This brief was the work of a Colorado journalist who had supported the President with such vim, through a set of slashing editorials and a book on the issues, during the 1916 campaign, that Tumulty had him down for a post in one of the departments. The journalist’s name was George Creel.
Creel was a little shrimp of a man with burning dark eyes set in an ugly face under a shock of curly black hair. He came from an impoverished family of Virginians who had moved to Missouri after the Civil War. He had made his way up through Kansas City newspapers and muckraking New York magazines by energy and brass to the position of Police Commissioner in Denver. He was a leader of the reform element among Colorado Democrats. He had graduated from the tubthumping Denver Post to his own Rocky Mountain News. He was married to Blanche Bates, one of the reigning stars of the American stage.
A hardworking man with an inexhaustible selfconfidence, his failing was snap judgements. He was famous for his wise cracks. His remark that Senator Lodge, like the soil of New England, was carefully cultivated but naturally sterile, undoubtedly endeared him to the President.
“To Creel,” wrote Mark Sullivan, the journalistic chronicler of the period, “there are only two classes of men. There are skunks and the greatest man that ever lived. The greatest man that ever lived is plural and includes everyone who is on Creel’s side in whatever public issue he happens at the moment to be concerned with.” “It must be admitted,” Creel wrote of himself, “that an open mind is no part of my inheritance. I took in prejudices with mother’s milk and was weaned on partisanship.”
For years Creel, working his noisy way through single tax, socialism, muckraking, progressivism and reform to the New Freedom, had been proclaiming that Woodrow Wilson was the greatest man that ever lived. He certainly did not keep that opinion to himself when he appeared at the White House for consultation about the Committee on Public Information the President had decided to set up with Daniels, Baker and Secretary of State Lansing on the letterhead. The result of a single interview was that Creel was appointed chairman with full executive powers. It was understood that his instructions would come direct from the President.
As the wartime tensions increased around the President’s desk, Creel, along with Baruch, Newton D. Baker and Colonel House were about the only men Tumulty was instructed to pass into the upstairs study. Creel was Wilson’s link with the Censorship Board, with the Post Office and the Department of Justice. He cooperated with Military and Naval Intelligence. Through these he exercised the President’s power to suppress. As head of the Committee for Public Information his function, so he liked to put it, was expression. He became the President’s mouthpiece in the war of slogans.
Creel set up his office across the street from the White House in an old brick residence on Jackson Place. There he collected about him a staff of Wilson-minded journalists who, through subsidiary offices in the large cities, spread the doctrine from coast to coast.
The C.P.I. became the fountainhead of war news for the Washington press corps. The existence of an official press censorship was consistently denied but editors were safer if their material had passed through Creel’s hands.
He developed a news bureau and a set of syndicated services giving the administration slant to events and explaining away false and damaging rumors. Special matter was prepared for the foreignlanguage press. A picture division was set up and a film division. A foreign division channelled propaganda into Germany and Russia. There was a speakers’ bureau through which speakers for the various Liberty Loan drives were furnished with material. The seventyfive thousand volunteer orators groomed for four minute talks at street corners, in movie theatres and churches and at civic events, on topics prepared for them by Creel’s bureaus, became known as “the stentorian guard.”
C.P.I. posters were in every postoffice. C.P.I. information bulletins were on every bulletin board. Country weeklies and trade journals were nourished on Creel’s boilerplate. In an astonishingly short time George Creel had the entire nation — except of course for the disreputable minority who insisted on forming their own opinions — repeating every slogan which emanated from the President’s desk in the wordy war to “make the world safe for democracy.”
Woodrow Wilson’s birthday was on December 28. The group of White House intimates, that the President and Mrs. Wilson kept carefully insulated from any mention of the strains and anxieties of high office, conducted their jollifications in the small dining room because the larger White House rooms were closed off to conserve fuel. Mrs. Josephus Daniels baked the cake.
“The cake was perfectly beautiful and as palatable as it was good to look at,” the President wrote her in his note of thanks. “The sixty one candles on the cake did not make so forbidding a multitude as I should have feared they would and our little family circle had a very jolly time blowing them out and celebrating.” He allowed himself a professorial pun: “It was a regular blow-out.”
Colonel House returned to the White House before Christmas bringing the documents his Inquiry had prepared on European populations and boundaries and on the pretensions of the various national leaderships. After New Years he came back with another mass of material including maps prepared by Dr. Bowman’s assistants at the American Geographical Society. Wilson decided to give his statement the form of a message to be delivered soon after the opening of Congress. He had to answer the Bolshevik challenge that the Allies state their war aims. He hoped to stir the German socialists to the sort of pacifist demands he decried among the unruly at home, and to reassert his position as leader of liberal and idealist trends of thought in France and Great Britain.
House’s train was late. McAdoo was giving coal shipments right of way even over crack passenger expresses. It was nine o’clock on January 4 before the colonel reached the White House. “They had saved dinner for me,” he wrote in his diary, “but I touched it lightly and went into immediate conference with the President.” Wilson who loved the number thirteen was trying to organize the points he wanted to make under thirteen headings.
Next morning they met again in the President’s study. “Saturday was a remarkable day,” wrote House. “I went over to the State Department just after breakfast to see Polk and the others, and returned to the White House at a quarter past ten in order to get to work with the President … We actually got down to work at half past ten and finished remaking the map of the world as we would have it, at half past twelve o’clock.
“We took it up systematically, first outlining general terms, such as open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removing of economic barriers, establishment of equality of trade conditions, guarantees for the reduction of national armaments, adjustment of colonial claims, general association of nations for the conservation of peace.”
They were still at work on a preliminary draft when the afternoon papers were brought in carrying a report of Lloyd George’s speech the day before to the British Trade Union Congress. The unpredictable Welshman, pressed by the opposition in Parliament to answer the Bolshevik demands and by the laborleaders whose assistance he needed in his conduct of the war, had jumped the gun on the American President by declaring: “We are not fighting a war of aggression against Germany … We are not fighting to destroy Austro-Hungary or to deprive Turkey of its capital … The settlement of the new Europe must be based on such grounds of reason and justice as will give some promise of stability. Therefore it is that we feel that government with the consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement in this war.”