Office of War Information

The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a government agency created during World War II to consolidate government information services. Besides coordinating the release of war news for domestic use, the office established an overseas branch which launched a huge information and propaganda campaign abroad.

In the next two years, OWI spent $68,000,000 and had 5,561 agents scattered all over the world.

The OWI was terminated, effective September 15, 1945, by an Executive order of August 31, 1945.

Origins

The OWI was established 13 June 1942 to consolidate the functions of the Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of Government Reports, the division of information of the Office for Emergency Management. The Foreign Intelligence Service, Outpost, Publication, and Pictorial Branches of the Office of the Coordinator of Information were also transferred to the OWI. (The Executive order creating OWI, however, stated that dissemination of information to the Latin American countries should be continued by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.) Elmer Davis was named director of OWI.

Activites

Among its first adventures was dropping cakes of soap from planes on the North Africans along with a picture book called "The Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt," with a pin button of a picture of Roosevelt painted to make FDR look like an Arab.

Congression concerns

Congressional opposition to the domestic operations of the OWI resulted in increasingly curtailed funds, and by 1944 the OWI operated mostly in the foreign field. The agency was abolished in 1945, and its foreign functions were transferred to the Department of State.

Among its wide-ranging duties, OWI sought to review and approve the design and content of government posters.

During 1942 and 1943, the OWI contained two photographic units whose photographers documented the country's mobilization during the early years of the war, concentrating on such topics as aircraft factories and women in the workforce.

Personal

Among the many people who worked for the OWI were Milton S. Eisenhower, Howard Fast, Alan Cranston, Jane Jacobs Lewis Wade Jones Murray Leinster, Archibald MacLeish, Charles Olson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., William Stephenson, James Reston, Waldo Salt, and James Reston.

Soviet propaganda

Soviet spies Philip Keeney, Irving Lerner, Peter Rhodes, Christina Krotkova and Flora Wovschin were employed within OWI during its lifetime.

OWI's broadcasts to Poland ended not with the Polish national anthem but with a song adopted by the Polish emigres in Moscow who were known as Stalin's "Committee of Liberation." The expert in charge of the Polish section was actually born in Poland, but left there and spent the rest of his life in France as a Communist. He fraternized with the Vichy government during the Hitler-Stalin rapprochement, but when Hitler invaded Russia he came to America and quickly became OWI's expert.

See also

• Office of the Coordinator of Information

External links

• Images from the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection (Library of Congress)
• War Aims Through Art (posters)
• National Archives and Records Administration
• The Roosevelt Myth, John T. Flynn, Fox and Wilkes, 1948, Book 3, Ch. 8, [>The Thought Police.