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Radio Utopia
Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest
By MATTHEW C. EHRLICH
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03611-8
Introduction
Utopian Dreams
It was the spring of 1945, so the story goes, and Edward R. Murrow was holding court among a group of his colleagues in war-ravaged Europe. During World War II, radio journalism had come into its own. Murrow had become internationally renowned during the German Blitz against London prior to America's entry into the war. According to the poet Archibald MacLeish, Murrow's CBS radio dispatches had demolished in Americans' minds "'the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are not violence and lies and murder here.'" Murrow had continued to inform his fellow citizens about Nazi brutality, most recently via a graphic radio report about the Buchenwald concentration camp: "If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry." During the same period, he had helped assemble a celebrated group of reporters for CBS, the so-called Murrow Boys, most of whom were indeed men—Eric Sevareid, William Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, and others. Some from among that group were in the room with Murrow now, all of whom "had made the antifascist cause their own, buoyed by a sense of unity at home," as one of Murrow's biographers later put it.
Also in the room was Robert Lewis Shayon, one of several radio writers and directors who had helped bolster that sense of unity. Shayon said that the Depression had made him and others "sensitive and sympathetic to justice, social 'causes,' and reform." That sensitivity had carried over to the war, during which he and his peers produced programs vilifying the enemy abroad while warning against injustice at home. Norman Corwin had helped lead the way by airing installments of the series An American in England live via shortwave from London. Shayon had come to Europe as part of a War Department–sponsored tour giving other radio dramatists firsthand knowledge of how the battle was progressing. Among those accompanying him was William Robson, the author of the CBS program Open Letter on Race Hatred, which had blisteringly criticized the conditions that triggered a deadly wartime riot in Detroit. Now the war was ending, and Shayon listened as Murrow extolled his assembled colleagues in Europe to carry on the good fight back home: "'We've seen what radio can do for the nation in war. Now let's go back to show what we can do in peace!'"
This book is the story of what happened next. Journalists joined dramatists in using radio to try to remake America and the world for the better. Murrow helped form the CBS Documentary Unit with Shayon as a member, and similar efforts developed at the other networks. They produced programs advocating action on everything from juvenile delinquency, slums, and race relations to venereal disease, atomic energy, and arms control. For a time, their efforts were encouraged by the commercial broadcasting industry, which was under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to demonstrate that it was truly serving the public interest. The head of the CBS Documentary Unit, Robert Heller, hailed the emergence of "a virtual Utopia for craftsmen who believe in radio's usefulness as a social force." By 1951, that "utopia" had evaporated as radio gave way to television, the war against fascism gave way to the cold war against communism, and many of radio's most acclaimed "craftsmen"—including Heller, Shayon, Corwin, and Robson—landed in the pages of the red-baiting publication Red Channels, their careers never to be the same again.
Interpretive framework
The media landscape underwent an extraordinary transformation between 1945 and 1951. As one account has put it, "[A] small radio system dominated by four networks" was replaced by "a far larger AM-FM radio and television system in which networks concentrated on television and left radio stations to their own programming resources." Ambitious radio programming endeavors launched immediately after the war were largely abandoned six years later. Edward R. Murrow, the great champion of radio and skeptic of television, moved to the new medium as of November 1951 with See It Now, marking the end of an era.
In the interim, American audio documentary would enjoy a brief heyday that vividly reflected the social and cultural climate of the times. That heyday has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Writing in 1965, A. William Bluem acknowledged radio's achievements in the six years immediately following the war: "From experience gained in earlier experiments it had evolved an authentic and dramatic form of journalistic documentary, dealing with the crises of the world as they continued to arise. It had worked from dramatic restatement of fact to drama made with fact. It had presented information in a compelling form on numberless major and minor issues and problems confronting the American people.... And as it did all these things, it gave a legacy to television."
Bluem pinpointed several reasons why postwar audio documentary is significant. It developed though early reality-based radio shows such as The March of Time and the socially conscious programs of the war years. It then underwent a crucial transformation as docudramas featuring actors impersonating real people were supplanted by actuality-based programs that took advantage of new recording technology. Along the way, it showcased the talents of noted journalists and writers grappling with some of the era's thorniest concerns. Norman Corwin produced the series One World Flight, which took him on a round-the-world trip assessing the prospects for postwar peace. Robert Lewis Shayon created The Eagle's Brood on delinquent youth as well as the historical series You Are There. Erik Barnouw—later a pioneering historian of broadcasting and documentary—wrote V.D.: The Conspiracy of Silence about syphilis. Ruth Ashton talked to Albert Einstein in researching The Sunny Side of the Atom on atomic energy. Fred Friendly tackled the same subject with The Quick and the Dead, starring Bob Hope. Friendly then joined Murrow in creating Hear It Now for CBS, which evolved into the venerated television series See It Now.
As such efforts shifted to television, American radio was left as "a shell of a medium" in terms of documentary, according to Bluem. Consequently, Bluem focused the brunt of his 1965 study on TV, as have others in subsequent years. A growing scholarly literature has called attention to the network-television documentary as the "product of converging social, economic, political, institutional, and discursive forces." For example, one study shows how a series of documentaries in the early 1960s emerged from a consensus among government officials and broadcasters that television ought to raise its standards and promote the image of the United States as a bastion of freedom during the cold war. Another study analyzes how muckraking documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s were enabled by government regulation that encouraged such programs even as they sparked government investigations into their reporting methods.
The historical evolution of American radio documentary has received much less scrutiny. One broadcast-journalism historian briefly discusses a few key works such as The Eagles' Brood, whereas another notes that some of those programs "are still remembered as the pinnacle of radio writing and production." Even so, Christopher Sterling and Michael Keith argue that historians have overlooked much of the serious radio work produced prior to television's ascendancy.
At the same time, however, the radio documentary has experienced a resurgence in recent years. A new wave of work beginning in the 1990s has attracted notice for "telling stories that can't be told on film" and introducing listeners to those with "lives that are different than theirs." Relatively inexpensive recording technology and editing software have made radio documentary an increasingly democratic and accessible medium. One study describes contemporary audio documentary as a form of ethnography that promotes civic life. The study's authors connect that work to earlier documentaries on radio and on records such as those produced by John and Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress before the war and by Tony Schwartz for Folkways Records after the war.
Audio documentary's revitalization has paralleled a rise in radio-history studies. The historians Michele Hilmes and Susan Douglas have each analyzed the heyday of American radio in relation to Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities" of citizens separated by geography but bound together by mass media, particularly newspapers. Douglas argues that radio played a greater role than print in forming such communities, even as it also allowed listeners to experience "multiple identities," some of which were "completely allied with the country's prevailing cultural and political ideologies" and others of which were "suspicious of or at odds with official culture." In a similar vein, Susan Merrill Squier notes radio scholars' particular interest in the medium's dual nature—"its power to enforce the status quo (especially consumerism and stereotyping of race, gender, and ethnicity)" alongside "its capacity to provide a voice for resistance and critique."
This book builds upon those related strands of research at the intersection of radio studies, documentary studies, and journalism studies. The postwar programs pointed to tensions and contradictions intrinsic to both radio and documentary. As Bluem notes, they showed "that radio had finally reached its goal of making documentary a force to influence a vast listening audience" by exposing social ills; at the same time, they stopped short of calling for radical change. They demonstrated how commercial and regulatory pressures both facilitate and constrain documentary, as would be the case with the network-television documentaries that followed in their wake. They also showed what has been described as documentary's enduring conflict "between the claim to truthfulness and the need to select and represent the reality one wants to share." Technological limitations and a network recording ban compelled many radio programs of the period to employ dramatizations, and hence they were akin to what today would be labeled "docudrama." But they were called "documentaries" in their time, and their claims to truth are no different from those of the documentaries rooted in recorded actuality that had become the norm by 1951. (For example, the series CBS Is There—later and better known as You Are There and noted for its dramatizations of history—was produced by the CBS Documentary Unit near the end of its radio run.)
The programs revealed tensions within journalism as well, as highlighted in contrasting essays by James Carey and David Paul Nord. In an often cited 1974 piece, Carey declared that historians should move beyond "Whig"-like accounts of journalism's inexorable progress and improvement and instead try to reveal "historical consciousness" by showing how it felt "to live and act in a particular period." Carey also wrote that rather than reducing all consciousness to the level of ideology or viewing journalism as the transmission of information to a passive public, scholars should see journalism "as an exercise in poetry and utopian politics." In response, Nord argued that historians ought not to get so caught up in utopian views as to overlook that "the 'consciousness' embedded in the language of journalism is the product of large institutions" and "the exercise of power." In brief, press history should retain a "focus on powerful individuals and institutions."
Both perspectives illuminate postwar audio documentary. The programs expressed a consciousness consistent with the tradition of the American "reformist Left" that the philosopher Richard Rorty said was active for much of the twentieth century and that encompassed "lots of people who called themselves 'communists' and 'socialists,' and lots of people who never dreamed of calling themselves either." What they shared were "utopian dreams—dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society." Those dreams animated radio writers in the "Cultural Front" that advanced progressive causes during the 1930s and 1940s. As one historian describes it, they shared a vision of "a world without prejudice, brutality, political oppression, or economic deprivation" and sought to produce programs that "challenged Americans to reform their own country." Those programs expressed their own form of poetry in the service of utopian politics.
At the same time, such programs existed only because they temporarily aligned with the interests of powerful individuals and institutions. The commercial networks used the programs to help deflect criticism from government regulators and to distinguish themselves from their competition. The postwar radio documentaries were in part a response to the FCC's 1946 "Blue Book" that criticized radio's rampant commercialism and outlined public-service standards for broadcast licensees. The documentaries aired at irregular and less-than-ideal times, and once television and McCarthyism took hold, they went into eclipse altogether. All that is consistent with Nord's view of history.
Indeed, one could broadly interpret the story of postwar audio documentary in a couple of ways, each resting on the notion that power trumps utopianism. The first interpretation would be of a utopia that was lost, a golden age of invention, independence, and hope done in by greed and reactionaryism. Norman Corwin recalled seeing friends "exiled, punished, jailed, ostracized" by the blacklist while witnessing the decline of his chosen medium of radio: "I had been riding a wonderful charger—a beautiful horse, the saddle and equipage of which was furnished by a great network [CBS]—and that horse was shot out from under me." Robert Lewis Shayon, who became a TV critic after leaving CBS, wrote upon the 1965 death of Edward R. Murrow that his "passing symbolized the end of a great adventure in broadcasting," even though "the broadcasting idealism that Murrow represented died many years ago." The death of that idealism is a major theme of Murrow's biographers, with one ironically contrasting his death in exile from journalism with his exuberant exhortation to his colleagues in Europe twenty years earlier: "Now let's go home to show what we can do in peace!" Such accounts underscore Murrow's status as the "patron saint" of broadcast news and as a tragic, martyr-like figure.
A second broad interpretation of postwar documentary would be of a utopia that never was. Such an interpretation is less likely to see Murrow as a saint than as an overrated "glory hog who played it safe, more puffery than paladin," and as a figure whose historical importance has been greatly exaggerated. 33 (Even Murrow's purported "let's show what we can do!" declaration is questionable; Shayon's diary of his 1945 European trip recounts meeting with Murrow but does not mention such a dramatic pronouncement.) Similarly, the radio works of the Cultural Front can be viewed as not having aged well and as today sounding "trite," "overwrought," "awkwardly bombastic," and filled with "unwitting condescension." Although they condemned social prejudice, they "still kept the reins of communication in the hands of the white majority" that also largely excluded women. The earnest public-affairs news programs to which they gave rise privileged journalistic authority as opposed to serving what has been called the "democratic impulse at the heart of documentary, to let people speak for themselves." As for the decline of radio documentary and the rise of the blacklist, both are unsurprising given broadcasting's cooptation by corporate America prior to the war and its use as a propaganda instrument during the war itself, whereas the postwar years saw the media harnessed in favor of a massive surge in consumerism at the same time that liberal-minded efforts at media reform were squelched.
Each of those two interpretations is valid in its way. As this book will relate, postwar audio documentary did serve corporate concerns, at least for a time. That time would pass, and there would be tragic or at least disillusioning consequences for some of the participants. The book's title, Radio Utopia, thus can be read ironically. Nevertheless, the title also can be taken in earnest, for utopian sensibilities did underlie the era's documentary. In his memoirs many years later, Shayon commented that contemporary observers "who view the world with a more cynical realpolitik attitude" might find such an outlook hopelessly romantic. Still, it was genuine: "idealism in the flush of military triumph over evil—amid the sense that a new world was about to be born." Whatever the shortcomings or limitations of the era's programs and the people who created them, they were rarely cynical. Even if the anecdote about Murrow urging his peers to show Americans what radio could accomplish in the name of peace did not happen exactly the way it was described, the record suggests that in fact the radio journalists and dramatists did do their best to "show them." That also is a key part of this book's story.
Plan of Procedure
The book focuses almost entirely on long-form radio storytelling that appeared in single programs or as part of a series; daily newscasts and standalone commentary are not included. The term "audio documentary" is used rather than "radio documentary" to place the era's programs within a long, ongoing tradition of such work that has appeared not only on radio but also on records and the Internet. One work discussed briefly—Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow's I Can Hear It Now—originally was released on records.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Radio Utopia by MATTHEW C. EHRLICH Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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