What it said
The order told the director to use press, radio, and motion pictures so people at home and abroad would have "an informed and intelligent understanding" of the war's status, policies, and aims. That is a mandate for explanation. The film manual the domestic branch actually circulated asked a different first question.
Will this picture help win the war?
Another of its questions asked whether an "escape" picture would harm the effort "by creating a false picture of America, her allies, or the world we live in."
Who made it and why
On 13 June 1942, Executive Order 9182 created the Office of War Information in the Executive Office of the President. It folded in the Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of Government Reports, the Division of Information of the Office for Emergency Management, and the Foreign Information Service of the Coordinator of Information. Elmer Davis, a CBS newscaster, was named director. The National Archives' guide to the records (Record Group 208) lists a Radio Bureau, a News Bureau with sections for the Negro press, the labor press, and the foreign-language press, a Bureau of Graphics, field operations, books and magazines, and a Bureau of Motion Pictures. Lowell Mellett ran that bureau. Nelson Poynter ran its Hollywood office.
The domestic operation was built because the White House wanted one voice. It immediately had several.
What it got right or wrong
A democracy at war does need a place that publishes shipping losses, ration rules, and war aims without waiting for a rumor. Davis's hiring from outside the advertising trade signaled that the job was supposed to be reporting. The Hollywood office then behaved like a studio executive with a flag. The figure usually given, and given as usual rather than as a file FRAME itself counted, is 1,652 scripts read. For Paramount's So Proudly We Hail!, Poynter wrote pages of suggested dialogue and complained that "the worst feminine characteristics have been emphasized." The studio took many notes and refused his rewritten lines. Mellett watched MGM's Keeper of the Flame on 2 December 1942 and disapproved of it. Advice a producer can reject is not a censor's stamp. Advice backed by the power to lean on a wartime industry is not a book club either.
In November 1942 the office released Japanese Relocation. The National Archives catalogs it as NAID 38743, producer the Office of War Information. The film narrates the exclusion and confinement of Japanese Americans, the act ordered by Executive Order 9066, as if it were a tidy success. That narration was false to the injury. The exclusion was wrong. A government movie that makes it look like cooperation compounds the wrong. It does not create it. The order did.
In April 1943 writers inside the domestic branch resigned. Their statement, as the FRAME study records it from later quotation, said it had become "impossible for us, under those who now control our output, to tell the full truth," and that the office was "now dominated by high pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest information." Congress had its own version of the complaint. One charge, preserved in the same study, called the output "purely political propaganda designed entirely to promote a fourth term, and a dictatorship." A House document of 19 April 1943 estimated a fiscal 1944 appropriation of $47,342,000. Funding was the legislature's lever, and it used it.
An executive order, not a statute: limit and danger
The office was created by executive order, not by a statute that defined what Americans were forbidden to say. That is both a limit and a danger. A limit, because Davis could not jail a critic. A danger, because script notes, newsprint priorities, and a presidential campaign's appetite sit outside the criminal code where a lawyer can see them. The First Amendment question is government pressure on private speakers, the studios, dressed up as help.
The exclusion is the clearer constitutional fact. Military commanders, under 9066, could bar "any or all persons" from areas they drew. About 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, roughly two-thirds of them citizens, were held. The archive's Roosevelt page states those figures. Korematsu v. United States (1944) upheld the exclusion order. Ex parte Endo, the same day, held that a citizen conceded to be loyal could not be detained. Both opinions are the Court's. The loyal-citizen holding is the one that matches the Constitution. The exclusion holding does not, and Congress said so in substance when it passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 after the commission report Personal Justice Denied.
Voluntary bond-buying and a film that prettifies a forced removal are not the same use of the word "we."
Its legacy
Domestic OWI is the model later disputes keep rediscovering: an office that says it deals in facts, a creative staff that says the advertisers took over, a legislature that smells a reelection, and a film that should not have been made in that tone about a policy that should not have existed. Record Group 208 is the place to test the memos. The posters in the collection are the part the public was meant to see.
Sources
- Executive Order 9182, 13 June 1942. American Presidency Project.
- National Archives, Guide to Federal Records, Record Group 208; Japanese Relocation, NAID 38743.
- FRAME case study of the domestic branch, for the manual's questions, the 1,652-script figure, Poynter's note on So Proudly We Hail!, the April 1943 resignation language, the congressional "fourth term" charge, and H. Doc. 78-165 ($47,342,000).
- Executive Order 9066, 19 February 1942. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944); Ex parte Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944). Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied.
- FRAME Roosevelt administration page, for the approximate confinement figures.