Southington, 1942. Congress Barred This Office From Publishing for Americans.

A schoolyard in Connecticut, May of nineteen forty-two. The government paid for this picture, and not for Americans to see.

Half of these children are of Polish descent and half of Italian. Their government's caption says so.

Fourteen months later, Congress made it unlawful for the office that owned this photograph to publish anything at all for the American public.

The town is Southington, Connecticut. The photographer was Fenno Jacobs, and he worked there for eight days at the end of May. The caption for this one points out a single building — the office of the Southington News.

The series has a title, and the title is the argument. An American town and its way of life.

The Memorial Day parade coming down the main street, the town hall on the left. The caption explains the thin crowd. The small number of spectators is accounted for by the fact that the town's war factories did not close.

A tractor and harrow on a ploughed field. Farm owned by James Pompey, who twenty years ago came from Italy on the advice of a brother. People of Finnish, Slav, German and Polish extraction help him to farm it.

Five nationalities in one caption. The next man gets a whole life. Nick Grillo dreamed of America when he was a boy in Italy. He saved enough money for boat passage to this country. Today, after twenty-two years, he is developer of the famous Thornless Rose.

Then a portrait against a blue sky, and a caption of one line — a farmer who came from Germany forty years ago, Gus Worke.

Jacobs made that portrait twice. Six of the ten colour captions from this town name a country somebody came from. In May of nineteen forty-two, Italy and Germany were the enemy, and Poland was occupied.

Two weeks after he finished, on the thirteenth of June, the President signed the order that created the Office of War Information. It opens with a sentence about who is owed the truth. In recognition of the right of the American people, and of all other peoples opposing the Axis aggressors, to be truthfully informed about the common war effort.

Paragraph one folds four organisations into the new office. The last of them hands over the pictures — the Publications and Pictorial Branches of the Coordinator of Information.

And paragraph four says who the work is for, in five words. An informed and intelligent understanding, at home and abroad.

A year on. June, nineteen forty-three, an airfield at Bar Harbor, Maine, and a different photographer — John Collier. Men in a line with their arms out, dressing the ranks, under the wing of a yellow aeroplane.

He exposed it again a few minutes later, in warmer light. The Library's caption for both is six words. Civil Air Patrol Base, Bar Harbor, Maine.

What the Civil Air Patrol was is in the government's own manual. Established by Administrative Order nine, of December the eighth, nineteen forty-one — the day after Pearl Harbor. To enlist, organize and operate a volunteer corps of civilian airmen, with their own aircraft and equipment, for wartime tasks.

The sentence finishes on the next page. Executive Order nine three three nine, of the twenty-ninth of April, nineteen forty-three, transferred the Civil Air Patrol to the War Department, to be operated as an auxiliary of the Army Air Forces. Collier arrived inside two months of that.

Their own aircraft. A light plane painted yellow, cowling open, a man in coveralls with one hand on the propeller blade.

A white triangle on the side with a number in it. Forty.

A man in an officer's cap in the open door, both hands on the wheel, somebody else in the shadow behind him.

Two men on a stepladder at an engine, between a blue machine numbered thirty-three and a red one numbered thirty.

The hangar, in timber, with the wing of something much bigger overhead and the little ones parked under it.

Collier liked shooting out from under a wing. A man at the strut of the red machine, and the field beyond him.

The Library's caption for that one is the same six words. So is the next.

Thirteen of the twenty colour frames from this base carry that identical line and nothing else. But Collier also worked the base in black and white, and the Library holds three hundred and thirty-seven of those. Set them beside the colour ones and the middle black-and-white caption runs a hundred and forty-four characters against forty. Here is what they say.

Dawn patrol at breakfast at three a.m. before taking off. Dawn patrol warming up in the canteen before taking off at four a.m.

Classes in submarine detection and shipping identification are held each morning after dawn patrol.

A flyer in an all-rubber crash suit testing the use of a rubber boat, which he is extracting from its bag.

Pilot checking his safety equipment with an intelligence officer. The object in his hand is a plug to screw into bullet holes in the rubber boat.

The base has three women on the staff who hold ranking positions in administrative and intelligence units.

An evening in the luxurious summer home rented by four of the flyers for very little, in the now deserted Bar Harbor summer colony.

Those captions name people. Major James B. King, the base commander. Lieutenant Day, the intelligence officer. Alfred Speckman, a flyer, in his rubber crash suit. Not one of the twenty colour frames names anybody.

Collier left Maine, went west into the mountains, and very nearly stopped photographing people at all.

White Mountains National Forest, New Hampshire. That is the entire caption, and it is used twice.

One person is named in all forty-one of the frames Collier made on this trip, and she is not in any of them. A view looking through the White Mountains from the fire control tower manned by Barbara Mortensen, a fire and airplane lookout on Pine Mountain.

Looking northeast from the same tower. What is in the picture is her job — the country she was paid to watch, for smoke and for aircraft.

And looking south.

Then farmland, for the rest of the trip. Five frames carry the identical caption: farmland along the upper Delaware River in New York state.

Hay ground, the river behind it, blue hills behind that.

Farmland in the Catskill country.

Farmland in the Catskill Mountains, Richmondsville, New York.

The same hills a few paces along, the farms down on the valley floor.

Farmland in the Taconic range, near the Hudson River Valley. A split-rail fence, a strip of corn, a line of trees at the top of the rise.

And the same fence again, from a few feet to the left.

A field of daisies and orange flowers in Vermont. The Library is not sure what the orange ones are. The caption says: possibly hawkweed.

A farm at Bethel, Vermont.

There are sixteen hundred and sixteen colour frames in this file, made over four years. Thirty-nine of them are dated June nineteen forty-three. Only four carry a later month than that, and three of the four are Collier's, from the following July. This is one of them.

On the twelfth of July, nineteen forty-three, the National War Agencies Appropriation Act became law. Page five hundred and thirty-one is the Office of War Information.

The money buys the acquisition, production and free distribution of publications, phonograph records, radio transcriptions, motion-picture films, photographs and pictures, educational materials.

And the sale or rental of such items, by contract or otherwise, to firms or individuals — for use outside the continental limits of the United States.

The appropriation is thirty-three million, two hundred and twenty-two thousand, five hundred and four dollars. Not more than twenty-four million of it to the Overseas Operations Branch. Not more than two million, seven hundred and fifty thousand to the Domestic Operations Branch — and then four words. For the following functions only.

Six functions. The Office of the Director, with its book and magazine sections. Program Coordination. The News Bureau. The Bureau of Special Services. The Radio Bureau. The Motion Picture Bureau, not exceeding fifty thousand dollars.

And half a million dollars for accumulated leave of eliminated employees, and for liquidation of organization units herewith reduced or discontinued.

Then the sentence. No part of this or any other appropriation shall be expended by the Office of War Information for the preparation, or publication of any pamphlet or other literature for distribution to the public within the United States.

The appropriation shall constitute the total amount available to the agency, and shall not be supplemented by funds from any source. There was to be no working around it.

Two years later the government printed a plain description of the half that survived. The Overseas Operations Branch plans and executes the wartime information and propaganda activities of the United States Government, in all countries outside the continental limits of the United States.

Six purposes, numbered. Undermine the enemy's morale and will to fight. Strengthen the resistance of the peoples of enemy-occupied territories. Create friendlier relations with the peoples of areas where our forces are stationed. Inform other nations of the part the United States is playing in the war. Convince neutral nations that a United Nations victory is inevitable and desirable.

One of its divisions was the Picture Division. It sends news photos, radiophotos, microfilms, filmstrips and picture exhibits.

And at the back of the same volume, in the list of what the office publishes, one line of small type. Note: publications of the Overseas Branch are not distributed in this country.

Southington is said, locally, to have ended up in a booklet dropped over occupied Europe. No federal record read for this film says that happened, so this film does not say it.

What the record does say is where the negatives went. The Librarian of Congress, reporting on the year that ended in June nineteen forty-four. Mention must be made of the establishment of the Library of Congress Photograph Section, under the direction of Paul Vanderbilt, with offices in the Auditor's Building at Fourteenth Street and Constitution Avenue.

Copies from the photographic negatives in this former O.W.I. collection are in frequent demand. And commencing in February nineteen forty-four, prints for sale from these negatives were made in the Photoduplication Service Laboratory.

Seven months after Congress ruled that this office could not print a pamphlet for an American, the pictures were in a federal building on Constitution Avenue, and anybody could buy one.

They are still there, and the Library gives them away now, at full size, to anyone who asks. Wheat in Pennsylvania, July of nineteen forty-three — one of only four frames in the whole colour file dated later than that June. If you know this country, or the aeroplanes, or the faces in the schoolyard, the comments are the place to say so.