Foreign Affairs

Records of the Committee on Public Information (RG 63)

The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was established by Executive Order 2594 as an independent agency in April 1917.  The Committee consisted of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy as ex officio members.  Its functions were to release news of the government, issue information to sustain domestic morale, and to publicize America abroad.  Domestic activities were discontinued after the Armistice in November 1918 and foreign operations were discontinued in June 1919.

A volume of the series Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) documents the overseas work of the CPI.

National Archives Preliminary Inventory NC-7: Records of the Committee on Public Information, prepared in 1962 and updated in 2021, describes the records in more detail.

You can search the National Archives Catalog for entries from RG 63 or see a description in the Guide to Federal Records.

Top