Radio Recap: Dear Adolf

Dear Adolf was 6-week long program that aired on NBC from June 21 to August 2, 1942. It was a wartime propaganda program; all of the shows I've surveyed thus far, it's most similar to the Man Behind the Gun. It's unlike that program in that it was driven by a singular creative talent - said talent being author Stephen Vincent Benet. Each episode was written by Benet and drawn from material found in open letters actual people had written "to" dictator Adolf Hitler.

I like Benet, although I can only take so much of him. He was a very pro-American author. Sometimes that was tempered when he would examine his nation's faults. Dear Adolf is not tempered but because it was propaganda being directed against the Nazis, I find it more palatable than other propaganda pieces. It also helps that Dear Adolf was a lean 15-minute program instead of a half-hour. Further, each of Benet's letters was performed as a sort of soliloquy by a first-rate famous performer. The six letters were thus:

1. June 21: "A Letter from an American Farmer" starring Raymond Massey
2. June 28: "A Letter from an American Businessman" starring Melvyn Douglas
3. July 5: "A Letter from an American Laborer" starring James Cagney
4. July 12: "A Letter from an American Housewife" starring Helen Hayes
5. July 26: "A Letter from an American Private" starring William Holden
6. August 2: "A Letter from a Foreign-Born American" starring Joseph Schildkraut

Dear Adolf feels like a Columbia Workshop offshoot, which I mean as high praise; NBC didn't often invest in dramatic programming to the extent CBS did, especially pre-1946 (a lot of Benet's stories were adapted on Columbia Workshop). The Cagney episode alone is a bit of a treat as Cagney didn't perform on radio very often!

The Old-Time Radio Researchers Group has a playlist collection of Dear Adolf on YouTube.