Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II

Rating:
Summary: Radio Goes To War
Review: (excerpted from The Independent Review, Summer 2002)

Horten's slim but rich study of broadcasting in the United States during World War II is a welcome addition to the literatures on radio, propaganda, advertising, and the war. It is a juggling act as well, at times a conventional historical account and at times something closer to cultural studies. It is an impressive performance, and only at the end does Horten drop one of the juggling pins to the floor.

With war propaganda embedded in ads and advertisements embedded in war propaganda - and both embedded in listeners' favorite programs - domestic public relations began to take a new turn. Horten writes sensitively about the interplay between different genres of programming and about the officially sponsored messages they now incorporated. Nor does he neglect the times when programs managed to undermine the official messages. The result is an excellent and multifaceted study that breaks new ground in radio history.

The book's epilogue, unfortunately, moves into a new territory, plunging suddenly into the much larger topic of America's "privatized" postwar culture. In this book, the meaning of privitization is shaky; it seems to refer more to the private sphere than to the private sector, though at times even that distinction gets blurred.

Why does Horten conclude an otherwise well-focused study with a broad new topic that he lacks adequate room to explore? Because one of the themes of the book is that this cultural shift, however you choose to define it, began during World War II, not afterward, and that it can be seen in the wartime alignment of private advertising and public propaganda. It is a substantial and defensible point, and I am glad he makes it, but I wish he had left it at that, reserving the larger social speculations for his next book.