Selling a war in 1917: the Creel Committee and modern propaganda

Series: How minds are moved · The record: documented campaigns · 1 of 7

On 13 April 1917, one week after the United States declared war on Germany, President Woodrow Wilson signed Executive Order 2594 and created a government office whose job was to make a hundred million people want a war that Wilson had been re-elected, five months earlier, partly for keeping them out of. Within a year it had about 75,000 volunteer speakers, offices in nine foreign countries, a film division, a poster studio and a news service that fed every newspaper in the country. Its name was mild: the Committee on Public Information. Its chairman, a journalist named George Creel, later called the whole thing “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising”.

My local AI agent and I went through what my library and my OSINT shelf hold on it, including the volume of the US State Department’s own historical series, Foreign Relations of the United States, on public diplomacy in the First World War, which prints the Committee’s cables. This is the story of how a modern state learned to sell a war, told from the record.

Contents · 10 sections

TL;DR #

• The Committee on Public Information (CPI), 1917–1919, was the first modern, industrial-scale government propaganda office in a democracy.
• It worked through volume and trusted local voices: about 75,000 “Four Minute Men” speaking in cinemas, churches and union halls, plus 1,438 poster and card designs, films, pamphlets and a daily official bulletin.
• It mixed true information, one-sided framing and, at least once, forged documents: the “Sisson Documents” it published in 1918 were later shown to be fakes.
• It worked alongside laws that punished dissent, so persuasion and pressure arrived together.
• Several people who later built the public relations industry learned the trade there.

What it was #

The CPI had a chairman, Creel, and three cabinet members on paper: the Secretaries of State, War and the Navy. In practice it was Creel’s machine. It grew to more than twenty divisions. A News Division wrote press releases that newspapers printed almost unchanged. A Films Division made and distributed war films. A Division of Pictorial Publicity recruited the best illustrators of the day for posters. A Foreign Section ran offices from Latin America to Russia. And a set of “voluntary” guidelines told editors which war news they should not print.

The word “voluntary” deserves attention. The same months saw the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, under which people were prosecuted and jailed for speeches against the draft or the war. The socialist leader Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years for a speech in 1918. Creel always said his Committee never used those laws itself, and that is broadly true. But an editor deciding whether to follow the CPI’s “voluntary” rules knew the laws existed.

How it worked #

Trusted messengers, not anonymous ones. The cleverest invention was the Four Minute Men. A local lawyer, doctor or shopkeeper, someone the audience knew, stood up during the four minutes it took to change a film reel and gave a short talk on that week’s topic: Liberty Bonds, food saving, why we fight. The CPI sent out the talking points; the neighbour supplied the trust. Creel’s own final report claimed millions of these speeches reached audiences counted in the hundreds of millions. Those are the Committee’s own numbers about itself and should be read as such, but nobody disputes that the programme was enormous.

Saturation. Posters on every wall, the same message in the newspaper, at the cinema, in the school and in church. No single item had to convince anyone. The repetition did.

An enemy with a face. The posters gave Germany a face: the “Hun”, an ape with a bloody club carrying off a woman. Atrocity stories from Belgium, some true and some invented (I write about them separately in this series, in the post on the “corpse factory”), were pushed hard, and doubting them could be made to look like taking the enemy’s side.

Documents that turned out to be forged. In 1918 the CPI’s man in Petrograd, Edgar Sisson, bought a set of papers that seemed to prove that Lenin and Trotsky were paid German agents. Some of the cables he sent to Creel are in that State Department volume on my shelf. The CPI published 54 of the documents as a pamphlet, The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, and distributed 137,000 copies. In 1956 the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan showed, from letterheads, dating systems and typewriters, that they were forgeries. The fakes were believable because they wrapped a real fact: Germany had helped the Bolsheviks financially in 1917. A real fact wrapped in fabricated proof is a pattern that comes back in almost every case in this series.

It was not only America #

It would be unfair to tell this as an American story alone. Britain had run a secret propaganda bureau at Wellington House since 1914, aimed largely at the neutral United States. Germany ran its own campaign in America before 1917; in 1915 a briefcase left on a New York train by a German official, Heinrich Albert, exposed German funding of newspapers and propaganda inside the US. Every major power in that war built a ministry of persuasion. The CPI was simply the most open about it, and the most proud.

The young men who learned the trade #

Two names connect the CPI to the century that followed. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, worked for the Committee, including its Latin American news service, and after the war turned what he had learned into a business he called “public relations”. Walter Lippmann, then a young journalist, pushed Wilson towards creating a propaganda body and in 1918 worked on propaganda aimed at German troops in Europe under Army intelligence, where he clashed with Creel’s people. I wrote about the ideas both men drew from this experience in an earlier post, Syndication is not conspiracy, so I will not repeat them here. What matters for this post is simpler: the people who designed modern corporate and political persuasion had their apprenticeship in a wartime government office.

Creel himself explained in 1920, in his book How We Advertised America, why his Committee had avoided the word “propaganda”: “for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption”. Our side informs; their side propagandises. Every government in every war has said the same.

What it felt like from the inside #

Imagine an ordinary evening in a small American town in 1918. You go to the cinema. Between reels, the pharmacist you know stands up and talks for four minutes about the bonds. The posters in the foyer say the same thing. Your newspaper says it. Your pastor says it on Sunday. Your child brings home a school leaflet that says it. Your neighbour, who has a German surname, has stopped speaking German in the street.

Nothing in that evening feels like a campaign. It feels like everyone agreeing. That is the point. Propaganda at its most effective does not feel like being told something; it feels like noticing what everybody already knows.

What it could and could not do #

The CPI did not create American participation in the war; Congress declared war before the Committee existed. It shaped how the public accepted it: the bonds were bought, the draft worked, open dissent was small and costly. Measuring how much of that was the Committee and how much was patriotism, fear of the laws or simply events is not possible with any precision; historians disagree.

What it did produce, with certainty, was a reaction. When the war ended, many readers discovered that some of what they had been told was false. Through the 1920s, books exposing wartime propaganda sold well; the political scientist Harold Lasswell published a whole study of the techniques in 1927. Congress shut the CPI down in June 1919 and Wilson abolished it by a further executive order in August. For a generation, “propaganda” became a dirty word in America. That distrust had consequences of its own, which the last post of this family follows to 1942.

How to notice it #

• One message, many mouths. When the same framing arrives from your newspaper, your local figures and your feed in the same week, ask who wrote the talking points.
• Trusted local voices reading national scripts. A familiar face is not an independent source if the words came from a central office.
• “Voluntary” guidelines next to punitive laws. Ask what happens to people who do not volunteer.
• The enemy with an animal’s face. Dehumanising images are a sign that someone wants feeling, not judgement.
• Documents that prove too much. A dramatic leaked paper that confirms everything you already suspected deserves more scrutiny, not less.
• Doubt framed as disloyalty. “Only the enemy would question this” is an argument about you, not about the evidence.

Frequently asked questions #

Was everything the Committee on Public Information said false? #

No. Most of what it published was factual information about the war effort, presented one-sidedly. Its distortions were in framing, selection and emotion, plus some real falsehoods, such as the Sisson Documents and some atrocity material.

Did Bernays and Lippmann run the Committee? #

No. George Creel ran it. Bernays was a staff member; Lippmann worked on wartime propaganda mostly through Army intelligence and was critical of the CPI’s work in Europe. Their importance is what they did with the experience afterwards.

Was this unique to the United States? #

No. Britain, France and Germany all ran large propaganda operations in the same war, and Germany had run one inside the United States before 1917. The CPI is notable because it was large, public and documented in detail by its own chairman.

Is this relevant today? #

The tools changed; the structure did not. Central talking points, delivered through trusted local voices, repeated across every channel, with social or legal cost for dissent: that pattern is recognisable in campaigns of every political direction today.

The lesson #

The CPI showed that a democracy could build a persuasion machine in a week and run it at the scale of a whole nation, mostly with true facts, a few false ones and an enormous amount of repetition. Its most lasting product was not a poster but a profession, and a public that, once it found out, stopped believing for a generation. Both outcomes are worth remembering. A campaign can succeed in the short run and, by succeeding, poison the trust that the next true warning will need.