# A publicity office with a name on the poster, and a sedition law behind it

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  A publicity office with a name on the poster, and a sedition law behind it
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In April 1917 Wilson created a committee to explain the war. It ran speakers, films, and a daily bulletin. The same years produced the Espionage and

When1917–1919ActorU.S. government: the Committee on Public Information…Full record at propagandaarchive.org

## What it said

George Creel, the chairman, refused the word propaganda. In How We Advertised America (1920) he described the work as salesmanship and said the committee had not used the German sense of the word.

In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventure in advertising.

George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), p. 4. Quoted on the FRAME Wilson administration page from that edition.

The public copy was not all that calm. "Spies and Lies," as printed in Trench and Camp (Augusta, Georgia) on 19 June 1918, told readers to report a man who "cries for peace" or "belittles our efforts to win the war," and to send the names to the Department of Justice. The same paragraph covers a secret leaked to Germany and a bleak remark. Content note: that copy also calls Germans "the Hun."

## Who made it and why

The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. Executive Order 2594, 13 April 1917, created the Committee on Public Information: the secretaries of State, War, and the Navy, and Creel, a journalist, as civilian chair. The committee's final report, published by the Government Printing Office in 1920, is the office's own ledger. It counted, for the Four Minute Men, 75,000 speakers and 755,190 speeches. Those figures are the committee's.

Charles Dana Gibson chaired a Division of Pictorial Publicity that recruited artists for the Army, the Navy, the Liberty Loans, the Red Cross, and the Food Administration. A Division of Films put out pictures such as Pershing's Crusaders (1918) under government auspices. An Official Bulletin started as a daily government newspaper. The speakers were volunteers reading topics sent from Washington. A slide was meant to say who had sent them.

Newton Baker later called this "in a sense the work" of mobilizing minds for American participation. He said it at Creel's dinner, 29 November 1918.

## What it got right or wrong

Creel was right that much of the output was white propaganda: the sponsor was named. He also wrote that the committee did not want the war argued by hate, and that it distrusted atrocity stories it could not prove, because one false charge would sink the rest. That standard was sound. The committee did not always meet it.

On 15 and 16 September 1918 it gave the press the Sisson Documents, papers Edgar Sisson had bought in Petrograd, as proof that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents. Papers ran headlines such as "Lenine-Trotzky German Agents." In October the committee published them as The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, War Information Series no. 20, with a report by historians J. Franklin Jameson and Samuel N. Harper, for the National Board for Historical Service, judging most of them genuine. In 1956 George F. Kennan examined the file and concluded the documents were forgeries. The release was wrong. An endorsement is not a test of origin.

The archive's case study is careful about Robert Prager, a German-born miner lynched in Collinsville, Illinois, on 5 April 1918, whose killers were acquitted. Historians place the killing in the anti-German climate. The record does not tie it to a committee product. This page will not tie it either.

## The Justice Department, not the committee, enforced the Espionage Act

Congress passed the Espionage Act on 15 June 1917 and the amendments called the Sedition Act on 16 May 1918. The Justice Department enforced them, not the committee. Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years in 1918 for an anti-war speech. The Supreme Court upheld Espionage Act convictions in Schenck v. United States and Debs v. United States (1919). Iowa's governor, William L. Harding, banned the public use of foreign languages, including on the telephone, on 23 May 1918. Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) later struck down a state ban on teaching young children a foreign language. Those cases are the constitutional record beside the posters.

Wilson had asked, in a 22 May 1917 letter to Representative Edwin Y. Webb, for press censorship "absolutely necessary to the public safety," in the form the House had just passed. Creel, for his part, wrote that incompetence in wartime needed more criticism, not less, and that "even a blackguard's voice was preferable to the dead silence of an iron suppression." The administration contained both sentences. The libertarian reading keeps them both and judges by what was done: voluntary speakers on one side, prison for a speech on the other, and a reporting appeal that put "cries for peace" in the same breath as espionage.

Herbert Hoover's food campaigns, a different agency, were built as pledges a household could refuse. He wrote in 1920 that the Allies had wanted a compulsory ration and that his group had bet on voluntary sacrifice instead. That contrast belongs on this page because it shows the same war could ask without the spy circular.

## Its legacy

The committee wound down after the armistice. Its habits did not. A later Office of War Information would again mix a "strategy of truth" with advertising men, and again fight Congress over tone. The durable lesson is smaller than Creel's adventure. Name the speaker. Do not launder a purchased file through a scholar's preface. Do not write a penal statute so that a grim sentence and a spy's sentence are the same offense. The posters are in the collection. The sentences are in the U.S. Reports.

## Sources

- Executive Order 2594, 13 April 1917.

- Committee on Public Information, Complete Report of the Chairman (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920).

- George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920).

- "Spies and Lies," Trench and Camp (Augusta, Ga.), 19 June 1918, p. 15. Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

- Committee on Public Information, The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, War Information Series no. 20 (October 1918).

- George F. Kennan, "The Sisson Documents," Journal of Modern History 28, no. 2 (June 1956): 130-154.

- Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919); Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919); Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).

- Wilson to Webb, 22 May 1917, in Baker and Dodd, eds., War and Peace, vol. 1 (1927), p. 45.

- Herbert Hoover, preface to a report of the U.S. Food Administration (1920), as quoted on the FRAME Wilson administration page.

- FRAME case study of the committee, for the chronology, the Prager caution, and the speaker counts.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/cpi-creel-committee/