Mississippi River Propaganda

Words: 1319
Pages: 6

The River is a short depression-era documentary film that carefully shows the importance of the Mississippi River to the United States. This documentary was created by a man named Pare Lorentz in 1938, who was backed with respectable financing and stepped forward to direct a powerful documentary which reveals the essence of the tragedy and brings it home to the public. It was one of the first documentaries ever created and the very first documentary to ever be released to the general public. The documentary focuses on the Mississippi River Valley, which is a large section of the eastern and middle United States whose rivers and streams flowed into the Mississippi River, causing considerable flooding during the springtime, causing banks to overflow, …show more content…
Roosevelt, as well as Herbert Hoover before him. Some may believe this documentary would be considered propaganda. Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of a population toward some cause or position. In the process of this documentary, Lorentz was not only raising awareness of the Mississippi problem itself, but he was also helping to support one of the New Deal’s capstones, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). I must agree that this documentary is a form of propaganda, it was “Pro-Roosevelt” propaganda; I also think any good documentary can in some way be labeled as propaganda. Documentaries tend to state facts about a situation, which can easily influence or cause a person to think differently about a cause. Lorentz definitely put this documentary out there to make people aware of the danger at hand, but even to this day, if someone were to watch this documentary, they’d realize how in danger the people were back then over the erosion of the Mississippi River, and also; take more precautions because even though they solved the issue, it could always backfire and happen again. It’s important to be aware of issues such as this that have happened in the