Truth and Trouble

(See Cover)

When tranquil, white-topped Elmer Davis went to Washington last summer as the people's choice for Director of War Information, his appointment was generally hailed. When he went to Capitol Hill, to ask for funds in well-rounded sentences full of common sense, modesty and "sirs," the House Appropriations Committee was moved to a rare compliment:

"The establishment of the Office of War Information is one of the most constructive steps which has been taken toward the coordination of agencies engaged in the war effort. The selection of Mr. Davis as director is equally significant and gratifying. . . ."

But last week to Elmer Davis, as it must to all wartime officials, came pots of trouble. His ears had scarcely finished burning from attacks on the expense and political tone of Victory, the de luxe glamor magazine designed to sell the U.S. to the world as a kind of Hollywood 3,000 miles square, when his sprawling OWI issued a cartoon booklet on the life of President Roosevelt, also designed for distribution abroad. A U.S. soldier sent a copy to New York's Republican Congressman John Taber. Mr. Taber, who has a low irritation point, was moved to cry: "Purely political propaganda, designed entirely to promote a fourth term and a dictatorship. . . . How much longer are the American people going to have that kind of stuff pulled on them?"

There were dark hints of an investigation of Davis and his OWI. Virginia's tart Senator Harry S. Byrd, who has quietly been looking into OWI's wastebaskets all along, was reinvigorated. Washington news beagles were spending many precious hours tracking down the rare and fragrant rumors out of OWI, whence came smells now overripe, now sulfurous. Each day brought rumors of reorganization, employes' rump sessions, secret caucuses. Many an OWIster was quietly looking for another job. The house might not yet be afire, but it was smoking.

Propaganda's Problems. Elmer Davis, sitting on the smoking roof, was calm as ever. For the Roosevelt cartoons, whose art was more reprehensible than their message, Davis had a commonsensible explanation: the President "symbolizes the United States, both as a powerful nation and as a land of liberty and democracy. This fact is a national asset. . . . A Government information agency would be stupid not to capitalize on it. . . ."

Davis' guiding principle is that "a free people has a right to know." He tries to base propaganda on plain truth, whenever he can dig it out in Washington. But the truth is not always palatable, either at home or abroad. The Allies do not enjoy hearing of strikes, Washington bungling, domestic political quarrels--but the Axis does. Yet Davis, reared under a free press, could not and would not suppress such facts. Thus one of his big problems is to explain the U.S. satisfactorily to the world.

This is a tremendous task. A totalitarian State can speak with one voice, its master's, can marshal all its logic, force and facts into one strong propaganda line. But a democracy, by its very nature, is a land of many voices. It can have no single speaking tube; it cannot have a single propaganda line, because its only propaganda is that it has none. The U.S., as a free nation, can only propagandize its freedom--and freedom includes the right of men to dissent from their Government, to strike, to vote against it, to cry out against it. And the right of a free press is the right to print these doings as news. Such news is very often bad propaganda abroad, as well as disturbing at home.

On the home front, Davis can be no better than the Administration. On the foreign front, he can be no better than his nation's foreign policy. He has not yet made U.S. war aims sound much clearer than the foggy Atlantic Charter; he cannot be blamed for being unable to explain what the State Department is up to in North Africa.

Gentleman from Indiana. Elmer Holmes Davis, now 53, was born in Aurora, Ind., a tired little town which got along by making boxes and coffins, selling to farmers on Saturday night and keeping one eye cocked for a rise in the Ohio River. His father, the elderly, bearded president of Aurora's First National Bank, was known as the richest man in town.

Like most small-town rich boys, young Elmer grew up a little apart. His mother and aunt, former schoolteachers, started his education long before he went to school; in a town where most boys preferred swimming off the sand bars, skating on Hogan's Creek or coasting at Dutch Hollow, he was soon known as an intellectual. Oldtimers remember him as a plump youngster (from a heavy appetite for beefsteak and cake), with a large, serious head thrust inquiringly forward, a stiff-legged, determined walk, a penchant for burying his nose in a book. In baseball games he was always the scorekeeper.

Neighbors figured he might someday be an orator. One recalls: ''Even when he was a little fellow, he always liked to make speeches. When he came to play at our house, he'd climb up on a stool and declaim. He was a Baptist, but when he made those little speeches we always said he seemed a lot more like a Methodist."

Scholar from Oxford. Davis skipped quickly through Aurora's schools, went on to Indiana's Franklin College, where he picked up a nickname ("The Deacon") and every scholastic prize, got himself a Rhodes scholarship. Aurora's oldtimers, mightily impressed, still remember the day he left home for England: "He was so calm and businesslike you'd have thought he was just going up to Cincinnati."

Davis returned from Oxford with the habit of wearing his handkerchief in his sleeve. Otherwise he was unchanged: he retained his Indiana twang, a dignity Midwestern rather than British. He taught high school for a year in Indiana, went to Manhattan and a $10-a-week job with Adventure magazine, doubled his salary by moving to the New York Times.

Ten years on the Times let Davis develop his tastes. He covered the Ford peace ship, the Dempsey-Gibbons fight, the Harding arms conference, the famed Zev-Papyrus match race, wrote everything from editorials to whimsy. By 1924, when his third novel was published, he was ready to try free-lancing as a steady thing. He wrote adventure and boy-meets-girl stories for the slick-paper magazines, essays on literature, politics and realpolitik for Harper's and Saturday Review of Literature.

In the summer of 1939, with World War II only days away, Davis was at his summer home in Mystic, Conn., writing the last chapters of a mystery novel for the Saturday Evening Post. He was a respected, reasonably successful author. He had his summer home, and a winter apartment on Manhattan's Morningside Heights, a wide circle of literary and bridge-playing friends. He also had the free lancer's occupational psychosis: worry over when the well would dry up.

When CBS invited him to broadcast the news, as a fill-in for Commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, he put the mystery novel aside, hurried to Manhattan.

Voice of the Midwest. The trust of the U.S. people in Elmer Davis today is a tribute 1) to the power of radio, 2) to the power of common sense. Until he began his news broadcasts, Davis was unknown to the population at large.

At war's beginning, few men who wrote the news, and fewer still who broadcast it, could resist the purple technique of dire warnings, manic-depressive cycles, sweeping prognostications. Many a news commentator offered his audience little more than a 15-minute nervous breakdown. Not so Elmer Davis. His voice was calm, incisive, with a Hoosier twang as reassuring as Thanksgiving, as shrewd as a small-town banker. (He did not at once recognize his voice's value, offered to take speaking lessons; CBS officials fortunately knew better.) He never interpreted, colored or predicted: the grist from his mill was fact, ground fine and digestible, sieved through a faintly subacid cast of thought.

By Pearl Harbor time, Davis had 12,500,000 listeners to his five-minute news summary and a $53,000-a-year contract. His studio estimated that half of all U.S. families heard him at least once a week. When Franklin Roosevelt tied all his muddling, uncoordinated news and propaganda agencies into a single loose package last summer, Elmer Davis was the only boss that no one could have objected to.

Four-Headed Monster. The Office of War Information that Elmer took over was the dizziest of all Washington holding companies. It was a merger of four agencies which had been getting on everybody's nerves: Archibald MacLeish's Office of Facts & Figures, Lowell Mellett's Office of Government Reports, Robert Horton's information service for the Office of Emergency Management, part of Colonel William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan's Office of Coordinator of Information.

Davis took over all these agency chiefs except Donovan, who moved into the Army's mysterious Office of Strategic Services (known irreverently in Washington as "the cloak & dagger boys"). He took over some 3,000 employes, scores of jealousies and quarrels, innumerable unsolved problems of policy and procedure. One radio vice president gave up a $50,000-a-year job to join OWI, was still waiting months later to know what his duties were. Henry Paynter, onetime Hearst man, working away at his new OWI job,.was amazed when a stranger walked into his office, introduced himself as head of the United Nations news bureau. "That's interesting," said Paynter. "So am I."

Lopping the Heads. Davis, an amateur administrator, left administration to his assistants: Associate Director Milton S. Eisenhower, longtime Government career man and brother of General Dwight D. Eisenhower; Gardner Cowles Jr., onetime president of the Des Moines Register & Tribune, now head of OWI's domestic branch; gangling Robert Sherwood, playwright, collaborator on Franklin Roosevelt's speeches and head of OWI's overseas branch.

OWI is no better an organization today than it was six months ago. Its Washington offices, spilling out of the massive Social Security Building into two adjoining buildings, are full of men seemingly looking for something to do. Its main overseas office in Manhattan has 1,400 employes who do work in shifts around the clock, often put in a 72-hour week. They shortwave 2,688 radio shows a week in 20 languages, cable spot news, features, and the texts of official speeches to 20 countries. They have 21 radio transmitters, 33 "outpost" offices abroad.

OWI overseas works like this: the Basic News desk in the newsroom receives the huge flow pouring in from all news and radio services and Federal bureaus, processes it for distribution, sends it on an intermit teletype circuit to all language desks, to NBC and CBS short-wave departments. This file of stories becomes the basic news for the day.

Once a week the main branch chiefs meet in Washington to prepare the general directive, or official "line"; they sit down with representatives of the War, Navy and State Departments. This general directive is mainly responsible for the writers' headaches and heartbreaks. (A Balkan expert, for example, will suddenly find his previously acceptable copy being roughly handled: the "line" has changed.)

Algiers to Teheran. Brightest results are on the press side. The percentage of OWI news in Turkish newspapers has skyrocketed; the Anatolian News Agency in Istanbul has more than doubled its news take. Africa was very backward about U.S. news: four papers in the Union of South Africa took the United Press service; Britain's Reuters went to Cairo. That was the sum total of U.S. news going to the Dark Continent. OWI now sends news, and lots of it, to Algiers, Casablanca, Accra, Brazzaville, Leopoldville, Johannesburg, Asmara and Cairo. The news differs in treatment: that for Sweden is very "sophisticated," that for Africa "primitive." In India news about the U.S. has increased 800%--meaning that now 10% of foreign news in India is American. No one knows whether this news has any propaganda effect. It probably has little. But U.S. news, such as it is, is interesting thousands of people who never thought much about America before.

Weakest spot is short-wave radio. The transmission is often weak and reception poor. The Nazis have some 100 transmitters to the U.S.'s 21. But OWI cares more about quality of reception than quantity, in this way: from private sources OWI knows that one Norwegian underground operator will be listening in--perhaps in his basement, perhaps on a mountainside. He does not need his news "angled": he just wants the truth. When he gets the news he fans it out to others--by letters, seditious handbills, etc. With the Nazi death penalty enforced for listeners to U.S. news, OWI wants to reach those men who are prepared to run the risks of disseminating the truth (seep. 50).

As head of this organization Davis' main concern--and job--is to connect OWI with the White House, and with the people. Actually he does nothing much in particular, either way, and this is not necessarily his fault. For, speaking largely, no one has conclusively proved that OWI has fulfilled any of the purposes for which it was set up.

Davis at Work. OWI's front man, still solid and sensible, has kept his old habit and attitudes. He had trouble getting used to a secretary, often typed out his own letters in the uneven, x'ed out style that is the mark of a working newsman. One night an OWI underling, faced with an emergency call for an advance copy of a Davis speech, wandered through the dark, empty hallways into the executive offices, found a tired man in shirt sleeves picking at a typewriter with two fingers. It was Davis at work. The underling asked if he could have a copy of the speech. "Well," said Davis, "you can if you'll read it over first and tell me what you think of it. I don't like it, myself. . . ."

With his white-haired wife, Davis lives in a small apartment filled with bulging bookcases, a big typewriter desk, a battered, slipcovered easy chair. For relaxation he still plays bridge, with Russian Ambassador Maxim Litvinoff, Publisher Eugene Meyer of the Washington Post, Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones. (Meyer and Jones, bitter enemies, are never in the same foursome.)

Davis' Work. But while his Washington life is perhaps comfortable enough to Elmer Davis, the U.S. has had the bad end of the bargain. In place of a voice that nightly made things sound clear, plain, sensible and always reassuring for five warming minutes, they got an Administrator, lost in the fog of Washington.

The U.S. was glad to hear that this week Elmer Davis goes back on the air. Every Friday night henceforth he will broadcast to the people at 9:45 p.m., C.W.T. This was what the U.S. wanted: there are lots of Administrators, Czars and such in Washington, and other agencies whose muddle is like OWI's--but in all the U.S. there is only one voice on the radio with that dry, reassuring twang.

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