‘I Want You’—How Uncle Sam helped invent public relations
A comms expert shares the fascinating, checkered backstory of how modern PR evolved—and which timeless tactics of persuasion still hold true more than 100 years later.
While it only lasted for a year and half, the Committee on Public Information was the first official propaganda machine in the United States. The CPI sold and financed a war, framed the Spanish flu pandemic, and helped birth the field of modern public relations.
As the United States entered the First World War in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information to shape public opinion on the danger of German militarism and the need for a global response. Essentially, the U.S. needed to sell Americans on why it should be in a war at all, and to raise money to pay for it.
Wilson installed George Creel as the first head of the CPI. A hard-driving, progressive journalist from Denver who cut his teeth at the Rocky Mountain News, Creel famously observed, “People do not live by bread alone: They live mostly by catch phrases.”
Creel hired some of the best and brightest from around the country — academics, advertisers, journalists — and brought them to Washington D.C. for what would become the official messaging machine of the United States.
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