What America did

by Florence Finch Kelly

A Service Bureau of the Committee at a centrally located office in Washington provided information as to the officials, the function and the location of all Government departments and similar matters. In the rapid expansion of all these departments, the creation of new agencies and the overcrowded condition of the capital, due to the thousands of men and women pouring into and going through the city, it saved for all these people many hours and much energy. The inquiries that came to it by personal appeal, by telephone, and by mail mounted to an average of many hundreds daily.

In addition to the news matter which it distributed at home and abroad, the Committee on Public Information sent out an official bulletin which, with a circulation of more than 100,000, gave information concerning all governmental affairs and activities in connection with the war; prepared special articles concerning all phases of the war progress of the nation which were widely published in the Saturday and Sunday magazine sections of newspapers; and published several series of pamphlets, written by authorities upon the questions discussed, which set forth the reasons for our participation in the war, exposed the pretensions of Germany and dealt with other important matters. These pamphlets also had a wide circulation and were especially useful for the hundreds of public speakers who talked to assemblages of people in mines, factories, ship-yards, theaters and other public places. They were intended to give information to all who wanted it and to furnish ammunition for the determined battle the Committee was waging to win the attention and rouse the feeling of a polyglot nation, huge numbers of whose people had not hitherto acquired much knowledge of or developed much interest in their adopted country.

For all this work several hundreds of authors, newspaper and magazine writers, publicists, university professors and others either gave their time and labor freely or took for their services an amount of pay that barely paid their living expenses, and, for the rest, were repaid by the satisfaction of doing something to aid the needs of their country.

An organization of speakers called “Four-Minute Men,” working under the Committee, had a membership of 35,000 and gave short, incisive talks in five or six thousand communities, speaking at motion picture theaters, at factories during the noon hour, at country churches and school houses, at assemblages of every sort. The campaigns in which they took part embraced work for the Red Cross, the welfare organizations. Liberty loans, savings stamps, against German propaganda, and every kind of activity for the winning of the war that the nation engaged in. A bulletin for the use of the Four-Minute Men was prepared by the Committee’s experts for each campaign, giving material for their suggestion and guidance.

In addition to these men, the Committee organized a great national campaign of public speaking which enlisted the services of patriotic men and women in each state, of returning soldiers, of people who had been abroad and had witnessed the fighting or had seen conditions in the belligerent and neutral countries, and of Allied officers. This work was decentralized and, by means of the coöperation of the State Section of the Council of National Defense, was organized in each state. War conferences and war exhibits were held in important centers, the war agencies in each state were brought into unison with the work and the campaign for informing and inspiring the people was carried through, all parts of the state, down to the villages and country districts. A band of a hundred veteran French soldiers,—the famous “Blue Devils”—a Belgian regiment, and a company of American doughboys sent back from the front for this purpose were severally conducted at various times across the country by the Committee on Public Information, with the double aim of helping the American people to realize the war more vividly and of enabling these fighting men to carry back to the front first hand information about what America was doing and what was her spirit.

At the request of the Committee the heads of the various advertising clubs of the country came together and mobilized for the country’s service their organizations and their experts in every phase of advertising. For every one of the great campaigns for the prosecution of the war, these experts, under the direction of the Committee on Public Information, saw to the preparing of posters, advertisements, matter for bill boards, street car cards and all such matter. In the campaign to recruit 250,000 laborers for the shipyards, as a single instance, eighty advertisements were prepared by typographical advertising experts and were carried in magazines and trade papers that donated the space and gave a combined circulation of 8,000,000. In a similar way the Committee organized and utilized the pictorial assistance that could be given by artists. Its Division of Pictorial Publicity included nearly all the best known artists of the United States and to it went every department of the Government that wished to make pictorial appeal to the people. Its hundreds of members contributed, for all purposes, three thousand or more posters, cartoons and drawings and aided much in the inspiring and uniting of sentiment.

Photographs and motion pictures were important factors of the Committee’s work. Through it were distributed all of the photographs taken by permission of the Army and the Navy and thousands upon thousands of these pictures, covering’ every phase of the operations of the war making and war production divisions of the Government, were published in newspapers and magazines, collected by individuals, used for the illustration of lectures and, in connection with some of the actual war making objects and with models of others, shown in exhibits at county and State fairs attended by millions of people. The motion picture division of the Committee’s many-sided activities gave powerful aid in its campaign of education and interpretation both at home and in other countries. Important phases of the preparation at home for war and of the army in training or in battle in France were put into single reel and longer features, some of them providing a full evening’s entertainment, and exhibited in thousands of moving picture houses in the United States and, with their captions translated into many languages, were sent all through Latin America, the Orient, Africa, the Allied and neutral nations of Europe, to carry their message of America’s spirit and America’s purposes.

All of these agencies the Committee on Public Information organized and used for the purpose of widening the horizon and informing and illumining the mind and spirit of our own citizens with regard to the causes, the purposes and the meaning of the war and of America’s participation in it and to combat the specious and wide-spread propaganda of the German Government. That propaganda sought to blind our people to the issues involved, to create sentiment against our war associates, to undermine our faith in our own war agencies and our conviction of the righteousness of the war and the adequacy of our war effort, and was especially insidious and dangerous among the ignorant, among aliens not yet well informed concerning the country and in some of the districts of the South. Wherever it worked the Committee met and endeavored to nullify its efforts.

Equally well organized, determined and successful, but much more difficult, was the struggle the Committee carried on against anti-American propaganda and influences in other countries. It had different phases and features, according to the conditions in the different lands, and it presents, altogether, one of the most dramatic and thrilling of all the stories of civilian effort for the war. But it is possible here only to outline its general features. The United States had for many years been soaked through and through with German propaganda, but so insidiously, so gently and so gradually had the work been carried on that scarcely any one had recognized its extent, its influence and its purpose. The shock of war brought some realization of what had been going on, the efforts of the Committee on Public Information revealed much more, and then the quick reaction of an intensely patriotic people brought against the pro-German campaign, paid for and directed in Germany, such a storm of popular indignation that it had little chance to make headway except among the ignorant and some of the foreign born. But in the neutral countries German propaganda, German effort to win sympathy and belief and set feeling and conviction against America and the Allies was in full possession and had to be combated with care and tact as well as haste and energy. In every one of them America had been misrepresented, jeered at, lied about, pictured in colors that made her and her people the most despicable and loathsome upon the face of the earth, while her war effort was described as so inefficient and so impossible of success as to be ridiculous.

The Committee established an office in the capital of each one of the neutral countries, as it did also in that of each of our co-belligerents. The office head and the greater part of his staff went from home, but at his destination he secured translators and other helpers and had the hearty coöperation of Americans already there. His mission, carried on by every available means, was to oppose German propaganda and spread the truth about America. Publication was procured for news by wireless and cable and for descriptive articles by mail, while pamphlets and leaflets were widely distributed. Particularly well organized and efficient was the machinery for the sending of news by wireless and cable which carried to all the nations of the earth, except Germany and her allies, two thousand words every day about what America was purposing and accomplishing for the war. Until this machinery was started the neutral nations knew next to nothing of what this country was doing except through the perversions and outright lies of German agents. It was by this means that President Wilson’s addresses and messages had almost world-wide distribution as soon as they were published in the home country and the advantage was gained of the striking influence they everywhere exerted.