Whispering in a Million Ears: Remembering the Intimate Power of Radio

In 1948 Ann B. Carl, the first American woman to fly a jet and the only woman to test fly experimental U.S. planes during World War II, was invited to be a guest on one of radio's most popular talk shows. The host of the show was Mary Margaret McBride, a former journalist, a skillful interviewer, and a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. Knowing that McBride always did her research and often surprised guests with her ability to recall details from their biographies, Carl expected to be asked about her flying days with Orville Wright and her history-making trial flight of the Bell YP-59A jet fighter at the Wright-Patterson test center in Dayton, Ohio. Given McBride's personal and professional commitment to the advancement of women, she was also sure to be interested in Carl's role in helping to create new opportunities for women in the U.S. Air Force. Yet, of her visit to McBride's program, Carl writes, "I can remember the year well as I was 8.99 months pregnant with our second child, and looked it. Mary Margaret was much more interested in this fact than any aspect of the flying, and in fact hoped for a birth on her show."¹

So much for lauding the war efforts or advancing the feminist cause. As she was sometimes known to do, McBride got carried away by the sentimental human-interest story that Carl's visit provided. Though McBride was a single woman working a full-time job and living a fast-paced urban lifestyle in New York, she always imagined that part of her role was to be the mouthpiece for small-town Missouri housewives like the one she might have become if she hadn't found radio. A female air force test pilot was exactly the kind of guest that McBride, the journalist, wanted to interview; but a nine-months-pregnant air force test pilot was a guest that McBride, the daytime host, knew would engage and delight her audience. Hence, stories of flight training and jet fighters were traded for talk of due dates and motherhood. Clearly, McBride the businesswoman knew that if she was to sustain the incredible popularity her show had attained, she would have to find a balance between her training as an investigative reporter and her yearning for a simpler domestic life.

Negotiating tensions between the realms of public and private, professional and domestic, is a theme that permeates two recently published works on the history of radio and its unique power to build intimate reception communities. While Susan Ware's compelling account of Mary Margaret McBride's life and radio career in It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography considers the way one influential radio personality used the special force of aural broadcast to connect with her audience, Jason Loviglio's Radio's Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy explores how various programming genres constructed listeners as unified members of a national audience. Through their disparate styles of investigation, both writers ultimately raise similar questions about radio's role as a groundbreaking medium of mass communication. How did the advent of radio affect democratic participation? Did it give isolated rural listeners and homebound mothers access to a distant public sphere, or did listening come to serve as a comfortable stand-in for real participation in civic life? Did radio producers adequately understand the programming needs and interests of their audiences, or did radio programming, in fact, dictate who did or didn't qualify for full membership in a highly raced, classed, and gendered national audience? Ware and Loviglio suggest that radio did all of these things by functioning within an intimate liminal space that...