Calling all stars: Emerging political authority and cultural policy in the propaganda campaign of World War I

This dissertation examines the legitimization of film stars as sources of political authority in the U.S. propaganda efforts of World War I. First, it shows how film stardom, evolving out of the broader conceptual category of celebrity, comes to claim a space of opinion leadership in the public sphere alongside the rhetorical practices of cultural and political elites. Second, it argues that Hollywood's policy relationship to the state from the Second World War henceforth has a precedent in the First World War. During the Liberty Loan Bond Drives of 1917–1919, the creative forces of cinematography and the symbolic capital of film stardom came to the aid of the Committee on Public Information, a state bureau created to promote domestic support for war intervention. The film industry and the stars' involvement in the war mobilization effort represented a new manner of linking the politics of national identity and policy with the activities of popular culture.;While the film industry organized to secure “essential status” by promoting its utility to political elites, “The Big Three”—Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford—and a host of other entertainment professionals voluntarily lent their celebrity status to the work of the Treasury Department to help sell the war bonds that would finance the intervention. Film stars toured the country selling bonds and promoting thrift, and thus they worked to valorize their industry culturally and politically. However, the war also provided the star with a new vehicle for signifying political opinion leadership. In their discursive capacities as government spokespersons, stars functioned as an ancillary of liberal governance in the formation and teaching of patriotic and cultural citizenship by addressing their publics (and their fans) as citizen-subjects eager to “do their bit” in the service of a unified national identity. In effect, the stars joined without hesitation the legion of pro-war advocates whose rhetoric and policies systematically shut down domestic dissent and directed the practices of film toward the politics of Americanization. This study suggests that celebrity's claim to political authority—a taken-for-granted part of today's political discourse—was discursively constructed during World War I.