George Creel The Committee on Public Information (CPI), also known as the Creel Committee, organized publicity on behalf of U.S. objectives during World War I. In 1917, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson tapped muckraking journalist George Creel [1] to head the CPI. At the time, a strong current of public opinion in the United States opposed Wilson's plan to enter the war in Europe, and in fact Wilson had run for re-election in 1916 on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." In a 1920 memoir, titled How We Advertised America, Creel wrote that the "war was not fought in France alone": To accomplish these goal, Creel reached out to the entertainment and advertising industries and developing a complex, sophisticated and diverse array of propaganda techniques:
Historian Robert H. Zieger calls the work of the CPI "an outstanding success. A vast army was raised. A polyglot population showed few signs of disloyalty or disaffection. Liberty Loan drives were all oversubscribed, Red Cross contributions and a dozen other war -support causes were successful." But while the Creel committee's efforts to sell the war were successful, its slogans of "the war to end war" and "making the world safe for democracy" were cruel illusions. In reality, the First World War laid the seeds for the rise of fascism, followed by the Second World War and a series of subsequent wars from which peace has yet to emerge. Contents
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