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This chapter highlights the Office of War Information's (OWI) crucial role in the formulation of postwar foreign policy and provides a thorough examination of the agency. It focuses on the OWI during 1942 and 1943 and highlights in particular the OWI's critical role in popularizing the concept of a postwar United Nations and in trying unsuccessfully to bridge the chasm separating America's wartime idealism with its all-too-obvious racism. It traces how profound differences over wartime propaganda, combined with political backbiting and policy disagreements, crippled the agency. It recognizes how the agency's wartime role profoundly influenced the conduct of the nation's Cold War propaganda campaign.

This chapter examines the use of propaganda as part of the foreign policy of the United States during and after World War II. More specifically, it considers the Office of War Information's (OWI) role in laying the groundwork for public diplomacy after the war. It analyzes how OWI officials theorized the place of propaganda in a democratic society, the proliferation of access to mass communications, the relationship between foreign relations and domestic affairs, the distinction between propaganda and psychological warfare, and the link between public and private sources of information. It also explains how propaganda mixed with cultural diplomacy formed the core of America's public diplomacy matrix in the postwar period.

This chapter discusses the United States film industry during the Second World War. The film industry and its personnel were recruited for the war effort. Directors such as Frank Capra and John Ford were conscripted into the armed forces where they made a series of documentaries that supported US involvement. Hollywood was also enlisted in other ways. The Office of War Information (OWI) worked with the film industry to mobilise support for the war and maintain morale during it. In the process, a whole host of films sought to illustrate the dangers of the menace posed by the Axis powers. The chapter also includes the study, ‘What to Show the World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood, 1942–1945’ by Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, which examines the OWI and its control over the content of motion-pictures during the Second World War.

This chapter examines automobile culture in the United States during World War II, with particular emphasis on the Office of War Information’s propaganda that implored Americans to alter their driving habits. It first considers the rubber scarcity that prompted the federal government to ration rubber and gasoline before turning to the government propaganda and advertising that portrayed driving as essential to Americans while simultaneously denigrating public transportation, walking, and other alternative modes of transportation. It shows that the propaganda strengthened Americans’ commitment to private automobile travel by celebrating carpooling as a patriotic act, for example. It also looks at how residents of Detroit, Michigan, resisted the imposition of gasoline rationing and asserted their need to drive in spite of the war.

This chapter investigates the role played by movies in disseminating knowledge about the wider world, placing the United States at the center of the global community. Studies reveal that Americans were ignorant about foreign affairs and suspicious of the Allies. Because popular resistance to the United Nations reached the highest levels of the U.S. government, the Office of War Information (OWI) orchestrated multimedia propaganda campaigns with the United Nations as a key part of its comprehensive strategy. Moving pictures rendered foreign relations understandable and meaningful to the widest possible audience, educating Americans who were relatively unfamiliar with the world beyond U.S. borders.

This chapter looks at the strategizing and planning efforts that went into the Advertising Council. It outlines the Council’s organizational setup and its working relationship with the government’s Office of War Information (OWI) during its first year of existence. It also presents the Council’s criteria for accepting the government’s domestic information campaigns and how individual campaigns were prepared and implemented in actual advertisements. By providing their services to the government through the Council at no charge, advertisers hoped to impress upon the American people that theirs was a patriotic institution helping the war effort. The chapter concludes with a discourse regarding the advertisers’ victory in the battle to keep advertising a tax-deductible expense for business.

This chapter explores Charles Olson’s and Amiri Baraka’s various ways of letting the body into their writing. Olson’s Maximus (1960-1970), for example, equates fidelity to a viewer’s particular perception and body with fidelity to meaning, privileging American immigrant experiences in the process. He imagines that the puff of air he breathes (when speaking a word) can be an element of that world—like a piece of newspaper—captured by the poet. Drawing on archival sources, we see how Olson injects his pluralist poetics with the administrative ideology he developed in the 1940s at the US Office of War Information. Such a relationship between perception, politics, breath, and meaning also characterizes Amiri Baraka’s early writing (as LeRoi Jones), when he identifies Olson’s influence on his work in “How You Sound??” (1960). Although Baraka’s Black Nationalist poetry of the 1960s and early 1970s explicitly rejects white American poetry, his adoption of Olson’s poetics of identity emphasizes racial qualities of voice over the meaning of words.

This chapter, by Alice Lovejoy, chronicles the United States Office of War Information’s plans to distribute forty Hollywood feature films in liberated Europe under the auspices of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force’s Psychological Warfare Division (PWD-SHAEF). From the comparative perspectives of OWI and the Allied countries for which the films were destined (Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Czechoslovakia, its central case study), it examines the economic, ideological, and pragmatic questions that intersected in these films’ selection and distribution, focusing on the tensions caused by OWI’s close relationship with the American film industry. The chapter argues that the case study of these forty films highlights Europe’s fraught political, cultural, and diplomatic relationship with American cinema on the cusp of the Cold War, as well as the complex logics underpinning film distribution in this period.

This chapter considers the debate over payment for the government’s home front promotions, which pitted the media’s desire for increased advertising revenues against concerns about government intrusion on the First Amendment. The government’s decision to rely on the advertising industry’s volunteer contributions through the Advertising Council was clearly a vote of approval for the organization, but it also imposed a huge responsibility on the business community, demanding a large and well-orchestrated effort. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how internal struggles within the Office of War Information helped to further solidify the advertising industry’s role in the war effort, which led the Council to change its name to the War Advertising Council.

This chapter examines the unification of U.S. foreign relations and domestic affairs as core components of the public diplomacy matrix during the Cold War. It starts by analyzing President Harry S. Truman's decision in August 1945 to combine the Office of War Information's overseas information programs with the Department of State's existing programs in public information, cultural diplomacy, and educational exchanges. It shows that the consolidation of all of the U.S. government's initiatives under one umbrella was part of a plan to shape the nation's image in the world as a foreign policy issue. It also considers the techniques used by the State Department for selling the Truman Doctrine and their implications for the European Reconstruction Program, also known as the Marshall Plan.

With the end of World War II in sight, Republicans in Spain began to concert their efforts to engage international support for their cause. In the United States, Rep. John Coffey had tried unsuccessfully before to get Congress on record in support of an immediate break with Francisco Franco. With the Yalta Conference imminent, the new United States Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, had many considerations to bear in mind in relation to future policy towards Spain, though little time to consider any of them. The main difficulty in formulating a coherent post-war foreign policy towards Spain which would be acceptable to public opinion arose from war-time propaganda run by the Office of War Information. As peace approached, little underlined the differences in Spanish policy between Britain and the United States more clearly than their diametrically opposed requirements of Argentina.

This chapter details the Council’s activities throughout 1944. It studies how individual advertisers were coached to stay on course, sacrificing money, resources, and some of their creative independence to streamline the government’s campaigns and make the Council a success. Most of the government’s requests were for help with noncontroversial campaigns, which meant there was little chance that participating advertisers might arouse public resentment. But this was not always easy, especially when commercial concerns clashed with patriotic goals—a fact driven home by a highly controversial anti-venereal disease campaign. With this campaign, the Council found itself awkwardly in the middle of its obligations to the Office of War Information and the need to protect individual advertisers’ self-interest.

Men and women faced a number of challenges and opportunities with the onset of World War II. This chapter explores how individuals in the United States dealt with this global conflict, whether they were musicians in uniform, performers providing wartime entertainment, composers working on music appropriate for this time, or musical mediators such as radio hosts and newspaper critics. Institutions such as the Office of War Information and United Services Organization are addressed in the context of a discussion of how individual musicians tried to forge various paths through institutional matrices so as to meet wartime needs. Musicians featured in this chapter are the composers Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Ulysses Kay, and Kurt Weill; performers such as Andre Kostelanetz, Eugene List, Yehudi Menuhin, and Lily Pons; and cultural mediators such as Harry Futterman, Paul Henry Lang, and Deems Taylor.

Chapter 5 focuses on propaganda documentaries of the Second World War, when documentary took a dominant public role extending far beyond any it had played before. This era's marriage of propaganda and documentary speaks to elements of propaganda that haunt the documentaries of other eras. The Second World War saw a severe straitening of notions of American selfhood, not least in the forceful pronouncements that saturated the media. As the voices of soldiers in John Ford's December 7th stated, ‘we are all alike … we are all Americans’. In addition to addressing issues of ideology and representation, this chapter works to untangle the complicated web of intense documentary production and distribution during the time, which was spread amongst government, corporate Hollywood, and military interests. It includes a close reading of The Memphis Belle.

During the German occupation of France (1940-44), in addition to the broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), shortwave broadcasters in the United States, such as NBC, and later, the U.S. government’s Voice of America (VOA) and Office of War Information (OWI) supplied broadcast news, entertainment, and moral support to French listeners living under the Vichy regime. This chapter explores U.S. and Allied international broadcasting to France between 1937, when daily transatlantic French-language programs began in earnest from America, through D-Day, to the liberation of Paris coordinated in part via radio broadcasting. The chapter analyzes the programs and strategies of broadcasters, Nazi and Vichy propagandists, and clandestine listeners during the Occupation.

This chapter examines the influence of Production Code censors and the Office of War Information on the tale of survivors of a U-boat attack confined to a lifeboat commandeered by the captain of the U-boat that sunk the survivors’ ship. It was Hitchcock’s idea to create the lifeboat as a symbol of World War II in microcosm, with the survivors representing various aspects of democracy arrayed against the competent, single-minded German captain. The Office of War Information objected to this portrayal, viewing the plot as one that ‘Nazi propagandists themselves would like to promote.’ The author of the original source, John Steinbeck, was also unhappy with Hitchcock’s allegorical treatment, and the critics agreed with the view of the Office of War Information, causing this well-made film to do poorly at the box office.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's role in World War II. In 1943, Henry was hired by the Office of War Information (OWI), a new version of the Foreign Intelligence Service, as associate music editor, working primarily out of its New York branch near Carnegie Hall. The OWI was created in 1941 to combat Nazi propaganda. Renamed when the United States entered the war, it was directed to coordinate the wartime message. Its radio arm, the Voice of America, had only begun work two months before Henry joined the agency. At the time Henry joined, the music staff faced serious issues of quality. He was presumably brought in because his knowledge of world music enabled him to find music that both represented the United States well and attracted listeners. Henry first supervised OWI's library of music for broadcasts to Continental Europe. As the war progressed, he supervised selection of music for other countries. The OWI was abolished by President Harry S. Truman in 1945.