Written at the London School of Economics
The first-half of the twentieth century saw the development of wireless technology from a point-to-point means of communication used mainly by amateur hobbyists into a mass medium that enraptured widespread and disparate audiences. As it matured, this novel mass medium mixed the public and private spheres in innovative ways, physically becoming part of the conventional American home while allegorically bringing the external world into people’s domestic lives. Thus, radio played several key roles in society in the United States – namely, government propaganda machine, corporate connector, and national unifier.
This essay will argue that radio broadcasting’s principle role in the United States was to streamline the newly-emergent listening public’s desires with the U.S. Government and Corporate America’s needs – in essence, bringing individuals under a national agenda. First, the essay will sketch out radio’s early-twentieth century development in the United States, briefly looking at the technological innovations that made this mode of communication possible, as well as the government and corporate systems that were put in place to make it function as a mass medium on a day-to-day basis. Next, it will examine how politicians used radio to cultivate relationships with their constituents and promote government policies, using President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a prime example. The essay will then examine the corporate factor – that is, how advertisers pervaded the very structure of the medium in order to sell products to a nascent mass consumerist population. And finally, building on these points, the essay will culminate in an analysis of how radio fostered national unity in the United States by publicly appealing to its audiences on a private level.
The Development of Radio Broadcasting
Wireless broadcasting initially developed along the lines of the telegraph, as a point- to-point communication system diffused over electromagnetic airwaves. By the turn of the twentieth century, universities were conducting research on radio transmission and amateur hobbyists were experimenting with one-to-one radio communication. The military soon picked up on the usefulness of this new technology, and by the First World War armed forces on both sides of the Atlantic were demanding radios for their servicemen. The escalation in production of radio parts required by the war generated an expansion of radio research, and by the 1920s radio was transformed from a person-to-person correspondence device into a broadcasting medium capable of mass communication.
While radio’s structure as a broadcasting system took various forms in Europe (the United Kingdom’s BBC was government-owned, and radio in Germany was regulated by the state from the beginning), in the U.S. it followed the corporate-control model set up by Guglielmo Marconi at the beginning of the twentieth century. Radio broadcasting became centrally controlled by communication companies, radio manufacturers, and advertisers, who ultimately all depended on the purchasing power of radio audiences for funding. This ad hoc system that developed during the 1920s culminated in the Communications Act of 1934, which cemented radio in the United States as a commercial enterprise.
The interwar period was pivotal for the development of the radio industry in the United States. In 1922, the American public began buying radio sets en masse; following suit, the number of broadcasting stations increased exponentially over the next year, from 30 to more than 500. Radio became an integral part of many Americans’ daily lives – so much so that even during the Great Depression, when financial circumstances were dire, Americans held on to their radio sets.
Listeners relied on radio for entertainment and news. From the privacy of their own homes, they were now privy to musical performances, sports games, vaudeville acts, dramatic performances, and political speeches. Additionally, the Great Depression and the onset of the Second World War made radio audiences crave news – more continuously, conveniently, and in different formats than the newspaper provided. Thus, radio set the broadcasting agenda while also appealing to what radio listeners wanted.
Radio Broadcasting as a Government Propaganda Machine
Although radio broadcasting in the United States was not owned or operated by the government, this medium indubitably served as an exciting new vehicle through which politicians and government officials could propagate themselves and their initiatives. President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) is acknowledged as the first U.S. President to benefit from this mass medium, though he was not the most prolific radio politician. That distinction belongs to President Roosevelt (1933-1945), who used the radio to get the American people through the Great Depression, into World War II, and almost all the way to peacetime.
By all accounts, Roosevelt was a masterful radio speaker. He understood the radio business and figured out how to use the medium early on (even prior to assuming the presidency). Roosevelt’s most extraordinary radio broadcasts were unquestionably his Fireside Chats. These intimate broadcasts – where Roosevelt spoke perceptively and seemingly candidly to the public about the country’s state of affairs and what he was trying to do about it – took advantage of radio’s ability to transcend private spaces with public issues, bringing political and social affairs directly into individuals’ domestic and personal domains.
Roosevelt began conducting his Fireside Chats almost immediately after taking office in 1933 to address the economic calamities that were wreaking havoc on the American people. While Roosevelt is sometimes cast as a shrewd enterpriser who knew how to use the broadcasting industry to his advantage, the President clearly grasped the importance of making his intangible policies seem relevant to Americans’ everyday lives. At the same time, he resolved an issue that many politicians and political theorists in the U.S. had been grappling with for nearly two centuries: how to inform an expansive population and get citizens to generate political consensus across geographic, ethic, cultural, and partisan divides.
In propagating the New Deal over the radio, Roosevelt turned his audiences into objects and agents of his plan. He talked plainly and directly to citizens about how they had been victimized by the Great Depression, and then he told his listeners what each of them could do about it – namely, abandon the class interests that had intensified over the previous few years and unite in supporting the economic policies of New Deal. Roosevelt repeated this scheme when the international crisis that would become World War II came knocking on the U.S.’s doorstep. This time, the President focused on and glorified American industriousness in order to unite his listeners in national defense.
Essentially, Roosevelt used the conveniently far-reaching medium of radio broadcasting to promulgate his ideas and policies in order to bring individual Americans into a collective public opinion and cooperative action during times of crisis. Seeing as though the New Deal garnered incredible popular support across the nation during the Great Depression, and considering the remarkable mobilization of American industry for WWII, it would certainly not be a stretch to assert that the radio played a crucial role in galvanizing these government-induced outcomes.
Radio Broadcasting as a Corporate Connector
As already elucidated, radio broadcasting took on a commercial form in the United States. In radio’s early days, a complex conglomerate was set up between General Electric (GE), the Radio Corporation of American (RCA), and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), where GE produced radio parts, RCA marketed them, and AT&T controlled wireless (and wired) transmission. Thus, the entirety of radio production and transmission was controlled by large companies. This model further developed with the creation of the three big broadcasting companies between 1922 and 1940: the National Radio Broadcasting Company (which became NBC), the Columbia Phonograph Corporation (which became CBS), and the Mutual Broadcasting System (which eventually fizzled and was virtually replaced by the American Broadcasting Company, or ABC). Consequently, radio broadcasting in the United States was corporate by nature.
The system’s structure inevitably percolated into radio’s programming. Instead of charging the audience for its consumption of radio broadcasting, advertisers footed the bill. The incentives for such an arrangement are exemplified by the structure and programming output of both NBC and CBS at the time. Owned in full by RCA, GE, and Westinghouse, the original objective in founding NBC was to stimulate sales of radio sets that were patented by all three of its managing companies. NBC had a number of local radio stations under its wing, and each time a new subsidiary joined, radio sales in that market promptly spiked. Local networks also opened their programming up to local and national sponsors; so businesses ranging from automobile companies to makers of household items and cleaning supplies paid for whole radio programs in exchange for getting their products advertised on the air. CBS, in fact, relied entirely on this type of investment arrangement, as its proprietors did not own any patents on radio equipment.
Although the government and the networks were nervous about giving too much of this medium over to advertising, the commercial model nevertheless prevailed for radio broadcasting. Companies were benefitting financially from having information about their products reach a wide spectrum of society, as radio was expanding to potential consumers in urban and rural areas alike. Furthermore, there is evidence that radio listeners appreciated and even endorsed the increasingly commercialized nature of the radio. As a state-of-the-art communicative connector between companies and customers, radio broadcasting became a mainstay in consumer society and helped solidify “the ideology of consumption in American life.”
Radio Broadcasting as a National Unifier
A more perceptible American ideology undoubtedly materialized around the same time that radio broadcasting was gaining prominence as a mass medium in the United States. Individual Americans were affected by the severe economic downturn of the Great Depression, and then many of them went headlong into aiding the war effort – all the while forming a political and economic picture of American society. And the fact that vast numbers of Americans were sitting down to their radio sets each day, listening to the same radio shows, advertisements, and political speeches as so many of their fellow citizens, only validated the claim that the radio was constructing a “national public.”
This “national public,” in fact, constituted what Benedict Anderson would call an imagined community – one that derived its “imagined” national linkages from radio broadcasting. The U.S. Government, American media corporations, and advertisers were all disseminating messages over the radio with the end-goal of coaxing American citizens into political and/or economic action. Thus, being potential agents of social change, members of the radio audience were the objects of the government and Corporate America’s broadcasting endeavors.
But these listeners had sovereignty, too. As they allowed the external world to seep into their personal lives through the radio sets in their living rooms, individual Americans were the ones who ultimately decided what kind of national unity they were willing to embrace. They heard the messages being propagated by Roosevelt and listened to the programs being sponsored by companies like Palmolive and Texaco; yet this large and diverse American citizenry still had choices within the emerging U.S. system. Because listening to the radio was actually a private avocation, audience members had the final say in choosing which programs to listen to, which products to buy, and which parts of the President’s proposed policies to endorse. In the end, the radio needed the American public just as much as (if not more than) politicians and corporations needed the radio. Hence why Roosevelt carefully crafted his Fireside Chats to appeal to the widest audience and media companies were wary about gorging their programming with too much advertising.
Conclusion
As the first broadcasting system of modern mass media, the radio established precedents for how direct and unencumbered information gets transmitted to and received by the American public. Not only did radio inaugurate the corporate-controlled media system that predominates today, but it also devised the paradigms for how politicians, companies, and advertisers interact with their audiences. Radio broadcasting’s penetration into the everyday lives of the vast majority of American citizens was the harbinger for television to do virtually the same (at an arguably more intense level). Ergo, radio broadcasting not only set the agenda for how America formulated its national identity in a mass-mediated world, but it still influences how Americans envisage their national public.