The Press: U. S. Propaganda

The ordeal of Robert Sherwood began last week. The tall, thin, solemn playwright (Reunion in Vienna, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, etc.) made his first request to Congress for money ($26,000,000) to carry on the foreign propaganda work of his Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information. Members of the House appropriations subcommittee wanted to know what had been accomplished with the money (from the President’s emergency fund) he had spent so far.

Before Pearl Harbor Sherwood began to assemble his branch under the auspices of the Coordinator of Information, Colonel William J. (“Wild Bill”) Dorfovan. Last June the organization was transferred in toto to Elmer Davis’ OWI. Now swollen to 1,800 employes, it has a high command in Washington, a sprawling operations unit in Manhattan, another in San Francisco and 18 outposts throughout the world. Its province is all the world outside of the continental U.S. and Latin America.

Tone & Content. Brain of the foreign propaganda division is its planning and intelligence board in Washington—which includes an ex-foreign correspondent (the Chicago Daily News’s Edgar Ansel Mowrer), an economist (James Warburg), representatives of the Army (Colonel Oscar Solbert), Navy (Captain Homer L. Grosskopf), State Department. The board’s job is to sift the vast portfolio of U.S. Government information on domestic and foreign events, pass it on to the operations division in the form of directives that fix the U.S. propaganda line for each country.

These directives determine the tone of U.S. propaganda, but not its content. That is primarily the concern of Operations’ International Press & Radio Bureau, which writes all the propaganda that the air waves and cables carry. Bureau Chief Joe Barnes, former foreign news editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and his staff of onetime newspaper, magazine and radio writers turn out enough copy to supply 250 radio shows a day and to service newspapers all over the world.

So far 80% of its propaganda has been spot news. The bureau works on the theory that average Europeans, deafened by a decade of intensive Axis propaganda, won’t listen to anything but news on the radio.

Although Joe Barnes’s bureau has plenty to say, it hasn’t much to say it with. Its chief outlets are the 14 U.S. international short-wave broadcasting stations. Their expansion is in the hands of Operations’ Communications Facilities Bureau, whose chief is ex-CBSman Murry Brophy. Some day Brophy hopes to have 36 transmitters for world coverage. Germany alone has 68.

Gadget Propaganda. Propaganda is also magazines, movies, handbills, leaflets for bombers to drop, soap, matches, shoelaces, games, puzzles, gadgets of all sorts, packaged to carry a message. These are the domain of Operations’ Overseas Publications Bureau, headed by ex-Associated Pressman Ed Stanley. They are the work of such once highly paid talents as Artist-Humorist Ludwig Bemelmans, Scenarist Robert Riskin (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, etc.), Novelist Jerome (I Can Get It for You Wholesale) Weidmann, Author Humphrey Cobb (Paths of Glory), Adman Ted Patrick and others.

This bureau, which produces all printed material except radio and cable news, believes that an air-dropped leaflet is more to the citizen of an occupied country than radio news. A leaflet—or a package of matches—is physical evidence that the U.S. is there.

The 18 branches of the Overseas Outpost Bureau (chief: Harold K. Guinzburg, owner of Viking Press) are the eyes, ears and distributing agents for the Overseas Branch. Most of them are just getting into operation. The branch chiefs are mostly ex-foreign correspondents like Wallace Carroll (London), former head of the U.P.’s London bureau; a couple of ex-drama critics like the New York Herald-Tribune’s Richard Watts Jr. (Dublin) and Gilbert Gabriel (Anchorage) of Hearst’s defunct New York American; ex-admen like J. Walter Thompson’s M. L. Stiver (Canberra).

The Line. Handicapped by the absence of resounding victories, by the lack of a definite Government policy, OWI’s Overseas Branch has concentrated on telling the simple truth.

It has taken a much more conservative line than U.S. newspapers. It has discussed the second front, promised that it was coming some time, but referred to it principally as the Western front. It talks about the food that is available in the U.S. once Hitler is defeated, of the fact that the Yanks are surely, inevitably coming.

To Germans, the foreign propaganda division has talked pretty cold turkey. It has never sought to argue with the German line, merely to expose it. Germans are constantly reminded of what happened when the U.S. came into the war in 1917. They receive a dose of spot news 15 minutes out of every hour. They are told about U.S. production achievements, etc.

Tot. Whether this amateur excursion into the new field of psychological warfare had done the U.S. much good, no one, including Bob Sherwood, can say. His failure to let Indians know how the U.S. felt about their differences with the British was reverse propaganda because silence forces India to assume that the U.S. is with Britain in the matter. Until the U.S. Government can make up its mind about India, Sherwood will be mute.

Nevertheless, he believes he can tot up some respectable credits. Before his outfit got going, there was almost no U.S. news in India’s 500 newspapers. Today the Overseas Bureau is the India press’s largest single news source. The Berlin radio is now taking considerable time and trouble to refute the arguments to the German people—proof that the Germans are listening.

Whatever Congress may think of the U.S.’s maiden propaganda effort, Sherwood can point to the Nazi opinion of the importance of propaganda in the middle of a war. One 200-kw. short-wave transmitter (our largest: 100 kw.) is already on the air, and the Germans are reported to be building 19 more.

OWI’s Paul Smith wrote a sizzling letter of correction to the New York Daily News’s Washington Correspondent John O’Donnell. He was sore at O’Donnell’s waspish cracks at OWI’s proposed budget and his ribbing Archibald MacLeish about an OWI dinner at Washington’s Carlton Hotel (TIME, Oct. 5). “You’re nuts, John,” wrote Paul. “Mr. MacLeish had nothing to do with the dinner check. It’s nobody’s damned business. I paid it. The dinner was $7.50 a plate—not $6 as reported. The total was $369.55.” Last week O’Donnell publicly admitted he had fudged his OWI budget figures, quoted the gist of Smith’s letter.