From the death of Franklin Roosevelt to the birth of the television era, Jack Benny spoke with the most welcomed voice in America. His weekly radio show on Sunday nights brought laughter to millions of families across the nation. His cast of characters conveyed the familiarity of home to thousands of American troops stationed around the world. The laughs Jack and his gang elicited underscored a serious purpose. More than just entertain his fellow citizens, Jack Benny broadcast values he believed needed to flourish everywhere in order to keep the peace after World War II: openness, pluralism, and internationalism. Jack sometimes enunciated these values in short speeches at the close of the broadcast; more frequently, he wove them thematically into the fabric of the show.

This article argues that Jack Benny's broadcasts did more than entertain – they reflected and illuminated America's sense of mission coming out of World War II. They did so by providing listeners with a conceptualization of a world in which the promotion of universal values was to usher in an era of lasting peace. A study of the Jack Benny Program from 1945 to 1950 illustrates how World War II changed the purpose of the show; how Jack Benny, his writers, and his cast understood notions of openness, pluralism, and internationalism; how the correlation they drew between social equality at home and international priorities abroad sometimes preempted official US policies; and how they provided, in the form of the show's central character, a model of supremely confident leadership in an era fraught with anxieties.Footnote ¹

Jack Benny became a household name in an era in which radio shaped American culture.Footnote ² The unwavering confidence Franklin Roosevelt conveyed in his fireside chats helped lift a nation from the depths of the Great Depression.Footnote ³ The stoicism with which Edward R. Murrow broadcast Londoners' response to the Battle of Britain transformed Americans' view of the British from monarchists to democratic brethren with whom they shared a common destiny, and it helped pave the way for the Atlantic Charter.Footnote ⁴

Radio broadcasts were more than just sound. Without visual effects, they required active participation on the part of the listener. They provided a semblance of time, but left to the imagination notions of space and distance. This unique format broke down traditional boundaries between public and private space; in a figurative sense, it allowed politicians, newsmen, and entertainers to enter Americans' homes. Rarely were Americans listening alone. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, gathering around the radio became a family ritual few today would recognize. In his memoir, Jack Benny's friend and associate Irving Fein recalled the routine of one such household at that time:

Jack Benny had a keen awareness of what radio meant to families like the Kennedys. “The radio audience totaled approximately thirty million,” he wrote in an autobiography co-authored with his daughter, Joan Benny, “but it really consisted of small family groups.” By the early 1930s, when Jack's show had become a mainstay, “I felt that now I understood the medium. I would play to those family groups and get them to know me and my family (the cast) as real people with real problems. Exaggerated people, yes, but fundamentally honest and true to life.”Footnote ⁶

The bond Jack struck with his listeners remained true throughout the hardships of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II. Born Benny Kubelsky to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland and arrived in Chicago, Jack was deeply affected by a war that brought so much suffering to his ancestral land and people. And he saw firsthand the soldiers who fought against totalitarianism. On a USO tour in the summer of 1942 Jack visited Allied troops in New Guinea, the Marianas, the Marshall Islands, the Gilverts, the Solomons, and Hawaii. A year later he traveled to Cairo, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, through Iran, Iraq, and into liberated parts of Italy. In 1945, he visited occupied Germany, where he performed for the troops and spent several hours alone with an exhausted General Dwight Eisenhower.Footnote ⁷ These visits had a profound effect on Jack, who likened his reaction to near incomprehension:

World War II led Jack Benny to reconfigure his show as a mission for peace. He did not embark on this mission alone. Supporting him was a talented team of writers that included George Balzer, Sam Perrin, and Milt Josefsberg, as well as John Tackaberry – a Texan “in word and manner” who had come on board in 1943, and whose collaboration with Benny and Rochester in a time of racial warfare had forced him to confront his own prejudices.Footnote ⁹ The writers competed with each other for choice lines, sometimes arguing with their boss. They found that Jack had the final say.Footnote ¹⁰ Like his good friend Ronald Reagan, Benny proved to be his own best writer, and his sense of timing made him the original great communicator. Free of formal obligations to the war effort, a fixture in the hearts of ordinary Americans, and a well-respected figure among the Hollywood elite, the comedian added financial control to creative authority by forming his own production company in 1947. In an era when production studios maintained strict discipline over their stars, a newly incorporated Jack Benny bucked the trend by moving his show intact from NBC to upstart CBS at the end of 1948.Footnote ¹¹

By then his mission was well under way. Understanding that his listeners looked to his radio family as role models, and that he had accrued tremendous social authority in the minds of his listeners over the course of his career, Jack had delivered the first in a series of editorial postscripts three years earlier. “While history will point to 1945 as the year of victory,” he pronounced at the end of a rousing episode celebrating the first New Year's Eve in peacetime, “1946 will be the start of a new era – an era in which people the world over must live in peace and mutual respect.” For America and its allies had

At the core of this new mission was an emphasis on preserving openness in an increasingly corporate American society. Infused with a liberal spirit, the Jack Benny Program used humor to expose business practices, mock organization men, and deliver a subtle yet powerful critique of the regimentation of American life based on work and class.

One way Jack and the gang promoted transparency was to make fun of the system of corporate patronage that existed throughout the entertainment industry. It was commonplace, then, for a corporation to send free samples to anyone who mentioned its products on the airwaves. On air, Jack's character took full advantage of this precursor to the payola scams of the 1950s. If he woke up feeling cold, for instance, he would offer words of praise for a new General Electric blanket and then remind Rochester to be on the lookout for a special delivery that afternoon.Footnote ¹³

Another method was to mock openly the show's sponsor. Although Jack Benny was the head of his own production company, by 1946 his radio show was the Lucky Strike Program underwritten by the American Tobacco Company. A standard, prerecorded routine came on toward the beginning and end of each episode. An auctioneer lauded the high quality of tobacco. A smoker then praised the superior quality of a Lucky Strike cigarette. And at some point during the broadcast, Jack's announcer, Don Wilson, reappeared to shill for Lucky Strikes. A jolly and rotund man, Wilson was a prototypical organization man, whose promotion of Lucky Strike cigarettes was deliberately pathetic and absurd. When Oscar-winner Ray Milland appeared as a guest star, Don insisted that the Welsh actor render a Lucky Strike version of Hamlet's soliloquy: “Whether 'tis nobler in the minds of men who know tobacco best/To be so round, so firm, so fully packed/Or to be so free and easy on the draw.”Footnote ¹⁴ In a later episode broadcast from the deck of the USS Saratoga, Don welled up thinking about the unused stock of Lucky Strike cigarettes aboard the ship. He bemoaned the fact that the precious, unsmoked cigarettes would be blown up as part of the atomic bomb tests when the famed aircraft carrier completed its final mission at Bikini Atoll.Footnote ¹⁵

Don's efforts to promote the sponsor met with derision from the rest of the cast. Jack directed his ire toward the Sportsmen Quartet, whom Don had hired in 1946 to perform commercial jingles ranging from barbershop standards to excerpts from Verdi's Rigoletto and Khachaturian's Sabre Dance laced with LSMFT (“Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco”). On air, Jack denigrated the Sportsmen's corniness and musical talent he deemed inferior to his own. At first, his character went to great lengths to get them fired. When that failed, he resorted to throwing a temper tantrum whenever the Sportsmen broke into their hysterical strains of LSMFT.Footnote ¹⁶

Ridicule of the corporate sponsorship occurred within an environment that combined work and leisure time. Outside of special events for charities or the USO, Jack and the gang rarely ever actually “performed” the show. Most of the time, listeners tuned in to Jack either going about his daily routine or rehearsing with the cast for the next week's broadcast. When Jack asked his tenor, Dennis Day, to run through the number he was preparing for “next week's show,” the apparent rehearsal constituted the actual performance.

The show's innovative format served to marginalize distinctions based on class. Besides inviting listeners into the home of a rich and famous Hollywood personality, it brought them into the offices of studio executives and frequent guest stars Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner. When Jack sought to pitch one of his typically ill-conceived ideas for a movie (such as a biopic about Benny himself that would star Errol Flynn), the doors of MGM and Warner Brothers were flung wide open as he marched into their offices to meet with Goldwyn and Warner. Untrained as actors, they fumbled lines to the audible delight of Jack's fans. Not even their phone lines were safe. As Jack waited on hold, radio listeners heard the two telephone operators, Gertrude Gearshift and Mabel Flapsaddle, eviscerate these Hollywood moguls, along with their usual discussion of Jack's halting attempts to romance the two of them.

Indeed, Jack was going to extraordinary lengths by the fall of 1945 to foster a community that afforded criticism of its most powerful. In a daring move, he invited his listeners to enter a contest: “Why I Can't Stand Jack Benny.” This sublime act of masochism elicited some 270,000 entries. The winner, as chosen by a committee headed by Jack's arch-rival radio personality Fred Allen, went as follows:

As the contest came to a close, Jack's character dreamt of fleeing to France under the guise of Pierre Benny rather than surrender the grand prize of $10,000 in liberty bonds.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet fork the money over the real Jack Benny did, along with the humiliation of hearing the poem read aloud to his audience.

Consider the implications of these plot devices. In the open society Jack Benny imagined, no doors were closed on account of class distinctions. Dissent was something to be championed. Individuals outweighed corporations, because one's freedom hinged neither on work nor on consumption but on a collective sense of humor. In contrast to the closed, totalitarian societies he had understood as the enemies in World War II, Jack led a team of writers and costars in constructing a postwar community that opposed rigid dogmas and promoted free and open discourse – even when that discourse seemed to be at the expense of his own authority.

Part and parcel with openness was an emphasis on pluralism, or – to borrow the motto from a specially engraved dime Colorado governor William Knous presented Jack – E Pluribus Benny.Footnote ¹⁹ Stressing pluralism may seem counterintuitive, given that the thrust of the show aimed usually at belittling its central character. Yet this apparent contradiction between humiliation and tolerance infused the show's more solemn moments and serious undertones with a heightened sense of authenticity. When Jack's neighbor Ronald Colman read the winning poem on the air in February of 1946, the esteemed British actor followed up by surmising, “Maybe the fellow that wrote this letter is right; the things we find fault with in others are the same things we tolerate in ourselves.”Footnote ²⁰ Later that month, Jack elaborated on this spirit in his closing message. “Ladies and Gentleman,” he began,

In the spirit of brotherhood, Jack introduced a new character named Mr. Kitzel after the war. Beginning in 1946, Kitzel showed up in a variety of jobs – as a hot-dog salesman, a diner cook, a butcher, and an antiques dealer. After his first few appearances that spring, Kitzel struck up a friendship with Jack's character. Soon Kitzel began to stop by the house to play bridge or drop in on broadcasts from out of town (meaning, of course, that actor Artie Auerbach traveled with the rest of the cast). Indeed, as his character evolved over the course of 1946, Kitzel became the only character on the show with no formal role other than being Jack's friend.

Mr. Kitzel had a distinct Eastern European accent and a tendency to Judaicize places and names. When he met Jack in Chicago, Kitzel described an aerial tour he had just taken over the Great Lakes: Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario, and Shapiro.Footnote ²² On another occasion, he revealed that he was a fan not only of Jack but of other popular entertainers – Nat “King” Cohen, Ed Solomon, and the Great Gilderstein.Footnote ²³ Kitzel had also tried his hand at acting, having appeared in cameo roles in the movies “Dark Sausage” and “Forever Epstein.”Footnote ²⁴ Once, when Jack was on the road in Colorado Springs, Kitzel showed up brandishing a six-shooter and dressed up as “Hopalong Kitzel.”Footnote ²⁵ Kitzel's supposed origins provided a source of constant bemusement. He lamented the loss of the Boston Red Sox to the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1947 World Series. “Oh, you're from Boston?” Jack asked. “Well where do you think I got this accent?” Kitzel, a self-professed graduate of Notre Dame, replied.Footnote ²⁶ When Jack visited San Francisco, he encountered his friend, who explained he was there visiting a cousin who owned the “Sir Francis Kitzel” hotel.Footnote ²⁷ And, in an encounter at Union Station in Los Angeles, Jack came upon Kitzel waiting for his son to come home from Southern Methodist University.Footnote ²⁸

Yet Kitzel was no clown. On another occasion at Union Station in the late spring of 1947, Kitzel joked that he was getting out of town because of all the relatives who had come to live with his family, belying a more serious point about accepting émigrés from Eastern Europe after the war. “Well, are a lot of them living with you?” Jack asked. “You think this station is crowded?”, Kitzel replied:

Consistent with the real Jack Benny's attempts to champion pluralism, this exchange evokes a subtle theme of Jewish solidarity that both infused the show and mirrored his own personal story. In That Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America, Lawrence J. Epstein recalls how in 1939 comedian Eddie Cantor had given a speech at the New York World's Fair in which he accused isolationist demagogue Father Coughlin of “playing footsie with the the Nazis.” Cantor's act of courage had infuriated his sponsors and led to the swift cancellation of his radio show. Finally, Jack Benny intervened, calling up the advertising agency Young and Rubicam to tell them, “If radio's going to go on, Eddie Cantor must be part of it … Why should he be punished just for having more guts than the rest of us?”Footnote ³⁰ Cantor was soon back on the air. In an episode from 1947, Jack seemed to allude to this incident in an exchange with guest star Al Jolson:

Jack's character, of course, ended up keeping the dollar to preserve his notorious stinginess. On the show, he charged guests when they ate lunch at his house. He insisted that Rochester buy only discounted “cans-of” varieties of meats and vegetables from the grocery store – so called because their labels had fallen off. He did the laundry for all the Hollywood stars, including Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. He had his teeth pulled in order to get free parking next to the dentist's office.Footnote ³² He sang Gershwin's “Embraceable You” to his money while he counted it.Footnote ³³ And, in what remains one of the most storied moments in radio, Jack was held up walking home and presented with an ultimatum, “your money or your life.” After a conspicuous pause and a reiteration of the threat, he replied in exasperation: “I'm thinking it over!”Footnote ³⁴

Jack's alleged stinginess helped build his character into a straw man whom individuals of different cultural backgrounds had fair and ample opportunity to knock down. In an environment filled with insults but devoid of any real hatred, Jack's role as the perpetual fall guy had a leveling effect on the rest of the cast. Except when it came to the corporate man, Don Wilson, who generally refrained from insulting his boss, no one else went without getting a shot at Benny each week.

Among them, perhaps the most skilled was the Irish tenor Dennis Day, who, in addition to performing a song in each episode, played a dimwitted “kid” for whom Jack's character became a surrogate father figure. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Dennis returned triumphantly in the spring of 1946 to regale Jack and the gang with stories about how his fellow sailors had repeatedly tossed him overboard, but “the Japs kept throwing me back.”Footnote ³⁵ Like Mr. Kitzel, Dennis made ironic, somewhat preposterous, remarks about his ethnicity, claiming that he had a cousin who had been forced to change his name from McNulty to Kazakowski in order to play football for Notre Dame.Footnote ³⁶ Dennis's official role was to sing, but his true function was to act as Jack's chief tormentor. A talented mimic, Dennis was a fixture in Jack's dream sequences, several times reprising the part of a German surgeon who operates on Jack (“Will the operation hurt?” Jack inquired in one of the later episodes. “No, not at all … Oh … You mean you? It might, a little”Footnote ³⁷). Outside of Jack's dreams, Dennis made sure to demolish any authority his boss tried to project. When Metropolitan Opera star Dorothy Kirsten visited the show and asked him what he thought about Mr. Benny, Dennis replied merrily, “in a bathing suit he looks like a spider.”Footnote ³⁸

The shots did not end there. In the same episode as Dennis's “spider” remark, Jack tried to engage Dorothy Kirsten in an erudite conversation about the third act of Madame Butterfly, only to be met by Mary Livingstone's interjection, “Oh, shut up!” Also overshadowing Jack's efforts to impress Ms. Kirsten was the boorish charm of bandleader Phil Harris, whose musical talent appeared limited to his ability to improvise new verses ad infinitum to his trademark number, “That's What I Like about the South.” The only character on the show more content with his own vanity than Jack, Phil Harris consistently made snide remarks about Jack's manliness while he flirted openly not only with female guest stars like Kirsten but also with Mary (who, as the audience well knew, was Benny's real-life wife, Sadie Marks).Footnote ³⁹ Even Jack's own publicist got into the fray at times, appearing on the show in the spring of 1947 to express concern that his client's popularity had moved up only one place in the past three years. “What happened?” the client demanded to be told. “Hitler killed himself.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Fittingly, the best lines were often reserved for Benny's manservant Rochester. In one episode, Jack complained that a line he had come up with – “I need that like a moose needs a hat rack” – had failed to draw a response during a recent performance. “I can't understand why it doesn't get a laugh,” Benny lamented, to which Rochester responded flatly, “Maybe it isn't funny.”Footnote ⁴¹ On another occasion, when Jack struggled to think of an outfit to wear to a costume party, Rochester suggested, “Why don't you wear your toupee upside down and go as a bird's nest?”Footnote ⁴² Rochester was just as merciless in his opinions of his boss's motion picture career. When Jack suggested to Rochester in the fall of October of 1946 that his feature, The Horn Blows at Midnight, would go down in history, Rochester enthusiastically agreed: “It sure will – it's the first thing [Soviet foreign minister Andrei] Gromyko ever walked out on.”Footnote ⁴³

Jack Benny's wartime experiences inspired an evolution in his program's treatment of race. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it had contained many of the trappings left over from its star's Vaudeville roots. Jack's trusted butler, Rochester, had behaved sometimes in stereotypically “black” ways. He had carried a switchblade and invited Jack's unsuspecting friends to bet against his loaded dice. These traits quickly evaporated, though, as the discovery of the full extent of Nazi Germany's campaign of racial warfare hastened calls for extending civil rights to all Americans. “When the black man's fight for equal rights and fair play became an issue after the war,” Jack Benny wrote, “I would no longer allow Rochester to say or do anything that an audience would consider degrading to the dignity of a modern Afro-American. So Rochester had to stop eating watermelon and drinking gin on radio and television after 1945.”Footnote ⁴⁴

One might question whether Rochester indeed fits into a model of cultural pluralism. Certainly, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson's character has generated a considerable amount of controversy. Scholars of African American history have often considered him an Uncle Tom who seemed overly eager to impress his white master.Footnote ⁴⁵ But their ire pales compared to that of many white southerners at the time. In one episode, Jack accidentally got knocked out by Rochester while training for a boxing match against arch-rival Fred Allen. This incident elicited thousands of letters complaining that Rochester's punch had been nothing less than an attack on the white race and the dignity of the South.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similar letters came in after episodes in which Rochester and Jack swam in the same pool.Footnote ⁴⁷ And one can only speculate how white segregationists must have felt when they heard Rochester on another occasion brushing his teeth at a public drinking fountain at Union Station and then hurrying to board the train to grab the lower berth in a car he was sharing with the son of Jewish immigrants.Footnote ⁴⁸

Like the rest of the cast, Rochester's character was assigned a geographical place of origin discernible to the audience's imagination. Rochester was from Harlem; Mary grew up on a small farm in “Plainfield” (the 1940s equivalent of The Simpsons' Springfield); Phil Harris hailed from the South; Dennis Day was clearly from Boston. By themselves, these characters might have had little in common. They spoke differently and came from different walks of life. But once the band struck up “Yankee Doodle Dandy” at the start of each show, the cast formed a tight-knit community around Jack Benny. The favorite son of Waukeegan, Illinois, Jack absorbed their taunts, but in so doing, formed one people out of many.

Jack Benny's notion of Americanism after World War II included a fervent sense of internationalism. Accordingly, a new addition to Benny's cast after the war was the great British dramatic actor, Ronald Colman, who moved in next door to Jack in December of 1945. In his second appearance, “Ronnie” and his wife Benita had Christmas dinner at Jack's house. To make the Colmans feel at home, Jack hired an English butler who muttered in an incomprehensible accent. By the end of the evening, Jack's excruciating attempts to be a proper host led Ronald Colman to thoroughly dislike his American neighbor. As he would go on to tell Benita in a later episode after a visit from Jack, “If he hadn't borrowed my razor, I'd go upstairs and cut my throat.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite the discord during the show, however, at the end of this Christmas celebration, Colman rose to deliver an eloquent speech ushering in a new era:

From the Christmas of 1945 onward, Jack Benny's neighborhood took on an international flavor. Jack's character claimed to have personally financed the $25 million necessary for the United States to purchase the Virgin Islands from Denmark after World War I (“I remember when I took Woodrow Wilson down into my vault,” he told the gang).Footnote ⁵¹ When France devalued the franc during one of the financial crises following World War II, Jack became a devotee of French cuisine.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, when Great Britain devalued the pound, Jack began to pay Rochester his weekly wages in sterling.Footnote ⁵³ And when his violin teacher, Professor LeBlanc, confronted him to demand payment for a series of five lessons, Jack responded curtly, “Now, let's see, I owe you $7.50. Is that right? [“Oui, monsieur,” Leblanc concurred] Now, France owes us four billion, six hundred and six million …”Footnote ⁵⁴

Jocularity foreshadowed a more solemn sense of internationalist destiny. The stinginess of Jack's character made the Jack Benny's real-life calls for compassion all the more genuine. On 2 March 1947, ten days before Harry Truman delivered his famous speech to Congress proposing aid for Greece and Turkey and establishing the Truman Doctrine, Jack Benny made his own plea to his listeners to rally support for the Greek War Relief Association headed by former president Herbert Hoover. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began, “as a result of the last war, no country entered peacetime reconstruction and rehabilitation with scantier resources than Greece. Here is another opportunity to share our blessings with our suffering neighbors overseas.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Later that year, Jack Benny again anticipated official US policy. In an episode from December 1947, some four months before Truman secured votes in Congress and signed the bill to establish the Economic Cooperation Administration, Jack came out in full support of the Marshall Plan. Playing the old year 1947 in a poignant version of the cast's annual New Year's skit, Jack showed the young boy who was 1948 his picture album. “Now, take a good luck at this picture – here's something I'm mighty proud of,” Jack told him. “Yep, that long one over there is the friendship train. It started out with just a dozen cars. But every place it stopped people added more and more food for Europe.” Next to it was the freedom train, “and I want you to get as many people as possible to see it. All of life is on that train: bill of rights; emancipation proclamation; declaration of independence.” “Those are big words – what do they mean?” the boy asked. “Well, I'll sum in it up for you in the words of a great fan, Abraham Lincoln: that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.” The rest of the world, Jack went on to say,

During World War II, when the War Information Board had compelled him to do so, Jack had played along with the government's official line. He knew instinctively what studies would later prove – that integration of the message with the show's thematic material was more effective to listeners who soon tired of public-service announcements. In Radio Goes to War, Gerd Horten writes that, by donating his beloved jalopy to the war effort, Jack's character set an example for every American who was reluctant to give up the old family car that often symbolized endurance through the Great Depression. Returning from the scrap yard in October of 1942, Jack expressed his own anxiety to Rochester. “How can I sleep with my Maxwell all busted up in that junkyard? I don't know.” Jack asked. “Boss, why don't you look at it this way?” Rochester responded,

After the war, Jack Benny did not need government prodding to champion policies like the Marshall Plan. He became a voluntarist agent who trumpeted the call to promote open societies and to renew America's commitment to support oppressed people at home and abroad. His actions were motivated not by state coercion but by a global outlook forged by the horrors of World War II, one in which fear of the atomic bomb loomed large. In the opening episode for the fall season in 1946, Jack dreamt he was held up by two hoods intent on stopping him from broadcasting another season. After a brief flurry of gunfire, listeners heard the unmistakable sound of an atomic detonation as Jack woke up screaming.Footnote ⁵⁸ The goons, one should note, were not meant to be Russians – they were common thugs who did not even have foreign accents.

The atomic nightmare of Jack's character was emblematic of how the anxieties of the postwar era permeated the show. The real Jack Benny made no claims to understand geopolitics; he was less concerned with the questions that befuddled US policymakers than he was fearful of atomic weapons in general. This sentiment was consistent with that of most Americans at that time. World War II instilled in them a sense of national mission and destiny. But there was also great unease about the meaning of America's victory in that struggle; there was ambiguity as well over the proper course of American leadership in the postwar era. Jack's role was thus not only to reinforce America's sense of mission, but to provide a model of leadership premised on supreme confidence.

Supreme confidence meant that Americans need not always be revered. The recap of Jack's tour of Europe in the summer of 1948 to the countries within the burgeoning Atlantic alliance intimated potential resentment over American preponderance. In England an audience member quipped, “If this is Lend-Lease, let's pay them off.”Footnote ⁵⁹ And at the Olympia Theatre in France, a Parisian, asked what he thought of the performance, responded, “I could tell you in one word, but I would rather use more.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet the joke was on these foreign nationals. They said what they could, but Jack remained the star. While he seemed the most marginalized figure on the show, it was merely an illusion, as Jack ultimately retained authority over the final version of the script.

Indeed, the supreme confidence Jack Benny exuded showed America that it could pursue its mission in spite of the rhetorical slings and arrows of sometimes petulant allies, so long as it projected moral authority and did not lose its head. If confident, America could afford to be seen as a caricature of itself – as selfish, arrogant, and the object of scorn – but only if it stayed true to first principles and its historic creed. Listeners got the message, especially a B movie actor named Ronald Reagan. According to Lou Cannon, the author of the definitive biography of Reagan, the President

Like Jack, “Reagan most often played himself … [but he] could poke fun at his ignorance because he considered himself abundantly blessed with common sense.”Footnote ⁶¹

Consider the role of common sense in how America regarded itself and its place in the world in the postwar era. If he had ever been asked about political messages within his show, Jack Benny probably would have demurred and insisted that the themes he stressed were common sense in light of what had occurred in World War II. In the postwar era, it was common sense that peace and freedom were inseparable, that America needed to promote openness in contrast to totalitarian societies, that it needed to replace intolerance with pluralism, that it needed to remain intimately involved in the world, and that it needed to lead with supreme confidence. It was common sense for liberals like Jack to support his friend Harry Truman over Henry Wallace in the election of 1948.

By 1950, when Jack Benny redirected his creative efforts to his new television show, common sense mixed with fear had crystallized into a Cold War consensus. In the twilight of the radio era Jack and his gang had forged a community that was the antithesis of a totalitarian state. His mission for peace may be regarded today as a kinder, gentler side of the national security mindset, for in America's collective imagination the values of Jack Benny's open society were requisites for peaceful coexistence with potential hostile nations following World War II. Alongside their analyses of the scope of Stalin's ambitions and America's aspirations toward an empire of liberty, then, historians of the origins of the Cold War ought to consider just who was defining the terms of potential accommodation between the two sides.Footnote ⁶²