180 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
While the carnage wrought by World War I indelibly
shaped Europe, the United States suffered
comparatively few casualties and no territorial losses.
Yet the conflict deeply shaped American society
by forging a modern state and establishing the
relationship between government and the public in
wartime. Nowhere was this more apparent than in
the realm of official propaganda.
For the first three years of the war, President
Wilson relentlessly urged American neutrality. The
United States had historical ties to Britain and France,
but ten million Americans had direct loyalties to
Germany and Austria. Even more Irish Americans had
a longstanding hatred of the English, and a sizable
population of Russian Jews opposed any aid to the
czar. Moreover, from the American perspective the
war presented no clear mission worth defending;
many considered Britain’s high-handed control of the
Atlantic as unwarranted as German military tactics.
In practice, however, the position of the United
States from 1914 to 1917 was hardly neutral. American
manufacturers traded heavily with the Allies, and
this activity directly stimulated the economy. Most
revealing is the balance sheet of credit: by April 1917
American banks had loaned $2.3 billion to the Allies
during the war, and only $27 million to Germany. Trade
similarly favored Britain and France over Germany, all
but ensuring that if the United States were to enter the
war it would do so on the side of the Allies.
That moment came when Germany resumed
submarine warfare in 1917, prompting Wilson to
request a declaration of war from Congress. To
generate support for this reversal from neutrality to
belligerency, the president created the nation’s first
state-sponsored propaganda agency. The Committee
on Public Information was overseen by journalist
George Creel, who used every conceivable form of
mass communication—posters, newsreels, public
lectures, books, newspapers, and pamphlets—to
recruit soldiers, stimulate patriotism, and raise
money for the war.
The CPI’s best-known materials are the bold
and vibrant posters enlisting public support, such
as Uncle Sam’s iconic “I Want You for the U.S.
Army.” But its most effective messages were not
THE CREATION OF A GERMAN ENEMY
Committee on Public Information,
“Why Germany Wants Peace Now,” 1917
those illustrating what Americans were fighting for,
but rather what they were fighting against. Posters
characterized the Germans as rapacious and
subhuman enemies of civilization, while an avalanche
of print warned of a longstanding German plan to
expand from “Hamburg to the Persian Gulf.” This
concept of “Pan-Germanism” was directly imported
from French and British propaganda to convince a
skeptical public that American participation in the
war was imperative.
The CPI’s campaign to publicize Pan-Germanism
spread quickly. With maps such as this, the agency
scorned German peace overtures as an opportunistic
plan to preserve the country’s territorial conquests.
The map is stripped of topography or any other
information not directly relevant to the argument at
hand. Instead, it foregrounds a German geopolitical
threat that stretched from the North Sea to the
Middle East. The map was reprinted over a million
times in the anti-German tract Conquest and Kultur,
and the CPI distributed an additional 122,000 copies
to the public. Military training camps posted large
copies of the map in mess halls to expose recruits to
the geopolitics of the war.
The CPI’s relentless demonization of the enemy
fostered terrible anti-German hysteria in 1917 and- In California, public schools discontinued
German-language instruction, while across the
country orchestras ceased to perform the music
of German composers. It was a short step from
portraying German culture as “poisonous” to
vilifying German Americans themselves, and they
were viciously singled out during the war.
Even more pernicious was the more general
crackdown on dissent. The nation’s leading papers
immediately began to report on “Pan-Germanism,”
demonstrating how successful the CPI had become
in disseminating a coordinated message during the
war. Radicals and pacifists who criticized the war and
challenged the expansion of state power were swiftly
prosecuted through the Espionage and Sedition acts.
Among these was Eugene V. Debs, a union leader
and four-time Socialist Party candidate for president.
Debs spoke publicly against the war, particularly
highlighting the irony of a nation that had gone to
war for democracy abroad while refusing to tolerate
dissent at home. The prosecution and conviction of
Debs left little doubt that the first casualty of war was
freedom itself.