Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [38]
“Truth and Falsehood are arbitrary terms,” Bullard wrote. “There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other. . . . There are lifeless truths and vital lies. . . . The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.”
Bullard proposed to Wilson that the government form a large “publicity bureau, which would constantly keep before the public the importance of supporting the men at the front. It would requisition space on the front page of every newspaper; it would call for a ‘draft’ of trained writers to feed ‘army stories’ to the public; it would create a Corps of Press Agents. . . . In order to make democracy fight wholeheartedly,” he said, “it is necessary to make them understand the situation.”
Bullard, whose papers I sifted through one afternoon at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, argued strenuously against Wilson’s desire for overt censorship. Walter Lippmann, in a private letter to the president on March 11, reiterated Bullard’s call for a government publicity bureau. He told Wilson the war had to be sold to a skeptical public by fostering “a healthy public opinion.”7 Lippmann, especially in his 1922 book Public Opinion, emerges as perhaps the darkest figure of the period. He assumes the intellectual role of the Grand Inquisitor, fearful of popular rule and brilliant enough to know how to manipulate public opinion. The war would prove him to be extremely prescient, and Public Opinion became a bible to the new power elite.
Wilson got the message. He agreed to set up the bureau Lippmann and Bullard proposed and turn it over to progressives and artists. “It is not an army we must shape and train for war, it is a nation,” he stated.8 A week after the war was declared, the president established the Committee for Public Information (CPI). The CPI, headed by a former muckraker named George Creel, which became popularly known as the Creel Commission, would become the first modern mass propaganda machine. Its goal was not, as Creel confessed, simply to impart pro-war messages but to discredit those who attempted to challenge the nation’s involvement in the conflict. And Creel, who knew the world of journalism, set out to demolish decentralized and diverse systems of information. He recalled that during the period of neutrality before the war, the nationhad been torn by a thousand divisive prejudices, with public opinion stunned and muddled by the pull and haul of Allied and German propaganda. The sentiment in the West was still isolationist; the Northwest buzzed with talk of a “rich man’s war,” waged to salvage Wall Street loans; men and women of Irish stock were “neutral,” not caring who whipped England, and in every stage demagogues raved against “warmongers,” although the Du Ponts and other so-called “merchants of death” did not have enough powder on hand to arm squirrel hunters.9
News, which had previously grown out of local discourses and public discussions, which reflected local public sentiment and concerns upward, would be dictated from above. It would have to deliver a consistent drumbeat of propaganda, a consistent pro-war narrative, and shut out or discredit dissenting views. It would have to leech off the news pages into every aspect of the nation’s cultural life, from theater to film to novels to advertisements. The wide diversity of newspapers, and with them the diversity of opinions, concerns, and outlooks, had to be managed and controlled. All information about the war would come from one source, a practice that in later generations would be codified as “staying on message.” There would be a total uniformity of ideas. Creel’s efforts—his bureau would employ thousands by the war’s end—had the twin effect of saturating the country with propaganda and dismantling the local, independent press. The committee would, by the time the war ended, see the president lionized by Secretary