Selling the Great War

In 1917, a muckraking journalist from the West created the first and only official ministry of propaganda in the history of the United States. It was a plainclothes army of 150,000, answerable to a single man, a force that transformed America into a nation of warriors and that was instrumental in elevating the United States to a position of world power. It is one of modern history's most chilling ironies that the idealistic administration vowing to "make the world safe for democracy" created the first great propaganda machine of the twentieth century, helping to enable the far more notorious apparatus of the Third Reich. The President's Drummer is the story of George Creel and the epoch-making but nearly forgotten agency he built and led. It will tell how he came to build the agency - how, with nearly the six-day speed of Genesis, he created it, and how he ran it, using the emerging industries of mass advertising and public relations to transform America into a nation of warriors. It was a force whose effects were felt throughout the twentieth century and continue to be felt, perhaps even more strongly, today.