Books: CPI

WORDS THAT WON THE WAR—James R. Mock & Cedric Larson—Princeton ($3.75).

Two years ago the National Archives in Washington, D. C. dispatched big trucks to the Munitions Building at 20th Street and Constitution Avenue to clear its basement of an all-but-forgotten stock of yellowing records. They were the files of the Committee on Public Information, better known as the Creel Committee of the World War, one of the most successful propaganda ministries of all time. Mysteriously, three-fourths of the files had disappeared.*

But the remaining fourth—the majority of which Authors Mock & Larson were the first to comb—told a true story, fascinating both as history and as a civics lesson, doubly absorbing in relation to the present times.

The work of the Creel Committee was well absorbed by most U. S. citizens—the younger generation, it has been said, never quite recovered. Not easily forgotten were the Creel Committee’s Halt the Hun posters, with their spidery villains; its movies, with riotous queues fighting to see that gory thriller, The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin; its 75,000 spellbinding Four-Minute Men; its Red, White and Blue pamphlets, in which famed history professors rewrote German history; its National School Service (circulation: 20,000,000 homes); its syndicated news (20,000 columns a week), boiler-plate ads, feature stories by such writers as Mary Roberts Rinehart, Booth Tarkington, Rex Beach. Few have forgotten the CPI’s war expositions, its traveling French officers, such stunts as Theda Bara in her Liberty Bond booth before the New York Public Library (receipts: $300,000 in one day). But the most voluminous memory will be surprised at the scope of the CPI in Words that Won the War.

Authors Mock & Larson also correct many a misconception about the CPI. One of these is that the Creel Committee was entirely responsible for converting a neutral-minded public into a rabid war mob overnight. A lot of neutrality had crumbled away before George Creel finished it off. From Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay to Ambassador Page in London, most of the “best people” in the U. S. had been pro-Ally from the start. On March 11, “War Sunday” had sounded the call to arms in the nation’s churches. Four weeks before war the Railroad Brotherhoods said their threatened strike would be called off in event of war. Nicholas Murray Butler’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had for several months been whooping up war spirit. Creel’s hand was seen, however, in the speedy passage of the Espionage Act of June 15, the Sedition Act of May 16, 1918.

George Creel, the genius of the CPI and Horrible Exhibit No. 1 of the last 20 years’ anti-war propaganda, was no Goebbels, but a Wilsonian from way back. A Kansas City reporter, editor for a decade of the semi-literary Kansas City Independent, he wrote verse, stories, jokes, songs, social-minded articles, was a hard-hitting muckraker on the Denver Post and later the Rocky Mountain News when he plumped for Wilson in 1911. His wife, Actress Blanche Bates, was a friend of Wilson’s daughter Margaret. Creel thought up the CPI as a Wilsonian answer to the ironclad military censorship threatened immediately after the U. S. entered the War. “Expression not repression,” was his slogan. His right-hand men were Edgar Grant Sisson, Progressive Republican and ex-editor of Collier’s and the Cosmopolitan; Harvey J. O’Higgins, author and playwright; Carl Byoir, exponent of the Montessori system of progressive education (now head of the big public-relations firm of Carl Byoir and Associates).

Like Wilson, Creel disapproved of lies, distortion, deplored the “civic shell shock” which prompted one patriot to suggest importing Belgian children with German amputated hands. He thought it childish to ban German-language study in schools, denounced a newspaper cartoon which shamed workers for asking overtime, deplored the national hysteria which his Committee had so successfully fostered. As Dr. Jekyll-Creel he said sincerely: “The CPI is without the slightest authority to decide what constitutes seditious utterances or disloyal attitude”; but as member of the Censorship Board Mr. Hyde-Creel had plenty of authority to crack down on the press. Like Wilson, he discovered the basic dilemma of a democracy at war: how to suppress democracy in the name of democracy.

If the U. S. gets into World War II, would the CPI be revived? Authors Mock & Larson’s answer: Yes. Better the CPI, say they, “as buffer between military dictatorship and civil life,” than censorship of the British and French variety. “If another war should come to this country,” say the authors, “no American would need to read the story of the CPI. He would relive it.”

*Part of the files were done away with by that curious scavenging bureau, the “Useless Papers Committee.” Main mystery: where is the rest of the body buried?