Note for a Planned Article
"Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy"
(comments welcome; draft, not for citation)
(comments welcome; draft, not for citation)
"There was also an even greater task beyond our borders. There were the war-weary peoples of England, France, and Italy that had to be strengthened by a message of encouragement, the peoples of neutral countries to be won to our support, and the peoples of the Central Powers to be reached with the truth. Not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'"
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--George Creel (1876-1953), chairman of the first USG "propaganda" agency, The Committee on Public Information (1917-1919), writing in his autobiography, Rebel at large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (1947), p. 158; Creel, a southerner (he was born in Missouri), had a (nominally) Roman Catholic father who drank too much; the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (image below) was created in the 17th century, with "with the double aim of spreading Christianity in the areas where the Christian message had still not arrived and of defending the patrimony of faith in those places where heresy had caused the genuineness of the faith to be questioned" (official Propaganda Fide website).
