structural:scholar_edition
Criticism

Walter Lippmann, a Wilson adviser, journalist, and co-founder of The New Republic, who was influential with Wilson in his advocacy for the establishment of a pro-war propaganda committee in 1917, and who was "associated with CPI propaganda" in Europe in 1918, may have later been a critic of Creel. He had once written an editorial criticizing Creel for violating civil liberties, as Police Commissioner of Denver. Without naming Creel, he wrote in a memo to Wilson that censorship should "never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression." After the war, Lippmann criticized the CPI's work in Europe: "The general tone of it was one of unmitigated brag accompanied by unmitigated gullibility, giving shell-shocked Europe to understand that a rich bumpkin had come to town with his pockets bulging and no desire except to please."