WOODROW WILSON'S LIBERTARIAN LACKEYS

Beware the temptation to collaborate with the state.

- JESSE WALKER

“I TOOK THIS position because I believed in the freedom of the press,” said the nation’s chief censor. That way, he explained, he could “be in a position where I could help to guard it.”

It was 1917, and the assembled members of the media were listening to George Creel, the head of Washington’s wartime propaganda and censorship agency. The federal government had taken an authoritarian turn during World War I, and Creel was in the thick of it. In addition to assisting in the suppression of supposedly seditious material, Creel’s Committee on Public Information (CPI) published agitprop encouraging a Stasi-like state of vigilance. One ad circulated by the committee urged Americans to report anyone who “cries for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.”

But Creel kept repeating versions of that guarding-our-freedoms line. At a speech in Indianapolis, he declared that he had “never considered himself a censor”—after all, “censorship plays but a small part in the work of the committee.”

It sounds like a perverse joke. But the really perverse joke is that he meant it.

Woodrow Wilson was, famously, one of the least libertarian presidents in U.S. history. Less famously, he hired several figures with quasi-libertarian pedigrees. From Creel, the censor against censorship, to Newton Baker, the borderline pacifist who became secretary of war, the Wilson years offer a cautionary tale about people’s ability to fool themselves into collaborating with the evils they claim to oppose.