A Latin America Exception and the OWI's 1943 Propaganda Order
By Theo Marchetti ·
For decades, the record of the Office of War Information presented a clean face of recruitment posters while masking a clandestine channel for influence in Latin America.
The people who saw these posters were not just citizens; they were targets of a state-run psychological operation designed to manufacture consent for a total war. From the factory worker in Detroit to the foreign national in a captured capital, the goal was the same: the total alignment of the individual's will with the needs of the empire.
This story is reconstructed from a set of archival descriptions rather than the records' own pages. What survives in the National Archives, the agency that preserves the bureaucratic paper trail of the state, is a series of reproduced color slides. These slides capture the visual output of the Office of War Information (OWI), the agency that managed the government's information and propaganda during World War II, reviewing film scripts to kill any trace of anti-war sentiment.
A Latin America Exception
For much of the war, the United States, the global power projecting its will across two oceans, operated a fractured propaganda machine. The OWI, led by Elmer Davis, a reporter and author who brought a journalist's instinct for narrative to the state's messaging, found itself in a bitter struggle for control. Its rival was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the civilian intelligence agency that coordinated espionage behind enemy lines and managed subversion and post-war planning.
This was more than a turf war; it was a conflict over the nature of truth. The OWI handled the "white" propaganda—the open, attributed messaging of a democratic state. The OSS handled the "black" and "gray" operations—the lies and the fabrications designed to look like they came from the enemy. The record shows that this "division of responsibility led to controversy," a sterile phrase for a fight over who got to shape the minds of the world.
On March 9, 1943, an Executive order attempted to settle the score. It directed the OWI to become the "sole agency for all activities related to United States propaganda abroad," but it included one glaring, specific carve-out: "except in Latin America."
The desk's reading is that this was no administrative oversight. By exempting Latin America from the OWI's public-facing bureaucracy, the state created a separate, non-OWI operational channel for regional influence. The pattern suggests that Washington wanted its activities in the Southern Hemisphere kept far away from the OWI's review processes and public mandates, likely placing those operations under the direct, clandestine control of the OSS or the State Department. While the OWI was busy making posters for the world to see, a shadow network was operating in the Americas, away from the record, managing a different kind of truth.
The Madison Avenue Pipeline
To make the state's messages stick, the OWI didn't just rely on patriotism; it hired the best manipulators in the business. The Bureau of Graphics, a specialized OWI unit tasked with creating and acquiring propaganda posters, became the bridge between the Pentagon and the boardroom.
Within this bureau, the Art Section in Washington provided layouts and technical assistance, but the Art Section in New York was where the real work happened. The New York office maintained a liaison with an "art pool" and, crucially, "purchased the service of graphic artists for Government agencies." They maintained an "industrial liaison," a phrase that reveals the fusion of corporate advertising and state psychological operations.
Among these artists was James Montgomery Flagg, the illustrator who had already immortalized the state's demand for obedience with his 1917 Uncle Sam recruitment poster. Flagg and his contemporaries were not just painters; they were the architects of visual persuasion. The OWI didn't just use their talent; it integrated Madison Avenue's emerging techniques of consumer manipulation into the machinery of war.
The pattern suggests that this "industrial liaison" functioned as a pipeline, importing the psychology of the sale to sell the war. If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the OWI was not just producing posters; it was building a blueprint for the post-war corporate-state communication complex. The government learned how to treat the citizen as a consumer of ideology, and they paid private industry to teach them how to do it effectively.
The September 15 Liquidation
By 1944, the OWI's output had become a global enterprise, even absorbing foreign materials. The Bureau of Graphics acquired propaganda sponsored by the government of Canada, the North American neighbor whose own Director of Public Information in Ottawa collaborated with the American machine. This was the image of a seamless, allied front—a world of war bonds, energy conservation, and recruitment for the Navy and the Coast Guard.
But as soon as the war ended, the OWI was erased. An Executive order on August 31, 1945, terminated the agency effective September 15.
To a casual reader, this looks like the natural winding down of a wartime necessity. The desk's reading is that this was a tactical absorption. The OWI did not stop its work; it moved its capabilities into the intelligence community. The contentious overlap with the OSS did not end in a victory for the OWI's "white" propaganda, but in the total integration of mass-influence capabilities into the nascent structure of the CIA. The agencies that managed the "art pool" and the "industrial liaison" didn't go home; they became the architects of Cold War psychological warfare.
The fact that the National Archives preserves this series as "reproduced color slides" is the final irony. The record has been transformed into an asset catalog. It preserves the "what"—the vibrant colors of the posters—while suppressing the "why" and the "how." There are no impact reports here, no measured efficacy of the campaigns, and no record of the failures. The operational history has been scrubbed, leaving only the art.
If a full release of the OWI's internal memoranda were possible, it would show that the "Latin America exception" was the prototype for the covert interventions that would define the next fifty years of American foreign policy. The gap in the March 1943 order is shaped exactly like the subsequent coups and clandestine operations in the region. The OWI's posters were the bright, colorful curtain drawn across the window of a room where the OSS was learning how to break the will of foreign populations.
The OWI's dissolution in 1945 was not a cessation of activity, but a professionalization of secrecy. The state realized that propaganda is most effective when the public doesn't know it's being targeted. The "white" propaganda of the posters was a useful tool for a world at war, but for the world that followed, the state preferred the shadow channel—the one that began with a single, redacted exception for Latin America.