Creating truth: the Committee on Public Information and the growth of government propaganda in the United States

Abstract

On April 13, 1917, Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information. For the next eighteen months, the members of the Committee attempted to gain the total support of the American people for the war effort. Historians who have written about the Committee focus on what it did. This thesis attempts to answer the question, why it insisted on distorting and fabricating facts when its Chairman, George Creel, had instituted a policy of only presenting facts to the American people. This thesis looks at several of the Committee's divisions in depth, including the Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation, the Four Minute Men, the Speaking Division, the Bureau of Cartoons, the Division of Advertising, the Division of Pictorial Publicity, the Division of News, and the Official Bulletin. Analysis of these divisions shows that their directors manipulated facts because they believed that the American people needed to be emotionally connected to the conflict to support it. They reasoned that facts alone would not suffice.