David Monger’s latest article, ‘“A not uncongenial task”: propaganda veterans and propaganda’s post-First World War reputation’ has been published online early in First World War Studies. The article surveys veteran propagandists’ memoirs and attitudes to the First World War, including prominent figures such as the authors H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, A.A. Milne and G.K. Chesterton, and suggests that most did not consider their propaganda work controversial, but rather a suitable contribution of their talents to wartime efforts. Chesterton went so far, in recollecting his anti-German pamphlets, as to assert in his autobiography that he was ‘still perfectly prepared to support their truth. I hardly know of a word I would alter’. Although we now think of propaganda as inherently dishonest and disreputable, and historians partly trace this reputation back to the excesses of the First World War, the article suggests that propaganda’s reputation was still negotiable in the decades after 1918.
