Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest

Introduction: Utopian Dreams

introduction Utopian Dreams It was the spring of 1945,so the story goes, and Edward R. Murrow was holding court among a group of his colleagues in war-ravaged Europe. During World War II, radio journalism had come into its own. Murrow had become internationally renowned during the German Blitz against London prior to America’s entry into the war. According to the poet Archibald MacLeish , Murrow’s CBS radio dispatches had demolished in Americans’ minds “‘the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are not violence and lies and murder here.’”1 Murrow had continued to inform his fellow citizens about Nazi brutality, most recently via a graphic radio report about the Buchenwald concentration camp: “If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.”2 During the same period, he had helped assemble a celebrated group of reporters for CBS, the so-called Murrow Boys, most of whom were indeed men—Eric Sevareid, William Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, and others . Some from among that group were in the room with Murrow now, all of whom “had made the antifascist cause their own, buoyed by a sense of unity at home,” as one of Murrow’s biographers later put it.3 Also in the room was Robert Lewis Shayon, one of several radio writers and directors who had helped bolster that sense of unity. Shayon said that the Depression had made him and others “sensitive and sympathetic to justice, social ‘causes,’ and reform.”4 That sensitivity had carried over to the war, during which he and his peers produced programs vilifying the enemy abroad while warning against injustice at home. Norman Corwin had helped lead the way by airing installments of the series An American in England live via shortwave from London. Shayon had come to Europe as part of a War Department–sponsored tour giving other radio dramatists firsthand knowledge of how the battle was progressing. Among those accompanying him was William Robson, the author of the CBS program Open Letter on Race Hatred, which had blisteringly criticized the conditions that triggered a deadly wartime riot in Detroit.5 Now the war was ending, and Shayon listened as Murrow extolled his assembled colleagues in Europe to carry on the good fight back home: “‘We’ve seen what radio can do for the nation in war. Now let’s go back to show what we can do in peace!’”6 This book is the story of what happened next. Journalists joined dramatists in using radio to try to remake America and the world for the better. Murrow helped form the CBS Documentary Unit with Shayon as a member, and similar efforts developed at the other networks. They produced programs advocating action on everything from juvenile delinquency, slums, and race relations to venereal disease, atomic energy, and arms control. For a time, their efforts were encouraged by the commercial broadcasting industry, which was under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to demonstrate that it was truly serving the public interest. The head of the CBS Documentary Unit, Robert Heller, hailed the emergence of “a virtual Utopia for craftsmen who believe in radio’s usefulness as a social force.”7 By 1951, that “utopia” had evaporated as radio gave way to television, the war against fascism gave way to the cold war against communism, and many of radio’s most acclaimed “craftsmen”—including Heller, Shayon, Corwin, and Robson—landed in the pages of the red-baiting publication Red Channels, their careers never to be the same again. Interpretive Framework The media landscape underwent an extraordinary transformation between 1945and 1951.As one account has put it, “[A] small radio system dominated by four networks” was replaced by “a far larger AM-FM radio and television system in which networks concentrated on television and left radio stations to their own programming resources.”8 Ambitious radio programming endeavors launched immediately after the war were largely abandoned six years later. Edward R. Murrow, the great champion of radio and skeptic of television, moved to the new medium as of November 1951with See It Now, marking the end of an era. In the interim, American audio documentary would enjoy a brief heyday that vividly reflected the social and cultural climate of the times. That heyday 2 . introduction has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Writing in 1965...