People
Among the many people who worked for the OWI were Jay Bennett (author), Humphrey Cobb, Alan Cranston, Martin Ebon, Milton S. Eisenhower, Ernestine Evans, John Fairbank, Lee Falk, Howard Fast, Alexander Hammid, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Wade Jones, David Karr, Philip Keeney, Christina Krotkova, Owen Lattimore, Murray Leinster, Paul Linebarger, Irving Lerner, Archibald MacLeish, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Charles Olson, Gordon Parks, James Reston, Peter Rhodes, Arthur Rothstein, Waldo Salt, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., William Stephenson, George E. Taylor, Chester S. Williams, and Flora Wovschin.
Many of these people were active supporters of President Roosevelt's New Deal and extolled the President's policies in OWI-supported radio programs such as This is War, which irritated Congressional opponents.
Some of the writers, producers, and actors of OWI programs admired the Soviet Union and were either loosely affiliated with or were members of the Communist Party USA. The director of Pacific operations for the OWI, Owen Lattimore, who later accompanied U.S. Vice-President Henry Wallace on a mission to China and Mongolia in 1944, was later alleged to be a Soviet agent on the basis of testimony by a defector from the Soviet GRU, General Alexander Barmine. In his final report, Elmer Davis noted that he had fired 35 employees, because of past Communist associations, though the FBI files showed no formal allegiance to the CPUSA. Flora Wovschin, who worked for the OWI from September 1943 to February 1945, was later revealed in VENONA intercepts to have been a Soviet spy.
Read more about this topic: United States Office Of War Information
Famous quotes containing the word people:
“I never could get on with representative individuals—but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.”
—Edith Hamilton (1867–1963)
“Frankly, I do not like the idea of conversations to define the term “unconditional surrender.” ... The German people can have dinned into their ears what I said in my Christmas Eve speech—in effect, that we have no thought of destroying the German people and that we want them to live through the generations like other European peoples on condition, of course, that they get rid of their present philosophy of conquest.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)