CREEL-MS-L Archives

From: "pat creel" <>
Subject: Creel, George Edward (1 Dec. 1876-2 Oct. 1953) was born in Lafayette County, Missouri, the son of Henry Clay Creel and Virginia Fackler
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:49:11 -0600

copied fyi...

http://www.anb.org/articles/home.html
Creel, George Edward (1 Dec. 1876-2 Oct. 1953), journalist and government administrator, was born in Lafayette County, Missouri, the
son of Henry Clay Creel and Virginia Fackler, farmers. He grew up in the Missouri towns of Independence and Odessa, where his mother
supported the family by sewing, gardening, and operating a boarding house, because his father was often drunk and unemployed. As a
teenager, Creel ran away from home to follow county fairs, then to roam the Southwest. In 1896 he was hired as a cub reporter by the
Kansas City World, a Scripps paper, at four dollars a week. In 1898 he hopped a cattle car for New York, where he shoveled snow and
sold newspapers before being hired by the comic supplement of William Randolph Hearst's New York American.

In 1899, with his wealthy friend Arthur Grissom, Creel established a weekly, the Kansas City Independent, and soon became full
owner, editor, and publisher. An aggressive reformer, he fought the political machine of Thomas Pendergast while promoting such
causes as single tax, women's rights, public ownership of utilities, direct primaries, and the commission form of government. In
1904, already skilled in developing publicity, Creel helped elect Democratic reformer Joseph Folk as governor. He received national
visibility by calling for the lynching of eleven state senators who opposed municipal ownership of Denver's water company.

Creel was editorial writer for the Denver Post in 1909-1910, during which time he helped organize a Citizen's party for the city.
When his own employers manipulated the party slate, in the process gutting much of its reformist thrust, Creel moved to New York,
where in 1911 he worked for Hearst's Cosmopolitan. Back in Denver later that year, he became editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain
News, where he ardently supported the policies of Woodrow Wilson. In 1912 he married Blanche Bates, a leading actress who died in
1941. They had two children.

From 1912 to 1913 Creel served as police commissioner of Denver, but when he accused the policemen of frequenting saloons, Mayor
Henry Arnold dismissed him. Creel had already been strongly attacked for recommending that the city's prostitutes be rehabilitated
at a city-supported farm. Leaving Denver, he returned to New York, where he wrote muckraking articles for Harper's Weekly, Century,
and Everybody's. In 1914, along with Judge Benjamin Lindsey and poet Edwin Markham, he wrote Children of Bondage, an exposé of child
labor that he later said was "more rhetorical than factual." In 1916 he organized a committee of authors and publicists to back
Wilson's reelection and published a campaign tract, Wilson and the Issues, in which he strongly defended the president's neutrality
policies and social reforms.

On 14 April 1917, eight days after the United States entered World War I, Wilson appointed Creel chairman of the Committee on Public
Information (CPI), the most gigantic propaganda effort in American history to that date. In its campaign to promote the war effort
at home and overseas, the committee engaged in what Creel called "a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventure
in advertising." It published 75 million pamphlets, 6,000 press releases, and 14,000 drawings and sponsored 75,000 public speakers,
often called Four-Minute Men because of the brevity of their addresses. It printed the first government daily, entitled Official
Bulletin, which was posted in every military camp and some 54,000 post offices. Its sixteen-page bimonthly, the National Service
Bulletin, reached 600,000 schools. Creel tried to avoid sensationalist accounts of alleged atrocities, but some committee publicists
were irresponsible. Creel attempted to suppress "dangerous" material, whether pro-German or pro-Bolshevik, and to stop any book that
was not "pro-American" from leaving the United States.

Creel's acerbic tongue created powerful enemies. He once compared the mind of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R.-Mass.) to the soil of
New England: "highly cultivated but naturally sterile." When asked about the loyalty of Congress, he snapped back that he did not go
slumming. Only Wilson's direct intervention kept him in office, though the president, Creel later said, put a "padlock on my lips."
Creel accompanied Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and while in Europe, he visited Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Ireland
on behalf of the president.

In 1920 Creel joined Collier's as a feature writer and began writing various nonfiction works. Six years later he moved to San
Francisco. When the New Deal was launched, Creel was firmly in the camp of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1933 he chaired the
Regional Labor Board for California, Utah, and Nevada. He also directed the West Coast office of the National Recovery
Administration. He left both posts in 1934 to seek the Democratic nomination for governor of California, where he was backed by the
party establishment. After losing the primary heavily to muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair, he rejoined Collier's, serving as
Washington correspondent. In 1935 he briefly chaired the National Advisory Committee of Harry Hopkins's Works Progress
Administration. In 1939 Roosevelt appointed him U.S. commissioner of the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.
Possessing strong misgivings over the president's spending and prounion policies, he began to sour over the New Deal around 1939 but
never formally broke with the president.

When World War II broke out, Creel sought again to direct war publicity but was rebuffed. In this and subsequent twentieth-century
wars nothing like the "Creel Committee" was attempted. In 1943 he married Alice May Rosseter, who died in 1948. In his book War
Criminals and Punishment (1944), he advocated harsh treatment of Germany and Japan, saying of the Germans, "After centuries of
deliberate, systematic poisoning, there is no health in them."

Creel was a prolific writer. In 1908 he wrote Quatrains of Christ, an effort to offer a "Christian answer" to the Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam. In Ireland's Fight for Freedom (1919) Creel offered a strong indictment of British policy and called for Ulster's union
with the rest of Ireland. The War, the World, and Wilson (1920) defends the Fourteen Points, the Versailles treaty, and the League
of Nations. His People Next Door: An Interpretive History of Mexico and the Mexicans (1926) expresses strong sympathy for that
nation's budding nationalism. Sons of the Eagle: Soaring Figures from America's Past (1927), a collection of essays originally
printed in Collier's, treats such figures as Daniel Boone and Sam Houston with superlatives, and Tom Paine--Liberty Bell (1932)
covers its subject in a similar fashion. Russia's Race of Asia (1949) claims that the Chinese Communists were mere puppets of the
Soviet Union and that Chiang Kai-shek was a great and often betrayed leader. Creel also collaborated with Vice Admiral Ross T.
McIntire, Roosevelt's medical doctor, in White House Physician (1946).

The postwar years reveal Creel as a man obsessed with conspiracy. In his memoirs, Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded
Years (1947), he claimed that V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky were German agents, accused Roosevelt of betraying the Atlantic Charter
at the Teheran and Yalta conferences, and linked President Harry S. Truman to the corruption of Kansas City's Pendergast machine. In
1951 he endorsed Senator Robert A. Taft (R.-Ohio) for the presidency and in 1952 backed the red-hunting efforts of Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy, saying he "stems from the same sturdy Americanism that led plain men to risk all at Lexington and Concord." Creel died in
San Francisco.

Creel's name will ever be synonymous with government propaganda of a heavy-handed nature. Yet to link him with the excesses of the
Creel Committee and to forget his entire record is something of an injustice, for his career was a rich one.




Bibliography
Creel's papers are at the Library of Congress. Major Creel correspondence relating to the CPI is in the Records of the Committee of
Public Information, RG 63, National Archives, and the papers of Woodrow Wilson and Josephus Daniels, both in the Library of
Congress. Creel's How We Advertised America (1920) is a firsthand account of his experience with the CPI. A superior short sketch is
Warren T. Francke, "George Creel," in American Newspaper Journalists, ed. Perry J. Ashley (1984). For a most perceptive treatment,
see Frank Annunziata, "The Progressive as Conservative: George Creel's Quarrel with New Deal Liberalism," Wisconsin Magazine of
History 57 (Spring 1974): 220-33. For favorable views of Creel and the CPI, see James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the
War (1939), and Walton Bean, "George Creel and His Critics: A Study of the Attacks on the Committee on Public Information,
1917-1919" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California at Berkeley, 1941). For a more critical treatment, see Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the
Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (1980). For Creel's political battle of 1934, see Greg
Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (1992). In
William L. Chenery, So It Seemed (1952), a former Collier's editor tells of his association with Creel. Creel's obituary is in the
New York Times, 3 Oct. 1953.



by:
Justus D. Doenecke

This thread:

• Creel, George Edward (1 Dec. 1876-2 Oct. 1953) was born in Lafayette County, Missouri, the son of Henry Clay Creel and Virginia Fackler by "pat creel" <>