FOREWORD[1]
In view of the fact that the works which Mr. Creel has performed are supposed to have been performed under the guidance of, or, at least, in association with, the Committee on Public Information, consisting of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of War, I am afraid that if I were to indulge in extravagant eulogy of the wise and helpful things Mr. Creel has done it might be assumed that I was seeking to reserve for the remainder of the Committee some share of the praise. I feel sure, however, that if the Secretary of State were present he would assent, as the Secretary of the Navy, being present, I know does assent, to a statement of the attitude of the remaining members of that Committee toward Mr. Creel; the feeling is that while our names have been used as members of the Committee on Public Information, its labors have been the labors of Mr. Creel, and, for myself, at least, I can say that the helpfulness has been from him to me rather than in the reverse direction.
I remember a statement of Sir William Hamilton that there is nothing great in the world but man, and nothing great in man but mind. It is obviously too soon to begin to appraise either what this war means to mankind or what forces have correlated in the winning of the war, and yet our minds have been, I think, rather more occupied in observing the correlation of physical forces than they have in observing the correlation of mental forces; and I have a feeling, a very strong feeling, that future historians, when they are farther removed from the events of to-day, will lay stress upon the latter, not neglecting, but at least less emphasizing, the former. When you are near the trenches the biggest thing in the world is the man in the trenches, and he is a very big thing in the world while the war is on. Our minds are fascinated by the presence of Americans in France. We see stretching over France the products of our mills and our factories; we see the boys we have taken from field and workshop and factory and office and school manufactured overnight into an altogether unsuspected stature of heroism and capacity for sacrifice in the field. We see the trained and veteran armies of the countries which have long maintained a great military policy caught up with by our own recruits, hastily trained; we see the ocean, filled with new and difficult perils, carrying larger numbers of American soldiers than have ever been transported in the history of mankind. Perhaps the greatest foreign army that ever crossed a sea in the history of the world prior to the present war was the Persian army of a million men, which bridged and crossed the Hellespont, and here the American army has sent two millions of men across the Atlantic. We sec workshops and factories in America transferred from civilian occupations and learning new and difficult arts, accustoming their tools to the manufacture of war supplies, and we see American labor learning new skills, new mechanical inventions brought into quantity production among us.
So we think of the physical things accomplished because we are close to them and because they are visible to the senses. Our minds naturally dwell chiefly upon the physical things that have been done. There are many people in this room who have been in Europe since we entered this war, and nobody could possibly go to France, enter a port, and travel from any port of France to the front-line trenches without recognizing the energy and efficiency of his own nation; the strength and skill of his own fellow-countrymen; the inventive genius of America; the large capacity for industrial output of America stamped all over France.
These things form our imagination; it is our disposition to think of the war as a great conflict of physical forces in which the best mechanic won, and in which the nation that was strongest in material things, which had the largest accumulation of wealth and the greatest power of concentrating its industrial factors, was the victorious nation. Yet, as I said at the outset, I suspect the future historian will find under all these physical manifestations their mental cause, and will find that the thing which ultimately brought about the victory of the Allied forces on the western front was not wholly the strength of the arm of the soldier, not wholly the number of guns of the Allied nations; but it was rather the mental forces that were at work nerving those arms, and producing those guns, and producing in the civil populations and military populations alike of those countries that unconquerable determination that this war should have but one end, a righteous end.
The whole business of mobilizing the mind of the world so far as American participation in the war was concerned was in a sense the work of the Committee on Public Information. We had an alternative to face when we went into this war. The instant reaction of habit and tradition was to establish strict censorship, to allow to ooze out just such information as a few select persons might deem to be helpful, and to suppress all of the things which these persons deemed hurtful. This would have been the traditional thing to do. I think it was Mr. Creel's idea, and it was certainly a great contribution to the mobilization of the mental forces of America, to have, in lieu of a Committee on Censorship, a Committee on Public Information for the production and dissemination as widely as possible of the truth about America's participation in the war. Undoubtedly for the country to adopt the censorship plan would have been to say, "Now, we must all sit still and breathe cautiously lest we rock the boat." It was an inspiration to say, instead: "Now, this boat is just so many feet long, it is so many feet wide, it weighs just so much, and the sea is just so deep. If, after having all of these facts before you, you think rocking the boat will help the cause, rock." That is what the Committee on Public Information did, and it required a stroke of genius—perhaps not a stroke of genius, but something better than genius—to see that it required faith in democracy, it required faith in the fact; for it is a fact that our democratic institutions over here would enable us to deal with information safely; that, as Mr. Creel believed, if we received the facts we could be trusted.
Now the men who said that, and started out to give the American people all the facts there were, to see that the story was fully told, to dig it up out of hidden places and put it before the people, performed a very distinct service in the war, and, if I may say so, it seems to me a very great service to the future of our development, and in the application of the fruits of the victory which democracy has just won in the world. But it did not stop there. Of course, as the head of the War Department I am committed irrevocably, and no matter what my private opinions may be, to a belief on the much mooted question as to whether the pen is mightier than the sword. I an: obliged to believe that the sword is mightier than the pen. But this war wasn't to be won by the sword alone. It was to be won by the pen as well as by the sword, and I am not speaking now of a purely military victory, because the victory is simply a point in time. The Germans signed the armistice and began to go pell-mell toward the Rhine; they turned over a certain number of ships and railroad-cars and big guns, etc., and if that were to end the war, the end of it would be no end whatever. The question which still remains as a part of winning the war is gathering up the results of that war and extracting the real fruits. Of course, we should all be happy over the military victory, but the things in the victory that will make for our happiness and for the happiness of our children twenty years from now, and our grandchildren forty years from now, are the real winnings of the war; these are the things that will count most both for our enduring happiness and the profit of our children and grandchildren, the things that will make most for the truth and the freedom and liberty of mankind always; and these are the things that are to be won out of this war, not by our way of fighting, but by what we fought for, and what other people believe we fought for.
So, it was of the greatest importance that America in this war should be represented not merely as a strong man fully armed, but as a strong man fully armed and believing in the cause for which he was fighting. It was necessary to have somebody who understood why we were at war, and in saying that I speak not of a man who could comprehend merely the difficult international problems with regard to it, but the spirit that made us go into this war, and the things we were fighting for. Wars are sometimes fought for land, sometimes for dynastic aspiration, and sometimes for ideas and ideals. We were fighting for ideas and ideals, and somebody who realized that, and knew it, had to say it and keep on saying it until it was believed. That was a part of the function of the Committee on Public Information. Its body was in Washington, but its hands reached out into the capitals of neutral countries and elsewhere; its representatives were in constant communication by cable and telegraph and letter with the central place here in Washington where there were gathered together men of talent and genius and comprehension, and the inspiration of their appreciation of America had to go out from Washington to all of these outlying places. Sometimes it appeared in the newspapers of neutral capitals, and sometimes it dropped from balloons in written statements that were meant to convey to the enemy not the size of our army, not the dreadfulness of our means of conducting warfare, but the invincible power of our ideas.
So, when the military end came to this war, it was a composite result which was won undoubtedly in part by the superb heroism of the American soldiers and the veteran soldiers of the nations with whom we were associated. Nothing that is said about any other part of it ought to be permitted to take away from these splendid soldiers in their hour of triumph any part of the imperishable glory which they have brought to themselves and to the nation which they have served. But it was this unseen but persuasive and unending flood of ideas that aroused a correct apprehension of the true spirit and idealism of America in the war, and when the armistice was signed and peace came back into the world, it came, led by one hand by the military prowess of the great free peoples, and led by the other hand by the conquering idea of justice and freedom as expressed in America's idealism.
Now we are all facing the future rather than the past. We are thinking of what we are going to get out of this war, and nobody is counting it in gains which can be deposited in a bank; nobody is thinking of it in terms composed of subject peoples, but in terms of the return of law, the reign of justice, and the establishment of that complete morality in the relations of people which we have always observed as necessary in the relations of individuals,
It is a great thing to have fought in this war. Every man who fought in this war, and every woman who fought in it, will for the rest of his or her life be telling these who gather round of the stirring things which took place during the years of the war. We shall be telling the new-comers on the stage of life, or those who were very young while the war was on, of the unselfishness of the sacrifices which were made, of the beauty of community co-operation, and of the great strength of a nation which is strengthened by high purposes. We shall be telling them all the rest of our lives, and I say we because we share with the soldiers who went to France the dignity and the glory of having fought as they fought, along a somewhat different front and with not quite the same peril; but we fought with the same spirit, we fought for the same cause, we fought with them, and when the night was dark in France, when the stars were not visible over the trenches and the noise of hostile artillery was menacing and fearful, when it was lonesome for the sentinel, the thing that sustained him there, the thing that made it possible for him to stay, was the unseen but almost palpable hand of his country resting on his shoulder. That country has kept true to its ideals and its cause, and these have been kept untarnished by the principles which were worked out in this country for a democratic nation; our ideals have been strengthened by their wide-spread dissemination throughout the world.
It would be impossible, if anybody wanted to do it, to pick out the particular persons to whom credit is due for these great things. Of course, it is very easy to know where the chief credit lies. Nobody could deny that the chief credit lies with the Chief Executive of this nation. As to all the rest, it is glory enough and credit enough to have been permitted to serve under his leadership, and in the cause of which he was the leader; but I want to close what I have to say by pointing out that the mobilization of America, superb as it was, was a mobilization not of men alone, nor of money, nor of industry or labor, but a mobilization of true appreciation of the rights of man. It was a democratic movement which made this great result possible, and in that mobilization of ideas the Committee on Public Information played a part of great distinction and value, and when I speak of the Committee on Public Information, of course, I speak largely of Mr. Creel. The land forces, for which I speak especially, recognize with gratitude the debt which they owe for making their victory possible, and also making it worth while.
- ↑ Being the informal address of Mr. Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, at a dinner given to Mr. Creel in Washington, November 29, 1918.