The Selling of the Great War

The Selling of the Great War PETER BUITENHUIS Nothing more clearly reveals a nation's character than a crisis. A striking example ofthis truism is revealed in the way in which the various combatant nations used propaganda in the first World War. Germany tended to see propaganda as a branch of military intelligence. France tended to see it as an arm of the Quai D'Orsay; Great Britain, perhaps reflecting the contemporary prestige of the writer, tended to make it a literary enterprise. As Paul Fussell has observed in The GreatWar and Modern Memory, the war occurred at a time when the appeal of popular education was at its peak, and when the educative power of classical and English literature was very strong: "The intersection of these two forces, the one 'aristocratic,' the other' democratic,' established an atmosphere of public respect forliterature unique in modern times." 1 When the United States entered the war, propaganda was seen in terms of a huge advertising campaign. This in turn reflected one of the major preoccupations of American culture. As Tocqueville wrote long ago, "In democracies nothing is greater or more brilliant than commerce; it attracts the attention of the public and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it.' 12 Advertising sprang, if not fully armed from the head of Commerce, at least as a lusty babe that grew during the nineteenth century into a powerful giant. As America·entered the war, Woodrow Wilson realized very quickly the need for a propaganda department. On April 13th, 1917, he created the Committee of Public Information and appointed George Creel Chairman with the Secretaries of State,War and Navy as the other members. As James R. Mock and Cedric Larson observed in 1939, '"The Committee' was America's 'propaganda ministry' during the World War, charged with encouraging and then consolidating the revol ution ofopinion which changed the United States from an anti-militaristic democracyto an organized war machine. This work touched the private life of virtually every man, woman, and child; it reflected the thoughts of the American people under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson; and it popularized what was for us a new idea of the individual's relation to the state." 3 If, as Emerson says, "an institution is but the lengthened shadow of one man," then the United States Information Service, the Voice of America, and all the other agencies which attempt to promote the image of America abroad are all shadows of George Creel's handiwork. He was a remarkable, pugnacious individual - newpaperman, publicist, politician, and early promoter of the interests THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 of Woodrow Wilson. Before moving to New York in 1913 to work as a free-lance writer while his wife pursued a stage career, he had been publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, and therefore knew a great deal about the commercial as well as editorial functions of running a newspaper. In New York he jumped on the tail end of the muckraking bandwagon, writing articles for Harper's, Collier's,Everybody 's and The Century. In the 1916campaign he put out a book called Wilsonand theIssuesand organized a committee of publicists and authors to write pamphlets in support of Wilson including Irwin Cobb, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker, Edgar Lee Masters, Kathleen Norris, Harvey O'Higgins, Ernest Poole, Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. Even before the war broke out, he had written a long brief to Wilson in which he proposed the creation of an agency that would publicize America's role in the war and also proposed that if war came there should be no censorship of the newspapers from above but that a system of voluntary censorship should be instituted. Therefore it was natural that Wilson should turn to Creel when war came. He became a member of that group of Wilsonians whom Robert Cuff has described in his article, "We Band ofBrothers - Woodrow Wilson's War Managers" -men from an administrative, technological , managerial and business elite, united by their loyalty to Wilson and to libertarian democracy. 4 It was the circumstances of war that moved such men...