5/18/2023 0 Comments National issues dominate ad wars![]() Wilson’s philosophizing had a democratic cast to it: The president was the “spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country.” The primacy that he gave communication suited his oratorial abilities. Presidential communication was a central theme in his scholarly study of government. In a sense, though, Wilson had been thinking about the CPI for years. The CPI offered a quick solution to the urgent need for censorship of sensitive military information. As Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, Secretary of War Newton Baker and Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in their proposal for the CPI, they could not wait for legislation. This can be explained by his many preoccupations in those early days of war. Wilson did not give forethought to the CPI when he signed the executive order establishing it. It also reflected the ideas and personalities of Woodrow Wilson and George Creel. The CPI excelled at advertising, a field Americans pioneered. The military dominated in Germany civilians in Britain. The British were far more adept than the Germans, the difference lying chiefly in the lines of authority over propaganda. Propaganda exhibited the same iron-law characteristics in every nation during the Great War, but with variations in execution. As partisan as they may have been during the war, the Republicans under Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had good reason to question the CPI’s existence. This has undermined the system of checks and balances essential to American democracy. Subsequent spurts of growth have been dramatic in time of war, when national security concerns have led Congress and the public to cede more power to the chief executive. Given its power over the thoughts of citizens and the lack of legal authority for its work, the CPI marked a significant step toward the imperial presidency that emerged afterward. Many later echoed Lloyd George’s acknowledgement that if the facts had been known about the losses on the battlefield, people’s demand for peace could have been difficult to resist. The CPI wanted the public to cheer, not think. Direct and implied appeals to patriotism – encouragement to suspend judgment – permeated CPI propaganda. The “German whispers” campaign – its warnings to beware of “spy talk” – made thoughts of negotiating an early peace treason. “We told that part which served our national purpose.” “We never told the truth – not by any manner of means,” Will Irwin, the CPI’s foreign division head, confessed in an article a year after the war. The CPI denied citizens the means of reckoning the true cost of the war. ![]() They did not show mangled bodies splayed in the mud. More than that, CPI pronouncements bore the Great Seal of the United States of America with its motto “E Pluribus Unum.”ĬPI films showed troops valiantly charging the enemy. Through various agencies, it had the power – a meaningful threat – to block mail and the export of films and books, to curtail ink and paper, to shut down movie theaters. The Post Office distributed its materials. It had access to the government printer as well as its own taxpayer-supported printing contracts to handle the overflow. The basic law of propaganda, CPI Petrograd representative Edgar Sisson said, was to “reiterate cumulatively.” But they did not work on a scale close to that of George Creel’s Committee on Public Information. Super-patriotic groups outside the government shaped opinion. George Creel, American investigative journalist and writer, a politician and government official who served as the head of the United States Committee on Public Information, a propaganda organization created by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |