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  • American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age
  • Alexander T. Russo
Clifford J. Doerksen . American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xi + 157 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3871-0, $34.95 (cloth).

In American Babel: Rogue Broadcasters of the Jazz Age, Clifford Doerksen presents a lively discussion of the economic implications of cultural hierarchy on radio broadcasting. In this slim volume, only 176 pages (including footnotes), he tells the stories of several radio pioneers who have been largely ignored in the retellings of the medium's history. The difficulties in exploring the world of independent broadcasters long has been a lament of radio scholars, and Doerksen's book represents a significant step forward in revising our understanding of radio's initial decades. In the past twenty years, revisionist radio scholars have challenged earlier triumphal and teleological histories by emphasizing organized audience resistance to the implementation of the "American System" of broadcasting. Yet these accounts retained a focus on the large networks and activities of the Federal Radio (later Communications) Commission. The value of American Babel is that by adding to, and complicating, this narrative by examining a colorful cast of characters that operated urban, low-power stations, rural, "farmer radio," and religious broadcasters of various stripes, a much more complicated narrative emerges.

The key to Doerksen's approach is the evocative way in which he links attitudes toward commercialization, the cultural orientation of individual broadcasters, and the responses of audiences. Thus he is able to both "provide a sense of what these forgotten radio stations were like and what they meant to the people whose listened to them" but also describe how "attitudes toward broadcast advertising were strongly conditions by socioeconomic standing" (p. ix). This insight allows him to argue convincingly that far from being a top-down affair "commercial broadcasting originated at a grassroots level, as a populist deviation from polite corporate practice" (p. x).

In support of this thesis, Doerksen presents a series of station case studies based on a cultural/economic typography: Station WEAF featured highbrow content in order to negate concerns of cultural critics about the value of "toll broadcasting." WHN drew on its metropolitan location in New York by programming lowbrow but extremely popular "hot jazz" obtained through close relationships with Tin Pan Alley song-pluggers and Manhattan nightclubs. Although no less commercial, Shenandoah, Iowa's KFNF eschewed both the highbrow classical and risqué jazz in favor of "old time" music favored by its rural audience. In contrast to the soft-sell [End Page 631] techniques employed by stations like WEAF, it found that its rural audiences preferred the seeming honesty of direct marketing. There are then two counterexamples, stations KWKH and WCBD, whose profane and sacred approach to programming and advertising illustrate the limits of permissible speech during broadcasting's initial decade.

Doerksen should be commended for his thematic emphases, his thorough archival research, and his wide-ranging review of 1920s radio publications. Together they provide a vivid portrait of these stations, their audiences, and the reactions of mainstream corporate liberal broadcasters. Although clearly aided by a few lucky archival finds, these are well complemented by materials drawn from FRC station files. Together they illuminate the internal operations of these independent stations, details which may be the most relevant to readers of Enterprise & Society. At the same time, Doerksen accounts for the programming reception through careful attention to audience letters. Cross-referenced by discussions of these stations in popular and trade journals, the cultural biases of the mainstream business community toward these stations are clear, as are the ways in which the innovations pioneered by these stations filtered upward into mainstream corporate culture.

This book can be faulted in two relatively minor areas. Its brevity makes some case studies appear relatively undeveloped and in need of further attention. The chapters on KWKH and WCDB, for example, are but twelve pages each. This brevity becomes a concern when it comes to the relative paucity of references to relevant secondary literature. Despite brief citations from some of the most well-known scholars of broadcasting and cultural history, this book fails to incorporate the insights of...

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