This frank statement will tend to cause “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” which was hailed as “the greatest novel of the war” by the literary critics on the newspapers, and many persons ignorant of the design concealed within the pages of the novel, to appear in a somewhat different light from that inspired by a belief in the untainted integrity of the author.
The English propaganda bureau for the United States, located in New York, was in charge of Louis Tracy, an English novelist. In an interview with Tracy, published in the New York “Evening Sun” of November 10, 1919, the author exposes frankly the methods pursued by himself and staff in fostering the British cause by attacks on the German and Irish element in the United States and in furthering libels of the enemy through the medium of the American press. Incidentally he is quoted as follows:
The great part of my work, of course, was the press. We began that during the first winter of the war, and it covered every phase of magazine and newspaper publication.... We had at our disposal the services of writers and scholars who made it possible for us to find out, at any particular moment or crisis, special information for articles about any event, place or person.... The growth of the work of the British Bureau of Information may be estimated by the fact that the working force grew from a mere nine at the time of Mr. Balfour’s installation of the office to fifty-four at the end of the war.
For the entire two years of our participation in the war, and for a period long antedating that event, the American people were under the hypnosis of a propaganda conducted with serpent tongues and poisoned pens by alien agents, spitting and hissing venom in the interest of England and France. Mr. Tracy tells us that other means employed were “war posters which went all over the country and which are still going.”
The British Bureau of Information was the headquarters of “writers, journalists and authors, dramatists and poets, who turned over to us special articles or descriptions or pieces of art, to be relayed to the periodicals.” And he adds: “There was also, perhaps most in the public eye, the almost endless chain of English men and women who came over during the war to speak under the auspices of the British Government upon different aspects of the war. These did not include the speakers and writers who came over here upon their own initiative and for pecuniary benefit. We were not responsible for them. Butwe did look after and made arrangements for all the speakers who were sent over by the Government. And they were legion!”
These, in the estimation of Tracy, were as much a part of the militant forces as the actual fighters, for he says: “No war in the history of mankind has been fought with so many aids from the army of intelligence, with so many pens and typewriters and cartooning pencils conscripted in the same army with the line man, the tank and the bird man.”
Need we be surprised that the last bulwark of resistance to this insidious propaganda was swept away? How the British Bureau of Information must have laughed in its sleeve and rejoiced when the fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters of the 17,000 American boys of German descent who bled in France were treated as criminal aliens in their own country under the spell of the British propaganda?
The French propaganda bureau was busy in a similar manner. “The Dial” of February 8, 1919, has this to say:
By 1916 the simple installation in the rear of the Quai d’Orsay Ministry had evolved into the famous Maison de la Presse, which occupied, with its many bureaus, a large six-story building on the Rue Francois Premier. This was one of the busiest hives of wartime Paris.There the promising novelist, the art critic, the publicist, or the well-recommended “belle chanteuse,” as well as the more vulgar film operator and press agent, found directions and material support for patriotic activities in the “propagande.” From the Maison de la Presse were dispatched to every neutral and entente nation select “missions.” The chief focus of all this Allied propaganda was the United States, especially Washington and New York, though itinerant propagandists in every variety have covered every section of the country. By this time the English propaganda, also, was in full blast, under the blunt leadership of Lord Northcliffe, with a Minister at home—in the person of Lord Beaverbrook—all to itself. In those days Fifth Avenue became a multi-colored parade of Allied propaganda. One could scarcely dine without meeting a fair propagandist or distinguished Frenchman or titled Englishman (titles in war being chiefly for American consumption!), or enter a theatre without suffering some secret or overt stimulation from the propaganda, etc.
Chief of the French propagandists was Andre Cheradame, who, when President Wilson at one time during the peace confab threatened to bolt the conference, rose to the boldness of proposing to start a conspiracy against him in his own country. According to the Paris “Le Populaire,” early in 1919: