George Creel

Journalist and government official, born in Lafayette Co, Missouri, USA. A self-educated ‘muckraking’ journalist who founded the Kansas City Independent (1898–1909), he wrote exposés for Cosmopolitan and attacked child labour in The Children of Bondage (1914). During World War 1, President Wilson named him head of the Committee on Public Information (1917–20), responsible for both propaganda at home in support of the war, and information abroad about America. In later years he turned to writing popular history and columns for Collier's.

George Creel (December 1, 1876–2 October 1953) was an investigative journalist, a politician, and, most famously, the head of the United States Committee on Public Information, a propaganda organization created by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I.

He also worked for The Denver Post (1909–1910) and the Rocky Mountain News (1911–1917) before President Wilson made him head of the United States Committee on Public Information during World War I. As head of this organization, he assembled a team of 75,000 public speakers, the "Four Minute Men," to give brief speeches throughout the country in favour of the War.

Creel gathered the nation's artists and created thousands of paintings, posters, cartoons, and sculptures promoting the War. He recruited about 75,000 "Four Minute Men," who spoke about the War at social events for an ideal length of four minutes, considering that the average human attention span was judged at the time to be four minutes. It was estimated that by the end of the war, they had made more than 7.5 million speeches to 314 million people. How the War Came to America, translated into many languages, sold almost seven million copies and included Wilson's war message.

He served on the San Francisco Regional Labor Board in 1933 and became chairman of the National Advisory Board of the Works Progress Administration in 1935.

He was an active member of the Democratic Party and ran against the novelist Upton Sinclair for the post of Governor of California.