Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [39]
The newspapers, with Creel feeding them propaganda packaged as news releases, began a relentless campaign of manipulation of public opinion thinly disguised as journalism. The papers not only published without protest the worst drivel handed to them by the CPI, including manufactured stories of German atrocities and war crimes, but in their news pages questioned the patriotism of dissenters.
“RADICALS AT WORK FOR GERMAN PEACE,” read a June 24, 1917, headline in the New York Times, with a subhead adding, “Well-Financed Propaganda Has Ample Quarters and Staff and Is Flooding Country. TAKES IDEAS FROM RUSSIA[.] Proposes Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates Here to Run the War.”
“A group of men and women, representing all shades of radical and pacifist opinion, have combined to carry on a campaign in this country to create sentiment in favor of peace along lines advocated by the most radical and visionary of Russia Revolutionists,” the article began.In other words, the peace which they will agitate for in every part of the country will be just such a peace as persons best informed as to the views of the Kaiser and his absolutist followers say the German Government favors. It is not denied by some persons prominent in the new propaganda that if Germany should cease its submarine warfare they would advocate the United States deserting the Allies and concluding a separate peace with Berlin.
In this new peace-at-any-price organization are a number of Germans and a great many radicals of other origin. The organization is called the People’s Council of America and is said to have the support of various organizations, such as the Collegiate Anti-Militarist League, two members of which were convicted last week of conspiracy to obstruct the military laws of the nation; the Emergency Peace Federation, which was so busy in the days immediately preceding the declaration of war against Germany, and the so-called American Union against Militarism.
The People’s Council, as they call it, apparently has strong financial backing. It has a large suite of rooms in the Educational Building, at 70 Fifth Avenue, where a score of stenographers and secretaries are busy sending out letters and literature urging, among other things, the organization in the United States of a “Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Committee” such as now exists in Russia.
In one of the pamphlets now being mailed occurs this statement:
“It is hoped that our own People’s Council will voice the peace will of America as unmistakably and effectively as the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates in speaking for Russia.”
Another document which is being mailed says that the organization is working for “an early, general and democratic peace, to be secured through negotiation and in harmony with the principles outlined by the new Russia,” while in another place it denounces the President, by plain inference, when it is stated that “America has yielded the honor of leading in peace and is now a participant in the international carnage.”
“Every day,” another propaganda sheet issued in the name of the organization says, “the constitutional rights [of] free speech, free press and free assembly are being assaulted.”
At the offices of the council it was frankly stated that the intention of those behind the agitation was to flood the country with propaganda, and that speakers and agitators would be sent to every part of the country. Joseph D. Cannon, a labor leader, has been delegated to agitate among the miners of the West; A. W. Ricker, a magazine editor, will try to gain a foothold for the organization among the farmers of the Northwest; James D. Maurer, the Pennsylvania labor agitator, will devote his efforts to the great labor centres in the State, while Professor L. M. Keasbey of the University of Texas and an