The Foreign Service Journal, June 2022

46 JUNE 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Establishing the Centrality of Public Diplomacy OWI drew VOA and almost all wartime communication initiatives into a single home. Only Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin America work remained outside the corral. (It helped to be a friend of the president.) An avuncular CBS radio journalist, Elmer Davis, oversaw the new agency as its director. New Deal speechwriter and playwright Robert Sherwood oversaw foreign activity. The agency’s con- stituent elements included offices encouraging helpful content in movies, domestic broadcasting and magazines, and even popular fiction. Overseas, OWI further developed the Foreign Information Service program. It expanded the USIS network and opened libraries in major cities around the world. It worked in partner- ship with the Office of Strategic Services (precursor agency to the CIA) and the British Political Warfare Executive to create a Political Warfare Division that used propaganda effectively as a force multiplier on the battlefield. Its achievement after D-Day in accelerating enemy surrender in the European theater turned General Dwight D. Eisenhower into a true believer in the value of a psychological approach. Though separate from State, OWI’s range of overt communi- cation activities toward Allied and neutral publics established media as an enduring component of U.S. diplomacy. It was the predecessor to postwar U.S. public diplomacy work, overseen during the Cold War by the United States Information Agency. During World War II, State had its own cultural attachés, and an assistant secretary of State for public and cultural relations position was created in December 1944 to which Archibald MacLeish was appointed. OWI offices overseas were subject to chief-of-mission authority, and some were collocated in embassy buildings. State simply took over OWI’s international functions in the immediate postwar period. While OWI increased its reach by guiding the media production of oth- ers, it had its own in-house creations for export, including the bimonthly magazine Victory , which launched in December 1942. OWI also made and distributed its own documentary films, which mixed representation of the war effort with insights into American civic life. Prime examples included “The Town,” a portrait of Madison, Indiana, created by the great Austrian filmmaker Josef von Sternberg in 1943. An audience favorite, “Autobiog- raphy of a Jeep” told the story of the GI’s favorite vehicle as if in its own words. The high point in the docu- mentary war came in 1945 when OWI won an Academy Award for a color documentary feature co-created with the U.K. about the Allied advance from D-Day, “The True Glory.” Some of these films remained in circulation through USIA for decades to come. Handling Disinformation The experience of OWI can be instructive for today’s com- munication dilemmas; its response to disinformation at home is a case in point. OWI experts were convinced that Germany would use disinformation to undermine the U.S. war effort and began systematically studying U.S. public opinion for signs of German rumors, using a network that included teachers and hairdressers as rumor collectors. Analysis of the rumors sug- gested that Americans were quite capable of undermining their country without Hitler’s help. Homegrown rumors predomi- nated, mostly based in the enduring cancer of domestic racism. While some in the agency suggested a radio program to repeat and rebut rumors, wiser heads at OWI realized that rebuttals tended to increase the currency of rumors. OWI resolved rather to focus on the greater vision: selling the positive image of an America in which racial difference was subsumed within an integrated war effort. OWI pressed for African American service characters to join radio soap operas as a reminder of the Black community’s role in the war. Simi- larly, at a time when racist fantasists reported that Jews were exempt from military service, OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures encouraged war films in which brave Jewish characters served This poster came from the U.S. Office of Facts and Figures in 1942, months before the Office of War Information was established. There were six posters in the series, each with a soldier from a different Allied country. UNIVERSITYOFNORTHTEXASLIBRARIES