--- title: The U.S. Office of War Information and the Writers' War Board:a 'strategy of truth' meets the advertising men url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/ description: the United States ran its wartime propaganda through an openly named federal agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), and a government-subsidised… 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 U.S. Office of War Information and the Writers' War Board:a 'strategy of truth' meets the advertising men At a glance The United States ran its wartime propaganda through an openly named federal agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), and a government-subsidised board of private writers, the Writers' War Board… - **When:** June 13, 1942 - **Actor:** U.S. Office of War Information (1942-1945) and the Writers' War Board (1942-1946) - **Target:** U.S. civilians and war workers… - **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/) [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/) [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) - **Regime:** [Roosevelt administration](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/roosevelt-administration/) Full details - **Target:** U.S. civilians and war workers (Domestic Branch, Writers' War Board); Allied, neutral and enemy audiences abroad (Overseas Branch) On this page - [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/#what-happened) - [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/#how-it-works) - [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/#then-and-now) - [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/#positions-on-the-record) - [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/#same-method-test) - [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/#how-to-spot-it) - [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/#images) - [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/us-owi-writers-war-board/#sources) On this page **In one line:** the United States ran its wartime propaganda through an openly named federal agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), and a government-subsidised board of private writers, the Writers' War Board; the agency's own staff fought over whether it should inform or sell, and Congress, which controlled its money, cut its home-front branch back sharply in 1943. ![Diagram: from the 1941 predecessor offices, to the OWI created by Executive Order 9182, to its home-front output and the Writers' War Board, to the 1943 writers' resignations and Congressional cut, to overseas psychological warfare and the agency's end in August 1945](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/us-owi-writers-war-board-diagram.svg) ## What happened **Before the OWI (1941-1942)** - **11 July 1941.** President Roosevelt appoints William J. Donovan Coordinator of Information (COI). Its Foreign Information Service, headed by the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, handles broadcasting and publicity abroad. In February 1942 the service begins the German-language broadcasts that became the Voice of America. Radio is covered in FRAME's wartime radio and film case studies ([Wartime radio voices: open and hidden broadcasts aimed at the enemy, 1939-1945](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/wartime-radio-voices/)). - **24 October 1941.** Executive Order 8922 sets up the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF) within the Office for Emergency Management, under the Librarian of Congress, the poet Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish called its approach "the strategy of truth": the strategy that "opposes to the frauds and the deceits by which our enemies have confused and conquered other peoples, the simple and clarifying truths" by which a democracy must guide itself (as quoted in the *Public Relations Review* study of the OFF, 2009). Its staff included the writer Henry F. Pringle, whose papers at the Library of Congress hold its files. **The OWI (June 1942)** - **13 June 1942.** Executive Order 9182 consolidates the OFF, the Office of Government Reports, the Division of Information of the Office for Emergency Management and the COI's Foreign Information Service into the Office of War Information. Its director is the CBS news commentator Elmer Davis. The order tells him to "formulate and carry out, through the use of press, radio, motion picture, and other facilities, information programs designed to facilitate the development of an informed and intelligent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and progress of the war effort". The rest of the COI becomes the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) the same day. - **Structure.** A **Domestic Branch**, directed in 1942-43 by the publisher Gardner Cowles Jr. (*Des Moines Register*, *Look*), and an **Overseas Branch** under Sherwood. The Domestic Branch had bureaus for news, radio, publications, graphics (posters), magazines and motion pictures, and field offices around the country. - **Budget.** On 19 April 1943 the President sent Congress an estimate of $47,342,000 for the OWI for fiscal year 1944 (House Document 78-165). The OWI did not control the press: news censorship was a separate agency, the Office of Censorship under Byron Price (December 1941), which ran a voluntary code for newspapers and broadcasters. ![Elmer Davis, in glasses and a bow tie, looks down at bound volumes labeled "Germany" and "Nippon" in front of wall posters reading "It's up to us" and "Stay on the job"](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/us-owi-writers-war-board-davis-axis-propaganda-1943.jpg) *Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information, examining Nazi and Japanese propaganda publications he displayed at a press conference on 6 March 1943 to show the material the Axis was distributing in neutral countries. Office of War Information photograph, Library of Congress (LC-USE6-D-009014-2). Public domain (U.S. government work).* ![Elmer Davis seated at a desk before a wall map and a row of microphones marked MBS, CBS, NBC, ACN and Blue](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/us-owi-writers-war-board-davis-broadcast-1943.jpg) *Elmer Davis, OWI director, at his weekly Friday-evening broadcast to the nation on the news of the week, facing microphones of the major radio networks, c. 1943 (Library of Congress date). Office of War Information photograph, Library of Congress (LC-USE6-D-009235). Public domain (U.S. government work).* **The home front (1942-1943)** - **Posters.** The Bureau of Graphics and its successors issued numbered "OWI posters" printed by the Government Printing Office, many for other agencies such as the War Manpower Commission and the Treasury: [United We Win](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/united-we-win-1943/) (a Black and a white worker under the flag), [The More Women at Work the Sooner We Win!](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/more-women-at-work-sooner-we-win-1943/) (OWI Poster No. 52) and [Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/americans-will-always-fight-for-liberty-1943/) (OWI poster no. 26). The graphics section was led for a time by Francis E. Brennan, formerly art director of *Fortune*, and employed painters such as Ben Shahn. - **Magazines and advertisers.** The Magazine Bureau sent editors a regular guide to the themes the government wanted covered, including the recruitment of women into war jobs (Honey 1984). Commercial advertising was organised through the War Advertising Council, formed by the advertising industry in early 1942 under the chairmanship of the adman Chester LaRoche; advertisers donated space and airtime to campaigns the government chose, such as war bonds, salvage, rationing and women's recruitment. - **Film, briefly.** The Bureau of Motion Pictures under Lowell Mellett issued the *Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry* in 1942 and reviewed studio scripts; that work is covered in FRAME's case study of the OWI Domestic Branch ([The Office of War Information's Domestic Branch, 1942-43](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/)) and FRAME's film case studies. - **Race.** In early 1943 the OWI published *Negroes and the War*, a heavily illustrated pamphlet by the journalist Chandler Owen showing Black achievement in the professions, education, sport and the armed forces, in about 2.5 million copies (Chicago Public Library, Chandler Owen Papers). Some Black readers found it condescending; Southern members of Congress read it as an attack on segregation. Senator John Overton of Louisiana forwarded a 1943 resolution protesting the OWI's effort to put "the negro on a social equality basis with the Caucasian" (same source). ![Poster: a Black worker and a white worker rivet an aircraft section under a large American flag, with the words United We Win](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/united-we-win-1943.jpg) *[United We Win](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/united-we-win-1943/), War Manpower Commission and Office of War Information, OWI Poster No. 18, 1943; OWI photograph by Howard Liberman. Public domain (U.S. government work).* **The 1943 split** - **Early 1943.** MacLeish leaves the OWI and returns to the Library of Congress. Cowles reorganises the Domestic Branch and brings in executives from advertising and publishing to run campaigns. - **14 April 1943: the writers resign.** Writers in Henry Pringle's division, among them Arthur Schlesinger Jr., resign, saying the home-front work was "now dominated by high pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest information"; Francis Brennan and Ben Shahn leave behind a mock poster of the Statue of Liberty holding Coca-Cola, captioned "The war that refreshes: the four delicious freedoms". (The Library of Congress finding aid for Pringle's papers dates his departure to July 1943.) The resignations and the parody are covered in detail in FRAME's case study of the OWI Domestic Branch ([The Office of War Information's Domestic Branch, 1942-43](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/)). - **Spring and summer 1943: Congress.** After Republican gains in the 1942 elections, Republicans such as John Taber (R-New York), joined by Southern Democrats such as Joe Starnes (D-Alabama), charged that the Domestic Branch was promoting Roosevelt and the New Deal; Davis answered that the Roosevelt material they cited was made for readers abroad. The House voted to strip the branch's fiscal 1944 funds; money was restored only with tight limits, and the branch was left to coordinate other agencies' campaigns and those of the War Advertising Council rather than produce its own. The charges and the vote are covered in FRAME's case study of the OWI Domestic Branch ([The Office of War Information's Domestic Branch, 1942-43](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/owi-domestic-branch/)). **The Writers' War Board (1942-1946)** - **Founding.** The Writers' War Board (WWB) was a private, New York-based board of writers formed soon after Pearl Harbor. The mystery novelist Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe, chaired it. The Library of Congress holds its records; members named there include Clifton Fadiman, Alan Green, Christopher La Farge and Margaret Leech. Government subsidies reached the board through the OWI, whose liaison officer, Frederica Barach, was also the board's executive secretary. The board's files include folders on the Office of Civilian Defense, the Office of Facts and Figures and the OWI. - **How it worked.** Government agencies asked the board for writing on a subject (the Army Air Forces, war bonds, the Office of Price Administration, the War Manpower Commission, "Japanese and Americans relocation", Lidice). The board found volunteer writers, who placed stories, articles, radio scripts and speeches under their own names (LOC finding aid, subject list). One of its early projects was the massacre at Lidice in Czechoslovakia (June 1942), which it commemorated; Edna St. Vincent Millay's verse play *The Murder of Lidice* (1942) was written for it. - **The line on Germany.** On 17 January 1943 *The New York Times Magazine* printed Stout's "We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail", with a reply from the clergyman Walter Russell Bowie. Stout argued that Americans had to hate not only the Nazi leadership but the Germans who accepted "the doctrine of the German master race" and those who had failed to prevent the Nazis from taking the country to war. The board pressed the same theme of German collective responsibility and a hard peace, and in 1944 Stout founded the Society for the Prevention of World War III on that basis. - **Radio.** Stout hosted *Our Secret Weapon* on CBS (1942-43), a program answering claims made in Axis shortwave broadcasts, sponsored by Freedom House. - **Race relations.** From 1944 the board turned more of its work to race and prejudice at home, lobbying writers, editors and broadcasters to drop racial and ethnic stereotypes (Howell 1997). **Overseas and the end (1942-1945)** - **Psychological warfare.** After the landings in North Africa in November 1942, OWI staff joined the Psychological Warfare Branch at Allied Force Headquarters, a combined body with OSS, British Political Warfare Executive and army staff, and later the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF in 1944-45. They wrote leaflets, loudspeaker texts and radio programs for enemy soldiers and civilians. Most of it was white (openly Allied); the OSS ran its own black operations separately. - **Japan, 1945.** In summer 1945 OWI writers and the Twentieth Air Force produced leaflets dropped over Japanese cities. Among them were the "LeMay leaflets", which named cities that might be bombed and told civilians to leave. Wartime radio is covered in FRAME's radio pages ([Wartime radio voices: open and hidden broadcasts aimed at the enemy, 1939-1945](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/wartime-radio-voices/)). - **31 August 1945.** Executive Order 9608 terminates the OWI. Its international information work goes to the State Department, and its remaining domestic functions are wound up or transferred. ## How it works - [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): the OWI's founding doctrine was "truth", but its posters carried the war's aims as virtue words with no content attached. *Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty* (OWI poster no. 26) and *United We Win* both rest on one word ("liberty", "united") that stands in for a specific claim about what the war was for or how the country actually treated its workers. The Four Freedoms were the official version of the same device, and the writers' "four delicious freedoms" parody was aimed at how they were being sold. - [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): *Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty* puts ragged Continental soldiers of "1778" beside GIs of "1943", moving the Revolution's prestige to the present war. *United We Win* sets two riveters under a flag that fills half the sheet. - [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/): *The More Women at Work the Sooner We Win!* (OWI Poster No. 52) shows a neat, ordinary young worker, not a heroine, and lists homely jobs from waitress to laundress. The Magazine Bureau's guides asked editors to build fiction and features around the same figure (Honey 1984). - [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/): *Don't Let That Shadow Touch Them* (1942) lets a swastika-shaped shadow fall across three children at play and offers a war bond as protection. The careless-talk posters in the gallery ([Loose Lips Might Sink Ships](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/loose-lips-might-sink-ships/)) use the same structure with a sunk ship as the harm. - [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): *Negroes and the War* assembled Black achievement in the professions, education, sport and the armed forces and left segregation mostly out of the frame, which is what some Black readers objected to. (The Bureau of Motion Pictures' script review applied the same selection to Hollywood; see the Domestic Branch case study.) - [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/), a loose fit: Stout's "We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail" extended blame for the war from the Nazi leadership to Germans who accepted its doctrine or failed to stop it. The German state's responsibility for the war is the documented record; the technique here is the move from that state to the whole nation as a group to be hated. - [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/), a loose fit: Writers' War Board stories, scripts and articles appeared under the writers' own names in commercial magazines and on network radio, while the board was subsidised through the OWI. The subsidy was not hidden (the board said it worked with the government), but readers of a given story were not told. War Advertising Council ads, likewise, carried government campaign lines under brand names. Neither was a forgery or a false identity, which is where this id usually applies. ## Then and now ![Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty (OWI poster no. 26, 1943)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/americans-will-always-fight-for-liberty-1943.jpg) *[Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/americans-will-always-fight-for-liberty-1943/), Office of War Information, 1943. Public domain.* The OWI poster carried its maker's name in the corner and a poster number, and Congress could and did cut the agency that made it. Eight years later the Crusade for Freedom ([Give Freedom to the Captive Nations! Fight Communism!](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/crusade-for-freedom-stamp-1951/)) asked the American public to fund Radio Free Europe with the same appeal to "freedom", while RFE's main funding came from the U.S. government through the CIA, which the public was not told until the 1960s and 1970s. The words and the patriotic imagery are close; the difference is the label. The OWI's home-front work was white propaganda, open about its source and exposed to budget votes in Congress; the Crusade campaign was gray, a public appeal that hid who was paying. The scale also differs: the OWI was a wartime agency with a budget request in the tens of millions of dollars; the Crusade was a fundraising campaign around one broadcaster. ## Positions on the record - **The OWI's stated position.** Its founding order spoke of an "informed and intelligent understanding" of the war, and MacLeish's "strategy of truth" held that a democracy should answer enemy lies with facts. Davis defended the agency's publications as information, and said the Roosevelt biography that Taber attacked was printed for readers abroad. - **The resigning writers.** Pringle, Schlesinger, Brennan and their colleagues said salesmanship had replaced honest information; their parody poster made the same point about the Four Freedoms. - **Congressional critics.** Republicans and Southern Democrats said the Domestic Branch was promoting the Roosevelt administration at public expense and that a government propaganda agency aimed at its own citizens was out of place in a democracy. Southern members added that *Negroes and the War* attacked segregation. - **Critics of the Writers' War Board.** Stout's call to hate was answered in the same issue of the *Times Magazine* by Bowie, who argued against hatred as a war aim; later historians (Howell 1997) describe the board as a quasi-official body whose writers carried government themes, and note both its anti-German hard line and its later work against racial stereotypes. - **Later historians.** Winkler (1978) describes an agency pulled between liberals who wanted to explain the war's purposes and advertising and publishing executives who wanted to sell its campaigns, and between both and a Congress suspicious of domestic propaganda. Koppes and Black (1987) document the Bureau of Motion Pictures' influence on Hollywood scripts (see the Domestic Branch case study). - **This archive's reading.** Documented: the executive orders, the agency's structure and named staff, the numbered posters, the April 1943 resignation statement, the 1943 House vote and the resulting cut, the *Negroes and the War* print run and the Overton resolution, the board's subsidy through the OWI and Stout's essay. **Not shown here**: that the OWI's domestic output measurably changed the 1944 election, or that its posters changed recruitment or bond sales by any figure this page could source. Whether it was "information" or "propaganda" is the argument the writers, Davis and Congress were having; this page records the argument rather than settling it. ## Same-method test The techniques on the posters are the same ones FRAME scores on the Reich ministry's and the British Ministry of Information's material: virtue words, borrowed symbols, a threatening shadow over children, an ordinary worker as a model. Scored with the flag swapped, a German poster putting Frederick the Great's grenadiers beside Wehrmacht soldiers would get the same [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) tag as *Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty*. Stout's essay would get the same [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) tag if a German writer had called for hatred of the British or Soviet people as a whole. The operations around the posters were not equivalent, and the differences are large: - **Legal control of the press.** The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (from March 1933), through the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Editors' Law of October 1933, controlled who could work as a journalist or artist ([The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 1933-1945](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/reich-propaganda-ministry/)). The OWI licensed no one; newspapers could and did attack it, and censorship was a separate, voluntary code run by the Office of Censorship. Britain's Ministry of Information worked with voluntary press censorship and D-notices but also used emergency powers to close the *Daily Worker* in 1941 ([Britain's Ministry of Information and Political Warfare Executive: posters at home, black radio abroad](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/british-moi-pwe/)); the OWI had no such power. - **Legislative control of the money.** Congress cut the OWI's Domestic Branch in 1943 because members disliked what it said. No legislature in Germany could do that to the Reich ministry, and Parliament in Britain, although it criticised the MoI heavily, did not defund it. - **Scale and reach.** The Reich ministry directed the whole German press, radio and film industry. The OWI directly ran posters, pamphlets and, abroad, radio and leaflets; at home it had to persuade independent studios, networks, magazines and advertisers to carry its themes, and after 1943 it did little else. - **What was the same.** All three governments ran central offices to shape what their publics saw, used artists and writers, borrowed advertising methods and measured public opinion. The U.S. case also had a private layer (the Writers' War Board, the War Advertising Council) that carried government themes without a government label on each item, as the Soviet and Japanese systems did through ostensibly independent writers' unions and patriotic associations ([Soviet wartime propaganda, 1939-1945: Sovinformburo, Agitprop and the Red Army press](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-wartime-propaganda/), [Imperial Japan's wartime propaganda at home: the Information Bureau, the neighbourhood associations and the war communiqués](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/imperial-japan-home-front/)), though those bodies had no legal independence from the state. ## How to spot it - Check the corner of the poster. OWI posters were numbered and carried the agency's name; the source was open. A patriotic message with no source line, or with only a brand name, is a different kind of object. - Look for the single virtue word ("liberty", "united", "freedom") and ask what specific claim it replaces. - Separate the fight about truth from the fight about politics. The writers' complaint (salesmanship over information) and Congress's complaint (promoting the administration) were different complaints, and they led to the same budget cut. - When a private board or an advertising council carries a government campaign, ask who chose the message and who paid for the space. ## Images | Image | Source | Licence | | --- | --- | --- | | Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from this page's sourced facts (`make_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME | | *Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty* (1943) | FRAME gallery, from the [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/91784917/) | Public domain (U.S. government work) | | Elmer Davis examining Axis propaganda publications, 6 March 1943 | [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2017696530/), Office of War Information | Public domain (U.S. government work; FSA/OWI collection) | | Elmer Davis at his weekly network broadcast, 1943 | [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2017696751/), Office of War Information | Public domain (U.S. government work; FSA/OWI collection) | | *United We Win* (1943) | FRAME gallery, from the [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/93506602/) | Public domain (U.S. government work) | | *The More Women at Work the Sooner We Win!* (1943) | FRAME gallery, from the [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/95504675/) | Public domain (U.S. government work) | | *Don't Let That Shadow Touch Them* (1942) | FRAME gallery, from the [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2015647884/) | Public domain (U.S. government work) | ### Image gaps - **The "Four Delicious Freedoms" parody poster (1943).** Not found in an openly licensed copy on loc.gov or Wikimedia Commons; it was a private mock-up by OWI staff, so its copyright status is unclear. - ***Negroes and the War* (1943).** An OWI publication and so public domain, but no copy was reachable from the build environment (the National Museum of African American History and Culture holds one). **Fillable.** - **The "LeMay leaflets" and other OWI leaflets over Japan (1945).** U.S. government works and public domain, but not ingested in this pass. **Fillable.** - **Photographs of OWI staff other than Davis (writers, poster artists, the Overseas Branch).** Two Davis photographs are now shown; other staff photographs in the Library of Congress's FSA/OWI collection were not ingested. **Fillable.** - **Stout's *New York Times Magazine* essay.** Copyrighted; cited only. - ***Someone Talked!* (1942) and other OWI careless-talk posters.** Available on loc.gov; left out because the gallery already has two careless-talk posters. ## Sources - [Executive Order 9182, Consolidating Certain War Information Functions into an Office of War Information, 13 June 1942 (American Presidency Project)](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-9182-consolidating-certain-war-information-functions-into-office-war) - [Library of Congress research guide: Office of War Information](https://guides.loc.gov/rosie-the-riveter/office-of-war-information) - [H. Doc. 78-165, estimate of appropriation for the Office of War Information for fiscal year 1944, $47,342,000, 19 April 1943 (GovInfo)](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/SERIALSET-10792_00_00-101-0165-0000) - [Writers' War Board records, 1941-1945, Library of Congress Manuscript Division](https://www.loc.gov/item/mm81046722/), and its [finding aid](https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms011188) - [Henry F. Pringle Papers, Library of Congress, finding aid](https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms012014) - [Chandler Owen Papers, Chicago Public Library](https://www.chipublib.org/fa-chandler-owen-papers/) - [National Museum of African American History and Culture: *Negroes and the War*](https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2012.55a-jj) - [National Archives, *Prologue*, "Getting the Message Out" (2005), on OWI posters and the graphics division](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2005/summer/posters) - [Cold War Radio Museum, "How Congress Exposed, Defunded and Stopped Domestic U.S. Government Propaganda in 1943"](https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/members-of-congress-exposed-domestic-us-government-propaganda-in-1943/) (for Taber's and Davis's statements; an advocacy site, quoting contemporary reports) - [Time, "The Press: Advertising in the War"](https://time.com/archive/6598501/the-press-advertising-in-the-war/) (War Advertising Council, Chester LaRoche) - [HISTORY, "Wartime Propaganda Helped Recruit the 'Hidden Army' of Women" (the April 1943 resignation statement)](https://www.history.com/articles/hitler-defeated-army-of-women) - Allan M. Winkler, *The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942-1945*, Yale University Press, 1978. - Sydney Weinberg, "What to Tell America: The Writers' Quarrel in the Office of War Information," *Journal of American History* 55 (1968). - Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, *Hollywood Goes to War*, Free Press, 1987. - Maureen Honey, *Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II*, University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. - [Thomas Howell, "The Writers' War Board: U.S. Domestic Propaganda in World War II," *The Historian* 59:4 (1997)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6563.1997.tb01376.x) - ["The Office of Facts and Figures: Archibald MacLeish and the 'strategy of truth'," *Public Relations Review* (2009)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0363811109000599), and ["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) - Library of Congress poster records: [91784917](https://www.loc.gov/item/91784917/), [93506602](https://www.loc.gov/item/93506602/), [95504675](https://www.loc.gov/item/95504675/), [2015647884](https://www.loc.gov/item/2015647884/).