episode 4

During World War II, the United States government established propaganda offices such as the Office of Emergency Management and the Office of War Information to shape public opinion. These offices produced programs and broadcasts that demonized Nazi Germany but did not villainize the German people. Hollywood also played a role in promoting American exceptionalism and patriotism. Radio emerged as a powerful medium for disseminating propaganda and was highly successful in educating audiences and reinforcing national unity. However, the prominence of radio as a political and cultural platform diminished after the war. Overall, radio played a significant role in shaping public discourse and influencing the fight against fascism through both overt and covert propaganda efforts. In the days after Pearl Harbor, the government propaganda infrastructure in the United States will materialize in the Information Division of the Office of Emergency Management, or the OEM, the Office of Government Reports, or the OGR, and the Office of Facts and Figures, or the OFS, which was the most heavily propaganda-related office of the war effort. The OFS would eventually become the Office of War Information in June 1942. In the first year of America's entry into the conflict, many Americans remained confused about the direction of the war and dissatisfied with government decision-making. FDR would attempt to chart the course for Americans on a February 23, 1942, fireside chat in which he decried the isolationist stance that Americans wanted to again adopt, and even described where and how America was fighting the war using a map and describing modes of warfare. Later writers at CBS and NBC would streamline war propaganda into dictating the nature of the enemy. The OWI's production of You Can't Do Business with Hitler posed Nazi Germany as a direct threat to the American way of life, as Horton writes of the program intended to show, quote, Nazi Germany used business as a weapon in its strategy for global supremacy, and that a defeat of the Allies would slowly but surely strangle American business and free enterprise, end quote. This is Douglas Miller speaking. I'll be very blunt and to the point. I want to give you a picture of Nazi trade methods and Nazi business methods as I saw them during my 15 years in Berlin. I have two reasons for so doing. First, to tell you some of the causes of this war that you perhaps have never heard of before. Second, to convince you, if you need convincing, that there can never be any compromise with Hitlerism. We wipe it out or it wipes us out. While You Can't Do Business with Hitler demonized the enemy of Nazi Germany, what it did not do was villainize the people of Germany. The program portrayed a stark difference between these two groups and allowed American audiences to see the plight of some of the German people. Horton writes, quote, according to a number of these broadcasts, Germans were also subjugated to ruthless policies against their will. In an episode entitled Work or Die, the audience was told how the average German worker had been enslaved in a systematic eight-year-long campaign. Similarly, two episodes, Visa Burden and The Sellout, focused on how German businessmen had become Visa Burden, groomed by the Gestapo to serve, feed, and obey the new order in Germany. One of the first Hollywood-inspired entries into the war effort would be written and produced by Norman Corwin for CBS, entitled We Hold These Truths, with a star-studded cast including Jimmy Stewart, Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore. The play was broadcast eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The play was a celebration of the history of the nation from the founding to its present day. Like so many American films of the future, it reinforced American exceptionalism as the birthplace of the modern republic, well-equipped to fight off the evils of fascism. Washington Monument, for example, or the Lincoln Memorial, where the seated and relaxed Abe Lincoln sits between two mighty murals with plain words, his own words. With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Corwin's later program, This Is War, aired for 13 weeks in 1942. In the first episode, America at War, Corwin throws the rules out the window as he evokes the atrocity stories that permeated the propaganda of World War I, as well as embracing Laswell's propaganda characteristics of Satanism in polarizing speech. Narrating over the airwave, Robert Montgomery asked the audience, what is the enemy? We know what we are, but what is the enemy? Answering his own question with, quote, the enemy is murder international, murder unlimited, quick murder on the spot, or slow murder in the concentration camp, murder for listening to the shortwave radio, for marrying a Pole, for propagation of the faith, for speaking one's mind, for trading with a non-Aryan, for being an invalid too long. The enemy is a liar also, a gigantic and deliberate and willful liar, end quote. More dramatic and inflamed than much of the subdued British propaganda, the United States implored a propaganda campaign that experimented with the models presented by the First World War and the Great Depression. What really cemented the success of this campaign, however, was the influence of radio on embracing disseminated information for audiences across the nation. The success of both British and American forms of propaganda would materialize in the years after the war ended. Throughout the world, throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe. It is five years and more since Hitler marched into Poland, years full of suffering and death and sacrifice. Now the war against Germany is won. A grateful nation gives thanks for victory. Hundreds of thousands crowd into American churches to give thanks to God. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan. In a poll taken by the National Opinion Research Center in November of 1945, 2,500 Americans were asked, taking everything into consideration, which of these do you think did the best job of serving the public during the war? Magazines, newspapers, moving pictures, or radio broadcasting? 67% of respondents put radio at the top of the list, with newspapers falling at 17%, movies at 4%, and magazines at 3%, as put forward by the public responses from American audiences as studied by CBS, NBC, the OWI, as well as other institutions, and from those seen in Great Britain by the BBC, the Ministry of Information, and groups like the Mass Observation Group and Listener Research, as well as from the thousands of private letters and diaries sent to journalists like Edward Murrow, H.V. Kelton Bourne, and J.B. Priestley, radio broadcasting was widely successful in its dissemination of white propaganda to educate audiences on the war effort and reinforce national unity and legitimacy of the war effort. In writing the Radio War, Ian Whittington writes, The preeminence of radio as a site for discourses of politics, culture, and identity did not last long. As a medium for propagating stories of national and transnational belonging, radio reached its apogee during the Second World War and was sustained for some years afterwards before beginning a slow fade-out that continues to this day. But for that brief historical period, the sound of an individual's voice and the weight of that individual's words could affect the shape of debate on a national scale. The same crisis that cemented writers' resolve to participate in the public sphere brought that public sphere to new life, as listeners tuned in to hear representations of the events and the ideas that shaped both the immediate and the more distant future. Writing the Radio War demanded an attention to the tenor of public discussion and a willingness to step in and influence that same discussion." For radio in the war effort, the voice proved mightier than the pen. Radio moved audiences and writers in a fight against fascism through overt and hidden propaganda.