Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.

Library · Report

Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information

Illustration, not an archive object

Content note: Quotes wartime anti-German language, including "Hun", and period terms for racial and national groups. This object is shown as it was published. Why

The report George Creel, as chairman of the Committee on Public Information, submitted to President Wilson on 1 June 1919, printed by the Government Printing Office in 1920. It sets out the committee's finances and the work of each of its domestic divisions and of its Foreign Section, and reproduces reports from some of its commissioners abroad, in Mexico, France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Russia, China and South America. It is the agency's own account of itself, not an independent audit, and it gives its own figures for what it did and spent; the archive's case study on the committee sets it beside other sources. The archive hosts it as the primary record behind that case study. The text is machine-read from a scan and has not been proofread, and its printed tables come out as loose columns of figures, so a reader who needs an exact figure should check the scan linked on this page.

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Download as plain text 103,446 words, with the provenance header above the text

Provenance and rights

Edition
Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, 1917: 1918: 1919. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920 (Library of Congress copy, Internet Archive item completereportof00unit)
Text source
Internet Archive, item completereportof00unit (Library of Congress)
Text basis
Machine-read (OCR) text of a library scan, not proofread.
Rights
A work of the United States government, printed by the Government Printing Office in 1920, so not protected by copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. 105) and in the public domain by age as well. The Library of Congress states that it is unaware of any copyright restrictions on the item. Checked September 29, 2026.
Changes made
Machine-read (OCR) text of a library scan, not proofread: recognition errors (for example "Infobmation" for "Information") are the scan's, not edits. Running heads, page numbers, printer's signature lines, stray marks standing alone on a line and library stamps removed, line-end hyphens resolved against the same book, line wraps rejoined, paragraphs that run across a page break rejoined, short all-capital subheadings and the chapter titles set in title case; nothing else changed. The printed tables are read by the scan as loose columns of figures and are kept as the scan reads them, one line to a row of the block; some ruled tables came out as strings of stray marks and are left as read. The report is divided into chapters at its main headings; sub-sections inside them, and the reports of some commissioners that the scan gives no separate heading, stay within the chapter before them. The title page, contents list and the printed scan boilerplate after the signature are not included.
Source file checksum
5a49c89113a0cf43… (SHA-256 of the download this text was made from)

Where it appears in the archive