1

Introduction

Every tomato we pick today makes Gordon’s job as a soldier a little easier. Because these tomatoes are going to war, Bill. They’re going to war as food for war workers, for our armed forces, for our fighting Allies.

—Home Forces: "U.S. Crop Corps," Uncle Sam

On August 3, 1922, the New York Times published an article concerning the fatal poisoning of six people in the Shelbourne Restaurant at 1127 Broadway in New York City. Each of the victims had eaten a piece of pie that had been prepared by Charles Abramson, a pastry cook who was the chief suspect in the incident. Also on August 3, the Times carried an advertisement for "Girls’ Black Sateen Bloomers, 2 for $1" at Bloomingdale’s. A second ad, from another establishment, promoted the sale of men’s pure wool, one-piece bathing suits, at $3.25 each. The Times did not make note, however, of a play entitled "The Wolf" that was aired on station WGY in Schenectady, New York, the same day as the article about the poisoned pies.¹

"The Wolf," by Eugene Walter, was the first "on-air" drama. After its broadcast, the station received 2,000 letters from listeners within a fifty-mile radius. The play featured a scene in which a character screamed. One letter recounted that a policeman, hearing the scream through an open window, was so convinced by its realism that he came bursting into the house to stop the "assault." The play’s success was also apparent from the fact that, in the fall, the WGY plays became regular features. "The Wolf" and the other early radio plays were literal readings of famous stage plays. The classics were the most successful of these non-radio radio plays. They depended less on visual images than did modern plays of the 1920s. On Friday nights, WGY began to offer stage plays over the air: "The Garden of Allah," "Seven Keys to Baldpate," and periodically some classics such as the plays of Henrik Ibsen. Each show ran two and a half-hours and used a live orchestra for musical bridges.²

The gradual development of radio drama, which broadcast of "The Wolf" initiated, was one of a number of factors that helped make possible the creation of a long-overlooked but substantial body of American war-related radio drama in the World War II era. Before and during that war, between 1936 and 1945, the commercial networks, Hollywood stars, private agencies, and the government cooperated to alert Americans to the threat of fascism, both within the United States and abroad. Much of this effort focused, of course, on stimulating support for American participation in World War II. That such stimulation was necessary is clear if one considers the results of two surveys. An opinion poll of June 1941, only five months before America entered the war, showed that 79 percent of the American people favored neutrality.³ A second survey, a year later, revealed that a full 50 percent had no clear understanding of what the war was about.⁴

The broadcasting of radio drama was paramount among the ways in which various organizations attacked American apathy or even hostility toward fighting fascism. A group of writers created a unique body of shows, sketches, and whole series to create support for American participation in the war. They also stimulated morale, showing how all Americans could support the fight against fascism, even if some just grew tomatoes.

In February 1943, the magazine of the American Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA) carried an essay entitled "Toward A Better World" by Robert Landry of CBS. "When the history of this war comes to be written, considerable credit will be due to the so called radio documentary programs, those lectures in dramatic form on the nature of our enemies, on the magnitude of our problems, on the challenge of our future. The documentaries have raised vigorous rallying voices of realism, and at the same time, helped articulate the new global concepts of future decency."⁵

Landry might well have broadened his statement to include not just radio documentaries but other forms of radio drama as well. As he implied, as they worked directly on the war effort, many radio writers simultaneously advanced a progressive agenda to fight the enemy within: racism, poverty, and other social ills. But America was not prepared to accept that agenda. When the war ended, many of those writers would pay for their idealism by suffering blacklisting. So would many of the actors.

A number of factors led up to the development and use of these radio dramas of the World War II era. We can look at the various elements in the history of their development as the recipe for a dish with an elaborate set of ingredients.

Recipe for American World War II Era Radio Drama

Serves: 100,000,000

Ingredients

Radio A dozen advertising agencies

The concept of radio drama Several dozen major sponsors

FDR’s pioneering propaganda Several dozen progressive, creative, and

broadcasts for the New Deal dedicated writers and directors

Orson Welles’s production of Several score of creative, dedicated actors

"The War of the Worlds" Two wartime government propaganda

agencies

The concept of the sponsored program Four or five private agencies

The concept of the non-sponsored One war

"sustaining program"

Directions:

2. Add the war.

3. Blend in the writers and directors with the actors.

4. Beat while pouring in, the advertising, private and government agencies, and the sponsors.

5. Lay this on a bed of semi-receptive, cautiously liberal radio networks.

6. Serve in generous portions to a skeptical national radio audience.

And there you have it, American World War II era radio drama.

The first "ingredient" of American war-related radio drama came into being in 1895 when Guglielmo Marconi sent radio communications through the air for the first time. Eleven years later, the human voice made its premier appearance on radio. Then, in 1920, the first regular commercial broadcasting took place with the establishment of stations KDKA in Pittsburgh and WWJ in Detroit. Within five years, radio began its role as a major source of family entertainment. By the mid 1930s, it had caught on. It was a relatively new, but incredibly important cultural phenomenon. Actor Elliott Reid remembered how when the phenomenally popular Amos ‘n’ Andy show was being broadcast, during the summer he could walk to a friend’s house and never miss a word of the show because he could hear it from each house that he passed on his way to his destination.⁶

Sometimes the radio bore the brand name of Atwater Kent. Stromberg-Carlson was another popular brand name. Radio was so important that by the time of the Depression, when numerous families were forced through repossession or other reasons to give up their furniture or other belongings, repeatedly they clung to one most-treasured item, their radio. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, 90 percent of the American people had at least one set in their homes. The average American listened for about four hours daily.⁷

Among the millions of radio owners was the family of Samuel and Rose Corwin, who lived in a three-story tenement on Bremen Street in East Boston, Massachusetts. Samuel Corwin was the son of Russian Jews who immigrated to England where he was born and raised. As a young man, he, in turn, immigrated to the United States. Rose was an emigrant from Hungary. Norman, the third of the Corwin’s four children, remembered a neighbor calling out to him, "Harold Merchant down the block just got this thing called a radio and you can hear things through the air." Corwin replied, "How can that be?" But it was true. Corwin went to the Merchant’s house and, via a crystal set, heard his first radio transmission.⁸

The MacDougal family of Schenectady, New York, also listened to early radio. Their son Ranald, made one of the first sets in the city by winding cotton-covered wire around an oatmeal box.⁹ And then there were the Millers of Harlem, Isidore and Augusta and their three children. The Millers bought their first radio, a superheterodyne set, in the early 1920s from a young neighbor who built it himself and powered it with an acid battery. Arthur, the middle child, remembered it with its tinny sound. Often it was out of commission, the victim of his older brother Kermit’s penchant for "fixing" things.¹⁰ Miller remembered how, at age eight, he heard his first broadcast, an orchestra performance from station KDKA in Pittsburgh, which he thought was close to Europe.¹¹

Families who may have been the first in their neighborhood to have a radio found neighbors and even strangers often flocked to their house oblivious of their intrusion. Jackson Beck remembered this from his childhood in Far Rockaway, New York. As he told the author, "In 1923 I was about ten years old. After my father brought home our first radio, word got out and not only neighbors but even strangers from nearby towns started coming to our house. We used to go to bed fairly early and often people were coming to our door so late that they were waking us up. On Sundays they came in very large numbers. Finally we had to put up a sign ‘Don’t come in.’"¹² In adulthood, Miller, Norman Corwin, Ranald MacDougall, and Jackson Beck got to know radio from another perspective, the first three as writers for the medium and Beck as one of its most ubiquitous actors.

The first important demonstration of radio’s potential for mobilizing public opinion was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s creation of a series of "fireside chats" to promote his New Deal programs. His goal was to help the nation get out of the Depression, which had hit it shortly before the election that brought him to power. He pulled out all the stops in arguing that America was fighting an enemy: unemployment, economic stagnation, and low national morale. In the process, he showed how powerful the new medium was, even mightier than the combined strength of all the nation’s newspapers. However, there were some problems with the Roosevelt administration’s use of radio as a tool of persuasion. In August 1933, one of the members of the Federal Radio Commission, predecessor of the Federal Communications Commission, sent a letter to all radio stations. He demanded that they reject any sponsor or advertiser who refused to cooperate with the codes of the National Recovery Administration, an agency established to help America deal with the economic problems brought on by the Depression.¹³ The letter backfired, and some newspapers criticized Roosevelt for his administration’s strong-arm tactics.

In 1936, lightning struck radio in the form of the Columbia Workshop, a newly created showcase for experimental radio drama. The Columbia Workshop was the brainchild of Brooklyn-born Irving Reis, who came into radio quite by chance.¹⁴ Reis lost a month’s pay buying bootleg gin and getting drunk for the first time. He tried to borrow $80 from a friend who worked for a radio station. The friend, who remembered that as a boy Reis had played around with amateur radio, invited Reis to apply for a job with the same station, a CBS affiliate. Reis first worked as a "log engineer," standing by for distress signals, on a shift from 4 p.m. to station closing at 2 a.m. At the time, the Federal Communications Commission required coastal stations to immediately stop broadcasting upon interception of an SOS. After his first year, when a studio engineer had to quit because of illness, Reis was promoted to fill the man’s role.

Reis visited Europe where he learned that the British and the Germans had been experimenting with radio drama as early as 1926. On his return, he lobbied CBS to give him a chance to try to do an American version of what he had observed abroad. Reis finally got that chance in 1936 with the arrival to the network of its new programming chief William B. Lewis. The Columbia Workshop succeeded so well that some 7,000 plays a year flooded into the network from playwrights hoping to see their work given a chance.¹⁵ Radio drama had come into its own. One sign of this was the publication of hundreds of radio plays in magazines and anthologies that appeared in libraries and bookstores around the United States.

Radio, of course, also came into its own as a business. Its goal, like all business ventures, was to make money. During its first several decades, to a great extent the networks sold time, not shows, to the advertising agencies. The agencies themselves produced many early shows for the sponsors and then used the networks’ radio studios for the actual broadcasting. In 1934, about one third of network time was sold for sponsored programming and more than half of network revenue came from advertising agencies. Only after World War II did the networks themselves begin to develop commercial shows for sale through the agencies to the sponsors.

The development of unsponsored "sustaining programs" such as the Columbia Workshop came about as a result of the Communications Act of 1934, which required radio stations and networks to fulfill a public service obligation. "Sustaining shows" were an important alternative to the early practice of the agencies of producing shows. The networks themselves produced these shows, and they filled an important gap. Some of the most important war-related shows of the late 1930s and the war period were sustaining shows. Whereas sponsored shows generally avoided current political and other problems, the sustaining shows were more inclined to deal with them.

The producers of sustaining shows and of commercial shows functioned in spheres so totally different that they seemed at times to be even in different universes. Norman Corwin, the most acclaimed writer of sustained shows, told a story that illustrates this fact. In about 1943, Corwin attended a Peabody Award dinner. The Peabodys were, and are, the highest form of recognition for excellence in the radio broadcasting industry. At one point during the evening, a man seated at his left introduced himself and asked, "And are you in radio, Mr. Corwin. "Yes," Corwin replied. "I am with CBS." "That so? What line of work," the man continued. "Well, dramatic . . . sort of." Later Corwin learned that the man was president of the biggest advertising agency in the country. Yet they had never heard of each other.¹⁶

With the establishment of both sponsored and sustained radio programs, there were vehicles for broadcasting radio shows. And with evidence from the analysis of public reception of FDR’s Depression-era fireside chats, there was also reason to believe that radio could affect people’s morale. But could it move people to action? The answer to this question was provided by a trio of men: John Houseman, Howard Koch, and twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles.

Orson Welles’s contribution to wartime radio drama was multifaceted. He not only acted in some of the most important radio dramas, he also wrote at least one. But his most significant work on radio was with coproducer John Houseman and writer Howard Koch on the Halloween 1938 panic broadcast, "The War of the Worlds." The show, based on the science fiction story by H. G. Wells about an invasion of earth by Martians, created a mass hysteria among the listening public. People in dozens of towns and cities around the country fled from the imaginary invaders described in the broadcast. The panic created traffic jams; flooded police, newspaper, and radio station switchboards; and sent scores of people to seek medical treatment for shock and hysteria. The factors that influenced it, the context in which it appeared, and the precedent that it set gave it an important role in the creation of war drama.

An important factor that governed people’s reactions to Welles’s broadcast was a state of anxiety resulting from a political crisis in Czechoslovakia that began several months earlier. The crisis, which culminated in the Munich Pact in late September, involved Adolf Hitler's demands that Great Britain and France accede to his wishes to annex a part of Czechoslovakia containing a large German ethnic minority. Its high point involved negotiations that saw British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain fly twice to meet with Hitler. Particularly during these negotiations, radio bulletins repeatedly interrupted regular American programming, sometimes a dozen or more times a day, to bring out the latest news. Typical was one that featured reporter Max Jordan on the day that the pact was signed:

In just a few moments the National Broadcasting Company hopes to bring you via retransmission from Europe, from Munich, the official communiqué just released of the results of the four-power conference between Prime Minister Chamberlain, Premier Daladier, Signor Mussolini and Herr Hitler. We, we [sic] plead for your indulgence for just a few moments while we make sure of all facilities in order to take you across the sea to bring you this important communiqué. We now take you across the sea.

Hello, NBC, this is Max Jordan calling from Munich, Germany. It is now eight minutes to two o'clock AM local time. Exactly seventeen minutes ago Premier Chamberlain of England, Premier Daladier of France and his [sic] and their delegations walked out of the assembly room at the Führer’s Palace here. . . .¹⁷

To millions of Americans the world seemed to be on the brink of war. It was. And to many of those listeners, the crisis pointed to the possibility that the United States might be dragged into the war and, perhaps less plausibly at the time, even be invaded by an enemy force.

Welles’s broadcast started with an introduction that clearly identified the show as a work of fiction. But in imitating the interruptions of the broadcast with "news bulletins" regarding the "invasion," it copied the realistic style to which listeners had become accustomed.¹⁸ The broadcast had its greatest impact on many people who tuned in late, missing the introduction. A study commissioned by Princeton University concluded that of the 6 million who heard the show, 1.7 million accepted its reports as authentic news and 1.2 million were genuinely frightened. Many, first hearing the program in mid broadcast, came upon it as it shifted realistically from one "on the spot field reporter" to another, and they were totally conned. In imitating the style of the previous weeks’ bulletins, the broadcast achieved credibility that exceeded anyone's expectation. The recollection of one listener, decades later, illustrates how some people came to accept the broadcast as a factual one: "My wife and I were driving though the redwood forest in northern California when the broadcast came over our car radio. . . . All we could think of was to try to get back to L.A. to see our children once more. And be with them when it happened. We went right by gas stations but I forgot we were low in gas. In the middle of the forest our gas ran out. There was nothing to do. We just sat there holding hands expecting to see those Martian monsters appear over the tops of the trees."¹⁹

Without the anxiety that the previous weeks’ bulletins about the Munich Crisis raised, Welles’s program would undoubtedly have had less impact. Even generations later, young people continue to be fascinated with the power over its listeners that radio demonstrated in October 1938. The lesson was noted by later radio writers and producers. In an undated memo to an official of the Office of War Information, written most likely in 1942, radio writer George Faulkner acknowledged the influence of "The War of the Worlds" broadcast. "When will we really believe that radio is a tremendous power?" asked Faulkner. Referring to the Welles broadcast, he wrote of the "terrific mass suggestibility of the American radio audience, made clear by that tragi-comic episode."²⁰ In short, Faulkner and his colleagues had seen proof positive that the public could be sold a bill of goods or, to put it less cynically, could be swayed to take action that it had never intended to take.

President Roosevelt’s creation of several propaganda agencies was also essential to the development of radio drama during World War II. The agencies had a difficult birth as a result of the nation’s experience with a World War I propaganda organization, the Committee on Public Information (CPI). During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson established the agency, the nation’s first great experiment with propaganda, and appointed George Creel, a short, stocky, muckraking journalist from Missouri, as its head. Unfortunately, in trying to garner support for the war effort, Creel used a high-handed style that offended Congress and hordes of plain citizens.

In addition to using a wide variety of propaganda techniques, Creel introduced "voluntary guidelines" for the news media. In essence, it was censorship. The CPI also helped to pass the Espionage Act of 1917.²¹ Because of the wording of a section of the new law, it was used to imprison Americans who spoke out or wrote against the war. As a result of Creel’s tactics, a lingering resentment developed. When the war ended, Congress took its vengeance out on him, canceling his committee’s appropriations so quickly that he was left without enough money to close down his office and organize its records.²²

The Creel legacy was an unwelcome one to any president who wanted to establish his own propaganda agency. Roosevelt knew that many Americans feared not only foreign propaganda but, as a result of their memory of Creel’s CPI, the domestic variety, too, for which reason they were particularly wary of having a government propaganda agency. For this reason, although events and the times called for creation of some sort of major propaganda bureau from 1939 through 1941, the administration overtly rejected the idea. Yet at the same time, it prepared to establish a coordinated propaganda agency.

In 1939, FDR established the Office of Government Reports (OGR) under the direction of Louis Mellett. The OGR and several other agencies were given severely limited powers and scope. Three administration officials, Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox made an early call for a government propaganda agency, but Mellett and FDR rejected the idea. The President still believed that establishing such an agency before America entered the war would invite attacks on it by his political enemies. Nevertheless, in addition to the OGR, in June 1940, the administration established the Office of Emergency Management, another agency that handled propaganda assignments; and by late 1941, the infrastructure for government-supervised propaganda campaigns was ready.²³

Roosevelt finally created his first real propaganda agency, the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), in October, only two months before America entered the war. But even this agency had severely clipped wings. OFF’s successor agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), had slightly more powers.

The war part of the recipe was easy to come by, too easy, thanks to one Adolf Hitler, a compliant German nation, and Hitler’s like-minded colleagues in Italy and Japan. Radio could not get away from the dramatic events taking place in Europe and elsewhere. "Tonight, after rehearsals," Norman Corwin wrote in his diary on March 18, 1939, concerning a show he was preparing, "[I] wrote in a special section to deal by unmistakable implication, with the latest development in Hitler's case of rabies—the nauseating grab of Czechoslovakia."²⁴

Eventually, of course, America was pulled into the war. From the start it was evident that people wanted reassurance. During the depths of the Depression, President Roosevelt had provided it through broadcast of his fireside chats.²⁵ Now, people wanted it at least as much as they had during the 1930s. They also often sought some level of personal contact with the people who spoke to them on radio. The numerous letters from listeners to the networks, hosts of radio shows, and the Office of War Information illustrate this last point. "I’m a native of Illinois and left penniless at age 59, am doing War Department Work, filing important papers and records . . . Just established a record of one year in service, with no annual or sick leave and never late to work," wrote a listener to Cecil B. DeMille, "producer" of Lux Radio Theatre. "Please give us something bright and cheerful [in] these troubled times," wrote a second listener, also to DeMille. And in a third one, a young listener inquired after hearing broadcast of "The Navy Comes Through," "I would like to know if you put on this play at my suggestion." A month earlier, after seeing the film on which the broadcast was based, he had written to DeMille, proposing that Lux Radio Theatre air an adaptation.²⁶

Where did the radio actors and the writers of radio drama who emerged in the late 1930s and 1940s come from? Some writers, Norman Corwin and Allan Sloane, for example, got their start as print journalists. Others were "lent" or "given" to wartime radio by another primary calling. Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benét, Langston Hughes, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were poets. Bill Robson first worked as a film script writer, and Millard Lampell was a folk singer.

Fredric March, Melvyn Douglas, and John Garfield were film stars. Joseph Julian, Art Carney, and Jackson Beck came directly to radio as young men. Carney, for example, got his start in radio almost as soon as he got into show business. His first job, when he was fresh out of high school, was as a mimic and announcer with Horace Heidt's Musical Knights, a big band touring troupe. He specialized in mimicking President Roosevelt and New York State's colorful governor, Al Smith. In addition to playing some of the country's largest clubs, the band appeared on a variety of radio programs, including, in 1938, "Pot O'Gold," a money giveaway program.²⁷

Regardless of their experience prior to radio, virtually all of the most prominent radio writers and many of the actors shared a common set of concerns with each other and with a broad array of people in the arts, education, the labor movement, and various other fields.²⁸ The Depression, Hitler's rise to power, the fascist attack on democracy during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and racial oppression in the United States, especially the lynching of Negroes, heavily influenced American leftists who came of age in the 1930s. They developed a pro-union, antifascist, internationalist-minded, and racially tolerant orientation that sought to create social and political change. The struggle in Spain especially appeared to American writers as a black-and-white model of the struggle between good and evil.

By 1940, the factors described earlier coalesced to form the mass of war-related radio drama. The first such show, "Fall of the City," appeared on the Columbia Workshop in April 1937. A variety of similarly focused plays followed it. Two things occurred in radio drama as the nation inched closer and closer to war. First, radio moved away from its position of neutrality. Initially, the name "Hitler" hung over events but rarely appeared in radio drama scripts. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, show after show blasted away at him. Second, even before the Japanese attack, radio gradually began to give less and less time to lighter fare. Many of the comedy and other types of more frivolous shows that remained were cut from one hour to half-hour time slots. In 1940, more than 10,000 hours of drama were broadcast over the air. This represented more than 30 percent of the available air time.²⁹ After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the percentage of hours devoted to war-related drama increased even further.

Notes

6. Elliott Reid to author, October 24, 1998.

7. Horten, "Radio Goes to War," 163.

9. Erik Barnouw, Radio Drama in Action (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945), 252.

10. Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 15

11. Arthur Miller, letter to the author, February 17, 2000.

12. Jackson Beck, telephone interview by the author, July 30, 1998.

20. Memo from George Faulkner to W. B. Lewis, n.d., Lewis Collection, BU.

23 Horten, "Radio Goes to War," 62-63.

24. Norman Corwin, Diary, March 18, 1939, Corwin Collection, TOL.

29. Norman Weiser, The Writer's Radio Theater (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), ix.