The War and the Intellectuals

Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information, by Stephen L. Vaughn. University of North Carolina Press, 397 pp., $21.00.

On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Imperial Germany. Within a week, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the federal government’s first attempt at large-scale propaganda. When the nation entered the conflict, its population was heterogeneous. Even though the majority favored war, isolationism persisted. Massive numbers of German and Irish Americans opposed mobilization. Some parts of the country harbored strong pacifists; other parts, particularly the hinter-lands, housed much apathy. It was to be the job of the CPI to unite public opinion around the war effort.

The committee made prodigious attempts to do just this. Its pamphlets numbered in the millions. Some 74,500 Four Minute Men gave brief speeches on the war, with each address closely controlled by Washington. Six hundred thousand schools received the committee’s National School Service, a 16 page bimonthly designed to inculcate “unswerving loyalty” by using the teacher as “an officer of the state.” (This language came from the bulletin itself.) The CPI printed the first government daily, entitled Official Bulletin and posted in nearly every military camp and some 54,000 post offices.

Results were spectacular. The CPI publicized the government’s war aims skillfully and with imagination, popularizing the notion that America was involved in a great struggle to save democracy. It served as a nationalizing agent, fostering such collective allegiance that at times it preached a civil religion. It established an apparatus so comprehensive that few citizens could escape its messages. It even subsidized a front entitled the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy to attract trade unionists and socialists. And by the end of the war, the committee had achieved its essential aim: most Americans accepted its case against German militarism.

Although scholars have long written on various aspects of the committee’s work, only now do we have an authoritative account. Stephen L. Vaughn, Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, has combed over fifty manuscript collections, including the committee’s own records housed in the National Archives. His narrative is fresh and thorough — and, whether he would concede it or not, most damning.

As far as the brigades of the typewriters were concerned, World War I was the liberal’s war. Even before the United States entered the conflict, two progressive journalists, Walter Lippmann and David Lawrence, pressed Wilson to establish a government publicity bureau. So did the muckraking reporter and novelist Arthur Bullard, once editor of the Socialist Call. In fact, Bullard’s memos to Wilson’s chief confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, did much to outline the structure of the committee. Americans, Bullard said, must be made to desire mobilization.

Yet Wilson chose progressive journalist George Creel to head the committee, and the CPI became informally known as the Creel Committee. Creel combined an arch-reformism with a brash personality. Child labor laws, anti-corruption practices, women’s suffrage, the single tax, public ownership of utilities—all found in the Denver Wilsonian a doughty champion. If, as one reporter noted, he was “a fascinating talker who looked like a gargoyle,” Creel had an acid tongue. Creel once compared the mind of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to the New England soil: “highly cultivated, but naturally sterile.” When asked about the mind of Congress, he snapped back that he did not go slumming.

Creel was not alone in his efforts. For those who spiced their reformism with more than a touch of coercion, work on the committee was ideal. Vaughn finds the CPI “a veritable magnet” for reformers of all shades, and the roster of CPI workers reads like a who’s who of the progressive movement. Among those working for the committee were such historians as Carl Becker, Charles A. Beard, and Sidney B. Fay, such political scientists as Edward S. Corwin, Charles E. Merriam, and George H. Sabine, such muckrakers as S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and Samuel Hopkins Adams, and such novelists as Booth Tarkington and Upton Sinclair. Several socialists, including Charles Edward Russell, Algie M. Simons, and John Spargo, worked enthusiastically for the committee. So did business analyst Roger W. Babson, pacifist settlement worker Jane Addams, advertising executive Edward L. Bernays, film director D. W. Griffith, illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, and journalist Heywood Broun.

To many such people, the war would not only retain democracy. It would make reform international, globalizing what they saw as the crusade against exploitation and oppression. Committee workers often perceived life, and politics in particular, as a crusade of good against evil, or to use the metaphor of Franklin K. Lane, “the world of Christ…come again face to face with the world of Mahomet.” To them, the Kaiser was committing—on a much greater scale—the sins of Tammany Hall and Standard Oil.

With such a perspective, it is hardly surprising to find committee propaganda advocating various forms of government interventions. The CPI’s War Cyclopedia defended the excess profits tax, while a CPI bulletin found the income tax rooted in the “copartnership of mankind, a certain vague sense of the brotherhood of man.” One Cyclopedia editor, constitutional expert Edward S. Corwin, claimed that the state needed wide police powers to promote the general welfare; Corwin saw Lincoln’s temporary suspension of civil liberties during the Civil War as a model for Wilson to follow. Economist John R. Commons predicted that “American labor will come out of this war…with as much power to fix its own wages by its own representatives as employers have.”

Moral regulation went hand in hand with reform. One professional educator (who had written a textbook with Charles A. Beard) mixed pleas for hygiene with warnings against youthful sex drives. Creel claimed that universal military training was bound to result in increased public health and civic virtue. Indeed the committee’s reformist thrust was so strong that CPI staffer and historian Guy Stanton Ford later regretted that “the Germans spoiled some perfectly good enterprises by ending the war when they did.”

Committee writers promoted a militant form of nationalism. If today we find much committee rhetoric vacuous and insipid, many Americans then undoubtedly found the words stirring. Interior Secretary Franklin Knight Lane told his countrymen to love America “because it is holy ground.” Katherine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful,” offered “The New Crusade,” a poem that began “Life is a trifle/Honor is all/Shoulder the rifle/Answer the call.” Stuart P. Sherman, later an editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature, believed—in Vaughn’s words—that “any person not indoctrinated with American ideals was a menace to the republic.” Historian Carl Becker, deploring the disappearance of the frontier, found the conflict a war “to save our own soul,” by which he meant to prevent America from backsliding into a class struggle as much as to defeat Kaiserdom. “Free education,” added Becker, aims at “good citizens rather than good scholars.”

Vaughn notes perceptively how the committee used ideology in an attempt to provide social stability, something that progressives found sorely lacking amid the turmoil created by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and the war itself. The committee would “hold fast the inner lines,” reinforcing a traditional America where, as one historian notes, “old landmarks were losing their familiar contours.” Yet Vaughn himself finds such a focus disturbing. Defining political freedom in terms of community service opens the possibility of undermining individual liberty and submerging the individual in the will of the state.

In its effort to impose unity, the committee fostered a powerful presidency. Wilson asked his countrymen to think of him as a symbol “of the power and dignity and hope of the United States.” Creel concurred, once claiming that “a President of the United States, in time of war, is either a dictator or a traitor, for dictatorship in war is the Constitution’s direct intent.” (emphasis his)

The committee encouraged domestic spying, urging citizens to report “defeatist” rumors to the Department of Justice. Said one CPI poster, “Do not wait until you catch someone putting a bomb under a factory. Report the man who spreads pessimistic stories, divulges — or seeks — confidential military information, cries for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.”

Censorship was assumed. So was suppression of unpopular ideas. Creel confessed that his agency had “suppressive features,” but he hoped that they would be overshadowed by positive propaganda efforts. The CPI chief sought to ban publications portraying the United States unfavorably or containing material deemed too dangerous for the public. Among such “dangerous” material were books “laudatory of Germany.” Although the committee itself lacked the power of censorship, it publicized statements — some made by reformers — advocating the suspension of free discussion. (Quotations by Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and Edward S. Corwin did quite nicely.)

Occasionally a committee speaker went further. For example, socialist Charles Edward Russell charged that traitors and pacifists had ended Russia’s participation in the war. Speaking in Madison, Wisconsin, he called for the removal of the antiwar senator Robert M. La Follette.

Attacks on Germany approached the hysterical, with scholars willingly adding their imprimatur to the cause. Wallace Notestein used German quotations to bolster his claim that the Second Reich sought world domination. The Cornell historian also accused the Germans of viewing the state “as something almost divine,” causing Vaughn to muse whether Notestein had ever read CPI messages by Lane and Sherman. An English professor at Stanford described a possible German capture of New York City — as well as a German pillaging of Lakewood, New Jersey. The committee distributed a map of a German-occupied United States. (Milwaukee was renamed “Prosit”; Savannah, “New Vienna.”) Sometimes fabricated atrocity stories were used, with Four Minute Men being told directly to appeal to fear. Such committee personnel as illustrator Charles Dana Gibson sought posters that were deliberately inflammatory. One drawing showed German officers chopping off the hands of a boy, another portrayed a soldier ready to commit rape. The indictment, of course, was always selective: German starvation of Poles was attacked, but not the British blockade of Germany. Even a bulletin aimed at secondary schools featured such articles as “American Aviators Bomb Hun Airdromes.”

In an effort to win black support, the committee claimed that Germany was no place for Negroes, as the Kaiser favored slavery. (Such arguments did not prevent committee films from stereotyping Afro-Americans. One film showed blacks tap-dancing, with the caption indicating that they had as much “rhythm” in France as under the southern sun.)

At one point, the committee promoted a pamphlet claiming that Lenin was in the pay of the German government. Although it was based upon false documents, J. Franklin Jameson, the managing editor of the

American Historical Review, claimed that the materials were authentic.

A one-sided view of America’s own past was almost inevitable. In 1776, so Sherman claimed, America had not been at war with Britain; the problem had been with “only a little ring of musty old drones from the German hive.” Evarts B. Greene, a specialist in the American Revolution, found a global-mindedness in such figures as George Washington, James Madison, and John C. Calhoun. Frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner called upon historians to stress close ties to Britain and France. Dexter Perkins pointed to what he called “the impossibility of our maintaining our older isolation.” Carl Becker argued that the logical implication of the Monroe Doctrine was two million doughboys in France.

What makes Vaughn’s indictment so effective is that he is not a muckraker. Vaughn in fact finds much of the committee work “well intentioned” and “worthwhile,” and he notes how often the committee stressed “antimilitarism, antiauthoritarianism, and the defense of democratic government.” The concept of propaganda itself did not have the negative connotation in 1917 that it has since acquired, and Creel never harbored the contempt for mass opinion that Hitler or Goebbels did. The committee did not harass any immigrant group; indeed it went out of its way to stress that German-Americans, in particular, were loyal. Historian Guy Stanton Ford, who directed a CPI division employing several hundred scholars, attempted to uphold standards of documentation. And in comparison to some propaganda emanating from other belligerents, and from unofficial sources within the United States, CPI material was tempered—some of the strongest criticism of the committee came from groups that thought it too mild in condemning Germany. Vaughn points out that the most severe repression of civil liberties did not come from the Creel Committee; rather it came from the state councils of defense and from such extra-governmental organizations as the National Security League.

Despite Vaughn’s attempt at balance, an effort this reviewer can only find commendable, the legacy of the Creel Committee emerges as most destructive. Vaughn’s excellent study shows that the CPI over-simplified complex international issues — and accompanying economic ones — to the point of caricature. Evil was projected upon the Germans and the Kaiser by the very people who had denounced “the trusts” and “the bosses” with such abandon. Professors abandoned their professional responsibilities to rally to the colors. Rather than presenting the world in all its complexity, many deliberately embraced indoctrination.

The French commentator Julien Benda once popularized the phrase “la trahison des clercs”—the treason of the intellectuals—in a book by that title. Although that book deals with Europeans of pre-World War I vintage, Mr. Creel’s World War I efforts could offer some excellent illustrations.

Justus D. Doenecke is Professor of History at New College of the University of South Florida.