SOURCE: Quinn, Patrick J. “The Enemy Within.” In The Conning of America: The Great War and American Popular Literature, pp. 101-31. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

In the following essay, Quinn considers several American novels and short stories that functioned as propaganda to turn the United States against Germany and rally Americans to enter World War I.

Part of the problem with propaganda attempts to generate American interest in the Allied side was that the bulk of the country, rightly, did not see the battles being fought in France and Belgium as particularly relevant to their daily existence The conception of a global village was still decades away. Admittedly, the atrocity stories made for frightful reading in the newspapers, but most Americans in the Midwest or West Coast could observe their German neighbors going about their daily business and could not imagine them as the “blond beast” the East Coast newspapers...