The Fight for the Mind of Mankind

DURING the Congressional hearing on our budget, which resolved itself into a searching inquiry into the work of the Committee, one of the Representatives asked if I did not think that the spectacle of American boys sailing for France was sufficient in itself to rouse the people of America. I answered that this very fact of departure for military service in a foreign land made it more imperative than ever that there should be a fundamental understanding of the causes of the war and of the absolute justice of America's position. A wave of national feeling might carry us into the war and national passions and hatred might whip us on, but froth and dregs would be the only ultimate result. Such methods might carry a mob a city block to tear something down, but they would not bear a self-determining democracy along the road of travail and uttermost sacrifice for great ideals. Could we count on a national understanding of such ideals? Could we be sure that a hundred million — the fathers, the mothers, the children of America, alien born and native alike — understood well enough so that they would support one loan after another, would bear new burdens of taxation and send wave after wave of America's young manhood to die in Flanders fields?

That the nation felt dimly that great issues were at stake was clear, but was it gripped by a conviction that those issues and their proper solutions were bound up with the permanent safety of America here and now and forever? It would have been blindness to assume such an understanding. Throughout our two and a half years of neutrality there had waged a daily battle of controversy, with press and public men alike divided. Some labored to range us at once on the side of the Allies, and another vigorous group, skilfully organized and cleverly directed, strenuously defended the Imperial German government. Public opinion was without shape and force. The country was in a state of mind in which it accepted the war and said, "The President has been patient; we are behind him; we are patriotic; and we fear a great danger." But the life-and-death character of the struggle was not understood. We felt that it had to be brought home to them as a matter of definite intellectual conviction. We wanted to reach the people through their minds, rather than through their emotions, for hate has its undesirable reactions. We wanted to do it, not by over-emphasis of historical appeal, but by unanswerable arguments that would make every man and woman know that the war was a war of self-defense that had to be waged if free institutions were not to perish.

How? There was no precedent to guide us; the ground was unbroken. The various belligerents had issued White Books, Yellow Books, and Blue Books, made up almost entirely of state papers. The publication of diplomatic documents covering our relations with Germany seemed, therefore, the eminently respectable, safe, and accepted thing to do. With the co-operation of the State Department, we began the project, Arthur Bullard being assigned to the task of selecting the documents. The farther we went the more it seemed clear that we would be firing very heavy ammunition, with the chance of a large percentage of such bulky volumes being "duds." Big books were not what we wanted, and long, tedious state papers were not what we needed. Abruptly abandoning the original idea that dealt with archives and formal documents, we decided to go in for "popular pamphleteering." What faced us, therefore, was the problem of proceeding systematically with the work, of doing it with accuracy, with thorough scholarship, and with a full sense that what we put out would have the authority and responsibility of a government publication. Billiard was needed in the Foreign Section, so what we had to look for was a university man, the practised historian, the writer skilled in investigation, one who knew America and Europe equally well. It was at this moment that there -came into my hands a pamphlet containing a patriotic address given out in Minnesota by one Guy Stanton Ford. I have rarely read anything that made a more instant impression, for it had beauty without sacrifice of force, simplicity, remarkable sequence, and obvious knowledge of every detail of America's spiritual progress. I made inquiries at once and found that Ford was head of the History Department of the University of Minnesota and Dean of the Graduate School, and before that a professor of Modern European History at the University of Illinois after five years as an instructor at Yale. I wired him that he was "drafted" and to report immediately. Here again the value of quick decision was proved, for I would have wasted months in search without finding any one so admirably fitted by temperament and training for the important position to which Professor Ford was called.

We were now prepared to initiate our first publication. Here we had a great advantage over similar organizations in England or other countries that had been drawn into the war. That advantage lay in the clear and moving address of President Wilson on April 2, 1917, before the

Congress. A group of men at the University of Minnesota, 8 101 headed by Prof. W. S. Davis of the Department of History, set to work under Dean Ford's direction on the annotation of that message, with the essential facts swept together in the broad compass of the President's eloquent presentation. The work was quickly and skilfully done and happily gaged for easy comprehension and thorough conviction. What should we do as to printing and distribution? We studied the newspaper directories and estimated that we could reach the press of the country with an edition of twenty thousand. Then we would see — and we did see. The press seized it and the consequent publicity overwhelmed us. The first day's mail was delivered to Professor Ford and his one clerk in a peach-basket. The next day there were two bushels of letters asking for copies. They came from all ranks and kinds of people; from boys going to the Officers' Reserve Training Camps, from fathers and mothers whose sons were going into service from farms and shops, banks and schools. One city superintendent wired for fifteen thousand so that it might go into every home in a community largely of foreign-born. As long as the war lasted the demand for the annotated war address of the President kept steadily up and the final figures at the end of our work were two and a half millions of this pamphlet alone.

When, with the aid of the Government Printing Office, we had dug ourselves out of this rush, we turned at once to the masterly introduction that Arthur Bullard had written to the proposed Wrhite Book. It was just the exposition of America's cause that was needed. It dealt with the two great American traditions, the Monroe Doctrine and the Freedom of the Seas. It explained the American effort to substitute arbitration for bloodshed; it followed the purposes and hopes of our neutrality from beginning to end, analyzed every note in the diplomatic exchange that marked our effort to keep the peace, and chronicled faithfully the bad faith of the Imperial German government, its intrigue in the United States, the course of the submarine warfare — in fact, it was a simple, straightforward story based upon the facts and ideals of America.

In authoritative judgment it stands to-day as the most moderate, reasoned, and permanent pamphlet put out by any government engaged in the war. And the way it was prepared was a cheering demonstration of citizens of a democracy doing its own defending and defining of its ideals. Bullard had the laboring oar, and the body of this anonymous pamphlet bears the imprint of his facile pen and clear brain. Sisson and Ford and I reviewed it after Ernest Poole had cast it into a popular form. Professors Shot well of Columbia and Becker of Cornell, who were in Washington on the National Board for Historical Service, shaped up certain points more sharply and judiciously. Then Secretary Lansing and, ultimately, President Wilson himself went over it and approved. It went forth under the title, How the War Came to America, the first of a proud series — the Red, WThite, and Blue books. We printed fifty thousand, but this time we were better prepared for the public demand that ultimately carried the circulation to six and a quarter millions in English and in translations. Some of the great dailies issued it as a Sunday supplement, and others in every part of the country ran it serially. It was one pamphlet we could never let go out of print.

With these two pamphlets fairly swamping the Government Printing Office, we felt more clearly than ever that we were right in judging the need of the country for information clearly put with a sound scholarship behind every statement. Three series of pamphlets were ultimately decided on — the Red, White, and Blue books, the War Information series, and the Loyalty leaflets. It was further decided that we would develop our own machinery for printing and distribution, as the Government Printing Office was overburdened and unable to keep pace with our demands. Our own frank and envelopes were more certain of securing attention than the too familiar Congressional frank, which many members willingly put at our disposal.

I can only indicate the method pursued in issuing the several series. When the pamphlet was decided upon in conferences, the next question was the proper man, or men, to handle its preparation, and these men were then telegraphed a request to come to Washington. In no instance was there a refusal to serve, and not only is it my privilege to pay a high tribute to the devotion of individuals, but also to the patriotism of the universities, who loaned members of their faculties generously and wholeheartedly. The writers were given only one simple direction, and that was to do their work so that they would not be ashamed of it twenty years later. When the pamphlet was finished it was submitted to a general examination and then referred to the various divisions of government for checking, and it is my pride to be able to say that in all the mass of matter issued by Professor Ford's division, dealing with thousands of facts, only one public charge of misstatement was ever voiced and this was followed by an apology.

In the various series we set before ourselves three main aims: The first was to make America's own purposes and ideals clear both to ourselves and to the world, whether ally or enemy. The sane execution of this purpose, involving a presentation of what this great experiment in democracy meant to its own people and to all forwardlooking peoples, had greater implications than the war needs of the moment. Through war the menace of autocracy made us conscious that here in the Western World we were following ideals that made us one with other great peoples and that separated us from the four in Middle Europe by a wide gulf. What we had accepted as unchallenged had to be redefined as well for the Brahmin of the Back Bay as for the Bolshevist of the Ghetto. When I think of the many voices that were heard before the war and are still heard, interpreting America from a class or sectional or selfish standpoint, I am not sure that, if the war had to come, it did not come at the right time for the preservation and reinterpretation of American ideals. A few years earlier would have found us still too absorbed in the problems of a frontier nation, too provincial to have responded unitedly to the world's cry of distress, too confident that the Atlantic was a barrier and not a hand. A decade or two later it might have found us unconsciously stratified in our own social organization and thinking, the prison-walks of class consciousness shutting out the visions of our nation's youth, with something too much gone of that abounding faith in ourselves and our institutions that had been our heritage from the eighteenth century, preserved by the pioneers and nation-builders of the fading Western frontiers.

Coming when it did, it found us ready to respond with the self-abandon of youth to great visions, and to direct our policies and weigh our actions with the ripened wisdom of maturity. President Wilson and his ultimate place in American history may now be a subject of debate, but there is one service that rises above the issues of war and partizanship, and that is that, in this transition period, of which the war made us conscious, he spoke the language of the New American instinct with the spirit of all our past history and traditions.

In this first series on our aims and purposes may be listed, How the War Came to America, The Battle Line of Democracy, War Labor and Peace, Some Recent Addresses of the President, all in the Red, White, and Blue series. In the War Information series, the War Message and Facts Behind It, The Nation in Arms (two addresses by Secretaries Lane and Baker); The Great War: From Spectator to Participant, by Prof. A. C. McLaughlin of Chicago; American Loyalty by American Citizens of German Descent, Lieber and Schurz, and American Interest in Popular Government Abroad, both by Prof. Evarts B. Greene of the University of Illinois; American and Allied Ideals, by Prof. Stuart P. Sherman of the University of Illinois; The War for Peace, compiled by Arthur D. Coll, secretary of the American Peace Society; and America's War Aims and Peace Terms, by Prof. Carl Becker of Cornell University. In the Loyalty leaflets could be counted Judge Buffington's Friendly Words to Foreign Born; Labor and the War, by Prof. John R. Commons of Wisconsin; and Plain Issues of the War, by Elihu Root.

Almost equally important from the standpoint of the unremitting prosecution of the war to a decisive finish was a thorough presentation of the aims, methods, and ideals of the dynastic and feudal government of Germany. Upon no pamphlets did we lavish so much care and scholarship as this series, and the pamphlets, as a group, proceeded logically and remorselessly to tear the mask of civilization and modernity from the medievally minded, medievally organized Prussian militaristic state that was dominating Germany and Central Europe and threatening the world. Disregarding the order of publication, which was by_no means accidental, this group was divided as follows: In the Red, White, and Blue series, The President's Flag Day Address with Evidence of German Plans and Conquest and Kultur, both prepared by Profs. Wallace Notestein and E. E. Stoll of the University of Minnesota; German War Practices and German Treatment of Conquered Territory, both by Profs. D. C. Munroe of Princeton, G. C. Sellery of Wisconsin, and A. C. Krey of Minnesota; German Plots and Intrigues, by Profs. E. C. Sperry of Syracuse and W. M. West, the historian. In the War Information series, The German Government of Germany, by Prof. C. D. Hazen of Columbia; The War of Self-defense, by Secretaries Lansing and Louis F. Post; The German War Code, by G. W. Scott (formerly of Columbia) and Prof. J. W. Garner of Illinois; German Militarism, by Charles Altschul; Why America Fights Germany, by Prof. J. P. Tatlock of Leland Stanford University; and The German Bolshevik Conspiracy, by Edgar Sisson, our representative in Russia. In the Loyalty leaflets, The Prussian System, by Frederic C. Walcott of the Food Administration, was an admirable thumb-nail sketch in this series.

Taken together, these pamphlets make the most sober and terrific indictment ever drawn by one government of the political and military system of another government. It was a serious business to draw it; it was a highly important thing not only that it should sway the opinion of the moment, but that it should stand in the court of all time. To tamper with the opinion of an essentially fair-minded nation in any crisis is the ready device of charlatans and demagogues, and neither they nor their works have ever survived that moment when Truth dispels the mists of momentary and misguided passion. Fortunately, the Germans had made their own record, and from that there was and can be no appeal. We could and did give them their own day in court; let them reveal their own purposes, describe their own methods, glorify their own guilt, and it is their rulers and leaders that have been swept into oblivion.

When I recall the mad swirl of the Washington days, the pressure we were under to do this or to do that, to publish or republish this address or that pamphlet, to indorse some movement or idea, I am cheerful and a bit amazed at our success in avoiding pitfalls. For this we may never receive credit, least of all from the perfervid patriots who would have smeared with blood every page we published, or disfigured it by the distorted fancy they were willing to accept for fact. Insistent people who know how to save the country always throng to Washington even in peace-times, and in war-times we sometimes had to stand on tiptoe to see over their heads the great, grim, honest, unselfish nation behind them. And it was to the heart and mind of that nation that we directed our appeals — and their response was our reward.

The third group of pamphlets has as a purpose the giving in convenient form of information which would help in a constructive way in the daily tasks of a nation at war. The National Service Handbook, edited by Dr. J. J. Coss and James Gutmann of Columbia University, published in the summer of 1917, was just such a compendium about war-work and war organizations and served as a helpful guide to the thousands who could not enter the ranks and yet wanted to serve in some capacity, no matter how humble. The War Cyclopedia, published afterward, not only brought such information up to date, but made available, in compact form, all the information on war topics and policies that any speaker or writer might want at hand. Professors Paxson of Wisconsin, Corwin of Princeton, and Harding of Indiana, with the aid of scores of scholars throughout the land, did a permanently worth-while piece of work under great stress for time and space. Together with the syllabus, we published The Study of the Great War, by Professor Harding, which became a text-book in schools, colleges, and cantonments. Our last pamphlet, in distribution when the armistice came, had moved us forward into new ground by summarizing our peace terms and the chief expressions of American and Allied statesmen on the League of Nations. Our one disappointment was that the second edition of The War Cyclopedia, then in the press, never appeared. Perhaps an explanation of delay is due to individuals and organizations, particularly to the several hundred colleges that planned to use it as a text-book for the Student Army Training Corps. From July 1, 1918, we carried forward our domestic work on a limited Congressional appropriation. Foreseeing difficulties, we had asked that receipts from those publications on which a nominal cost price had been set might come into our receipts for further use and later accounting. The usual precedents had been followed, however, and all receipts, except from the film division, went into the Treasury, and nothing but another Act of Congress could make them available to our use. The net result was that the more successful we were, and the greater the demand for our publications, even though we charged for some, the more quickly we exhausted our fixed appropriation and brought our activities to an end.

Each pamphlet has its own story from the first suggestion through its execution by the best qualified scholar. For many of them I must refer to the plain but significant table in the appendix, and simply renew an expression of my own personal sense of obligation to Guy Stanton Ford and the distinguished leaders of thought who served with him. The figures will tell something of their usefulness, but not all. These pamphlets became an arsenal from which speakers and newspapers drew whole batteries of speeches and editorials and special articles. They helped fill out many pages of privately published patriotic collections and have even found their place in widely used text-books in history and civics. Many a good and misinformed citizen, who had an unformed but vivid impression that the "Creel Committee" was some iniquity of the devil, took with his breakfast a daily diet of our material from the same journal that had given him this impression, met us again at lunch when his children came home with what the teacher had given them from material we prepared, heard us again through our Four Minute Men organization when he went to the "movies," where our films might be part of the program, and rose to local prominence by the speeches he drew from the pamphlets of that other useful organization, the Committee on Public Information. Like the truant boy who ran away from the schoolmaster, Hugh Toil, he found us, recognized and unrecognized, at every turn of the road.

This material went out almost exclusively by request, either from individuals or responsible organizations, such as defense councils or the Loyalty Legion in Wisconsin. Even Congressmen, after the first few months, were furnished not with the pamphlets, but with return postalcards on which was printed a list of our publications, any two of which could be checked as desired by his constituents. This arrangement was a means of conserving our limited resources and gave us a distribution to real readers.

In only one case did we vary from this program of distribution, and that was when we put in the hands of the trusty Boy Scouts several million copies of the President's Flag Day address with annotations on the German plans. The boys delivered it directly to householders and were to secure their promise to read it and pass it on. The boys did their work faithfully, but reported that they partly failed because they could not get the promise to pass on the pamphlet to some other reader!

The States Section of the National Defense Council was especially active in bringing our material to the attention of state and county defense organizations. Newspapers in all parts of the country willingly carried descriptive lists without charge, and the information syndicate headed by Frederick Haskins in Washington gave us publicity on the front page of many great dailies.

Even more important, in the early days when Professor Ford was first preparing pamphlets, was the support and aid given by the National Board for Historical Service, no through which the historians of the country organized perhaps more effectively than any similar group of scholars. It was of great value to this division throughout the war to have available the judgment and ripe scholarship of men like Shotwell of Columbia, Greene of Illinois, Jameson of The American Historical Review, Munro of Princeton, Leland, secretary of the American Historical Association, A. C. Coolidge and F. J. Turner of Harvard, Schafer of Oregon, Johnson of Teachers College, Lingelbach of Pennsylvania, Hull of Cornell, Dodd of Chicago, Fish of Wisconsin, Hunt of the Library of Congress, Hazen of Columbia, Connor of North Carolina, Victor Clark of the Carnegie Institution, Notestein of Minnesota, and S. B. Harding of Indiana. The last named joined our staff in November, 1917, and remained throughout the war as an able assistant to Professor Ford in all the multitudinous work of checking and editing the pamphlets.

Our efforts were supported and supplemented by so many organizations that it is difficult to single out many. Excellent series of pamphlets were put out by the universities of Chicago, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Illinois, and Columbia. Publishing-houses gave precedence to patriotic books without thought of profit and offered us all their material at the cost of printing.

Our last and perhaps our most unique and effective publication was The National School Service, a sixteen-page semi-monthly periodical going free of charge to every public-school teacher in the United States — about 600,- 000 in all. We foresaw a time when, perhaps, if the war with its burdens and losses continued, the national morale would need the support of a message that went without fail into every home. For this purpose there was no other agency so effective, so sure, as the public schools with their twenty millions of pupils. Furthermore, so many governmental and national organizations were flooding the schools, as they had flooded the press, with their material that there was danger of confusion, conflict, and ineffectiveness. Could not the story of the war, of America's effort and ideals, of the work of the Red Cross, the Food Administration, the Liberty Loan, the War Savings Stamps, Public Health, School Gardens, and a score of other activities be brought together as a national unified program and treated in a way that would make it presentable in the schoolroom and effective in the homes? It was worth the effort, cost what it might in time and money. With the support of the National Educational Association, we engaged the co-operation of all the departments in Washington and launched the first publication in which the national government of the United States had ever attempted to reach every public school and home in the land. W. C. Bagley of Teachers College was enlisted as editor-in-chief, and J. W. Searson of Kansas Agricultural College as managing editor, and a staff of specialists prepared all the material so that it could be presented effectively in every kind of school from the primary to the high-school. Special editions were arranged for the Red Cross, War Savings, etc. Junior Four Minute Men contests were organized and supported with material through special supplements prepared by the staff and the Division of Four Minute Men. I shall always treasure the memory of the gratitude with which the underpaid and overworked school-teachers received National School Service; most of all, the letters that came from isolated rural teachers in out-of-the-way valleys and on the far reaches of the prairies. The national government had reached out and placed a hand on their shoulder to encourage them and to ask for their aid and support. They saw a new vision and a new, vitalizing mission. At the end, we were moved by the protests against discontinuing National School Service to present the matter to the President, who promptly made available enough funds to continue it to the end of the year under the Department of the Interior with the same efficient staff of editors.

A number of the principal pamphlets were put into other languages — German, Italian, the Scandinavian tongues, Spanish, Portuguese, Bohemian, Polish, Yiddish, etc. — and given careful distribution through the clubs and churches of the foreign-language groups in America, while the translations themselves were sent to the various countries to be printed on daily presses and circulated by our representatives.

It is perfectly evident that we had to exercise care in making these translations, especially the German versions. We had in mind here not only our German-reading public, but the Germans of the Empire. We hoped to make them our readers if not in war-times, at least ultimately, when they might really seek to understand the voice of a world that had united against them. No awkward phrase or American colloquial German could be allowed to excite ridicule and rob our case of its full effect. A waif of the war, a distinguished German scholar, who had lived long in England before coming to America, did the work, and did it so well that his translation of How the War Came to America, and of the President's addresses, was adopted by some schools as substitutes for the sycophantic texts about modern Germany and its Hohenzollern readers. This man was a technical "enemy alien," but if any one doubts his spiritual kinship with the ideals of America and the Allies, they should read his own tragic story under the title, "A Man Without a Country," in The Ladies' Home Journal for September, 1917.

Besides these translations, special material was published for the foreign-language groups. In selecting this material we had the benefit of advice from our representatives abroad and our connection with the leaders of the patriotic groups of the foreign-born in the United States. While sternly revealing the methods and principles of Germany, we emphasized again the ideals of America, of the America that had drawn the foreigners to its shores, and that was the home of their children, for we knew that, whatever their own transplanted prejudices, the great mass of the foreign-born, like the native Americans, were loyal to the land of their children. An unwise use of the discretion granted us in presenting America's cause might easily have helped hammer these foreign groups into permanently aggrieved and hostile elements.

All in all, more than seventy-five million copies of these pamphlets went into American homes, each one a printed bullet that found its mark. This does not include the circulation given by the metropolitan dailies that printed many of the pamphlets in full. Nor does it take account of the hundreds of thousands of copies printed by state organizations such as the Department of Education in Michigan, or by private individuals at their own cost.

It is a matter of pride to the Committee on Public Information, as it should be to America, that the directors of English, French, and Italian propaganda were a unit in agreeing that our literature was remarkable above all others for its brilliant and concentrated effectiveness.

All this labor of preparation, publication, and distribution was heavy and exacting, but there is a gleam or two when I view it in retrospect. I thought at one time that we were in direct touch with all the people who knew how to win the war. The White House and the War Department may dispute this, but certainly all who thought the Germans could be overwhelmed with printer's ink or oratory landed on our door-step either in person or through the intermediacy of the postmen. What we did not get directly we got by reference from every other war agency in Washington. We had considerable faith in the power of the press, but it was all quite overtopped by the old German-American who pleaded with us to send him up to the front-line trenches accompanied by one man who could run a hand-press. Then there was the considerable number who felt sure that some poem or song or sermon —not infrequently of their own composition — would, if printed and distributed to the whole nation, set the people on fire with patriotic ardor.

Such material came in almost predictable waves, two weeks of poetry, then two weeks of sermons. If a vigorous article — especially one with a large element of imagination about a German invasion — appeared in some journal of wide circulation, we knew we would receive it, clipped and sent in from all quarters as the best possible thing to which we could give government sanction. Some of the more discriminating suggestions were helpful. Some of the material submitted was too valuable to lose and we sought always to direct the writer toward an effective avenue of publicity. We sought invariably to return the manuscript with a courteous acknowledgment, for we knew it came from people who really wanted to help — "to do their bit," was the phrase penned so often by hands that could never hope to handle a musket. I remember one woman who sent in a poem with a letter in which she told how two of her sons were in the army and she, at seventy, was earning her living by washing. Still, she wanted "to do her bit" and had written this poem. You may be sure that she had a special letter that convinced her we sometimes appreciated poetry by other standards than those of the Browning circle.

All these letters were of immense value to us, for they kept our hand on the pulse of the land, letting us know the tides of hope and earnest purpose that were surging through a great country. Often enough there was evidence of the rapid spread of idle or vicious rumors or of the baneful influence of some utterance of a picayune politician with a statesman's responsibilities, but this was a momentary phase or a purely surface matter, and the great mass of the nation responded over and over again to every appeal to their sturdy and enlightened patriotism.

I know the distressing illiteracy revealed by the draft and I am disturbed by all the inadequacies of the public-school system with its low salaries and immature and everchanging teaching corps, but I also know that the press or politician who appeals to ignorance and prejudice is not reckoning on the reading and thinking and dominant mass of the American people. Great issues clearly put will always arouse them and there is no need to talk in words of one syllable to the man in the street. He wants the truth and will read to get it far more closely than many a man whom fortune has favored by putting him in a swivel-chair behind a glass-topped desk. I know, for we tried it out on a nation-wide scale, and that is why the publications of Professor Ford's division will remain a worthy evidence of the Committee's work in war education.