United States Office of War Information

But by comparison with the enormous scope of the word warfare in World War II, the Committee on Public Information used primitive tools to do an important job.

The Office of War Information alone probably broadcast more words over its shortwave facilities during the war than were written by all of George Creel's staff.

That was their way of getting directly using shortwave, getting directly into the kind of people who would be using the internet or using like Usenet or something like in the late 80s and the 90s and

things like that.

Third, a program to strengthen democracy itself.

And fourth, a program to sell the army to the people and the people to the army.

What this eventually becomes in World War II is the Office of War Information.

In 1942, he addresses the U.S. Army, quote, total warfare has three fronts, military, economic, and psychological.

At least that's how the, uh, Louis Wirth phrased it.

He was the agent for the Office of War Information who studied the riots in Detroit in 1943, the racial riots.

They had shipped up a lot of Negroes from the, from the South to work in the factories and plopped them in the middle of a Polish neighborhood, and lo and behold, there's a riot.

Who could have thought that? [laughs] And so he went to investigate it, and, uh, he came out with a report that, you know, of course, some of these ethnic Catholics were s-suspect.

While working in comics, Pius would teach at the Harlem Community Arts Center, which was established in 1937 by sculptor Augusta Savage, meant to provide artistic instruction to the local community for free.

Later, Pius volunteered for the Office of War Information, OWI, during World War II, providing one-panel cartoons for black Americans and courage them to serve, which were widely distributed in black newspapers like New York Age from 1943 to 1945.

Pius would later become an editorial cartoonist after the war, working on the Pittsburgh Courier's Double V campaign, which was called V for Victory in War Against the Axis Powers Abroad and Racism at Home.

Pius also continued to work in comic books, such as General Tom Fighting Anzac and Street and Smith's Super Magician Comics, Volume 2, No. 7, on November of 1943.

Now, mind you, in living memory, there was the Roosevelt administration where Roosevelt had literally incarcerated Germans, Italians, and Japanese in concentration camps.

He shut down national media, absorbing all coverage and reporting on the war into the penumbra and authority of the Office of War Information.

He had people arrested.

without formal charges for criticizing the war effort under auspices of national security exigencies like the idea that um the the idea that lbj was somehow acting against precedent in time of war was preposterous and um obviously too you know uh kennedy and and johnson's predecessor eisenhower not only was eisenhower not only was eisenhower the equivalent of a five star of which there's you know only been three um he very much ran the oval office like a five-star general would you know so this kind of sudden this kind of sudden declaration that an imperial executive is afoot that's and that's un-american um it was uh it didn't make a lot of sense upon a superficial um But there was a basic revolt against authority that had been brewing.