A journalist friend once described George Creel as a man who saw only two classes of men — skunks and the greatest man that ever lived. ‘The greatest man that ever lived,’ the friend explained, ‘is plural and includes everyone who is on Creel’s side in whatever public issue he happens to be concerned with.’ While he called that portrait an exaggeration, Creel admitted it was ‘not entirely untrue.’

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Creel often styled himself ‘the original Wilson man.’ He had tried to persuade Woodrow Wilson to run for president as early as 1905, when Wilson was still presiding over Princeton University. When war with Germany became imminent in 1917, Wilson, just re-elected by a whisker for a second term, was uneasy about the American people’s reaction to a plunge into the carnage that had been wracking Europe for the previous three years. He leaned toward accepting the proposals of his admirals and generals for a censorship law that would give him iron control of the unruly American press. Creel, however, convinced Wilson that the country needed not suppression but the expression of a coherent pro-war policy. He warned Wilson that American opinion about the war was ‘muddled’ by the barrages and counterbarrages of German and Allied propaganda.

That was an understatement. Enthusiasm for war was largely confined to the elite Eastern establishment, most of whom were Republicans and Anglophiles. Their leaders, like J.P. Morgan, had loaned vast sums of money to the Allies and faced the prospect of bankruptcy if the Germans won.

Wilson had just been re-elected using the slogan, ‘He kept us out of war.’ By 1917 no less than 40 different peace groups were active in the United States, agitating against American involvement in the horrendous conflict. Wellington House, the British propaganda arm in America, nervously reported to London that apathy toward the war was pervasive.

Other people were reporting a lot of active opposition to the war. Ten thousand people rallied in the Chicago Coliseum to hear a Texas congressman denounce the drift toward war. A mass meeting of German-Americans demanded a national referendum. Radical groups urged Americans to refuse to serve in the Army and get killed or wounded for ‘the profit takers.’ On April 2, the day Wilson called on Congress to declare war, 1,500 pacifists swarmed through the Capitol and began arguing with pro-war senators and congressmen.

Against that dubious background, Creel persuaded the president to launch the Committee on Public Information. Ostensibly, it was run by three cabinet members and Chairman Creel. They met as a body only once. Creel listened to the cabinet members’ advice and never spoke to them again. ‘The Committee on Public Information was George Creel,’ wrote a Washington newspaperman. ‘It continued to be George Creel after a hundred and fifty thousand people were taking part in its incredibly varied activities.’

The short (5 feet 7 inches), stocky Missouri native was a human dynamo. Previously a muckraking journalist of some renown, he had also served as a reform police commissioner of Denver, Colo., and was the creator of Newsbook, which was supposed to be the flagship publication of the National Fellowship of the University Militant, an organization that proposed to reform America overnight by turning the college professors loose on the hoi polloi. The publication lasted all of four months. A talented mimic, Creel regularly reduced the president to helpless laughter with his imitations of the numerous flamboyant Southerners and stuffed-shirt Yankees in Congress. His sense of humor, plus some powerful political enemies he had made as a muckraker, would later bring him trouble.

In a memoir he wrote in 1920, Creel candidly described what he set out to do with the Committee on Public Information. The goal was the creation of ‘a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that would weld the American people into one white hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.’ Creel was a strong believer in ‘the war will.’ In a democracy, he maintained, that will depended upon ‘the degree to which each one of all the people can concentrate and consecrate body, soul, and spirit in a supreme effort of service and sacrifice.’

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