Many horrible things happened in 1917, but most of them were caused by one man: Woodrow Wilson. Wilson laid the foundation for today’s Big Tech surveillance. He did it through centralization and bureaucracy, a collectivism unlike anything America had ever seen before.
On April 2, 1917, Wilson urged Congress to declare war on Germany, saying that “the world must be made a safe place for democracy” and that “we do not want to be conquered or dominated.”
Woodrow Wilson transformed “intellectuals” into national combatants.
Wilson had a penchant for using fear to manipulate people: he won the 1916 election on a platform of non-interventionism, claiming that a Republican victory would lead America into war.
But within a year, he changed his mind. It was clear that America needed to get into the war. But he couldn’t let the public know that he’d changed his mind. No, that would be too simple. Instead, he had to convince the public that getting into the war was his own brilliant idea.
So he did what any of us would have done (right?): he launched a malicious propaganda campaign.
It began with the formation of a Public Information Committee, very reminiscent of 1984.
The Committee on Publicity was the first and only American organization to have a Ministry of Propaganda, and set the standard for modern propaganda. The Committee had 47 departments, including the Photographic Propaganda Department, the Four Popular Affairs Departments, the Press Department, and the Censorship Board.
To control the CPI, he needed a shady ally, George Creel. And guess what he did for a living?
He was a journalist. Well, “journalist” might be a bit of a stretch. Mr. Creel described the Committee on Public Affairs as “a giant enterprise of salesmanship.”
Wilson’s manipulation of the media was part of what made this new propaganda so powerful. Control the media and you control public opinion. Control public opinion and you control people’s minds and their actions.
After all, whatever society’s watchdogs and truth-tellers say must be true.
An army of informants
This propaganda campaign was also deeply personal. It took to the streets. Within a few months, Creel had recruited 100,000 men. These thugs raided movie theaters across the country, delivering impassioned speeches to captivating audiences during the four minutes it took the projectionist to change the film.
Creel used prominent members of the community to spread this propaganda to every corner of America.
In particular, they hoped to change the minds of people in the South, who saw no reason to enter a European war at the behest of a president they did not vote for.
Soon the Four Minute Men were uttering violent abuse wherever people gathered, including churches, lodges, fraternal organizations, labor unions, and even logging camps.
Preachers, actors, lawyers, teachers, school superintendents, athletes, magicians, aviators, business magnates, and even a few KKK leaders like DeForest Henry Perkins and the Grand Wizard used their oratory skills to spread fear and promote the war among middle-aged men who were too old to fight. They also used their oratory skills to convince people of progressive ideas, military conscription, food rationing, and support for the Red Cross.
They spoke in a variety of languages. Historians estimate that 500,000 people heard these speeches each week in New York City. The aim was to make the speeches look like outbursts of patriotic fervor from enthusiastic members of the community. In reality, every message was scripted by the state.
Creel once said that these speeches were “not the haphazard lecturing of some obscure person, but the product of a careful, studied and practiced effort by the best men in each community, each aimed like a rifle and shot to the mark with the precision of a bullet.”
Hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteered to patrol their neighborhoods, betraying their fellow Americans who lived alongside them in their communities.
Hollywood also played a key role: the most famous actors of the time, people like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, did the same thing that famous actors do today: reprimand ordinary people and make them subordinate to the elite.
Eventually, no one could speak out against the war.
His goal was to censor and crush anyone who tried to stop him, labeling them as “seditious,” seditionist, anti-American villains.
Hmm, doesn’t this seem a bit similar to the recent “rebellion” movement?
They claimed that Germany was “waging nothing but war against the Government and people of the United States.” Wilson offered his “Fourteen Points” to maintain his image as a pacifist, but behind the scenes he was sneaking progressivism into his foreign policy Trojan Horse.
He transformed the “intellectuals” into combatants of the nation.
Teddy Roosevelt wrote in an editorial: “If the League of Nations were founded on a document as lofty and meaningless as Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, it would be but another sheet of garbage in the diplomatic dustbin. Most of these points will be interpreted either to mean something or to mean nothing at all.”
The Germans, too, understood it to be propaganda.
Meanwhile, at home, the Four Minute Men continued their propaganda campaign until the war’s end in 1918. By the end of the campaign, which lasted more than a year and a half, the propaganda had reached every American. This was the foundation of Wilson’s war state, with four million Americans sent to war, of whom 116,708 died in combat.
Wilson destroyed the America we will never know: he transformed it from a quaint, small-town country into a global war machine controlled by an all-powerful executive.
In June 1917, Wilson gained complete power by passing the Espionage Bill through Congress, and in May 1918, he passed the Oberman Bill. In addition, he made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any dishonest, blasphemous, malicious, or offensive word respecting the form of government of the United States.”
A few years later, in 1924, the FBI became America’s first federal police force.
