Book Review: Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II, by Gerd Horten, Reviewed by Jesse Walker

The U.S. government entered World War II aware that Americans had grown wary of heavy-handed propaganda. If it wanted to keep the public dedicated to the war effort—and to fend off rival views of how the battle should be fought, in particular the notion that the United States should wage a strictly defensive war—it could not simply reprise the techniques it had used in World War I. (This difficulty pertained more to the European war than to the war in the Pacific, where, as Horten notes, popular racism toward the Japanese made it easier to engage in cruder forms of incitement.) At the same time, the feds now had much more practice at propaganda thanks to the New Deal: throughout the 1930s, “[t]hrough newsreels, documentary films, theater, murals, and radio, the state was reaching out to the American people” (p. 21). The National Recovery Administration had produced massive amounts of radio programming before the agency was ruled unconstitutional, paving the way for such subsequent innovations as Franklin Roosevelt's famous fireside chats. Nor was the government the only institution broadcasting its point of view: anti-Roosevelt material, much of it sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers, was also widely aired.

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sick world we're living in

Article on new three-volume, 1,873-page Advertising Age Eycyclopedia of Advertising, edited by John McDonough and Museum of Broadcast Communications and Karen Egoff of Advertising Age magazine; photos (M) Cayce Packard, the heroine of William Gibson's recent novel, ''Pattern Recognition'' (Putnam), has a serious problem. Corporate symbols and logos make her ill. A glimpse of the bulbous Michelin Man is traumatic; even trademarks on the buttons of her Levis have to be sanded off.

But her hypersensitivity to commercial insignias also makes her eminently qualified to be a ''cool-hunter.'' She is hired by businesses to assess their logos and anticipate trends before they congeal into fads. She thus combines the cultural antennae of an advertising copywriter with the allergies of a Marxist: she helps create the very products that most disgust her.