‘Hello, Americans. This radio show is for all of you who speak this language; it’s about the rest of America. That’s a big word, America. It’s easy to forget how much it means’.Footnote 1 These were the first words spoken by filmmaker, radio and theatre man Orson Welles in the first episode of his radio series Hello Americans, which was broadcast between December 1942 and January 1943 and received positive ratings. It was produced by Welles for CBS with the support of the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) and the RKO Studios, as part of Welles’s war efforts as ambassador for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy – a foreign policy based on reciprocal exchanges with Latin America under the guiding principles of non-intervention and non-interference in the domestic affairs of the region. The policy came after decades of American interventionism (or Big Stick policy) linked to the Monroe Doctrine.Footnote 2 As part of this programme, the proclaimed objective of Hello Americans was to bridge the gap between the North and the South, between the United States and ‘the rest’ of America.
The twelve thirty-minute episodes explored various regions of Central and South America, delving into specific aspects of their history and culture. Four episodes focused on particular countries or areas: ‘Brazil’; ‘The Andes’; ‘The Islands’ (with an emphasis on Haiti); and ‘Mexico’.Footnote 3 Three episodes followed keywords related to the continent and arranged alphabetically: ‘Alphabet A to C’; ‘Alphabet C to S’; and ‘Alphabet: Slavery (Abednego) to End of Alphabet’. These episodes were organized around individual letters and took the form of a prose poem: ‘A is for Arawaks, Armadillos, Anacondas, Angostura bitter, and Aro Root . . . for Aeroplanes that bring the Americas together’,Footnote 4 sometimes exploring different stories centred on these keywords.
Episodes such as ‘The Bad-Will Ambassador’, ‘Feed the World’, and ‘Bolívar’s Idea’ conveyed an underlying message of Pan-Americanism as a pathway to peace. The first two were scripted stories: Richard Brooks’s ‘The Bad-Will Ambassador’ is a Christmas tale about an American diplomat reflecting on his career during a trip home, while Milton Geiger’s ‘Feed the World’ features Welles portraying Famine – the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse – contemplating how the resources of the Americas could help feed a suffering world. The final episode, ‘Bolívar’s Idea’, featured Welles engaging with various fictional characters to discuss the importance of Pan-Americanism in the context of a world at war. Shifting to a different tone, the episodes titled ‘Ritmos de las Américas’ (episodes 8 and 11)Footnote 5 featured jazz musician Lud Gluskin,Footnote 6 who performed and commented on a variety of Latin American dance music genres, taking Welles’s place for these segments.
In this article, I examine the sonic strategies – both music and sound – that Welles employed to promote a Pan-Americanist agenda in Hello Americans, with a core focus on how radio as a medium becomes a site of transatlantic encounter. The guiding question asks: How does Welles’s use of sound and music in his radio series shape and communicate a particular vision of Latin American identity within the broader context of Pan-American cultural exchanges? This analysis explores how sonic elements serve as tools of cultural diplomacy during moments of encounter, illustrating how music and sound can both foster understanding and construct idealized images of Latin America. In doing so, the article reflects on the broader processes of how music and sound are created, performed, perceived, and discussed across different contexts – ranging from intercultural exchange to cultural dominance – shedding light on how these encounters influence cultural production and perception in the twentieth century.
In general terms, Hello Americans was among a number of radio programmes that adopted a ‘travelogue format’.Footnote 7 However, as a conceptual unit, the radio series is a heterogenous object, and the contents of its episodes alternates between two formats. The first is that of the radio drama – a scripted fiction performed by actors, in line with much of Welles’s previous radio work, and produced by his company, the Mercury Theatre. The subject matter of these episodes aligned with Welles’s previous interests, which had dealt with historical figures connected to America’s colonial history such as Christopher Columbus and Simón Bolívar.
In a second format, Welles addresses the listeners directly on a given topic to articulate specific ideas. He does so by incorporating fictional elements, with actors playing the roles of audience members calling in to chat with him. The main recurring topic of these conversations was Pan-Americanism – a movement advocating diplomatic, political, and economic alliances between North, Central, and South America – which Welles defines throughout the Hello Americans radio series. His final episode is devoted entirely to this theme, in which Welles asks his grandmother, ‘What does “Pan-Americanism” or “Pan-American” mean, Grandma?’
In these episodes in which Welles interacts with his audience, music from Latin America comes to the fore – likely as a strategy to connect U.S. listeners to the rest of the continent through something already familiar. This includes, for example, the appearance of well-known musical guests such as Carmen Miranda, from Brazil, and Miguelito Valdés, from Cuba. The two episodes featuring Lud Gluskin and his orchestra – ‘Ritmos de las Américas’ – function as interludes that nevertheless promote a unified vision of Latin America and the Caribbean, voiced respectively by the hosts, Mexican singer and actor Tito Guízar, and Colombian baritone and actor Carlos Julio Ramírez. At any rate, Welles’s emphasis on a shared history of the continent also implied a shared future. The connection between the celebration of Pan-Americanism and the effort to involve the ‘rest’ of America in the U.S. war effort in Europe – hinted at in Welles’s opening line – becomes apparent early on.
This was indeed another purpose of the Good Neighbour Policy: to promote ‘hemispheric unity’Footnote 8 by counteracting years of successful Axis propaganda in South America.Footnote 9 One example of this two-way exchange between North and South America is the fact that many of the programmes were translated from English into Spanish and Portuguese, and broadcast throughout Latin America. If the Germans sought to turn Latin America against Anglo-America by emphasizing their differences, American radio sought to highlight their commonalities in order to bring them together. In the golden age of radio, these soundwaves were regarded as a privileged medium through which this message could be conveyed – and Orson Welles’s iconic radiophonic voice served as a powerful reinforcement. In short, Welles’s message throughout the series was the following: listen, we are not that different from each other.
Hello Americans was broadcast a little over a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into the war, a moment when the Pan-Americanist ideal also served to support efforts to persuade South America to align with North America in its wartime mobilization in Europe. In her analysis on cultural diplomacy during the Second World War with a focus on Latin America, Darlene Sadlier describes Welles and Hello, Americans as ‘[u]ndoubtedly, the most exciting and flamboyant broadcast contributor’Footnote 10 within the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s massive campaign to promote inter-American cooperation and solidarity, which had already started in 1940 when Nazi troops entered Paris.
This unifying message of North–South samenessFootnote 11 was conveyed across the different types of episodes: scripted historical radio dramas, talk-show-style segments with a fictionalized audience, and those with a commented-concert format, which focused on Latin American music featuring guest musicians and a live orchestra. A constant underlying tension persisted between the familiar and the exotic: music served as a bridge, something most listeners already knew and enjoyed (artists such as Carmen Miranda were popular in the United States at the time). Similarly, affirmations such as ‘children dance samba before they can walk and play the rhythm before they can talk’Footnote 12 reveal that clichés were not kept at bay. Another clear intention Welles pursued throughout the series was to show how modern some Latin American cities were. Portrayals of a modern city such as Rio, and of Brazil’s metallurgical industry, served as a way of bridging the gap between a developed ‘us’ and an undeveloped ‘them’. And yet, descriptions such as ‘skyscrapers and the jungle’Footnote 13 linger – the exotic allure proved too difficult to resist. The more historical radio dramas, on the other hand, tackled mostly two topoi that connect the Americas through a shared history: the experience of colonial oppression and the ideals of independence.
Welles’s radio-drama productions for Mercury Theatre on the Air began in 1938 and brought him considerable popularity, mainly because of his broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. As Erik Barnouw has argued,Footnote 14 it was in these productions that Welles changed the rules of radio writing: using almost exclusively first-person singular narration and loosing up the overall structure of the radio drama. Passionate about this medium, Welles even claimed of himself: ‘My big inventions were in radio and the theatre. Much more than in movies’.Footnote 15 Many of the themes fictionalized in Hello Americans had already been explored in his earlier radio work. For example, his play Christopher Columbus, written in collaboration with Robert Meltzer and Norris Houghton, was broadcast for ‘Columbus Day’ in October 1942 as part of the Cavalcade of America series under the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea. As Simon Callow has analysed,Footnote 16 Welles passionately personalized historical facts to make them vivid and accessible, dramatizing information with a commitment to an enlivened educational process. This approach can be heard in different episodes of Hello, Americans: both in the desire to disseminate historical facts, and in Welles’s use of radio as a medium capable of creating an immersive and vivid experience – in other words, hearing an actor perform as Simón Bolívar brought history into the living rooms of American listeners.
In the two sections of this article, we examine the sonic strategies that Welles employed to shape and communicate a specific vision of Latin American identity and ‘Latin American music’ within the broader framework of Pan-American cultural exchanges. I propose analysing the series within its production context, reflecting on what diplomacy through music and sound might involve and how Welles’s use of sound and music in his radio series influences the construction of this identity and functions as a diplomatic tool.
The first section begins with an analysis of the twelve episodes, bringing to the foreground the main sonic and musical elements of the series. I examine the techniques put in place to ‘move’ an audience towards the Pan-American cause, to bring together Americans from the North towards the South, and, to a lesser degree, vice versa. Poetic licence was preferred at the expense of historical precision – the focus is placed on creating an emotional bond with the audience, making them feel closer to Latin Americans. For this purpose, the immersive quality of sound and music is key to bringing this common history and music inside the homes of American citizens. There is a dissonance between this vision of ‘sameness’ and a representation of the ‘other’, often reinforcing the different Latin American cultures as ‘different and exotic’.Footnote 17 Where can these moments of dissonance be heard? In the second section, I consider to what degree Welles was truly such ‘a knight for the good-will cause’ in his diplomatic mission to enlist Latin America in the U.S. war effort. If the radio was a privileged medium in the nation-building processes of the time, Orson Welles also had his own agenda that was not always in line with the official guidelines from government officials.
Both sections deal with the consequences of these encounters, between Orson Welles and Latin America, and between the different interpretations of what this shared Pan-American history meant. In his study on the ‘invention’ of the concept of ‘Latin American music’, Pablo Palomino defines the transnational encounter through which this concept takes shape.Footnote 18 In this sense, I propose that this ‘other America’ (as Welles puts it) emerges through Welles’s encounters with the southern continent – even if the nature of these exchanges varies from case to case.
Another theoretical prism considers these diplomatic missions as ‘ethnographies of encounter’ between Welles and his Latin American counterparts. As defined by Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel, it is through these types of encounters that ‘meanings, identities, objects, and subjectivities’ can materialize ‘through unequal relationships involving people and things’.Footnote 19 In his series, I argue that Welles creates ‘speculative geographies’, conceived by Keith Woodward as spaces that arise from dissonance, that ‘offer percepts that force thought open to dynamic sites rather than enclosing it within creative geography’s “worlds”’.Footnote 20 Additionally, for these geographies to exist, it is important for listeners to have the sensation of ‘being mobile’, of ‘being’ in Brazil, the Andes, and the Pampas – the mobility trope as analysed by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek.Footnote 21
It is through this interpretative grid that I now listen to the twelve episodes of Hello Americans with a focus on the opening episode on Brazil. In the analysis, the two guiding questions are: What are the sounds and music that came to represent the different Latin American countries and cultures to U.S. audiences? How are these aural representations intertwined with music diplomacy and radio as an effective soft power tool within the Good Neighbour Policy and the Pan-Americanist movement?
Aural representations of the ‘rest’ of America
Orson Welles produced Hello Americans after many years of experience as a radio man, a medium he was passionate about because of its potential for education and for imparting information clearly, loudly, and effectively. Welles needed little rehearsal during the recordings, and much of the programme was made directly in the recording studio.Footnote 22 Most of the research for the series came from his goodwill tour of Latin America on 1942, as part of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy. In a letter to businessman and politician Nelson Rockefeller, Welles explicitly stated: ‘the best goodwill propaganda is to sell South America to North America’, and his colleagues even mentioned that he was ‘working harder on this series than anything he’s ever done before’.Footnote 23 As for Rockefeller, he reported to Time that he trusted Welles ‘so completely’ that he didn’t even need to go over his ‘South American scripts’.Footnote 24
The first episode, ‘Brazil’ (broadcast on 15 November 1942), opens with a dialogue between Welles and a fictional caller, with whom he reflects on the questions: ‘What is America?’ and ‘Who are the “Americans” in the title of this series?’ Welles positions himself as the intermediary introducing American nations to one another, starting with Brazil. Thus, the fictional nature of the programme is quickly established. When the same caller asks, ‘You mean you are broadcasting from Brazil? How? By shortwave?’, Welles answers, ‘No, dramatic licence’, as the episode simulates being aired from Rio de Janeiro.
Music is clearly in the foreground of this opening episode, during which Welles claims to bring the ‘real samba’ to his fellow citizens. He quickly describes it as ‘the old two-step with a South American accent’ before playing a samba for the listeners. He welcomes his musical guest, singer and actress Carmen Miranda, a prominent figure in the Brazilian cultural industries of the 1940s and 1950s,Footnote 25 who is introduced as ‘North America’s South American favourite’. Miranda and Welles perform a short singing lesson that culminates with both singing Ary Barroso’s ‘No tabuleiro da baiana’ in Portuguese. They then describe the instruments of the samba, one by one ‘to investigate the anatomy of samba’: surdo (a big bass drum), two tamborim (hand drum with two different rhythms), pandeiros (tambourines), reco-reco (scratcher), ganzá (a percussion instrument ‘handled with the flair of a cocktail maker with a shaker’), cuica (catgut stick drum), and agogô (twin bells). Welles describes each instrument and their often-African origins, advancing the metaphor of Brazil as ‘a drop of blood of all humanity’, where Europe, Africa, and America coexist under a single nation. He portraits Brazil as a paradise and its inhabitants as embodiments of racial integration.
The listeners are clearly at the centre of Welles’s concerns. In the episode, he oscillates between maintaining the charm of the exotic and calling attention to certain misconceptions. This leads to affirmations such as: ‘If you scramble the two words “music” and “Brazil” together and then unscramble them again, you end up with the word “samba”’; Brazilians being able to produce samba by ‘tapping matchboxes, straw hats, tabletops, little pieces of wood – anything at hand’; and ‘if you scramble a moderate number of Brazilians together and then unscramble them, you find that they’ve been dancing the samba’.Footnote 26 However, he concludes that ‘samba is the soul of Brazil’, and that its children sing it before they can talk and dance it before they can walk. He nevertheless adds that this should not lead one to believe that ‘Brazilians think seriously of nothing but dancing and singing’ – and counters – ‘This isn’t true, as any Brazilian will tell you’.Footnote 27
The episode – and Welles’s approach throughout the series – has two major focuses: on the one hand, the celebration of samba and its origins, explaining the different rhythms and instruments, with samba goddess turned Hollywood’s sweetheart Miranda as guest. On the other hand, Welles tries to deconstruct some stereotypes about Brazil and to present it as a modern country. To do this, Welles introduces fictional characters performed by the Mercury Players, through whom he presents the richness and diversity of the country. He thus introduces ‘the businessman’, ‘the economist’, ‘the mining engineer’, ‘the girl’, ‘the writer’, ‘the sociologist’, and ‘the naturalist’. He refers to the importance of sciences, of Brazil’s industrial power and resources, as well as the need to protect the Amazon rainforest.
To a certain degree, the episode mirrors the film sequence called ‘Anatomy of samba’Footnote 28 from Welles’s unfinished film It’s All True. The hypothesis that the ‘Pan-American film’Footnote 29 It’s All True would probably have resembled this first episode is one of the main topics in Marguerite Rippy’s book about the infamous lost film. André Bazin defined the film as ‘indirect propaganda’, portraying an enthusiastic Welles trying to teach the samba to North American listeners as though it were ‘swing’.Footnote 30 The point of the episode is, mostly – and regardless of the clichés about Brazil and samba rhythms – to make this culture accessible and familiar to U.S. citizens, even affirming that ‘Samba is just a way of playing North American jazz’.Footnote 31 Again, we can hear that just as he deconstructs certain existing clichés, he replaces them with new ones.
However, the political implications of the ‘Brazil’ episode were also present, and not without contradictions. Welles was a highly esteemed foreigner to Brazilians, as he had gone places that tourists did not usually venture. Roosevelt’s non-interventionist principle of the Good Neighbour Policy was a welcome change for Brazil’s Estado Novo (1937–1945) dictatorship. In 1939, its foreign minister Oswaldo Aranha travelled to Washington, DC, and the two countries enjoyed a privileged relationship, with Welles calling Vargas ‘Mr. Roosevelt’s great and good friend’ during a famous broadcast from Rio in honour of Vargas’s birthday.Footnote 32 The broadcast from Rio transported the audience – this time not by poetic licence but by Welles’s physical presence, as he was there for the festivities. Even though Welles might not have been completely in line with Vargas’s government (although he sympathized with it), he played the game of soft power diplomacy.
This tension between the exotic and the familiar, between sameness and a resistance to sameness, recurs in several passages. For instance, when Welles explains the meaning of the word carioca, he refers to ‘the inhabitants of Rio. It’s a word like “Angeleno” or “Maverick” or “Hoosier”’. Not only that, but cariocas ‘get an extra lot of fun out of life, which is understandable when you consider where they live, and they’re the best-natured folks I’ve ever met’. And a little later, ‘But there’s another side of Rio. Not a seamy side – not at all, even if smart isn’t the word of it. No, indeed, if Rio’s backyard isn’t exactly gala, it’s even gayer than Rio’s front lawn’.
It appears that the policy aimed for more than just transnational friendship – it sought support to counterbalance Adolf Hitler in the European war, as well as the German national socialist propaganda that had been operating in the region since the 1930s. Latin America was experiencing progress and began to present a different face to North Americans and Europeans. In the end, the various countries adopted different positions towards the war effort (some took part, others remained neutral). Afterwards, during the Cold War, the United States adopted a more hands-on approach – pursuing an interventionist policy in support of the new array of dictatorships that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 33
Darlene Sadlier revealed that this first episode was intended to have a Portuguese version to be broadcast to Brazilian audiences. If the U.S. version began with a scripted call from a cranky American who asked Welles, ‘Why should he [the listener] care about the non-English speaking America?’, the Brazilian version featured two callers who complained about the mistreatment of largely Black and poor samba composers at the hands of white elites. This version never saw the light of day, as Sadlier points out, but it reaffirms Welles’s emphasis on race and social class – an emphasis that likely would not have passed the censorship of either U.S. or Brazilian authorities.Footnote 34 Music assisted Welles in his rhetorical mission to make Latin America comprehensible to Americans: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’re nothing if not Pan American. We have played for you a North American jazz imitation of a Mexican song, rendered by a Brazilian orchestra into a samba. We followed this with a Mexican singer singing a real samba’.Footnote 35
Brian McCann considers the fundamental rules of the music that emerged during Getúlio Vargas’s government and how a new popular music, themes, and practices were created between the 1920s and the mid-1950s – a period during which samba became the expression of national identity.Footnote 36 A new national culture emerged in which the boundaries between the high-culture modernism of the Semana de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (1922)Footnote 37 and popular music innovation blurred – a salient example being Oswald de Andrade quoting samba lyrics in his Manifesto Antropófago of 1928,Footnote 38 even as he lamented the fact that samba was an urban genre rather than a rural and folkloric one.Footnote 39 This connection between samba and Brazilian identity, framed within a modernist artistic movement, likely justifies Welles’s decision to focus on this musical genre for his episode on Brazil.
In the episode, we hear Ary Barroso’s ‘Aquarela do Brasil’ (1939) several times. The song became popular through Walt Disney’s The Three Caballeros and was frequently performed by Carmen Miranda for U.S. audiences – and, when given English lyrics, it simply became ‘Brazil’. As Juan Carlos Poveda has analysed, these representations of ‘Latin Americans’ in Hollywood (Disney included) were common during the Good Neighbour Policy era.Footnote 40 This connection between nation and samba has been widely studied. As Florencia Garramuño argues,Footnote 41 we must denaturalize the process by which a music genre becomes the ‘symbol’ of a nation, as well as the connections between popular music and the modernisation of both Brazil and Argentina between the 1920s and 1940s. This perspective highlights the concept of nationhood as a creative process – an ‘invention’. As Pablo Palomino has shown, it is during this same period that the concept of ‘Latin American music’ was invented and stabilized as a signifier within a transnational context, contributing to the formation of Latin America both as an idea and as a reality.Footnote 42 This tension between the idea and the reality of Latin America is what emerges from Welles’s reading of the Brazilian case. What Welles emphasizes throughout is the presence of a Brazilian nationhood, despite internal differences: ‘Some like the sertões of the north; some like the cattle plains of the south; some like the port cities along the coast; and some like the jungles in the interior. But all Brazilians like Brazil, as you say, very much’.
The aural representation of all these tensions and dialogues is achieved through a ‘kaleidosonic’ use of radio,Footnote 43 presenting different events as happening on one same plane – a sense of simultaneity and a dynamic movement. This effect is created solely through sound, particularly Welles’s voice, which weaves these diverse elements and geographies into a cohesive auditory tapestry. For example, Welles invites listeners to ‘fly to Rio’ or ‘to the Andes’: fictional invitations, since listeners did not leave their homes and Welles did not leave his studio to flirt with Carmen Miranda. Furthermore, he incorporates multilingualism by voicing the foreign languages himself, as well as employing a ‘call-and-response’ mechanism – for example with Carmen Miranda, as she ‘teaches’ him about samba, or in other episodes, when he has conversations with fictional callers.Footnote 44 Another strategy involves interviewing dead heroes and evil conquistadores as if they were alive, and profiling as many Latin American countries as possible, evoking their sounds and atmospheres. These moments offer sound-illustrated lectures on history, geography, economics, politics, and culture of the Caribbean and Latin America. We thus hear rhythmic beats of jungle drums in Brazil, followed by an orchestral rendition of a samba – with Welles calling out ‘Dig that rhythm, you cats, that’s the Amazon and the Conga talking!’Footnote 45
Welles ends the programme by defining his role – that of an ambassador. He conceives this role as providing the most complete version of these countries so that ‘you can get a notion of what the other half of America looks like’. According to film historian Robert Sam, Welles as a diplomat was in ‘perfect accord with his personal sympathies and his left-leaning politics’,Footnote 46 as well as his sensibility to class and racial issues. Thus, Welles concludes with a metaphor that presents Brazil as an interracial nation, a sort of utopia of peace among free men: one drop of Brazilian blood represents the blood of all men.
The second episode, ‘The Andes’ (broadcast 22 November 1942) is a radio drama about the libertador Simón Bolívar – with Mercury Theatre performer Edmond O’Brien as Bolívar, and Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins in other roles. Music in this episode, by Haitian composer Justin Elie and Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes, was crucial in creating most of the dramatic pauses. They were conceived as programmatic works inspired by the folklore of Indigenous Americans and the African diaspora, performed by Bernard Herrmann’s orchestra. The episode features two musical compositions: ‘Night in the Andes’ by Elie and ‘Il Guarany’ by Gomes. At the opening of the programme, Welles is ‘flying over the Andes’, from where listeners ‘can see all the nations of our hemisphere’ – creating this sonic ubiquity for his audience by transporting them from their homes.Footnote 47 The episode begins with a short three-minute introduction in which Welles interviews imaginary audience members to ask how much different characters (a small girl, a housewife, a man) know about the Andes. Welles asks: ‘Do facts tell a story? How do we best tell it? By anecdote, by heroes, by legend? Is there a chain that binds this scattered history together? [music]’.Footnote 48
Welles’s answer was that the metaphoric chain is the Andes. He then focuses on the South American wars of independence and the heroic deed of famous liberators – Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and Francisco de Miranda – all key leaders in Latin America’s independence movements. These figures emerge as a recurring theme throughout the series, representing the struggle to gain freedom from oppressors. Welles paints a negative portrait of Francisco Pizarro and his men, presenting the Spanish Empire as founded on treason, murder, and exploitation-expropriation. He encourages his American audience to identify with the Inca culture (described as rich and complex), as Americans are said to love peace and hate injustice. In this sense, Welles also mentions figures such as Túpac Amaru IIFootnote 49 and highlights the connections between the U.S. constitution and the constitutions of several Latin American nations, which it served to inspire.
The broadcast begins, once again, with a fictionalized ‘conversation’ between a housewife, a salesman, a truck driver, and a little girl. The dialogue morphs into a quiz (a common format for radio at the time), in which the adults struggle to answer factual information about the Andes, while the girl fills in all the gaps as if she were reading from an encyclopaedia. Welles draws a comparison that would resonate with his audience, referring to the Andes as ‘South America’s Rocky Mountains’. Bernard Herrmann did the music for this episode, using sound effects to dramatize both Pizarro’s and Bolívar’s crossing of the Andes.
The third episode, ‘The Islands’ (broadcast 29 November 1942), dealt with the abolition of slavery in Haiti led by Toussaint Louverture, and the following reign of Henri Christophe. The episode benefitted from the participation of a chorus from Haiti, and shared many of the strategies deployed in Episode 2. As listeners, we feel as if we are in the room with these historical figures: we hear their voices and the sounds of their surroundings; we are even transported to Paris at the precise moment when slavery was abolished in 1794 (only to be reintroduced by Napoleon in 1802). To Peter Bogdanovich, Welles himself had confessed: ‘I’m queer for the Caribbean anyway – not as it exists, but as it was in my mind in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Caribbean is just great stuff. All of it. The whole idea of all these empires fighting over tiny little islands, and Black independence and Spanish pride and the War of Jenkins’s Ear and those great earthquakes.’Footnote 50 For Welles, the Caribbean appears to represent a space that condenses these ideals of freedom and of resistance against despotic rule.
The episode gives a portrayal of the enchanted island of VoodooFootnote 51 – then a fashionable theme across various art forms when portraying Haiti.Footnote 52 If the previous episode focused on the Latin American independence movements, Welles’s ‘islands’ examined abolition of slavery in the Caribbean from a moral perspective, stressing that such freedom is won through the efforts of the people – in his words, ‘liberty needs toil’. The reference to the war in Europe is explicit: Welles speaks of zombies on the islands (Haiti, but also the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Trinidad) and then compares them to ‘Germans and the Nazis and fascism: their minds and souls taken from them, living-dead’.Footnote 53
Episode 4, ‘The Alphabet: A to C’ (broadcast 6 December 1942), Episode 5 ‘The Alphabet C to S’ (broadcast 13 December 1942),Footnote 54 and Episode 6, ‘The Alphabet: Slavery (Abednego) to End of Alphabet’ (broadcast 20 December 1942), as we can infer from their titles, trace the alphabet, mentioning various words related to the continent with a cadence in the enumerations that resembled a poem in prose. Letters A to C welcomed Miguelito Valdez as guest singer, focusing on the Mexican Revolution, on (Simón) Bolívar, and on (Henri) Christophe (leader of the revolution and first king of Haiti). Their format was that of three radio dramas that approached different moments of history. Letters C to S focused on ‘Calypso from Trinidad’, ‘H for Hurricanes, Haiti, Honduras’, ‘M for Monroe Doctrine’, ‘L for Liberty and for Languages’ – with sections of the programme focusing on slavery and the importance of freedom. The final segment of the alphabet was devoted to the story of the enslaved man Abednego (‘S’ for Slave), who crosses paths with Henri Christophe – first king of Haiti and participant in the Haitian revolution under the command of Toussaint Louverture.
As Welles himself told Peter Bogdanovich, these A–B–Cs of the Caribbean ‘were very amusing. I didn’t really do much of it – the writers were awfully good’.Footnote 55 Welles highlights the role of Haitians who fought in the U.S. independence war. He mentions Napoleon betraying the revolution in France, Henri Christophe doing the same in Haiti, and the terrible yet awe-inspiring construction of the La Ferrière fortress. In his narrative, Napoleon was harmful not only to France and Europe but also to America, as he made Emperor Christophe possible. The episodes present a case against despotism and against slavery – even affirming that ‘Christophe, Napoleon, and George Washington didn’t see the problem in celebrating freedom while supporting slavery’. These three A–B–C episodes can be heard as a cohesive unit divided into three parts. While the topoi are extremely diverse – ranging across culture, geography, and history from all over the continent – there is, however, a common and unifying thread. As I have discussed, the central focus is on the pursuit of freedom, highlighting it as a shared aspect of American history.
Episode 7, ‘The Bad-Will Ambassador’ (broadcast 27 December 1942), and Episode 10, ‘Feed the World’ (broadcast 17 January 1943), are two radio dramas based on pre-existing writings and performed by Mercury Theatre actors. The first is based on a story by Richard Brooks (screenwriter, film director, novelist, and film producer); the second by Milton Geiger (who wrote for radio, television, and film). The former dealt with a phenomenon that came to be known as ‘the ugly American’ – an arrogant and ignorant figure, indifferent to the rest of the world and anxious to return home without concern for those around him.Footnote 56 The latter refers to the resources in Latin America that could literally ‘feed the world’ – an image that brought the gaucho and the cowboy closer together. It served both to shorten the geographical and cultural distance between North and South America and to raise awareness among Americans of the resources needed to support the war efforts.
The importance of involving Latin America in the war in Europe can be read as a constant subtext throughout the radio series. For example, it is conveyed through figures of speech such as ‘this war we are fighting’,Footnote 57 which Welles employs repeatedly, across different characters and countries. In Episode 7, the focus is clear: Latin America had resources that could assist the United States in the war, and there was also a moral imperative to help – to free Europe from tyranny, just as all of America had been freed during the independence movements.
Episodes 8 and 11, both titled ‘Ritmos de las Américas’ (broadcast on 3 and 24 January 1943, respectively) were exceptional in that Welles was unable to host due to illness. Taking his place was Ludwig Elias ‘Lud’ Gluskin, an American jazz drummer and bandleader born in Manhattan, who had returned to the United States after a career in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. A Jew, Gluskin found it difficult to find a job after the rise of Hitler. Back in the U.S., he took the position of director of music for CBS in 1937, leading the orchestra on many Hollywood programmes and films, as well as on radio – in both Hello Americans and The Orson Welles Almanac. Gluskin, who had joined many Pan-American projects, devoted these two episodes to performing Latin American music with the orchestra. Guest musicians included calypso singer Sir Lancelot, Cuban singer Miguelito Valdés, and the singers and actors Tito Guízar (Mexico) and Carlos Julio Ramírez (Colombia) as presenters.
Gluskin not only performed and explained various genres of these ‘exciting rhythms of the Americas’, but also linked the music to contemporary events – most notably the war in Europe, which had affected him personally, as previously discussed. One example was his rendition of a calypso song ‘commemorating the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor’, with lyrics that include the line ‘Your Uncle San needs you’, and a call to ‘live in dignity, justice and liberty’.
Episode 9, ‘Mexico’ (broadcast on 10 January 1943), another radio drama, fictionalized the encounter between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés, and the fall of the Aztec Empire. In his narrative, Welles emphasizes the treacherous nature of the conquistadores, who lied to and tricked Moctezuma. He compared Napoleon and Cortés to Hitler: they might be called great men, but they were not. Once again, we observe recurring tropes of anti-despotism and a united America, in relation to what was happening in Europe. The episode also addresses the figure of Benito Juárez, a key political leader and president of Mexico (1858–72) following the country’s independence in 1821.Footnote 58
Episode 12, ‘Bolívar’s Idea’ (broadcast 31 January 1943), closes the series with an endorsement of Pan-Americanism. Welles again begins with a fictionalized audience, to whom he explains ‘a big idea and a big word: Pan Americanism’. It was an explicit plea for Pan-American unity in the face of Axis barbarism, using flashbacks from earlier episodes and all the radio pyrotechnics in the Mercury arsenal.Footnote 59 The focus is on shared heritage, traditions, democratic ideals, and a common destiny for all Americans. However, he makes a point of distinguishing the different Latin American nations through their artists and art forms. In a way, as Sadlier points out, Welles was refreshingly complex, ‘during a time when audiences were inundated with messages about truth and hemispheric sameness’.Footnote 60 This is clear when he enunciates: ‘sameness, despite difference’, ‘different liquor but same hang-over’, ‘different jokes but the same laughter’, ‘different nations but same humanity’, concluding ‘thank God for those differences, for it’s out of those difference that culture grows, and it grows big in all directions at once’.
During the episode, Welles invites the listeners to travel back in time: ‘let’s turn the dial of history again, pass the failure of Bolívar’s Assembly at Panama, 1826, pass the narrow national eras and misinterpretations of the Monroe Doctrine’.Footnote 61 He then ‘tunes’ into the time of the Pan-American Conference 1889, in Washington DC, focusing on one fictional individual called José. José, a member of the Latin American Confederation of Workers in Mexico, knows that it is absurd to speak of neutrality, that one must be either ‘against Hitler or in favour of Hitler’. However, the series had been a plea for a common history, a shared heritage and tradition of freedom, born out of revolution and expressed through declarations of independence. Welles’s closing remarks place Pan-Americanism as the final step in this process of liberation.
In the following section, I focus on how this series fits into a logic of radio diplomacy within its specific political context – namely, the United States’ entry into the Second World War and the diplomatic policies that come to surface in these North–South sonic exchanges.
Radio diplomacy: Welles as cultural ambassador for Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy and radio as a soft power tool
In November 1941, Welles was appointed as goodwill ambassador to Latin America by Nelson Rockefeller, who had himself been named U.S. Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) by order of the U.S. Council of National Defence. The Council, operating with both private and public funds, had been established by Roosevelt through executive order on 30 July 1941. The OCIAA’s mission was ‘to provide for the development of commercial and cultural relations between the American Republics and thereby increasing the solidarity of this hemisphere and furthering the spirit of cooperation between the Americas in the interest of hemisphere defence’.Footnote 62 The OCIAA comprised four departments: Cultural Relations (which included Radio and a Motion Picture Division), Health, Communications, and Finance. De Moraes and Silva define the OCIAA as a form of micropower that concentrated and disseminated the true objectives of society at a given moment – namely, the construction of a sense of unity to support the American war effort.Footnote 63
This approach of cultural diplomacy taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt – to use pedagogy and other means of soft power to broadcast his ideas through speeches and culture – came after decades of U.S. military interventions in the Southern Hemisphere and hard power strategies such as Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick politics, which applied the Monroe Doctrine through occupation and force.Footnote 64 In contrast, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s interpretation of the doctrine was not for the United States to govern new territories, but rather, to build a Pan-American doctrine of continental self-defence’,Footnote 65 which was at the core of the Good Neighbour Policy (1933–1945). However, this did not mean the emancipation of the Latin American nations from economic dependency and domination, and the United States continued to support dictators in the region while preaching for democracy – backing dictators such as Batista, Somoza, and Trujillo.Footnote 66
It was in this context that Roosevelt organized the presidential tour of 1934, which took him to Uruguay, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Panama, and the Caribbean. Since 1929, with the economic crisis and the military expansion of Germany, Italy, and Japan, a rhetoric of ‘us against them’ had begun to build up – ‘us’ (democratic Americans) versus ‘them’ (the Axis powers and non-Americans). The objective of the Good Neighbour Policy was to contain the fascist ideology in Latin America (particularly in Brazil and Argentina) and to fight anti-Americanism in the region.Footnote 67 Within this context, radio became the ideal means for soft power, and cultural diplomats or ambassadors such as Orson Welles, Walt Disney, Aaron Copland,Footnote 68 and Carmen Miranda joined these war efforts and undertook goodwill tours through Latin America.
This was the context in which Hello Americans was produced, recorded at the Mercury Theatre between December 1942 and January 1943, following Welles’s return from his 1942 goodwill tour. Mercury Production Inc. was a studio and independent repertory theatre company founded in New York City in 1937 by Welles and producer John Houseman. The company produced theatrical presentations, radio programmes, and motion pictures. After a series of acclaimed Broadway productions, the Mercury Theatre evolved into its most popular incarnation: The Mercury Theatre on the Air (1938–1946), which famously broadcast The War of the Worlds in 1938.
Welles’s 1942 Latin American trip was sponsored by both the U.S. OCIAA and the RKO,Footnote 69 which had produced Citizen Kane the year before. The main objective of the trip was to film Welles’s Latin American project It’s All True, which ran over budget and ultimately ruined his relationship with RKO. As a goodwill ambassador, Welles went to Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, where he toured the studios at San Miguel in Buenos Aires and met Argentine film personalities, including actress Libertad Lamarque.Footnote 70 His trip also lasted longer than expected, with the rumour that Welles prolonged it to avoid the draft,Footnote 71 and his activities as a cultural ambassador – promoting hemispheric solidarity and ‘interpreting North America to the South and vice versa’Footnote 72 – clashed with his role as director, given that his primary purpose was to film It’s All True. This poses the question: was Welles’s Pan-American mission and his role as a goodwill ambassador merely secondary? In what follows, I consider It’s All True alongside Hello Americans to analyse the visual and aural representations of Latin Americans and examine how they align with – or depart from – contemporary constructions of Pan-Americanism. To what extent do these representations resist reductionist and stereotypical portrayals of Latin American societies?Footnote 73 Do they at times conflict with the ideological framework of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy? And finally, what were the particular affordances of radio as a medium for diplomacy and soft power?
It’s All True was a film conceived as a docu-fiction comprising three stories about Latin America: ‘My friend Bonito’, about a bull and a toreador, was supervised by Norman Foster in Mexico, with Welles co-directing remotely while filming in Brazil; ‘Carnaval’ (also known as ‘The Story of Samba’); and ‘Jangadeiros’ (literally ‘raftsmen’, also referred to as ‘Four Men on a Raft’) – the latter two shot by Welles on location in Fortaleza, mainly during June 1942. The film formed part of Welles’s unprecedented and much-envied contract with the RKO following Citizen Kane (which included the production of two additional feature films, The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear), but it ultimately led to his dismissal from RKO. There reasons for this have been the subject of much debate in the history of American film production:Footnote 74 among them were Welles’s extravagant spending (widely perceived as wasteful and unplanned), the insufficient returns for a company like RKO (less financially secure than other studios), and the broader economic uncertainty generated by the Depression and the war, which left little room for box-office experimentation.Footnote 75
Tom McEnaney nonetheless suggests that It’s All True was ultimately rejected by RKO for political reasons, given the tensions between official government policy and Welles’s cultural approach.Footnote 76 In particular, Welles’s representations of the African diaspora may have conflicted with the wishes of U.S. and Brazilian officials, as well as RKO executives. He presented the African diaspora as a unifying thread between North and South America,Footnote 77 exploiting the potential of a Pan-Africanist perspective as a unifying criterion – primarily, but not exclusively, through music.Footnote 78 For instance, his depiction of Carnival diverged from the polished, touristic image favoured by authorities. Instead, Welles foregrounded less glamorous spots of RioFootnote 79 and placed dark-skinned Brazilians from the favelas as central figures in his film.Footnote 80
Welles’s emphasis on Brazil’s African heritage, his critical viewpoint on social inequality, and his attention to the ecological risks of Brazil’s modernization conflicted with the official narratives promoted by both U.S. and Brazilian governments. In contrast, Walt Disney – another cultural ambassador who had toured the region the year before Welles – produced Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, two animated films more attuned to the official desired message.Footnote 81 These films portrayed Latin American cities as modern and sophisticated while drawing simple analogies – such as Carnival and Mardi Gras, or gauchos and cowboys – and featured Ary Barroso’s iconic 1939 samba ‘Aquarela do Brasil’, which gained widespread popularity through this film. Disney’s portrayal of Brazil, in this sense, reinforced familiar tourist-friendly stereotypes and aligned with the image promoted by both the U.S. and Brazilian governments – depicting Latin American women, for example, as happy, fun, carefree, festive, and sexy.Footnote 82
In It’s All True, however, Welles’s portrayal of Brazil as a modern, sophisticated, and culturally rich nation aligned with both Roosevelt’s policy and President Getúlio Vargas’s ambitions for Brazil’s international image. In this sense, the Brazilian government was not a passive recipient of U.S. soft power, but an active participant, using the OCIAA to further its own nation-building goals.Footnote 83 A particularly close relationship developed between the United States and Brazil, with Vargas’s government among the first in the region to break ties with Germany and Italy in January 1942. This diplomatic alignment was reinforced through cultural policy that exported samba to the U.S. – with artists such as Carmen Miranda entering Hollywood and samba becoming a national symbol – and imported jazz bands and big bands to Brazil. Songs like ‘Copacabana, princesita del mar’, by Braguinha, helped project an image of Rio de Janeiro as modern and cosmopolitan. The OCIAA worked tirelessly to promote and expand these forms of cultural exchange.Footnote 84
Welles’s view of Vargas’s government and the Estado Novo was largely positive. In April 1942, he even broadcast from the Casino da Urca in Rio de Janeiro – a musical extravaganza celebrating Vargas’s birthday. The event featured Carlos Machado’s orchestra with Emilinha Borba performing a samba-inflected version of the song ‘Dolores’, as well as the song ‘Amélia’ by Chu Chu Martínez, ‘an American imitation of jazz of a Mexican song interpreted by a Brazilian orchestra as a samba’.Footnote 85 Similarly, during the first Hello Americans episode devoted to Brazil, Welles apologized for playing a rumba – acknowledging that while it originated in Central America, it had been written in North America. The broadcast aired both coast-to-coast in the United States and through Brazilian local stations – to the delight of Vargas and his Ministry for Propaganda.
Welles emphasized that samba was ‘profoundly Brazilian’: ‘if you come down the hills, it vibrates in the streets and everyone dances it: it’s called samba’; although linking it to the Amazons and to the Congo in Africa. In conversation with Carmen Miranda for Hello Americans, he stated that the instrument called ‘surdo’ ‘sounds like a tambourine but from Africa’.Footnote 86
As discussed in the first section of this article, Welles introduced a series of fictionalized characters – a businessman, an economist, an engineer, a writer, a sociologist, and an explorer – to highlight the richness and modernity of Brazil, its importance for potential warfare, and to change the image that Brazilians do not take anything seriously – ‘which they do’. He even introduced ecology, with a character regretting the disappearance of the jungle for the sake of industrialisation.
Welles’s representations of Latinos, on the other hand, were in line with the official policy: to change their image as lazy and unemployed. The U.S. government needed to alter the caricature of ‘Latinos’ as violent and brutal – an image that dated back to the second half of the nineteenth century and the taking of the Southwest, with the Mexican War and the annexation of Texas. Another point of tension between Welles’s interpretations and the government line revolved around the representations of the Spanish Conquest – condemned by Welles as part of his critique of despotism; Roosevelt, however, was more positive about the Spanish heritage in South America. In all of these examples, local productions were often misrepresented:Footnote 87 samba was indiscriminately mixed with other types of Latin American and Afro-Caribbean musics (such as calypso from Trinidad). This musical syncretism, already present in Latin America – the cradle of antropofagia – was perhaps a better representation of Pan-Americanist ideals than what government policies promoted.
In the end, It’s All True was a titan project that became one of the most famous unfinished films of all times. After the shoot, Welles spent many years trying to purchase footage and complete the film, encountering so many obstacles that he would later claim that it was haunted by a voodoo doctor. While some footage was lost forever – a considerable amount was reportedly dumped into the Pacific Ocean – the surviving material became the basis for the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles, directed by Richard Wilson, Bill Krohn, and Myron Meisel. Ultimately, in both It’s All True and Hello Americans, Welles privileged a Pan-Americanist perspective, advocating for hemispheric solidarity even when it meant opposing certain aspects of the official political agendas of the respective governments.
This comparative analysis of It’s All True and Hello Americans, examining Welles’s role as a cultural ambassador for Roosevelt’s policies, reveals that his position was both complex and fraught with tensions. Nonetheless, both cinema and radio were evidently regarded as powerful instruments of soft power and diplomacy. To conclude this section, I ask: What made radio such an effective tool in these efforts?
To answer to this question, and following Gordon W. Allport and Hadley Cantril in The Psychology of Radio, Gisela Cramer explores how the experience of listening to the same content at the same time can psychologically foster common interests, tastes, and attitudes.Footnote 88 Cramer analyses radio as the new nation-building tool that replaced printed media after the 1930s. In this interpretation, radio helped create twentieth-century ‘imagined communities’ (following Benedict Anderson), becoming a ‘combination of the schoolhouse, the church, the public rostrum, the newspaper, the theatre, the concert hall’.Footnote 89 This nation-shaping role of the radio was also evident in other broadcasts of the time, such as Americans All – Immigrants All, sponsored by the Office of Education, which celebrated the contributions of African Americans, Jews, and other minorities to the nation’s progress and well-being.Footnote 90 This did not mean, however, that these imaginary nations were more inclusive of minorities in practice; rather, the Nation as a category came to include all citizens as national subjects while reducing their cultural diversity.
In Hello Americans, the goal was not to build a national identity but to forge alliances between nations, with ‘Pan-Americanism’ emerging as the unifying category. Whereas the nation as a category renders all its members ‘citizens’, setting cultural diversity aside, ‘Pan-Americanism’ proposed a wider imagined community of nations – one that, ultimately, blurred transnational diversity in favour of a common cause.Footnote 91 Following this logic, Hello Americans was one among the many radio programmes that contributed to this Pan-American effort.Footnote 92
The use of radio to promote Pan-Americanism became increasingly instrumental in the context of the U.S. war effort. If, before Pearl Harbor and the war in Europe, radio dramas evoked the conflict through allegory and avoided direct attacks on fascism in order not to lose sponsors, after 1941 radio was conceived as a way to boost morale – as was the case with the NBC programme Worlds at War (1943–1945), which featured war-related stories highlighting aspects of social injustice and where Welles was a recurring actor.Footnote 93 Different empirical studies and polls confirm that radio (and mass media in general) was indeed an effective medium to harness a more positive disposition towards Latin America – without actually being able to gauge ‘the net effect of U.S. radio’s newfound, if short-lived, infatuation with Latin America’.Footnote 94
This effectiveness and power of radio can be exemplified one last time: Welles’s famous radio adaptation of War of the Worlds Footnote 95 by H. G. Wells, which aired on 30 October 1938, with the orchestra conducted by Bernard Herrmann. It is a perfect example of Welles’s talents in adapting the novel to sound as radio verité. The programme created a mass-hysteria reaction among citizens who had taken the fictional tale of a Martian attack at face value, launching the memorable exodus from New Jersey – martial law declared in several counties, Houseman and Welles being brought into the police station, and a lawsuit being filed against CBS. Recent research shows, however, that the panic was not as widespread as early writings and historical sources on the episode had suggested.Footnote 96 In fact, the event spoke more to the importance and influence of radio on public life, and many of the listeners writing to CBS actually wanted a discussion on the new place of this mass media in their society. It was about radio as a tool to shape public opinion, to put an end to the illusion – if we follow Theodor W. Adorno’s thoughts on radio – that there was such a thing as a freedom of listening.Footnote 97
The broadcast was also proof that radio travelled; and War of the Worlds versions were aired in Santiago de Chile (1944) and Quito (1949), set locally, with considerable panic being caused in both cases.Footnote 98 As a film director, Welles was full of aural ideas – such as the recurrent use of overlapping dialogues, voice-overs (creating continuity and dynamism), but also using sounds as symbols (silence representing death in The Magnificent Ambersons or the chime that signified someone had died in The Stranger).Footnote 99 Welles applied these techniques in this broadcast, for example, by introducing a six-second pause right after the Martians release their laser-like heat ray.Footnote 100
Many of these strategies to convince an audience were present in Hello Americans, particularly in the aural techniques used to ‘sell South America to North America’ – as Welles had informed Nelson Rockefeller. One strategy of the show was to depict the Americas by juxtaposing historical periods and geographies. In this sense, Welles gives numerous descriptions of listeners being able to ‘twist the dial of history and listen in wherever you like’.Footnote 101 These techniques are described by Tom McEnaney as ‘kaleidosonic’:Footnote 102 they imply the creation of sonorous ‘neighbourhoods’ that place cultures from the United States and Latin America on the same level. These included audio depictions of U.S. senators arguing over a diplomatic mission to South America in 1816, and scenes of a family listening to the radio, blurring the lines between private (domestic) and public spaces. McEnaney defines this as radio creating a ‘new neighbourhood’ through both the acoustic properties of the medium and ‘narrative acoustics’ (writing that also involves the practice of listening). All of these productions were layered in their intentions – for example, if we consider these domestic sonic spaces in light of Roosevelt’s struggles to develop a public housing policy,Footnote 103 or how CBS’s Latin American productions were useful for both Welles’s propagandist mission and for the network’s founder’s capitalist ends (advertising his cigar company).Footnote 104
One final point concerns Welles’s voice and the importance of the narrator in guiding the listener. One of his first employers at the Gate Theatre described his voice as a ‘brazen transatlantic sonority’, the voice ‘of a preacher, a leader of men, of power’, which ‘boomed and boomed its way through the dusty air as though it would crush the . . . walls and rip up the floor’.Footnote 105 Welles used the first-person as a way to make the listener feel that events were unfolding as they were being described. He was very specific about his creative process, imposing a strict ‘no audience in studio’ rule – unlike popular shows of the time such as Cecile B. De Mille’s No. 1 Lux Radio Theatre. As McEnaney describes it, ‘radio was for him a conjuring act. To glimpse its behind-the-scenes infrastructure was tantamount to observing the wires, false bottoms, and other devices used by a magician when performing his act’.Footnote 106
On several occasions, the writer Arthur Miller, a frequent collaborator of Welles, referred to the unique qualities of his voice, even claiming that his voice was in itself ‘a format’.Footnote 107 Miller was writing a script for a radio broadcast featuring Welles, and when considering what form or format he would use, he wrote: ‘I’ve been thinking about it today, however, and I feel sure of one thing: we don’t need one. Your voice is a format. The only two things that must be heard at the beginning of the show every week are your voice and Lockheed Vega . . . your voice, if I may say so, portends much’.Footnote 108 What Miller is describing in Welles is what Roland Barthes called, ‘the grain of the voice’, the presence of a body in the voice that sings and the hand that writes.Footnote 109 In this sense, Welles’s voice is an element that gives Hello Americans a unity as a series that was otherwise heterogenous.
This period of aural diplomacy for Welles came to a halt in 1945 with Roosevelt’s death. Welles was a central figure in many of the broadcast tributes to Roosevelt, but after this period, his radio career declined.Footnote 110 He was not a supporter of Harry S. Truman,Footnote 111 who closed the OCIAA in 1946. Furthermore, the FBI had already opened a file on Welles because of Citizen Kane and its criticism of monopoly capitalism, placing him on the FBI Security Index and blacklists as early as 1942.Footnote 112 Although Welles was a vocal advocate for social justice and opposed racism, antisemitism, and fascism, he was not openly socialist; the FBI had been unable to find sufficient evidence to label him a communist. By 1950, during the McCarthy Era, Welles was listed in red channels and called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which ultimately led him to join friends such as Arthur Miller and Charles Chaplin in a self-imposed exile in Europe, effectively ending an era of diplomatic exchange.
Conclusion
Hello Americans was a series that focused on selling the ideals of Pan-Americanism to U.S. audiences but, ultimately, it was also about the war: the poetic ideals behind ‘we are all Americans’ quickly transformed into matters of national defence, with the United States hoping to enlist the Latin American nations in the war effort. This study has demonstrated the extent to which radio functioned as a strategic medium of soft power within this broader diplomatic and cultural initiative. Even though Welles’s collaboration with the OCIAA ended with Hello Americans and the fallout from It’s All True, he continued to advocate for the Good Neighbour Policy and actively supported Roosevelt’s re-election campaign in 1944, continuing to speak about world affairs in his Orson Welles Almanac series.
It was mainly through sound and music that the notion of ‘one America’ was conveyed across the continent. This was achieved by linking specific musical genres to national identities (with Brazil and samba as a key example), by reconstructing the history of the American revolutions as a shared hemispheric history, and by means of fictionalized exchanges between Welles and his listeners, through which he sought to persuade using dialogic techniques.
The series is, of course, a work of fiction. As I have demonstrated, while it gestures toward historical accuracy, it ultimately privileges dramatic and poetic licence – and it is precisely here that its power resides. Radio, as an aural medium capable of stirring emotions and shaping public consciousness, exploits this potential to create illusions. For example, the illusion of being immersed in distant or imagined geographies – what I have called ‘speculative geographies’ (dynamic spaces of creativity and thought).Footnote 113 It invites audiences to hear Latin American artists and to experience these historical times of revolutions and independence that constitute a shared Pan-American past. Hello Americans thus stands as the product of a unique moment in the history of inter-American relations, shaped by a constellation of dialogues and tensions that remains, to this day, without parallel.
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