Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist.(Book Review)

Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist. Howard Blue. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

The efforts of radio dramatists to persuade their fellow countrymen that Allied victory in the Second World War must be total and unconditional have not been widely studied by popular culture scholars--until now. Howard Blue's meticulously documented Words at War does much to convey an appreciation of this important period, when the voices of actors such as Burgess Meredith, Mercedes McCambridge, and Art Carney reached into millions of homes with a powerful and moving call to arms.

Blue also describes factors before and after the Pearl Harbor attack that served to vitiate in some degree the "war writers'" positive impact. A number of US companies that sponsored radio dramatizations in the late 1930s and early 1940s were chary of scripts that were pointedly anti-Fascist, and more particularly anti-Nazi. They feared a reduction of their profits if German Americans or Italian Americans took offense to radio broadcasts criticizing their homeland, and translated their anger into economic boycotts.

Blue notes that a high percentage of the most talented war writers and radio dramatists were Jewish. For many of these writers, Nazi brutality toward the Jews of Europe was especially galling. Yet, as Blue points out, somewhat off-handedly, the US government, studio executives, and corporate sponsors collaborated in an effort to attack Nazism and its atrocities. But they avoided the full import of the Holocaust or any possible inference that Jewish scriptwriters treated their suffering coreligionists in Europe with special solicitude.

When the Office of War Information (OWI) was established after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the CBS news broadcaster Elmer Davis as its head. FDR's opponents considered the OWI and its chief to be the president's cat's paw, as well as a hotbed of Communists and fellow travelers. Davis's firing of 35 OWI employees over a three-year period for alleged Communist associations lends considerable credence to this accusation--this despite an assertion elsewhere (127) in the book claiming that, as FBI files later showed, allegiance to the Soviet Union as distinct from admiration of beleaguered Russia was virtually nonexistent among writers during the war.