From the World War I Centennial News Podcast

WWI Remembered:
Alan Axelrod on George Creel, America's Chief Propagandist- Part 2

In April 12th's edition of the World War I Centennial News Podcast, Episode 118, author Alan Axelrod returned to finish an expansive interview on George Creel, the publisher of the government's Official Bulletin and one of the most powerful war-time Americans. The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity:

Theo Mayer: So, with us to explore this character is Allen Axelrod, the author of Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda. It's the bio of George Creel, and this is part two of our conversation. You'll find part one in episode 117. Alan, to kick off part two let's talk about the post-armistice period. You know, we've republished every issue of the Official Bulletin on the website at the Commission. And one day, at the end of May, it just stops. So, on April 1st, suddenly there's nothing in the last issue that says we're stopping. It's just all of a sudden it goes away. Did the whole committee just evaporate all of a sudden?

Alan Axelrod is the author of over 150 books on topics such as history, management, and businessAlan Axelrod: It evaporated all of a sudden. Congress cut it off and Congress went after it with almost literally a hatchet. They threw everything away that they could get their hands on, they destroyed all the records they could get their hands on. The only things that were saved were what Creel himself managed to salvage. He rented trucks and men to load them, and took stuff away and stored it at his own expense. And any of this vast amount of material that he didn't save was destroyed. There was a real revulsion in Congress against everything he had done. It was very strange.

Theo Mayer: Well, revulsion of just him, or him and Wilson both?

Alan Axelrod: After the armistice and ultimately after the defeat of the League of Nations in the US and the Treaty of Versailles, there was a real collective political effort at group national amnesia. There was almost an effort to erase most of what the war had been about, and Creel's effort was part of it.

I actually think that part of the animus against Creel was that he had done his job too well, that the propaganda and the mindset it created were considered dangerous, and that the incoming Republican wave that swept in after Wilson, beginning with the midterm elections that transformed the balance of Congress, wanted to disengage the nation from the global orientation that it was shifting to under Wilson. It was the closest thing we ever had to a book burning.

Theo Mayer: So, we get to the end of the war and suddenly all of this just sort of disappears, evaporates, goes away. And over the next number of years, this stuff starts to reemerge as Germany regains power. We've talked about that in the past. Why don't you talk about that a little bit?

Alan Axelrod: Creel himself preserved much of this and later told the story, but between the wars with the rise of the Nazi party and the rise of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels discovered not Creel first, but actually the writings of the nephew of Sigmund Freud, a Jewish man named Edward Bernays, and his book Propaganda, which came out in the 1920s, and then there was another book after that. Goebbels was very excited about this, and through it he discovered the work of the Committee on Public Information. He put all of this together and saw this as the template for what the Nazis needed to do, not just help further the demonization of the Jews, but for creating an orientation to war. The Germans had lost World War I, but they came out of World War I in tact. Their cities weren't destroyed, their farms weren't destroyed, they weren't pocked with shell holes, they weren't crisscrossed with trenches, but they had lost. That became a narrative of betrayal, betrayal by democracy, and betrayal by the Jews. That became the central message of Nazi propaganda. And the answer to that was to fight to re-litigate that war with a new war. And the basis for doing that had all been laid out by the methods of Creel and Bernays and others who worked for the CPI. It had to do not with withholding information, but by controlling information and putting it out there in profusion and with apparent full transparency. And Bernays, when he learned of this, was appalled that Goebbels had his books in his library.

Theo Mayer: Well, it is incredibly ironic. Alan, let's wrap this up with what happened to Creel after World War I as a person.

Allan Axelrod: Creel became a writer. I mean, he went on writing. He became a journalist. He made a very good living as a feature writer for popular magazines, such as Colliers and so forth. And then he became a labor activist during the Depression, and once again found somebody to champion and to support in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. And he tried to enter politics. He ran for Governor of California in 1934 in the democratic primary, and his leading opponent was Upton Sinclair. Neither of them prevailed, of course. But he didn't disappear, he just never became particularly influential.

Theo Mayer: Obviously he was incredibly influential in this period from turn of the century, 1915 on through 1920 something. Why don't we know his name?

Alan Axelrod: Well, I would say first of all the major reason is that there was an active movement at the end of the war to bury him. He was excluded from history that essentially he himself wrote, and he never again attained prominence in politics. Until the emergence of FDR, the White House was dominated by Republicans, politics was dominated by Republicans. He was not a Republican, so he wasn't going to get any love there. And he turned to writing a series of popular, but quite undistinguished books. I mean, if you read his writing it's fascinating historically, but he wasn't a very good writer. He's rather dull, he is burdened by cliches. He's one of the labor-oriented popular writers of the 30s, but without any real voice. So, he never really got a foothold in the popular mind. He became a kind of shadowy figure. He was discredited. He was the victim of very deliberate campaigns to discredit him, and they stuck. He wasn't ruined as a human being. He made money, he lived. He certainly wasn't in despair. He wrote toward the very end of his life an autobiography that is at least readable, called Rebel at Large, but nobody much cared.

Creel at the White House. Following the end of Wilson's presidency, a Republican-lead government dismantled Creel's operation Theo Mayer: Well Alan, I think that that's a great wrap of the interview. You're one of the very few people who's actually written a book about him, and we've got the link in the podcast notes. It's called Selling the Great War. What got you to write the book?

Alan Axelrod: I became interested in Creel at the time that President George W. Bush was leading us into a war against the one country that had nothing to do with 9/11. And it was done in a way that was a massive propaganda campaign, the like of which I had never seen as an American. I mean, I lived through Vietnam. Even then there wasn't that kind of approach. So, I had heard about Creel. I have a friend who is a collector of World War I posters, a magnificent collection. And it was through the posters that I came to know about the Committee on Public Information. In fact, I edited a book that he wrote. And it was through all that that I found the name of Creel and I discovered how he advertised America, and I discovered Rebel at Large. I read these and I thought well, this man should be written about.

Theo Mayer: Well Alan, you and I had a conversation one day. We picked two people that without whom World War I would not have looked at all like it did, and one of them was not Wilson.

Alan Axelrod: I think we decided finally that it was Pershing and Creel.

Theo Mayer: Yes, we did.

Alan Axelrod: And it's quite true. In fact, I think had a Republican won in 1912, actually who would've won in 1912 would've been Teddy Roosevelt running as the Bull Moose candidate. He came in second to Wilson in 1912. And had Teddy Roosevelt been in the White House, we would have been in World War I probably in 1914 or 1915, but there would not have been this transformation of the American public into an almost monolithic commitment to the war. It was very frightening. As you know, there were terrible consequences that Creel did his best to avoid, which was retribution against immigrants of all kinds, but especially Germans of course, laws against not only speaking German in public, but speaking any foreign language in public, things like that. But without Creel, there would not have been what Creel described with this kind of Nietzsche- like phrase: there would not have been a war wheel in America. There would not have been this total support that enabled a nation that previously had about the 17th largest army. And it was able to create a will to turn that into a 4,000,000 strong force very, very rapidly. The war was declared on the 6th of April, the Committee on Public Information was in business on the 13th, and almost instantly was controlling every piece of war related news that reached the American public and much of the international public too.

Theo Mayer: And that concludes our two part exploration of George Creel, the man who sold America on World War I, with Allan Axelrod, a prolific author and publisher who's also, by the way, writing a book about the history of the World War I Centennial Commission. We have links for you in the podcast notes. 

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/Alan-Axelrod/e/B001IQULA4
https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Great-War-American-Propaganda/dp/0230605036