Opinion Control and the 'Man of Letters'

While “Propaganda” may have turned to a bad word thanks to its use by the Germans in the First World War, it does not mean that the United States was guiltless.  The Creel Committee, headed by George Creel, otherwise known as the Committee on Public Information, was created during World War I by Woodrow Wilson to garner public support for military involvement overseas.  While the committee at first attempted to distance itself from what was seen as demagogic lies from Germany by preaching upbeat, truthful accounts of America’s involvement, but that did not mean it did not control who and what was produced to the public.  To quote Creel, “The printed word, the spoken word, motion pictures, the telegraph, the wireless, cables, posters, signboards, and every possible media should be used to drive home the justice of America’s cause.  Not to combat prejudices and disaffection at home was to weaken the firing line” (Creel 158).  The control of public opinion at home was just as imperative as controlling the frontline overseas; the public image of the war would need to remain positive, and be spread over ever possible “media” available to the United States at the time.

The Creel Committee, though its intent was to maintain a control of public information, largely stuck to their initial goals of a positivist light—unlike their private contemporaries.  According to Creel, “The National Security League and the American Defense Society, offered by prominent citizens, were easily the most obnoxious” in their rampant jingoism and hateful, bigoted propaganda” (196).  The alienation and xenophobic vitriol of not only Germans, but any group of foreign speaking bodies (enemy, ally, and neutral alike), was nothing but acidic, and the call to embody ‘true American idealisms’ was rampant (something we are all more than familiar with in a Post-9/11 America).

‘Positivity’ of the Creel Committee aside, journalists and authors heavily criticized the notion of an ‘adulterated’ or ‘filtered’ news.  Creel implemented his tactics in the style of a Madison Avenue advertising executive, and his 1920 memoir, How We Advertised America, he makes the point of how he and his group “fought for the minds of men” (while others were literally fighting other men overseas) and that the “recognition of Public Opinion as a major force that what differed most essentially from all previous conflicts” (3).  The irony of labeling every home in America a “frontline” did not go unnoticed, and journalists and authors, such as Dos Passos, skewered duly: “the war was great fought from the swivel chairs of Mr. Creel’s bureau in Washington” (Emphasis Added JDP 1919 81).  The critic Matthew Stratton take this notion a step further, and points out Dos Passos’ verbal irony in that the “Great War was ‘great’ only in the minds of those who fought with words and ideas rather than the machine guns, artillery shells, and poison gas, and that the devastation of war far outstripped any possible rhetoric of glory that motivated citizens to support the war” (Stratton 426).

After the war, the lessons learned through the Creel Committee were transferred from the public sphere to the private.  Hearst and his corporate cabal’s ability to manipulate and control information turned its eye from the ‘frontlines’ to rest on Creel’s ‘homefront’.  The psychological effect of advertising toward consumer driven markets was a new phenomenon, and the employing of Ivy Lee and similar journalists-turned-corporate-lapdogs was an attempt to exploit the base consumer psyche.  J.W. in The Big Money, whose image is largely taken from Ivy Lee, spends much of his work time “inventing new ways of rendering mundane commodities more desirable to consumers through a combination of creative brainstorming and research into the published work about public relations” (Stratton 428).  This is what, according to Stratton, Dos Passos regarded as corporate “literature,” the calculated control of public opinion through copy and other mass produced outlets.  Dos Passos’ literature then sought to subvert corporate style literature through mimetic irony, and produce a “public opinion that is trained and attuned to recognize paradox and irony, and which may thus read corporate and novelistic “literature” with a critical eye that inculcates resistant skepticism rather than tractable credulity” (428).

Dos Passos’ disillusionment with the left later in life may have stemmed from the inability of art or information to resist adulteration, whether by governmental or private hands.  Journalists like Walter Lipmann, who later went on to advocate a global, independent, and innocuously political news organization free from magnate and journalistic influence, and John Dewey, who believed journalists and writers should act as a frontline, a watch dog, for corruption and moral ambiguity among government, business, and the elite.  Dos Passos himself, aligned more with Dewey, but in a much more cynical manner; Dos Passos “makes it abundantly clear that even if information could ever be transmitted and distributed with a positivist transparency, media magnates like William Randolph Hearst…would do everything in their power to prevent or distort the transmission of such data, and that the struggle for political change would simply be deferred to a different theater” (431).