This Diary is dedicated to Boo from an earlier comment in an Open Thread
Whether through inadequate public education or just lack of interest, much of American history has disappeared down the “Memory Hole” and been forgotten. Last week I wrote about a near coup that occurred in 1933. Today I want to tell you the story of the Creel Commission.
The Creel Commission was created by President Woodrow Wilson during World War 1, then the deadliest fighting (8.6 million soldiers and 6.5 civilians killed outright) that had ever taken place in the planet’s history.
Conventional history says that WW1 began when Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. This triggered war between the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and Serbia. Serbia had a strong ally in Russia and within a year every major European power was involved.
The war was fought between the “Entente Powers”, principally Russia, France, Britain and Serbia versus the “Central Powers”, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottomon Empire (Turkey).
The United States did not enter the war until April 6, 1917 and the war officially ended on November 11, 1918. For three years, the most gruesome and horrifying battles took place with no American participation.
This was largely due to the political climate in the United States, which is often termed “isolationism”. Wilson was elected President in 1912 and faced a number of domestic issues much more pressing than the build-up to war, namely suffrage (women gaining the right to vote) and the outlawing of alcoholic beverages.
Wilson was very narrowly re-elected in 1916 and he campaigned on a platform pledging that the United States would not enter the war in Europe. So how did both Wilson and the American public’s sentiments change so that within a year they had declared war against the Central Powers and entered the fight?
The answer lies in Wilson’s creation of the “United States Committee on Public Information”, which was headed by a man named George Creel and is therefore often referred to as the “Creel Commission”. The Creel Commission successfully created one of the most amazing propaganda machines of all time, yet people know almost nothing about it today.
Creel was a journalist and therefore understood how the media worked. Using government money, he hired 75,000 men to tour the country and speak in favor of the United States joining the fighting in WW1. These became known as the 4 Minute Men because their speeches could not run longer than 4 minutes:
Creel claimed that his 75,000 amateur orators had delivered over 7.5 million speeches to more than 314 million people. CPI publications from the Four Minute Man crusade offered tips on developing and delivering a brief, effective speech–the predecessor to today’s “sound bite.” They also recognized diverse audiences, with reports of Yiddish speakers in theaters and workplaces, a Sioux Four Minute Man, and a speech called “The Meaning of America” delivered in seven languages.
Creel singlehandedly created the “sound bite”, collapsing the central idea into a brief, attention-grabbing piece of oratory much different than the long-winded speeches that most politicians and lecturers gave at the time. This was an unprecedentedly sophisticated ad campaign at the time when mass media, nationwide radio broadcasts, was in its infancy.
Creel also hired two extremely effective men to help him. The first was a fellow journalist named Walter Lippman, who among other things founded the “New Republic” magazine which is still in existence.
The second however was an innovator in his field. In fact, you could accurately call him the father of modern propaganda. His name was Edward Bernays.
He was born in Vienna, Austria and was a close blood relative to the father of psychology, Sigmund Freud. Bernays efforts at public relations helped popularize his uncle’s philosophies (Bernays also translated many of Freud’s works into English). And it’s clear that Freud’s teachings were used by Bernays.
Bernays got his first major PR job in 1915, when he was hired to promote a Russian ballet’s tour of the United States. At the time, ballet was not widely popular and Bernays’ own notes say that most Americans thought male dancers were “deviates”. So Bernays devised a plan to change public opinion to sell more tickets:
Bernays began to connect ballet to something people understood and enjoyed. “First, as a novelty in art forms, a unifying of several arts; second, its appeal to special groups; third, its direct impact on American life, on design and color in American products; and fourth, its personalities.”
Beginning with newspapers, Bernays developed a four-page newsletter for editorial writers, local managers and others, containing photographs and stories of dancers, costumes, and composers. Articles were targeted to his four themes and audiences. For example, the “women’s pages” received articles on costumes, fabric, and fashion design; the Sunday supplements received full-color photos.
He also created the modern version of a “press kit”, a summary of positive things to say about the tour, which he distributed to magazine editors and his employees. Bernays’ pre-publicity work was so successful that crowds lined up at the docks to greet the Russian ballet troupe when they arrived in New York. The ballet did so well that they sold out tickets for a tour of the country.
Bernays believed that the key to successful propaganda (advertising) was a scientific technique called “the engineering of consent”. From Wikipedia:
One of Bernays’s favorite techniques for manipulating public opinion was the indirect use of “third party authorities” to plead for his clients’ causes. “If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway,” he said. In order to promote sales of bacon, for example, he conducted a survey of physicians and reported their recommendation that people eat hearty breakfasts. He sent the results of the survey to 5,000 physicians, along with publicity touting bacon and eggs as a hearty breakfast.
Bernays later worked for a large variety of corporate clients. But it’s his work for the Creel Commission which interests us here.
In 1928, Bernays published a book aptly entitled “Propaganda”. In it, he describes his techniques and some of the passages are quite chilling:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. … In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
This book impressed quite a number of people, including the Nazi leadership in Germany. In fact, Bernays later wrote a memoir about his time on the Creel Commission, with this passage:
“The U.S. Committee on Public Information had no precedent in this country… The U.S. Committee marked the first organized use of propaganda by our Government, and its work was the forerunner of modern psychological warfare… Years later, the Nazis and Communists adapted and enlarged upon the Committee’s methods.”
Joseph Goebbels, the chief Nazi propaganda, inventor of the “Big Lie” school of propaganda, admitted that he used Bernays’ techniques. From Bernays’ autobiography:
Karl von Weigand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. … Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.
“Crystallizing Public Opinion” is another book Bernays wrote.
More from Bernays’ book Propaganda:
“It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach–visual, graphic, and auditory–to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group–persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousand of followers. They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from the accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe.
At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror, and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace… “The important thing is that it is universal and continuous; and in its sum total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as any army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.”
All of this should come as no surprise to modern readers but its quite sinister to read it in such stark terms.
Here’s another chilling passage, this time from Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf”, written while he was in prison and before his rise to power:
But it was not until the [First World] War that it became evident what immense results could be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. Here again, unfortunately, all our studying had to be done on the enemy side…”
And so you can now see how Wilson’s creation of the Creel Committee marked a major turning point in world history – the first time modern governments had actively shaped public opinion through advertising techniques, “pulling the wires” to control the public mind.
Bernays also later worked on government propaganda, including making the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala “palatable” to the American people.
Spin doctors such as today’s Karl Rove are deeply indebted to the techniques Bernays and others developed nearly 100 years ago.
For a fantastic article on Bernays and the history of modern propaganda, I recommend reading this article and this one.
And now you know about another chunk of forgotten American history…
Peace
