Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (review)

It was once a truism that radio history was a neglected field, languishing and forgotten in ways that did not reflect its former prominence in American culture. In recent years this has begun to change as a new generation of scholars reassesses the medium’s social construction and cultural import. The achievements of Bruce Lenthall’s Radio’s America reflect its position as part of this new wave of research. At the same time, the book’s limits are symptomatic of this new scholarly activity.

Lenthall’s focus is the relationship of radio to the ideas and realities of mass society. He charts the attempts of various groups to engage with radio’s influence on their lives in ways that reflected the medium’s ability to facilitate increased awareness of one’s position in the world at the same time that itmade the position of each individual in that world seem smaller and less significant.

Radio’s America is organized around six chapters. Chapter 1 charts how public intellectuals on both the right and left critiqued radio’s supposedly deleterious effects on a mass audience. Largely focusing on William Orton on the right and James Rorty on the left, this chapter examines how these intellectuals responded to fears that the “mass public” created by radio came “at the expense of the individual and democracy” (p. 21). Chapter 2 looks at the way in which audiences developed intimate relationships with mass-oriented performers. Lenthall argues that individual listeners may not have controlled the programming they received, but they did negotiate with the medium to retain a sense of autonomy by seeking out forms of mediated intimacy with their radio friends. Chapter 3 takes up the iconic case study of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats as harnessing the power of a mass medium as a political medium. This is followed by a chapter on what Lenthall calls “radio champions.” These figures, such as FDR, Father Charles Coughlin, and Dr. John Brinkley, gained success and popularity by acting on behalf of their audiences, cutting through the perceived anonymity and depersonalization of mass society. Chapter 5 examines the ways that the newly formed field of mass communications took radio as an object of study. Lenthall contrasts three contemporaries, Paul Lazarsfeld, Theodor Adorno, and Herman Hettinger, in terms of their vision of democracy and belief in radio’s ability (or lack thereof) to aid that process. The final chapter examines the efforts of Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin, radio writers who sought to engage the new medium and produce art that matched the challenges of a dispersed, mass society.

Lenthall ably demonstrates how radio embodied contradictory elements of 1930s life and served as a screen on which larger social and cultural dynamics were projected. Combined with a highly readable prose style, this would serve a useful viewpoint in courses in U.S. social and cultural history. The interactions and influences of these various perspectives are not explored in depth, however, and readers of Technology and Culture may particularly note the omission of any radio or sound engineers, whose views of radio’s social and cultural function certainly influenced their work in developing the medium.

Lenthall’s research is based on extensive consultation with primary sources. He draws on numerous collections from a wide variety of archives as well as other primary documents. This primary research enlivens the many familiar characters and anecdotes in the book. Though good for the introductory reader, this is also somewhat problematic. While well-known scholars like Susan Douglas, Michele Hilmes, and Robert McChesney are represented in the endnotes, there is a nearly complete lack of reference to important new work by Douglas Craig, Derek Vaillant, Jason Loviglio, Kathy Newman, Michael Socolow, and Elena Razlogova, all of whom speak to issues in this book. One imagines the improvement that an engagement with these perspectives would have brought to Lenthall’s synthetic approach...