1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  “We are being forged into a new unity amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world,” he proclaimed. “In their ardent heat we shall, in God’s providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and division.” By “faction and division,” Wilson now meant dissent from his vision of what America was fighting for, and why it was fighting. How far he was willing to go to purge that dissent would become clear in the following months.

  His first step in doing so came with his creation of the Committee on Public Information, or CPI, on April 13, 1917, and his appointment as its first head the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, George Creel.

  Forty-one years old and with something of a reputation as a muckraking journalist, Creel had been a Wilson enthusiast as far back as 1905, when Wilson was still president of Princeton University. During the 1916 election, Creel had published a book, Wilson and the Issues, which proclaimed, “It is the capacity of a people for self-government that is on trial. It is the honesty, intelligence, and faith of the mass that are up for judgment. There is not a lie that has been told that lacks its answer; there is not a slander for which refutation cannot be found; there is not an ugly charge that does not come clean in the light of truth. It remains to be seen whether the people of the United States prefer facts to clamor, fairness to betrayal, and democracy to oligarchy; in a word, whether they are able to think for themselves.”3

  It was precisely to ensure that the American people didn’t think for themselves that Creel would throw himself into his job at the Committee on Public Information. “To Creel there are only two classes of men,” a friend once said. “There are skunks and the greatest man in the world.”4 That greatest man in 1917 was Woodrow Wilson. The skunks were Wilson’s opponents, who, after April 6, included Germany and anyone sympathizing with it.

  Shortly after the declaration of war, Creel was one of Wilson’s first visitors at the White House. Into his hands the president would entrust mobilizing the nation’s public opinion.

  That was not going to be easy. Despite widespread stories of German atrocities in Belgium and the release of the Zimmermann telegram, the American public was still not entirely convinced that going to war was a good idea. Pacifists such as leftist journalist Randolph Bourne and socialists such as Eugene Debs were voicing opposition to participating. Large numbers of descendants of Irish immigrants opposed becoming allies of Britain, especially in the wake of the bloody suppression of the 1916 Easter Rebellion.

  In addition, many American Jews were opposed to joining with Russia, given its legacy of pogroms and anti-Semitism. “If American Jews could be said to have sympathy for any side in World War I,” an article in the Jewish newspaper the Forward noted in 2014, “it would have been for the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary.”5 And for millions of Americans of German descent, their ties to their homeland were still real. They may not have been fans of the Kaiser, but they failed to see why Germany’s use of submarines to starve the enemy’s civilian population into submission was considered inhumane while Britain’s use of a naval blockade to achieve the same end was not.

  Getting a disparate and divided American public to rally around the war would require a two-pronged effort. The first part was to craft a positive message that would appeal to the American majority; the second was to limit access to negative messages that undercut or contradicted this positive narrative. The usual term for the first is propaganda; the term for the second is censorship. Creel recoiled from both. As he assumed the helm of the CPI, he was convinced he could generate a wave of enthusiasm for the war by propagating a message that was as truthful as it was upbeat.

  He scorned the idea of being Wilson’s propaganda minister. “That word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption,” he wrote later. “Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts.”6

  That “straightforward presentation” involved coordination with all the other federal agencies, as well as with many private businesses, ranging from newspapers and advertising agencies to movie studios. The Committee on Public Information, comprising seven separate divisions, created a panoply of initiatives and efforts that would not only generate public support for the war but also reshape American culture.

  The Division of Pictorial Publicity, for example, as led by Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the famed Gibson Girl, recruited America’s most celebrated artists and illustrators to the mobilization cause. Meanwhile, America’s media became the obedient conduit for the CPI’s Division of News, which bombarded the public with six thousand press releases a week. According to Creel’s memoirs, on any given week, more than twenty thousand newspaper columns carried material that the Division of News deemed fit to print—and all of it was free.

  The CPI’s Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation recruited respectable scholars to compose pamphlets urging support for the war; leading Progressives John Dewey and Walter Lippmann happily chimed in. A host of syndicated newspaper columnists were encouraged to spread the pro-war message to their readers, a total of twelve million Americans every day.

  Creel didn’t stop at the written word or the graphic image. The Division of Films also turned to the motion picture industry, still in its infancy, to mobilize pro-war, anti-German sentiment. Hollywood jumped in with both feet. As a 1917 editorial in Motion Picture News put it, “every individual at work in this industry wants to do his share,” so studios large and small got involved in churning out movies with titles such as The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin and Wolves of Kultur. They proved popular; a screening of To Hell with the Kaiser! triggered a riot when crowds couldn’t get tickets for admission.

  Recruiting moviemakers was a farsighted policy, not unlike recruiting social media or Instagram to carry government propaganda today. It also helped burnish the image of an industry that had seemed cheap and sleazy but that very much wanted to be seen as patriotic and respectable. Indeed, if any year marked the emergence of the American cinema as a positive conveyor of moral and civic values as well as entertainment, it was 1917.

  And the propaganda didn’t stop when the picture was over. As the last reel ended and the image faded from the screen, a message would regularly pop up: “Please remain seated. A representative of the government is to deliver an important message.” Then, one of the so-called “Four-Minute Men,” usually a government official or a prominent local businessman, would step onstage to deliver a rousing speech on America’s war aims, registering for the draft, buying Liberty Bonds, going meatless, or not driving your car one day a week—whatever was the latest campaign or narrative Creel and his team were working on.

  Nor was the style of delivery left to chance. Official instructions were passed along to the Four-Minute Men to “use short sentences . . . avoid fine phrases . . . Be natural and direct . . . Finish strong and sharp . . . Stick to the four minute limit.”7 There was even an effort to recruit African American speakers, especially clergy, to carry the messages to their communities, and a Women’s Division to promote the same thing at women’s clubs, luncheons, and church gatherings. Four-Minute Men worked with teachers to get their pupils to buy Liberty Bonds, or to urge their parents to do so. McAdoo’s use of Boy Scouts to promote the bonds overlapped with Creel’s message at CPI: the children of America expect their parents to do their patriotic duty.

  The result was a media storm that was coordinated, comprehensive, and virtually around-the-clock. In every newspaper an American citizen opened (except socialist papers, which were soon under pressure from Washington to shut down); at every street corner where he stopped at; in every trolley, ferry, train, or subway car he traveled on; at every school he visited and in every classroom his child attended, he was exhorted by word and image to buy Liberty Bonds, save gas or food, watch out for spies, hate the Kaiser, or join the U.S. Navy, Army, Marines, or Coast Guard—or kiss those who did. The famous poster of
Uncle Sam, “I Want You,” may have been inspired by British artist Alfred Leete’s 1914 poster of General Kitchener making the same commanding gesture at the viewer, but it also summed up a powerful message: acceptance of the United States’ role as arbiter of the new global order was going to require effort and sacrifice by every American.

  Later, Creel called the war “a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”8 Indeed, slogans crafted by the propaganda machine flew around the country like biblical proverbs. There were even some for Hoover’s Food Administration: “If U fast U beat U boats” and “Serve beans, by all means” and “Wheatless days in America make sleepless nights in Germany.” Or, at its most direct and simplest, “Pray hard, work hard, sleep hard, and play hard. Do it all courageously and cheerfully.”9

  Yet, even with Creel’s energy and innovative genius, the emphasis on projecting a positive message was not enough. Although Creel had been a vocal critic of censorship, the CPI early on took steps to limit the spread of information that could be deemed “defeatist” or “unpatriotic.” It began with setting voluntary guidelines for news media—guidelines that became increasingly nonvoluntary, or compulsory. That pointed the way to the passage, on June 15, 1917, of the Espionage Act, which was aimed ostensibly at halting the activity of German spies but which actually gave government officials wide latitude in limiting the spread of undesirable opinions—otherwise known as limiting free speech.

  This suited Wilson. On April 16, he had warned his fellow Americans that “failing to bear true allegiance to the United States” had consequences. He pointed out that the Constitution defined treason as “levying war” against the United States or “in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort” (Article III, Section 3). The U.S. Criminal Code included under the definition of giving aid and comfort “the performance of any act or the publication of statements or information which will give or supply in any way aid and comfort,” regardless of intent. Wilson concluded: “I hereby proclaim and warn all citizens of the United States and all aliens, owing allegiance to the United States, to abstain from committing any and all acts which would constitute a violation of any of the laws herein set forth.”10 How far was he willing to go to suppress activity, including speeches and publications, he considered treasonous? The Espionage Act gave him and his attorney general, Thomas Gregory, a fierce Texas Progressive, the opportunity to push the envelope.

  The case that summer involved the radical labor union the Industrial Workers of the World. Founded in 1905, the IWW, or “Wobblies,” as they were known, had a history of provoking labor violence, including participating in the murder of half a dozen policemen during the bloody Pressed Steel Car Company strike in Pennsylvania in 1909. The IWW had tried unsuccessfully to organize strikes on both coasts in 1916; the attempts had cost it members, until its numbers shrank to fewer than four hundred.

  The coming of war, however, revived the IWW’s fortunes. Its numbers swelled into the tens of thousands, but when it tried to organize strikes against the war mobilization, the members and their president, Bill Haywood, found themselves on the receiving end of the violence, by angry miners in the West. In Montana, IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched, and in Bisbee, Arizona, twelve hundred striking copper miners who had joined the IWW were loaded onto cattle cars and shipped to the middle of the New Mexico desert, where they were dumped without food or water.11

  Copper was one of the vital strategic metals for the war effort, and Bernard Baruch of the War Industries Board was determined not to let any strike interfere with the flow of copper to American munitions factories. Baruch and mine owner John D. Ryan found a ready ally in the Citizens Protective League, an offshoot of the American Protective League, a semi-vigilante group that sprang up in May 1917 to root out spies and traitors in the nation’s midst, and that wasn’t afraid to go where legal authorities feared to tread. By June, the APL had grown to a quarter million members; with the support and connivance of Attorney General Gregory, it became the unofficial enforcement arm of the Espionage Act.12

  Under siege from Wilson, the APL, the Justice Department, and statutory law, the IWW didn’t stand a chance. When Bill Haywood wrote to Wilson protesting the Bisbee incident, Wilson contemptuously handed the letter to Gregory, saying Haywood was only aiming to be a “martyr,” and adding in his own letter to American Federation of Labor (AFL) president Samuel Gompers, “[W]e must oppose at home the organized and individual efforts of these dangerous elements who hide disloyalty behind a screen of specious and evasive phrases.”13

  With Wilson’s approval, Gregory set out to destroy the IWW once and for all. On September 5, investigators raided IWW offices in thirty-three cities, looking for evidence of the group’s having received covert German financial support. When none was found, Gregory’s attorneys sifted through the mountains of files, memos, and diaries until they had found enough evidence to support charges of sedition under the ever-useful Espionage Act. Three weeks later, on September 28—just as Douglas Haig was getting ready to renew his attack along the Ypres Salient—no fewer than 166 IWW organizers were indicted on charges relating to the Espionage Act and other laws. When their case went to trial the next year, many drew sentences of twenty years’ imprisonment.

  They were the lucky ones. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, local authorities turned over seventeen Wobblies to the Ku Klux Klan, who tarred and feathered them. Their crime? Not having bought Liberty Bonds. When the IWW men were on trial for their “crime,” five people testified on their behalf; they wound up being tarred and feathered, too.14

  By 1918, the IWW and the entire radical labor movement were on the run. Yet Wilson did not think of himself as antilabor. He had signed an eight-hour-workday bill during his first term, and that November, he was the first president to address a labor union convention, telling those assembled for the AFL meeting in Buffalo, “[W]hile we are fighting for freedom, we must see . . . that labor is free [at home] . . . I am with you if you are with me.”15 In the aftermath of the Bisbee incident, Wilson appointed a commission, headed by a young Harvard Law professor named Felix Frankfurter, to figure out how to prevent future labor clashes. Inevitably, a new federal bureau came into existence, the National War Labor Board, made up of labor and industry leaders and co-chaired by former president William H. Taft, to deal with the problem.16

  All the same, radicals don’t easily tolerate the presence of other radicals, and Wilson was radical in his vision of an America marching in lockstep into war with a unity of industry, government, and labor that would brook no opposition or dissent—a vision that later would be known as corporatism, or even fascism.17

  Trotsky and Lenin shared aspects of that vision. Later, they would put in place a version in Russia that would make Wilson’s look remarkably laissez-faire. In 1917, what separated them, and American radicals and socialists like Bill Haywood from Wilson was the issue of the war. For Wilson, it was going to serve as a springboard to a bright new future. For them, it would be more of the same: capitalism oppressing, cheating, and killing the masses, not in factories or mines this time but on the battlefield.

  America’s entry into World War I, in other words, was more than a point of arrival in world history. It was also a point of departure—one at which Wilson, for all his liberal Progressivism, parted company with those who had, in many ways, a vision of America similar to his domestically, but who saw in the intervention on the side of the Allies a great and catastrophic leap into the dark unknown, one that we are still coming to grips with today.18

  Of course, given the IWW’s violent record, someone could make the argument that the Wobblies were simply getting as good as they gave. That rationalization didn’t apply to Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs. No apostle of violence, the former presidential candidate saw his outspoken opposition to the war run afoul of provisions of the popularly known “Sedition Act,” a rider to the Espionage Act. The Sedition Act, which Wilson signed on May 16, 1918, made it ille
gal to speak, print, write, or publish any “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution, the military, or the flag—certainly the single most restrictive gag on free speech and freedom of the press in U.S. history.

  Wilson’s postmaster general, Albert Burleson, had already declared war on the Socialist Party by yanking second-class postal rates for a series of socialist-minded periodicals, including The Masses, the Milwaukee Leader, the New York Call, and the paper Trotsky had written for, the Forward.19 Soon delivery stopped altogether. In October 1917, Masses editor Max Eastman found himself indicted under the Espionage Act, along with cartoonist Art Young and a fellow editor, a twentysomething Harvard graduate named John Reed, who would soon earn his place in Lenin’s world as well as Wilson’s.

  Eastman, Young, and Reed’s trial ended in acquittal, but with the passage of the Sedition Act, the government tried again in September 1918. Again, the editorial team was acquitted, but The Masses was forced to close its doors. With Eastman clearly in the crosshairs, Debs’s indictment was almost inevitable. In the end, Debs would draw a ten-year sentence for making a single antidraft speech. Wilson ignored several appeals by prominent figures to lift or at least moderate the sentence. The next time Debs ran for president, in 1920, it would be from behind bars, as Convict No. 9653 in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

  If Wilson had some lingering sympathy for those on his left—when he received letters from his friend Amos Pinchot protesting the indictment of Max Eastman, he forwarded them on to Attorney General Gregory with a note that read, “[H]is letter, I must admit, made some impression upon me”—his feelings toward German Americans ran in a very different direction.