Broadcasting the ‘Voice of Science’ on America’s Town Meeting of the Air: Public Education, Popular Entertainment, and Post-World War II Scientific Ambivalence

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between radio broadcasting and post-World War II discourses of scientific and technological ambivalence, specifically looking at a special broadcast of the America’s Town Meeting of the Air radio discussion program conducted at the 1946 George Westinghouse Centennial Forum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Titled ‘Science: Salvation or Destroyer of Mankind?’, the broadcast posited that there were two possible paths for science – one leading to future peace and prosperity, and the other bringing about world catastrophe. Here, the ‘voice of science’ – atomic scientist Harold C. Urey, microbiologist Selman A. Waksman, science reporter William L. Laurence, and medical doctor Herman N. Bundesen – addressed the new scientific challenges facing society after World War II, where the question of humanity’s future was presented as a matter of life and death. An examination of the rhetoric of this broadcast within the broader historical context of the George Westinghouse Centennial Forum demonstrates how the liberating or dangerous potentials of science intersected with the challenges of presenting science on the air, revealing some of the inherent contradictions in broadcasting’s relationship to science and placing radio itself in a position that parallels the ‘two sciences’ question posed on Town Meeting.