ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to theorise the Committee on Public Information (CPI) activities and presents an explanatory lens that makes its long-lasting and profound effects comprehensible. Because CPI was aimed at the national level, it requires a dimension that can cope with the notion of a mass consciousness indicated by the term "national public opinion". George Creel's project had to bring together a population profoundly divided along ethnic, class, religious, and geographic lines. In keeping with that aspect of the age, Creel is singular in his claims for the CPI as an institution that operated along totally fact-based, scientific lines. Many of the criticisms of the CPI, beginning with Walter Lippmann's, were based on Creel's assertions that the CPI did nothing other than present facts. That Creel conceived of a social level of cognition is evident in the many some comments he made, such as his framing of the CPI's efforts as a 'fight for the mind of man'.
