Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [41]
“In 1909-1910, 58 percent of American cities had a press that was varied both in ownership and perspective,” Stuart Ewen wrote in his classic Captains of Consciousness.By 1920, the same percentage represented those cities in which the press was controlled by an information monopoly. By 1930, 80 percent of American cities had given way to a press monopoly. The role and influence of advertising revenues multiplied thirteen-fold (from $200 million to $2.6 billion), and it was the periodicals, both the dailies and others, which acted as a major vehicle for this growth.12
Creel was, in many ways, the godfather of modern public relations. John Dos Passos called him “a little shrimp of a man with burning dark eyes set in an ugly face under a shock of curly hair.”13 He came from a poor Virginian family, fiercely loyal to the Confederate cause, which had migrated to Missouri after the Civil War. He had worked as a reporter for Kansas City newspapers and as a muckraking journalist for New York magazines. He was married to Blanche Bates, a well-known stage actress, and he was endowed with supreme self-confidence, boundless energy, and a penchant for a binary view of the world that painted reality in bold strokes of black and white. “To Creel,” wrote journalist Mark Sullivan, “there are only two classes of men. There are skunks and the greatest man that ever lived. The greatest man that ever lived is plural and includes everyone who is on Creel’s side in whatever public issue he happens at the moment to be concerned with.” It had to be admitted, Creel wrote of himself, “that an open mind is not part of my inheritance. I took in prejudices with mother’s milk and was weaned on partisanship.”14
Creel’s power—he had direct access to Wilson—was resented by many in Washington, and after his usefulness ebbed with the war’s end, he would never regain his prominence, although he made many attempts. He was involved following the war in two shady business deals, the first as part of a sleazy Manhattan-based mail-order business, the Pelman Institute of America, which peddled a self-improvement scheme called “Pelmanism.” It promised to teach people “how to think; how to use fully powers of which they are conscious; how to discover and to train the power of which they have been unconscious.” It promised subscribers that “Pelmanism” produced salary increases “from 20 to 200 percent.” He later was mixed up in the Teapot Dome oil scandal and admitted before a 1924 Senate investigation that he had accepted a check for $5,000 to convince Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, whom he had worked with during the war, to lease two government-owned oil fields to private oil interests. He ran against Upton Sinclair in the 1934 Democratic primary for governor of California and lost. Franklin Roosevelt, who had had enough of Creel’s arrogance during World War I, when Roosevelt had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, rejected Creel’s requests to work in the Office of War Information during World War II. Creel ended his life as a fervent anticommunist and a champion of right-wing causes who worked with Senator Joseph McCarthy and Representative Richard Nixon during the Red Scare of the late 1940s. It was a fitting conclusion.
Creel knew that his task of selling the war would require emasculating powerful social movements that not only had opposed the war but also had exposed the brutality and ruthlessness of major industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller. Labor unions, progressive journalists, pacifists, isolationists, the large number of immigrants who disliked the British, and some one million Socialists, led by Debs—who announced at Cooper Union in New York City on March 7, 1917, that he would rather be shot as a traitor than “go to war for Wall Street”15—would prove to be obstacles to Wilson’s war if left alone. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or