Using history to move forward the public dialogue on free speech and social justice.

Censorship in World War I

The United States has always experienced government censorship, the First Amendment notwithstanding. The infamous Sedition Act during the presidency of John Adams at the beginning of the 19th century limited acceptable criticisms of the government. During much of the century, though, censorship efforts were largely local or state affairs (the first amendment would not apply to the actions of individual states until 1925).1 The Comstock Act at the end of the same century, though, expanded the ability and influence of the federal government by granting the Postmaster General the ability to seize obscene material transported through the mail. Yet, regular and consistent censorship did not really take off at the federal level until the First World War.

Censorship efforts usually increase during wartime. President Lincoln attempted to control war news via the telegraph system, controlling what the press could print about it. During World War II, the Office of Censorship restricted what could be printed about the war effort, perhaps most famously keeping the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb a secret. Laws passed after 9/11 such as the PATRIOT Act, in particular section 215, chilled free speech by enabling greater government oversight, surveillance, and search and seizure powers over institutions like libraries. Yet, censorship efforts before World War I were either temporary or rather curtailed in scope. The laws and institutions following World War I, on the other hand, were much more potent and of longer duration. In this way, the censorship efforts of World War I mark a turning point in censorship efforts in the United States.

The formal system of World War I censorship consisted of multiple organizations of the federal government with overlapping members empowered by a series of laws and executive orders passed by Woodrow Wilson following American intervention into the war. Perhaps most well-known among these organizations was the Committee on Public Information (CPI) otherwise known as the Creel Committee after its chairman, George Creel.2 The CPI was established by EO 2594 and consisted of Creel, as well as the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and State. The four-member body was charged with overseeing the distribution of information from the military to the newspapers, as well as enforcing a voluntary code of conduct on the nation’s news media. The code limited what newspapers could print about the war, such as troop positions or movements, but had no formal sanction in place for a lack of compliance. Yet, according to Creel, papers did regularly comply with the code. Another major component of the CPI was its propaganda divisions. Another institution, the War Trade Board.3 The Board was authorized to be created by the Trading with the Enemy Act of October 1917, and Wilson did exactly this with EO2729-A. The Board was headed by the Alien Property Custodian, A. Mitchell Palmer, who would go on to become the Attorney General. In this role, Palmer was in charge of confiscating the property of enemy aliens, mostly German immigrants, residing in the United States. This also extended to controlling the flow of foreign newspapers into the United States. The property, which ranged from physical property to patents, thus confiscated was given out to Palmer’s allies leading to a series of corruption scandals in the 1920s. The Trading with the Enemy Act also established a Censorship Board, consisting of the Secretaries of the Army and Navy, George Creel, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, and Chairman R.L. Maddox. Unlike the CPI, the Censorship Board did have actual penalties that could be imposed for non-compliance. Finally, the Espionage Act of 1917, later expanded with the Sedition Act of 1918 empowered the Department of Justice and the Post Office to arrest people and seize anything which they deemed to undermine the war effort. Combined, these laws and institutions collectively censored to varying degrees the news that Americans read in domestic papers, the foreign newspapers they might read, the conversations they might have privately or informally, and anything they might distribute through the mail system.

A couple things stand out as interesting to me about these efforts. First, George Creel, in his biography of the CPI consistently rejected that what his organization was doing was censorship.4 In fact, he saw himself as mediating between the media and the military, a rabblerousing mass on one side and a stern, cold bureaucracy on the other. He saw himself as a man of moderation seeking to convey what truth he could to the American public. He adamantly rejected the idea that the CPI was producing propaganda. He also emphasized the voluntary nature of the code, happening to elide the fact that the Censorship Board, War Trade Board, and Espionage and Sedition Acts provided the legal fear of retribution for non-compliance. Could someone be arrested under these laws for not complying with the supposedly voluntary code? This is an attitude we see often in the historical record – censors do not tend to see themselves as censors. They are mediators, protectors, activists, concerned citizens, but they are not censors. This also raises an interesting historical question – Historians try to understand the time periods that they study on their own terms. Does that make it inaccurate to think of Creel as a censor since he himself did not? Or is something gained epistemologically by categorizing him so?

Another question is the possibility, raised by the present COVID-19 pandemic, that these censorship efforts might have reduced the ability of states and localities to respond to the Spanish Flu outbreak with occurred during and after the war. I am not alone in this conjecture; the Baltimore Sun recently ran am op-ed claiming just that. The evidence appears to be primarily based on John Barry, a scholar of the Spanish Flu, who made a similar argument in the New York Times back in March. I have not read his book yet, but I hope to do so soon.56