Radio: American Charter

How would radio showmanship in the U.S. rise to the occasion of war? Mindful of radio’s potency over the public mind, radiomen had given this question anxious thought. They (and everyone else) got an answer of a sort last week from the Bill of Rights anniversary program. Heard by more people than any other U.S. radio “show” in history, it might serve as a touchstone for future patriotic programs.

Its “talent” was the best Hollywood has (James Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Brennan, et al.) and the best radio voice in Washington (Franklin D. Roosevelt). Its writing, timing and direction (by Norman Corwin) were expert. It was produced under the wand of the Office of Facts & Figures, headed by Archibald MacLeish. Government, networks and artists collaborated on it.

If in wartime public sentiment can be stirred and public thinking informed only by something unfavorably known as “propaganda,” the program was propaganda. Yet its theatrics, its sentimentality, its moments of bad taste were not products of war but of imperfect art. It did not descend to cheap and spurious jingoism. And it told a truth in telling, out of the mouths of the imagined People, why and when the Bill of Rights was written, what it says, and what it means as an American Charter promising no deprivation of life or property except by due process of law—a conception notably not held by the adversary in Berlin.