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

Radio's America offers a critical media analysis about the loss of individual expression, resulting in homogenization of public messages. By blurring the lines between the individual and mass culture, Bruce Lenthall argues, radio's power diminishes individual autonomy within that mass communication system.

Lenthall contends that broadcasting structure does not allow for competing stations or diverse voices (33). As a critical broadcast history of one decade, the research context within the big picture of radio history is missing. Broadcast historians Christopher Sterling, et al. (Stay Tuned 2002) contend that by the 1930s, radio programming was half national and half local (180) and that by 1938, an FCC report found that 50 to 70 percent of programming came from networks, with 52 percent of it music.

Lenthall focuses only on the narrative elite programming. While he gives an admirable synthesis of the negative responses to racial stereotyping in "Amos 'n' Andy" and the lack of network access for talented Langston Hughes, Lenthall ignores the network African American musicians: Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Paul Robeson, etc. Radio's America misses how local radio programming served American communities, college campuses, and farms with local events, regional music, sports, morning wake-ups, religious services, and crop reports. Nor is the programming of the joint station and newspaper local ownership discussed. Rather, Lenthall follows the capitalist critique of James Rorty and Ruth Brindze, that the near monopoly of the networks served the interests of corporate capitalism.

The author expounds on the creative dramas of Orson Wells and Archibald MacLeish, but more as aberrations, and sticks to the premise that advertising limits artistic speech (205) by network obsession with listener numbers. With easy redistribution of identical cultural forms, radio reached a largely undifferentiated audience as one. The majority preferences impacted the individual, whether politically or sociologically, as Alexis de Tocqueville found earlier.

Lenthall refers to Roosevelt's two broadcast goals. FDR did indeed initially use radio as a way to distribute information, reassure, and give hope to the nation crippled by the economy. Yet, without evidence Lenthall also writes that Roosevelt's "belief" (87) was that radio could enable him "to enhance his political power." By World War II, FDR's administration relied on radio more in paradoxical ways: simultaneously empowering and manipulative.

Lenhall states that 1930s radio changed America to a narrow, mass consumer culture that also limited liberal democracy in contemporary life. Rather, radio was just one of the twentieth century mass media forms; earlier, mass magazines filled with national advertising also built a consumer culture.

Specific chapters cover public intellectuals' responses to radio, audiences' personal reactions to particular programs, and participatory radio democracy by Roosevelt and other broadcast champions. Most useful are chapter summations of early radio research and major radio writers' artistic efforts.

The extensive primary research is impressive. Yet, without context and placement the author goes too far: the "interconnected and vast society of the twentieth century made older notions of participatory and local democracy seem nonsensical" (7). This belies Robert Putnam's social capital findings of twentieth-century community civic engagement (Bowling Alone 2000) and the higher voter turnout statistics in the 1936 and 1940 elections.