Creel, G
oops, see commission
also https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-2195
In October 1933, Decker became involved with the San Joaquin cotton strike. Cotton was the "second most lucrative crop in California".[8] In 1921, there were 1,500 acres in production; by 1937 there “was close to 600,00 acres”.[9] The Great Depression had sharply reduced the prices that cotton growers got for their product, and they passed those declines on to workers in the form of lower wages, with wages declining nearly 75 percent in three years.
By the time of the strike, growers had sold 75 per cent of the crop to Japan at 7 cents a pound in advance of the harvest, and had no room whatsoever to pass on added labor costs. Field workers demanded one dollar per hundred pounds; growers offered sixty cents, at which rate "even a strong, steadily working man could make no more than $1.20 a day. An entire family working all day would average $2."[8]
The strike began on October 4, with twelve thousand workers walking off the job and a strike front extending for five hundred miles. Growers evicted families of strikers from company-owned housing, and in Pixley, California, a violent clash between strikers and growers left "two Mexican strikers … dead [and] eight others…wounded.[6] An estimated 5,000 people gathered for the funeral mass for the two murdered strikers—Delfino Davila and Dolores Hernandez. Governor James Rolph appointed a fact-finding committee to look into the violence."[8]
Decker led strikers to the courthouse in Visalia where, on October 19, 1933, the committee began its hearings. She questioned strikers on the stand, where she brought out the details of their lives: "a work day extending from daylight to dark, their fingers bleeding from the prickly cotton bolls, the children working alongside their parents until they collapsed on the ground in exhausted sleep".[8]
After hearing testimony from another woman who said her children "had not worn shoes since 1930" the growers' counsel charged that Decker had coached witness testimony. She "immediately offered to let him personally select all further strikers' witnesses" but he declined the offer.[6]
Despite the drama of the testimony, the action of the government through NRA regional director George Creel ultimately ended the strike. Creel brought in relief supplies for striking workers, and got the Federal Intermediate Credit Bank to help finance the cotton growers so they could give a wage of 75 cents an hour.
Creel's goals were to persuade growers and strikers to accept that rate, and to deny National Labor Board recognition to the CAWIU because of its communist leadership. Eventually the Central Strike Committee agreed to the terms and workers returned to work without an officially recognized union.[8]
no lnx pix
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Within a week of Congress declaring war, on April 13, 1917, Wilson issued an executive order creating a new federal agency that would put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage.
That agency was the Committee on Public Information, which would take on the task of explaining to millions of young men being drafted into military service – and to the millions of other Americans who had so recently supported neutrality – why they should now support war.
How Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine Changed American Journalism
George Creel Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress
The new agency – which journalist Stephen Ponder called “the nation’s first ministry of information” – was usually referred to as the Creel Committee for its chairman, George Creel, who had been a journalist before the war. From the start, the CPI was “a veritable magnet” for political progressives of all stripes – intellectuals, muckrakers, even some socialists – all sharing a sense of the threat to democracy posed by German militarism. Idealistic journalists like S.S. McClure and Ida Tarbell signed on, joining others who shared their belief in Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy.
At the time, most Americans got their news through newspapers, which were flourishing in the years just before the rise of radio and the invention of the weekly news magazine. In New York City, according to my research, nearly two dozen papers were published every day – in English alone – while dozens of weeklies served ethnic audiences.
Starting from scratch, Creel organized the CPI into several divisions using the full array of communications.
The Speaking Division recruited 75,000 specialists who became known as “Four-Minute Men” for their ability to lay out Wilson’s war aims in short speeches.
The Film Division produced newsreels intended to rally support by showing images in movie theaters that emphasized the heroism of the Allies and the barbarism of the Germans.
The Foreign Language Newspaper Division kept an eye on the hundreds of weekly and daily U.S. newspapers published in languages other than English.
How Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine Changed American Journalism
James Montgomery Flagg/Library of Congress
Another CPI unit secured free advertising space in American publications to promote campaigns aimed at selling war bonds, recruiting new soldiers, stimulating patriotism and reinforcing the message that the nation was involved in a great crusade against a bloodthirsty, antidemocratic enemy.
Some of the advertising showed off the work of another CPI unit. The Division of Pictorial Publicity was led by a group of volunteer artists and illustrators. Their output included some of the most enduring images of this period, including the portrait by James Montgomery Flagg of a vigorous Uncle Sam, declaring, “I WANT YOU FOR THE U.S. ARMY!”
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Other ads showed cruel “Huns” with blood dripping from their pointed teeth, hinting that Germans were guilty of bestial attacks on defenseless women and children. “Such a civilization is not fit to live,” one ad concluded.
How Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine Changed American Journalism
Frederick Strothmann/Library of Congress
Creel denied that his committee’s work amounted to propaganda, but he acknowledged that he was engaged in a battle of perceptions. “The war was not fought in France alone,” he wrote in 1920, after it was all over, describing the CPI as “a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”
Buried in paper
For most journalists, the bulk of their contact with the CPI was through its News Division, which became a veritable engine of propaganda on a par with similar government operations in Germany and England but of a sort previously unknown in the United States.
In the brief year and a half of its existence, the CPI’s News Division set out to shape the coverage of the war in U.S. newspapers and magazines. One technique was to bury journalists in paper, creating and distributing some 6,000 press releases – or, on average, handing out more than 10 a day.
The whole operation took advantage of a fact of journalistic life. In times of war, readers hunger for news and newspapers attempt to meet that demand. But at the same time, the government was taking other steps to restrict reporters’ access to soldiers, generals, munitions-makers and others involved in the struggle. So, after stimulating the demand for news while artificially restraining the supply, the government stepped into the resulting vacuum and provided a vast number of official stories that looked like news.
Most editors found the supply irresistible. These government-written offerings appeared in at least 20,000 newspaper columns each week, by one estimate, at a cost to taxpayers of only US$76,000.
In addition, the CPI issued a set of voluntary “guidelines” for U.S. newspapers, to help those patriotic editors who wanted to support the war effort (with the implication that those editors who did not follow the guidelines were less patriotic than those who did).
The CPI News Division then went a step further, creating something new in the American experience: a daily newspaper published by the government itself. Unlike the “partisan press” of the 19th century, the Wilson-era Official Bulletin was entirely a governmental publication, sent out each day and posted in every military installation and post office as well as in many other government offices. In some respects, it is the closest the United States has come to a paper like the Soviet Union’s Pravda or China’s People’s Daily.
How Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine Changed American Journalism
National Archives
The CPI was, in short, a vast effort in propaganda. The committee built upon the pioneering efforts of public relations man Ivy Lee and others, developing the young field of public relations to new heights. The CPI hired a sizable fraction of all the Americans who had any experience in this new field, and it trained many more.
One of the young recruits was Edward L. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer in theorizing about human thoughts and emotions. Bernays volunteered for the CPI and threw himself into the work. His outlook – a mixture of idealism about the cause of spreading democracy and cynicism about the methods involved – was typical of many at the agency.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” Bernays wrote a few years after the war. “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
All in all, the CPI proved quite effective in using advertising and PR to instill nationalistic feelings in Americans. Indeed, many veterans of the CPI’s campaign of persuasion went into careers in advertising during the 1920s.
The full bundle of techniques pioneered by Wilson during the Great War were updated and used by later presidents when they sent U.S. forces into battle.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.