George Creel
1876 – 1953 American journalist, government propaganda chief
American journalist who ran the Committee on Public Information, the United States government's First World War propaganda agency, and later wrote a candid account of its work.
- Affiliations
- Committee on Public Information
George Creel was a muckraking journalist and Wilson supporter who was appointed in 1917 to head the Committee on Public Information, the new federal agency charged with rallying American opinion behind the war. Under Creel the CPI flooded the country with posters, pamphlets, films, and press releases and recruited a corps of Four Minute Men to give short pro-war speeches in theaters and public places. The campaign both informed and inflamed, promoting the war while stoking hostility toward Germans and dissenters. After the war Creel described the effort frankly in his 1920 book How We Advertised America. His agency became a model that both admirers and critics of modern propaganda studied, Edward Bernays among them.
Connections
- associate of Edward Bernays — Bernays worked for the Committee on Public Information and drew on it for his later theory of engineering consent.
- associate of Walter Lippmann — Both were part of the American wartime propaganda and information effort.
- associate of Walter Lippmann — Both were part of the American wartime propaganda effort of 1917 to 1918.
In the timeline
- 1917 – 1919 Committee on Public Information (Creel Committee) the chairman who ran the agency
- 1917 The Creel Committee mobilizes mass opinion for war the chairman who ran the agency
- 1917 Creel's wartime propaganda bureau refuses the name mentioned
- 1920 George Creel publishes How We Advertised America central figure