1

“’Pride and Joy’: Propaganda Wars, ‘Projections

of America’ and the Dismantling of the Office of

War Information at the Close of World War II”

Dr Ian Scott | Senior Lecturer in American Studies| Division of English, American Studies and

Creative Writing (EAC)| School of Arts, Languages and Cultures| N.1.5 Samuel Alexander

Building| University of Manchester| Oxford Road, Manchester| M13 9PL| Telephone

+44(0)161 275 3059| ian.s.scott@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract

The OWI was the key agency for the distribution and dissemination of US film and propaganda

during World War II. But it was the Overseas Branch of the OWI that dominated activity and the

Motion Picture Unit (MPU) of the OB that helped shape documentary production through the

portrayal of American values and society. The OWI’s winding up at war’s end has long been seen as

part of a natural reversion to peacetime government policy. Yet, as this article argues, events within

the MPU/OWI in the last year of the war throw up evidence that suggests the agency was being

deliberately sidelined – even undermined - in preparation for a more rigorous and ideological post-

war propaganda apparatus. This revised propaganda philosophy was set in train by a select number

of individuals, principally historian Edward Lilly, newspaperman C.D. Jackson, and the army’s Brig

Gen Robert McClure. Their scrutiny of the MPU/OWI – accessed via private correspondence and

archival papers - is revealed for the first time in this article and is explained away as a self-conscious

move away from civilian and towards military propaganda authority and control in the emergent

Cold War era.

2

Introduction

In the summer of 1944, the Catholic University of America history professor Edward Lilly was offered

a position at the Office of War Information by the agency’s director, Elmer Davis. Lilly had set up a

specialized army training programme on the university’s Michigan Park campus in the suburbs of

Washington D.C., which involved the preparation of film material to be shown to troops going

abroad. Taking on the role of programme director, it was this initiative that brought Lilly to the

attention of Davis, and precipitated his joining the OWI as official historian.

Lilly was engaged to write a sweeping narrative account of the OWI’s wartime role as the

conflict reached its climax. Perceived as both an instructive document for the post-war work which

might follow as well as a fascinating insight into the agency’s wartime contribution, Lilly’s OWI

history was a potentially inspired move that could advertise the organization’s crucial achievements

and future practice. His account also offered the prospect of highlighting the creativity of a coterie of

American filmmakers who worked for the OWI and more especially the agency’s Overseas Bureau

Motion Picture Unit (MPU) that produced and distributed a range of propaganda films around the

world.

Lilly’s account however, quickly took on an alternative motive. As this article argues, his

unpublished 800 page history – later complemented by a government-authorised 1400 page study of

psychological warfare during World War II – became nothing short of an opening salvo in the battle

for post-war propaganda control and dissemination. It is a battle revealed here for the first time, and

one that shows how a triumvirate of individuals not only helped change propaganda policy, but alter

the whole direction of future US Cold War foreign relations.

The Evolution and History of the OWI

While Lilly’s account of OWI operations would open up all manner of political and ideological

conflicts previously hidden, it would nevertheless be wrong to assume the broader history of the

3

agency has been interpreted as trouble-free by historians. Formed in the summer of 1942 by

Executive Order 9182, the OWI was a problematic conflation of organisations and imperatives from

the start. The Office of Facts and Figures was the agency’s direct predecessor, but it was only one of

a number of incarnations stretching back to the Office of Government Reports and the Division of

Information of the Office for Emergency Management as well as the Foreign Information Service.

This last division was a part of the Office of the Coordinator of Information and the unit that would

finally become the core of the Overseas Branch, later Bureau (OB) of the OWI; the principal

American agency for the dispersion of wartime propaganda.1

This complicated gestation process for the OB - and within it the MPU - has only garnered

scholarly attention over time, incrementally accelerating the controversies attached to the agency.

While Richard Dyer MacCann’s initial investigation did highlight the “wide agreement on the goals of

action” that reinforced OWI complicity in the government/military project, his concentration on a

longer US documentary tradition shied away from some of the OWI’s political battles.2

Allan Winkler’s later 1970s history of the OWI did make a facet of the personalities holding

the agency together against considerable political pressure. Robert Sherwood (Director of the

Overseas Branch) and Archibald MacLeish (Assistant Director, formerly in the Office of Facts and

Figures) were especially important to Winkler who saw these two men as constantly at the vanguard

of tussles in Washington to broker deals, and as characters who had to use every ounce of their

political acumen to hold the OWI together.3 By the 1980s and 1990s, Clayton Koppes and Gregory

Black as well as Thomas Doherty were interrogating the OWI’s relationship with Hollywood to fruitful

effect. These scholars interpreted the ideological intrusion of the OWI’s political and social agendas

onto Hollywood feature films that propagandized the film industry’s wartime contribution and

brought controversy and criticism to aspects of the studios’, and OWI’s, output in equal measure.4

Clayton Laurie’s examination of American actions in The Propaganda Warriors (1996) finally

pitched the OWI into the arena of internecine warfare across wartime governmental agencies.

4

Nevertheless, the extent to which key military and political personnel were manoeuvring the OWI

like pawns around a very delicate and complex chessboard as the final months of the war dawned

does not emerge in Laurie’s otherwise fascinating study. Elsewhere, Jeffrey Geiger’s compelling

account of the American documentary tradition moves MacCann’s earlier history on apace by

examining more marginal, cutting-edge filmmakers in the war and beyond who highlighted the

OWI’s difficulties in directing a progressive propaganda agenda.5

This wide array of perspectives complicated the history but maintained one over-riding fact;

with over 5000 employees by the summer of 1944, the OWI was without question deeply embedded

within the wartime propaganda nexus. Indeed, it gained plaudits and success for its work, especially

abroad where the OB cultivated goodwill and support, increased cinema attendance as a result of its

film programme and lessened tension among liberated peoples and former enemies.

The resultant dominance of the OB emerged out of the OWI’s exposure to political pressures

and then budget purges on Capitol Hill in 1943. A suspicious Congress had always regarded the

agency as an arm of Rooseveltian politics, a haven for communist travellers and, sometimes not

unusually, both at the same time. As Nicholas Evans Sarantakes observes, if the OWI had acquired an

oversight committee, better transparency would have warded off some of the threats to curb its

work. Without such protection though, the OWI repeatedly “failed to engage with Congress”.6

Unsure of the agency’s intent therefore, representatives tried to dismantle it, believing they’d all but

killed off the whole organization with a $2 million budget cut.7 But the Overseas Branch (then to

become Bureau) remained largely intact and not only managed to be the presiding force of OWI

activity for the remainder of the war, but contrived to engage in a delicate balancing act between

civilian orientation and ideological enforcer of American political doctrines, while still a tool of

military strategy.

The investigations of 1943 exposed the OWI to conflicting political, military and artistic

pressures that strained its many ambitious activities from thereon in. But the purge in Congress also

5

emphasized the need for the agency to project its work to key decision-makers. Convincing powerful

leaders it had a role to play in a post-war environment intent on selling America to the world, was a

task some personnel in the MPU particularly thought the agency was well placed to tackle. Civilian

and military leaders thought otherwise, and came to the swift conclusion before the war’s end that

the OWI and its film personnel were not fit for purpose. But how and why did such a view coalesce

so quickly in the minds of those in Washington? That the MPU and wider OWI might possibly have

been conspired against from within has never been entertained. And yet it is this very proposition –

that the MPU, and by implication the wider OWI, as the forceful advocate of film propaganda

output, were ideologically undermined and then consciously and systematically dismantled - that is

the basis for the argument at the heart of this article.

Edward Lilly was not the only person involved in the OWI/MPU’s disassembly, however. At

the centre of the reorientation Lilly’s history set in train in the final days of the war were two further

individuals with similar ideologies and broad remits to reinvent propaganda. Psychological Warfare

Division (PWD) chief Brigadier General Robert McClure and newspaperman, psychological warfare

exponent and one of the OWI’s own, Charles Douglas (C.D.) Jackson formed a tripartite coterie of

civilian and military propaganda experts with Lilly. Together, they loosened the OWI and MPU from

their moorings and proceeded to close the war by remaking psychological warfare for the bi-polar,

nuclear age.

The mass media remained the sine qua non of their strategy for communication but it was to

be, in John Allen Stern’s words, “a seemingly (my emphasis) ‘independent’ media [that was] the very

essence of democratic propaganda.”8 Instead of being a foundation for post-war renewal and an

incubator for American ideology then, the MPU and the OB were deemed surplus to requirements in

a post-war world where the media would be directed in a far more forceful capacity towards the

hardened doctrinal approach that McClure, Jackson and Lilly had in mind.

A New Mood

6

In the later months of 1943, after the Congressional clear-out from the summer, the Motion

Picture Unit and the Overseas Bureau of the OWI more generally were already running into political

problems. From mid-1943 plans had been afoot to create a Psychological Warfare Division to

supersede the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB) which had served several masters, in different

contexts, and across a multitude of dizzying agency remits. Under Brigadier General McClure, the

new agency was to be military-controlled and threatened to tread directly on the toes of the OWI’s

work. The PWD’s structure was consolidated during a series of meetings held in London in

November 1943.9 A World War I veteran who then served as military attaché to the American

Embassy in Britain, McClure was handed intelligence control in Europe in 1942 by General

Eisenhower, overseeing radio stations as well as conducting censorship of Allied correspondence

including mail and cables. Two years later, he was heading up the PWD and would in time be in

charge of all information across Europe after invasion and liberation.

Attending that preliminary meeting in 1943 was Richard Crossman representing the British

Psychological Warfare Executive (PWE), Frederick Oechsner of the OSS and C.D. Jackson for the OWI.

With the input from these men, by April 1944, the PWD was already directing rather more than

coordinating the work of the OSS, the PWE, MOI (the British Ministry of Information) and the OWI.

As Allan Winkler notes, the new body was now better integrated and proceeded to be “more

aggressive in its propaganda attack.”10 With over 360 personnel and that number rising through the

year, the increasingly powerful PWD became, as Clayton Laurie explains, “the overall coordinating

agency for all civilian and military psychological warfare campaigns in Northwest Europe.”11

The OWI by contrast, was suffering internal conflicts. In late 1943 OWI regional boards had

been consolidated and the New York office was attempting to direct overseas operations almost

independently from the OWI headquarters in Washington D.C., against the wishes of Elmer Davis.12

The D.C. office was understood to be wracked with scandal and incompetence and Davis did

successfully purge a number of individuals he believed were not serving the interests of the agency

7

as much as themselves, notably Joseph Warburg and Joe Barnes. In Diana West’s American Betrayal,

Barnes is charged as a communist, despite him later aiding Owen Lattimore in refuting Joseph

McCarthy’s accusations of him after the war in 1950.13 Lattimore had worked for the OWI overseas

himself. No sooner had Barnes run to Lattimore’s defence however, than he was identified as a

communist in the 1951 hearings, unmasked by Whittaker Chambers no less. West suggests Barnes

had ‘reds’ in the Overseas Office of OWI in any case and this always had the potential to haunt him

and the agency after the war.

During the conflict, however, dismissing such sympathetic, left-wing travellers, who Davis

knew could damage the agency, had proven difficult. He also remained suspicious of Robert

Sherwood’s managerial competence – even Sherwood himself admitted that, “I’m hopelessly inept

as an administrator” – but President Roosevelt had a strong allegiance to his sometime speechwriter

and removing Sherwood was tricky. Davis managed to have him relocated to London for a time but

Sherwood eventually found his way back to Washington working on Roosevelt’s 1944 re-election

campaign and historic fourth term victory.14 Davis meanwhile brought in Edward Barrett from North

Africa to run the overall OWI overseas operation.15

Barrett had extensive experience but by the end of 1944 was already having his competence

questioned by C.D. Jackson. Jackson had been a Princeton graduate and influential Time magazine

correspondent between the wars, a protégé of the magazine’s proprietor, Henry Luce. He helped set

up the Council for Democracy in the late 1930s - a bastion of anti-isolationist thought - and promptly

went to work for the OWI via the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Psychological Warfare

Division (PWD) of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) during the war.

Described by Blanche Wiesen Cook as having “remained strangely unknown, his activities largely

unrecognized,” Jackson became an immense but shrouded influence in the Eisenhower Cold War

administration and as a publisher for Fortune and then Life magazine in the 1950s and 1960s.16 David

Talbot’s exhaustive account of Allen Dulles’s reign at the head of secrecy and spying in Washington

8

reads Jackson as “a fascinating and somewhat mysterious figure” who provided a link between the

presidency, the CIA and media circles.17 In 1953, he was instrumental in the formation of the ‘talking

shop’ for world leaders and influential business/media figures, calling it the Bilderberg Group.

A year later Jackson was tightly enmeshed enough in the Eisenhower administration to

counsel the president that following in the footsteps of the French in Indo-China by attempting to

stop the rise of Ho Chi Min was “wishful thinking”.18 If Jackson’s prophetic warning wasn’t heeded

there, in and out of government he continued to wield a remarkable amount of power on the

domestic and foreign stage. In November 1963, it was Jackson who ordered the purchase of the

infamous Zapruder film in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s death and who then locked

the footage away in the vaults of Life magazine’s offices in New York for the next six years. Jackson

consented to allow the magazine to occasionally publish stills from the film but often with

commentary that largely reaffirmed the Warren Commission findings; conclusions that the full 26

seconds of 8mm footage seemed to at least in part contradict.

Jackson was just as shadowy a figure in the war as afterwards. His wartime associations

would help to make him a powerful, integrative force in mid-century American politics, “helping to

popularize the ‘American century’ theory” touted by his boss Luce.19 And at the close of 1944, with

the war at a delicate juncture and future American hegemonic influence in the balance, Edward

Barrett felt the full weight of his growing influence.

Seemingly at the behest of the PWD, Jackson asked Barrett about managerial decisions

surrounding feature film distribution and the recruitment of high-profile personalities for the final

push to liberate the European theatre. Correspondence between the two of them remained cordial

and polite through December, but a Jackson letter dated January 3rd, 1945 showed how much the

cordiality was slipping. That day he wrote a stinging rebuke of the OWI/MPU’s handling of motion

picture distribution in France and its central philosophical engagement with propaganda. MPU Chief

and one of Hollywood’s most famous screenwriters, Robert Riskin was responsible for sending films

9

into liberated territories as well as coordinating work on original documentary shorts made by a

handful of leading practitioners. Riskin had worked “a near miracle” with his ‘Projections of America’

documentary series declared Jackson; but the bottom line was that the liberated peoples of Europe

wanted a portion of the ‘American Dream’ and that could only be handed to them through the

glamour of movies. Jackson accused the agency and its operatives in France of not distributing

newer films fast enough or with the required enthusiasm, despite reports that some Hollywood

movies offered to the OWI were of indifferent quality and hadn’t even been vetted. The British, by

contrast, were hand-picking their films for screenings, though the fact this happened to be occurring

through the joint auspices of the MOI and OWI somehow passed Jackson by.

Undeterred, Jackson accused the OWI of high-mindedness and not coming to terms with the

need to kick-start Hollywood’s new commercialism in Europe. In short, they were not achieving their

mandate; exactly the conclusion Lilly would draw some months later in his historical report. Jackson

indirectly blamed Riskin and Barrett for not trying harder to get the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Walt

Disney to offer their films for screenings. This would generate revenue for the film industry – passed

off as propaganda - while at the same time establishing a toehold for Hollywood commercial

operations in post-war Europe.20

Barrett thought the letter was too alarmist but Jackson persisted. Riskin’s operation was

being squeezed by the people in LA and “by [Sidney] Bernstein” as he put it, Riskin’s friend, liaison

and counterpart at the MOI. But the OWI had repeatedly stated that it was in a successful

partnership with SHAEF and the MOI to make ever more movies for a variety of distribution. As far

back as May 1944 Riskin had reaffirmed in the press the strength of the continuing British/American

liaison which dated back to at least 1941. Both had committed to a joint operation making films

ahead of and after D-Day for example.21 On June 16th, Riskin submitted a formal proposal to do a film

on Rome – and subsequently confirmed an interest in doing more ‘city’ films to show the impact of

liberation in urban centres like Marseilles – that would be an explicit OWI-MOI collaboration.22 Such

10

initiatives never got off the ground however, almost as if the rollback of the MPU/OWI plans were

already underway.

Jackson’s claims undercut the MPU/OWI’s reputation in the corridors of Washington, but -

like Lilly’s later testimony - these were at best contrived thoughts, and at worst wrong. Chaplin for

instance, far from holding back his anti-fascist satire The Great Dictator, which had been perceived

as a controversial but potentially potent symbol of Hollywood propaganda, had in fact already

agreed to its release and seen it get a rapturous reception in Italy.23 Riskin reported how audiences

in North Africa, Sicily and mainland Italy had been “embarrassingly enthusiastic” about all the films,

not least Chaplin’s. “We were a little afraid of the possible effect, because obviously there are many

fascists left,” he said. “But the people actually clamoured for the dictator picture.” This article’s

appendix photograph, taken in November 1944 (two months before Jackson’s complaints) and part

of the OWI Record Files, actually shows a military and civilian audience scrambling to get into

Chaplin’s movie – with accompanying cartoon-driven publicity – in the centre of Rome.24 Disney too

was making short features for the war, contrary to Jackson’s assertion; it was just that he was doing

it for another agency, the CIAA (Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs), under the auspices of Nelson

Rockefeller.

Documenting the American Scene

In early 1945, while McClure consolidated the power of the PWD over propaganda and

Jackson rattled the OB management with pointed questions about credibility and competence, Lilly’s

path towards the repudiation of the MPU and OWI started with his wholesale access to files,

documents and memos, included a host of interviews with key personnel. In April he started talking

to officials like Lacy Kastner - who had worked in the Hollywood Motion Picture Bureau under

Domestic Branch assistant head Nelson Poynter, and subsequently was the first director of the

Overseas Bureau’s Film Unit operations in Europe - and Louis Lober who was chief of special

promotions. Lilly also interviewed the Oscar-winning Riskin, arguably the OWI’s most famous

11

Hollywood recruit. As MPU head, Riskin’s canny distribution of both feature films and his self-

produced ‘Projections of America’ project had been a mammoth feat of coordinated talent and

management.

By the time Lilly and Riskin met, ‘Projections’ had become a collection of twenty-six

documentaries, between 10-20 minutes in length, and sometimes designated as part of ‘The

American Scene’ series offering perspectives on US history and society to recently liberated peoples

across the world.25 Riskin’s producer role for ‘Projections’ combined with his distribution control of

other agency pictures, allowed him to unveil key propaganda, not least his former partner Frank

Capra’s famous Why We Fight series.

The exchange between Lilly and Riskin, recorded in Lilly’s papers at the National Archives,

revealed how antagonistic he was towards Riskin’s MPU, let alone the Overseas Bureau’s wider

mandate. Tensions emerged early in the interview. Riskin hadn’t really reconciled the relationship

between the OWI and Hollywood had he, pressed Lilly? He hadn’t really solved the difficulty of

where and how to use motion pictures – not just documentaries – within the agency’s operations.

Lilly’s notes revealed that documentaries remained Riskin’s “pride and joy”, but the phrase in

context seemed bitter and ironic rather more than complimentary. He claimed that Riskin belatedly

understood where “damage” could have been done by sending the wrong type of film to a territory

– implying again that this is exactly what had happened during the MPU’s existence – and concluded

by observing that Riskin was “becom(ing) restless” with all the questions and so he took his leave.26

Far from being an objective account of Riskin’s time as head of the Film Unit therefore, and

ignoring the ‘Projections’ series that he had so successfully compiled and distributed globally, Lilly

disclosed an agenda that was sceptical of the MPU’s and Overseas Bureau’s achievements. Indeed

his subsequent conversations with Lober and Kastner struck a tone that was suggestive of someone

actively grappling to uncover malpractice and failure and who was being aided in that pursuit by at

least one of his interviewees. In two interviews for instance, held either side of the Riskin

12

conversation - April 18th and 23rd 1945 - Lilly eagerly quotes Kastner's proclamation that scriptwriters

were highly paid, highly strung artists who didn’t really understand how to sell Hollywood movies

abroad at all. Declaring Riskin a “friend” of OWI Overseas Head Robert Sherwood – intimating this

was how he got the job in the first place – Kastner went on to state that Riskin “came late” to the

OWI and, while “a great feature picture writer”, he “did not appreciate the documentary.” Lilly’s

notes continue as follows: “He (Kastner) talked at length about the mistake in judgment by Riskin

with regard to the production of documentaries. [Kastner had] investigated the possibility of OWI

doing production and discovered it was an impossibility.”27 His reasoning was that properly trained

Hollywood talent cost too much money and government employees could not do the job effectively.

Kastner’s testimony, as interpreted by Lilly, is significant for at least one reason. It seems to

show a far greater division of opinion about the tactics and strategy employed by the OWI than

previously thought, questioning not only how effective the agency’s film production and distribution

really was, but how cogent its strategy had been in the first place. Kastner seems determined in the

interviews to assert that Riskin’s tactics – essentially setting up an ‘in-house’ film unit - were unwise

and that he, Kastner, had in their first meeting presented plans to sign an agreement with the March

of Time film producers and essentially contract out MPU filmmaking. The problematic aspect of

Kastner’s assertions however, is that the claims were simply not true.

Riskin and Sherwood were not great friends before or even after the war had started so

Sherwood did not smooth the path to Riskin’s appointment. Riskin had only been recommended to

the playwright in the first place by a third party intermediary and the two had only got to know each

after 1941, and that was thanks to Riskin’s wife-to-be, the actress Fay Wray. Riskin did not “come

late” to OWI either, but went through a formal appointment process in the summer of 1942 only

months after the agency had been formed. Nor was he a stranger to propaganda requirements

having already been involved with the British Ministry of Information in London in the autumn of

1941.

13

Kastner was right that production talent for making films was in short supply. Frank Capra’s

Army Signal Corps unit for example, sometimes relied on soldiers and military technicians on the

ground, with only limited training in camerawork, in the absence of more adept photographers.28 It

was Riskin’s further “mistake” to go down this road too and accept semi-skilled operatives said

Kastner, and Riskin never admitted this. This curious testimony perhaps reinforced Kastner’s

bitterness about the rejection of his production plans. It is also important to note that Riskin

replaced Kastner as the director of Overseas Film for the OWI in 1943 after Kastner had held a

version of that role dating back to the Office of Coordinator of Information.29

Whatever the motive for Kastner’s testimony to Lilly, the facts told an alternative story.

Contrary to Kastner’s implication, not only had Riskin obtained Hollywood talent cheaply –

sometimes at no cost at all – to make ‘Projections of America’, it was a colossal undertaking to make

twenty-six films that would be translated into many different languages and distributed to dozens of

countries at the point of liberation.30 Indeed, those who worked with Riskin and his deputy, fellow

screenwriter Philip Dunne, were quick to tell a very different tale from Kastner’s account. In his

unpublished autobiography, documentary filmmaker and ‘Projections’ contributor Willard Van Dyke

had nothing but praise for the pair:

Within the first few weeks, we built a fine production unit. Riskin and Dunne were a surprise; I would never have believed that two Hollywood writers could understand the methods of documentary filmmakers or the problems inherent in the genre, but they brought a sense of structure that was just as applicable to our work as it was to theirs. They were both well-suited to the jobs they were undertaking.31

Lilly’s notes, by contrast, sought to directly undermine this record of achievement. He

relayed the story of a special screening of the first ‘Projections’ film, Swedes in America, in London in

1943. The theatre owner who agreed to the screening proceeded to offer the view that under

normal circumstances he would never book such a film because it had no audience interest in the

U.K.32 Proof in Lilly’s eyes that the series was of marginal interest, the fact was Britain went on to

order 500 reels of Swedes in America for distribution throughout the country as its popularity

spread. Insiders like Van Dyke argued that the target audience had always been Sweden in any case,

14

and they had lapped up the film, as a New York Times article quoting Riskin confirmed in August

1943.33 Featuring Ingrid Bergman narrating the story of her people’s emigration to the United States,

the success Swedes had globally reinforced Riskin’s philosophy for the series as well as keeping

Bergman’s native country neutral in the war when the Allies most needed it. As Riskin had in fact

predicted, Swedes in America attracted audiences well beyond Scandinavia. It was dubbed into

eleven European languages, including Flemish, Danish and Portuguese, and was seen by more than

118,000 people in Egypt. In Australia and New Zealand, over 200,000 people watched the film.34

Lilly’s anecdotal evidence marginalizing the MPU suggested a far more deterministic agenda

might be cascading down through the corridors of power. The attitude being conveyed was that

overall the OWI’s work was perhaps moderately successful and mildly diverting, but it was somehow

pedagogically redundant as a story of America, and, more pointedly, commercially disastrous for

Hollywood’s post-war overseas ambitions.

Whether he anticipated this kind of backlash against his agency or not, Riskin had already

been lobbying to have the MPU play a significant role in future government plans even before he

met Lilly. Their first conversation, for example, came only a month after Riskin had laid out his case

in the American media for the MPU/OWI to become the defining agency of future US information

services. Proposing a continuation of the MPU’s mandate that would include twenty-four pictures a

year being made at a cost of around $1 million, Riskin argued in the Los Angeles Times in March 1945

for what Joseph Nye would coin many years later as ‘soft power’ diplomacy, noting that: “It is

startling the interest manifested in documentary films describing educational, cultural and other

phases of American life.”35

Reinforcing Riskin’s claims, Elmer Davis himself approached the House Subcommittee on

Appropriations in Washington in May 1945 with a bid to carve out a similar peacetime role. Edward

Barrett, speaking on behalf of the OWI’s Overseas News and Features Division, then wrote to James

Byrnes as Secretary of State also pleading the agency’s case. Both stressed the OWI’s successful

15

cultural activity all over the world and not least the reaction and praise garnered for Riskin’s Motion

Picture Unit in general, and ‘Projections of America’ in particular. But something was afoot. Barrett’s

entreaty got nowhere. Davis’s pleas in Washington not only stalled but resulted in a budget cut of

$17 million as the agency’s funds were slashed on the understanding that the war was winding down

in Europe and would soon do so in the Pacific.36

Davis was never a popular figure in the corridors of power, but rebuffing the OWI’s head was

nevertheless a political decision much more than it was a personal one. In that spirit however, the

OWI’s Assistant Director Archibald MacLeish – who had previously been a driving force for civilian

propaganda initiatives while working in both the Office of Facts and Figures and the OSS (Office of

Strategic Services) – wrote once more to Secretary of State Byrnes questioning whether the US had

any post-war strategy at all and warning of the dangers of this absence once the new world order

had been fashioned.37 Each proposition and plea fell on deaf ears in the spring of 1945, but it was

Riskin’s rebuttal that was the most curious, and potentially the most revelatory of all.

On March 7th, only one day after the LA Times had reported on Riskin’s grand post-war plan,

independent Hollywood producer Lester Cowan was denouncing Riskin’s scheme in the press as

unworkable and, crucially, ideologically suspect. Cowan equated the “propaganda machine” Riskin

was envisioning with just the sort of institutional superstructure the US and its allies had spent

nearly six years combating. To extend the reach of the OWI beyond the war, Cowan’s implication

stressed, was to create a version of totalitarian control over populations at home and abroad that

would be expensive and undesirable for the United States. And, he added, it would destroy the

motion picture industry in the process.38

The press had latched on to Cowan’s dismissive comments almost immediately, and yet he

seemed an unlikely figure to be attacking Riskin given that the two of them had been friends and

colleagues for a number of years. Cowan had helped produce The Whole Town’s Talking in 1935, a

vehicle for Edward G. Robinson that was directed by John Ford and scripted by Riskin. So why seek

16

him out for a story that diminished Riskin’s plan so quickly? One possible reason is that those in

power hadn’t expected Riskin to still be in office in March 1945, let alone offering visionary

documentary ambitions for America. A high-level re-ordering of the OWI was underway and it

needed swift media admonishment of a plan like Riskin’s to give credibility and momentum to a

reorganisation that had a very different view of the future.

For Riskin’s grand strategy in the LA Times had actually come on the back of reports that he

was on the verge of resigning the previous December. The Hollywood Reporter then carried a

headline in January 1945 stating that Riskin was not going to resign from the OWI after all – implying

that he had tried and/or changed his mind or been rebutted. On the point of leaving in December

1944, Riskin then put forward his post-war vision for the MPU/OWI in March and saw it receive a

less than lukewarm reception. It is perhaps understandable then that he felt his efforts and those of

his colleagues were being undermined and he dutifully resigned his post after all, effective May 1 st.

Just four months later, two weeks after Emperor Hirohito had ordered the surrender of Japan and

two days before the official treaty was signed on September 2nd that finally ended World War II,

President Harry Truman dissolved the OWI by Executive Order 9608 on August 31st, 1945.

In less than six months the MPU and OWI had gone from being the possible if not obvious

option for an American post-war agency of propaganda and dissemination, to one that evaporated

amidst the cessation of hostilities. Riskin and the OWI were certainly victims of reorganization in

Washington, including the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the perceived change of tack in the White

House that re-ordered governmental priorities. Michael Waller for instance, draws attention to the

fact that the OWI had ready replacements as an agency in the guise of the Interim International

Information Service, then to become the International Information and Educational Exchange and

finally receiving “nominal independence as the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1953.”39

But the journey from the OWI to the USIA was anything but as natural, smooth or intended as this

progression intimates. These organizations sprung up and were wound down precisely for having no

17

coordinated intent. Indeed they seemed to confirm, as MacLeish had intimated, that the

government didn’t have a proper plan for post-war propaganda.

Retrospectively however, it is clear that Edward Lilly, together with C.D. Jackson and Robert

McClure did have an agenda and it involved strategy, ideology and control anywhere but within the

confines of a non-military unit run by leftist Hollywood types. Decisive as they were in this re-

orientation Jackson and McClure came from very different backgrounds. But it was this potent

mixture of influences that hinted at where the priorities lay for the future.

Davis’s need to purge agency figures in the summer of 1944, the disagreements emanating

from Barrett and Jackson together with Lilly’s emerging OWI history were all worrisome signs for

Riskin, the MPU and the majority of OWI personnel in the final months of the war. Riskin was

certainly attuned enough to the pressures around him to spot that an overhaul of future information

services was being contemplated. Whether the rest of his team perceived their work no longer as an

aid but as a threat to American military and governmental visions of the post-war world, is another

matter. So Riskin decided to part-company with the OWI before the war in Europe was officially

concluded and his immediate post-war remarks told their own story about his failings to advance a

new documentary mandate.

Back home in America, Riskin appeared on ABC’s Town Meeting of the Air radio programme

in September 1945. Regarding himself as now free to speak his mind, he re-articulated his post-war

plan from months before. Without information and appreciation, he reasoned, the world would

become a more dangerous place and American ideals would be less well understood.40 Due to

illness, Riskin’s post-war career turned out to be tragically brief, but his view of future film

propaganda was ominously prescient. America and its allies were witnessing a government being

recalibrated at the end of the war for a newer, higher-stakes game he suggested, and it was a game

that he sensed his friends and associates in Hollywood had not seen coming.

18

The New Frontier of the Mind

The political scientist Harold Lasswell stated in the 1920s what was blindingly clear by the

later years of World War II. In assessing the role of information dissemination in the Great War,

Lasswell commented that propaganda had become an incredibly powerful instrument, “the new

dynamic of society” as he referred to it.41 By 1943 American planners in the White House, State

Department and wartime agencies like the PWD had taken Lasswell’s assertion to heart and were

well aware of the post-war requirements and social dynamics that their propaganda machine might

be used to reinforce. “Endless desire. Endless demand. Endless growth. The Americanization of the

world. It was unlimited,” suggests Blanche Wiesen Cook in her brief account of C.D. Jackson’s career.

For Jackson, ‘black-ops’, disinformation and propaganda was “the frontier of the minds, the

hearts, the lives of the two billion people who inhabit the world.” Enterprise America meant

liberation in his terms, continued Wiesen Cook. “It meant infinite opportunity, and unlimited

psychological warfare.”42 Jackson reinforced this opinion in a speech in Detroit after the war.

Stressing the need for an alliance between government and business, he emphasized how important

businessmen were to the running of America’s international economy. The government’s part in all

this was to create the diplomatic and foreign policy conditions for business to thrive and prosper

abroad, he explained.43

In 1945 as the war reached its climax, certain OWI members had a post-war vision too, but it

wasn’t Jackson’s business-of-America-is-business model - psychological warfare through capitalism -

that he touted vociferously in the years following and put into practice at the Johns Hopkins School

for Advanced International Studies where future “consuls for democracy” were trained with

diplomatic and business skills in mind.44 For Riskin and others, the goal was to build a world of

persuasively peaceful American ideals. No wonder then that politically, diplomatically and tactically,

the OWI struggled to hold with these principles throughout the war in the competitive world of

Washington politics and inter-service military rivalries. Struggling most with the definitive aim of

19

winning the war whatever the cost, the ideological and philosophical compromises that were

needed came at a price for many. Only “grudgingly [did] the leaders of OWI begin to shift” towards

this reality as the conflict wore on, explains Allan Winkler.45

Lilly continued working on a preliminary draft of his OWI history in the spring of 1945. He

met again with Riskin and Louis Lober. The notes from these meetings made Riskin once more a

rather querulous figure. Lilly strangely quotes him as saying the history was proceeding along the

“correct lines” and yet reports Riskin wondering aloud why the Domestic Branch garners attention

ahead of the OB and the MPU. Lober is couched as a moderating figure attempting to placate Riskin

by urging him to take a draft of the work and re-write it. Riskin denies he has time to do such a thing

and in making his excuses wondered no doubt why he should spend any time on a project that was

never his in any case. In other parts of the transcript Riskin’s alleged mistakes again crop up, notably

Kastner’s contention that the production operation should have been a commercial venture;

something Riskin had strongly and successfully resisted.46

Kastner’s further comments to Lilly identified an agency that was far more closely tied to

military intelligence and spying than the OWI’s leaders might have realized or felt comfortable with.

They suggested a military infiltration that was deeply ingrained therefore and already plotting to

dismantle the OWI’s remaining civilian credibility as the war ended.

Lilly’s summary rehashed the ‘failings’ of the MPU and wider OWI, his testimony selective,

the achievements all but ignored. It was as though Riskin was deemed blind to the difficulties at

hand, though he wasn’t. In letters home to his wife Fay Wray Riskin rarely failed to gloss over the

issues of the MPU within the OWI’s network. “There are forces pulling in many directions,” he wrote

from London in 1943. “I find myself exposed to such a variety of views and conflicting information, it

is difficult to clearly appraise the situation.”47 But appraise it he did, and the path he plotted through

the governmental pressures and artistic countenances garnered praise and glowing endorsements

that Lilly’s report never mentioned.

20

T.L. Barnard (Assistant Executive Director of the Overseas Branch of the Motion Picture

Bureau) wrote to Riskin on May 15, 1945, highlighting a letter he had received, via Edward Barrett,

from President Roosevelt himself. FDR’s memo, dated October 11, 1944, praised three of the

‘Projections’ films - Hymn of the Nations (featuring Arturo Toscanini), Valley of the Tennessee and

the Autobiography of a Jeep - commenting in the process on the broad educational value of each

and the hope that they could be shown in wider circles.48 They never were; but Barnard was clear

about what such praise meant. “If anybody leaves this business with a feeling of satisfaction for a

good job done, it should be you,” he asserted.49 The endorsement was never mentioned by Lilly and

nor did it make it into any official documents pertaining to the OWI’s work.

When Lilly and Lober met again some months later Lilly’s notes did at least record his

interviewee’s insistence that outside contractors as suggested by Kastner could not have done the

job that Riskin’s film unit did in its two-and-a-half year existence. Indeed Lilly had to acknowledge

the fact that Hollywood had been given a couple of assignments to make documentaries in the vein

of ‘Projections of America’ and nothing was ever finished, the complete antithesis of the Motion

Picture Unit’s stripped down, efficient production process.50 The MPU had created a clockwork

operation with philosophical heart. But it was never going to see the light of day in the new world

order.

Conclusion

Edward Lilly’s history of the OWI was never meant to be a pro-active evaluation; there was

no overt mandate to support the agency’s continuance, let alone champion a sub-sect like the MPU.

But nor was it expected to be an active re-write of the whole MPU/OWI story, to the detriment of

those involved. Yet this latter path was exactly the course pursued in the spring of 1945.

Lilly’s eventual report emphasized the OWI’s ‘blind spot’. Winning the war at whatever cost

took time to percolate down into the minds of some OWI personnel, though Riskin – who had seen

21

the Blitz first-hand in London, and who had travelled through wrecked towns and cities in Belgium

and The Netherlands seeking out government personnel even while places lay in ruins and bodies

rotted on the streets – was hardly that naïve. He understood the OWI mandate the moment he

joined. A memo from Irving Jacoby (head of OWI’s European Operations) to Riskin as early as

December 1942 cited three important criteria for the movies, the top one of which read ‘victory for

the United States and its Allies – “Indoctrination”’.51 The message was unequivocal; end the war

quickly and convince people of the Allies’ intentions and philosophy. Riskin didn’t cling to some

idealistic vision of the purity of documentary therefore, that he thought would somehow finally

prevail, and certainly not in the way Lilly seemed to suggest.

Lilly’s agenda – underscored and encouraged by the activities of Jackson and McClure – was

simply more calculating than the small matter of a few pointed remarks bemoaning the

organizational endeavours of the Overseas Bureau. His history was arguably the tip of a considerable

iceberg shifting the flow and momentum of propagandistic philosophy from civilian to military

jurisdiction as the war ended, and at the forefront of efforts, well under way in the last year of the

war, to undermine the agency’s brief past and thus demolish its future prospects. The MPU could

have consolidated American liberty and unity at home for the challenges to come, much as it

provided a template of American life upon which liberated peoples came to judge US society. That

so few of the American public ever got to see a series like ‘Projections of America’ though – which

was shown almost exclusively to liberated peoples abroad – only underscores the suspicion that

hard-line propaganda exponents needed to pre-empt the picture of freedom, justice and

accountability being screened and not show such films at home for fear that they would be seen as

weak and vacillating in the post-war environment.

Ironically enough two of the ‘Projections’ films won Academy Awards (Toscanini [as Hymn of

the Nations became known] in 1944 and Library of Congress in 1945, both in the Short Documentary

category. Hugely acclaimed by the select group of critics that saw them, military and governmental

22

apparatchiks nevertheless systematically tore the series apart after the war, ideologically, but also

physically by locating so few of the films together in the archives.52

Propaganda rhetoric became more inured to sensitivity, and demonstrable psychological

warfare quickly became the order of the day after 1945. Men like Edward Lilly, C.D. Jackson and

Robert McClure, their tactical influence battle-hardened by war, their opinions increasingly holding

sway in the corridors of power, were the figures who decided that the American century needed

defining. And definition for them came not from the hopeful and progressive reasoning at the heart

of the MPU and their ‘Projections’ films, but from constructing unrelenting propaganda power, and

grasping the possibilities for American influence that spread out across the Cold War world over the

next fifty years.

1I would like to thank Antje Boehmert for all her help and encouragement in the research and writing of this

article.

Endnotes

For an extended assessment of the genesis of OWI vis-à-vis its relationship to other agencies, see chapters five

and six, Clayton Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade against Nazi Germany (Lawrence:

University of Kansas Press, 1996), 88-127; Alan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War

Information 1942-45 (London: Yale University Press, 1978), 8-37; Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Films

(New York: Hastings House, 1973), 123-28.

2 MacCann’s work was originally written in the 1950s but wasn’t published until 1977. Richard Dyer MacCann,

The People’s Films, 118.

3 Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 9-18.

4 Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Propaganda and Profit Shaped World

War II Movies (London: University of California Press,, 2000); Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood,

American Culture and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

5 Jeffrey Geiger, American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2011), 121-53.

6 Nicholas Evans Sarantakes, “Word Warriors: Information Operations During World War II”, Mismanaging

Mayhem: How Washington Responds to Crisis, James Jay Carafano and Richard Weitz, eds, (Westport 2008), 40

7 Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 70. See also; Ian Scott, In Capra’s Shadow: The Life and Career of

Screenwriter Robert Riskin (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 170.

8 John Allen Stern, C.D. Jackson, Cold War Propagandist for Democracy and Globalism (Lanham: University Press of

America, 2012), 33.

9 Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 187. See also memo, Morgan to Undersecretary of State, 10 May 1944, Box

20, Entry 87, RG331; Thompson Overseas Information, 102-03; and History of PWD, 6-7.

10 Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 126.

11 Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 188.

12 Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 104-05.

13 Diana West, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013),

115-16.

14 Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 106.

15 Harriet Hyman Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2008), 258-59.

16 Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 122.

17 David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

(New York: Harper, 2015), 215.

18 Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: St.

Martins Griffin, 2013), 182-3.

19 Blanche Wiesen Cook, ‘First Comes the Lie: C.D. Jackson and Political Warfare’, Radical History Review, 31

(1984), 44.

20 Jackson to Louis Galentiere, Jan 3rd, 1945, C.D. Jackson Papers, Eisenhower Presidential Library, Box 11:  OWI-

USA--Paris (1)

21 Daily News, May 8th, 1944 “OWI Films follow Troops into Europe” Box 4:13, No. 11, Riskin Papers, Fay Wray

Collection, University of Southern California.

22 Memo Louis Lober, Sept 6th to C.W. Riegel, OWI offices West 45th St NYC, 4:13 12, Riskin Papers.

23 Daily News, May 8th, 1944 “OWI Films follow Troops into Europe Box 4:13, No. 11, Riskin Papers.

24 As part of a further series of showings, an OMPB Report 1/1945 states that: “Cantania: THE GREAT DICTATOR

played from November 8 to November 17 at the Sala Roma simultaneously with the Lo Po. 24.000 people saw

the film during this most successful run. From November 12 to November 18, 172 prints of documentaries,

including newsreels and shorts, were distributed in this area.”

25 The OWI released a series called Magazine of the Screen, a collection of very quick shorts cascaded down to

audiences on a monthly basis. MacCann, The People’s Films, 139.

26 Lilly’s notes are part aide-mémoire, part direct transcripts. How much is recollection, word-for-word

commentary, and how much ‘fitted’ Lilly’s agenda isn’t easy to determine from their reading. Transcript of

Edward Lilly interview with Robert Riskin, April 19th, 1945, OWI Record Group 208-350-71-17-03, Box 2,

Record of the Historian relating to the Overseas Branch, 1942-45 in the National Archives, College Park,

Maryland.

27 Transcript of Edward Lilly interviews with Lacy Kastner, April 18 and 23, 1945, OWI Record Group 208-350-

71-17-03, Box 2, Record of the Historian relating to the Overseas Branch, 1942-45 in the National Archives,

College Park, Maryland.

28 Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014),

278.

29 Thomas Pryor, “Our Newsreel Across the Seas”, The New York Times, May 14, 1944. In, The American Newsreel:

A Complete History, 1911-1967, 2d ed. Raymond Fielding (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 222.

30 The influential film reviewer Bosley Crowther wrote a glowing appreciation of the ‘Projections’ films in the

New York Times spring citing the “simple and unpretentious way in which the character of America is displayed.”

The Toscanini film was described as “a magnificent piece of work.” Bosley Crowther, “Speaking Up for America”,

the New York Times, May 21, 1944, X3, Box 4:13, The Riskin Papers.

31 Willard Van Dyke, Unpublished autobiography (1985) (Center for Creative Photography, University of

Arizona, Willard van Dyke Papers, AG77:10/23, 197)

32 Transcript of Edward Lilly interviews with Lacy Kastner, April 18 and 23, 1945, OWI Record Group 208-350-

71-17-03, Box 2, Record of the Historian relating to the Overseas Branch, 1942-45 in the National Archives,

College Park, Maryland.

33 “The Overseas Motion Picture Bureau of the Office of War Information, which handles the situation in all areas

save Latin America, has finally revealed to us, privately, some of the films, which the bureau has made, and

Robert Riskin, its close-lipped director, has graciously come out and talked. … It has made – and is making –

short pictures, of which “Swedes in America” [is the first] … it was made primarily for showing in Sweden with a

Swedish narration by Miss Bergman, but it should be effective in other countries, for it has what Mr. Riskin calls

an eaves-dropping method of propaganda.” Bosley Crowther, “Destination Abroad: Pictures Sent Abroad”, The

New York Times, August 29th, 1943, Box 4:13, The Riskin Papers.

34 “SWEDES IN AMERICA is readied for dubbing into Danish, Dutch, French, Flemish, German, Greek, Italian,

Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.” (Overseas Motion Picture Bureau Report Sept 19, 1943) NARA,

RG208, Box 357, Records of the Office of War Information, Overseas Branch, Bureau of Overseas Intelligence

Central Files.

35 Riskin cited attendance figures of 672,000 in Britain alone in December of 1944 that had viewed Projections

and other OWI features. ‘Plan to ‘Sell’ U.S. Proposed’, Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1945. Box 4:15, No. 16, Riskin

Papers.

36 Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the US Information Agency, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),

20.

37 Ibid., 21.

38 ‘Postwar Movie OWI Opposed in Hollywood’, New York Telegram, March 7, 1945. Box 4:15, No. 17 of the Riskin

Papers.

39 J. Michael Waller, Strategic Influence: Public Diplomacy, Counterpropaganda, and Political Warfare (Washington

D. C.: World Politics Press, 2009), 354.

40 “Should Hollywood Make Movies Designed to Influence Public Opinion?”, Town Meeting of the Air, ABC,

September 6, 1945, Box 4:15, No. 17 of the Riskin Papers.

41 Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 149.

42 Blanche Wiesen Cook, “First Comes the Lie:”, 49. Jackson is quoted from: "Who Will Win the Cold War Between

Free Enterprise and Statism?" 24 Oct. 1949 Box 83, and speech to St. Louis Advertising Club, 9 Jan. 1950, Box 43;

"The Greatest Opportunity on Earth," Fortune, Oct. 1949. C. D. Jackson Papers at the Dwight D. Eisenhower

Library, Abilene, Kansas.

43 C.D. Jackson “Who will win the Cold War between Free Enterprise and Statism”, The Economic Club of Detroit,

October 24, 1949, Box 83, C.D. Jackson Papers.

44 Stern, C.D. Jackson, 14.

45 Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 153

46 Transcript of Lilly, Lober and Riskin, April 19, 1945, OWI Record Group 208-350-71-17-03, Box 2, Record of

the Historian relating to the Overseas Branch, 1942-45 in the National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

47 Letter from Robert Riskin to Fay Wray, 1943, personal collection of Victoria Riskin.

48 Letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Edward Barrett, Director, Overseas Branch of OWI, October 11, 1944.

Personal collection of Victoria Riskin.

49 Letter from T. L. Barnard to Robert Riskin, May 15, 1945, personal collection of Victoria Riskin.

50 Transcript of Lilly’s meeting with Louis Lober, October 4th, 1945. NARA, RG 208, Box 2, Records of the Office of

War Information, Records of the Historian, Records of the Historian relating to the Overseas Branch 1942-1945,

Overseas Branch – Motion Picture Bureau

51 Memo, Irving Jacoby to Robert Riskin, December 22, 1942, personal collection of Victoria Riskin.

52 Part of the Toscanini film’s great accomplishment was to insert ‘The Internationale’ into a collage of anthems

that was edited out of later versions when the documentary was eventually released on video many years later.

Appendix 1

AFHQ.-Nov. 6th, 1944 Fascist forbidden movieshown in lberated Rome. Crowds in front of oneof the many theatres in the Italian Capital Citywhere the once forbidden movie, CharlieChaplins "The Great Dictator" was released forthousands of movie going italians to see andhear.PWB Staff Photo Serviced by RX. All points.Approved by appropriate military authority.

This is the actual text recorded in the NA files that accompanies the photograph

Ian Scott is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of American

Politics in Hollywood Film (2nd ed) Edinburgh: EUP, 2011, and In Capra’s Shadow: The Life and Career of

Screenwriter Robert Riskin Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006, amongst other works, and has written

extensively on political movies and Hollywood’s association with Washington and American political culture

more generally. His next book, A Better Tomorrow, is an critical examination of the wartime cinematic

relationship between the OWI and the British Ministry of Information