A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DThe March of Radio : Technology and Utopia 'Primary Documents', Chapter 5
"...But there's a critical difference between today's debates over the Internet and yesterday's over the radio. Today, questions of cultural corruption--pornography and violence--hold the public's interest, while the more complex issues of commercialization and private control of a public resource are relegated to the business pages and the peripheries of the public mind." Welcome to Primary Documents. The idea behind this web site is to provide primary documents on a variety of topics in media and social history as a tool for teachers or as a source of enjoyment for the historically minded. In years of poking around in archives we've come across gems of documents that articulate an historical moment particularly well or shed light on a complex issue in a rich vernacular. As teachers we've found these useful in opening up discussion on what can sometimes be a dry and distant subject: history. But Primary Documents is also a bit of an historical fanzine. It often includes bits and pieces of history that we find, aren't really sure what to do with, but get us excited. We hope they excite you as well. Browse and enjoy.
Minute Men of the Air William S. Dutton, Congressional Record, 1929
Rajah in a Low Back Chair Thos. L. Williams, Radio Digest Illustrated, 1926
Radio Wrinkles and other news excerpts collected in Radio Broadcast, 1925
Radio and the Child Sidonie Matner Gruenberg, Annals of the American Academy, 1935
A Radio Husband Rhea Sheldon, Radio Digest Illustrated, 1926
Radio as an Educational Force Glenn Frank, Annals of the American Academy, 1935
The Public Interest? Hope Thompson, Congressional Record, 1929
Radio and the Humanities William S. Paley, Annals of the American Academy, 1935 from "This Is Norman Brokenshire", 1954
The National Radio Home-Maker's Club Ida Bailey Allen, 1930s
Do They Earn Their Pay? Robert Eichberg, Congressional Record, 1934
Should Radio Be Used For Advertising Joseph H. Jackson, Radio Broadcast, 1922
What Radio Reports Are Coming To New York Sun, 1926
The Future of Radio Advertising in the United States Roy S. Durstine, Annals of the American Academy, 1935
The Impending Radio War James Rorty, Harper's Magazine, 1931
"A recurring vision whirls in the shared mind. . .a vision that nearly every member glimpses. . .of wiring human and artificial minds into one planetary soul."
Kevin Kelly, founder of the WELL and editor of Wired, writing on the Internet in Harper's Magazine, May, 1994
To every new technology are pinned the hopes and fears of society. Excitement--like Kevin Kelly's--over the liberatory communication and utopian potential of the digital revolution, is met by the passage of a law by Congress that will broadly censor Internet content in the name of protecting the tender psyche of the nation's youth from uncensored, anarchic, and "indecent" material.
Many of the fantasies and anxieties swirling around the explosion of the Internet today are more than reminiscent of controversy surrounding radio in its early days. The issues raised in the material we have collected below will sound remarkably familiar: Some radio utopians believed that this new technology would bring humanity together in a grand community transcending regional boundaries; while others thought that radio would be the instrument for spreading the gospel of culture, education and rationality to the masses, bringing with it the good life of modernity and consumer society.
But as the enormous power of the medium became evident, critics worried that the radio might only be spreading the heretical preachings of crass commercialism and the corruptions of mass entertainment, stiff competition for the "small town" values of middle America. While still other critics feared that radio was being monopolized by powerful commercial and political interests, creating a medium for the powerful to exploit the many.
But there's a critical difference between today's debates over the Internet and yesterday's over the radio. Today, questions of cultural corruption--pornography and violence--hold the public's interest, while the more complex issues of commercialization and private control of a public resource are relegated to the business pages and the peripheries of the public mind.
The massive Telecommunications Bill, recently passed into law, is clearlymore a result of corporate discussion over how to maximize profits than any real debate on the part an informed citizenry over who should have access to means of communication. Is it naive to hope for a public debate over the enormous implications ofwho controls our media and for what purposes? Perhaps, but we present these documents from a previous time, about a medium that seems now quaintly archaic, as a possible place from which to start.
Radio in its infancy was an interactive medium. Every receiver was also a transmitter, and the air waves were dominated by radio amateurs practicing point - to - point, two-way communication. Radio fans were not members of a passive audience but active participants in a culture that they helped to build. The utopian ideal of these early days was of a community of radio operators that spanned the nation, if not the globe, transmitting news and vital information to far off places. "Minutemen of the Air," (1929) champions this romantic vision of the radio amateur saving lives and building a moral community even as the powerful signals of radio broadcasting began to dominate the air.
The whimsical illustration from Electrical Retailing (1922) sketches out a related radio fantasy: Radio would not only connect people to others in far away lands, but by its magic it could bring goods from afar directly into your home, bringing the good life to all.
The medium offered the possibility of a connection between distant places andpeoples, but as centralized broadcasting displaced point-to-point interaction by the mid-Twenties, this "connection" became increasingly imaginary and one-sided. In 1926, Radio Digest Illustrated, one of the many new magazines for the fans of radio broadcasting, published a poem entitled "Rajah in the Low Back Chair." In it, the passive radio listener explores and masters the world without ever leaving his home. A blissful dream, true, but only a fanciful contact with a far off land, without any real exchange of views.
William S. Dutton
Mr. DILL: Mr. President, in the American Magazine for November, 1929, is an article entitled "Minute Men of the Air," by William S. Dutton. It reads like a romance. It is the story of what the amateurs in radio have done in developing the radio. I ask unanimous consent that it may be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed In the RECORD, as follows:
While in Hartford, Conn., not long ago, I spent a morning with Hiram Percy Maxim, one of that trio of famous engineers who during the past half century have made their family name renowned wherever firearms and explosives are in use.
Among Mr. Maxim's numerous inventions in the fields of ordnance and electricity that of the Maxim silencer is probably best known to the public. He is president of the Maxim Silencer Co., a member of innumerable scientific and engineering bodies, and the founder and press of both the American Radio Relay League and the International Amateur Radio Union.
It was of the two latter organizations, closest to Mr. Maxim's heart, that we talked - he is probably the world's foremost radio amateur. And as he talked and I listened, I found myself possessed, first, by a thrill of wonder and then by sheer amazement.
He told me of the existence in this world of ours of an adventurous band of brothers, 30,000 strong and scattered over five continents, who hold communion almost at will in the empyrean spaces.
He told me of men and boys who, at the touch of a key, can leap around the world who have wiped out for all time the age-old barriers of race and language and distance; who have even dared, intrepid souls that they are, to shoot their messages into the void of the infinite and to challenge answers of the stars themselves !
There, in that prosaic business office, he told me of matchless heroism in flood and disaster of a great emergency system of communication which stands ready to " carry on "ówhich has carried on when all other means have tailed. He told me of a mighty university of the air In whose thousands of laboratories toil thousands of volunteers nightly. And all for the love of the work and the thrill of achievement!
And when Mr. Maxim had finished, I was amazed, not alone by the tremendous scope of this thing but equally was I amazed by the manner in which it had been built. This whole grand enterprise of world dominion, this Gargantuan kingdom of space, had been conceived and executed by amateurs in the face of ridicule! It had been built without capital as such, without exact knowledge as the scientific world defines it. In large part it has been built by schoolboys!....
Thos. L. Williams
At evening-at ease, in a low back chair,
There in the dusk beyond the lamp's gleam,
A rajah in "make-believe" then am I,
What rajah of old had more to amuse,
The advent of any new medium or technology disrupts traditional practices and social relations. Papers in the 1920s were filled with discussion and commentary on the possible effects of radio. Some were comical, epiphenomenal, like "radio wrinkles." Others, however, were evidence of more serious changes: radio listening's effect on reading habits, the erosion of public social life and interaction as many spent more time at home listening to the radio, and the fear that commercial radio was corrupting youth with the salacious sensationalism of crime serials and melodramas.
"RADIO WRINKLES" MAR FAIR LISTENERS' FACES
BERLIN. Radio wrinkles are the latest bugaboo of German women, who see their faces marred by folds and creases brought on by the strain of listening to wireless programs. Beauty specialists affect to find that the faces of female radio fans acquire a strained expression from listening night after night to the radio. Their brows become knitted, their lips firmly pressed together and their whole expression hardened and less womanlike, say the beauty experts. The consequence is what is called the "radio face," of which the chief characteristics are radio wrinkles.
LONDON.The British workman of today prefers wireless to whisky and Bunyan to Barleycorn, Captain Charles Nicholson of the Salvation Army told the Finsbury justices at their meeting to consider liquor license renewals.
" Drunkenness has been reduced by one half during the last few years," said the Captain,
"and many public drinking houses are often empty on Sunday evenings. "
It has been said that the new and increasing interest in radio work has caused a falling off of interest in the libraries of England. The Middlesex Library Committee reports that for November of last year there were over five thousand fewer books taken from the library than during the corresponding month of the year before.
Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg
Looking backward, radio appears as but the latest of cultural emergents to invade the putative privacy of the home. Each such invasion finds the parents unprepared, frightened, resentful, and helpless. Within comparitively short memory, the " movie," automobile, the telephone, the sensational newspaper or magazine, the "funnies," and the cheap paper-back book have had similar effects upon the apprehensions and solicitudes of
parents.
A new instrument or medium always brings difficulties that cannot be solved the basis of earlier experiences or earlier criteria of conduct. Many literary masterpieces, such as Mark Twain's classics of child life, at first aroused the hostility of adults, only to become "required reading" in the public schools. Similarly, the "movies" brought protests that made no discriminations among the crude slapsticks, the impossible "Westerns," and the new creations of Charlie Chaplin. It took time to reveal that some of the performances which were at first offensive to parents were not only better adapted to children's tastes and needs, but also psychologically and educationally more sound than those which parents preferred.
To point out that we have gradually assimilated these other "invaders," and to expect, therefore, that we shall before long find for the radio its proper place, is not to belittle either the validity of the parental anxieties or the dangers of the instrument itself as a potential agent for harm; nor is it to minimize the difficulties it presents. The parallel is intended merely to suggest that some perspective may be helpful in considering the problem of the radio and the child. We must not overlook, however, the important fact that in some respects the radio finds the parents more helpless than the " movies " or the "funnies"; for no locks will keep this intruder out, nor can parents shut their children away from it....
Rhea Sheldon
Monday
Wife: "Pa, let's go to the theater,
Tuesday
Wife: "Mrs Jones has asked us to play bridge,
Wednesday
Wife: I've tickets for the opera dear."
Thursday
Wife: "Tonight you must work in the garden,
Friday
Wife: "I have a BIG surprise for you,
Saturday and Sunday
Hubby: "Well!! if you are not the limit!
Radio's effect on American Politics and culture was debated at the highest levels. In 1935, the president of the University of Wisconsin, Glenn Frank, weighs in, claiming that radio is a force for reason, a tool for education and moral culture. Countering many critics who saw the medium as the demagogue's tool for the emotional manipulation of the mass audience, radio, he argued, promised to provide the means to rationalize the democratic process by removing political debate from the passions of the "mob-minded gallery" and giving it over to the political experts.
Similarly, in the hands of educational experts, radio could be a "unifying influence" bringing together the nation in a time of economic hardship and disunion. But this unification is a curious one: true to his elite distrust of "the crowd," Frank's ideal of union is an audience of individuals, separate from one another, all listening to the same source.
Glenn Frank
I have long been convinced that the invention of radio, the talking film, and television is destined to affect the process and scope of education with quite as revolutionary results as followed in the wake of the invention of the printing press. Some day, when we have really adapted these new instrumentalities of instruction to the enterprise of education, we may find that they have enabled us to reduce the cost and raise the quality of education at the same time. There is at lease one commodity of which we suffer a shortage rather than a surplus. That commodity is genius in general, and teaching genius in particular.
To just what uses these new instrumentalities can be put in the routines of education is still in the lap of the experimenters I shall not tempt fate with prophecy in this field that is entirely too extensive to explore in one brief paper. But already we know at least this much: Radio, the talking film, and television can warm, illumine, and fertilize the routines of education by bringing to them, as spur and supplement, the supreme teaching geniuses of the generation.
The printing press has been able to spread the fruits of scattered genius the world around. But through radio, the talking film, and television it has become possible for the first time in human history actually to syndicate living genius itself. The color, the vibrancy, the contagion of the great teaching geniuses classroom can at last be brought into the smallest classroom, on the outer rim of the world.
But these new instrumentalities of instruction need not, indeed may not, restrict their direct educational activity to the classrooms of the traditional school system. Already, education is being marketed commercially by hundreds of organizations outside the regular school systems. The schools, colleges, and universities have been able thus far to ignore this competition because they have the advantages of traditional prestige, the human relation with living teachers, an atmosphere of culture, and the presence on their staffs of the world's most distinguished scholars.
But these advantages may not be eternal. The modern world turns with disturbing if intelligent facility to new methods of meeting old needs. When the printing press was invented, I have no doubt that many educators sniffed at the idea that the printed word would ever be more than a very minor supplement to the spoken word of the ancient teacher, just as today many educators sniff at the shoddy methods of many commercially promoted educational agencies that operate outside our school system, refusing to consider them serious competitors of the regular schools.
But can we be sure that our traditional schools will forever retain their near monopoly of education, when to the printing press have been added such agencies of visualization and communication as radio, the talking film, and television?
The ghosts of the great inventors who gave us the technical foundations of radio, the talking film, and television are looking wistfully down at us wondering whether we shall make full use of these new tools of civilization which they have given us. I hope that we shall be able to bring to the educational use of these new tools in our classrooms an insight equal to the inventiveness that created them.
But quite apart from the professional use to which these instrumentalities may be put in the schools, and quite apart from the specifically educational programs sent out over publicly and privately operated radio stations, the radio is indirectly exerting a profound and productive educational influence on American life. The mechanism of radio itself, entirely aside from any deliberate policy on the part of its administrators, will tend in time to give us a new kind of statesman and a new kind of voter. And I know of no educational achievement more worth the winning.
The microphone is the deadly enemy of the demagogue_a ruthless revealer of "hokum." Two thirds of the appeal of the old-fashioned political oratory and the mob-stirring of the rabble-rouser lay in the hundred-and-one tricks of posture and voice that catch on when the crowd is massed and the speaker looks it in the eye. But what was rousing in the old mass meetings may become ridiculous when it comes through the radio to the single listener. The radio will increasingly tend to put the rhetorician to rout and exalt the realist.
Even the most average of Americans is a more critical listener when he is not part of a mass meeting. The slightest trickery of phrase or voice shows up on the radio, a restricting type of statesman is demanded by the radio. When the statesman steps to the microphone, his ideas must stand on their own feet without benefit of the crutch of emotionalized crowd reaction. He must master the art of simplicity and clarity, as even a Republican must admit that Franklin D. Roosevelt has done. Long and involved sentences must go.
The realization that millions may be listening in puts the statesman on his mettle. He has an added compulsion to accuracy. When he thoughtlessly resorts to demagogic tricks over the radio, there is likely to drift back to him the chastening suspicion that here and there and yonder in quiet rooms throughout the Nation, thousands of intelligent Americans may be laughing derisively.
It may be that radio will in time effect a needed reform in our national party conventions. Today they are overgrown and outmoded institutions They contain intelligent and statesmanlike minds. But nine times out of ten they crumble at the touch of a really critical issue. Our national conventions have become so large that mob psychology finds a fertile field in them. Large conventions give rise to an interlocking insanity and a compound irresponsibility.
But now that the radio has made it possible for the whole Nation to eavesdrop even the whisper of national conventions, it may prove possible to exclude the public from the actual sessions, restricting attendance to accredited delegates, alternates, officials, and working representatives of the press. This would enable parties to hold their conventions in halls small enough to make sessions more nearly manageable. This would eliminate the distracting influence of the mob-minded gallery that so often destroys the possibility of truly deliberate action.
I think, that with no gallery to play to, a realization that hearers were safely away, listening quietly to the voices and votes of the convention, would make for less street carnivalism and more statesmanship in these assemblies. Heretofore, press reports have not been able to carry enough of the inanities and inefficiencies of the conventions to give the people at large a full sense of their actual operation.
The politicians who have captured the headlines have remained to the masses Olympian figures; but now, millions of voters, as they turn the knobs of their radios, are gaining a sense of the chaos and confusion of conventions even more vivid than the impression made on the men and women actually in attendance. If no man remains a hero to his valet, certainly conventions that do not rid themselves of "hokum" and "hooliganism" cannot remain statesmanlike assemblies to listeners at the radio.
And, finally, if it be one of the major functions of education to enable us to function as an intelligent and integrated nation, one of the profoundest educational effects of radio will be its increasing influence for national unity. This vast Nation, with its 125,000,000 people, faces a dilemma. It must not iron itself out into a dull sameness. It must resist the forces that seek to impose an extreme standardization upon its thought and life. It must, at all costs, maintain the color, the character, the charm, and the creativeness of its varied regions.
But it must at the same time play for national unity. There are some things it must do with a solid front. This is one of the lessons we are learning as we face the baffling enterprise of economic recovery and social reconstruction. There is a minimum unification of the mind and interests of the Nation that is imperative.
This is a difficult order for so vast a territory and so varied a population. All history shows that far-flung empires have sooner or later failed because they could not maintain the necessary unity of mind and purpose. They fell apart because they lacked the binding cement of a common vision of their problems and their possibilities. The Greek republics began to slip when they grew beyond the city-state stage in which the whole population could at once have access to the councils in which public policy was being shaped. The Athenians, gathering en masse at the Acropolis, had an ideal agency of unification. They could all listen at once to their peerless leader, Pericles.
Until radio was invented, America lacked an Acropolis. Her Pericles, when she was lucky enough to have one, had to make the swing around the circle if he wanted to speak to the people of America. And even then he could touch only the strategic centers. The masses had to hear him at second hand as they scanned the reports of his speeches in the next day's press. With radio, an American Pericles can have his Acropolis and speak to all America at once. The radio is an agency of national unification whose development and freedom we must guard with jealous care.
I have tried to indicate that the very nature of radio as a technical medium of communication has profound and productive educational implications for the national future, in rationalizing our public life by compelling the development of a new type of statesman and a new type of voter, and in giving unifying ideas quick access to the mind of the entire Nation.
Let me end with the earnest hope that we shall not be content with these automatic by-products of radio as a mechanism, but that we shall use this mechanism with the utmost of intelligence and moral responsibility. "You think your souls are saved," Mahatma Gandhi once said to a Westerner, "because you can invent radio, but of what elevation to man is a method of broadcasting if you have only drivel to send out?" Radio deserves the best the national mind can bring to its microphones, in content and in presentation. Quality must learn to sing. Education may "get away" with dullness if it is dealing with prisoners in a classroom. It cannot when men are free to turn from dull quality to interesting frivolity by a simple twist of the dial.
Radio has given education a new medium. Education must invest radio with meaning.
As commercial broadcasters began to dominate the airwaves in the late 1920s, the public began to realize the radio spectrum was a limited resource. The question of who will have access and who will have control over this powerful force became the topic of heated debate. Central to this debate was the definition of the "public interest." In order to obtain a broadcasting licence, the Federal Government required that broadcasters serve
Commercial broadcasters measured service to the public interest by the size of their audience. Others, like Hope Thompson of the American Federation of Labor's broadcating station WCFL, argued that the public interst is served by assuring access to institutions and ideas that served the greatest number of people.
Hope Thompson
....Up to the present time it seems to have been assumed that if a station furnished entertainment popular with many people it was ipso facto, operating "in the public interest, necessity, and convenience," and that the station it the greatest number of listeners was the " best " station. Acknowledging that there is much to justify those who hold to this view, and with a full appreciation of the important element of entertainment in a radio program, we submit that popularity is an inadequate test for "public interest, necessity, and convenience."
The most popular of entertainment is a prize fight. Next to that a ball game. The most popular books are usually sex novels. We offer no criticism of those things, but we do not regard them as standing first in the test of public interest, necessity, and convenience. We believe that radio is too great, too close to the dally lives of all of the people, to be devoted almost entirely to popular entertainment.
Some stations may well be devoted entirely to this kind of programs. Probably all stations should furnish some of it. But we think the public interest requires that radio cover many fields of human interest; that some stations may well be devoted to subjects that do not interest the multitude and yet be rendering a greater public service than some others that entertain a great audience. The public interest may be more truly served if 10,000 people listen to a scientific lecture, than if 1,000,000 weep over "Old Pal."
To further illustrate: Suppose there were only 89 printing presses available in the United States for all kinds of printing, and these were under Government control, licensed to users. Would these presses be licensed solely, or chiefly, for printing "best seller" novels? Would any degree of "popular demand" for sporting news and murder stories prove that such publications were in the public interest, convenience, and necessity, to the exclusion of books of science, history, biography, and economics?
Certainly a wise licensing authority would make a broad study of the needs of all the people, it would allocate a reasonable service to entertainment to news of the day, to books of all kinds; it would give opportunity for expression to every reputable and substantial class or group. It would not let any single user monopolize even one of these precious printing presses, even though he promised to print what be considered a "diversified" output.
Such a licensing authority would not say to the millions of organized working men and women of the country: "You can not use any of these printing presses to promulgate your principles, ideals, and policies; they are all needed to supply the public demand for books of entertainment and newspapers" Those printing presses would be treasured as the sacred heritage of all the people.
We think of the 89 radio broadcasting channels in the same way. We believe that the Federal Radio Commission has yet to perform its greatest service in a true interpretation of the "public interest, necessity, and convenience" in the administration of radio law. It is our hope that this will be done within the coming year and that there will be substantial changes in the allocation of broadcasting facilities....
Rebutting the educators and labor advocates, CBS president William Paley argues in 1935 that commercial broadcasters can offer more cultural value and effective education than the more traditional tecniques of educational institutions and their not-for-profit radio efforts. Setting the stage for "Edutainment," Paley writes that commercial broadcasters know how to entertain, and thus keep the interest of their audience.
Perhaps his most profound--and disturbing--point is that almost any programming can be considered "educational" as long as it keeps the attention of, and unifies, a mass audience. Like Frank and Thompson above, Paley considers radio an important force for national unity, the conflict is over who will lead this force: educators, labor, or business.
William S. Paley
It is an interesting paradox that the so-called commercial broadcasters as represented by the major nation-wide networks, have in recent years been a far more important factor in the creation of programs of a broad cultural and educational interest than have been those special stations originally licensed by Congress to undertake specific educational activities. Today the broadcast time sold commercially by the major networks averages little more than 30 per cent of their broadcast hours; and an overwhelming proportion of the remaining part of the average day's broadcasts_all of which are supported by revenues derived from the limited commercial sales_consists of material of definite cultural values.
It would of course be obvious to include under this head such broadcasts as Columbia's 534 programs of music in 1933 that could definitively be classified as serious, ranging from the two-hour programs of the New York Philharmonic Symphony to the less formal presentations of the Columbia Symphony Orchestra composed of Columbia's own artists. But such a listing would equally well include programs devoted to home economics and cooking, which are among our most important if unheralded arts: no less than broadcasts of news events, of social, political, and scientific information, and of worthy dramatic literature.
Why so many of the exclusively educational stations, originally assigned special wave lengths, have abandoned the major part of their educational activities, either by selling a large part of their time commercially or by leasing their entire facilities to commercial broadcasters; and why, even then they maintained a certain flow of educational broadcasts, they failed to attract large audiences or financial support adequate for the type of program required to build and hold such audiences_all of this is a subject worthy of a special study, which it should some day receive at the proper hands.
It is possible, however, that the failure of the educational stations to achieve the results that had been hoped for grows out of the essential difference in the techniques of radio education and classroom education. The school, because it is necessarily rooted in tradition, develops and adopts changes in teaching technique slowly; and the leading educators have themselves been among the first to realize that the usual classroom methods are not applicable to the new demands of radio. A very brief experience with broadcasting is quite sufficient to prove that if radio is to teach at all, it must first master the problem of attracting and holding its audience-_an audience not confined in a classroom, not deferential to an instructor's authority, and not indisposed to ramble all over the air waves if one turn of the dial provides a voice that bores.
We cannot hand the critical and often restive American audience some brand of bright encyclopedic facts and expect it to listen enthralled as might an astonished European peasant who had grown up without benefit of school or newspaper. Nor can we prescribe for it our own particular brand of culture and expect it to drink deep, appreciative drafts. Just as, in a land where propaganda has been so plentiful--and often effective-_we have a public perhaps more suspicious of propaganda than any other nation in the world; so here, where the sources of cultural education and enjoyment are so freely numerous, our people are perhaps more critical of well-meaning campaigns to improve their minds than in almost any other country.
All this is a high tribute to the American intelligence, which it is indeed dangerous to underestimate, or talk down to. If in the American audience we have perhaps the highest common denominator of cultural appreciation in the world--thanks to our democratic school system--we also have perhaps the most critical audience, and one most independent in establishing its own standards of appreciation and judgment. As a commercial broadcaster, the greatest sin one can commit is to bore it, for this sin carries its own penalty: a loss of steady audience, which promptly results in a loss of revenues just as soon as advertisers discover the decline.
Experience has soon taught us that one of the quickest ways to bore the American audience is to deal with art for art's sake, or to deify culture and education merely because they are worthy gods. Learning for the sake of pure learning is indeed the leitmotif of the old aristocratic educational system, but it seems very lightly esteemed in the boundaries of our forty-eight states. Interest of the general American audience in the arts, the sciences, the humanities in general, goes hand in hand with a passionate interest in the direct application of all of these to living what has been called the full and more abundant life as our people currently conceive of it.
All this has a very important bearing on any estimate of the work of the American broadcasters in those fields called cultural, for lack of a better word. It is wholly understandable for instance, that the foreign bred scholar, tutored to believe that one the goals of education should be the writing of verse in Latin, would mildly shocked to learn that we even went so far as to classify a broadcast the World's Fair opening as an educational program. Yet such a broadcast was undoubtedly useful, informative and hence educative in our own American sense, to hundreds of thousands listeners. It is worth noting, in passing, that all broadcasts which tend to develop in our Nation a unity of national sense and feeling may be considered to have important educational value, whatever their subject....
The idea that radio would bring the political process to the people, and that this public exposure would bring light to the smoke filled back rooms, was a commonly held belief. Unfortunately, as this selection from the memoirs of radio reporter Norman Brokenshire makes clear, what radio brought to politics was the transformation of contentious political debates into carefully orquestrated media events: conventions carefully scripted for representation to a mass audience, where the real decisions were still made behind closed doors.
....The one episode...that I'll never forget was the 1924 Democratic National Convention, in the old Madison Square Garden. Nowadays political
conventions over television are the thing, with no punches pulled in the heat of argument or internal secrets of excitement sacred; but to me--largely for personal reasons, I admit--there will never be another event like that 1924 convention.
A Canadian boy, knowing very little up to now about politics and caring less, here I was suddenly on a platform where everything happening on the convention floor could be seen and reported by us. We occupied a strategically placed glass enclosed booth, equipped with news tickers to fill us in on the running story. Our job, [Major J. Andrew White's] and mine, was to relay the running story, adding to it the "color," the hundred and one little incidents and touches to make the event a spectacle that would interest, entertain, and also inform the great voter-radio audience. These broadcasts marked the first time the voter in his home had ever heard the step-by-step conduct of a political convention, including the roll call ("Twentyfour votes for Underwood") and Al Smith's addition to the English language of a new word "Rad-dio."
I acted as the Major's leg man, racing around the Garden to pick up bits of information, political news, hints of switches in roll-call votes, and color.
Speeches, introductions, ballots, delegation hassles over policies and prerogatives were punctuated with blasts from bands basking briefly in the glare of the political sun. My own moments in the sun came when Major White needed a respite and would take himself off to lunch at the downtown Newspapermen's Club or some such oasis, leaving me in charge.
In one of these spells on the air it was my "good luck" that a real fight between two delegations mushroomed near my post, well down in front on the
convention floor. Spotting it, wanting to do well for the glory of WJZ, I concentrated on the fight and let everything else go by. I explained that one whole delegation had blustered across the aisle to register a complaint, following with a blow-by-blow eyewitness account of one of the finest donnybrooks I'd ever seen. Delegation signs were banged down on opponent's heads, chairs and decorations destroyed; I had a ringside seat.
I was letting the listening audience in on the fracas when Major White walked in. When he grasped what I was doing, his face turned pale, he grabbed the microphone from me, signaled the operator to take us off the air, picked up a telephone, and called the studio. We were off the air only a few seconds. Keith McLeod came on, placidly playing "Traumerei," while Major White conferred with the studio about this green announcer who had gone berserk, and what should be done about it.
When the Major got back his equilibrium and received his instructions, he took the air again, not, however, before taking me aside and explaining to me in words of one syllable_some with four letters_that WJZ had only secured broadcast rights to this event on the distinct understanding that no disorders of any kind would be reported. "You get some lunch now," finished Major White, "and in future remember what I've told you."
With elegant composure I heard him say, "And now, ladies and gentlemen, we resume from Madison Square Garden and the Democratic National Convention...." As I drooped over my ham on rye in a nearby one-arm lunch I reflected bitterly that the time to have told me about the prohibition against relaying any disorders would have been before the convention opened. However, standing in awe of men as experienced as Major White, I felt filled with shame and fear and a great anxiety as to whether by tomorrow morning I'd still have a job in radio. Happily for me the station's permission to broadcast was not taken away....
The ideal of radio community continued into the 1930s. Ida Bailey Allen, a popular radio host of the time, celebrates below how radio has brought together 20 million homemakers in a national "club" of their own. But the scripting of community on a radio now dominated by commercial broadcasters was increasingly shaped by commercial imperatives. On the next page is an an excerpt from an article read into the Congressional Record in 1934 shows another side of Ida Bailey Allen's relationship with her community. To broadcasters and advertisers, the radio entertainers around whom these "communities" formed were "supersalesmen of the air"; and "community" was an audience of potential consumers.
Ida Bailey Allen
There are twenty million of us--Home-Makers. That is our job. Sometimes we become so enmeshed in it that we cannot look beyond the narrow confines of our own home. Then it is--that the flapper daughter--the "too modern" son--the gayety-loving husband--present real problems--we have not their viewpoint. To be a successful Home-Maker one must keep up. Any woman who has the wish can do it. Magic is not confined to myths or the Dark Ages. There is Magic today. The Magic of great manufacturers who have taken drudgery away--the Magic of gas and electricity--the Magic of books and libraries--and we have the Radio--that makes the Whole World Kin.
For years I have dreamed of some way that women could be united--some way thatwonderful music--excellent talks--helpful suggestions could go to them while they--kept house. Nursed the babies. Cared for the sick. The Radio has done it all. That subtle, wonderful Magic of the twentieth century has made our National Radio Home-Maker's Club possible. For some months I have asked you to be ready with pencils and paper to tune in on my Radio Hour. Many of you have done it--and have written me letters of appreciation that make me want to help you more and more. Little groups of you are meeting in central homes to "listen in" while you sew and are having Radio Luncheons afterward.
The National Radio Home-Maker's Club was announced "over the air" in July--a club designed to promote happier, better homes and mutual helpfulness. We have had visible meetings in a large hotel. There is a meeting "over the air" every Tuesday. There are no due--no obligations. Just listen in--and see if you don't want to join. Already there is a membership of thousands. Special Radio Recipe Contests are run each week, autographed copies of my Big Book--"Mrs Allen on Cooking, Menus, Service" are given for prizes.
The recipes in this Little Book belong especially to the National Radio Home-Maker's Club because each one was written by a member of this organization. The talks are mine. I wrote them and gave them to the World, first by Radio, then in the form of this Little Book and I have a so carefully edited the recipes for you. Women today are as home-loving as ever. Women will always be the Mothers of Yesterday--Today--and Tomorrow. Rich or poor--sick or well--through your Radio, you can belong to this club.
Robert Eichberg
...Ida Bailey Allen, as you know, broadcasts at a time of day when charges for time are low. Likewise, she appears under the joint sponsorship of several trade-marked brands, which further reduces the cost for each of her sponsors.
One of them, who makes a product retailing for 15 cents, had 7,000 handy little kitchen appliances left over from a former premium stunt and asked Mrs. Allen to give them away over the air. So she offered one to anybody sending in 10 flaps torn from the product, thus proving actual sales of $1.50 for each
request. Suddenly the advertiser found that all the appliances had been given away. Still package tops poured in, until more than 200,000 had been received. The cash return, as proved by package tops, was $304,500 from just that two-line announcement, which Is quite a feather in the C.B.S. chapeau.
That network also made an exhaustive survey of the sales of various products_soaps cigarettes, cleansers, etc.-_to find the relation between their sales in centers where they were advertised on the air, as compared with places where no stations carried the programs, and to find out whether they were more popular in homes that had radios than in those which hadn't. The results, far too long and complex to be given in this article were overwhelmingly in favor of broadcasting. Enough figures have been given, however, to prove conclusively that no matter how high a radio entertainer's salary is he brings a profit to the sponsor. So, a toast to the supersalesman of the air and to the advertising agents who are the brains of broadcasting.
The commercialization of the airwaves did not go unnoticed by the listening public. Very early on some critics--like Joseph H.Jackson, writing in 1922--predicted that if advertising were allowed on radio it would soon clog the airwaves. Within a decade Jackson's worst fears were realized. Criticism of this commercialization ranged from scathing invective: radio pioneer Lee DeForest described commercial radio as a "huckstering orgy" and "a vulgar, cheapjack show, designed solely to coax dollars out of the public"; to more humorous responses and satirical commentaries on commercial radio's effects on American culture such as in the New York Sun reprinted on the next page....
Joseph H. Jackson
.
....Supposing--just supposing--you are sitting down, head phones clamped to your ears, or loud-speaker distorting a trifle less than usual, enjoying a really excellent radio concert. A famous soprano has just sung your favorite song, and you're drawing a deep breath, sorry that it's over. Your thoughts, carried back to some pleasant memory by the magic of the radio, are still full of the melody. You are feeling sort of soothed and good-natured and at peace with the world. All of a sudden a gruff voice or a whining voice or a nasal voice or some other kind of a voice says "Good Morning! Have you used Hare's Soap?" Or maybe a sweet, girlish baritone implores you "Ask for Never-Hole Sox. There's a Reason. You just know she wears 'em."
Well, how about it? Do you like the idea? Can you picture to yourself the horror of sitting down to listen to a good song or two, or perhaps a newsy chat on the events of the day, and then being forced to listen toe broadcasting programme that is nine tenths advertising matter? Yes, "forced" is the word _there's the difficulty, life-size for you can't refuse, like movie-goers, to patronize the show. If such a thing as broadcasting advertising matte' should become general-_and it is no remote possibility--you'll hare to listen to it or listen to nothing at all! And you didn't buy receiving apparatus to listen to nothing at all.
Now then, you have...seen to what unmitigated horrors advertising by radio would lead, should it ever become a reality. You have seen how plausibly such a scheme might be presented and developed before measures to stop it could be taken. Granted that it is possible enough: is it really likely? Does the problem of radio advertising seem at all imminent or is any warning regarding it merely to be classed with the alarmist's cry of "Wolf!"?
Any one who doubts the reality, the imminence of the problem, has only to listen about him for plenty of evidence. Driblets of advertising, most of it indirect so far, to be sure, but still unmistakable, are floating through the ether every day. Concerts are seasoned here and there with a dash of advertising paprika. You can't miss it: every little classic number has a slogan all its own, if it's only the mere mention of the name--and the street address, and the phone number--of the music house which arranged the programme. More of this sort of thing may be expected. And once the avalanche gets a good start, nothing short of an Act of Congress or a repetition of Noah's excitement will suffice to stop it....
The Sun Dial, New York Sun, 1926
"This, ladies and gentlemen, is the annual Yale-Harvard game being held under the auspices of the Wiggins Vegetable Soup Company, makers of fine vegetable soups. The great bowl is crowded and the scene, by the courtesy of the R. & J. H. Schwartz Salad Company, is a most impressive one.
"The Yale boys have just marched onto the field, headed by the Majestic Pancake Flour Band, and are followed by the Harvard rooters, led by the Red Rose Pastry Corporation Harmonists, makers of cookies and ginger snaps.
"The officials are conferring with the two team captains in midfield under the auspices of the Ypsilanti Garter Company of North America. They are ready for the kickoff. There it goes! Captain Boggs kicked off for Yale by courtesy of the Waddingham Player Piano Company, which invites you to inspect its wonderful showrooms.
The ball is recovered by "Tex" Schmidt by arrangement with the Minneapolis Oil Furnace Company, Inc., and is run back 23 yards by courtesy of Grodz, Grodz & Grodz, manufacturers of the famous Grodz Linoleums.
"On the next play the Harvard runner is thrown hard by McGluck one of Mahatma Cigarette Company entertainers, and is completely knocked out by two Yale guards, Filler and Winch, by courtesy of the Hazzenback Delicatessen Products Corporation, makers of exquisite potato salads, cheeses, smoked ham and salads. Yale is penalized fifteen yards through the kind cooperation of the National Roofing and Copper Gutters Company.
"The teams are lining up again. It is a forward pass . . . a long forward pass under the direction of the Great Western Soap Powder Company, makers of the world's finest soap powders and cleaning fluids. The pass was caught by Schnapps, the Harvard back, who slipped on the wet ground under the auspices of the Hector M. Milligatawney Chocolate Works, the world's leading manufacturers of bon bons and almonds...."
Writing in the same elite academic journal as CBS president William Paley, Roy S. Durstine, VP and General Manager of advertising giant BBD&O, has a very different analysis of the role that radio plays in people's lives and of the radio audience itself. While Paley apparently champions the discernment of the radio audience, Durstine describes "the barren lives of the millions," making a clear distinction between what he sees as the critical intellectual elite and the ignorant, emotional masses who compose the mass audience.
His disdain speaks of the dramatic transformation of radio from the early days of the relatively egalitarian interaction of the "Minutemen of the Air" radio amateurs to the huge gulf between those who produce the culture and those who consume it in the world of commercial broadcasting during the 1930s.
Roy S. Durstine
The miracle of turning a knob on the front of a box and hearing, virtually at the instant it is produced, a sound originating many thousands of miles away is still an experience new to the human race. Yet so swiftly do people condition themselves to the miraculous, once it is absorbed into their lives, that the tendency is to toss off appraisals of radio with about as much thought as is used in flipping a cigarette end into a fireplace.
"I hate radio," announces a sweet young thing, "except the dance bands."
"Radio"' exclaims the Great Executive. "I never bother with it unless the President talks, or something like that."
"Shut that thing off!"' commands the bridge player, trembling on the brink of an original two-bid. "I hate talk on the radio."
Those whose lives always have keen crowded with books and the theater and concerts and interesting friends are no more typical of the American owners of eighteen million radio sets than Catherine of Russia was typical of the average peasant of her time. The simple fact is that never before in the history of the world have five or ten or fifty million people listened to the same sound at the same time. Never has there been a means of communication so widespread and so vital.
....The confusing fact to most nice people is that they and their friends are in no sense typical of radio's audience. The typical listening audience for a radio program is a tired, bored, middle-aged man and woman whose lives are empty and who have exhausted their sources of outside amusement when they have taken a quick look at an evening paper. They are utterly unlike those who are most vocal in their criticisms of radio programs--people with full lives, with books to read, with parties to attend, with theaters to visit, with friends whose conversational powers are stimulating. Radio provides a vast source of delight and entertainment for the barren lives of the millions. It is small wonder that the millions do not complain, and that the unhappiness and sensitiveness about over-commercialism and other objectionable features is confined to the top layer....
In conclusion, we present an excerpt from an 1931 article written by prominent critic James Rorty on "The Impending Radio War". In this passage Rorty lays out what he feels is the crucial issue in the struggle between commercial and educational interests over the airwaves . For Rorty the roots of this conflict over who will control the ether are deep: embedded in "the social, political, and cultural anomolies of our 'business man's civilization'". As such, "the work of cleaning up the air has to be done on the ground."
Today, as the Internet threatens to become a pipeline for corporate America's selling strategies, and battles over acceptable content rage in Washington, perhaps we should take Rorty's advice. The debate over media content, access and control must engage larger social and structural issues, and in the end, the very notion of "public interest" and "the public" itself.
James Rorty
....The problem of the control and administration of radio broadcasting is approximately coextensive with the problem of controlling and administering the modern world in the cultural and economic interests of the people who inhabit it. In this country especially, the ether has become a great mirror in which the social, political, and cultural anomalies of our "business man's civilization" are grotesquely magnified.
Granted that the radio is socially and politically one of the most revolutionary additions to the pool of human resources in all history--how does one go about integrating it with a civilization which itself functions with increasingly difficulty and precariousness? The work of cleaning up the air has to be done on the ground. Again, the ether is a mirror: the confusion of voices out of the air merely echoes or terrestrial confusion.
At bottom the issue is part of the larger conflict between exploitation for private profit and the increasingly articulate movement for public ownership and operation of essential public services. In this conflict the citadel of radio is the key position, because the control of the radio means increasingly the control of public opinion.
Big business knows this. So do the educators....
Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson teach in the American Studies/Media and Communications program at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. Primary Documents is in part funded by a Presidential Faculty Development Grant from Old Westbury. You can reach us c/o American Studies, SUNY--Old Westbury, Old Westbury, NY 11568-0210 or via e-mail at srd@dorsai.org. Please drop us a line and let us know what you think.
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