Book Review

Canada and the United States

During World War II, the United States government abandoned the attempt to control radio broadcasts directly and encouraged radio stations, radio personalities, and advertisers to pursue their own versions of war patriotism. By withdrawing from the direct production of propaganda and limiting itself to providing suggestions and a measure of control, the U.S. government encouraged the privatization of public discourse by corporate sponsors and radio stations.

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The first three chapters of Gerd Horten's book document the government's efforts at direct involvement in the production of radio propaganda from the mid-1930s to 1943. The Roosevelt administration made several attempts at using radio programs to explain New Deal efforts, but even before the U.S. entry into the war, Roosevelt had chosen to tone down governmental radio propaganda. According to Horten, radio's interventionist position before Pearl Harbor was due less to Roosevelt's direct pressures than to the passionate anti-Axis internationalism of radio personalities like H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow. In the first years of the war, government agencies tried to steer radio toward what they considered to be the correct war goals and resumed production of their own programs. This strategy had mixed results. Radio stations agreed to broadcast noncommercial government propaganda and in many cases removed from the air ethnic commentators that the government deemed unpatriotic or pro-Axis. Yet the limited popularity of these broadcasts contributed to relegate government programs to the "leftover" air times. Roosevelt's political opponents were also adamantly opposed to these activities, and the public was suspicious of government's intervention after the excesses of the Creel Committee during World War I.

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