Posted on 10/24/2020 6:59:54 AM PDT by george76
The media are still feeling the impact of an executive order signed in 1917 that created ‘the nation’s first ministry of information’..
When the United States declared war on Germany 100 years ago, the impact on the news business was swift and dramatic.
In its crusade to “make the world safe for democracy,” the Wilson administration took immediate steps at home to curtail one of the pillars of democracy – press freedom – by implementing a plan to control, manipulate and censor all news coverage, on a scale never seen in U.S. history.
Following the lead of the Germans and British, Wilson elevated propaganda and censorship to strategic elements of all-out war. Even before the U.S. entered the war, Wilson had expressed the expectation that his fellow Americans would show what he considered “loyalty.”
Immediately upon entering the war, the Wilson administration brought the most modern management techniques to bear in the area of government-press relations. Wilson started one of the earliest uses of government propaganda. He waged a campaign of intimidation and outright suppression against those ethnic and socialist papers that continued to oppose the war. Taken together, these wartime measures added up to an unprecedented assault on press freedom.
I study the history of American journalism, but before I started researching this episode, I had thought that the government’s efforts to control the press began with President Roosevelt during WWII. What I discovered is that Wilson was the pioneer of a system that persists to this day.
All Americans have a stake in getting the truth in wartime. A warning from the WWI era, widely attributed to Sen. Hiram Johnson, puts the issue starkly: “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”
Mobilizing for war..
Within a week of Congress declaring war, on April 13, 1917, Wilson issued an executive order creating a new federal agency that would put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage.
That agency was the Committee on Public Information, which would take on the task of explaining to millions of young men being drafted into military service – and to the millions of other Americans who had so recently supported neutrality – why they should now support war.
The new agency – which journalist Stephen Ponder called “the nation’s first ministry of information” – was usually referred to as the Creel Committee for its chairman, George Creel, who had been a journalist before the war. From the start, the CPI was “a veritable magnet” for political progressives of all stripes – intellectuals, muckrakers, even some socialists – all sharing a sense of the threat to democracy posed by German militarism. Idealistic journalists like S.S. McClure and Ida Tarbell signed on, joining others who shared their belief in Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy.
At the time, most Americans got their news through newspapers, which were flourishing in the years just before the rise of radio and the invention of the weekly news magazine. In New York City, according to my research, nearly two dozen papers were published every day – in English alone – while dozens of weeklies served ethnic audiences.
Starting from scratch, Creel organized the CPI into several divisions using the full array of communications.
The Speaking Division recruited 75,000 specialists who became known as “Four-Minute Men” for their ability to lay out Wilson’s war aims in short speeches.
The Film Division produced newsreels intended to rally support by showing images in movie theaters that emphasized the heroism of the Allies and the barbarism of the Germans.
The Foreign Language Newspaper Division kept an eye on the hundreds of weekly and daily U.S. newspapers published in languages other than English.
Another CPI unit secured free advertising space in American publications to promote campaigns aimed at selling war bonds, recruiting new soldiers, stimulating patriotism and reinforcing the message that the nation was involved in a great crusade against a bloodthirsty, antidemocratic enemy.
Some of the advertising showed off the work of another CPI unit. The Division of Pictorial Publicity was led by a group of volunteer artists and illustrators. Their output included some of the most enduring images of this period, including the portrait by James Montgomery Flagg of a vigorous Uncle Sam, declaring, “I WANT YOU FOR THE U.S. ARMY!”
Other ads showed cruel “Huns” with blood dripping from their pointed teeth, hinting that Germans were guilty of bestial attacks on defenseless women and children. “Such a civilization is not fit to live,” one ad concluded.
Creel denied that his committee’s work amounted to propaganda, but he acknowledged that he was engaged in a battle of perceptions. “The war was not fought in France alone,” he wrote in 1920, after it was all over, describing the CPI as “a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”
Buried in paper..
For most journalists, the bulk of their contact with the CPI was through its News Division, which became a veritable engine of propaganda on a par with similar government operations in Germany and England but of a sort previously unknown in the United States.
In the brief year and a half of its existence, the CPI’s News Division set out to shape the coverage of the war in U.S. newspapers and magazines. One technique was to bury journalists in paper, creating and distributing some 6,000 press releases – or, on average, handing out more than 10 a day.
The whole operation took advantage of a fact of journalistic life. In times of war, readers hunger for news and newspapers attempt to meet that demand. But at the same time, the government was taking other steps to restrict reporters’ access to soldiers, generals, munitions-makers and others involved in the struggle. So, after stimulating the demand for news while artificially restraining the supply, the government stepped into the resulting vacuum and provided a vast number of official stories that looked like news.
Most editors found the supply irresistible. These government-written offerings appeared in at least 20,000 newspaper columns each week, by one estimate, at a cost to taxpayers of only US$76,000.
In addition, the CPI issued a set of voluntary “guidelines” for U.S. newspapers, to help those patriotic editors who wanted to support the war effort (with the implication that those editors who did not follow the guidelines were less patriotic than those who did).
The CPI News Division then went a step further, creating something new in the American experience: a daily newspaper published by the government itself. Unlike the “partisan press” of the 19th century, the Wilson-era Official Bulletin was entirely a governmental publication, sent out each day and posted in every military installation and post office as well as in many other government offices. In some respects, it is the closest the United States has come to a paper like the Soviet Union’s Pravda or China’s People’s Daily.
The CPI was, in short, a vast effort in propaganda. The committee built upon the pioneering efforts of public relations man Ivy Lee and others, developing the young field of public relations to new heights. The CPI hired a sizable fraction of all the Americans who had any experience in this new field, and it trained many more.
One of the young recruits was Edward L. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer in theorizing about human thoughts and emotions. Bernays volunteered for the CPI and threw himself into the work. His outlook – a mixture of idealism about the cause of spreading democracy and cynicism about the methods involved – was typical of many at the agency.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” Bernays wrote a few years after the war. “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
All in all, the CPI proved quite effective in using advertising and PR to instill nationalistic feelings in Americans. Indeed, many veterans of the CPI’s campaign of persuasion went into careers in advertising during the 1920s.
The full bundle of techniques pioneered by Wilson during the Great War were updated and used by later presidents when they sent U.S. forces into battle.
People can argue whether Carter, Clinton or Obama were the worst president but they are all pikers compare to the global damage Wilson inflicted that we are still seeing.
You can tell Freepers love Beck and Levin and their hangers ons
It’s simply propaganda like information but it fits a clean binary paradigm which is easier for them to absorb and takes less time to understand
Remember the old child’s toy where u spun the wheel to an animal and the machine would make the animal sound
It’s like that but with two choices only
An elephant and a donkey
But most important you have to treat slavery and racism as original sins of America and the West
That’s where they really go off the rails from true conservative thought as we knew it before the pre Neo Con engineered purges
Who in 1970 amongst conservatism ranks would have demonized Wilson like NeoCon II adherents do?
And worse they also demonize Teddy to be fair
It’s poppycock....worse president....duh I dunno maybe Clinton or Obama or Harding or LBJ or FDR
I’ve been reading some of the history concerning the ratification of the 17th Amendment and have learned that the press back then played a massive role in the emotions that led to the ratification and the election of Wilson.
From what I gather (I have not read the original articles from that day), the railroad barons, steel businessmen and their teams were controlling businesses in the cities, and, through their influence in the Senate, were blocking solutions and promoting more problems. The sales pitch was that the Senate had to be changed so the people could free society from the influences of the rich and powerful.
It takes a lot of work for a constitutional amendment. The press had to be fully behind it for it to succeed.
It went on from there.
Bfl
That famous Republican president Woodrow Wilson Oh Wait...
“And worse they also demonize Teddy to be fair”
Beck & Levin didn’t start demonizing Teddy Roosevelt until some posters here at FR pointed out that TR was a progressive years before Woodrow Wilson. Those two don’t know much about history despite their posturing and they got caught flat footed.
Instead of conceding that they don’t know what the hell they are talking about they added Teddy to the cannibal’s pot after the fact hoping that no one would notice.
Beck, Levin, D’Souza, and a host of others whose names we all know have been selling their audience a cartoon version of American political history that reduces to the GOP having been God’s Chosen Party and the Democrats being the Party of Evil. This takes advantage of people who trust them and think they are honest. It predictably will end badly.
As long as we don't count the 300 newspapers forcibly shut down during the Lincoln administration. The editors and reporters jailed without trial, including Francis Scott Keye's grandson. You have to appreciate the irony of Fort McHenry being used to imprison him. But why spoil a good story with unseemly facts?
“The only other possible contender is James Buchannan.”
And can you tell us what Buchanan did that merits him being the worst president?
Note nobody challenges u
“Joseph Goebbels learned propaganda from Woodrow Wilson and George Creel .”
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Likely the other way around. From 1933 to 1938 Goebbels made and broadcast radio speeches almost daily. They were imported to willing American radio stations in the Midwest.
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There were many German speakers in the Midwest and the broadcasts were in German only and had great effect in spreading Isolationism.
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Wilson picked up on that, especially the anti-semitic themes and used it as a major campaign plank for the presidential campaign.
Within a week of Congress declaring war, on April 13, 1917, Wilson issued an executive order creating a new federal agency that would put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage.
That agency was the Committee on Public Information, run by George Creel
German propaganda lost its appeal after the Lusitania sinking with 128 Americans killed, and other sinkings.
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Wilson’s Isolationism ended finally on April 2, 1917 when we declared war. Creels’ propaganda agency came along 11 days later as Wilson and Congress understood they needed to drum up political support for a draft which was then enacted May 18, 1917.
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The next goal was raise money on war bond drives. Back in the day, before we had serious income taxes, war was more an act of The People that needed some persuasion.
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