The Sounds of the Early Cold War

Though compact, the period from 1945 to 1951 was a significant and transformative one in United States history. Having won a two-front war that enjoyed massive public support, Americans were filled with optimism about the future. Domestically, many finally and resoundingly put the Great Depression behind them. Internationally, American capital and energy were helping to rebuild Europe. This optimistic mood, however, was tempered by unease at home about such matters as juvenile delinquency, civil rights, and the specter of communist subversion. Internationally, concerns about communism and the Soviet Union motivated American policymakers to adopt the strategy of containment, and, with the Truman Doctrine in 1947, the United States began what would be a long process of funding anticommunist forces around the world. Tensions about communism were amplified when the Soviets successfully detonated an atomic bomb in August 1949, ending the period in which the United States was the world’s only nuclear power and raising the stakes of geopolitical conflict with the Soviet Union. The following year, the United States engaged in a major military conflict again with the Korean War, and Joseph R. McCarthy gave the speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that would propel him to national prominence as an anticommunist crusader. Post–World War II American optimism was always balanced by a sense of anxiety, and ultimately the celebratory mood was short-lived.

The institutions of the American mass media had significant effects on American public life during this brief period, but in ways that are not always appreciated by historians who are not specialists in media history. For many historians, the concepts of “television” and “post–World War II” are coincident. This, however, was not the case. Americans did begin to purchase television sets in great numbers after World War II, but it was only in the 1950s that it became the mass phenomenon that historians often take it to be for the entire postwar period. As media historian Thomas Doherty remarks, “in 1949 television was a luxurious indulgence in one of out of ten American homes; in 1959, television was essential furniture in nine out of ten American homes.”¹ Between 1945 and 1951, radio remained the dominant broadcast medium in American life, and as Americans acculturated themselves to the domestic and international effects of the Cold War, many did so through a media landscape that was mostly the same as the one before and during World War II.

Matthew Ehrlich’s fascinating book focuses on the radio programs that Americans listened to during this brief but highly significant period. Ehrlich elegantly analyzes the aspirations and constraints that shaped the production of postwar audio documentaries, and he suggests how the evolution of the program form fit within broader cultural trends of the period. The audio documentary “texts” that form the basis of the book have been neglected by historians; by demonstrating the significance of these programs in the immediate post–World War II period, Ehrlich makes a novel contribution to the history of radio broadcasting and, more importantly, to our understandings of the cultural history of the United States as the Cold War began.

World War II was a watershed moment for radio journalism. Having attracted some on-air talent and developed some of the basic practices of news broadcasting by the mid-1930s, the networks used the voracious public appetite for reports from Europe starting later in the decade to make themselves into indispensable parts of American life. Americans wanted radio to bring them immediate reports of what was happening in Europe, and they came to trust the networks and their broadcast journalists’ abilities to do that. As the war ended, news broadcasters faced the challenge of maintaining the public’s relentless desire for news during peacetime. Ehrlich’s book narrates “the story of what happened next” (p. 2) and focuses on broadcasters engaged in “using radio to try to remake America and the world for the better” (p. 2). Among journalists and network executives...