Radio Utopia

RADIO

UTOPIA

Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest

Matthew C. Ehrlich

THE HISTORY OF COMMUNICATION

Radio Utopia

the history of communication

Robert W. McChesney

and John C. Nerone, editors

A list of books in the series

appears at the end of this book.

Radio Utopia

Postwar Audio Documentary

in the Public Interest

Matthew C. Ehrlich

University of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

© 2011 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 5 4 3 2 1

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ehrlich, Matthew C.

Radio utopia : postwar audio documentary in the public interest /

Matthew C. Ehrlich.

p. cm. — (The history of communication)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn-13: 978-0-252-03611-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

isbn-10: 0-252-03611-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Radio broadcasting—United States—History—20th century.

2. Documentary radio programs—United States—History—

20th century. 3. Radio broadcasting—Social aspects—United

States—20th century. 4. Radio broadcasting—Political aspects—

United States—20th century. I. Title.

pn1991.3.u6e37 2011

791.44—dc22 2010040243

Dedicated to George Ehrlich (1925–2009)

Father, teacher, scholar

To despair of the world is to resign from it.

—Norman Corwin

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Utopian Dreams 1

1. A Higher Destiny 13

2. One World 24

3. New and Sparkling Ideas 46

4. Home Is What You Make It 71

5. The Quick and the Dead 104

6. Hear It Now 129

7. Lose No Hope 155

Notes 165

Index 211

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the staffs of the following archives, who made researching

this book such a pleasure: CBS News Archives Reference Library, New York;

Daley Library Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago; Dolph

Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Howard

Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University; Library of American

Broadcasting, University of Maryland at College Park; Library of Congress,

Washington, D.C.; Paley Center for Media, New York and Beverly Hills; Rare

Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Ratner Center for the

Study of Conservative Judaism, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York;

Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University;

Special Collections, Thousand Oaks Library, Thousand Oaks, California;

University of Illinois Archives and University of Illinois Library, Urbana;

Wesleyan Cinema Archives, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut;

and the Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

Equally pleasurable, if not more so, was the privilege to speak with a

few of those who lived the actual events that this book relates. Thanks to

Norman Corwin, Robert Lewis Shayon and his wife Nash Cox, and Ruth

Ashton Taylor.

For access to historic radio broadcasts, thanks to Digital Deli Online (http://

www.digitaldeliftp.com); Jerry Haendiges Productions, Whittier, California

(http://www.otrsite.com); Original Old Radio, Berea, Kentucky (http://www

.originaloldradio.com); and the Radio Program Archive, University of Mem￾phis, Tennessee (https://umdrive.memphis.edu/mbensman/public).

For helpful comments concerning earlier drafts of this book, thanks to

Victor Pickard, Patrick Washburn, and Mike Conway. Thanks as well to Ken￾dra Boileau and Daniel Nasset of the University of Illinois Press and to John

Nerone and Robert McChesney of the History of Communication series.

For tips, shelter, and good cheer, thanks to Joe Saltzman, Chris Chandler,

and Kavitha Cardoza. For continuing to provide an intellectually vital place

to investigate and think, thanks to colleagues and students at the College of

Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Finally, thanks

and love always to my family.

x . acknowledgments

Radio Utopia

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 Mac￾Leish, Murrow’s CBS radio dispatches had demolished in Americans’ minds

“‘the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another con￾tinent are not violence and lies and murder here.’”1

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.”2

Dur￾ing 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 oth￾ers. 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.3

Also in the room was Robert Lewis Shayon, one of several radio writ￾ers 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.”4

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.5

Now the war was ending, and Shayon lis￾tened 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!’”6

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. Mur￾row helped form the CBS Documentary Unit with Shayon as a member, and

similar efforts developed at the other networks. They produced programs ad￾vocating action on everything from juvenile delinquency, slums, and race re￾lations 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.”7

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 televi￾sion system in which networks concentrated on television and left radio sta￾tions to their own programming resources.”8

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

2 . introduction