Framing the President: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Participatory Quests, and the Rhetoric of Possibility in World War II Propaganda

Authors

James Kimble Ph.D., Seton Hall UniversityFollow

Abstract

This essay examines The Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a comic book distributed internationally by the Office of War Information (OWI) in late 1942, as a creative form of international propaganda. Drawing from existing research in comic scholarship, narrative theory, and visual inquiry, this case study suggests that OWI’s booklet represented a fusion of verbal and visual appeals, which together worked to produce a potent depiction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s character traits and exceptionality. The analysis concludes that this depiction ultimately presented the president as the protagonist of a romantic quest narrative, one that actively invited foreign readers to envision an Allied victory in the ongoing war.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Kimble, James Ph.D. (2017) "Framing the President: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Participatory Quests, and the Rhetoric of Possibility in World War II Propaganda," Speaker & Gavel: Vol. 54: Iss. 1, Article 5.
Available at: https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/speaker-gavel/vol54/iss1/5