# Boston printed the rumor next to the answer. Washington thought that made things worse. Case studies Boston printed the rumor next to the answer. Washington thought that made things worse. Illustration, not an archive object - Home - Case studies - Boston printed the rumor next to the answer. Washington thought that made things worse. At a glance Beginning on 1 March 1942, the Boston Herald and two Harvard psychologists ran a weekly column that set a circulating rumor beside an official rebuttal. WhenMarch 1, 1942ActorBoston Herald and the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety's Division of Propaganda Research…Full record at propagandaarchive.org ## What it said The format fit on a quarter page. A rumor someone had heard went first, set in italics. Then came the word FACT and an answer from an official or a local expert. One entry, as the New England Historical Society records it, ran like this: Soldiers are being charged exorbitant prices in Army canteens for cigarettes and beer, etc. FACT: False! Post exchanges are operated to the benefit of the soldiers. Boston Herald Rumor Clinic column, 1942, with the reply attributed to Army Public Relations; as recorded by the New England Historical Society and the FRAME case study. Other items the column took on were stranger and uglier. One claimed no Navy ship had come through Pearl Harbor. One claimed Indian soldiers stationed at Fort Devens were raping women. One claimed a shell-factory worker's permanent wave had made her head explode. The column's premise was that a false story loses force once it is said out loud and answered in daylight. The most consequential rumor of the period never needed a clinic to travel. In 1942 white Southerners passed around a story that Black cooks and laundresses had formed "Eleanor Clubs," inspired by the First Lady, to demand better pay or quit domestic work, with the slogan a white woman in every kitchen by Christmas. Officials, Mrs. Roosevelt among them, asked the FBI to look into it. Neither the Bureau nor local sheriffs found a single such club. ## Who made it and why The Boston clinic opened on 1 March 1942. Gordon Allport and Robert Knapp, both of Harvard, worked on it with the paper. Knapp also directed the Division of Propaganda Research inside the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety, a state body. Some accounts give the founding credit instead to Frances Sweeney, a Boston editor who campaigned against antisemitism. The record does not settle which version is right, and this page does not pick one. The clinic had ears as well as a column. About 300 volunteers it called "morale wardens," among them bartenders, waitresses, insurance salesmen, and union representatives, passed along what they overheard. Readers wrote in by the hundreds. Over its run the clinic collected more than a thousand rumors. Other papers liked the idea. A New York Times feature on 24 January 1943 counted as many as 40 newspapers with their own columns, and clinics turned up from San Francisco to Montreal. Washington had its own operation. The Office of War Information, created on 13 June 1942 with Elmer Davis as director, ran a World War II Rumor Project from 1942 into 1943. Federal field staff in 42 states signed up local correspondents, whose reports went to Dr. Eugene Horowitz at the OWI's Bureau of Public Inquiries. Those files are now at the Library of Congress. The domestic side of the OWI is covered in our study of the Office of War Information's domestic branch, and its posters on the OWI hub. ## What it got right or wrong Knapp sorted the Boston haul by the feeling each rumor carried. Two-thirds, 66 percent in his sample, were what he called "wedge-driving": stories that turned one group of Americans against another, such as the claim that Catholics were dodging the draft or that German, Italian, or Japanese Americans were disloyal. Fear stories ("bogies") made up 25 percent. Wishful stories ("pipe-dreams"), like the one about Japan running out of oil, were only 2 percent. The OWI's own reporting, as Smithsonian describes it, came to a similar conclusion: most of the rumors it tracked were racial stories Americans told about other Americans, not plots planted by German agents. That finding is the clinic's best contribution. The danger to wartime unity was mostly homegrown suspicion of neighbors. Saying so in print, with a named source attached to the rebuttal, was a reasonable thing for a free newspaper to do. The weak side is that nobody checked. Organizers said readers had become more "rumor conscious," and historians report they found it hard to show more than that. No survey compared readers with non-readers. No one counted a rumor before and after it ran. The OWI's 1943 complaint, made in a New York Times story, was that printing a rumor to kill it also spreads it. That was a judgment, not a test. Both sides were arguing without data. The clinics closed over the following period; sources disagree on when. The OWI's preferred alternative was to put out facts without restating the rumor, and to circulate material that showed Americans of every background in the fight together, rather than answering racist stories one at a time. The same government was also issuing security posters that warned against talk of any kind. Those were a different campaign. One of them, a Seagram-printed sheet, has its own page: a security slogan that made silence the whole of patriotism. ## A rumor clinic is counter-speech A rumor clinic is counter-speech. It answers a claim with a claim and a name. That is the remedy the First Amendment prefers, and the Boston version was run by a newspaper, not a federal agency. Readers could ignore it, mock it, or write in. Nobody had to buy the Herald. The listening network is the part that deserves a harder look. Three hundred volunteers reporting what customers said in bars and shops, coordinated with a state committee's propaganda division, is a monitoring system whatever its intentions. The sources FRAME reviewed describe wardens passing along rumors. None of them describes files kept on the people who repeated them, or any American prosecuted because a warden overheard something. Where the record is silent, this page does not fill it in either way. Britain is the useful comparison because it went further. In July 1940 the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, asked listeners to join a "Silent Column" against loose talk. Critics in the press and Parliament were hostile, and within about ten days Churchill told Parliament the phrase would no longer be used. Prosecutions for remarks "calculated to cause alarm and despondency" under Defence Regulation 39BA were another matter. A Home Office answer in October 1940 reported 47 cases authorized since 24 July, with 30 convictions. The sources reviewed here tie no comparable prosecutions to the American clinics, and the federal information agency was the one telling them to stop. The Eleanor Clubs episode is the warning. A lie about Black women organizing for higher wages, which is lawful activity, was taken seriously enough that federal police were asked to investigate. They found nothing, because there was nothing. The rumor was wrong, and even a real club organizing for higher wages would have been lawful activity, not a matter for federal police. ## Its legacy The columns faded. The research did not. Knapp published "A Psychology of Rumor" in Public Opinion Quarterly in the spring of 1944. Allport and Leo Postman followed with "An Analysis of Rumor" (1946) and the book The Psychology of Rumor (Henry Holt, 1947). Their "basic law" held that the volume of rumor tracks the importance of a subject multiplied by how ambiguous the evidence is. Their laboratory chains, in which each person described a picture to the next, lost roughly 70 percent of the details within five or six tellings. They named the distortions leveling, sharpening, and assimilation. Howard W. Odum's Race and Rumors of Race (1943) gathered thousands of Southern student reports on the same racial material. Later scholars pushed back. Tamotsu Shibutani's Improvised News (1966) treated rumor as ordinary collective sense-making when news is scarce, not a social disease. A 1980 review in Psychological Bulletin reconsidered the whole framework, and a paper in Law and Human Behavior found the Allport and Postman study had been misreported by the eyewitness-testimony literature that cited it. The open question from 1943, whether repeating a falsehood to refute it helps or hurts, is still argued by people who run fact-checks today. The wartime record does not answer it. It does show that a private newspaper could try, that a federal office could object in public, and that the dispute was settled by argument rather than by statute. The prewar effort to teach readers to spot propaganda on their own is covered in our study of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. ## Sources - FRAME case study, World War II rumor clinics and rumor control (1940 to 1947), for the chronology, Knapp's percentages, the OWI Rumor Project, the 1943 objection, and the British figures. - New England Historical Society, "The Boston Herald Rumor Clinic of World War II" (canteen item and other recorded rumors). - Smithsonian magazine, "World War II 'Rumor Clinics' helped America battle wild gossip" (OWI's view of the clinics; race-based rumors). - Harvard Crimson, "Faculty Members Edit Rumor Clinic," 13 March 1942. - Library of Congress, World War II Rumor Project collection and finding aid. - South Carolina Encyclopedia, "Eleanor Clubs." - Robert H. Knapp, "A Psychology of Rumor," Public Opinion Quarterly 8(1), 1944. Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, "An Analysis of Rumor," Public Opinion Quarterly 10(4), 1946; The Psychology of Rumor (Henry Holt, 1947). - Howard W. Odum, Race and Rumors of Race (University of North Carolina Press, 1943). Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News (1966). "Psychology of rumor reconsidered," Psychological Bulletin (1980). "Cite unseen," Law and Human Behavior. - Cathy Faye, "Governing the grapevine: the study of rumor during World War II," History of Psychology (2007). - Hansard, House of Lords, "The Silent Column," 1 August 1940; House of Commons, Civil Defence, 23 October 1940 (Regulation 39BA figures). The Spectator, 26 July 1940. - Jo Fox, "Confronting Lord Haw-Haw," Journal of Modern History 91(1), 2019. Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/wwii-rumor-clinics/