Emil Lederer: Review of Hello America!—Radio Adventures in Europe (1939)

Emil Lederer’s signed journal review assesses César Saerchinger’s account of international broadcasting as evidence for understanding the relationship between world politics and public opinion. Saerchinger’s experience as the first representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System in Great Britain gives him access both to broadcasting’s organizational machinery and to political personalities before the microphone. Lederer values these observations, but his central concern is the medium’s political ambiguity: radio can expose theatrical demagoguery while also carrying dictatorial propaganda across national borders into private homes.

The review begins by unsettling the ordinary listener’s sense of radio as entertainment and information. Music, drama, speeches, and news belong to a worldwide communications system whose reach can blur political frontiers and facilitate attacks on other countries. The domestic intimacy of listening does not place audiences outside political struggle; it provides international propaganda with access to them. Lederer then turns to the historical significance of broadcasting. Print had displaced the human voice as the principal means of reaching large populations; radio reconnects vocal persuasion with mass distribution.

The radio has restored the power of the human voice, and with it the sphere that one man influences, if he is given the opportunity to broadcast.

This restoration changes rather than simply reproduces public oratory. The speaker addressing an assembly can employ gestures, dramatic presentation, and the emotional atmosphere of a gathering. Radio instead demands a clear, articulate voice whose effects depend on words alone. Lederer presents Saerchinger’s argument that this difference weakens the demagogue. A passage attributed to Bernard Shaw describes the microphone as exposing insincerity and empty political rhetoric. The examples that follow emphasize leaders’ reliance on cheering crowds: Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin do not deliver their broadcasts privately from their studies, while Lloyd George’s theatrical abilities lose their usefulness on air. Listening at home could therefore free individuals from the suggestibility generated by mass meetings and make broadcasting an instrument of democracy.

Lederer does not accept this democratic possibility as a settled property of the medium. His decisive qualification is:

But there are examples to the contrary (such as Father Coughlin) and the author himself makes us acquainted with the extent to which dictatorship has seized upon radio propaganda which can cloak itself in a seemingly objective argument.

The contrast shifts attention from the sincerity of an individual voice to the organization and presentation of propaganda. Dictatorships possess powerful short-wave stations and broadcast in multiple languages. Their influence need not depend on obvious ranting: apparently objective argument can serve political manipulation. Lederer’s remark that Italian broadcasts in Asian languages evidently exist only to provide “unbiased news” is pointedly ironic. His comparison with France’s concentration on languages spoken in its colonies underscores how broadcasting’s geographical and linguistic reach follows political interests.

The review’s closing movement places Saerchinger’s book against events subsequent to its composition. Developments in the autumn of 1938 demonstrated radio’s capacity to communicate consequential political issues to hundreds of millions as decisions unfolded, making newspapers outdated before publication. Broadcasting thus affects not only the reach of public communication but its timing: audiences encounter historical events while those events are still being enacted.

For Lederer, the book’s principal value is the view it affords behind this machinery. The public is both an instrument used by political actors and a power capable of directing them. This reciprocal relationship prevents the review from reducing listeners to passive recipients, even as it stresses their vulnerability.

This book may be regarded as source material for an analysis of the interrelation between world politics and public opinion.

Lederer’s final judgment identifies the book’s relevance without claiming that it supplies a complete theory. Its observations illuminate a medium whose democratic possibilities coexist with unprecedented opportunities for transnational manipulation.