Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947 (review)

Kathy Newman's book succeeds in several contexts. It is part of a new concern among cultural historians and historians of technology for the users (or the audience, as we might think of them in this case because of broadcasting's mass-entertainment potential) and their reaction to, and influence on, new technologies. It also takes its place in a new generation of scholarship that pushes beyond the work of Susan Douglas (Inventing American Broadcasting [1989] and Listening In [2000]), Michele Hilmes (Radio Voices [1997]), Robert McChesney (Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy [1995]), and this reviewer (Selling Radio [1996]) in order to explore important and overlooked moments in radio history.

The field has burgeoned in the last several years with a large number of well-attended panels at scholarly meetings, the founding of The Radio Journal, the publication of an exciting anthology called Radio Reader (2001), and a new series of international radio conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, and Melbourne, Australia. Newman stands at the head of a group of young scholars trained in several disciplines who are writing about radio, and her work shows the influence of literary and cultural criticism on a historical case study. She is less concerned with presenting a linear history that documents change over time or in digging up new material (although she does both) than in changing our perceptions of a particular set of historical actors.

Radio Active explores the ways in which commercial radio turned listeners into consumers and at the same time energized new consumers to protest their own commodification. It makes several points that will change the ways in which scholars of consumerism, radio, and advertising think about audiences and audience resistance. By tying radio to the consumer movement, Newman has opened up new understandings of both. In addition, she has linked the reactions of what she calls "audience intellectuals" with ordinary listeners. Audience intellectuals are defined as those who studied and constructed commercial radio, including Paul Lazarsfeld, Theodore Adorno, and Hadley Cantril. Newman also devotes a chapter to the less-well-known, but here usefully recuperated, activists James Rorty, Ruth Brindze, and Peter Morell, who protested commercial radio and influenced the consumer movement of the 1930s. She deals with consumer boycotts of products advertised on the radio, such as the CIO boycott of Philco receivers because of newscaster Boake Carter's on-air antagonism, and she concludes with an interesting reading of Frederic Wakeman's important novel about the commercial radio industry, The Hucksters (1948).

Newman does not completely avoid the evidentiary problems of using radio advertising as a historical source. It remains difficult to know when particular ads were aired, and she has depended on nostalgic compilations which do not include dates. Yet scholars have stayed away from this topic for a long time and surely it is better to have some analysis than to have none at all.

The strength of the book lies in the way it links a disparate set of events and actors to show that there was resistance to radio advertising. Some readers may find the resistance to have been less than overwhelming. Newman agrees that "the power of the individual listener is surely limited" but concludes thus: ". . . I continue to be interested in the power of listeners/consumers to organize collectively. Radio may have 'activated' listeners, but in virtually every case it was political leaders, church leaders, consumer leaders, union leaders, and clubwoman leaders who organized these 'activated' listeners into powerful coalitions that the broadcast industry could not ignore. Radio advertising certainly provoked listener resentment. But it was grassroots organizers who turned that resentment into collective action. In the radio age, consumers were 'radio active.' Some attention to their stories, to their successes, and to their failures should help us in our own active efforts to grapple with mass culture today" (p. 192).