Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America (review)

Rural Iowan Doris Bertram Owen remembers her family purchasing its first radio around 1925 and waiting daily for her dad to come home and play it. If it was an especially good program, the family pulled the battery out of their Model T Ford. Radio scholar Steve Craig's new book, Out of the Dark, examines rural families like the Owens, arguing that radio pulled them out of social and geographic isolation and into the American mainstream. This is a slim volume that trods over already well-covered ground, albeit with a focused eye on rural folk and their evolving acceptance of radio in the 1920s and 1930s.

Craig documents the development of radio broadcasting as well as the establishment of networks, focusing on the various laws and conventions that valued the large radio station over the smaller one. The FCC assigned clear channel status (one bandwidth to one station) and then allowed those stations to increase their signal strength which reached over broad sections of land. This is familiar ground investigated by scholars such as Susan Smulyan. His argument that rural families tuned into those stations once they bought a radio in the 1930s seems counterintuitive given the economic downturn, but he argues that radio prices dropped significantly ($136 in 1929 to $47 in 1932) at the same time as batteries improved, crucial since electricity was not available to many rural families until the 1940s. With shows such as NBC's National Barn Dance, rural farmers found programs to their liking. Exposure to ads like Alka Seltzer then invested rural listeners in mainstream consumer culture even as it gave them access to national political and religious culture, especially given Franklin Delano Roosevelt's effective use of the medium. Craig then jumps to postwar America, arguing radio's demise came from television's challenges and the FCC's rule change that catalyzed the development of new local stations in the 1950s.

This is a study that cuts across numerous academic disciplines—radio studies, music history, even political science - much like a clear channel station's signal cut across hundreds of miles. He uses some interesting and relatively rare surveys of rural radio audiences, particularly from the U.S.D.A., and is at his best when he allows the farmers to speak. But he buys the image of an isolated rural community too readily and never asks whether it was the sociologists producing the surveys who promoted an image of an isolated farmer or if it was the farmers who believed themselves to be isolated. In some ways, his evidence suggests sociologists taught farmers to feel isolated. Moreover, black listeners who were marginalized by radio executives appear equally so in this book, but with a relatively unsophisticated analysis. Executives excluded most black performers because they did not want to integrate any white household, not just those in the South as he argues. Moreover, black listeners bought Bessie Smith records instead of purchasing radios because they wanted to hear their own, not because they did not have the capital.