The Office of War Information

On 13 June 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9182, creating the Office of War Information (OWI). The new office absorbed several scattered information agencies of the federal government and was, in the words of the order, to “formulate and carry out, through the use of press, radio, motion picture, and other facilities, information programs” designed to foster an informed and intelligent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and progress of the war effort and of the government’s war policies, activities and aims. To head it Roosevelt appointed Elmer Davis, one of the most popular radio commentators in the country.

The OWI is often described as a centre that coordinated war information and passed it on from the military and the administration to the public. That is true but incomplete: the office was also the main instrument of American propaganda, both among the country’s own citizens and abroad, and of psychological warfare in enemy countries.

Too much, too little and contradictory

Americans remembered the propaganda of the First World War. George Creel’s Committee on Public Information had in 1917–1918 stirred up feelings in the country of which people were later ashamed, and in the 1930s the word “propaganda” was associated in the United States with Joseph Goebbels’s ministry. Congress and the press were wary of a single government agency that would decide what citizens should know, and Roosevelt’s opponents suspected that it would be used for party propaganda.

So before Pearl Harbor, and for half a year afterwards, the government had several competing offices. The Office of Government Reports (from 1939) reported on the work of federal agencies; the Division of Information of the Office for Emergency Management (from February 1941) on rearmament; and the Office of Facts and Figures, set up in October 1941 under the poet Archibald MacLeish, was to explain defence policy to Americans. Activity abroad was handled by the Foreign Information Service, headed by the playwright and presidential speechwriter Robert E. Sherwood within the office of the Coordinator of Information, William Donovan. It was this service that on 1 February 1942 broadcast the first programme in German, from which the history of the Voice of America is dated. In it, listeners were told that the news might be good or bad for America, but that they would always hear the truth.

After the outbreak of war the effects of this fragmentation were plain to see. One observer summed up the complaints in three points: there was too much information, there was too little of it, and on top of that it was contradictory. Ministries, the Army and the Navy issued their own communiqués, and the public, as the polls showed, had a poor grasp of what the war was about and felt little sympathy for the Allies.

Elmer Davis and the new office

Order 9182 merged the Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of Government Reports and the Division of Information into a single office, and the Foreign Information Service became the core of its Overseas Branch. On the same day Roosevelt, by a separate military order, turned the rest of Donovan’s office into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), subordinate to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Open information and propaganda thus went to the OWI, intelligence and covert operations to the OSS.

The choice of Elmer Davis sent a signal. Born in Indiana in 1890, a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and reporter for The New York Times, he had been commenting on events on CBS radio since 1939. In 1941 some 12.5 million people listened to his five-minute evening broadcasts, valuing his calm tone and matter-of-factness. He gave up a high radio salary for the new job. Davis repeatedly said that Americans had the right to be truthfully informed about the war, within the limits set by military security.

The office was divided into a Domestic Branch and an Overseas Branch, the latter based in New York and run by Sherwood. Davis’s deputy was Milton Eisenhower, who had earlier organised the removal of Japanese Americans. At its peak the OWI employed several thousand people.

Radio, posters, film

The Domestic Branch ran bureaus of radio, press, graphics, publications and motion pictures. It prepared programmes and slogans for radio stations, guidelines for newspaper and magazine editors, pamphlets and series of posters encouraging people to buy war bonds, to save, to let women work in factories and to be discreet (“loose talk costs lives”). OWI photographers documented the country’s mobilisation, and films about the camps for Japanese Americans were made in cooperation with the relocation authority.

Lowell Mellett’s Bureau of Motion Pictures issued a manual for the film industry in 1942, urging Hollywood to portray the war as a struggle of democracy against fascism. Soon it also began reading scripts; according to figures cited in the literature, it reviewed 1,652 of them by 1945. It had no power to ban a film, but it could block its export through the Office of Censorship, which had been operating separately since December 1941. Davis said openly that the easiest way to plant a propaganda idea in people’s minds was to deliver it through entertainment, when viewers did not realise they were being subjected to propaganda.

The OWI must be distinguished from the Army, which ran its own propaganda. The most famous series of those years, Frank Capra’s Why We Fight, was made at the behest of the Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, as training films for soldiers. The first of them, Prelude to War, was later also released in cinemas.

The Overseas Branch took over the Voice of America and expanded it into a network of broadcasts in many languages, published magazines for the Allies such as Victory, and waged psychological warfare in the combat zones. According to OWI figures, aircraft dropped more than 180 million of its leaflets over Japan, some 98 million of them in the summer of 1945.

Disputes and cuts

From the outset the OWI was caught between a rock and a hard place. The Army and Navy were reluctant to share news, and Davis had to fight for permission to publish bad news – in 1943 he persuaded Roosevelt to allow photographs of dead American soldiers to be shown in the press. On the other hand, some of the staff felt that honest information was being pushed aside by advertising men. On 14 April 1943 a group of writers from the Domestic Branch, among them the young historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., resigned, publicly accusing the leadership of preferring “slick salesmanship” to honest information.

Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress saw the OWI as Roosevelt’s election agency. In the summer of 1943 the House of Representatives voted to abolish the Domestic Branch. In the end it survived, but with its budget cut to a fraction and barred from producing many materials of its own; domestic film production, among other things, was shut down. From 1944 the OWI operated mainly abroad.

For Poles the most damning matter proved to be the Katyn massacre. The congressional committee that investigated it in 1951–1952, known after its chairman as the Madden Committee, established that in 1943 OWI officials, together with the bodies overseeing radio, had pressed Polish-language radio stations in the United States not to challenge the Soviet version of the crime. Protecting the alliance with the USSR then weighed more than the truth.

Its place in the war

The creation of the OWI was part of a great reshaping of the American state in the first six months of the war. In March the Army was reorganised, in May women received their own corps attached to the Army, and in June the government finally gained an office that was to speak with one voice. The office did not become an American counterpart of Goebbels’s ministry: it worked in a country with a free press, under the eye of a distrustful Congress, and its director staked – at least in his declarations – on truth rather than lies.

By Executive Order 9608 of 31 August 1945 President Harry Truman abolished the OWI with effect from 15 September 1945. Its overseas operations, including the Voice of America, passed to the State Department, and in 1953 to the new United States Information Agency (USIA). The Voice of America, born in February 1942 and taken over by the OWI in June, broadcast in Polish among other languages during the Cold War and became the most enduring legacy of Washington’s wartime propaganda.