American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age

Preface

Preface When I began the research that led to the writing of this book, my intent was to write about border radio stations, the high-powered pirates that cropped up on the southern side of the Texas-Mexico border in the 1930s to bombard the United States and Canada with hillbilly music, fundamentalist preaching, populist politics, seedy mail-order merchandising , and advertisements for quack medical treatments. The borderblasting tradition was started by Dr. John Romulus Brinkley of Kansas and Norman Baker of Iowa, pioneer broadcasters whose licenses were among the first to be revoked by the Federal Radio Commission on the grounds that the programs their stations provided were at odds with ‘‘the public interest, convenience, and necessity.’’ I came to this subject as a fan of the Carter Family, the seminal proto-country-music act who spent much of the 1930s making prerecorded programs to be broadcast by Brinkley’s ultrapowerful border station, XERA. As I traced the careers of Baker and Brinkley back to the days before they were pushed off the airwaves by federal regulators, however, I lost interest in the border blasters in favor of a general study of independent radio broadcasters in the 1920s, some of whom made the border pirates look fairly staid. The field, I was happy to discover, was seriously underdeveloped . Almost all of the scholarship on early broadcasting was narrowly focused on the ‘‘Big Four’’ corporate players: Westinghouse, General Electric (GE), American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). By and large the early 1920s were treated as a messy prelude to the rise and consolidation of the tidy network systems: it was a period of undifferentiated chaos to be covered as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to get to the big players and the main events in which they starred. The five hundred or so independent stations on the air at the time were generally treated as bit players , if not mere background scenery. To me, they soon came to represent something more significant. An apocryphal tradition has it that when asked why he robbed banks, the bandit Willie Sutton answered, ‘‘Because that’s where the money is.’’ Historians operate on similar principles: they gravitate toward the largest available troves of documents. As Michele Hilmes acknowledges viii Preface in her Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952, there are drawbacks to this approach. Hilmes writes: Many—the vast majority—of broadcast hours are lost forever. What does exist tends to privilege the dominant and centralized sources. I have drawn heavily on NBC records for this study because they make up a very large proportion of what has been preserved and is accessible to the historian. Records and accounts of the larger and more successful stations, programs, and performers are more likely to survive than those that actually may be of more interest to the poststructuralist scholar: those small stations providing a different service to a more marginalized audience, those programs deemed of specialized interest or least appeal whose scripts and records have long been destroyed, limited regional and local broadcasts, those efforts that never made it to realization precisely because they went against the grain of dominant practice. Much research needs to be done in these lesser-known areas to bring them to other scholars’ attention and to reflect more fully our diverse and conflicted media heritage.1 In a sense, this book is my attempt to fulfill the research mandate proposed by Hilmes—except that I am not a poststructuralist and I take issue with her assumption that small stations were necessarily marginal. I have found, to the contrary, that many of these were among the most successful and popular stations of the day, and that many of the commercial and cultural practices that eventually came to dominate and define American broadcasting originated among them. Obviously the profiles of independent broadcast pioneers in this book are just as dependent on documentary sources as any previous history was (I have heard the recorded voice of just one of the broadcasters pro- filed here, William K. Henderson of station KWKH, Shreveport, Louisiana ). Turning up information on these largely neglected stations was partly a matter of persistence and partly one of dumb luck. Had I not spent a week in the basement of Christ Community Church in Zion, Illinois , I could not have reconstructed the story of WCBD, a phenomenally popular midwestern station dedicated to gospel music and flat-earth geophysics. But...