Popular Culture, Art Education, and the Committee on Public Information During World War I, 1915-1919

During World War I, the advertising industry and public schools in the United States were subjected to intervention from the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a clearinghouse established by President Woodrow Wilson to promote propaganda of wartime patriotism. In this history, I discuss how the CPI used strategies of social efficiency to marshal advertising and art education in public schools as a unified mass media for transmitting a patriotic culture imbued with racial and gender stereotypes. I argue that the CPI used adventure tropes from American popular culture to romanticize the war in advertising images and school lessons. In this way, the CPI portrayed Germany as a sinister enemy in order to convince Americans that war was necessary for keeping the world safe.