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Book Review
| Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II. By Gerd Horten. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xiv, 218 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-520-20783-1.)Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio. By Edward D. Miller. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. viii, 256 pp. Cloth, $59.50, ISBN 1-56639-992-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-56639-993-9.)
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| In tone, outlook, and focus, two recent entries in the burgeoning field of radio studies take two separate tacks that, between them, cover the cresting arc of the medium's hegemony, a period that dates roughly from the 1930s, when radio first spread its webbing coast to coast, to World War II, when it served as a taut lifeline for news, propaganda, entertainment, and combinations thereof. Gerd Horten, an associate professor of American history at Concordia University, adopts a straightforward historical approach; Edward D. Miller, chair of the department of media culture at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, opts for a more theoretically informed and impressionistic rumination. Both illuminate the still undervalued impact and elusive gestalt of the first true network of simultaneous mass communications in human history. |
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"No one has written a broad-based study of the role of domestic American radio during the war years" (p. 2), Horten declares at the outset of his study, a stunning declaration given the centrality of the medium to the home front experience and the propaganda agenda of the Office of War Information (OWI). Horten remedies the neglect by surveying the news, commentary, foreign-language broadcasts, comedy shows, and soap operas beamed into the living room hearth of the day. He concludes that wartime propaganda advanced a cause somewhat less altruistic than Franklin D. Roosevelt's four freedoms, namely, freedom from New Deal–style socialism. While urging wartime listeners to do their bit, radio programming also sold the notion that private enterprise, not government regulation, was the most authentic brand of Americanism, the best reason for why we fight. |
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Whatever the hidden agenda, however,
the bold-faced message was always a clarion call to hunker down
and bite the bullet. Sometimes by way of forthright pleas, sometimes
sprinkled over serial narrative and sitcom shenanigans, industrial-strength
shots of
OWI
-inspired patriotism flowed through every genre on the dial. "In
fact, during these years listeners never knew quite what to expect:
a commercial plug or a patriotic service or propaganda message"
(p. 107), Horten observes. Contrary to popular memory, grim warnings
were more the rule than blithe jingoism. "'Men are going to die—very
good men are going to die,'" the poet Stephen Vincent Benet declared
bluntly in "This Is War!" "'Our enemies aren't pushovers—they
are skillful, savage, and relentless'" (p. 46).
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Yet not all radio programming hewed to the party line. In Horten's telling, soap operas were surprisingly subversive in their relegation of aspiring home front heroines to Kinder, Kirche, and Kuchen. Rosie the Riveter may have flexed her muscles on OWI posters, but, on sudsy housewife bait such as Lonely Women and Today's Children, women who worked outside the home—even in defense plants—were apt to sabotage true love, cripple male egos, and spawn juvenile delinquents. |
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