INFORMING THE PUBLIC
America fought ardently in the world war because of the devotion of
her people to democratic ideals. Since one of those ideals is to base
the participation of the people in public affairs upon a knowledge
of those affairs as complete and accurate and universal as the
limitations of human nature and human institutions make possible, it
was necessary to provide some machinery that would serve as a means of
communication between the purposes and the vast undertakings of the
Government, functioning for the people, and the people themselves. In
common with the spirit and the methods by which all the war activities
were carried on--spirit and methods which strikingly exemplified one
of the fundamental traits of the national genius--the situation was
met by creating an organization for the widest possible spreading
of information about the national needs, activities and aims. The
Committee on Public Information, created by an executive order of the
President soon after our declaration of war, began with a civilian
Chairman and the Secretaries of State, War and the Navy as its members.
At the close of hostilities it had a world-wide organization which
commanded the services of thousands of authors, artists, journalists,
speakers, moving picture actors and producers and people of public
spirit, most of them giving their services, who were working zealously
among our own people, our war associates, our enemies and the neutral
nations.
The Committee was not concerned at all with censorship rules and
regulations and constantly endeavored to secure, for the widest
dissemination, all news of the war activities that would not benefit
the enemy or obstruct our efficiency. As always in time of war, the
decision upon what should be made public rested with the war making
agencies of the Government. The function of the Committee was to secure
important news and descriptions of all phases of our war making effort
with as little waste as possible of the time and attention of absorbed
and over-burdened officials and to make systematic and effective
distribution of all this matter at home, among our war associates, in
neutral countries and even behind the enemy lines, and to combat enemy
propaganda by meeting its lies and perversions with simple truth. It
depended always and solely upon facts, whether material or spiritual,
and did not in any phase of its work deal in opinions or arguments.
In each of the war making departments of the Government the Committee
had a representative experienced in newspaper work under whom, in
each of the department’s bureaus, was an assistant whose duty was to
know accurately all the phases and details of the bureau’s work, to
keep in touch with its progress and production, and to prepare such
information concerning it as could be published. All this matter passed
through the hands of the Committee’s representative in the department,
who was responsible for its accuracy. Connected with his office was
the censor for that particular war making agency who decided upon the
military advisability of its publication. Of all the many thousands of
releases for publication thus made the accuracy of only three or four
was ever questioned, and of these one was afterward proved by official
dispatches to have been true.
Practically all the reputable newspapers of the United States agreed
with the Government to refrain from publishing any news obtained by
their own representatives which would hamper the war making program
or give information to the enemy and in every large newspaper office
the country over hung the Committee’s list of specified classes of
information which they were requested not to mention. With one or two
disloyal exceptions all the newspapers of the country voluntarily put
themselves under this restraint and themselves censored their own
columns until the end of the war. In no other country at war was the
press ever so little hampered by governmental restrictions, or put upon
its honor in this way, or animated by a spirit so unselfishly patriotic.
A Service Bureau of the Committee at a centrally located office in
Washington provided information as to the officials, the function and
the location of all Government departments and similar matters. In the
rapid expansion of all these departments, the creation of new agencies
and the overcrowded condition of the capital, due to the thousands of
men and women pouring into and going through the city, it saved for all
these people many hours and much energy. The inquiries that came to it
by personal appeal, by telephone, and by mail mounted to an average of
many hundreds daily.
In addition to the news matter which it distributed at home and abroad,
the Committee on Public Information sent out an official bulletin
which, with a circulation of more than 100,000, gave information
concerning all governmental affairs and activities in connection with
the war; prepared special articles concerning all phases of the war
progress of the nation which were widely published in the Saturday and
Sunday magazine sections of newspapers; and published several series of
pamphlets, written by authorities upon the questions discussed, which
set forth the reasons for our participation in the war, exposed the
pretensions of Germany and dealt with other important matters. These
pamphlets also had a wide circulation and were especially useful for
the hundreds of public speakers who talked to assemblages of people
in mines, factories, ship-yards, theaters and other public places.
They were intended to give information to all who wanted it and to
furnish ammunition for the determined battle the Committee was waging
to win the attention and rouse the feeling of a polyglot nation, huge
numbers of whose people had not hitherto acquired much knowledge of or
developed much interest in their adopted country.
For all this work several hundreds of authors, newspaper and magazine
writers, publicists, university professors and others either gave their
time and labor freely or took for their services an amount of pay that
barely paid their living expenses, and, for the rest, were repaid by
the satisfaction of doing something to aid the needs of their country.
An organization of speakers called “Four-Minute Men,” working under the
Committee, had a membership of 35,000 and gave short, incisive talks in
five or six thousand communities, speaking at motion picture theaters,
at factories during the noon hour, at country churches and school
houses, at assemblages of every sort. The campaigns in which they
took part embraced work for the Red Cross, the welfare organizations.
Liberty loans, savings stamps, against German propaganda, and every
kind of activity for the winning of the war that the nation engaged
in. A bulletin for the use of the Four-Minute Men was prepared by
the Committee’s experts for each campaign, giving material for their
suggestion and guidance.
In addition to these men, the Committee organized a great national
campaign of public speaking which enlisted the services of patriotic
men and women in each state, of returning soldiers, of people who had
been abroad and had witnessed the fighting or had seen conditions
in the belligerent and neutral countries, and of Allied officers.
This work was decentralized and, by means of the coöperation of the
State Section of the Council of National Defense, was organized in
each state. War conferences and war exhibits were held in important
centers, the war agencies in each state were brought into unison with
the work and the campaign for informing and inspiring the people was
carried through, all parts of the state, down to the villages and
country districts. A band of a hundred veteran French soldiers,--the
famous “Blue Devils”--a Belgian regiment, and a company of American
doughboys sent back from the front for this purpose were severally
conducted at various times across the country by the Committee on
Public Information, with the double aim of helping the American people
to realize the war more vividly and of enabling these fighting men to
carry back to the front first hand information about what America was
doing and what was her spirit.
At the request of the Committee the heads of the various advertising
clubs of the country came together and mobilized for the country’s
service their organizations and their experts in every phase of
advertising. For every one of the great campaigns for the prosecution
of the war, these experts, under the direction of the Committee on
Public Information, saw to the preparing of posters, advertisements,
matter for bill boards, street car cards and all such matter. In
the campaign to recruit 250,000 laborers for the shipyards, as a
single instance, eighty advertisements were prepared by typographical
advertising experts and were carried in magazines and trade papers
that donated the space and gave a combined circulation of 8,000,000.
In a similar way the Committee organized and utilized the pictorial
assistance that could be given by artists. Its Division of Pictorial
Publicity included nearly all the best known artists of the United
States and to it went every department of the Government that wished
to make pictorial appeal to the people. Its hundreds of members
contributed, for all purposes, three thousand or more posters, cartoons
and drawings and aided much in the inspiring and uniting of sentiment.
Photographs and motion pictures were important factors of the
Committee’s work. Through it were distributed all of the photographs
taken by permission of the Army and the Navy and thousands upon
thousands of these pictures, covering’ every phase of the operations
of the war making and war production divisions of the Government, were
published in newspapers and magazines, collected by individuals, used
for the illustration of lectures and, in connection with some of the
actual war making objects and with models of others, shown in exhibits
at county and State fairs attended by millions of people. The motion
picture division of the Committee’s many-sided activities gave powerful
aid in its campaign of education and interpretation both at home and in
other countries. Important phases of the preparation at home for war
and of the army in training or in battle in France were put into single
reel and longer features, some of them providing a full evening’s
entertainment, and exhibited in thousands of moving picture houses
in the United States and, with their captions translated into many
languages, were sent all through Latin America, the Orient, Africa,
the Allied and neutral nations of Europe, to carry their message of
America’s spirit and America’s purposes.
All of these agencies the Committee on Public Information organized
and used for the purpose of widening the horizon and informing and
illumining the mind and spirit of our own citizens with regard to
the causes, the purposes and the meaning of the war and of America’s
participation in it and to combat the specious and wide-spread
propaganda of the German Government. That propaganda sought to blind
our people to the issues involved, to create sentiment against our war
associates, to undermine our faith in our own war agencies and our
conviction of the righteousness of the war and the adequacy of our war
effort, and was especially insidious and dangerous among the ignorant,
among aliens not yet well informed concerning the country and in some
of the districts of the South. Wherever it worked the Committee met and
endeavored to nullify its efforts.
Equally well organized, determined and successful, but much more
difficult, was the struggle the Committee carried on against
anti-American propaganda and influences in other countries. It had
different phases and features, according to the conditions in the
different lands, and it presents, altogether, one of the most dramatic
and thrilling of all the stories of civilian effort for the war. But
it is possible here only to outline its general features. The United
States had for many years been soaked through and through with German
propaganda, but so insidiously, so gently and so gradually had the work
been carried on that scarcely any one had recognized its extent, its
influence and its purpose. The shock of war brought some realization
of what had been going on, the efforts of the Committee on Public
Information revealed much more, and then the quick reaction of an
intensely patriotic people brought against the pro-German campaign,
paid for and directed in Germany, such a storm of popular indignation
that it had little chance to make headway except among the ignorant
and some of the foreign born. But in the neutral countries German
propaganda, German effort to win sympathy and belief and set feeling
and conviction against America and the Allies was in full possession
and had to be combated with care and tact as well as haste and energy.
In every one of them America had been misrepresented, jeered at,
lied about, pictured in colors that made her and her people the most
despicable and loathsome upon the face of the earth, while her war
effort was described as so inefficient and so impossible of success as
to be ridiculous.
The Committee established an office in the capital of each one
of the neutral countries, as it did also in that of each of our
co-belligerents. The office head and the greater part of his staff went
from home, but at his destination he secured translators and other
helpers and had the hearty coöperation of Americans already there. His
mission, carried on by every available means, was to oppose German
propaganda and spread the truth about America. Publication was procured
for news by wireless and cable and for descriptive articles by mail,
while pamphlets and leaflets were widely distributed. Particularly
well organized and efficient was the machinery for the sending of news
by wireless and cable which carried to all the nations of the earth,
except Germany and her allies, two thousand words every day about
what America was purposing and accomplishing for the war. Until this
machinery was started the neutral nations knew next to nothing of what
this country was doing except through the perversions and outright
lies of German agents. It was by this means that President Wilson’s
addresses and messages had almost world-wide distribution as soon as
they were published in the home country and the advantage was gained of
the striking influence they everywhere exerted.
Next to the news service in importance was the influence exercised by
the moving picture films, which everywhere won favor almost instantly,
aroused the greatest interest, by their better quality crowded out
the German films and in every country brought straight to the people
such knowledge of Americans, of their every day life, of their purpose
in the war and of their wonderful achievements for its prosecution
as amazed them and greatly helped to turn the general sentiment as
much in favor of as it had previously been against the United States.
These pictures, on the civilian side, were gathered from every phase
of American life, showing our cities, our agriculture, our educational
institutions, our industries, our homes, our manifold efforts for
social welfare, and were used to correct the deplorably mistaken
conceptions about this country which had gained vogue almost all over
the world. They were always followed by pictures of war work, such as
training camp activities, aviation fields, ship building and other
matters, with films also of our camps and troops in France.
A Foreign Press Bureau had the services of a long list of authors
and publicists, many of them of wide reputation in our own and
other countries. It sent every week to each one of the foreign
representatives of the Committee a budget of matter that supplemented
the daily news service and covered every phase of American life and
endeavor. From the different countries came requests by cable for
articles on specific subjects of the greatest variety which were
prepared by specialists. One of these articles was reprinted by the
British Government for use in England, where it distributed 800,000
copies. Through this Bureau and in connection with the matter it issued
went posters, captioned in the language of each country to which
they were sent, and millions of picture postals and photographs. The
Committee representatives in the various lands commandeered the show
windows of American business houses and kept up in them a frequently
changed display of posters, bulletins and pictures.
In some countries reading rooms were established equipped with American
newspapers, magazines and books and decorated with American posters
and photographs, and in some cases classes were held in them for
the study of English. Sometimes men of American citizenship and of
thorough patriotism were sent back to their native countries to talk
to and with the people concerning America. A company of newspaper
editors from each of several countries toured the United States as
guests of the Committee on Public Information and others from Spain,
Switzerland, Holland and the Scandinavian countries were taken through
the districts of American war works and camps in France. What they saw
was so different from their preconceived and Germany-perverted ideas
and made such a revolution in their minds that it changed the tone of
their papers and had a notable influence upon public opinion in their
respective countries.
German propaganda was busy against America even in the countries of
our war associates where it sought to undermine confidence in us,
create suspicion of our purposes and in each one instill the fear that
the United States would join some other of the Allies against that
particular one. This presented a problem easier to deal with than
did the neutral countries because the Committee had the coöperation
of the respective governments. The same means were used as in the
neutral countries, the moving picture being a particularly efficient
instrument in the work. Russia was the only country in which the
Committee failed to win its purpose. Its representatives there worked
hard and zealously, but Russia was so big and inarticulate, the German
propaganda had behind it such vast sums of money and the Bolsheviki,
as soon as they gained the upper hand, shut down so completely upon
all freedom of expression except for their own ideas and purposes that
they had finally to give up their struggle. But they had used the
opportunity to spread information among the advancing German troops, to
leave the seeds of some knowledge of America and her desires and aims,
and they did achieve some worth-while results in Siberia and in the
prison camps of Russia.
Some of the most interesting and valuable work done by the Committee
in this war of ideas was in connection with its effort, in which it
coöperated with the War Department, to inject some real knowledge of
America into the enemy’s troops and into the country behind his armies.
The Committee prepared most of the material for this purpose, among
those engaged upon the effort to make it efficient being authors,
historians, journalists, and advertising and psychological specialists,
while the military forces undertook the job of distribution. Immense
quantities of material, pamphlets, leaflets, short, pungent statements,
speeches, facts about America’s war preparations and intentions, were
dropped by the ton upon the troops of the Central Powers and behind
the lines upon cities and towns and countrysides. They were carried by
airplanes which spread the documents far and wide, they were thrown
by rifle grenades, by rockets and by a specially developed type of
gun. Balloons of various kinds rained literature upon armies and the
country just behind them. Kites dropped leaflets upon the trenches. An
American invention was a specialized balloon with a metal container for
the literature and a control attachment governing the movements of the
balloon and the distribution of the ten thousand leaflets it carried.
There can be no doubt of the effectiveness of this campaign upon the
minds of the enemy’s people because, in the first place, both the
German and the Austro-Hungarian governments went to the most extreme
lengths in the effort to combat it, making death the penalty for
touching the literature. Nevertheless, the majority of the prisoners
captured by the Americans had it in their pockets. In the next place,
the influence of it became evident after the war closed in the temper
and attitude of the enemy peoples and their determination to discard
crowns and thrones and set up democratic governments. President
Wilson’s speeches were found to be especially effective, each one that
was sent across the lines being followed invariably by increasing
ferment and dissatisfaction among the people. Into Germany, when the
German censor had mutilated one of these speeches and distorted its
meaning, the Committee at once sent the entire speech in German with
the omitted and distorted parts properly printed in red. The result
was so evident that the German government soon began to print the
President’s addresses correctly and in full.
It was a difficult fight that the Committee waged outside of the home
country and the lands of our co-belligerents, for it had to meet a
tricky foe who already held possession and would and did use all manner
of insidious means and lying statements. But everywhere the Committee
presented its claims frankly and openly, telling the authorities just
what it wanted to do and what its methods would be, offering to the
people plain and true statements and depending upon their honesty,
intelligence and sense of justice. One large factor in its success
was undoubtedly this openness and honesty of purpose and methods.
The completeness with which public opinion in the neutral countries
finally swung to the side of the United States and the Allies, the
collapse of civilian Germany and the decay of morale among the German
and Austro-Hungarian troops all helped to prove the importance and the
success of its long, hard struggle. Just how great a portion of these
developments was due to the Committee’s work can not yet be estimated.
But, because mind and spirit dominate force and its weapons were wholly
those of mind and spirit, it is already evident that it deserves no
small measure of credit.