“A Breath from Home”: Soldier Entertainment and the Nationalist Politics of Pop Culture during World War II

During World War II, USO Camp Shows provided entertainment to American soldiers to boost morale and depict the home for which the troops were fighting. This article uses this under-explored cultural formation to analyze the nationalist politics of popular culture during World War II. Recovering the production, censorship, content, and reception of the shows reveals that they were a centralized site for the construction of a particular vision of American national belonging during the war—a vision that was particular in its gender politics, in its racial politics, and in its vision of apolitical consensus. Beyond what the Camp Shows can tell us about the nationalism of the war effort, they also shed new light on the mid-century history of popular culture—for Camp Shows administrators marginalized the radical popular culture of the 1930s, and helped to produce the ostensibly apolitical mass culture of the postwar decades.