It feels fitting, in the country’s semiquincentennial, to reflect on the ways in which we have mythologized ourselves over the past 250 years.Article continues after advertisement
As you might imagine, the Golden Age of Radio, in which the medium was in lock-step with the three major commercial networks and their sponsors, produced a glut of blindly patriotic programming. Most of it was propagandist. There was no radio documentary form in this era, so very little framework for audio as something that questioned the narrative.
Some works directly reflected current events. Time magazine’s intriguing combination of promotion and radio drama, The March of Time, translated one or two of that week’s print stories into short radio plays. This hybrid form provided a sort “slice of life” approach to American life.
(Fast forward to the New York Time’s podcast The Daily, which unpacks one of the paper’s print articles each day.)
Other programs celebrated the idea of America as an ideal in dramatic form. In 1938, with the Nazi’s advancing in Europe, radio producer Himan Brown created a series called Main Street U.S.A, that both celebrated American values and warned of how easy it would be to lose the privilege our much-vaunted freedom allowed. When America entered the war, the government approached Brown about re-working the series to highlight all the ways in which ordinary people could help the war effort through their own initiatives. This new version was called Green Valley U.S.A. As Brown recalled it in an oral history interview conducted by the Directors’ Guild of America, “It was a town in which when we needed the doctor, we had the doctor, the postmaster, the general store, the cab drivers, the hotels. It was a total community of several hundred people whom I could draw on to do a government directive on writing to your boy in the army, on conserving fuel, creating a victory garden, on the need for nurses, or for general people in the army, and so on.
