Radio's Hidden Voice: The Origins of Public Broadcasting in the United States (review)

Even casual listeners to National Public Radio quickly realize two things about public broadcasting in the United States: the stations cluster at the left of the dial, and a substantial proportion of the stations are operated by colleges or universities. Hugh Richard Slotten's Radio's Hidden Voice: The Origins of Public Broadcasting in the United States uncovers the origins of this phenomenon at college and university radio stations in the 1920s through the 1940s. Midwestern land-grant colleges in particular played a key role in developing a public-service-based alternative to the commercial, network-dominated approach to broadcasting that came to characterize American radio. Based on extensive archival research, the book attempts to counter what the author considers to be unfounded assumptions about the early days of noncommercial, nonreligious radio: namely, that it was primarily educational and aimed to instill the cultural values of middle-class life in its listeners.

In support of his case, he demonstrates that the stations featured entertainment as well as education, queried their listeners about their needs and preferences, developed specific programs for individual segments of their listening audience, and offered opportunities for young broadcasters to experiment with the medium. Ultimately, their approach to what we might call "narrowcasting" created regulatory hurdles for the stations by earning them a "propaganda" designation from the Federal Radio Commission. Lumped together with evangelicals and other extremists, a majority of these college radio stations lost their access to the airwaves in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The future of those hearty survivors was only assured in 1940, when the Federal Communications Commission reserved a portion of the FM dial for the exclusive use of noncommercial stations.

Slotten is clearly at his best when focused on the close relationship between these college stations and their listeners. As previous scholarship on the use of the radio in rural America has already made clear, radio was by far the most direct connection most farm families had to modernity. The announcers at WSUI (the State University of Iowa), KFKU (the University of Kansas), KFJM (the University of North Dakota), WNAD (the University of Oklahoma), and WHA (the University of Wisconsin) provided their listeners with farm and weather reports, sports broadcasts, and tips for homemaking. Some stations in the 1920s distributed special placards and receptacles to radio owners so the owners could display the latest weather forecasts and market conditions for any visitors who happened to stop by. Others hoped to create actual (not merely imaginary) communities through group-listening programs that doubled as home extension meetings.

Slotten should be credited for his exhaustive archival research, encompassing nearly sixty collections in more than a dozen states. This strength is nevertheless also the source of the book's greatest weakness. In an admirable attempt to take his actors seriously, Slotten is perhaps too credulous of their explanations for their actions. The fact that rural housewives actively requested programs on modern home economics, for example, does not make the concept of home economics any less "uplifting." Similarly, the stations' overwhelming insistence on broadcasting classical music, rather than jazz or white popular music, says something about the station managers' sense of middle-class propriety. One also has a sense that the book ends about twenty years too soon, with the true development of the American public-radio broadcast network confined to the epilogue.

Notwithstanding the book's contribution to debates about the radio's use as a technology of uplift, historians of technology will primarily be interested in, first, the discussion of early radio technologies, and second, the account of how the Federal Radio Commission largely relied on technical benchmarks to eliminate stations that posed a challenge to the American system of commercial radio.