Devious Means Research Articles

Prisoner Into Politician: A Biographical Study of de Valera in 1917

The spring of 1917 in Ireland was a peaceful season in contrast with the year that had preceded. The rising of Easter week of 1916 had failed militarily and the peace it precipitated did not prove effective for either the Irish rebels or their English adversaries. By dint of constant agitation and devious means of communication with relatives and friends at home, the Irish prisoners in English jails began to take an active part in political developments in Ireland. Eamon de Valera, once condemned to death and now a life-term prisoner, wasassembling the forces of the future from behind walls and bars. Irish men and women never before concerned with national affairs ralliedunder the banner of Sinn Fein, the party that was not a party, the cause that was a crusade. Patriots began concentrating their efforts around this unifying force and their aims and aspirations centered around the martyrs of the 1916 rising, both dead and living. With other meansprohibited, the old familiar practice of fighting through Parliamentary channels was resumed, and when word penetrated the walls of Lewes Prison in England in the month of May, 1917, to the effect that a prisoner would be named to stand on the Irish Republican platform for a Parliamentary by-election in County Longford, Ireland, the inmates found ways and means to discuss the situation among themselves. Their leader, Eamon de Valera, at first took the point of view that this would compromise Republican principles.

Foreign Quarantine in Military Traffic 1

The dissemination of disease through international military traffic has been much discussed in recent years, and the problem has been evaluated from multiple viewpoints. Some persons have apparently been convinced that many diseases would be encountered abroad which might easily be introduced into the United States, particularly by aerial traffic, and fantastically devious means of infection have been suggested. Some opinions have not seemed to give adequate weight to past experience, or to improbabilities involved. Military policy has necessarily been based upon careful evaluation of the entire problem by The Surgeon General with all reasonable regard to military expediency. World-wide commercial and military experience have been considered along with advice of American and foreign authorities in preventive medicine, and recommendations of the National Institute of Health, The National Research Council, the United States of America Typhus Commission, and other interested military and civilian groups.

Propaganda and Leisure Reading

7(7ARIOUS scholarly attempts to define propaganda have not gone far beyond the statement that propaganda is selected evidence. That is, the difference between propaganda and truth is the difference between a part and the whole of the pertinent facts. Various minority groups, ranging from super-patriots to power-trusts, have been accused of using devious means to secure the adoption of elementaryand highschool textbooks in which their interests are somewhat glorified. But much less attention has been paid to propaganda on the collegiate level, doubtless on the assumption that the students can recognize it as such and therefore can beware. The weakness of any such assumption is apparent in the typical undergraduate's preference for what is interestingly presented as distinct from what is demonstrably true. Appeals to group loyalties and to group prejudices are proverbially effective. The curricula of the American college have accordingly attempted, by prescribing varied programs for the junior-college classes and by other means, to present subjects as wholes, to teach the importance of checking the completeness and validity of sources, and to develop a critical attitude toward conclusions based upon unreliable data. Authorities on the collegiate curriculum are hard at work on this major problem of giving the student an adequate perspective. Hence the danger is less that students will be misled by propaganda in respect to matters which are covered by systematic courses of instruction than in respect to matters not so covered. Many significant problems confronting the college student are not treated by systematic courses simply because the problems have no departmental classification; for example, sex, militarism, crime, business ethics, and personal ideals. The student's equipment for dealing with such problems consists of information obtained from entirely casual sources such as early home influences, conversation with other students, and media like popular literature, the theater, and motion pictures which no one can escape. Here propaganda is most insidious and effective, since from these sources the undergraduate obtains only what is interesting, and this presumably falls considerably short of the whole truth. It is here also that the most deliberate attempts are made to restrict the supply of reading-matter within certain social and political limits-by city