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Reviews of Books
them serves us well in our continued struggle to open
the sciences to women today. Well written, thoroughly
researched, and informed by a clear-eyed view of
gender discrimination in scientific fields, Williams has
made an important contribution to studies of World
War II, the role of women in winning the war, and our
image of the sciences as a realm in which women
belong.
MAUREEN HONEY
University of Nebraska
GERD HaRTEN. Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp.
xiv, 218. $45.00.
During World War II, the United States government
abandoned the attempt to control radio broadcasts
directly and encouraged radio stations, radio personalities, and advertisers to pursue their own versions of
war patriotism. By withdrawing from the direct production of propaganda and limiting itself to providing
suggestions and a measure of control, the U.S. government encouraged the privatization of public discourse
by corporate sponsors and radio stations.
The first three chapters of Gerd Horten's book
document the government's efforts at direct involvement in the production of radio propaganda from the
mid-1930s to 1943. The Roosevelt administration
made several attempts at using radio programs to
cxplain New Deal efforts, but even before the U.S.
entry into the war, Roosevelt had chosen to tone down
governmental radio propaganda. According to Horten,
radio's interventionist position before Pearl Harbor
was due less to Roosevelt's direct pressures than to the
passionatc anti-Axis internationalism of radio personalities like H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow.
In the first years of the war, government agencies tried
to steer radio toward what they considered to be the
correct war goals and resumed production of their own
programs. This strategy had mixed results. Radio
stations agreed to broadcast noncommercial government propaganda and in many cases removed from the
air ethnic commentators that the government deemed
unpatriotic or pro-Axis. Yet the limited popularity of
these broadcasts contributed to relegate government
programs to the "leftover" air times. Roosevelt's political opponents were also adamantly opposed to
these activities, and the public was suspicious of government's intervention after the excesses of the Creel
Committee during World War I.
In 1943, Congress attacked the domestic branch of
the Office of War Information as excessively proRoosevelt and left leaning. As a result, the administration withdrew from the production of propaganda,
and the shaping of the radio war effort was left in the
hands of advertisers, radio personalities, and radio
stations. According to Horten, the United States increasingly fought a propaganda war shaped by the
interests of the private sector, which "provided a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
crucial link for the strengthening and relegitimation of
the privatized culture of consumer capitalism" (p. 9).
The second half of this book offers an analysis of the
making of this privatized "radio discourse" in the cases
of radio advertising, radio comedy, and radio soap
operas. Left in the hands of private enterprise, the
meaning of radio patriotism varied. Radio ads stressed
the connection between the virtues of a specific product and the general welfare of the United States while
comedians-in particular Bob Hope-glorified the
common man in a GI uniform.
Horten impressively summarizes this story in an
engaging book of less than 200 pages. The idea of the
privatization of American public culture is fascinating,
although it begs further development. Of course, the
government did regulate the media during World War
II, for instance by recommending, via the Policy and
Principles Committee formed by J. Edgar Hoover in
December 1941, the end of all Japanese-language
broadcasts-but not those in German and Italian,
which the government monitored but did not suppress.
According to Michel Foucault, power is at its most
effective when it is the least visible. Perhaps, then, the
real question is whether the government did not need
to enforce censorship because its point of view and
that of advertisers and radio businessmen were largely
overlapping. Yet if one is to judge from the story of
other media-for instance, Hollywood movies-there
were disagreements that in some cases prompted
intellectuals who had decided to work in mass media to
take their talents elsewhere. In one of the book's most
interesting chapters, Horten recounts the case of Irna
Phillips, one of the most successful radio writers of this
time, who objected to the new social and economic
roles the war economy offered women.
Horten's scant attention to the intellectual debates
surrounding the political use of radio might have
limited the value of his book by obscuring the connection between this story and the broader context of
contemporary U.S. intellectual history. In these years,
American intellectuals embraced mass media as a
possibility to communicate democracy and antifascism
to the general public. The integration of entertainment
and political propaganda in Jack Benny's wartime
radio shows recalled the progressive modernism of the
Warner Brothers film Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939)
that, according to the Popular Front magazine Film
News, interwove "documentary and dramatic materia!." This broader intellectual framework would have
emerged had Horten cast a larger net and examined
more closely his characters' political and intellectual
biographies. This said, however, Horten has written an
engaging account of a relatively neglected topic, and
his book will make a nice assignment in a variety of
classes in both U.S. and media history.
SAVERIO GIOVACCHINI
University of Maryland,
College Park
OCTOBER 2002