Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph

Los Gatan George Creel (left) encouraged anti-German sentiments during World War I. He is shown here with Pop Warner, founder of Pop Warner football.

Best of Picture from the Past

George Creel helped create WWI's anti-German frenzy

By John S. Baggerly

When flags were flying at half staff July 27 for the Veterans' Armistice Day, it reminded this writer of the late George Creel, who lived on Oak Hill Way in Los Gatos.

Creel was the head of the Committee on Public Information (CPI) for the United States during the Great War, later named World War I after a second world war broke out in the 1940s. In today's Picture from the Past, Creel and former Stanford football coach Pop Warner enjoy dessert at a Dec. 19, 1931, banquet sponsored by the Saratoga Men's Club. President Bert Lyon presided, and honored guests included baseball great Ty Cobb and Don Thompson, a popular Bay Area radio announcer.

As one of the speakers that night, Creel--a newspaperman and prominent muckraker--said that for homefront morale on American holidays he sometimes fabricated Allied victories. He said, "If we had gained all that ground, the Allies would have been in Berlin and back many times over." WWI was a deadlock war with high casualties from battles fought in trenches in France. Fighting on the German side was a corporal named Adolph Hitler.

Creel, as head of CPI, urged the press not to print anything about the war that would undermine the U.S. effort or put the United States in a bad light. Although many reporters resented this suggestion of self-imposed censorship, they complied out of fear of government reprisals.

As a result of techniques like Creel's, such movies appeared as To Hell With the Kaiser, The Prussian Cur and The Kaiser, Beast of Berlin. Creel did his job so well that people went a little nuts in their hatred of Germany and things German. German books were burned, the name sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage," hamburgers became "liberty steaks" and frankfurters were replaced by "victory sausages." Stores with German names were sometimes boycotted and broken into, and owners were attacked.

Berlin, Iowa, changed its name to Lincoln, while East Germantown, Ind., became Pershing. Banks, hotels and other businesses with German in their names soon found new identities. Statues of Schiller, Beethoven, Heine and other icons of German culture were defaced. In Texas, the governor tried to fire all aliens on the faculty of the state university, while the College of the City of New York reduced by one point the credit value of each course in the Department of German.

Before the Allies could defeat the Germans on the Western Front, much of the Russian Army on the Eastern Front fighting against Germany quit fighting for the czar when they learned that sawdust rather than gunpowder was in their shells and bullets. Losing part of his army led to the czar's overthrow by the Communists. In our Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's effort was hindered by the same industrial crookery--sawdust in shells. Both of those swindles called for a muckraker like George Creel.

Creel's hillside Los Gatos home was complemented by a sizable barn. The inside walls were covered with posters urging enlistment in the Army and Navy. George R. Kane, then publisher of the Los Gatos Times, was a book collector and collector of ephemera who acquired part of Creel's poster collection and then put it on public display at Forbes Mill Museum.

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John Baggerly is now semi-retired. This column is from the Los Gatos Weekly-Times archives.

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