Abstract
In his War Message on 8 December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that Americans, although in grave danger, had determination and confidence. His inspiring words described a people that in many ways did not exist. Most Americans had wanted to stay out of the world war already under way for years in Europe and Asia. Many believed that the lesson of the First World War was to avoid other people’s wars, especially since the economic hard times of the Great Depression meant that they had enough problems at home. Now, shocked and angered, they were in a war for which they were not prepared. Where did the war come from, where was it going, and what would victory bring? It was the job of wartime propaganda to answer these questions in a way that would mobilize the population for total war. It justified the war as a fight for freedom.
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Notes
Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), Bureau of Intelligence, ‘Newspaper Comic Strips’, 17 June 1942, Office of Government Reports (OGR), Record Group (RG) 44, Entry 171, Box 1844, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Archives II, College Park, Maryland; OFF Bureau of Intelligence, ‘Analysis of April 1942 Newsreels’, 14 May 1942, OGR, RG 44, Box 888, NARA; some of the material presented in this chapter is adapted from Susan A. Brewer (2009) Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (Oxford University Press) ch. 3.
Woodrow Wilson, ‘Indianapolis Speech’, 4 September 1919, A.S. Link, (ed.) (1990) The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, September 4–November 5, 1919, vol. 63 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 27.
See, for example, M.C.C. Adams (1994) The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press); W.I. Hitchcock (2008) The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York: Free Press); A.J. Huebner (2008) The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).
E. Borgwardt (2005) A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press); M.H. Moore (2010) Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press).
On the definitions, meanings, and uses of propaganda, see E.L. Bernays (1928; repr. 1972) Propaganda (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press); N.J. Cull, D. Culbert and D. Welch (eds) (2003) Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO); E.S. Herman and N. Chomsky (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books); G. Jowett and V. O’Donnell (1986) Propaganda and Persuasion (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications); H.D. Lasswell (1927) Propaganda Techniques in the World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf); R.A. Nelson (1996) A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press); T.H. Qualter (1985) Opinion Control in Democracies (New York: St Martin’s Press); P.M. Taylor (2003) Munitions of the Mind: War Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Nuclear Age (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press).
Michael Darrock and Joseph P. Dorn, ‘Davis and Goliath: The OWI and Its Gigantic Assignment’, Harper’s Magazine, February 1943, pp. 225–37; A.M. Winkler (1978) The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
H.C. Shulman (1990) The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 76–87, 99–100.
OWI Domestic Branch, ‘Reception and Wake’, 7 September 1945, Box 38, Papers of Arthur Sweetser, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
N.J. Cull (1995), Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American ‘Neutrality’ in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press); S.A. Brewer (1997) To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
OFF, ‘Pros and Cons on Hate and Atrocities’, 8 May 1942, RG 44, Entry 78, Box 888, NARA; S.A. Brewer (2009) Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 46–86.
D.M. Kennedy (1999) Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 482; Clifton Fadiman to Leo Rosten, ‘Cooperation with Commentators’, 19 March 1943, Box 11, Papers of Philleo Nash, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri.
Dick Dorrance and Joseph Liss (OWI), ‘When Radio Goes to War’, 1943, Container 114, Papers of Raymond Clapper, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; see also J. Dower (1986) War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books); Moore, Know Your Enemy.
Why We Fight: Prelude to War (Frank Capra, 1942); G. Horton (2002) Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), pp. 57–9; Lowell Mellett to Gardner Cowles, Jr, ‘Progress Report’, 22 March 1943, OGR, RG 44, Entry 78, Box 890, NARA.
For a detailed discussion of Norman Rockwell’s famous illustrations of the Four Freedoms, see S. Murray and J. McCabe (1993) Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms (New York, Gramercy Books); William M. Nelson, Chief of Photographic Section, OWI News Bureau, ‘Memorandum to Editors’, undated, OWI, RG 208, Entry 6A, Box 4, NARA.
L. May (2000) The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 139–74; Horton, Radio Goes to War, 142.
I. S. Scott (2008) ‘Why We Fight and Projections of America: Frank Capra, Robert Riskin, and the Making of World War II Propaganda’, in P.C. Collins and J.E. O’Connor (eds) Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky), p. 247.
Electric Light and Power Companies advertisement, ‘Supermen — the morning after’, Life, 22 November 1943, p. 5; The OWI worked with the War Advertising Council to persuade businesses and advertisers to include propaganda messages in advertisements, which does not mean that they always did. See Brewer, Why America Fights, pp. 116–19; R. Griffith (1983) ‘The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942–1960’, Business History Review, 57, pp. 388–412; C.F. McGovern (2006) Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press); M. Neff (1991) ‘The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II’, Journal of American History, 77, pp. 1296–318.
W.A. Lydgate (1944) What Our People Think (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell), p. 42.
T. Borstalmann (2001) The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); M. Dudziak (2002) Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
N. Fick (2005) One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin), p. 251.
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© 2012 Susan A. Brewer
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Brewer, S.A. (2012). Fighting for Freedom: The Second World War and a Century of American War Propaganda. In: Welch, D., Fox, J. (eds) Justifying War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230393295_11
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