Considerable attention has been paid to the 1950s Red Scare, McCarthy, and the notorious Hollywood Blacklist. But almost nobody is aware of a liberal censorship regime that was in place just a few years earlier. In 1942, President Roosevelt consolidated several government propaganda agencies into a single hub, the Office of War Information (OWI). OWI enjoyed huge power over what Americans saw in movie theaters. OWI head Elmer Davis said: “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize they’re being propagandized.” Staffed almost exclusively by progressive New Dealers, the agency reviewed 1,652 film scripts, and “encouraged” the revision or excision of any material that it found portrayed the United States in a negative light, including material that presented Americans as “oblivious to the war or anti-war.” Over time it emerged through intelligence intercepts and the admission of Davis himself that many employees of the OWI were Communist sympathizers or outright Soviet agents.
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