Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [42]
Wilson’s initial worries about lukewarm public support proved well grounded. Enlistment rates were paltry with only seventy-three thousand young men volunteering for the army between April and the middle of May. The government was forced to institute conscription. It was then that Creel went to work.
Creel and his associates, which included artists, cartoonists, graphic designers, filmmakers, journalists, and public relations experts, saturated the cultural and intellectual life of the country with war propaganda. It did this by crossing the traditional boundaries of propaganda. It created the Division of Syndicated Features, one of nineteen divisions, which hired novelists, short-story writers, and essayists. These fiction writers masked the pro-war and pro-government message, in an example of social realism, in stories that reached an estimated twelve million people a month. Posters and ads in support of the war blanketed the country. Hollywood, which had a deserved reputation for sleaze, churned out war favourites such as The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin, Wolves of Kultur, and Pershing’s Crusaders. A movie titled To Hell with the Kaiser was so popular that Massachusetts riot police were summoned to deal with an angry mob denied admission. The film division nearly made enough money to pay for itself.
Creel’s committee established direct relationships with eighteen thousand newspapers, eleven thousand national advertisers and advertising agencies, ten thousand chambers of commerce, thirty thousand manufacturers’ associations, twenty-two thousand labor unions, ten thousand public libraries, thirty-two thousand banks, fifty-eight thousand general stores, 3,500 YMCA branches, ten thousand members of the Council of National Defense, one thousand advertising clubs, fifty-six thousand post offices, fifty-five thousand station agents, five thousand draft boards, one hundred thousand Red Cross chapters, and twelve thousand manufacturers’ agents.16 All were showered daily with war propaganda tailored specifically toward their interests and members. And the few institutions reluctant to spew out war propaganda were shut down.
In a 1920 memoir titled How We Advertised America, Creel wrote that the “war was not fought in France alone”:It was the fight for the minds of men, for the “conquest of their convictions,” and the battle-line ran through every home in every country.
It was in this recognition of Public Opinion as a major force that the Great War differed most essentially from all previous conflicts. The trial of strength was not only between massed bodies of armed men, but between opposed ideals, and moral verdicts took on all the value of military decisions. . . . In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising. . . .
There was no part of the great war machinery that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board—all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms. . . . What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.
The committee manufactured daily news stories through its news bureau that were run in the nation’s newspapers. It provided a syndicated news service to disseminate “facts” about the war. It had a foreign language division, with a large group of translators, to plant pro-American stories in the foreign press. It established a speaker’s bureau thanks to which speakers,