Extended family
In the 1930s, Americans listened to radio four to five hours a day. What did radio mean to them? A lot, apparently.
1.) Vaudeville comedian Eddie Cantor divulged his shirt and sock sizes on the air, fifteen thousand fans sent birthday gifts;
2.) Amos and Andy complained they could not afford a typewriter, NBC received 1,880 machines from listeners wanting to help their radio friends.
3.)Thousands of letters were mailed every week to radio's musicians, announcers, domestic advisors, and soap opera characters. Some offered advice, some asked for help, and some simply said thanks. "You are not giving us a fairy story," wrote an admirer of the eponymous heroine of The Story of Mary Marlin, "You are giving us Life" (71).
Shake the blues away
Modern readers may think imagining an intimate relationship with voices on the air is nuts; Bruce Lenthall concludes otherwise. Reading the letters collected in radio archives while doing research for his dissertation, Lenthall saw irony, not insanity. Depression-era Americans, he reminds readers, felt overwhelmed by change. On guard against distant forces of government and commercial empire that increasingly mattered in their lives, Americans relied on one of the leading change agents of mass culture, broadcasting, to personalize an impersonal and potentially threatening public sphere, even imagining ways that the medium could help them count and perhaps be noticed by those wielding power in the broader world. Yes, readers should question the adequacy of this remarkable use of radio, Lenthall allows. But he asks us to appreciate how and why so many found radio useful for humanizing mass society.
Airwave romance
Lenthall begins with the concerns of public intellectuals in the 1930s who provide him with his theoretical frame. Some, such as the economist William Orton and the Marxist journalist James Rorty, feared that mass culture would overwhelm individual voices and choices, cordoning off public speech to all but the powerful, who would use the airwaves to engineer a mass mind. Cheerleaders for radio countered that the commercial nature of radio's ownership guaranteed that ultimate power over programming lay with the masses. Lenthall assesses these claims through a series of case studies analyzing important understandings and practices that developed around radio. Examining the ethereal relationships listeners formed with radio characters--the radio democracy exemplified by Roosevelt's fireside chats, the faith in popular radio champions such as Father Charles Coughlin and Dr. John Brinkley, the birth of media studies, and the hope that radio could make art matter--Lenthall concludes that neither critics nor defenders got the significance of radio completely right.
Balance of culture
The meaning of radio, argues Lenthall, can be found "in some delicate balances" between individual authority and centralized mass culture (210). If Americans learned to accept the new rules of mass culture, such as the power of corporations to control broadcast programming, they also found ways to push back as individuals, leaving their stamp on the culture they inhabited.
A welcome development in recent years is that a number of scholars have set out to update Erik Barnouw's classic three-volume work, A History of Broadcasting in the United States. Lenthall's book is less comprehensive and descriptive than Susan Douglas's Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. But advanced students will find it valuable for its clear and undistracted focus on important analytical questions raised by the rise of mass culture.
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