creelcommitte.html

As the United States formally declared their entry into the War in Europe, one of the main concerns of President Wilson was trying to gain the full support of the American people. Wilson believed that he had two options on how to handle the publicity of the war, he could either lean toward a policy of censorship which would mean an iron grip over all forms of media or flood all media with only pro-war information.(1) Both were forms of censorship, but it was crucial to have the to have the full backing of the American citizens. The choice was made when President Wilson created the Committee of Public Information(CPI) by executive order on April 13,1917 and George Creel was appointed as the civilian chairman. The committee was to also include the Secretaries of State-William Jennings Bryan, War-Lindley M. Garrison, and Navy-Josephus Daniels.

George Creel (from Literary Digest, 1917)

From the very begging George Creel was going to run the project. He only met once with the secretaries and then went on with his own agenda. At the time Creel was appointed he was already a close friend of President Wilson, declaring himself a "Wilson's man before 1912"(2) One his main reasons on why he believed that he should be appointed the chair of the committee, having a background in journalism. Creel was the editor of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver when he was appointed to the committee. Creel's past careers also included being the police commissioner of Denver and also he tried to start his own organization, the NewsBook-an organization that proposed reforms by education which lasted only 4 months. Creel saw the CPI has a big ad agency, and he filled his committee with the brightest and talented of journalists, editors, scholars, press agents, and artists. Creel's point of view on the winning the war at home was that "expression not suppression" would be the key. The American opinion was already being shaped by other forms of propaganda, like that of the hyphenated americans and also what was being reported to them via the newspapers and radio. The main goal of the committee was to "carry Wilson's idealism-a war to end war, and America to rescue civilization"(3). In his memoir that he published in 1920 he viewed the committee as "a passionate belief in the justice of America's cause that would weld the American people into one white hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion,courage, and deathless determination"(4). Creel and his committee did this by filling every media service with only pro-war information, the CPI handed out "voluntary" rules for the newspapers to follow, and that was only the beginning of Creel's ideas.