George Creel

“ Censorship laws, too, even though they protest that the protection of military secrets is their one original object, have a way of slipping over into the field of opinion, for arbitrary power grows by what it feeds on. "Information of value to the enemy" is an elastic phrase and, when occasion requires, can be stretched to cover the whole field of independent discussion. Nothing, it seemed to me, was more dangerous, for people did not need less criticism in tune of war, but more. Incompetence and corruption, bad enough in peace, took on an added menace when the nation was in arms. ”

“ Nobody could deny that the chief credit lies with the Chief Executive of this nation. As to all the rest, it is glory enough and credit enough to have been permitted to serve under his leadership, and in the cause of which he was the leader; but I want to close what I have to say by pointing out that the mobilization of America, superb as it was, was a mobilization not of men alone, nor of money, nor of industry or labor, but a mobilization of true appreciation of the rights of man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our minds naturally dwell chiefly upon the physical things that have been done. There are many people in this room who have been in Europe since we entered this war, and nobody could possibly go to France, enter a port, and travel from any port of France to the front-line trenches without recognizing the energy and efficiency of his own nation; the strength and skill of his own fellow-countrymen; the inventive genius of America; the large capacity for industrial output of America stamped all over France. ”

“ 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. All that was fine and ardent in the civilian population came at our call until more than one hundred and fifty thousand men and women were devoting highly specialized abilities to the work of the Committee, as faithful and devoted in their service as though they wore the khaki. ”

“ Even to-day, when the war is a thing of the past, can it be said that the card contained a word or a phrase to which any decent American could take objection? Newspaper men, it must be remembered, were holding peace-time jobs while others sacrificed or fought. Should it not have been their glad duty to aid enthusiastically in the provision of a veil of secrecy that meant larger safety for American ships and troops and larger chances for American military success? ”

“ While America's summons was answered without question by the citizenship as a whole, it is to be remembered that during the three and a half years of our neutrality the land had been torn by a thousand divisive prejudices, stunned by the voices of anger and confusion, and muddled by the pull and haul of opposed interests. ”

“ Our policies, America's unselfish aims in the war, the services by which these policies were explained and these aims supported, and the flood of news items and articles about our normal life and our commonplace activities— these combined to give a true picture of the United States to foreign eyes. It is a picture that will be of incalculable value in our future dealings with the world, political and commercial. It was a bit of press-agenting that money could not buy, done out of patriotism by men and women whose services no money could have bought. ”

“ Nothing was more important than that there should be the least possible impairment of the people's confidence in the printed information presented to them. Suspicious enough by reason of natural anxieties, a censorship law would have turned every waiting heart over to the fear that news was being either strangled or minimized.
Aside from these considerations, there was the freedom of the press to bear in mind. No other right guaranteed by democracy has been more abused, but even these abuses are preferable to the deadening evil of autocratic control. ”

“ We shall be telling the new-comers on the stage of life, or those who were very young while the war was on, of the unselfishness of the sacrifices which were made, of the beauty of community co-operation, and of the great strength of a nation which is strengthened by high purposes. We shall be telling them all the rest of our lives, and I say we because we share with the soldiers who went to France the dignity and the glory of having fought as they fought, along a somewhat different front and with not quite the same peril ”

“ We fought prejudice, indifference, and disaffection at home and we fought ignorance and falsehood abroad. We strove for the maintenance of our own morale and the Allied morale by every process of stimulation; every possible expedient was employed to break through the barrage of lies that kept the people of the Central Powers in darkness and delusion; we sought the friendship and support of the neutral nations by continuous presentation of facts. We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. ”

“ Every conceivable means was used to reach the foreign mind with America's message, and in addition to our direct approach we hit upon the idea of inviting the foremost newspaper men of other nations to come to the United States to see with their own eyes, to hear with their own ears, in order that they might report truly to their people as to American unity, resolve, and invincibility. ”

“ Under the pressure of tremendous necessities an organization grew that not only reached deep into every American community, but that carried to every corner of the civilized globe the full message of America's idealism, unselfishness, and indomitable purpose. ”

“ The whole business of mobilizing the mind of the world so far as American participation in the war was concerned was in a sense the work of the Committee on Public Information. We had an alternative to face when we went into this war. The instant reaction of habit and tradition was to establish strict censorship, to allow to ooze out just such information as a few select persons might deem to be helpful, and to suppress all of the things which these persons deemed hurtful. ”

“ No one knows who starts a rumor, but there is a responsible editor behind every printed word. But the greatest objection to censoring of the news against the home population is that it has always tended to create the abuse of shielding from public criticism the dishonesty or incompetency of high officials. While it certainly has never been the policy of any of the European press bureaus to accomplish this result, the internal censorship has generally worked out this way. ”

“ Turning away from the United States to the world beyond our borders, a triple task confronted us. First, there were the peoples of the Allied nations that had to be fired by the magnitude of the American effort and the certainty of speedy and effective aid, in order to relieve the war-weariness of the civilian population and also to fan the enthusiasm of the firing-line to new flame. ”

“ 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. Other wars went no deeper than the physical aspects, but German Kultur raised issues that had to be fought out in the hearts and minds of people as well as on the actual firing-line. The approval of the world meant the steady flow of inspiration into the trenches ”

“ Money could not have purchased the volunteer aid that was given freely, the various universities lending their best men and the National Board of Historical Service placing its three thousand members at the complete disposal of the Committee. Some thirty-odd booklets, covering every phase of America's ideals, purposes, and aims, were printed in many languages other than English. Seventy-five millions reached the people of America, and other millions went to every corner of the world, carrying our defense and our attack. ”

“ The question which still remains as a part of winning the war is gathering up the results of that war and extracting the real fruits. Of course, we should all be happy over the military victory, but the things in the victory that will make for our happiness and for the happiness of our children twenty years from now, and our grandchildren forty years from now, are the real winnings of the war ”

“ Perhaps the greatest foreign army that ever crossed a sea in the history of the world prior to the present war was the Persian army of a million men, which bridged and crossed the Hellespont, and here the American army has sent two millions of men across the Atlantic. We sec workshops and factories in America transferred from civilian occupations and learning new and difficult arts, accustoming their tools to the manufacture of war supplies, and we see American labor learning new skills, new mechanical inventions brought into quantity production among us. ”

“ It is the pride of the Committee, as it should be the pride of America, that every activity was at all times open to the sun. No dollar was ever sent on a furtive errand, no paper subsidized, no official bought. From a thousand sources we were told of the wonders of German propaganda, but our original determinations never altered. ”

“ I remember a statement of Sir William Hamilton that there is nothing great in the world but man, and nothing great in man but mind. It is obviously too soon to begin to appraise either what this war means to mankind or what forces have correlated in the winning of the war, and yet our minds have been, I think, rather more occupied in observing the correlation of physical forces than they have in observing the correlation of mental forces ”

“ These things form our imagination; it is our disposition to think of the war as a great conflict of physical forces in which the best mechanic won, and in which the nation that was strongest in material things, which had the largest accumulation of wealth and the greatest power of concentrating its industrial factors, was the victorious nation. ”

“ The motive for the establishment of this internal censorship is not merely fear of petty criticism, but distrust of democratic common sense. The officials fear that the people will be stampeded by false news and sensational scare stories. The danger feared is real, but the experience of Europe indicates that censorship regulations do not solve the problem, A printed story is tangible even if false. ”

“ The visits of the editors of Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway were remarkable in their effect upon these countries, and no less successful were the trips made to the American front in France under our guidance by the newspaper men of Holland and Spain.
Before this flood of publicity the German misrepresentations were swept away in Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, Italy, Spain, the Far East, Mexico, and Central and South America. From being the most misunderstood nation, America became the most popular. ”

“ The atmosphere created by common knowledge that news is being suppressed is an ideal "culture "for the propaganda of the bacteria of enemy rumors. This state of mind was the thing which most impressed Americans visiting belligerent countries. ”

“ The European press bureaus have also attempted to keep objectionable news from their own people. This must be clearly differentiated from the problem of keeping dangerous news from the enemy. It will be necessary at times to keep information from OUT own people in order to keep it from the enemy, but most of the belligerent countries have gone much farther. In one of the confidential documents submitted to us there is, under Censorship Regulations, a long section with the heading, "News likely to cause anxiety or distress." ”

“ Sometimes it appeared in the newspapers of neutral capitals, and sometimes it dropped from balloons in written statements that were meant to convey to the enemy not the size of our army, not the dreadfulness of our means of conducting warfare, but the invincible power of our ideas. ”

“ It is a great thing to have fought in this war. Every man who fought in this war, and every woman who fought in it, will for the rest of his or her life be telling these who gather round of the stirring things which took place during the years of the war. ”

“ Partizanship, as a matter of course, played a larger part in this attitude, but a great deal of it proceeded from what the French call "professional deformation." Long training had developed the conviction that nothing in the world was as important as a "story," and not even the grim fact of war could remove this obsession. ”

“ Starting with the initial conviction that the war was not the war of an administration, but the war of one hundred million people, and believing that public support was a matter of public understanding, we opened up the activities of government to the inspection of the citizenship. ”

“ No one was left with power to rent a building, employ a clerk, transfer a bank balance, or to collect a dollar. This condition of chaos endured for weeks—for it was not until August 21st that the President found power to turn the records of the Committee over to the Council of National Defense—and it is only to-day that a final accounting to the people is able to be made. ”

“ That country has kept true to its ideals and its cause, and these have been kept untarnished by the principles which were worked out in this country for a democratic nation; our ideals have been strengthened by their wide-spread dissemination throughout the world. ”