Contextual Essay

Introduction

During the Second World War, the organizing principle that directed mass media in the United States was victory—both on the battlefield and on the homefront. All outlets for communication were to aid the American war effort according to what each did best. Therefore, the kind of patriotism that pervaded the country also unified the whole spectrum of media, from forms of pure entertainment such as motion pictures to outlets that were supposed to inform and educate the populace such as the press. This unity had a profound effect on American media during the war. While ostensibly serving their country, media firms enjoyed enormous growth in profits, which in some cases (such as the advertising industry) saved them from the Great Depression.

And the War Came

“Today, December 7th, 1941, is a date which will live in infamy.” While those words likely conjure up a specific set of visual and auditory images, there is an irony to our contemporary perception of that historical moment: most Americans have come to know FDR’s famous announcement through images in the movies and on television rather than over the radio as it was first conveyed. That difference highlights an important shift that began to take place during the Second World War. Before 1945 the most extraordinary events of the day, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the nighttime raids of London, and the Nazi invasion of Poland, were delivered by familiar voices over the radio or splashed across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. They even might have been covered in a “special edition,” one of many such sheets published each day by America’s dailies.

Nevertheless, Americans had grown increasingly accustomed to watching the day’s events unfold in the darkness of movie theaters. And while the technology that would allow television to bring a war “live” to Americans was still in its infancy when WWII broke out, motion pictures sought to provide experiences that radio and the print press could not. Thus, the story of media and the homefront is one that illustrates certain tendencies in how Americans came to understand events in their world. It was a period during which the public no longer processed information by actively engaging its sources, such as with radio or newspapers, but by receiving it passively on the silver screen.

Office of War Information (OWI)

The rules under which media outlets operated during the Second World War were looser than they had been in First World War and considerably tighter than they would be during Vietnam. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the government-media relationship was how little direct control the government exercised over the press, radio, and the movies. In June 1942, FDR created the Office of War Information by executive order and placed former CBS news analyst Elmer Davis in charge of gathering “all varied Government press and information services under one leadership.” In practice, Davis’s job became much less centralized than this description suggested. During the First World War, the government had created Committee on Public Information (CPI)—better known as the Creel Committee because of its energetic director George Creel—to generate propaganda for the war effort. Creel succeeded all too well with his over-zealous restriction of information and promotion of American war aims. Beyond the desire to avoid repeating Creel’s mistakes, the government also realized that it did not need to enforce strict control over media outlets, they did a fine job of censoring themselves. Thus, one historian of motion pictures writes that “gentlemen’s agreements and word-of-mouth accommodations influenced production decisions as much as the printed directives of the OWI.” (Doherty, 43)

Radio

On average, Americans owned one radio per household during the war. The cost of purchasing a wireless had fallen dramatically, generating a steady stream of sales even during the Depression. Prior to the war, the warm glowing light of a radio represented the single most popular source of family entertainment, offering programs of comedy, drama, classical music, jazz, and news to millions and millions of listeners. Many of Hollywood’s biggest names, such as Orson Welles, broke into entertainment through radio. The box also allowed Americans to hear President Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats” and people knew instinctively to huddle around the receiver when a “news flash” interrupted a regularly scheduled program.

Perhaps the most dramatic reports that compelled listeners to sit motionless around their Philco and RCA sets were Edward R. Murrow’s eyewitness accounts of the Nazi bombing of London. Working for the Columbia Broadcasting Company (CBS), Murrow soberly related the terror and destruction of the nighttime raids that paralyzed the English population for weeks. Murrow’s reporting set the industry standard and influenced an entire generation of younger men, known as Murrow’s Boys, to pursue stories with cold, clear purpose. It is not too much of a stretch to say that all war journalism, whether covering the rice paddies of Vietnam or the desert sands of the first Gulf War, tries to capture the serious tone of Murrow’s broadcasts from London.

While Murrow became the most trusted man on radio, it was FDR who mastered the medium to influence public perception of the war. Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” made listeners feel as if they were being spoken to directly rather than getting the message as part of an impersonal, official pronouncement. The president used them sparingly, however, to promote bold and broad policy initiatives, and to establish an agenda for other media outlets to follow.

Print Media

Newspapers, of course, printed every speech the president made. They also provided detailed accounts of battles and, tragically, lists of Americans killed or missing in action. It was through the newspapers that the public received information about rationing, war jobs, and strikes. In short, newspapers offered the single best source for information about the war in all its complexity.

The print media was hardly unbiased in its reporting. Newspapers and magazines did, after all, depend on sales of advertising space, most of which emphasized a fairly basic message: that the nation had to ban together to stop enemies that threatened the American way of life. The clearest manifestation of that message was Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—an ostensibly political argument that grew into a complex alignment of media needs and government policies. Initially, Norman Rockwell published his illustrations of the “Four Freedoms” in the nation’s most popular magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, as a voluntary contribution to the war effort. But because he used his Vermont neighbors as characters for his illustrations, the images became the perfect representation of common Americans uniting in defense of common values. Appearing in early 1943 on the covers of four consecutive issues of the Post, Rockwell’s work became an advertising sensation, fusing the political with the commercial. The government made millions of reprints and used the pictures in a campaign that raised an incredible $133 million in war bonds. Here was a union of government policy, personal conscience, and media power.

Hollywood

Though print ads such Rockwell’s were among the most memorable of the war, none could ultimately compete with those appearing in the most popular medium of the day: motion pictures. Between 80 to 90 million people attended the movies each week, accounting for 80 cents of every dollar spent on wartime entertainment—a staggering dominance of the media market that has yet to be replicated by any other medium.

The relationship between the government and Hollywood seems more complicated than what advertisers produced in print media or what was aired in radio spots. Of course, the ideals reflected in patriotic ads also made their way into hundreds of motion pictures; after all, both Hollywood and advertisers appealed to the same audience. The movies, however, had an advantage—they were seen by millions each week in a darkened theater without any distraction and therefore were able to tell much longer stories.

Movies carried messages better and with more power, which was one of the prime reasons censors monitored this medium more closely and with more direct authority than any other means of communication. Film historian Thomas Doherty notes that the “War Department, the Office of War Information (OWI), and Hollywood’s studio heads colluded in keeping the awful devastation of combat from the homefront screens—sometimes by outright fabrication, usually by expedient omission.” (Doherty, 3)

Even with such scrutiny, movies addressed issues related to the war with remarkable breadth. Some efforts from these years were laughably naïve and simplistic but, as Doherty asserts, “whether overseas or on the homefront, American audiences knew what Hollywood was about and Hollywood knew they knew.” (Doherty, 9) In other words, it would be equally naïve of us to look back at this generation of films and filmgoers and believe that what they watched was taken at face value.

This implicit understanding between the viewer and the viewed is evident in audience reaction to fiction and non-fiction films of the war years. The Hollywood movie Air Force, which came out in 1943, left audiences laughing and cheering at the sight of Japanese Zeros being shot out of the sky. However, when people witnessed real war footage of flamethrowers eviscerating Japanese soldiers in pillboxes and caves, the audience sat “silent and grim.” The public was sophisticated enough to grapple with the disconnect between Hollywood’s shadows and the war’s reality.

Newsreels and combat reports played in two-thirds of the 16,800 theaters in the United States. Throughout the war, they brought as many people into theaters as A-list features; by 1944 over eighty percent of newsreel footage was about the war. Hungry for information—especially pictures—about the fighting, audiences forced the movie industry and the government to their change policies regarding war footage. In September 1943, the U.S. government officially permitted newsreels to include much more disturbing footage from the war, including images of American soldiers killed in battle. And near the end of the war, newsreels also revealed the darkness of the Holocaust. Nazi Atrocities appeared in movie theaters in April 1945, and was quickly followed a month later by Army Signal Corp footage of the liberation of four Nazi death camps. Ed Herlihy, the voice of Universal Newsreel, admonished the audience, “Don’t turn away! Look!”

Perhaps the best way to characterize the complex relationship between the movies and the Second World War is to say that the war had more profound effect on Hollywood than the movie industry had on the war. The war became a training camp for young filmmakers, including a director named Frank Capra. During the war, Capra was employed by the American military to make films intended to boost the morale of soldiers. The series that emerged was entitled, Why We Fight, a seven-film project produced from 1942 through 1945. While it is difficult to measure the actual power these films had on those who watched them—they were seen by both soldiers and civilians—observers at the time and since have estimated that this series constituted the single most powerful American documentary on the war. Its power, though, came from the weaving of archival footage with re-created sets, and its ability to portray those constructions as absolute truth. Here was cinema at the service of propaganda. Fifty years before Oliver Stone tried to persuade the film-going public that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy, Frank Capra had already familiarized Americans with the ideological power of movies.

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