Chomsky on the 'first state propaganda agency':

Independence Day was designed by the first state propaganda agency, Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information (CPI), [also called the 'Creel Commission'] was created during World War I to whip a pacifist country into anti-German frenzy and, incidentally, to beat down the threat of labor which frightened respectable people after such events as the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) victory in the Lawrence, Mass., strike of 1912. [1]

The Creel Commission ...

... succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population...

The Creel Commission and the 'public relations industry':

The U.S. pioneered the public relations industry. It's commitment was 'to control the public mind', as it's leaders put it. They learned a lot from the successes of the Creel Commission and the successes in creating the Red Scare and its aftermath. [2]

... The great mass of the population, 'ignorant and mentally deficient,' must be kept in their place for the common good, fed with 'necessary illusion', and 'emotionally potent oversimplifications' (Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Reinhold Niebuhr). . Chomsky, Year 501: [3]

Robert Lansing was the uncle of Allen Dulles [CIA Director in the Eisenhower Administration and Kennedy Administration

Lansing recruited his nephew [Allen Dulles] to go to Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama on the pretext of company business but in reality to sound out the Latin Americans on aiding the US war effort. Costa Rica was led by the vicious dictator Federico Tinoco. Dulles advised Washington to support the dictator, as he was anti-German. Dulles also encouraged the Nicaragua dictator Emianiano Camorro to issue a proclamation suspending diplomatic relations with Germany. In Panama, Dulles offered to let Panama waive the tax on its annual canal fee as long as Panama would declare war on Germany. [3]

Adolph Hitler also learned quite a lot from the Creel Commission, according to Chomsky in "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" [4]. At this time Walter Lippman, says Chomsky, was the "most respected figure in American journalism for about half a century (I mean serious American journalism, serious think pieces)." It was he who introduced the new art in democracy called "manufacture of consent".

The attempt to nationalize radio under military control:

Nowhere had the line between private industry and military need blurred more than in the information and communications industry. Throughout the twentieth century, the development of cutting-edge communications systems in America has not occurred without substantial input from--if not outright control--by the American military. If this seems odd, recall that the rapid growth of radio as a means of communication in America took place during World War I, that in 1918, [Wilson's] Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels tried unsuccessfully to have radio communications industry nationalized under military control.[5]

About the 'Red Scare' & the 'Palmer Raids':

In 1919 and 1920 Wilson's Attorney General, 'Alexander M. Palmer, conducted what came to be called the 'Palmer Raids' - with the assistance of a young J. Edgar Hoover, who was then head of the Justice Department’s Alien Radical division.

In 1919 and 1920, a wave of anticommunist hysteria swept the United States. By June 1920, some ten thousand people were arrested and imprisoned solely for their political beliefs or for belonging to labor or political organizations. About eight hundred of them were deported. The government's repression of radical movements in 1919 and 1920 was among the most severe in the country's history. It involved coordinated raids from coast to coast using federal warrants based on immigration laws that did not provide for due process of law. Men and women were rounded up, imprisoned without charges or access to a lawyer, and in some cases deported before their families could even learn their whereabouts. [5]

Not unlike the massive campaign of preventive detention conducted by Attorney General John Ashcroft in the George W. Bush Administration. On the Amnesty International page there is an article called The Ashcroft Raids that offers an excellent comparison of the tactics of the two attorney generals: [7]. See also: [8], and Howard Zinn: [9]

It was during these years that an elected Socialist (pacifist Victor Berger from Wisconsin) was expelled from Congress and convicted of sedition; although Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis said he regretted the law did not allow him "to have Berger lined up against a wall and shot", the conviction was later thrown out by the Supreme Court [Berger v. U.S., 255 U.S. 22 (1921)]. In another incident that occurred during this period, when a sailor shot a man to death for failing to rise during the national anthem, "the crowd burst into cheers and hand-clapping," reports a Washington Post article, in apparent approval. [6]"

On Wilson's foreign policy innovations:

He developed a foreign policy primarily orientated towards furthering national interests, but which was presented and accepted as being primarily concerned with universal values. Furthermore, Wilson innovated in colonial policy, devising a new method, cultural colonisation, which extended national influence without committing massive resources or military. [10]

Wilson's first Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan [who appeared for the prosecution in the Scopes Trial "blamed [WWI] in part on the godlessness he associated with the theory of evolution". [11]

Wilson's second Secretary of State was Lansing (see above). His third was Bainbridge Colby. According to one geneology site, Dick Cheney (Vice President in the George W Bush Administration) is part of the Colby family tree. William E. Colby, CIA Director in the Ford Administration is also a member of the Colby family tree. [12]. George H.W. Bush followed Colby as CIA Director in the Ford Administraion.

Book censorship:

When Secretary of War Newton D. Baker issued his directive of late summer and early fall of 1918 ordering the removal of 47 published works from U.S. Army post and camp libraries as unfit for the soldiery to read, he opened up an immense subject, potentially. This was especially true after his action spilled over into the civilian sector, and public libraries about the land, without official direction, began to weed out, impound and/or destroy these same 47 publications. [13]

Using troops domestically:

In 1878, Congress enacted the Posse Comitatus Act [PCA], firmly placing the Army within the military chain of command and ending the use of the army as a means of civilian law-enforcement. Governors and marshals could no longer command the army themselves without facing criminal penalties ...

[But] the PCA has not always prevented violations of the chain of command. ... From 1917 to 1920, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker gave military commanders the authority to answer governors' requests for federal troops without requiring the approval of the War Department or the President. There has never been a criminal prosecution under the PCA, and no one was prosecuted for these apparent violations. [14]

Josephus Daniels - who, as Secretary of Navy, tried to commandeer radio broadcasting (see above) - was at an earlier point in life a newspaper man:

In North Carolina, Democrats regained control of the Legislature in 1898 by mounting a white supremacy campaign that featured vote fraud and outright intimidation by paramilitary thugs called Red Shirts. Two years later, all but a handful of the state’s blacks would be disenfranchised through a voter referendum (with electoral fraud so blatant that the disenfranchisement even “passed” in majority-black counties). Such efforts were loudly championed by a Raleigh editor named Josephus Daniels, a key figure in Democratic politics. .... [Josephus Daniels] went on to hold positions in both the Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt Administration.[15]

James C. McReynolds was Wilson's first Attorney General. Later he served as Supreme Court Justice, from 1914 to 1941. In the following excerpt from "The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox: A Year in the Life of a Supreme Court Clerk in FDR's Washington", McReynolds cautions his new clerk against becoming chummy with the help:

I realize you are a Northerner who has never been educated or reared in the South, but I want you to know that you are becoming much too friendly with Harry [McReynolds' messenger]. You seem to forget that he is a negro and you are a graduate of the Harvard Law School. And yet for days now, it has been obvious to me that you are, well, treating Harry and Mary [McReynolds' housekeeper and cook] like equals. Really, a law clerk to a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States should have some feeling about his position and not wish to associate with colored servants the way you are doing....Of course, you are not a Southerner, so maybe it's expecting too much of someone from Chicago to act like a Southerner, but I do wish you would think of my wishes in this matter in your future relations with darkies. [16]