# Woodrow Wilson's government asked for belief, then wrote the penalty for doubt The Wilson administration governed the United States from 4 March 1913 to 4 March 1921. It created the Committee on Public Information in April 1917, enforced the Espionage and Sedition Acts against war critics, separated Black and white federal clerks, and kept the extent of the president's 1919 stroke from the public. Administrations Woodrow Wilson's government asked for belief, then wrote the penalty for doubt Illustration, not an archive object - Home - Administrations - Woodrow Wilson's government asked for belief, then wrote the penalty for doubt At a glance The Wilson administration, 1913–1921: the Committee on Public Information, the Espionage and Sedition Acts, federal segregation, and the 1919 stroke. Period1913–1921Full record at propagandaarchive.org The Wilson administration governed the United States from 4 March 1913 to 4 March 1921. It created the Committee on Public Information in April 1917, enforced the Espionage and Sedition Acts against war critics, separated Black and white federal clerks, and kept the extent of the president's 1919 stroke from the public. This page reads one presidency as a government that persuaded. It keeps the posters and the speakers on the same page as the statutes, because in 1917 and 1918 the same cabinet ran both. The objects linked here are on this site; the fuller roster and image credits are on the FRAME record. Woodrow Wilson, 1919. Harris & Ewing photograph; public domain, Library of Congress, as the FRAME record credits it. ## How he came to hold the office Wilson had run Princeton and then New Jersey. In 1912 he beat Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Debs with 41.8 percent of the popular vote and 435 electors. Four years later he won 49.2 percent and 277 electors on the line "He kept us out of war." That slogan matters to this page. The country that re-elected him had been told neutrality was the program. By April 1917 it was at war. He told the Associated Press in April 1915 what he thought the trade in news was for. You deal in the raw material of opinion and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world. Woodrow Wilson, address to the Associated Press, New York, 20 April 1915, in Baker and Dodd, eds., The New Democracy, vol. 1 (1926), p. 302. As quoted on the FRAME Wilson administration page. A president who believes that will want a hand on the raw material. That is not a charge. It is a fair reading of his own sentence, and the rest of this page is what the hand did. ## The war message and the promise in it After the Lusitania in May 1915, renewed submarine warfare, and the Zimmermann telegram made public on 1 March 1917, Wilson went to Congress on 2 April 1917. Congress voted for war four days later. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. Woodrow Wilson, address to Congress, 2 April 1917, in Baker and Dodd, eds., War and Peace, vol. 1 (1927), p. 14. Political liberty was the stated foundation. The test this page applies is the one the speech set: did liberty at home survive the campaign for it abroad? In part, and only in part. ## The selling side: a committee with its name on the work A week after the declaration, Executive Order 2594 set up the Committee on Public Information. George Creel, a journalist, chaired it. The secretaries of State, War, and the Navy sat beside him. The committee's divisions put out a daily Official Bulletin, films, posters drawn by volunteer illustrators, and talks by volunteer speakers. The full history of that office is on this site's Committee on Public Information case study. The most American thing about it was the speaker corps. The Four Minute Men were local volunteers who stood up in picture houses with a short talk drafted in Washington. The committee's own report counted 75,000 of them and 755,190 talks. Those are the office's figures, not an audit. The government film unit also issued Pershing's Crusaders, billed in the language of a holy war. Other wartime pictures in the record came from other offices. James Montgomery Flagg's I Want You for U.S. Army was an Army recruiting sheet. Destroy This Mad Brute drew Germany as an ape. The Treasury's Halt the Hun sold the Third Liberty Loan under the word "Hun," with an American soldier stopping a German one who has seized a mother and child. William G. McAdoo, the Treasury secretary who ran the loans, went further in a speech reported from San Francisco in October 1917. Every person who refused to subscribe or who takes the attitude of 'let the other fellow do it' is a friend of Germany, and I would like nothing better than to tell it to him to his face. William G. McAdoo, speeches at San Francisco, October 1917, as reported in The New York Times, 13 October 1917, p. 1. As quoted on the FRAME Wilson administration page. A bond is a loan. A citizen who declines to make one is not an enemy agent. The sentence was wrong when it was said, and it was said by a cabinet officer. Creel himself argued for a cooler register. He wrote that unprovable atrocity tales would backfire and that the committee wanted to reach people "through their minds, rather than through their emotions." Herbert Hoover's Food Administration, a separate agency, ran its saving drives on pledge cards a family could ignore, and later wrote that the Allies had wanted a compulsory ration and his office had bet on the voluntary kind. Both of those choices deserve credit. They show the same war could ask instead of order. ## The enforcing side: statutes, the mails, and a volunteer league The committee did not prosecute anyone. The power to punish speech sat with Congress, the Post Office, and the Department of Justice. Wilson asked for it. On 22 May 1917 he wrote to Representative Edwin Y. Webb that press censorship in the form the House had just passed was "absolutely necessary to the public safety." The Espionage Act became law on 15 June 1917. The Trading with the Enemy Act of 6 October 1917 made foreign-language papers file English translations of their war coverage or get a permit. The Sedition Act of 16 May 1918 reached "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson used Title XII of the 1917 act to keep periodicals out of the mails. The Masses and the Milwaukee Leader were among them. Judge Learned Hand ordered The Masses carried in July 1917 and was reversed. After a cabinet meeting on 9 October 1917 Burleson told reporters what papers could not print. For instance, papers may not say that the government is controlled by Wall Street, or munition manufacturers, or any other special interests. Albert S. Burleson, remarks to reporters, Washington, 9 October 1917, Associated Press report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, 10 October 1917, p. 3. As quoted on the FRAME Wilson administration page. That is a viewpoint rule. A claim that Wall Street runs Washington may be wrong, but it is a political opinion, and the First Amendment was written for exactly that kind of opinion. The Attorney General, Thomas W. Gregory, reported his department's record in 1917 in words that answer themselves. The care used by the department in its desire to do nothing to interfere with the legitimate exercise of the right of free speech is shown by the fact that in practically every case convictions were secured and substantial sentences imposed. Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States for the Year 1917 (Washington: GPO, 1917), p. 75. As quoted on the FRAME Wilson administration page. The same report praised the American Protective League, a private volunteer body, as an "auxiliary and reserve force" for the Bureau of Investigation. The League claimed about 250,000 members, looked into neighbors, and joined the "slacker" raids on draft evaders in 1918. A citizen deputized by a letterhead and not by a court is the arrangement a free country should fear most. The committee's own "Spies and Lies" advertisement of June 1918 fed that machine when it asked readers to report anyone who "cries for peace." Eugene Debs spoke against the war at Canton, Ohio, on 16 June 1918 and got ten years. The Supreme Court upheld convictions under the act in Schenck, Debs, and Abrams in 1919. Wilson had already told Congress, in December 1915, that some citizens "born under other flags" had "poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life." Name-calling from the rostrum and prison terms from the courts came from the same government. Counts of prosecutions differ, and this page gives no total. Not everyone in the cabinet wanted it that way. Newton D. Baker, the war secretary, told college presidents on 5 May 1917 that a nation fighting for an ideal had no need "to discolor its purpose by hatreds." He was right, and the administration he served did not follow him. ## The color line inside the federal offices Separation began in 1913, before the war. In some Post Office and Treasury offices Black and white clerks were split by work area, lunch room, and washroom, and other departments followed. William Monroe Trotter and other Black leaders protested to Wilson in person in November 1914. Wilson said the purpose was to reduce friction. A government that sorted its own employees by race while it spoke of democracy abroad was doing something wrong, and its stated reason does not change what it did. The scholarship the archive relies on is Wolgemuth (1959) and Yellin (2013). Suffragists picketed the White House from January 1917, and some were jailed for it. Wilson came out for a federal amendment in January 1918. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on 18 August 1920. The picket was speech; the jail was the reply; the amendment was the result. All three are part of the record. ## Open covenants abroad, raids at home The Fourteen Points of 8 January 1918 called for "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at." After the Armistice of 11 November 1918 Wilson went to Paris himself. At home, under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the Justice Department raided radical groups and immigrants in November 1919 and in January 1920; the largest raids came on 2 January 1920. In February 1920 Palmer published an article in The Forum that likened revolution to a prairie fire licking at church altars. Arrests by the thousand, justified in prose like that, are a due process problem whatever one thinks of the people arrested. ## A president the public could not see The last information-control story of this administration is about Wilson's own body. On 2 October 1919, in the middle of the Senate fight over the Treaty of Versailles, he had a stroke that left his left side paralyzed. Edith Wilson and his physician, Cary T. Grayson, kept its seriousness from the public and from most of the cabinet. Grayson told the press the president was "a very sick man" and did not name a stroke. Secretary of State Robert Lansing was told of a depleted nervous system. Edith Wilson screened the papers, messages, and visitors that reached her husband. In her 1939 memoir she called that a stewardship and said she made no decisions herself; historians have questioned how firm that line was. No transfer of power happened, and none was available. The Constitution had no procedure for a disabled president until the Twenty-fifth Amendment of 1967. The Senate rejected the treaty on 19 November 1919 and again on 19 March 1920. Lansing, who had convened the cabinet on 6 October 1919 without the president's approval, left office on 13 February 1920. Wilson finished his term on 4 March 1921 and died at his house on S Street in Washington on 3 February 1924. The archive's separate page on how Wilson died carries the funeral record and the disputed points; this site keeps the part that bears on public information here rather than on a page of its own. For the seventeen months that remained, the public was not told how far the president could do the job, and the person who controlled what reached him held no office at all. The country was told less than the truth about who was deciding. That was wrong, and the amendment that finally answered it took nearly half a century. ## What to keep from this administration Keep the volunteer speakers, the named sponsor on the posters, Hoover's voluntary pledge, Creel's line that "even a blackguard's voice" beat silence, and Baker's warning against hatred. Those were the habits of a republic. Reject the viewpoint rules in the mails, the prison terms for speeches, the deputized neighbors, the federal color line, and the concealment of a disabled president. Congress repealed the 1918 amendments on 3 March 1921, the day before Wilson left. Debs was still in prison. President Harding commuted his sentence that December. The next administration on this site is Franklin D. Roosevelt's, which inherited the lesson of Creel's committee and built its own information offices with a different set of powers. ## Sources - Executive Order 2594 (13 April 1917); Espionage Act, 40 Stat. 217; Trading with the Enemy Act, 40 Stat. 411; Sedition Act, 40 Stat. 553. - Woodrow Wilson, address to the Associated Press (20 April 1915); annual message (7 December 1915); war message (2 April 1917); letter to Edwin Y. Webb (22 May 1917); Fourteen Points address (8 January 1918). Baker and Dodd, eds., The New Democracy (1926) and War and Peace (1927). - Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.N.Y. 1917); Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919); Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919); Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919). - Committee on Public Information, Complete Report of the Chairman (1920); George Creel, How We Advertised America (1920); "Spies and Lies," Trench and Camp (Augusta, Ga.), 19 June 1918, p. 15. - Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States for the Year 1917 (GPO, 1917), pp. 75, 83; A. Mitchell Palmer, "The Case Against the 'Reds'," The Forum 63, no. 2 (February 1920). - Newton D. Baker, "The Task of the Colleges," 5 May 1917, in Frontiers of Freedom (1918); Herbert Hoover, preface to a report of the U.S. Food Administration (1920). - Kathleen L. Wolgemuth, "Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation," Journal of Negro History 44 (1959); Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation's Service (2013); Joan M. Jensen, The Price of Vigilance (1968); Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You (2008). - On the stroke: Edith Bolling Wilson, My Memoir (1939); Phyllis Lee Levin, Edith and Woodrow (2001); Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, on Robert Lansing; United Press, Washington, 4 February 1924. As cited on the FRAME page on Wilson's death. - FRAME, Wilson administration and How Woodrow Wilson died, for the chronology, the office-holders, the quotations as cited, and the portrait credit. Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/regimes/wilson-administration/