"We Need No Goebbels"

When Radio Playwright Arch Oboler erupted about "hate" last month (TIME, May 18), at the Institute for Education by Radio at Columbus, a few responsible thinkers were on hand. Fumed Oboler: "Anger [on the radio] is what people want, and they want hate." This flare-up had a profound effect on all present. Many of the educators left the conference in a reflective mood, and at least three of them have had something to say about radio in print since:

> Wisconsin University's Curtis Nettels did not precisely agree with Oboler, but he did let fly at Radio's business-as-usual patter. Said he, in the New Republic: "He [the radio advertiser] puts us off guard; he lulls us with a feeling of false security; he invites us to pamper our appetites when we need to be self-denying and hardy. He magnifies the trivial when great efforts are necessary for our survival."

> Professor Fred Eastman of Chicago's Theological Seminary wrote in the Christian Century: "Our young dramatists would do well to consider the psychological nature of this weapon of hate by which they seek to improve our morale. Hatred is a consuming fire. The dramatists may fan this flame, but they cannot control it. Some day ... it will spread through our own midst and blaze out in race riots, in conflicts between Capital and Labor, and in the violent rebellion of our dispossessed sharecroppers."

> But it was Harvard's Professor of Government Carl Joachim Friedrich who in Common Sense last week ripped into the whole idea of "indoctrinating" people with hatred or anything else. Wrote Dr. Friedrich, developing a theme he expressed last year as "losing the war by propaganda": "We need no Goebbels. . . . Can the methods of a Goebbels fashion the mind of a new democracy? One consideration that suggests a ministry of propaganda to its proponents is the fact that we had a Committee on Public Information in the last war. . . . The Creel Committee, as it was known, has been studied thoroughly. But from the learned battle emerges only one conclusion: this country would have won the war, anyhow.

"The great formulae of the Creel Committee, like 'making the world safe for Democracy,' became a mockery soon after the armistice. The man at the breakfast table felt that he had been duped. ... It was then that the little man began to shout, 'Back to normalcy.' The violence of the reaction was stunning; it lost us the peace."

Political Scientist Friedrich has seen history made both in the U.S. and in Germany. He came to the U.S. in the middle '20s after receiving a Ph.D. from Heidelberg, gave lectures at Harvard and decided to stay. In London in 1935 he became fascinated by Parliamentary debates about BBC and by radio in general. Partly aided by a Rockefeller grant which expires this month, yellow-haired, big-domed Professor Friedrich has given five years of study to radio politics--five years in which his contempt for Naziism and Nazi "indoctrination" methods (indebted to the Creel Committee, as Goebbels used to acknowledge) has been thoroughly confirmed.

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