What it said
Before there was an Office of War Information, the poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish ran a smaller shop with a stated creed. He called it the strategy of truth.
opposes to the frauds and the deceits by which our enemies have confused and conquered other peoples, the simple and clarifying truths
Two years later the most widely read output connected to the federal effort was not a fact sheet. On 17 January 1943 The New York Times Magazine ran an essay by Rex Stout, the mystery writer who chaired the Writers' War Board, under the title "We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail." Stout argued that Americans had to hate more than the Nazi leaders. They had to hate the Germans who accepted the doctrine of the German master race
and those who had not stopped the Nazis from taking the country to war. The magazine printed a reply in the same issue from the clergyman Walter Russell Bowie, who argued against hatred as a war aim.
That pairing, a call to hate and its rebuttal on facing pages of a private paper, is the whole story in miniature.
Who made it and why
The federal side. On 11 July 1941 President Roosevelt named William J. Donovan Coordinator of Information. Its Foreign Information Service, under the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, began German-language broadcasts in February 1942 that grew into the Voice of America. Executive Order 8922 of 24 October 1941 created MacLeish's Office of Facts and Figures. The writer Henry F. Pringle was on its staff. On 13 June 1942 Executive Order 9182 merged these pieces into the Office of War Information under Elmer Davis of CBS; the rest of Donovan's office became the OSS the same day. Gardner Cowles Jr., publisher of the Des Moines Register and Look, ran the Domestic Branch in 1942 and 1943. Sherwood ran the Overseas Branch. The home-front bureaus, the Hollywood script work, the April 1943 resignations, and the congressional cut are covered in our study of the OWI's domestic branch; this page does not repeat them.
The private side. Soon after Pearl Harbor a group of New York writers formed the Writers' War Board. Stout chaired it. The Library of Congress holds its records and names among its members Margaret Leech, Christopher La Farge, Clifton Fadiman, and Alan Green. The board was private, but it was not independent of the government's purse. Federal subsidies reached it through the OWI, and the OWI's liaison officer to the board, Frederica Barach, was also its executive secretary.
The working method was simple. An agency wanted something written: the Army Air Forces, war bonds, the Office of Price Administration, the War Manpower Commission, Lidice, and a subject the finding aid files as "Japanese and Americans relocation." The board found a volunteer writer. The writer placed a story, article, radio script, or speech under his or her own name. Edna St. Vincent Millay's verse play The Murder of Lidice (1942) was written for the board's commemoration of the Czech village massacre of June 1942. Stout also hosted Our Secret Weapon on CBS in 1942 and 1943, a program that answered claims from Axis shortwave radio, sponsored by Freedom House.
Advertising worked on a parallel track. The industry formed the War Advertising Council in early 1942, with Chester LaRoche as chairman. Advertisers gave space and airtime to campaigns the government picked: bonds, salvage, rationing, and the recruiting of women. The OWI's Magazine Bureau sent editors regular guidance on the themes it wanted covered.
What it got right or wrong
Some of the work deserves credit. Writers volunteered. Nobody was licensed, and nobody had to join. From 1944 the board turned much of its effort toward race and prejudice at home, pressing writers, editors, and broadcasters to drop racial and ethnic stereotypes (Howell 1997). In early 1943 the OWI published Negroes and the War, a pamphlet by the journalist Chandler Owen showing Black Americans in the professions, education, sport, and the armed forces, in about 2.5 million copies. Some Black readers found it condescending. Southern members of Congress objected for the opposite reason. Senator John Overton of Louisiana forwarded a 1943 resolution protesting the OWI's effort to put the negro on a social equality basis with the Caucasian
. On that dispute the pamphlet's premise was the one consistent with equal citizenship, and the resolution's was not.
Stout's essay was a different matter. Hatred of a whole people, extended to those who merely failed to stop their rulers, is collective guilt. It is the logic the same government was applying at home to Americans of Japanese ancestry, and it does not become sound because the target nation was the aggressor. The board pressed the theme of German collective responsibility and a hard peace, and in 1944 Stout founded the Society for the Prevention of World War III on that line. Bowie's answer in the same magazine is the better American argument.
The quieter problem is the label. A reader who saw a story by a well-known novelist saw that novelist's name. The reader did not see that a federal agency had asked for the piece, that a federal subsidy kept the board running, or that the board's executive secretary was a federal liaison. The OWI's own posters carried a number and an agency line in the corner. The board's pieces carried the government's themes without a government label on each item.
Abroad, OWI staff joined combined Allied psychological-warfare units after the North Africa landings of November 1942, and the SHAEF division in 1944 and 1945. Their leaflets and broadcasts were mostly open about being Allied; the OSS ran its covert work separately. In the summer of 1945 OWI writers and the Twentieth Air Force produced the "LeMay leaflets," which named Japanese cities that might be bombed and told civilians to leave. Executive Order 9608 ended the OWI on 31 August 1945 and sent its international information work to the State Department.
The information office had no power over the press
The federal information office had no power over the press. Censorship sat in a separate agency, the Office of Censorship under Byron Price, set up in December 1941, and it ran a voluntary code for newspapers and broadcasters. Papers attacked the OWI freely. Congress, which held the money, cut the home-front branch in 1943 because members disliked what it said. A government information office that can be criticized in print and defunded by the legislature is a far smaller threat to liberty than one that licenses writers.
That is the reassuring half. The other half is that a government working through private bylines does not need a license system. It needs willing volunteers, a subsidy, and readers who assume a signed article is the writer's own idea. Here the writers did choose to participate, and their names were real. Whether a reader should have been told who asked for the piece is the question the record raises. On the libertarian reading, yes: the citizen weighing an argument is entitled to know when the government commissioned it.
Nothing in the sources shows that the OWI's domestic output changed the 1944 election, or that its posters moved bond sales or recruitment by any figure FRAME could source. This page does not claim either.
Its legacy
The posters are what most people remember. Two from the program are United We Win (OWI Poster No. 18), with a Black and a white worker riveting under the flag, and Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty (OWI Poster No. 26, Bernard Perlin), which sets soldiers of 1778 beside soldiers of 1943. More are gathered on our Office of War Information hub and the Four Freedoms page.
The board is what historians argue about. Allan Winkler (1978) describes an agency pulled between liberals who wanted to explain the war and executives who wanted to sell it, with a suspicious Congress over both. Thomas Howell (1997) calls the Writers' War Board a quasi-official body whose members carried government themes, and records both its anti-German hard line and its later work against stereotypes. MacLeish's phrase lasted longer than his office did. What a democracy should take from the episode is less the slogan than the structure that checked it: a press that could answer back, and a Congress that could stop paying.
Sources
- FRAME case study, The U.S. Office of War Information and the Writers' War Board, for the chronology, staff, the board's structure and subsidy, Stout's essay, Negroes and the War, and the overseas work.
- Executive Order 9182, 13 June 1942 (American Presidency Project). Executive Order 8922, 24 October 1941. Executive Order 9608, 31 August 1945.
- Library of Congress, Writers' War Board records, 1941-1945, and finding aid. Henry F. Pringle Papers, finding aid.
- Chicago Public Library, Chandler Owen Papers (print run and the Overton resolution).
- Rex Stout, "We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail," The New York Times Magazine, 17 January 1943, with Walter Russell Bowie's reply (cited, not reproduced).
- "The Office of Facts and Figures: Archibald MacLeish and the 'strategy of truth'," Public Relations Review (2009).
- Thomas Howell, "The Writers' War Board: U.S. Domestic Propaganda in World War II," The Historian 59:4 (1997).
- Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942-1945 (Yale University Press, 1978). Sydney Weinberg, "What to Tell America," Journal of American History 55 (1968). Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter (1984).
- Time, "The Press: Advertising in the War" (War Advertising Council).
- Library of Congress poster records 93506602 (United We Win) and 91784917 (Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty).