How We Advertised America

Front matter

HOW WE ADVERTISED AMERICA

The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe

By GEORGE CREEL Author of "IRELAND'S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM"

Dedicatory

DEDICATORY

The Committee on Public Information was wiped out of existence on June 30, 1919, by action of Congress. The work of the Committee had been discontinued months before, and only an orderly liquidation was in progress. It was this liquidation that Congress desired to interrupt and confuse. No one was left with power to rent a building, employ a clerk, transfer a bank balance, or to collect a dollar. This condition of chaos endured for weeks—for it was not until August 21st that the President found power to turn the records of the Committee over to the Council of National Defense—and it is only to-day that a final accounting to the people is able to be made.

At the time of the Committee's annihilation a complete report of its activities was on the presses in the Government Printing Office. This was included in the general slaughter, for not only was it the purpose of Congress to prevent any final audit, but also to keep the Committee from making a statement of achievement for the information of the public.

It was to defeat this purpose that this book has been written. It is not a compilation of incident and opinion, but a record and a chronicle. I have followed through the work of the organization from beginning to end, division by division, both as a matter of duty and as a partial discharge of my debt of gratitude to the men and women who worked with me.

It is to them and to Woodrow Wilson—great and inspired leader in the fight for the moral verdict of mankind—that this volume is dedicated.

The Author.

New York, May 1, 1920.

A very special word of thanks is due to Mr. Maurice Lyons, secretary of the Committee from first to last, and to Mr. Harvey J. O'Higgins, associate chairman.

Foreword

FOREWORD

In view of the fact that the works which Mr. Creel has performed are supposed to have been performed under the guidance of, or, at least, in association with, the Committee on Public Information, consisting of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of War, I am afraid that if I were to indulge in extravagant eulogy of the wise and helpful things Mr. Creel has done it might be assumed that I was seeking to reserve for the remainder of the Committee some share of the praise. I feel sure, however, that if the Secretary of State were present he would assent, as the Secretary of the Navy, being present, I know does assent, to a statement of the attitude of the remaining members of that Committee toward Mr. Creel; the feeling is that while our names have been used as members of the Committee on Public Information, its labors have been the labors of Mr. Creel, and, for myself, at least, I can say that the helpfulness has been from him to me rather than in the reverse direction.

I remember a statement of Sir William Hamilton that there is nothing great in the world but man, and nothing great in man but mind. It is obviously too soon to begin to appraise either what this war means to mankind or what forces have correlated in the winning of the war, and yet our minds have been, I think, rather more occupied in observing the correlation of physical forces than they have in observing the correlation of mental forces; and I have a feeling, a very strong feeling, that future historians, when they are farther removed from the events of to-day, will lay stress upon the latter, not neglecting, but at least less emphasizing, the former. When you are near the trenches the biggest thing in the world is the man in the trenches, and he is a very big thing in the world while the war is on. Our minds are fascinated by the presence of Americans in France. We see stretching over France the products of our mills and our factories; we see the boys we have taken from field and workshop and factory and office and school manufactured overnight into an altogether unsuspected stature of heroism and capacity for sacrifice in the field. We see the trained and veteran armies of the countries which have long maintained a great military policy caught up with by our own recruits, hastily trained; we see the ocean, filled with new and difficult perils, carrying larger numbers of American soldiers than have ever been transported in the history of mankind. Perhaps the greatest foreign army that ever crossed a sea in the history of the world prior to the present war was the Persian army of a million men, which bridged and crossed the Hellespont, and here the American army has sent two millions of men across the Atlantic. We sec workshops and factories in America transferred from civilian occupations and learning new and difficult arts, accustoming their tools to the manufacture of war supplies, and we see American labor learning new skills, new mechanical inventions brought into quantity production among us.

So we think of the physical things accomplished because we are close to them and because they are visible to the senses. Our minds naturally dwell chiefly upon the physical things that have been done. There are many people in this room who have been in Europe since we entered this war, and nobody could possibly go to France, enter a port, and travel from any port of France to the front-line trenches without recognizing the energy and efficiency of his own nation; the strength and skill of his own fellow-countrymen; the inventive genius of America; the large capacity for industrial output of America stamped all over France.

These things form our imagination; it is our disposition to think of the war as a great conflict of physical forces in which the best mechanic won, and in which the nation that was strongest in material things, which had the largest accumulation of wealth and the greatest power of concentrating its industrial factors, was the victorious nation. Yet, as I said at the outset, I suspect the future historian will find under all these physical manifestations their mental cause, and will find that the thing which ultimately brought about the victory of the Allied forces on the western front was not wholly the strength of the arm of the soldier, not wholly the number of guns of the Allied nations; but it was rather the mental forces that were at work nerving those arms, and producing those guns, and producing in the civil populations and military populations alike of those countries that unconquerable determination that this war should have but one end, a righteous end.

The whole business of mobilizing the mind of the world so far as American participation in the war was concerned was in a sense the work of the Committee on Public Information. We had an alternative to face when we went into this war. The instant reaction of habit and tradition was to establish strict censorship, to allow to ooze out just such information as a few select persons might deem to be helpful, and to suppress all of the things which these persons deemed hurtful. This would have been the traditional thing to do. I think it was Mr. Creel's idea, and it was certainly a great contribution to the mobilization of the mental forces of America, to have, in lieu of a Committee on Censorship, a Committee on Public Information for the production and dissemination as widely as possible of the truth about America's participation in the war. Undoubtedly for the country to adopt the censorship plan would have been to say, "Now, we must all sit still and breathe cautiously lest we rock the boat." It was an inspiration to say, instead: "Now, this boat is just so many feet long, it is so many feet wide, it weighs just so much, and the sea is just so deep. If, after having all of these facts before you, you think rocking the boat will help the cause, rock." That is what the Committee on Public Information did, and it required a stroke of genius—perhaps not a stroke of genius, but something better than genius—to see that it required faith in democracy, it required faith in the fact; for it is a fact that our democratic institutions over here would enable us to deal with information safely; that, as Mr. Creel believed, if we received the facts we could be trusted.

Now the men who said that, and started out to give the American people all the facts there were, to see that the story was fully told, to dig it up out of hidden places and put it before the people, performed a very distinct service in the war, and, if I may say so, it seems to me a very great service to the future of our development, and in the application of the fruits of the victory which democracy has just won in the world. But it did not stop there. Of course, as the head of the War Department I am committed irrevocably, and no matter what my private opinions may be, to a belief on the much mooted question as to whether the pen is mightier than the sword. I an: obliged to believe that the sword is mightier than the pen. But this war wasn't to be won by the sword alone. It was to be won by the pen as well as by the sword, and I am not speaking now of a purely military victory, because the victory is simply a point in time. The Germans signed the armistice and began to go pell-mell toward the Rhine; they turned over a certain number of ships and railroad-cars and big guns, etc., and if that were to end the war, the end of it would be no end whatever. The question which still remains as a part of winning the war is gathering up the results of that war and extracting the real fruits. Of course, we should all be happy over the military victory, but the things in the victory that will make for our happiness and for the happiness of our children twenty years from now, and our grandchildren forty years from now, are the real winnings of the war; these are the things that will count most both for our enduring happiness and the profit of our children and grandchildren, the things that will make most for the truth and the freedom and liberty of mankind always; and these are the things that are to be won out of this war, not by our way of fighting, but by what we fought for, and what other people believe we fought for.

So, it was of the greatest importance that America in this war should be represented not merely as a strong man fully armed, but as a strong man fully armed and believing in the cause for which he was fighting. It was necessary to have somebody who understood why we were at war, and in saying that I speak not of a man who could comprehend merely the difficult international problems with regard to it, but the spirit that made us go into this war, and the things we were fighting for. Wars are sometimes fought for land, sometimes for dynastic aspiration, and sometimes for ideas and ideals. We were fighting for ideas and ideals, and somebody who realized that, and knew it, had to say it and keep on saying it until it was believed. That was a part of the function of the Committee on Public Information. Its body was in Washington, but its hands reached out into the capitals of neutral countries and elsewhere; its representatives were in constant communication by cable and telegraph and letter with the central place here in Washington where there were gathered together men of talent and genius and comprehension, and the inspiration of their appreciation of America had to go out from Washington to all of these outlying places. Sometimes it appeared in the newspapers of neutral capitals, and sometimes it dropped from balloons in written statements that were meant to convey to the enemy not the size of our army, not the dreadfulness of our means of conducting warfare, but the invincible power of our ideas.

So, when the military end came to this war, it was a composite result which was won undoubtedly in part by the superb heroism of the American soldiers and the veteran soldiers of the nations with whom we were associated. Nothing that is said about any other part of it ought to be permitted to take away from these splendid soldiers in their hour of triumph any part of the imperishable glory which they have brought to themselves and to the nation which they have served. But it was this unseen but persuasive and unending flood of ideas that aroused a correct apprehension of the true spirit and idealism of America in the war, and when the armistice was signed and peace came back into the world, it came, led by one hand by the military prowess of the great free peoples, and led by the other hand by the conquering idea of justice and freedom as expressed in America's idealism.

Now we are all facing the future rather than the past. We are thinking of what we are going to get out of this war, and nobody is counting it in gains which can be deposited in a bank; nobody is thinking of it in terms composed of subject peoples, but in terms of the return of law, the reign of justice, and the establishment of that complete morality in the relations of people which we have always observed as necessary in the relations of individuals,

It is a great thing to have fought in this war. Every man who fought in this war, and every woman who fought in it, will for the rest of his or her life be telling these who gather round of the stirring things which took place during the years of the war. We shall be telling the new-comers on the stage of life, or those who were very young while the war was on, of the unselfishness of the sacrifices which were made, of the beauty of community co-operation, and of the great strength of a nation which is strengthened by high purposes. We shall be telling them all the rest of our lives, and I say we because we share with the soldiers who went to France the dignity and the glory of having fought as they fought, along a somewhat different front and with not quite the same peril; but we fought with the same spirit, we fought for the same cause, we fought with them, and when the night was dark in France, when the stars were not visible over the trenches and the noise of hostile artillery was menacing and fearful, when it was lonesome for the sentinel, the thing that sustained him there, the thing that made it possible for him to stay, was the unseen but almost palpable hand of his country resting on his shoulder. That country has kept true to its ideals and its cause, and these have been kept untarnished by the principles which were worked out in this country for a democratic nation; our ideals have been strengthened by their wide-spread dissemination throughout the world.

It would be impossible, if anybody wanted to do it, to pick out the particular persons to whom credit is due for these great things. Of course, it is very easy to know where the chief credit lies. Nobody could deny that the chief credit lies with the Chief Executive of this nation. As to all the rest, it is glory enough and credit enough to have been permitted to serve under his leadership, and in the cause of which he was the leader; but I want to close what I have to say by pointing out that the mobilization of America, superb as it was, was a mobilization not of men alone, nor of money, nor of industry or labor, but a mobilization of true appreciation of the rights of man. It was a democratic movement which made this great result possible, and in that mobilization of ideas the Committee on Public Information played a part of great distinction and value, and when I speak of the Committee on Public Information, of course, I speak largely of Mr. Creel. The land forces, for which I speak especially, recognize with gratitude the debt which they owe for making their victory possible, and also making it worth while.

Part I - The Domestic Section

Part I THE DOMESTIC SECTION

The "second lines"

I

THE "SECOND LINES"

As Secretary Baker points out, the war was not fought in France alone. Back of the firing-line, back of armies and navies, back of the great supply-depots, another struggle waged with the same intensity and with almost equal significance attaching to its victories and defeats. It was the fight for the minds of men, for the "conquest of their convictions," and the battle-line ran through every home in every country.

It was in this recognition of Public Opinion as a major force that the Great War differed most essentially from all previous conflicts. The trial of strength was not only between massed bodies of armed men, but between opposed ideals, and moral verdicts took on all the value of military decisions. Other wars went no deeper than the physical aspects, but German Kultur raised issues that had to be fought out in the hearts and minds of people as well as on the actual firing-line. The approval of the world meant the steady flow of inspiration into the trenches; it meant the strengthened resolve and the renewed determination of the civilian population that is a nation's second line. The condemnation of the world meant the destruction of morale and the surrender of that conviction of justice which is the very heart of courage.

The Committee on Public Information was called into existence to make this fight for the "verdict of mankind," the voice created to plead the justice of America's cause before the jury of Public Opinion. The fantastic legend that associated gags and muzzles with its work may be likened only to those trees which are evolved out of the air by Hindu magicians and which rise, grow, and flourish in gay disregard of such usual necessities as roots, sap, and sustenance. In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited the freedom of speech and press. 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.

Under the pressure of tremendous necessities an organization grew that not only reached deep into every American community, but that carried to every corner of the civilized globe the full message of America's idealism, unselfishness, and indomitable purpose. We fought prejudice, indifference, and disaffection at home and we fought ignorance and falsehood abroad. We strove for the maintenance of our own morale and the Allied morale by every process of stimulation; every possible expedient was employed to break through the barrage of lies that kept the people of the Central Powers in darkness and delusion; we sought the friendship and support of the neutral nations by continuous presentation of facts. We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts.

There was no part of the great war machinery that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board—all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms. All that was fine and ardent in the civilian population came at our call until more than one hundred and fifty thousand men and women were devoting highly specialized abilities to the work of the Committee, as faithful and devoted in their service as though they wore the khaki.

While America's summons was answered without question by the citizenship as a whole, it is to be remembered that during the three and a half years of our neutrality the land had been torn by a thousand divisive prejudices, stunned by the voices of anger and confusion, and muddled by the pull and haul of opposed interests. These were conditions that could not be permitted to endure. What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America's cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination. The war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice. What had to be driven home was that all business was the nation's business, and every task a common task for a single purpose.

Starting with the initial conviction that the war was not the war of an administration, but the war of one hundred million people, and believing that public support was a matter of public understanding, we opened up the activities of government to the inspection of the citizenship. A voluntary censorship agreement safeguarded military information of obvious value to the enemy, but in all else the rights of the press were recognized and furthered. Trained men, at the center of effort in every one of the war-making branches of government, reported on progress and achievement, and in no other belligerent nation was there such absolute frankness with respect to every detail of the national war endeavor.

As swiftly as might be, there were put into pamphlet form America's reasons for entering the war, the meaning of America, the nature of our free institutions, our war aims, likewise analyses of the Prussian system, the purposes of the imperial German government, and full exposure of the enemy's misrepresentations, aggressions, and barbarities. Written by the country's foremost publicists, scholars, and historians, and distinguished for their conciseness, accuracy, and simplicity, these pamphlets blew as a great wind against the clouds of confusion and misrepresentation. Money could not have purchased the volunteer aid that was given freely, the various universities lending their best men and the National Board of Historical Service placing its three thousand members at the complete disposal of the Committee. Some thirty-odd booklets, covering every phase of America's ideals, purposes, and aims, were printed in many languages other than English. Seventy-five millions reached the people of America, and other millions went to every corner of the world, carrying our defense and our attack.

The importance of the spoken word was not underestimated. A speaking division toured great groups like the Blue Devils, Pershing's Veterans, and the Belgians, arranged mass-meetings in the communities, conducted forty-five war conferences from coast to coast, co-ordi- nated the entire speaking activities of the nation, and assured consideration to the crossroads hamlet as well as to the city.

The Four Minute Men, an organization that will live in history by reason of its originality and effectiveness, commanded the volunteer services of 75,000 speakers, operating in 5,200 communities, and making a total of 755,190 speeches, every one having the carry of shrapnel.

With the aid of a volunteer staff of several hundred translators, the Committee kept in direct touch with the foreign-language press, supplying selected articles designed to combat ignorance and disaffection. It organized and directed twenty-three societies and leagues designed to appeal to certain classes and particular foreign-language groups, each body carrying a specific message of unity and enthusiasm to its section of America's adopted peoples.

It planned war exhibits for the state fairs of the United States, also a great series of interallied war expositions that brought home to our millions the exact nature of the struggle that was being waged in France. In Chicago alone two million people attended in two weeks, and in nineteen cities the receipts aggregated $1,432,261.36.

The Committee mobilized the advertising forces of the country—press, periodical, car, and outdoor—for the patriotic campaign that gave millions of dollars' worth of free space to the national service.

It assembled the artists of America on a volunteer basis for the production of posters, window-cards, and similar material of pictorial publicity for the use of various government departments and patriotic societies. A total of 1,438 drawings was used.

It issued an official daily newspaper, serving every department of government, with a circulation of one hundred thousand copies a day. For official use only, its value was such that private citizens ignored the supposedly pro- hibitive subscription price, subscribing to the amount of $77,622.58.

It organized a bureau of information for all persons who sought direction in volunteer war-work, in acquiring knowledge of any administrative activities, or in approaching business dealings with the government. In the ten months of its existence it gave answers to eighty-six thousand requests for specific information.

It gathered together the leading novelists, essayists, and publicists of the land, and these men and women, without payment, worked faithfully in the production of brilliant, comprehensive articles that went to the press as syndicate features.

One division paid particular attention to the rural press and the plate-matter service. Others looked after the specialized needs of the labor press, the religious press, and the periodical press. The Division of Women's War Work prepared and issued the information of peculiar interest to the women of the United States, also aiding in the task of organizing and directing.

Through the medium of the motion picture, America's war progress, as well as the meanings and purposes of democracy, were carried to every community in the United States and to every corner of the world. "Pershing's Crusaders," 'America's Answer," and "Under Four Flags" were types of feature films by which we drove home America's resources and determinations, while other pictures, showing our social and industrial life, made our free institutions vivid to foreign peoples. From the domestic showings alone, under a fair plan of distribution, the sum of $878,215 was gained, which went to support the cost of the campaigns in foreign countries where the exhibitions were necessarily free.

Another division prepared and distributed still photographs and stereopticon slides to the press and public. Over two hundred thousand of the latter were issued at cost. This division also conceived the idea of the "permit system," that opened up our military and naval activities to civilian camera men, and operated it successfully. It handled, also, the voluntary censorship of still and motion pictures in order that there might be no disclosure of information valuable to the enemy. The number of pictures reviewed averaged seven hundred a day.

Turning away from the United States to the world beyond our borders, a triple task confronted us. First, there were the peoples of the Allied nations that had to be fired by the magnitude of the American effort and the certainty of speedy and effective aid, in order to relieve the war-weariness of the civilian population and also to fan the enthusiasm of the firing-line to new flame. Second, we had to carry the truth to the neutral nations, poisoned by German lies; and third, we had to get the ideals of America, the determination of America, and the invincibility of America into the Central Powers.

Unlike other countries, the United States had no subsidized press service with which to meet the emergency. As a matter of bitter fact, we had few direct news contacts of our own with the outside world, owing to a scheme of contracts that turned the foreign distribution of American news over to European agencies. The volume of information that went out from our shores was small, and, what was worse, it was concerned only with the violent and unusual in our national life. It was news of strikes and lynchings, riots, murder cases, graft prosecutions, sensational divorces, the bizarre extravagance of "sudden millionaires." Naturally enough, we were looked upon as a race of dollar-mad materialists, a land of cruel monopolists, our real rulers the corporations and our democracy a "fake."

Looking about for some way in which to remedy this evil situation, we saw the government wireless lying comparatively idle, and through the close and generous cooperation of the navy we worked out a news machinery that soon began to pour a steady stream of American information into international channels of communication. Opening an office in every capital of the world outside the Central Powers, a daily service went out from Tuckerton to the Eiffel Tower for use in France and then for relay to our representatives in Berne, Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon. From Tuckerton the service flashed to England, and from England there was relay to Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and Russia. We went into Mexico by cable and land wires; from Darien we sent a service in Spanish to Central and South-American countries for distribution by our representatives; the Orient was served by telegraph from New York to San Diego, and by wireless leaps to Cavite and Shanghai. From Shanghai the news went to Tokio and Peking, and from Peking on to Vladivostok for Siberia. Australia, India, Egypt, and the Balkans were also reached, completing the world chain.