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 Committee on Public Information was wiped out of existence on June 30, 1919, by action of Congress. The work of the Committee had been discontinued months before, and only an orderly liquidation was in progress. It was this liquidation that Congress desired to interrupt and confuse. No one was left with power to rent a building, employ a clerk, transfer a bank balance, or to collect a dollar. This condition of chaos endured for weeks — for it was not until August 21st that the President found power to turn the records of the Committee over to the Council of National Defense — and it is only to-day that a final accounting to the people is able to be made.
At the time of the Committee's annihilation a complete report of its activities was on the presses in the Government Printing Office. This was included in the general slaughter, for not only was it the purpose of Congress to prevent any final audit, but also to keep the Committee from making a statement of achievement for the information of the public.
It was to defeat this pwjrpose that this book has been written. It is not a compilation of incident and opinion, but a record and a chronicle. I have followed through the work of the organization from beginning to end, division by division, both as a matter of duty and as a partial discharge of my debt of gratitude to the men and women who worked with me.
It is to them and to Woodrow Wilson — great and inspired leader in the fight for the moral verdict of mankind — that this volume is dedicated.
THE AUTHOR.
NEW YORK, May lt 1920.
A very special word of thanks is due to Mr. Maurice Lyons, secretary of the Committee from first to last, and to Mr. Harvey J. O'Higgins, associate chairman.
How We Advertised America, George Creel. 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. Provenance and rights.