"Souvenez-vous" -- French Post-WWI propaganda/advertising postcard

 From

From the internet: Origin of Boche: French slang, contr; from tête de caboche, hard head, head of cabbage (see cabbage); Webster's New World College Dictionary Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio.

Creel and Muckraking, or How War Employs Intellectuals

This entry is a work in progress; updated/reviewed 5/22/2016; suggestions welcome -- please email john.h30@gmail.com

George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information -- the first USG propaganda agency (1917-19) -- had, before he assumed that position (thanks in large part of his loyal support of Woodrow Wilson), became something of a passé muckraker by the second half of the 1910s. This may  have contributed to his willingness to work for the USG (since his earliest years Creel, born poor, had always been looking for a job; in his mid-teens, he ran away from his Missouri home and worked at country fairs, doubtless a good "real life" preparation of propaganda tsar for that "generalissimo" of the art, the president himself); the president was thus labeled by Harold D. Lasswell in his groundbreaking volume, Propaganda Technique during the World War (1927): 216-217.

Here is an interesting passage on muckraking from James Rorty, "Yesterday's Muckrakers," The Nation, Volume 149, Issue 24 (December 9, 1939): 654:

[S]tarting in 1901 and 1902, with priority disputed among Lincoln Steffens [he hired Lippmann for a brief period in 1904 during the latter's early socialist tendencies, which definitely ended when Walter left the Socialist party during WWI], Mark Sullivan [he wrote about Creel], and Ray Standard Baker, and among McClure's, Collier's Weekly [to which Creel contributed], and the Atlantic Monthly as publishing mediums, the muckraking movement spread like a forest fire and was soon devouring three-quarters of the wood pulp that went into the magazines. By 1910 a dozen muckraking periodicals, each with a score of lesser sheets competing in the the same market. But by 1916 there was nothing left except a pulp paper Pearson's [to which Creel contributed], rapidly expiring in the hands of the raffish Frank Harris. Big business dispatched the muckraking magazines either by cutting off their credit or by "joining" them through the business office; the muckrakers found themselves without a market, and the war completed their demoralization.

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Some of the muckrakers, like Charles Edward Russell, Upton Sinclair [acquainted with Creel; they became political/ideological enemies; Sinclair defeated Creel for the California Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1934], Albert Bullard [also known to Creel and considered by Vaughn to be a key intellectual figure in the origins of the Committee on Public Information, for whose Foreign Section he eventually worked (in Russia)], and  George Creel (who else), were Socialists [Creel however denied he was a Socialist when so asked by Congress during his tenure as Chairman of the CPI], Ray Stannard Baker, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ida Tarbell, Will and Wallace Irwin [Will was chief of the CPI foreign department in 1918] Ernest Poole [also a CPI-er], Harvey O'Higgins [a associate chairman of the CPI who wrote a profile on Creel in the New Yorker in a 1925 that I haven't been able to obtain, as well published a book, Some Distinguished Americans (1922), in which Creel is not mentioned] -- into the propaganda apparatus for the war. ...

The muckrakers of the nineteen hundreds acquired a big following, accomplished many reforms, and at their peak were dressed up with a good deal of power. But they didn't where to go or what to do do; so it was Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to war we go. Today [1939] it would seem that candidates ... for chairman of the Committee on Public Information (George Creel) are already almost visibly standing in line.

Press and Congressional Criticisms of Propaganda Tsar George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (1917-19)

This entry is a work in progress; updated/reviewed 5/22/2016; suggestions welcome -- please email john.h30@gmail.com

In Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Box OV 7, the following item can be found in a folio scrapbook, p. 7: "The Creel 'Elaboration' A Flagrant Example of Misleading Censorship by Government Officials" [penciled in at the margin in barely legible handwriting S F Examiner, no date, but most likely summer of 1917]:

Just what this Government wants with a press censor, and what this Government would do with a press censor if it had one, is pretty clearly illustrated in the recent blundering performance of Mr. George Creel.

Nobody knows by what authority of Government Mr. Creel is sitting in the seat of the censor or what particular fund is paying him for his rhetorical services. Senator Penrose has introduced n the Senate a resolution to ascertain this information.

But it does not matter. Mr. Creel has for some time been rioting rhetorically in the title of Chairman of the Committee on Public Information. The President placed him there. He evidently is not working for nothing, and his work is applauded by the Secretary of the Navy, even if it is resented by the public that pays the salaries of both.

The Secretary of the Navy, who is to be credited with some recent excellent work against the coal barons and the oil magnates, is sharing in the indignant ridicule being heaped upon the wanton “elaborator” of the succinct and sufficient dispatches of Admiral Gleaves.

Admiral Gleaves wrote a clear, definite official account of the contact with one or more German submarines of the convoys accompanying our soldier-laden transports to France. Creel, “the Administration’s censor,” took the dispatch and rewrote it with the reckless rhetoric of as the Fourth of July orator into the thrilling battle of our navy with German submarines "in force," and made a flaming story without foundation of fact. Creel wrote it. Daniels chuckled over it and sponsored it with his name, and thought it was fine. And the public would laugh at both Creel and Daniels if it was not thoroughly indignant with them both.

But the whole incident furnished a sample of the Administration’s idea of a censor, and the sample is promptly repudiated by the American people. If the public had not risen indignantly to rebuke the performance, it would doubtless have been repeated all during the war – since there was not a chirp of audible condemnation in Government circles over the highly colored, inaccurate and untruthful story concocted out of Admiral Gleaves’ official dispatch. [NB: The below in capital letters in the text.]

THE EVIL OF SUPPRESSING THE NEWS OF A VITAL WAR PERIOD LIKE THIS SHOULD ONLY BE LESS CRIMINAL THAN THE EVIL OF FALSIFYING THE NEWS! …

‘IF ANY PARTY OR ADMINISTRATION IS GIVEN THE RIGHT TO ALTER FACTS IN THE NEWS IT WILL SURELY ALTER THEM IN ITS OWN INTEREST.” …

THE PEOPLE WILL NEVER KNOW WHAT HAS ACTUALLY HAPPENED, BUT ONLY WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION WOULD LIKE THEM TO HAVE THEM BELIEVE HAS HAPPENED. …

THE ADMINISTRATION PRESUMES TO IMPRESS UPON THIS PEOPLE THAT THIS IS THEIR WAR.

WHEN, IN POINT OF FACT, THE PEOPLE ARE NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO NOW THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS WAR!

***

An article summarizing the hostility of Senator Sherman from Illinois toward Creel gives a flavor of how much he was despised by some members of Congress and the public, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Box
OV 7 [penciled in “San Diego Paper’; n.d. [probably July 1918]; folio scrapbook, p. 67.

Merely as an example of what an American statesman can do in the way of satirical invective, we shall devote this editorial space solely to extracts from a speech from Senator Sherman of Illinois against government control of the telephone and telegraph. The object of the Illinois senator’s “barbed shafts” was George Creel, a shining mark and vulnerable to the winged thoughts of a thousand merry marksmen.

Senator Sherman took the view that if the measure under debate was enacted into law, George Creel, chairman of the committee on public information, might become the wire censor, as he is now the “public censor.”

Continuing, Senator Sherman reviewed the activities of the committee. Note the pungency of the allusions and the picturesqueness of the diction: “Creel is the parent trunk, which forks so near the ground that no saw timber can be got out of it. Moving pictures and professors of elocution synchronize themselves in voice and action. Speakers are classified into four-minute squad and those who run an oratorical marathon. The long-distance men are usually hardened miscreants who can talk for hours without obtaining permanent relief. Some have a chronic propensity to part their names and hair in the middle and wear lavender spats in the corn belt. Mr. Creel suffered intensely from their refusal to harmonize themselves with the western landscape.”

Speaking of what he called a “reprehensible type of journalism to which he (Mr. Creel) contributed 10,000 words before he was regenerated," Senator Sherman said: “It aimed at shock rather than sense, and usually hit its mark. It was miserable. It cannot be denatured without being defunct. Its brilliancy is the glow of putrescence. It shines with the fitful glimmer of decay, like the phosphorescence of a deceased fish.”

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Referring to the Creel bureau’s feature story on Secretary Baker, Senator Sherman declared that “It identified unmistakably the toad-eater from whence it came. He then described the feature, which was entitled “Round the Clock With Baker,” and purported to relate to the Secretary’s activities, his dress and his recent trip to France. “After enduring this from Creel, the terrors of a Hun invasion are considerably mitigated,” said the caustic-tongue senator. “Congress is stigmatized as a slum [SEE BELOW – JB]. After this, any servile deputy candle-snuffer is at liberty to revile us at pleasure. Any gangrened egoist afflicted with ingrowing conceit may spurn Congress and demand appropriations to feed him, with the complacent assurance that precedent now justifies anything.”

George Creel may be impervious to this sort of things. He is himself in his unofficial function, something of a dabster at verbal calumny. He has mucked much with the rake of the journalistic scavenger. Now that his pen is guided by the policy of the administration which he serves, his powers of vehement retort are largely curtailed, although he did manage on one memorable occasion to say that he “never went slumming into the hearts of congressmen.” He probably contents himself with the bitter laugh of the scorner when his contemners [sic] charge hil [sic] with “Creeling” [my emphasis] the press of America and writing stuff the brilliancy of which shine with the fitful glimmer of a dead mackerel in a dark cellar. Unhappily for George Creel, the sardonic smile is now his sole defense and consolation. He is naked to his enemies, not is the bleak wind of their disesteem tempered in kindliness for his nakedness; it blows chill as an Alaska gust on a cool September morn. And Creel must “Say it with a smile,” or say it not all.

But wait until the war is only history; wait until the fetters are stricken from the aching wrists of this “public censor,” wait until the clarion cry of Creel shall be “Havoc!” ere he lets slip the dogs of another war! Wait – watchfully – if you will; but wait – patiently if you must. There’ll be doings in the old town when Creel is once more free to shoot it up. There’ll be grudges to wipe out, feuds to fight to the finish, vendettas to pursue, revenges to expiate, scores to write off the long-standing account. And trust George Creel to make good for all he suffers when once again he swing his vorpal pen in the dusty arena of gladiatorial journalistics.

image from, with caption: John Tenniel's original illustration of "Jabberwocky" from Through the Looking-Glass features the vorpal sword.

Propaganda Tsar George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (1917-19) on the "Opinionists" and Censorship

Note for a Planned Article

"Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy"
(comments welcome; draft, not for citation)

"Creel never abandoned his faith in 'the fact,' but as the war went forward, the CPI [Committee on Public Information] strayed ever farther away from its original, exclusively informational mission and increasingly took on the character of a crude propaganda mill."

--David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society – Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University PFress, 2004, p61.

From: "Makers of Opinion [:] Personal Impressions of Mark Sullivan and Other Widely Read Reporters for the American Press by George Creel," Collier’s May 15, 1920, Vol. 65, no. 16 pp. 20 ff ; Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Box OV 7:

By reporter I mean one who is willing to give time and energy to the pursuit of facts, and who presents these facts without bias and without color, leaving it to the reader to draw his own conclusions and to form his own opinions. Always an important function, it was never more so than to-day, when a thousand and one intricate problems of reconstruction press for intelligent decision. Yet at the very time when good, honest reporting is virtually a necessity, the reporter elects to list himself among the missing. In his place we have Opinionists, men who have small interest in facts, choosing to deal entirely in Conclusions, Charges, Persuasions, and Cocksure Certitudes.

A flood of dope poisons the wells of public opinion until it would seem that the only salvation is to amend the antinarcotic laws and have them take in the daily and periodical press. Information -- plain, straight, old-fashioned information – is increasingly difficult to get. People are not fools. They can do their own thinking if put in possession of the facts. And it is facts that are being kept from them. The printed word, for the most part, is no longer concerned with the dissemination of facts, but is a spoon-feeding device.

The Easier Life has something to do with it. This is peculiarly the day of short cuts. Facts are generally at a distance, while opinions are always with one. A reporter has to use his legs, while an Opinionist does not have to leave his desk.

A more fundamental cause, perhaps, is to be found in the press’s conception of what constitutes news. Year by year, slowly but not surely, information has been crowded out, and news has come to be defined as the satisfaction of curiosity. Since curiosity is seldom concerned with anything but the obvious, all emphasis is placed on the obvious. Facts lie deeper. As a consequence, there are few schools for the training of a reporter, and the professions suffers the fate of every trade that neglects its apprentices. 

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As for editorial writers, they are, and have always been, without the slightest reportorial value. Opinionists of the most confirmed type, the worst of it is that their opinions are always invariably based upon facts that another man has gathered and into the truth of which they have not inquired. Either this or they sit in solemn seclusion and spin out of themselves like so many silkworms. …

I have worked with scores of men who looked upon reporting merely as a stepping-stone to “literature.” Although invariably the story took shape in their minds before they approached the facts, with the inevitable result that they tried to make the facts fit their prepared form instead of fitting the form to the facts. …

The opinionist rarely asks questions and listen even more rarely. He tells about himself, what he likes, what he thinks, and, having exhausted these subjects, darts off to write a story based upon such of his own assertions as you have not had the spirit or time to challenge. …

It is the common thing, of course, to blame the censorship for failures in reporting. As a matter of fact, there was never any censorship in the United States save a simple voluntary agreement, without force of law, that pledged the papers to conceal the arrival and departure of ships, the movement of troops, etc. … The great wide sweep of the war, with its tangle of related problems in every country, was open to anyone who cared to write. Few wrote be such articles called for reportorial ability rather than for the chronicle of the obvious.

Why historians can't write poetry (II)

Today I lost my keys

And got down on my knees

Dear God, I prayed, please help:

All I can do is yelp.

I ransacked desk and floor

And Christ did I get sore.

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I gave up hope and search

And thought of Holy Church.

An angel smiled and showed me where

My old keys had been buried there:

Beneath my sheets, that's where they hid

To play tricks on my sleepless id?

Propaganda Tsar George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, on Reason, Emotion, and Public Opinion

Note for a Planned Article

"Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy"
(comments welcome; draft, not for citation)

Creel was a publicist, not a philosopher. Unlike Water Lippmann's books and articles, his writings, though voluminous, seldom contain thoughts of any profundity. He is rightly remembered (if at all) for what he did -- primarily his work as Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (1917-1919), the USG's first propaganda agency, which he described in detail and with much exaggeration, in his best known work with the breathless title, How We Advertised America: How we advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (United States of America: Harper and Brothers, 1920). His ideas, if so they can be called, are of minor intellectual interest, but his observations on reason, emotion, and public opinion deserve a look because of the light they shed on his views on propaganda.

In certain passages of his writings, Creel argues that public opinion was a rational process. In a 1918 article for the Annals of the American Academy of Sciences (July 1918), “Public Opinion in War Time,” p. 185, he states that:

I do not believe that public opinion has its rise in the emotions, or that it is tipped from one extreme to the other to the other by every passing rumor, by every gust of passion, or by every storm of anger.

Rather, Creel emphasizes,

I feel that public opinion has its source in the minds of people, that it has its base in reason, and it expresses slow-formed convictions rather than any temporary excitement or any passing convictions of the moment.

Over twenty years later, in his article, “Propaganda and Morale,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 47, no. 3 (November 1941), p. 347-8 Creels contends that asserting the rationality of man was part of the American revolutionary tradition. He evokes one of his heroes, Thomas Paine:

Paine image from

As a lifelong admirer of Thomas Paine, carrying admiration to the point of writing a book in his vindication, I learned still another fundamental of propaganda from the study of his works. Many people believe that public opinion – the key stone in the arch of morale – is a state of mind, formed and changed by the events of the day; a combination of kaleidoscope and weathercock. At every point Paine dissented from this theory, denying that public opinion had its rise in the emotions. …

It was reason, Creel then argues, that was, according to Paine, the foundation of public opinion:

[Paine] proceeded from the assumption that [public opinion] had its source in the minds of the people, its base in reason. … In every issue of the Crisis, every issue of Common Sense, he provided “information” for the “formation” of public opinion. True, he argued mightily in every pamphlet, but always from the facts in the case.

Creel concludes by comparing Paine’s painless, praiseworthy propaganda to its brutal, threatening totalitarian counterpart:

In totalitarian states, where there are no such things as free speech and a free press, people are compelled to accept what is handed out to them by the censor and the propagandist. In a democracy, however, nothing is more imperative than that the people be given full and exact information. A feeling that they are being kept in the dark, or an impairment of popular in the news, lessens more quickly and oftentimes fatally.

But earlier in this Journal American Sociology essay, Creel seems to contradict what he writes about the primacy of reason’s role in forming public opinion by emphasizing the emotional element in Paine’s propaganda appeals to the American people (p. 345):

At every crucial moment in the Revolution, when the struggle seemed hopeless, when leaders and men despaired, Thomas Paine issued some stirring appeal that went straight to the soul of America; a master propagandist who played upon the hearts of the colonists with strong, sure touch [my italics]. … [T]here would have been no armies to lead, no cause to save, had the “rebellious staymaker” not blown upon the dying fires of patriotism until they blazed again.

He then links the morally pure, emotion-stirring Paine with the near-immaculate work of the Committee on Public Information (pp.345-346):

As no other, Thomas Paine proved that propagandists do not have to lie, do not have to preach hate, do not have to corrupt, and do not have to fall victims to megalomania and national egotism. As further proof, I offer the two-year record [cited at the beginning of this essay] of the Committee on Public Information, America’s propaganda agency throughout the first World War.

In additional writings Creel seemed to question his own view that public opinion was a function of reason. In “Mobilizing America’s Resources for the War,” (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume LXXVIII, July 1918, p. 191). He states,  for example, he that “We want public opinion that springs from the heart and soul – that has its roots in the rich soil of truth.” Elsewhere, in his accolade to the president, Wilson and the Issues (1916), p. 63, he suggests emotional side of bonding a populace by inspiring words when he writes that “the soul of the many is found in the far-flung idealism of the Declaration of Independence, not in the cautious phrases of the Constitution.” (His preference for the Declaration of Independence over the Constitution doubtless contributed to his disdain of Congress and its procedures).

Creel image from

The vague entity “soul” as a determinant of identity and behavior – and hence, logically, of a person’s frame of mind or opinion – is expressed in a agitated fashion in Creel’s wartime article, “The Measure of a Permanent Peace,” The Advocate of Peace, Vol. 80, no. 9 (October 1918), p. 272:

Life itself is a struggle from the cradle to the grave. Every great principle demands that one fight for it; and the belief that is not worth dying for is not worth living for.

Let us stand fast against the Chauvinists, with their gospel of hate and disunity and let us stand fast also against those who refuse to see the essential justice and necessity of this war, putting the base fact of physical life above spiritual health.

Apocalyptically, he then declares:

As God is my judge, I would rather see my children dead at my feet than that they should grow up in a world made vile and poisonous by German victory; and that their souls should develop in the spiritual vacuum decreed by the supremacy of Teutonic ideals.

In an astute observation regarding reason vs. emotion fuzziness in Creel’s writings on propaganda, Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carlina Press), (p. 21) comments on the CPI chairman's irony work:

Ironically, Creel’s work with the CPI during the war may have undermined his ideas about public opinion. … So convinced was he of the correctness of America’s position that he probably did not appreciate the dilemma of attempting to educate the public while rousing it with such intensity.

Vaughn’s remark finds support in Creel’s statement in his autobiography Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Tears (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1947), p. 213 that:

Never once throughout the war did I have a doubt as to the wisdom and justice of our propaganda, preaching the Fourteen Points in particular with gospel fervor. True, we had said that it was the right of every people to choose the kind of government under which they wished to live, but all the same there was plain implication that the republican form was far and away the best. Why not? What more conclusive proof than the United States?

After the war, however, when Creel traveled in Europe and had a “close-up” of the Old Continent that he notes “this complacence was jarred into small pieces.” He adds that

"Self-determination" did not have the old rich, satisfying sound when seen in action. Instead of seventeen countries, twenty-six had come into being, and the growth of an intense and aggressive nationalism added mean hates to the tragedy of chaos precipitated by the utter lack of any sound economic basis.

He then expresses a mitteleuropa nostalgia for the stability of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, destroyed by the War to End All Wars:

Whatever the faults of the Hapsburg dynasty, at least it assured the unity of the Danube basin, the indispensable keystone of European equilibrium. With this unity shattered, and free movement and free trade shackled by the creation of new frontiers, Europe's progressive pauperization looked to be inevitable. Only Germany, the real criminal, had hope of finding profit from the muddled situation.

In a memorable passage, again found in his Rebel at Large (p. 214-5), Creel recalls his conversation with Wilson on the deck of the George Washington, on its way to Europe to bring the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference:

of the USS. George Washington

image from

[One] evening … I spoke of the tremendous help his addresses had been to us in our work, and how the peoples of the world had rejoiced in his words. He stood silent for a while, and then answered slowly and soberly: "It is a great thing that you have done, but I am wondering if you have not unconsciously spun a net for me from which there is no escape."

Wilson then gets to the heart of the heart of the matter:

"It is to America that the whole world turns today, not only with its wrongs, but with its hopes and grievances. The hungry expect us to feed them, the roofless look to us for shelter, the sick of heart and body depend upon us for cure. All of these expectations have in them the quality of terrible urgency."

The president then expresses his immense concern a world supposedly made safe for democracy:

"There must be no delay. It has been so always. People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately [my emphasis - JB]. Yet you know, and I know, that these ancient wrongs, these present unhappinesses, are not to be remedied in a day or with a wave of the hand. What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope that I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment.”

In a November 8, 1919 letter to Wilson, rather striking by the candor with which Creel addresses the Chief Executive he worshiped and endlessly flattered publicly, he writes the following (Creel Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Box 2):

You have indeed made this war a war to “make the world safe for democracy.” But it was not that sort of war when it began. And it was not that sort of war when we entered it.

Before we got into it, our entrance had its impulsionfrom our most reactionary and least democratic elements …

When you raised it to the level of democracy, you rallied to the support of the war all the progressive and democratic elements. The Big Business patriots went with you, ostensibly on your own terms, because they saw that only on your own terms could the war be won …

All the radical or liberal friends of your anti-imperialist war policy were either silenced or intimidated. The Department of Justice and the Post Office were allowed to silence or intimidate them. There was no voice left to argue your sort of peace …

You will have to give out your program for peace and reconstruction and find friends for it. Otherwise the reactionary patrioteers will defeat the whole immediate future of reform and progress.

World War I American Propaganda Images

From

Wartime Propaganda World War I "The War To End All Wars"

"As generally understood, propaganda is opinion expressed for the purpose of influencing actions of individuals or groups... Propaganda thus differs fundamentally from scientific analysis. The propagandist tries to "put something across," good or bad. The scientist does not try to put anything across; he devotes his life to the discovery of new facts and principles. The propagandist seldom wants careful scrutiny and criticism; his object is to bring about a specific action. The scientist, on the other hand, is always prepared for and wants the most careful scrutiny and criticism of his facts and ideas. Science flourishes on criticism. Dangerous propaganda crumbles before it." Alfred McLung Lee and Elizabeth Bryant Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda, 1939

"Lead this people into war, and they'll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life, infecting the Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street."

It is one of history's great ironies that Woodrow Wilson, who was re-elected as a peace candidate in 1916, led America into the first world war. With the help of a propaganda apparatus that was unparalleled in world history, Wilson forged a nation of immigrants into a fighting whole. An examination of public opinion before the war, propaganda efforts during the war, and the endurance of propaganda in peacetime raises significant questions about the viability of democracy as a governing principle.

Like an undertow, America's drift toward war was subtle and forceful. According to the outspoken pacifist Randolph Bourne, war sentiment spread gradually among various intellectual groups. "With the aid of Roosevelt," wrote Bourne, "the murmurs became a monotonous chant, and finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at first to be disreputable, and finally almost obscene." Once the war was underway, dissent was practically impossible. "If you believed our going into this war was a mistake", wrote The Nation in a post-war editorial, "if you held, as President Wilson did early in 1917, that the ideal outcome would be 'peace without victory', you were a traitor."


Forced to stand quietly on the sidelines while their neighbors stampeded towards war, many pacifists would have agreed with Bertrand Russell that "the greatest difficulty was the purely psychological one of resisting mass suggestion, of which the force becomes terrific when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement."

This frenzied support for the war was particularly remarkable in light of the fact that Wilson's re-election had been widely interpreted as a vote for peace. After all, in January of 1916, Wilson stated that "so far as I can remember, this is a government of the people, and this people is not going to choose war."

In retrospect, it is apparent that the vote for Wilson cloaked profound cleavages in public opinion. At the time of his inauguration, immigrants constituted one third of the population. Allied and German propaganda revived old-world loyalties among "hyphenated" European- Americans, and opinions about US intervention were sharply polarized. More than 8 million German-Americans lived in this country, and many were sympathetic to the cause of their homeland.

Meanwhile, anti-German feeling was strong among the upper classes on the Atlantic coast, and was particularly intense among those with social and business connections to Britain or France. Most Americans, however, were not connected to the European conflict by blood or capital, and were not interested in waging war overseas.


The absence of public unity was a primary concern when America entered the war on April 6, 1917. In Washington, unwavering public support was considered to be crucial to the entire wartime effort. On April 13, 1917, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to promote the war domestically while publicizing American war aims abroad. Under the leadership of a muckraking journalist named George Creel, the CPI recruited heavily from business, media, academia, and the art world. The CPI blended advertising techniques with a sophisticated understanding of human psychology, and its efforts represent the first time that a modern government disseminated propaganda on such a large scale. It is fascinating that this phenomenon, often linked with totalitarian regimes, emerged in a democratic state.


Although George Creel was an outspoken critic of censorship at the hands of public servants, the CPI took immediate steps to limit damaging information. Invoking the threat of German propaganda, the CPI implemented "voluntary guidelines" for the news media and helped to pass the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The CPI did not have explicit enforcement power, but it nevertheless "enjoyed censorship power which was tantamount to direct legal force." Like modern reporters who participate in Pentagon press pools, journalists grudgingly complied with the official guidelines in order to stay connected to the information loop. Radical newspapers, such as the socialist Appeal to Reason, were almost completely extinguished by wartime limitations on dissent. The CPI was not a censor in the strictest sense, but "it came as close to performing that function as any government agency in the US has ever done."

Censorship was only one element of the CPI's efforts. With all the sophistication of a modern advertising agency, the CPI examined the different ways that information flowed to the population and flooded these channels with pro-war material. The CPI's domestic division was composed of 19 sub-divisions, and each focused on a particular type of propaganda.


One of the most important elements of the CPI was the Division of News, which distributed more than 6,000 press releases and acted as the primary conduit for war-related information. According to Creel, on any given week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns were filled with material gleaned from CPI handouts. Realizing that many Americans glided right past the front page and headed straight for the features section, the CPI also created the Division of Syndicated Features and recruited the help of leading novelists, short story writers, and essayists. These popular American writers presented the official line in an easily digestible form, and their work was said to have reached twelve million people every month.

The Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation relied heavily on scholars who churned out pamphlets with titles such as The German Whisper, German War Practices, and Conquest and Kultur. The academic rigor of many of these pieces was questionable, but more respectable thinkers, such as John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, also voiced their support for the war. Even in the face of this trend, however, a few scholars refused to fall in line. Randolph Bourne had been one John Dewey's star students, and he felt betrayed by his mentor's collaboration with the war effort. In one of several eloquent wartime essays, Bourne savagely attacked his colleagues for self-consciously guiding the country into the conflict. "The German intellectuals went to war to save their culture from barbarization" wrote Bourne. "And the French went to war to save their beautiful France! Are not our intellectuals equally fatuous when they tell us that our war of all wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good?"

The CPI did not limit its promotional efforts to the written word. The Division of Pictorial Publicity "had at its disposal many of the most talented advertising illustrators and cartoonists of the time," and these artists worked closely with publicity experts in the Advertising Division. Newspapers and magazines eagerly donated advertising space, and it was almost impossible to pick up a periodical without encountering CPI material. Powerful posters, painted in patriotic colors, were plastered on billboards across the country. Even from the cynical vantage point of the mid 1990s, there is something compelling about these images that leaps across the decades and stirs a deep yearning to buy liberty bonds or enlist in the navy.


Moving images were even more popular than still ones, and the Division of Films ensured that the war was promoted in the cinema. The film industry suffered from a sleazy reputation, and producers sought respectability by lending wholehearted support to the war effort. Hollywood's mood was summed up in a 1917 editorial in The Motion Picture News which proclaimed that "every individual at work in this industry wants to do his share" and promised that "through slides, film leaders and trailers, posters, and newspaper publicity they will spread that propaganda so necessary to the immediate mobilization of the country's great resources." Movies with titles like The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin, Wolves of Kultur, and Pershing's Crusaders flooded American theaters. One picture, To Hell With The Kaiser, was so popular that Massachusetts riot police were summoned to deal with an angry mob that had been denied admission.


The word "propaganda" has already been used several times, and the reader may wonder how this term is being used. The definition of propaganda has been widely debated, but there is little agreement about what it means. Some argue that all persuasive communication is propagandistic, while others suggest that only dishonest messages can be considered propaganda. Political activists of all stripes claim that they speak the truth while their opponents preach propaganda. In order to accommodate the breadth of the CPI's activities, this review relies on Harold Lasswell's broad interpretation of the term. "Not bombs nor bread," wrote Lasswell, "but words, pictures, songs, parades, and many similar devices are the typical means of making propaganda." According to Lasswell, "propaganda relies on symbols to attain its end: the manipulation of collective attitudes."

Propagandists usually attempt to influence individuals while leading each one to behave "as though his response were his own decision." Mass communication tools extend the propagandist's reach and make it possible to shape the attitudes of many individuals simultaneously. Because propagandists attempt to "do the other fellow's thinking for him," they prefer indirect messages to overt, logical arguments. During the war, the CPI accomplished this by making calculated emotional appeals, by demonizing Germany, by linking the war to the goals of various social groups, and, when necessary, by lying outright.

Emotional Appeals
CPI propaganda typically appealed to the heart, not to the mind. Emotional agitation is a favorite technique of the propagandist, because "any emotion may be 'drained off' into any activity by skillful manipulation." An article which appeared in Scientific Monthly shortly after the war argued that "the detailed suffering of a little girl and her kitten can motivate our hatred against the Germans, arouse our sympathy for Armenians, make us enthusiastic for the Red Cross, or lead us to give money for a home for cats."

Wartime slogans such as "Bleeding Belgium," "The Criminal Kaiser," and "Make the World Safe For Democracy," suggest that the CPI was no stranger to this idea. Evidence of this technique can be seen in a typical propaganda poster that portrayed an aggressive, bayonet-wielding German soldier above the caption "Beat Back The Hun With Liberty Bonds." In this example, the emotions of hate and fear were redirected toward giving money to the war effort. It is an interesting side-note that many analysts attribute the failure of German propaganda in America to the fact that it emphasized logic over passion. According to Count von Bernstorff, a German diplomat, "the outstanding characteristic of the average American is rather a great, though superficial, sentimentality," and German press telegrams completely failed to grasp this fact.

Demonization
A second propaganda technique used by the CPI was demonization of the enemy. "So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations," wrote Lasswell "that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about who the public is to hate." American propaganda was not the only source of anti-German feeling, but most historians agree that the CPI pamphlets went too far in portraying Germans as depraved, brutal aggressors. For example, in one CPI publication, Professor Vernon Kellogg asked "will it be any wonder if, after the war, the people of the world, when they recognize any human being as a German, will shrink aside so that they may not touch him as he passes, or stoop for stones to drive him from their path?"

A particularly effective strategy for demonizing Germans was the use of atrocity stories. "A handy rule for arousing hate," said Lasswell "is, if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity. It has been employed with unvarying success in every conflict known to man." Unlike the pacifist, who argues that all wars are brutal, the atrocity story implies that war is only brutal when practiced by the enemy. Certain members of the CPI were relatively cautious about repeating unsubstantiated allegations, but the committee's publications often relied on dubious material.


After the war, Edward Bernays, who directed CPI propaganda efforts in Latin America, openly admitted that his colleagues used alleged atrocities to provoke a public outcry against Germany. Some of the atrocity stories which were circulated during the war, such as the one about a tub full of eyeballs or the story of the seven-year old boy who confronted German soldiers with a wooden gun, were actually recycled from previous conflicts. In his seminal work on wartime propaganda, Lasswell speculated that atrocity stories will always be popular because the audience is able to feel self-righteous indignation toward the enemy, and, at some level, identify with the perpetrators of the crimes. "A young woman, ravished by the enemy," he wrote "yields secret satisfaction to a host of vicarious ravishers on the other side of the border."

"Honest, unbiased news simply disappeared out of the American papers along about the middle of August, 1914." C. Hartley Grattan
Incredible tales of German barbarism in Belgium and France gave rise to a myth of unique German savagery that continues to color the thinking of many persons to this day. German soldiers, the world was gravely informed, amused themselves by cutting off the hands of Belgian babies. Another oft-repeated tale related how German soldiers amputated the breasts of Belgian women out of sheer viciousness."


Anti-German propaganda fueled support for the war, but it also contributed to intolerance on the home front. Dachshunds were renamed liberty dogs, German measles were renamed liberty measles, and the City University of New York reduced by one credit every course in German. Fourteen states banned the speaking of German in public schools. The military adversary was thousands of miles away, but German-Americans provided convenient local scapegoats. In Van Houten, New Mexico, an angry mob accused an immigrant miner of supporting Germany and forced him to kneel before them, kiss the flag, and shout "To hell with the Kaiser." In Illinois, a group of zealous patriots accused Robert Prager, a German coal miner, of hoarding explosives. Though Prager asserted his loyalty to the very end, he was lynched by the angry mob. Explosives were never found.

The War to End All Wars
Emotional appeals and simplistic caricatures of the enemy influenced many Americans, but the CPI recognized that certain social groups had more complex propaganda needs. In order to reach intellectuals and pacifists, the CPI claimed that military intervention would bring about a democratic League of Nations and end warfare forever. With other social groups, the CPI modified its arguments, and interpreted the war as "a conflict to destroy the threat of German industrial competition (business group), to protect the American standard of living (labor), to remove certain baneful German influences in our education (teachers), to destroy German music - itself a subtle propaganda (musicians), to preserve civilization, 'we' and `civilization' being synonymous (nationalists), to make the world safe for democracy, crush militarism, and establish the rights of small nations."

It is impossible to know which one of these appeals was most effective, but this is the advantage that the propagandist has over the communications scholar. The propagandist is primarily concerned with effectiveness and can afford to ignore the methodological demands of social science.

Dishonest
Like most propagandists, the CPI was frequently dishonest. Despite George Creel's claim that the CPI strived for unflinching accuracy, many of his employees later admitted that they were quite willing to lie. Will Irwin, an ex-CPI member who published several confessional pieces after the war, felt that the CPI was more honest than other propaganda ministries, but made it clear that "we never told the whole truth - not by any manner of means." Citing an intelligence officer who bluntly said "you can't tell them the truth," G.S Viereck argued that, as on all fronts, victories were routinely manufactured by American military authorities. The professional propagandist realizes that, when a single lie is exposed, the entire campaign is jeopardized. Dishonesty is discouraged, but on strategic, not moral, grounds.

In the final months of 1918, as the war drew to a close, the CPI fell under increasing scrutiny from a war-weary American public and from the Republican majority that had gained control of Congress. On November 12, 1918, George Creel halted the domestic activities of the CPI. The activities of the foreign division were ended, amidst great controversy, a few months later. One might assume that the wartime propagandists then put down their pens and paintbrushes and returned to ordinary life. This was not the case.

According to Lasswell, many former agents of the CPI stayed in Washington and New York and took advantage of their skill and contacts. Two years later, the Director of the CPI's Foreign Division argued that "the history of propaganda in the war would scarcely be worthy of consideration here, but for one fact - it did not stop with the armistice. No indeed! The methods invented and tried out in the war were too valuable for the uses of governments, factions, and special interests." Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, took the techniques he learned in the CPI directly to Madison Avenue and became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic government.

"It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind," wrote Bernays in his 1928 bombshell Propaganda. "It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace."

This peacetime application of what was, after all, a tool of war, began to trouble Americans who suspected that they had been misled. In The New Republic, John Dewey questioned the paternalistic assumptions of those who disguised propaganda as news. "There is uneasiness and solicitude about what men hear and learn," wrote Dewey, and the "paternalistic care for the source of men's beliefs, once generated by war, carries over to the troubles of peace."

When one considers the horrible legacy of the war, it is tempting to pin complete responsibility for American involvement on hate-mongering militarists in the CPI. Such retroactive condemnation is no more complex than a wartime slogan. Ultimately, their guilt is less important than the questions their activities raised about the role of propaganda in a democratic society.

Democratic theory, as interpreted by Jefferson and Paine, was rooted in the Enlightenment belief that free citizens could form respectable opinions about issues of the day and use these opinions to guide their own destiny.
Communication between citizens was assumed to be a necessary element of the democratic process. During the first world war, America's leaders felt that citizens were not making the correct decisions quickly enough, so they flooded the channels of communication with dishonest messages that were designed to stir up emotions and provoke hatred of Germany. The war came to an end, but propaganda did not. For the past seven decades, those who lead our nation, along with those who seek to overthrow it, have mouthed the ideals of Jefferson while behaving like Bernays.

Should America follow Bernays and accept the wisdom of "a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses?" Or is "leadership democracy" simply one stage of our democratic development? Could it someday be replaced by something more far reaching?

An important difference between our "leadership democracy" and a totalitarian state is that we are allowed to raise questions such as these. However, history shows that, in times of political crisis and social dislocation, this freedom is one of the first to disappear.

"Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy." Arthur Ponsonby, Member of Parliment, England - 1928