The Vigilantes, the leading group of American writers dedicated to promoting the war, also was a source of book material for Greenslet.23 Hermann Hagedorn, a German-American author and poet, conceived the organization in the home of playwright Porter Emerson Browne in November 1916. “Germany,” Browne said, “has unsheathed and brought into play one weapon that the Allies and ourselves didn’t even know existed. . . . It is propaganda.”24 The Vigilantes sought to mold public opinion through syndicated articles, poetry, and art. The group sent typeset stories every Friday to newspapers in towns with populations over five thousand inhabitants. It reached ten thousand weeklies through the American Press Association.25 Many members of the Vigilantes signed on to the CPI staff, which became a virtual government writers’ colony.
The formation of the Committee on Public Information was the only instance in United States history when the government had an official information ministry. (Post-war propaganda was, and remains, diffuse throughout the bureaucracy.) George Creel, the chairman of the CPI, was a fiery muckraker who worked on Wilson’s reelection campaign and helped orchestrate the embarrassing letter to Charles Evans Hughes that Adams and other writers signed. Every aspect of modern propaganda can be traced to the CPI. Much of it, such as the Federal Register (under the CPI it was called The Official Bulletin), or public diplomacy to shape foreign public opinion, is positive. But, contrary to Creel’s insistence the CPI hew strictly to facts, it went beyond those by appealing to base emotions and endorsing coercion. It also resorted to another standard feature of propaganda: the suppression of inconvenient information and opinion.
At the time, Creel, Adams, and others on the CPI staff did not view their work a perversion of the progressive vision of wholesome “publicity.” In public and private they showed no indication they worried about the implications of their actions, let alone admitted they used techniques they claimed to abhor within enemy propaganda. Their fervor to prosecute the war to the fullest trumped any considerations that the CPI’s tactics were non-consensual. Adams, who had unflinchingly railed against false advertising, regarded his efforts to advertise the war as righteous; he considered anyone who objected to his messages a traitor. “The fact is that I am in a rather cynical mood as to those untrammeled spirits who tremble lest war methods fix upon us shackles that we never can throw off,” Adams told Greenslet. “Wherever I had talked with men of this mind I have found them to be either pro-German or pacifist at bottom; generally the latter.”26
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Adams referred to himself as a “National Security and Defense Executive.”27 It was difficult to tell when he was on the job directly for the CPI and when he was independently writing propaganda to earn a living, something he had to do since he came to Washington at his own expense.28 In “The Dodger Trail,” a short story for Collier’s, a small-town editor helps a “War Intelligence” agent ferret out German agents. Accompanying the story was a vague author’s sketch that touched on his working life. “Nowadays,” Adams was quoted as saying, when he picked up his pen, “it is mainly in the conscientious endeavor to earn the dollar a year which a recklessly extravagant Government pays me, or to write articles or fiction dealing with the one all-engrossing subject, the war.”29 In a letter to one of Greenslet’s associates, he confided, “I’m frightfully busy trying to make a living and at the same time do such war work as its handed to me—and it is being handed at an increasing rate, I assure you.”30
This blurring of the lines at the CPI was not unusual. The organization was constantly adding units and, occasionally, discarding them. Staff drifted in and out of journalism. Its syndicated features division drew on Mary Roberts Rinehard, Booth Tarkington, and other popular writers for articles it distributed to newspapers and magazines at home and abroad.
Adams’s most clearly identified job at the CPI was with its Four Minute Men, an innovation that remains an astounding propaganda feat more than one hundred years later. This unit, created a few days after the United States entered World War I, brought the Wilson Administration’s themes into movie theaters. The Four Minute Men spoke to captive audiences during the change in movie reels. A modern analog is the ubiquitous ads that pop up when viewing videos online. The speakers, comprised of community volunteers, were seemingly local expressions of patriotism, but were in fact carefully orchestrated by Washington and managed through statewide and city structures. Speakers were admonished to limit their talks to four minutes and to stick to whatever messages Washington wished to convey. These themes ranged from promoting Liberty Loans to “Unmasking German Propaganda.”
Adams was a member of the Four Minute Men National Advisory Council, established in November 1917.31 He recruited speakers and assisted with the Four Minute Man Bulletin, a vehicle for managing speakers. Solomon H. Clark, a fellow council member and head of the University of Chicago’s Department of Public Speaking, told one Four Minute Men audience they enjoyed more influence than journalists because they reached the masses with messages “carefully laid out for us by experts in our main office at Washington.”32 By the end of the war, the CPI had a force of seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men across the country. Although the great majority spoke in movie theaters, they could also be found at Grange Halls, at picnics, and under Chautauqua tents. Four Minute Men spoke at five hundred different logging camps and once, when a North Dakota town’s lone church was not available, in a village pool hall.33
The war work that played most to Adams’s strengths was an extension of the “Ad-visor” column exposing dishonest advertising he wrote for the New York Tribune.34 The Tribune created an internal Bureau of Investigations to unearth information for Adams’s use. At the CPI he had access to information from government agencies whose agents were on constant lookout for evidence of German perfidy.
Adams’s first major investigation for the CPI grew out of a stash of papers seized from the New York office of Wolf von Igel in 1916. Von Igel had been involved in German espionage. His papers documented subsidies to journalists, connections to Irish revolutionaries working against the British, and possible sabotage of shipping and war industries. The Justice Department, with the blessing of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, shared the documents with the CPI. Adams prepared “a skillful analysis . . . that showed German intrigue down to the last sordid detail,” CPI chief George Creel later wrote.35 Newspapers across the country hyped the “official exposé,” as it was described in the New York Times.36 Although the von Igel papers belonged to a period before the war (von Igel had returned to Germany before he could be tried for conspiring to destroy a canal in Canada), the clear implication was that German treachery skulked in every corner of the United States.
The New York Tribune ran the von Igel story, in the form it was distributed by the CPI, on page one, minus Adams’s byline. Next to it was the second installment of a three-part series under Adams’s byline on “Herr William Randolph Hearst.” The series portrayed Hearst as the “leading spirit of German propaganda in the United States today.”37 The maverick newspaper tycoon had deployed his signature style of sensationalism to argue against U.S. involvement in the war. Once Americans were on the European battlefields, Hearst’s newspapers adopted a far more patriotic tone, but the publisher remained a major annoyance to President Wilson, who asked his attorney general if legal means existed to bring him to book. The Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation and Military Intelligence, with help from Creel, investigated Hearst in hopes of making a case, all in vain.38
Adams also used the Tribune to attack the editor of the Yiddish daily Forward and Victor L. Berger, editor of the Milwaukee Leader, two Socialists not supportive of the war. Adams went after anti-war Senator Robert M. La Follette, of Wisconsin, posing the question, “Is Wisconsin Against America?”39
Adams followed up that accusation in a three-part investigative series for Everybody’s magazine. The series, “Invaded America,” took Adams to Wisconsin, a state with a large population of German ancestry, for an investiga
tion purporting to show the surreptitious German poisoning of “the American mind.” It was insidious, according to Adams’s findings: “Of the precise method employed I can not [sic] speak with knowledge,” he wrote. “It may be that there is a central and secret bureau, a German official press agency, which plans each separate campaign and issues instructions or even syndicated matter.” He cautioned that “perhaps my country is too tolerant of the alien within its gates.”40
In this same series in Everybody’s, Adams celebrated the Treasury Department’s coercive techniques for selling Liberty bonds. Methods included ostentatiously writing on blue cards the names of those who declined to buy the bonds and forwarding them to higher authorities, who sometimes revisited the reluctant customer. Adams considered this “blue-carding” especially effective with immigrants, calling the blue card “an energizing and regenerating force for nationalism.”41
In addition to articles in this vein, Adams wrote on military medical preparedness and about organizations that sought to boost soldiers’ morale.42 He reprised war themes in his short fiction. One told the story of a young man so determined to join the army that he bribes his draft board so he can enlist. Another story concerned a speaker on behalf of War Savings Stamps. A third story, also about War Savings Stamps, involved a rich man, a beggar, and a magic wallet.
It seemed as though Adams would affix his name and a few pro-war words whenever asked. In order to oxygenate anti-German sentiment in the United States, the British promoted the work of Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers, whose drawings depicted babies with throats slit by the Germans. When the Century Company published Raemaeker in book form in the United States, Adams joined President Wilson, Creel, and many of his CPI associates in supplying commentary. Alongside a drawing of the Kaiser strung up by his wrists, Adams, anything but a subtle still-hunter, declared:
To me the deliberate, coldly reckoned murder of the invaded countries’ trees and vines so that the children of the slain and enslaved and their children’s children may draw no sustenance from the kindly earth—that seems the most perverse, the most detestable, the most typical of all the crimes of Kaiserism. The sterilization of Mother Earth. It took the mind of a Wilhelm to conceive it.43
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Common Cause began as a short story by the same name in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1918.44 It drew on Adams’s investigations for the “Invaded America” series in Everybody’s. After reading the story, Greenslet wired Adams: “The Common Cause is worth building up. Could you make it fifty or sixty thousand words and introduce a skirt?”45 Greenslet had found his opus.
Common Cause tells the story of Jeremy Robson, publisher of a patriotic newspaper in the fictional Midwestern town of Fenchester. Robson’s muckraking has spurred special interests to withhold advertising in order to drive him out of business. When war comes in 1917, his equally passionate exposé of local German-American fealty to their homeland inspires Fenchester’s plutocrats to put aside differences with Robson to save the Guardian.
Looking to tie the book into war themes, Greenslet recommended the hero’s love interest be a “levelheaded” young lady who organizes “the women on the right side.”46 One of Greenslet’s colleagues chimed in, “I wish you could double the appeal by mixing up the women’s committees which are so active today and which form a part of the Public Safety Committees and the Hoover work all over the country.”47 Adams’s heroine, Marcia Aimes, fell in line by mobilizing women and, in fearless suffragette fashion, hardboiled men as well. She helps rally the townspeople to Robson’s side.
Adams accelerated his writing speed that summer of 1918 for fear the war would end before he finished. In July he informed Greenslet he was producing nearly twice his normal rate of a thousand words a day.48 In August he called off a fishing trip, because “the novel is pressing too hard.”49 At the end of the month he sent in his first draft.50 He mailed a revision in mid-September.51 Adams was delayed reviewing the page proofs due to a case of influenza, which was sweeping the country, including Houghton Mifflin’s offices. “You jangled our sensitive nerves here with apprehension lest you were to pass out before those proofs could come back,” Greenslet told him.52
Greenslet also worried the ever-changing war would somehow diminish the relevance of Common Cause, as it had The Clarion. Roger Scaife, his associate, asked for the book’s opening pages in late May so he could provide them to the salesforce when it hit the road to promote the autumn book list.53 Greenslet had the book jackets printed in July, much ahead of the usual schedule.54 “The best time to publish a war book,” he had learned, “is the day you accept it.”55
Greenslet’s fears proved well-founded. Adams mailed the corrected proofs on November 8. Three days later, the Armistice was signed. His war book was ready for printing, but there was no war. “The war, contrary as I recall it . . . to your views, has come incontinently to an end,” Greenslet informed Adams, “and things have been at sixes and sevens as to our making publishing plans.”
To Adams’s annoyance, the publisher saw no reason to now rush the book off the presses before Christmas, as originally planned. The new publication date was January 25, when Houghton Mifflin would launch it “not as a war book, but as a #1 novel of Western newspaper life, with a certain amount of historical interest.”56
Reviews were good. Sales were not. Only 7,500 copies were purchased, about a quarter of the sales recorded for The Clarion. Common Cause was a “darn good book,” Scaife told Adams. “There are every now and then passing regrets that the armistice was signed so quickly.”57
Although Greenslet wanted to market the book as a newspaper novel, many reviewers focused on the public’s “historical interest” in the war. “The foundation of fact which underlies this story,” Booklist observed, “has come to light in an investigation made by Mr. Adams, and the book in its varying moods reflects very accurately the attitude of the people of the United States toward the Germans among them.”58
Common Cause had particular resonance in Wisconsin. Adams sent copies to newspaper editors across the state, noting the book “is based upon the Wisconsin situation as I found it in 1917 and the early part of 1918.” The editor of the Sauk County Democrat in Baraboo replied to Adams, “The book completely satisfies a feeling that I have had, and one that I am sure has possessed every citizen who has lived close to this situation in Wisconsin, that the struggle through which this state passed in conquering itself should not be forgotten or permitted to go unreviewed by those who failed to see its portent at the time.”59
The review in the Sauk County Democrat noted the similarity between the book’s fictitious Governor Embree and the sitting Republican governor, Emanuel L. Philipp, a railroad executive, “except he combined many of the traits of character of Senator La Follette.” The review added, “If you are a red-blooded American, you will want to read ‘Common Cause’ . . . If you are a pacifist you won’t like it.” The book, it said, held “the mirror up to Wisconsin.”60 Adams mailed the review to Greenslet with a letter written on leftover CPI stationery.61
Adams sent an autographed copy of Common Cause to the secretary of the Wisconsin Loyalty League, which had been “the right-arm distributing agency of the CPI” in the state.62 He praised the League “for its inspiring and winning fight . . . in Wisconsin to make and keep the state loyal to American principles.”63 Pleased with “the splendid tribute to militant Americans in Wisconsin,” the secretary forwarded Adams’s letter to newspapers around the state to promote his organization.
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Samuel Hopkins Adams is not well remembered today. Common Cause is all but forgotten. Although they were creatures of their time, Adams’s book is worth revisiting both for its value in understanding the past and its relevance in thinking about the present.
As the Booklist reviewer and others pointed out when it was first published, Common Cause draws the reader into the home front atmosphere that existed during the Great War. While technically fiction, the novel provides a profound
history lesson. It draws on events that Adams and his readers knew well, and vividly portrays attitudes and emotions that were widely held at the time. Adams’s novel is such a powerful endorsement of these sentiments that modern readers who are appalled by the xenophobic hate-mongering that is currently sweeping over America are nevertheless likely to find themselves identifying with the hero, Jeremy Robson, and his sweetheart, Marcia. To read Common Cause today is to recreate the emotional experience of war. The novel is, as Adams maintained, “distinctly a war story.”
After the war, many progressives (although not Adams and George Creel) felt betrayed. They regretted their complicity in promoting a war that did not produce the just peace Wilson had promised. Speech had been suppressed. Domestic reforms stalled. Big business grew more powerful. The progressive movement became dispirited and faltered. “We failed to give liberty to Europe. We might have saved America,” lamented Frederic Howe, a civic organizer, journalist, and official in the Wilson entourage during the treaty negotiations in Paris.64
In postmortems on the war that asked what went wrong, one of the most common complaints was the evils of propaganda—both by foreign countries and the United States. “The whole discussion about the ways and means of controlling public opinion testifies to the collapse of the traditional species of democratic romanticism,” wrote Harold Lasswell, whose scholarship contributed to making propaganda a field of study. “That credulous utopianism, which fed the mighty words which exploited the hopes of the mass in war, had in many minds given way to cynicism and disenchantment.”65
“‘Propaganda’ is a horrid word that has come to have a horrid meaning,” a British propagandist wrote after the war. “If it could be turned out of our language I should rejoice.”66 In a sense it has been: no one admits to disseminating propaganda. Yet, for all the postwar hand-wringing, the practice of government propaganda—never referred to by the pejorative, always recast with some benign designation such as “public information”—has only grown. New social media tools power modern propaganda. Its effectiveness is enhanced by scientific research at the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where neurologists study blood flow to the brain to evaluate the effectiveness of “messages.”67
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