COMMUNICATIONS ACT OF 1934

The congressional architects of federal policy regulating communications were determined to not make the mistakes Congress had made in the development of the railroads. In that case Congress had invited corruption by distributing lands to the owners of the railroads, and aided in what became a continuing problematic relationship between private ownership of railroads and the industry's public service function.

The Communications Act of 1927 was an announcement by progressives that the federal government would own and administer the airwaves. The 1927 legislation established an experimental commission to oversee communications; the Communications Act of 1934 made that body, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), permanent. The Communications Act of 1927 was built upon the belief that the new technology of radio would serve the public by facilitating national education and the dissemination of valuable information collected by the federal government, such as weather reports to aid agriculture. The act also addressed the potential use of radio in transportation, and anticipated that seagoing vessels, for example, would come to rely on radio communication in that same way the railroads had relied on the telegraph.

The Communications Act of 1934—a forty-page document that was compiled after a single day of hearings—reaffirmed the FCC's authority and the federal government's control, but it also addressed the relationship between local radio stations and new national networks, a relationship that would produce confusion and political conflict for years to come. Later additions to the 1934 act extended the government's responsibility for public education and the dissemination of news, and provided for licensing with controls and limits that were politically useful. These and later amendments to the Communications Act of 1934 have continued to wrestle with the evolving relationship between the communications industry and the federal government. Try as they might, the progressives who had shaped the Communications Act of 1927 reached the same point their predecessors had reached in their effort to require national control over the railroads. By providing for local ownership of radio stations, the authors of the Communications Act of 1934 continued the debate between local independence and national control that had tormented the railroads.

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; RADIO.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McChesney, Robert W. Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935. 1993.

Paglin, Max D. A Legislative History of the CommunicationsAct of 1934. 1989.

Rosen, Philip T. Modern Stentors: Radio Broadcasters and the Federal Government, 1920–1934. 1980.

Barry Dean Karl