World War II was, we’re taught in high school, a total war. This meant that the combatants marshaled as many of their resources and as much of their populations as they could to win the war. The United States transformed its economy and society to achieve its war aims. Consumer goods manufacturers converted their factories over to making everything from tanks to parachutes. Americans were encouraged not to waste — people collected rubber and foil for reuse. Speed limits were lowered to save fuel for the war. Taxes went way up.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a shock to America’s system, but Franklin Roosevelt’s administration worried that Americans — most of whom had been isolationist before December 1941, and many of whom remained so after the attack — would not be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to win a war fought across two oceans. So Roosevelt created the Office of War Information in 1942 to coordinate his government’s efforts to inform and, more importantly, persuade the public.
The OWI and its director, Elmer Davis, a leading news reporter at CBS with q classic 1940s name, had to walk a fine line. Roosevelt wanted to use government resources to persuade the public, but the United States was not an authoritarian country like its enemies. Many Americans — and many in Congress — were wary of a government propaganda organ; it sounded just like what Goebbels was doing in Germany.
The OWI and its affiliates in other departments of the government unleashed an avalanche of propaganda on the American public. They read most movie scripts produced during the war and pressured studios to make their stories patriotic. They established the Voice of America, which broadcast radio messages all over the world. They dispatched photographers to record the war effort, on the battlefield, in the factories, and in the home. They spread information and misinformation designed to demoralize America’s enemies. Oh, and most famously, they issued a blizzard of posters, which is our subject today.
The propaganda effort was not without its controversies. The government whitewashed the issue of Japanese internment and perpetuated racist stereotypes of Japanese leaders. Some OWI writers quit because they felt that they were being asked to sell a fantasy to the public rather than tell them the truth. Congress eventually cut the office’s funds because they worried that Roosevelt was using the office to bolster his 1944 campaign.
Nevertheless, the OWI and other government agencies issued a dizzying array of propaganda. You’ve probably seen some of it — Rosie the Riveter, the “loose lips sink ships” posters, “Uncle Sam Wants You,” and the like. This week, I’d like to look at a few genres of propaganda that strayed far from the battlefield, encouraging Americans to stay healthy, preserve national resources, and even read.
One theme of American propaganda was that Americans had intellectual freedoms that their enemies did not. This 1943 poster reminded people of that fact:
The OWI also put out this famous poster. I love the way that it makes the book tower over the book-burning Nazis below.
The government urged Americans to donate their books to their local library — this way, they’d conserve resources and broaden the knowledge available to everyone:
The government believed so much in the power of books that, after American troops invaded France, they shipped a carefully curated selection of American and British books for sale in French bookstores to help shape public opinion in former Nazi territories.
But what about the trees those books were made from? The government (mostly the Department of Agriculture) issued quite a lot of anti-forest-fire propaganda. There were simple approaches like this:
And more melodramatic stuff like this:
Sometimes, like a lot of World War II propaganda, they included racist caricatures of Japanese leaders:
Why the focus on forest fires? There seem to be a couple of reasons. There were a few feeble Japanese attempts to attack the U.S. West Coast. Japan used incendiary balloons, which threatened to start fires wherever they landed, and there was one incident in which a Japanese submarine launched some shells at the California coast. These attacks (which never really amounted to much) combined with the fact that a lot of firefighters and firefighting equipment were sent overseas as part of the war effort to create an increased danger of wildfires. The government seemed to have been very worried that wildfires could spiral out of control while the nation’s attention was focused elsewhere.
The government even enlisted the Walt Disney Company to help with the anti-wildfire campaign. Disney had released Bambi — which features a climactic wildfire caused by a careless hunter — in 1942, and it allowed the government to use imagery from the movie for one year, resulting in posters like this:
Once the government could no longer use the Bambi characters, they stuck with the cute-animals approach, inventing Smokey the Bear, who, in this poster mockup, is lecturing a young cub about making sure to fully extinguish his matches:
There was a lot of World War II propaganda that focused on dangers other than the Axis. Soldiers in the Pacific were often beset by malaria-carrying mosquitoes, who threatened to take those soldiers off the front lines. Most of these messages were much less melodramatic than other posters. A lot of them were made up in comic-book style, appropriate for the large number of troops who were really just kids.
The posters pushed atabrine, the anti-malarial drug of choice at the time (including, again, a racist depiction of Japanese people):
Soldiers were issued calendars, which used cartoonish images to make sure they sprayed for mosquitoes:
Many of the images in the calendar were of attractive women — anything, I guess, to get the soldiers to absorb the anti-mosquito message:
Malaria wasn’t the only illness that the military was worried about. Venereal disease was a big concern during the war, as soldiers on leave visited sex workers and otherwise hooked up with local women. The government tried all sorts of approaches to keep soldiers from contracting an STD. This poster appealed to their senses of shame and guilt, telling them not to disappoint their fellow soldiers and virtuous spouses back home:
They warned soldiers not to trust heavily-made-up “street-walkers” and “pickups,” equating venereal disease with the other forces facing American troops:
Soldiers were told to watch out for “loose women,” too, who might be “loaded with disease:”
And it wasn’t just the obvious temptresses who should be avoided — even “clean,” wholesome-looking women might be harboring an STD:
World War II was the last American propaganda campaign of this scale. The government didn’t exactly give up on trying to shape public messaging, but overt propaganda efforts felt a little too close to Nazi and Soviet attempts to control the minds of the public. Part of the reason it’s so interesting today is that it’s hard to imagine the government trying to shape public opinion so overtly.
What strikes me about all this wartime propaganda is the wide array of techniques that artists used. Some posters were deadly serious and filled with gravitas; others tried to be silly. They used all sorts of images to draw the attention of Americans, from cute cartoon animals to scantily-clad women to racist caricatures. They tried everything.
Did all of this effort and creativity work? Nobody really knows; as with many advertising campaigns, it was difficult to tell just how successful any particular poster — or campaign — had been. And Americans mostly accepted it — it’s hard to imagine American citizens engaging in such a collective endeavor today.
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"I Want You" was designed by J. M. Flagg in 1917 and was used to recruit soldiers for both WW I and WW II. It wad based on the original British Lord Kitchener "Wants You" poster of three years earlier.
Great post. WWII government posters are plentiful and in the public domain. I turned them into 3 free iBooks on US Homefront in WWII. Here's the first: "Why We Fight: WWII and the Art of Public Persuasion" Filled with posters, films and audio files from the era. Free at Apple bookstore https://books.apple.com/us/book/why-we-fight/id569278505