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Committee on Public Information

The Committee on Public Information (1917–1919), also known as the CPI or the Creel Committee, was an independent agency of the government of the United States under the Wilson administration created to influence public opinion to support the US in World War I, in particular, the US home front.

Agency overview

April 13, 1917 (1917-04-13)

August 21, 1919 (1919-08-21)

significant staff plus over 75,000 volunteers

  • over twenty bureaus and divisions including:
  • News Bureau
  • Film Bureau

In just over 26 months (from April 14, 1917, to June 30, 1919) it used every medium available to create enthusiasm for the war effort and to enlist public support against the foreign and perceived domestic attempts to stop America's participation in the war. It is a notable example of propaganda in the United States.

Criticism[edit]

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, provides a detailed critique of the Creel Commission in his 2010 book Death of the Liberal Class. He describes the CPI's work as “a relentless campaign of manipulation of public opinion thinly disguised as journalism,” including manufactured German atrocities and war crimes.[41]


Walter Lippmann, a Wilson adviser, journalist, and co-founder of The New Republic, who was influential with Wilson in his advocacy for the establishment of a pro-war propaganda committee in 1917, may have later been a critic of Creel.[41] He had once written an editorial criticizing Creel for violating civil liberties, as Police Commissioner of Denver. Without naming Creel, he wrote in a memo to Wilson that censorship should "never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression." After the war, Lippmann criticized the CPI's work in Europe: "The general tone of it was one of unmitigated brag accompanied by unmitigated gullibility, giving shell-shocked Europe to understand that a rich bumpkin had come to town with his pockets bulging and no desire except to please."[42]


The Office of Censorship in World War II did not follow the CPI precedent. It used a system of voluntary co-operation with a code of conduct, and it did not disseminate government propaganda.[18] /

a pioneer in public relations and later theorist of the importance of propaganda to democratic governance.[43] He directed the CPI's Latin News Service. The CPI's poor reputation prevented Bernays from handling American publicity at the 1919 Peace Conference as he wanted.[44]

Edward Bernays

(1886 – 1957), like Bernays, a founding father of public relations in America.

Carl R. Byoir

Maurice Lyons was the Secretary of the committee. Lyons was a journalist who got involved in politics when he became secretary to William F. McCombs, who was Chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Woodrow Wilson's presidential campaign of 1912.

a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and an adviser to several US Presidents.

Charles Edward Merriam

. Poole was the co Director of the Foreign Press Bureau division. Poole was awarded the very first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, His Family.

Ernest Poole

Dennis J. Sullivan, Manager of Domestic Distribution for films made by the CPI.

[45]

director of the CPI's office in Switzerland. She repeatedly crossed into Germany to deliver propaganda materials. She later told of her experiences in A Year as a Government Agent (1920).[46]

Vira Boarman Whitehouse

Among those who participated in the CPI's work were:

American Alliance for Labor and Democracy

Office of War Information

Presidency of Woodrow Wilson

United States Information Agency

Writers' War Board

World War I film propaganda

Benson, Krystina. "The Committee on Public Information: A transmedia war propaganda campaign." Cultural Science Journal 5.2 (2012): 62–86.

online

Benson, Krystina. "Archival Analysis of the Committee on Public Information: The Relationship Between Propaganda, Journalism and Popular Culture." International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society (2010) 6#4

Blakey, George T. Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1970.  0813112362 OCLC 132498

ISBN

Breen, William J. Uncle Sam at Home : Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, and the Council of National Defense, 1917-1919. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.  0313241120 OCLC 9644952

ISBN

Brewer, Susan A. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. (2009).

Fasce, Ferdinando. "Advertising America, Constructing the Nation: Rituals of the Homefront during the Great War." European Contributions to American Studies 44 (2000): 161–174.

Fischer, Nick, "The Committee on Public Information and the Birth of U.S. State Propaganda," Australasian Journal of American Studies 35 (July 2016), 51–78.

Hamilton, John, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda

[1]

Kotlowski, Dean J., "Selling America to the World: The Office of War Information's The Town (1945) and the American Scene Series," Australasian Journal of American Studies 35 (July 2016), 79–101.

Mastrangelo, Lisa. "World War I, public intellectuals, and the Four Minute Men: Convergent ideals of public speaking and civic participation." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12.4 (2009): 607–633.

Mock, James R. and Cedric Larson, Words that Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917–1919, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939.  1135114

OCLC

Pinkleton, Bruce. "The campaign of the Committee on Public Information: Its contributions to the history and evolution of public relations." Journal of Public Relations Research 6.4 (1994): 229–240.

Ponder, Stephen. "Popular Propaganda: The Food Administration in World War I." Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (1995) 72#3 pp. 539–50. it ran a separate propaganda campaign

Schaffer, Ronald. America in the Great War: The Rise of the War-Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.  0195049039 OCLC 23145262

ISBN

Vaughn, Stephen. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information. (University of North Carolina Press, 1980).  0807813737 OCLC 4775452 online Archived 2019-03-29 at the Wayback Machine

ISBN

Vaughn, Stephen. "Arthur Bullard and the Creation of the Committee on Public Information," New Jersey History (1979) 97#1

Vaughn, Stephen. "First Amendment Liberties and the Committee on Public Information." American Journal of Legal History 23.2 (1979): 95–119.

online

Merriam, Charles E. (1919–11). "". American Political Science Review. 13 (4): 541–555.

American Publicity in Italy

Smyth, Daniel. "Avoiding Bloodshed? US Journalists and Censorship in Wartime", War & Society, Volume 32, Issue 1, 2013.

online

Zeiger, Susan. "She didn't raise her boy to be a slacker: Motherhood, conscription, and the culture of the First World War." Feminist Studies 22.1 (1996): 7-39.

. 2016-08-15.

"Records of the Committee on Public Information"

a brief history by a participant

Guy Stanton Ford, "The Committee on Public Information," in The Historical Outlook, vol 11, 97-9

Committee on Public Information materials in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)

Open Library. . 1922

Walter Lippmann; Public Opinion

The Committee on Public Information

Who's Who - George Creel

WWI: The Home Front

"Mobilizing Movies! The U.S. Signal Corps Goes To War, 1917-1919" (documentary made in 2017 on film propaganda during World War I)