RADIO

The most important new mass medium of the Depression era had evolved dramatically in earlier decades. The development of telegraphy in the nineteenth century, along with investigations into electromagnetism, gave rise in the late 1800s to the genesis of wireless communications. At the turn of the century Guglielmo Marconi invented the first devices that transmitted bits of Morse Code via electromagnetic waves, using an oscillating electrical circuit. Wireless telegraphy soon bridged the Atlantic and announced Robert E. Peary's arrival at the North Pole, and it would dominate the wireless scene into the 1910s. Meanwhile, though, American scientists led by Lee De Forest developed vacuum tubes that could receive and reproduce the human voice and other transmitted sound. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed in 1919, after the military ceased its wartime control of wireless communications. RCA and other companies produced the first crystal radio kits, receivers for individual listeners that required the use of earphones.

The first radio station had been established in San Jose, California, in 1909, but modern radio broadcasting began with the formation in 1920 of KDKA in Pittsburgh. Victrola records were played into a "wireless telephone" or pick-up microphone and broadcast (a term invented at KDKA) over a three-state area; a music store soon allowed unlimited playing of its disks in return for on-air promotions. On election night 1920, amplified kits were arrayed in movie houses and other halls where Pittsburghers received returns. By 1922 local stations across the United States were broadcasting concerts, sermons, and political speeches. Vaudeville and musical performers, such as Ed Wynn and Paul Whiteman, soon appeared regularly on radio, and such broadcasters as Milton Cross, Walter Damrosch, and "Major" Edward Bowes also were heard. All remained popular through the Depression era. Bandleaders placed "wires" or radio transmitters into ballrooms and transmitted their music beyond the immediate dance floor. By 1928 shortwave transatlantic broadcasts were possible. Labor unions, political parties, and municipalities began their own stations in this early era of democratic experimentation.

Overlapping frequencies and distorted signals increased the demand for regulation or standardization in radio. While Britain's government nationalized the airwaves in 1922, creating the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), David Sarnoff of RCA and others in the United States pushed for a commercially-sponsored system of radio networks that would dominate programming and the widestband (AM, or "amplitude modulation") signals. In 1926 RCA's National Broadcasting Company (NBC) became the first radio network. The next year NBC transmitted the Rose Bowl game coast-to-coast. That same year the Radio Act became law, protecting the interests of networks and relegating nonaffiliated local stations to narrower, less-powerful frequencies. NBC actually ran two networks, the Blue and the Red, derived from existing station alliances; these were joined in 1929 by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), founded by William Paley, and in 1934 by the Mutual Broadcasting System. All of them featured predominantly musical programs, often sponsored and funded by a commercial advertiser. Product advertising thus took a quantum leap forward with the arrival of radio's electronic mass-marketing. On the eve of the Depression radio receivers were attached to loudspeakers that allowed families and other groups to listen together, and the problems of air-wave static and tinny-sounding pickup microphones were increasingly overcome by technological improvements. Just as Wall Street crashed, radio was becoming a major communications phenomenon.

By the end of the 1920s domestic and small-town melodramas (the first "soap operas," presented by Palmolive and other sponsors), sermons, band and symphony broadcasts, primitive infomercials featuring "blindfold tests," quiz shows, speeches by presidents and other notables, and children's series derived from comic strips were everyday fare for millions. Educators and others condemned the lowbrow content of radio series—"This child of mine is moronic," Lee De Forest lamented—and new legislation sought to regulate the content of children's programming. By the fall of 1929, though, the antics of Amos 'n' Andy, two shiftless and comical Negro caricatures portrayed by the white actors Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, had conquered the national audience. Amos 'n' Andy appeared for a quarter hour at 7:00 P.M. every Monday through Saturday and created an unprecedented following, even among millions of African-American listeners. Supporting characters, such as the Kingfish and Senator Claghorn, helped construct a comical vision of American race relations that reinforced the passivity of most Americans regarding such issues as civil rights and lynching. Vaudeville-style ethnic programming such as The Rise of the Goldbergs soon followed, and a culture of celebrity grew up around such crooning variety-show hosts as Rudy Vallée and Bing Crosby. Vallée is credited with popularizing the variety show format, which became standard. Vaudeville comics such as Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Fred Allen, and Bob Hope also became radio stars, and like Vallée and Crosby they also crossed over into successful motion picture careers.

Journalism was a decidedly minor aspect of the networks' programming, despite the efforts of pioneering commentators such as H. V. Kaltenborn and reporters such as Edward R. Murrow and Robert Trout, and it was often obscured by the trivial but wildly popular "reporting" of gossip-dispensers such as Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons. Into the early 1930s, in short, network radio solidified its presence as mass entertainment in a box, bringing ephemeral diversions and capitalism's thirtysecond fables into almost every living room and eatery.

Radio nevertheless still showed some diversity. The Depression made it far more difficult for grass-roots local stations to survive, but some were able to continue to offer alternatives to the networks' mass-oriented fare. Union dues and listeners' subscriptions kept dozens of low-wattage stations on the air. In New York City, the Socialist Party's WEVD (named after the party's founder, Eugene V. Debs) dispensed news, discussions, and jazz by both black and white musicians. Regional arrangements targeted subgroups of the national audience as well, such as the syndicated networks that broadcast WMC-Nashville's Grand Ole Opry across the South and WLS-Chicago's Barn Dance in the Midwest. Even these regional trends, though, increasingly made radio a homogeneous, standardized corporate product that, like movies, had the effect of "massifying" American culture to an unprecedented degree.

With the deepening of the Great Depression, radio brought basic political discourse into almost every home for the first time. In 1921, as secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover had been the first American public official to give a radio address. A decade later, now a beleaguered president, Hoover was a regular but notably ineffective presence on the airwaves. He fell prey to the criticisms of such network commentators as Father Charles E. Coughlin of Royal Oak, Michigan, whose NBC-broadcast Sunday sermons became increasingly political and polemical in nature. (High listener ratings—first tabulated in the early 1930s—ensured that Coughlin kept his radio platform for a long time.) In 1932, broadcast political conventions and campaign oratory helped to ensure Hoover's defeat and a landslide victory for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Roosevelt pioneered the intimate presidential radio address, intended solely for the mass audience in their homes. His first "fireside chat" took place just days after he took office, and he made three more such broadcasts in 1933. In the first two years of his term he spoke on national radio forty times, in public and in "fireside" settings, and his audiences were almost always large. This trend continued into his second term; a fireside chat in March 1937 was heard by a third of the entire radio audience. The intense ideological struggles between Roosevelt's New Dealers and opponents on the political right (such as Hoover and Alfred E. Smith) and on the left (such as Norman Thomas, Huey Long, and Father Coughlin) were serialized in an extended debate over the radio waves, democratizing the great political discourse of the day to an unprecedented degree. However, radio's journalistic coverage of actual grassroots suffering during the Depression was minimal. Meanwhile, radio became increasingly regulated during the New Deal. In 1934 the new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began more intense scrutiny of the operations of networks and small stations.

Network radio's artistic standards improved markedly in the late 1930s. Executives partially took the critics' scorn to heart and sought out more substantial talent, especially in the field of writing. In 1936 CBS's Columbia Workshop began presenting experimental original work by Irwin Shaw, Archibald MacLeish, James Thurber, Steven Vincent Benét, and others, as well as Aldous Huxley narrating an adaptation of his novel Brave New World. Bernard Herrmann's musical scores enhanced the program's quality as well. Similar programs such as The Theater Guild on the Air (for which Arthur Miller wrote) signaled the increased translation of good drama from stage to sound studio, while the Lux Radio Theater adapted high-quality motion pictures to radio, featuring the original screen stars. Norman Corwin began a distinguished career as a creator of thoughtful dramatic programs, while Arch Oboler churned out hundreds of expertly-crafted mysteries, adventure stories, and kitchen-table dramas.

The most notable risk was taken in 1937 by CBS, when Orson Welles, the 22-year-old sensation of the avant-garde theater (and already a veteran radio performer), was given the Mercury Theater on the Air. Welles's versions of classic and popular literature caused little controversy until his October 30, 1938, broadcast of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. By then, Americans had grown familiar with broadcasts of the tirades of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and network news departments had intensified their coverage of such world issues as Europe's move toward war. Welles's pseudojournalistic approach to the martian invasion, featuring a simulated news broadcast that evoked the memorable coverage of the 1937 explosion of the dirigible Hindenburg (which, like the "invasion," took place in New Jersey), fooled and terrified thousands of listeners, who were convinced that the war of the worlds had actually begun. The FCC warned the networks not to allow such provocative and clever deceptions in the future. The specter of censorship had also been raised in 1937, when Mae West performed a risqué comedy sketch by Arch Oboler, The Garden of Eden, and the FCC received hundreds of complaints. The Welles controversy showed, above all, that radio could be a powerful expression and reflection of a troubled nation's mood.

By the late 1930s radio's prominence as a social force was being acknowledged by cultural commentators and scholars. Princeton University began an Office of Radio Research to explore the content of radio programming and its impact on the attitudes and lives of listeners. Exiled Central European scholars such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodor Adorno provided intellectual ballast to Princeton's investigations. Adorno in particular published studies that revealed, through his Marxist critical perspective, patterns of manipulation and degradation in the consciousness of the mass of American listeners. Such perspectives were hotly debated, but they also indicated the growth of a body of critical analysis in mass communications that increasingly shaped the response of educated Americans to radio and other electronic media. It was one more indication of the wide and diverse impact of radio on American culture during the 1930s.

As the 1930s closed, radio continued to evolve. FCC pressure on the networks to surrender their monopolies increased; antitrust legislation would eventually be brought against NBC and force it to divest its Blue network. Despite the dangers of monopolization, however, unaffiliated local radio stations grew in number. Increasingly they pioneered the use of disk jockeys, listener research, and package deals with record companies, while some of them also became guardians of regional and special musical styles, such as country-western and big-band jazz. African-American musicians faced much discrimination in radio, but their invisibility in that medium allowed more bands and soloists to appear than in films or on vaudeville touring circuits. Also before 1940, FM (frequency modulation) radio was introduced, promising more true-to-life transmissions in the near future. Television's stalled development before 1940 also ensured the primacy of radio in America's living rooms. In short, despite the difficulties caused by the Depression and the dominance of the networks—and sometimes because of it—radio made stunning advances and caused decisive transformations in American communications and culture.

RADIO

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