Hysteria Part 6.  The Birth of the Hun: Goebbel's Teachers
'The Four Minute Men', an arm of this brutally effective organization, managed 75,000
volunteer speakers operating in 5,200 communities. Thousands of their speeches had
such dreadful impact that mobs sometimes formed afterward and proceeded to
vandalize German-American homes and businesses. Left: Gompers, Bernays
The CPI target marketed their propaganda to distinct segments of the population using psychological
methods rivaling today's retail giants. They fully understood and implemented subliminal messaging.
The Four Minute Men enlisted the support of foreign speaking people to target the immigrants,
farmers to sell the war to farmers, businessmen to convince other businessmen and even children to
spread the hate to other children. The effort expended to push the nation to war was inexhaustible.
To further control the written word, the CPI, working in conjunction with the Food Bureau, formed
strong allegiances with editors of women's magazines, most notably The Ladies’ Home Journal's
editor Edward Bok, a Wilson supporter. Bok even credited Wilson with suggesting specific themes
for the magazine. The covers of The Journal were patriotic and sentimental, sandwiching
advertisements and posters created by the CPI artists and sappy articles extolling sacrifice, thrift and
an eagerness to send their sons to war. The Four Minute Men created a womens division to speak at
womens groups and at matinees to counteract any notions of war resistance, such as those displayed
in the popular pre-war song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”. Discrediting women pacifists
was at the top of the CPI agenda and even resulted in violence against such women.
American women were not told how badly living conditions within Germany had deteriorated since 1915 when the illegal
British embargo caused the decline in food supplies. The diet in Germany, initially reduced to bread and potatoes, turned
to turnips as a staple in 1916 when the potato crop failed. Only the very young or old, invalids or expectant mothers were
permitted milk. 88,232 Germans starved to death in 1915, and 121,114 in 1916. The blockade, which continued even
after armistice, is thought to have caused the eventual deaths of up to a million Germans.
The propagandists had no shame when it came to using children as a vehicle to spread their message,
and the psychologists they recruited did their work well. Children in America were scared to death of
the Germans. In fact, children were organized to be "Four Minute Men" speakers in their schools! In
1918, over 200,000 schools participated in a spring competition to promote the Third Liberty Loan
drive. The "Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation" published a bi-monthly bulletin
promoting patriotism and hatred of Germans.
The "National Thrift Director" Dr. J. Stanley Brown saw to it later that fifteen million disengaged hand grenade
piggy banks were distributed to children in 1919 as thanks for their "loyal service in war time."
The CPI easily formed a choke hold on the public library system. It fostered the idea that it was a
librarian's duty to protect their patrons from potentially "disloyal" material, and very few protested.
Donated books seen as "pro-German" were removed, and requests honored for the removal of
pacifist books. The directors of libraries across the nation were "using their judgement" to purge the
shelves of German books, including books by Goethe, Schiller and other German cultural icons.
The CPI established a cartoon bureau during the war, realizing that a good many Americans read the
comics and not the rest of a newspaper. CPI planted propaganda in cartoon pages and supplements.
Headed by George Hecht, the 'Bureau of Cartoons' closely supervised its doodling purveyors of hate
to “mobilize and direct the scattered cartoon power of the country for constructive war work.”
The lewd, sexually violent "Germans" now sprouted snouts, tusks, hairy faces,
red eyes and fangs. One cartoon book that told the story of Germans boiling
down corpses for fat deliberately mistranslated the word "kadaver" as "corpse"
to circulate the story of German "corpse factories", knowing full well that the
German word kadaver is used in German to refer only to the body of an
animal and not humans. Invented in 1917, the story was not exposed as false
until a 1925 debate in the House of Commons. Even then, it was so effective
that it, along with other tall tales such as the human soap and lampshade
myths, were easily resurrected during the next war. Depicting the Hun as a
defiler of innocent maidens was an effective tool in promoting outrage.
Propaganda was delivered to an average weekly movie audience of 80 million people. The CPI’s
Films Division itself produced over sixty official films, ranging from feature films like 'Pershing’s
Crusaders' to its weekly newsreel the 'Official War Review' which ended a day at the movies. The
CPI was able to recruit film producers such as D.W. Griffith of "Birth of a Nation" to do propaganda
movies. The British government also commissioned Griffith to make "Hearts of the World" (1918)
about a small French village under brutal German occupation.
Their activities were widespread, extending especially into Russia where the CPI ran one of
its most vigorous campaigns, often in conjunction with British operatives. They dispersed
printed materials by the millions and made creative use of films in its Russian operation
beginning in 1917, initially under the direction of C.P.I.s Edgar Sisson. The CPI conducted
business in Russia without interference. Using the newest technical gimmicks, these movies
geared toward Russian movie lovers fostered violent hatred of Germans. Left: In a typical
CPI movie shown in Russia, heroic agents in The Eagle's Eye raid a German spy operation
which was  "planning to invade Canada"
With criticism mounting of Bolshevism and America's strange new bed-fellows, Sisson presented documents in 1918 that
he insisted could “prove” that “the present Bolshevik government is not a Russian government at all but a German
government acting solely in the interests of Germany and betraying the Russian people, as it betrays Russia’s
allies, for the benefit of the Imperial German Government alone.”  The CPI published the "documents" accompanied
by these bogus assertions in Pamphlet #20 in the War Information Series “The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy.” The
New York Times stated: “Documents Prove Lenin and Trotzky Hired By Germans,” a complete fabrication.
Thousands of song writers were hired, with the songs written by the government
composers identified only as "Army Song Leaders." Most tried to portray an ethnically
diverse United States railing against the German Race. They infused the music with
anti-German lyrics and messages and included imagery coupling the grotesque looking
Germans with pro-war messages that were printed on sheet music. There were over a
hundred anti-Kaiser songs produced by Tin Pan Alley such as the cheerful ditty "We
Are Out for the Scalp of Mister Kaiser". The very day after Wilson's declaration of
war against Germany on April 16, 1917, George M. Cohan was ready with "Over
There," one of the most successful American propaganda songs for which Cohan was
later awarded a special Congressional Medal of Honor. Irving Berlin played as big a
role in the pro-war propaganda. Even John Philip Sousa provided patriotic inspiration
with his music at Liberty Loan rallies and Red Cross relief drives. Cohan, Berlin, left
Meanwhile, Across the Pond...
The British government, eager to involve the US in the war on their side, set up a top secret War
Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House under the direction of Charles Masterman. Its work was so
furtive that even most Members of Parliament were unaware of it. It was essential to hide from the
American people the fact that the majority of material they were receiving from Britain about the
war, including the news itself, was developing under Foreign Office guidance, and the extent of their
activities was kept secret until 1935. In all, they produced in excess of 1,160 pamphlets and books
between 1914-18, using popular authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling.
Charles Masterman had been elected to Parliament as a Liberal and had a bright political
career ahead when he was appointed to head the propaganda bureau. He had nearly a
free reign. Over the next two years ninety artists worked for him indirectly. By 1916,
Masterman arranged for a whole team of artists to visit France.Only British officers
were allowed to take pictures of the Western Front, the penalty being the firing squad
for anyone else caught taking a picture. Photos of dead soldiers were banned.
Masterman chose Canadian Sir Gilbert Parker, who had close ties to the political culture of the USA,
to direct British propaganda toward the States. Parker manipulated what Americans read by
schmoozing American war correspondents operating out of London. He arranged staged tours of the
front so that the war would be seen solely through British eyes and he farmed through "Who’s Who
in America" to build a 200,000 name mailing list of influential Americans to whom he then provided
articles, speeches and pamphlets on War topics written solely from a British perspective. He and his
staff also provided substantial war related materials to American newspapers and libraries with full
approval of the US Government.
When British Red Cross volunteer Edith Cavell was convicted by German authorities in occupied Belgium of
assisting in the escape of 200 French and British soldiers prisoners from the hospital where she worked in
violation of German wartime law, she was executed by a German firing squad on October 12,1915. The
propagandists went wild, and the emotional story of poor Nurse Cavell received prominent news coverage in the
USA as well as other neutral countries.
The Parliamentary War Aims Committee in Britain fed the British public a
diet of outrageous exaggerations and outright lies which were regurgitated to
the American public. In 1915, a committee of lawyers and historians under
Britain's Lord Bryce, former ambassador to the USA, came out with the
'Bryce Report' into alleged German atrocities, claiming  'Murder, lust and
pillage on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the
last three centuries.' Over 1,200 depositions from Belgian refugees and Allied
soldiers, not taken under oath and without verification, were heard by the
committee. The "enquiry's" other main source was (allegedly) captured
German war diaries, some of which were obvious forgeries.
Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers (1869-1956) was perhaps the best known propaganda cartoonist
showing inflammatory images of "German brutality" in Belgium, although the artist once later
admitted he'd never actually been to Belgium. He drew over 1,000 cartoons in his career depicting
the Germans as the enemy of civilization. Raemaekers and the other artists zeroed in on German
Kultur and produced entire books which ridiculed, disparaged and misrepresented German values
and history, making German culture itself contemptible as part of dehumanizing the enemy.
In just a few short months, the age old, generally good public image of the German people would be
completely turned on its head by thousands of propagandists working at this diabolical task from both
sides of the ocean.
"However the world pretends to divide itself, there are only two divisions in the world today...human beings and
Germans." Rudyard Kipling June 22, 1915
The Women
The Children, Libraries and Schools
The Media
The Music
Within days of the outbreak of hostilities, the British cable ship Telconia cut the direct subterranean
cables linking Germany with the USA, and the British blockade of Germany made the distribution of
German news and books difficult. American newspapers became almost completely dependent on
British sources for war news and the propagandists in Britain began sending crates full of pro-war
pamphlets and books to public libraries across America. This worked out well for the Pro-War camp.
Americanization Registration Cards were distributed by the thousands to immigrants through public
libraries by the CPI which were in turn returned with signatures to the CPI’s 'Division of Work with
the Foreign Born'. Libraries, sometimes in cooperation with schools, sought to indoctrinate children
regarding the war. The bigger cities sponsored library story hours to thousands of children on the
topic of “stories of our allies” with biased, pro-war material supplied directly from the CPI.
Conan Arthur Doyle, when he wasn't trying to convince people of
the reality of fairies, borrowed much of the same material he'd used
with success when writing sensational accounts of the atrocities in
the Belgium Congo a few short years before, such as the Belgians
"cutting hands off of the poor Congolese"(right). Doyle now simply
revamped it into Germans cutting off Belgian hands.  
One of the CPI's 19 domestic divisions centered its efforts on music. Its importance in rallying public
opinion cannot be overstated. Sadly, the Anti-German hate music continued even after the war's end.
However, when two German nurses working in a Red Cross hospital in France
were found guilty of a similar offense and executed by the British and French, the
events weren't reported at all in American media. Then there was Mata Hari...
The 'National School Service' was sent to public schools throughout the country to assist teachers in
making “every school pupil a messenger for Uncle Sam." Thousands of books from mysteries to
comics and adventure stories were published with hate-German propaganda especially geared for
children . It was successful. Children in St. Louis, for example, were praised in the local paper for
"doing their duty" in the war movement by stoning the daily delivery wagons of a German grocer.
They were given credibility by the recruitment of respected figures such as John Dewey and Walter
Lippmann under the wing of the CPI's 'Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation'. This batch
of scholars was under the directorship of Guy Stanton Ford who Creel hired to write pamphlets.
They produced hundreds of publications and such writings as 'The German Whisper', 'German War
Practices' and 'Conquest and Kultur' .
George Creel was a small, homely, second-rate publicist and Woodrow Wilson's
personal friend. A party hack, he went at his new job with zeal. The CPI's
domestic division was organized into nineteen subdivisions, each focused on a
specific type of propaganda. Using psychologists and marketing experts, they
flooded every possible channel of public communication to whip up war fever,
often with blatantly dishonest messages designed to invoke violent emotions and
provoke intense hatred of both Germany and German people.
The "Anti-Yellow Dog League" was a younger version of the American Protective League and had about 1,000
nationwide branches emanating from public schools. It was a vigilante group made up of schoolboys above age 10 who
searched out "disloyalty." They "barked" when a "disloyal yellow dog" was suspected. Schools enthusiastically cooperated
in these "Dog Hunts."
"Will it be any wonder if, after the war, the people of the world, when they recognize any human being as a
German, will shrink aside so that they may not touch him as he passes, or stoop for stones
to drive him from their path?" Vernon Kellogg, CPI
In a typical CPI approved book, 'Why America Fights Germany', the Germans penetrate into America and advance
toward Lakewood, New Jersey, where, true to form, they demand beer and money (!) and hang a feeble old woman
who tries to hide her paltry 20 dollar savings. The town's maiden school teachers meet an even worse fate, and a Catholic
priest and Methodist minister are thrown into a pig-sty while the German soldiers laugh. 50 leading citizens are then lined
up and shot. The dirty, alien- like Germans then burn the lovely town and move on to maraud another.
America's media jumped right on board. The New York Times, claming “any book whatever that
comes to us from a German printing press is open to suspicion" suspended all German publications
because, "the German microbe is hiding somewhere between its covers.” Publisher Irving Putnam
declared he was “opposed to opening the markets of America to the products of Germany for the
next 25 years, and I will knowingly buy and use no German-made goods in the said period of time.”
By the end of 1917, the CPI was sending every newspaper in California an average of six pounds of
propaganda paper a day.
Among other lurid tales, there were stories of how German officers gang-raped girls in marketplaces, how German
soldiers had speared babies and sliced off girls' breasts. Raemaeker's gruesome illustrations of Germans beheading
babies and eating their flesh advertised the report. The Bryce Report was translated into 30 languages. In 1922, a
Belgian commission of enquiry failed to corroborate a single major allegation contained in the report. Lord Ponsonby
opinion following a postwar investigation into the accuracy of wartime atrocity stories could find little or no evidence
that any of them had been true. And later, following the decision of the American Senate not to ratify the Versailles
Treaty with Germany in 1919, a series of investigations began as to the reasons America entered into the war, and during
the course of these enquiries, many details concerning the devious nature and scope of Britain’s propaganda campaign in
America between 1914 and 1917 were uncovered. Many in the United States concluded that they had been duped into
involvement on the Allied side, especially by the secret British propaganda emanating from Wellington House.
The 'American Alliance for Labor and Democracy', formed under the leadership of
Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, was instructed to keep peace
in the unions in connection with the war effort. The CPI reached deeply into every
avenue of brain washing available to them. Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays
led the charge of psychologists recruited by the CPI to indoctrinate the American
public by employing a well-studied psychological assault, infusing their daily life with
disgust and hatred against not just Germany, but German culture and people.
The 'Division of Pictorial Publicity' established on April 17,1917 was headed by Charles Dana
Gibson and dealt with print media, notably posters, illustrations and print ads in magazines and
newspapers in which they received free ad space.  N.C Wyeth produced gigantic patriotic paintings
and James Montogomery concocted the famous Uncle Sam.
One of Creel's amateur orators would speak wherever they could get an audience: in churches, labor
union halls, lodges or grange halls. Over 7.5 million speeches provoking hate, fear and suspicion
toward Germany and Germans were delivered to more than 314 million people.
When Woodrow Wilson won election as a peace candidate with the slogan "He kept us out of War"
then caved in to the pro-war camp, he changed positions so rapidly that there were actually rumors
that he was being blackmailed. He needed to save face quickly by whipping up war fever. One week
after war was declared, he turned to an old friend and journalistic muckraker named George Creel to
head a new propaganda ministry, the first of its type in history: the Center for Public Interest (C.P.I.)
Using new, magically believable media weapons, Wilson's men invented the arch villain: the German.
The CPI grew into a massive agency digging into almost every aspect of daily life, and it would later
function as a censor, vetting nearly all published material about the war and helping to draft
legislation such as the 'Espionage and Sedition' Acts which would effectively silence any opposition
to the war. Almost functioning as a secret police agency, this government sanctioned gang crafted an
atmosphere which, in the process of war mongering, intentionally created mistranslated hatred and
violence directed against America's German citizens.
At the theaters, movies made in full conjunction with Hollywood producers such as The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin,
The Claws of the Hun, The Prussian Cur, and Wolves of Kultur gushed forth in a fury. A patriotic slide appeared on
the screen first, and the pianist would shift to patriotic songs. Movie idols such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford
soon participated in war loan drives. In one typical movie, an ugly, cruel "German" officer throws a baby out a window
before ravaging the baby's nurse. The Little American, 1917, directed by Cecil B. De Mille, was about a young girl
(Pickford) whose ship is torpedoed by Germans as she travels to France to visit a sick aunt. Once in France, she
witnesses horrid German atrocities and supplies information to the French about German positions. She is arrested by the
Germans but is rescued just before she is due to be shot by firing squad.
Once the Americans had entered the war, Wellington House's task was done. There was little need for the British to
concentrate so much of their propaganda in that direction and in 1918, a Ministry of Information was created under Lord
Beaverbrook at the behest of Prime Minister Lloyd George to deal with all propaganda used to stir up trouble in allied
and neutral countries, while the Department of Enemy Propaganda was formed at Crewe House under Lord Northcliffe
to stir up trouble in enemy countries.
"Millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy live amongst us....Should there be any disloyalty it will
be dealt with a firm hand of repression." Woodrow Wilson