Woodrow Wilson’s public relations: Wag the Hun

• Published in: Public relations review 1999, Vol.25 (3), p.309-330
• Main Author: Pinsdorf, Marion K
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Atrocities; Censorship; Committees; Government agencies; Minority & ethnic groups; Persuasive Discourse; Political Influences; Presidents; Propaganda; Public Relations; Wilson (Woodrow); Wilson, Woodrow (American president); World War I
• ISSN: 0363-8111; 1873-4537
• DOI: 10.1016/S0363-8111(99)00021-1

Communicators, unlike most military leaders, understood World War I was a totally new, mechanized, mass conflict. Populations must be mobilized, “taught” to hate and fight the evil enemy, respond emotionally to atrocities, even if invented or exaggerated. Opinion would be industrialized following the declaration of war in April 1917; President Woodrow Wilson authorized the Committee of Public Information, more popularly known for its leader George Creel. Creel’s inflammatory efforts and his rhetoric wagged the Hun, transforming a once highly respected ethnic group into one feared, reviled, and spied on. Creel’s committee used every means of communications available to conscript opinion, to control, centralize, and censor all information. Most later leaders of public relations were involved: Edward Bernays, Carl Byoir, and Ivy Lee in the Red Cross. Criticism of the committee’s and Wilson’s efforts is justified, but so are such questions as how do you galvanize forces to defeat your enemy? And as critical as one can rightly be of Wilson, he was the only major world leader trying to talk, not to kill. Marion K. Pinsdorf is Senior Fellow in Communications at Fordham’s Graduate School of Business.