Posters were produced to encourage and inspire Americans, but also to warn, scold, and scare Americans as well. They were mass produced and distributed around the country and hung in train stations, post offices, schools, churches, factories, and grocery stores. Posters were an important part of the OWI's output.
Artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals were recruited to work on this creative "factory floor." They produced posters, pamphlets, newsreels, radio shows, and movies-all designed to create a public that was 100 percent behind the war effort. The Office of War Information (OWI) was formed in 1942 to oversee the propaganda initiative, scripting and distributing the government's messages. Persuading Americans to support the war effort became a wartime industry, just as important as producing bullets and planes. Their ambitions were similar, but each leader had his own distinct methods, his own carefully created script for elaborately produced and often wildly successful acts and campaigns of deception to win hearts and minds on the frontlines and the home front.The result of this investigation is a wholly distinctive and often surprising work of history, a book that manages to cast a fresh light on the most obsessively studied conflict in human history.During World War II, the US government waged a constant battle for the hearts and minds of the public. Each side employed uniforms, meticulously staged events, and broadcast their messages via all media available-motion pictures, radio broadcasts, posters, leaflets, and beyond. Impression management, the art of political spin, was employed to drive the message home with the careful use of black and white propaganda. Brilliantly conceived oratory was applied to underscore each vision. Each area of the media was fully exploited. He presents the war as a drama that evolved and developed as it progressed, a production staged and overseen by four contrasting masters: Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin.Each leader used all the tools at his disposal to present his own distinctive vision of the global drama that was the Second World War. In this fascinating new book, bestselling author and historian Nathaniel Lande explores the Great War at the heart of the twentieth century through the prism of theater.
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