More seriously, German propaganda lacked both organization and moral drive. Lieutenant Colonel Nicolai, the Imperial German General Staff officer responsible, puts part of the blame on the German press and on the press officers of the Army and the Reich: "In fact, the enemy remained virtually untouched by any kind of German propaganda. This reproach falls against the press, it would seem, as well as on the responsible officials.... Internationally minded papers themselves failed to cooperate. Yet it was precisely these which were circulated and esteemed abroad. Newspapers with other (pro-militarist) editorial policies, failing to get leadership from the Government, could not aim at any unified effect.... Instead, the goal of the governmental press leadership remained a thoroughly negative one: to prevent the press from doing harm to national policy."[23]
Without developing his theme into systematic doctrine for psychological warfare, the German colonel stated the basic defect of World War I from the German point of view. Writing in 1920, he went on to say: "The enemy alleges simply to have copied our front-line propaganda when he initiated his. In so doing, he is guilty of a deliberate untruth, made for the sake of removing the moral blot which is attached to his victory...." Nicolai could not overcome the supposition that propaganda was a dirty and unsoldierly device and that it was much more honorable for armies to exchange loss of life than to save men on both sides by talking the enemy into surrendering, but he went on to the real point at issue. "Furthermore, it was not moralistic misgivings which kept us from applying to the enemy front lines a propaganda campaign as successful as theirs, but very sober practical obstacles. There were available to us none of the (psychological) points of attack at which propaganda would have been effective against the enemy forces, points such as the enemy found in our own domestic conditions. What was lacking was political propaganda as precursor of military."
What the Germans failed to learn in World War I, they later learned and applied in World War II. The German Imperial Government started in 1914 with a defiant assurance of its own power. Power was not sought among the masses so far as Kaiser Wilhelm was concerned; one inherited it from one's ancestors, along with an army, and the masses had better keep their noses out of it. The Hitlerite German government of 1939 began its world war only after two decades of shrewd, conscienceless, bitter domestic propaganda. Hitlerism had come to power by first wooing and then bullying the common man, and the Nazi chiefs, in their strategy of terror or "warfare psychologically waged," subsequently applied the same tactics to the international community. Hitler conquered Europe with these tactics; he started with flattery, made scenes, and ended with cold brutality. These were the skills of the urban slum.
The Creel Committee.
The Creel Committee had the superlative advantage of possessing a chief who enjoyed the confidence of the President and whose participation in national policy was on a high enough level to give propaganda coordination to other governmental policies on a basis of equality. Creel himself considered the task to be one of advertising, and he organized his Committee with extreme looseness, expanding it rapidly. Although his total gross budget for the war was only a fraction of OWI's budgets in World War II, he systematized most of the publicity activities then available.
News services were maintained by means of a news bureau in Washington that fed material to the commercial press and processed other material to publicity missions abroad. Heavy emphasis was placed on the home audience for Creel's mission covered all phases of propaganda work. Sections were set up for posters, advertising, "Four Minute Men" (volunteer local speakers in all American communities), films, American minority groups and the foreign-language press, women's organizations, information bureaus, syndicated features, and cartoons. The young but already large American motion picture industry was made a channel whereby American propaganda movies went to both the United States and overseas audiences. In one instance Creel got the American producers to threaten Swiss exhibitors with a boycott unless they showed American propaganda film along with the features.
Missions were sent to France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Spain, Scandinavia, Mexico and other Latin American countries, China, and Russia. It was not considered necessary to send American propagandists to Japan in World War I. The Japanese were given the American propaganda file and were asked to use it; they said they would.
The Creel Committee was run in simple, almost chaotic fashion. Agencies proliferated whenever a new idea turned up. The basic concept was that of domestic American agitation, as practiced commercially through advertising and socially through the civic clubs. The war propaganda left a rather bad taste in the mouth of many Americans, and the boisterous joviality of the arousers probably produced negative attitudes which encouraged pacifism and isolationism in the postwar years. The purely technical side of the work was done well, but at the terrible cost of overshooting national commitments.
America emerged from the war disappointed at home and discredited abroad—so far as the heated propaganda of "making the world safe for democracy" was concerned. A more modest more calculated national propaganda effort would have helped forestall those attitudes which, in turn, made World War II possible. Creel and his fellow-workers did not remember that beyond every war there lies a peace, in its own way as grim and difficult as war. They did not understand that no war is the last war, that leeway must be left for propaganda to be effective again. They said that World War I would be the last of all wars; perhaps they believed it themselves.