# Franklin Roosevelt's government talked to the country by radio, and moved about 120,000 people by order The Roosevelt administration governed the United States from 4 March 1933 to 12 April 1945. It spoke through fireside chats and New Deal publicity, created the Office of Censorship and the Office of War Information after Pearl Harbor, and carried out the exclusion of people of Japanese ancestry under Executive Order 9066. Administrations Franklin Roosevelt's government talked to the country by radio, and moved about 120,000 people by order Illustration, not an archive object - Home - Administrations - Franklin Roosevelt's government talked to the country by radio, and moved about 120,000 people by order At a glance The Roosevelt administration, 1933–1945: fireside chats, censorship, the Office of War Information, Executive Order 9066, and a hidden health record. Period1933–1945Full record at propagandaarchive.org The Roosevelt administration governed the United States from 4 March 1933 to 12 April 1945. It spoke through fireside chats and New Deal publicity, created the Office of Censorship and the Office of War Information after Pearl Harbor, and carried out the exclusion of people of Japanese ancestry under Executive Order 9066. Most of the American wartime posters on this site were made while Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. This page puts them back inside the government that issued or carried them, beside the censorship office, the courts, and the order that sent American citizens to camps. It reads twelve years as one record. Franklin D. Roosevelt, December 1933. Photograph by Elias Goldensky; public domain (copyright registered 1933, not renewed), as the FRAME record credits it. ## Four elections and a country that could still say no Roosevelt had been assistant secretary of the Navy under Wilson and then governor of New York. In November 1932, deep in the Depression, he beat Herbert Hoover 472 electoral votes to 59. He won again in 1936 (523 to 8), in 1940 (449 to 82), and in 1944 (432 to 99). The Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1951, later capped a president at two elected terms. That amendment is the country's verdict on the four. The checks that a propaganda state removes were still working. Congress sat. Elections ran on schedule in wartime. The Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1935, and the Senate killed the February 1937 plan to add justices. Newspapers were privately owned, and by Betty Houchin Winfield's count most of them, by number, endorsed the Republican in 1936, 1940, and 1944. A president who loses most of the editorial pages and wins anyway is persuading the public, not commanding it. That deserves to be said first, because the rest of this page is about the places where persuasion turned into command. ## A voice in the front room His inaugural address of 4 March 1933 told a frightened country that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Eight days later he gave the first of about thirty radio talks the press called fireside chats. I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking. Franklin D. Roosevelt, first fireside chat, 12 March 1933. As quoted on the FRAME Roosevelt administration page. The method was direct address: a president in the listener's house, in plain sentences, over the heads of the papers. It was open about its sender, and anyone could switch it off. The press conferences were less open. Reporters met him often, under ground rules that limited what they could quote. Stephen Early ran the press office for all twelve years. The New Deal had its own publicity. The National Recovery Administration's Blue Eagle asked businesses to show the emblem. Resettlement Administration photographers made the pictures now held in the Library of Congress FSA/OWI collection. Government films such as The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) argued for federal programs on movie screens. The private Institute for Propaganda Analysis was teaching readers to spot persuasion devices in the same years; its board voted to suspend it in January 1942 rather than become a war agency. ## After Pearl Harbor: who held which power Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Roosevelt asked Congress for war the next day, and Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on 11 December. The First War Powers Act of 18 December gave him wide authority over agencies and communications. Three kinds of office followed, and the difference between them is the whole lesson. Censorship. Executive Order 8985 of 19 December 1941 created the Office of Censorship under Byron Price, an Associated Press editor. For newspapers and radio the system was voluntary: a code issued on 15 January 1942 asked editors to hold back listed subjects such as troop movements and ship sailings. For mail, cables, and telephone calls crossing the border it was compulsory. The armed forces censored dispatches from the fronts. George Roeder's research shows that photographs of dead Americans were kept out of print until September 1943, when Roosevelt approved their release. A voluntary press code that editors could refuse is a defensible wartime bargain. Opening private letters is a real power, and it should be named as one. Information. Executive Order 9182 of 13 June 1942 combined four existing offices into the Office of War Information under Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster. The order spoke of the right of the American people to be "truthfully informed." The domestic branch issued posters and guides, and its film bureau under Lowell Mellett read Hollywood scripts. The overseas branch ran the broadcasts that became the Voice of America. The office had no censorship power. It still drew fire from both sides. In April 1943 writers in the domestic branch quit, saying the home-front work was now run by high pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest information, and the House then cut the branch's money, some members charging that it promoted Roosevelt. This site's case study of the domestic branch and its Office of War Information hub go further. Everything else. At General George C. Marshall's request the Army made the orientation films for soldiers; this site reads the first, Prelude to War, and a frame from The Battle of Britain. William J. Donovan's Office of Strategic Services ran propaganda aimed abroad. Henry Morgenthau's Treasury ran the war bond drives, and the advertising industry's War Advertising Council put government themes into commercial space. Enemy radio aimed at American troops, and the American citizen later prosecuted for treason under the name Tokyo Rose, are in the Tokyo Rose case study. ## The posters, sorted by what they asked Some asked for silence. Loose Lips Might Sink Ships and Glenn Grohe's He's Watching You turned ordinary talk into a security risk. Some asked for money: Right in Der Fuehrer's Face sold the Treasury's Second War Loan. Some asked for hatred of a regime that had earned it: This Is the Enemy, This Is Nazi Brutality, and The Nazis Burned These Books, which told Americans they could still read what Berlin had burned. The anti-Nazi hub collects them. The Four Freedoms set is the high-water mark of the period's self-description. Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech shows a working man standing to speak at a town meeting. It is a fine picture of the First Amendment, and it hung in the same years as the order discussed below. Other sheets aimed at a race rather than a regime. Your Enemy the Jap was an official Navy sheet. The Tokio Kid series was a Douglas Aircraft plant character, a private company's product, and Japs Execute Doolittle Men was a payroll-savings poster with no issuer printed on it. Not every item in the file was a government product, and each object page says who made it. The anti-Japanese hub keeps the distinction. ## Executive Order 9066 and the people it moved Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942. It let the Secretary of War and the military commanders he chose mark out zones from which any or all persons may be excluded. The order names no ancestry. The orders written under it did. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt applied it on the West Coast to people of Japanese descent, citizens and aliens alike. Congress made disobeying an exclusion order a misdemeanor on 21 March 1942, and Executive Order 9102 set up the War Relocation Authority. About 120,000 people, roughly two-thirds of them American citizens, went first to assembly centers and then to ten camps. None of them was charged as an individual or given a hearing. The paper version of that power is on this site: the posted Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry, which called citizens "non-alien." So is a citizen's answer, the "I am an American" sign in an Oakland shop window, and the Office of War Information's account, the opening card of Japanese Relocation, which called the removal a transfer. The internment propaganda page reads the three together. On 18 December 1944 the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion in Korematsu v. United States and, the same day, held in Ex parte Endo that a citizen conceded to be loyal could not be held. The exclusion orders had been rescinded the day before. The last camp closed in March 1946. In 1983 a congressional commission found that the policy came from race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership, and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 brought an apology and redress. That is the record, and the exclusion was wrong. No poster on this site did as much harm as an order with no ethnic word in it. Enemy-alien proclamations of December 1941 also covered German and Italian nationals, and the Justice Department interned some of them. Those were individual proceedings against non-citizens. The West Coast removal was a group order against citizens. The difference is due process. ## A health record the voters did not see On 27 March 1944 the cardiologist Howard Bruenn examined Roosevelt at Bethesda Naval Hospital and recorded congestive heart failure and a blood pressure of 186/108. The president's official physician, Vice Admiral Ross McIntire, described his health as good in public statements that year. Roosevelt won his fourth election on 7 November 1944 without voters knowing what Bruenn had found. Bruenn's notes were not published until 1970. Roosevelt was inaugurated on 20 January 1945, went to Yalta in February, and reported to Congress seated on 1 March. He died at Warm Springs, Georgia, on 12 April 1945 at 3:35 in the afternoon, of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Harry Truman took the oath that day. The archive's page on how Roosevelt died has the funeral and the disputed points, including a contested melanoma theory that cannot be tested without an autopsy. This site folds the part that matters for public information into this essay. Historians differ on how much Roosevelt and his family understood of the prognosis. What is not in dispute is that a doctor who knew more than the public told the public less. A self-governing people choosing a wartime president for four more years was entitled to the record. It did not get it, and that was wrong whether or not the result would have changed. ## The ledger On one side: elections in 1936, 1940, and 1944 won against most of the editorial pages, a voluntary press code, a named information office that Congress could defund and did, and posters that told Americans their freedom to read was the difference between them and Berlin. On the other: compulsory reading of private mail, the removal and detention of about 120,000 people without charge, a film that called that removal a transfer, and a health record withheld through an election. The administration admired its own Four Freedoms. The record shows where it kept them and where it did not. The earlier government on this site is Woodrow Wilson's. The later one is Donald Trump's. ## Sources - Executive Orders 8985 (19 December 1941), 9066 (19 February 1942), 9102 (18 March 1942), and 9182 (13 June 1942); Public Law 77-503 (21 March 1942); Public Proclamation No. 21 (17 December 1944); Proclamations 2525 to 2527 (December 1941). - Franklin D. Roosevelt, first inaugural address (4 March 1933); first fireside chat (12 March 1933); message to Congress (8 December 1941). - 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 (1982 to 1983). - Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda (1978); George H. Roeder Jr., The Censored War (1993); Michael S. Sweeney, Secrets of Victory (2001); Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War (1987); Betty Houchin Winfield, FDR and the News Media (1990). - Howard G. Bruenn, "Clinical Notes on the Illness and Death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt," Annals of Internal Medicine 72 (1970), 579 to 591; National Park Service, "The Dying President"; United Press, 12 April 1945; Ross T. McIntire, White House Physician (1946). As cited on the FRAME page on Roosevelt's death. - National Archives, Records of the Office of War Information (RG 208). - FRAME, Roosevelt administration and How Franklin D. Roosevelt died, for the chronology, the office-holders, the quotations as cited, and the portrait credit. Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/regimes/roosevelt-administration/