The Creel Committee

The campaign

Woodrow Wilson had won re-election in November 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war." On 2 April 1917 he asked Congress to declare it, and on 13 April, by executive order, he created the Committee on Public Information to explain the reversal to a country that was divided, distracted, and in large parts foreign-born. The chairman was George Creel, a muckraking journalist from Denver who had worked on Wilson's campaign, and the committee's nominal members were the secretaries of State, War, and the Navy, who rarely attended. It was Creel's shop from the first day.

Creel's problem was reach. The country had no national broadcaster, a press that was largely regional, and a population that spoke dozens of languages. His answer was to use every channel at once and to invent the ones that did not exist. The committee's News Division issued the Official Bulletin, a daily government newspaper, and fed thousands of releases to the press. Its Division of Pictorial Publicity, under the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, recruited the country's commercial artists, James Montgomery Flagg among them, and produced the posters that fill a wing of the Library of Congress. Its Division of Films made and distributed features. Its Foreign Language Newspaper Division monitored and supplied the immigrant press. And its Four Minute Men, some seventy-five thousand volunteers, stood up in cinemas during the reel change and gave four-minute speeches on topics the committee assigned each week, reaching, by the committee's own count, hundreds of millions of audience-exposures.

The committee worked abroad as well, through a Foreign Section whose staff included a young Edward Bernays, and it ran what it called a campaign of "expression, not suppression", a phrase Creel liked. The suppression was handled elsewhere: the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 made it a crime to obstruct recruiting or to speak disloyally of the government, and the Post Office withdrew mailing privileges from publications that did. The committee and the laws were two halves of one policy.

Who ran it and why

Creel described the committee, in his 1920 memoir How We Advertised America, as "a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventure in advertising." The language was deliberate. He had hired advertising men, and he believed, as they did, that public opinion was a product to be manufactured by the same methods that sold soap. The Progressive reformers around him, Wilson included, held a related conviction: that the public was not competent to form its own view of a European war and needed to be given one. Walter Lippmann, who served in army intelligence and later wrote Public Opinion, drew the lesson that consent had to be manufactured and that someone had to do the manufacturing.

The committee's own view of its product was that it was true. Creel insisted that it dealt only in facts, and the Official Bulletin was in large part accurate. But the facts were selected, the framing was total, and the emotional register ran far ahead of the evidence. The committee's job was not to inform the public about the war; it was to make the public want to fight it.

The techniques, in order of weight

Flag Waving carried the whole effort. The committee's central claim was that support for the war was identical with loyalty to the country, and that doubt was disloyalty. The Four Minute Men's weekly bulletins told speakers to close every talk by linking the subject, whether it was Liberty Bonds or food conservation, to the flag. Posters addressed the viewer as an American first and a person second.

Common Enemy and Dehumanization came next. The enemy was "the Hun", a word the committee did not invent but did everything to spread. Harry Ryle Hopps's 1917 enlistment poster, a gorilla in a spiked helmet carrying a half-naked woman up an American shore over the words "Destroy this mad brute", is the archive's clearest example of the two techniques in one image. Atrocity stories from the invasion of Belgium, some true and some not, were recirculated without distinction.

Appeal To Fear supplied the urgency. The committee's "spy and sedition" material told citizens that German agents were among them and asked them to report disloyal talk; the "Beat back the Hun" bond posters showed the enemy at the Atlantic shore.

Bandwagon did the organizing. Liberty Loan drives were run as public contests, with honor flags for communities that met their quota and published lists of those who had not subscribed. The committee's "100% American" campaigns made participation visible and non-participation conspicuous.

Testimonial and Transfer followed, in the form of film stars selling bonds and the recruitment of every respected institution, from churches to the Boy Scouts, to carry the committee's message under its own name.

Card Stacking was the method of the Official Bulletin: accurate, official, and silent about losses, dissent, and the war's aims as they were being argued over in Europe.

The artifacts

The committee's visual record is the largest single body of American propaganda in public hands, and most of it is in the Library of Congress. The Division of Pictorial Publicity produced some seven hundred poster designs, and the Liberty Loan drives, run by the Treasury with the committee's artists, added hundreds more. The sheets that survive show the committee's techniques in their purest form, because a poster has no room for argument and must choose one device and press it.

Three groups are worth a reader's attention. The enlistment posters, Flagg's "I Want YOU" among them, address the viewer as an individual whom the nation has singled out; their technique is transfer and the second-person imperative. The bond posters, "Beat back the Hun with Liberty Bonds", "Halt the Hun!", and the series that showed the enemy's hand reaching for an American child, work on fear and on the common enemy, and were the committee's most lurid output. The home-front posters, on food conservation, war gardens, and the Red Cross, use plain folks and bandwagon: ordinary families doing their part, and the implied question of whether the viewer is doing his. The archive on this site reproduces items from each group, with pins at the spots where the device is doing its work.

The Four Minute Men left a paper record as well: the weekly Four Minute Men Bulletin that supplied each speaker with his topic, his facts, and a model speech. The bulletins show the committee's method at its most explicit, since they were instructions rather than products. Speakers were told to be brief, to be concrete, to end on an appeal, and to "make it a point to drive home the lesson that the Government is the people." The phrase is the committee's whole theory in nine words.

What happened

The committee succeeded by every measure it set itself. The Liberty Loans were oversubscribed; enlistment and conscription proceeded; dissent was marginal and, where it was not, prosecuted. The country that had voted for peace in 1916 was, by the summer of 1918, one in which a German-American coal miner was lynched in Illinois and the orchestras stopped playing Beethoven.

Then the war ended, the committee was wound up in 1919, and the public learned how it had been managed. Creel's memoir, intended as a boast, read to many as a confession, and the 1920s produced a literature of disillusion: Lippmann's Public Opinion, Harold Lasswell's Propaganda Technique in the World War, and a general suspicion of "propaganda" that gave the word its modern meaning. The suspicion had consequences. It fed American isolationism in the 1930s and shaped the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1937, whose seven devices were, in large part, a catalog of what the Creel Committee had done.

The men who had run it went into business. Bernays opened his public relations office in 1919. The advertising industry absorbed the committee's methods and its people. The techniques that had sold the war sold cigarettes and bacon in the next decade, and the next war's Office of War Information was staffed by men who had learned the trade under Creel.

The committee's reputation has moved with the century. In the 1920s it was the cautionary example that made "propaganda" a dirty word. During the Second World War it was the model that the Office of War Information consciously improved on, keeping the scale and dropping the hysteria. In the Cold War it was cited by both sides of the argument about whether a democracy should run information programs at all. Historians since have been more interested in what it reveals about the Progressive mind: the confidence that experts could and should manage public opinion for the public's own good, which Lippmann articulated and which the committee put into practice before anyone had thought it through.

The committee also left a practical legacy in the people it trained. Besides Bernays, its alumni included Carl Byoir, who founded one of the largest public relations firms of the century, and dozens of the advertising executives who shaped the 1920s. The methods of the committee went into business with them, and the business of persuasion has never since lacked practitioners who learned their trade on a government payroll.

What it teaches

The Creel Committee is the founding case because it shows the machine whole. A democratic government, acting from motives it believed good, used every technique in the catalog to move a public from one view to its opposite in a matter of months, and did so largely with true statements. The lesson is not that the war was wrong or that the committee lied; it is that the techniques work regardless, and that a public which does not know them has no defense against a government that does.