Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1976

Keywords

Government publicity, Public opinion, Office of War Information, United States

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

Richard M. Dalfiume

Second Advisor

Sidney S. Harcave

Third Advisor

Walter Hugins

Abstract

The people who are the power entitled to say what they want, are less qualified to say how, and in what form, they are to obtain it, or in other words, public opinion can determine ends, but is less fit to examine and select means to those ends. (James Bryce, The American Commonwealth Vol. I, p. 361)

This study examines the United States government’s domestic information agencies, the formulation of information policy, and the effects of that information policy upon the nation during the Second World War. In exploring information policy and techniques, the study analyzes the epistemological axiom, “What we know is based upon how we know it,” and inquires into the question, “What made them think so?” Examined are those agencies of information that delivered the domestic news, including the Office of Government Reports, the Office of Civilian Defense, the Office of Facts and Figures, the Division of Information of the Office of Emergency Management, and the Domestic Operations Branch of the Office of War Information. The major focus of the dissertation is on the activities of the Domestic Operations Branch of the Office of War Information. The Division of Information, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Overseas Operations Branch of the Office of War Information are considered only as they offer insights into domestic information policy and management.

The dissertation describes a process. An analysis is a given of “incoming” and “outgoing” information, types of surveys conducted, and matters or questions regarded as important enough to survey, thus shedding light on those substantive problems perceived as important to the federal government during the war years. In examining “What made them think so?”—who made the decisions, what factors were involved, and what the successes and failures of the information program were—this study discusses the manner in which information was managed and used. Of all the service activities of government, perhaps information is the most closely tied to overall policy, both in the informing and in the influencing of attitudes and opinions toward those policies. This study is two-pronged: on the one hand, official Washington’s measurement of public opinion (its attitudes and opinions about certain war-related issues) and, on the other hand, the management of official releases and relations with the media to direct popular thinking into acceptable patterns of thought and behavior. Although by no means unique to the war years, these procedures were most concentrated and urgent under conditions of the wartime emergency.

The information policy-makers had the capacity to both lead and follow public opinion. They measured popular attitudes, opinions, and prejudices while providing information upon which the public formed those opinions. During the 1940s the United States government had available extensive facilities for the gathering of data on public thinking and the influencing of that thinking through the radio, the printed word, and other communication devices. While not establishing overall policy, the information managers measured what the people wanted to hear and gauged the effectiveness of news releases toward meeting that need. Information directives took public thinking very much into consideration; however, the policy-makers determined the thrust of stories on factors over and above popular thinking. Public opinion served as a limiting factor (certain policies were thwarted because of popular values), but the American people, trained to make judgments upon facts, received those facts primarily that supported the government’s policy.

The Domestic Operations Branch, OWI, a unified command under a single leadership, centralized all aspects of the information process into one agency, which permits examination of both the incoming and the outgoing processes in one study. A study of information activities of the Department of Agriculture, for example, would reveal facets related directly to agricultural policy, but not necessarily to the process of information per se. Unique since the introduction of modern electronic technology, OWI dealt directly with the universal problems of government information.

The war brought a flowering of information management, re-enforced and supported by the urgency of the moment. Orthodox standards of objectivity were sacrificed in the name of the national emergency as all resources, including the free press and the electronic media, were mobilized for the war effort. The spirit of inquiry gave way in some cases to blind patriotism for the duration of the war. In retrospect, the maintenance of any level of objectivity seems remarkable. Even in the darkest months of the war, December, 1941, to December, 1942, some semblance of objectivity was preserved although official censorship and managed news intensified. Not that bold-faced lies were offered the nation, but vital information was withheld in the name of national security.

Information management may be described as a two-way street: on the one hand, it involves promoting extensive programs to sell a position or policy (thesis) to the public, and, on the other hand, it encompasses measuring, sampling, and polling the effectiveness (antithesis) of the selling job (not the inherent worth of the program) to the people. The results of the polls are used to reassess the selling job (synthesis), in order to make the official policy more palatable. Note that the government has provided the information upon which public opinion is based so that the poll really measures the effectiveness of the news release and the people’s response to it. The cycle of sample-sell-resample-resell begins anew with the new promotional campaign becoming the new thesis. The Hegelian dialectic applied to ideas—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—also applies here. Franklin Roosevelt’s campaigning against isolationism on radio—the fireside chat, an analysis of public reaction, and another chat on the weak points shown by the polls—exemplifies this approach to Administration leadership-followership.

In the course of this dissertation the problem of causation will be a recurring one. To prove a definite cause and effect relationship between a poll and a change of policy that would meet the rigid standards of courtroom evidence may be impossible. If, however, the case can be made that information policy-makers cared enough to take a poll, that a poll finding revealed a definable public attitude, that the findings were available to the elite decision-makers, and that a policy change reflecting the findings of the poll occurred within a reasonable length of time, the cause and effect relationship has been reasonably well established. However, other possibilities must be kept in mind. The decision may have been made without taking the polls into consideration or based upon other reasons.

To this date there has not been published a monograph on OWI’s public opinion activities. Lamar Seale MacKay’s “The Domestic Operations of the OWI in World War II,” (University of Wisconsin, 1966), a generally uncritical journalistic study, deals with OWI’s work from the standpoint of newspapers’ relations with the government. MacKay used Elmer Davis’ “Report to the President,” declassified in 1963, and Burlingame’s biography of Davis, as well as Davis’ own quotations as the foundation for his work. Stressing voluntary cooperation and liaison with the press, MacKay concluded that press cooperation made the war news program successful. More recently, Sydney Stahl Weinberg’s “Wartime Propaganda in a Democracy: America’s Twentieth Century Information Agencies,” (Columbia University, 1969), discussing OWI as one part of twentieth century propaganda, studies the “long-run effect of the marriage of propaganda and ideology.” This well written dissertation cites some primary documents but relies mainly upon newspapers and secondary sources. Both these studies are concerned with values—journalistic ethics, the former, and liberalism, the latter. After eliminating deceiving terms such as propaganda, the intent of this history is to examine pragmatically OWI’s activities.

A history of information procedures and policies for the wartime period has been needed for some time. A wealth of primary documents had been classified. While the OWI was still in operation, two abortive attempts were made to draw together the sources and write a history. Barbara Soule, appointed by Elmer Davis for the task, used an interpretive and critical approach and was replaced by Edward Lilly. Lilly drew up some outlines and asked each department to write its own story. He was confronted with uneven results, as some departments submitted budget type accounts of their activities, others presented usable descriptions of their activities, and some submitted nothing at all. The uneven results, never drawn together, remain in the Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland. Harold F. Gosnell, University of Chicago political scientist working for the Bureau of the Budget, conducted several valuable studies examining the workings of various information agencies. Notes from Gosnell’s interviews with OWI officers are filed in Record Group 51, War Records Section, National Archives.

This dissertation also introduces important new primary sources from Record Group 44, Records of the Office of Government Reports, and Record Group 208, Office of War Information, filed at the Washington National Records Center. These sources are supplemented by Library of Congress manuscripts, material from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, and National Archives sources. Record Group 44, Office of Government Reports, contains the vital intelligence reports, special memos, surveys, and working papers of Lowell Mellett and the line units. While most of this intelligence data was collected initially by the Office of Facts and Figures and then by the Office of War Information, for some organizational reason the documents are housed with the Office of Government Reports collection. Working documents of the Office of War Information (an incredible volume of materials about evenly divided between the Domestic and the Overseas Branches) are found in Record Group 208, Washington National Records Center. The author obtained the necessary State Department clearance to examine classified documents in the OWI Record Group.

In summary, this is a study of the techniques and organizations, policy and implementation, of the agencies conducting the information program during the war years, 1939-1945. Concentrating on domestic information, this dissertation examines the factors determining information policy, the incoming and outgoing information, the questions concerning the public’s need to know and management of public opinion, and the resulting successes and failures of the program. For the first time on a large scale the findings of government-sponsored domestic polls and surveys made by the Office of Government Reports and the Office of War Information are explored. Intelligence data from the measurement of many war-related problems and questions provide insights and comments on American society as seen from the information point of view. Although some conclusions of the polls may be questioned on technical grounds (inadequate sampling, poorly phrased questions), in most cases they constitute the only evidence on these questions available today and were trusted by information officials and Administration policy-makers at the time. Their further use by students of the period will, it is hoped, be encouraged by this study.

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