Office of War Information

Office of War Information (OWI), U.S. agency created (1942) during World War II to consolidate government information services. The OWI absorbed the functions of 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. Elmer Davis was named director. Besides coordinating the release of war news for domestic use, the office established an overseas branch, under Robert E. Sherwood , which launched a huge information and propaganda campaign abroad. 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, contributing to undermining enemy morale. The agency was abolished in 1945, and its foreign functions were transferred to the Dept. of State.

Bibliography: See W. Carroll, Persuade or Perish (1948).

Office of War Information (OWI), US organization established by Roosevelt in June 1942 under Elmer Davis to disseminate information about the government's policies. Domestically, the OWI also acted as a link between the media and the government and it had a special division for the film industry (see Hollywood). Unlike its predecessor during the First World War, the OWI was not officially responsible for censorship, and Roosevelt avoided using the word ‘propaganda’ to describe its function: Davis said his task was primarily educational and that he would tell ‘the truth and nothing but the truth’. But what OWI disseminated was bound to be selective and it was accused by Republicans of spreading Democrat values; its information was for ever being disputed by one faction or another. In 1943 the House of Representatives voted to disband its domestic branch. The Senate overturned this decision but the OWI's budget was severely cut.

Office of War Information OWI established in 1942 and responsible for creating and disseminating pro-Allied Powers propaganda. Among its wide-ranging operations were film productions and the review and design of government posters. It was made up of two photographic units, one headed by Roy E. Stryker, the other the News Bureau. (The two units were merged in 1943.) Stryker's OWI section was transferred from the Department of Agriculture's Farm Security Administration (FSA) in late 1942, and a world-famous collection of documentary photographs (numbering 108,000), mostly black-and-white, is at the Library of Congress. The advertising specialists in OWI came to dominate the group in 1943 and, from that time until the end of World War II, government posters looked like magazine illustrations, and the idea of “war art” quietly died.