Propaganda began as the name of a Vatican missionary office in 1622
In 1622, as part of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church set up the Congregation for Propagating the Faith to spread Catholicism in non-Catholic lands, known informally as Propaganda. The Latin simply meant things to be spread. Only in the twentieth century did the English word acquire its sense of deliberate manipulation.
The practice long predates the label. Egypt's New Kingdom portrayed warfare as orderly and clean, and Ramesses II recast the Battle of Kadesh, really a stalemate, as a personal triumph blessed by the gods, with temple artists drawing the pharaoh as a giant among men. The Behistun Inscription of around 515 BCE justified Darius I's seizure of the Persian throne. During Rome's final civil wars, from 44 to 30 BCE, Octavian and Mark Antony accused each other of shameful ancestry, cowardice, drunkenness and bad writing. Genghis Khan sent men ahead of his armies to spread rumours, often while commanding fewer troops than his enemies.
Printing changed the scale. No ruler used the press for image-building before Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, who put out one-sided battle reports that foreshadowed newspapers. Reformation pamphlets carried new doctrines to ordinary people, and Patriot printers in the American colonies ran a thriving network of their own. From the 1790s the word spread into secular use.
The First World War, from 1914, brought the first large-scale organised government campaigns. Afterward the German general Erich Ludendorff credited British messaging with helping defeat Germany, a belief Hitler later echoed. Film raised the stakes further: the Soviet state sponsored works such as The Battleship Potemkin in 1925, and the 1930s and 1940s have been called the golden age of propaganda. Even Disney joined in, with the 1942 cartoon Der Fuehrer's Face mocking Hitler.
Debate over its power grew fierce. In 1929 Everett Dean Martin told Edward Bernays that propaganda made puppets of people, moved by hidden strings. Bernays himself argued that an invisible government of unseen manipulators shaped tastes and ideas. More recently, RAND described a firehose of falsehood: rapid, repetitive messages pumped across many channels, indifferent to truth or consistency.
Source: Propaganda
