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180 Horton and Government PR after the Division of Information June 1942–June 1946 A bout a month after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt asked Milton Eisenhower of the USDA Office of Information to prepare a study of wartime information needs. Working closely with BOB, Eisenhower surveyed the existing defense-related PR apparatus and recommended replacing most of them (except OGR, which Roosevelt had put off-limits) with a single temporary wartime agency. Eisenhower was not a fan of Horton or his centralized model, which he called the “city-editor system.”1 When he submitted his report in late February 1942, he could have recommended that DOI become the core of a wartime information agency, but he quite overtly did not. In the meantime, attacks by congressional conservatives on PR spending increased in intensity. Several White House advisers, including Lowell Mellett, Sam Rosenman, and BOB director Harold Smith, felt the president needed to get ahead of the curve or be faced with Congress imposing a statutory war information agency on him. By March, they had prepared a draft executive order reflecting Eisenhower’s study. They submitted it to him. He let it sit on his desk. He wasn’t ready to make a decision. The Denouement of the Division of Information It was the worst-kept secret in Washington. Rumors began circulating and were reported in the press as early as March that Roosevelt was on the verge of reorganizing the information agencies into one.2 Press accounts of the justaround -the-corner event continued all spring.3 The openness of the rumors chapter 8 181 Horton and Government PR after the Division of Information served FDR well. It had the effect of somewhat tamping down congressional and press criticism of government PR, given that a major reorganization was apparently imminent. In the meantime, the president didn’t actually have to take any action. But the rumors didn’t totally eliminate press and legislative criticism of federal PR. The blowout battle over the construction of OGR’s US Information Center on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House tipped the political scales, even though Roosevelt got his way in launching it. (Critics dubbed it “Mellett’s Madhouse,” and the term stuck.) The president knew he had to act, but he continued dithering.4 Partly, he was waiting until he found the right candidate to head the new agency. He also wanted to wait until the FY1943 appropriations for existing information agencies were largely in place, so as not to give Congress a chance to zero out funding for information activities before a new agency would come into existence. He wanted Congress to face the fait accompli of a new agency with all funding transferred from the old ones before it began the next appropriations cycle. Finally, he wanted to be sure the US Information Center was up and running first. It opened on May 4, 1942. This all made for a demoralizing work environment. Horton and the DOI staff knew they were on the chopping block, but they didn’t know when the changes would occur or what exactly would change. The uncertainty extended for an agonizingly long time. In late May (nearly three weeks before the executive order was eventually signed), Horton called a highly unusual staff meeting for all headquarters personnel. His terse memo notifying them of the meeting made it clear that attendance was not optional: “All employees of the division are expected to be present.”5 Only the auditorium at DOI’s office building was big enough for such a large number of people. This was no intimate meeting. Horton would have filled them in on what he knew (not a lot), assured them that whatever happened, their jobs were most likely to continue unchanged (partly because of their CSC status, partly because the new entity would need them), and asked that they keep concentrating on doing to the utmost their current projects because the need was as valid then as on any other day of the war. Horton wanted the job, but probably knew he was unlikely to get it. Roosevelt was authentically undecided about who would get it until nearly the end. A journalist’s assessment, published in fall of 1942, noted that “jockeying for key propaganda jobs has consumed a scandalous amount of time.”6 According to an academic account issued in February 1943, “It was obvious that 182 Promoting the War Effort there was not room in Washington for the three super-information agencies such...

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