Scope and Content Note
The papers of Henry Fowler Pringle (1917-1958) span the years 1932-1957, with the bulk of the items concentrated in the period 1939-1946. Consisting of personal and official correspondence, reports, minutes, lists, research data, and print and near-print material, the collection focuses on government morale work during World War II and Pringle’s biography of William H. Taft. The papers are organized into Correspondence and Subject File series.
A journalist and historian best known for his books on Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, Pringle kept most of the records from these and other writing projects separate from this collection. The major exception is a small amount of correspondence and research material pertaining to the Taft biography. Included are typed copies of original Taft correspondence, letters to and from Val R. Lorwin, Pringle’s researcher at the Library of Congress, plus noteworthy responses from the former president’s associates to the final manuscript or published edition of The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (1939). Prominent among the respondents were Robert A. Taft, Horace Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, Harold L. Ickes and William Allen White. A letter from Robert Taft, handwritten on thirteen pages after a detailed review of the book’s galley, is especially significant because of Taft’s candid and revealing assessment of Pringle’s work. He was concerned about the impact of his father’s criticisms of political enemies who were now valued colleagues, but he was also deeply troubled about an analysis of his father’s political principles by a man whom he had come to regard as a New Dealer.
The rest of the papers deal almost solely with the Office of War Information and its predecessor agency, the Office of Facts and Figures, or with the research data Pringle collected while working as consultant to the Personal Narratives Section of the Army Air Force. The OFF-OWI materials are the official letters, memoranda, minutes, reports, and manuscripts that Pringle donated to the Library after he and a large part of his staff resigned from the information office in July 1943. Appointed chief of the Bureau of Production of the OFF in early 1942, Pringle left in a dispute over whether the emphasis in government news reporting should be on its accuracy as truth or its value as propaganda. Both the official correspondence and the subject files treat this phase of his work as well as sketching in considerable detail the plans and goals with which the OFF-OWI, under the leadership of Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, carried out their programs. Also in the Subject File are the research and writing materials from many of the OWI projects. Important topics include a controversial report on the war and African Americans, inflation, drinking in the services, and the readiness of the navy. Another set of themes involves Axis atrocity stories and the postwar aims of the United National alliance. Sensitive to the rhetoric used by propagandists to justify World War I, Pringle and his aides aimed to document as carefully as they could the goals and aims of fascist dictatorships.
Included among the many writers and journalists who worked with Pringle in the Washington office or on special assignment were Chandler Owen, W. E. B. Du Bois, E. B. White, Arthur Schlesinger (1917-2001), Martin Sommers, Milton MacKaye, and Philip Hamburger. Other names that appear in thes papers are Henry Steele Commager, Allan Nevins, Stephen Vincent Benét, Robert Shaplen, Paul Palmer, John Farrar, and William D. Hassett. The OWI worked closely with the Writers’ Board, and files on the relationship can be found interspersed in the Subject File and in the official correspondence.
Following his mid-war resignation, Pringle spent 1945-1946 as special consultant to the air force and the secretary of war. Retained in the collection are declassified items regarding Allied bombing operations and the experiences of fliers in the European theatre. Labeled “Air Force Study,” this portion of the Subject File contains transcripts of Strategic Bombing Survey interviews with captured German Chief of Staff Franz Halder. Pringle’s assignment was to participate in a special mission to gather and preserve individual narratives about the army air force “in connection w/Human Interest History.” He completed the assignment, and he wrote a memoir of the experience with observations and anecdotes about military brass such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton.
A subject heading titled Office of Scientific Research and Development concerns background material for a paper by Pringle on Vannever Bush and government-sponsored scientific research.