---
title: The Office of War Information's Domestic Branch, 1942-43
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/
description: in June 1942 President Roosevelt merged four information offices into the Office of War Information under the broadcaster Elmer Davis.
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: a Second World War naval-intelligence collage of a Pacific theatre map, aerial reconnaissance photographs and radar plots.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-wwii-pacific.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# The Office of War Information's Domestic Branch, 1942-43

At a glance

In June 1942 President Roosevelt merged four information offices into the Office of War Information under the broadcaster Elmer Davis. Its Domestic Branch made posters, pamphlets and films…

- **When:** June 13, 1942
- **Actor:** U.S. Office of War Information (Domestic Branch), Roosevelt administration, directed by Elmer Davis
- **Target:** The U.S. public on the home front, reached through posters, pamphlets, radio, newsreels and…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/)
- **Regime:** [Roosevelt administration](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/roosevelt-administration/)

Full details

- **Target:** The U.S. public on the home front, reached through posters, pamphlets, radio, newsreels and Hollywood feature films

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This case quotes a 1942 U.S. government film that describes the forced removal of Japanese Americans in the government's own terms. The terms are quoted as evidence of the method. They are not this archive's description of the events.

**In one line:** in June 1942 President Roosevelt merged four information offices into the Office of War Information under the broadcaster Elmer Davis. Its Domestic Branch made posters, pamphlets and films, read and edited Hollywood scripts, and made the government's film on removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast. By mid-1943 its own writers had resigned in protest and Congress, accusing it of working for a fourth Roosevelt term, had cut the branch back sharply.

![Diagram: Executive Order 9182 creates OWI; the Domestic Branch runs posters and pamphlets, reviews Hollywood scripts and makes films including Japanese Relocation; writers resign in April 1943 and Congress cuts the branch that summer](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/owi-domestic-branch-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **13 June 1942.** Executive Order 9182 sets up the Office of War Information (OWI) in the Executive Office of the President. It merges the Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of Government Reports, the Division of Information of the Office for Emergency Management and the Foreign Information Service of the Coordinator of Information. The director is to run information programmes "through the use of press, radio, motion picture, and other facilities" to build "an informed and intelligent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and progress of the war effort and of the war policies, activities, and aims of the Government". Elmer Davis, a CBS newscaster, is named director.
- **How the Domestic Branch was built.** The National Archives' guide to OWI records lists a Radio Bureau, News Bureau (with Negro Press, Labor Press and Foreign Language sections), Bureau of Graphics, Bureau of Field Operations, Book and Magazine Bureau, and a Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP). An Office of War Programs held the Bureau of Campaigns (1942-43) and a Speech Clearance Unit.
- **Summer 1942: the film manual.** The BMP, run by Lowell Mellett, issues the *Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry*. Its sections cover why we fight, the enemy, the United Nations allies, production, the home front and the fighting forces. It asks filmmakers to put a first question to every picture: "Will this picture help win the war?" Another of its seven questions asks whether an "escape" picture will "harm the war effort by creating a false picture of America, her allies, or the world we live in".
- **1942-45: script review.** The BMP's Hollywood office, under Nelson Poynter, reads studio screenplays and suggests changes. The figure usually given is 1,652 scripts reviewed. For Paramount's *So Proudly We Hail!* Poynter wrote several pages of suggested dialogue and complained that "the worst feminine characteristics have been emphasized". Paramount took many suggestions but refused his rewritten dialogue. Mellett saw MGM's *Keeper of the Flame* on 2 December 1942 and disapproved of it.
- **November 1942: *Japanese Relocation*.** The National Archives catalogues this short film as produced by OWI and distributed by the War Activities Committee of the Motion Picture Industry (NAID 38743, local ID 208.207). Milton S. Eisenhower, who had led the War Relocation Authority (WRA) for its first 90 days before resigning on 18 June 1942, narrates. The WRA's own later film, *A Challenge to Democracy*, was a separate production made with OWI and OSS cooperation. *Japanese Relocation* is therefore correctly credited to OWI, not the WRA.
- **February to March 1943.** OWI issues *Battle Stations for All: The Story of the Fight to Control Living Costs*, a pamphlet on inflation and rationing. On 4 March Representative John Taber (R-NY) tells the House that an OWI comic book on Roosevelt's life is "purely political propaganda designed entirely to promote a fourth term, and a dictatorship". Davis replies that the comic was made mainly for overseas readers. The National Archives files it under the Overseas Branch's Bureau of Overseas Publications. On 18 March Davis orders staff to avoid anything that would appear partisan.
- **14 April 1943.** Writers in Henry Pringle's writers' division, among them Arthur Schlesinger Jr., resign. Their statement says it is "impossible for us, under those who now control our output, to tell the full truth" and that home-front work is "now dominated by high pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest information". Francis Brennan, former chief of the graphics bureau, and the artist Ben Shahn make a mock poster: the Statue of Liberty holding a Coca-Cola bottle, captioned "The war that refreshes: the four delicious freedoms". Accounts say the new appointees included a Coca-Cola advertising executive. Brennan said the government was treating Americans "as if they were twelve years old".
- **Summer 1943.** The House votes to strip all funding from the Domestic Branch for fiscal 1944. Money is restored with tight limits, and further distribution of OWI pamphlets is barred. Accounts put the branch at about a tenth of its earlier budget. BMP film production stops. The President had asked for $47,342,000 for all of OWI for fiscal 1944.
- **October to November 1943.** Representative Harold Knutson (R-MN) says an OWI security poster shows Roosevelt as Uncle Sam. The artist, Leon Helguera, denies it, and the Archives finds no sign that Knutson pursued the charge. Arthur Krock of the *New York Times* criticises OWI's use of the President's picture on overseas buttons and biographies.
- **1945-48.** OWI is abolished on 31 August 1945. Its domestic functions pass to the Bureau of the Budget and then lapse in 1948, the year the Smith-Mundt Act barred domestic distribution of the government's overseas information material.

![Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information, holding Axis propaganda publications at a press conference on 6 March 1943, in front of OWI home-front posters reading "It's up to us" and "Stay on the job"](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/owi-domestic-branch-elmer-davis-1943.jpg)

*Elmer Davis at a press conference on 6 March 1943, displaying German and Japanese propaganda magazines in front of OWI's own home-front propaganda posters. Photograph by the U.S. Office of War Information, Library of Congress (fsa.8b06037). Public domain.*

## How it works

- [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): the campaigns were organised around virtue words: "United We Win", the Four Freedoms, "It's up to us". The resigning writers' complaint was about this register. They said it was salesmanship taking the place of information, and their Coca-Cola parody made the point by putting the freedoms into an advertising slogan.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): the President's image carried the nation's standing. Davis defended this in writing, calling Roosevelt's name "a symbol all over the world for the strength of the United States" and saying it would be absurd for propaganda abroad not to "employ it in the national interest". Opponents said the same image also carried a candidate's standing in an election year. The record documents that argument. It does not show that OWI intended electoral effect, and the comic Taber attacked was an overseas item.
- [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/): *Japanese Relocation* describes the forced removal of about 120,000 people as a "mass migration". It says the army and WRA wanted "to do the job as a democracy should". The same words appear in the Army's exclusion orders ("evacuation", "assembly centers").
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): the film shows orderly registration and camp routines. It also states that "the quick disposal of property often involved financial sacrifice", and it closes by hoping this "fundamental decency" will influence the Axis powers' treatment of American prisoners. Across the industry, the BMP's review asked studios to cut portrayals that made the country look bad or unaware of the war.
- [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): the BMP's themes and suggested dialogue reached audiences inside studio feature films. The films carried no OWI credit. The manual and the review programme were public and debated in the press, so the channel was not secret. But a viewer of a given film could not see which lines the government had proposed.

## Then and now

![Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry, 1942](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/exclusion-order-japanese-ancestry-1942.jpg)

*['Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry' (exclusion order posted in San Francisco)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/exclusion-order-japanese-ancestry-1942/), U.S. Army Western Defense Command, April 1942. Photograph by Dorothea Lange for the War Relocation Authority. Public domain.*

The Army's posted orders and OWI's film used the same vocabulary. The order spoke of "evacuation" and "assembly centers"; the film called the removal a "mass migration". In 1983 the congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that the exclusion was not justified by military necessity and had been shaped by "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership". That finding is about the policy. This page scores how the film described it.

**Content note:** Dehumanizing caricature of Germans as an ape, implied sexual violence and partial nudity. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was) ![Destroy This Mad Brute (1917)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/destroy-this-mad-brute-1917.jpg)

*[Destroy This Mad Brute — Enlist](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/destroy-this-mad-brute-1917/), U.S. Army recruiting poster by Harry R. Hopps, 1917. Public domain.*

OWI's predecessor was the Committee on Public Information, set up by Executive Order 2594 on 13 April 1917 under George Creel during the Wilson administration (also a Democratic administration). It ran the "Four Minute Men" speakers and a daily *Official Bulletin*, and administered voluntary press censorship. Its domestic work stopped after the Armistice. Posters of that era, such as the Army's "mad brute", drew the enemy as a beast. OWI's 1942 film manual, as later readers of it summarise it, told studios to treat the enemy as militarism and its governments rather than whole peoples. OWI still ran enemy-image campaigns such as [This Is the Enemy](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/this-is-the-enemy-1943/) alongside its "strategy of truth".

![United We Win, OWI Poster No. 38, 1943](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/owi-domestic-branch-united-we-win.jpg)

*"United We Win", OWI Poster No. 38, photograph by Alexander Liberman, issued for the War Manpower Commission, 1943. U.S. National Archives, NAID 513820. Public domain.*

## Positions on the record

- **The government's stated position:** Executive Order 9182 gave OWI the job of giving the public an "informed and intelligent understanding" of the war and making sure federal agencies' war information was accurate and consistent. The Office of Facts and Figures had called this approach the "strategy of truth", and Davis took it over. Davis said the President's image was used abroad because it stood for the United States, not to win votes. He ordered staff to avoid partisan material and warned in March 1943 that "attacks of partisan political activity could be expected against OWI until the 1944 election". In October 1943 he called some of the agency's critics in the press "small time fascists just beyond the reach of indictment".
- **Critics inside OWI:** the April 1943 resigners said advertising methods had replaced honest information. Pringle's dispute, as his papers' finding aid puts it, was over whether government reporting should be valued for its accuracy or as propaganda.
- **Critics in Congress:** Taber, Knutson and others, Republicans joined by some Southern Democrats, said the branch promoted New Deal policy and a fourth term. They cited the Roosevelt comic, pamphlets such as *Battle Stations for All* and *Negroes and the War*, and the poster likeness.
- **This archive's reading:** the executive order, the bureaus, the film manual, the script review, OWI's production of *Japanese Relocation*, the resignation statement and the 1943 cuts are **documented**. That OWI set out to help Roosevelt win re-election is **not shown**. The comic Taber cited was an overseas item, and the Archives found no follow-through on the Uncle Sam charge. The shift toward advertising methods is documented through the resigners' account, and Winkler's history treats it at length.

## Same-method test

Britain's Ministry of Information, set up at the outbreak of war in September 1939, faced the same kind of charge from its own public. One of its first posters, "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory", was criticised in Mass-Observation responses as long, annoying and divisive, and was called "insipid and patronising" in *The Times*. The run was cancelled in October 1939. When the ministry's Wartime Social Survey became public in July 1940, the *Daily Herald* called its interviewers "Cooper's Snoopers" after the minister, Duff Cooper. Legislators and the press constrained both democracies' home-front ministries. The scoring here is the same for London and Washington, and would be the same for a Republican administration. In 2004 and 2005 the Government Accountability Office found that agencies of the Republican Bush administration had produced "covert propaganda": prepackaged Medicare news segments and paid commentary on the No Child Left Behind Act. That finding is the same technique family as OWI's unattributed film work: government content presented without its source.

## How to spot it

- Check who is credited on the screen or page. A studio film, a newsreel or a "news" segment may carry government-drafted lines with no credit.
- Compare the official vocabulary ("mass migration", "evacuation") with a plain description of the act.
- When a national leader's image is the emblem of a public-information campaign in an election year, separate what the record shows (the image was used) from what it does not show (electoral intent).
- Notice who is objecting. In 1943 the objections came from OWI's own writers as well as from legislators of the opposing party.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from this page's sourced facts (`make_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Elmer Davis at a press conference, 6 March 1943 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elmer_Davis.jpg); Library of Congress [fsa.8b06037](http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8b06037), U.S. Office of War Information | Public domain (PD-USGov-FSA) |
| "United We Win", OWI Poster No. 38 (1943) | [U.S. National Archives, NAID 513820](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/513820) | Public domain (U.S. government work) |
| Exclusion order, April 1942 | FRAME gallery | Public domain (U.S. government work) |
| *Destroy This Mad Brute* (1917) | FRAME gallery | Public domain |

### Image gaps

- **The Brennan-Shahn Coca-Cola parody poster (April 1943).** No openly licensed reproduction was found. As a private protest work by Brennan and Shahn it may still be in copyright. Not fillable without a verified licence.
- **Frames from *Japanese Relocation*.** The film is an OWI production held by the National Archives (NAID 38743), but the catalogue marks it "Restricted - Possibly" for copyright. Probably fillable once that flag is checked.
- **Pages of *Battle Stations for All*, the *Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry*, and *The Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt*.** All are U.S. government publications and so public domain, but no scans could be reached from the environment used to build this page. **Fillable.**
- **Ben Shahn's OWI poster *This Is Nazi Brutality* (1942).** Public domain (NARA NAID 513687), but only a small preview image was available. **Fillable** from a full-resolution copy.

## Sources

- [Executive Order 9182, 13 June 1942 (American Presidency Project)](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-9182-consolidating-certain-war-information-functions-into-office-war)
- [National Archives, Guide to Federal Records: Records of the Office of War Information (RG 208)](https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/208.html)
- [National Archives, Guide to Federal Records: Records of the Committee on Public Information (RG 63)](https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/063.html)
- [National Archives catalog: *Japanese Relocation*, NAID 38743 (producer: Office of War Information)](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/38743)
- [National Archives catalog: *The Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt*, OWI Overseas Branch publication, NAID 148720976](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/148720976)
- [National Archives catalog: "United We Win", NAID 513820](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/513820)
- [Daniel Dancis, "Propaganda, Politics, and the Personification of FDR: The Uncle Sam Poster Controversy", National Archives *Text Message* blog, 24 September 2019](https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2019/09/24/propaganda-politics-and-the-personification-of-fdr-the-uncle-sam-poster-controversy/)
- [Heidi Holmstrom, "Fractured Ideals: Japanese American Internment through a Government Lens", National Archives *Unwritten Record* blog, 16 February 2017](https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2017/02/16/fractured-ideals-japanese-american-internment-through-a-government-lens/)
- [National Archives *Unwritten Record*, "Hollywood Roundtable" (Smith-Mundt Act and domestic distribution), 2012](https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2012/09/21/hollywood-roundtable/)
- [H. Doc. 78-165, estimate of appropriation for the Office of War Information, fiscal year 1944, $47,342,000, 19 April 1943 (GovInfo)](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/SERIALSET-10792_00_00-101-0165-0000)
- [*Battle Stations for All: The Story of the Fight to Control Living Costs*, OWI, 1943 (GovInfo record)](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GOVPUB-PR32_5000-4b1bb4d7a57b7e52018f9791fcfd3bb6)
- [Monthly Catalog entry for *Battle Stations for All* (UNT)](https://mocat.library.unt.edu/catalog/599-2332)
- Allan M. Winkler, *The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945* (Yale University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 65-72. [Journal of American History review](https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/65/4/1183/736229)
- [Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, "What to Show the World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood, 1942-1945", *Journal of American History* 64:1 (1977), 87-105](https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/64/1/87/741203)
- [Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, *Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies* (University of California Press)](https://www.ucpress.edu/books/hollywood-goes-to-war)
- ["From the 'strategy of truth' to the 'weapon of truth': The Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry, 1942", *Public Relations Review* (2010)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0363811110000536)
- [Indiana University Libraries, digital archive of the *Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry*](https://libraries.indiana.edu/collection-digital-archive-gimmpi)
- [Spy Culture, "'The Enemy is Militarism': Office of War Information Manual for Film Makers"](https://www.spyculture.com/the-enemy-is-militarism-office-of-war-information-manual-for-film-makers/)
- [Warfare History Network, "Hollywood Goes Pacific" (the manual's seven questions)](https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/hollywood-goes-pacific/)
- [Turner Classic Movies, *So Proudly We Hail!* article (Poynter's script notes)](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86514/so-proudly-we-hail)
- [AFI Catalog, *Keeper of the Flame* (1942)](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/528)
- [Library of Congress, Henry F. Pringle Papers finding aid](https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms012014)
- [HISTORY, "Wartime Propaganda Helped Recruit the 'Hidden Army' of Women" (April 1943 resignation statement)](https://www.history.com/articles/hitler-defeated-army-of-women)
- [Riot Material, "Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms" (Brennan-Shahn parody)](https://www.riotmaterial.com/enduring-ideals-rockwell-roosevelt-the-four-freedoms/)
- [Densho Encyclopedia, "Milton Eisenhower"](https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Milton%20Eisenhower)
- [Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (U.S. Capitol Visitor Center)](https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/artifact/personal-justice-denied-report-commission-wartime-relocation-and-internment-civilians-1982)
- [UK Government history blog, "Keep Calm and Carry On: the compromise behind the slogan" (2014)](https://history.blog.gov.uk/2014/06/27/keep-calm-and-carry-on-the-compromise-behind-the-slogan/)
- Ian McLaine, *Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II* (1979). [Routledge edition](https://www.routledge.com/Ministry-of-Morale-Home-Front-Morale-and-the-Ministry-of-Information-in/McLaine/p/book/9781032041230)
- [University of Sussex Special Collections, War-time Social Survey papers](https://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/speccoll/collection_catalogues/wss.html)
- [GAO B-302710, Department of Health and Human Services, Medicare prescription drug video news releases, 19 May 2004](https://www.gao.gov/products/b-302710)
- [GAO B-305368, Department of Education, contract to obtain services of Armstrong Williams, 30 September 2005](https://www.gao.gov/products/b-305368)