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known as “four-minute men,” would get up in crowded movie houses, in churches, at civic functions, or even on the street to deliver pro-war messages and raise money for Liberty Loan drives. By the war’s end Creel had some seventy-five thousand speakers who gave four-minute talks on topics prepared for them by the committee. Creel called them “the stentorian guard.” The CPI published “Red, White and Blue Books,” containing essays by prominent academics and historians, including John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, who argued for the war. Newspapers were never directly censored but were given guidelines and flooded with pro-war reports from the committee that were reprinted as news.

“CPI posters were in every post office,” Dos Passos wrote. “CPI information bulletins were on every bulletin board. Country weeklies and trade journals were nourished on Creel’s boilerplate. In an astonishing short time George Creel had the entire nation—except of course the disreputable minority who insisted on forming their own opinions—repeating every slogan which emanated from the President’s desk in the wordy war to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ ”17

The few figures who resisted, such as Bourne, Addams, Debs, Emma Goldman, or Bertrand Russell, became pariahs. The press accused them, with Creel’s help, of being disloyal and pro-German. Addams, the socialist founder of Hull House in Chicago, which provided aid to poor and working-class families, was booed when she spoke against the war at Carnegie Hall and branded by the New York Times as unpatriotic. She noted the shift in the press as early as 1915, when the papers began to “make pacifist activity or propaganda so absurd that it would be absolutely without influence and its authors so discredited that nothing they might say or do would be regarded as worthy of attention.” She went on to write, in Peace and Bread in Time of War, that “this concerted attempt at misrepresentation on the part of newspapers of all shades of opinion was quite new to my experience.”18 Voices of dissent were silenced under the onslaught. Appeal to Reason, a socialist journal founded in 1897 that provided an outlet for writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Mary “Mother” Jones, and Debs, had by 1902 the fourth highest circulation at 150,000 of any weekly in the nation. It opposed the war—not unusual for a publication at the start of the war—but its attempt to hold to its antiwar stance soon saw it come under tremendous pressure. The Espionage Act, making it an offence to publish material that undermined the war effort, effectively censored its content. The Masses, another left-wing journal, decided to cease publication for the duration of the war, but Appeal to Reason buckled and reluctantly agreed to back the war effort. The effect of Creel’s work on American debate and culture was cataclysmic.

“German courses were dropped from schools and colleges,” Dos Passos wrote.German dishes disappeared from the bills of fare. Sauerkraut became known as liberty cabbage, German measles was renamed. German clover appeared in the seed catalogues as crimson or liberty clover. All manifestations of foreign culture became suspect. German operas were dropped from the repertory. The drive against German music culminated in the arrest of Dr. Carl Muck, the elderly and much admired conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.19

The virus of nationalism infected every aspect of society. Dachshunds were renamed liberty dogs. The City University of New York reduced by one credit every course in German. Fourteen states banned the speaking of German in public schools. German-Americans, like Japanese-Americans in World War II, provided convenient scapegoats. An angry mob in Van Houten, New Mexico, accused an immigrant miner of supporting Germany. The mob forced him to kneel before them, kiss the flag, and shout, “To hell with the Kaiser.” Robert Prager, a German-born coal miner, was accused in April 1918 by a crowd that swelled to 500 people of hoarding explosives outside of St. Louis. Prager, who had tried to enlist in