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 · Book

How We Advertised America

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

George Creel's account, published in June 1920, of the Committee on Public Information, the United States government's wartime publicity agency, which he chaired from its creation in April 1917 until it closed on 30 June 1919. The book describes the committee's domestic divisions (news, the Four Minute Men, films, posters, advertising, work among the foreign-born) and its work in other countries, and ends with the closing of the agency. It is the agency's own account of itself, written by its chairman as, in his words, a record and a chronicle, and not an independent audit; the archive's case study on the committee sets it beside other sources. The archive hosts it because that case study and several other write-ups cite it. The text is machine-read from a scan and has not been proofread.

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Download as plain text 141,371 words, with the provenance header above the text

Provenance and rights

Edition
How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1920; Prelinger Library copy (Internet Archive item howweadvertameri00creerich)
Text source
Internet Archive, item howweadvertameri00creerich (Prelinger Library)
Text basis
Machine-read (OCR) text of a library scan, not proofread.
Rights
Published in the United States in 1920, more than 95 years ago, so in the public domain in the United States; the Internet Archive lists the scan as not in copyright. Creel died in 1953, so the text is also in the public domain in countries that count the author's life plus 70 years. Checked September 29, 2026.
Changes made
Machine-read (OCR) text of a library scan, not proofread: recognition errors (for example stray marks, and the first word of a chapter, where the large initial capital is often misread or lost) are the scan's, not edits. Page numbers, running heads (the book's title and the chapter titles), part headings, printer's marks, stray marks standing alone on a line and the library's bookplate page removed, line-end hyphens resolved against the same book, line wraps rejoined, paragraphs that run across a page break rejoined, chapter titles set in title case and the book's parts shown as group headings; nothing else changed. Two footnotes are moved from the foot of the page to just after the paragraph the page break falls in and set as quotations. Printed tables, forms and letter closings are kept as the scan reads them, one line to a row of the block. The title page, contents list, list of illustrations, the portrait plates and the index are not included; the dedicatory note, foreword, all chapters, the two appendix chapters and the appended catalogue of the Committee's publications are.
Source file checksum
cb9833142b9fe913… (SHA-256 of the download this text was made from)

Where it appears in the archive