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Honeymoon Shocker: Lucille Fletcher's “Psychological” Sound Effects and Wartime Radio Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

NEIL VERMA
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Abstract

This paper describes a change in how American radio dramatists used sound effects around the time of Pearl Harbor, particularly on Suspense, one of the signature “shocker” anthologies of the 1940s. In Suspense dramas by writers such as Lucille Fletcher, sound effects no longer merely described settings and action, as had been the custom previously. Instead, effects swept away interpersonal forms of colloquy and coded character psychology, often to the detriment of the populist spatial aesthetics that had prevailed during the Depression. Using accounts of studio technique, as well as a close reading of Fletcher's “The Hitch-hiker,” I argue that when radio told tales of characters under the sway of sound effects, it helped to promulgate the idea that minds are available to penetrating and persuasive “signal-based” communicative acts, just the sort of language required to make works of propaganda meaningful. In a larger way, this paper tries to rediscover the American radio play of the 1940s by treating it as not only “theater of the mind,” but also a theater about the mind.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 137 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 On this period at CBS see Erik Barnouw, The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States 1933–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 64–125; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1998), 381–84; and Judith E. Smith, “Radio's Cultural Front,” in Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, eds., The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (New York: Routledge, 2002), 209–30.

2 Lucille Fletcher, “Squeaks, Slams, Echoes and Shots,” New Yorker, 13 April 1940, 81–96.

3 Ibid., 86.

4 On coercion and radio see Christopher Simpson, The Science of Coercion: Communications Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 124–60; Gitlin, Todd, “Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm,” Theory and Society, 6, 2 (September 1978), 205–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jason Loviglio has also touched on these themes; see Jason Loviglio, Radio's Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy (Minneapolis: The University Of Minnesota Press, 2005).

5 William C. Ackerman, “The Dimensions of American Broadcasting,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring 1945), 3. “87% of Nation has Radios,” Variety, 11 March 1942; “600,000 Words or More Daily Pass through Propaganda Analysis Mill of FCC,” Variety, 31 Dec. 1941, 33.

6 “Radio's Billion $ Scope,” Variety, 21 Jan. 1942, 3.

7 Douglas, 152; Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 10.

8 See e.g. John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1976); John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Richard Lingeman, Don't You Know There's a War On? The American Home Front, 1941–1945 (New York: Nation, 2003).

9 Lingeman, 182; “603 War Shows on Web,” Variety, 29 July 1942, 25; the CBS figures come from an advertisement in Variety, 6 Jan. 1943, 113.

10 See e.g. Robert McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Alan Brinkley, “World War II and American Liberalism,” in Lewis Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds., The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); James Kimble, Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2006); Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

11 These figures are based on Mitchell E. Shapiro, Radio Network Prime Time Programming, 1926–1967 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002).

12 See e.g. Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 91–127; Howard Blue, Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 109–92; and Barbara Dianne Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

13 Bruce Lenthall, Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 208.

14 For a model of the approach that I advocate, please see: Shawn VanCour, “The Sounds of ‘Radio’: Aesthetic Formations of 1920's American Broadcasting” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2008); and my dissertation, Neil Verma, “Theater of the Mind: The American Radio Play and its Golden Age, 1934–1956” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008).

15 See e.g. Andrew Crissell, Understanding Radio (New York: Routledge, 1994); Tim Crook, Radio Drama: Theory & Practice (New York: Routledge, 1999); Richard Hand, Terror on the Air! Horror Radio in America, 1931–1952 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2006).

16 Pierson is quoted in Remy Brunel, “‘March of Time’ Scenarists and Actors Trained to Swift Changes to Keep up with News,” Washington Post, 13 Sept. 1936, AA5.

17 See Robert L. Mott, Sound Effects: Radio, TV, and Film (Boston: Focal Press, 1990), 197–98.

18 Lord is quoted in Remy Brunel, “Broadcasters Employ Complex Tricks to Put Over Radio Crime Thrillers,” Washington Post, 30 Aug. 1936, AA7.

19 Brown is quoted in Ira Skutch, Five Directors: The Golden Years of Radio (Los Angeles: Directors Guild of America, 1998), 29.

20 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1992), 272.

21 Earle McGill, Radio Directing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940), 39.

22 Fletcher relates this anecdote in Martin Grams Jr., Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills (Kearney, NB: Morris, 1997), 13.

23 This broadcast (2 Sept. 1942) is not to be confused with a version that aired on The Mercury Summer Theater (21 June 1946).

24 For appraisals of the program see Douglas Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 90; James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 279; Hand, 21; Allison McCracken, “Scary Women and Scarred Men: Suspense, Gender Trouble and Postwar Change, 1942–1950,” in Hilmes and Loviglio, The Radio Reader.

25 For more on this see Douglas, Listening In, 40–82; Allan Weiss, Phantasmatic Radio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence for Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 59–91.

26 “Cycle of Ghost Stories Hits Radio,” Variety, 4 March 1936, 49.

27 “Radio Reports – The Witch's Tale,” Variety, 8 Oct. 1936, 37.

28 Hand, 82.

29 “Letter from the National League for Decency in Radio,” Variety, 15 May 1935, 38–39.

30 McCracken, 183; Skutch, Five Directors, 25.

31 John K. Hutchens, “The Shockers,” New York Times, 8 Nov. 1942, X12.

32 Ibid.

33 Schafer, The Soundscape, 175.

34 Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War (New York: Lancer Books, 1943), 157.

35 Ibid., 158.

36 This reading is based on a version that aired in two parts on Suspense (18 and 25 May 1944).

37 Sherman Dryer, Radio in Wartime (New York: Greenberg, 1942), 205; William Bennett Lewis, “Radio Propaganda Must Be Painless,” Variety, 6 Jan. 1943, 97; Robert J. Landry, “Radio: Key to National Unity,” The Atlantic, April 1942, 503.