Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921-1935

Our chronicle will involve statesmen, mountebanks, teachers, salesmen, artists, wheeler-dealers, soldiers, saints, reporters, propagandists--and others. The tower-builders reached for heaven, each in his way.

Erik Barnouw ¹

In Chicago during the 1920s, local radio stations, many without educational, chain, or network affiliation, shaped a vibrant on-air world. ² They used music and cultural affairs programs to entertain, inform, and serve communities of ethnic, immigrant, middle- and working-class listeners. ³ More than a "radio imaginary" or an "imagined community," local broadcasting promoted face-to-face community life among its audiences, whether encouraging listeners to participate in programs as talent or guests, support ethnic institutions and causes, attend church, vote for local politicians, patronize local businesses, support organized labor, or even cut loose at neighborhood dance halls. ⁴ Broadcasting altered public culture because it linked public and private spaces into new on-air configurations that offered listeners fresh ways of mentally and physically locating themselves and others within the neighborhood, the metropolis, and the nation itself. ⁵

For the diverse groups who obtained licenses, equipment, or slots on the air and for those who listened, local radio embodied obvious and less-obvious forms of power and privilege. The public nature of the airwaves--where anyone or everyone might be invisibly present and listening--conferred special status to immigrant, ethnic, and working-class broadcasters and their listeners. The airwaves became a neighborhood as well as a metropolitan stage, and many listeners tuning to independent stations swelled with pleasure and pride at hearing music and cultural programs that acknowledged and validated their particular languages, histories, and cultural backgrounds for both the designated group and the larger audience to hear. Self-generated broadcasts offered the possibility of a respite from the subordinate status many Chicago immigrant, ethnic, and working-class individuals experienced in other urban public settings, such as streets or parks, whether on account of language, dress, mannerism, or skin color. ⁶

But while local radio helped to empower many community groups and to strengthen ethnic institutions in a display of broadcast Americanism, it excluded and marginalized numerous potential shapers of electronic public culture, most notably for the purposes of this study, African Americans. While German, Lithuanian, Polish, and Swedish Americans and a host of other national and ethnic participants generated programs in multiple languages and myriad music styles, African Americans were barred from the broadcast control room prior to 1928. Even as local radio brought the artistry and excitement of African American jazz and blues to the mainstream via live-remote concerts from nightclubs and via race records, self-generated representations were few relative to the performances of popular syncopated dance music featuring white studio bands, orchestras, and phonograph recording artists.

Complicating the scenario further, minstrel dialect and musical entertainment featuring whites in blackface were another staple of 1920s urban broadcasting. These hackneyed representations produced a further racialized distortion of African Americans in which aural representations of "blackness" produced a cultural formation--a sound of whiteness--that bound ethnic listeners together as racialized whites consuming a racialized Other. Simultaneously present within and absented from local radio, African Americans were unable to control their radio representations to the extent that others could. Their physical absence confirmed their marginal social and cultural status elsewhere in the city. At the same time, the disembodied cultural presence of African American jazz on radio and its popular elaboration by white performers supplied another means of unifying ethnic audiences under the cultural sign and sound of whiteness. ⁷

The centrality of music to early radio and the sound of whiteness that resulted arose within a particular historical context. Since the late nineteenth century, a generation of urban residents had actively competed with social reformers over the control of music in public as a medium with which to organize urban space, demonstrate public authority, and constitute and...