When President Woodrow Wilson created the first largescale government propaganda agency, the Committee on
Public Information (CPI) (aka Creel Committee), on April
13, 1917 (Executive Order 2594), he turned to his friend,
the former muckraking journalist George Creel, to organize and lead the agency. The energetic Creel (one colleague called him “that thunderous steam engine”) was
temperamental and thin-skinned, and he was a controversial choice to head the CPI but his name soon became synonymous with the government’s propaganda efforts. There
was no doubt about his enthusiasm for the American cause
in World War I, or his loyalty to Wilson. “Democracy is a
religion with me,” Creel said in May, 1918, “and throughout
my whole adult life I have preached America as the hope of
the world.” He had difficulty, though, separating America
and its ideals from Wilson and his policies. As he told the
President in late 1917, “I find it hard always to think of you
as a person, for you stand for America so absolutely in my
mind and heart and are so inseparably connected with the
tremendous events of the time.”
Creel believed in the power of the press and thought its
influence could not be overestimated because, he said, “we
know only what it tells us.” In more recent times, U. S. presidents have turned first to Madison Avenue to find advertising and public relations specialists to conduct propaganda,
but in 1917, Creel turned instinctively to other journalists
to build the CPI. In this group, he found a deep reservoir of
people who were genuinely committed to spreading democracy. During the Progressive era before the war, many of
them had been strongly involved in efforts to reform society. From the outset, Creel sought to control information
about the war. One of the first sections he created in the CPI
was the Division of News. L. Ames Brown, who had been
the White House correspondent for the New York Sun and
the Philadelphia Record, headed this section until he left
it to lead the CPI’s Division of Syndicated Features, which
was created to capture Sunday newspaper readers. Brown’s
replacement in the Division of News was first J. W. McConaughy, who had been an editorial writer for Munsey’s
Magazine and a correspondent with the New York Evening
Mail, and then Leigh Reilly, who had been managing editor of the Chicago Herald. The news division attempted to
flood the country with information. It sent out enough mimeographed material each week to fill twenty thousand news
columns. During the war it produced about six thousand
news releases. Most newspapers and magazines readily
accepted this output.
The CPI established the nation’s first government daily
newspaper, the Offi cial Bulletin. President Wilson thought
that the United States needed a national newspaper. Edited
by Edward S. Rochester, who had been managing editor
of the Washington Post, it published official government
announcements and acts that directly affected citizens. The
Offi cial Bulletin usually ran about eight pages (until casualty lists increased its size) and went free to other newspapers, government officials, post offices, and military bases.
The paper’s circulation peaked in August, 1918, at 118,000;
the publication was discontinued on March 31, 1919.
There were many other efforts by the CPI to mobilize
the news. A Foreign Language Newspaper Division and a
Division of Work with the Foreign Born monitored between
800 and 900 foreign-language newspapers in the United
States. Under the Trading-with-the-Enemy Act of 1917,
these papers were required to file sworn translations with
the postmaster if they carried articles or editorials on the
United States or on countries with which America was at
war. The CPI also managed to place regular news releases
in more than 700 of these papers.
The CPI expanded to involve much more than just journalists. Academicians and other intellectuals were among
the most active propagandists during the war. Realizing
that not everyone read newspapers or pamphlets, Creel and
the CPI attempted to enlist visual media in the war effort.
A Bulletin for Cartoonists sent material suggesting ideas to
more than 750 cartoonists in the U.S. The Division of Films
used photography and newsreels to sell the war. In January, 1918, the CPI added a Division of Advertising and a
Division of Pictorial Publicity which helped to create some
of the most striking visual images of the German enemy
used in posters and elsewhere. In a time before regular
radio broadcasting, the CPI enlisted 75,000 local speakers
who became surrogates for the President and known as the
Four Minute Men. Each week the Wilson administration
prepared a bulletin for them with sample talks on topics the
President wished covered. Newspapers also often carried
these speeches.
The CPI tried to influence news not only in the United
States but abroad. It established a news service between the
Division of News and the American Expeditionary Force in
Europe, and despite General John J. Pershing’s objections,
U. S. correspondents visited war zones. The CPI’s Foreign
Press Bureau, led by the Saturday Evening Post’s European correspondent Ernest Poole, helped the Committee on
Public Information maintain a news network that covered
events not only in Europe but in many other parts of the
world. A wireless and cable service known as COMPUB,
also helped the United States send its message abroad.
The CPI attempted to exploit every form of mass communication during the war. By this time there were many
new and exciting non-print media that could be used for
propaganda including motion pictures, newsreels, and phonograph records. In all, the CPI had more than a dozen
subdivisions that specialized in various aspects of propaganda in the United States and offices in more than thirty
countries abroad. Creel boasted after the war that even his
severest critics “took with his breakfast a daily diet of our
material.”
Creel maintained that his committee had no formal
censorship powers, which while technically true, is also
misleading. Creel was a member of the government’s Censorship Board that censored messages between the United
States and other countries. Creel and the CPI had little
interest in news that might be critical of the American war
effort and indeed attempted to overwhelm such news with
their own information. Moreover, the committee, through
its publications, helped to popularize the idea that freedom
of expression during the war had severe limitations.
The great slogan of this period was that the war was
to “make the world safe for democracy,” and many of the
people who worked for the CPI did believe in democratic
government. In the short-term, the CPI was undoubtedly
successful in mobilizing American public opinion behind
the war. But whatever enthusiasms journalists may have
had during this period, many of them quickly became
disillusioned with government propaganda once the war
ended. Walter Lippmann concluded that propaganda and
censorship had prevented citizens from seeing the real
world and that reporters had been “derelict” in their duty
to inform the public. When in 1920, he and Charles Merz
wrote “A Test of the News,” a study of how the New York
Times had covered the Russian Revolution, they began by
quoting from the Iliad, which offered an assessment of
the news much different from the one Creel had made:
“Enlighten me now, O Muses, tenants of Olympian homes.
For you are goddesses, inside on everything, know everything. But we mortals hear only the news, and know nothing at all.”
During the 1920s, the belief grew that the Creel Committee had oversold the war. During the 1930s, the public was slow to heed warnings about the dangers of Germany’s
growing military power, in part some believe, because many
Americans thought that the threat to freedom during First
World War had been overstated. By the time United States
entered World War II in 1941, the reputation of Creel and
the CPI were in such disrepute that as Elmer Davis and others created a new American propaganda agency, the Office
of War Information, they considered the zealous approach
taken Creel and his compatriots during World War I to be a
model of what should be avoided.
Further Reading
Creel, George. How We Advertised America. New York: Arno
Press, 1972, originally published 1920.
Lippmann, Walter, and Charles Merz. “A Test of the News.” New
Republic, 23 (suppl. Aug.4, 1920): 1–42.
Mock, James R., and Cedric Larson. World That Won the War:
The Story of the Committee on Public Information. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939.
Vaughn, Stephen. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy,
Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
Stephen Vaughn