Radio

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Radio

In September of 1895, Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian inventor, pioneered wireless telegraphy when he transmitted a message to his brother, who was out of sight beyond a hill. By 1906, U.S. inventor Lee De Forest had greatly increased the potential of Marconi's work by developing a three-electrode vacuum-tube amplifier that made modern radio broadcasts possible. From these relatively humble beginnings radio quickly evolved to become the basis of an electronic media revolution that would shape the face of American popular culture during the middle years of the twentieth century. From the early 1920s to the mid-1950s radio both recorded and influenced popular culture in a way that no other media had ever done, forever changing the way information and entertainment would be disseminated and paving the way for television.

The first modern radio station came into being in 1920, when Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad set up KDKA in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and began sending out programs "over the ether," in the parlance of the day. On November 2 of that year, KDKA broadcast the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. However, at that time only about 5,000 Americans had radio receivers, so the broadcast went largely unnoticed. As Susan Smulyan writes in Selling Radio, the problem was that "when the first radio station began in 1920, no one knew how to make money from broadcasting." Nevertheless, a number of different groups soon realized that radio could be a powerful and important medium, which resulted in a battle for control of the airwaves.

One faction, spearheaded primarily by educators, believed that radio could be a tool for enriching people's lives. They wanted a government-funded national radio program that would be largely informational and educational. These groups would have to wait nearly fifty years to get their wish; on November 7, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson would sign the Public Broadcasting Act into law, resulting in the creation of the noncommercial National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting (television) networks. But in 1920 the question for broadcasters was, "Who would pay for radio?" The general public was not yet ready to pay for its information and entertainment directly (that would come in the 1970s, with the growth of cable television beyond its humble beginnings as a source for programming in areas beyond the reach of airborne signals). In 1922 New York radio station WEAF—which would later become WNBC—solved the funding dilemma when it aired the first paid radio commercials. Although advertisers were initially unconvinced as to radio's ability to sell products, they eventually realized that it was an incredibly effective way to reach people in their homes. Accordingly, WEAF's commercialization set into motion the private control of U.S. public airwaves. In a now-famous quote, radio pioneer De Forest responded to radio's commercialization by asking, "What have you done with my child? You have sent him out on the street in rags of ragtime to collect money from all and sundry. You have made of him a laughingstock of intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere."

The concept of "selling time" for advertisements had immense ramifications for American popular culture. Since the inception of mass media advertising, the public's conception of life in the United States has become defined not by what people do, but by the products they consume; success or failure in the U.S. is largely defined by material possessions instead of by accomplishments. As Smulyan writes, "broadcasting's programs and structures," which paved the way for later media advertising like television commercials and website banners, were first "developed in radio." However, radio's contribution to popular culture is not exclusively confined to its role in the birth of modern advertising. Just as important are the medium's contributions to the ways in which people are informed and entertained.

Prior to the onset of the Depression, radio had already established its core of music, news, and entertainment programming. Of the three, music and news programming were the most predominant because they were the cheapest to produce; entertainment programming would not enter its golden age until the early 1930s. There were two ways of presenting music on radio: either by playing records or broadcasting musicians as they played live in a studio, concert hall, or hotel ballroom. The widespread integration of musical numbers into more complex variety shows was still a number years off. In addition to musical programming, news broadcasts and issue-based discussion shows also flourished in the 1920s. Never before had the dissemination of news been so immediate. Sports events like the World Series and news events like the infamous Scopes trial, which Chicago station WGN broadcast live, united Americans around their radios. From its earliest days, radio began the move towards instantaneous news.

Radio networks also began appearing in the late 1920s: NBC was established in 1926, and CBS in 1927. Perhaps the most important effect these networks had on radio was their contribution to the establishment of a more national medium. The respective networks began buying up local stations, which became known as "affiliates." Locally produced shows gave way to uniform national shows that the networks broadcast over their affiliates. Concurrently, radio was becoming an item commonly found in every home. As noted by Fred MacDonald in Don't Touch That Dial, by the early 1930s approximately 90 percent of Americans had at least one radio in their homes. As a result, American regionalism began to disappear at an accelerated rate as Californians began to hear the same shows as people in Alabama and New Jersey. What in the late 1990s has come to be known as the "homogenization of American culture" can be traced back to the rise of the early radio networks.

Despite the success of radio in the 1920s, something was still missing. Although there were a few popular programs, radio shows had yet to fully come into their own; however, the Great Depression ushered in their "golden age." By the early 1930s, listeners had grown bored with mostly music, news, and talk, and many of them craved escape from the hard reality of their difficult financial circumstances. Radio responded by expanding its programming diversity and broadcasting shows in many genres, including Westerns, detective shows, dramas, soap operas, comedies, romances, and variety shows. Americans danced to the latest rhythms as played by bandleaders who broadcast live from hotel ballrooms, or gathered around their radio sets on Sunday morning to hear prominent preachers and choirs, precursors to the radio and television evangelists of a later era. Many radio shows of the period were serialized so fans could follow the ongoing weekly adventures of their favorite characters. The serialization of radio shows created a continuity in American entertainment that was unique to the medium at that time. The Lone Ranger, for example, was on the air for twenty-two years. Likewise, The Jack Benny Program enjoyed a twenty-six-year run. Perhaps MacDonald best sums up radio's importance during the Depression when he writes, "for audiences trapped by the economic depression and social uncertainty of the 1930s, radio became the great wellspring from which came escape, diversion, knowledge, and inspiration." As programmers realized that national shows needed national celebrities in order to achieve immediate success, they came to rely heavily on the many popular performers who had been displaced by the rise of electronic media—making radio stars out of ex-vaudevillians like the Marx Brothers, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, and Fred Allen.

Conversely, in the early 1930s, entertainment's brightest lights—Hollywood movie stars—were reluctant to appear on radio. Most studios, and many stars, believed that appearing on radio would somehow lessen a star's cinematic appeal. Radio loved the movies, on the other hand: most stations ran movie reviews, and syndicated gossip columnists such as Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell often focused on Hollywood figures. Hollywood studios eventually came to the realization that increased exposure for their stars would most likely result in increased revenues for their films. By the early 1940s Hollywood actors, including Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, James Cagney, and Clark Gable, routinely participated in radio reenactments of their films; at the same time a number of actors who got their start in radio, such as Don Ameche, Richard Widmark, Agnes Moorehead, and Art Carney, were beginning to appear in films. As the lines between the two media slowly blurred, America became more and more infatuated with its stars. As a result of the unprecedented media exposure stars received when they began to appear both on radio and in film, the cultural iconolatry of entertainers, which began in earnest with the silent movie stars of the late 1910s and early 1920s, reached new heights in the 1930s and 1940s.

Perhaps the most vivid example of the cultural influence radio had in its heyday is Orson Welles' October 30, 1938, broadcast of an adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which presented itself as a would-be Martian invasion broadcast in real time. Welles and the other actors meant the broadcast to be dramatic fiction, but millions took it seriously. Although the show did run an opening explanation, many who tuned in late were greeted by an announcer saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News." Listeners mistakenly believed that Martians were invading the United States and that radio was covering it live. All over the country hysteria prevailed for several hours, and the power of radio to influence the American public was confirmed.

Just as radio entertainment became more diversified during the 1930s, so too did the ways in which news was presented. Whereas in the 1920s and early 1930s news had most often been simply read, a new type of reporter was coming into being in the mid-1930s: the broadcast journalist. Reporters began live coverage of developing stories and often offered on-air appraisals of news stories as they happened. Americans who had previously only heard reporters reading recaps of speeches, conferences, conventions, and military clashes began to hear them live. These live broadcasts of social and political events played a large role in America's national attitude of unity as it entered World War II. The public had been largely uninformed when America entered World War I, but because of radio and its broadcast journalists the American public was keenly aware of the cumulative series of events that had occurred prior to its entering World War II.

As radio grew, politicians realized its importance as a means through which to disseminate their ideology. In an extreme example, European leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler routinely broadcast their fervent speeches live. Although their message was often one of hatred and intolerance, both leaders—but especially Hitler—were brilliant and impassioned speakers who understood just how effective a propaganda tool radio could be. Perhaps the most fervent ideologue on U.S. radio in the late 1930s was Father Charles Coughlin, the "radio priest" of Royal Oak, Michigan, who commanded an audience of millions with tirades that became increasingly anti-Semitic and pro-Franco. On the home front, perhaps no U.S. leader used radio as effectively as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Beginning in 1933 and lasting until his death in 1945, Roosevelt took his message directly to the people in a series of live radio speeches. Roosevelt called some of these speeches "fireside chats," which were constructed to seem like personal conversations with the public. Opening each chat with the phrase, "My dear friends," Roosevelt carefully explained his policies and programs and used the intimate format to gain popular support from the American people. In addition, Rooseveltian sound bites such as "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (from his first inauguration) and "a date which will live infamy" (from his speech to Congress after Pearl Harbor) were immediately and permanently thrust into the nation'a popular culture, in part because they were broadcast live to an audience of millions.

Throughout U.S. involvement in World War II, radio played a crucial role in the public's perception of the war. Although not televised as the Vietnam War would later be, radio brought World War II into every American living room. From Britain and France's declaring war on Germany in 1939, to Roosevelt's "day of infamy" speech after the attack on Pearl Harbor, to the surrender ceremonies aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on September 2, 1945, Americans heard the war's major events as they happened. Perhaps the most memorable broadcasts of the war were Edward R. Murrow's reports during the London blitz of 1940, which helped solidify U.S. public opinion on behalf of the Allies. As the war proceeded, and despite strict censorship restrictions, other broadcast journalists reported from military hot spots and the government used radio to communicate with the nation. All through the war Americans turned to their radios for the latest news from the fronts. In addition to the first-hand accounts of those returning from overseas and newsreels, America's memories of World War II have been shaped largely by the immediacy offered by radio.

Although radio continued to enjoy tremendous popularity in the early 1950s, it was never quite the same after World War II. The war had given radio a uniformity of purpose and focus. With the war over, radio was forced to scramble to institute peacetime programming that could match the heady days of broadcasting during the war years. As traditional formats began to lose popularity, it became clear that new formats and ideas were needed; but radio was slow to change. Experimentation was limited by the cold war atmosphere of fear created by the anti-Communist movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Producers were afraid that anything different from the norm might be construed as subversive. Concurrently, television was beginning to gain a firm hold in American homes. Many of the shows that had long been broadcast on the radio made the transition to television. By 1960 the golden age of radio was over.

Radio has never fully regained the popularity it enjoyed during its forty-year heyday from 1920 to 1960. The rise of FM radio stations in the 1960s propelled rock 'n' roll to a position of cultural influence unequaled by any other musical genre. FM stations sounded better than AM stations, and came in stereo. The disc jockeys who played records took advantage of their new-found freedom to experiment with the FM dial as "free form" radio. Whereas radio news had chronicled the cultural events of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, rock 'n' roll became the sound track for the cultural revolution ushered in by the Boomer generation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Before World War II, most radio programs, dramas, comedies, musical shows, or quiz shows, were fifteen-minute or half-hour programs; after the war, stations tended to devote round-the-clock programming to specific musical formats, such as rock 'n' roll, Top-40, classical, rhythm & blues, or jazz, for example. In the 1990s, talk radio enjoyed a resurgence, especially on the AM dial, with figures as diverse as Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and Howard Stern enjoying a cultural influence perhaps never equaled by their radio predecessors—to say nothing of the frank sex therapy dispensed by Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Dr. Judy Kurlansky.

During the height of radio's popularity, as Charles Siepmann writes, "The average man or woman spends more leisure hours in listening to the radio than in anything else—expect sleeping.… For radio—cheap, accessible, and generous in its provision for popular tastes—has come to be the poor man's library, his 'legitimate' theater, his vaudeville, his newspaper, his club. Never before has he met so many famous and interesting people, and never have these people been at once so friendly and so attentive to his wishes." On the eve of the year 2000, American audiences had immediate access to more news and entertainment options than any population in the history of the world; radio was the seed from which the structure of contemporary current mass media grew. But America's plethora of options reflects its culture: fractious, scattered, and able to agree on little. Conversely, for a brief forty years in the mid-twentieth century, radio contributed to the creation of at least the semblance of a united country and inspired the national imagination in a way no medium has done before or since.

—Robert C. Sickels