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Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Restricted Thesis: Campus only access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

History

First Advisor

Dr. David Brandenberger

Abstract

At the start of the United States’ entry into World War I, Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), tasked with selling the war to the American people and rallying public opinion. Not only was it intended to mobilize US society for war, but it was also to contain and counteract those in US society who resisted mobilization. Between 1914 and 1917, US immigrant newspapers such as The Fatherland and The Gaelic American, based in New York City and led by radical editors George Sylvester Viereck and John Devoy, had published divisive articles targeting Great Britain and Woodrow Wilson’s economic support for the Entente in the war. Blatant in their pro-German, anti-British, and pro-neutrality stances, they became prime targets for the CPI. Looking at the work of the CPI concerning these German American and Irish-American newspapers clarifies the nature and efficacy of some of the CPI’s most important propaganda campaigns during World War I, and assesses the CPI’s effect, or lack of effect, on the changing narratives of these papers.

This thesis is organized into two case studies of immigrant press responses to WWI, as well as the US government’s efforts to mobilize these groups. The first chapter explores German American sentiment from 1914-1918 through The Fatherland, tracing how CPI pressure and propaganda late in the war motivated the paper’s overt ideological shift from anti-war sentiments to promoting official CPI material. The second chapter focuses on Irish-American journalistic activism through The Gaelic American, tracing the trajectory of its anti-British and pro-German editorial line before and after the United States’s entry into the war. Further, it investigates the CPI’s peculiar silence in regard to Irish-American dissent, which contradicted the efforts of other government institutions, such as the US Post Office and Department of Justice, to silence, censor, and prosecute Irish-American leaders voicing anti-British sentiments. Together, these chapters highlight the dichotomous treatment of two “hyphenated” American immigrant groups as well as broader themes about how journalism and propaganda struggled with each other in a battle over public opinion.

This study uses a combination of archival research and newspaper research. Records from the US National Archives regarding the CPI, the George Creel Papers at the US Library of Congress, and the John Devoy Papers at the National Library of Ireland provide insight into the priorities and operations of the US government throughout WWI. They also allow an analysis of The Fatherland and The Gaelic American that traces changes in these papers’ tone, rhetoric, and politics throughout the war. In its inquiry into government records and wartime journalism, this thesis provides new insight into how US propaganda attempted to mobilize immigrant communities in New York City to support official war aims from 1917 to 1918.

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