Queens, witches & powers of persuasion
"Did they have brains or knowledge? Don't make me laugh; they were popular."
This is the second story in a four-part series exploring the “Large Queens,” Canada’s first postage stamp issue following Confederation in 1867. This part, longer than the other ones, includes several key concepts and readings, all of them necessary for a true telling of the story. You can read part one, published three days ago, here.
If united desires make a nation, those arbitrary manifestations built on the backs of certain people living in a certain place at a certain time, why are we all so genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow?
Well, you remember Hemingway—“all things truly wicked start from innocence,” including the innocence of our desires.1
“So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war.”
There's a war going on for your mind—no doubt. And because the so-called truth is “not a thing of fact or reason, the truth is just what ev-ryone agrees on,” our personal knowledge of any situation falls short of whatever the propagandized masses have been encouraged to believe.
For centuries, in varying ways, we’ve been under the influence of not just marketers but all makers of mass media, including postage stamps, which earned the title of the “neglected medium” from a pair of Israeli researchers in 2020.2 Our individual and even shared desires – all things, according to Marcus Aurelius, to which we can devote time and energy – seem less clear on the level of mass media. There, even the most unfeigned desires can and will be pushed in new directions by whoever’s in control of the message or the medium. With as much skill as possible, by whatever means necessary and to whatever end deemed mission critical, they use things as far removed as stamps, coins, comics, movies and social media to reorient the will of the people they govern.
How else would powerful prigs maintain their grip on people?
I suppose they can and sometimes do use guns, but violent force is usually a less than ideal way to uphold power. As another option, they have something far more effective, efficient and firm against the unrelenting assault on power known as time. It’s persuasion, something so effective it can give generational dynasties the “psychological lebensraum” they, like any power-seeking entity, need to endure.
‘THE MANUFACTURE OF CONSENT’
The power holders chose life, as it were.
Instead of violence, our grandparents and parents worked towards “the manufacture of consent,” which U.S. journalist and author Walter Lippmann first mentioned in his 1922 masterpiece Public Opinion.
“That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough,” Lippmann wrote, adding the “practice of democracy … turned a corner” with the advent of modern communication.
Canadian media master Marshall McLuhan echoed these sentiments four decades later in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, but it really reminds me of a still more recent example—Wicked.
Ariana Grande plays Glinda the Good, an eternal realist formerly known as “Ga-linda,” and like most exceedingly popular people, she sings her praises to the time-honoured opportunities presented by manipulation.
“When I see depressing creatures with unprepossessing features, I remind them on their own behalf to think of celebrated heads of state or especially great communicators. Did they have brains or knowledge? Don't make me laugh.”
If not with brains or knowledge, how did these people uphold their power? Guns? Flying monkeys? Other forms of authoritarian control?3
Of course, the Oz regime sometimes deemed violent force necessary, but mostly, powerful people used covert persuasion via popularity—even Glinda could see it.
The effect proved powerful for Glinda’s green-skinned counterpart Elphaba, who, despite possessing exceptional and useful sorcery skills, soon realized her lack of popularity would deny her any chance to change Oz.4
All regimes, which operate according to their own rules for their own reasons, are total. To maintain totality, they have built-in mechanisms to prevent underclasses from gaining a foothold from which they could potentially take even a modicum of power. Not only is power limited in an area dominated by a regime; it’s concentrated to the point that any partial (i.e., incomplete) changes within a regime are immaterial to its overarching power. It’s all or nothing when it comes to regime change: it’s either success or failure, and the the former outcome is comparatively uncommon.
Sure, you might have unozly talents in sorcery, something beyond the skills of today’s best STEM students—but if you’re not pop-u-lar?
A regime change rarely works for long if you’re unpopular. The ideal situation requires a popular mandate for absolute power, but people can and do try their chances with guns and flying monkeys and all the apparent trimmings of bright and shiny societies.
“Alas, these wayward witches seem determined to shit all over our paradise,” your advisors might say. “Should I get the monkeys?”
Now, this is the Emerald City and you’re the goddamn Wizard of Oz, so you consider your options. Madame Morrible is stopping by later, and she can do things few other woman, perhaps other than Elphaba, seem willing or able to do. In a desperate sin comprised of both lust and pride, you think you can persuade Elphaba to return and keep Morrible around to serve you and your regime. You decide to release the monkeys—not as the agents of your secret police, but as a gesture of goodwill.
“Here, you have the monkeys,” you might say as you release those newly winged beasts to your sworn enemy, a known witch and a clear outsider, whose lifelong worldview has clashed with most all her peers—especially the good aristocrats of Oz.
If she doesn’t come back and lend her sorcery skills for the benefit of Oz, you can and will tarnish her reputation. You’ll do something Lippmann described, way back in 1922, as a different “revolution … infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.” You’ll print posters (and perhaps even stamps) showing her as a yellow-eyed witch with nefarious intentions, demonize her green skin and sorcery skills, and incite pro-Oz death riots if you eventually need to bury this witch.
After all, despite your good intentions, your plan could fall short if those fucking monkeys side with Elphaba, who could then be well enough armed to destroy your legacy. Or what if Morrible, an authoritarian of the Joseph Goebbels variety, lands in prison for the torture and murder of civilians plus other war crimes committed under your regime?
I mean, the monkeys are already gone. You’ll just have to print those posters, make a few compelling broadcasts and pray to Oz there’s at least one goddamn good witch around here somewhere.
Luckily, thanks to your dedication to Oz and Morrible’s penchant for “banal nationalism,” most Ozians – everyone from aristocratic Ozmopolitans to supportive Wiz-o-maniacs and even some Munchkinlanders – will hear your message.
“Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables,” according to Lippmann. “It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.”
A MYTH CALLED DEMOCRACY
Lippmann’s “dogma of democracy” still stands strong.
We continue to uphold it today despite—well, you know how it works.5
“The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it, consisted of an ideal environment and a selected class.”
Today, 103 years after Lippmann put those thoughts to paper, we span many classes – often callously divided and still (mostly) allowed to vote – and we exist in an environment hostile to our time, energy and overall wellbeing.6 We have reasons to thank our ancestors for our modern domesticated lives, but our propaganda-prone psychology isn’t one of them.
Cunning linguist Noam Chomsky and his fellow media critic Edward Herman later defined the propaganda model through the lens of mass media. Powerful entities use covert communication – “a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion” – to manufacture the consent of the people they govern.7
All regimes are like the nations over which they hold power (and which provided the subject of our original question): they only really exist when and if people believe in them.
Like art, consent and dissent can be the product of all kinds of coercive manufacturing processes, not the least of which is propaganda via mass media. It, too, can come in virtually any form—even postage stamps.
People, the propagandized masses, with all their thoughts, beliefs and decisions, provide both the results of and catalyst for propaganda in a sort of closed-loop system. Propagandists distribute their propaganda to the public, which in turn suggests – even confirms – the next round of propaganda in a process akin to customer feedback.
Of course, our beloved stamps belong to this system of propaganda turned “public relations,” under which they have served as some of the most powerful myth-making and nation-building tools of the past 185 years.8 Future historians will look back on our time and opine on stamps, once the backbone of a global communication revolution, having fallen by the wayside when the Internet opened the door for us to move from paper- to computer-based communication.9 But for nearly two centuries, those adhesive-backed bits of paper, whose front side features government-approved designs meant to push society in a specific direction on a near-daily basis, allowed propagandists to manage the vicissitudes of public opinion.10 Unassumingly small and disproportionately effective, perhaps a trillion of these stamps have franked pieces of mail since 1840. And as we know thanks to the marketing industry, attention and especially engagement can make or break a successful campaign.11 For generations, people used the mail to mingle the world over, and most of this mail came franked with a small, sticky poster telling a specific story for a specific stamp-issuing entity for a specific reason.12
Marshall McLuhan, born in 1911 in Edmonton – the same western capital that gave us Jordan Peterson half a century later – taught us many key concepts in his 69 years. From McLuhan, we learned about mass communication and its requisite parts—the senders, the medium, the message, the masses and their perceived feedback.13
McLuhan supplanted the leading contemporary “hypodermic” media theory with his own theory.14 He marked modernity’s origin with moveable-type printing and described the printed, portable book as the “first commodity.” Printing technologies increasingly allowed people – namely people with power – to disseminate tailor-made information across vast distances. Its effects have proven as profound for the social, cultural, political and economic fabrics of life today as it likely did for John Swanton’s “bases of national life” from part one of this series.
In 1964, in Understanding Media, McLuhan goes as far to name print as the catalyst of the modern nation. Only after print did modern regimes standardize national languages – spelling and grammar – according to the geographic boundaries under which they were spoken. Print also opened the door to Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community,” a concept related to nationalism, in which individuals view themselves as a society bound by a common identity despite lacking direct contact with one another.
As we saw with Germany by the early 1940s, the Nazi of it all even extended to cat magazines. Over time, as the regime continued to build its imagined community, the readers of The German Feline began noticing the magazine’s editors “exalting the authentic German cat over the suspect and degenerate ‘breeds’ that had been allowed to creep in,” as Christopher Hitchens wrote for The Atlantic in December 2004.
OF STAMPS & NATIONS
Considering our original question from part one – “What constitutes a nation?” – let’s think about what constitutes Canada.
Surely, its name is significant—“CANADA,” one of only four words on the first stamps issued after Canadian Confederation.15
And what about the Canadian public’s thoughts, beliefs and decisions—our united desires, which bring us together and divide us? What does it mean to be a Canadian person, and why is it as difficult to unpack as determining what’s needed to make a country such as Canada?
We’re more than a complicated assemblage of English and French origins, the “Two Solitudes” of Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel of the same name. Our story predates the British North America Act of 1867, before which time all related colonial legislation used the phrase “peace, welfare and good government” rather than “peace, order and good government.” Both English and French settlers had long-standing alliances and took part in bitter and bloody skirmishes with local indigenous communities, of which there were many dating back tens of thousands of years. From the pre-Confederation conferences leading to Canada’s creation to ongoing indigenous treaty disputes, the most recent Québec referendum plus past and present U.S. encroachment, we’ve remained, in the immortal words of 17-year-old Heather Scott, “as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”
In 1868, a year after Canada gained dominion status, political officials continued their work to establish its national identity. One of the initial steps included the launch of a stamp series now known as the “Large Queens,” which first appeared in April 1868 and all of which centred on a portrait of Queen Victoria. Known to collectors as the Large Queens due to their relatively sizeable specifications, the stamps were both costly to produce and initially disliked by the public; however, they now rank among the favourite first issues of collectors around the world.16
The first Canadian definitive issue began an era of truly Canadian philately while marking a milestone in the nation’s transition from a French-controlled area to a group of British colonies and then a relatively independent dominion, albeit a constitutional monarchy, whose current sovereign and head of state is King Charles III.17 The series, which saw widespread use and now now provides collectors with many well-known philatelic and postal history rarities, includes what’s now Canada’s rarest stamp—the 1868 two-cent Large Queen on laid paper, an example of which recently sold for a record price.18 Along with Canada’s other early issues, the Large Queens played a role in shaping the country’s foundational myths and public opinions—a cog in the early machinery designed to manufacture the public’s consent and uphold this new thing called a dominion.
The next edition of Power & Philately will continue with the third part of this series on Tuesday afternoon. Check back here or in your inboxes on Jan. 21.
P.S. Remember, subscriptions for Power & Philately are free. Subscribers receive an utterly luscious story in their inbox each week with full access to the archive of past stories plus Substack’s large reader community. While no payment is ever necessary to access Power & Philately, many righteous readers have opted to pay for donation subscriptions ($5 a month or $50 a year) or join the founding member plan ($100 a year) as “esteemed financiers.” Each of my esteemed financiers receives in the mail a special gift related to philately, propaganda or both.
The quote comes from Ernest Hemingway’s 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast, in which he looks back at his life as a young, relatively unknown and still struggling writer in 1920s Paris.
Yehiel Limor formerly served as a long-time director at Sapir College while Ilan Tamir currently heads Ariel University’s School of Communication. In the August 2021 issue of Communication Theory, published by Oxford University Press, they wrote: “Postage stamps constitute official state documents that reflect the values that a country wishes to represent to its citizens and the world. Embracing the definition of postage stamps as a mass medium would, among other things, extend the research horizons of fields such as media, politics, arts, and culture.” Welcome to what I like to call Power & Philately.
Frankly, it was a bit of a mixed bag in the Land of Oz (originally seen as an area on Earth landlocked by a desert and protected by magic) as it has been here, from time to time, with our own society.
Later, towards the end of the musical Wicked, we see Elphaba demonized as “the Wicked Witch of the West.” She puts her lack of popularity to Glinda this way in the opening verse of “For Good.”
“I’m limited—just look at me. I’m limited, and just look at you. You can do all I couldn’t do, Glinda. So now it's up to you—for both of us. Now it’s up to you.”
They would need each other if they ever wished to change the world. And that’s all well and good for the animal and human citizens of Oz, but perhaps we live in an even more complex system, one in which the mere mention of “change” now carries eerie Orwellian overtones. Here, our system has for centuries more or less maintained itself. But in Oz and elsewhere around the world, some events prove what is possible: time and again, even the most powerful regimes can and will fall.
As with Lippmann’s early 20th-century United States, the regime of the present day acts less like a substantive democracy and more like a theocratic oligarchy. Today, a cultural “cathedral” allows an elite class of presently progressive priest-like people to promote a specific version of reality based on myth-making and nation-building principles. Before Lippmann’s time, the 19th-century civil-service system and “spoils system” placed an even more substantial barrier between the people with and the people without power. All the while, the people with power generally encouraged everyone else to avoid politics (i.e., democracy, especially those potentially squirrelly populist uprisings, which should be met with doubt and derision lest you look like a deplorable, dirtbag, degenerate or delinquent—there are names for us all, really, and no shortage of reasons to use them).
Today, social media, drug abuse and homelessness might stand as the usual suspects, but planes, trains and automobiles remain age-old favourites ready to lead you to your tragic demise. Right now, you might also be on the lookout for large fires, unsafe food and disgruntled “play area” participants.
In 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman authored Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which found a more homogenous contemporary mass media landscape riddled with powerful people, mostly in government, “manufacturing consent.” Today, it’s common for all stripes of people trying to maintain or gain power to manufacture both consent and dissent according to their respective goals. From misinformation to increased general confusion, public grievances, bitter lawsuits and international embarrassments, the world has changed since 1988—that’s 37 long, liturgical years of life and death and rebirth. But if you squint, you’ll see what’s really changed is the people within the system, whose machinery of manufacturing consent and dissent has largely remained the same.
Britain issued the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, in May 1840. Read all about it in a February 2023 edition of Power & Philately.
The stamp-to-email communication transition between the mid-19th century and early 21st century provides another principle of revolution (i.e., regime change): only a new revolution can topple the status quo. Stamps flaunted their superiority as a medium and carried global communication for more than a century and a half before email and e-commerce gained quick and widespread favour in a revolt against the existing methods, which we now view as rather provincial since the advent of the Internet.
Some 20th-century German philosophers – Nazis – called it “Gleichschaltung,” which roughly translates to “co-ordination” in English. In a 2017 paper titled “Hitler's ‘Utopia,’” Emma Lichtenberg says non-Jewish Germans in the 1930s “likely saw the Gleichschaltung of society through rose-colored glasses: it was a restoration of the great nation-state, the transformation of a failed democracy into a National Socialist ‘utopia.’” Ultimately, Germany’s Gleichschaltung allowed the Nazification process in which Adolf Hitler successively established a system of totalitarian control. Everything from stamps to cat magazines fell under the purview of the Nazi’s Gleichschaltung.
In a Ipsos Views paper published by the Ipsos Knowledge Centre in November 2017, Gailynn Nicks and Yannick Carriou argue brands (i.e., consumer propagandists) “need to have a range of distinctive iconography or assets that are consistent, engaging and understood so that they reinforce the stories and emotional stimuli in advertising. … Effective emotional priming means having stories that are relevant to people’s motivations and goals, so that engagement with advertising is sustained and so that people associate the brand with the things that matter most to them.” The same process of gaining and sustaining the public’s attention and engagement applies to postage stamps, their messages and their widespread use beginning in the mid-19th century through the 20th century.
And these messages make up the means to a specific end whether it’s overt or covert in nature.
Before Marshall McLuhan (and his slight predecessor Harold Innis, a fellow University of Toronto professor and communications theorist), mainstream public opinion followed a communication model developed in 1948 by U.S. political scientist Harold Lasswell. He completed some academic work on propaganda 21 years earlier, and his ensuing communication model described the mediation process with a simple formula—one, however, that ignored communication’s critical feedback portion: “Who says what in which channel to whom to what effect?” By the 1960s, McLuhan added to Lasswell’s question: “How, too, has the ‘noise’ a medium could inherently embody potentially distorted the sender’s original message and intention?” McLuhan opens Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, his 1964 mass media magnum opus, with a message we still hold true today: “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
Our ancestors were clever people. The hypodermic media theory of Harold Lasswell’s time presented a linear communication theory suggesting media messages could be consistently injected into the consciousness of an unrealistically passive audience like the contents of a needle into a person’s body. It suggests we all respond to media messages in the same manner as we do, albeit only in general, with drugs such as heroin.
Sixteen years before Confederation, in 1851, three of Britain’s North American colonies (the Province of Canada, Nova Scotia and then New Brunswick) issued the first stamps in what’s now the Dominion of Canada. Just one of the stamps promoted a distinctly Canadian idea, the industrious beaver, which became the world’s first non-royal stamp subject. Read more about these pre-Confederation issues in a past edition of Power & Philately. The first stamps issued after Confederation, in 1868, all feature a handful of similar words and values, including “CANADA,” “POSTAGE” and the respective denomination written in letters and numerals.
Darnell Publishing’s Stamps of Canada catalogue, as outlined in the March-April 2001 issue of the Canadian Philatelist, the official journal of the Royal Philatelic Society of Canada, “takes the position that the first stamps issued by the Dominion of Canada” include the eight-stamp series known as the Large Queens. “These were the first stamps to be issued … after Confederation in 1867. When one views the philatelic history of Canada, the position taken by Darnell is perfectly sound, even though there was a transitional or provisional use of colonial stamps between the date of Confederation and the production of the first set of Large Queen stamps.”
At the beginning of July 1867, the British North America Act united the former colonies of the Province of Canada – comprising Canada East (Québec) and Canada West (Ontario) – plus New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to form the new dominion. But Canadian officials only took control of their postal service in April 1868, when the Post Office Act came into effect, according to the 2008 book The Large Queen Stamps of Canada and Their Use. Previously, postal services operated in accordance with pre-Confederation colonial legislation. Following the Post Office Act, another order outlined the principle postal rates plus the accompanying stamp denominations, “all bearing as a device the effigy of Her Majesty.” The government set its first domestic-mail postage rate at three cents for letters across Canada; however, until October 1875, people could mail letters either paid or unpaid as the payment of postage with stamps remained optional. To allow the public to prepay the various rates for sending mail in the new dominion, the Post Office Department initially issued seven stamps, including half-cent, one-cent, two-cent, three-cent, six-cent, 12.5-cent and 15-cent denominations. Postmasters could accept the colonial stamps previously used in the pre-Confederation provinces “for a reasonable time” after April 1, but beginning on that day, they would only issue and publicly sell the seven new Large Queens. In 1875, following a reduction in the letter rate to the United Kingdom, Canada’s Post Office Department issued an eighth denomination, five cents.
I’ll have more on the rarest of all Canadian philatelic rarities in the series’ fourth and final story, which will come later this month. You can expect part three, which comes next, on Jan. 21.