Archibald Macleish’s Air Raid: Interventionist Drama and the Gendering of American Radio

Scholarship on Archibald MacLeish’s Air Raid (1938) has focused on the play’s warnings about destructive military technology and fascist aggression. This article takes a new approach, focusing on the play’s self-conscious scrutiny of American radio. In the play, MacLeish advocates for an actively interventionist radio. But the play also registers a set of anxieties about the medium’s fitness for this task, due to concerns about media ownership and, especially, about the gendered nature of the American mass audience. Air Raid reflects contemporary stereotypes that associated American radio’s more frivolous content with its supposedly feminine, passive listenership. The play also, however, envisions a more actively engaged listenership in tune with MacLeish’s conception of (implicitly masculine) public service. Through close reading of the play and exploration of historical debates about radio, this essay reveals the complex intersections of war, gender, class, and technology brought about at a time of intense technological, social, and political change.