Creel, George

George Creel, in full George Edward Creel, (born December 1, 1876, Lafayette county, Missouri, U.S.—died October 2, 1953, San Francisco, California), American writer and newspaperman who, as head of the U.S. publicity bureau during World War I, did much to shape subsequent government programs of publicity and propaganda.

Creel began his career as a newspaper reporter for the Kansas City World in 1894 and started publishing his own newspaper, the Kansas City Independent, in 1899. After writing for the Denver Post (1909–10), he became editor of the Rocky Mountain News in 1911 and began to establish a reputation as a dedicated investigative reporter. In 1917 he was appointed head of the U.S. Committee on Public Information, the government’s propaganda and publicity agency, by Pres. Woodrow Wilson. For the next two years he used modern public-relations techniques to promote the war effort, at home and abroad, and rallied popular support for the war effort with the “Four-Minute Men,” a volunteer force of 75,000 speakers for public meetings.

Creel remained in public life after the war, serving with the San Francisco Regional Labor Board in 1933 and as chairman of the National Advisory Board of the Works Progress Administration in 1935. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor of California against the novelist Upton Sinclair in 1934. Devoting much of his later years to writing, he completed 15 books, including War Criminals and Punishment in 1944, which was dramatized for the radio.