Next, Creel created a Division of Pictorial Publicity in the committee’s already crowded offices and hired Charles Dana Gibson, one of the most noted illustrators of his day, to run it. Soon, famous illustrators such as N.C. Wyeth were painting patriotic canvases 19 feet high and 25 feet long to promote another Liberty Loan drive. The brushmen created 1,438 works of art, which were reproduced by the millions. Probably the most famous was James Montgomery Flagg’s portrait of Uncle Sam, pointing his finger and declaring, ‘I want you.’

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The next test of Creel’s program came in September 1918, when the government decreed a second draft call, registering every male from 18 to 45 years of age, in hopes of adding another 12,800,000 men to the rolls. By now the country had been at war for 18 months, and casualty lists were being published in the newspapers every day. A violent swing against the war was a real possibility. Creel went all-out, lashing his Four Minute Men to fresh rhetorical heights. A newly created advertising division shipped ready-to-use full-page ads to 18,000 newspapers. Working in day and night shifts, Creel’s staff mailed out 20 million copies of something called the Selective Service Register, a potpourri of questions and answers about the Army and the draft, plus instructions, exhortations and appeals. On September 12, 1918, 13,975,706 men registered, again without protest.

The enormous propaganda machine Creel created, he tirelessly pointed out, had cost taxpayers only $4,912,553. He coyly neglected to mention that along with that appropriation he also had unlimited access to a $50 million ‘president’s fund’ that Congress had given Wilson early in the war to spend with no questions asked. When Wilson suddenly dropped his bipartisan stance and called for the election of a Democratic Congress in 1918, some Republican legislators began calling Creel ‘Wilson’s press agent.’

Creel struck back in his take-no-prisoners style, comparing Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s mind to the soil of his native Massachusetts as ‘highly cultivated but naturally sterile.’ After a speech in New York, someone asked Creel what he thought about ‘the heart of Congress’ in regard to supporting the war. Creel replied, ‘Oh, I have not been slumming for years.’

The crack made headlines. Congressmen rushed to their dictionaries to discover they had been accused of being ‘poor, dirty, degraded and often vicious.’ Creel apologized, but an outraged Congress still asked for his head. Wilson refused to fire Creel, but he could do nothing to save him from an unmerciful roasting before the House Appropriations Committee.

A few months later, the war was over and Congress really went to work on Creel. They canceled the appropriation for the Committee on Public Information without even leaving him enough money to shut down his office and organize his records. Creel spent his last months in Washington fending off a series of rumors that the Committee was guilty of gross financial mismanagement, if not outright fraud.

In the next 18 months, Creel suffered torments of regret as he watched Wilson’s peacemaking efforts being wrecked by congressional opposition. If Creel had held his tongue and managed to keep the Committee on Public Information going, he might have assisted Wilson in the propaganda war that erupted between the White House and the Republican majority in Congress over the League of Nations.

This article was written by Thomas Fleming and originally published in the December 1995 issue of Military History.

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