material for three films, “Hearts of the World”, “The Great Love” and “The Greatest Thing in Life.” These were good stories and deeply moving at the time. But when we ran them six or seven years ago, the “Huns” and the “Beast of Berlin” as we then called the kaiser, were so villainous and dastardly that the audience screamed with laughter.
And no wonder! Every time a “Hun” came near me he knocked me down, kicked me or beat me with a cat-o'-nine tails. That was a part of the propaganda designed to teach a nation how to hate. We have all come to realize that. But now, with propagandized hysteria at its height, who knows but that those who laughed then might take all this seriously again.
At any rate, our 1917 propaganda succeeded so well that on our return to the United States our countrymen asked us, in all seriousness, if it were true that the Germans cut off the hands of old people and little children. After the war Sir Philip Gibbs revealed that these stories were created out of whole cloth for propaganda purposes — propaganda that made our people think and talk like idiots.
Scenes like this from a 1917 “Liberty Loan” picture, Miss Gish says, aroused the American people to fight on the side of Britain and France in the last War.An Ironical Fact
It is ironical that Mr. Griffith should have made these pictures, for he felt that the movies represented a sort of universal language.
He, and all of us, had believed such a little time before that through moving pictures all nations could learn to understand one another and that war would be banished through this great new instrument of Peace.
It is Ironical, too. and very sad. that America's noblest and most characteristic quality … her generosity of heart … should make her an easy victim of the vicious propaganda of war and hate.
All over the world, whenever disaster has struck, wherever people have suffered, America has been quick to bring or send succor. Victims of earthquake, flood, famine and disastrous fires the world around know the quality of American sympathy through the aid we have always so eagerly extended.
Now when Europe is wracked by the greatest disaster of our times, we would like so much to help … to bring an end to brutality and suffering and death. We are an emotional people and we do not stop to think that we cannot resolve this conflict by plunging into the maelstrom ourselves.
However much we may love the neighbor whose house is ablaze, we cannot help him much by setting fire to our own.
American Heritage
Goes Back to 1632
Miss Lillian Gish is one of the foremost actresses of our day and one of the best loved.
She attained nationwide prominence while still in her teens though her acting in the epoch-making silent motion pictures directed and produced by David Wark Griffith in the days before our entry into the first world war. She has won new fame and affection during the past year as “Mother” in the hilarious play, “Life With Father.”
She was born in Ohio and her American heritage dates back to 1632 when her mother's people, French Huguenots, came to America to escape religious persecution and settled in Deerfield, Mass. The first Gish to come to America arrived in 1733. He was Lillian's ancester, Mathias Gish, who hailed from Luxembourg and who settled as a farmer in Lancaster County, Pa.
“I have but one platform,” says Miss Gish, “it is pro-American and anti-hate.”
Putting the Hooey in War Propaganda by Lillian Gish, The Detroit Evening Times, May 04, 1941, Final.