Auman, William R. Papers

Information Specialist, Chief of the News Branch, and Director of the Editorial Division, Office of Price Administration, 1942-1947

The papers of William R. Auman consist primarily of materials concerning Auman’s work with the Information Department of the Office of Price Administration (OPA). The materials include official correspondence, publicity materials, press releases, memoranda, newspaper articles, and quarterly reports.

Size: 1 linear foot, 9 linear inches (about 3,000 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: William R. Auman donated his copyright interest in all unpublished writings in this collection to the U.S. government. Documents created by U.S. government employees in the course of their official duties are also in the public domain. Copyright interest in other documents presumably belongs to the creators of those documents, or their heirs.
Processed by: Charles W. Orhvall (1980).
Updated by: Louise Hilton (2009) as part of the Truman Library Internship Program.
Supervising Archivists: Randy Sowell and David Clark.

The papers of William R. Auman cover the years from 1942 to 1953, but mostly date from 1942 to 1947, when Auman served as an official with the Office of Price Administration (OPA) in Washington, D.C. Most of the collection consists of press releases, official correspondence, newspaper articles, promotional pamphlets and brochures, quarterly reports, and other documents relating to the OPA’s activities (and especially to Auman’s work in the OPA’s Information Department). The collection also contains materials from Auman’s tenure as director of the Scandinavian Information Service Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 1951 to 1953, as well as a digest of newspaper editorials and columns prepared by the Office of War Information in 1945.

The collection contains three series: an Office of Price Administration File, a Subject File, and a Printed Material File. Subjects covered in the collection include the wartime and postwar economic situation in the United States, inflation, and special programs administered by the OPA, such as the Maximum Average Price Program. Also included is information on OPA Administrators Chester Bowles and Paul A. Porter, and wartime commodities, such as clothing, cotton, and meat. The primary focus of the collection is on the public information efforts of the OPA during World War II, as reflected in drafts of an official history of the OPA’s Information Department and in a variety of OPA publications.

Further information on the OPA and the wartime and postwar economic situation may be found at the Truman Library in Record Group 188 (Records of the Office of Price Administration), available on microfilm, and in Record Group 250 (Records of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion).