Countless other liberal and leftist intellectuals lent their talents and energies to the propaganda effort. Edward Bernays, who would be credited with creating the field of public relations, cut his teeth on the Creel Committee, learning the art of "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses." The CPI printed millions of posters, buttons, pamphlets, and the like in eleven languages not counting English. The committee eventually had more than twenty subdivisions with offices in America and around the world. The Division of News alone issued more than six thousand releases. Just under one hundred pamphlets were printed with an estimated circulation of seventy-five million. A typical poster for Liberty Bonds cautioned, "I am Public Opinion. All men fear me!...[I]f you have the money to buy and do not buy, I will make this No Man's Land for you!" A CPI poster asked, "Have you met the Kaiserite?...You find him in hotel lobbies, smoking compartments, clubs, offices, even homes...He is a scandal-monger of the most dangerous type. He repeats all the rumors, criticism, he hears about our country's part in the war. He's very plausible...People like that...through their vanity or curiosity or treason they are helping German propagandists sow the seeds of discontent."58
One of Creel's greatest ideas — an instance of "viral marketing" before its time — was the creation of an army of nearly a hundred thousand "Four Minute Men." Each was equipped and trained by the CPI to deliver a four-minute speech at town meetings, in restaurants, in theaters — anyplace they could get an audience — to spread the word that the "very future of democracy" was at stake. In 1917-18 alone, some 7,555,190 speeches were delivered in fifty-two hundred communities. These speeches celebrated Wilson as a larger-than-life leader and the Germans as less-than-human Huns. Invariably, the horrors of German war crimes expanded as the Four Minute Men plied their trade. The CPI released a string of propaganda films with such titles as The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin, and The Prussian Cur. The schools, of course, were drenched in nationalist propaganda. Secondary schools and colleges quickly added "war studies courses" to the curriculum. And always and everywhere the progressives questioned the patriotism of anybody who didn't act "100 percent American."
Another Wilson appointee, the socialist muckraker Arthur Bullard — a former writer for the radical journal the Masses and an acquaintance of Lenin's — was also convinced that the state must whip the people up into a patriotic fervor if America was to achieve the "transvaluation" the progressives craved. In 1917 he published Mobilising America, in which he argued that the state must "electrify public opinion" because "the effectiveness of our warfare will depend on the ardour we throw into it." Any citizen who did not put the needs of the state ahead of his own was merely "dead weight." Bullard's ideas were eerily similar to the Sorelian doctrines of the "vital lie." "Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms...there are lifeless truths and vital lies...The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it's true or false."59
The radical lawyer and supposed civil libertarian Clarence Darrow — today a hero to the left for his defense of evolution in the Scopes "Monkey" trial — both stumped for the CPI and defended the government's censorship efforts. "When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace," Darrow wrote in a government-backed book, "I know he is working for Germany." In a speech at Madison Square Garden he said that Wilson would have been a traitor not to defy Germany, and added, "Any man who refuses to back the President in this crisis is worse than a traitor." Darrow's expert legal opinion, it may surprise modern liberals to know, was that once Congress had decided on war, the right to question that decision evaporated entirely (an interesting standard given the tendency of many to assert that the Bush administration has behaved without precedent in its comparatively tepid criticism of dissent). Once the bullets fly, citizens lose the right even to discuss the issue, publicly or privately; "acquiescence on the part of the citizen becomes a duty."60 (It's ironic that the ACLU made its name supporting Darrow at the Scopes trial.)
The rationing and price-fixing of the "economic dictatorship" required Americans to make great sacrifices, including the various "meatless" and "wheatless" days common to all of the industrialized war economies in the first half of the twentieth century. But the tactics used to impose these sacrifices dramatically advanced the science of totalitarian propaganda. Americans were deluged with patriotic volunteers knocking on their doors to sign this pledge or that oath not only to be patriotic but to abstain from this or that "luxury." Herbert Hoover, the head of the national Food Administration, made his reputation as a public servant in the battle to get Americans to tighten their belts, dispatching over half a million door knockers for his efforts alone. No one could dispute his gusto for the job. "Supper," he complained, "is one of the worst pieces of extravagance that we have in this country."61
Children were a special concern of the government's, as is always the case in totalitarian systems. They were asked to sign a pledge card, "A Little American's Promise":
At table I'll not leave a scrap
Of food upon my plate.
And I'll not eat between meals but
For supper time I'll wait.
I make that promise that I'll do
My honest, earnest part
In helping my America
With all my loyal heart.
For toddlers who couldn't sign a pledge card, let alone read, the Progressive war planners offered a rewritten nursery rhyme:
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn!
The cook's using wheat where she ought to use corn
And terrible famine our country will sweep,
If the cooks and the housewives remain fast asleep!
Go wake them! Go wake them! It's now up to you!
Be a loyal American, Little Boy Blue!62
Even as the government was churning out propaganda, it was silencing dissent. Wilson's Sedition Act banned "uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military." The postmaster general was given the authority to deny mailing privileges to any publication he saw fit — effectively shutting it down. At least seventy-five periodicals were banned. Foreign publications were not allowed unless their content was first translated and approved by censors. Journalists also faced the very real threat of being jailed or having their supply of newsprint terminated by the War Industries Board. "Unacceptable" articles included any discussion — no matter how high-minded or patriotic — that disparaged the draft. "There is a limit," Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson declared. That limit has been exceeded, he explained, when a publication "begins to say that this Government got in the war wrong, that it is in it for the wrong purposes, or anything that will impugn the motives of the Government for going into the war. They can not say that this Government is the tool of Wall Street or the munitions-makers...There can be no campaign against conscription and the Draft Law."63