CHAPTER XXIVINFORMING 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, movingpicture 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 officewas 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 personalappeal, 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 Devilsâ€â€”a Belgian regiment, and a company of American doughboys sent back from the front for this purpose were severally conducted atvarious 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 permissionof 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 convictionof 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 andenergy. 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 languageof 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 wereused 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 byrifle 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.