Death of the Liberal Class (13 page)

Read Death of the Liberal Class Online

Authors: Chris Hedges

Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism

BOOK: Death of the Liberal Class
11.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
The newspapers, with Creel feeding them propaganda packaged as news releases, began a relentless campaign of manipulation of public opinion thinly disguised as journalism. The papers not only published without protest the worst drivel handed to them by the CPI, including manufactured stories of German atrocities and war crimes, but in their news pages questioned the patriotism of dissenters.
 
“RADICALS AT WORK FOR GERMAN PEACE,” read a June 24, 1917, headline in the
New York Times,
with a subhead adding, “Well-Financed Propaganda Has Ample Quarters and Staff and Is Flooding Country. TAKES IDEAS FROM RUSSIA[.] Proposes Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates Here to Run the War.”
 
“A group of men and women, representing all shades of radical and pacifist opinion, have combined to carry on a campaign in this country to create sentiment in favor of peace along lines advocated by the most radical and visionary of Russia Revolutionists,” the article began.
In other words, the peace which they will agitate for in every part of the country will be just such a peace as persons best informed as to the views of the Kaiser and his absolutist followers say the German Government favors. It is not denied by some persons prominent in the new propaganda that if Germany should cease its submarine warfare they would advocate the United States deserting the Allies and concluding a separate peace with Berlin.
 
In this new peace-at-any-price organization are a number of Germans and a great many radicals of other origin. The organization is called the People’s Council of America and is said to have the support of various organizations, such as the Collegiate Anti-Militarist League, two members of which were convicted last week of conspiracy to obstruct the military laws of the nation; the Emergency Peace Federation, which was so busy in the days immediately preceding the declaration of war against Germany, and the so-called American Union against Militarism.
 
The People’s Council, as they call it, apparently has strong financial backing. It has a large suite of rooms in the Educational Building, at 70 Fifth Avenue, where a score of stenographers and secretaries are busy sending out letters and literature urging, among other things, the organization in the United States of a “Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Committee” such as now exists in Russia.
 
In one of the pamphlets now being mailed occurs this statement:
 
“It is hoped that our own People’s Council will voice the peace will of America as unmistakably and effectively as the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates in speaking for Russia.”
 
Another document which is being mailed says that the organization is working for “an early, general and democratic peace, to be secured through negotiation and in harmony with the principles outlined by the new Russia,” while in another place it denounces the President, by plain inference, when it is stated that “America has yielded the honor of leading in peace and is now a participant in the international carnage.”
 
“Every day,” another propaganda sheet issued in the name of the organization says, “the constitutional rights [of] free speech, free press and free assembly are being assaulted.”
 
At the offices of the council it was frankly stated that the intention of those behind the agitation was to flood the country with propaganda, and that speakers and agitators would be sent to every part of the country. Joseph D. Cannon, a labor leader, has been delegated to agitate among the miners of the West; A. W. Ricker, a magazine editor, will try to gain a foothold for the organization among the farmers of the Northwest; James D. Maurer, the Pennsylvania labor agitator, will devote his efforts to the great labor centres in the State, while Professor L. M. Keasbey of the University of Texas and an Australian preacher named Gordon will try to bring the South into line against President Wilson and in favor of a peace which it is generally admitted is such a peace as the Germans would now accept.
 
Some of the people who are listed as “hard workers” in the organization are David Starr Jordan, who is the Treasurer; L. P. Lochner, the man who is generally credited with having persuaded Henry Ford to back the peace ship venture; the Rev. Dr. Judah L. Magnes, Algernon Lee, and Morris Hillquit, the Socialists who failed to get passports to Europe recently, where they wanted to attend the so-called Stockholm conference; Max Eastman, editor of a radical pamphlet; J. Schlossberg, a labor leader; Fola La Follette, a daughter of the Wisconsin Senator; Professor W. L. Dana of Columbia University, who, it was said at the offices of the organization, is also a prominent member of the Collegiate Anti-Militarist League; Mrs. Emily Greene Balch, and a score of other persons of similar views, and all of them violent opponents of the military policies of the Wilson Administration.
 
Here is a sample of the letters which the council is scattering over the country.
Dear Friend: You will rejoice with us at the evidence of a powerful and rapidly growing sentiment for peace. The success of the First American Conference for Democracy and the Terms of Peace, and its remarkable climax at Madison Square Garden, have sent a ray of hope to hosts “that sat in darkness.”
 
 
 
You stood nobly by the Emergency Peace Federation, and I thank you again for your support. The federation is one of several organizations now being merged into the larger and more powerful movement represented by the People’s Council. I am sure your loyal support will continue into the new organization.
 
 
 
The Organizing Committee of the People’s Council is undertaking a tremendous task. The People’s Council meets on August 4. Before this time we must secure delegates to the People’s Council from which the thousands of organizations of workers, farmers, women, clergymen, anti-militarists, Socialists, single taxers, &c. We must send out organizers to explain the purpose of the council. We must arrange hundreds of public meetings, and flood the country with literature.
 
 
 
Fifty thousand dollars is needed before Aug. 1. We want 25,000 one dollar bills. A dollar contribution from 25,000 people means ten times more than the same amount from large contributors.
 
 
 
Will you not send us $1? Send more if you possibly can. Get your friends Interested—urge them to contribute—and do let us count on you.
 
 
Yours very sincerely,
REBECCA SHELLY
Financial Secretary.
 
That the activities of the organization will be closely watched by the Federal authorities can be stated on authority. Because of its evident strong financial backing and because it is out for the avowed purpose of attacking the policies of the Government and to stir up discontent over the conscription law, the proper authorities say the council “will bear watching,” although its activities will in no wise be interfered with so long as it stays “within the law.”
 
Members of the council admit that if they had their way France would not recover Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium would receive no indemnity for the destruction which the Germans have wrought, the Lusitania would be unavenged—in other words, the world would get a “German peace.”
11
 
The mass propaganda established during the war, which included journalists, entertainers, artists, and novelists, became the model for twentieth-century corporate and governmental advertising and publicity. The selling of the Iraq war by the administration of George W. Bush was lifted from the playbook of the CPI, as was the tactic used by ExxonMobil to use $16 million to fund a network of forty-three “grassroots” organizations opposed to the science of climate change, recruit scientists to publish non-peer-reviewed articles challenging the scientific evidence, and repeated placement of these “experts” on the national airwaves to manufacture public confusion. The use of these propaganda techniques has permitted corporations to saturate the airwaves with images and slogans that deify mass consumer culture. And it has meant the death, by corporate hands, of news.
 
“In 1909-1910, 58 percent of American cities had a press that was varied both in ownership and perspective,” Stuart Ewen wrote in his classic
Captains of Consciousness
.
By 1920, the same percentage represented those cities in which the press was controlled by an information monopoly. By 1930, 80 percent of American cities had given way to a press monopoly. The role and influence of advertising revenues multiplied thirteen-fold (from $200 million to $2.6 billion), and it was the periodicals, both the dailies and others, which acted as a major vehicle for this growth.
12
 
 
 
Creel was, in many ways, the godfather of modern public relations. John Dos Passos called him “a little shrimp of a man with burning dark eyes set in an ugly face under a shock of curly hair.”
13
He came from a poor Virginian family, fiercely loyal to the Confederate cause, which had migrated to Missouri after the Civil War. He had worked as a reporter for Kansas City newspapers and as a muckraking journalist for New York magazines. He was married to Blanche Bates, a well-known stage actress, and he was endowed with supreme self-confidence, boundless energy, and a penchant for a binary view of the world that painted reality in bold strokes of black and white. “To Creel,” wrote journalist Mark Sullivan, “there are only two classes of men. There are skunks and the greatest man that ever lived. The greatest man that ever lived is plural and includes everyone who is on Creel’s side in whatever public issue he happens at the moment to be concerned with.” It had to be admitted, Creel wrote of himself, “that an open mind is not part of my inheritance. I took in prejudices with mother’s milk and was weaned on partisanship.”
14
 
Creel’s power—he had direct access to Wilson—was resented by many in Washington, and after his usefulness ebbed with the war’s end, he would never regain his prominence, although he made many attempts. He was involved following the war in two shady business deals, the first as part of a sleazy Manhattan-based mail-order business, the Pelman Institute of America, which peddled a self-improvement scheme called “Pelmanism.” It promised to teach people “how to think; how to use fully powers of which they are conscious; how to discover and to train the power of which they have been unconscious.” It promised subscribers that “Pelmanism” produced salary increases “from 20 to 200 percent.” He later was mixed up in the Teapot Dome oil scandal and admitted before a 1924 Senate investigation that he had accepted a check for $5,000 to convince Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, whom he had worked with during the war, to lease two government-owned oil fields to private oil interests. He ran against Upton Sinclair in the 1934 Democratic primary for governor of California and lost. Franklin Roosevelt, who had had enough of Creel’s arrogance during World War I, when Roosevelt had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, rejected Creel’s requests to work in the Office of War Information during World War II. Creel ended his life as a fervent anticommunist and a champion of right-wing causes who worked with Senator Joseph McCarthy and Representative Richard Nixon during the Red Scare of the late 1940s. It was a fitting conclusion.
 
Creel knew that his task of selling the war would require emasculating powerful social movements that not only had opposed the war but also had exposed the brutality and ruthlessness of major industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller. Labor unions, progressive journalists, pacifists, isolationists, the large number of immigrants who disliked the British, and some one million Socialists, led by Debs—who announced at Cooper Union in New York City on March 7, 1917, that he would rather be shot as a traitor than “go to war for Wall Street”
15
—would prove to be obstacles to Wilson’s war if left alone. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, with some 100,000 members, and perhaps another 200,000 active supporters, denounced the war as capitalist exploitation, encouraged draft dodging, and called for strikes.
 
Wilson’s initial worries about lukewarm public support proved well grounded. Enlistment rates were paltry with only seventy-three thousand young men volunteering for the army between April and the middle of May. The government was forced to institute conscription. It was then that Creel went to work.

Other books

State of Pursuit by Summer Lane
The Fairest of Them All by Carolyn Turgeon
Bound by Consent by Dalia Craig
A Little Night Music by Kathy Hitchens
The First Man You Meet by Debbie Macomber
Sin Eater by C.D. Breadner