Committee on Public Information

The [Committee on Public Information] issues the daily war news to the whole press of the country, and, in addition, it supplies some thirty thousand newspapers with feature articles, a weekly news service and governmental publicity material of all sorts. It has prepared, printed and distributed to all parts of the world, twenty-five million copies of thirty-three propaganda pamphlets in eight different languages. It conducts speaking campaigns throughout the country, directing the activities of some ten thousand public speakers in one Division and thirty-five thousand others in the Division of Four Minute Men who speak chiefly in moving picture theatres. It prepares and releases here and abroad patriotic moving pictures that reach hundreds of thousands of people daily. In the Official Bulletin, it issues a daily newspaper for the Government with a circulation of one hundred and fifteen thousand copies a day. It has mobilized the advertising agents of the country in support of the war, prepared advertisements and posters and window cards for advertising campaigns, obtained the co-operation of two hundred advertising clubs and a contribution of more than a million dollars worth of free advertising space for the Red Cross, Liberty Loan, Shipping Board and Smileage "drives". Among the foreign-language groups in America, it has organized a score of patriotic societies in support of the war, furnishes their press with articles of propaganda, arranges patriotic rallies, supplies speakers, and helps to direct the Americanization of the foreign-born. Abroad it carries on an extensive propaganda in twelve foreign countries through some fourteen directing agents of its own, and with the assistance of the embassies, attaches, and loyal American citizens of those countries. It conducts also a foreign press bureau that sends daily a wireless and cable news service to Europe, the Orient, Mexico and South America, as well as a service of feature articles for the foreign press. It supervises the voluntary censorship of our loyal press and administers the rules and regulations for the cable censorship with respect to press dispatches. It censors the publication of war photographs and it has issued one hundred and thirty-five thousand photographs and thirty eight thousand slides for the use of lecturers. It conducts a Service Bureau in Washington to inform and direct applicants for aid in seeking war work, in obtaining knowledge of any administrative activities, or in approaching business dealings with the government. It has on its pay roll only 362 employees, of whom 27 receive merely nominal salaries. From April 1917 to April 1918 it has paid $245,000 for salaries and $718,000 for all its other expenses. This remarkable showing has been made possible by the co-operation of patriotic groups and individuals, and by the self-sacrifice of volunteer workers.