George H. Roeder Jr. (1944–2004)

In The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two, George H. Roeder, Jr. argues, “A clear understanding of how Americans experienced World War II requires attention to choices and circumstances that introduced complexity into wartime imagery, as well as to those that put limits on this complexity” (pg. 3). Further, “What Americans saw between 1941 and 1945 helped determine what type of society they shaped during and after the war” (pg. 5). Roeder examines the nature of censorship and the narrow balance government officials, the military, and the press enacted to both maintain the appearance of honesty and control the power of the narrative at any given moment in the war.
Roeder writes, “Officials put few restrictions on what pictures photographers too, assuming correctly that censors would keep objectionable material out of sight. Because they were far more likely to get in trouble for letting through a photograph they should have blocked than for restricting one they might have released, in doubtful cases censors were more likely to stop an image than let it pass” (pg. 9). He continues, “Proponents of candor offered grim photographs as an antidote to the problems of success. If in 1942 officials feared that American military setbacks would demoralize the public, in 1943 they feared that victories would lead to overconfidence” (pg. 10). Roeder argues, “Americans eventually saw more not because the government loosened control, but because it used its power to encourage a different emphasis in the visual presentation of the war. Officials made these changes in response to evolving wartime needs and circumstances, including diminished public tolerance for sanitized images of war” (pg. 25).
Roeder writes, “Visual imagery played a key role in efforts to encourage widespread participation in the war effort while minimizing concern over disruptions to the social order. Imagery often served as a substitute for, or one barrier to, more substantive changes in the distribution of opportunity within the United States. Few images sharply criticized existing discriminatory practices” (pg. 44). He continues, “Keeping disturbing sights out of view was one way to avoid arousing fears about war’s personal and social consequences. Another way was to create reassuring visual comparisons of military and home front activities” (pg. 59). Roeder asserts, “The war was the most intense collective visual experience in the nation’s history” (pg. 62).
Roeder argues, “Whatever the wisdom of the competing policies of restriction and openness, the war as presented gave many Americans an enlivened sense of purpose. Despite significant contributions to dialogue made by individual effort, free speech traditions, and the diversity of the American population, wartime imagery reinforced those aspects of the culture that encouraged thinking of international relations in simple terms of right and wrong. Because of its consequences, this encouragement of polarized ways of seeing must be calculated as one of the costs of the war” (pg. 104). Roeder further writes, “At the war’s end Eisenhower insisted that German civilians, international journalists, and bipartisan congressional delegations visit the camps to confront the results of programs designed to remove entire groupings of humanity from the face of the earth. Here was one instance where visual evidence was indispensable; only by seeing could the true but unbelievable become credible” (pg. 127). Roeder concludes, “An understanding of the war grounded in study of the experiences it engendered cannot fail to recognize its complexity. I have argued in this book that wartime visual imagery understated this complexity” (pg. 155).… (mehr)