George Creel

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consultant on labor union issues, and he was an unsuccessful candidate for the nomination to be governor of California in 1934. However, Creel remains best known for his groundbreaking work in public information. To this day, the CPI is regarded as the forerunner of later government efforts to influence the news media, such as the Office of War Information during World War II (1939–45), as well as the United States Information Agency. A Newspaper Man George Creel was born in Lafayette County, Missouri, on December 1, 1876. He was the son of Henry Clay Creel, an officer in the Confederate army during the Civil War (1861–65), and Virginia Fackler Creel, a member of an old Virginia family. The Creels moved to Missouri after the Civil War, and young George went to the public schools in Kansas City. He wrote for the school newspaper but left high school before graduation to travel around the country. In 1898, he moved to New York City, where after working as a day laborer (usually an unskilled person who works for day wages), he landed a newspaper job writing for the New York Journal. By 1900, Creel had returned to Kansas City with his friend Arthur Grisson. The two founded a weekly newspaper, the Kansas City Independent, to which Creel contributed light verse and essays. Politically, Creel leaned toward leftwing (a political position advocating radical change in the government) and even socialist (shared or government ownership of production and goods) platforms, and he used his influence as a publisher to help elect the reformer Joseph Wingate Folk as governor of Missouri. Creel also published a book of poetry titled Quatrains of Christ. In 1908, Creel turned over the Independent to two women editors and moved to Colorado, where he became an editorial writer for the Denver Post. After serious disagreements with the paper’s owners, he returned to New York for a year to write for a number of magazines, then returned to Denver as editor of a competing newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News. It was during this period that he became friends with Ben B. Lindsay, a progressive judge who strongly influenced Creel’s political positions. Creel soon acquired a national reputation as a muckraker, the name given to reform-minded journalists who wrote exposés of social injustice during the early twenti- 28 World War I: Biographies
eth century. In his editorials, Creel strongly endorsed the election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912. In 1914, Creel, Lindsay, and the poet Edwin Markham worked together on writing a book titled Children of Bondage, which criticized child labor in the United States. Two years later, when Wilson was running for reelection, Creel wrote Wilson and the Issues, a book that urged voters to return Wilson to the White House for a second term. Creel refused Wilson’s offer of a subcabinet position (an appointed position below the cabinet level of government) out of “dislike for bureaucratic routine” but also because the move to Washington, D.C., would have caused him financial hardship. Supporting a Free Press When the United States finally entered World War I, Creel wrote a letter to Wilson urging him to resist the military’s proposals for strict censorship of the news media. In his autobiography, Rebel At Large, Creel states that he believed such censorship laws to be “criminally stupid and bound to work untold harm.” Arguing that “expression, not suppression, was the real need,” Creel proposed instead that American newspaper editors should be the sole judges of what materials they could print. He told Wilson that it would be far more effective for the U.S. government to fight enemy spying than to impose censorship on a free press. Creel also urged the creation of a government agency that would organize a media campaign to convince all Americans to join in the war effort. On April 14, 1917, just eight days after the U.S. declaration of war, Creel was sworn in as the chairman (director) of a three-man Committee on Public Information (CPI). The other committee members were Secretary of State Robert Lansing and Secretary of War Newton Baker. Creel’s appointment was a controversial one. Lansing was disturbed by what he considered to be the “Socialistic ideas” of the new CPI director, and the New York Times complained in an editorial that Creel’s “career had been one of turbulence and mudspattering . . . . His name stood for acrimonious contention [bitter controversy].” Despite these criticisms, Wilson allowed Creel to lead the way in creating an effective, centralized information office for the United States. Creel had, in effect, become a minister of propaganda for the United States, George Creel 29
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George Creel

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