Among those offering to serve was fifty-eight-year-old Teddy Roosevelt, who visited Wilson on April 10 and requested permission to lead a division of volunteers into battle. Roosevelt was so eager to go to the front that he even promised to cease his attacks on Wilson. Wilson denied his request. Roosevelt accused him of basing his decision on political calculations. Among those who criticized Wilson’s decision was soon-to-be French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who thought Roosevelt’s presence would be inspirational.
Imbued with the martial spirit and patriotism of their father, all four of Roosevelt’s sons did enlist and see combat. Ted, Jr., and Archie were wounded in action. Ted was also gassed at Cantigny. Twenty-year old Quentin, the youngest of the children, was killed when his plane was shot down in July 1918, a blow from which his father would never recover. Theodore Roosevelt’s health declined rapidly and he died within six months at age sixty, having been able to witness, from a safe distance, the horrors of modern warfare.
Unfortunately for Wilson, not all Americans were as gung ho as the Roosevelts. Because antiwar sentiment had run so deep in much of the country, the Wilson administration felt compelled to take extraordinary measures to convince the skeptical public of the righteousness of the cause. For that purpose, the government established an official propaganda agency—the Committee on Public Information (CPI)—headed by Denver newspaperman George Creel. The committee recruited 75,000 volunteers, known as “four-minute men,” who delivered short patriotic speeches in public venues across the country, including shopping districts, streetcars, movie theaters, and churches. It flooded the nation with propaganda touting the war as a noble crusade for democracy and encouraged newspapers to print stories highlighting German atrocities. It also asked Americans to inform on fellow citizens who criticized the war effort. CPI advertisements urged magazine readers to report to the Justice Department “the man who spreads pessimistic stories… cries for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.”25
Underlying Wilson’s wartime declarations and the CPI’s emphasis on promoting “democracy” was the realization that for many Americans democracy had become a kind of “secular religion” that could exist only within a capitalist system. Many also associated it with “Americanism.” It meant more than a set of identifiable institutions. As Creel said on one occasion, it is a “theory of spiritual progress.” On another occasion, he explained, “Democracy is a religion with me, and throughout my whole adult life I have preached America as the hope of the world.”26
Newspapers voluntarily fell in line behind the propaganda effort as they had in 1898 and would in all future U.S. wars. Victor Clark’s study of the wartime press for the National Board for Historical Service (NBHS) remarkably but revealingly concluded that the “voluntary cooperation of the newspaper publishers of America resulted in a more effective standardization of the information and arguments presented to the American people, than existed under the nominally strict military control exercised in Germany.”27
Historians also rallied to the cause. Creel established the CPI’s Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation under the leadership of University of Minnesota historian Guy Stanton Ford. Several of the nation’s leading historians, including Charles Beard, Carl Becker, John R. Commons, J. Franklin Jameson, and Andrew McLaughlin, assisted Ford in simultaneously promoting U.S. aims and demonizing the enemy. Ford’s introduction to one CPI pamphlet decries the “Pied Pipers of Prussianism,” declaring, “Before them is the war god, to whom they have offered up their reason and their humanity; behind them the misshapen image they have made of the German people, leering with bloodstained visage over the ruins of civilization.”28
The CPI’s penultimate pamphlet, “The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy,” proved to be its most controversial. Based on documents obtained by the head of the CPI’s foreign section and former Associate Chairman Edgar Sisson, the pamphlet alleged that Lenin and Trotsky and their associates were paid German agents who were betraying the Russian people on behalf of the imperial German government. The documents, for which Sisson paid lavishly, were widely known to be forgeries in Europe and were similarly suspected by the State Department. Wilson’s chief foreign policy advisor, Colonel Edward House, wrote in his diary that he told the president that their publication signified “a virtual declaration of war upon the Bolshevik Government” and Wilson said he understood. Publication was withheld for four months. Wilson and the CPI ignored all warnings and released them to the press in seven installments beginning on September 15, 1918.29 Most U.S. newspapers dutifully reported the story uncritically and unquestioningly. The New York Times, for example, ran a story under the headline “Documents Prove Lenine and Trotzky [sic] Hired by Germans.”30 But controversy quickly erupted as the New York Evening Post challenged their authenticity, noting that “the most important charges in the documents brought forward by Mr. Sisson were published in Paris months ago, and have, on the whole, been discredited.”31 Within a week, the Times and the Washington Post were both reporting charges by S. Nuorteva, the head of the Finnish Information Bureau, that the documents were widely known to be “brazen forgeries.”32 Sisson and Creel defended their authenticity. Creel responded angrily to Nuorteva’s allegations: “That is a lie! The government of the United States put out these documents and their authenticity is backed by the government. This is bolshevik propaganda and when an unsupported bolsheviki attacks them it is hardly worth bothering about.”33 He flailed wildly in a threatening letter to the editor of the Evening Post:
I say to you flatly that the New York Evening Post cannot escape the charge of having given aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States in an hour of national crisis. These documents were published with the full authority of the Government behind them. They were not given out until there was every conviction that they were absolutely genuine…. I do not make the charge that the New York Evening Post is German or that it has taken German money, but I do say that the service it has rendered to the enemies of the United States would have been purchased gladly by those enemies, and in terms of unrest and industrial stability this supposedly American paper has struck a blow at America more powerful [than] could possibly have been dealt by German hands.34