Tuning in for Solidarity

In recent years, as American liberals, progressives, and radicals of various stripes have struggled to counter the conservative political hegemony of the past several decades, more often than not they have focused much of their attention on the right’s influence over the mass media. While shrill accusations of the alleged “liberal bias” of the media may remain the stock in trade of conservative pundits, from the perspective of their opponents it seems that the advocates of unregulated free enterprise and traditional “family values” have exploited the media to shift public discourse decisively in their favor. Representations of alternative lifestyles may be found on television, in film, on radio, and in print, usually to the extent that they can be deployed to encourage consumer spending, but content that promotes the cause of organized labor or that is critical of the political economy of contemporary consumer capitalism is largely absent from the mass media. The rise of the right has been perhaps most pronounced in radio. National Public Radio and, more recently, Air America have barely made a dent in the ascendancy of conservative talk radio over the past thirty years. In this battle over who gets to speak as the authentic voice of populist America, the tribunes of the right like Rush Limbaugh and his Dittoheads have, for the most part, held the upper hand. The power of conservative radio listeners was demonstrated in the Republican Party’s victory in the 1994 Congressional elections, and their influence has been a factor in nearly every contest since. Moreover, the performance of populist authenticity on conservative radio has furnished vital support for politicians whose economic policies have not benefited most Americans. To the extent that “blue-collar” sensibilities have inflected the discourses prevalent in the contemporary mass media, often it has been perversely in opposition to the political and economic agenda advocated by today’s weakened labor movement.

As Elizabeth Fones-Wolf freely concedes in the introduction to Waves of Opposition: Labor’s Struggle for Democratic Radio, “in an era in which the media has rendered organized labor largely invisible, it is almost impossible to imagine that unions had a significant voice in the media that vigorously promoted labor and liberalism” (p. 1–2). Nonetheless, her book proves remarkably successful in reconnecting readers with the period from the 1930s through the 1950s, when American unions were at the apex of their power and were able to dedicate a significant share of their resources toward supporting a wide range of endeavors in radio broadcasting. Drawing upon an impressive range of archival and secondary sources, she argues that during the middle decades of the twentieth century, radio “helped spark labor’s growth” and emerged as “an important weapon in the ideological and cultural war between labor and business” (p. 2). Although unions operated a handful of their own stations— most notably WCFL, which was owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor—for the most part they depended on airtime purchased from commercial stations to broadcast labor programming.¹ The more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) made comparatively limited use of the medium until the Second World War, but the upstart Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) made more extensive use of radio and showed far greater creativity and imagination in devising a wide array of pro-union programs, including popular music showcases, dramas, and quiz shows. With these broadcasting initiatives, “the CIO transmitted the concept of industrial democracy from union halls and shop floors into homes across the nation,” and encouraged listeners to identify with “imagined oppositional communities of organized labor through the airwaves” (pp. 60, 62).

Yet requests by the CIO and its affiliated unions to purchase airtime were frequently denied, resulting in a protracted fight to gain greater access to radio. These obstacles grew in 1939, when the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) adopted a restrictive code of standards that sought to prevent member stations from selling time to any...