The genius of mobilization. How the US government hired a media man who convinced Americans to go to the trenches of the First World War, the first time so far from home

People like George Creel are usually said to be self-made. As a teenager, he disappeared for a long time from the house of his alcoholic father, somehow managed to study at the Odessa college (Missouri) and in Kansas City began to earn $4 a week as a reporter. When he was expelled from the newspaper for the article about the escape of a rich man’s daughter with a coachman, he went to New York – in a cattle car, paying for the passage by caring for animals.

After taxing the Big Apple, Creel began working for Joseph Pulitzer and his rival William Hearst. It is now in honor of the first Columbia University gives an award for high standards of journalism. And then both publishers, in pursuit of the reader, created a sensational yellow press, disregarding all the rules of accuracy of information. Creel locked himself in a room of a cheap hotel and invented comics around the clock, from the stacks of which he sold just a couple.

Later, Creel joined the prestigious weekly magazine Collier’s with experience in all genres of journalism, from book reviews to investigations. At the end of 1916, he was invited to the team of Wilson, who was going for a second presidential term. He won the election, and Creel soon wrote him a tactful remark about the censorship of criticism of the war.

Wilson read Krylo’s letter and suggested that he head the government’s Committee on Public Information (KGI). Now the war had to be promoted.

Edward Bernays, a Viennese emigrant, soon joined KGI. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and came to the States long before the war to distribute the books and treatment methods of his famous relative in Europe.

Bernays will be named later “the father of PR”, because he will be able to sell anything, often carrying out ethical nuances in parentheses. It was his campaign for women’s smoking in the 1920s that made tobacco magnates even richer. And at KGI, he was engaged in advertising America, as Krill would call it.

A relative of Freud worked with exporters to Latin America, and every shipment of any product from the States, wherever it went, was accompanied by product catalogs with articles about the US contribution to victory.

At the end of the war, the activities of the committee produced an unexpected result. When discussions about the new world order were already taking place in Paris, the Americans volunteered on other fronts. Like pilot Marian Cooper, who in May 1920 helped the Ukrainian-Polish army liberate Kyiv from the Bolsheviks.

In Europe, Americans were no longer perceived as philanderers or voyeurs-tourists. Because, as Newton Baker, the US Secretary of War at the time, who was also a member of the KGI, noted, “Kreel succeeded in mobilizing the common sense of the whole world.”

Read more about the US’s motivations for entering the Great War in print issue #6 of NV, available for purchase here.