The Veneer of Authoritarian Art

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.According to George Orwell, there’s a simple reason authoritarian cultural campaigns can’t last: They assume that history can be “created rather than learned,” he wrote in a 1947 Atlantic essay, and this produces superficial literature, unstable and fleeting. By contrast, free societies promote “intellectual liberty” and the belief that “a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course.” Their art lasts because it has depth, and it has depth because it has truth.Take Soviet Communist Party propaganda. As my colleague Anne Applebaum has written, throughout the 20th century, the party’s posters and films were meant to be “overwhelming and inspiring,” with strong visual styles, rousing music, and a clear message: Here is the bounty of a communist society, with its abundant harvest and strong, healthy workers. But many of those spectacles fell short, Anne observed: When people saw them, they felt a chasm between the propaganda’s veneer and their own “impoverished reality.” This is what Orwell meant when he said that writings in a totalitarian state are “bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set”—rigid, rote, and brittle.Which is not to say that art as propaganda cannot be effective. It has long been a powerful tool, especially since the advent of mass media enabled states to disseminate messages on an unprecedented scale. In the U.S., many administrations have attempted to extend their influence through art. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, which commissioned the famous “I Want You” posters of Uncle Sam that helped persuade people to join the fight; under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the War Advertising Council (now the Ad Council) coordinated campaigns supporting the World War II effort, leveraging symbols such as Rosie the Riveter to recruit women to the workforce.Activ