From the issue dated February 19, 1999
Exploring Radio's Sociocultural Legacy
Scholars examine how the medium defined and defied American norms
By PETER MONAGHAN
Michele Hilmes recalls the day "some stuffy academic" droned on to her "about how wonderful radio was compared to TV."
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All fired up to study television, she was trying to persuade a panel of professors to award her a prestigious scholarship.
"Who would want to go back to that old, dead period?" she asked herself.
That was during her undergraduate years, in the 1970s. While in graduate school a few years later, she was looking at the way the film and television industries had battled and cooperated with each other. "I realized that if you wanted to tell the story of TV, you had to go back to radio," says Ms. Hilmes, now an associate professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
She soon found that "books on TV acted as if radio hadn't existed."
Ms. Hilmes is now prominent among a fast-growing number of researchers who are rectifying that deficiency by asking what radio programs and audiences since the 1920s reveal about American culture and society. Her Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952 (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) (How to buy this book) is the most-cited publication in a recent spate of cultural studies of radio.
Some earlier books have analyzed the radio industry's history and economics, but even from those perspectives, television and film have been far better covered. Sociocultural takes on radio, like Marshall McLuhan's 1964 best seller, Understanding Media, (How to buy this book) and J. Fred MacDonald's Don't Touch That Dial! Radio Programming in American Life from 1920 to 1960 (Nelson-Hall, 1979) (How to buy this book) , have been relatively isolated.
But now it's increasingly common for scholars to study radio "not as a collection of wires, transmitters, and electrons but as a social practice grounded in culture, rather than in electricity," as Ms. Hilmes writes in Radio Voices. Publications and conference activity on that approach to radio have boomed.
The new scholarship focuses on the tension between two disparate poles. One: radio's complicity in advancing some now-well-documented features of American culture -- its intense consumerism and its questionable notions about such factors as race, gender, and ethnicity. The other: the ability of the invisible medium to transgress accepted cultural norms and to feed new ideas into American homes.
In Radio Voices, Ms. Hilmes analyzes the early practices and programs of radio -- such as the daytime serial drama that would evolve into the soap opera -- in relation to the emergence, after World War I, of mass consumerism. She argues that, as the United States rose to world power during the Age of Radio, the medium was crucial in helping to form an American national identity and to blur the boundaries between public and private spheres.
She describes, for example, the way the hugely successful Amos 'n' Andy, which was first broadcast on radio in 1929 and made its way to television in the 1950s, furthered the divisive "national norm of 'whiteness'" that had developed in minstrel shows. Programs such as The Rise of the Goldbergs (which also began on radio in 1929 and ended up on television) focused on ethnic assimilation and national identity, while prevailing gender roles resulted in daytime programming's becoming a reserve for women.
Assisted by compliant station managers and radio personalities, powerful advertising agencies produced or shaped programming, and helped to assure commercialism's victory over an earlier vision of radio as culturally uplifting, Ms. Hilmes says. The most powerful of the agencies, the J. Walter Thompson Company, for example, launched big-name variety shows like the Lux Radio Theatre and Fleischmann's Yeast Hour with Rudy Vallee.
Still, despite the overall triumph of the commercial model, alternative forces did manage to sneak in. A simple example was jazz. Ms. Hilmes writes: "Early regulatory decisions attempted to mark radio out as a controlled and sanctioned space in which the 'vulgar,' such as black jazz performers or race records, could find only a tenuous and sanitized foothold." Federal regulators hit on the idea of issuing licenses specifying what kinds of programming could be aired, and when.
While radio's managers of morality could claim that jazz contributed to licentiousness, their real motivation was often racial hostility. But many white listeners wanted jazz. Via radio, it had convinced them that their own musical cultures were decidedly lacking.
Ms. Hilmes says that part of what won her over to radio as a field of study was its ability to loosen cultural strictures. Susan J. Douglas, a professor of media and American studies at the University of Michigan, at times rhapsodizes about that quality of the medium in Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos 'n' Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern, which Times Books will release in April. "The music transported us out of the house, out of our dull neighborhoods, and off to someplace where life seemed more intense, more heartfelt, less fettered," she writes.
Because people listened to radio "lying there in the dark in our bedrooms, or driving around at night in our parents' cars," Ms. Douglas says, the medium revolutionized human cognition.
"Radio," she writes, "was a perceptual technology that extended, deepened, and magnified hearing to completely unprecedented levels" -- all of which set the cultural and perceptual table for television.
Listening In is as much impassioned polemic as academic tome. Citing studies that show that radio is the most profitable of all media industries -- each American listens to an average of 22 hours a week -- she deplores the increasing corporate control of radio and its resultant embrace of "safe, gated-in listening" that guards profits.
Ham-radio operators and the recent spate of pirate-radio stations -- broadcasting without federal licenses -- have resisted that corporate control, Ms. Douglas says, but government policies have tended to squelch diversity and local color. Between September 1997 and October 1998 alone, she notes, the Federal Communications Commission shut down 320 stations that were broadcasting with miniaturized radio technology from hidden locations.
Politics is never far from the cultural focus in many recent or forthcoming books, articles, and doctoral dissertations on radio. That's not surprising, say several authors, since radio's powerful commercial masters threw the first stones in that ideological battle.
Many scholars have armed themselves with feminist approaches in economics and other fields to examine the forces at work after radio producers and advertisers came to recognize that women were a market worth exploiting.
Some of the marketing strategies were not unexpected. Because women were the audience for most daytime radio programming, producers of radio soap operas in the 1940s, for example, often adapted their story lines to include products promoted in commercials.
But researchers are finding more-complex and more-telling approaches, too. To galvanize shoppers, advertisers often simultaneously invoked women's distaste for housework, flattered them by stressing their control of household spending, and tried to annoy them, says Kathleen Newman, an assistant professor of literary and cultural theory at Carnegie Mellon University.
"Advertising studies showed that irritating commercials were remembered, even when they were disliked," she says. She discusses such dynamics in the manuscript for a book she plans to call "Critical Mass: Audiences, Advertising, and Consumer Activism in the Age of Radio."
Like many radio researchers, Ms. Newman has a long personal history with the medium. "As a kid," she recalls, "I and my cousins got together and made up a radio station, which we called 'KRAP.'"
Judith Jackson Fossett, an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California, also has a soft spot for old-time radio, particularly radio dramas from the Cold War.
She says her interest stems from her father's love of The Shadow -- a crime drama that aired from 1937 to 1954 and always began with the portentously intoned slogan "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"
The Shadow was a spinoff from a pulp-fiction series of dime novels and comic books. The radio series originally featured the 22-year-old Orson Welles as Lamont Cranston, a dilettante millionaire, secretly The Shadow.
Many episodes featured villains with mystical powers and were set in diamond mines or other mysterious locations in countries with continuing struggles to shake off colonial bonds, such as Haiti and India. In addition to showing how Americans imagined indigenous cultural forms -- "whether voodoo or weird Eastern telepathy" -- the programs cast light on America's anxiety about foreign threats to its growing international dominance, Ms. Fossett suggests.
One curious aspect of the program was that its hero, in one sense, resembled the bad guys. Lamont Cranston had himself learned mesmerism in India, from a yogi -- as if he had prepared metaphorically to inoculate his countrymen against foreign crookedness.
Often in The Shadow, points out Jason Loviglio, a doctoral student in American studies at the University of Minnesota, the "easily seduced public mind" was "figured as feminine" -- in the form of, for example, society women infatuated with guileful exotics from "the Orient." That scenario, of course, paved the way for the (male) hero to save the day.
Mr. Loviglio is writing a dissertation about notions of masculinity on radio in its heyday. Heroism, clearly, was manly. But another early-radio phenomenon -- crooning -- was more complex.
Crooning, a style in which men sang with velvet voices about dreams, crying, gardens, and the like, came about because loud or shrill singing often overpowered early radio tubes. In the early 1920s, the singer Vaughn de Leath pioneered the style on WJZ, in Newark, N.J.
Crooning would make big stars of singers such as Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby. There lies another curious tale, says Allison McCracken, a doctoral student in American studies at the University of Iowa who is writing her dissertation on crooning.
When crooners began to flood the airwaves, she says, critics assailed the style as "emasculated" because of its tender delivery and sissy lyrics. She says husbands were uncomfortable with those on-air men who were romancing their womenfolk, and asked, in effect: "What kinds of disembodied voices should we let into the house?"
Crosby's remarkable achievement, Ms. McCracken suggests, was that he was able to overcome opposition to the crooning style by simultaneously projecting masculinity -- allying himself with the white patriarchy.
Radio's ability to introduce unknown, and unsettling, ideas into American homes is one of the themes of an undergraduate course Ms. McCracken offers at Iowa on radio suspense -- a huge genre in the Age of Radio. She grew up listening to tapes of dramas and other kinds of early radio broadcasts that her father had acquired.
What, she asks, drew people to shows that were more perversely violent than film noir -- shows about, for example, women being stalked in their own homes?
She believes part of the answer lies in the dramas' projection of the era's strong "fear, paranoia, and mistrust between the sexes." But just as important, she argues, is that radio, with its element of invisibility, reveled in cultural notions of deviance -- far more than television and cinema.
That quality meant that not just stalkers but other supposedly "deviant" persons, such as homosexuals, could be made central to stories broadcast on the radio. Radio comedies of the 1930s and 1940s often employed a complex lampooning of gayness in response to public outcries against homosexuality, says Matthew Murray, an assistant professor of speech communication at North Central College. "The feminine gentleman, the queer remark, and the swish routine were resilient and recurrent features in network prime time comedy," he writes in a recent article.
Comics, he says, delighted in using gay gags to upset radio moralists, including NBC executives who in 1935 urged prime-time comedy to root out "anything of the lavender nature." Abbott and Costello, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, and other vaudevillians brought the "pansy act" tradition to the radio -- Eddie Cantor often in black face. None used it as often as Jack Benny.
However, Mr. Murray notes, the comics in reality joined the disparagement of homosexuals. Part of the humor was that the gags reaffirmed "indomitable masculinity"; comics signaled that impersonations of gay people were just that, by referring to girlfriends or by chuckling to break the illusion.
The depiction of African Americans in radio -- as well as their exclusion from it -- was even more derogatory and complex than portrayals of homosexuals, researchers note.
Doctoral candidates in communications and related fields -- from literary studies to history to psychology -- should tune in now to radio's research possibilities, says Ms. Douglas, of Michigan.
Both she and Wisconsin's Ms. Hilmes say that much cultural analysis of radio remains to be done. In her preface to Listening In, Ms. Douglas sets out some of the subjects awaiting more study: children's radio, radio drama, late-night radio, classical-music stations, pirate radio, country-and-western radio, and regional radio's role in the lives of ethnic groups and migrants.
Scholars are also starting to merge cultural-studies and cognitive-psychology approaches to sound. A conference on that subject took place last month at Duke University. Says Ms. Newman, of Carnegie Mellon:
"Though we have volumes of theory on reading, perception, looking, the gaze, and subliminal images, we have hardly thought at all about the psychological effects of a mass culture that is apprehended through the ears."
Ms. Douglas agrees. As she writes in Listening In: "There are enormous chasms here waiting to be filled."
Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
