Radio Utopia

Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest

Matthew C. Ehrlich

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780252083112, 9780252036118
• eBook ISBN: 9780252093005
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

As World War II drew to a close and radio news was popularized through overseas broadcasting, journalists and dramatists began to build upon the unprecedented success of war reporting on the radio by creating audio documentaries. Focusing particularly on the work of radio luminaries such as Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly, Norman Corwin, and Erik Barnouw, Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest traces this crucial phase in American radio history, significant not only for its timing immediately before television, but also because it bridges the gap between the end of the World Wars and the beginning of the Cold War.

 

Matthew C. Ehrlich closely examines the production of audio documentaries disseminated by major American commercial broadcast networks CBS, NBC, and ABC from 1945 to 1951. Audio documentary programs educated Americans about juvenile delinquency, slums, race relations, venereal disease, atomic energy, arms control, and other issues of public interest, but they typically stopped short of calling for radical change. Drawing on rare recordings and scripts, Ehrlich traces a crucial phase in the evolution of news documentary, as docudramas featuring actors were supplanted by reality-based programs that took advantage of new recording technology. Paralleling that shift from drama to realism was a shift in liberal thought from dreams of world peace to uneasy adjustments to a cold war mentality.

 

Influenced by corporate competition and government regulations, radio programming reflected shifts in a range of political thought that included pacifism, liberalism, and McCarthyism. In showing how programming highlighted contradictions within journalism and documentary, Radio Utopia reveals radio's response to the political, economic, and cultural upheaval of the post-war era.

1

A Higher Destiny

Utopian hopes for American radio are almost as old as the medium itself. In the words of one historian, radio was widely seen in the early 1920s as “a force new and powerful that seemed to have unlimited possibilities for social good” and as a “bright hope for a better world.” It would promote peace and democracy while raising the standards of education and mass culture. However, disillusionment soon followed over “the utter dullness, banality, and absence of controversy” offered by the commercial system that quickly came to dominate American broadcasting.¹ Hoping to reverse the trend, a coalition of labor, educational, and religious groups lobbied Congress to reserve a significant share of the airwaves for nonprofit entities. The broadcasting industry successfully fought to kill the initiative, and by the mid-1930s, the continued corporate control of radio was ensured.²

Prewar Documentary and News

Even within that corporate framework—which, according to one radio critic of the day, diminished the medium “‘to the level of a gigantic vaudeville show’”³—documentary-type programming soon appeared. The earliest examples were commercial ventures. The March of Time debuted on CBS in 1931 and was underwritten by Time magazine, which developed the program out of experimental news dramatizations called NewsCasting and NewsActing. Time’s new radio series aggressively promoted its parent. “There is one publication which watches, analyzes, and every seven days reports the march of human history on all the fronts,” an announcer intoned at the start of the program’s premiere. “Tonight the editors of Time, the weekly newsmagazine, attempt a new kind of reporting of the news, the reenacting as clearly and dramatically as the medium of radio will permit [of] some themes from the news of the week.” There followed dramatizations of “Big Bill” Thompson’s victory in the Chicago mayoral primary, the death of the New York World newspaper, and the transfer of French prisoners to Devil’s Island, among other happenings.⁴ A subsequent 1931 episode reenacted an encounter between “India’s first citizen—world-famed Mahatma Ghandi” and a starstruck American tourist, Mrs. Hattie Belle Johnston (“Oh, Mahatma, when are you coming to America? They’ll go wild about you there”). The episode ended by asking whether “threats to end the life of nut-brown little Mahatma Gandhi” would be realized.⁵

The March of Time lost money for Time at first, and the publishing company attempted to cancel it. Listeners protested, other sponsors were eventually found, and the series remained on radio (with brief hiatuses) until 1945. It featured top radio actors such as Agnes Moorehead and Orson Welles impersonating everyone from Winston Churchill and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. It also served as the prototype for the well-known film March of Time, which in 1937 would win an Academy Award for having “revolutionized” the movie newsreel.⁶ The radio version left a legacy of its own. According to a chronicler of the series, “[I]t reached millions of Americans during its fourteen-year history, provided publicity for Time’s publications that was of incalculable value, and was consistently rated in industry-conducted polls as one of network radio’s most popular dramatic programs.”⁷ In addition, it influenced young writers learning how to create reality-based scripts for the new medium.⁸

Another long-running series premiered on CBS in 1935. The Cavalcade of America dramatized notable events from the nation’s past. It was sponsored by the DuPont chemical company in response to Senate hearings on war profiteering during World War I, an investigation that led to DuPont being branded a “merchant of death.” As a consequence, the company prohibited Cavalcade of America from making any reference to war or using sound effects of gunshots or explosions. Likewise, any discussion of strikes or labor unrest was strictly forbidden. Instead, as the sometime Cavalcade writer Erik Barnouw recalled, the series celebrated American “explorations, inventions, and humanitarian progress,” including the achievements of women (but not of African Americans, who were virtually ignored). Such progress was frequently attributed to the advancement of science, as underscored by DuPont’s advertising slogan, “Better things for better living through chemistry.” Ironically, the series’ bowdlerization of history appealed to some pacifist radio writers, who preferred not to write about violence. Consequently, according to Barnouw, “the public relations interests of a munitions manufacturer dovetailed for the moment with the social concerns of young writers of liberal and even leftist bent.”⁹

Such writers and artists were plentiful during the Depression and New Deal years. The historian William Stott has asserted that “the primary expression of thirties America” was that of documentary (broadly defined), particularly that with “an axe to grind” and aimed at “social improvement.”¹⁰ Documentary expression appeared in a host of media, including novels such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; government-sponsored art, theater, and dance, through the Works Progress Administration; the photojournalism of Margaret Bourke-White, Dorthea Lange, and Walker Evans; and the literary journalism of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Documentary film also came to the forefront, following the example of the British filmmaker John Grierson, who declared that he viewed “cinema as a pulpit” devoted to promoting “organized and harmonious living.”¹¹ In America, according to one historian, early documentary film “was sharply political in origin” and frequently championed organized labor. Then came “a more moderate reflection of the liberalizing change sweeping in the nation,” with government-commissioned films such as Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The Flood (1937), promoting New Deal agriculture and conservation programs.¹²

Radio soon proved to be a uniquely powerful documentary vehicle. In Stott’s words, it was “the ideal medium for putting the audience in another man’s shoes [through] the immediacy of the human voice.”¹³ Similarly, the radio historian Bruce Lenthall argues that listeners “formed imagined but meaningful relationships with radio voices” in the 1930s, raising hopes that the medium “had the capacity to inform listeners and involve them directly in national civic affairs” to the extent that “radio might reinvent democracy.”¹⁴ Radio attracted writers such as Arch Oboler, William Robson, Arthur Laurents, Arthur Miller, Langston Hughes, Orson Welles, and Norman Rosten. “‘The writer of the 1930s and 1940s belonged to a generation in rebellion,’” Rosten later said. “‘He was an accuser [whose] enemy was poverty, war, fascism, corruption in high places or low.’”¹⁵

Such rebellious passions, although by no means the norm on network radio, did occasionally find a place to be heard. The failed radio-reform movement of the early 1930s at least encouraged the networks to demonstrate a commitment to public service, if for no other reason than to try to discourage future attempts at more stringent regulation. In the case of CBS, they also presented an opportunity for the network to distinguish itself from its more powerful rival, NBC. Under William Paley, CBS became an innovator in its “sustaining” or noncommercially sponsored programming, which as of the 1930s constituted two-thirds of its schedule. The network attracted new affiliates by offering such shows for free.¹⁶ Sustaining programming was ideal for documentaries and other programs that were not obligated to please sponsors by attracting large audiences, which offered young writers the advantage of working without the restrictions imposed by a Time or DuPont. So it was that in 1937, CBS’s sustaining Columbia Workshop presented Archibald MacLeish’s verse play The Fall of the City, a thinly veiled antifascist allegory that “seemed to go to the heart of the terror of its time,” as a historian later put it—namely, the terror associated with the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.¹⁷ MacLeish enthused about radio’s potential of reaching “an infinitely greater number of people” than live theater could, and the success of The Fall of the City encouraged the production of similar works.¹⁸

At the same time that radio docudrama was beginning to flower, radio journalism also prospered, having overcome stiff resistance from newspapers and wire services that had unsuccessfully fought to limit the kind and amount of news that radio could broadcast.¹⁹ Paul White and Ed Klauber at CBS and Abe Schechter at NBC had begun news operations at their respective networks by the early 1930s, followed by G. W. “Johnny” Johnstone doing the same at the Mutual radio network.²⁰ In contrast to the accusatory advocacy of the docudramatists, the network news organizations aspired toward balance and objectivity. Klauber mandated that those “presenting or analyzing the news must not express their own feelings” and that an “unexcited demeanor at the microphone must be maintained at all times.” Once Edward R. Murrow assumed oversight over CBS’s European coverage in 1937 and started assembling the group of correspondents who would become known as the Murrow Boys, he sought to recruit those “‘who would be steady, reliable, and restrained,’” as he later put it.²¹

After the London Blitz erupted in 1940, the line between objectivity and advocacy became increasingly blurred for Murrow. Radio had extensively covered the buildup to the war, with CBS producing its first European news roundup in conjunction with the Nazi occupation of Austria in March 1938 and all the networks devoting saturation coverage later that year to the Munich crisis and subsequent German takeover of Czechoslovakia. Within a year after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939—and again as reported by radio—the Nazis controlled the majority of Europe, with Britain standing virtually alone against them. Murrow’s subsequent broadcasts from London became legendary. Although nominally remaining “steady, reliable, and restrained” and never openly urging American intervention on behalf of the British, Murrow acknowledged to his wife that he wanted to shake up listeners and “let them have it”: “Now I think is the time. A thousand years of history and civilization are being smashed.” In a letter to his parents, he declared that he was “trying to talk as I would have talked were I a preacher” and that radio provided “a powerful pulpit,” much as John Grierson would say of film.²²

Those broadcasts prompted Archibald MacLeish to lavish praise upon Murrow at a testimonial dinner back in New York in 1941: “You burned the city of London in our homes, and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors, and we knew the dead were our dead.” For his part, Murrow told the assemblage that although it was “no part of a reporter’s function to advocate policy,” the English believed “that unless the United States enters this war, Britain may perish.” He added that it could no longer be doubted that “the important decision, perhaps the final decision, that will determine the course of human affairs will be made not in front of Moscow, not on the sands of Libya, but along the banks of the Potomac.”²³ Five days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Wartime Documentary and News

With America now in the war, radio journalists were less apt to maintain an objective façade. “‘This is a war for the preservation of democracy,’” Paul White told CBS News personnel in a memorandum. “‘The American people must not only always be kept vividly aware of this objective, but of the value of every man, woman, and child in the nation of preserving democracy.’”²⁴ The journalists sent back appropriately vivid accounts of the war’s progress in Europe and the Pacific. Murrow was far from the only such journalist and perhaps received too much attention in comparison with some of his peers at CBS and the other networks.²⁵ Still, he would provide some of the most celebrated examples of radio war reportage, including a 1943 nighttime airstrike against Berlin (“the small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet”), a paratroop drop over Holland the following year (“they seem to be completely relaxed, like nothing so much as khaki dolls hanging beneath a green lampshade”), and the 1945 liberation of Buchenwald (“It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald”).²⁶

Wartime documentarians embraced even more fervently what one historian has called the role of “bugler” in producing work that would serve as an “adjunct to military action, [a] weapon of war.”²⁷ Hollywood’s leading directors were enlisted in that mission. Some produced films about courage and heroism on the front lines, as with William Wyler’s Memphis Belle, John Ford’s The Battle of Midway, and John Huston’s comparatively bleak The Battle of San Pietro. The Why We Fight film series overseen by Frank Capra aimed more at explaining the rationale behind the war, as the title implied. The films in the series avoided dwelling on the more unpleasant realities of American life, with The Negro Soldier failing to mentio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Utopian Dreams
• 1. A Higher Destiny
• 2. One World
• 3. New and Sparkling Ideas
• 4. Home Is What You Make It
• 5. The Quick and the Dead
• 6. Hear It Now
• 7. Lose No Hope
• Notes
• Index