Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist (review)

Words at War explores popular radio entertainment in the context of larger political events in the 1940s. Howard Blue shows that one cannot underestimate the importance of this medium in framing the world situation for Americans sitting by their radios each night. Blue makes a convincing case that radio dramas can be seen as historical texts with meaning beyond momentary escapism during World War II. Although he adds many new details, he primarily confirms existing literature on the subject.

As was done with the wartime motion picture industry, the Office of War Information brought official messages to the public via a medium the government could not control. Radio dramatists sometimes pushed their own agendas, guided by the conviction that Americans should draw links between Adolf Hitler's fascism and discrimination at home. Idealistic and progressive radio dramatists saw the war as an opportunity to attack a litany of social ills and ultimately to realize democratic ideals after the fighting ended. Programs encouraged patriotic participation but also attacked colonialism abroad and racism at home. Shows boosted morale but also depicted the harmful byproducts of war, such as tales of emotionally broken veterans returning home. On many occasions, network and military censors curbed such messages, but dramatists also compromised for the sake of a united war effort. Blue explains that social commentaries faded from the airwaves in the last year of the fighting as the Soviet Union shifted from a wartime ally to a Cold War enemy.

The book supports the view that the mass media are a forum in which many competing forces—government, business, the military, artists, and the public—seek to exert power. In this regard, Blue adds little new. Perhaps the greatest strengths of the book derive from the impressive compilation of interviews and the use of rich archival collections. Although the book is substantive and authoritative in many ways, several lingering questions suggest that it is not the definitive work on the subject.

Blue has written a good organizational history when no tangible organization existed. These individuals merely "shared a common set of concerns with each other and with a broad array of people in the arts, education, the labor movement, and various other fields" (p. 12). He eschews the use of the term Popular Front, but it is unclear why he should not anchor his subjects to that available mooring. By tracing the scripts and activities of an exclusive group of seventeen influential dramatists and actors, Blue inevitably must rely on awkward labels to identify their collective ideology: "progressive" (p. 21), "left-wing" (p. 40), and "the liberal and somewhat populous end of the political spectrum" (p. 66). Presumably this is to distinguish them from radicals, socialists, and Communists, but these terms certainly applied to some of his subjects—Arthur Miller, Langston Hughes, and Will Geerand—and not to others such as Orson Welles and Fredric March. Deep divisions between liberals, progressives, and radicals are glossed over here. They "developed a pro-union, antifascist, internationalist-minded, and racially tolerant orientation that sought to create social and political change" (p. 12) via the mass media. Given those qualities, the influential publishing magnate Henry Luce almost fits the description, but surely he was not "left-wing." A book focusing on ideology-laden popular culture should provide some clear definitions here.

Blue deftly avoids the trap of expressing boundless admiration for the protagonists without taking account of the wartime environment in which they worked. He reminds readers of the difficulty of promoting democratic principles during wartime, even when one may sympathize ultimately with the plight of those who try. To his credit, Blue shows the formidable obstacles that prevented even the most determined progressives from promoting favored themes such as civil rights and unionism. Many Jewish dramatists were more successful at criticizing generic fascism abroad than they were at spotlighting the Holocaust or domestic anti-Semitism. Dramatists softened their...