Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 9780812206869

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Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture Series Editors: Roger Horowitz, Philip Scranton, Susan Strasser A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Sound

in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Edited by

David Suisman and

Susan Strasser

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 䉷 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sound in the age of mechanical reproduction / edited by David Suisman and Susan Strasser. p. cm.—(Hagley perspectives on business and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4199-0 (alk. paper) 1. Social history—20th century. 2. Popular culture—History—20th century. 3. Economic history—20th century 4. Sound—Social aspects—History—20th century. 5. Sound—Political aspects—History—20th century. 6. Sound—Economic aspects— History—20th century. 7. Mechanization—History—20th century. 8. Hearing— History—20th century. 9. Listening—History—20th century. 10. Radio—History—20th century. I. Suisman, David. II. Strasser, Susan. HN16.S598 2010 306.4⬘8420904—dc22 2009024356

Contents

Introduction: Thinking Historically About Sound and Sense David Suisman 1

Part I: Affect and the Politics of Listening 1

Distracted Listening: On Not Making Sound Choices in the 1930s David Goodman 15

2

‘‘Her Voice a Bullet’’: Imaginary Propaganda and the Legendary Broadcasters of World War II Ann Elizabeth Pfau and David Hochfelder 47

3

‘‘Savage Dissonance’’: Gender, Voice, and Women’s Radio Speech in Argentina, 1930–1945 Christine Ehrick 69

Part II: Sonic Objects 4

Collectors, Bootleggers, and the Value of Jazz, 1930–1952 Alex Cummings 95

5

High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961 Eric D. Barry 115

Part III: Hearing Order 6

Occupied Listeners: The Legacies of Interwar Radio for France During World War II Derek W. Vaillant 141

7

An Audible Sense of Order: Race, Fear, and CB Radio on Los Angeles Freeways in the 1970s Angela M. Blake 159

vi

Contents

Part IV: Sound Commerce 8

‘‘The People’s Orchestra’’: Jukeboxes as the Measure of Popular Musical Taste in the 1930s and 1940s Chris Rasmussen 181

9

Sounds Local: The Competition for Space and Place in Early U.S. Radio Bill Kirkpatrick 199

10

The Sound of Print: Newspapers and the Public Promotion of Early Radio Broadcasting in the United States Michael Stamm 221 Notes 243 List of Contributors 299 Index 301 Acknowledgments 311

Introduction

Thinking Historically About Sound and Sense David Suisman

Two propositions. One: Some people can ignore sound. On Friday, 12 January 2007, at 7:51 a.m., a man dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap began to play the violin beside a trash can outside the Metro station at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. While he played, for forty-three minutes, nearly 1,100 people walked by. This was not just an ordinary busker, however; he was Joshua Bell, an acclaimed virtuoso who has performed with nearly all of the world’s leading orchestras. Bell’s humble performance of pieces from his world-class repertoire was an experiment staged by the Washington Post to see how rush-hour commuters would react. As it happened, six minutes passed before a single person stopped to listen, and only seven people paused for longer than a minute the whole time he played. Twenty-seven gave money, most on the fly. A few weeks later, reflecting on the commuters’ overwhelming indifference, Bell expressed sympathy for those who were too busy to stop, but he had trouble grasping how easily people ignored him altogether. When he later watched a video of the performance shot with a concealed camera, he said, ‘‘I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible. Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!’’1 Two: Some people cannot ignore sound. One day in May 2003, at the U.S. military detention facility Camp Delta in Guanta´namo Bay, Cuba, a young British citizen named Shafiq Rasul was taken from his cell to an interrogation booth, where he sat on the floor, his hands chained to his ankles, his ankles chained to the floor. An irregularly blinking strobe light and the sound of loud heavy metal music filled the room. For nearly three weeks, he endured this every day, sometimes twice a day, for up to twelve hours at a stretch. Finally, he confessed to attending a meeting in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta in

2

Introduction

August 2000. Was this a breakthrough in the ‘‘global war on terror’’ and a vindication of the U.S. military’s harsh ‘‘interrogation’’ techniques? Not exactly. Investigators subsequently established that in August 2000 Rasul had been attending university in England and working in an electronics store. In early 2004, he was released from detention without charges. Officially, the U.S. government has denied that it has used loud music and noise in interrogations. Indeed, such practices have been roundly condemned by institutions ranging from the European Court of Human Rights to the Israeli Supreme Court and would likely violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, which the United States ratified in 1994. Statements from Shafiq Rasul, other former detainees, human rights advocates, and current and former military personnel belie the U.S. military’s disavowal, however. Indeed, in 2009 the widely publicized leak of a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross established that persistent loud music and noise were widely used as interrogation tools by the U.S. military. On the effect of the music, Rasul recalled, ‘‘It just starts playing with you. . . . Even if you were shouting, the music was too loud—nobody would be able to hear you. You’re there for hours and hours, and they’re constantly playing the same music. All that builds up. You start hallucinating.’’2 These two propositions and the vignettes accompanying them denote the extremes of the modern soundscape: at one end, that which is beneath notice; at the other, that which cannot be ignored.3 Music is an element in both, but not really the point of either. Bell’s performance was ostensibly part of a commentary on the relationship between art and society, but it was a setup—an example of what Daniel Boorstin famously labeled a pseudo-event, that is, an event staged for the sake of the story to be written about it.4 (Indeed, in this case, it was a story with tremendous cultural resonance. Within a month of its publication, the article elicited more than 1,300 comments on the Washington Post’s website, and ultimately it earned a Pulitzer Prize for its writer, Gene Weingarten.5) In the hands of the U.S. military, loud music is a weapon and a tactic. The combined effect of the cultural, psychological, and acoustic properties of music is wielded as a blunt instrument of state power. These examples, representing the ends of the spectrum of modern aural experience, demonstrate that the meaning of music and sound is more than aesthetic and affective. Indeed, they suggest we need a framework for understanding the complex ways that music and sound can inform, structure, and reflect a wide range of other, non-aural concerns as well. But what if instead of listening only to the present, we crane our ears to the past and listen for similar issues? Indeed, what does it mean to think about music and sound historically? For starters, it means recog-

Introduction

3

nizing that sound has power and is woven into a host of other social, political, and economic power relations. When sound is audible it is difficult to block out. Its effects can range from subtle to overbearing, but people have only limited control over the sounds they hear. Moreover, the experience of many kinds of sound, especially music, is very often mediated, either technologically or discursively, and this mediation introduces other elements of power. Thinking about music and sound historically also means considering how aural phenomena and sensory experience in general may be historically constructed. Marx suggested this when he wrote in 1844, ‘‘The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.’’ Walter Benjamin, in the 1930s, carried this argument forward into the twentieth century. In his well-known essay ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ Benjamin wrote, ‘‘During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.’’ More than extending Marx’s analysis of industrial capitalism, however, Benjamin proposed a radical departure from Marxist orthodoxy. He was calling new attention not just to the structure and culture of capitalism but also to its affective character. For Benjamin, it is modes of perception, not modes of production, that hold the key to revolutionary social change. Modes of production did not cease to be important, Benjamin suggested, but their meaning and impact could no longer be grasped without attention to the subtle, culturally embedded ways people experienced them.6 From a different vantage point a few years later, the French historian Lucien Febvre called for a broad social history of the senses, which he imagined could help recover more fully the mental and emotional world of the past.7 This notion fell largely on deaf ears, however, and not until the 1980s, with the pioneering work of Alain Corbin on smell, sound, and touch in the French social imagination, did the potential of Febvre’s work start to become manifest. Reflecting on what the history of the senses can and cannot do, Corbin has taken pains to emphasize that its goal is not merely to supplement existing historical interpretations but to discover how (or even if ) sensory experience has been historically meaningful. Indeed, the senses may not be historically significant for all dimensions or events of the past, he has noted, but this does not mean they are not historically significant for some. Moreover, although Corbin recognized that each sense underwent a different process of historical development, he also cautioned against isolating one form of sensory experience within the whole of the sensorium and against severing the senses from all other aspects of human relations. Historicizing the

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Introduction

senses, he maintained, is a means of getting at dimensions of history that have formerly been obscured, not an antiquarian end in itself.8 As we consider the possibilities and limits of placing sensory experience in historical perspective, we may recognize that even the enumeration of the senses and the ways that one sense is distinguished from another are subject to historical contingency. Our commonplace notion of five distinct senses—not four or six or eight—has deep and broad cultural underpinnings, deriving from Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophy, but it is not fixed, universal, or static. Other schema have been proposed, too. Plato, for example, admitted only four senses; it was Aristotle who added a fifth, discrete sense of touch. Since that time, numerous philosophers have tried to expand this number, offering a sixth sense for sexual feelings or an awareness of the supernatural. But the number five has stuck, in part perhaps because of its profound symbolic importance—resonating, as it does, through much of the world’s philosophy and religion, as in the five fires of ancient Indian philosophy, the five points of the compass in Chinese thought, the five points of the Christian pentagram, Judaism’s five books of the Torah, and Islam’s Five Pillars.9 Yet grouping the senses as a fivesome can imply an equivalence, interchangeability, or unity of the five senses that is quite at odds with how varied their respective influence has been on human social organization. Indeed, all senses were not created equal, a fact that Aristotle emphasized in his hierarchy of the senses, which placed vision at the top, followed by hearing, smell, taste, and touch. This ordering, even as it asserted a differential importance among the senses, gave the false impression of a certain closeness, as if they were like the five fingers of the hand—the thumb might be special, and the middle finger a little longer, but they all do pretty much the same thing. For reasons of both culture and evolutionary biology, though, vision informs our knowledge and understanding of the world much more than the other senses. The language we have developed for talking about what we see is far more sophisticated and refined than that available for describing and analyzing any other kind of sensory experience, and visual metaphors in turn suffuse everyday language to a much greater degree than those derived from the other senses.10 (If you focus your attention on common language, even casting a quick glance at the scope of idioms used in ordinary speech, I am sure you will see what I mean.)11 In the past four decades, visual culture has been aggressively historicized by philosophers, art historians, cinema studies scholars, and others. While numerous themes and concerns recur in their work, one element common to almost all of it is that vision has been the sense most closely associated with reason, knowledge, and cognition.12 Hearing and

Introduction

5

the rest of the sensorium have thus far received much less critical scrutiny. Walter Benjamin’s work, which has been a touchstone for many recent scholars of visual culture, exemplified this elision. Although he proposed historicizing sensory experience generally, he thought and wrote mostly in terms of visual phenomena. Notwithstanding the breadth suggested by the title of ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ Benjamin’s principal concerns were photography and cinema, and he made only a few, fleeting references to sound recording or aural experience.13 Still, for people interested in the history of aural experience, the work of scholars of visual culture is an extremely useful starting point, affording powerful theoretical tools and convenient bases for comparison. For example, the historian of photography Allan Sekula has explored how looking at and making sense of photographs in the nineteenth century was a learned form of behavior, freighted with specific ideological investments, rather than a natural effect of the technology. It may be possible to transpose such contentions to aural experience, asking how people learned to listen to and make sense of reproduced sounds, whether they issued from a phonograph record or a radio. Sekula maintains that ‘‘photography,’’ as we generally understand it, is constituted not only by technology but also by a body of discursive codes and practices. The main thrust of his work, however, is the argument that these codes and practices have been shaped dialectically both by art, which is the conventional framework for historicizing photography, and by nonartistic uses of the medium, such as corporate image-making, police surveillance, and photographic surveys of landscapes by railroad and mining companies. It is an argument that takes seriously the impact of all aspects of photography, not just those that have been sacralized by the arts.14 If art has long been the public face of photography—that is, its idealized form, even among amateurs and journalists—music has been the public voice of sound recording and broadcasting. Recent scholars of sound, most notably Jonathan Sterne and Emily Thompson, have opened up new historical channels for understanding the practices and meanings of modern sound technologies, just as Sekula did for photography. The chapters that follow take up this charge as well, stretching the historical analysis of sound in new directions, redefining what it encompasses, and advancing new arguments about what it can offer. The overarching goal of this new aurally based work is not to create an alternate world of sound studies. Rather, it is to demonstrate the unique possibilities that thinking about sound can open up, the potential importance of thinking about all kinds of sensory experience (not just visual), and the inadequacy of analyzing a single kind of sensory knowledge apart from all others.15

6

Introduction

Taken together, the essays in this book limn the new aural environment that took shape during the twentieth century. This environment was never homogenous, even within a single country or region and certainly not across borders. These articles, however, which build on and expand other recent scholarship, suggest the emergence of certain characteristic forms, patterns, and tendencies in the soundscapes of industrialized countries. In the study of visual culture, the work of Christian Metz, Jonathan Crary, and Martin Jay has advanced a theory of differential ‘‘scopic regimes’’ to analyze and periodize different modes of seeing in history. These scholars maintain that the way people see is something that changes over time and that it is possible to track and understand changes in the prevailing modes of visual perception in different epochs and contexts.16 Sound scholars have not yet produced an equivalent theory to describe historically contingent modes of hearing and listening. The growth of sound-related scholarship in recent years, however, has begun to reveal the organization and significance of changing modes of aural perception as well. The essays collected in this book make a signal contribution to the understanding of one such aural regime: that of industrialized society during the twentieth century.17 Does listening have a politics? Does it have an ethics? According to the three articles in Part I of the book, ‘‘Affect and the Politics of Listening,’’ the answer to both of these questions is an unqualified yes. In ‘‘Distracted Listening: On Not Making Sound Choices in the 1930s,’’ David Goodman revises conventional radio histories that presuppose radio as a medium to which listeners gave their concerted and undivided attention. On the contrary, Goodman shows, by the 1930s a variety of forms of casual or inattentive listening had become the norm for many people in the United States. For the elderly and those living in remote areas, broadcast programming mitigated feelings of loneliness and isolation and offered a means of forging emotional bonds; for young people, the sound of radio increasingly played in the background while they did homework or other activities. Critics attacked this so-called distracted listening, fearing that it contravened the values and skills of good citizenship. Such behavior, they charged, impaired people’s critical listening and reasoning abilities and made them susceptible to demagoguery and aural propaganda. Such critiques became particularly prominent as part of the mass culture debates of the 1950s, but Goodman reveals an earlier iteration, from an era of radio that produced both Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and Adolf Hitler’s declaration (in the German Radio Manual of 1937) that ‘‘without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany.’’18 Ann Pfau and David Hochfelder bring perceptions of the insidious

Introduction

7

potential of radio into the foreground in their critical reassessment of Axis radio propaganda in World War II. Not only does ‘‘ ‘Her Voice a Bullet’: Imaginary Propaganda and the Legendary Broadcasters of World War II’’ offer a complete and thorough debunking of the myth of Tokyo Rose, the allegedly omniscient radio seductress of the Pacific, but it shows how rumor, innuendo, and mis-hearing underpinned the legal conviction of Tokyo Rose’s real-life counterpart, Iva Toguri, after the war. Furthermore, it historicizes the problematics of listening in two respects. First, it demonstrates how Toguri and her fellow Axis broadcasters Lord Haw Haw and Axis Sally affected U.S. and British soldiers and civilians more through what people thought the broadcasters had said than through what they had really said. Second, the chapter links these discrepancies to wartime studies of critical radio listening and the efficacy of radio propaganda. Pfau and Hochfelder show that the sexualized, fetishized voices of Toguri and Axis Sally complicated the politics of wartime radio listening. In ‘‘ ‘Savage Dissonance’: Gender, Voice, and Women’s Radio Speech in Argentina, 1930–1945,’’ Christine Ehrick complements their work with her analysis of the proto-feminist broadcasts of Silvia Guerrico on Argentine radio during the 1930s, which Ehrick contrasts with the right-wing nationalist politics of the radio star Eva Duarte. Ehrick frames her consideration of Guerrico’s career broadly, situating the rise and fall of a woman who was, for a time, one of Argentina’s most widely listened-to radio hosts within the larger discourses about women speaking in public. Whereas Pfau and Hochfelder used Tokyo Rose to explore the potentially destabilizing effect of one kind of female radio voice, Ehrick analyzes the political dimensions of others. The politics of radio and of gender intersected in critiques of Guerrico’s voice, which was effectively silenced after she candidly verbalized the romantic desires many of her female listeners felt and voiced as well the frustrations many experienced with their husbands. Men and women heard Guerrico’s broadcasts very differently, and in male-dominated Argentine society, her transgressive gender politics were by the 1940s superseded by both the political propaganda and soap opera fantasies of radio actress Eva Duarte, later known to the world as ‘‘Evita,’’ and the right-wing nationalist-populist politics of her future husband, Juan Pero´n. In Part II, ‘‘Sonic Objects,’’ the authors turn our attention from broadcasting to recordings. In a study of an influential group of record collectors in the United States, ‘‘Collectors, Bootleggers, and the Value of Jazz, 1930–1952,’’ Alex Cummings deconstructs the conventional dichotomy between producers and consumers of sound recordings. He reveals both the predatory and generative dimensions of the work of collectors, many of whom fetishized the records and music they collected

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Introduction

but who also preserved and circulated a valuable body of recordings. More surprisingly, Cummings shows as well how collectors themselves became producers when they began to reissue out-of-print recordings, often with the artists’ consent and encouragement, thereby challenging the monopoly of record companies and the mass market to dictate which recordings remained available. Because of a loophole in the copyright law, Cummings shows, informal copying of records existed in a legal gray area, and as long as pirated recordings did not compete with the legitimate pressings of the record companies, the companies granted their tacit consent. This equilibrium was upset after World War II, however, when bootleggers began to press records with more than just fringe appeal, and the unreconciled conflicts over intellectual property, on which the shadow economy depended, became difficult to suppress. Like Cummings, Eric Barry, in ‘‘High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961,’’ asks who made records and under what circumstances, but he connects these questions to issues of truth, artifice, and epistemology embedded in any sound recording. More specifically, by looking at the eccentric producers of audiophile recordings of trains, exotic calypsos, and space-age bachelor pad music during the 1950s, Barry uncovers an ideological transformation in the making and marketing of sound recordings in the United States during the 1950s. As he foregrounds the recorded-ness of the sounds on records, Barry’s work explores in a commercial context conceptual issues developed during the same years in France by the radio engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer, whose radical approach to music-making was known as musique concre`te. Schaeffer actively sought to distinguish and isolate the recording—what he called the objet sonore, the sonic object—from the sounds recorded. His goal was to develop ways of listening to the recordings themselves, as recordings, disrupting the cultural practice of listening to source material through recordings (that is, you hear a recording of a cello and you picture and think about a cello). The commercial fare Barry discusses bore little resemblance to the musical abstractions of Schaeffer and his collaborators and followers, but as Barry shows, the audiophile recordings produced for the North American commercial market extended and popularized a similar interest in what people really heard when they listened to a recording.19 Part III, ‘‘Hearing Order,’’ builds on a crucial question that Barry’s essay suggests but does not address explicitly: how do the organization and technological specifications of new sound technologies affect their politics? A question of this breadth defies comprehensive or facile answers, but the two essays in this section model the potential of such inquiry. They demonstrate how the aural environment bears on the

Introduction

9

political environment and exemplify how historical understanding of the political order can be enriched by studies of the soundscape. In ‘‘Occupied Listeners: The Legacies of Interwar Radio for France During World War II,’’ Derek Vaillant revisits one of the pivotal moments in twentieth-century French history and a landmark in the French aural imagination: Charles de Gaulle’s radio address of 18 June 1940, calling on the French people to resist the occupying forces and the collaborationist Vichy government. Beneath the surface of the address, Vaillant argues, its deeper resonance and the source of its emotional power came from listeners’ familiarity with the political and regulatory battles for control of the French airwaves during the decade before the war. These disputes were surrogates for a struggle over French identity and character during the 1930s that echoed in the ears of listeners to wartime radio propaganda and to the influential French-language broadcasts by the BBC. To striking effect, Angela Blake shifts the focus from Europe to the United States, from the national level to the municipal, and from a wellstudied technology to one that has been almost entirely overlooked. ‘‘An Audible Sense of Order: Race, Fear, and CB Radio on Los Angeles Freeways in the 1970s’’ is a pathbreaking analysis that reclaims the history of citizens’ band (CB) radio from the outlaw trucker movies of the 1970s and situates it instead within the urban landscape. Beyond their popular image of connecting drivers of eighteen-wheelers across the nation, CB radios served other ends in Los Angeles. There, in one of the nation’s biggest CB-radio markets, they functioned as a device for drivers in the semi-privatized space of automobiles to police the newly completed freeways against the presumed menace of inner-city African Americans wreaking violence on the outlying suburbs. Blake’s argument combines a trenchant analysis of the social context in which CB radio took root in Los Angeles with a critical interpretation of the technology itself. Thus, the sonic properties of CB radio and its discursive meaning converged. The medium permitted only short, choppy exchanges whose low-fi sound reinforced the self-styled ‘‘gritty,’’ vigilante character of CB-radio culture. Meanwhile, its southern-inflected argot echoed the conservative, racially coded rhetoric of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, and its specialized lexicon amplified the division between insiders and outsiders—that is, it drove a wedge between those who understood the language and therefore belonged to the ‘‘community’’ and those who did not. Despite the obvious differences between Blake’s account of CB radio culture in 1970s Los Angeles and Vaillant’s study of the interwar radio in France, they share an underlying concern with the interconnectedness of the soundscape and the political order, and both have serious interpretive and methodological implications. Vaillant and Blake also have in common an alertness to the complex

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Introduction

relationship between local and national conditions and pressures, and in Part IV, ‘‘Sound Commerce,’’ this theme is developed further. In ‘‘ ‘The People’s Orchestra’: Jukeboxes as the Measure of Popular Musical Taste in the 1930s and 1940s,’’ Chris Rasmussen reimagines the music business in the United States from the point of view of jukebox operators, who placed and serviced automatic record players in local restaurants, bars, and other public places. Based on the conversations that operators had with the proprietors of those establishments and on the automatic tabulation devices later placed in the machines themselves, the so-called coin men monitored which records consumers played over and over again and which they did not care for (and should be replaced). Although the music industry initially disparaged these quintessential middlemen, record companies gradually came to realize that the operators had better direct knowledge of what consumers in different places actually wanted to listen to than anyone in the industry at the national level. Rasmussen’s work thus echoes that of Alex Cummings in Part II, problematizing the conventional binary opposition of producers and consumers. Indeed, as Rasmussen shows, the growing responsiveness of music companies to local tastes had cultural ramifications, leading to greater industry interest in and support for country music and blues, and simultaneously legitimizing and rationalizing the professional function of the jukebox operators. The complex dynamics of local and national economies likewise commands the attention of Bill Kirkpatrick in ‘‘Sounds Local: The Competition for Space and Place in Early U.S. Radio,’’ a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the challenges facing locally based radio development in the 1920s and 1930s. Demonstrating how radio stations functioned as both symbols and organs of small-town boosterism, Kirkpatrick adds a new dimension to the concept of ‘‘commercial’’ radio. As an agent of boosterism—one easily imagines Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt trumpeting his support for a local radio station—the new medium functioned in paradoxical ways. Not only were local stations dependent on federal licenses to operate, but their concerted localism, based on enhancing the commercial attraction of one place over another and drawing business away from outlying areas, had the effect of weakening the economies of other, nearby locales. Moreover, boosterism notwithstanding, local commercial broadcasters saw that the greatest source of potential revenue lay in attracting national advertisers, for whom local broadcasters functioned as conduits to small-town markets. To secure a place in the growing economy of radio marketing, Kirkpatrick shows, local broadcasters fashioned themselves as sensitive but savvy intermediaries between cosmopolitan advertisers and the tastes and proclivities of rural and small-town consumers.

Introduction

11

Finally, Michael Stamm explores another dimension of commercial radio development, its interconnectedness with newspapers, in ‘‘The Sound of Print: Newspapers and the Public Promotion of Early Radio Broadcasting in the United States.’’ When radio emerged in the 1920s, proponents championed its unprecedented potential as a means of disseminating information and ideas, but the leading institutions of mass communications at that time, the newspaper companies, remained skeptical about the actual character and value of the technology, unsure whether to view radio as a potential complement to their business or as a rival. Hedging their bets, many—but not all—newspapers bought or established radio stations and used them to both promote and enhance their print offerings. Stamm details the ‘‘war’’ that erupted in the 1930s between newspaper companies that owned radio stations and committed themselves to radio as a news and advertising medium and those that resisted such horizontal integration. The leaders of many of the latter, Stamm shows, harbored deep suspicions about radio news. They characterized information transmitted aurally through radio as appealing more to emotion than to reason and posing a threat to rational civic discourse—bringing the themes of the articles in this book full circle by returning to some of the same issues confronted by David Goodman at the outset. Although the advocates of integration and consolidation won the day and transformed the structure of news and entertainment institutions in the United States, Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 heightened a persistent anxiety about radio’s power and served as a cautionary tale to the nation on the eve of World War II. Together, these chapters set in relief the political economy of sound in the twentieth century and peel back the inner workings of the ‘‘cultural apparatus,’’ as C. Wright Mills once called it, that structured the soundscape.20 On the most obvious level, this apparatus was dominated by manufacturers and marketers of sound recordings and radios and by the sounds these technologies emitted. But these authors show that it also encompassed a range of ancillary participants—including music critics, advertising agencies, and the editors and owners of newspapers; jurists, lawmakers, and officials who drafted and implemented regulatory policies; inventors, tinkerers, engineers, and product designers; middlemen like record collectors and jukebox operators; and the musicians, journalists, actors, and radio hosts whose voices actually reached listeners’ ears. Moreover, this work explicates how listeners’ actual lived experience took shape within the matrix of connections among different components of this apparatus. Remaining alert to the ways that sound often functions as a visual and spatial phenomenon, as well as an aural one, these scholars engage in a dynamic exchange with the field of visual studies. Rather than advancing a competing paradigm or parallel

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Introduction

analytical trajectory, these sound scholars by turns build on, complement, and depart from the robust scholarship that has already done so much to explore the implications of Walter Benjamin’s provocative ideas. As a subject, sound hovers in the interstices between the intangible and the material, the ephemeral and the fixed, the ambiguous and the self-evident, presenting not just interpretive challenges but opportunities. The essays collected here recover the importance of sound in numerous historical registers, underscoring the ongoing interrelationship of sensory and social experience. While sensitive to the potential pitfalls in this mode of analysis, these scholars showcase its possibilities. Listening to the aural complexity and richness of the past, they open up new ways of thinking about the present and the future.

Part I Affect and the Politics of Listening

Chapter 1

Distracted Listening: On Not Making Sound Choices in the 1930s David Goodman

Distracted listening is a constant, commonplace occurrence in our massmediated world. We are accustomed to having broadcast or recorded sound all around us, whenever we want, and to listening distractedly or closely at different times and places. I recently visited a deli in New York that had two radio stations playing—one with Christmas music (presumably for the customers) and one a Hispanic talk station (presumably for the staff )—and both were on loud. While some today would be disconcerted or annoyed by such a barrage, others admire the aural dexterity of those who can inhabit and negotiate such a multilayered sound environment. Processing complex information—whether aural or visual—is today recognized as a skill. Susan Douglas’s important history of ‘‘radio and the American imagination’’ offers a taxonomy of kinds of listening—distinguishing passive hearing from active listening, and then within the practice of listening, disentangling ‘‘informational’’ from ‘‘dimensional’’ and ‘‘concentrated’’ modes. Ola Stockfelt describes how ‘‘each listener has a great repertoire of modes of listening’’ that are needed to function competently now in the diverse ‘‘listening situations in the everyday soundscape.’’1 Such accounts are happily pluralist. Diverse listening modes exist side by side: people have ‘‘repertoires of listening,’’ each with its own pleasures.2 That is indeed how we live now, understanding that there are different kinds of listening for different situations, but also that there is never enough time to listen carefully to all the things we ought or want to hear. There is an emerging scholarly and advice literature on listening skills and their importance to every conceivable field: education and counseling, language learning, management, marketing, health care, religion, interpersonal relationships, and more. The 1987 founding of the Inter-

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Affect and the Politics of Listening

national Journal of Listening reflected this growth of interest. Much of this recent literature treats the enhancement of listening skills as part of a project of self-improvement and self-advancement. In contrast, during the 1930s, there was a strong social and public emphasis in American public discussion of radio. Commentators maintained not only that some modes of listening were better than others but that some were positively dangerous—socially, civically, politically, as well as psychologically. It was the distinction between attentive and inattentive listening that most troubled Americans during the 1930s as they struggled to comprehend and to shape the social effects of radio. While most of those who took the trouble to identify distracted listening in public debate were sure that it was not a good thing, ordinary Americans were frequently and routinely engaging in it, untroubled by the grim warnings of experts. This largely forgotten debate about casual and distracted listening illuminates an important chapter in the technologically enabled transition from relatively sound-scarce social environments to the sound abundance of modernity. By this I do not mean simply that the modern world is louder. People in the past did, of course, live in complex and sometimes noisy sound environments. But in the pre-modern world bursts of sound would often eventually subside into what sound historian Alain Corbin has characterized as ‘‘habitual silence.’’3 In Britain, from the mid-nineteenth century, noise was perceived to be an increasing urban blight.4 Noise became a condition of modern urban life rather than an episodic interruption of it—the twentieth-century city generated a range of mechanical noises that were constant rather than occasional. Historian Emily Thompson has written of the growing concern about urban noise in the early decades of the twentieth century in the United States, an anxiety which found expression in the noise abatement movement and in New York’s 1929 appointment of a Noise Abatement Commission.5 Important to my theme is that amplified sound from loudspeakers, including radios, was by the 1930s a significant part of this urban noise problem. People noticed radio noise as something new, a significant and novel addition to the soundscape of domestic spaces. Part of the problem was that radio noise leaked through apartment and car windows, changing the sound environment all around. ‘‘What a wonderful thing it would be,’’ wrote ‘‘A Neighbor Who Loves Peace’’ from Madison, Wisconsin, ‘‘if everyone would play their radio for themselves only.’’6 A 1935 ‘‘Sonnet on Turning a Radio Dial’’ spoke of the silence-destroying power of radio: They are the foes of silence and of time, These voices from the fringes of the earth,

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Thronging the streams of air with stave and rhyme, Charging the clouds with ribaldry and mirth.7 My argument about sound abundance does not, however, focus simply on the question of relative volume of noise. The era of mechanical reproduction provided new possibilities for controlling sound and for making choices about, and exercising responsibility for, one’s sound environment. The exercise of judgment involved in turning the dial and changing stations was celebrated in broadcasting industry publicity as a fundamental American freedom. Decisions about sound environment, like choices of personal appearance and opinions, became important acts of self-definition and self-projection. With surprising rapidity, radio and the phonograph made the choice of music one of the key signs and expressions of personal identity.8 Radio magazines asked listeners about their preferences—Radio Stars, for example, ran a column entitled ‘‘What They Listen to and Why—Dial Twisters Cast Informal Votes for Pet Programs.’’9 More was at stake than musical taste or middle-class household aural decorum. Radio ineluctably made choice of music listening part of the work of shaping personal opinion and identity that was beginning to gain new importance during the 1930s, a key part of the task of self-making that is widely held to have characterized modernity.10 This emphasis on the role of music choice in the formation of the modern individual presupposes, but goes considerably beyond, the romantic conviction that appreciation of music is an inward, introspective, and emotional thing.11 Prudent sound choices and the concomitant practices of careful, conscious listening became citizenly duties during radio’s golden age. The opposite practices—neglect or abandonment of the responsibility of sound choice, and careless, promiscuous, or uncritical listening—were denounced as threats to social, civic, and psychological well-being. In listening as in so many other areas of modern life, citizens were, as sociologist Nikolas Rose puts it, ‘‘not merely ‘free to choose,’ but obliged to be free.’’12 Distracted listening was a renunciation of listening choice, the opposite of responsibly paying attention, of managing one’s responsiveness to the world. Art historian Jonathan Crary argues that by the early twentieth century, the attentive subject was ‘‘part of an internalization of disciplinary imperatives in which individuals are made more directly responsible for their own efficient or profitable utilization.’’13 Distracted listeners came to be perceived as either culpably unaware of or contesting that responsibility, and hence they became the objects of some anxious social and cultural commentary. Most obvious was that distracted listeners often had the radio on loud so that they could listen while they did other things. They left the radio on when not actually paying atten-

18

Affect and the Politics of Listening

tion. Proponents of deliberate and chosen listening regarded excessively loud or uncontrolled radios as egregious examples of ‘‘unnecessary noise.’’14 The new technologies for mechanically reproducing sound facilitated choice in different ways. The phonograph made possible the selection of sounds in bounded time—a record played for four or five minutes and then stopped. Technology now allows people to hear only the music of their choice, and whenever they want. Broadcasting, in contrast, allowed some choice of sound, but it also required constant vigilance, as one program followed another, to ensure that listening remained deliberate rather than random and accidental. Radio also created the possibility of the abandonment of choice—you could just let it play and hear whatever came along. Today that would give you from most radio stations some consistency of musical or discussion style. But if an American radio was just left on in the pre–World War II era of comprehensive, something-for-everyone programming, what came along was far more miscellaneous.15 The effects of exposure to such a stream of unsought and diverse sounds seemed, to many concerned commentators, highly unlikely to be beneficial. The abandonment of the responsibility of choosing sounds carefully was often said to be both symptom and cause of a distracted mind. This distraction was a classed and gendered phenomenon, a state of being that was understood to be both plebeian and feminine, but also to be technologically induced and hence becoming more common.

‘‘Just to Get Definite Programs’’ In 1928, early in the era of network broadcasting, a newspaper in Charles City, Iowa, reported that: ‘‘A family possessing a good radio set, and enjoying it, were surprised to be told by a friend the other day: ‘You’re the only friends I have, with radios in the house, who use them just to get definite programs. The rest all turn them on and keep them going all the time. They’re usually talking or eating or playing cards or reading, without paying any attention.’’’16 The disapproving tone of this story, and its description of American listening practices as already polarized between an elite of attentive and selective listeners, and a mass of distracted and indiscriminate ones, suggest the class dimensions of a history that still lies submerged. For the historian of listening, however, there is here a problem of evidence. There are many prescriptive sources that illustrate attentive, elite listening practices—the listening of those people who consulted a program guide, selected a program, dialed it in on their radio, and switched the set off at its conclusion. But how do we recover the rather more hidden—yet certainly more com-

Distracted Listening

19

mon—history of distracted listening, suggested by all those Iowans paying little or no attention to their radios? Few of them, unfortunately, produced memoirs of their inattention or autobiographical descriptions of how their lives flourished amid the apparent aural chaos of their households. The visual record at best offers little assistance and at worst leads the historian of listening in some wrong directions. The ideal mode of radio listening was depicted most often as a scene of people paying close attention, taking their listening seriously. The iconic image of the family seated around the living room radio as they once might have sat around the hearth still dominates the popular memory of radio’s golden age. These are attentive listeners, absorbed in their listening. One 1927 study described the radio as ‘‘merely an artificial extension’’ of the listener’s natural sense of hearing: ‘‘by its use, the scope of audition is extended far beyond natural range,’’ just as spectacles or a telescope had extended the range of vision.17 This sense of the radio listener as fully engaged and paying close attention to what he (usually it was he in such accounts) could hear stemmed from the earlier figure of the keen radio hobbyist intent upon pulling in distant stations, chained to his radio by headphones. The highly attentive listener was also the type involved in early radio listeners’ organizations, such as the Radio Listeners League, which began in Des Moines and had ten branches in Iowa by 1928. The League was opposed to direct selling but also very concerned about preserving good reception and eliminating sources of electrical interference.18 In South Dakota, the Huron Radio Listeners League was similarly dedicated to promoting advances in radio reception and reducing interference: ‘‘It is possible to quiet every type of man-made interference we have in Huron.’’19 During these early years of radio, in rural and quiet places, people often took their listening very seriously. But by the 1930s, these ardent listeners were a minority. Mass-audience broadcasting and the sheer abundance of radio sound soon created the possibility of other, more careless modes of listening. The serious, attentive listeners, however, have come to seem the archetypal listeners of radio’s golden age. From the advent of the loudspeaker era to the present, the dominant visual representation of radio listeners has been a family seated in a semicircle in the living room for the evening, listening intently to a program they all enjoy, engaging the radio with their eyes as well as their ears as they gaze respectfully, lovingly, delightedly at it. They are silent themselves, because their activity is happy listening (Figure 1.1). Shared radio entertainment certainly did bring the family together in unaccustomed ways. The congregation of the family in the home to hear news from outside was a novel but rapidly mythologized practice. A

Fig. 1.1: ‘‘With Philco the family hears the singer’s voice just as though the artist were present in person.’’ The family assembles around the radio and, although no one is looking directly at it, each person is listening with rapt attention. National Geographic 62 (December 1932).

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household listening to one of President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats remains the most iconic image of 1930s radio listening. American history textbooks portray this experience as a signature part of Depression and New Deal culture. This potent cultural memory has undoubtedly reinforced the dominant image of listeners generally as attentive and serious, earnestly receptive to information and advice about their own and the nation’s future.20 George Segal’s sculpture Fireside Chat at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., of a solitary man listening to one of the Fireside Chats, further enshrines this image of the attentive listener paying solemn, almost prayerful, attention to his radio, as one of the dominant national visual memories of 1930s radio listening.21 In contrast, the half-staged/half-ethnographic photographs of radio listening taken by Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographers show a greater range of postures and demeanors. They depict listeners seated or lying down, although with some evidence of simultaneous activity—perhaps reading, cuddling, or talking are also taking place (Figures 1.2, 1.3). But here too listeners are positioned at rest, in close proximity to and often in direct visual contact with their radios. In several of these photographs one listener has his or her hand on the dial, as if to emphasize that this is controlled, deliberate, choice-making listening, not a leisure-time scene with background sound. We have few visual records of the other kind of listeners—the casual, distracted, preoccupied multitaskers. Yet written evidence indicates that 1930s Americans often listened to radio in casual, fitful, indifferent, irreverent, self-preoccupied ways, paying whatever attention they could amid the aural cacophony of their lives. People did housework, shopwork, farmwork with the radio on. They relaxed as they listened, drank, smoked or played cards, bathed, dressed or undressed; women knitted, children played, teenagers talked and danced. Because people typically listened to radio with others, in the living room, they also often talked as they listened. The Crossley ratings agency estimated that the average radio set in use had three listeners—and hence, the University of Chicago’s radio director concluded, ‘‘the average listener more often than not is a ‘half-listener’; he is unable or unwilling to give full attention to his radio.’’22 Some of this happened just because radios were left on for several hours a day. A CBS survey in 1937 found that the average radio set was turned on for five hours and ten minutes each day.23 Often the radio was left playing simply because no one had switched it off, or because people had come to like the company of the background noise, as one program after another tumbled out of the speaker. But sometimes too people deliberately planned to use radio as background and invited oth-

22

Affect and the Politics of Listening

Fig. 1.2: Mother and son listen to the radio together in this Italian American home in Illinois. She is gazing at the radio, but he looks a little more restless. ‘‘Listening to a radio in the Senise home,’’ February 1943, Jack Delano, photographer, courtesy of the Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USW3016996-D, Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

ers to spend time with them in a distracted listening situation. Individuals and social organizations of many kinds held ‘‘radio parties’’—a new social form—in which social interaction and radio listening occurred together. In 1929 a Billings, Montana, woman hosted a radio party at which ‘‘besides enjoying the radio music, the afternoon was spent doing needlework and in social conversation.’’24 In 1930 the parents of a Missouri boy held a ‘‘radio party’’ for him: a ‘‘number of his little friends were present and spent a delightful evening at games and music.’’25 More than a decade later, students and faculty of a Missouri business college hosted a radio party at which ‘‘fifty young people were in attendance to enjoy dancing, ping pong and games.’’26 We know, then, that this kind of distracted listening was common. But when people were conscious that they were being photographed as radio listeners, they chose to play the role—or were directed to play the role—as best they could, as they knew it should be done, attentively and seriously.

Distracted Listening

23

Fig. 1.3: ‘‘A family listening to the radio and reading Father Coughlin’s newspaper Social Justice,’’ Royal Oak, Michigan, December 1939. The title given to this photograph suggests that part of the intention was to show the simultaneity of reading and listening. At this moment, the Social Justice newspaper is set aside for some more intense listening, but the picture nonetheless depicts an evening most likely spent reading and talking as well as listening. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USW3-016733-C DLC, Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Attentive listeners fulfilled civic expectations when they engaged news of the world or public speech with all of their serious attention. They were also doing what advertisers very much hoped they would— attending carefully to every word. A listener in Newark told a survey researcher in August 1935: ‘‘I like music more than anything because I can putter around without just sitting and listening.’’27 Such listeners were anathema to advertisers. Louis Witten, the director of the radio department of a New York advertising agency, advised potential radio advertisers in 1935 that ‘‘listening listeners’’ were what they needed: ‘‘I would fight to the death with any advertiser . . . who wanted to put on a nice musical program that you can have turned on without distracting the listener from his reading or bridge game.’’ Witten’s best advice for

24

Affect and the Politics of Listening

combating distracted listening was to make the advertisement ‘‘as strong entertainment as the show’’—he gave the example of the gag commercial perfected by some of radio’s top comics such as Jack Benny and Ed Wynn.28 The distracted listener posed a problem to advertisers, who did not want to pay for expensive programs and have listeners chatting as they listened, or worse, walking out of the room or performing noisy household chores when the advertisement break came on.

Gendered Distraction Only one kind of distracted listener has so far figured to any extent in radio history. British radio historian Kate Lacey argues that the ‘‘paradigmatic listener constructed by the industry throughout the better part of the twentieth century was the distracted, isolated and impassive housewife listening to the radio in the home while busy doing other things.’’29 The discovery of the money to be made from commercial daytime programming was certainly a turning point for the American radio industry in the mid-1930s. Program makers created open-ended, repetitious daytime programs with this archetypal distracted housewife in mind.30 Frank Stanton, then a researcher at Ohio State University, conducted a survey in 1935 on what people did while they listened to the radio. Men reported that they read and ate, while women mentioned a more diverse range of activities, including sewing, cleaning house, eating, ironing, and resting.31 Researchers well into the television age were still discovering that media consumption was gendered in just this way, with men expressing a desire to watch television quietly and attentively, and women becoming accustomed to viewing in a more distracted fashion as they dealt with an array of household tasks.32 Federal Writers Project interviewers, sent out to record the daily life of ordinary Americans, met some archetypal, distracted female radio listeners. When the radio was on in a busy household, it was often on loud. Visitors had to shout over it or yell at someone to turn it down. The interviewers described such scenes carefully and disapprovingly as they made their rounds in the late 1930s, noting how radio often competed with other household noise. In a South Carolina mill worker’s home in 1939, ‘‘a radio was playing full tilt and through the closed door came the strains of the popular song, ‘The Umbrella Man.’ To the noise of the radio was added the confusion of crying, petulant children.’’ The daughter of the house explained: ‘‘I’ve been back in the cook room scrubbing, and I had the radio turned loud so I could work and listen. I love the music and the songs.’’33 The housewife working at home epitomized the distracted listener, snatching what moments of enjoyment and concentration she could amid the ordinary tumult of her home.

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25

Women at home in the 1930s certainly were likely to listen extensively and hence distractedly during their other activities. A Florida woman told her interviewer: ‘‘Y’know, every minute I’s in the house, I keep that radio going. When I get up in the morning, first thing I do is turn it on. If I come in late at night, I turn it on until the local stations sign off; then I get an out of town station. I have to play it low tho, because Paul must get his sleep, but I like the gol-dern thing played full when I’s alone in the house.’’34 That sounds like someone in control of her sound environment. But the conclusions that critics reached about distracted women listeners were far from flattering. Women’s advice columnist Ruth Millett warned in stark terms against this kind of extensive listening: ‘‘He got a divorce—she got the radio. That was the way a California judge decided a divorce suit in which a husband charged his wife ‘wouldn’t clean house, care for the children, cook my meals or talk to me,’ because she was always listening to the radio.’’35 The housewife who has fallen into the habit of turning on the radio when she gets up in the morning and keeping it on all day, Millett advised, ‘‘is apt to be a muddle-headed person’’ with ‘‘a nervous, jittery state of mind.’’ Such feminine, extensive—and hence inevitably, at times, distracted—listeners were, Millett maintained, vulnerable to emotional influence. They were in danger of trading interest in real experience and their own actual lives for deep and often emotional involvement with a fictional world: ‘‘The worst radio addict among housewives ought to turn the radio off for at least three hours a day. She should do this even if she does have to stop following the fate of one or two of her airwave heroines. Her own life would be just as interesting to her if she ever took time out to figure out how to improve it and to find more happiness and contentment within herself.’’36 Adelaide Hawley was the host of a morning women’s show that aired over the years on the Mutual, CBS, and NBC networks. She talked often to her audience of women at home, advising them to think of themselves not as ‘‘housewives,’’ but rather as ‘‘home executives.’’ She understood, however, from her voluminous fan mail, that women more often responded to her show emotionally than as rational managers seeking enlightening information. This happened in part because the always-on radio became a companion imbricated in their lives, not a voice from outside to be rationally assessed. Hawley once characterized her audience: ‘‘Women in general—lonely, sentimental, eager to better themselves, eager to be kept in touch, prone to take the commentator’s remarks as gospel, think of her as personal friend.’’37 In 1944 a young mother wrote to Hawley: ‘‘Twice in the last twenty-four hours I have dreamed about you. Yesterday morning, after getting up early to take care of the baby and get my husband off to work, I fell asleep again while

26

Affect and the Politics of Listening

the baby took a nap, just about the time of your program, which I always listen to. I dreamed I was present at a broadcast and talking cheerfully to you and Clyde Kittell. I feel as though I know you both.’’38 Radio researchers, many of them with backgrounds in psychology, worried that women like Louise, whose radio friends had entered so fully into their mental and emotional world, had given up engagement with real life for a poor imitation of it—for what radio researcher Herta Herzog famously dubbed ‘‘borrowed experience.’’39 The most pressing concern was that such listeners would be vulnerable to skillful propaganda. Radio provoked both hopes and fears about its capacity to persuade. Early discussion of broadcasting contained a strong element of Progressive optimism about radio as a new tool of social planning and for communication of desirable and enlightened information. By the mid-1930s, however, with the examples of fascist and communist regimes aggressively using radio for propaganda internationally, and much anxious discussion domestically of the political power wielded by skilled, radio-adept populist political leaders such as Charles Coughlin and Huey Long, the dangers to democracy of a thinkalike population loomed large in the American imagination. Much of the 1930s educational material about the dangers of propaganda posited a connection between extensive background radio listening and an emotional, rather than detached, autonomous, and critical, response. The archetypal distracted housewife did not, it was feared, critically distance herself from what she heard, and thus she threatened to become a weak link in a democratic society and ultimately in national defense. What has been less recognized in the scholarship is that many men during the 1930s also listened in such stereotypically ‘‘feminine’’ and distracted ways, because their radios too were always on. Age, illness, loneliness, unemployment, isolation, and youth could each bring men into a more distracted relationship to the radio. Both male and female listeners in the late 1930s reported that they turned to radio for solace and companionship when they were home alone, and thus that their mental world included the continual sound of half-heard programs. A Connecticut man admitted that his listening was both constant and distracted: ‘‘Mr. Botsford . . . has been nodding in his Morris chair by the kitchen stove. . . . The radio is going full blast with a market broadcast, but he switches it off. ‘Got so I sleep or read with that damn thing goin’ and don’t pay no attention to it half the time.’ ’’40 Catherine Healy, of Lynn, Massachusetts, talked about her elderly uncle: ‘‘he’s got books and cards too and he’s got the radio. That things agoin’ from the time he gets up ’till he goes ta bed.’’41 It was not only older men who listened so extensively and distractedly. Unemployment during the Depression also provided many opportuni-

Distracted Listening

27

ties for extensive and compensatory radio listening. ‘‘The radio is going practically all day,’’ said an interviewee from an unemployed family, ‘‘It is our only recreation.’’42 Invalided and hospitalized men and women, often known as ‘‘shut-ins,’’ were also often avid radio listeners, likely to be extremely grateful for the boon of radio entertainment and to listen continually rather than selectively.43 ‘‘Shut ins’’ were, as Alice Keith observed in 1944, radio’s ‘‘most constant and loyal audience.’’44 Then there were the geographically isolated men and women who left the radio on a great deal of the time because it provided companionship in their rural or remote settings. A woman was observed in North Carolina: ‘‘As the radio program came to a close she said, ‘I can’t hardly wait every day to hear that story. I live out here two miles from towns and it’s jist like being in jail. Nobody comes, and I can’t git nowhere.’’45 A North Carolina farmer told an interviewer in 1938: ‘‘We get sort of lonesome. . . . We listen to all the good stories and string music. Sometimes we buy things they sell on the radio—medicine and other things.’’46 This kind of consolatory and extensive listening was not at all what the optimists about radio as a socially transforming technology had been hoping for. They wanted critical and finite listening, not an everlasting drone that intermittently became a deep part of the listener’s consciousness. The problem was serious because extensive and consolatory listening seemed to be becoming more widespread. Feelings of isolation were not, it turned out, confined to the countryside. In 1943 radio researcher Marjorie Fiske maintained that radio helped ameliorate a sense of isolation that she found to be almost everywhere in American society: ‘‘Most Americans today are more or less isolated in one way or another. Some people live on farms and are physically isolated; others live in cities and are psychologically isolated.’’47 For such isolated Americans, the alwayson radio provided a miscellaneous but absorbing engagement with other places and ways of life. When asked in 1937 if he liked to go out, a Polish farmer in rural Massachusetts responded: ‘‘No, I stay in da house, listen to radio. By God! dose cowboys are good! We like dem better dan anything else.’’48 Several categories of men, then, also began to develop extensive rather than intensive—and hence almost certainly at times distracted rather than focused—listening habits, thus joining the emerging pattern. That this kind of listening was coded as feminine in the culture no doubt only added to the vehemence of the publicly expressed disapproval of it. The distracted housewife remains one of the archetypal figures of media history. While not denying that many actual women did at times listen to radio in that way, I have tried here to complicate our under-

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Affect and the Politics of Listening

standing of the gendering of golden age radio listening. Extensive listening was necessarily at times distracted, because no one could listen attentively all day long. Men also engaged in distracted listening as they went about their activities and labors, and as they too chose to live in households in which the radio was on for many hours a day. Some of the housewife’s distraction grew from her engagement in housework and child care as the radio played. But some of it arose also from having the radio on a great deal of the time, and in adopting this new mode of living with sound she was not alone.

Radio as Noise One of the sources of our knowledge that many radios were played extensively rather than in a limited, planned, and intensive manner is the growing number of complaints, from the late 1920s on, about urban noise. The always-on, always-loud radio appeared to many Americans as a new urban nuisance. Some anti-noise campaigners referred to quietness as cleanliness and excessive noise as dirt—‘‘a kind of audible dirt,’’ one member of the League for Less Noise described it in a letter to New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia.49 Radio noise was different, however, from traffic or industrial noise. Because people chose to play their radios too loud and too long, excessive radio noise was described more as a product of sound addiction than of aural slovenliness. A 1929 newspaper article explained: ‘‘There are two classes of radio listeners. One is composed of people who use their radios with taste and temperance, tuning in when there is a program which interests them and shutting off the radio when the program is ended. They create no problem. The other is composed of people who keep their radios turned on all the time, accepting uncritically everything the ether has to offer.’’ This second class of constant, distracted, and hence uncritical listeners, the writer continued, ‘‘always go in for volume of sound’’ and ‘‘use the radio programs only for background for shouted conversation.’’50 The language of disapproval is revealing. There are ‘‘classes’’ of listeners, the better class exhibiting not only ‘‘taste’’ but ‘‘temperance.’’ The listeners whose radio is ‘‘on all the time’’ are thus positioned as displaying intemperance—they are the morally lax drunkards of listening, who do not know when to stop. Americans who lived in apartments found the noise of neighbors’ radios a new and often intolerable annoyance. A 1929 survey of Washington Post readers found that radio speakers topped the list of noise concerns.51 Many complained of the noise competition that resulted from adjacent urban radio listening—each resident turning up their radio to drown out the one next door—resulting, one noted, in ‘‘a rising cacoph-

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ony of sound including a cheesecake recipe, the fifth at Racehorse park, a high tenor, the strains of some song and four adenoidal announcers plugging the housewives’ latest commercial blessings.’’52 A 1939 poem complained of ‘‘My Neighbor’s Radio’’: No matter what the hour of day, My neighbor’s radio Is blaring forth the newest ads Of why and where to go. Of what to use for toothpaste, For shaving and for soap. Or Hitler’s speech in German Or peace words from the Pope. The poet concluded that the only consolation was: That since his always plays so loud At least mine won’t wear out.53 The novelty of the radio noise nuisance thus generated some wry and exasperated commentary through the 1930s, amounting at times to a debate on the idea of a right to quietness. In the context of a discussion of the failure of loud radio players to take responsibility for their own and others’ sound environments, the etiquette of adjusting the volume on radios was much discussed. One irate listener wrote to the New York Times: ‘‘My own maddening observation has been that the great majority of radio listeners turn on the volume very nearly full force: the announcers bellow at a pitch that would be heard through the Pennsylvania Station, and music is stepped up many times the volume heard on the concert stage or the dance hall.’’54 Devoted radio listeners demanded some quiet in order to hear their own favorite programs. In 1931 a Virginia man started a fight with his neighbor who was making so much noise that he could not hear Amos ’n’ Andy on his radio. The judge dismissed the charge, remarking that he could sympathize because he too was a radio fan.55 In some instances radio’s noise was becoming as much a topic of public debate as its message. In May 1935, the Catholic archbishop of Boston, Cardinal O’Connell, denounced the radio priest Charles Coughlin in terms that had to do with the sound of Coughlin’s broadcast voice as well as with the content of his ideas: ‘‘All those disturbing voices, the shouting, yelling and screaming, are so unbecoming to any one who occupies the place of a teacher in Christ’s church, that even the quality of their voices betrays them. They are hysterical.’’ Cardinal O’Connell

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talked also of ‘‘shouters and shriekers’’ who were ‘‘howling and shrieking for more money.’’56 Here it was not just the volume of radio noise that was resented but the capacity of radio to bring such angry political voices into the imagined tranquility of homes. Failure to take responsibility for radio noise could have serious consequences. In 1930 an Indianapolis woman committed suicide rather than face the humiliation and possible financial consequences of her neighbor’s decision to sue her for $5,000 in damages for playing her radio so loud and continuously that it had become a public nuisance.57 Loud radios left playing were coming to be understood as a sign and consequence of disorder and behavior out of control. Police arriving on the scenes of murders and suicides often reported finding the radio blaring—it was sometimes in fact the uncontrolled radio that had alerted neighbors to the problem.58 But the chaos of urban noise also eventually provided a certain immunization. U.S. health officials reported in 1940 that city boys made better soldiers than rural ones because ‘‘it takes more time to condition the lads from rural areas to the noise of battle.’’59 This would have been little comfort, however, to those concerned to protect the tranquility of the home from this new menace, who continued to find loud radio noise a distressing feature of urban life. Excessive noise stimulation was understood ultimately to pose a threat to mental health because it made people too nervous and excited. ‘‘At this time,’’ reported Federal Communications Commissioner Thad Brown in 1933, ‘‘we are being petitioned by many ‘distracted’ listeners for relief from loud speakers operating late in the night. Many complainants charge they are on the verge of nervous prostration.’’60 A New York man complained: ‘‘When I objected to the neighbors below me that I had a radio of my own, and did not care to listen to their roar from 6.30 to 11.30 every night, I was called a neurotic. After listening to the shabbiest jazz programs pounding on your ears for five hours every night, who would not develop a neurosis or something worse?’’61 The Chicago Tribune reported medical opinion about a possible cause of the ‘‘alarming increase in insanity’’ in the nation: ‘‘urban noises which wear upon and finally snap delicate nerves.’’62 In 1939 a physician reported ‘‘many cases of induced psycho-neurotic patients, whose condition has been caused by some imbecile who runs his radio above room pitch.’’63 One letter to the New York Times in 1933 told of a person being driven to suicide from the ‘‘incessant din’’ of a neighbor’s radio—‘‘this poor soul was only one of thousands who lie awake night after night with their nerves, their ears, their brains pounded to distraction by others utterly heedless of any right to a sanely quiet night.’’64 The sheer volume and relentlessness of extensive radio playing was a matter of considerable concern.

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The problem was, however, not just the volume of radio noise but the dangers of listening to competing sounds. Some experts began to argue that listening to two things at once would overtax the mind, and in the longer run lead to mental strain or insanity. ‘‘I am sure many parents do not realize the harm they are doing,’’ observed one educator, ‘‘when they keep up a steady flow of conversation during good radio programs.’’ This, she warned, could not but have a ‘‘disturbing effect on the nervous and emotional system.’’65 Distracted listening was thus being defined as a health hazard—listening to too many things at once could contribute to mental overstimulation and eventually madness. The Charles City, Iowa, newspaper quoted earlier continued its reflections on households where the radio was always on: ‘‘No man or woman can serve two masters. Doing two things at once is double service. If conversation and radio are going on at the same time in the same room, neither can be altogether ignored. From such confusion come many of the nervous troubles of present day life.’’66 Because radio listening was voluntary, the implication was that people should take more responsibility for their listening and not endanger others by their slovenly or addicted listening practices. Radio noise was a problem because it took away the possibility of making sound choices. The consensus of educated opinion was that excessive listening, which was necessarily at many times distracted listening, would ultimately drive people mad. During World War II, with its disturbing news reports, experts were further warning of ‘‘radio fatigue,’’ among the symptoms of which were overexcitement, insomnia, and an inability to recognize that there was a problem: ‘‘without realizing it, the nervous system may be ‘edgy’ and remain in that undesirable state for hours because we lack the wit to change the dial.’’67 Always, the key distinguishing characteristic of the responsible listeners was that they knew when to switch off and to return to unmediated life. This suggested a new issue—how to bring up children to be responsible listeners. If the young were raised as distracted listeners, prospects for an attentive society in the future were dim.

Young Listeners Distracted listening was demonstrably becoming more widespread, in part because young people seemed—disturbingly—even more comfortable than their elders with extensive, inattentive, background listening. Children and young adults liked having the radio on as much of the time as possible, and young people were repeatedly discovered to be among the most ‘‘radio-minded’’ of Americans.68 Families that had to sell their radios during the Depression often found that their children

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were the most disconsolate at the loss, the most likely to start going out just to hear radio again. A 1937 survey of the listening preferences of ten thousand Minnesotans found that the ‘‘average amount of time the radio is in use each day is greater in the homes of lower socio-economic status and in the homes with the larger number of children under sixteen years of age.’’ The fear was that if young people retained their extensive listening habits into adulthood, the more plebeian, extensive mode of listening was destined to become the norm.69 Where household radios were on for more than four hours a day, children were listening for a significant proportion of their waking time, much of it in a distracted fashion. A child-rearing advice columnist painted this picture of a radio home in which the children created a distracted listening environment: ‘‘In the next room the radio was going full blast. And as if it were not bad enough to have it turned on so loud, the broadcasting stations were constantly being changed. In trying to make themselves heard above the din from the next room, the two mothers were shouting at each other.’’70 Many children, it was calculated, were putting in more hours over a year listening to the radio than they were in attending school.71 The perceived issue about children, as about women, was not just the time ‘‘spent’’ but the substitution of vicarious for real experience. In a 1936 survey of sixth-grade children in New York, 50 percent of boys and 43 percent of girls reported dreaming about radio programs.72 An advice columnist warned a mother in 1943: ‘‘Obviously your 5 year old is overdoing his radio listening. He needs companionship. . . . He is living a phantom existence in an unreal world and he will not leave it unless forced to do so.’’73 Radio researcher Herta Herzog moved from data such as these to some disturbing questions about the emotional effects of radio on children and the civic consequences of extensive listening: ‘‘To what extent will they be trained this way, later on always to look for somebody else to provide excitement for them and thus fall easy prey to any kind of propaganda which makes use of their emotional starvation?’’74 Through the 1930s, discussion of radio and emotion was inevitably linked in this way to the idea of propaganda. Any emotional rather than rational engagement with broadcast material was, as I have suggested, scrutinized for its national security implications, the suggestion of a population dangerously vulnerable to manipulation by skilled persuaders. Distracted listening would, it was feared, render people—especially those who listened in stereotypically feminine or juvenile ways—more susceptible to propaganda.75 The ideal listener was most often in contrast implicitly gendered masculine. He was the rational and emotionally detached listener who had the self-confidence and the internal resources

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to turn the radio off and offer his own opinion. Distracted, extensive, radio-always-on listeners—just like emotionally intensive, gripping-thefurniture listeners—were said to lack critical distance from their listening. Both kinds failed to meet the norms of ideal listening attentiveness because both had trouble separating themselves from their listening and bringing it to an end. Keith Tyler, an educational researcher at Ohio State University, produced a depressing list of what he understood to be some of the typical effects of radio listening on children: ‘‘Excessive stimulation of small children from exciting radio dramas; excessive anxiety over fate of characters on part of some children; tendency towards excessive use of the ‘wisecrack’ and other ‘broad’ humor; dissatisfaction with situations not highly spiced with melodrama; warped sense of values from dishonest portrayal of life; imitation of poor English usage in some cases; tendency toward inattention during music and speaking owing to radio-listening habits.’’76 The summary pulled together the diagnoses that were most commonly made of young radio listeners—that while at some times they paid radio too rapt and excited attention, their overexposure to the medium necessarily made them at other times listless and inattentive. These apparently contradictory themes—that radio caused too much excitement but also induced passivity and torpor—amounted to a charge that young people both under- and overvalued their listening. They lurched from listening that was distracted, passive, and too extensive to listening that was excited and too intensive. On the one hand, then, children’s radio listening was criticized as a passive amusement ‘‘demanding nothing from a child but a pair of ears,’’ but on the other hand, radio serials were blamed for children’s sleeplessness and overexcitement: ‘‘Any child who is made nervous, excitable or sleepless by radio programs, or who neglects his active play to stay pasted to the radio, is being harmed, not amused, by its entertainment.’’77 A researcher in 1938 found that children became very excited when listening to radio drama, ‘‘gripping some article of furniture tightly, gasping, chuckling involuntarily, sobbing, laughing and weeping quietly.’’78 This was clearly a form of listening that could not be extended for hours a day, and a natural consequence then was reported to be subsidence into a more passive, disengaged, and distracted form of listening. Overlistening produced under-listening, and both stood in clear moral contrast to the kind of deliberate, calm, rational, fully attentive and timebounded listening that was always recommended by experts. Concerns had thus been expressed, almost since the beginning of broadcasting, about the dangerous passivity of radio listening. Douglas McGregor of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory reported in 1934 on research that appeared to show that radio listening ‘‘has a somewhat

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dulling effect on the higher mental processes of the listener.’’ Radio listeners became ‘‘less critical, less analytic, more passively receptive’’ than when talking face to face.79 It was thus feared that many radio listeners— and again particularly those whose radios were always on—entered an inactive mental state as they listened. In a survey of California high school students, only 10 percent reported that they were completely alert while listening—20 percent listened lying down while ‘‘completely relaxed’’; half regularly read or studied with the radio on.80 Particularly with young adults, there was concern that such distracted, extensive listening might dull the senses and lead to generally lowered levels of response to the world around. The passive and excited listener thus offered opposed warnings. Both conditions stood in stark contrast to those civically responsible modes of listening that connected appropriately critical listeners to their community. Two educators in 1940 described each kind of listening pathology: ‘‘We are being steadily weaned away from resolute questioning, steadily debased into passive mental receptivity, dulled by repeated narcoticisms of ‘swing,’ of shock-psychology advertising, so that even the reserved and wary are finding their discriminative powers to be growing dull and torpid.’’81 In contrast, they asserted, short fifteen-minute radio programs ‘‘resort to devices which induce emotional tension that finds no physical release; the listener, moreover, moves rapidly from program to program, often leaving the radio tuned to the same station for a series of wholly unrelated programs. The habits of indiscriminate listening which are formed in this way tend to generalise themselves in all ordinary listening situations.’’82 In such an environment, these teachers concluded, as did many of their colleagues, that the ability to listen appropriately could no longer be assumed but would have to be carefully taught.

Listening Reformers The kind of compensatory, consolatory listening that the Federal Writers Project interviewers encountered in U.S. households rarely met with approval from official or intellectual elites. In their ostentatious consumption of a previously scarce resource, many ordinary Americans thus incurred the stern disapproval of those who hoped that radio could be improving rather than merely distracting, and who wanted a clear separation between leisure activities and work and self-improvement, not a continual blur and muddle of the three. Many of those Americans who held high hopes for radio as a transformative force were provoked by the apparent epidemic of distracted listening to describe and facilitate a better and more attentive mode of listening. The history of concern about distracted radio listening is in its turn

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but a chapter in the longer history of attentiveness and concern about attention deficit. Critics of the recent medicalization of attention deficit draw attention to the speeded-up contemporary cultural context, the proliferation of technologies designed to ‘‘make people go through all activities of their life faster.’’ Such a culture, they argue, encourages the very behaviors of ‘‘sensory addiction,’’ distractibility and inability to attend to mundane activities, which it then labels, in their more egregious or persistent forms, as aberrant.83 During the 1920s, ‘‘restlessness syndrome’’ was also defined as a new clinical behavioral problem. Restlessness as a diagnosis was in part a consequence, as historian Peter Stearns notes, of the ‘‘imposition of heightened control standards on children’’—in other words, expectations of attentiveness had shifted more than behavior.84 Jonathan Crary also argues that ‘‘modern distraction can only be understood through its reciprocal relation to the rise of attentive norms and practices,’’ as an effect of ‘‘the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects.’’85 Radio listening became an important site of this new concern about levels of attentiveness, resulting in a proliferation of advice that listening had to be conscious and deliberate, chosen rather than accidental. Recommendations that people consult newspaper radio program guides, make considered choices of programs, and organize listening groups were common responses to the known background of endemic casual listening. Lesley Johnson writes that intelligent listening to early radio was understood as ‘‘a matter of making choices, selecting programs appropriate to one’s needs or desires.’’ Radio, she reports, was thought of as a bountiful medium, and the listener had to be ‘‘responsible in choosing from the array of goods.’’86 It soon became clear in discussions along these lines that listening reformers had a classed as well as a gendered understanding of who the problem listeners were. The rejection of distracted listening was in one sense a pathologizing of the more extreme forms of a condition that was understood to be all around—of what the New York Times in 1924 referred to as the ‘‘restlessness of the age’’ stemming from ‘‘jazz and all that it implies—automobiles, speed and so forth.’’87 But some were understood to be more able to resist this restlessness than others. The Americans thought to be most vulnerable were those least able to assert themselves and their own personalities against the tide of information and entertainment flowing from their radios. One educator, writing in 1924 about the education of ‘‘low I.Q.’’ students, described ‘‘slow’’ school students as typically ‘‘restless’’ and ‘‘impulsive’’ and as therefore needing a ‘‘quiet, peaceful atmosphere to serve as an anodyne for their restlessness and excitability.’’ In the age of radio and talking pictures, she argued, such students had to be taught how to listen as well as how to read.88

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Listening reformers wanted listening to be not just a private or solipsistic activity but something that eventually led outwards to engagement with people in the world. It was clear to many educators that proper listening would have to be taught and that schools should concern themselves—as one New York English teacher put it in 1938—with the making of ‘‘alive and intelligent listeners.’’89 Sherman Dryer recommended dimming the lights at home, even closing one’s eyes, to really concentrate on broadcast drama and music.90 The first step was to alert people to the undesirability, even danger, of distracted listening. It became an explicit aim of school music appreciation to teach students that they should listen to broadcast music with all their concentration, not while they did something else. Educators were responding to surveys that showed that most radio listeners, most of the time, were not giving their undivided attention to listening. One of the primary messages of broadcast music appreciation lessons was thus simply that music listening—wherever it took place—ought to be undertaken in a serious and concentrated manner. Educators lamented the new practice of studying with the radio on. A Newark high school music teacher reported the following exchange: ‘‘Why, my radio is on all the time,’’ said one pupil . . . ‘‘I like to listen to it when I do my homework.’’ The others nodded assent. ‘‘We all do. Don’t you?’’ The teacher replied that it required all his attention to listen to the radio.91

College students were also studying with the radio on. A reporter in 1935 found that many Yale students had a radio both by their bed and in their studies: ‘‘Many students leave their sets on, to form a soft musical background, which, they say, is definitely helpful to study.’’92 In 1941 Harvard’s rule forbidding radio use after 10:00 p.m. was amended, in recognition of the fact that it was being broken nightly. The new regulation allowed the later use of radios, ‘‘so adjusted as not to be heard in any neighboring room.’’93 Music appreciation lessons on the radio were one of the educational activities undertaken by American radio during the 1930s. NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour, hosted by conductor and composer Walter Damrosch, was the most celebrated and publicized of these programs. The introduction to the NBC Music Appreciation Hour Student Notebook warned students that, to become really acquainted with what music can do, ‘‘we must learn to listen with concentration . . . we must listen with all our might to hear what is going on.’’94 That insistence was the polemical edge to the music appreciation movement, newly energized at the disturbing prospect of all the casual listening that radio enabled. Many young people, reported one prominent English teacher, ‘‘have the radio

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performing constantly during waking, and sometimes working, hours . . . the beat of a jazz band accompanies, agreeably for them, the study of Julius Caesar, the probing of a geometrical problem, or a translation from Victor Hugo.’’95 Exhorting students to regard listening as an activity in itself, and hence both curtailing and concentrating listening, was an important pedagogic aim. The insistence that listening was an activity requiring full concentration led many to oppose the idea of car radios when they were first proposed. Massachusetts wanted to ban the use of car radios while the car was in motion.96 There was concern that listening would divert drivers from their principal task, that tuning the radio would distract, and even that listening to music could lull the driver to sleep. As late as 1934, a survey conducted by the Automobile Club of New York found that 56 percent of respondents regarded car radios as a dangerous distraction.97 The car industry argued in response that in fact listening to radio in the car made for ‘‘steadier and easier driving.’’98 Pontiac’s accessories manager claimed in 1935 that car radio listening ‘‘reduces nervous tension and driver fatigue.’’99 The debate about car radios illustrates the persistence and the depth of concern about distracted listening, for there was much commercial pressure to accede to the new practice of driving and listening. The teaching of proper radio listening also took a place in the English curriculum, where the emphasis was on critical listening and the making of choices and discriminations. English teacher Carlton Larrabee described a series of lessons in which pupils could be brought to understand the need for conscious and attentive listening. Students were asked to keep a log of their daily listening, including not only the names of programs, but answers to the key questions ‘‘why did you listen?’’— was it by choice or mere circumstance?—and ‘‘how did you listen?’’— were students giving their ‘‘whole attention,’’ or were they ‘‘reading, writing, talking, playing a game, or trying to study when the program was on?’’100 English teachers were thus also attempting to convey the idea that listening was a serious matter, not to be undertaken in conjunction with other tasks. In high schools, students were taught ‘‘critical and discriminating radio listening.’’ Educator Keith Tyler was one of those advocating a pedagogical solution to the cultural, civic, and political threats that distracted radio listening posed. He argued that the ‘‘primary objective’’ in radio education at school should be to ‘‘develop in students the ability and the disposition in their leisure listening to select radio programs with discrimination.’’ This was not just a moral or class preference for attentive listening. Educators like Tyler understood that indiscriminate listeners were a national liability. A population of critical listeners

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offered national protection against propaganda—such listeners ‘‘will be our greatest bulwark against these threats to democracy because they will be able to discriminate—to discern differences.’’101 Tyler reported proudly, ‘‘Teachers are recognizing their responsibility to aid the student in interpreting his radio experience. They know that the hope of democracy is a citizenry which is alert and critical.’’102 Educators like Tyler were in the 1930s very articulate about the civic context of listening practices.

Sacralized Music Recorded and then broadcast sound effected a permanent shift in people’s relationship to music. For the first time, music educator Lilla Belle Pitts observed with some satisfaction in 1939, ‘‘the everyday lives of all are flooded with gratuitous music.’’103 Contemporaries were right to regard this diffusion of free music as a profound, even a revolutionary change, and it is one still inadequately explored by historians. Cocooned in the mass-mediated age of commodified sounds, habituated to the rapid succession of new technologies for producing audio stimulation on demand, we have only imperfectly comprehended the hopes and fears that such a revolution in the availability of music initially provoked. The broadcasting of music created the unprecedented possibility that ordinary people could select the music they liked and accompany their everyday lives with music. Music educators moved from saying that music could be part of everyone’s daily life to arguing that it should be. In 1938 Hannah Cundiff and Peter Dykema maintained that the first goal of elementary school music education should be that all children welcome music ‘‘as an important part of their lives and desire to share it with others.’’104 Dykema thought that radio music could help women in particular ‘‘develop their personality by giving them freedom of choice of the material to which they listen.’’105 Phonographs and then radio brought the experience of a life accompanied by music to most Americans, not long after ‘‘silent’’ films (which were actually accompanied by live music) and then movies with soundtracks had popularized the idea of matching appropriate music to life activities. Radio, however, as one music educator lamented, was a ‘‘regrettably chaotic instrument.’’106 It exposed listeners to an endless miscellany of programs and allowed them to listen in a great variety of circumstances. That radio listeners were making musical choices without the benefit of formal instruction was a matter of concern to music educators. One Los Angeles teacher argued that there was an urgent need for music appreciation instruction to aid the listener ‘‘in selecting his musical friends as he would his personal friends.’’107 The possibilities of random, episodic,

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distracted encounters with music disturbed educators, just as they began to excite and intrigue listeners. Theodor Adorno even speculated that listeners could be enjoying ‘‘playing’’ their radio as they might learn to play a piano accordion, generating satisfying sounds by twirling the dial.108 Without a live, proximate audience, there could be nothing like the implied social contract of the concert hall with its codes of respectful silence, rapt attention, and not applauding between movements. Radio listeners remained embedded in their own mundane surroundings, subject to all the interruptions and distractions of daily life. A Federal Writers Project interviewer noted archly of her visit to a Brookfield, Massachusetts, household that ‘‘the radio was on, a symphony orchestra was playing softly and beautifully, but we were chatting because two of the group ‘just love music,’ but evidently didn’t care to ‘listen.’ ’’109 The suspicion voiced here was clearly that the ability to appreciate good music, to listen appropriately, would not be as easily diffused as the music itself. This pessimism about the capacity of ordinary people to pay attention for long enough truly to appreciate great music was also of course a conservative optimism that the class order would hold and that the cultural markers of class would retain their efficacy. The suspicion that people were listening to profound or sacred music while engaged in mundane activities was an inevitable topic for debate. Composer and publisher William Arms Fisher asked pointedly, ‘‘Is music really debased by becoming an accompaniment to everyday existence; is it losing its divinity because an immense amount of it resounds in ‘unhallowed places’?’’ He denounced such ‘‘snobbish exclusiveness’’ as ‘‘the cry of the Brahmin caste brought up in the old idea that music is essentially an aristocratic art that must be screened and protected from the unthinking multitude.’’110 The Chicago Tribune’s Edward Barry announced with mock seriousness that he sided with the ‘‘fanatics’’ who objected to washing the dishes to music or shaving to the Egmont Overture, although he conceded that the attitude of considering music an end in itself ‘‘is a rather recent development’’ and that historically music had more often been used as a means to ‘‘intensify mood.’’111 Music educator Peter Dykema acknowledged that music could sometimes ‘‘legitimately and helpfully’’ be used as background—‘‘almost everyone is stimulated in his thinking and conversation by music, provided it is not so loud that it claims the center of attention.’’ But Dykema also warned that too much listening to music as background could ‘‘develop the habit of nonchalance, or inattention, of treating all music as though it were not worthy of one’s careful thought.’’112 To the guardians of the classical music tradition, the possibility of listening to great music in a distracted, distanced, or preoccupied manner was thus vexing. Music

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educators and critics futilely exhorted listeners to attempt to recreate something of the rapt attention of the concert hall at home. Why was casual listening to broadcast classical music in particular so provoking of anxiety? Daniel Barenboim recently observed, ‘‘The United States I think was very active in starting this process of creating opportunities to hear music without listening to it.’’113 That was precisely the concern of music educators during the 1930s as they saw or imagined radio creating the possibility of ordinary Americans listening to great music with intermittent attention and inappropriate casualness. Historians of classical music have argued that it had become sacralized by the later nineteenth century.114 Secular musical performances in the eighteenth century were, Peter Gay argues, ‘‘mere accompaniments to sociability,’’ but by the nineteenth century ‘‘undivided silent attention’’ was expected.115 The proliferating evidence of casual and inattentive listening during the 1930s posed then a particular threat to the only recently sacralized status of the classical music tradition. Some of this unease among elites was dismay as ordinary Americans began conspicuously and wastefully to consume what had so recently been rare, precious, and even sacred sound commodities. The opportunity to listen to music while doing something else had for much of history been a prerogative of the wealthy, who could afford to pay musicians to play while they ate or talked—a form of conspicuous consumption of the labor of hired musical servants. Just as the new aural abundance created the possibility of choice, so it also created the likelihood of wasteful consumption. Thorstein Veblen in 1899 had argued that only conspicuous and ‘‘wasteful’’ consumption added to the consumer’s good fame and reputation.116 The loud and unattended radio clearly amounted to a wasteful consumption of sound. While critics chastised inattentive listeners, perhaps—more speculatively—those listeners understood themselves as possessors of a bountiful and abundant sound resource, and as gaining some prestige from that bounty. The phonograph and then radio—mechanical servants—put such casual listening within the reach of the many and thus created the troubling possibility of a daily and domestic form of the conspicuous, wasteful consumption of something culturally esteemed.117 Pierre Bourdieu has argued that ‘‘material or symbolic consumption of works of art constitutes one of the supreme manifestations of ease, in the sense both of objective leisure and subjective facility.’’118 He described in the French context an aristocratic aesthetic, which involved an at times indifferent relation to art works, and he argued that this ‘‘aesthetic disposition is one dimension of a distant self-assured relation to the world and to others which presupposes objective assurance and distance.’’119 There was certainly a residual air of aristocratic insouciance

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about not paying close attention to ‘‘serious’’ music—an attitude quite at odds with the bourgeois seriousness of the now sacralized tradition. Radio made possible that kind of distraction or inattention in the home and gave the listener the aristocratic power to dismiss music with a twist of the dial. Now anyone could listen with casual indifference to even the most sacred works. This diffidence was also a form of emotional restraint, quite different from the emotional intensity that music, from Wagner to swing, had historically provoked—an example perhaps of what Peter Stearns, delineating the history of the American idea of ‘‘cool,’’ describes as a growing ‘‘general aversion to emotional intensity’’ and a ‘‘declining tolerance for emotional intensity in others’’ in the United States from the 1920s.120 Casual, distanced, cool consumption of serious music could be read as a claim to ‘‘aristocratic’’ status quite inappropriate among those without long and deep familiarity with musical tradition. The prevalence of distracted listening to broadcast sound soon suggested something else—the designing of a music specifically made for distracted, background listening. In 1934 Muzak first introduced its standardized, formatted background ‘‘functional music,’’ targeted to moods appropriate for each time of the day, designed not to be listened to with full attention.121 Muzak played a part in normalizing the experience of background distracted listening to music. It conveyed broad moods but did not provide or demand any more precise emotional or intellectual engagement—music historian Ronald Radano argues that Muzak stands ‘‘at the nexus of music and noise.’’122 Condemned by earnest music lovers, Muzak was at least a concession that distracted listening really required a whole separate, purpose-designed category of music. But it did little to allay the greatest concern of defenders of the musical tradition—distracted listening to ‘‘serious’’ music.

Adorno on Distraction Nobody theorized the cultural conflict about distracted listening to canonical music more eloquently, insightfully, and intolerantly than Theodor Adorno. Working from 1938 for the Rockefeller Foundationfunded Princeton Radio Research Project, and hostile to so much of the ethos of American commercial radio, Adorno held strongly to the ideal of serious listening and contrasted it with the mundane circumstances of much actual American radio use. Radio allowed people to listen to music in the ordinary circumstances of their homes, perhaps, he speculated thoughtfully, ‘‘as a background to console them for their trivial lives.’’123 Distraction had first entered the vocabulary of twentieth-century cul-

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tural theory with a visual rather than aural reference.124 Walter Benjamin famously found in popular viewing of film and architecture a new mode of distracted perception (‘‘Rezeption in der Zerstreuung’’), to which he attributed some positive possibilities. He thought that distracted viewing was ‘‘symptomatic of profound changes in apperception’’ and suggested that in the formation of modern urban masses there was a new potential for a sort of distracted criticism, unintimidated by the ‘‘aura’’ around the original work of art. Destroying the aura and tradition of the work of art was ‘‘the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ ’’ was strong—it was, in other words, a progressive form of seeing.125 Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno would have none of this. His continuing interest in music, and his employment at the Radio Research Project, led him to respond to Benjamin’s visually centered ideas about art, film, architecture, and mechanical reproducibility with a complex set of arguments about distraction in relation to listening and mechanically reproduced music. Adorno’s intention in his radio work during the late 1930s was in part to counter Benjamin’s rather cryptic optimism about distracted viewing. In 1936 Adorno was already disputing the progressive potential of the distracted mass cinema audience and telling Benjamin, ‘‘I cannot find your theory of ‘distraction’ at all convincing.’’126 In his various, lengthy writings on music and radio, Adorno argued a case about the effects of distracted listening to broadcast music. In 1938 he told Benjamin that he was particularly interested in the problem of ‘‘what happens to music that gets played even though no one actually listens to it’’—just the kind of enigmatic gesture toward a research problem that so teased and exasperated his more empiricist colleagues at the Radio Project.127 In his work on broadcast music, Adorno argued that radio transformed music as well as disseminated it and that the experience of listening to radio music was profoundly different from the experience of listening in the concert hall. To this extent, Adorno agreed with Benjamin that there was an aura about the live concert performance that was lost when people listened at home—but he lamented the loss. Distraction in the cinema was one thing—the cinema audience was at least seated, in the dark, facing the screen. Distraction at home, in radio listening, was quite a different thing. The ‘‘authenticity, or aura,’’ Adorno wrote, was ‘‘vanishing in music because of mechanical reproduction.’’128 Broadcast music, he concluded, could be listened to only in ‘‘regressive’’ and ‘‘infantile’’ fashion, and by that he meant distractedly, in evasion of the responsibility to make sound choices: ‘‘Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music . . . but they stubbornly reject the

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possibility of such perception.’’129 Adorno thus came to quite different conclusions about distracted listening than had Benjamin about distracted cinema viewing. The distracted listener of radio music was condemned to hear only fragments and to appreciate only ‘‘isolated charms’’ rather than the whole structure of a piece: ‘‘if the film as a whole seems to be apprehended in a distracted manner, deconcentrated listening makes the perception of a whole impossible.’’130 While this might trouble only musical purists, of obviously broader concern was Adorno’s assertion that regressive, fragmented, and distracted listeners were likely to lose ‘‘the age-old sacral function of music as the locus for the taming of impulses.’’131 The distraction argument was for Adorno part of the explanation for the rising popularity of jazz and other forms of popular music. He maintained that popular music was intrinsically a music of distraction and that it thus suited perfectly the circumstances of most radio listening: ‘‘The frame of mind to which popular music originally appealed, on which it feeds, and which it perpetually reinforces, is simultaneously one of distraction and inattention.’’132 Radio exaggerated these tendencies, reducing even classical music to the condition of jazz. Distraction was ‘‘bound to the current mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subjected.’’ For Adorno, distraction could even be characterized as ‘‘a product of popular music,’’ a genre that neither sought nor rewarded sustained attention.133 These ideas have been influential, generative, and of course deeply controversial in cultural studies and history. Arguably, Adorno and Benjamin were right about the cultural importance of distraction, even if we are not entirely persuaded by their generalizations from it. But my point here is that Adorno and Benjamin’s debates are better remembered now—in scores of texts—than the concerns of their contemporaries about distracted listening. It is useful to put their theoretical preoccupations back into cultural and historical context.134 It was, as we have seen, by no means only e´migre´ theorists who were troubled by radio’s distracting effects and the apparent contagion of distracted listening. The theme of the contrast of distracted and serious listening was taken up in myriad discussions in American society, concerning quite mundane as well as high aesthetic issues. Whether children should be allowed to listen to the radio while doing their homework, for example, was a practical question confronting many American families. Thomas Clyde Polson undertook research for his 1936 Berkeley doctoral dissertation, ‘‘Effects of Heterogeneous Auditory Stimuli of Various Sound Levels upon Reading Rate and Reading Comprehension.’’ He found—in some ways confirming Benjamin’s hunch that distracted perception allowed one to

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grasp wholes more than parts—that listening to music on radio while studying increased the ability to understand paragraph organization and outline material, but slightly reduced the ability to get meaning from sentences.135 Many Americans were keenly interested in the questions that motivated Polson’s research—what effects would the new conditions of listening have on people’s everyday lives? Adorno thought research into the relation between radio music listening and digestion deserved special attention: ‘‘Do they listen before meals, during meals, or after meals?’’ Even the normally skeptical and empiricist Paul Lazarsfeld, director of the Princeton Radio Research Project, was moved to write ‘‘good’’ against the suggestion that if people listened after meals ‘‘this would prove the easing, distracting effect which music attains today.’’136 Adorno was not alone in asking anxious questions about the relation between digestion and radio listening. Research earlier in the decade at the Colgate University psychological laboratory had appeared to show that listening to loud radio music in fact slowed or inhibited digestion, and could even cause indigestion.137 But Adorno’s concern was on the listening, not the digestion, side. In modern America, ‘‘the listener can hear a Beethoven symphony while he shaves or takes a nap.’’138 Or, he might smoke. ‘‘Very likely,’’ Adorno speculated, ‘‘a large proportion of listeners smoke while they listen.’’ This, he argued, was ‘‘directly contrary to the attitude of the concert listener’’ and was actually, he feared, ‘‘directed against the aura of the work of art’’: ‘‘One, so to speak, blows smoke into the face of the sound.’’ In fact, for Adorno, the smoking radio listener was emblematic: ‘‘The person who smokes, feels himself in a state of isolation and has no great respect for what he is offered. . . . It is very possible that a close correlation may exist between smoking and radio in general.’’139 It is a striking aside, more illuminating than much of Adorno’s more deliberate and extended theorizing about radio. In linking radio listening to smoking, Adorno draws attention to what he regards as the self-focused and merely gratificatory nature of both activities. The smoking listener might appear to be attentive—in an earlier formulation of this idea Adorno observed that ‘‘smoking can serve to concentrate attention’’— but in the end, ‘‘the person who smokes is experiencing himself.’’140 Adorno’s response was extreme, so allergic was he to the ways that the new technology enabled new distracted or insufficiently attentive ways of listening. But I have been arguing that we have largely forgotten the extent to which many thoughtful, if overanxious, Americans shared his concern about the new possibilities for casual, distracted, and careless listening, about listening that was subordinated to mere relaxation and self-gratification. It is one of the striking things about the 1930s that they produced a concerted discussion of the social, cultural, and civic con-

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texts of listening—in many ways anticipating and even exceeding in complexity the somewhat repetitive concerns of cultural critics of later decades about active and passive listening. Meaghan Morris argued in a critique of 1980s cultural studies that reducing cultural consumption to the opposition contemplation/distraction originally formulated in Weimar Germany ‘‘can serve only to limit and distort the possibilities of popular practice.’’141 One important reason that we should know the history and extent of earlier debates about distraction is so that we do not simply reproduce them in the present.

Conclusion: Distraction’s History Distracted listening was a part of the modern condition—enabled by the revolutionary technology of recorded and broadcast sound that allowed ordinary people to choose to accompany their lives with talk and music from elsewhere. In the 1930s, responsible and irresponsible modes of listening were defined and debated as the new conditions of listening were culturally absorbed. Excessively attentive and negligently inattentive listening practices were identified and invidiously contrasted to the listening behavior of the ideal, attentive, alert, and critical citizen, who would listen for a finite time and then turn off the radio. The debate about distracted listening belongs to the age of the furniture-sized loudspeaker. The portable transistor radio, which enabled listening outdoors, provoked different concerns.142 When the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis visited the United States toward the end of his career in 1966, he chose in one lecture to observe how in ‘‘those once very quiet places’’ near Cambridge ‘‘to which my wife and I used to take our children, the working-class people now everywhere to be met with in profusion carry transistors round with them almost invariably.’’ It was not, he pointed out, Beethoven to which they were listening. These people were perceived both as distracted listeners and as destroyers of some of the few remaining sanctuaries of quietness. Leavis concluded his comments by observing that whenever he looked upon such people, he felt ‘‘shame, concern and apprehension at the way our civilization has let them down.’’143 The portable transistor brought a new set of debates, less about distraction than about invasion, and the consequences of the new mobility of broadcast sound. In the much later individualized, headphoned sound environments of the Walkman and iPod eras, a different set of debates about the civility of listening practices replaced these—this time about how too-intent listening led to removal of oneself from the public soundworld. Distracted listening in the late twentieth century came more often to seem a symptom of solipsism, a sign of too deep absorption in the self, manifested in

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diminished interpersonal interactions. This concern about withdrawal from actual social relations into a cocooning sound environment had been present earlier, but it now clearly dominated discussion of bad listening practices. In Allan Bloom’s conservative 1987 polemic The Closing of the American Mind, the student with the Walkman stood as symbol for cultural decline. The headphoned students are cocooned in something that will prevent them participating in ‘‘our’’ world and engaging with ‘‘our’’ traditions—‘‘as long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say.’’144 For Bloom the Walkman provided ‘‘distracting’’ and ‘‘alienating’’ sound that enabled people to listen inappropriately—privately in public spaces.145 More recently, the multitasking ability to pay attention to several things at once has come to be seen as a valuable skill, rather than, as in the 1930s, a recipe for madness. The office workplace with music or radio playing as workers focus intently on the visual information on their screens could be interpreted as representing a demotion of aural stimulus and a lessening of anxiety about ‘‘auricular chaos.’’ The networked computer has again in its turn provoked intense anxiety about the unregulated flow of visual imagery into private spaces—but also about distraction. Knowledge workers in front of a screen respond to a constant stream of interruptions, paying ‘‘continuous partial attention’’ to many different things, as experts in the new field of ‘‘interruption science’’ attempt to work out how best to manage their attention so that important interruptions are dealt with but workflow is not impaired.146 Meanwhile, pessimists predict dire consequences from the spread of what they perceive to be historically new levels of inattentiveness in the contemporary networked world. Journalist Maggie Jackson’s 2008 book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the New Dark Age is billed as a gripping expose´ of the ‘‘hyper-mobile, cyber-centric, attention-deficient life.’’147 The anxiety about distraction and inability to pay attention to one thing at a time has taken a more medicalized form, with significant numbers of adults as well as children now being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.148 The crisis of attentiveness extends to human relations. ‘‘In our hurried world,’’ one advice book observes, ‘‘we are all guilty of a great deal of distracted listening. We seem to be more interested in the conversations in our heads than in each other.’’149 What is clear is that without some better knowledge of the history of the way that modes of attentiveness, including listening practices, were contested, applauded, and reviled for much of the twentieth century, we will always remain in danger of thinking that the current generation and the newest technology have created uniquely uncivil forms of listening or viewing.

Chapter 2

‘‘Her Voice a Bullet’’ Imaginary Propaganda and the Legendary Broadcasters of World War II Ann Elizabeth Pfau and David Hochfelder

‘‘Her Voice A Bullet Aimed at the Hearts of American Foxhole Soldiers’’—Paramount publicists coined this phrase to promote the 1946 film Tokyo Rose. The power of radio to sway wartime emotions was a major theme of the movie. The film opens with a group of American prisoners of war listening to Radio Tokyo. Most of the men think announcer Tokyo Rose is harmless, but one, Pete Sherman, knows that words can kill. He blames Tokyo Rose for the death of his buddy Joe, who went berserk and was shot by a Japanese sniper after listening to a taunting broadcast about unfaithful wives. To avenge Joe’s death and prevent further casualties, Pete devises a successful plan to kidnap the Japanese radio siren and deliver her to the Chinese and Korean underground in Tokyo.1 Although the film’s plot was pure Hollywood fantasy, Paramount’s press book encouraged theater owners to promote Tokyo Rose by exploiting recent events. One strategy was to plant editorials in local newspapers about the recent capture of Iva Toguri, a Japanese American woman who broadcast for Radio Tokyo during the war and who was identified in the popular press as ‘‘Tokyo Rose.’’ Another was to arrange radio interviews with former servicemen about ‘‘the danger this Japanese woman exerted throughout the entire South Pacific.’’ In their attempts to promote the film as ‘‘timely,’’ studio publicists distorted history, equating filmic persons, events, and broadcasts with actual ones.2 This confusion of the real with the imaginary infects the whole history of Axis radio propaganda. Although Paramount screenwriters and publicists deliberately distorted the facts of such broadcasts, most distortions

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were and are unconscious. American and British radio listeners commonly misheard, misremembered, and invented content they attributed to enemy announcers, producing what we call imaginary propaganda. These listeners repeated stories about what they believed they had heard to loved ones, neighbors, colleagues, comrades, journalists, investigators, and, eventually, historians. As a result, belief in imaginary propaganda has spread far beyond radio propaganda’s actual audience and given birth to wartime legends—Lord Haw Haw and Axis Sally, as well as Tokyo Rose. By analyzing the physical and psychological conditions of wartime radio listening, this essay traces the origins of imaginary propaganda and seeks to dislodge this distortion from the history of radio broadcasting and the collective memory of World War II.

Enemy Broadcasts and Imaginary Propaganda Radio broadcasts became psychological weapons during World War II. This use of the medium was, an internal BBC report noted, ‘‘the main difference in propaganda between this War and last.’’3 Both Axis and Allied propagandists broadcast programs designed to bolster homefront unity.4 They also engaged in a ‘‘war of words’’ to weaken the enemy’s will.5 The latter category of radio propaganda is the focus of this essay, which examines English-language radio programs designed for American and British audiences. These programs typically consisted of prisoner-of-war messages, slanted news stories, commentaries on such topics as strikes and profiteering on the home front, and popular music—sometimes rerecorded with threatening new lyrics.6 Early in the war, Allied radio listeners in Britain, the United States, and overseas theaters of operations began to report hearing taunts, threats, and predictions never broadcast by German or Japanese transmitters. At first, the imaginary nature of this content went undetected, but monitoring of foreign broadcasts by such organizations as the Princeton Listening Post, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS) soon revealed much of the purported propaganda to be apocryphal. In fact, Allied officials discovered that imagined words were often more dangerous—to civilian and military morale, security, and even health—than those actually broadcast over enemy airwaves. The many stories told about Tokyo Rose in American soldiers’ letters and reminiscences and in military and civilian intelligence documents are prime examples of imaginary propaganda. In addition to the sexual taunts depicted in the 1946 film, Tokyo Rose was famous for her astonishing intelligence-gathering powers. According to rumor, Rose welcomed American units to the Pacific, identifying them by unit and

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location. Her uncanny accuracy led servicemen to speculate that she had a direct line to Japanese military intelligence. And when Rose predicted an attack by Japanese forces, her American listeners knew to prepare for the worst.7 A version of this wartime legend appeared in the 1951 film Wild Blue Yonder. In one scene, a B-29 aircrew tuned in to Tokyo Rose, who, to the men’s astonishment, read their plane’s serial number over the air.8 More recently, Tokyo Rose appeared as an omniscient and threatening force in both the book and film versions of Flags of Our Fathers. Describing the emotional state of young Marines the night before their invasion of Iwo Jima, authors James Bradley and Ron Powers wrote, ‘‘Their confidence must have been shaken when, that night, Tokyo Rose named many of their ships and a number of the Marine units. She assured the Americans that while huge ships were needed to transport them to Iwo Jima, the survivors could later fit in a phone booth.’’9 Tokyo Rose’s German counterpart, Axis Sally, was likewise famous for her presumed omniscience. According to legend, Sally welcomed individual military units to Europe and North Africa, promising her American listeners a speedy demise.10 During the summer of 1944, one GI stationed in Italy claimed that her intelligence was so good that she was able to broadcast his unit’s nightly passwords.11 A participant in the bloody Allied landing at Anzio in Italy, medic Robert Franklin, years later recalled Sally’s ‘‘daily reports,’’ which he described as ‘‘accurate beyond comprehension,’’ including even the ‘‘names of company commanders and newly arrived officers.’’12 Loosely based on war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s columns, the movie Story of G.I. Joe (1945) featured such a broadcast. The night before they would meet German armies for the first time at the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, the men of the Eighteenth Infantry Division listened to the radio as Sally spoke directly to them, urging the men to ‘‘be sensible and surrender.’’ In what one character described as a ‘‘bedroom voice,’’ she reminded her listeners of all they had left behind—Coca-Colas, double malts, summer nights with their sweethearts—and promised them that as her ‘‘guests in Germany,’’ they would meet ‘‘lovely girls who know how to entertain nice young men like you.’’13 Less seductive but equally ominous was Sally’s on-air colleague Lord Haw Haw, who broadcast to British and American audiences on German radio. Believed to command a vast network of fifth-column spies and saboteurs, the enemy broadcaster’s intelligence was purportedly so good that he was able to announce which town hall clocks were running slow on any particular day. Especially alarming to his British audience was Haw Haw’s seeming ability to pinpoint buildings for destruction in future bombing raids.14 For example, a report on civilian morale from

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September 1940 by the British social science research organization Mass Observation recorded a number of Haw Haw rumors circulating among the Jewish community in London’s East End; purported targets included the Jewish Hospital and Bloom’s, a famous kosher restaurant. According to the report, ‘‘The general attitude to these rumours is shown by the following remark: ‘I’m definitely anti-Haw-Haw, in fact I don’t believe a word he says, but you must admit he’s been right up to now.’’’15 Imagined threats such as these served as the basis of the plot of the 1942 film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, which transported the Victorian sleuth and his sidekick Dr. Watson forward in history to wartime London. Opening with the line, ‘‘Germany broadcasting, Germany broadcasting,’’ the film directly mimicked broadcasts by William Joyce, the man most identified with the moniker Lord Haw Haw. But unlike Joyce, the ‘‘Voice of Terror’’ is able to report such events as the derailment of a train or the destruction of a secret airplane factory just as they occur.16 The actual propaganda from which these legends arose was far less sensational. Broadcasting for Radio Tokyo as ‘‘Orphan Ann’’ (short for Orphan Announcer), Iva Toguri introduced musical numbers on a radio show ominously named The Zero Hour. Sandwiched between slanted news stories and propaganda-tinged skits, Ann’s segment had a lively, friendly air. Indeed, she often ridiculed the notion that her broadcasts might demoralize American listeners: ‘‘Hello there Enemies . . . how’s tricks? This is Ann of Radio Tokyo, and we’re just going to begin our regular programme of music . . . news and the Zero Hour for our Friends . . . I mean, our enemies! . . . in Australia and the South Pacific . . . so be on your guard, and mind the children don’t hear! . . . All set? . . . O.K. here’s the first blow at your morale . . . the Boston Pops . . . playing ‘Strike Up the Band.’ ’’ Nowhere in this broadcast did Ann threaten her listeners, disclose American troop movements, or predict impending attacks. Instead, she portrayed herself as the soldiers’ ‘‘friend and playmate,’’ cracking corny jokes and exhorting her ‘‘Orphan Choir’’ to sing along to sentimental favorites, such as ‘‘My Love Parade.’’17 In 1946, U.S. Department of Justice officials concluded that Toguri’s broadcasts were, in and of themselves, ‘‘innocuous.’’18 Nevertheless, Toguri became entrapped in the Tokyo Rose legend, which predated her November 1943 radio debut.19 Most Axis propaganda was not so benign. Mildred Gillars, an aspiring actress and American expatriate with Nazi sympathies, certainly sought to demoralize American soldiers and civilians.20 Although she called herself ‘‘Midge’’ on shortwave broadcasts from Germany, Gillars was dubbed ‘‘Axis Sally’’ by GI listeners in North Africa. Her broadcasts to soldiers were designed to foster sexual anxiety. She encouraged the men to fantasize about the girls they left behind but warned them to expect

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Fig. 2.1: Iva Toguri was photographed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps reenacting one of her wartime broadcasts. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.

romantic troubles, ‘‘especially if you boys get all mutilated and do not return in one piece.’’ Insisting she was a ‘‘one hundred percent American girl,’’ Gillars sought to stoke anti-Semitic and anti-British prejudices, bemoaning the shedding of American blood on behalf of Jewish and English interests.21 Her broadcasts were emotional, none more so than Vision of Invasion, a radio play broadcast to both American soldiers and civilians weeks prior to the Allied invasion of France. Designed to cultivate fear, the play featured Gillars as an anguished mother in psychic contact with her dying son as he and his comrades drown in the English Channel. Awaking from this troubling nightmare to the sound of church

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bells ringing, she hears ‘‘the death knell of America’s youth.’’22 The role of radio propagandist provided Gillars with a satisfying and relatively well-remunerated dramatic outlet. When interrogated by Army intelligence officers soon after her capture in March 1946, Gillars expressed particular pride in Vision of Invasion, which became the basis of her treason conviction in 1949.23 The British fascist William Joyce made straightforward propaganda broadcasts from Berlin.24 To an audience of British civilians and soldiers, he read slanted news items, delivered fascist commentaries, denigrated British political leaders, and celebrated German military prowess. For example, on 24 June 1944, soon after Germany began launching guided missiles into England, Joyce bragged of secret weapons and attacks to come: London and southern England have now been under bombardment for more than a week. For nine days, with very little interruption, the V-1 projectiles have been descending on the British capital. May I remind you, the name V-1 has been given to them officially. ‘‘V’’ is the capital letter of the German word ‘‘Vergeltung,’’ which means ‘‘retaliation,’’ and its use to denote the concept of victory must be familiar to nearly all of my listeners. The very term V-1 implies, of course, that Germany has other new weapons which have not as yet been employed against the enemy.

With this and other broadcasts, Joyce sought to produce anxiety about future bombing raids. But he made none of the individualized threats and pinpoint predictions that comprise the wartime legend of Lord Haw Haw.25 Unconsciously fictionalized propaganda—with roots in the collective imagination—held greater sway over Allied beliefs and behavior than actual wartime broadcasts. A Mass Observation report from the London district of Streatham demonstrates the power of imaginary propaganda. On 14 October 1940, the Streatham Spitfire Fund began exhibiting a downed German Messerschmidt fighter plane to raise funds for the Royal Air Force. Almost immediately, local residents, claiming to have heard Lord Haw Haw announce ‘‘Germany’s intention of bombing every place which exhibited a Messerschmidt,’’ began clamoring for the plane’s removal. A massive air raid the following night seemed to confirm popular fears, particularly after one bomb fell twenty or thirty feet from the Messerschmidt. The next morning, the chairman of the local Spitfire Fund ordered the plane’s removal ‘‘in deference to public opinion.’’ During the Blitz, as Mass Observation diarist Nancy Satterthwaite noted, Britons paid increasing attention to Haw Haw’s purported predictions. According to Satterthwaite, one young factory worker was even

Fig. 2.2: Mildred Gillars in a German prison cell, ca. January 1947. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.

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persuaded to evacuate on the basis of such imaginary propaganda. The others, however, remained on the job, ‘‘anxious’’ but resolute.26 Perhaps the most dangerous piece of imaginary propaganda came from the Southwest Pacific theater of operations, where American medical officers reported an epidemic of malaria caused, in part, by soldiers’ refusal to ingest Atabrine—an antimalarial drug that temporarily turned white skin yellow and whose other side effects were unknown.27 According to many, Tokyo Rose was to blame, informing her listeners that the drug would make them impotent or sterile. Newspaper columnist Frank Farrell, who served as an officer with the First Marine Division, later claimed that the Marines on Guadalcanal heard this propaganda broadcast: ‘‘You poor little Marines, I wish you could spend the night with me. I am a little Japanese pin-up girl. But it wouldn’t be any use. . . . Your officers don’t dare tell you—but I will—that when you swallow those bitter little pills, they will not only turn you yellow for the rest of your life, but they will also prevent you from ever being able to make love again.’’28 Despite round-the-clock monitoring of enemy radio stations, there is no evidence that any Japanese radio announcer ever broadcast such propaganda. Yet this piece of fiction has become part of the legend of Tokyo Rose. In 1948 newspaper columnist Walter Winchell used Farrell’s account to drum up support for the government’s case against Iva Toguri, soon after she was indicted on eight counts of treason. Fifty years later one veteran interviewed for an oral history project recalled that Tokyo Rose had ‘‘hammered at the fact that if the GI’s continued to take their Atabrine that they would become impotent. That’s the worst scare you can visit upon a virile GI,’’ he commented.29 In this case, imaginary propaganda proved as dangerous as enemy bullets. After the Battle of Buna in New Guinea (November 1942–January 1943), counterintelligence officers asserted that while Japanese weapons were responsible for 643 American deaths, U.S. troops suffered 7,000 malaria casualties because of the rumor attributed to Tokyo Rose.30 During the course of the war, British and American officials came to realize that loyal citizens, rather than enemy broadcasters, were the source of most of the statements popularly attributed to Rose, Sally, and Haw Haw. In May 1940, a Mass Observation morale report to the British Ministry of Information documented this phenomenon: ‘‘Lord HawHaw is said to predict events which subsequently happened, a few hours later in this country. He never makes such predictions but this type of rumour is persistent and has increased.’’31 A 1945 intelligence report described the process through which stories of Lord Haw Haw’s seeming omniscience spread: ‘‘It was usually impossible to find the person who had actually heard the broadcast. It was always, ‘Well, I was told by So

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and So,’ and So and So, you found, had been told by Watzizname, and on, and on. The stories were not true. But it shows how such nonsense can be credited, and as a result, the impression gets around that the enemy knows everything.’’ In the Pacific theater, U.S. Army investigations of purported Tokyo Rose predictions turned up the same results. As Captain Thomas C. Dutton, an intelligence officer with the Second Marine Division, later told the FBI, each investigation resulted in the same finding: ‘‘the rumor originated among the men and not from the Zero Hour program.’’ The danger of such rumors, according to British intelligence officials, was that Allied citizens would become careless about security measures, reasoning, ‘‘What’s the use of bothering’’ if the enemy knows all.32 Despite such damning evidence, stereotyped stories of ominous and omniscient enemy broadcasters have persisted. The legendary propagandists and their haunting predictions have become stock characters in war movies. Through oral history interviews and memoirs, imaginary propaganda has made its way into many popular histories and film documentaries about the war. Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day, for example, includes the story of American paratrooper Gordon Carson, who recalled hearing Axis Sally welcoming his unit back to base after a weekend leave in London. ‘‘Oh, by the way,’’ she added, ‘‘please tell the town officials that the clock on the church is three minutes slow.’’ Asserting that ‘‘Axis Sally had her facts straight,’’ Ambrose attributes the radio announcer’s seeming omniscience to information fed to German spies by British counterintelligence. Ambrose cites as his source Sir John Masterman’s academic history of British counterintelligence, but nowhere does Masterman’s book mention enemy radio propaganda generally or individual announcers specifically. Another popular explanation is that Sally and Haw Haw got their information from fifth-columnists, but historian Louis de Jong has shown that no appreciable German fifth column existed in Britain during World War II.33 Such logical contortions are typical of attempts to validate imaginary content as actual radio propaganda.

A Social History of Wartime Radio Listening To make sense of these enduring stories, we have begun constructing a social history of wartime radio listening drawn from British and American archival sources. The records of the BBC’s Listener Research Department and of the sociology project Mass Observation detail British listening habits and Britons’ attitudes toward German propaganda. During the summer of 1939, Mass Observation recruited several hundred ordinary Britons to keep diaries recounting their daily wartime experi-

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ences, providing a rich body of sources on radio listening during the early war years.34 U.S. Army soldier surveys, private correspondence, and interviews by FBI special agents provide similar information about American troops. Together, these documents help us understand who tuned in to Germany’s and Japan’s English-language shortwave and mediumwave broadcasts and why loyal citizens listened to enemy propaganda. In the early stages of World War II, the British audience for enemy propaganda was surprisingly large. In late 1939, the British Institute of Public Opinion found that 35 percent of the British listening public ‘‘was in the habit of listening to’’ German broadcasts. Likewise, BBC researchers estimated that roughly nine million Britons listened daily to William Joyce over Germany’s Hamburg medium-wave transmitter. The majority, about six million, listened to the 9:15 pm broadcast, following directly after the most popular BBC news bulletin, which had an audience of sixteen million. Historian Martin Doherty argues that wartime polls likely overestimated the scale of this audience but, nevertheless, concedes that during the early stages of the war, a large proportion of the British public listened to German broadcasts.35 U.S. Army surveys provide similar information about American soldiers’ radio listening habits. Studies from the fall of 1943 and spring of 1944 revealed that the majority of American infantrymen in Europe had listened to at least one English-language broadcast from Germany. Likely due to the relative stability of their living conditions, U.S. airmen in England were Berlin’s best audience. Roughly 15 percent claimed to listen daily; 46 percent of bomber crew personnel and 59 percent of fighter pilots tuned in at least once a week. During the fall of 1944 in the Pacific theater of operations, Radio Tokyo’s listenership ranged from just over 10 percent of U.S servicemen on Espiritu Santos to more than 50 percent of those stationed on Saipan. A January 1945 survey from the China-Burma-India theater yielded similar results: 24 percent of soldiers stationed in India-Burma and 32 percent of those in China listened to Radio Tokyo ‘‘a little’’ or ‘‘a lot.’’ They also reported listening to Axis propaganda broadcasts originating in Germany, Malaysia, and the Philippines.36 Along with Hollywood films and American Forces Radio programs, Radio Tokyo broadcasts were an important, and in some cases officially sanctioned, source of entertainment for American military personnel stationed on Pacific island bases. When interviewed by FBI special agent William Wilson in 1946, Cols. William David and William Mitchell agreed that the men of the Fourth Marine Division regarded Tokyo Rose ‘‘much in the same vein as Bob Hope.’’ Col. John T. Selden, a former regimental commander with the First Marine Division, recalled seeing ‘‘as many as two or three thousand men sit out in a clearing in the pour-

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ing rain for the evening’s entertainment,’’ which ‘‘usually consisted of a broadcast of news from the states, a half an hour of the Tokyo Rose broadcast and a motion picture.’’ Selden declared that Rose’s ‘‘tremendous lies made her the laughing stock of the Marine Corps; no one took her seriously at all.’’ Likely alluding to sexual banter among the Marines, Selden commented, ‘‘The remarks made by the men about her were choice.’’ American war correspondent Ernie Pyle recorded what were probably similar (if somewhat censored) remarks in a column published in newspapers across the nation during the invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943. Aboard the USS Biscayne, where sailors listened to Sally’s ‘‘come-hither voice’’ every night, ‘‘the most frequently expressed opinion . . . was that if they ever got to Berlin they’d like first to sock [Sally] on the chin—and then to make love to her.’’37 Although radios were more widely available to them than to soldiers, British civilians, too, tended to listen in the company of family and friends. Congregating in private homes, in pubs, outside of radio shops, and even in bomb shelters, Britons listened to Lord Haw Haw read the news, sometimes booing the enemy announcer or calling him a ‘‘liar.’’ On army bases British soldiers listened to Haw Haw after the BBC news bulletin, which Gen. Sir Frederick Pile described as ‘‘extremely dull.’’ The German broadcaster seemed to elicit more interest in listeners than did the BBC. According to Pile, ‘‘when someone tunes in to Lord Haw Haw, the whole room gets up and gathers round the wireless. After it is over, they go back to their games without comment.’’ By contrast to American military officers who generally dismissed such concerns, the worried British general feared that enemy broadcasts might adversely affect his men’s attitudes and morale.38 Interviews, surveys, and diaries reveal that Allied listeners had a broad range of motives for tuning in to enemy broadcasts. Many Britons began listening to Lord Haw Haw out of curiosity. They read about the announcer in the popular press and wished to hear him for themselves. In fact, in the fall of 1939, journalists such as Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express encouraged Britons to listen and laugh—to ‘‘kill him by ridicule.’’ Added to curiosity and amusement was a pleasurable feeling of naughtiness. A BBC report to the British Ministry of Information described Lord Haw Haw’s broadcasts as appealing to ‘‘the latent schoolboy in each of us.’’ His ‘‘notorious voice’’ and ‘‘barefaced lies,’’ the report continued, ‘‘give to his words a sufficient air of unreality to satisfy the conscience which is ever standing guard over the schoolboy.’’ Yet, studies by Mass Observation revealed that no matter what they said in public, Britons were privately ‘‘less amused’’ than they claimed to be. Furthermore, 28 percent of study participants admitted to believing that there was a grain of truth to what Haw Haw said.39 Surveys of American

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soldiers in Europe and the Pacific yielded similar results. While the majority of listeners agreed that enemy radio propaganda was ‘‘mostly lies,’’ a large minority believed that broadcasts from Tokyo and Berlin contained ‘‘a little more truth than we care to admit.’’40 As psychologists Gordon Allport and Leo Postman observed in their 1947 study of wartime rumors, lack of information and distrust of official news sources promoted reliance on alternatives. One American GI in Italy, for example, explained why he and his comrades listened to Axis Sally rather than to American Forces Radio: ‘‘Not only is she more humorous, but a great deal more reliable on news and far more up-todate.’’ Aware that news from official sources was both censored and shaped by domestic propaganda goals, many servicemen were skeptical radio listeners. From the Pacific theater, another soldier commented, ‘‘We heard a program with Kate Smith on it telling us what we were fighting for. You should have heard the boos. I wonder why they have to feed us propaganda like that? No wonder the guys over here would rather listen to Tokyo Rose.’’41 A British librarian expressed a similar attitude in explaining why she listened to Lord Haw Haw: ‘‘We nearly always turn him on at 9:15 to try and glean some news that the Ministry of Information withholds from us. . . . Between the frantic eulogies of the B.B.C. and the sneers of the German wireless one achieves something like the truth.’’ A Mass Observation survey in May 1940 found that 90 percent of Britons polled expressed some degree of skepticism about the fullness and ‘‘factualness’’ of reports from the British press and the BBC. In fact, during the Blitz, British civilians often turned to German radio stations in order to discover which cities had been bombed. The BBC deliberately withheld this information in order to prevent the Luftwaffe from learning whether their attacks had been successful. A November 1940 Mass Observation report concluded that ‘‘anyone who wants to know what places were raided last night would now naturally listen to Haw Haw for the information.’’ It required only a slight adjustment of the radio dial after the BBC news bulletins to receive Hamburg’s reply.42 Lord Haw Haw’s popularity among Britons prompted some to fear that enemy broadcasts would foster social unrest. Although the British Institute of Public Opinion surveys found that the wealthy and well informed were most likely to tune in to German broadcasts, researchers, public officials, and well-to-do citizens worried more about propaganda’s effects on factory workers, servants, and soldiers, believed to be the nation’s most credulous or restive listeners. Some reports from Mass Observation seemed to confirm this fear. For example, in January 1940, one diarist, a working-class housewife with socialist sympathies and antiSemitic prejudices, recorded these sentiments toward German broadcasts: ‘‘Lord Haw-haw—wouldn’t miss him now. Tom [diarist’s hus-

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band] & I know he speaks truth about our social & other problems. . . . Tom talks at work to men. More & more people are fed up with war. Sez Haw haw is right that Conservatives found this war a veritable godsend.’’ Her entry on food shortages later in the year echoed German propaganda themes by rhetorically posing the pointed question, ‘‘Is the Upper 10 starved like this?’’ Another diarist, a Royal Air Force mechanic, wrote of Lord Haw Haw, ‘‘I think he’s dangerous—not to England to the English plutocracy.’’ He predicted, ‘‘when the war is over, our public will perhaps turn to right some of the wrongs [Haw Haw] has pointed out.’’43 Such comments reveal less about the psychological effects of William Joyce’s broadcasts than about how working-class Britons used Lord Haw Haw stories to articulate their own frustrations and resentments.44 Similarly, middle- and upper-class expressions of concern tended to ignore actual sources of discontent by blaming German propaganda for what seemed to be signs of imminent strife.45 In the spring of 1940, in part to combat the perceived threat of class warfare, patriotic organizations and the popular press initiated a campaign to discourage listening to German propaganda by condemning it as an act of disloyalty. Many Britons pledged never again to tune in to Hamburg and chastised friends and neighbors who failed to follow suit. One Mass Observation diarist recorded this overheard conversation from the summer of 1940: ‘‘I’ve just heard Lord Haw Haw. He said Southampton docks have been completely destroyed.’’ ‘‘You shouldn’t listen to Lord Haw-Haw. You know jolly well everything he says is lies. And don’t say anything about it to anyone else.’’ ‘‘Why not? I think he’s funny. Can’t I have a decent laugh.’’ ‘‘No, not at that anyway. It’s past a joke now.’’46

Another Mass Observation diarist reportedly chided a neighbor, contending that ‘‘anyone who listens regularly is a traitor to his country in thought if not in deed.’’47 Because of peer pressure, reported—if not actual—listenership dropped significantly. A Mass Observation survey in November 1941 found that 42 percent of respondents—up from 33 percent in January 1940—claimed never to have listened to Lord Haw Haw, and only 18 percent admitted to listening to him within the past three months. The researchers concluded that respondents likely underreported listening, ‘‘since people feel rather ashamed of saying that they do listen, and listening is regarded by most people as slightly unpatriotic at least, while some regard it as slightly treasonable.’’ Robert Silvey of the BBC’s Listener Research Department reported similar results. After the summer of 1940, ‘‘BBC interviewers could no longer ask, with any hope of getting reliable replies, whether Lord Haw Haw had been heard

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or not. Indeed, had they tried to do so, they would themselves have been suspected of being Fifth Columnists!’’48 British authorities contemplated jamming Axis broadcasts but, along with American officials, they opted instead to compete for listeners’ attention by improving their news and entertainment programming. At the beginning of the war, BBC programming consisted of ten news bulletins a day, repetitive gramophone records, and heavy doses of the Scottish organist Sandy Macpherson. In response to public clamor for better news and commentary and more entertaining programs, BBC officials beefed up its programming to compete with German broadcasts. In early 1940, it began broadcasting a ‘‘Postscript’’ commentary after the 9 pm news bulletin, changing the times of popular entertainment programs such as Band Waggon and setting up a Forces network featuring light entertainment.49 The BBC also increased its number of highpowered transmitters, particularly on frequencies adjacent to German broadcasts.50 In Europe and the Pacific, the U.S. military established the Armed Forces Radio Network to transmit domestic programs as well as special broadcasts for soldiers and sailors. The theory behind the creation of this network, according to Ted Sherdeman, who helped set up Pacific theater radio stations during the war and later served as a witness against Iva Toguri, was that ‘‘if a man could listen to a program by Dinah Shore he would much prefer that to hearing Orphan Ann, your friendly enemy.’’51 Despite peer pressure and improved access to a broader range of radio programming, loyal British and American citizens continued to listen to Axis propaganda. Some seemed mesmerized by enemy broadcasts. ‘‘There’s a feeling you can’t turn off. You’ve got to listen to him,’’ one British laborer wrote of Lord Haw Haw. Rebecca West, who reported on William Joyce’s 1945 treason trial for the New Yorker and famously mused about the ‘‘meaning of treason,’’ described ‘‘a rasping yet rich quality’’ to his voice ‘‘which made it difficult to not to go on listening.’’ Joyce’s ‘‘nearly convincing . . . assurance,’’ West added, contributed to his pull, for ‘‘it seemed as though one had better hearken and take warning when he suggested that the destiny of the people he had left in England was death, and the destiny of his new masters in Germany life and conquest, and that, therefore, his listeners had better change sides and submit.’’52 Among Britons, contemporary observers detected, in the words of one Mass Observation report, an ‘‘admiration or grudging affection’’ for the enemy announcer. A March 1940 study by the research organization revealed that while some believed that Lord Haw Haw was dangerous and that his broadcasts should be jammed, others admitted, in the words of one listener, to finding ‘‘something vaguely likeable about him.’’

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Another Haw Haw fan wrote, ‘‘I love his voice and manner and would love to meet him.’’53 A similar affection is evident in soldiers’ attitudes toward Tokyo Rose. She was, according to one former Army counterintelligence officer, ‘‘an unending source of satisfaction’’ to American soldiers who served in the Pacific. ‘‘Thousands of letters went home from the troops telling of the girl’s all-knowing, all-seeing powers,’’ Gen. Elliot Thorpe wrote in his memoir, ‘‘and no matter how small a unit each soldier would stoutly maintain his unit had been specifically mentioned on Radio Tokyo.’’ Soldiers were proud to believe that their efforts merited Rose’s notice.54 Some Allied soldiers and civilians listened out of fear. Many more tuned in to Hamburg, Berlin, and Tokyo in the hope of hearing information withheld by their own governments. Others claimed to find entertainment value in enemy propaganda. In most cases, the practice of allowing the Axis voices into Allied homes and barracks was an implicit criticism of wartime censorship regulations and domestic propaganda efforts. More worrisome to public officials and social scientists was the question of whether listening to Axis propaganda would warp Allied attitudes and behavior, for the medium’s effects on the human mind were largely unknown. But research from the preceding decade suggested there might be danger.

Reception and Rumors The problem, according to a BBC report from early 1940, was not that listeners would believe everything they heard. Britons generally agreed that Lord Haw Haw was ‘‘a liar’’ whose broadcasts contained only ‘‘grains of truth.’’ Rather, BBC researchers worried about the ‘‘secondary,’’ or unconscious, effects of radio propaganda ‘‘of which [the listener] may be quite unaware, and which are . . . potentially much more powerful.’’55 Although radio researchers and regulators initially embraced what historian Douglas Craig has called the theory of the ‘‘sovereign listener’’—the assumption that ‘‘listener-citizens’’ would form a ‘‘discriminating and skeptical’’ audience56 —by the mid-1930s, many feared that listeners would be unable resist radio propaganda’s appeal. In the United States, the medium had proven its worth as a manipulator of mass emotions in the hands of commercial advertisers and charismatic broadcasters like Huey Long and Father Coughlin.57 Orson Welles’s celebrated War of the Worlds broadcast on 30 October 1938 and the hysterical response it elicited also provided troubling evidence, in the words of U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Frank McNinch, ‘‘of the power and force of radio’’ when placed in irresponsible hands.58

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More dangerous than irresponsible broadcasts were those transmitted by enemy propagandists. Attributes of the medium itself seemed to make radio an ideal psychological weapon. Unlike print media, broadcasts were immediate, ephemeral, and played to listeners’ emotions. Similar to advertisers’ sponsorship of radio programs, propaganda broadcasters repeated subversive themes frequently and sugarcoated them with music and light entertainment. Particularly troubling was the apparent ease with which a skilled speaker—no matter how sinister— might develop an emotional rapport with his audience. In his 1936 book Propaganda and the News: Or What Makes You Think So? journalist Will Irwin argued that radio, ‘‘through the magic inherent in the human voice, has the means of appealing to the lower nerve centers and of creating emotions which the hearer mistakes for thoughts.’’ So powerful was this ‘‘crystallizer of public opinion’’ that military authorities might feel compelled to impound civilian radio receivers in a future war. Furthermore, with the aid of radio, war appeared to be on the horizon. As early as 1934 journalism professor and propaganda expert Oscar W. Riegel blamed government control of electrical and electronic communications media—telegraph and telephone as well as radio—for fostering the growth of ‘‘rampant’’ nationalism and a concomitant ‘‘intensification of political and cultural rivalries’’ among nations. Describing domestic wireless propaganda as a ‘‘potent instrument of mass control,’’ Riegel also anticipated that foreign broadcasts would become dangerous psychological weapons. Eight years later, history seemed to confirm his prediction. ‘‘Since 1933,’’ Riegel wrote in Public Opinion Quarterly, ‘‘we have witnessed one incident after another which . . . proved the effectiveness of shortwave radio as an instrument of political and military aggression on a worldwide scale.’’59 In the early stages of World War II, observers credited German broadcasts with sapping the will to resist among the Austrians, Czechs, and French prior to invasion. Journalist Edmond Taylor, in his 1940 account of the fall of France, concluded that German psychological warfare had so demoralized the French as to produce the conditions for surrender well in advance of Germany’s June 1940 attack.60 German propagandists shared this faith in the effectiveness of their radio propaganda. Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was particularly proud of William Joyce’s broadcasts. On 6 January 1940, Goebbels crowed in his diary, ‘‘Our English radio broadcasts are now being taken with deadly seriousness in England. Lord Haw-Haw’s name is on everybody’s lips.’’ Two years later he concluded from interrogations of British prisoners of war that ‘‘our propaganda in England has been more effective than we imagined.’’61 While listeners might consciously reject Axis messages, radio researcher and U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) administrator

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Charles Siepmann worried that the medium allowed propagandists to infiltrate ‘‘the hinterland of our subconscious mind, where doubt and fear and hatred lurk. . . . We house, each one of us, a little hell of dormant hatreds and anxieties.’’ What particularly concerned Siepmann was how the ‘‘almost hypnotic influence’’ of the medium might affect ‘‘the more suggestible among us.’’62 Some Mass Observation diaries and soldiers’ letters seem to confirm such anxieties. After listening to Lord Haw Haw for the first time in early 1940, for example, a fifty-year-old Londoner wrote in her diary, ‘‘Can’t say I found it amusing. Should think definitely dangerous. Very much doubt if many who think they are laughing are really unaffected. . . . The effect was one of vague depression.’’63 Of Axis broadcasts, an American GI wrote, ‘‘The Germans are clever, and phrase their propaganda really well. For a minute or two—if you are not careful or if you’re feeling homesick or low—you are apt to believe what they say.’’ Similarly, an American officer described the propaganda broadcast over Radio Tokyo as ‘‘both laughable and at the same time diabolically clever.’’ ‘‘Men can listen and think that they are unaffected,’’ he explained, ‘‘and later come out in their conversation with some utterly false statement that they have received from the radio and believed without knowing it.’’64 Even though patriotic citizens might not believe, or even listen to, enemy broadcasts, experts feared that radio propaganda would infiltrate the popular mind through the agency of fifth-column spies and Axis sympathizers. In the United States, psychologists Floyd Ruch and Kimball Young, both members of the Committee for National Morale, which sought to bolster the nation’s psychological defenses, believed that they had found evidence of this tactic in 1942. While few Americans on the home front would admit to tuning in to enemy propaganda broadcasts, close to 23 percent of Ruch and Young’s respondents reported hearing one or more of the stories recently broadcast on shortwave from Germany.65 Ruch and Young, however, failed to prove that German propagandists were responsible for starting and spreading the rumors study participants recalled. In fact, one of the war’s most damaging rumors— that members of the U.S. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps served as ‘‘government issue mistresses’’ rather than as soldiers—originated with American servicemen and civilians rather than with Axis agents. Salacious stories of promiscuity and pregnancy within the women’s corps were widespread in the United States before German broadcasters picked up on the theme.66 Although Ruch and Young’s assumptions were faulty, the psychologists’ work did reveal strong links between broadcasts and gossip networks, links that would foster the rise of radio legends. Comical or alarming stories of imaginary warnings spread quickly among listeners

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and nonlisteners alike. But popular imagination was not limited to words. As psychologists Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport found in their pioneering 1935 research on American radio listening, the disembodied voice also prompted a visual response. Listeners envisioned what they could not see—speaker, scenery, wardrobe.67 The anonymity of enemy broadcasters further liberated the imagination, prompting journalist Jonah Barrington to describe Lord Haw Haw as an upper-class twit. ‘‘From his accent,’’ Barrington wrote, ‘‘I imagine him as having a receding chin, a questing nose, thin yellow hair brushed back, a monocle, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his button-hole. Rather like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.’’ This description, like the Lord Haw Haw moniker, was designed to encourage listeners to respond with ridicule to enemy broadcasts. Photographs of William Joyce, published after the radio announcer’s ex-wife identified his voice in December 1939, revealed a far more menacing visage, with close-cut hair, a crooked nose, and a long, deep scar from ear to mouth, acquired in 1924 during a fight with communist agitators.68 Popular images of Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, by contrast, tended to be erotic, for American servicemen were avid consumers of Hollywood pinups. Aboard the USS Biscayne, sailors speculated about Sally’s appearance. ‘‘Every night,’’ Ernie Pyle wrote, ‘‘you’d hear the boys conjecturing about what she looked like. Some thought she was an old hag with a fat face and peroxide hair, but the majority liked to visualize her as looking as gorgeous as she sounded.’’69 Tokyo Rose’s voice—variously described by ear-witnesses as ‘‘soft,’’ ‘‘smooth,’’ ‘‘sultry,’’ ‘‘sexy’’— aroused similar interest among American servicemen.70 Indeed, when Iva Toguri was discovered in Japan, curious servicemen flocked to see the woman behind the voice. This desire to envision female broadcasters as sexually desirable (or not) was, as Christine Ehrick argues elsewhere in this volume, a symptom of gendered anxiety deriving from the on-air dissociation of voice and body.71 Yet there was also a comic component to these visual imaginings. For example, a photograph of an Italian statue named ‘‘Axis Sally’’ by American GIs and dressed in a battle helmet was published widely in the American press. Likewise, the image of Tokyo Rose gracing the F-13 photo-reconnaissance plane named for her was nothing like the scantily clad pinups decorating the noses of most other aircraft. Listeners did not simply and passively receive propagandists’ messages. Rather, they named and envisioned anonymous and disembodied announcers and even put words into their enemies’ mouths. In the process, listeners—along with their colleagues, neighbors, and comrades— produced enduring legends. Belief in the power of radio to shape attitudes and sway beliefs may have blinded scholars and propagandists

Fig. 2.3: Photograph of William Joyce, found among his possessions in Apen, Germany. Courtesy of the British National Archives.

Fig. 2.4: The American crew of this warplane decorated it with a comic image of the notorious radio announcer. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.

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alike to the medium’s ability to liberate and stimulate the collective imagination. Although British and American authorities were aware of the phenomenon of imaginary propaganda, radio researchers and other experts failed to describe and analyze it. ‘‘The psychology of radio is still largely an unwritten work,’’ Charles Siepmann acknowledged in 1944. ‘‘We count heads, but reckon little what registers in the head.’’72

Legendary Treachery In August 1945, just before the Japanese surrender, the U.S. government publicly announced that there was no Tokyo Rose and that her alleged predictions were simply ‘‘legend.’’73 By this time, however, the legend was too strong to dispel. A multitude of news reports and letters home from the Pacific had already described the imaginary broadcasts. A Hollywood movie about the radio siren was in the works. Less than a month after the government announcement, two American journalists published the story of their interview with Iva Toguri, claiming to have discovered the one and only Tokyo Rose. And as the war drew to an end the Allies captured Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce), two Axis Sallies (Rita Zucca as well as Mildred Gillars), and several other Allied nationals who broadcast from Rome and Berlin. Although some of the so-called radio traitors avoided prosecution, the most notorious—notably Toguri, Joyce, and Gillars—were tried and convicted of treason. Joyce was quickly executed by the British government, despite strong evidence that the American-born fascist was a U.S. citizen. Toguri and Gillars were fined, imprisoned, and stripped of citizenship. Although imaginary propaganda was unnecessary to convict Joyce and Gillars, it played a key role in Toguri’s 1949 treason trial. Testifying as ‘‘ear witnesses,’’ former servicemen described taunts and threats never broadcast over Radio Tokyo. No two, however, told the same story of imagined treason. Despite several years of interviews, the U.S. Department of Justice was unable to find evidence sufficient to support a treason conviction—which, as defined in the Constitution, requires two witnesses to the same overt act. Furthermore, radio scripts, recordings, and transcripts were little help; they contained none of the purported propaganda with which Americans were by then so familiar. Ultimately the government’s case depended on perjured testimony by two of Toguri’s Radio Tokyo colleagues. Yet veterans’ testimony did play an important role in Toguri’s conviction, for it lent legitimacy to the prosecution.74 The injustice of Toguri’s treason conviction has fostered popular and scholarly interest in the real woman and the wartime legend—likewise, the British government’s indecent haste to execute William Joyce. How-

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ever, the sensational stories surrounding these broadcasters are the fundamental source of their cultural staying power. Indeed, their chilling but fictitious predictions have become cherished traditions, for they add drama and suspense to individual narratives (both literary and filmic) about the Allied fight against fascist aggression. Currently enjoying something of a career revival, Axis Sally is a minor but effective character in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna. A Nazi temptress, complete with cigarette holder, lipstick, and low-cut evening gown, Lee’s Sally urges African American infantrymen to surrender their arms and stop fighting for a racist nation.75 Ubisoft, the maker of Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, enlisted a heavily made-up Sally to promote the World War II–themed videogame. Wrapped in shadows and sitting beside a microphone, record player, and Nazi flag, Ubisoft’s Sally taunts potential players with virtual death.76 Despite the persistence of these legends and their significance to our collective memory, historians and communications scholars have devoted scant attention to imaginary propaganda. Certainly the combined weight of criminal proceedings, oral history interviews, and historical and Hollywood misrepresentations has discouraged critical investigation. Perhaps the laboratory of war was impossible to replicate once peace returned. New radio legends emerged among American servicemen during the Korean and Vietnam wars, but by then television had begun to supplant radio as the nation’s primary entertainment and news medium, drawing scholarly attention away from radio research.77 In this void distortion flourished. Yet imaginary propaganda is not simply a historical problem; it is also an opportunity. Beneath the surface of these stereotyped stories about Sally, Rose, and Haw Haw, we discover a standardized pattern of reception. Enemy announcers seem directly and hauntingly to address their listeners’ fears. Unintended by propagandists and unanticipated by radio theorists, this by-product of aural propaganda helps us understand both the wartime experiences of soldiers and civilians and the psychology and sociology of radio listening.

Chapter 3

‘‘Savage Dissonance’’ Gender, Voice, and Women’s Radio Speech in Argentina, 1930–1945 Christine Ehrick

‘‘History,’’ writes communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, ‘‘has many themes. One of them is that women should be quiet.’’1 Across time and cultures, women’s voices have been contained, confined, and channeled in ways that parallel other constraints placed on women’s bodies. Voice and voice difference have reinforced and naturalized gender roles. Praised for its qualities in soothing crying babies and educating the young, the female voice has been presented as unsuited for public oratory, a terrain typically reserved for men and often directly linked to constructions of masculinity and male citizenship. During the modern era, women have made sustained claims to both citizenship and a presence in the public sphere, a historical theme that has a distinctly sonic dimension. As women began to openly (and vocally) challenge gender roles, their voices became the subject of attack and criticism. Condemned as weak, shrill, and irrational, women’s voices were heard as disrupting both the traditional gendered order and the public soundscape, where male voices dominated. During the early twentieth century much of the world experienced important changes in the soundscape. Industrialization, urbanization, and mass communications technology changed the nature of sound, speech, and audience in dramatic ways. As one site of (re)negotiation and contestation of gender in the modern era, radio deserves more attention in studies of gender and feminism than it has heretofore received. In blurring the boundaries of public and private and separating the voice from the seen body, radio is a technology with profound gender implications, one in which we can hear the challenges, reaffirmations, and contradictions of the gendered soundscape in the first half

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of the twentieth century.2 For many, radio was a new means to make women’s voices heard for personal, political, or other ends. Yet while some heard the possibility of greater gender equality, for others a woman’s voice on the radio was the sound of all that was negative or threatening about modernity: disorder, immorality, and the breakdown of the traditional family.3 Radio, in other words, has been a contested medium, one whose relationship to the prevailing and dissenting gender cultures was, initially at least, far from assured. Moreover, its emergence coincided chronologically with changes in and challenges to gender relations during the first half of the twentieth century. In her study of women and early German radio, Kate Lacey points out that ‘‘the years following the First World War saw the simultaneous emergence of radio as a public medium and the large-scale emergence of women into the public sphere of politics and production.’’4 This chapter seeks to further our understanding of the links between these two historical trajectories by examining the case of Argentina, one of the world’s more important early radio markets. Eras of historical transition can generate ‘‘windows’’: moments where gender relations become more malleable, often followed by a backlash that asserts, not the status quo ante necessarily, but gendered hierarchies within a new context.5 In such moments one may find women actively seeking to take advantage of propitious conditions, creating and defending new spaces and opportunities. In the early years of radio—the 1920s to the early 1930s, generally—radio’s gender character was more fluid than it would be later, offering women and women’s voices new spaces and more platforms than were available once the medium was better established.6 Especially during these earlier years, many women fought for a place for themselves and their gender on the airwaves. In 1934 a writer in the popular Argentine magazine Caras y Caretas explained that from radio’s inception, there were women who ‘‘understood that radio, in their hands, could be an instrument of incalculable value.’’ ‘‘In a short time,’’ the article continued, ‘‘radio has done more for women’s emancipation than all other media combined.’’7 But that opening engendered a corresponding backlash that sought—in many cases successfully—to put women’s voices back in their place. This did not in any way mean that women’s voices disappeared from the radio. Women could sing, they could entertain children, they could perform in radio drama, and they could give domestic advice and sell consumer goods to housewives. But roles like announcing, reporting the news, and speaking authoritatively about public affairs became a more exclusively male domain. There were exceptions to this rule, however, and, as we will see, Argentina offers a rich and unique narrative that underscores the com-

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plex interactions among mass media, gender, and political culture during the 1930s and 1940s. For the United States and to a lesser extent western Europe, this process of marginalizing and channeling women’s radio voices has been partially documented.8 Less understood is how this pattern played out—or not—in other parts of the world. The history of Latin American radio is just beginning to be told, but little has been written about its gendered aspects and how radio mirrored and in some cases anticipated debates and discourses about women’s citizenship and place within the public sphere.9 Stereotypes of ‘‘machismo’’ and corresponding images of Latin American women’s subordination and silence conceal a far richer and more complex history. As elsewhere, the voices of Latin American women were present from radio’s early days, and many sought to use broadcasting as a platform to advance women’s citizenship in direct and indirect ways. And as elsewhere, they often faced criticism, ridicule, and attack when those voices rubbed against the grain of prevailing gender norms. Both radio and feminism (broadly conceived) challenged the existing gendered soundscapes. A historical examination of their intersection exposes the points of contact between these two historical trajectories and underscores the sonic dimensions of power and struggles for equality. An empirical focus on women’s radio voices in Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s serves to both illustrate these themes and expand our understanding of women’s radio history beyond the usual boundaries of western Europe and the United States. Of particular focus here are two important female radio voices that embody the struggles over the contours of both the ‘‘modern woman’’ and the gendered soundscape during this era: Silvia Guerrico and Eva Duarte. Their stories also illustrate how, in Argentina, radio’s ‘‘professionalization’’ and commercialization intersected with a growing authoritarianism, a process that muffled voices like Guerrico’s and amplified and elevated that of Eva Duarte to ‘‘a voice of the people’’ (even before she married Juan Pero´n). Taken together, these women’s careers suggest new ways to think about sound, gender, and mass communications in a moment when all were in flux and in the process of defining or redefining themselves in the modern era.

Gendered Soundscapes and Speech in the Modern Era Emily Thompson’s groundbreaking work The Soundscape of Modernity asks us to listen to aspects of the modernizing project in early twentiethcentury urban United States. Building upon the work of R. Murray Schafer, Alain Corbin, and others, Thompson defines a soundscape as

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an ‘‘auditory or aural landscape . . . a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment.’’10 This perspective challenges us to use sound more effectively as a category of historical analysis, asserting not only that sound and the perception of sound have varied over time and place but also that one can ‘‘hear’’ change over time. Gender has yet to be fully integrated within this body of theory. In Gender and Qualitative Methods, Helmi Ja¨rviluoma, Pirkko Moisala, and Anni Vilkko use (and perhaps coin) the term ‘‘gendered soundscape,’’ asking readers to contemplate the way gender—and gendered hierarchies—may be projected and/or heard in sound environments. We not only ‘‘learn gender through the total sensorium,’’ as they put it; gender is also represented, contested, and reinforced through the aural.11 Their discussion of the concept is meant to be suggestive, and the authors are mostly providing a signpost for future scholarship. Accepting their invitation, I want to further develop the concept of the gendered soundscape by applying it directly to the historical study of gender and radio speech. While there are many ways in which gender can be present, or encoded, in sound, one of the most immediately gendered sound categories is the human voice. Like other aspects of gender, voice differences have roots in biological sex difference, but gendered constructions of the human voice vary widely over time and place.12 Women’s voices are by no means absent in the traditional gendered soundscape, but they are muted, private, and largely outside of the realm of what R. Murray Schafer calls ‘‘signal’’: sounds listened to consciously and that often convey messages and/or authority.13 More generally, the traditional soundscape has been characterized as one of quiet women and vocal and audible men. Female silence has traditionally been heard as indicative of modesty and chastity, while female public speech suggested promiscuity, hysteria, and subversion.14 Just as other aspects of gender inequality become naturalized, so the ear becomes attuned to this patriarchal soundscape. If the female voice broaches these boundaries, it disrupts the sonic environment, and the result is often perceived as dissonant and jarring. An instructive example of this can be found in an 1853 editorial in Harper’s New Monthly magazine that attacked the women’s rights movement in the United States. Here the editors employed a distinctly sonic metaphor to describe what they thought such civil and legal equality would realize. ‘‘Instead of that exquisitely harmonized instrument which comes from the right temperament of the sexual relations,’’ they wrote, ‘‘it would make human life, at the best, a tuneless monochord, if not, in the end, the chaos of all harsh and savage dissonance.’’15 Here the separate spheres doctrine is rendered—and defended—in sonic/musical terms: harmony and order threatened by the cacophony that feminism

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represented. Indeed, there was a distinctly sonic dimension to discourses about feminism and women’s rights movements in the United States and elsewhere. Feminists were famously mocked as the ‘‘shrieking sisterhood’’ and ‘‘shrieking cockatoos.’’16 Just as sound scholars distinguish between social constructions of ‘‘sound’’ and ‘‘noise,’’ so ‘‘speech,’’ which historian Nancy Isenberg defines as ‘‘the ability to communicate, persuade, and engage in political action,’’ was distinct from mere ‘‘talking.’’ Isenberg further writes: ‘‘Nor could men hear truth from female lips, because a woman’s speech lacked the masterful presence needed to voice the will of the people. Shrill and discordant, a woman’s voice transformed the sublime act of representation into a sideshow or public spectacle.’’17 Women, in other words, could talk, but they could not speak, and any attempt at ‘‘speech’’ was heard as an aberration, unnatural and inherently unfeminine, and as evidence that women were intrinsically unqualified for citizenship. While little work has been done on the history of gender and sound in Latin America, the traditional gendered soundscape reflects patterns similar to those documented in the United States and Europe. In predominantly Catholic Latin America, however, women’s public speech may have been more restricted than it was in places like the United States and England, where some Protestant churches (most notably the Quakers) allowed women a voice and even gave them a place at the pulpit.18 As elsewhere, because of their class status and assumptions of innate honor, elite women seem to have had greater public audibility and their voices more tolerated than their less affluent sisters. When women were heard speaking out, it was often in defense of the status quo and traditional paternalism, from which they also benefited. As a result, and somewhat ironically, political conservatives often allowed women more of a voice than their more liberal counterparts. ‘‘Since Conservatives [members of the Conservative Party] imagined society as inherently unequal,’’ argues James Sanders in his study of nineteenthcentury Colombian politics, ‘‘women could be allowed to participate in politics in certain ways since such participation would give them no grounds to claim equal standing with men.’’19 Yet while conservative elite women may have had more leeway, they were not immune from attack when their activities were judged to have crossed a line, especially if such an attack served the author’s polemical purposes. Sanders cites an example from 1849 when elite Conservative women organized—and spoke out in public meetings—against Liberal plans to mobilize the popular classes in Colombia. Liberals rebuked women’s actions as immoral and as a threat to their family honor. ‘‘While you leave your homes to occupy yourselves in political conquests,’’ a Liberal paper wrote, ‘‘perhaps your daughters, those delicate

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flowers, will hear the voice of the seducer.’’ The newspaper further insinuated that, as women could never hope to convince men through reason in political discussions, they would inevitably be tempted to ‘‘employ their physical charms.’’20 This argument can be read as a version of the ‘‘savage dissonance’’ rhetoric voiced by Harper’s during the same era, whereby women’s voice in the public sphere provokes disruption, impropriety, and ultimately an erosion of social order. It also speaks to a double disruption of the gendered soundscape. Because she is incapable of ‘‘speech,’’ a woman cannot hope to convince an audience with her voice, and she must seduce listeners with the rest of her body, subverting the rationality of the public sphere. Furthermore, the absence of the maternal ‘‘voice’’ in the home leaves a void that allows the voice of dishonor and immorality—that of the male seducer—to threaten the sanctity of the domestic sphere. The result is chaos, immorality, and dishonor in both the public and the private.21 To an important degree, these patterns and perceptions of speech, gender, and honor carried forward into the twentieth century and the radio age. While much of the discourse about gender, voice, and speech persisted into the age of mechanical reproduction, the mass communications and mass consumption of the twentieth century altered the gendered soundscape in important ways. Radio, in particular, brought ‘‘public’’ speech into the ‘‘private’’ home and separated the audience from visual access to the speaker, changes that had major implications for representations and contestations of gender and the gendered soundscape. The implications of this new technology for women and gender relations were ambiguous. From one perspective radio supported patriarchy, shoring up and complementing the atomization and isolation of the middle-class housewife, for example, by providing companionship and homemaking advice without interrupting her necessary wifely duties. But radio also contained the potential to challenge the relegation of the feminine to the private, and thus to intersect powerfully with the feminist trajectory that was expanding in many parts of the world at the same time.22 Whether radio reinforced or undermined patriarchy depends in large part, of course, on who had access to the airwaves, the content of radio broadcasts, and the composition of the listening audience. Many heard the same dissonance and destabilization in women’s radio speech as had been heard in women’s nineteenth-century oratory. Scholarship on women and radio in the United States and Germany points out that as radio began to establish itself in the mid-1920s, a backlash against women speakers on the air set in, marginalizing female announcers and commentators on the airwaves or relegating them to daytime hours.23 Donna Halper describes a U.S. debate that began

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around 1924 about ‘‘whether women sounded good as speakers and announcers.’’24 Critics asserted that women’s voices were too shrill and unmodulated for radio commentary and that women’s voices ‘‘lacked a distinct personality.’’25 In both the United States and Germany, technical limitations were cited: early radio technology distorted upperregister tones, which meant that women’s higher-pitched voices (like flutes) simply did not sound good over the air. But the resolution of these technological limitations by the 1930s did not translate into the return of women’s speech to broadcasting. In the German case, Kate Lacey notes that ‘‘prejudice against women announcers hid behind technological excuses long after the shortcomings of the hardware had been resolved.’’26 In any case, women’s main flaw was that they did not sound like men, and the male voice was the voice of authority on the airwaves.27 But the marginalization of women’s voices, especially in commercial broadcasting, had its limits and contradictions. Radio looked to women as its primary audience, and commercial radio sponsors looked to women as its primary market. During the twentieth century, particularly in the more affluent, capitalistic parts of the world, a woman’s citizenship and place in the public sphere came to be increasingly defined by her consumption.28 Selling consumer goods to women was one of the primary goals of commercial golden age radio, and the female voice was an integral part of the realization of that project. One of the challenges of early radio, therefore, was to integrate the female voice into the public gendered soundscape but also to channel the voice into more or less acceptable arenas so that the overall hierarchy of that soundscape could remain largely unthreatened.

Radio and Citizenship in Argentina: Silvia Guerrico and Female Commentary Radio emerged early and expanded rapidly in Argentina, which was quite a wealthy country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An important cohort of technicians and entrepreneurs shaped and supported the nation’s mostly homegrown radio industry. Argentine radio developed along largely commercial lines, but parallel to, rather than in imitation of, emerging commercial radio in the United States.29 The fact that Argentine workers had higher salaries and more leisure time than many of their neighbors in the region also meant that there was a large and ready market for radio. By the early 1930s, radio receiver ownership in Argentina, especially in the capital Buenos Aires, had reached a point where stations could hope to reach mass audiences.30 While there was discomfort, critique, and ultimately realignment of women’s speech on the Argentine airwaves, the nature of that criticism

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was different than in the United States and Germany. In Argentina, there seemed to be less emphasis placed on the sonic qualities of the female voice itself (pitch, modulation, and so on), and more emphasis on women’s overly emotional and irrational way of speaking. Rather than claiming that women’s voices were too high-pitched (as in the U.S. critique), Argentine radio critics often faulted women for their overuse of adjectives, a charge that seemed to associate them with irrationality and imprecision, as opposed to the precise, rational speech of males.31 While the same general patriarchal agenda was surely underlying these three cases, we can only speculate as to the reasons for these differences. Since there is little evidence to suggest that Argentine radio technology was superior or that Argentine women’s voices were lowerpitched than in the United States or Germany, one must look elsewhere for explanations. Radio did not emerge dramatically later in Argentina, either. What is different is that in the United States and Germany, radio and women’s suffrage were roughly contemporary, whereas Argentine women did not gain the vote until 1947, the end of the medium’s ‘‘golden age.’’ Did the fact that women were full citizens at radio’s debut in some places shape their broadcasting presence and the way their onair speech was heard by the audience? Did this, or perhaps other aspects of gender relations in the United States and Germany, make it convenient to cite technological limitations as a reason for marginalizing women’s voices, whereas in Argentina critics were more direct in calling for silencing women speakers based on what were presented as almost inherent qualities of female speech? Was it that Argentine women did not mount their challenge to male hegemony on the airwaves until the early 1930s, when technological limitations had been overcome, thus necessitating other justifications? What we do know is that in the early years of the 1930s, there was still room for different kinds of women’s voices on the Argentine airwaves, even those that seemed to challenge the dominant gender culture. But as radio matured, the window began to close, and by the second half of that decade women’s speaking voices were increasingly relegated to the less threatening arenas of radio drama, household tips, and children’s radio. Silvia Guerrico was the most important and influential female journalist on Argentine radio during the early 1930s, and her career charts the potential and gendered outcome of broadcast radio in Argentina. Born around 1905 in Uruguay with the name Mirtha Barberı´a, Guerrico began her career in journalism in her home country.32 Sometime around 1928 she moved across the river to Buenos Aires, and by 1930 she had her own ‘‘oral magazine’’ program on Radio Prieto, and later a ‘‘woman’s chat’’ program on that same station. Guerrico was thus well positioned to take advantage of radio’s rapid expansion during these

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years, as well as the fluidity that made it possible for a young wellregarded female journalist and writer to create new spaces for herself, and by extension women’s voices, on the airwaves. For a short time Guerrico also had a regular column in the earliest issues of Argentina’s first popular radio magazine, Antena, which began publishing in May 1931. These columns provide insight into Guerrico’s ideology and sense of self, and—given the absence of transcripts of her broadcasts—a glimpse into the content of her radio shows. Guerrico was no self-identified feminist, but her print/on-air personality certainly chafed against traditional gender norms. She was a self-identified ‘‘intellectual,’’ and she imagined her audience as composed of intelligent women. Describing her show in a June 1931 interview published in Antena, Guerrico claimed, ‘‘All the intelligent women who have radios listen to me.’’ Daytime radio was supposed to make women better mothers, wives, and homemakers, but Guerrico saw what she did as deviating from the usual format. In the same 1931 interview she described her show’s content as ‘‘frivolous’’ because it focused on impractical matters such as poetry and poking fun at men rather than recipes and stain removal.33 A response to a reader/listener in her magazine column is also illuminating. To ‘‘Eleanora in Avellaneda,’’ she replied: ‘‘Of course! It would give me great pleasure to read your observations on the radio. An intelligent woman cannot help but write interesting things.’’34 Socalled intelligent women, therefore, had in Guerrico’s view both a right and perhaps something of an obligation to speak out and to comment on their lives and the world around them. This selection also implies that Guerrico’s radio show gave other women an opportunity to air their ideas and opinions, even if it was through the voice of the show’s hostess. The other key component of Guerrico’s public identity was her status as a single woman. In one of her Antena columns, entitled ‘‘Girls of Marriageable Age,’’ she railed against the intense social pressure on women to marry young and not necessarily for love. Written in Guerrico’s satirical style, the column mocks the kinds of conversations she says unmarried women faced everyday: ‘‘When are you getting married?’’ she wrote. ‘‘What? You don’t have a boyfriend? I can’t believe it. Such a nice girl, such a good girl. You are now almost twenty-five you know. (Ay! They say this to me!)’’35 As the last line suggests (Guerrico was around twenty-five at this time), this column was at least in part autobiographical. Guerrico took her unmarried status as something of a badge of honor, one that accompanied her identity as an ‘‘intellectual.’’ To a letter from ‘‘Tito in Entre Rı´os,’’ she responded: ‘‘My age? Ay, my son, what a question? Let’s keep quiet on that one, OK? As for my status . . . it’s good, thank God; that is to say, single. Understood?’’36 Silvia Guerrico, in other words,

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appears to have voiced a perspective of the young, educated, and confident woman, sufficiently independent to ward off the pressures to conform to the old ways, but without a clear affirmative articulation as to what or who the ‘‘New Woman’’ should be. But Guerrico’s success did make her, for a time, something of a model for the ‘‘New Woman’’ in Argentina. In August 1931, Guerrico started Cartel Sonoro, a ‘‘magazine of the air’’ that soon became an important institution in Argentine radio. She wrote the scripts and put together what has been described as the ‘‘first radio journalism team’’ in Argentina.37 Considered an ‘‘intellectual’’ show, Cartel Sonoro was a radio variety program that featured important journalists, writers, and other guests, combined with lighter discussions of film, topics of ‘‘women’s interest,’’ and comedy. Many years later, in the 1980s, the Argentine newspaper Cları´n described Cartel Sonoro as ‘‘an advance in narrative and journalistic style far ahead of its time.’’38 Cartel Sonoro started in an afternoon slot (Saturdays from 5:00 to 5:30 p.m.). But the show was an instant success, and by December 1931 Cartel Sonoro had moved to Radio Fe´nix (it later moved around to other stations) and was broadcasting daily and during prime time (10:30 to 11:30 p.m.; prime time was later than in the United States). Guerrico had thus made an almost unheard-of leap: from overseeing a weekly afternoon ‘‘women’s’’ chat show to a ‘‘serious’’ daily program that ran in prime time. Guerrico’s ascent coincided with a moment in which Argentine radio had space for political women it would not see before or for a long time after. In 1932, a high point for women’s suffrage campaigns in Argentina, feminists and other women’s groups maintained a rather regular presence on the airwaves. Their emergence, and rapid disappearance, from Argentine radio is a good marker of the opening and closing of the ‘‘window’’ of change/opportunity described above.39 While all of Guerrico’s initial collaborators were men, over time Cartel Sonoro became an important platform for women journalists and writers, and it introduced women’s words and voices to an ever-larger (female and male) listening audience. Yet despite the show’s success, Cartel Sonoro could not entirely escape the stigma of its feminine label. In August 1933, on the occasion of its five hundredth episode, Cartel Sonoro was now, according to Sintonı´a, ‘‘the most popular talk radio program in the country.’’ The magazine’s commemorative story praised Guerrico as a ‘‘true twentieth-century woman’’ but described the voice of the show as ‘‘possibly still a bit high-pitched/fluty [aflautada],’’ an interesting use of musical terminology to refer to the fact that Cartel Sonoro, despite its prestige and its prime-time slot, still presented as a bit effeminate.40 Guerrico’s own (that is, her literal) voice was praised in gendered terms as well. Later that same year, writer Roberto Gandarias wrote: ‘‘Silvia’s

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voice, warm and cordial, makes us interested in radio again. Silvia’s voice is a delicious affliction of the ears [una deliciosa enfermedad de los oı´dos].’’ The author went on further to praise the sensual qualities of Guerrico’s voice, but he wondered whether her physical appearance could ever match her ‘‘sonic’’ appearance, asking, ‘‘Could her gaze ever match the depth of that voice?’’41 By this point, however, the tide was beginning to shift. Staring in late 1933 and into 1934 there was a flurry of commentary in the radio press questioning women’s qualifications to speak and/or recite poetry on the airwaves, suggesting that a key moment of backlash had arrived. As elsewhere, women speakers on Argentine radio were criticized as annoying and hard on the ears.42 Many of these radio critics also heard women’s voices as an example of amateurism and ‘‘vulgarity’’ on the radio. ‘‘A woman on the radio,’’ argued Sintonı´a in September 1933, ‘‘whether she is a writer, a recitationist, or a doctor of philosophy and letters, has a hard time being successful. More than anything, she must have a defined personality that will allow her to address the audience with authority’’—something, the author explained, women were less likely to be born with. ‘‘Virtuosity is difficult; vulgarity is easy,’’ the section concluded.43 The sequestering of female voices was also presented as part of radio’s professionalization. Radio’s early, more amateur era accommodated women, the argument went, but rising standards left little room for generally unqualified female speakers. Writing about the still-important role of on-air poetry recitationists (diseuses), an early 1934 issue of the middle-class weekly Caras y Caretas described this transition. ‘‘In the early days of radio,’’ the writer explained, ‘‘there was an alarming abundance of diseuses. The stations took in any candidate who presented herself, with nothing more than her self-confidence as a re´sume´. But the last round of elimination arrived and the women recitationists disappeared as if blown away by the winds of the Pampas.’’44 Later that year the radio magazine Sintonı´a declared its general prejudice against women reciting poetry: ‘‘When we hear of a female recitationist we grit our teeth. They have made us suffer so much that, like cats, we are frightened by the mere sight of water.’’45 Another Caras y Caretas radio commentary, discussing what seemed to have been a particularly chaotic radio show, complained: ‘‘When two people talk at the same time it is a given that it is two women. Speaking in unison, with no patience to wait their turn, is an exclusive privilege of women.’’46 Finally, radio speech could also be associated with a certain exhibitionism on a woman’s part. The April 1934 issue of Sintonı´a contained a rather pointed attack on noted radio personality Jenny de Ford Richard. Criticized as ‘‘annoying’’ and ‘‘antimicrophonic,’’ de Ford Richard was

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also accused of being a woman ‘‘who never wants to be a violet, but, rather insolently, a jasmine, with enough perfume that she never passes unnoticed.’’47 Here the critique seems to be that the speaker is too ‘‘loud’’ and demanding of attention, characteristics that unsexed a woman or, perhaps worse, contained intimations of immorality. During this era (and to a lesser extent even today), a woman walking unescorted on a Latin American street was seen as sexually available and of questionable morality. Women’s speaking on the radio can be understood in those terms: as public exhibitionism and as a violation of gender norms that could easily mark the woman involved as dishonorable and unladylike. For a time, however, Silvia Guerrico remained an important exception to the rather sweeping condemnation of women speakers. Not yet thirty years old, she was a young woman running a popular prime-time news and variety radio show in one of the world’s largest and most important radio markets. Yet her stature and celebrity in Argentina were still circumscribed by her gender. Just as her program was characterized as ‘‘still a bit high-pitched,’’ so her position remained contingent on her walking a fine line of acceptable female speech and behavior. In 1934, at the height of her popularity, Guerrico landed not one, but two interviews with the Mexican-born Hollywood movie actor Ramo´n Novarro when he traveled to Buenos Aires in May of that year. Novarro was a big star, billed as the next Rudolph Valentino by the Hollywood studios, and there was much excitement about his visit. But Guerrico’s homily to Novarro in the second interview caused a scandal, and clearly and dramatically underscored the significant limits on the way women could speak over the air. The following is a somewhat abridged version of what Silvia Guerrico said to Ramo´n Novarro and, by extension, to a large Argentine audience, that night in May 1934: I am going to say to you, Ramo´n Novarro, what all women would want to say to you today, if nobody was listening, if the mocking gaze of men did not weigh upon them, injuring and humiliating them. . . . Women love you, and there isn’t one who would not like to offer her hand and thank you. . . . They would say thank you: you have filled our lives with beautiful dreams. For an hour, from whatever movie screen in the world, you have been the prince that comes to us with your smile, your wavy hair, your svelte figure, your easy stride. . . . During that hour, your name erased all realities . . . there were no women who worked like dogs and had to marry some pimple-faced guy; there were no women who waited for the rough kiss of a dirty husband; there were no women overloaded with sadness and children. . . . Men have made life very difficult for women. And day-by-day, they make it uglier.48

Guerrico committed a number of infractions here. She spoke about feminine desire and fantasy and she spoke derisively about (Argentine)

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men. A woman interviewing a man was problematic enough, but Guerrico also portrayed Novarro as the admired object, presented before— and for the pleasure of—the female gaze. This is a dramatic inversion of the usual gendered arrangement, whereby the male voice has the power to comment on the (speechless) female body exhibited as visual spectacle. Here, in contrast, the audience listened (without visual referent) to Guerrico’s oral commentary on Novarro’s visual screen appearance.49 Guerrico also got in trouble because she spoke collectively on behalf of women generally. Her use of the conditional verb tense contains an important ambiguity. Guerrico told Novarro—and by extension her listening audience—what women would say if they could: not just if they were in Novarro’s presence, but if they could speak at all. As the one woman who was empowered to speak—to Novarro and in general— Guerrico was articulating their collective suffering and desires. By speaking both of women’s abuse at the hands of men and patriarchal society, and by expressing a desire to escape—and perhaps even invert—that oppressed state, Guerrico spoke to—and on behalf of—what Michele Hilmes has called the ‘‘feminine subaltern counterpublic.’’50 Guerrico also gave voice to that ‘‘counterpublic’’ in prime time, and to an audience of both men and women, probably one that was larger than usual because of Novarro’s presence. On her afternoon chat show Guerrico might have gotten away with criticizing men once in a while, but now male ears were part of her audience. The irony here is that Guerrico said what she claimed women would say if nobody (i.e., men) were listening. But men were listening to her, and she was clearly not as free from patriarchal pressure as she may have presumed. The reaction to Guerrico’s words was strong and swift, with calls for government investigations and her banishment from the airwaves. While she had previously been exempt from the usual slurs and criticisms meted out to women who spoke on the radio, now Guerrico was lumped in with the rest of them. Argentine intellectual Jorge Luque Lobos spoke on another Argentine radio station the day following the controversial interview. After explaining that he had tuned into the radio to ‘‘admire the star Ramo´n Novarro,’’ Luque Lobos said, ‘‘The sky must have been cloudy [for] when we looked for the star we didn’t find him anywhere. . . . We heard instead another voice, the voice of a woman . . . with inflections intermingled with intimate emotion and an abundance of adjectives—like a military parade in formal dress.’’51 Although the radio press made some half-hearted attempts to defend her—and broadcasting generally—from censorship, an editorial in Sintonı´a described Guerrico’s speech as an ‘‘improper amorous sermon’’ and as an ‘‘an attack on the sovereignty of our sex.’’52 Unfortunately for Guerrico, this incident occurred at a time of general (and government)

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outcry against immoral and ‘‘anticultural’’ radio. Later that year, in September 1934, an Executive Decree handed down strict regulations on radio broadcasting, meant to curb overt or excessive political and commercial propaganda, and any content deemed immoral, offensive, damaging to the national interest, or as deforming the national language.53 The fact that Guerrico was Uruguayan was also used against her. As a ‘‘foreigner’’ claiming to speak on behalf of Argentine women, she was subject to attack in an era of rising nationalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric. The Argentine public also weighed in on this scandal. Letters to Sintonı´a raised the very issue of which women Guerrico was speaking for and whether she had the right to do so. In May 1934 a letter writer attacked Guerrico for daring to speak in the name of Argentine women, thus ‘‘depriving every Argentine woman of her conscious thought [and] . . . the right to express herself.’’54 The magazine editors, who presumably added the headline ‘‘A Man Speaks in the Name of Women’’ above the letter, perhaps saw the irony that a man was condemning the silencing of women upon whose behalf he saw fit to speak. But Guerrico also had her defenders. A few weeks later another reader letter was published, this time by a (presumably female) writer identified as ‘‘Ninette.’’ ‘‘Sen˜orita Silvia Guerrico did not speak for Argentine women, nor for those of any other country,’’ explained Ninette. ‘‘She said what she felt towards a great movie star, and when he kissed sen˜orita Silvia Guerrico’s hand he kissed the hand of all the ladies who think the same way she does.’’55 Taken together, these letters represent two very different interpretations of the relationship between Guerrico’s voice and her broader female audience. While the first writer accused her of taking away women’s voice, usurping women’s right to speak, the second heard Guerrico as giving voice to many of her female listeners, thus facilitating women’s expression. The latter defense also insists upon women as plural: rather than interpreting Guerrico’s inclusive language as a claim to speak for all women, ‘‘Ninette’’ asserts that she was speaking only for those women who share her views. Thus we see imbedded in this scandal a debate about female subjectivity and whether women, like men, can speak in more than one voice. As the scandal was winding down, a short item in Sintonı´a returned to the old topic of women on the radio. ‘‘Ladies, with all our due respect as ladies, but not as radio speakers, occupy various microphones at many hours of the day,’’ the article explained. ‘‘They desperately seize upon exotic vocabulary and far-fetched ideas, convinced that they are making a strong impression. They do make an impression, but only in that they are worse every day. . . . Decidedly, woman and microphone are incompatible’’ (emphasis added).56 The ‘‘Guerrico affair,’’ as it was referred to,

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seems to have cleared the path for wholesale condemnation of women speakers on the radio. Again, it is worth noting that this critique had little to do with the tone or pitch of a woman’s voice, and everything to do with the content of her speech. It also had little to do with women singers or actresses. The fact that this piece talks about women ‘‘at many hours of the day’’ suggests that this critique now also included Guerrico. Woman speakers on the radio are presented, in sum, as overly perfumed, irrational charlatans who contribute to the ‘‘vulgarity’’ of the airwaves. Following this incident, Cartel Sonoro did remain on the air, and in August 1935, the show celebrated its fourth anniversary, but it seems to have gone off the air for good later that year. A reader letter to Sintonı´a lamented the passing of the show, which she described as ‘‘a true oasis in radio programming.’’57 In 1938 Guerrico resurfaced on Radio Stentor with a similar ‘‘on-air magazine,’’ but she was presented in the radio press as merely one of several collaborators, not the main figure, as she had been on Cartel Sonoro.58 Although she remained a very important radio figure, by the 1940s Guerrico had been relegated back to the ‘‘female’’ sphere of daytime radio, writing radio soap operas and heading up the ‘‘Friendship Club,’’ a women’s radio club that was very popular in the middle of that decade. Guerrico eventually left Buenos Aires and returned to her hometown of Montevideo, where she continued to work on radio and to publish fiction, and during the 1950s she also worked for a time as a screenwriter in Mexico. Guerrico continued to be successful by most indicators, but the Novarro scandal was both the apex of her career and a turning point for women doing serious, high-profile ‘‘intellectual’’ radio on the Argentine airwaves.

Radio Drama and Political Theater: Eva Duarte and the ‘‘Voice of the People’’ By the late 1930s two important, and in some ways self-reinforcing, changes in Argentine radio and politics were well under way. The radionovela (radio drama, or radio soap opera) was an increasingly important part of daytime and some evening radio, displacing musical programming and pushing aside what little there was of ‘‘intellectual’’ or political women’s radio. Housewives and domestic workers were the primary and most important audience for these romantic, melodramatic fantasies.59 At the same time, important political changes were afoot in Argentina. The ‘‘liberal consensus’’ that had governed the country since the late nineteenth century was facing a profound crisis. 60 By the late 1930s, radical right-wing nationalism was on the rise, responding both to this crisis of the old regime and to the emergence of the urban and semi-

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urban working classes as a political force. All of the above trajectories converged in Peronism, a distinctly Argentine variant of Latin American populism associated with Juan Pero´n, president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 (and again from 1973 to 1974). One of the things that distinguishes Peronism from other Latin American populist projects of the same era is the high visual and auditory profile of a woman, First Lady Eva Duarte de Pero´n. Loved and hated more passionately than her husband, the rise of both radio drama and populism converge in the persona of ‘‘Evita,’’ whose voice made an indelible mark on the Argentine soundscape. While a full and proper discussion of Eva Duarte and her transition into ‘‘Evita’’ lies beyond the scope of this essay, she is a key player in the story of women’s radio voices in Argentina. Of interest here is the formation of Duarte’s on-air persona and the radio propaganda she produced between 1943 and the official end of her career as a radio actress in 1945, shortly before her marriage to Juan Pero´n and the beginning of a new chapter in both her life and Argentine history. Much of the groundwork for Duarte’s later incarnation as a woman of tremendous political influence and power was laid during these earlier years. One can also see the way radio drama informed Peronist political theater and, in turn, how a woman’s voice came to play such a leading role in a paternalistic Argentine populism. As in the United States, Argentine radio drama was often sponsored by common commercial household products like soap (hence the term ‘‘soap operas’’). Thus it makes some sense that a soap manufacturer, seeking a voice to sell its products, would discover what would later be identified as the ‘‘voice of the people’’ in Argentina. In 1941 Empresa Gueren˜o, the maker of Radical Soap, signed a five-year exclusive contract with a young radio actress named Eva Duarte. Under this first important contract of her career, Duarte starred in radio dramas under the company’s sponsorship.61 In these early days Duarte’s voice seems to have echoed her youth as well as her popular and provincial origins. One of her many biographers described Duarte’s voice when she first began working on radio as ‘‘high-pitched and trembling, painful and honest. It was childish, clumsy and unrehearsed, a plain voice that resembled her listeners’ voices.’’62 In contrast to Silvia Guerrico, therefore, Eva Duarte’s appeal was not to the ‘‘intellectual’’ woman, but to the women of the popular classes, who heard their own lives and struggles in her voice. Although Duarte’s oratory underwent important changes over the course of the decade, the basic ‘‘grain’’ of her voice remained, lending her an air of credibility and authenticity among an important sector of the Argentine populace.63 Duarte was a propagandist for the military regime before she and Juan Pero´n publicly joined forces. In June 1943 a military coup ushered in a

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new era in Argentina, one that had an important impact on radio. The more radical nationalist faction that came to dominate the government at this time moved quickly to consolidate its position and marginalize its opponents. The regime also imposed new restrictions on radio content and format. Through her ambition and personal connections, Duarte seized this opportunity to secure an important role within the regime’s new plan for political control and moral uplift of the airwaves. She successfully pitched an idea to the military official in charge of radio for a series of documentaries focused on famous women in history, utilizing the radioteatro format and incorporating ‘‘high moral and historical themes.’’64 The program brought her the stardom that had previously eluded her: in late 1943 the show, with Duarte as the star, went on the air at top-rated Radio Belgrano and in a prime-time slot: 10:30 p.m., Sunday through Friday. Biographers have considered the ways that this ‘‘famous women’’ program served as something of a rehearsal for Eva’s later role as first lady.65 Indeed, looking at a list of some of the women Duarte depicted in this series, one is struck by the similarities of these women to her own later political persona. They are, collectively, a study in how to be a powerful woman without rocking the patriarchal boat. This was no series dedicated to feminist heroines (with the possible exception of Catherine the Great); rather, programs were largely dedicated to the wives or lovers of famous men such as Empress Carlota of Mexico and Josephine of France, or (in)famous performers like Sarah Bernhardt and Lola Montes. The show also featured Latin American heroine/martyrs, themselves also mostly linked to famous men, such as Eliza Lynch and Margarita Weild de Paz. It also seems to have been during this show that Duarte’s voice and speaking style transformed from the ‘‘childish’’ and ‘‘clumsy’’ actress to the powerful forceful orator we hear in her later discourses. Yet more elite and ‘‘cultured’’ listeners, such as writer and intellectual Gloria Alcorta, still heard the poor country girl playing vocal dress-up. ‘‘Randomly we stumbled upon a certain Eva Duarte playing the part of Catherine of Russia,’’ Alcorta commented, ‘‘And what a daily pleasure, this nasal voice who played the empress with rural tango accents! It was hilarious.’’66 But while some heard vulgarity and the voice of the hoi polloi, many of Duarte’s fans heard a voice that was familiar, and one whose prominence gave them reason to hope. As a radio celebrity Duarte was one of many artists tapped for a benefit for victims of a devastating earthquake that struck San Juan, Argentina, in January 1944. This benefit was another major turning point in Duarte’s life, and in the history of Argentine radio, for it was here that she first officially met a recently widowed colonel named Juan Pero´n, although some speculate they already knew each other. Pero´n, a rising

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star in the Argentine state, held the increasingly powerful post of secretary of labor and welfare. In his memoirs he recalled this fateful encounter and Duarte’s vocal style. ‘‘I was quite subdued by the force of her voice and her look,’’ Pero´n wrote. ‘‘Eva was pale but when she spoke her face seemed to catch fire.’’67 The two were soon publicly linked and— not without scandal—moved in together shortly thereafter. Duarte and Pero´n worked together to bring their voices to the forefront of the Argentine political stage. In June 1944, at the same time Pero´n was named vice president of the republic, Duarte began a new radio program, Hacı´a un futuro mejor (Toward a Better Future). While little documentation of the content of these broadcasts is available, the program was direct propaganda in favor of the military regime and, specifically, Pero´n himself. The show continued to smudge the lines between radio drama and political propaganda, mixing dramatized depictions of the regime’s promises to aid the poor with direct commentary by Duarte, and sometimes by Pero´n and others. In a September 1944 interview, Duarte alluded to this blurring: ‘‘I am absolutely convinced,’’ she stated, ‘‘that radio drama is a direct path to bring our emotions to all class of listeners and, moreover, reduce the distances between us.’’68 This statement suggests that Duarte already understood that one of her projects was to bring the radio drama format to the service of the military regime, further enmeshing radio and political populism. This is very different from the journalistic approach favored by Silvia Guerrico. By this point, Duarte’s voice was being heralded as the voice of the people. In a July 1944 episode of Toward a Better Future, she was introduced in the following way: ‘‘Here is the voice of a woman of the people—that of the anonymous masses—in whose voice is revealed the momentous nature . . . of this redeeming revolution. Here is the voice of a woman of the people. . . . The voice of this woman . . . addressing the entire country, is speaking today about the extraordinary tale of the preordained men who have made this movement of national salvation possible.’’69 In an earlier episode, she had been introduced as ‘‘a woman who carries in her voice and gesture, the magnificent vigor of the new hour that has sounded in our country.’’ Duarte’s oratory further reinforced her claim to speak for all Argentines, and especially for Argentine women. ‘‘I am a woman like you,’’ she exclaimed, ‘‘mothers, wives, fiance´es, or sisters. . . . From me was born the son in the barracks, or the worker who is forging a new Argentina, on land, air and sea.’’70 Like Guerrico, therefore, Duarte claimed to speak on behalf of Argentine women. But this time, instead of voicing women’s grievances against men, she spoke in defense of and deference to the ‘‘vigorous’’ and decidedly masculine leaders of the ‘‘Revolution.’’

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The show was apparently a success. ‘‘The propagandistic machinery of Toward a Better Future,’’ write Evita biographers Otelo Borroni and Roberto Vacca, ‘‘on the pretext of bolstering the ideas of the Revolution of June 4, 1943, in reality crystallized the image of Colonel Pero´n among the masses. The role of Eva Duarte in these broadcasts was of great utility to him.’’71 What one sees here is an important restructuring of the gendered soundscape, one that allowed the female voice (perhaps only in the singular) to rise from out of the background, acting as a relay between the regime and its popular supporters. As Pero´n’s lover, and later his wife, Duarte could get away with a kind of fanatical devotion that might have sounded improper coming from almost anyone else.72 Yet in this, she modeled the kind of unwavering fidelity Peronist supporters were expected to show their leader. This twice-weekly program aired at 10:30 in the morning, a time when the audience was mostly women and children. Duarte also continued to make her ‘‘famous women’’ programs, which aired at 10:30 in the evening. Taken together, these shows speak to the gender ambiguities of Peronism: the desire to use a female voice to create spaces for women, but carefully within the parameters of both patriarchy and paternalism. She made a prime-time show aimed at a mixed audience depicting strong but generally self-sacrificing women, and a daytime show aimed at a primarily female audience in which a female voice spoke forcefully but in support of and in deference to male political leadership. On the daytime program, however, Duarte did acknowledge and call upon the private influence of women over men: ‘‘Women, listen to me, and tell your man what you are hearing.’’73 In her daytime show, Duarte spoke directly to that ‘‘subaltern feminine counterpublic’’ and urged them to use their voices, but only in the private sphere. It might have been perceived as improper and emasculating for men to be the direct recipients of strongly (and publicly) worded propaganda via a woman’s voice. But under cover of radio drama, female self-sacrifice, and women’s influence within the domestic sphere, her voice remained in tune with the prevailing order. Later on, once her power was more secured, other kinds of address would be possible. But at this early date, she (and Pero´n) had to tread more lightly. If this daytime show was such a success in locking in Pero´n’s power with the masses, we must give some of that credit to the voices of those women who followed Duarte’s instructions. Yet while some may have heard redemption, empowerment, and the promise of social justice in Duarte’s voice, others heard ‘‘savage dissonance’’ and threats to civilization. Her very presence—visual and vocal— was seen and heard as an affront and a threat, especially by the armed forces, and sectors within the army repeatedly demanded that Pero´n force Duarte to retire from politics. The descriptively titled Woman with

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the Whip is a less than flattering biography of Evita published in 1952 under the pseudonym Marı´a Flores. This portrait is keenly attuned to sound, presenting Peronism as a disruption of the Argentine soundscape, and the voice of Eva Duarte received particular attention. Her voice is alternately referred to as ‘‘overdramatized,’’ ‘‘hysterical,’’ ‘‘harsh,’’ and ‘‘shrill as a parakeet.’’74 Thus we return to much the same rhetoric used to silence and condemn nineteenth-century suffragettes. Eva Duarte’s challenges to the gendered soundscape, in other words, met with similar condemnation to that Silvia Guerrico faced a decade earlier. The difference, however, is in the larger political context and in the ambiguous position Duarte successfully carved out within that soundscape. Eva Duarte is a paradox, one that harnessed the important and often contradictory changes that had taken place in gender relations and the gendered soundscape in prior decades. She was a public, forceful political presence who spoke to and in favor of women but at the same time used her voice to mobilize women in support of a paternalistic authoritarian movement. In lending her voice to Peronism, she represented one kind of resolution to the contradictions of women’s radio voices, citizenship, and place in the public sphere. Even before she became Latin America’s most powerful first lady, she confirmed the inexorable changes of the twentieth century that had redrawn the lines between house and street, and between the elite and popular classes, that had reconfigured the political soundscape. But at the same time she reinforced the old hierarchies: women were incorporated into the regime’s political project, but generally in ways that emphasized the old associations of women with the private sphere and as caretakers of home and family. Just as radio found ways to incorporate women’s voices (and to target women as consumers) without seriously disrupting patriarchal gender relations, so Eva Duarte’s radio shows in the mid-1940s opened a path for incorporating women into the political sphere while retaining an overall ideal of domesticity and female subordination.

Conclusion: The Female Voice and the Mass-Mediated Public Contemplating the radio personas of Silvia Guerrico and Eva Duarte encourages us to think about ways in which the gendered soundscape was shaped, generally by modernity and mass communications, and more specifically by the alternately conflicting and intersecting trajectories of feminism, capitalism, and populism in the 1930s and 1940s. They also remind us that women’s growing visibility in the twentieth century was accompanied by a greater audibility as well. Britta Sjogren’s study of the female voice-off in 1940s cinema offers considerable insight into the

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complexities and contradictions of the female radio voice in the time period under examination. Among other things, her work helps us to understand the relationship of voice and speech to the gendered body, as well as the plural and contradictory ways in which the ‘‘feminine’’ might speak from within patriarchy.75 Settling comfortably into that contradictory space helps us listen to and understand the radio voice and speech of Guerrico and especially Duarte. Both determined, strongwilled women born into challenging economic circumstances who came to Buenos Aires (and Buenos Aires radio) to make a living and a name for themselves, these women represent two very different eras in Argentine radio and politics, and two different, yet not unrelated, interventions of the female voice in the public sphere. The years of Cartel Sonoro with Guerrico at the helm during the 1930s coincided with the more open and accessible years of early commercial radio in Argentina. They were also the ‘‘infamous decade’’ in Argentine politics when conservatives, backed by important elements of the oligarchy, struggled to retain control over a dynamic and increasingly restive society. At the same time, women’s growing participation in the workforce and as consumers brought them into the economy in ways that challenged the traditional relegation of the feminine to the private realm. Guerrico’s voice and radio presence can be read as a more straightforward claim for the inclusion of the feminine within the public sphere based on women’s capacity for ‘‘critical rationality.’’76 In this sense Guerrico’s voice echoed the claims and desires of liberal feminists who demanded a voice for women in bourgeois democracy. While, sadly, there are no known recordings of Guerrico’s broadcasts, textual sources describe a voice that was refined and sonorous, although not always constrained within the boundaries of female propriety. At the same time, Guerrico retained a certain elitism, advocating most forcefully for educated and ‘‘intelligent’’ women, and not always or necessarily for women in general. She may have paid occasional lip service to women workers, but her target audience was clearly educated middle-class women. But by the decade’s end, commercial and political factors meant that radio was becoming both more restrictive in its content and aimed at a larger and more popular audience. Radio drama came to dominate the broadcast soundscape, especially of so-called women’s radio. Guerrico was a part of this trend, in that she wrote some of these radio dramas, but it was Eva Duarte who made the most of this format to promote both her own career and, increasingly, the goals of an ambitious military regime. Duarte’s voice and radio presence played an important role in the transformation of the public sphere and constructions of citizenship via populist politics. In the historical literature and popular imagination, we tend to think of ‘‘Evita’’ as visual spectacle: the designer clothing,

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the elegantly coiffured blond hair and, in later years, the visibly obvious physical deterioration as cancer consumed her body. But looking at her early years as radio propagandist underscores that it was with her voice that Duarte first established her importance within the Argentine political scene. Like other populist experiments, Peronism sought the ‘‘noise’’ but not the ‘‘signal’’ of the working and popular classes: a theater of popular participation that concealed top-down rule. Indeed, one can argue that a voice like Duarte’s was an ideal model for the kind of noisy, but ultimately compliant, posture Peronism sought from its supporters. Her voice echoed the growing demands of the Argentine working and popular classes for inclusion in the public sphere, while containing those demands under a paternalistic umbrella. Eva Duarte had a populist voice, one that had acquired fortitude and confidence but never left behind a certain coarseness that gave her authenticity and allowed her to speak intimately to her target audience. As a feminine voice, she helped blur the lines between public and private and to simultaneously legitimate the regime’s claim to popular representation and to depoliticize its supporters. Yet at the same time, her forceful oratory contained the contradictions of populist mobilization that threatened to break free of the controls imposed upon it. To quote Britta Sjogren, Duarte’s voice ‘‘enunciate[d] both the patriarchal and the feminine simultaneously.’’77 Therein lies its subversive potential and, I would argue, a key to understanding the durability and malleability of ‘‘Evita’’ as a political symbol in Argentina. Debates and struggles over women’s voices are an important thread within the history of the twentieth century. Looking at the history of early radio through this lens of gender, voice, and citizenship informs our understanding of the medium’s early trajectory and how the new technology was shaped by larger, and in most cases preexisting, social forces. Modernity ultimately left patriarchy standing, but it did not go unchallenged or unchanged during this era. The gendered soundscape underwent powerful changes, yet just as nineteenth-century critics heard women’s speech as shrill and dissonant, so their twentieth-century counterparts recoiled against women at the microphone. The fact that other kinds of (performative) on-air vocalizations (singing, theatrical performance, and so forth) were heard as acceptable underscores that what was defined as ‘‘antimicrophonic’’ was as much a part of social construction, context, and implication as it was about acoustic quality. ‘‘Woman and microphone’’ were incompatible because ‘‘speech’’ was incompatible with femininity and masculinist definitions of the public sphere. Even today we have still not entirely left behind the notion that the male voice embodies strength, authority, and rationality, and that women’s oratory

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can easily sound shrill and irrational. We anxiously await further studies on women’s radio voices in Latin America and elsewhere, which will allow us to more fully understand the ways radio and gender politics intertwined and informed one another during the medium’s golden age.

Part II Sonic Objects

Chapter 4

Collectors, Bootleggers, and the Value of Jazz, 1930–1952 Alex Cummings

In the late 1920s a new breed of listener entered the scene of American popular culture—the jazz record collector, who appreciated jazz as an art form and sought to hoard the artifacts of its early evolution. Most of the early jazz recordings were produced in limited numbers by small or unstable companies. The records collectors loved best had been targeted largely at African American consumers, who played the discs until they were nearly rubbed raw. ‘‘Your sole consolation was that early jazz was like folk music, a people’s music,’’ collector Charles Edward Smith reflected years later, ‘‘and the grooves were sometimes all but gone, only because people who had loved it had listened to the records again and again.’’1 In any case, the early recordings of jazz were fragile and few in number. Major companies like RCA Victor and Columbia could not see much to be gained by keeping obscure records in print. ‘‘The large mass-distribution organizations can handle, to their own satisfaction, only those large-selling items which have mass appeal,’’ collector Wilder Hobson observed in 1951, when the movement for collecting and preservation that he and his colleagues had started years before was bringing music copying to a head as a legal issue. ‘‘The pirate may be ethical or unethical, as you choose, but he is frequently engaged in offering timetested, out-of-print works of art which the big recording interests have not felt it worthwhile to issue.’’2 Zealots like Hobson had discovered how scarce the relics of Bix Beiderbecke and other collectors’ favorites really were, and they duplicated these records for their friends. Then, in the late 1930s, collectors began the Hot Record Society to reissue classic recordings as an indifferent music industry looked the other way, establishing a precedent for record copiers who catered to jazz enthusiasts after World War II. In the

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process, the spirit of collecting collided with the dubious ethics of copying. Collectors gathered up things that were valuable because they were rare, while copiers made rare goods less so. While bootlegging might seem to contradict collecting, in this sense, the two practices often coincided, meeting on one side of the law and then the other. Record collectors and copiers reinterpreted the economic, legal, and social meaning of sound in the twentieth century, offering their own answer about how to deal with the accumulating backlog of recorded music. Working with shellac and vinyl, they prefigured consumers who copied, compiled, and shared recordings through media such as magnetic tape and computer networks later in the twentieth century. Bootleggers highlighted the potential for recorded sound to have long-term commercial value at a time when the music industry still treated recordings as products of the moment, aimed at contemporary markets and abandoned as consumer tastes shifted. ‘‘Records made music a kind of consumable good,’’ notes David Suisman in his history of the early music industry, ‘‘whether their limited lifespan was constrained by the ephemerality of fashion, the continual attraction of innovation, or the physical properties of the records of themselves,’’ which could break or wear out.3 Collectors insisted that performances from the past ought to remain available, and if large companies could not make a profit by keeping such recordings in circulation, individual fans and entrepreneurs would copy and distribute the music themselves. They exploited a curious loophole in copyright law that remained open until Congress passed the Sound Recordings Amendment in 1972. According to the U.S. Constitution, copyright can protect only the fixed expression of an idea in the form of a ‘‘writing,’’ a broad term that encompasses books, maps, photographs, sheet music, and more. In the Copyright Act of 1909, Congress declined to recognize phonograph records as writings, leaving record companies without copyright protection for their ‘‘mechanical reproductions’’ of written music. As a result, neither companies nor artists technically owned the unique performances captured on a record.4 However, by buying, selling, and copying the out-of-print discs of yesteryear, collectors showed that recordings did have an enduring value that the original producers—artists and record companies—would have an incentive to protect. In the process, bootleggers tested the limits of how listeners could legitimately use the products of modern culture industries, while provoking a reconsideration of the meaning of recorded sound as both art and property.

The Emergence of Collecting Culture Intellectuals began to reevaluate jazz during the 1930s, a moment when the public embraced swing as popular music. ‘‘One of the outgrowths of

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the popularity of jazz in the 1930s,’’ historian Eric Porter observes, ‘‘was the consolidation of jazz criticism in new trade publications such as Down Beat and Metronome, small journals for record collectors, and leftwing organs such as New Masses.’’ As Porter notes, this discourse was ‘‘by and large created by whites for a white readership.’’5 In 1934 Frenchman Hugues Panassie´ broke ground on theorizing an aesthetics of jazz, and another Frenchman, Charles Delaunay, soon inaugurated the project of cataloguing jazz recordings. Americans took note and began publishing ‘‘the little jazz reviews,’’ according to folklorist Alan Lomax, who remembered ‘‘frightfully serious and sophisticated jazz critics’’ descending on Jelly Roll Morton at the Jungle Inn, a club in Washington, D.C. Morton saw his early innovations like ‘‘The Pearls’’ and ‘‘Wolverine Blues’’ played on the jukebox.6 Jazz magazines sprouted up in the late 1930s in response to the growing public interest in swing music. The new craze prompted the emergence of a breed of connoisseurs who preferred small group improvisation and badmouthed the tastes of the mainstream.7 Some critics believed that popular swing was compromised by commercialism, while earlier and less popular forms of jazz were more authentic or artistic; some perceived jazz as an earthy ‘‘folk’’ genre, while others envisioned it as a high art that could compete with European classical music.8 Whatever their vision, such jazz aficionados in the 1930s and 1940s disdained swing as artless pop music, and their journals resemble the tiny, self-published ‘‘zines’’ of the late twentieth century, which frequently favored independent or avant-garde subcultures.9 These small jazz journals cultivated a market for rarities, with the value of a recording determined by the number of copies that had come into the hands of collectors. Affluent white collectors described their search for the scattered remnants of early jazz as if they were anthropologists doing exotic field research. Often enough, the field consisted of the homes and neighborhoods of black Americans, who made up much of the initial audience for the music. ‘‘Many of the collectors’ items were originally issued purely for Negro consumption,’’ collector Steve Smith wrote, ‘‘and consequently were sold only in sections of the country which had a demand for them.’’ White men canvassed black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Kansas City, often going door to door. One collector in New York abandoned this method and just left his card ‘‘with all the janitors in Harlem,’’ who were asked to contact him when they came across an item of interest.10 Collector Dick Rieber described one such excursion in an early jazz fanzine; ‘‘First Thrills in Beulah Land’’ described a Philadelphia neighborhood that proved to be a ‘‘collector’s Eden’’ because the residents were willing to part with their records for much less than their potential value. The local children followed Rieber

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through the streets and directed him to homes where records could be found.11 The eponymous Beulah could not understand what he wanted with all the old records. Her collection included sermons, washboard bands, blues, jazz, and much more. Rieber bought sixty of her records for five dollars, even though he knew one of the discs to be worth two dollars by itself. ‘‘Beulah, though she didn’t know it, was giving me one of my biggest collecting thrills,’’ he wrote. Rieber did not clarify whether it was the joy of discovering unexpected treasures or the thrill of buying someone’s possessions for drastically less than they were worth that excited him so much. In any case, the story is a familiar one. He managed to buy up records from several of Beulah’s visitors, too, who had heard that a white man was looking for the blues. (‘‘And old blues at that!’’ he added.) He even managed to find Bessie Smith’s sister living nearby, but she would part with none of her records.12 Observing the jazz scene in 1939, Steve Smith gently mocked the devotees of genuine, original recordings, with their ‘‘little black books’’ full of recording dates and master numbers. ‘‘I sometimes wonder when there is time for listening to the music,’’ he wrote.13 If two such collectors were sitting in a club, he said, they would be so wrapped up in their competitive comparing of notes that they would pay little attention to the music performed around them. Smith credited collectors with contributing to the storehouse of knowledge about the music, but he saw little point in memorizing data or keeping a record just because Louis Armstrong was known to have been in the room when it was made. Similarly, some fans frantically pursued any trace of their favorite musician. ‘‘These fanatics are the loneliest people in the world,’’ Smith wrote, ‘‘shunned by other collectors who regard them as not fit to talk to.’’ Rather than having a genuine love of the music, whoever might be playing it, they paid attention only when their idol began plucking, tapping, or blowing away. Worst of all, Smith thought, were the collectors who got into the game only because they heard that old jazz records were increasing in value. They hoped to catch a windfall and did not care for the music much at all. At least the fanatic and the know-it-all listened to jazz.14 Writing about 1970s collectors of doo wop records, anthropologist Mark Jamieson exposes motivations similar to those of the various breeds of jazz collectors in the 1930s. Like the jazz hounds, doo wop fans sought to hoard the remnants of a musical style that had not been taken seriously as an art form when it first appeared, and whose earliest examples seemed likely to be lost or forgotten. The collectors were not professional musicologists but enthusiastic amateurs. They too had a penchant for showing off their expertise in memorizing artists, labels, and dates, and that became for some the point of collecting. ‘‘The most successful

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collectors flaunted their rarities and knowledge of doo wop in competitive displays of symbolic capital both privately and publicly through the medium of specialist magazines,’’ Jamieson writes.15 Possession of an authentic, original recording carried considerable cachet, and collectors published photos of their records to show that they did own the real thing. Entrepreneurs issued copies of rare records, taking care to mimic the exact packaging and style. Even these imitations were sought after by collectors, especially if they were the ‘‘original repros,’’ removed from the initial recording by only one degree. ‘‘If anything these repros enhanced the value of the originals from which they were taken,’’ Jamieson reasons, ‘‘since they showed they were considered worthy enough to be copied illegally.’’16 He contrasts the doo wop collectors with the fans of jump blues in Jamaica and of American soul music in the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s. In those cases, pirates rarely tried to duplicate the original package of a recording, which few listeners had ever seen anyway. The significance of the copied music lay in its approval by respected disc jockeys (‘‘specialists,’’ in Jamieson’s terminology) who informed their audiences that a record was rare or special. A disc was enjoyed for its sound and the currency it held in a social scene rather than kept and fetishized for its innate qualities. The variety of 1930s jazz collectors suggests that Jamieson’s association of each style of music with a certain pattern of collecting might be too simple a model. In Steve Smith’s time, some fans focused on history and authenticity and would accept only an original recording. A diehard follower of a particular performer such as Bix Beiderbecke, in contrast, might settle for any reproduction of an unheard recording, no matter what it looked like. For his part, Smith defined mainstream collectors (e.g., the Hot Record Society crowd, for which he spoke) in contrast to both these kinds of men of narrower motivations. ‘‘The majority of hot collectors are quite normal human beings who do not go to extremes,’’ he wrote. ‘‘They look mainly for the classics of hot, for the thrill of possession and enjoyment. They, too, keep up the search for rare records, but solely in the hope of finding something satisfying to the ear, as well as something they consider to be of historical significance.’’17 Here Smith identified a mix of reasons behind the movement. Aesthetic appreciation, historical preservation, and the fetish of possession all drove him and his fellows to collect. While some collectors did insist on having the original disc, the smallscale copying of records during the 1930s suggests that others would accept a copy. ‘‘There are those who will have nothing but the original label,’’ Smith observed, ‘‘and who will turn down a clean copy of a record in preference to [the original] in bad condition because the latter has what is known to be an earlier label.’’ However, fans who cher-

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ished a record not only for its historical character but also for the sound it contained would settle for unofficial copies of these rare works. ‘‘One often had acetates made from discs owned by a fellow collector,’’ according to Charles Edward Smith. ‘‘These were called ‘dubs’ and were brought out on display apologetically, like fish bought in the market instead of caught properly with rod and reel.’’18 The word ‘‘dub’’ originated in the late 1920s, meaning to ‘‘double’’ an object. The term connotes a practice of making individual copies, doubling an item one copy at a time, rather than mass producing it in large batches.19 The verb was fittingly used by those pragmatic collectors who made copies of rare records for each other. Speaking of the music of Sidney Bechet, George Hoefer wrote, ‘‘The original record is so rare that it is almost impossible to even find a copy from which to dub an acetate.’’20 The collector, critic, and producer John Hammond once had to seek out the New Orleans musician Meade ‘‘Lux’’ Lewis personally because he could not find a Lewis record of good enough quality to copy.21 Although personal disc-cutters found greatest use among wealthy consumers like Hammond, a Vanderbilt heir turned activist and jazz impresario, record-copying technologies appeared on the consumer market as a response to the economic woes of the Depression.22 RCA confronted the calamitous drop in music sales during the early 1930s by marketing record players that could connect to a separate disc recorder. Presumably, consumers would make their own recordings if they could no longer afford to buy records. ‘‘The new recorder utilized a small, pregrooved, 6-inch disc made from a piece of cardboard with celluloid plastic laminated to each side,’’ writes historian David Morton. ‘‘Later, solid plastic blanks were sold in 10- and 12-inch sizes. The recording attachment used an electromagnetically driven stylus to emboss the recording into the pre-grooved disc.’’23 The engineer S. J. Begun noted that a few companies offered radios with built-in disc recorders in 1940, but to little avail. ‘‘Disc home recording requires a great deal more skill than magnetic home recording, and if a mistake is made in the process of recording, the record is lost,’’ he argued.24 After World War II, the cumbersome and delicate operation of a disc recorder, available to those with the money and inclination to record and copy music, would give way to the more flexible, user-friendly medium of magnetic tape, particularly with the rise of the high-fidelity home recording market in the 1950s. Manufacturers improved disc recording sets and lowered prices slightly throughout the 1930s, but in an era of economic distress consumers were unlikely to exchange their old record players for new ones with fancy new accessories. Indeed, people were hardly buying records, opting instead to listen to the radio for free. Remco’s Babytone

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recorder, introduced in 1936, cost $125, and Universal Microphone offered models ranging from $92 to $375 soon after.25 A few well-heeled music aficionados, such as Hammond, could afford a disc-cutting machine to reproduce records and share them with friends, but home recording technology failed to take off in a big way until after World War II, with the emergence of reel-to-reel magnetic recording and the highfidelity market. While dubs were a necessary evil for collectors, groups of jazz enthusiasts launched their own programs to reissue classic recordings soon after collecting emerged as a hobby. England’s Brunswick label copied some ‘‘classic swing’’ records in the early 1930s, and collecting impresario Hugues Panassie´ led the reissue charge in France with his magazine Jazz Hot. Panassie´ visited the United States for the first time in 1938 and joined with Steve Smith, William Russell, and others to start the Hot Record Society, which distributed copies of old tunes to its members and irregularly issued its own journal, the HRS Rag.26 ‘‘The reissue adherents made like Don Quixote on a hot kick,’’ Charles Edward Smith recalled; they took on the task of reintroducing recordings that the major labels had let lapse into obscurity years before, a job they considered noble and, perhaps, quixotic. The New York–based HRS got permission from record companies to copy their old records, he explained, because ‘‘(1) no one had discovered any loopholes in the copyright situation, and (2) pressings often had to be done through record companies, subsidiaries or firms in some way associated with them.’’27 Permission did not mean cooperation, though. The labels condoned the activities of HRS with indifference; the only evidence of their tacit support is the fact that the Society never suffered any legal retaliation, unlike later bootleggers who also made copies of out-of-print recordings available to the public. HRS had to seek out the best copies of records, since firms such as Decca and Columbia would not let them use their masters. Society members tracked down the original musicians and urged them to share their knowledge about the recording sessions, suggesting that the buzz around a rediscovered classic might raise their profile in the music world. That said, ‘‘a hot chorus blown through a bustup horn in 1924, whatever its merit, didn’t bring home the bacon a decade later,’’ Smith admitted, but many old pros were willing to contribute anyway. In 1941 Columbia told the Society it could reproduce the Red Onion Jazz Babies record by Clarence Williams. HRS made new masters of the record, and Williams joined in to provide historical context for the recording. However, Columbia withdrew its consent shortly before the record’s release date. In fact, the whole HRS program ended soon after, as the three major labels decided to try producing their own reis-

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sues in the early 1940s and the outbreak of a new world war put everything on hold.28 In its time, the Rag strove to be ‘‘strictly for, by and about collectors’’ and featured in-depth articles on its members, such as Hammond, ‘‘Dean of the Swing Critics,’’ and Wilder Hobson.29 The portraits show that the HRS crowd hailed from Ivy League schools and thought of itself as an elite of music lovers. William Russell had studied classical violin in Chicago and taught music before becoming obsessed with hot music.30 He was also an accomplished avant-garde composer whose work influenced John Cage. Of Hobson, Frank Norris observed that ‘‘he had the most inclusive collection of jazz records’’—in 1929, before the collecting craze got into full swing—though it was hard to say whose collection was best since ‘‘a lot of jazz philatelists have muscled into the tribe.’’31 Writers in the Rag scorned mainstream critics, sometimes contrasting their own views with the ignorant pronouncements of other music reviewers.32 At the same time, though, they disdained pedantic terminology and impenetrable jargon in the discussion of music, putting a populist spin on an otherwise elitist enterprise. The Society’s first bulletin proclaimed its pursuit of a middle path between snobbery and populism: ‘‘We will choose to reprint discs that are distinguished both by greatness of performance and by rarity, leaving the corn to the hillbillies and the more accessible hot records to the assiduousness of individual collectors.’’33 This statement rings with the self-assurance that characterized the collectors’ division of jazz music between good and bad, legitimate and illegitimate. The white critics and collectors of the HRS sought to perpetuate recordings that they considered to be worthwhile, and they could use their status and resources to impose particular standards of value on the work of some African American musicians. In this sense, the Society represented as much of a cultural gatekeeper as the record company that neglected to keep a certain recording in print. What they chose to copy and distribute would continue to be available, while music that did not meet their standards would succeed or founder according to the fortunes of the marketplace. Hammond, in particular, played such a gatekeeper role. As Porter observed, ‘‘Hammond championed blues players, gospel singers, and New Orleans jazz musicians whose expression was not yet diluted by musical training or the marketplace as well as those commercially successful artists—such as Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Fletcher Henderson, and Benny Goodman,’’ with whom he had worked in his side career as a producer.34 The Hot Record Society was caught between the desire to spread the good news about jazz and its own role as a band of experts, specializing in the intricacies of obscure, out-of-print rarities. Steve Smith might have

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written off the compulsive fact-checkers as a minority out of step with the spirit of collecting, but the Society could not escape a certain lust for details. When Charles Edward Smith first delved into the hobby, he ran into Frederic Ramsey, Jr., Russell, and Steve Smith examining old records in a junk cellar. They managed to fool the young novice out of some of his finest records. ‘‘I knew nothing about master numbers and condition of labels,’’ Smith observed. ‘‘With me, everything was in the groove, and I could see that was all wrong.’’ In other words, he came to believe that listening to the music was only one part of enjoying it. Still, the other men let him into ‘‘the game’’ and gradually shared their secrets with him.35 As Jamieson argued about doo wop, a collector who was fully acquainted with the ins and outs of this esoteric discipline was often reluctant to disburse his own ‘‘symbolic capital’’ by sharing information with others.36 Indeed, Steve Smith observed that collectors tended not to provide needed information to other seekers, ‘‘since a little information to certain collectors is enough to set them up in business across the street.’’ Thus, finding information was hard, and finding what records were available was harder.37 Despite claims to the contrary, the Hot Record Society was indeed preoccupied with the value that age, authenticity, and rarity gave to an object. In a whimsical example, the Rag once featured an ad for a fictional group called the Original All-Star Dig Band. The band’s songs consisted mostly of inside jokes about the organization (‘‘Hustlin’ for HRS’’) and the collectors’ favorite jazz clubs (‘‘Sulking at Solo Art,’’ a Chicago venue). One member played ‘‘clavicytherium,’’ and another excelled at the ‘‘downright trombone.’’ The odd instruments did not matter, of course, for the ad explained that their recordings consisted of men who could not read music making animal noises. The humor would amuse only loyal readers of the HRS Rag, as it alluded to their own specialized knowledge of jazz and collecting. The gag does reveal two key priorities of the Society: membership in an elite group, and the value of obscurity and rarity. ‘‘I did become a bit suspicious of the advertisement announcing the Clackingola album—which would have been my greatest find,’’ Smith commented in the same issue, ‘‘since the band was never even organized.’’38 Here was rarity in the extreme. The ultimate collectible would be a recording that never existed.

The Rise in Bootlegging After World War II ‘‘Now there is a babel of labels,’’ Ramsey wrote in the popular Saturday Review in 1950. A wave of new entrepreneurs had succeeded Ramsey and his friends in the Hot Record Society, catering to collectors by reissuing the scarce recordings of early jazz. Labels such as Biltmore, Jazz-time,

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and Jay were based in post office boxes. A former baker in the Bronx had started turning out copies of jazz classics through a variety of labels, such as Anchor, Blue Ace, and Wax, in order to confuse any lawyers who came sniffing down his trail. So many labels had popped up to meet demand for the old records that some were copying the products of other pirates. Their evasive tactics indicate that, unlike HRS, these businesses did not operate with the sanction of the record companies that owned the original masters. Still, Ramsey argued that the bootleggers prospered under a policy of benign neglect. One New York pirate showed him a letter from the Copyright Office, which stated that recordings were not protected by law. ‘‘That means that anyone can dub a recording and sell pressings,’’ the man insisted. In any case, Ramsey felt that the majors were not paying attention. Why, he asked, did the mainstream music industry let bootleggers have the reissue market? ‘‘Ah, it wasn’t worth the trouble to put out that moldy stuff,’’ one executive told him. ‘‘It never sold anyway.’’39 When sales of the moldy oldies got too high, though, the major labels saw an interest in testing their rights in court. ‘‘Guys were afraid of the big companies, and the big companies were afraid of each other,’’ one pirate explained. ‘‘But now, they’re getting bolder. They found out there’s sort of a feeling with big record company brass that it’s O.K. for a little fellow to dub and sell if his sales just don’t get too good’’—a ceiling of about 1,000 records, in his estimation.40 Sales did indeed look good in 1950. The bootleg boom received more sympathetic coverage in the Saturday Review than in jazz journal Down Beat, which condemned the copiers as ‘‘dirty thieves.’’ Fellow HRS alum Wilder Hobson followed up on Ramsey’s piece a year later, observing that ‘‘the recording seas are

Fig. 4.1: The music from an African American musician’s horn becomes a disc and is passed from the record company to consumers, collectors, and bootleggers in this visual representation of bootlegging from Record Changer’s January 1952 issue. Courtesy of the Brad McCuen Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University. Reprinted by permission of Richard Hadlock.

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now full of piracy.’’41 By then, the three main companies—Columbia, Decca, and RCA Victor—had begun their own series of reissues to coopt the collectors’ market.42 Interest in the origins of jazz had attained new heights by the early 1950s. Alan Lomax’s efforts to document folk, blues, and jazz had led to the 1950 publication of the oral history Mister Jelly Roll, in which Morton recounted the heterogeneous array of musicians and styles that had developed in fin-de-sie`cle New Orleans. (The memoir was also Jelly Roll’s bid for a starring role in the origin story.) Working at the Library of Congress, Lomax had tried to prevent the work of Morton and his contemporaries from vanishing, and others assisted in this task by illicitly copying the recordings. ‘‘I am informed that every known commercial record cut can be purchased—if not on original labels, at least as unauthorized reissues,’’ Lomax wrote. ‘‘Jazz, even in its antiquarian phase, operates a bit beyond the pale.’’43 The popularity of Mister Jelly Roll, which influenced the later oral histories of Studs Terkel and Theodore Rosengarten, attests to the surging interest in ‘‘antiquarian’’ jazz at this time. As Lomax’s words suggest, bootleggers highlighted the profit potential of reviving old recordings. They were not the first to do so, however. Milt Gabler had pioneered the concept of reissues through his Commodore Music Shop on New York’s 42nd Street. ‘‘In 1934, noticing that a few jazz titles had gone out of print, [Gabler] licensed the music and produced a few hundred copies at his own expense,’’ writes Ashley Kahn, in a memorial of Gabler’s long career as an entrepreneur and producer. Gabler was only one man, however; though the Commodore Music Shop became a hot spot for jazz enthusiasts in New York, the small batches of reissues were limited to his store and a mail order catalog. The ‘‘hipoisie’’ who hung around Commodore, which moved to a bigger store on 52nd Street in 1938, included HRS members such as Bill Russell. Gabler continued reissuing old records until the major labels took notice of the music’s profitability and determined to start their own reissue programs.44 Once record companies started to take reissues seriously, they stopped permitting small-scale, legitimate reproduction of records from their catalogs. After World War II, illicit bootleggers jumped into the niche for outof-print music that the likes of Gabler and the HRS had opened up. As Ramsey observed, listeners had ‘‘for the past fifteen years . . . been thirsting to hear certain rare records by the great maestros of jazz.’’ During the war, when supplies of shellac were limited, the music industry could not afford to waste resources on marginal, niche records, making the prospects for historically significant reissues dim. Even when the limitations of war ceased, major labels chose to resurrect only a handful of

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older recordings as ‘‘prestige items,’’ failing to satisfy the demands of collectors and antiquarians. ‘‘It is assumed that such items will both pay their own way and have promotional value for the entire list,’’ Charles Edward Smith observed in 1952. ‘‘The suggestion that the major record companies accept a position of custodianship for recorded hot jazz performances must be regarded as unrealistic. Unless it were presented as something more than a gratuitous notion, it would quite likely meet with tolerant smiles from those who stand to profit more from the exploitation of a current crooner than the rediscovery of a Bessie Smith.’’45 Thus, bootleggers stepped in to meet a demand that had once been met legitimately by licensed reproducers like HRS. As bootlegging spread during the late 1940s, a court case tested the limits of property rights for recorded sound, resulting in a decision that left the door wide open to piracy. A decision of the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, Shapiro, Bernstein v. Miracle Records (1950), dealt with the ownership of a particular interpretation of a musical idea, as embodied in a record.46 Boogie woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey held down a job as groundskeeper at Chicago’s White Sox stadium most of his life, but he helped pioneer a genre of jazz that focused more fully on the piano than any other form. He taught the style to Meade ‘‘Lux’’ Lewis, who wrote the tune ‘‘Yancey Special’’ in honor of the eponymous musician. When Lewis later sued Miracle Records for selling a disc, ‘‘Long Gone,’’ that allegedly imitated ‘‘Yancey Special,’’ Yancey himself came forward and insisted that ‘‘Special’’ was a copy of his own work, rendering Lewis’s claim against Miracle meaningless. The judge agreed that Lewis had no legal claim to the composition; it was substantially similar to Yancey’s work, and, more importantly, ‘‘Lux’’ had given away any right to control his performance when the record ‘‘Yancey Special’’ was released to the public. Lewis had not registered the written composition of the tune for copyright protection prior to the record’s release, which meant that he effectively ‘‘abandoned’’ his rights to the tune, while the sound of the recorded performance itself was not eligible for copyright.47 Judge Michael Igoe acknowledged that the recordings of ‘‘Yancey Special’’ and ‘‘Long Gone’’ shared a similar bassline, but he concluded that this creative element did not create any grounds for Lewis to enjoy a copyright for his work. All the two recordings had in common, Igoe wrote, was ‘‘a mechanical application of a simple harmonious chord.’’48 In other words, the performance recorded by Lewis was not a copyrightable expression. ‘‘The purpose of copyright law is to protect creation,’’ Igoe ruled, ‘‘not mechanical skill,’’ which is all the innovations of boogie woogie amounted to in the eyes of the court.49 If anything, what was copied was not a song, but a style of playing. On the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Learned Hand had ruled similarly in

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1940; the case RCA v. Whiteman held that the U.S. Copyright Act did not allow record companies or performers to own the recordings they sold to the public. While Hand conceded that a recording might contain elements of genuine creativity, the law simply did not provide copyright for various interpretations of the same composition. In Igoe’s view, Yancey and Lewis were merely arguing over different ways of playing a tune, not a copyrightable expression.50 As Bill Russell observed in the earliest scholarly analysis of the new genre, many critics alleged that ‘‘the Boogie Woogie has no melody.’’ Yet melody was the solid core of written music, as traditionally protected by copyright. If the Miracle opinion held, there would be nothing copyrightable about the frenetic improvisation that made up a recording by boogie artist Pine Top Smith or Cripple Clarence Lofton. The rapid-fire piano pieces danced around a theme, consisting ‘‘of simple and logical yet satisfying patterns of notes in a limited range, usually proceeding conjunctly,’’ in Russell’s words. ‘‘Often in the more elaborate melodic texture there is incessant arabesque and figuration based on the essential notes of the melody.’’51 Igoe’s ruling would seem to rule out protection not just for ‘‘Yancey Special’’ and its imitators, but also for a whole species of jazz whose originality derived from nimble involutions of a tune that sounded only like ‘‘mechanical skill’’ to the judge’s ears. U.S. copyright law protected only written compositions, and if boogie woogie musicians recorded unique variations on what sounded like a similar melodic pattern to a judge’s ear, the creators could not own any of those individual performances as a distinctive creative work. The decision showed how existing copyright law failed to address elements of distinctiveness and value that could be found only in a recorded performance, such as the improvisation that distinguished Yancey’s work. The Yancey case also resulted in a wave of anxiety in the recording industry about whether their products would be copied by other firms. Since the decision came from a district court in Chicago, Variety suggested that it spawned a bootlegging boom in the Midwest.52 Some firms did take the ruling to mean that other companies’ records could be copied and sold within the limits of the law. Whether they were really sure about the legality of their actions is unclear. When producer Norman Granz sued Colony Records for selling parts of his Jazz Scene album, Colony said that the records were actually made by El Torro in Canada. Detectives soon discovered that El Torro was owned by Joe Marlo, a Colony employee, and the court ruled for Granz. The album in question featured Charlie Parker and an all-star lineup, capturing for the first time the sound of live improvisational jazz. Jazz Scene emphasized the primacy of interpretation, variation, and the serendipity of a particular performance—all hallmarks of jazz as we know it today. All were features of

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music, also, that Congress and the courts had declined to recognize as protectable under U.S. copyright law.53 Fears of a fresh wave of bootlegging were realized in 1951 when a major label was caught pirating its own records. ‘‘RCA Victor, sworn enemy of disc piracy, is currently engaged in pressing illicit Victor and Columbia LPs for one of the most blatant of the bootleggers!’’ howled the Record Changer, a jazz collectors’ magazine, on the cover of its November 1951 issue. RCA ran a custom pressing service that manufactured small batches of records for labels that were too small to have their own facilities. One such outfit was Jolly Roger, which had contracted with RCA during the summer of 1951 to press hundreds of records at a cost of sixty-five cents apiece.54 ‘‘Without exception, this material consisted of master acetates made from old Victor and Columbia sides strung together to form long-playing records,’’ Record Changer observed.55 Jolly Roger compiled unique LPs of recordings that the likes of Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton had made for Victor, as well as some tunes from the Columbia catalog. The outfit also had RCA press records of Louis Armstrong, who remained, unlike Morton and Bechet, one of the biggest stars of contemporary jazz. Anyone in the industry should have realized that he would not be recording for such an obscure label, Record Changer argued.56 The situation was particularly embarrassing because the record companies had just started making noise about piracy, or ‘‘disk-legging.’’

Fig. 4.2: The December 1951 issue of Record Changer lampoons RCA Victor’s unwitting involvement in bootlegging by showing the iconic dog ‘‘Nipper’’ walking the plank. Courtesy of the Brad McCuen Collection, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University. Reprinted by permission of Richard Hadlock.

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Variety reported that the Harry Fox Agency, representative of song publishers, had begun investigating bootleggers at the behest of the labels in August 1951. The entertainment industry rag reported that the records were being wholesaled in batches of five hundred at thirty cents apiece.57 The number of records accords with the accounts of other pirates, who spoke of a range of up to one thousand copies. RCA had actually become one of the loudest critics of piracy in the months prior to the Jolly Roger revelation. The company announced in September that it would begin retaliating against pirates. ‘‘Up until recently, the bootleggers had more or less confined themselves to the jazz field, where they sold dubs of the out-of-print Victor collector items,’’ Variety said. ‘‘In recent months, however, several bootleg firms have been distributing straight copies of current Victor hits under a variety of labels.’’58 Little did the company’s leaders realize that their own employees were helping the bootleggers raid the Victor catalog, using their own facilities. As the Record Changer wryly noted, ‘‘One high RCA spokesman had heatedly informed us that they would ‘seek injunctions and damages, prosecute, throw into jail and put out of business’ not only the operators of bootleg labels but also those processing and pressing plants that serve them (apparently considering the latter as guilty as the former).’’59 The bootleggers’ chutzpah had pushed their activities into the open. Dante Bollettino, a young jazz enthusiast, had run Jolly Roger’s parent company, Paradox Industries, for three years prior to his run-in with the law in 1951. Prior to Jolly Roger, his Pax label had released elegant reissues of musicians such as Cripple Clarence Lofton, the Chicago boogie woogie pioneer who influenced the likes of Meade ‘‘Lux’’ Lewis and Jimmy Yancey.60 The back covers of Pax records featured detailed liner notes by Bollettino and jazz writers such as George Hoefer that described the historical significance of the music and, in many cases, told of when and where the performances were recorded.61 The label, based in Union City, New Jersey, promised ‘‘Records for the Connoisseur,’’ compiling anthologies like New Orleans Stylings and Americans Abroad: Jazztime in Paris, which culled the best of lesser-known artists.62 Jolly Roger, in contrast, dared to go further. There was the swagger of the name, and the fact that Bollettino had marched right into enemy territory to have his records made. ‘‘[RCA] apparently did not react at all when confronted with a label that every schoolboy would know meant, by definition, ‘a pirate flag,’’’ marvelled the editors of the Record Changer. ‘‘Record bootlegging is just as often referred to as record piracy . . . catch on, Victor?’’63 The label also reproduced fare that was not quite as obscure as Pax’s. A Jolly Roger catalog from the early 1950s lists one Frank Sinatra, two Bessie Smiths, and seven different Louis Armstrong

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records.64 While some of the performances were out of print, names like Armstrong and Sinatra were bound to raise some eyebrows eventually. Jolly Roger records featured the same style of starkly colorful and iconic covers as Pax records had, but they lacked the liner notes and other identifying features. Their back covers were blank.65 Perhaps Bollettino realized that the Jolly Roger venture might elicit more attention and wanted to minimize his own mark on the records. In any case, he had gone too far. Armstrong and Columbia sued Paradox in February 1952, and the story made headlines in Business Week and Newsweek. Seeking an injunction, the plaintiffs cited the 1950 decision Metropolitan v. Wagner-Nichols, in which the New York Supreme Court ruled against a company that had sold unauthorized recordings of the Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcasts.66 ‘‘This marked the record industry’s first major reaction to the bootlegging problem,’’ Business Week noted.67 Facing the legal might of the music business, Bollettino decided to settle out of court. ‘‘My lawyer insisted that we had a good case and could win, but I knew the record companies would feel they couldn’t afford to lose and would throw in everything they had,’’ he reflected in 1970, sitting in a fabric shop he had started in Greenwich Village. ‘‘I was only twenty-three and didn’t have the money for a long expensive court case. . . . But afterwards the big companies began to reissue more jazz records, so maybe I accomplished something after all.’’68 For Bollettino, the bigger goal was to ensure that at least some of the music he copied would continue to be available to the public. Perhaps Bollettino and his fellow pirates went too far, got too greedy, and drew too much attention. They proved the viability of a market that the big record labels had left fallow and, in fact, relinquished to collectors for years. ‘‘Disk bootleggers, who have been coining considerable profit from their operation of selling dubs of cut-out jazz sides, are being rapidly squeezed out of business,’’ Variety declared, as the major labels started their own reissue programs.69 However, Bollettino shot back at the industry. ‘‘Columbia and the ‘majors’ have failed to make or keep jazz records available to the public,’’ he told the press. ‘‘Their few reissue programs have started out with a big hullabaloo and fizzled out simply because it is not profitable to try to sell a few thousand copies of a record. . . . Only a small firm with low overhead can profitably reissue such records.’’70 Though torn, the jazz writers echoed this criticism of the major labels, saying that the companies had failed to honor their responsibilities as custodians of culture. Some of the majors had tried reissues, but ‘‘usually it only served to emphasize the gap between ‘their’ standards and ‘ours,’’’ the editors of Record Changer opined. ‘‘There is much more to jazz than Armstrong and Goodman and a scattering of sides by a few

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other people, although obviously you can come closer to breaking even or showing a profit with those names.’’71 An obscure Bix Beiderbecke record was not worth the time and money of a promotional machine that was accustomed to manufacturing records en masse and hyping them nationwide. Regardless, Record Changer publisher Bill Grauer, jazz writer John Hammond, and bootlegger Sam Meltzer all claimed to have been rebuffed when they sought to reissue old recordings legally by obtaining licenses from the major labels. In doing so, these critics maintained, the companies denied the American people a portion of their heritage. ‘‘It involves a moral and artistic burden that they automatically took on when they first decided to make their money in part by the commercial recording and distribution of material that ‘belongs’ (by virtue of its cultural significance) to the people as a whole,’’ a Record Changer editorial argued.72 Elsewhere, the editors wrote, ‘‘We are not so naı¨ve as to believe that all, or even many, bootleggers are motivated solely, or even partly, by noble impulses.’’ Still, their activities served the public when scarce music was preserved and perpetuated.73 Numerous bootleggers scrambled to get out of the business after the public demise of Jolly Roger, but piracy persisted. In some instances organized crime sought to take advantage of the ephemeral popularity of a hit single by dumping its own copies of 45s on the market. In 1960 Robert Arkin of the Bronx and Milton Richman of Queens were charged with copying Cameo singles of rock and roller Bobby Rydell’s ‘‘Ding-a-ling’’ and ‘‘Wild One.’’ Operating out of Fort Lee, New Jersey, their Bonus Platta-Pak company worked with an accomplice in Hollywood named Brad Atwood.74 In October seven men were arrested in Los Angeles, including Atwood. ‘‘More than half the shelf stock in [Los Angeles] county of one particular recording were bogus reproductions,’’ the Los Angeles Times reported. ‘‘Undercover agents wormed their way into the ring and were actually helping load records purchased by two other agents of the district attorney when yesterday’s raids were made. [District Attorney] McKesson said the bootleggers were making their reproductions using facilities of legitimate record manufacturing firms at night and on weekends.’’75 More persistent were the small entrepreneurs who copied records that the major labels saw no interest in reissuing. During the 1960s, many bootlegs entered the United States from abroad. Pirate Records of Sweden made available the likes of Barbecue Bob and Blind Lemon Jefferson, blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s. The label pressed records in batches of one hundred and requested correspondence in English or French.76 Swaggie, based in Melbourne, Australia, reprinted records from as far back as 1917, including recordings by well-known performers

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like Sidney Bechet and lesser-known acts from the 1920s, such as Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. The Swaggie catalog plainly listed which labels had originally released the material, and label head Nevill L. Sherburn pursued licensing agreements with artists and record companies where possible to reissue their work.77 In 1966 the manager of Fats Waller’s estate even asked Steve Sholes at RCA Victor if the label would work with Swaggie in releasing some lost recordings Waller had made while working for Victor: Can something be arranged for Swaggie on the V Discs made by Fats on that memorable session, when Old Granddad flowed fluently . . . as Fats would remark . . . and all concerned had a ball. . . . ‘‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’’ That was Fats’ motto thruout his short lifetime and that date on September 23, 1943 . . . turned out to be ‘‘fini’’ at Victor. I sincerely hope that something can be arranged [to] get these records on the market, for they contain numbers from the musical ‘‘Early to Bed[,]’’ . . . Fats’ Broadway musical which was never recorded because of the musicians strike.78

Ed Kirkeby’s request did not find a sympathetic ear. The letter ended up in the files of RCA’s Brad McCuen, who had been investigating allegations that labels such as Folkways were reissuing Victor’s old blues, folk, and jazz records since 1964.79 During his research, McCuen had learned of the Jolly Roger incident and the surge of piracy in the early 1950s. Writing to Sholes, he compared the new wave of copiers to Blue Aces and Jazz Panoramas of old. ‘‘There are now at least a dozen labels openly offering for sale our masters without permission,’’ McCuen wrote. ‘‘Included are the labels Palm Club, Swaggie, OFC, Historic Jazz, Limited Editions, Pirate (Sweden), etc. I feel we should discuss making a stand against these illegal labels if for no other reason than to protect our Vintage futures.’’80 McCuen’s goal was to protect his employers’ long-term corporate interest in securing exclusive control of their recordings, which unauthorized competitors undermined. The prevalence of firms like Swaggie indicated that the desire for old records had not slackened, as entrepreneurs moved to fulfill the demand formerly met by the likes of HRS and Jolly Roger. The ultimate question remained: who should be the stewards of the ever-growing legacy of recorded music? Should the companies that originally recorded and marketed such music decide whether it would remain available to the public, beyond the worn-out relics hoarded by collectors? Should music lovers be able to keep copies of old recordings in circulation, in the face of the industry’s indifference or active opposition? Given the up-front costs involved in recording, advertising, and distributing an original recording, large firms such as RCA Victor could maximize profits by selling large numbers of a few popular releases

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rather than offering the public a wide range of records that each sold fewer copies.81 A reissue of an obscure Sidney Bechet side, catering to perhaps a few hundred avid collectors, seemed a waste of RCA’s sales staff and productive capacity. Since the means of production—recordpressing plants—remained concentrated in the hands of a few major labels in the 1950s, those firms could exercise a wide degree of discretion about what music was available to the public. As music historian Robert Burnett has noted, the American music industry of the 1940s and early 1950s was highly consolidated in a few firms that sought to vertically integrate production and to deter competitors from entering the market.82 The Jolly Roger case shows how entrepreneurs who wanted to market recordings to smaller niche markets had to turn to the custom-pressing services of companies like RCA to have their records made, drawing on the infrastructure of the major labels to copy records that those firms no longer had an interest in selling, for consumer tastes that seemed too minor for them to fulfill. The persistence of outfits such as Swaggie and Pirate Records suggests that the mainstream industry’s efforts to satisfy such demand, once they recognized it, with reissue programs failed to provide the full range of out-of-print recordings desired by fans and collectors. Confusion about the ownership of recorded music left it unclear who should get to decide whether a record would remain in circulation, and the Jolly Roger flap marked the beginning of the industry’s effort to protect a newly revealed value in recordings from the encroachment of unauthorized reproduction—a campaign that would bear fruit with the provision of copyright for sound recordings in 1972. Until then, the labels sought to deter anyone from copying the records that they no longer wanted to sell, with the aim of keeping such music unavailable until the established firms decided to reissue it. This struggle occurred only because bootlegging showed the labels that their back catalog might be worth something. Collectors insisted that there was something uniquely valuable about each recording, each variation, that copyright law had treated as incidental to the essence of the work. It was collecting that led to bootlegging, and bootlegging that led to legal suppression and, eventually, an expansion of copyright restrictions that would make collecting more difficult. The unique attention to variability in jazz helped prompt this reconsideration of copyright. Some elements of creativity could not be captured in musical notation—the characteristic playing of an instrument with an unusual timbre, for instance—although American copyright law did not recognize them until 1972. The wave of successful anti-bootlegging litigation in the 1950s followed a spike in the popularity of jazz bootlegs that jolted the record companies into action. But the industry’s victory over Jolly

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Roger was short lived. During the 1950s and 1960s, new media such as magnetic tape made recording cheaper and easier than before, and lovers of opera and other unprofitable genres argued that their copying served a wholesome purpose by capturing and preserving music that would otherwise sink in the commercial marketplace. And in the late 1960s, not long after McCuen hunted the copiers of folk and jazz, bootleggers turned to rock and roll, provoking a bigger legal battle than seen in the skirmishes of the 1950s.

Chapter 5

High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961 Eric D. Barry

‘‘Picture, if you will, a tour through the halls of a music school, past 100 practice rooms each with its occupant singing or playing at top volume, and you will have some idea of how the Audio Fair sounded last weekend,’’ wrote the New York Times of the third annual New York Audio Fair of 1951.1 Ten thousand ‘‘electronics experts, high-fidelity fans and home-style music lovers’’ descended on the Hotel New Yorker that fall, constituents of a high-fidelity boom that took off with the introduction of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948, grew from a do-it-yourself hobby into a 1950s fad, and entered the mass market in the 1960s. The fair-goers came to see and hear equipment that delved into the deep bass and produced the tones above 5,000 hertz that define sound’s timbre, unlike obsolescent phonographs that played 78 rpm records and radios tuned to the AM band. The most popular exhibit was given by Emory Cook, who ‘‘attracted crowds with his spectacular recordings of train sounds, music boxes, and an organ.’’2 According to High Fidelity, Cook ‘‘made history’’ with his sensational demonstrations of Rail Dynamics (Cook 1070), an LP in his ‘‘Sounds of Our Times’’ series. ‘‘For three days,’’ said the magazine, ‘‘the hall outside his exhibit room . . . was jammed solid with fevered audiomaniacs, blenching with ecstasy at the tremendous whooshes and roars of Cook’s locomotives.’’3 Audio Fairs were the most visible examples of high fidelity’s culture of demonstration, inculcated in retail showrooms and in magazines, and brought home by audiophiles who continually evaluated and showed off the quality of sound they experienced. What drew customers to high-fidelity audio in the 1950s was not merely the prospect of ‘‘reproduced music indistinguishable from actuality.’’ True, ‘‘this ide´e fixe,’’ as audio writer Roland Gelatt called it,

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‘‘threads its chimerical way throughout the history of the phonograph.’’4 Indeed, in the science-obsessed 1950s, the customary claims of verisimilitude made by advertisers, journalists, salesmen, and phonophiles were redoubled, underwritten by new technical bona fides like frequency response, distortion, and signal-to-noise ratio. Despite the appeal of these technical criteria, the final standard of sound quality for most audiophiles remained evaluation by ear. And in practice at least, ‘‘concert-hall realism,’’ a catchphrase of the day, was not listeners’ sole desire. Indeed, the ‘‘audiomaniacs’’ in thrall to Cook’s recordings of roaring locomotives were not basking in the glow of music transparently rendered—they were entering a spectacular world of sound and reveling in the power of technology to deliver a sublime experience. Perhaps no image is more evocative of the overlapping values of fidelity, spectacle, and the sublime power of technology than the iconic ‘‘Is it live or is it Memorex?’’ advertising campaign begun in 1971. The signature commercial of this campaign depicted jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald’s feat of breaking a wine glass with the power of her voice, followed by Memorex’s feat of breaking a second glass via tape playback of her performance. While this ad certainly implies the fidelity of recorded sound to its antecedent, it does so by transforming sound into a spectacle of shattering glass, an image meant to awe the viewer with the prowess of technology. Memorex reproduction is so faithful, implies the ad, that it might blow you, or at least your stemware, away.5 A second advertising campaign inaugurated by Maxell in 1978 also created a spectacle of the material power of sound, but in this case the listener as well as inanimate objects were affected. In Maxell’s iconic photographic image, subsequently adapted for TV, a man clings to his chair as his necktie, hair, and even the martini and lamp beside him recoil from the blast of his stereo. While Memorex presents real indices of faithful reproduction, Maxell’s photographic image presents a fantasy of the power of recorded sound to create a sublime experience. These images of high fidelity’s power over listeners evoke the technological sublime, what new media scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum calls ‘‘a simultaneous ecstasy and oblivion immanent in our encounters with the virtual.’’6 As defined by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century, the sublime is beyond words, giving a sense of majesty, awe, wonder, or even danger that overwhelms reason—themes that recur in the discourse of high-fidelity sound. As deployed by its inventors in American studies departments, the term ‘‘technological sublime’’ describes how wondrous technologies such as railroads and electric light became objects of aesthetic pleasure and symbols of American identity.7 Historian of technology David Nye, for example, chronicles Americans’ persistent love of the technological sublime that allowed them to glory

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in ‘‘nearly magical displays of scientific prowess.’’8 High-fidelity spectacles tapped into this longstanding love of the technological sublime. During the 1950s, as the high-fidelity equipment market grew by leaps and bounds, an audiophile record market grew alongside it, offering disks of audiophile spectacle that could test the accuracy of your equipment—or blow you away. Audiophile record labels such as Cook, Audiophile, Audio Fidelity, HiFi, and Command found marketplace success with LPs of sonic obstacle courses that verified the capabilities of hi-fi and thrilled listeners with the sounds of trains, planes, and automobiles, of bullfights and bullfrogs, of storms and surf, of exotic music from foreign lands and conventional Western music tinged with exotic accents, of music laced with percussion instruments of all stripes, and in the stereo era, of music leavened by the movement of sounds. Some classical labels such as Mercury’s Living Presence division, Westminster, and Vanguard likewise found success with sound as their selling point, highlighting the audiophile recording techniques used to capture the splendor of the orchestra, and programming LPs with works that featured awesome bass sounds from organs, tympani, and cannon, and high-pitched sounds from bells and cymbals. In the wake of this discovery of an enthusiastic market for audiophile spectacle by independent entrepreneurs, major labels like Capitol, RCA Victor, and London capitalized too, offering both classical and popular recordings that could give one’s audio system and one’s ears a workout. This essay will trace the popularization and commercialization of audiophile spectacles through the 1950s, chronicling the attendant changes in the aesthetics of sound recording that were negotiated by engineers, impresarios, musicians, and fans in this period. At first, engineers used new technologies to close the gap between the rhetoric of verisimilitude and the recording techniques that had been required to create plausible illusions of reality. Some record labels capitalized on innovative equipment, including magnetic tape, the long-playing microgroove record, and improved microphones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers to thrill customers with their newfound ability to document sublime, noteworthy, or unusual sounds, making a spectacle of fidelity, much like Memorex’s subsequent advertisments. These recordings aimed to present sound from the perspective of an audience member or at least from a real, unitary perspective, which meant not only portraying sounds as though they came from a distance but capturing some of the reverberation of the performance space. The leap in fidelity offered by the LP created ‘‘elaborate tapestries of sound that five years ago would have been sensational,’’ said Saturday Review in 1953.9 But as the mimetic capabilities of high fidelity became commonplace, engineers made use of new technological facilities to make recorded

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sound more sensational than the real thing. To judge from sales figures, audiences too became increasingly interested in the processes and possibilities of reproduced sound and increasingly desirous of synthesized soundscapes that deviated from the ‘‘natural’’ perspectives on sound they might be hear at a live performance. Nowhere was this trend more visible than in stereo ‘‘percussion’’ records that deployed multiple microphones extremely close to the various instruments, synthesizing multiple perspectives that deemphasized reverberations from the performance space, and manipulating the sounds electronically to move them back and forth across the virtual stage in an effect known derisively as ‘‘ping-pong stereo.’’ Audiophile percussion records, like the subsequent Maxell campaign, emphasized a sublime listening experience rather than fealty to an original event. But even in the conservative realm of classical music, engineers deployed some of the same techniques, synthesizing close-up perspectives in order to create delicate instrumental balances not possible in live performance. As conductor Morton Gould said in 1959, ‘‘‘Concert hall realism’ has been technically superseded.’’10 The sonic world of the classical LP did not merely represent a snapshot of a performance but evoked an ideal version of the work, and of sound itself, that existed only in the mind. These trends in sonic presentation conform closely to the characteristics of new media that Walter Benjamin described in his 1930s consideration of ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.’’11 In this essay, Benjamin theorizes the aesthetic effects of reproducible media, particularly cinema and photography, by contrasting them to traditional works of art. In his reckoning, the work of art is characterized in large part by its singularity, its provenance, and the social ritual that surrounds it, all of which add up to what he calls aura. The aura of Western concert music, for instance, would include its ephemerality, its cultural authority, the social and physical distance between audience and orchestra, and the symbolism and sound of the concert hall as a ‘‘cathedral’’ of sound. While he claims these features ‘‘wither’’ when reproduced, Benjamin also analyzes how new media are not only reproductive, but productive. He uses cinema as his example, highlighting how the careful crafting of films using editing techniques such as jump cuts and montage means that the sense of reality portrayed by film is actually ‘‘the height of artifice,’’ a property of reproducible objects that have no single antecedent original. As in cinema, a variety of technological techniques can heighten the illusion of reality in sound recording. In Benjamin’s formulation, the technological artifices of the work of art in its new context of reproducibility function as the counterpart to aura in new media, creating new perceptions of reality. He focuses on

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the ability of the camera to transcend the eye with its acuity and to bring attention to things not normally noticed—for instance, by panning across perspectives, zooming in to close-ups, or the use of slow motion. Though sound is not his concern, analogous sound recording techniques such as multiple microphones, equalization, and dynamic-range compression similarly transcend the capabilities of the ear. The revolutionary facility of new media to ‘‘strip the veil,’’ in Benjamin’s words, i.e. to remove the aura from objects and show things as they really are, is one of the pleasures of technological reproducibility. The ‘‘urge to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness’’ becomes an imperative with new media, according to Benjamin.12 This desire to feel close to the object reproduced was satisfied by 1960s recording techniques which granted LPs an ‘‘analytic clarity, immediacy, and indeed almost tactile proximity’’ that contrasted sharply with the ‘‘cathedral-like sound’’ of the concert hall, according to pianist Glenn Gould.13 Unfortunately, Benjamin does not describe the process by which these changes occur, nor the tensions they provoke. An analysis of the audiophile world, rich with fine-grained discussions about sound reproduction and its relation to music, will elucidate the complex cultural negotiations over technological reproducibility. Despite the marketplace success of technologically enhanced sound, it took some time for the pleasures of technological reproducibility and the transcendence of natural sound to gain legitimacy. On one hand, as musicologist Tim J. Anderson writes, ‘‘high fidelity was always already positioned as a celebrated form of artifice and spectacle that, through the union of science and the arts, would provide listeners with sensational renditions of the real.’’14 But at the same time, strict ideals of fidelity and technological transparency in sound recording were (and are) durable, one of the chief differences between cinema, on which Benjamin bases much of his analysis, and phonography. The ideal of sonic fidelity and the aesthetic of realism appeal as a bulwark against the defilement of musical culture by commercially motivated producers, promising to fix meaning amid the ‘‘deceptive surfaces’’ of the modern marketplace.15 Fidelity to the sound of the concert hall also appealed to those invested in the cultural authority or the crowd-drawing powers of music performance, because its supersession by records left audiences ‘‘shocked by . . . natural acoustics,’’ in the words of Lincoln Center’s program director.16 Meanwhile, sonic spectacle, often denigrated as ‘‘sound effects,’’ ‘‘novelties,’’ and ‘‘gimmicks,’’ threatened the hegemony of music over sound and art over technology. As engineers answered the urge to ‘‘strip the veil’’ with what musicologist Colin Symes calls ‘‘super-realism,’’ some were left to ask if, in the words of the president of Columbia Records, ‘‘high fidelity [had] become an end in itself, a

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gross scientific toy . . . a sort of microscope of sound, a great revealer of unimportant minutiae.’’17 Over the course of the 1950s, audiophiles, musicians, and critics became increasingly comfortable with recording artifices that dispensed with the documentary ideal. By 1960, the recording art was plainly directed not toward duplicating the sound of an original performance, but toward crafting a soundscape specifically for the home listener. Though some listeners continued to yearn for an effacement of technological mediation, many began to trumpet its benefits. A chorus of musicians and critics gloried in the advances of modern technology, declaring that the best seat was now at home, in front of the stereo. For classical music this recording aesthetic was justified because making all the musical voices audible could provide a fidelity to the work—that is, to the score and the intentions of the composer—greater than that of a concert performance. In popular music, this recording aesthetic made the creation of distinctive soundscapes by sonic experimentation in the studio part and parcel of legitimate musical creation, as heard, for instance, in the tremulous echo of Sam Phillips’s recordings of Elvis Presley and others in the 1950s, in Phil Spector’s ‘‘wall of sound’’ in the early 1960s, and in the psychedelia of the Beatles and others during the mid-1960s. In what follows, I trace these developing aesthetics of recording, and their marketplace success, from the largely documentarian early 1950s efforts of Cook Records and Mercury’s classical division toward the more overtly crafted soundscapes proffered by Command Records and classical labels at the end of the decade.

Emory Cook: The Spectacle of Fidelity As the first king of audiophile spectacle, Emory Cook played a central but largely forgotten role in 1950s high fidelity as the industry carved out an alternative to the mass market, largely from the ground up. By playing up his maverick identity and contrasting his fidelitarian methods with the conventions of commercial recording, Cook made ‘‘New Horizons in Sound, captured in stark realism,’’ as one ad put it, into a million-dollar business.18 Cook used new high-fidelity technologies in an explicit attempt to capture the aura of sublime and unusual sounds that included railroads, theater organs, symphony orchestras, folk rituals, calypso competitions, earthquakes, and the steelpan bands of Trinidad and Antigua. In turn, manufacturers, salesmen, and audiophiles used Cook Records’ ability to suggest sonic aura not only for stay-at-home sonic tourism, but to demonstrate the wondrous pleasures of highfidelity technology to the uninitiated. Cook’s documentarian approach promised an authentic perspective on authentic performances, untain-

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ted by the commercial process or the engineering hubris that produced ersatz culture. And Cook played a key role in developing a market for both sonic spectacle and sonic exploration that would be transformed and popularized by record labels less documentarian in approach. The circumstances of Cook’s entry into the record business exemplify the ground-up appeal of high fidelity as technological sublime. In 1946, he made a career out of his love of sound with his first product, a recordcutting apparatus that, he claimed, was the first to engrave records with the full 20,000 cycles per second to which human hearing extended.19 He made his first records not for sale but to show off the capabilities of that cutting apparatus. When people wanted to buy the records rather than the apparatus, Cook met the demand with his 1950 LP The Christmas Music Box (Cook 1011), which featured the sublime high frequencies of antique music boxes, to the tune of 50,000 copies sold.20 The next issue from his fledgling label, a bagpipe record entitled Kilts on Parade (Cook 1025), also featured high-frequency sounds to which old technology was deaf. The ‘‘horrific realism’’ of Rail Dynamics and a record of a rumbling theater organ did the same trick with bass and volume, cementing the label’s reputation for both fidelity and sublime sound.21 Like his samples, Cook’s commercial releases were superb fodder for showing off the capabilities of hi-fi technology as well as for the enjoyment of sound for its own sake. High-fidelity spectacles like Cook’s hearken back to the turn-of-thecentury ‘‘cinema of attractions,’’ which, by depicting spectacular scenes such as fires and collapsing buildings, both exploited the novel technology of film and established its ability to ‘‘show something.’’22 Cook’s label at first featured the technological marvel of sublime frequencies, then sonic wonders both man-made, such as trains, steamship whistles, symphonies, and massive choirs, and natural, such as thunder, the sea, earthquakes, and the ionosphere. The public response translated into a thriving small business in the mid-1950s, with thirty employees and annual sales of 300,000 LPs.23 Subsequently, Cook showed off the technological sublime by documenting the aura of the exotic in recordings of religious rituals from Yemen to Cuba, as well as Japanese koto, Mexican marimba, and a range of Caribbean music. He supplied the nostalgic as well, with recordings of forgotten blues shouters, a burlesque show, the clavichord, and tales from storytellers.24 Cook added a series of sonic collages similar to musique concre`te but in comic guise. Beginning in 1956, the label specialized in Calypso and steelpan music as well as audiophile fare. In the audiophile culture of demonstration and spectacle, Emory Cook was king. At the 1952 Audio Fair, he followed up the 1951 success of Rail Dynamics with an experimental demonstration of stereo sound

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that was described as ‘‘literally breathtaking.’’25 Cook’s exhibit at the 1954 New York Audio Fair, a collaboration with his Connecticut neighbor, speaker manufacturer Rudy Bozak, deployed a hi-fi system that offered visual as well as sonic spectacle. Nicknamed ‘‘Thumper,’’ each enclosure of this stereophonic pair of speakers was large enough to contain both men and held eight woofers and ten tweeters—at a time when a single speaker comprising woofer and tweeter was the hi-fi norm. Rendered by this fantastic apparatus, installed on the sixth floor of the Hotel New Yorker, Cook’s recordings of the Queen Mary’s all-aboard bass whistle resounded through the elevator shaft, shaking the lobby and befuddling onlookers. Sick of the din, hotel management moved to muzzle the demonstration, and show organizers promised to keep the volume down at subsequent fairs. Cook was such a signature presence at the New York Audio Fair that when he failed to attend in 1956, the New York Times reported his absence.26 Though high fidelity’s unique selling point was its measurable advances in bandwidth, distortion, and background noise, the industry was convinced that nothing sold equipment better than demonstrations of the newly enhanced pleasures of technological reproducibility. As a 1952 advertisement aimed at drawing businesspeople into the trade exhorted, ‘‘you must be prepared to demonstrate high-fidelity, because people can only appreciate full-range tone by hearing it. It can’t be described in words.’’27 Salespeople needed records that could effectively differentiate high-fidelity sound, and their customers wanted to own those same records in order to thrill themselves and show off to their friends. Used in this way, Cook’s records were ‘‘as responsible as any other single factor for making converts,’’ High Fidelity editor John Conly told the New Yorker.28 This idiom of conversion, proselytizing, and the hifi adept’s ‘‘missionary zeal’’ was so commonly repeated it became a cliche´.29 The indescribable experience of hearing high-fidelity sound was so compelling, wrote eminent music and hi-fi critic Edward Tatnall Canby, that ‘‘publicity or no, the first hearing of a good hi-fi system, properly used, is a revelation.’’30 In order to propagate this revealed truth, entrepreneurs in major cities built well-appointed listening salons capable of demonstrating the full force of high-fidelity sound in a homelike environment. Likewise, organizers of the annual New York Audio Fair, begun in 1948, expanded to a series of fairs across the country, attracting an estimated half million attendees in 1958.31 High fidelity’s appeal derived not only from the pleasures of music, sound, and technology, however. It carried significant cultural symbolism that added to its popular appeal. High fidelity’s foundation myth, repeated in both the general-interest and enthusiast press, highlighted the self-reliance, iconoclasm, and risk-taking of the pathfinding high-

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fidelity hobbyists-cum-entrepreneurs who, the story went, had rejected the antiquated standards of sound reproduction after World War II and established new standards and a flourishing industry by dint of their own talent and determination.32 Male audiophiles who wished to distance themselves from the passivity of mass consumption and the conformist manhood imputed in popular sociology texts such as David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills’s White Collar (1951), and William H. Whyte, Jr.’s Organization Man (1956) could instead identify with the swashbuckling entrepreneurialism of men like Emory Cook. Cook reported his own temperamental incompatibility with the ethos of compromise and harmony at the corporations that employed him before he set off on his own.33 Though late in life Cook lamented that his unwillingness to compromise his sound was ‘‘not commercial,’’ in truth his maverick personality helped establish his success with the burgeoning ranks of audiophiles.34 He made a spectacle of himself, attracting generous press coverage with his charismatic combination of iconoclastic bombast, plain-speech self-effacement, dry wit, scientific seriousness, and beatnik-ish adventure-seeking.35 The personal and financial risks that Cook took on his customers’ behalf allowed his listeners to imagine themselves as participants in his thrill-seeking nonconformity. His unilateral introduction of stereo discs in an idiosyncratic format, requiring an unwieldy twin-tonearm assembly to trace their two concentric grooves, five years before the industry settled on the stereo LP format familiar today, exemplified his recalcitrance in the name of sonic advance.36 He also acted as a sort of technoKerouac with his series of Road Recordings, ‘‘ranging from gull-cries and backwoods Haitian drums to Southwest bar-room pianos,’’ not to mention the whaling stories he collected on his travels.37 As a recordist in search of remarkable sound in the field rather than an electrical engineer tethered to a laboratory bench, Cook cut a particularly colorful figure in the industry, perched variously at entrances to railroad tunnels, in the copilot seat of a prop plane, or in the hills of Trinidad. Journalists hyped the thrill-seeking element of high fidelity by playing up Cook’s pursuit of the extraordinary, as in the headline ‘‘He Risks Death Daily to Capture Real Sounds.’’38 Cook’s adventurism was symbolically linked to the adventurism of audiophiles who dared their systems to reproduce his recordings. In the words of the New Yorker, ‘‘Never has Cook been held in higher esteem by his disciples than when he returned from Mount Washington with his recording of the thunderstorm and it turned out to contain such extreme frequencies that only a few audiophiles had equipment capable of handling them.’’39 Journalists and advertisers contrasted the aural challenges of high fidelity to the putatively soporific pleasures of radio

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and television.40 Played back through high-fidelity equipment, ‘‘specially made records for the hi-fi enthusiast’’ were to the average record as a sports racer was to a four-door sedan, according to Canby.41 This type of rhetoric layered a veneer of manliness over what was in fact a characteristic form of homebound consumption during the 1950s.42 In contrast to the excitement offered by enthusiast-oriented hi-fi firms, electronics giants like RCA promoted a less arresting, more genteel listening pleasure in which ‘‘music is woven into the pattern of good living.’’43 Audiophiles wanted not merely the background diversions of a cultured lifestyle, but something deeper. ‘‘Sound is a way of daydreaming—an escape into the wild blue,’’ Cook told the New Yorker. To retreat from the corrosive influences of daily life into the private fantasies stirred by a fine record were ‘‘wonderful therapy,’’ he reported.44 The escape Cook offered was the aura of a different place: ‘‘The listener would like to imagine himself on the flying carpet and transported to . . . an optimum listening position within the audience.’’45 The impression of being in another place depended upon capturing the sonic aura of the original sound, the ambience of a reverberating performance space or the background noise of the outdoors. The newly available German omnidirectional condenser microphone, the Telefunken U-47, was key to capturing this ambience. Unlike the directional ribbon microphones standard in American studios before the war, it captured sounds from all directions equally well. Cook’s deliberately simple microphone placements maintained a unitary perspective and opened up a spacious soundscape that could be likened to widescreen cinema. He hoped to ‘‘recreate the visuals’’ of what he recorded, to allow his customers to ‘‘hear what was to be heard’’ with a plausible sense of distance between the auditor and sonic subject rather than provide the ‘‘upfront’’ sound of commercial recording.46 With his omnidirectional mikes and portable Magnecord tape recorder, Cook was equipped to travel the world in pursuit of aura. ‘‘The basic reason for serious records, is to preserve something: a performance, a situation, a sound, an emotion,’’ he told Time.47 Cook’s portable equipment and ‘‘on-the-road’’ mentality allowed him to capture sounds in situ, with minimal if any intervention in the events he taped. An admirer of the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, Cook had an ethnographic ear for folk music and rituals from around the world, and at home in the U.S.—not least a burlesque show in New Jersey.48 Like Benjamin he linked the power of art to the ‘‘fantastic power tapped by ritual practices.’’49 He even used the term ‘‘aura,’’ though obviously not exactly as Benjamin did: ‘‘Both Zither and Cimbalom have persisted almost unchanged for centuries. The reason they both have remained is because of their unique ability to create mood, to speak the intense lan-

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guage of men’s inner feelings. And they still do. That is what is on this record. . . . The unique aura of music and instrument stems directly from the artist. . . .’’50 The sublime sounds Cook captured, as emanations from an exotic other, ‘‘defie[d] dissection and pat intellectual understandings.’’51 But not all of his listeners had such a philosophical attitude. Despite Cook’s anticommercial rhetoric, Benjamin was correct that wrenching events out of context and circulating them in commodity form turned them, for some listeners at least, into entertainment to be judged on the same terms as any other record. A review of Three Rituals, for instance, praised Cook’s aura-imbued recording of shango, a Trinidad sacrifice rite, for its ‘‘wonderfully frenzied native drumming, enchanting singing by an untrained native girl, with village noise as a backdrop—including the barking of a dog.’’ In contrast, the reviewer complains that the Cuban ritual sounded ‘‘like a completely abandoned orgy’’ that was ‘‘too lengthy and repetitive for a record.’’52 And though Cook understood Trinidad’s carnival and new musical traditions like steel drum bands as rituals, he saw commercial potential in his recordings of The Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, and the Brute Force Steel Band. Unfortunately for him, he stood first on the leading edge and then on the margins of a calypso craze that arrived with Harry Belafonte’s million-selling 1956 RCA Victor album Calypso.53 While Cook hoped his records would sell, he was unwilling to use a commercial recording style that sacrificed aura. His label copy advised that Cook records were ‘‘not studio productions, but are made on the road—on location in their natural habitat,’’ which he was convinced was crucial to getting good musical performances as well as good sound. By contrast, commercial recordings often ‘‘suggested an intimacy between musician and listener, performer and audience, by emphasizing the proximity of the musical source to the listener by virtually cutting out ambient sound.’’54 Engineers captured the detail and vividness of sound where it was first emitted by carefully reducing the reverberation of the studio space and placing microphones close to each instrument or voice in order to minimize the dispersion, reverberation, or blending that smoothed or muddled the sound when heard from a distance.55 The signals from various microphones were then balanced in the mixing process, and when desired, artificial reverberation was added to create a controlled sense of spaciousness. As Peter Doyle argues, these techniques could combine to make recordings into a conceptual ‘‘nonplace’’ in which musician and listener could commune directly.56 All together, such techniques added up to the destruction of aura in favor of the possibilities of reproducibility, paralleling Benjamin’s analysis of cinema. ‘‘The resultant blend of sound,’’ asserted an RCA engineer

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upon the debut of these techniques in film sound around 1930, ‘‘may not be said to represent any given point of audition, but is the sound which would be heard by a man with five or six very long ears, said ears extending in various directions.’’57 From Cook’s perspective, these promiscuous adulterations of true sound stemmed from the fact that ‘‘most recording engineers are frustrated musicians. They want to put themselves into the records they make, from behind a forest of microphones and a 17-channel mixer, to ‘create’ something they can identify later, with pride.’’58 But even Emory Cook, the staunchest defender of realism and aura in the record business, imposed himself on his recordings; he just didn’t want to get too ‘‘heady’’ about it.59 When pressed, Cook admitted with some pride that recording was ‘‘an impresario problem’’ that required ‘‘conducting a performance’’ to ‘‘make an impression on an audience.’’60 Nor was he above sometimes exaggerating the sonic truth by separating his microphones to enhance the spread of sound or using directional microphones to capture particular sounds. Indeed, one does not ordinarily hear a train from inside a tunnel, or a burlesque show from the stage itself, or thunder from a mountaintop, the perspectives presented on Cook’s records. Despite his generally laudatory press, Cook was sometimes criticized for his portrayal of perspective and came in for some scorn over his fetish for sound. Displaying the urge for clarity and immediacy that Benjamin identified as a characteristic of reproducibility, the High Fidelity review of Three Rituals complained, ‘‘The chanters are somewhat distant relative to the drums,’’ as if Cook should have rearranged the traditional ritual in order to excite the LP listener or abandoned his unitary perspective by mixing in sounds from an additional close-up microphone. Paradoxically suggesting that realism could occur only in a studio, the review added, ‘‘Although recorded in the field, the sound is realistic.’’61 More frequently, Cook was ridiculed for challenging the priority of musical quality vis a` vis sound. For instance, when RCA executive Frank Walker quipped that Cook’s lasting contribution to the music business was the record without royalties, he was impugning Cook’s lack of legitimate music or legitimate musicians and his ethos of sound for sound’s sake.62 Record reviewers as well commonly pitted the high sound quality of Cook LPs and other audiophile efforts against their lack of musical interest. The Drums of Willie Rodriguez (Cook 1086), said High Fidelity, was for ‘‘collectors of pure sound effects,’’ but any relation to ‘‘genuine jazz . . . is purely semantic.’’63 Similarly, after ‘‘lending an ear to the melodic mediocrities’’ of the band on A Night at the Tropicoro (Cook 1187), another reviewer questioned ‘‘why anyone would tote a single mike, let alone two, into their presence.’’64

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Cook himself echoed the allegiance to ‘‘fidelity as a musical tool instead of a fetish,’’ and like most audiophiles he put ‘‘serious music’’ on a pedestal above sonic shenanigans.65 But Cook clearly loved sound for its own sake, releasing a handful of tape collages that played around with the fascination for sound, much like the contemporaneous musique concre`te of French avant-gardist Pierre Henry. Cook’s Speed the Parting Guest (Cook 1041, 1953) featured seven tympani, five cocktail shakers, four marimbas, and one wind machine, while Cook’s Tour of High Fidelity (Cook 1079, 1958) offered, in a combination typical of the hi-fi demonstration record, both ‘‘a serious experiment with high-fidelity recording techniques and a monumental farce.’’66 Perhaps the pinnacle of this genre was The Compleat in Fidelytie (Cook 1044, 1956), ‘‘a parody of the whole trend toward the glorification of odd sounds, which [Cook] himself has largely brought about,’’ said the New Yorker. In addition to a baby’s yowling, Mexican firecrackers, and the sounds of scratchy acoustic cylinders, the record featured a ‘‘Technical Section’’ that comprised a ‘‘truly incredible monstrosity of screaming, plunging distortion that is guaranteed to turn conscientious hi-fi perfectionists into blubbering, cringing idiots.’’67 Though he was unwilling to bend toward the ‘‘close-up’’ commercial sound, Cook sold a surprising number of records and established an audiophile repertoire that was copied by many labels, big and small. Said an RCA engineer, ‘‘His business is small enough so that he can act as a kind of trial balloon for the rest of us.’’68 The commercial potential of Cook’s approach to capturing aura is perhaps demonstrated most clearly by the career of his second-in-command, Bob Bollard, after he left Cook for RCA Victor. Under corporate auspices, Bollard produced such classics of audiophile spectacle as the percussion record Music for Bang, Baaroom, and Harp (RCA LSP-1866), the hi-fi demonstration disk Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular (RCA LSP-1773), and the first live album to see substantial chart success, 1959’s Belafonte at Carnegie Hall (RCA LSO-6006). The latter record, a triumph in the portrayal of aura that has been an audiophile reference since it was released, rode the charts for three years.69 To this day, audiophiles sit in awe at the ability of this recording to put them on a proverbial ‘‘flying carpet,’’ conjuring the aural presence of Belafonte as he moves about the stage, the palpable placement of the instruments, and the aura of being in the audience, at a distance from the stage, immersed in the noises of the crowd, as if psychically transported.70

Mercury: The Spectacle of Presence If any mainstream record imprint promised to capture the aura of the concert hall with an audiophile approach, it was Mercury’s classical divi-

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sion, whose Olympian series, like Cook LPs, served as spectacles that could challenge and show off the capabilities of high-fidelity systems. In lieu of the charisma Cook exuded, Mercury’s calling card was its recording method, which employed a single omnidirectional microphone suspended twenty-five feet above the conductor that transported the listener to a privileged, Olympian vantage point that was at once real and spectacular. The tension between aura and presence, between fidelity and spectacle, and between music and technological gimmick in Mercury’s history had a special resonance because many listeners were invested in safeguarding the traditions of classical music against the potential adulterations of technology. Despite Mercury’s strong rhetoric of realism and its engineers’ own devotion to preserving the cultural meaning of classical music, the Mercury story also exemplifies listeners’ strong desire to ‘‘get hold of an object at close range,’’ a desire embodied in their trademark ‘‘Living Presence.’’ And with its 1956 version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Mercury earned its biggest sales by rendering sublime sounds as a spectacle that highlighted the processes of reproducibility and served as an audio test record among audiophiles. For most audiophiles, classical music and high fidelity were joined at the hip. Both were in part fruits of a multifaceted effort by the radio, piano, and record industries to market classical music and the charisma of its stars in the years before World War II.71 The music industry hoped that if technology could deliver the full sensuality of the orchestra at home, classical music would be irresistible to the masses, whose souls would find uplift. In the words of Peter Goldmark, who headed the development of the LP at CBS, he hoped the new format would change nothing less than ‘‘the musical taste of a nation.’’72 Indeed, the introduction of the LP did catalyze substantial growth in the classical record market as well as the high-fidelity market. But high fidelity’s ability to capture the beauty of music was also appealing as technological sublime. As cultural historian Jacques Barzun put it, ‘‘This mechanical civilization of ours has performed a miracle for which I cannot be too grateful: it has, by mechanical means, brought back to life the whole repertory of Western music.’’73 The aesthetics of this miraculous resurrection that occurred when needle hit vinyl were confusing and controversial. While many listeners loved the new sense that the music they heard was close at hand, for some listeners in the 1950s the fetish for sound threatened to ‘‘strip the veil’’ that was key to classical music’s meaning and power. In its liner notes, Mercury promoted the musical and sonic aura that they captured by going on location rather than recording in a studio, their ‘‘truly realistic depiction of the sonority of the respective orchestras performing in the acoustical surrounding of their own halls.’’74 Like Cook, Mercury

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promised transparent representation of an authentic, unadulterated performance as well, since their microphone technique meant that ‘‘the control of instrumental balances and dynamic range remains where it rightfully belongs—in the hands of the performing artist’’ rather than the mixing engineer of typical classical productions, who balanced the feeds from microphones spread throughout the ensemble.75 Their influential single-mike perspective allowed the listener to inhabit the role of a privileged, Olympian observer. Indeed, Mercury was praised for ‘‘the completeness of its big orchestral sound.’’76 In addition to aura and authenticity, Mercury cagily emphasized the quality of sound they created by choosing a repertory of what critic Edward Canby called ‘‘spectacular orchestral noises.’’77 The debut release in 1951 featured Moussorgsky’s 1874 composition Pictures at an Exhibition (MG 50000), which aimed explicitly to conjure the visual—ten sketches and watercolors—via sound. The version recorded, Maurice Ravel’s 1922 transcription of the piece for orchestra, brought Mussorgsky’s musical depictions of such scenes as hatching chicks, quarreling Jews, and the catacombs of Paris to a new level of aural grandeur with such sonic treats as chirping woodwinds, reverberant, dark brass, and pealing carillons. The second release, Bartok’s Music for Stringed Instruments, Percussion and Celesta (MG 50001), had a title befitting a novelty percussion record designed to show off high-frequency extension and dynamics to hi-fi enthusiasts. The recordings themselves, while realist in that they documented the sound that arrived at a real point in an orchestra hall, were not exactly natural, in that no human set of ears ever had, or would, experience the sound from twenty-five feet above the conductor’s head. Mercury’s minimalist miking, their spectacular vantage point, and the top-flight equipment deployed by engineer Robert C. Fine created a sound that Canby called ‘‘stunning in its basic clearness and transparency,’’ causing ‘‘no small sensation among the hi-fi record fans.’’78 Compared with other classical recordings of the 1950s, Mercury’s Living Presence recordings were known for close-up perspective, vivid presentation of detail, and attention-grabbing dynamics. Reviewing Mercury’s Pictures, for instance, the New York Times gushed, ‘‘the orchestra’s tone is so lifelike that one feels one is listening to the living presence,’’ giving the label its Living Presence trademark.79 Others averred that Mercury had a tendency toward shrillness and exaggerated vividness that was a consequence of capturing more direct sound than live audiences heard. The responses to Mercury’s sound demonstrate the illusory nature of fidelity and the consequent overlapping meanings of descriptors such as clarity and presence. Breathless claims of fidelity were suspect; since the original sound could never be directly compared to the record of it, one

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could only judge ‘‘faithfulness to the imagined original,’’ as the critic Canby pointed out. Consequently, he noted, so-called high-fidelity sound was often anything but natural.80 According to film scholar Michel Chion, ‘‘definition’’—that is, ‘‘the acuity and precision in rendering of detail’’—is actually the standard by which fidelity is subjectively judged.81 The apparition of presence derives largely from what Chion calls ‘‘materializing sound indices,’’ sonic details ‘‘that cause us to ‘feel’ the material conditions of the sound source.’’82 In parallel to Benjamin, Chion characterizes the desire for definition as boundless. Indeed, as early as 1934, pioneering acoustics researcher Harvey Fletcher suggested the possibility that reproduced sound could provide ‘‘greater emotional thrills to music lovers than those experienced from the original music.’’83 In answering this desire for definition, recording engineers pleased the majority but fell afoul of some conservative audiophiles and music lovers, particularly those invested in the sanctity of concert performance. In addition to unnaturally close microphone placement, engineers utilized electronic adulterations such as equalizers to boost what is known as the presence range of frequencies and volume limiters to make the quietest sounds in a recording more audible relative to the loudest.84 In 1953 New York Times critic Harold Schonberg complained that these techniques threatened ‘‘an essential falsification of what is heard in the concert hall,’’ where ‘‘we ordinarily do not hear heavy breathing from a singer . . . or the tapping of fingers against a cello fingerboard, or the click of fingernails against ivory.’’85 Mercury too disavowed sonic excess such as ‘‘the tonal distortion resulting from attempts to create spurious effects of ‘ultra-wide’ frequency range and brilliance.’’86 Westminster, an independent classical label that focused on the audiophile market with its Lab series of LPs, joined the chorus against unfaithful enhancements in an ad that declared, ‘‘When you hear castanets and triangles so loud that you can’t hear the music any more . . . that is only a sound effect but it is not hi-fi.’’87 By the mid1950s, these spectacular deviations from naturalism were making presence a dirty word to some audiophiles, a synonym for ersatz enhancements that marked a recording as fake and intruded on the direct connection between music and the sensitive listener.88 Musical Quarterly criticized the approach behind such sonic shenanigans, which treated music ‘‘as ‘mere pleasing sounds’ to be communicated by synthetic electronic instruments.’’89 The magazine, like many music lovers, took the romantic position that music was more than just sound.90 Thus they praised hi-fi writers who properly subordinated the fetish for sound to the appreciation of music and thus ‘‘could be caught listening to great music, completely enthralled, even though the phono-

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graph at hand happened to be a poor one.’’ Under the ‘‘intoxicating influence’’ of great music, said the magazine, sound is a ‘‘stranger to everything material,’’ addressed ‘‘not to the tympanic membrane of the ear but to our souls.’’ Likewise, High Fidelity was troubled enough by the fetishistic aspects of high fidelity to ask, ‘‘Would Mozart Have Been a HiFi Fan?’’ as if the composer was so concerned with ‘‘spiritual expression’’ that he might have ‘‘disdained the innate physical characteristics of the materials with which he worked so deftly.’’91 But for the majority, the ability of technology to transcend the reality of performance was becoming a more important aspect of high-fidelity sound, even when attached to the musical canon, as proved by Mercury’s million-selling 1956 release of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (MG 50054). The record’s selling points were the sublime fidelity of its cannon blasts and bells and the technological legerdemain that blended four disparate recordings into a synthesized whole, making a classical symphony into a popular audiophile test record. The composition itself, commissioned for the 1882 Moscow Arts and Industry Exhibition, evoked the technological sublime with its remote-control cannon, triggered by an electric signal from the conductor’s podium, and with the sonic bombast of its brass band and all the carillons of Moscow, meant to duplicate the sounds of the battle and its victory.92 Mercury’s LP version was an instant sensation among audiophiles in part because it pushed the limits of hi-fi technology, providing a stern test of a stylus’s ability to track the violent squiggles engraved in its grooves without distorting and of a system’s ability to portray the high frequencies of the bells and the prodigious bass and transient energy of the cannon shots—perfect examples of ‘‘materializing sound indices.’’ The other principal appeal of Mercury’s 1812 Overture was that it lifted the veil on the recording process, reveling in all the art and artifice of reproducibility that created it. On the second cut of the LP, critic and composer Deems Taylor, who had officiated that classic of sonic spectacle, Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1942), chronicled how Mercury produced the 1812. On this cut, at least, the LP validated the claim by Mercury’s music director that ‘‘documentation is our watchword.’’93 Otherwise, the record was no document, but a creative technological synthesis whose fealty was not to the sound of a real performance but to an imagined one that embodied the producers’ notion of the intent of the composer. Taylor revealed to the listener, with recorded examples, the machinations that went into recording the perfect boom at West Point and creating the impression of sixteen cannons cloned from that single shot. The sound of the ‘‘Russian’’ bells was another ‘‘special effect’’ accomplished by mixing the sound of the bells from Yale’s Harkness Tower with the sound of the same tape played twice as fast, creating the illusion of

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higher-pitched bells to accompany the sound of the actual ones.94 For the aural thrill seeker, Mercury provided the opportunity to hear the cannon track alone, the carillon track alone, and the cannon and carillon together, mixed as for the finale of the Overture, without the distraction of the orchestra. Accordingly, most reviewers treated the disc as an exercise in sonic spectacle rather than music, recommending alternate recordings for music and even for sound. Gelatt’s audiophile viewpoint was that ‘‘on good equipment the record made a tremendous, soul-satisfying noise.’’95 Schonberg acknowledged Mercury’s ‘‘hard to beat’’ feature of real cannon and real bells, but scoffed at Mercury’s hyping of the ‘‘artillery belches’’ that were ‘‘almost as loud as a bass drum,’’ preferring a version on Vanguard.96 High Fidelity, commenting on the stereo re-recording released in 1959, was also less than satisfied with the concessions made to spectacle, which entailed sacrificing the average volume level and ironically the ‘‘presence’’ of the orchestra ‘‘in order to make this climax sound really big.’’ While the Taylor commentary was deemed the most interesting part of the album, a London version was preferred for its ‘‘full and rich’’ sound, while a monophonic Angel version took the prize for ‘‘those who really care about the music rather than the gimmicks.’’97

Fi Man’s Fancy Despite such sneers, by 1957, audiophile records, gimmick or not, had become important and recognizable enough for High Fidelity to inaugurate a new column called ‘‘Fi Man’s Fancy’’ to review them. The records that fell under that rubric, an emergent genre designated ‘‘exotica’’ by collectors today, were marked by liner notes promising spectacular sound and fantastical, hyperpresent soundscapes, rich in sonic details with which audiophiles could test and enjoy the sublime capabilities of phonography. Newer audiophile labels like Audio Fidelity applied a close-up multi-mike recording style to the repertoire established by Cook, aiming to produce ‘‘the feeling of being in the band’’ instead of the sensation of listening at a distance, and outselling Cook in the late 1950s and early 1960s.98 Mimicking many of these features but framing his records for the average customer, Enoch Light exploited the new medium of stereo LPs, producing the signature demonstration albums of the new format on his Command label. Command’s Persuasive Percussion series (1959–61) turned exotica-inflected, percussion-drenched albums of pop standards into audio test records for the mainstream, a template copied by labels both big and small, who mimicked their luxuriously glossy sound, their luxuriously glossy album covers, and their fanciful exploitation of a stereo’s ability to suggest the location and

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movement of sounds. Triumphant products of modern technology, the exotica LPs of Light and others were bearers of a synthetic sonic world of sound for sound’s sake, one for which not only the best seat, but the only seat, was in front of stereo speakers. Despite his unmitigated willingness to manipulate sound in the name of listening pleasure, Light’s story demonstrates the continued cultural appeal of high fidelity in his adoption of tropes of realism and maverick perfectionism. Nonetheless, in making two dozen best-sellers in a three-year span, Light labored to counter critics’ disdain for percussion records by dissociating his work from the sound fetishism of audiophiles, framing it as respectable middlebrow music perfectly captured. As high fidelity became more popular during the 1950s, the ‘‘fi man’’ wanted ‘‘adventures in sound,’’ like David Carroll’s Percussion in Hi-Fi (Mercury MG 20166, 1956) and exotica that evoked foreign or heavenly sounds, such as Arthur Lyman’s Taboo (HiFi R806, 1958) or Esquivel’s Other Worlds, Other Sounds (RCA LSP-1753, 1958). In contrast to the documentary approach of Emory Cook, Martin Denny, the genre’s most popular artist, presented what he called a ‘‘pure fantasy’’ of the tropics, a submissive but alluring ‘‘Quiet Village’’ rendered with a percussionheavy mix of ‘‘semi-jazz or latin beat’’ and accented with ethnic instruments.99 Instead of offering the actual music of the islands, exotica artists played ‘‘cocktail-hour sentimentality with a liberal spiking of pseudojungle sound effects’’ and exotic percussion recorded so that ‘‘every jingle jangle’’ appeared in ‘‘bright purity,’’ as a Denny review put it.100 The basic musical and sonic approach was quite similar to a percussion album, in fact: ‘‘We establish a mood by stressing melodic content and highlight it with novel effects,’’ explained Denny on his debut LP Exotica (1957), which had a recording budget of just $850 but sold 400,000 copies.101 ‘‘You have to hear it, experience it, to believe that glasses, small cymbals, bamboo sticks with drum heads, and exotic Oriental effects can enrich music so much.’’102 Exotica’s popularity was not the result of the machinations of the music industry but ground-level desires that labels underestimated for several years. Denny’s signature ‘‘psuedojungle’’ bird calls started as a goof that their audience wanted to hear again (and again), and his number-two single ‘‘Quiet Village’’ charted in 1959, two years after its release on his debut Exotica, a bottomup phenomenon that spread from a single disc jockey whose listeners responded to the track.103 Like exotica but unlike Cook Records, Grand Award, Enoch Light’s first label, frequently presented facsimiles and allusions in preference to the real thing. Whereas Cook, for instance, went to New Orleans to record forgotten musicians like Lizzie Miles, on location, Grand Award’s best-sellers enlisted session ace Dick Hyman to play the honky-tonk

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piano of ‘‘Knuckles O’Toole,’’ and Light’s big band to play a series of Roaring Twenties hits in a top-drawer New York studio. A master merchandiser, Light used the liner notes to explain every aspect of Grand Award records in smooth puffery, heralding ‘‘Acclaimed by Music Critics/Approved by Music Educators/Treasured by Music Lovers’’ on every LP jacket. Anticipating Command, Grand Award’s notes offered the technical bona fides of the recording process, explained the provenance of the paintings used for cover art, and conjured the aura implied in the music. Light knew his audience well, and he made his first fortune when ABC bought Grand Award in 1959. Light’s big idea for his new label, Command, was to exploit the new medium of stereo LP and the interest in sound that stereo had stirred with a mainstream audience, and to sell at a premium price. Stereo LPs were pushed to market prematurely by an audiophile label, Audio Fidelity, in late 1957, and were selling almost exclusively to audiophiles through 1958, but they quickly garnered widespread attention.104 Believing that too many LPs in the fledgling stereo market were aimed at eggheaded classical music fans and nerdy audiophiles, he saw an opening for ‘‘a good musical pop record’’ whose sound was ‘‘so noticeably directional’’ that the ‘‘average customer of phonograph records would notice it.’’105 Command’s Persuasive Percussion and Provocative Percussion series (four volumes each from 1959 to 1961), were entities in themselves— artificial, self-contained worlds of sound, tailored to the vicissitudes of mechanical reproduction in the living room, representing the triumph of the urge to ‘‘strip the veil.’’106 In this, they merely expanded upon the soundscapes of the monophonic exotica and percussion records that were Command’s antecedent while aiming for a wider market.107 Command’s hyper-real, incandescent sonic clarity resulted from Light’s engagement of engineer Robert C. Fine, the man responsible for the Living Presence sound and also a number of exotica, pop, and jazz recordings, who combined the most sensitive recording equipment available with modern studio techniques that captured detail that only an array of electronic ears, i.e. microphones, could hear. Command’s most overt and innovative deviation from naturalism was ‘‘ping-pong stereo,’’ in which sounds would switch from one speaker to the other willy-nilly. The results, described as ‘‘ultra-stereoistic,’’ ‘‘dazzlingly brilliant,’’ and ‘‘glassy-hard’’ by High Fidelity, assaulted the listener in spectacular fashion with a battery of sharply defined percussive transients embedded in light, melodic tunes.108 In creating a synthesis of mobile close-up perspectives, Light abandoned the notion of fidelity, admitting to an interviewer that ‘‘no live jazz band ever sounded quite like a Persuasive Percussion record.’’109 In fact, it required up to six people just to operate the mixing board.110 In foregrounding the medium of

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representation, Light went beyond the desire for immediacy or even the ‘‘shock effects’’ identified by Benjamin to what media theorists Bolter and Grusin call ‘‘hypermediacy.’’111 With a Command record, wrote Light in his bombastic fashion, with terms evoking the sublime and Maxell’s blown-away listener, ‘‘it is possible to reproduce music of such great intensity that it actually approaches the threshold of pain,’’ an experience he described as ‘‘shocking,’’ ‘‘exhausting,’’ and ‘‘exhilarating.’’112 The unmistakable directionality of a Command LP, in concert with the brilliant, crystalline treble combined to imbue a sheen of reproducibility so obvious that even listeners to cheap console stereos with deficient treble response and inadequate stereo separation could recognize as stereo high fidelity, making perfect demonstration material for audio retailers—and the perfect electronic foil to Benjamin’s notion of aura. Fidelity may have been abandoned in practice, but Light’s rhetoric, rich in audiophile tropes, demonstrates its continued discursive traction. Command declared fealty to ideals of realism, coyly promising ‘‘true sound’’ and ‘‘new and more exacting standards of clarity and brilliance.’’113 Even the most unfaithful aspect of his discs, the ‘‘ping-pong stereo,’’ was marketed as an audio test of the in-room, subjective balance between left and right channels. Likewise, the glassy hard transients presented a test for contemporary phono cartridges to reproduce without adding fuzzy distortion. According to High Fidelity, the ‘‘dramatic channel switching’’ did indeed ‘‘provide useful and rigorous playback system tests’’ as well as ‘‘a few new sonic titillations.’’114 Light made it easy for the novice with annotations that explained where the ear should focus on each track. As with other consumer audio test records, the home listener, rather than measurements from the test bench, was the proper judge of sound quality. Echoing Emory Cook and other high-fidelity pioneers, Light also painted himself as a maverick perfectionist. Despite his successful track record, his Grand Award partners and his new bosses at ABC initially refused to back Persuasive Percussion. Confident his concept would pay off, he fronted the $80,000 of recording costs himself, as he told every interviewer who would listen. Even with his own money tied up, he explained, he was so committed to quality that he held up the record for six months as Fine struggled to properly engrave the sound of the Chinese bell tree on the disk. In 1961 he similarly undertook an expensive entrepreneurial risk in switching his recording medium to 35mm film, which had greater measurable fidelity than recording tape, reinforcing his commitment to fidelity.115 In marketing audiophile spectacles more to the ‘‘average customer’’ than the serious audiophile, Command attempted to dissociate from the fetishization of sound for sound’s sake and the erotic overtones that characterized the fi man’s fancy by hyping the quality of music that was

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pedestrian even at the time. Staking a claim of uniqueness in a world of audiophile gimmick, the liner notes to Persuasive Percussion claimed, ‘‘These are the most unusual records you have ever put on your turntable. What’s on these records? music—not sound effects—but music. Brilliantly recorded music, played on fascinating percussion instruments with new and exciting tone textures.’’116 A more valid distinction was in Command’s album covers, which became the object of countless imitations. The eroticism of exotica album covers partook of popular notions of primitive sexuality that offered escape from American ideals of committed romantic love and served as an idealized reminder of military service in the Pacific.117 The sexy, playful covers common to percussion albums featured what Light deemed ‘‘too many girls in too few clothes,’’ typically juxtaposing cheesecake with circuit diagrams, electronic components, and decidedly nerdy men.118 In contrast, Command introduced luxuriously laminated gatefold covers embossed with distinctive abstract paintings and imprinted with smooth hype that assured the buyer that Command Records were the fruits of ‘‘concentrated effort by a dedicated group of world renowned artists and sound scientists’’ that would add to the ‘‘musical stature’’ of the record libraries of ‘‘discriminating people.’’ The proudly modernist covers, the first few by Bauhaus artist Joseph Albers, though seeming to offer no more intrinsic meaning than the music in the grooves, perfectly matched the music by deploying standard figures in a novel way. Command’s success in reframing exotica for the ‘‘average customer’’ is inarguable. Persuasive Percussion was one of the best sellers of the 1960s, and Command shifted more than 100,000 copies of twenty-two of its initial twenty-six releases. The first two alone grossed $5 million, in addition to whatever sales heavy bootlegging produced.119 In the wake of Light’s success, stereo percussion albums became a fad. Soon RCA mimicked Command’s concept of luxurious album covers and disks filled with artificial aural movement with their ‘‘Stereo-Action’’ series, packaged in sumptuous die-cut jackets with colorful abstract art and the slogan ‘‘The sound your eyes can follow.’’120 Decca/London offered ‘‘Phase Four Stereo’’ in glossy gatefold sleeves, and Mercury answered with the similar ‘‘Perfect Presence Sound.’’ In their success, exotica records overcame the many stigmas associated with the love of sound. The tension between the appreciation of hifi technology and the appreciation of music was still operative, reprised for example in Edward Canby’s characterization of stereo lovers as musical ignoramuses compared with the ‘‘real music lover.’’121 Likewise, critics frequently complained of ‘‘yet another percussion demonstration record,’’ exotica’s unnaturally bright tones, and the threat posed to good music.122 In addition, percussion sounds, popular with audiophiles

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in part because they are such effective ‘‘materializing sound indices,’’ were a particular affront to legitimate music because percussion threatened to replace keyboard-influenced music with what avant-garde composer John Cage characterized as an ‘‘academically forbidden ‘nonmusical’ field of sound.’’123 Light himself traded in notions of percussion and sound as non-musical, contrasting his label to those that ‘‘were enraptured by various kinds of noises—those of locomotives, cowbells, etc.’’124 The immature, uncivilized associations of percussion are captured by a record executive who told Downbeat, ‘‘I have the feeling that little boys who pound on drums, or generally make lots of other noises, grow up to buy percussion albums. Like, they like to beat their stereo rig, or their wife, or maybe both.’’125

Conclusion: Fidelity Redefined Throughout the 1950s, critics endlessly repented for the ‘‘excesses perpetrated in the name of high fidelity’’ by audiophiles ‘‘of dubious musical sensibility’’ who aimed to ‘‘cleave the ear’’ with piercing and growling exaggerations of reality.126 By the end of the decade, the tension between musical values and spectacular sound finally began to find resolution in a distinctive blend of technophilia and romanticism that refocused on a new object of fidelity, the work itself, and applauded the ability of technology to deliver it. ‘‘There are moments in Wagner when you just can’t hear the singers,’’ asserted conductor Igor Markevitch in 1957. ‘‘To restore the balance is part of the real art of recording. . . . To tell the truth you have to change a little.’’127 The new philosophy of recording was coming into line with recording practices that abandoned natural perspective and sonic aura in the name of clarity, detail, and balance. Classical performances were now understood as simulations of the written score, and high-fidelity technology was hailed for its ability to transcend mere reality in order to convey the true meaning of the abstract musical work.128 Soon, the spectacular soundscapes of exotica would spread to popular music. Moreover, the use of recording technologies to create sublime sounds became assimilated not as ersatz but as authentic art in the Romantic mode of self-expression. The acceptance of the new recording approach as authentic was heralded by the arrival of John Culshaw’s production of Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold for UK Decca, a classical sensation and best-seller in 1959.129 Das Rheingold was the first record to combine explicitly spectacular production, the cultural authority of classical music, and unanimous critical acceptance. Using a self-consciously cinematic approach marked by movement and effects, recording director John Culshaw hoped to ‘‘get a sound . . . which is perhaps more intense than the sound you

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could ever hope to hear in an opera house.’’130 Like its antecedents discussed above, Das Rheingold’s spectacular effects, including eighteen pounding anvils, maidens floating underwater, and the tremendous thunderclap of the third act, ‘‘became a sort of international standard by which you judged the quality of your gramophone.’’131 But instead of falling afoul of audiophile stigmas, Das Rheingold was praised by critics for staying true to ‘‘every single effect as Wagner wanted it,’’ offering what Decca called ‘‘a new kind of personal involvement to the listener by placing him closer to the score, and thus to the drama, than has been possible hitherto.’’132 The ‘‘theater of the mind’’ Culshaw evoked with movement, effects, and resonant aura was superior to live performances with their ‘‘grease-painted actors before cardboard rocks.’’133 So unanimous was the appreciation of Culshaw’s work that even such a curmudgeon as Theodor Adorno, who had once complained bitterly of the depredations that electronic reproduction visited upon the sound of the orchestra, used opera recordings as the linchpin of his argument that listening at home was superior to attending live performance.134 By the 1960s, recording no longer needed to ‘‘break the glass,’’ as Memorex did, in order to prove itself, and indeed mere fidelity was no longer all that exciting. Over the course of the 1950s, encouraged by consumer response, producers gave the artifices of technological reproducibility an increasingly overt role in the creation of records. As the goal of documenting an original sound faded, the audiophile practice of escaping into a sublime virtual soundscape—a theater of the mind— enjoyed new popularity and legitimacy not only in classical and exotica, but more broadly with the flowering of psychedelic pop in the mid1960s. Rather than fearing its taint, listeners expressed a newfound faith in technology to deliver them from the comfort of their living rooms to a place beyond the concert hall. While these audiences were far from the first to enjoy titillating manipulations of sound, the sheen of technology, rather than assuring the triumph of fidelity, infused sonic experimentalism with new cultural authority.

Part III Hearing Order

Chapter 6

Occupied Listeners: The Legacies of Interwar Radio for France During World War II Derek W. Vaillant

On 18 June 1990, pedestrians approaching the Place de la Concorde in Paris witnessed an astonishing spectacle. Near the former location of the fearsome guillotine of the Reign of Terror and the dazzling electric light display of the 1881 Paris Exhibition stood an enormous radio. The mock replica of a 1940s receiver towered thirty-five meters into the air and encased the Luxor Obelisk. Throughout the day it played excerpts of period broadcasts from French radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). At regular intervals, a voice uttered the words of the most famous French radio address of all time: l’appel du 18 juin 1940 (the appeal of 18 June 1940; hereafter the Appeal). On this date, Charles de Gaulle, a brigadier general, spoke live via the BBC from London. Breaking with Philippe Pe´tain, the head of the new French government, de Gaulle called on France to refuse to make peace with the conquering Germans, and to continue the fight. ‘‘The flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished,’’ he insisted.1 De Gaulle was virtually unknown to the public when he delivered the Appeal. Winston Churchill had authorized his emergency request for airtime, but BBC technicians had no inkling of the momentousness of the occasion and made no recording of the fateful speech.2 In the chaos of mid-June, few in France were listening when de Gaulle spoke. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had fled their homes to escape the advancing German army, and an armistice was quickly signed. But de Gaulle’s views spread quickly across France, by word of mouth, in clandestine print form, and via the BBC’s airwaves. However dramatic the circumstances of its delivery, historians agree that the Appeal should be

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Fig. 6.1: A 35-meter (115-foot) radio replica covered the Luxor Obelisk on the Place de la Concorde in Paris on 18 June 1990, as part of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Charles de Gaulle’s broadcast from London. Courtesy of AP Images/Pierre Gleizes.

regarded as ‘‘mainly a landmark in retrospect,’’ in the words of Asa Briggs.3 ‘‘Few people heard [de Gaulle’s] speech; fewer still acted upon it,’’ notes another scholar, pointing to the fact that attentisme (a wait-andsee attitude) rather than active resistance characterized the majority response. Organized resistance took shape gradually among supporters of the Free French government-in-exile and ardent supporters of the French left, which turned decisively against Germany only after Adolf Hitler attacked Soviet Russia in June 1941. In short, political networks, more so than radio networks, built the Resistance.4 Nevertheless, the subject of broadcasting radiates throughout French popular memory of World War II. An estimated two hundred commemorative plaques, named streets and squares, and roundabouts reference the date of de Gaulle’s famous broadcast. French schoolchildren are drilled in the significance of the Appeal and know the date by heart. Along with the Bayeux Tapestry, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the metric system, and the films of the Lumie`re studios, the text of the Appeal stands acknowledged in the Memory of the

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World Register maintained by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). As one commentator notes, ‘‘De Gaulle’s symbolic act of defiance and resistance has entered national French mythology as a turning-point in France’s recovery of its self-esteem, and into Gaullist mythology as the first heroic appearance of their national savior.’’5 While scholars downplay the immediate effect of the Appeal, they agree that radio listening dramatically punctuated everyday life during the German Occupation. The erection of an enormous radio in 1990 underscored the centrality of listening during ‘‘the war of the airwaves,’’ ‘‘the war of words,’’ and ‘‘the war of radio.’’ Listening secretly to banned BBC broadcasts kept occupied French listeners in touch with the Free French movement, informed them of war news, and countered propaganda on the German- and Vichy-controlled airwaves of France. Radio also provided thought-provoking talks and diverting entertainment, which buoyed hopes that France would someday be free. Over time, broadcast listening helped shape French public opinion in opposition to the occupiers and to Pe´tain’s collaborationist government at Vichy, and lent indirect, and sometimes direct, support to the Resistance movement.6 The symbol of an enormous radio reveals something further about broadcasting’s place in French history, but only if we adopt an alternative perspective on Occupation-era radio’s supposed effects on the public. Focusing exclusively on the culture and politics of radio listening during the Occupation mistakenly detaches this period analytically from the history of radio immediately preceding it. Such a narrow focus ignores the distinct possibility that prior listening experiences informed or even enabled listeners to mobilize as they did around messages of resistance circulated via the Appeal and subsequent broadcasts. Just as historians stress the social and political continuities between the Third Republic and Vichy governments, scholars of communication must consider themes of continuity, as well as rupture, in understanding debates, structures, and habits of listening to, and thinking about, radio, politics, and national identity, which connect the interwar and Occupation eras.7 I argue that broadcasting emerged in interwar France through a sequence of events that gave it a particular social, cultural, and political status that illuminates the form that listening took during the Occupation. Efforts to develop interwar radio transpired amid domestic and international political conflicts that battered France’s institutions, shredded its political culture, and sometimes poisoned the airwaves with ideological discord. Disagreements over free enterprise and routes to innovation, how to establish a national/regional/local system of broad-

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cast service, how to mediate network rationalization with local/regional autonomy; and whether to include political debate on the airwaves shaped the turbulent politics of the medium. As patterns of occupied listening demonstrate, however, a broadcast audience coalesced across time and space, and radio succeeded in communicating a credible political vision despite, or perhaps because of, the implosion of the Third Republic. This chapter explores how the flux of interwar French politics and various battles to control radio’s form and functions required listeners to be patient, discerning, and discriminating in their engagement with the changing medium. I argue that French experiences with radio’s imperfect realization as a public medium resulted in a strong engagement with the possibilities of broadcasting tempered by skeptical habits of mind concerning its future. Quite unexpectedly, the resulting outlook proved integral to listeners’ ability to navigate the competing political appeals of Free French and Vichy collaborationist broadcasting during the Occupation. Interwar radio experiences shaped the basis of a culture of French radio listening at the time of the Occupation wherein the possibility of a nation reconstituted via collective listening could take shape in a compelling new way.

First Waves: The Emergence of Broadcasting in France Modern French broadcasting emerged after World War I when the French military, which had used radio extensively during the conflict, transferred operations of an experimental radio transmitter atop the Eiffel Tower to the Ministry of Posts, Telegraphs, and Telephones (PTT). In 1921 the ‘‘Eiffel Tower’’ station became France’s first regularly broadcasting public station, joined in 1923 by Paris-PTT. Early broadcasts included news, weather, market reports, and occasional concerts. Exercising a mandate to develop radio further, the PTT added transmitters in Rennes, Toulouse, and Bordeaux to carry programs relayed from Paris. The affiliates produced local programs as well. By the early to mid1920s the PTT produced national newscasts that garnered regular listeners, but its cultural programs appear to have enjoyed more limited success, perhaps because of their literary and cultural high-mindedness, which emphasized themes of cultivation and uplift over excitement or diversion.8 Consensus over radio’s future as a public service in France proved difficult to attain because of the political division between conservative nationalists and sympathizers of the French left. Debate over the Republic’s economic and political future, linked to fears of free market domination and threats to individual liberty in the form of state encap-

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sulation stunted broadcasting’s development. Competing associations of radio users and developers lobbied in favor of privatization (French Association of Radio Listeners) or public monopoly (Committee for the Defense of National Broadcasting).9 Ideological disagreement and governmental hesitation impeded the expansion of a national system as rapidly as peer European nations, such as Britain and Germany. France’s coalition governments, headed most often after 1900 by the centerright, anti-clerical party known as the ‘‘Radicals,’’ formed, dissolved, and reformed with such dizzying rapidity that one analyst was moved to grumble in 1925: ‘‘Must each change in the composition of the French political cabinet lead to a sweeping change in radio policy?’’ Through the mid-1920s, a solution to making radio a national medium remained frustratingly out of reach.10 Although the French National Assembly did not support unbridled privatization of the airwaves, it did authorize a few private enterprises to launch broadcast stations. Radiola, backed by several other electronics firms and the news and advertising agency Havas, commenced broadcasting in 1922. It operated as Radio-Paris between 1924 and 1932, at which point it was purchased by the government and continued operations under the same name as a public station. The Poste-Parisien was affiliated with the newspaper Le Petit Parisien, which had begun regular broadcasting in 1923.11 Without waiting for formal approval, interests in Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and several other cities established private stations, too. Throughout the 1920s, these ‘‘unauthorized’’ stations furnished music, news, and entertainment programs. They were also mired in continual disputes with the PTT over their extralegal status.12 A governmental decree of 28 December 1926 reaffirmed the state’s monopoly over radio and noted that any authorization of private broadcasting was a temporary privilege, subject to review. The precarious status quo halted the growth of independent stations for fear of government interference or annexation. Not until France’s first parliamentary debate on radio in spring 1929 would the government recognize the right of both authorized and unauthorized private stations in France—thirteen in all—to operate legally.13 This right came with a significant compromise, however, extracted by opponents of the privatization of France’s airwaves: no additional private stations would be added in the future.14 Plans for a national network run by the PTT began to take shape in 1926 when Marcel Pellenc, director of the French inter-ministerial commission for radio, outlined his guiding principles for public broadcasting. These included: (1) developing a comprehensive relay system to carry signals of the national flagships (Eiffel Tower and Paris-PTT) to all corners of the country accessible to those with even the most rudimentary of crystal radio sets; (2) guaranteeing that regional PTT affiliates

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receive direct financial, technical, and operational assistance from the government; (3) ensuring that affiliates draw on regional talent to fill program slots; and (4) encouraging affiliates to minimize or eliminate entirely their dependence on paid advertising.15 In 1927 the PTT established regional stations in Grenoble, Lille, Limoges, and MontpellierLanguedoc, which joined existing public stations Bordeaux-Lafayette, Lyon, Marseille-Provence, and Toulouse-Pyrenees. In 1931 the PTT launched the shortwave Poste-Colonial to reach France’s overseas colonies.16 Turning to General Gustave-Auguste Ferrie´, a pioneer of French radio, the PTT commissioned a design for a comprehensive network model linking the PTT ministry to the regional affiliates. The Ferrie´ Plan of spring 1931 divided France into twelve geographical zones served by two streams of public programming—a national stream originating from Paris using longwave transmitters, and a regional stream provided by affiliate stations using the medium-frequency band.17 The Ferrie´ Plan endorsed the dual private-public system of broadcasting in effect in France per the compromise achieved in 1928 between government and private operators. Whether by intention or not, the Ferrie´ report left somewhat open the question of the rights of regional PTT stations to conduct their internal affairs. As broadcasting grew in scope and significance the question of regional participation in the construction of a French radio nation would loom larger for policy makers.18

Listening in the Provinces: Associational Life and Autonomy During the 1920s, provincial radio developers and users took advantage of their distance from the seat of economic and political power in Paris to advance a radio culture of relative autonomy.19 While listeners in the north of France enjoyed news, music, sports, and literary/drama programming from well-appointed public and private stations in Paris and its environs, listeners elsewhere had fewer options.20 In the provinces, commercial and noncommercial interests often forged alliances to bring broadcasting to their communities. In Languedoc, six such stations were operating prior to 1939: two each in Toulouse and Montpellier, one in Nıˆmes, and another in Be´ziers.21 In the southwest, a private station, Radio Agen, obtained funding from the Department of Lot-etGaronne, despite the fact that a private consortium led by the impresario Jacques Tre´moulet controlled its operations. PTT affiliates courted prospective advertisers, just as their private counterparts did, to meet the expenses that their modest governmental outlays failed to cover. Stations developed their local/regional bases of support through a combi-

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nation of innovative programs, ties to listener associations, hobbyists, and amateur radio clubs, and by recruiting local talent to fill program slots.22 While neither as prestigious nor as polished as Parisian stations, outlets in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lyon, and elsewhere won enthusiastic support from listeners because they imparted a local flavor to broadcasting. In France, the promise of instantaneous connectivity and the delivery of live, mass experience made interwar broadcasting a symbol of modernity. Many French industries contributed to the design, manufacture, and sale of radio sets to consumers, as well as the development of the medium for amateur experimental, scientific, and recreational use. The government and the marketplace shaped important aspects of radio’s incorporation into everyday life at the level of economic rationalization, state planning, and cultural assimilation. At the same time, radio developed in relation to social and cultural behaviors particular to France in the early twentieth century. Although factory-based industrialization had proceeded rapidly in the 1920s, the majority of French trade workers in the early 1930s continued to work in establishments of fewer than one hundred employees. Over one-third worked in collectives of no more than ten.23 Traditional social and cultural practices exerted their own impact on radio’s development, particularly an understanding that modern technologies be viewed and controlled to the extent possible by the people themselves.24 The clearest evidence of widespread expectation that radio belonged to the people, as much if not more so than to the government or the private sector, emerges from the activity of France’s amateur radio associations. Listener organizations bespoke patterns of associational work and leisure characteristic of traditional French society. These organizations guided the emergence of radio at the national, regional, and local levels through economic development, lobbying, education, publishing, and technical innovation. With encouragement from the government, private, and scientific community of radio developers, amateur organizations played a major role in supporting public and independent stations. While some associations promoted radio chiefly as an economic medium, others allied with municipal and departmental government to popularize the medium for its own sake, to promote radio as a public trust or as an educational and scientific tool, and to establish and operate PTT affiliate stations. Groups of amateur radio operators, known as ‘‘F8s,’’ formed clubs across the country to train members in the use of Morse code and shortwave communication.25 These actors shaped the conception of radio as a publicly responsive technology and a democratic medium. While local activism had helped familiarize the population with some

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of radio’s possibilities, the creation of a functional PTT network serving the nation’s needs had only just begun. In the 1930s radio set ownership surged and competing interests clashed over the appropriate level of power the central government should wield over the medium. Regional radio users and developers faced the challenge of reconciling a vision of radio as a locally managed and culturally relevant extension of authority rooted in a specific locale with a national government obligated to render broadcasts that served the entire country in consistent, democratic, and systematic fashion.

Power Politics: The Mixed Legacies of PTT Reform In France’s National Assembly, elected officials continued discussion of how to harmonize state-directed public radio with the greater needs of the public. Edouard Herriot, a socialist, who served as prime minister in 1924–25, 1926 (for three days), and 1932, articulated his vision for state control of radio as in France’s best interests. ‘‘Radio must be organized in the care of the State, the holder of the radio communications monopoly,’’ he argued, ‘‘not as a means of distraction for the leisured classes, idlers, and hard-to-please and easily bored, nor as a mere instrument of research for amateur technicians, but as an organism of popular education, popularization of scientific, artistic, literary, even economic matters, of national progress, and of peace.’’26 Charles Guernier, minister of the PTT (1931–32), who had helped commission the Ferrie´ Plan, believed that public broadcasting must ‘‘establish across the nation a continuous spiritual connection so that alongside the grand national works that advantage Paris and our other large cities, the innumerable equally powerful and precious works generated throughout many parts of our provinces can also be diffused over the entire country.’’27 Despite a conception of ‘‘nation’’ that eschewed mention of the empire, its citizens, or colonized subjects, Guernier hinted at ways in which broadcasting might redraw the conventional boundaries of national identity by offsetting the cultural power of Paris (and other major cities) with ideas and programs from the provinces. Most of all, the state monopoly argument championed broadcasting as a tool of national uplift. With variations, this idea would exert continued appeal to French interwar leaders across the political spectrum. Between 1934 and 1936, Georges Mandel, a one-time aide to former Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and a conservative deputy to the National Assembly, ran the PTT and set about reforming public broadcasting.28 Mandel coordinated efforts to register radio set owners in order to collect the government’s recently adopted radio-set tax to feed

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the network’s growth. As PTT coffers filled, Mandel doubled the hours of national programming from eight to sixteen per day. He introduced a PTT national news roundup, which listeners admired because it included the views of different journals of opinion such that it ‘‘quoted the Monarchists as well as the Communists.’’29 With broadcasting on a surer financial footing, Mandel barred all advertising from PTT airwaves, effective 1 January 1935.30 The decision implied that in exchange for giving up commercial forms of support, affiliates could expect the French state to provide adequate operational support. According to historian Ce´cile Me´adel, however, disparities in funding packages for different PTT affiliates suggest that stations were treated unfairly by the central government. Me´adel speculates that Mandel’s action may have been driven by a desire to weaken the autonomy of regional stations by denying them outside sources of income.31 PTT affiliates would henceforth have to manage with what the ministry saw fit to budget. The loose ties to Paris tightened as a result, and ministry politics had the potential to influence local and regional affiliate affairs to a greater degree. Declaring a new era in the relationship between the PTT and listeners, Mandel issued a report, dated 13 February 1935, ‘‘devoted to the rights of the listener who often complains, not without cause, about the shortage of [public] stations, of the mediocrity of programs, and who, until now, while funneling money into the broadcast budget, had no means of control at his disposal.’’32 To provide at least an impression of affiliate autonomy, Mandel formed regional management councils. Each council consisted of twenty persons charged with overseeing administrative and program operations at the affiliate level—ten directly elected by listeners, five appointed by the minister of the PTT, and five drawn from local radio associations.33 Responding to concerns about political interference in program content at the national level, Mandel established the High Council for public broadcasting, comprising six subsections to oversee the national program stream. Mandel filled the program advisory council with leading newspaper editors from across the political spectrum, including Henri Simon, publisher of the rightleaning L’Echo de Paris, and the Socialist Le´on Blum, of Le Populaire.34 Through such innovations, Mandel simultaneously reached out to affiliates, while strengthening centralized authority. Me´adel argues that the regional council model decisively weakened the power of local and regional nongovernmental associations with ties to provincial affiliates. The PTT minister was now assured of at least five handpicked supporters at the regional level with the ability to promote certain agendas and potentially forestall projects not favored in Paris.35 Mandel’s reforms altered state and regional control, decentralizing administrative and

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program authority while enhancing the power of the prime minister of the PTT to direct the form and function of the network. Mandel’s efforts to streamline PTT operations had not been in place long before France experienced an unanticipated political realignment. In 1936 Mandel and the government he served were swept from power with the upset election of the left-coalition Popular Front under Le´on Blum.36 The Popular Front’s party platform included a pledge to open public radio to more diverse political voices. Mandel’s successor at the PTT, Robert Jardillier, proceeded to fire or transfer over three hundred employees believed to be loyal to Mandel and the center-right political agenda. Jardillier defended actions of this kind as a necessary step toward transforming French media into ‘‘the image of living France.’’37 The Popular Front government’s attempts at developing radio programs, however, proved a disappointment. They suffered from cultural conservatism and failed to capture the imagination or affection of listeners to the extent that livelier fare on commercial stations could.38 Conservative opposition to the Popular Front in general, including its public radio policy, turned the 1937 PTT regional council radio elections into national political theater. Factions on the French left and on the right (which openly despised Blum) turned out to vote. Two leading radio associations, Radio-Liberte´ (Radio Liberty), aligned with the French left, and Radio-Famille (Radio Family), aligned with the predominantly Catholic, nationalist right, ran slates of candidates across the country. Radio-Famille won a resounding victory in every region except Toulouse, a bastion of trade unionism. Conveniently forgetting how politics had shaped PTT activity in the past, the right-wing journal Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere) called the radio election results ‘‘a true kind of political protest’’ against the Popular Front and its shameless ‘‘politicization’’ of the PTT.39

The Golden Age of Interwar Commercial Broadcasting Not even the political static surrounding the 1937 radio elections could diminish the surging popularity of radio, particularly commercial broadcasting. During the 1930s, commercial media thrived in France, whether phonograph records, cinema, newspapers, or mass-circulation magazines, often brimming with photographs. Between 1932 and 1939 radio set ownership in France increased fivefold to 124 sets per thousand persons. Although penetration levels lagged the United States, Britain, and Germany, broadcast listening had become a true national phenomenon. Audiences chose among twenty-odd major stations both commercial and public in France, as well as from long- and shortwave Frenchlanguage programs from abroad. Commercial stations Poste-Parisien

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and Radio-Cite´ helped drive the exploding popularity of singers, such as Charles Trenet, Tino Rossi, Maurice Chevalier, and Jean Sablon. While never as popular with listeners as private stations, the PTT continued its national newscasts, as well as a strong regimen of classical concert and chamber music. Dramatic serials, game shows, live sporting events like prizefighting and the Tour de France, and arts and culture programming rounded out the kinds of programs available on France’s airwaves.40

The Coming Storm: Dissent and the Dial Despite broadcasting’s coming of age in France as a dual public and private service, with some openness to different viewpoints and constituencies, the European political crisis exerted a chilling effect on its democratic potential. In late January and February 1934 clashes involving right-wing, pro-fascist leagues, communist sympathizers, and the police forced a change in the government’s ruling coalition and resulted in new efforts to monitor internal threats to national security, including the use of the airwaves.41 When the French government banned the country’s right-wing leagues, activists turned to shortwave transmitters to mobilize their constituencies. Activists on the left also used shortwave transmitters and receivers to communicate with one another and, in defiance of French foreign policy, provide direct aid to the Popular Front opposition to General Francisco Franco in Spain. Such clandestine uses of radio concerned the French Interior Ministry and PTT officials and led to intensified intelligence operations, in which amateur radio users were subjected to government surveillance and secret listening campaigns by an organization known as the Police de l’Air (the Police of the Air).42 When Edouard Daladier became the center-right’s Radical Party leader in spring 1938, he took greater control of French radio in the name of national security. On 13 October 1938, following the Munich agreement that allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland, Daladier bypassed the French National Assembly and used an executive law decree to force independent radio stations to ‘‘cooperate’’ with the PTT national news service in the reporting of sensitive political, economic, or financial topics.43 Private broadcasters had scooped the Munich story to the embarrassment of the French government, the PTT, and the Parisian journalistic establishment. Daladier also took over production of the national news program for the PTT. In late July 1939 he took full control of France’s public broadcast system. Although listeners and the radio association Radio-Liberte´ complained bitterly about his authoritarian tendencies, Daladier remained unbowed. His decision to suppress

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the French Communist Party and all of its publications and communications in response to Hitler and Joseph Stalin’s nonaggression pact of 23 August 1939 emphasized his uncompromising attitude toward perceptions of disloyalty or threat to his government.44 France’s private stations continued to operate independently, but on the condition that they carry the PTT news feed and not run news reports of a controversial nature that had not been cleared with government officials.45 While the Daladier government successfully curtailed dissent on the PTT network and on France’s private stations, it had less success contending with foreign broadcast propaganda. Since the 1920s, Russia had used radio to circulate pro-communist propaganda in French and in other languages. The ‘‘war of the waves’’ grew more pronounced in 1933, however, when Germany mounted an extraordinary campaign of electronic propaganda against Britain and France. Hitler’s contention that ‘‘in times of war, words are weapons’’ encapsulated the principle that Joseph Goebbels, minister of information, applied mercilessly to French radio listeners.46 The period between 3 September 1939, when France formally declared war against Germany, and 10 May 1940, when Germany launched its attack against France, marked what came to be called the Droˆle de Guerre, or the Phony War. During the tense months prior to armed confrontation, German propaganda intensified. Powerful transmitters broadcast signals toward French soldiers massed along the Franco-German border. Combatants and civilians listened with a mixture of bemusement and alarm to the broadcasts of Paul Ferdonnet, a right-wing French journalist who had defected to the Germans. He became known as the ‘‘Traitor of Stuttgart’’ due to the location of the high-powered transmitter used to carry his broadcasts. Ferdonnet claimed that the French were being manipulated to defend Britain’s wealth and strategic interests rather than theirs alone. This was a popular critique used by pacifist and communist interests in France as well. Addressing listeners on the French right, Ferdonnet warned of an imminent fifth-column (i.e., communist) uprising inside France. ‘‘The skill was unmistakable,’’ concludes historian Asa Briggs. ‘‘Information, propaganda and direct appeals were adroitly interspersed with recorded songs by Tino Rossi and Lucienne Boyer, and ended with the words ‘Bonne nuit, les gars. A bientoˆt.’’’ French officials monitored these and other international broadcasts and combed letters from service personnel for evidence of eroding convictions, but were unable to measure the degree of radio propaganda’s effects on listeners.47 During the Phony War, the combination of governmental constraint on French radio and intense propaganda from Germany required patience, discernment, and skepticism on the part of French radio lis-

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teners. By early 1939 French airwaves carried banalities from a censored public network at home, diversions via commercial radio, some reliable news from abroad (BBC), propaganda from abroad, and an insidious new weapon from Germany’s information ministry. In addition to Radio Stuttgart and other high-powered transmitters heating up Europe’s airwaves, the Germans used broadcasts to circulate so-called black propaganda in France. The term refers to the technique of circulating misleading information from a deliberately misidentified source. Using secret transmitters to disguise the origins of such signals, these broadcasts claimed to be the work of radio ‘‘patriots’’ inside France. RadioHumanite´ (Radio Humanity), slyly named for the suppressed French communist newspaper of the same name (which had once had broadcasting aspirations), falsely presented itself as the voice of underground French communists. Using revolutionary slogans and attacks on alleged warmongers, the station played to prejudices (sowed by conservative nationalists as well) that France’s true enemy was not Germany, but communism. By contrast, La Voix de la Paix (The Voice of Peace) espoused a pacifist stance that served as a subterfuge for vitriolic attacks on the Daladier government as bellicose and incompetent. Dissembling enterprises like these picked up on currents of domestic disaffection and grotesquely distorted and enlarged them, poisoning public discussion and debate in France during the Phony War.48 Other than attempts at electronic jamming of German radio signals, the Daladier government had few plans to counter such attacks.49 For years the PTT had produced foreign-language broadcast news reports in many different languages, including German, but the idea of government-coordinated domestic propaganda ran contrary to Republican ideals.50 In July 1939 Daladier belatedly named novelist and playwright Jean Giraudoux to head a Propaganda Commissariat. But Giraudoux’s literary arts could not offset his lack of experience, resources, and tactical instincts as a propagandist. The half-hearted venture fizzled, and with it Daladier’s exhausted political capital. In May 1940 Daladier resigned and was succeeded by Paul Reynaud.51 For all of the diabolical ingenuity of German propaganda, scholars agree that its impact on French public opinion was limited.52 Contemporaries were not so sure. German, French, and British intelligence agents believed French listeners to be vulnerable to broadcast manipulation. Rumors and disinformation swirled throughout the Phony War, and Paul Ferdonnet and the black broadcasters undoubtedly accelerated their circulation. Ultimately, German tactical boldness rather than France’s depleted morale made the difference. On 13 May 1940, German divisions crossed the Meuse River into France. By 14 June they had occupied the country and taken control of French radio.53

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Occupied Listening Given their interwar experiences and the turmoil of the Phony War period, French listeners were understandably inclined to turn a skeptical ear to the pronouncements of state broadcasting during the Occupation when German occupiers and Vichy collaborationists controlled domestic programming. The topsy-turvy politics of interwar broadcast development had left French audiences cognizant of radio’s capacities to educate, inform, and entertain, as well as its vulnerabilities to direct and indirect forms of manipulation. After the fall of France, listeners remained attuned to the possibility that radio might yet deliver on the promises of the interwar era. French listeners were already turning to the BBC for reliable news during the Phony War, and gave indications that they were prepared to exploit the medium to meet their needs under the Occupation. Following the defeat of June 1940 the PTT network officially ceased to exist. Many stations in the north of the country fell silent. Some closed voluntarily, others were sabotaged, and still others fell into the hands of the German occupying authority controlling the north of the country.54 Broadcasting resumed in the northern occupied zone, with Radio-Paris serving as a flagship and feeder station to the entire country. By the terms of the Armistice, Radio-Paris technically remained the property of the French government, but it operated as an instrument of the German military command and a close-knit band of French collaborators. At Radio-Paris and other stations that remained in operation during the war, many French technicians, staff, and talent remained at their posts. French stars and celebrities continued to appear on Radio-Paris. For these reasons, or perhaps by sheer habit, French listeners continued to listen to Radio-Paris, chiefly, it would seem, for its musical entertainments, which made up 70 percent of its daily content.55 The most dramatic change at Radio-Paris during the Occupation came in the newsroom, which became a distributor of pro-German, collaborationist propaganda. The most widely heard French propagandist was Philippe Henriot, a member of the infamous Milice, the German SSaffiliated French militia. Henriot also served as the Vichy government’s secretary of state for information and propaganda. He produced a daily national radio address between 1942 and 1944 that was repeated throughout the day on Radio-Paris and Radio-Vichy, the flagship of the Pe´tain-led government in the unoccupied/southern zone. A blatant fascist apologist, Henriot used his airtime to praise Pe´tain, deride de Gaulle and the Free French, cast doubts that the war would end soon, stir fears of communist threats to France, and relentlessly attack the British, the United States, and the BBC.56

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In the south, Radio-Vichy anchored France’s ‘‘national broadcasting’’ system that comprised the stations of the southern region.57 While not as popular as Radio-Paris (or as easy to hear nationally), Vichy’s broadcast network furthered the Pe´tain government’s propaganda campaigns waged via print, film, and broadcasting. It gave a platform for Pe´tain to speak to the people, and its programs enshrined themes of ‘‘work, family, and country,’’ which were central to the conservative nationalist agenda. Radio-Vichy bore the exclusionary stamp of the Occupation-era culture as well, by promoting the idea of a French national ‘‘family’’ that could not abide communists, Freemasons, or Jews.58 Unable to obtain reliable information from stations such as these, more and more French listeners tuned their dials to international signals, most notably the BBC.59 On 6 September 1940, the Frenchlanguage service of the BBC presented the first episode of Les Franc¸ais Parlent aux Franc¸ais (The French Speak to the French), a daily thirty-minute news and features program produced by a team of French journalists and radio talent in exile. The program rapidly developed a large audience and lasted throughout the war. In addition to fifteen minutes of hard news, it offered segments ranging from historical and political reports, to roundtable discussions, to music (including banned French military tunes), popular chanson, and satirical compositions, such as Jean Oberle´’s ‘‘Radio-Paris Ment’’ (‘‘Radio-Paris Lies’’), a song for children (and adults) set to the melody of ‘‘La Cucaracha.’’ Families must have listened to the program together because the mischievous jingle circulated widely among the young, and even surfaced as a chant at a playground in Tarbes in southwestern France.60 On another French-language BBC program Honneur et Patrie (Honor and Country), hosted by political journalist and radio personality Maurice Schumann, Charles de Gaulle and his associates championed the Free French movement. German and Vichy authorities felt sufficiently threatened by such programs questioning their legitimacy before the French listening public that in late October 1941 a new law banned listening to the BBC. Attempts were also made to jam the BBC’s signal, but these could not stop the broadcasts from reaching France. The BBC and its French-language programs remained audible, particularly in the north, and heard during the Occupation.61 Knowing that the French listened to both the BBC and Radio-Paris, The French Speak to the French made a point of challenging false or misleading statements made on France’s domestic airwaves. BBC programs provided news that Radio-Paris and Radio-Vichy distorted or suppressed entirely. One lesson the BBC imparted to French listeners was that that despite familiar voices and on-air personalities at Radio-Paris, the Germans and collaborationists manipulated the station like a marionette.62

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For what it said and left unsaid, Radio-Paris received frequent criticism for encouraging and abetting the repression of French citizens, and for routinely lying to the French people.63 Because Pe´tain enjoyed widespread, even cultish popularity among the French at the start of the Occupation, criticism of his words and actions required judicious handling. Commentators on The French Speak to the French made respectful mention of Pe´tain’s remarks before proceeding to pointed criticism of his claims and the integrity of his government.64 They exhorted French listeners to look beyond the bromides of Vichy to the hypocrisies and hate they rationalized or concealed. Listeners learned of repressive measures directed against European Jews, including evidence of the Holocaust, such as the murder of 700,000 Jewish captives in Poland. They learned, if they were unaware, that France was itself a ‘‘land of the pogrom, a land of shame,’’ as a result of the government’s assistance in the roundup and deportation of immigrant and French Jews to concentration camps in spring and summer 1942.65 The French Speak to the French inspired listeners in direct and indirect ways. While only a small percentage of the French population rose up in armed opposition to the Occupation, BBC broadcasts encouraged belief in France’s eventual liberation. Those who were active resistors, such as Georges Bidault, found that The French Speak to the French sustained his will to undertake difficult and dangerous work. ‘‘This food,’’ he wrote later of the broadcasts, ‘‘was as life-giving as the bread and salt on our bare table.’’66 Imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Le´on Blum and Georges Mandel, both Jews, had access to a radio and heard their compatriots on the BBC. Blum cherished such broadcasts as ‘‘the great antiseptic’’ in ‘‘a world of poison.’’ The French Speak to the French, he continued, was ‘‘as beautiful as a Beethoven symphony because Frenchmen were allowed to express disagreement with the British government.’’67 For Blum, it appeared, longstanding aspirations to utilize broadcasting to uplift the French people and embody principles of free expression had borne fruit, albeit in an unlikely place, and in an unlikely moment in French history. The scenario of patriots discussing and debating the future of the French nation before a mass listening audience on a broadcast system other than their own strikes an ironic note. A multiplicity of technical experts and politicians, business people, amateur radio hobbyists, local station managers, programmers, and others had labored to make radio a meaningful force in the civic, economic, cultural, and national life of France throughout the interwar period. While the system had developed its services significantly, in key respects the ambitions to produce a system responsive to the country’s needs and values had fallen short by 1940.

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The calamity of war and defeat reshaped the political possibilities of broadcasting in France in dramatic and unexpected ways. With help from the British government, the BBC, French activists-in-exile, and listeners themselves, a culture of occupied listening took shape. As dubious as the idea of a redemptive national project via broadcasting might have appeared at the moment of de Gaulle’s 1940 Appeal, the core premise of radio’s potential force in national life would have been familiar to French listeners acquainted with the development of the medium in the interwar period. Since the 1920s broadcasting had fueled fantasies of connectivity and national self-realization. It had also fallen prey to false promises, partisan ideological manipulation, and anti-Republican sentiment, and revealed deep rifts in French society and culture. Enmeshed in the politics of the past as well as the present, French broadcasting nonetheless afforded the means of an instantaneous, distinctive experience of being connected, however ephemerally as a broader public, perhaps capable of realizing the elusive goal of becoming a nation again. Returning to the enormous radio towering over the Place de la Concorde, we see that the commemorative exercises of 1990 distorted the reality of radio’s place in French history. Its technological determinist message overstated the power of broadcasting to liberate France during World War II. Prior to the war, France’s radio users and developers confronted the uncertainties of how to develop a powerful new medium, how to balance private enterprise and public welfare, how to manage centralized and decentralized authority, and how to resolve bitter ideological battles, whether on or off the air. Interwar broadcast experiences revealed that radio had limited power to repair structural weaknesses in French politics, and in certain cases might even exacerbate them. Yet out of these myriad experiences came a technological system connecting citizens to one another that would be put to use during the Occupation in surprising and historic ways. In some sense an enormous radio may have loomed in the imagination of listeners as a symbol of hopes for national solidarity and political repair. Out of a difficult era came an important legacy for Occupied France: a capacity for discerning, skeptical, and ultimately hopeful radio listening. Despite or perhaps because of the many ways that the politics of radio had inhibited its development and proved frustrating to the public on occasion, listeners conserved a resilient belief in radio’s potential. Seeking out the banned programs of the BBC and drawing strength from these experiences, listeners built a relationship between radio and national will that was improvisatory and situational in one sense, yet also connected to a legacy of experiences with radio as a political medium and as a meaningful part of everyday life. During the Occupation the

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French listened to radio to learn, to know, to escape, to connect across the gulf of space, and most of all, to endure. They had learned these strategies of listening well, for they were emblematic of the experience of listening during the interwar era. Occupation listening required engagement, wariness, and insistence that there was cause to hope: for the future of radio and for the future of the nation.

Chapter 7

An Audible Sense of Order: Race, Fear, and CB Radio on Los Angeles Freeways in the 1970s Angela M. Blake

It is interesting, if not useful, to consider where one would go in Los Angeles to have an effective revolution of the Latin American sort. Presumably, that place would be in the heart of the city. If one took over some public square, some urban open space in Los Angeles, who would know? . . . The heart of the city would have to be sought elsewhere. . . . The only hope would be to take over the freeways. —Charles M. Moore, Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, about 1967

The 1977 documentary film CB Radio: A New Hue and Cry, produced with the assistance of retired Los Angeles police officer Lee Kirkwood, opens with a detailed costume drama set in a medieval town. A ship’s captain observes a thief stealing from the blind beggar who sits in the busy marketplace. Seeing the theft, the captain and other citizens give chase to the robber, calling out ‘‘Stop thief!’’ and gathering an ever-larger crowd as they pursue him through the town, eventually catching him. A male voiceover informs the viewer that in those days ‘‘any citizen witnessing a crime was bound by common law to raise what was known as a ‘hue and cry.’ All those who heard this hue and cry were obliged to join in until the authorities were alerted. A simple means of community involvement—of people banding together to make their lives and the lives of those around them safer.’’ While the narration suggests this is all quite ‘‘simple,’’ in fact what plays out is a conservative representation of community hierarchy, leadership, and action to protect the status quo: a powerful male directs the community to act in response to an attack on a vulnerable member of

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their society. But neither that leader nor the community wishes to change the social status of the victim—they are all happy for him to continue begging at their feet as they go on with their regular trading activities. The screen image freezes on the face of a townsperson in mid-cry while the sound track fades up a male voice and then his image as he talks into his citizens’ band (CB) radio while driving his car. He’s reporting to his neighborhood CB network monitor that there’s a ‘‘prowler’’ outside a house. His call results in a police cruiser arriving and the arrest of the alleged prowler. As the film’s title and opening scenes suggest, the ‘‘hue and cry’’ of a long-ago era is supposedly linked in spirit and effectiveness to the technological ‘‘hue and cry’’ made possible in the 1970s by ordinary townsfolk equipped with citizen band radios. This scenario departs from the popular image of CB radio’s mid-1970s heyday presented in such films as Smokey and the Bandit. Although film, television, and mass-market CB radio ephemera represented CB as antiauthoritarian, in fact its use frequently allied it with forces of law and order, certainly with a mostly white, male network of ‘‘good buddies’’ eager to effect control over their individual and community lives. In Los Angeles in particular, the local racial-political context during the years of the CB radio fad—roughly 1975–78—created an ideal environment for such racialized uses of CB radio. I want to suggest that working- and lower-middle-class white men in Los Angeles in the 1970s used CB radio to create an audible sense of order. Faced with newspaper articles suggesting high levels of crime committed by black men against white people on L.A. freeways, and feeling a keen sense of isolation and cultural or socioeconomic vulnerability in their daily lives, they derived reassurance from hearing other apparently ‘‘white’’ voices of fellow citizens within the paradoxically vulnerable and impregnable environment of the private car on the public roadway. The use of CB radio, a newly mass-produced mobile communications device, in 1970s Los Angeles among predominantly white drivers to assist in policing the mobility and mobile behaviors of fellow Angelenos served to reinforce the structures of mobility and immobility that kept white residents feeling secure and unimpeded. Los Angeles, more than other U.S. cities in the late twentieth century, was defined by the idea and the practices of mobility—most obviously automobility, but also social mobility and the mobilities of migration and immigration that continually redefined its demographics and local geographies. However, the historic immobility of the city’s black population—its stasis in South Central and the proximate neighborhoods of Watts and Compton—puts the lie to Los Angeles as mobility-city. Cultural historians and cultural theorists have repeatedly linked motion, mobility, and vision as the triumvirate of modernity. The inter-

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related motions and emotions of driving, specifically freeway driving, most famously represented by Joan Didion’s distraught character Maria in the 1970 novel of Los Angeles Play It as It Lays, are based in the relation between car and driver—or, as sociologist Tim Dant has described it, the ‘‘driver-car,’’ a human-machine assemblage formed during driving. Ideally, the car-and-driver enters into its own symbiosis while traversing the Mobility City (Los Angeles), within an ‘‘ecology’’ described as ‘‘autopia’’ by Reyner Banham in his famous panegyric to Los Angeles. However, such ‘‘autopian’’ experiences are always shaped by race, by class, and by gender, factors ignored by Banham in his sensuous response to the motorscape of Los Angeles—though he wrote the initial essays in 1968, only three years after black residents of Watts mobilized violently in the streets to protest their continued social, economic, and geographic immobility.1 I would like to suggest that the late twentieth-century, mostly white, mobility of freeway driving, defined by the Los Angeles freeways and defined by an inattentive and unfocused seeing, rendered the audible significant in new ways, as each driver entered into his desired ‘‘autopic’’ state of self-invention and fantasy. CB radio allowed white drivers to construct and utter aloud their mobile narratives as well as to listen to and comment on those of their fellow CB-connected drivers. This mobile communication, with its peculiar slang and accent, its mixture of intimacy and anonymity, offered reassurance by creating an audible community of whiteness. If the motorized journey links us to modernity via the cinematic way of seeing, then the audibility of mobile communications during such journeys completed the connection: CB provided the soundtrack to the silent black-and-white mov(i)es of the L.A. freeways.2 Although the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first offered citizens’ band radio to the American public in 1948, CB was not truly feasible for mass use until a decade later when the Federal Communications Commission set aside twenty-three channels for the service. The FCC’s idea was to use low-bandwidth frequencies to offer a way for motorists, isolated farmers, or boaters to contact each other or emergency personnel in times of need. It was designed for brief, urgent communication, not for personal conversations of the sort conducted via telephone or in person.3 Long-distance truck drivers accounted for about a third of CB users before the CB radio craze of the mid-1970s. CB also proved useful for those whose work or leisure activities could be made safer or more efficient by mobile communication with a home base or with others involved in similar activities. Such users included farmers, sport fishermen, and in-shore boaters.4 CB radios achieved sudden mass popularity in the mid-1970s as a result of the publicity surrounding the December 1973–January 1974

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independent truckers’ strike that followed on the heels of the 1973–74 OPEC oil embargo. Newspapers, television, and radio reported how truckers used their CB radios to contact each other and form illegal convoys, disrupting traffic and blocking highways, or to share information about police and highway patrol activity, and about gas stations with available and affordable gasoline. In 1974 Congress introduced the new national speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour (the ‘‘double nickel,’’ in CB slang) as a fuel conservation measure, adding more pressure on independent truckers and increasing motorists’ desire to use CB to avoid officials enforcing the new speed limit.5 Sales of CB radio sets grew from two million in 1974 to five million in 1975, to a peak of approximately ten million in 1976. But by 1978, CB radio sales dropped abruptly, signaling that the CB craze had definitely waned.6 Market saturation and, more important, the congestion of CB channels by large numbers of users contributed to the decline of the CB fad. During the 1970s, popular and consumer culture quickly picked up on the CB fad. An epidemic of CB-related movies; television shows, including NBC’s Movin’ On (1974–78); and novelty items became popular in the United States between 1974 and 1978. Movies like Convoy (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1978), Breaker! Breaker! (dir. Don Hulette, 1977), White Line Fever (dir. Jonathan Kaplan, 1975), and Smokey and the Bandit (dir. Hal Needham, 1978) provided a series of handsome, loveable rebels. All white, male southerners, these heroes drive eighteen-wheelers or fast cars and use their CB radios to outwit pesky sheriffs, corrupt judges, and cops. Country-western singer C. W. McCall’s hit song ‘‘Convoy’’—one of many popular songs about CB radio that received extensive airplay in the 1970s—inspired Peckinpah’s movie of the same name. First Lady Betty Ford got into CB while campaigning for her husband Gerald in 1976—with the adopted ‘‘handle’’ (or CB radio-user nickname) ‘‘First Mama.’’7 Rumor has it that Gerald Ford’s favorite television show was NBC’s Movin’ On, so perhaps Betty Ford’s dabbling in CB helped connect her not only to the latest fad among the electorate but also to her husband’s interests.8 In stark contrast to its popular image as the tool of trucker culture, working- and lower-middle-class white men driving ordinary passenger cars formed CB’s largest market. The majority of articles about, and advertisements for, CB radio appeared in such publications as Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, Hot Rod, and Car and Driver, which at the time assumed a male readership. By 1977 drivers of passenger vehicles outnumbered truckers as CB users by about five to one.9 CB’s appeal to this market’s population of tinkerers, geeks, and auto enthusiasts lay partly in the technology’s association with the hypermasculine, renegade image of the long-distance truck driver—certainly

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the main users of CB radio before its wider marketing in the mid-1970s. One might speculate that participating in a techno-culture supposedly rooted in the butch world of truckers appealed to white working-class and lower-middle-class men in the mid-1970s looking for ways to assert themselves in an America shaped by a decade or more of civil rights, feminism, gay rights, black power, and defeat in Vietnam. To cap it off, the nation’s leading white male—President Richard Nixon—had just been caught in his own shameful web of political scandal. The backlash against the rights- and cultural identity-based politics of the 1960s and early 1970s coalesced particularly among straight, white men who saw the dominance of their race, gender, and sexuality challenged by formerly marginalized and disempowered women, blacks, and gays. CB’s association with manly truck drivers no doubt contributed to its appeal to straight white men but, as I will show, their enthusiasm for this technology drew on deeper political and cultural trends of the mid-1970s. Recent research has shown how Southern California, especially the Los Angeles region, proved vital to the growth of ‘‘sunbelt’’ conservatism and its role in the making of the New Right during the 1970s. Historians Lisa McGirr and Becky Nicolaides both argue convincingly for the region’s significance for late twentieth-century conservatism. McGirr’s study of Orange County examines the role of the area’s new suburban communities in moving the Republican Party’s focus away from the specter of communism and toward questions of morality, ‘‘law and order,’’ and local autonomy. Nicolaides’s research on the working-class suburbs of Los Angeles, especially South Gate, which abuts Watts, concludes in 1965, showing how questions of race, neighborhood, and home ownership shaped the conservatism that then marked those predominantly white communities during the late 1960s and 1970s and conclusively separated them from their black neighbors.10 Historian Matthew Lassiter argues for a spatial and class-based rather than a primarily racial explanation for the rise of the ‘‘sunbelt South’’ in American politics. Eschewing previous studies that have made a southern exceptionalism argument for the political realignments of the 1960s and 1970s, Lassiter argues that the class-based interests of America’s northern as well as southern suburban homeowners drove U.S. politics, and the move to the right, during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Crucially, federal disavowal of civil rights-based measures to support school and residential desegregation came as a result of mostly white suburban voters in both north and south virulently asserting their will to protect and defend (as they saw it) their (homogeneous) communities. This shared, defensive suburban homeowner politics joined North and South in an effectively racist (but officially ‘‘color-blind’’) Republican coalition in the 1970s.11 But the sunbelt states and their major cities and

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suburbs, stretching from Florida to Southern California, provided the majority of the electoral demographic that began as the ‘‘Silent Majority’’ and evolved into the New Right under Nixon and Reagan. The ascendant economy and cultural capital of the South rapidly permeated American popular culture in the 1970s. With the election of Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, to the presidency in 1976, the South had a hold on national power—though the many southerners who had moved to the political right by that date (their votes specifically courted by Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon) may not have shared much common ideological ground with Carter. But Carter’s homely, if inaccurate, image as the peanut-farmer president with the winning smile, and his seeming trustworthiness in the aftermath of Nixon and Watergate, fit with a new national willingness to embrace things southern. Country music, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats— southern and southwestern cultural icons previously shunned or mocked by urban northeasterners—became high fashion in New York, Boston, and Chicago in the mid- to late-1970s. We should add CB radio, connected at least in popular culture to southern culture and southern masculinity, to this list of imports from below the Mason-Dixon line.12 As Lisa McGirr has shown, the New Right put down some of its strongest roots during the late 1960s in the sunbelt communities of Southern California. Orange County, part of the freeway-connected commuter region with its growing high-tech workforce, some of whom had recently migrated from southern states, proved particularly receptive to the emerging New Right ideology. A focus on ‘‘law and order’’ and the citizen-based defense of middle-class, white communities and their property values lay at the heart of New Right Republicanism. The Los Angeles area formed a fertile ground for the growth of New Right politics because of the growing prosperity of the largely white suburban communities benefiting from the area’s success in new high-tech industries and the presence of a large, increasingly frustrated minority population against whom these white suburbanites felt a need to defend themselves. We should understand the use and popularity of CB radio in the area as part of the armory of white middle-class self-defense community politics that underpinned the rise of the New Right.13 The Los Angeles area formed an especially large market for CB radio during the 1970s. The Los Angeles Times reported in May 1976 that the FCC acknowledged Los Angeles as the CB radio capital of the United States, with approximately one million licensed CB users. Starting in 1964 the FCC required all owners of CB radio equipment to apply for and obtain a license, and to have read a copy of the relevant FCC regulations pertaining to that class of radio equipment, before using their CB radios. U.S. citizens over the age of eighteen could obtain a CB license

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from stores selling CB equipment or from one of the FCC’s field offices. The license application required neither special knowledge nor any test of ability, asking only for the applicant’s name, date of birth, address, citizenship status, and the number of CB units the applicant planned to have in use. Some popular CB radio handbooks included advice on how to fill out the license forms and reiterated the importance of obtaining the license for legal CB radio use. The FCC gradually modified CB licensing rules during the 1970s, reducing the cost of a CB license from $20 per year to $4 per year and allowing CB owners to start using their equipment while they awaited approval of their license applications. In 1978 the FCC abandoned the CB licensing requirement altogether— most likely because of enforcement problems and, during the height of the consumer craze for CB in the mid-1970s, the swamping of the FCC’s licensing office in Gettysburg (reportedly 200,000 applications a month in mid-1975). Although the FCC and various published popular guides to CB radio use made clear the legal requirement of a license (until 1978), comments in the popular guides and in newspaper and periodical articles suggested that CB-ers commonly flouted FCC regulations.14 Assuming that some percentage (perhaps as high as 50 or even 80 percent) of CB users never bothered to obtain the FCC license legally required for operating a CB radio, the actual number of CB users in Los Angeles in 1976 probably far exceeded the FCC’s figure of one million.15 CB radio’s popularity during the 1970s in Los Angeles and Southern California is not surprising. More than most areas of the United States at the time, Los Angeles was a city of roads and road users, a poly-nucleated city of close to three million people, commuting each day in all directions. By the mid-1970s, the freeway system was almost as fully developed as it is today, the largest, most complex freeway system in the country. The population of the greater Los Angeles area was spread out across about four hundred square miles. With virtually no workable public transit system following the demise during the 1940s of the once extensive and well-used streetcars, most area residents had to rely on automobiles for transportation. The completion of the freeway system in Los Angeles coincided with the rapid growth of the city and region after World War II. Although the area’s first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, was completed in 1940, most freeway construction did not get fully under way until the 1950s, following the passage of California’s Collier Burns Highway Act of 1947. Some major freeways remained unfinished until the late 1960s. For example, the construction of the Santa Monica freeway took place between 1961 and 1966, and the completion of the San Diego freeway did not occur until 1969. Lauded by business interests and most state and local politicians as the latest evidence of ‘‘progress,’’ for many

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poorer and minority Angelenos the advent of the freeway age meant the bulldozing or division of their neighborhoods, leading to increased spatial isolation from the suburbanized, privatized Los Angeles of the later twentieth century.16 The years of freeway construction, especially its latter stages, also coincided with the emergence of a new phase of racial politics in Los Angeles. The sons and daughters of Los Angeles’s World War II–era black migrants grew increasingly frustrated, as did younger African Americans elsewhere in the United States during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, with their parents’ politics of integration. From the early twentieth century, when W. E. B. Du Bois had first written glowingly about Los Angeles as a place of settlement and opportunity for African Americans, through World War II, when the area offered decent jobs for African Americans, black expectations of greater success in Los Angeles than in many other parts of the United States had run high.17 But by the mid-1960s, those good jobs had grown fewer in number and those hopes for a good life in the area seemed unfounded for black Americans. As Josh Sides argues in his study of black Los Angeles, just as civil rights leaders had begun to make headway in securing unionized, well-paid blue-collar work for black men, those jobs rapidly disappeared. Manufacturing and industrial plants moved further away from black neighborhoods like South Central to take advantage of cheaper real estate in more middle-class, more ‘‘white,’’ locations in the suburbs. Other jobs moved overseas or disappeared entirely as American businesses faltered in competition with a larger world of industrial production in the postwar period.18 In a city and region defined by ‘‘automobility,’’ connecting police eyes and ears to a population seemingly always in motion posed special challenges. In 1965, the inadequacy of police telecommunications became apparent to officers and to frightened citizens on the first night of the Watts riot when the police dispatcher tried in vain to keep pace with calls for police assistance.19 Beginning in 1974, police departments in the Los Angeles area began developing plans for a technically superior and more coordinated police radio network. The efforts to improve police radio and other emergency communications resulted in part from the telecommunication chaos of the Watts riot. A 1969 study examining the Watts riot revealed that ‘‘different police agencies found that they could not easily communicate with one another.’’20 Clearly, improved mobile radio communications would be a key technology for the police in the decade following Watts. Police, highway patrol officers, and white citizens experimented with various forms of radio communications in post-Watts Los Angeles for surveillance of the city’s main arteries of population movement and circulation—the freeways. In the early

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1970s, the L.A. police force still had an inadequate radio network. The system allowed officers to call from their police cars into their division’s dispatcher to relay information or requests for assistance. Likewise, the dispatcher could contact the police radio cars. But since all communication, emergency and non-emergency, went through the same channel and the same dispatcher, those involved found it difficult to prioritize urgent messages. In addition, the lack of mobile communication for police officers outside of their cars also slowed down the communication between the division and the cop on the beat. In the 1970s the L.A. Police Department still used police street telephones for foot patrol officers to communicate with their division or local department. A federal government push to set up an emergency telephone scheme—what became the 911 system—required all areas of the United States to come up with a plan by 1 January 1975 for how they would create their part of the new communications procedure. The 911 emergency number became active across much of the United States by the early 1980s.21 During the mid-1970s, Los Angeles area residents heard a new sound related to crime control and police communication: regular police helicopter patrols. Initially, some residents experienced more rather than less fear when they heard and saw a police helicopter in their neighborhood. According to the Los Angeles Times, one woman in a North Hollywood neighborhood fled back into her house, fearing ‘‘a criminal was roaming nearby,’’ when she heard a police helicopter overhead and then saw its spotlight illuminating a nearby street corner. As she recalled hearing other helicopter patrols recently, she explained, her next thought ‘‘was that crime seemed to be really getting out of hand in the neighborhood.’’ The article commented on the ‘‘added urban anxiety’’ caused by the helicopter patrols but stated that, despite this, a police survey had found ‘‘most people welcome the helicopter. . . . They know crime is getting out of hand in some neighborhoods and they are glad to see concrete evidence of crime repression.’’ While such obvious visual surveillance may have comforted some Angelenos fearful about crime in the 1970s, it did not solve the problem of feeling alone and unable to call for help when driving the freeways.22 In the city’s larger political context, the quotidian task of freeway driving easily lent itself to racial paranoia. Many black men adversely affected by job loss and increasing hopelessness in neighborhoods such as Watts and South Central, and portrayed in the popular media as most likely to get involved in criminal activities, could not afford to own a car, yet nonetheless the specter of the mobile black male criminal spreading misery and mayhem from his car appeared repeatedly in the press during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Popular news media combined this old American icon of white male fear with the new 1970s icon of the politi-

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cized hijacker or kidnapper. Articles in the Los Angeles Times reported stories of black men hijacking commuter buses or private vehicles, or pulling over to assist young white female drivers only to then kidnap and assault them. In early August 1974, three armed black men ‘‘terrorized and robbed’’ the passengers and driver of a Greyhound bus on the Ventura freeway that was bound for San Francisco from Los Angeles. One of the passengers, a tourist from Sweden, reported to the press that ‘‘one of the highwaymen kept screaming, ‘I hate you, I hate you, you white sonsabitches. Give me your money.’ ’’ The robbers had boarded the bus in the downtown L.A. Greyhound station—apparently without anyone seeing they had two handguns and a sawed-off shotgun with them. When the men had finished robbing the passengers, the bus had reached Camarillo, about an hour out of Los Angeles. At that point the robbers told the driver to pull the bus over, at which point they got off the bus and ran to a waiting car that drove back in the direction of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times article reported that police said a similar holdup involving three gunmen had happened a few months earlier, in April, on a Greyhound bus traveling from Los Angeles to San Diego. In early March 1976, the Times reported yet another three-man holdup, this time on the Hollywood ‘‘Freeway Flyer’’ commuter bus. Again, all three armed robbers were described by witnesses as black. In all of these bus holdups, the drivers had no means of getting help or sending out any distress call until they could run to find a freeway telephone or find police assistance after the gunmen had left.23 The fear-mongering about dangerous black men on the L.A. freeways fit with a larger national concern about keeping the generally whiter suburbs safe from the generally poorer, more black, inner cities. By the 1970s, freeways, beltways, and highways connected the outer- and innercity areas of large U.S. metropolitan areas. An August 1976 New York Times article referred to a recent FBI report showing a 10 percent increase from the previous year in serious crimes in suburbs nationwide. Apparently, suburbanites believed that ‘‘inner-city minority resident[s] who journey out of the city to find more affluent victims’’ had caused the problems. Statements from police officers around the country supported the suburbanites’ fears, suggesting that roadways connecting downtowns to suburbs might become criminal conduits. The article quoted Daryl F. Gates, then an assistant police chief in Los Angeles, as saying ‘‘ ‘anyone can jump in a car, get on the freeway, rob a house and be back in the inner city in an hour.’’’24 In the film CB Radio: A New Hue and Cry, a Los Angeles police officer, standing next to a freeway and speaking directly into the camera, states that although the freeways were ‘‘designed for safety and efficiency . . . when emergencies do occur, [this] can be a lonely and isolated place.’’ Therefore, he suggested, free-

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ways were ‘‘just a natural place’’ for drivers to use their CB radios. In Los Angeles, a city defined for white suburbanites by daily use of the freeways, and under these historic circumstances of urban-suburban anxiety, the rapid deployment of CB radio in passenger cars suggests its use as a technology of white rescue. The potential victims of freeway crime were, as implied in the newspaper stories referred to above, white. Drivers’ inability to call for help—to set up a ‘‘hue and cry’’—created particular fears on the freeways. With their fellow citizens sealed off behind their own car windows, their eyes staring at the road ahead, and their ears perhaps ‘‘tuned’’ to a music radio station, motorists in distress had little means of attracting reliable help on the freeway. To many white freeway drivers, installing CB radios in passenger vehicles may have seemed the best protection (Fig. 7.1).25 Given Angelenos’ dependence on roadways, newspaper stories about crime and violence on the freeways exacerbated the local version of a broad-based urban anxiety at play in the postwar American city. The race riots in U.S. cities during the 1960s firmly connected race, the city, crime, and violence in the minds of most Americans. During the same decade, larger postwar changes such as economic restructuring, urban renewal, and the growth of suburbs lent credence to the status of American cities as zones of crime and fear. By the late 1970s many white Americans had a heightened fear of crime against both person and property. In Los Angeles, some fear connecting the freeways with violent crime seemed justified based on the reporting of violent, unsolved murders in the 1970s. Front-page articles in the Los Angeles Times in 1977 reported stories about new victims from what police viewed as the work of two serial killers, thought to have begun in 1975. In both series of killings, police found the victims’ bodies near major roads and freeways.26 The connection between the freeway—upon which a large population relied so heavily—and violent crime made that transportation system into a zone of fear and danger. By the 1970s, Los Angeles’s system of automobile circulation—unmatched in the United States—had started to earn a reputation as a zone of lawlessness, danger, and possibly a racial battleground. The larger context of U.S. urban concerns during the 1970s provides a framework for interpreting the use of CB radio to combat white urban fear. Motivated by events like the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York, in 1964, in which citizen/neighbor inaction contributed to the crime, communities began to form groups—loosely allied with local police forces—to take steps to provide citizen-to-citizen security in urban neighborhoods. The efforts began in the 1960s and grew in strength and numbers through the 1970s and 1980s, exemplified in the Neighborhood Watch system. Through Neighborhood Watch programs,

Fig. 7.1: This advertisement for Cobra Electronics CB equipment, printed in the December 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, spoke through both word and image to drivers’ fears of vulnerability in the 1970s when the lack of emergency telephones on most roadways, and growing concerns about the strangers with whom one shared the roads, created an ideal marketing environment for the mobile communications offered by CB. As the Cobra advertisement suggested, installing CB into one’s passenger vehicle gave the promise of immediate and trustworthy help for a driver needing to ‘‘get help on a lonely road.’’ Reproduced by kind permission of Cobra Electronics. Photograph of advertisement by Abigail Godfrey.

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citizens attempted to address their feelings of fear and insecurity in urban neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs’s argument for the role played by ‘‘eyes on the street’’ in keeping small urban neighborhoods safe for their inhabitants became a popular rallying cry not only for those trying, like Jacobs, to prevent the redevelopment of intimate older urban neighborhoods, but also for those frustrated with the lack of effective policing of local streets to prevent casual street crime such as purse-snatching and mugging. The notion of designing residential buildings and neighborhoods as ‘‘defensible space’’ also contributed to this discussion about ways to combat urban crime and feelings of fear and insecurity. A 1987 article looking back at earlier studies of Neighborhood Watch programs found that such efforts had done little to solve fear and urban crime issues. Furthermore, residents of relatively low-crime, middle-class, white neighborhoods most frequently formed Neighborhood Watch groups. In some instances, the community meetings and door-to-door visits by Watch proponents actually increased levels of fear and anxiety about crime and personal safety.27 As citizens took steps to defend and secure their homes and neighborhoods, the relative insecurity of their private automobiles became apparent. While cars had seemed to represent a defensible, safe, private space, the unpredictable and sometimes dangerous realm of the public urban roadways threatened that automobile safety. Essentially a mobile private environment, the car bridged the securable spaces of home and work. During the high-crime and fearful urban 1970s, the car’s (and therefore the driver’s) exposure to strangers traveling at high speeds along inadequately surveilled roadways suggested the need to seek contact and community among trustworthy strangers with whom one hoped to share the roads. The problem was how to identify them. Based on her extensive field work in large U.S. cities, urban sociologist Lyn Lofland argued in 1973 that the modern city had become ‘‘a world of strangers,’’ that its inhabitants struggled to create order because they could no longer use codes of visual appearance to distinguish between a good stranger and a bad stranger. Modern city dwellers relied, she argued, on a system of spatial ordering to replace an older pre-industrial system of visual ordering.28 In this spatial system, anxiety occurs when someone tries to function socially outside their normal territory or when they see a ‘‘stranger’’—someone unfamiliar in that space, someone ‘‘out of place.’’ According to Lofland, the modern city dweller had to possess the ability to create some kind of order out of the apparently disordered urban environment. Given the large city’s necessary production of mobility, especially via public roadways, locational ordering had limited usefulness. To create a deeper and more reliable sense of order, Lofland argued, the individual must ‘‘privatize public space’’ to limit the unset-

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tling sense of living in a ‘‘world of strangers.’’29 The creation of ‘‘home territories’’ within unpredictable urban public spaces ‘‘contribute[d] to the overall spatial order on which the modern urbanite depends.’’30 However, the necessity of moving between ‘‘home territories’’ (the individual’s actual home, neighborhood, or usual workplace) that characterized the life of the large-city resident itself created the necessity of forming what Lofland calls ‘‘mobile ‘homes.’’’31 ‘‘The traveling pack’’— a group of friends or family members making their way through and into public spaces as a group—might form such a ‘‘mobile home.’’ But, since most urbanites had to move through and inhabit public spaces as ‘‘loners,’’ they had to change the nature of their relationship to public space by ‘‘creat[ing] . . . a symbolic shield of privacy.’’32 The loner thus adopts the affect of impassivity, of emotionlessness, avoiding physical and eye contact with others; the loner remains aloof.33 Accepting Lofland’s evidence and analysis, one can see that the appeal of using CB radio on the public roadways of a large, sprawling city such as Los Angeles lay in the ability to use that technology to create community, ‘‘home territory,’’ and order, and to negate the affect of affectlessness (or aloofness) adopted by urban dwellers in the 1970s in response to the prevailing fear of, and insecurity among, strangers. Used as a tool to create community and order and to combat fear, CB radio also broke open the private, commodified, passive listening space of the car. CB radio in cars signified a permeation of the barrier between public and private—a barrier that had defined driving, as well as broadcasting and commercial radio practices. ‘‘The public’’ normally existed outside one’s car—the other people enclosed in their own private cars, on the public roadway, often feared simply because they were ‘‘strangers.’’ The public-while-private environment of CB radio offered a way to connect with strangers—a practice that, for some citizens in the 1970s, may have seemed especially fraught with danger. As one CB-using commuter put it, in a New York Times article during the fall of 1977, ‘‘People in their cars feel more secure and less threatened about reaching out to one another. Each individual CB-er on the road is, collectively, a member of a fraternity. . . . Outside of the protective isolation of my car, I’m not too likely to speak to a stranger in an elevator or on the street.’’34 One joined a passive, commodified public by tuning into commercial radio and music production via AM-FM car radio. With CB installed in the car, the driver invited into that private space a largely noncommodified, active public of fellow ‘‘citizens’’—with CB, ‘‘public’’ became ‘‘community.’’ Of course, that ‘‘community’’ remained an imagined one until put to the test by the needs of one of its members. But, as one study found, CB users regarded other CB-ers, even those entirely unknown to them, as more ‘‘friendly’’ than other strangers. Perhaps driven by a par-

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ticularly strong desire for ‘‘community,’’ the Times article suggested, CB users assumed that even in the absence of any evidence to support the claim, fellow CB-ers were, in fact, their ‘‘good buddies.’’35 Of course, CB radio did not entirely remove fear and suspicion of strangers. A CB user had no guarantee that the person behind the voice matched his apparent audible identity.36 The ‘‘good buddies’’ of a driver’s audible community might be the ‘‘commuter criminals’’ he so feared. As one 1977 academic study suggested, ‘‘The distressed motorist one stops to aid, or the motorist who comes to aid the one in distress may be a mugger or rapist.’’37 The construction of, and reliance on, such audible community required a leap of faith grounded in a fear deeper than the fear of being misled. Crucial to any understanding of the cultural work of CB radio is, then, a sense of why and how CB radio users constructed a sense of ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ on the road different from that adhered to by non-CBusing Americans during the 1970s. In Los Angeles, the nation’s CB radio capital, for the city’s mostly white CB radio users on the freeways, ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ connoted ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘white.’’ The public comprised the strangers one feared or mistrusted. In that context, African Americans comprised the ‘‘public’’ most feared by whites. Therefore, CB users transformed ‘‘public’’ from its connotation of ‘‘fear–stranger– black’’ into the more positive ‘‘safety–friend–white.’’ To reimagine ‘‘the public’’ as friendly and safe required reimagining that public, those strangers, as white. It seems clear that part of what was at stake for CB users, and what they therefore constructed, consisted of a transformation of ‘‘public/black’’ into ‘‘community/white.’’ The actual sound of CB radio contributed, in part, to this transformation and reimagination. CB’s actual sound became, in a sense, its message and contributed to the formation of white, male community on the freeways. The sound quality of CB radio transmissions and the sonic performance of CB users defined CB radio in the 1970s. That sound differed markedly from the sound of broadcast radio, particularly as commercial stations moved from AM to FM, acquiring a clearer broadcast signal. CB radio sound involved varying amounts of static (depending on proximity to electromagnetic interference—especially in urban areas). Also, because the technology did not allow users to talk and listen at the same time, it fostered a staccato speaking style, making conversation halting as each party logged on and off the channel. But the poor sound quality and onoff style that mitigated against smooth conversation constituted part of CB’s appeal. These features reinforced the amateurish and communitybased aspects of CB radio that added to its ‘‘outside the mainstream,’’ noncommercial, maverick identity.38 In addition, as part of CB radio’s paradoxical character, that sound-

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and-style combination connected the CB user to an imagined world of law enforcement inspired by years of radio and television police dramas featuring police officers tersely communicating crucial information over crackly police radios. Beginning in 1949 with the radio version of Dragnet, the police show set in Los Angeles and made with the cooperation and involvement of the LAPD, the dramatized sound of crime prevention and the maintenance of law and order had become quite familiar to Americans. Dragnet moved to television in 1951 and established the genre on that new medium. Highway Patrol, a syndicated television show (1955–59), shot on location in southern California with the assistance of the California Highway Patrol, picked up on the trend. Another Los Angeles–based police drama, specifically centered on police radio cars, Adam-12, aired on NBC from 1968 to 1975. By the mid-1970s, a number of television shows reinforced the sound of radio as an anti-crime technology. Jack Webb, involved as an actor, writer, director, and producer with both Dragnet and Adam-12, produced Emergency (NBC, 1972–77), a show following the daily lives of Los Angeles fire department paramedics. Other L.A.-based police and law enforcement dramas from the 1970s included Police Story (NBC, 1973–78; written by then–LAPD Detective Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh), CHiPs (NBC, 1977–82; a show about the California Highway Patrol), and Police Woman, starring Angie Dickinson (NBC, 1974–78). These television shows, so numerous in an era of fear about crime and the city, strongly associated mobile radio communication with the effective suppression of crime. CB sound’s most salient feature, its distinctive slang, developed partly out of necessity, given the fractured nature of most exchanges and the requirement to be brief. The lingo came from two sources: the ‘‘ten’’ codes—such as ‘‘10–4’’ meaning ‘‘OK’’ and ‘‘10–20’’ meaning ‘‘location’’—used for decades by police forces around the United States, and the slang used by truckers to disguise the contents of their CB conversations from all but fellow truckers. One academic author linked the use of CB slang in the creation of a CB community to traditions of ethnic or racial self-defense: ‘‘In this new group . . . the individual CB-er finds selffulfillment, like a member of an ethnic minority who in his language reserves his pride. . . . The metaphors of CB language arise from the same aspirations that induce metaphors in racial argot—self-defense, hostility, and desire for identity and solidarity.’’39 CB radio’s ‘‘insiders’ ’’ language formed one important aspect of its gendered and racialized exclusive community.40 The popular press frequently gave brief examples of a CB radio exchange to demonstrate the importance of learning the slang if you wished to join the CB craze. For example, a May 1976 article in Time magazine began with a paragraph written in CB slang. It read, in part:

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‘‘This cotton-picker name of Red Vine from the Dirty Side was rolling a pregnant skate through Watergate town the other day when he passed the home twenty of lady breaker First Mama.’’ The author then offered this translation: ‘‘a non-trucker from New York City, whose CB nickname is Red Vine, was driving his Volkswagen through Washington when he passed the White House, home of fellow CB-owner Betty Ford, whose radionym is First Mama.’’41 Learning CB radio slang was undoubtedly part of the fun of having a CB ‘‘rig,’’ but it also committed one to participating in a language community with rather conservative politics. Participating in CB meant, for example, tacitly accepting the overt misogyny of the slang. CB user guides and slang dictionaries readily educated the neophyte CB user in sexist ‘‘lingo.’’ These reference books gave the meanings of commonly used slang words and phrases such as ‘‘beaver’’ (‘‘Gal, other half, female CBer’’), ‘‘Check the seatcovers’’ (‘‘Watch out for a car with a pretty female driver or passenger’’), ‘‘GoGo Girls’’ (‘‘Loads of [actual] pigs’’), ‘‘Hag feast’’ (‘‘Group of female CB-ers on the channel’’), and ‘‘Warden’’ (‘‘The wife, The FCC’’). The use of sexist language reinforced the masculine aspect of CB radio while also suggesting the extent to which American men participating in CB culture felt it necessary to draw boundaries separating them from, and defending them against, women. The class of men most involved in CB during the 1970s constituted the same demographic most threatened by the rise of second-wave feminism and the successes of the women’s movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Gains for women, enforced with varying degrees of vigor and success, included securing government support for equal pay and equal employment opportunities, and Title IX’s funding for women’s sports. In addition, second-wave feminism managed to make some inroads challenging everyday uses of sexist language and sexual harassment, empowering some American women to challenge the patriarchies of their daily lives. These various acts of government support for women’s progress nipped at the heels of blue-collar and lower-middle-class men who occupied a socioeconomic sector with the fewest possibilities for job security and economic mobility. Losing power—in the job sector or in daily interactions—to women posed as much of a challenge as did encroachments in housing, schools, and jobs by black men and their families. Both sources of CB’s slang—the police and long-distance truck drivers—came from communities placing a high value on (audible) privacy and the exclusion of ‘‘outside’’ listeners. The coded language of CB radio provided those who understood it with the key to enter and participate in what was, despite CB culture’s populist rhetoric, an exclusive, selective community. One mass-market CB radio slang dictionary contained a foreword describing CB as a ‘‘communication medium that is

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tax-free, toll-free, and almost legislation-free.’’ CB, the foreword claimed, was ‘‘a growing weapon against potential elements of tyranny,’’ and the language was distinctly American—‘‘Can you imagine a language like this springing up in Russia . . . or China . . . or Kuwait?’’42 The claims to fight ‘‘tyranny’’ and promote freedom from ‘‘governmental restraint’’ reinforced the image of CB users as right-wing rebels, as nonconformists. In the 1970s, the quasi-libertarian rhetoric of CB-ers’ rebellion allied them with Richard Nixon’s not-so-silent majority of the white backlash and the burgeoning New Right.43 Like the sound and the slang, CB radio users’ vocal performance served to create an exclusive community on the roadway. Contemporary newspaper and magazine writers, as well as sociologists and other academics, remarked on CB users’ southern accents and southern-sounding idioms. The press sometimes described the CB accent as ‘‘Arkahoma,’’ referring to its invented rather than regionally accurate character.44 Popular phrases associated with southern speech that formed part of the CB lexicon included exclamations such as ‘‘mercy sakes,’’ ‘‘cottonpicking,’’ as well as the ever-present ‘‘good buddy.’’ Given that the majority of Los Angeles’s post–World War II African American migrants hailed from the urban South (the largest numbers coming from Texas and second-largest numbers from Louisiana),45 the dominant adoption of—however vaguely construed—a style of speech and accent reminiscent of the white South may have served to exclude or at least to discourage African Americans from participation in the new virtual community of CB radio.46 Black participation seems to have varied regionally and, more significantly for this discussion, may well have sounded quite different from mainstream ‘‘white’’ CB. An article in Ebony magazine in 1976 suggested that an organized black CB radio presence existed in Cincinnati, Evanston, Chicago, and Atlanta—all of which had black CB radio clubs. The author makes a passing reference to white Americans’ use of CB to mobilize against blacks for what the article called ‘‘vigilante purposes’’ in Boston, Louisville, and Chicago during conflicts around fair housing and busing, but the article emphasized the potential to create black community using CB radio.47 The adoption of a distinct non-white CB radio language certainly contributed to this potential: ‘‘Most blacks use a different kind of lingo’’ on CB radio, the author stated, on a CB channel available locally in all parts of the nation called ‘‘the superbowl.’’ The article quoted a black CB radio user from St. Louis as saying, ‘‘If you can’t talk the soul bro’ talk, then you don’t need to be on the superbowl.’’48 Initial research suggests that black CB slang had a connection to the cadences and vocabulary of ‘‘jive’’—a slang, used mostly by African Americans, originating partly in jazz music and jazz culture of

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the 1920s, and familiar in an updated form during the 1970s to most blacks living in the major urban centers of the United States. Today’s superbowl slang includes elements of jive, a few CB terms held in common with mainstream ‘‘white’’ CB, as well as expressions rooted in current African-American culture. African American CB users active on ‘‘the superbowl’’ create (and preserve) a form of audible community on and off the air by making recordings of themselves talking on CB and then either posting these recordings to Internet-based superbowl community message boards or transmitting them over the air. These signature recordings are known in superbowl slang as ‘‘Watergates,’’ and serve within the community as a reliable record of an exchange between participants on ‘‘the bowl.’’ The name ‘‘Watergate’’ is probably a link to the superbowl’s emergence in the mid-1970s soon after the Watergate scandal broke, bringing about the demise of President Richard Nixon, whose secret White House tape recordings confirmed his guilt.49 Both Nixon’s audio surveillance and CB radio moved the audible to the sensory foreground of U.S. politics during the 1970s. Just as the Neighborhood Watch initiatives, developed in response to Jane Jacobs’s call for ‘‘eyes on the street,’’ addressed one set of urban fears, so CB radio put ‘‘ears on the freeway’’ to help motorists create an audible community of ‘‘good buddies’’ with whom they felt both safe and empowered, in an environment of limited visual security. CB Radio: A New Hue and Cry ends with an upbeat and would-be ‘‘hip’’ sequence: to the lilting strains of ‘‘tune in, turn on and help each other along,’’ the chorus of a song written and sung by the film’s co-producer Kirby Timmons, a series of CB-equipped drivers on L.A. freeways—including the film’s one African American character—happily cruise the roadways, relaying useful information to their fellow CB-connected drivers. The song’s lyric echoes Timothy Leary’s 1966 advice to Americans to ‘‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’’ But Timmons’s lyric modifies Leary’s call for drug-induced narcissism, instead championing a form of conservative 1970s citizen self-help that predicated the formation of community on the policing of public space in the presence of racial difference.50 By the end of the 1970s, the CB radio craze had generally waned, and the medium’s devotees lent their voices and their ears to another newly rising radio culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, the live, participatory aspect of CB, as well as its self-created community of ‘‘good buddies,’’ nurtured in Southern California’s rising New Right political culture, provided the technoculture and the audience demographic for the rapid rise of conservative talk radio. The political environment of the mid-1970s that had fostered the nascent community of the mostly male, white working- and lower-middle-class users of CB radio, soon also produced the relationship between listeners and talk radio hosts like Rush

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Limbaugh, Don Imus, and Larry King. That relationship reached maturity when cell phones became widely available during the early 1990s. Calling in to a conservative political talk radio show while driving offered an even more heady ‘‘good buddy’’ experience than broadcasting over the limited range of CB radio. The mostly male, white political culture of CB, restricted to fellow enthusiasts within a range of only ten miles at best, saw its politics of conservative discontent go national as talk radio moved from city-based or regional AM stations to FM and ultimately to satellite stations.51 The growth of conservative talk radio represented one measure of the national rise of the second generation of the New Right, from Reagan to Bush. That generation took up the ‘‘hue and cry’’ of the CB-ers, a call for order shaped so decisively in the political and racial environment of Los Angeles freeways in the 1970s, letting it resonate across a nation once again in search of an audible sense of order through America’s airwaves.

Part IV Sound Commerce

Chapter 8

‘‘The People’s Orchestra’’ Jukeboxes as the Measure of Popular Musical Taste in the 1930s and 1940s Chris Rasmussen

At the depth of the Great Depression, the recording and phonograph industries in the United States were virtually moribund, victims of both the economic downturn and the phenomenal success of radio, which afforded listeners less expensive musical entertainment and superior sound quality. In 1927 some 104 million recordings and one million phonographs were manufactured; by 1932 annual production had plummeted to six million discs and forty thousand players.1 The recording industry was revived in the late 1930s, as jukeboxes became a fixture in taverns and restaurants across the country. By the decade’s end, some 400,000 coin-operated phonographs had been manufactured, and nearly half of the 75 million records pressed annually were purchased by jukebox operators, who owned, serviced, and stocked these machines. By the time the United States entered World War II, the jukebox ranked alongside baseball and hot dogs as an icon of American popular culture.2 Coin-operated machines became a fixture of American life during the 1920s and 1930s, as vending machines, pinball games, and jukeboxes became ubiquitous in taverns, restaurants, hotels, and other establishments. Jukebox operators, who proudly referred to themselves as ‘‘coin men,’’ excitedly predicted that these machines would streamline the selling of goods and entertainment, and speed the flow of goods from manufacturer to consumer. Mechanization would transform the selling of goods, just as it had revolutionized production and distribution. The coin-op industry took off remarkably during the 1920s, when automatic vending machines spread rapidly. Pinball games became a nationwide

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sensation just at the depth of the Depression in the early 1930s, and thrived amid hard times. In the second half of the 1930s, aided greatly by the repeal of Prohibition, which allowed thousands of taverns to open their doors legally, coin-operated phonographs became the third major component of the coin machine industry. By decade’s end some 400,000 automatic phonographs blared in bars and restaurants across the United States, and at least half of all records pressed landed on the turntables of these machines. In only a few years, then, the jukebox trade employed thousands of manufacturing workers and some fifteen thousand operators, who placed the machines in taverns and restaurants and changed their selection of records periodically. Jukebox operators were close to the patrons they served and earned their income nickel by nickel through a combination of entrepreneurship and hard work.3 The improbable resurgence of the recording industry and takeoff of the automatic phonograph trade during the Depression astonished many observers and even people in these industries, who cast about for some explanation as to why their enterprise, unlike so many others, had not only averted bankruptcy but actually thrived during hard times. Manufacturers and operators alike quickly adopted the view that their machines were unique not only in their ability to provide ordinary Americans with precisely the music they wanted to hear but also to register popular musical taste so that record companies would know precisely what songs and genres of music Americans favored. According to operators, jukeboxes were largely responsible for identifying a vast demand for blues and for country music, genres that recording companies had neglected. Further, they claimed, these phonographs had actually changed the way Americans listened to music and the sort of music they favored when socializing in restaurants and bars. Proponents of the coin-operated phonograph called it ‘‘the people’s orchestra,’’ and one happy to play requests. The popular musical culture of the 1930s and 1940s was neither a giddy bazaar, in which consumers were able to purchase precisely what they wanted, nor a capitalist conspiracy, directed by a nefarious cabal presiding over some vast ‘‘culture industry,’’ but a complicated negotiation between consumers and producers. Despite their populist pronouncements, jukebox operators felt themselves tugged between the goals of record companies, phonograph manufacturers, and patrons. Operators’ rhetoric suggested that the creation of American popular music was virtually dictated by the consumer, an impression that deliberately understated the role musicians, record companies, radio networks, and others played in the creation and dissemination of popular music, and one that retains considerable influence in scholarly understandings of popular culture today. A closer look at the business of popular music

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and the coin-operated machine trade in the 1930s and 1940s reveals why jukebox operators adopted their ostensibly egalitarian rhetoric and how they reoriented popular music by helping hillbilly, western, and blues musicians to reach a larger audience. Recording companies and phonograph manufacturers, which were in large part resurrected by the advent of the jukebox, maintained considerable influence over the production of popular music. Coin men became indispensable middlemen in the negotiation between producers and consumers during the 1930s and 1940s as they attempted to bridge the various interests and desires of listeners, location owners, musicians, phonograph manufacturers, record companies, and, of course, the coin-op industry.

Names Wanted The people had their own name for coin-operated automatic phonographs: ‘‘jukeboxes.’’ Phonograph manufacturers and many operators detested the word because it linked coin-operated phonographs with southern ‘‘juke joints,’’ most of which served poor black customers. As one observer put it, ‘‘The term ‘juke box’ is auditory poison to the automatic phonograph trade.’’4 They feared that adverse publicity would confine their machines to less affluent locations and induce local authorities to regulate coin machines more strictly. ‘‘The music industry will have to do a lot of public relations work to undo the damage which the all-too-frequent use of the expression causes,’’ lamented Billboard in 1940.5 Already besieged by foes of pinball games and slot machines, coin men realized that the term ‘‘jukebox’’ burdened their machines with a host of associations they preferred to avoid: southern road houses, poor whites, poorer blacks, race mixing, hillbilly music, and blues. A 1941 article in the Saturday Evening Post, ‘‘Land of the Jook,’’ began by evoking precisely the image that men in the coin business dreaded: ‘‘Along thirty miles of highway across the northwest corner of Palm Beach County, Florida, there are more than 100 jooks, three out of four of them Negro. At some of them it is a slow week without several knifings or shootings. The police nearly always are at work on a murder. In one night five persons were killed. . . . This raw country roars wide open and is tough. The term ‘jook’ was coined in the turpentine camps of Northern Florida. It means a coin-operated magazine phonograph.’’6 Coin men were keenly aware that vending machines, pinball games, and jukeboxes had almost immediately acquired a seedy image, and they feared regulation by state and local governments. Throughout the late 1930s, they strove to persuade the press and the public to refer to the machines as ‘‘automatic phonographs,’’ ‘‘coin-operated phonographs,’’ ‘‘public phonographs,’’ ‘‘music boxes,’’ or ‘‘musophones’’—virtually

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anything other than ‘‘jukeboxes.’’ In 1941, RCA even held a contest, offering a $150 prize for a suitable alternative to the term ‘‘jukebox.’’7 The catchy term was not easily dislodged, however. After several years of inveighing against the term ‘‘jukebox,’’ in the early 1940s manufacturers and operators suddenly shifted gears and made a virtue of necessity, praising the term as a suitably popular coinage for the ‘‘people’s phonograph.’’ The industry’s embrace of the term ‘‘jukebox’’ was not merely a semantic change or a bow to inevitability; it bespoke its strategy of capitalizing on the populist rhetoric that pervaded American culture beginning in the late 1930s, an era that was, as historian Warren Susman aptly put it, ‘‘the heyday of the people.’’8 In 1942 James Mangan of the Mills Novelty Company declared that the word had shed its unflattering connotation: ‘‘When the term ‘juke box’ was first introduced, manufacturers, distributors and operators frowned and feared the consequences. Time went by and the public, the common denominator of all sentiment, took the term to its heart and endeared it forever to history as a perfect reflection of a time in our history that was happy, bright and worth knowing. . . . Love and fidelity to the machines by a hundred million Americans erases all slurs and gives the old-fashioned word a newer and heartier meaning.’’9

Music Merchandising Coin-operated phonographs and other music machines had been collecting coins in arcades and nickelodeons for decades. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and scarcely a decade later entrepreneurs attached a coin slot to a record player and discovered that these devices could be profitable in arcades, saloons, and restaurants. These early music machines contained only a single record and, lacking electronic amplification, either were equipped with a stethoscope-like listening tube for a single listener or played music for a small number of patrons gathered directly in front of the machine. Player pianos and other music machines also became common sources of entertainment in saloons and arcades. The growing popularity of home phonographs during the 1910s undercut the market for these music machines. The growth of radio during the 1920s in turn posed a challenge to the phonograph industry, and the Depression drove it nearly into bankruptcy. After the invention of electronic amplification, a few coin-operated phonographs and radios were marketed in the late 1920s, but these failed to excite much interest among operators, location owners, or patrons.10 Automatic phonographs became a fixture in bars and restaurants across the United States during the second half of the 1930s and contributed greatly to increasing demand for popular recordings. Herb J. Allen,

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who had worked in both the recording industry and coin-op, claimed that record sales defied the Depression because the jukebox operator, unlike an ordinary consumer, was ‘‘a customer who must buy.’’ Because jukebox operators purchased an estimated 40 percent of the records pressed in the United States by 1940, manufacturers sold discs to operators at a steep discount. After only a few years, the automatic phonograph industry employed thousands of manufacturing workers and offered a new field of opportunity for some fifteen thousand operators and repairmen, who placed the machines in locations and changed their selection of records periodically.11 Jukeboxes, of course, were not solely responsible for reviving the recording industry. Recording companies began to capitalize on the vast market for popular songs during the 1920s, when Columbia’s Okeh label released hundreds of discs—especially blues and country tunes—at affordable prices. In 1934 Jack Kapp, formerly with the Brunswick record label, and E. R. Lewis, head of Decca Records in Britain, launched Decca Records in the United States. They sought to market danceable records by such popular artists as Bing Crosby, the Dorsey brothers, and Guy Lombardo for as little as thirty-five cents. By 1938 Decca had become the second-largest label in the United States, trailing only RCA, and pressing a majority of the records on the nation’s jukeboxes.12 Still, coin men eagerly staked a claim for their machines and for their own indispensability to the music industry. From the outset, operators used trade publications and press releases to depict phonographs as reputable in order to avert the seedy reputation that burdened slot machines and pinball games.13 Coin men initially depicted automatic phonographs as an important new component in the larger music industry, one that complemented the goals of recording companies, music publishers, and radio stations by disseminating the swing music and popular vocalists favored by the music industry.14 Operators explicitly likened jukeboxes to the radio, imagining an extensive ‘‘automatic phonograph network’’ that utilized a new technology to broadcast hit songs to the public.15 But operators soon began to make much larger claims for the automatic phonograph, touting the jukebox as a machine ideally suited to cater to diverse clienteles and crediting these phonographs with altering the types of music Americans preferred to listen to and how they listened to it. Because jukeboxes could satisfy and measure popular taste, coin men boasted that these machines had fundamentally reshaped American popular music by shifting influence away from recording companies toward consumers. For example, they insisted that automatic phonographs had identified and satisfied a demand for coun-

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try music and blues that had been greatly underestimated by recording companies and radio stations. Jukebox operators felt pulled between their desire to depict their business as a sizable, reputable concern and their insistence that they were small business owners who catered to the tastes of ordinary Americans. As Billboard proclaimed in 1940, automatic phonographs had become a ‘‘real business,’’ one that had outgrown its origins as an arcade novelty to become ‘‘a legitimate and necessary outlet to please the music demand.’’16 Operators alternately depicted their trade as a substantial, respectable enterprise and claimed that they catered to working Americans, placing their machines in taverns and other small establishments frequented by a working-class clientele. Because jukeboxes vended songs rather than candy bars, they were especially subject to this tension between aspirations to commercial respectability and appeals to populist rhetoric. Proponents and critics debated the merits of jukeboxes, which occupied a less-than-glamorous niche of the consumer market by making popular music available in thousands of taverns, restaurants, and other small businesses. Jukeboxes were alternately praised and criticized, and the songs blaring from their speakers were either celebrated as an outpouring of popular taste or castigated as a debasement of American musical culture. As a result, what sort of records were placed in and played on jukeboxes was crucial to the image of this branch of the coin machine industry.17

Picking Records: An Art or a Science? Because operators negotiated between the producers and consumers of music, they were well positioned to exert considerable influence on the market for American popular music. Initially, operators were ambivalent as to whether they should serve the interests of record companies and phonograph manufacturers or the tastes of the public. As they began to recognize that their patrons’ musical tastes did not necessarily coincide with record companies’ offerings, however, operators found it advantageous to make sweeping claims about the power of ‘‘the people’’ to determine what music was popular and to force record companies and musicians to follow their lead. In fact, neither the objectives of the music industry nor mass tastes alone governed the market for recordings. As operators sought to negotiate between producers and consumers of music, they puzzled over why some songs became hits while others flopped. In their effort to gauge popular taste and strengthen their position within the music industry, operators contended that hit songs were ultimately created not by composers, musicians, and record companies but by the preferences of millions of ordinary listeners.

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Selling music was much trickier than stocking a vending machine with candy bars. Jukebox operators, who owned, serviced, and stocked their phonographs, were confronted with the bewildering task of trying to predict which records would succeed best—or succeed at all—with their patrons. Jukeboxes were considerably more expensive than pinball games and vending machines, costing at least two hundred dollars. An average operator owned roughly fifty jukeboxes, while large operators owned hundreds, so the operator’s investment in phonographs and records was sizable. Because these early jukeboxes contained only twelve or, later, twenty-four songs, picking the right tunes was crucial to success. Gauging which records would turn a profit on these machines was a difficult task, one that immediately attracted considerable attention within the industry.18 What was the role of the jukebox operator, and how much familiarity with popular music was necessary to succeed in this business? Initially, operators conceived of themselves as ‘‘music merchants’’ whose job was simply to retail popular songs to the public.19 Unfortunately, at the outset of the ‘‘jukebox craze,’’ measures of records’ popularity were imprecise at best. Billboard, the nation’s leading entertainment magazine, added automatic phonographs to its coverage of vending and amusement machines in late 1935. Over the next decade, Billboard’s record charts became increasingly sophisticated as the magazine’s editors refined their methods for gauging which songs were popular or likely to become hits and added charts rating more genres of music. While Billboard already published lists tallying which records were selling and receiving extensive radio airplay, not until 1938 did the magazine begin to publish its list of ‘‘The Week’s Best Records,’’ which purported to identify discs with the ‘‘greatest play potentialities’’ so that ‘‘phonograph operators may be more selective in buying records.’’ The following year, the magazine added its ‘‘Record Buying Guide,’’ which was compiled from a survey of jukebox operators around the nation and listed those records that were ‘‘Going Strong,’’ ‘‘Coming Up,’’ and considered ‘‘Possibilities.’’20 Many phonograph operators praised the new guide, which they relied on to select their records. ‘‘By reading The Billboard we know what records to place on our phonos,’’ wrote a Mississippi operator in the autumn of 1939.21 Even those who detested the automatic phonograph conceded the guide’s extraordinary influence. Writing in the American Mercury in 1940, music critic Barry Ulanov, a jazz aficionado, lamented both the growing prominence of the jukebox and the fact that Billboard’s recommendations, sandwiched ‘‘between pages devoted to pin-ball and slot machines and the doings of pitchmen and carnivals,’’ had become ‘‘the buying guide that contributes most significantly to the popular musical taste of America.’’ Ulanov warned, ‘‘Greater mechani-

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zation is in store for our music. Gears and sprockets will displace musicians and originality will make way for the standardized output necessary to feed the market created by the proliferation of Jukes.’’22

Is It A Hit? Ask the Automatic Phonograph Although they depicted themselves as ‘‘music merchants’’ who catered to public demand, phonograph operators insisted that they did not simply purchase whatever records led radio’s Hit Parade or topped Billboard’s sales charts. Because these merchants had a vested interest in asserting their importance within the music industry, they began making ever larger claims in the trade press that they were close to their customers, whose tastes they could accurately measure and predict. As operators pointed out, jukeboxes not only disseminated the record companies’ product but tabulated detailed statistics as to which songs customers cued up. Thus, the jukebox was an ‘‘opinion barometer’’ that collected information on listeners’ tastes that would prove invaluable to recording companies.23 Coin men advanced their case in trade journals that served the music and coin machine industries, but it was soon echoed by the national media, which by the early 1940s had embraced operators’ contention that jukeboxes permitted working-class Americans in taverns and restaurants an unprecedented ability to register their musical preference. Instead of merely vending music, coin men were collecting data on consumer taste and refining the measurement of songs’ popularity. Billboard, the leading trade magazine for coin men and the music industry, steadily refined its measures of records’ popularity during the 1930s and 1940s. The magazine, as its title suggests, began as a trade publication for the outdoor advertising industry but evolved into the ‘‘Showman’s Bible,’’ covering all branches of commercial entertainment, before narrowing its focus to become the leading music trade publication. As it sought to develop more detailed and accurate charts of popular records, Billboard hailed operators’ ability to identify which records attracted the most nickels from customers. ‘‘Phono Ops Cue Diskers,’’ the magazine declared in 1941, as it reported that record companies and music publishers had become attentive to operators’ opinions, because ‘‘the ops often have a better judgment of what the public will take to than many of the execs on the production end of the business.’’ As a result, phonograph operators were able to gauge the popularity of songs with a degree of precision and sensitivity to diverse clienteles unattainable by the radio or record stores, and they relayed their findings to record manufacturers and musicians.24 Most operators readily conceded that they were not particularly knowledgeable about

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music but claimed that their ignorance was actually an advantage, because it rendered them more responsive to listeners’ demands and discouraged them from imposing their own musical taste on their customers. As Billboard’s coin machine editor, Walter Hurd, put it in 1939, ‘‘The professional operator of phonographs, being free from any previous prejudices about music, has developed into an expert in quickly deciding what his customers like.’’25 As a result, operators boasted, record companies had already begun to tailor their output in response to operators’ recommendations.26 The jukebox, then, became not only a medium for ‘‘merchandising’’ music but a feedback mechanism that measured Americans’ musical preferences. While weekly charts of record sales and radio playlists were influential, operators extolled the jukebox as a far more sensitive and accurate gauge of Americans’ musical taste. A customer who purchased a record for his home phonograph might play it until the grooves wore out, or play it only once; radio listeners frequently had to endure many lackluster songs and advertisements before hearing a favorite tune. The jukebox, by contrast, seemed to afford the consumer an opportunity to select exactly the song he or she wanted, and to play it once, twice, or twenty times in a row, while the machine’s ‘‘Play Meter,’’ introduced by the Wurlitzer Company in 1937, registered precisely the number of times each record had been selected.27 The ‘‘Play Meter’’ freed operators from reliance on anecdotal evidence from bartenders, whose impressions of which songs received the most play from their customers might prove inaccurate, and strengthened the operator’s position relative to the location owner. According to Wurlitzer’s M. G. Hammergren, the ‘‘Play Meter’’ made jukeboxes ‘‘the most infallible device known to the music world for registering the public’s tune preference.’’ Operators still had to select records to place in their machines, of course, but they now had precise tallies of which records hit or missed.28 In making their case for the importance of the jukebox and the patrons’ ability to shape the course of popular music, operators were also making a case for their own indispensability within the music industry. One coin man claimed in 1941 that each operator had his own idiosyncratic method for choosing records, and that selecting the right discs for a particular jukebox could never be distilled to a formula, but depended instead on the operator’s intimate familiarity with his locations and patrons. The patrons of taverns on adjacent corners—or even the patrons of a single tavern—sometimes had divergent musical preferences, and only an operator attuned to his customers’ tastes could accurately predict which records would succeed in a particular spot.29 Operators frequently claimed that popular taste was too poorly understood and too ineffable to be neatly tabulated in charts of hit records.

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Predicting which records would hit or miss could never be reduced to a science, according to Billboard’s Walter Hurd, because ‘‘the final answer lies within the hearts of the people, and it is not always easy to say what is in the heart.’’30

Hillbilly Discs Pull Most Nickels Billboard’s remarks about the ineffable tastes of ‘‘the people’’ notwithstanding, coin men and music men alike were eager to devise more accurate means of measuring and predicting which songs would succeed with diverse jukebox patrons. In an effort to collect anecdotal evidence about the musical preferences of jukebox patrons, Billboard in 1938 introduced ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ a column that printed letters from operators, who recounted their successes and failures in purchasing discs for different locations and clienteles.31 Collectively, these operators’ observations began to suggest a musical culture markedly different from the sweet swing bands and popular vocalists who dominated Billboard’s charts of radio airplay and record sales. Operators had diverse methods for picking records for their phonographs. As Coin Machine Journal observed, the operator’s job was ‘‘to study the public’s tastes’’ in each of his locations. Some operators stocked their machines only with tunes that were promoted by record companies or that had already become hits. Others sought to identify ‘‘all-purpose records’’ or an assortment of records that would succeed with an ‘‘average’’ clientele in virtually any location.32 But many phonograph operators quickly recognized that patrons in their locations did not favor the records featured on radio’s Hit Parade or pushed by Billboard. ‘‘Why don’t the sponsors of the ‘Hit Parade’ take a consensus of phonograph operators before they release the popularity ratings of songs?’’ groused operator Art Carp of Los Angeles in 1939. ‘‘Some of the numbers picked as the most popular of the week get very little play on our machines.’’33 Mort Siffen, a Chicago operator, observed that ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me’’ might contain useful suggestions for ‘‘the higher class American location’’ but was largely irrelevant to the operator who catered to ethnic or working-class customers. Siffen, like many other operators, had noticed that patrons in his locations seldom cued up the sweet swing tunes that filled the airwaves and the Billboard charts. What operators sorely needed, he insisted, was a ‘‘listing of hillbilly and race disks.’’ Operators had relatively little trouble choosing successful swing tunes, but they were often flummoxed when attempting to purchase records for patrons who favored blues, country, or other genres of music. Operators, nearly all of whom were white, often allowed black bar owners to select records for their jukeboxes. Selecting records

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for black locations was even more bewildering to many white operators than was trying to guess which discs would succeed in working-class or ethnic white neighborhoods. J. M. Dalziel of South Carolina advised his fellow operators to ‘‘allow the black proprietor of the juke joint to select records for his establishment.’’ ‘‘The Negro’s choice of records,’’ from Dalziel’s perspective, ‘‘is very hard to discover. . . . He will listen to a score of blues records that all sound alike to the white man and finally announce his selection of one or two.’’ But selecting records for some white establishments could also prove difficult. Robert Clark, a California operator, confessed to being ‘‘up a tree’’ when it came to picking hillbilly discs, since he could not tell a good country song from a bad one and found that the songs’ titles offered no assistance. Who would have guessed that Roy Acuff ’s grim ‘‘Wreck on the Highway’’ would be a hit?34 Operators across the nation noticed that patrons in many locations were cuing up fewer swing records. Vince Corroo, a Milwaukee operator, declared that ‘‘John Q. Public’s taste for swing, zing and bang is definitely on the wane.’’ His locations were patronized by ‘‘men and women past 30 with plenty of worldly worries, who look to soft music and beer to drown their sorrows and soothe their nerves.’’ These patrons tended to hunker down at the bar and listen to hillbilly and western tunes such as Patsy Montana’s ‘‘Someone to Go Home To,’’ which they played repeatedly. ‘‘Can it be the song,’’ Corroo asked presciently, ‘‘or is it the public trend?’’35 Corroo was scarcely alone in noticing the remarkable popularity of hillbilly and western music on jukeboxes. Initially, southern operators were most likely to report the popularity of hillbilly and cowboy recordings on their phonographs.36 But operators from decidedly northern climes also began to observe that these discs were garnering nickels in their machines. In the spring of 1939, E. M. Perry of Spokane reported that the miners and loggers who frequented his locations ‘‘demand all hillbilly stuff.’’ The following year operators in Buffalo and Milwaukee reported that hillbilly tunes were favored by working-class patrons in their cities.37 The migration of southern workers northward and westward in search of factory jobs helped spread hillbilly music across the nation, as these transplanted southerners brought their musical preferences with them and often sought solace in the familiar music of their native region when their shift ended. But many northerners quickly developed a taste for hillbilly and cowboy music as well. As historian Bill C. Malone has noted, especially during World War II, country music spread from the South to become the music of much of America’s white working class.38 In 1941 Billboard conceded that ‘‘hillbilly disks are cropping up in machines that never before saw the likes of one. . . . Even the

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stolid New Englander and the blase´ New Yorker are beginning to slip in a coin’’ to hear a country tune.39 Not every location, of course, was hospitable to hillbilly records. Billboard estimated that half of all locations were favorable to country records, but ‘‘the remainder tend to dislike it,’’ and ‘‘swank’’ locations and those patronized by immigrants ‘‘intensely dislike the wilder manifestations of the hillbilly style.’’ According to the magazine, these divergent attitudes toward country music represented nothing less than ‘‘a significant social cleavage’’ between those Americans still tethered to the nation’s rural heritage and music, and those who did not share these cultural and musical traditions.40 According to operators, hillbilly and western records had an appeal to patrons that differed from that of swing, ballads, and other popular songs. While many popular tunes remained on the jukebox for as little as two or three weeks, country songs attracted repeated, even consecutive plays from patrons and retained their popularity much longer than did songs in other genres. Fans of country music seemed considerably less enchanted by novelty than swing fans and would deposit nickels even to hear old standards. ‘‘It is strange,’’ wrote operator Roy Bangs of Little Rock to Billboard in 1939, ‘‘but the customers will keep plugging the buffalos to hear these numbers over and over again.’’41 Within a few years, such behavior was no longer considered unusual. ‘‘Folk records, like folk singers, do not climb to high peaks, and then fall out of public favor, but rather go on and on year in and year out,’’ reported Billboard in 1944. Country music listeners, the magazine surmised, were content to listen repeatedly to familiar songs because they derived a different type of satisfaction from music than did most other jukebox patrons. While some fans of hillbilly music played songs to create a festive atmosphere or for dancing, most listened to their favorite music in taverns while drinking to drown out worldly cares. Operators gushed over the sustained popularity of country songs on jukeboxes, which greatly reduced their need to purchase new records. The durable appeal of these records was considerably less appealing to record companies, whose profits rose when records were changed more frequently.42

The Pulse of the People The newfound popularity of country music enabled jukebox operators to insist more strenuously that their machines were uniquely able to register and satisfy the tastes of ordinary Americans. The appeal of this previously neglected genre seemed almost tailor-made to bolster operators’ claim that their machines were altering the American musical landscape. Without the jukebox, they claimed, the widespread popularity of

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these songs might have gone unrecognized, and they might never have reached such a large audience. ‘‘There is no question,’’ declared Daniel Richman in Billboard in 1939, ‘‘that the amount of hillbilly selections released is designed almost solely for the boxes.’’43 Jukeboxes, of course, were not solely responsible for propelling country music’s newfound popularity, as many radio stations also recognized the vast audience for hillbilly and western music.44 Still, coin men strategically used their ‘‘discovery’’ of country music’s appeal to enhance their importance within the music industry. While Billboard’s ‘‘Record Buying Guide’’ had virtually ignored country records, operators around the nation quickly realized that the music’s appeal was not confined to the South or to rural areas. Billboard struggled to define this musical genre, alternately lumping hillbilly and cowboy songs together with foreign records, ‘‘race’’ records, ‘‘folk’’ music, even polkas. By helping to define and promote the distinct genres of ‘‘hillbilly’’ and ‘‘western’’—later fused into ‘‘country-and-western’’—music, coin men strove to make popular musical taste more intelligible and to identify a category of music virtually guaranteed to succeed on jukeboxes in working-class locations across the land.45 In 1942 Billboard no longer classified hillbilly tunes along with foreign recordings, but now launched a separate column on ‘‘American Folk Recordings,’’ which included western, hillbilly, spirituals, and other genres.46 In 1944 Billboard added a separate list of ‘‘Most Played Juke Box Folk Records’’ to its weekly ‘‘Music Popularity Chart,’’ at last acknowledging the importance of hillbilly and cowboy music to the music industry.47 Trade publications, coin machine manufacturers, and the nation’s press soon echoed operators’ resounding defense of ‘‘the people.’’ Billboard’s Walter Hurd acclaimed ‘‘the inherent right of the individual to have good music, as economically as possible,’’ while Wurlitzer’s Homer Capehart asserted that ‘‘poor people have a right to enjoy good music with their beer or sandwiches.’’48 The advent of the jukebox, some observers claimed, had not only provided ordinary Americans with a new source of diversion but had given them an altogether new power to determine what sort of music was popular. As a writer for the Associated Press declared in 1939, ‘‘The man at the bar with a glass of beer has just popped up as an important force in American music.’’49 Jukebox operators, however, extended this argument even further, describing the virtues of the coin-operated phonograph in terms that could best be described as populist. Even manufacturers, who had initially sought a tonier image for their machines, began to emphasize phonographs’ power to democratize music by making it accessible to more listeners. A series of advertisements for Wurlitzer, the nation’s largest manufacturer of ‘‘automatic phonographs,’’ emphasized that these machines enabled

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thousands, even millions, of Americans to enjoy the music of famous orchestras and singers. Formerly, ‘‘only a privileged few’’ had the opportunity to listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s voice or Fats Waller’s piano. Now, thanks to the coin-operated phonograph, Americans everywhere could enjoy these musicians ‘‘at the touch of a finger.’’50 As Billboard put it, jukeboxes whisked patrons from their barstool to ‘‘a $3.30 orchestra seat upon the deposit of a nickel.’’51 By the early 1940s, some jukebox manufacturers and operators were making ever more extravagant claims for their machines, claiming that they placed control over the market for popular music at the fingertips of the customer. James Mangan of the Mills Novelty Company, the nation’s leading manufacturer of slot machines and a fledgling manufacturer of phonographs, contrasted jukeboxes with ‘‘passive’’ amusements such as movies, sporting events, and radio, declaring that ‘‘it is different in the case of the coin machine. The coin machine is a passive instrument in the hands of an active manipulator. When a man selects a tune on a phonograph, he ‘makes’ that tune, in the sense that he causes it to come into existence then and there.’’52 Mangan claimed that anyone with a nickel to spare could ‘‘own’’ a coin machine for at least a few minutes, transforming it into ‘‘his personal property, his stamping ground, his factory. He has rented its use and owns its service.’’53 By the early 1940s, the contention that coin-operated machines were unique in their ability to allow consumers unprecedented control in consuming products and entertainment had become the centerpiece of coin men’s rhetoric. Consumers, of course, did not control the production of popular songs but had to choose from the selections available on the jukebox. Despite coin men’s extravagant celebrations of consumer sovereignty, recording companies still shaped the production of popular songs, and operators negotiated between recording companies and listeners.

Music Conscious Jukeboxes reshaped not only which songs became popular, but how Americans listened to them. Operators contended that the jukebox not only measured popular tastes but actually altered which songs patrons preferred to hear. Some songs simply sounded better on the jukebox or cut through the din of a crowded barroom better than others. Indeed, blues, jazz, and country musicians alike began to utilize more percussion and bass in order to make sure their songs got the attention of tavern patrons. Records that might sound terrific in a living room were ‘‘totally lost in the noisy and confusing atmosphere of the average location,’’ Billboard observed, while ‘‘the brilliant performance that will get nickels is too blatant to be tolerated in the home.’’54 As another writer put it in

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1939, ‘‘Slow, dreamy music is incongruous with the tavern atmosphere.’’55 Jukeboxes reshaped not only the genres of popular music, but altered the way that Americans listened to music, although manufacturers and operators struggled to understand exactly how. Coin men debated whether tavern patrons treated songs merely as background music or listened to them intently. Jukeboxes transformed the atmosphere in taverns and restaurants, as amplified music was louder than patrons’ conversation. Songs such as Willie Glahe’s 1939 hit, ‘‘Beer Barrel Polka,’’ were virtually ignored by radio stations but became hits on the jukebox.56 Customers sometimes abused the jukebox’s ability to provide their favorite song as often as they were willing to deposit a nickel, repeatedly playing runaway hits such as the ‘‘Beer Barrel Polka’’ or Al Dexter’s ‘‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’’ to the annoyance of other patrons.57 In 1944 Billboard reported that a St. Paul man had to be forcibly restrained from smashing a jukebox with a chair after a customer inserted a dollar to play ‘‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’’ twenty times.58 Music connoisseurs complained that these phonographs were debasing Americans’ musical tastes by allowing any nitwit with a nickel not only to hear his favorite song but to inflict it on every patron in a restaurant or tavern. In 1944 a self-described ‘‘Symphony Fan’’ wrote to a Minneapolis newspaper to complain that he was ‘‘tired of the moanings of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, et al., in public places, and the fewer juke boxes there are the happier I will be.’’59 Indeed, a few states and communities even considered requiring jukeboxes to permit patrons to plunk down a nickel to obtain a few minutes of respite from music.60 Jukeboxes were sometimes characterized as though they were almost human, which may have lent some credence to the charge that ‘‘the people’s orchestra’’ was forcing flesh-and-blood musicians into breadlines. Ben Boldt, advertising manager for Wurlitzer, described automatic phonographs as ‘‘salesmen’’ that beckoned customers to get off their barstools and insert a few nickels in the coin slot. According to Boldt, jukeboxes, despite their rather short, squat physique, were ‘‘like a Hollywood Glamour Girl—they have ‘IT.’’’61 Manufacturers designed phonographs so that the record-changing mechanism was visible, and many patrons marveled as the ingenious, robot-like machine grasped their selection, placed it on the turntable, and filled the room with song. According to an advertisement for the Wurlitzer Company, patrons would insert nickels in their phonographs ‘‘over and over again to see it as well as hear it in action.’’62 Designers and engineers soon devised new gadgets to enhance the machines’ powers of salesmanship. According to one study, only 6 percent of patrons in a typical tavern or restaurant played the jukebox, and

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women were extremely reluctant to venture across a bar crowded with men in order to insert a coin in a phonograph.63 In an effort to overcome ‘‘sales resistance,’’ manufacturers devised ‘‘wall boxes,’’ ‘‘bar boxes,’’ and other gadgets that enabled customers to hear their favorite song without getting off their barstool or sliding out of their restaurant booth. In 1940 the Rock-Ola Company introduced Dial-A-Tune, a remote control device that could be placed in booths and on tables throughout an establishment. Rock-Ola boasted that Dial-A-Tune would extend the potential of the automatic phonograph by taking the selection of music even closer to each individual customer, because it ‘‘gets into those dark corners and puts them on a paying basis.’’ Like jukeboxes, Dial-A-Tune was designed to encourage customers to part with their spare change and to buy on impulse. ‘‘Dial-A-Tune breaks down the invisible wall of resistance set up by any patron and puts him in a spending mood. It creates a desire for music, and it’s always ‘on tap.’ . . . Dial-A-Tune is a great persuader. It gets ‘under their skin’ and makes them music conscious.’’ Rock-Ola’s ambitious experiment, which aimed to put music at the fingertips of each patron, flopped.64 With their brightly colored plastics and lights to attract customers, jukeboxes resembled arcade games, contributing to their lowbrow image. Jukeboxes and the music played on them were both commonly associated with working-class venues, especially taverns. In an effort to create a new market for their phonographs in hotel lobbies, finer restaurants, and other ‘‘classy’’ establishments, manufacturers began to design more elegant machines that would blend in with these locations’ decor. In 1941 Rock-Ola introduced its Tone Column phonographs, which, the company’s advertisements boasted, ‘‘will harmonize with and enhance even the most elegant location setting.’’ One model of the Tone Column featured Art Deco styling, while another resembled ‘‘expensive organ pipes.’’65 Not to be outdone, Wurlitzer unveiled a coin phonograph in a Colonial Revival cabinet, which it billed as ‘‘A Triumph in Conservative Beauty’’ that would enable operators ‘‘to land hundreds of hard-to-get locations, particularly those establishments which have been aloof to all automatic phonographs on the basis of their ‘commercial’ appearance.’’ Wurlitzer’s advertisements depicted the machine in a tony club and touted its ‘‘authentic early American beauty,’’ including its ‘‘Governor Winthrop cabinet top! Pewter finished hardware! Butterfly peg construction!’’ Automatic Age predicted that the machine would lend dignity to the coin-op trade by gaining admission to ‘‘more places of distinction and conservative character.’’66 Despite designers’ remarkable inventiveness, however, jukeboxes retained their lowbrow image, and the ‘‘people’s orchestra’’ continued to play almost exclusively in taverns and inexpensive restaurants.

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Music Future America’s entry into World War II made the sustained popularity of country songs even more attractive to jukebox operators. Although wartime rationing of shellac cut in half the number of new records released, operators were cheered to find that patrons continued to part with their nickels to hear well-worn country records. ‘‘Many a juke op switched to folk disks because of the pop shortage only to find he hit the jackpot . . . now the ’billies are in the boxes to stay,’’ reported Billboard in 1944.67 During the war, coin men implored record companies to press more country discs and fewer popular vocalists.68 The war gave the music business another rationale to salute country songs as the ‘‘music of the people.’’ Country music, they pointed out, embodied an ‘‘earthy, homespun philosophy so typically American’’ that it was almost certain to inspire patriotism.69 Demonstrating their patriotism during wartime enabled operators to burnish the image of their industry. Operators, stocking their machines with patriotic songs, claimed that the nation’s 400,000 automatic phonographs supplied a tonic for Americans’ morale.70 Operators made Irving Berlin’s ‘‘Any Bonds Today?’’ the first selection on many of the nation’s phonographs, and James Mangan of the Mills Novelty company penned a hit song, ‘‘We’re All Americans,’’ recorded by Kate Smith. Anti-Japanese songs, such as ‘‘Remember Pearl Harbor,’’ ‘‘Bomb Tokyo,’’ and ‘‘You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap’’ were also heard frequently in the nation’s taverns.71 As coin men looked ahead, past the ravages of the Great Depression and the privation of wartime, they regained the breathless enthusiasm that infused their industry’s heady takeoff in the 1920s, when they predicted that coin-operated machines would streamline the selling of goods and entertainments and eliminate many of the barriers that impeded the flow of merchandise from manufacturer to consumer. Operators expected that peacetime would propel the jukebox to even greater popularity.72 Phonograph manufacturers and recording companies had already announced their intention to develop the potentially vast market for home phonographs after the war, but operators reassured themselves that home phonographs posed no serious threat to jukeboxes, maintaining that the various branches of the music industry complemented one another. They predicted that home phonographs would only add to the popularity of recorded music, making Americans even more likely to desire musical entertainment in public venues.73 Operators commonly referred to home phonographs as ‘‘home jukes’’ and even speculated that consumers would prove willing to pay operators to visit their homes and update their record selection periodically.74 Unfortunately for coin men, there were already signs that the new

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effort to market phonographs and recordings for the home posed a significant challenge to the popularity of ‘‘public phonographs.’’ Some operators complained that recording companies were not pressing enough country records for jukeboxes because they were instead supplying home phonographs with recordings by big bands and popular vocalists. After the war, home phonographs exerted a growing influence over the market for popular recordings.75 Rising sales of home phonographs forced jukebox operators to confront the tremendous influence that producers of phonographs and records retained on the market for popular music and to acknowledge that jukebox patrons might prove fickle to the ‘‘people’s orchestra’’ if they could afford a phonograph for their own home. Long after collectors have snapped up every Wurlitzer phonograph, the jukebox remains one of the most recognizable icons of mid-twentieth-century American popular culture. As coin men helped revive the phonograph and recording business during the 1930s, they established the jukebox’s image as the embodiment of popular musical taste by extolling the consumer’s ability to deposit a nickel, push a button, and register his or her musical preference. Coin men’s rhetoric discounted the considerable power that the recording industry wielded over the market for popular music and neglected the limited menu of songs from which jukebox patrons had to choose. Operators, quintessential middlemen, strove to understand the complexities of the market for popular music yet offered a deceptively simple account of its workings, in which the consumer with a nickel in his pocket could at least momentarily become a tastemaker simply by playing his favorite song for all to hear.

Chapter 9

Sounds Local: The Competition for Space and Place in Early U.S. Radio Bill Kirkpatrick

In 1932 an entrepreneur applied to the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) for permission to build a new radio station in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, a town of 15,000 people about thirty miles from Pittsburgh (which then had a population of 670,000). He hoped to offer a more local alternative to the Pittsburgh stations that were ‘‘not altogether suitable advertising outlets for many of the merchants in the Jeannette area who are interested in and might patronize a local station.’’ The FRC summarily denied the application, arguing that Jeannette was already well served by broadcasters in Pittsburgh and did not need a station of its own.1 The next year, the commission made the same point even more forcefully in the case of an applicant from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a town of 16,500 about thirty-five miles from Pittsburgh: ‘‘There is no . . . station licensed to operate in Greensburg, but this community and its neighboring communities appear to be well within the service range of broadcasting stations located in Pittsburgh. . . . The evidence shows in this connection that Greensburg and the other communities nearby are all definitely a part of what is generally known as the Pittsburgh area.’’2 On the one hand, these two cases (and hundreds more like them) confirm much of what we already know about federal bureaucracy. The FRC was not terribly interested in the fine distinctions between Jeannette and Pittsburgh, nor between Greensburg and Pittsburgh—nor, for that matter, between Greensburg and Jeannette. Surveying the radio landscape from their federal perch, the Radio Commissioners tended to perceive a national media system and, in the name of efficiency and rationalization, demonstrated little sensitivity to such local identities and

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needs as presented in the Pennsylvania cases.3 On the other hand, these application denials tell us something profound about radio’s contribution to Americans’ sense of space and place in the early twentieth century. Larger cities like Pittsburgh were given a broadcast voice and with it a new source of local pride, regional economic advantages, and occasionally even national attention. Meanwhile, towns like Jeannette and Greensburg, which for decades had been merely near Pittsburgh, now found themselves, in part through the local radio signals they received, increasingly becoming part of ‘‘the Pittsburgh area.’’ Given the civic orientation of much early radio, with local citizens and clubs producing a significant amount of volunteer programming on many stations, this refusal to recognize a distinctive local identity, expressed through the denial of broadcast facilities, radically curtailed public access to the airwaves. Residents of Jeannette and Greensburg, like millions of other Americans, were expected to orient their broadcast interests not toward a local station on which they potentially also had a voice as members of a local community but toward outside stations as mere listeners belonging to regional or national communities. The radio footprint itself thus became one important factor in struggles over the construction of regional and local identities, cultures, and economies. Numerous scholars have observed that sound, especially through the medium of national radio broadcasting, helped to reorganize space in American life and create new iterations of the national imagined community. By promoting national brands, chain stores, and a national culture, radio worked to undermine local economies and cultures on structural as well as ideological levels; furthermore, by offering the possibility of a simultaneous experience across the country, broadcasting contributed temporally and spatially to a reconfiguration of Americans’ sense of national belonging. This national community through radio was, in fact, the primary goal of early regulators, including commerce secretary Herbert Hoover, who declared national broadcasting to be the medium’s most important mission: ‘‘Radio will not have reached its full service until we have such interconnection of our local stations that we may also enjoy each night the product of our greatest artists and the thoughts of our leading men and women, and may participate in great national occasions.’’4 In the words of historian Michele Hilmes, radio thus became ‘‘a machine for the circulation of narratives and representations that rehearse and justify the structures of order underlying national identity.’’5 It is not for nothing that the great national network programs and high-powered clear-channel stations of the 1930s and 1940s remain the bedrock of our cultural memories of early broadcasting. Radio also had countervailing effects, however, privileging the local in

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interesting, sometimes self-contradictory ways. For example, FCC decisions about which localities did or did not get a licensed station—and the kinds of radio programming that resulted—were just two of many aspects of radio sound effecting a local and regional spatial reorganization of the nation. As Jody Berland put it, ‘‘Radio, like other media, is constituted (and constitutes us) spatially as much as by genre, signification, or mode of address.’’ In the production of sound texts as well as the production of ‘‘local’’ audiences, argues Berland, we can recognize how radio’s spatiality intersects with economic and cultural power more generally.6 Specifically, the regulatory determination that localities A, B, and C should not receive stations of their own, but rather should all get their radio signals from locality X, strengthened emerging centerperiphery relations and helped create new ones among previously discrete (or relatively discrete) local communities. This figurative remapping of local and regional geographical space through the airwaves contributed to the growth of the more centralized regional and national structures that would characterize much of twentieth-century American life. At the same time, such decisions also had the potential to remap cultural space, often boosting the reach and influence of urban culture (e.g., jazz, ethnic humor, urban civic concerns) while denying a radio outlet for rural or provincial tastes, talents, and concerns. Many historians, including Derek Vaillant, Lizabeth Cohen, Alexander Russo, and Clifford Doerksen, have analyzed local resistance to broadcasting’s nationalizing effects, both in big cities like Chicago and in rural and small-town communities around the country.7 But radio’s complicated role in Americans’ spatial imagination through these local and regional cultural, economic, technological, and political flows deserves closer examination. Local radio participated in the spatial reorganization of the country in at least three distinct capacities: as local boosterism, which made local radio a tool of economic development in competition with other localities within a region; as industrial strategy on the part of local broadcasters seeking to attract local listeners and, importantly, both local and national sponsors; and as an aesthetic mode that both local and national broadcasters sought to reproduce and profit from. Each of these aspects contributes to our understanding of the growth of the media system and Americans’ shifting relationship to the nationalizing and modernizing projects of the early twentieth century.

Local Radio and Local Community It is not easy to specify what we mean by local radio in the United States, especially for the early days of broadcasting. Technically and legally, all

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American terrestrial broadcasting is local in that, since 1912, every station’s license has been tied to a specific geographic locale (the ‘‘community of license’’), and the licensee is expected to serve the needs and interests of those living within that locale.8 So even a 50,000-watt ‘‘national’’ clear-channel station of the 1930s, such as Pittsburgh’s KDKA, though it carried mostly national network programming and could be picked up by listeners ten states away, was ostensibly mandated to serve the local Pittsburgh audience. At the same time, regulators also approved hundreds of low-powered ‘‘local’’ stations (up to 500 watts) in cities and towns around the country; their reach was usually just a few miles and they were never affiliated with the national networks. In between these two categories were ‘‘regional’’ stations, up to 15,000 watts, which might or might not carry both locally originated and national network programming. When radio historians talk about local stations during this period, they are usually talking about these independent low- and medium-powered broadcasters and their locally originated programming. The connections between radio and listeners’ sense of space are even more complex. As Doreen Massey has pointed out, one’s ‘‘local community’’ is already less a place than an ever-shifting set of ideas about one’s position in relation to others: what we imagine to be ‘‘local’’ to ourselves contracts and expands depending on need and context.9 Furthermore, these perpetual shifts in definitions of the local often have less to do with geographical or political boundaries than with social and cultural ideas about belonging and identity. Economic interests are central to this process (e.g., the suburbanites who happily think of themselves as part of a larger urban community until it comes time to fund infrastructure and services for the urban center), but transportation and communication also play important roles in our spatial imagination. In the specific case of radio communication, Harold Innis theorized radio as a space-binding medium, meaning that it can connect people across space but also works to erode the self-determination of peripheral groups. The struggle over what is central and what is peripheral, then, is an economic, cultural, and social contest in which communications media are necessarily deeply embedded.10 These definitional issues intersect in U.S. radio with the economic imperatives of the commercial system. The financial success of many local radio stations was closely tied to their transmitter power and thus the areas that they could reliably serve, even as they promoted the particularity of their hometowns. Radio sound thus played a complex role in American spatiality and capitalist competition. The permission to build and operate a station at a given locality (and thereby to have a proprie-

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tary presence on the air at all) depended on federal regulators who were prone to ignore or erase local distinctions; those local distinctions nonetheless persisted, but the siting of local stations situated listeners in new relations—of center and periphery, of affinity and difference—to the towns and cities within a geographical region. At the same time, radio conveyed economic advantages to individual localities within those regions, and its programming often promoted new regional economic relationships even as it articulated local identities based on an assiduously constructed local specificity. Radio thus complicated those ever-shifting ideas about one’s position in relation to others and added new dimensions to the longer-term problem of defining local community, which was especially acute in the early twentieth century as Americans adjusted to the changes brought about by modernization, and struggles over the place of the local in American life intensified. In particular, the first three decades of the twentieth century were marked by numerous challenges to the spatial order of the nineteenth century, including new modes of transportation that helped expand the practical boundaries of one’s geographic locale and new economic modes that strengthened the center at the expense of the periphery. Continuing through World War I and into the 1920s, local differences and practices were threatened by both mass production and governmental reforms like Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s Division of Simplified Practice, established in 1921, which sought to impose uniform national standards on everything from the thickness of lumber to the weight of a loaf of bread to mattress sizes. Perhaps most interesting, this era was marked by cultural struggles over the place of the local community in modern America. An ascendant national professional-managerial class, loyal to no particular locality and often operating under the banner of modern efficiency, tended to privilege centralized political and economic structures that worked to disempower locally based economic elites.11 This ‘‘national class’’ was invested in translocal cosmopolitan culture and corporate production that had little use for local idiosyncrasies and even less patience for local inefficiencies. At the same time, national-class spokesmen like H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis popularized a vision of small-town life as parochial and petty: attachment to the ‘‘local’’ itself came to be stigmatized as premodern and retrograde, antithetical to the power and potential of the modern American nation. This national class was, not coincidentally, the social formation that most profoundly shaped U.S. radio according to its own translocal ideals, laying the foundations for a nominally local but largely national media system that is still with us.12

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Radio and Civic Boosterism Recognizing the power of broadcasting in these struggles over the place of the local community in modern America, local business leaders around the country seized on radio during the 1920s and early 1930s as both an important advertising medium and a marker of ‘‘up-do-dateness’’ akin to good roads and electrification. Although there were surprisingly few publicly owned broadcasters during this era (New York’s municipally owned WNYC was the most visible of the rare exceptions), local economic elites often vigorously supported privately owned local stations as commercial-civic enterprises. Radio, in other words, gave new form—and importantly, new urgency—to the very old strategies of civic boosterism. As described by historian Sally Foreman Griffith, boosterism was a widespread mode of localist rhetoric that sought to contain the potentially antisocial entrepreneurial energy of American individualism by directing it toward social ends at the local level: ‘‘The booster ethos addressed the need in newly created towns for both economic growth and social order. It offered a vision that fused economic and moral values in the belief that a town’s prosperity rested upon its spiritual condition. . . . Harmony within the community was therefore a means to both economic growth and social cohesion.’’13 In its focus on creating a congenial business climate, attracting outside investment, discouraging outside spending (a growing problem for local retailers, thanks to mailorder and automobile-enabled shopping trips to larger localities), and equating the interests of local business leaders with the interests of the community as a whole, civic boosterism was an unabashedly class-based and economically motivated strain of localism. Daniel Boorstin calls the booster a peculiarly American invention, conflating the needs of the booster’s own merchant class with the betterment of his locality. In that sense, ‘‘Not to boost your city showed both a lack of community spirit and a lack of business sense.’’14 Although Boorstin’s analysis emphasizes the undeniable energy of the boosters themselves and the competition among communities (which he calls ‘‘community-ism’’),15 boosterism was equally instrumental in attempting to discipline the behavior of local citizens and consumers. Often working hand-in-hand with the local press, who wanted to court favor with local advertisers, civic boosters used localist rhetoric to police how people used their time, spent their money, and oriented their behavior toward a posited communal good. Significant social pressure encouraged residents to act in a sufficiently public-spirited way, and in general the discourses of civic promotion worked to define the conditions of full membership in the community. As a handbill announcing a town meeting in Keokuk, Illinois, insisted, ‘‘All Good Citizens who feel an interest in the safety and welfare of our

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City are expected to be present.’’16 Timothy Mahoney argues that through such rhetoric, ‘‘the booster ethos operated upon and through individuals and groups to contour and coordinate action and stimulate and promote town development.’’17 Civic boosterism had long used discourses of independence and selfsufficiency to attract and retain capital and labor as well as to discipline residents’ economic behavior, but in the early twentieth century it had to carry the additional burden of defending the very idea of the local community as an economic and social entity. Boosters had to map out the place of the local within the modern nation and protect it from multiple threats to the local business community, whose economic prospects depended largely on real estate and local retailing. These challenges came not only from without, as the corporate economy and national culture increasingly encroached on local economies and cultures, but also from within, as the behavior of local citizens became ever more difficult to police. Specific threats included: changing consumer habits as represented by mail order, chain stores, and the desire for national brands; increased mobility due to the automobile, which intensified the competition for shopping and entertainment dollars within a region; and continuing rural depopulation in the face of multiple farm crises and the lure of city jobs that eroded the local economic base of many small towns. Now able to drive to neighboring towns to shop for products and brands unavailable at local general stores, or to partake of national culture at a nearby movie palace, rural and small-town folk became less contained by geography and, as a result, less subject to local business-class control in their economic and social behavior.18 One important result of these shifts was the increased competition among towns for the economic and cultural loyalty not just of their own citizens, but of a region. This competition had long existed, but new technologies and economic practices after 1900 made possible the startlingly quick death of once-thriving towns; economic and cultural competition with neighboring towns became an increasingly urgent priority. The stakes were not merely bragging rights for the most wonderful place to live, but the continued prosperity or even existence of the town itself. For example, historian Hal Barron recounts the booster efforts during the 1920s of Oregon, Illinois, population 2,000, which was newly within driving distance of Rockford, population 80,000. In order to compete with the retail opportunities in the larger cities, merchants in Oregon had to offer special discounts, ‘‘dollar days’’ sales, and similar retail promotions, while also attempting to inculcate in residents the virtues of shopping at home. Extralocal competition also directly affected traditional local cultural life—for instance, by forcing the repeal of blue laws to keep people from going elsewhere for their entertainment. As a local

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paper put it in 1927 when advocating an ordinance allowing movie exhibition on Sundays, ‘‘If Oregon did not have to compete with surrounding towns connected by good roads, then there would be no serious reason for having Sunday pictures here. Rockford, Dixon, Rochelle, and Polo have Sunday movies. . . . Why not let Oregon have an equal chance with our surrounding towns? We must keep up with the times or go backwards. . . . Good roads through ‘dead towns’ result in business failure.’’19 At the same time, there was a paradox in keeping up with the Rockfords: in order to avoid having economic and cultural life sucked away by nearby cities, Oregon and similar towns had to suck away the economic and cultural life from even smaller towns and villages within their orbits. As Barron put it, ‘‘Oregon merchants wanted their own people to heed the cry of localism, but they did not want anyone else to, and their older spatial conceptions of community became increasingly contradictory.’’20 Towns that failed to poach capital and regional shoppers from their neighbors, as well as tourists from urban centers, faced a steady decline in population and prospects, making localism increasingly predatory. The idea of ‘‘local’’ itself expanded and contracted as seemed politically and economically necessary (or expedient): business and social leaders sought to define the local community to include weaker locales while excluding stronger ones, and to articulate a local loyalty that corresponded to the geographical contours of economic possibility rather than patterns of population settlement, legal jurisdiction, or demographic clustering. Tellingly, such local loyalty was often called ‘‘local patriotism’’ during this era, a phrase that conveys the expected depth of active commitment to the identity and well-being of the town. Arriving during this period of economic and social realignment, local radio broadcasting was especially well suited to this more predatory localism, reaching local citizens with ‘‘shop-at-home’’ propaganda and the regional population with advertisements for the town. Thus, while independent local stations often aired a wide range of programming, the ideal broadcast modeled the booster ethos of civic promotion, publicizing a town’s openness to entrepreneurial capitalism, the attractiveness of its stores, and the general wonderfulness of its appurtenances. To listeners within the locality, the desired effect of such civic programming was the promotion of citizen loyalty (economic as well as social) to a distinctive local identity. To regional listeners in nearby towns, the goal was to attract investment capital, shoppers from neighboring towns, and tourism. A typical example of this civic booster programming was a 1924 broadcast prepared by the Northfield, Minnesota, Lions Club and aired over WCAL. Interspersed with musical numbers, the program discussed the area’s agriculture, its two colleges (St. Olaf and Carleton), and Jesse

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James’s famous botched raid on a Northfield bank. A local newspaper from the following day illustrates the blurry line between outer-directed boosterism and the inner-directed cultivation of local loyalty: ‘‘Cows, colleges, and contentment were in the air last evening. Northfield, Minnesota, was telling the world about herself by wireless. . . . Almost everybody nowadays is discontented. . . . Northfield folk are different. Their city is beautiful, their business is booming, their banks are solvent, their colleges are flourishing, their cows are making new butter fat records, and their people are contented. Let the Lions roar. Who has a better right[?]’’21 Local radio was thus freighted with the task of conferring structural advantages to local elites in competition not only with national economic forces but also with the other local elites down the road. In that sense, local radio was not merely about encouraging civic pride and ‘‘city beautiful’’ programs, nor even about buying locally. Indeed, for all the noise and vehemence of the ceaseless ‘‘support your local merchants’’ campaigns, most citizens seem to have largely ignored the rhetoric and shopped wherever they wanted to.22 Instead, the desire to have a local radio station in one’s town was part of an increasingly urgent project to achieve economic and cultural hegemony over an entire area, vying with other potential commercial centers in the area to become regional financial seats. By the mid-1920s, radio was already considered so integral to the economic success of a locality that if no one else had entered the field in a given market, the business community often took the lead in opening a local station. In 1925, for example, sixteen St. Louis businesses each contributed $15,000 to build a station ‘‘as a civic undertaking to tell the world that St. Louis is ‘the center of centers’ in America.’’23 Merchants liked the competition between radio and newspapers that drove down ad rates, and radio could also reach customers that the newspaper missed—regional listeners who had no access to the local paper, and local and regional listeners who didn’t read the paper at all. Similarly, business leaders took the possible loss of their stations very seriously. For example, when WLBW in Oil City, Pennsylvania, wanted to move sixty miles north to Erie in 1932, the Oil City business community organized a letter-writing campaign to the FRC to keep the station in their town. They offered just three reasons, all economic: concerns about the potential loss of business to Oil City, the resulting loss of jobs, and the decreased value of radio sets if listeners could not pull in a clear local signal. None of the letters preserved in the FRC case file raised concepts like local public service, a local public sphere, or even local identity apart from Oil City’s commercial prospects.24 Such issues of localism may have been important to the residents of Oil City, but the way that

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the business community attempted to motivate those residents to write letters to the government was to construct the station as vital to Oil City’s competitive stature within the region, indicating what the town’s boosters felt was their best argument during the depths of the Great Depression. Even though Erie already had a station at the time (WEDH) and Oil City had only WLBW, the FRC allowed the move and Oil City lost its ‘‘voice on the air,’’ and with it a crucial instrument in remapping northwest Pennsylvania to Oil City’s economic advantage. Perhaps predictably, nationally minded cosmopolitan critics usually failed to see these competitive processes at work and misread these social and economic discourses. When the Lions of towns like Northfield roared their communities’ virtues through the ether, big-city observers had a good laugh at their expense, ridiculing the yokels’ provincial pride in their dull, one-horse towns. Such critics were primed to see civic boosters (it’s easy to imagine Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt among them) as wasting valuable radio frequencies on local stations— frequencies that would be better used for ‘‘high-quality’’ national stations. The New York Herald Tribune, for example, was indifferent to the stakes in local radio, imagining local broadcasting to be nothing more than a wasteful exercise in ego-gratification that even threatened to stunt the country’s mental growth: ‘‘It is pleasant for the owner of a [small] station to realize that he is the biggest frog in the puddle of ether that surrounds him for a hundred miles. It may even please the local citizenry to remember that it possesses any frog at all. . . . Which is better for the country’s mental growth, to listen each evening to local broadcasting that everybody knows about already or to hear programs of artistry and importance which everybody in the whole continent is hearing at the same time?’’25 Similarly, Carl Dreher, a prominent radio expert with close ties to RCA, completely missed the life-or-death struggle in which the traditional local business class saw itself engaged, attributing the desire for a station to an ‘‘irresistible impulse’’ to feel unduly important. As he scornfully wrote in Radio Broadcast: Some village of 2000 out on the plains possesses a broadcasting station, perhaps by accident. A manufacturer of babies’ diapers, say, has erected it to advertise his product. Incidentally, he advertises the town. The next village . . . feels an irresistible impulse to have a broadcasting station bigger than the diaper broadcasting station. The local manufacturer of varnished pretzels thinks he might take a whack at it. His primary object is, of course, to advertise his varnished pretzels. But he also wants to shine at his luncheon club among his fellow business men. He wants to be slapped on the back by the President of the Chamber of Commerce.

The preferred national-class solution was, of course, to reduce the number of these small local stations to free up room in the ether for the

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high-powered network affiliates and large independent stations that they considered more important and worthwhile. In Dreher’s words: ‘‘Instead of Podunk and Peadunk each having their own stations, they should share a transmitter and just each have their own studios.’’26 Whatever the merits of consolidation as a technical solution to limited bandwidth, however, these critics largely missed the point about local radio: business leaders in Podunk and Peadunk were not merely provincial Babbitts with overblown pride in their respective burgs, but in fact saw themselves locked in a fight with each other for economic and cultural survival. Local stations were playing an increasingly important role in the social and economic reorganization of small-town and rural life, continuing a process that had begun in earnest with the arrival of the automobile in the early 1900s; indeed, one could argue that local radio promised a modern ‘‘repair’’ to the social changes of modernization, giving an ironic twist to the emergence of car radios in the 1930s. In any case, the marginalization of local radio among regulators, national cultural leaders, and industry powerhouses reflected not just indifference but antagonism to that project of local retrenchment.

Selling the Local While civic boosters, as both economic and social leaders within a community, had one set of interests in radio, local stations often had different concerns, at times coinciding or overlapping but occasionally colliding with merchants’ needs and desires. In part these differences were due to the different constituencies that local broadcasters had to please: audiences, regulators, employees, and advertisers—both local and national. Whereas network affiliates could count on a strong market presence and healthy listenership for their national programs, as well as a steady source of relatively inexpensive programming with which to fill the hours that they could not sell to advertisers, nonaffiliated local stations were much more reliant on an imagined ‘‘local’’ to survive, especially during the lean years of the early 1930s. As Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd put it in their second Middletown study, ‘‘A small city station has an especially heavy and direct financial stake in featuring local matters that will attract and hold listeners.’’27 These local stations did not necessarily attempt to construct or appeal to an idea of a ‘‘local community’’ in the geographical sense, often focusing instead on ethnic identities, language groups, religious and political ideologies, or class identities. Class in particular often correlated with the kind of radio one enjoyed: working-class audiences frequently preferred popular (even ‘‘vulgar’’) musical genres, transgressive

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politics, and oppositional speaking styles that tended to put off middleand upper-class listeners.28 Derek Vaillant has emphasized the various ethnic and racial communities of Chicago and the ways in which different radio stations constructed their identities to appeal to different groups.29 Clearly, the concept of a geographically based ‘‘local’’ was not the only option available for a station trying to carve out a niche for itself against its competitors, including network stations. Furthermore, as pointed out above, when stations did posit a geographically local identity, it was as much defined by economic and political imperatives as by actual geography, population, or legal jurisdiction. Nonetheless, in hundreds of towns across the country, stations claiming to be the ‘‘voice of . . .’’ (Portland, Maine; Coffeyville, Kansas; wherever) found places for themselves within a difficult and competitive broadcasting field. In fact, given the right market, such localism could often help these stations do better than the network-affiliated competition. As Variety pointed out, ‘‘In radio we have the spectacle and the seeming paradox of stations with 500 or 1,000 watts making more powerful transmitters run a poor second in the local races. The small stations have showmanship and the big ones often have only their oscillation.’’30 Like the local independent merchant competing with chain stores (and radio networks like NBC were often called ‘‘chains’’ in this era, with all the divisive connotations of that term), local broadcasters could sometimes exploit knowledge of the local market to successfully compete with national rivals. One such broadcaster was Don Davis, the station manager at WHB, a part-time, independent station in Kansas City. ‘‘It’s tough to go up against some of the networks’ big musical shows,’’ Davis wrote in 1934, ‘‘and, of course, the indie seldom broadcasts spot news events of national importance—but in other respects the independent can lick its chain competitors time after time.’’31 In part this competition was waged through simple counterprogramming for local or niche taste communities neglected by the networks (‘‘When the chains have dance bands and dramatic skits, we give them hill-billy’’), but more frequently there was a direct appeal to local interests and attachments, from broadcasting municipal traffic court, to airing ‘‘locally popular talent with tested audience appeal,’’32 to programming what another Variety article called ‘‘the flux and reflux of municipal life, with stunts, prize fights, wrestling, sports events, and court trials.’’33 Additionally, a local station could take advantage of the phenomenology of place, helping to make that slippery and shifting notion of the ‘‘local’’ more concrete by inviting people to watch in person the shows being aired, thereby articulating performer, audience, station, and place to a local community in which they were all included. An example from the WHB case demonstrates the potential of this practice: the noontime

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program broadcast from Jones’s department store in Kansas City drew an average of 1,400 people per day for twenty-eight weeks. Similarly, the ‘‘man-on-the-street’’ genre in which an announcer stood on a busy corner and chatted with passersby instantiated the local community by blurring the line between broadcaster and audience.34 Additionally, a station could open its doors to local citizens and organizations to use the radio facilities, a move that had the effect of strengthening an idea of a local community that was centered on the radio station and providing the station with free programs to fill unsold airtime. A station did not need to be in a relatively large and musically rich market like Kansas City for the construction of a profitable localism to work. KFIZ, a local independent in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (population 60,000 in 1930), was equally adroit at deploying discourses of localism. Begun in 1922 as a sideline for a local car dealer, the station specialized in recorded music, news, and ‘‘chatter,’’ giving away a car annually as a promotion.35 Once an alliance was struck with the local newspaper in 1926, KFIZ’s schedule became quite typical for a broadcaster of its size, integrating the station into an imagined local community using local talent, interests, and social networks.36 Thus the ‘‘Fond du Lac Players’’ presented regular radio plays, including religious dramas for Holy Week; the Fond du Lac Fireman’s Band and the Elks Glee Club were regular features; the station aired live coverage of the county fair; and so forth. Fond du Lac’s equivalent of the noonday concerts at Jones’s department store in Kansas City took place in the (presumably less festive) surroundings of the Dugan Funeral Home, a main sponsor that hosted radio concerts in its parlor; additionally, ads for KFIZ emphasized local station personalities and invited listeners to visit the engineer in his booth at the station.37 Local sports were another popular feature, and a rise in attendance was noted at the high school basketball games after the station began airing them, suggesting a further elaboration of radio’s ability to exploit the phenomenology of place. As a team official explained, the broadcasts ‘‘cannot help but create a desire for the radio fan to attend a game and see who makes the noise—what the game is all about and why all this wild-eyed cheering and yelling.’’38 In addition to encouraging local groups and politicians to use its airtime, the station actively cultivated a local civic image, for instance, by promoting the local VFW’s poppy sale or sending KFIZ performers to provide the entertainment for such events as the Annual Badger Picnic.39 The construction of a local community gave broadcasters the ability to imagine and program for a somewhat coherent audience. It helped them select which records to play and inspired them to dream up the kinds of novelty shows that might work—stunts like KSO’s ‘‘Small Town Band Competition’’ in Des Moines; WHN’s contest to ‘‘Saw a Sponsor

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in Half ’’ in New York; and KTSA’s ‘‘Hillbilly Wedding’’ in San Antonio.40 Regular features were often derived from the supposed interests of this imagined audience, and a station that hit the mark could do quite well with such local shows. KLZ in Denver, for example, aired a highly successful regular program called Nuggets of the Rockies composed of skits based on the history of the old west; as a pamphlet for potential sponsors described the show’s appeal, ‘‘Fact is, such material finds its natural target in Denver, because both city and state are littered with hand-medowns from the pioneer mining days, and the citizens foster a strong interest therein.’’41 Articulating the station’s offerings to the local community also enabled broadcasters to contextualize what might have been considered second- or third-rate programming for easier consumption. Often relying on amateur or semiprofessional talent, stations embedded these performances in a discourse of locality that encouraged audiences to approach such shows with different expectations and interpretive lenses than they would a high-budget network program featuring Eddie Cantor or Rudy Vallee, counting on such discourses of localism as ‘‘neighborliness’’ and ‘‘unpretentiousness’’ to guide listeners’ reception of locally originated shows. In that sense, sound could have yet another spatial correlate, with the polished and professional talent of the networks ‘‘sounding’’ national and the slightly-less-ready-for-primetime glee club ‘‘sounding’’ local. Here, too, national-class critics had little sympathy for the ways in which local stations sought to promote a lens through which the available local talent could be appreciated by their local listeners. Just as Carl Dreher had complained about Podunk and Peadunk clogging up the dial, so too did John Wallace, writing in Radio Broadcast, complain about the ‘‘provincial minded’’ yokels whose baffling willingness to listen to Aunt Millie read her poems threatened to overrun the ‘‘real’’ talent on the network stations. In an article provocatively titled ‘‘Should the Small Station Exist?’’ Wallace agreed to tolerate small broadcasters only if they kept their local offerings out of the way of national programs: The farmers and other dwellers in the Centerville area are just as likely to prefer the wares of Centerville’s 10-watt broadcasting station to those of WCCO as they are likely to prefer the Centerville Bugle to the Minneapolis Tribune. Probably they are personally acquainted with most of the performers who appear before the Centerville station’s microphone, or at least they know the announcer’s cousin Nellie or their nephew goes to the same District school as the Staff Organist’s son. Hence their interest in the local program is natural enough, and since they enjoy it they are entitled to it. But we are all in favor of abolishing the small station from the metropolitan area.42

‘‘Sounding local’’ may have worked financially for local stations, then, but it also offended the national-class critics who disproportionately

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influenced the federal policy decisions that could disempower local independents, and fed the Babbitt stereotype that helped fuel the localnational struggles of the period. More important than guiding programming decisions and shaping listeners’ tastes, the idea of a local community gave local broadcasters something to sell to sponsors when larger stations and the networks had the big-name talent and higher production values. In that sense, localism was an economic discourse first and foremost for the small station, produced for the advertiser in order to justify, legitimate, and perpetuate the commercial underpinnings of the radio industry. This ‘‘market localism’’ was related to the discourses of civic boosterism discussed above and often served the same ends, as can be seen in an application to the FRC for a new local station in Pontiac, Michigan. In a clear attempt to defend Pontiac’s place distinct from and in competition with Detroit for regional influence, the application connected local shows to their local economic base, arguing, ‘‘None of the programs broadcast [in the area] may be considered local to Pontiac and any advertiser desiring to advertise in Pontiac . . . must also pay for the entire advertising coverage,’’ including Detroit.43 Although market localism and civic boosterism often overlapped, they were not completely compatible projects. The key distinction is that civic boosterism sought to cultivate ‘‘local patriotism,’’ while market localism constructed a local community that was available for sale to anyone, including national sponsors who were advancing the very translocal economic structures that civic boosterism was designed to resist. When stations sold the idea of local community, then, they were not necessarily boosting the community but rather positioning themselves as the ideal intermediary between sponsors—especially out-of-town sponsors—and audiences. In attracting non-local accounts, it was to the station manager’s advantage to play up the uniqueness and local-mindedness of his listeners. This tactic worked for both the local independent station as well as the network affiliate attempting to drum up more non-network business; stations of all sizes had a strong financial stake in convincing sponsors that only they knew the peculiarities of the local market. Thus we see Henry A. Bellows, a former radio commissioner who subsequently went back through the revolving door to become manager of CBS-affiliate WCCO in Minneapolis, practicing market localism when he claimed in Broadcast Advertising: ‘‘The majority of [WCCO’s] radio listeners prefer a good local program to a program of equal merit coming from a distance. We find, for instance, that there is vastly more enthusiasm among the listeners over the broadcasts of the Minneapolis Symphony orchestra than there has ever been over broadcasts of symphony concerts from New York or Chicago.’’44 Whether this claim was true or not,

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it did put sponsors on notice that they should strongly consider working with WCCO locally rather than with CBS nationally if they wanted to do well in the Twin Cities market. Similarly, Charles G. Burke, the manager of WDAY in Fargo, warned national sponsors about the importance of respecting local differences: ‘‘A vast majority of our listeners go for hill billy music, if it may be called music, in a big way. They would tune out a symphony. Yet we have accounts, desiring to sell to the farmers, who provide beautiful music, when hill billy music is needed.’’45 As was often the case in market localism, Burke’s reference to different cultural tastes had the dual effect of exploiting not just the national sponsor’s ignorance of local markets but also his cosmopolitan anxiety about the ‘‘locals’’ and their strange, pre-modern ways. Ad men themselves often contributed to the success of this strategy; as T. J. Jackson Lears argues, advertisers tended to hold themselves apart (and above) the consumers they were trying to reach: ‘‘This outlook required that admakers emphasize the social and intellectual chasm separating themselves from their audience.’’46 Michael Curtin adds that Chicago advertising agencies took particular advantage of this supposed chasm, claiming that their midwestern sensibility allowed them to know what would ‘‘play in Peoria’’ and thus bridge the cultural gap between urban cosmopolitanism and small-town life.47 What worked for ad men vis-a`-vis sponsors also worked for local stations vis-a`-vis advertisers. Thus, Burke’s seemingly gratuitous aside—‘‘if it may be called music’’—culturally aligned him with the national class, putting him on the side of national corporate sponsors and advertisers while securing for himself the privileged position of understanding his puzzling audience in a way that New York ad men could not.48 Perhaps the best example I have found of a station exploiting this national-local tension comes from an advertisement in a national advertising industry journal for WIBW, Topeka. It describes the Kansas ‘‘farmer’s daughter’’ in terms seemingly designed both to lure sponsors to the Topeka market and at the same time to undermine the confidence of a cosmopolitan ad man—an ad man who himself was trying to maintain a sense of cultural superiority while simultaneously not screwing up a big account: ‘‘Smart without being sophisticated, she leads her sex in High School or University. Her needs, as well as those of her parents, are those of Broadway, of Hollywood. Main Street and R.F.D. are disappearing. WIBW is keenly aware of this transition period and the increasing need for proper sales approach. Kansas is still Kansas. Its people respond best to sales messages from their own people in their own language. That’s why you can’t reach Kansas without WIBW.’’49 Through this kind of manipulation of local-modern cultural differences and national-local tensions, local station managers attempted to woo lucrative national accounts away from the networks. This is not

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to suggest that it was a fair fight. Local stations could still struggle mightily—one South Dakota station was in such dire straits in the early 1930s that it was reduced to playing not shellac phonograph records but lowerfidelity paper records that it received as free promotions from record companies—and network affiliation was still the key to assured profitability in 1930s radio.50 These economic realities help explain the hundreds of petitions for increased transmitter power filed with the FRC and the FCC during this period: the desire of the business class to poach business from ever farther outlying towns coincided with the desire of the station owner to get a powerful enough signal to secure network affiliation. But in lieu of such FRC-conferred advantages, ‘‘sounding local’’ to listeners as well as advertisers proved a viable strategy for small broadcasters around the country. While such efforts brought dollars into the local community, however, they did so by further nationalizing their locality in ways that were contrary to the objectives of civic boosterism—for example, by promoting national brands and the practices of national consumption themselves. Lears calls this the ‘‘universalist rhetoric of modernity’’ and argues that the discourses and practices of the new economy ‘‘helped rural folk submerge local and regional idiosyncrasies in standardized commercial style . . . [and a] growing uniformity of taste.’’51 Hal Barron links the same phenomenon to the kind of reorganization of space that radio facilitated: ‘‘The growing centrality of cities and the rise of consumer culture threatened to erode traditional sources of authority and diminish the social and cultural primacy of local communities.’’52 The irony, then, is the significant degree to which market localism and the local identities it precipitated helped make local radio an important part of this process of local diminishment.

Sounding Local and Translocal Localism A similar irony may be found in the ways in which national network shows found ways to tap into listener interest in the ‘‘neighborliness’’ and ‘‘unpretentiousness’’ of local radio: the production of what Hal Barron identifies as a transregional local identity. In other words, even bigcity producers of national programs for NBC and CBS could learn to ‘‘sound local,’’ using aesthetic markers of ‘‘local’’ broadcasting (e.g., regional accents, colloquial speech, a ‘‘common man’’ persona, plots involving small-town life) to posit shared ‘‘local’’ values of simplicity, neighborliness, independence, and face-to-face communication while advancing national economic and cultural structures.53 Specific examples of such shows will be discussed below, but the most prominent ones

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include Memory Lane, The Real Folks of Thompkins Corners, Lum and Abner, and National Barn Dance. This kind of ‘‘translocal localism’’ was in fact nothing new by the time of the network radio era. Among its most visible incarnations, rural and small-town newspapers had long used syndicated material to construct a generic ‘‘local’’ identity for themselves, running nationally distributed cartoons and columns proclaiming the virtues of ‘‘your local community’’ or ‘‘your hometown’’ (for example, Figures 9.1 and 9.2). In a particularly absurd iteration of this phenomenon, small-town presses around the country ran mass-produced, nationally distributed ads for civic boosterism, prepared by syndicators, that urged readers to ‘‘buy local.’’ But although the discourse was well established by the mid-1920s, the national networks were slow to draw on its power, not least because of the hostility to the ‘‘local’’ that equated socially responsible programming with national-class norms of propriety, decorum, and cosmopolitan taste. Over time, however, national programming increasingly employed an aesthetic of localism to overcome resistance to urban culture or appeal to different market segments, even as it continued to advance national radio at the expense of local radio and a shared national culture over local cultures and public spheres. ‘‘Local’’ broadcasters had been telling the national broadcasters for years how to reach the mass audience, urging them to adopt the folksy, friendly banter of a Henry Field on KMA in Shenandoah, Iowa, or the exuberant hucksterism of a Nils Thor Granlund (better known as ‘‘NTG’’) on WHN in New York. ‘‘People don’t care about gentle, modest talk,’’ argued William K. Henderson, a notorious populist radio personality who ran Shreveport’s KWKH, ‘‘They want it strong.’’54 As for the cultural selections themselves, in 1924 ‘‘farmer radio’’ pioneer Henry Field described his station’s style to a conference of mostly corporate broadcasters: ‘‘We have used the home type of music and program at our station, . . . and we find that there’s a very big demand, which a great many do not suspect, for simple, wholesome, old-fashioned, home type of music.’’ Implicitly rebuking national-class programming, he urged his colleagues to try a little more of his brand of ‘‘sounding local’’ in their broadcasts: ‘‘Now, I am admittedly a small town man, live on a farm, and expect to die there, and my tastes might be expected to run that way. But I find that a surprisingly large number of listeners of all classes feel very tired of cabaret music, and would like to have a little more of the old home-town stuff.’’55 Although national-class publications like The Nation continued to mock figures like Field for ‘‘talking familiarly to the folks,’’56 large broadcasters increasingly began taking Field’s advice during the late 1920s and early 1930s, abandoning the elevated speech and mid-Atlantic

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Fig. 9.1–9.2: Syndicated cartoons such as ‘‘Bill Booster’’ and ‘‘Mickie Says’’ (both by Charles Sughroe) and other features constructed a generic, translocal ‘‘local’’ identity for hundreds of localities around the country. Sources: Mountain Democrat (Placerville, Calif.), 30 June 1923, 10; Cuba City News-Herald (Cuba City, Wisc.), 8 Feb. 1924, 8. Images courtesy of International Paper Company.

accents known as ‘‘potted-palm’’ programming for more ‘‘home-town stuff,’’ and to great success. In part this shift was the result of economic considerations: sponsors may have desired to associate their products with prestige and class, but they also wanted to reach the largest possible pool of potential consumers. Thus audiences formerly known as ‘‘Ladies and Gentlemen’’ were increasingly addressed as ‘‘Friends,’’ as in ‘‘Friends, the products of General Petroleum are just as dependable as

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the good, honest, home folks whom you have just heard in Memory Lane.’’57 Advertising trade journals and the networks’ own promotional literature from the era are full of admonishments to sponsors to avoid going too highbrow in their programs. One anonymous broadcaster boasted to Broadcast Advertising in 1932, ‘‘We have eliminated the ‘highhat-ism’ which radio once knew,’’ while a few years later in Variety another advised his colleagues to develop ‘‘original program ideas through broadcasts having ‘Main Street’ appeal.’’58 Similarly, by 1935 an NBC pamphlet urged sponsors to follow the advice of a former BBC director of talks: ‘‘The key to successful broadcasting is personality—and personality as seen not from the point of view of the sophisticated listener but from the point of view of the average man and woman, who is suspicious of any trace of superiority and of anything that sounds highbrow and of any attempt at uplift or education.’’59 This folksier tone became integrated into the programming as well, and a host of programs featuring small-town crossroads and general stores reached the network schedules during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Michele Hilmes discusses this phenomenon at work in nonmusical programs like Memory Lane, The Real Folks of Thompkins Corners, Smackout, and Lum and Abner. These and other broadcasts featured small-town, unpretentious folks, often doing not much more than simply acting neighborly. In some ways, they were less stories than doses of pure localism through the ether; as the creators of Memory Lane admitted, ‘‘There is not enough plot to call it [a comedy]. . . . Each week the audience gets glimpses of the home life of the Goshen Center folks, their simple pleasures, their squabbles, quickly made up, the ‘box socials’ of the Ladies Aid, the annual church fair.’’60 Through shows like these, as well as the old-timey musical programs of the Barn Dance and Grand Ole Opry genre, radio, in Hal Barron’s words, ‘‘institutionalized localistic values of homeliness and neighborliness in ways that transcended the particular community, and it helped to define a more general culture that celebrated localism without being directly tied to the culture of any one locality.’’61 The small-town idyll these shows constructed was also free of the markers of social difference that made modern life so contentious: The ‘‘real folks’’ of Thompkins Corners and other denizens of the translocal locale were white, presumably Protestant, and safely middle class. On radio’s generic Main Street, if not on actual Main Streets around the country, the status and privilege of the traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class was never threatened by class, ethnic, or religious others. Such shows became just one of many different genres, not all of them reacting against urban culture,62 but they remain a significant part of the story of local radio. While small, independent local broadcasters like Mr.

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Davis in Kansas City sought to use their localness as a way to compete with national radio, the emergence of translocal localism represented competition from the networks in the realm of imagining—and giving sound to—the ‘‘American local community’’ even as the economics of national radio sucked dollars and cultural influence away from actual local communities around the country. And while local elites were trying to use local specificity to remap the spatial (and economic) relations within a region, national broadcasters were using local non-specificity to remove the spatial dimension altogether, constructing a localism whose place in modern America was only on the ether, a vast radio elsewhere that nonetheless sounded ‘‘local.’’

Conclusion: Assessing the Legacies of Early Local Radio The purpose and importance of local radio remain contested today, and struggles over the place of the local within the national economy and the national media system continue; these battles often center on the question of whether we should be concerned about localism at all. This chapter puts such issues in historical perspective. The technical, economic, and semantic characteristics of local radio during the 1920s and early 1930s became integrated into larger struggles over the spatial, economic, and cultural reorganization of American life at a key moment in the emergence and consolidation of a national culture. The devaluation of local radio in favor of national radio at the time—paralleled in radio scholarship ever since—was no innocent endorsement of ‘‘quality’’ broadcasting but a significant aspect of class, cultural, and geographical realignment. As the cases of Jeannette and Greensburg (and hundreds more such ‘‘Podunks’’ and ‘‘Peadunks’’) demonstrate, the marginalization of local radio during this period was part of a nationalizing project underwritten by federally minded authorities in the name of efficiency and rationalization, and by nationally minded cultural critics in the name of quality and progress.63 In that sense, it was part of a broader cultural project supported by urban, cosmopolitan elites to privilege national culture at the expense of local and regional cultures and identities (a marked difference from our present era, when urban-minded cosmopolitan elites consider ‘‘buying locally’’ an act of civic virtue). But putting it this way, in an oversimplified local-national dichotomy, understates the complexity of the local and regional reorganization of space of which local radio was a central part—the predatory localism of Oregon, Illinois, or the defensive localism of WHB in Kansas City. That the role of local radio in these struggles was unpredictable and contradictory speaks less to the value of localism as a media policy than to the success of the forces of national culture and national economy in remapping

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and resituating the local in American life. It also illustrates the shortcomings of overly political-economic approaches that attribute the relative weakness of localism in the U.S. media system primarily to network corporate power and the failure of regulators to keep that power in check: yes, national economic forces were strong, but questions of the local in policy, economics, and culture were too complex and too interwoven with larger cultural and spatial trends to reduce to a simple David and Goliath story. Like sound itself, Americans’ senses of local and national space—both geographic and social—shifted and echoed well beyond the scope of national-corporate control. What is at stake in the ways that local radio developed over this period? Beyond the role that it played in remapping Americans’ sense of space, which was profound, the growth of local broadcasting within a system of capitalist competition also had important effects on American culture and media democracy. As the worst of the Depression eased during the late 1930s and available advertising dollars increased for sponsored programming, even small local radio stations began to professionalize by using paid talent and syndicated programs, gradually reducing space for civic radio of the kind that the Northfield Lions Club or the Fond du Lac Elks Glee Club actively participated in during the 1920s and early 1930s. The spatial and cultural valence of local radio shifted as the public’s access to the airwaves diminished. The local would continue to be an important signifier and a major part of what a radio station had to sell, but increasingly that local was defined primarily by the station and its sponsors: the construction of local identities and public spheres in and through radio became less of a collaborative process in which citizens had a voice. It would be another forty years before cable access television and community radio made possible the degree of public media production that was common in early local radio. And as the advent of the Internet indicates, the competition to define space and place through the media system is far from over.

Chapter 10

The Sound of Print: Newspapers and the Public Promotion of Early Radio Broadcasting in the United States Michael Stamm

Daily life in the 1920s and 1930s was a bit louder than it had been previously, as the new invention of radio gave Americans the sound of music, news, sports, church services, and dramatic programming.1 ‘‘With but little equipment,’’ sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd marveled in 1929, ‘‘one can call the life of the rest of the world from the air.’’ Six years later, psychologists Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport argued that radio expanded and democratized human experience through sound. While listening to the radio, the ‘‘poor man escapes the confines of his poverty; the country dweller finds refuge from local gossip; the villager acquires cosmopolitan interests; the invalid forgets his loneliness and his pain; the city dweller enlarges his personal world through contact with strange lands and peoples.’’ Radio was a ‘‘gigantic and invisible net which each listener may cast thousands of miles into the sea of human affairs and draw in teeming with palpable delights from which he may select according to his fancy,’’ and its effects were revolutionary, Cantril and Allport concluded. Radio was ‘‘an altogether novel medium of communication, preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.’’2 Between 1920, when about one of every five hundred American households had a primitive, often homemade apparatus to receive radio broadcasts, and 1940, some 80 percent of American homes added a new piece of mass-produced machinery that brought in the sounds of the outside world. For many contemporaries, radio was an alluring and fantastic medium that allowed listeners to hear disembodied voices from distant people and places that they might never see with their own eyes.

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In early 1922, a writer in The Nation remarked that the radio listener could ‘‘build his own Utopia in contemplation of the conquests of space by sound.’’ Radio offered the revolutionary possibility of linking spatially disparate people into a communal network of aural spectators. ‘‘Those who believe that revolutions are made neither by the pen nor the sword but by new inventions,’’ the writer claimed in a tone of pure technological determinism, ‘‘will find a fascinating subject for speculation in the sudden and amazing growth in the use of radio.’’3 And yet, while radio certainly did enable new ways of imagining the world through sound, it did not simply or seamlessly displace the longstanding practice of apprehending the world through print. A nation of radio listeners remained as well a nation of readers, and as they added radio sets to their homes in vast numbers in the 1920s and 1930s, Americans never stopped reading newspapers and books. In fact, they read more. Between 1920 and 1940, the period when radio became a regular part of American life, daily newspaper circulation rose by almost a third, a rate that well outpaced population growth. Printed books remained similarly popular.4 The Book-of-the-Month Club began operation in 1926 and helped spur, as historian Joan Shelley Rubin argues, the ‘‘continued growth of the book market.’’5 This is not to suggest that there was nothing new or peculiar about early radio listening, nor is it to ignore the profound strangeness that was part of the early radio listening experience. But it is to suggest that the experience of listening to radio is impossible to bracket completely from the experience of reading printed texts. Theologian and cultural historian Walter Ong remarks that radio creates new ways of listening to and communicating with sound, but he also argues that this new orality does not override or diminish the significance of reading. In fact, Ong argues, this ‘‘secondary orality’’ completely depends upon print. For Ong, a pure or ‘‘primary orality’’ was a historical and cultural phenomenon existing before the invention of writing and the development of literacy. While these old and new forms of orality both have a ‘‘participatory mystique’’ and a ‘‘communal sense,’’ modern ‘‘secondary orality’’ is ‘‘essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print.’’ As a component of this ‘‘secondary orality,’’ radio listening is for Ong a kind of willful and temporary release from literacy and rationality, a practice that ‘‘promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing.’’ The modern orality experienced through radio listening, in other words, never fully escapes the clutches of the printed text, and as the listener delights in radio sound, he or she does so knowingly and only in fleeting withdrawal from the ‘‘analytic reflectiveness implemented by writing.’’6

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In this essay I would like to propose a new way of understanding the history of early broadcasting by examining the ways that radio developed through its relationship with the familiar medium of print, in particular the institution of the daily newspaper. In the 1920s, American newspapers were filled with articles about radio, often in lavish specialty sections teaching listeners how to build sets and promoting the programs and personalities they might hear once they had done so.7 As historian Catherine Covert suggests, this practice of reading about radio helped temper and moderate the new medium’s novelty. Through reading newspapers, Americans found ways of adapting to radio, of making it seem familiar, and of becoming comfortable with the idea that some part of their knowledge of the world was now given to them in the form of sound by disembodied voices emanating from a machine. Newspapers, Covert argues, ‘‘played a crucial conservative role in the process of confronting the new.’’8 Newspapers not only covered radio as a news item but also became significant producers of radio sound as they began establishing their own broadcasting stations, in the process playing a major role in what Susan Douglas has called the ‘‘social construction of American broadcasting’’ in interwar America.9 Historians are currently producing a vibrant and growing literature on the new aural culture created by radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, but most have thus far largely neglected two significant aspects of this history: the degree to which it was continuous with an established culture of print, and the degree to which newspapers as existing business enterprises contributed to the development of American radio broadcasting.10 In the formative era of American broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, Detroit News, and Milwaukee Journal were among the hundreds of papers around the country that owned radio stations. By 1935, newspapers owned 20 percent of American radio stations, and by 1940 they owned 30 percent of the stations on the air, including some of the most powerful and important stations in the country.11 The creation of Walter Ong’s ‘‘secondary orality’’ involved not only the cultural linkages forged as Americans incorporated radio listening into the everyday practice of reading newspapers, but also institutional linkages, as the corporations that had been selling printed newspapers to Americans also began to use radio broadcasting to reach the audience through sound. Newspapers owning radio stations used radio as a way to promote themselves and in the process framed radio as the outgrowth of a familiar and recognizable print institution. Through broadcasting, newspapers linked the new aural medium to an established visual medium and created a new kind of media institution with a multimedia presence. In order to create this new multimedia corporation that linked sound

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and print, newspaper-broadcasters employed several strategies: they constantly announced themselves on the air through call letters and station identifications, developed complementary content that circulated as both radio sound and printed text, and generated a discourse attempting to establish themselves as the most legitimate and authoritative providers of news in a society that was becoming increasingly saturated with multiple forms of media. During the 1920s and 1930s, the strategies used by corporations responsible for producing the silent, printed page also generated the new sounds on the radio. Ultimately, newspapers made radio part of an ongoing everyday process in which listeners heard what might be described as the sound of print.

Invisible Ink: Newspapers and the Branding of the Airwaves For some newspapers, radio was a promotional tool that allowed them to reach people who could literally not read their printed pages: the blind. In 1924 a consortium of newspapers in New York and Chicago partnered with the American Radio Association and the American Foundation for the Blind and began trying to raise money to provide radio sets to the sightless. The Chicago Tribune began implementing a version of this program the following year when it arranged to have Boy Scouts place radio sets in the homes of the city’s blind. Through this program, the paper claimed, ‘‘Something new will come into the sightless lives of Chicago’s needy blind. Sitting there in the eternal night he or she will hear a young chap steal into the room, fuss around and in a little while the boy will place two strange things on his or her ears—yes, a new world.’’ This strategy of donating radio sets to the blind allowed newspapers to promote themselves through a medium that otherwise lacked a visual presence, and with it the Tribune could count among its audience people who could not actually see the printed page.12 Newspapers also connected their print and radio presences by using the call letters of their stations to reinforce to the audience the identity of the common corporate producer. In Oregon, the small Roseburg NewsReview obtained the call letters KRNR (‘‘K-Roseburg-News-Review’’), giving its radio station a regular, direct, and easily recalled connection to the printed page. Similarly, the Milwaukee Journal obtained the call letters WTMJ, which stood for ‘‘The Milwaukee Journal,’’ a fact that the station reminded listeners of with what one journalist called ‘‘repeated station call letter announcements’’ during its broadcasts.13 The Chicago Tribune, the paper that had long been calling itself the ‘‘World’s Greatest Newspaper,’’ successfully petitioned the Department of Commerce in the early 1920s to have its station’s call letters changed to WGN, the slogan’s acronym, and several times per hour, between musical selections

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and during program breaks, listeners were reminded of WGN’s relationship to the Chicago Tribune. Many other papers used this strategy of constantly identifying themselves on the air. In 1931 Detroit News managing editor W. S. Gilmore reported success with WWJ, the paper’s radio station, remarking that it ‘‘offered a new and startling method of putting our name before the public,’’ and claiming that listeners had responded to the constant invocation of the institutional connection between the two media. ‘‘We know that in thousands of homes our station is spoken of as ‘The News’ rather than as WWJ,’’ Gilmore stated, ‘‘and that the letters WWJ and Detroit News are synonymous.’’ In 1935 new Detroit News managing editor Fred Gaertner stated that his paper ‘‘always . . . appended’’ its name to the call letters WWJ when it announced them, ‘‘thus always keeping in the listeners’ minds the name of the station’s owner.’’ The paper found the practice quite successful, and Gaertner remarked that as ‘‘pure institutional advertising alone, the constant ‘drip, drip of the water on the stone’ idea has been of great value.’’ Ultimately, this strategy made newspapers regular presences on the airwaves around the country, and it gave them a way of using their stations to complement the newspaper business. As William S. Hedges, the manager of the Chicago Daily News station WMAQ, asserted in 1924, through the repeated mention of a newspaper’s name on the air, the ‘‘broadcasting station of the newspaper pours inoffensively its name into the willing ears of thousands of listeners.’’14 In the early 1920s, many listeners were attracted to radio not as much by the broadcast content they heard as they were by the sheer novelty of listening to distant voices. Newspapers owning radio stations explored the new medium’s promotional potential through call letter and station announcements, in the process providing the sense that these strange new sounds came from established and familiar institutions. As historian Susan Douglas points out, however, the basic existence of radio sound soon proved insufficient for the many listeners who began desiring more structured and polished broadcasts. In response, Douglas argues, stations began developing more professional-sounding musical, sports, news, and dramatic programming to attract and retain a wider audience.15 By virtue of established reputations in their communities, many newspapers were connected with local institutions such as symphonies, universities, churches, and sports teams and were thus uniquely positioned to provide this appealing content for radio. In 1921 the Detroit News, for example, claimed to have established the ‘‘first ever radio orchestra ever organized,’’ and they began broadcasting University of Michigan football games in 1924. Edwin Lloyd Tyson, a teen radio enthusiast who went to work at WWJ, recalled how he used the local

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prestige of the News when he negotiated with Detroit Tigers owner Frank Navin to broadcast the teams’ games in 1928. Baseball exploded in popularity throughout the 1920s as radio broadcasts of games ‘‘democratized’’ the sport, historian Jules Tygiel argues, by providing an ‘‘intimate sense of being at the game to millions who could never attend.’’ Tyson’s deal with the Detroit Tigers allowed WWJ and the Detroit News to provide both a live listening experience of the games over the radio and the opportunity to sell subsequent coverage in the newspaper’s pages. In 1934 the paper took this a step further when it secured commercial sponsorship for the baseball broadcasts, thus earning the company additional profits from presenting baseball in both sound and print. Besides concerts and baseball games, radio interviews with traveling celebrities were also ways for newspaper-broadcasters to use both media in tandem. Rex G. White, another WWJ and Detroit News employee, recalled that he would always ‘‘watch the news columns; and if someone was in town, a scientist for instance, or a great artist or musician—anyone of any note—I would try to contact them and persuade them to come over and do something on the radio.’’ White sold the potential guests on the fact that an appearance on WWJ would give them extra publicity, as the paper would announce and report it. This early multimedia marketing appealed to many potential guests, and Rex White stated that most of the people he approached ‘‘agreed very readily and came over,’’ though ‘‘nearly all of them’’ were ‘‘in a state of nerves’’ in the early days.16 Like Tyson and White at WWJ, staffers at the Chicago Daily News’s WMAQ groped for appealing programming to air and found that the newspaper provided an ideal means of doing so. Station employee Judith Waller recalled that she spent a great deal of time visiting ‘‘music schools, and lyceums, Chautauqua agencies and places of that kind,’’ asking them to come on the radio and ‘‘offering them some publicity in the paper’’ in return. Programming was a question of ‘‘getting what you could get,’’ and Waller tried to use the Daily News staff to assist her. Luckily, a number of columnists ‘‘were willing to help,’’ and Daily News writers filled a good portion of WMAQ’s early programming schedule with talks by the paper’s writers. WMAQ also attracted public figures onto the air by offering them additional promotion in the newspaper. As William S. Hedges recalled, the best incentive he developed to entice potential radio personalities ‘‘was the fact that I always saw to it that our talent got a good plug in the Chicago Daily News.’’17 The Daily News’s rival Chicago Tribune spent lavishly on WGN programming and searched for public events that could be broadcast to a wide audience. In 1924 WGN began broadcasting the games of both local major league baseball teams, and the following year, the station broadcast the Rose Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, and the Indianapolis 500,

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among other events.18 Along with coverage of these live events, newspapers like the Tribune also began developing serial programming to attract regular listenership, and one of the most popular and controversial of these programs was the Tribune’s Sam ’n’ Henry, the program that later became Amos ’n’ Andy. The program began on WGN as a six-dayper-week serial, a format that seamlessly integrated the radio station and the newspaper. Historian Michele Hilmes remarks that the ‘‘newspaper is the original serial form: appearing daily, open-ended, with many recurring features’’ and points out that regular programs like Sam ’n’ Henry were direct outgrowths of this model. As printed comic strips, advice columns, and crossword puzzles encouraged the regular purchase of a daily newspaper even when the events of the day were not necessarily compelling, radio serials attracted regular audiences to listen to stories with familiar characters. Barely three months after going on the air, Sam ’n’ Henry was a hit, and it attracted a wide audience that understood the show’s relationship to the newspaper. The Tribune claimed in an advertisement that, after the program at one point had been off the air for several days, the newspaper was ‘‘deluged with thousands of telephone calls’’ and ‘‘seven thousand letters’’ asking when it would be back on. The advertisement, featuring gross racial imagery of characters played on the air by two white actors, assured concerned readers that the program would be back on that evening. In 1927 the Tribune began running a companion comic strip to the broadcast, further linking station, paper, and program. In 1928 Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the show’s creators, took the program to WMAQ, the station owned by the rival newspaper Chicago Daily News, changed the name to Amos ’n’ Andy, and continued to enjoy the multimedia promotion of a newspaper-radio corporation. Though the Tribune lost Amos ’n’ Andy, it continued to use its radio station and printed pages to supplement each other. In 1930, WGN began airing a radio version of Little Orphan Annie, a program based on a popular comic strip that the paper had run since 1924.19 Newspapers were certainly not the only station owners to develop new kinds of programming during the 1920s or to aggressively promote their stations. Hundreds of stations around the country owned by a variety of individuals, groups, and corporations were doing this as well. What is significant about the newspaper group is how they used radio programming and printed content to link the two media together in the eyes, ears, and minds of their audience. As they connected printed text and radio sound, newspapers marked the airwaves with their names and brands, and they developed corporations with presences in multiple media. The new sound of radio, in other words, was tethered to print.

Fig. 10.1: Chicago Tribune advertisement, 22 April 1926, 34. Though the race of the characters Sam and Henry was not visible over the radio, print advertisements explicitly demonstrated it. They also touted the Chicago Tribune’s production of the show. Reprinted by permission of the Chicago Tribune; Copyright Chicago Tribune; all rights reserved.

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Authoritative Sound: Newspapers, Radio, and the Press-Radio War As baseball games and serial programs like Amos ’n’ Andy helped radio attract an audience desiring access to sports and entertainment programming, news broadcasting attracted an audience that wanted live coverage and reports of current events, and newspapers sought such events for their radio stations. Perhaps the most significant early example of this sort of news coverage was WGN’s broadcasting of the Scopes trial in 1925. John Scopes, a biology teacher arrested for teaching the theory of evolution in a public school classroom, went on trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in July in a case that became one of the defining events of the decade. The Scopes trial, WGN officials believed, was a chance to cover a legal proceeding that elicited great public fascination and one that offered the possibility of great oratory from William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. WGN set up microphones in the courtroom and obtained an exclusive wire connection back to Chicago, where it used its powerful transmitter to broadcast the proceedings of the trial across the country. The coverage of the trial that WGN aired reflected the inchoate and experimental practices involved in radio broadcasting during the mid1920s, a time when the live reporting of ongoing events was rare. It was so rare, in fact, that one instance of live news broadcasting by the Atlanta Journal station WSB in 1922 drew national attention as a significant event in itself. In late 1922, a fire broke out in downtown Atlanta near the Journal’s building during WSB’s evening music program. Station announcer Lambdin Kay stopped the music and began providing a live news report of the unfolding events before he was forced to leave the scene when the fire crept too close. The station earned praise from the city’s fire chief for quickly alerting residents to the fire and from other newspapers for its news reporting. The Philadelphia Inquirer claimed that it learned about the fire not through the ‘‘more conventional medium of the telegraph instrument’’ but through the radio from a ‘‘speaking voice’’ that ‘‘came floating through the air, a distance of approximately 760 miles.’’ Other newspapers around the country reported the story based on WSB’s account, attesting to both the range of the station and the news-reporting possibilities of a medium with the ability to reach a mass audience from a single transmitter, as opposed to the point-topoint nature of the telegraph.20 When WGN went to Dayton in 1925 to broadcast the Scopes trial, the profession of broadcast news had yet to take shape, and radio ‘‘news’’ did not mean coverage of breaking stories but was much more the planned live broadcasting of interesting and prescheduled events like the Scopes trial. WGN’s coverage of the trial reflected this, as the station

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treated the trial like the sporting events that it aired. The announcer was Quin Ryan, the voice of the station’s sports broadcasts, and the Tribune promised that Ryan would ‘‘give a comprehensive radio picture of the setting from his coop in the courtroom, as he has done the big sporting events that have been put on the air,’’ and claimed that as ‘‘the various court officials or lawyers begin to speak, or as the witnesses appear on the stand, the announcer will identify for the benefit of listeners the person speaking, using no more time than is necessary to keep the listener in touch with the various situations as they arise.’’ As hundreds of print reporters from around the country reported from Dayton, WGN broadcast live courtroom proceedings for the first time in American history, including Darrow’s now legendary examination of Bryan as a witness for the prosecution. Tragically, no recordings of any of the broadcasts exist, but in photographs on the silent pages of newspapers and magazines, the WGN microphone is present in the frame, providing a sign that events in the Dayton, Tennessee, courtroom were being sent live across the country. The WGN microphone was also the mark of a brand, a sign that the self-proclaimed ‘‘World’s Greatest Newspaper’’ was bringing the news to the people over the new medium of radio. Newspapers, the WGN microphone signaled, were present at and instrumental in the creation of American broadcasting, and instrumental in redefining the concept of news for an audience that both read and heard it.21 Not all newspapers owned radio stations, however, and for those papers that did not own a station, news broadcasting created a great deal of anxiety, and their defensive responses eventually led in the early 1930s to what was called the Press-Radio War. Publishers opposed to broadcasting battled to save their businesses and in the process created debates about the relationship between printed and radio news and about the political consequences of a society developing an attraction toward the latter.22 The Press-Radio War was in one sense a commercial conflict between ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new’’ media corporations, as newspapers’ advertising revenues dropped substantially while radio’s increased dramatically during the early 1930s.23 Though the ongoing Great Depression played a significant role in the decline of print advertising, many publishers instead laid the blame squarely on radio. Trade journal Editor & Publisher claimed in 1931 that radio was ‘‘the greatest competitor [newspapers] . . .ever faced,’’ and asserted that the industry was ‘‘being picked to pieces, unit by unit’’ by what the magazine described as an ‘‘integrated, centralized, vigorous radio competitor.’’24 In response, publishers in the early 1930s employed a variety of tactics to compete with radio. Some papers stopped printing specialty sections devoted to radio. Other papers dropped radio program listings or demanded that stations

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that wanted their listings printed pay for the space like any other advertiser. Some publishers agreed to print program listings only with the names of program sponsors omitted, so as to discourage advertisers from thinking they could attach their names to radio programs and get their name in the paper free.25 These newspaper strategies were unsuccessful in slowing radio’s growth, and by late 1932 tensions spilled over into the situation known as the Press-Radio War. Historian Gwenyth Jackaway asserts that the clash was unavoidable because the two media competed not only over advertising revenue but also over which medium would be America’s primary and most trusted source of information. Newspapers, Jackaway argues, struggled to ‘‘retain control over . . . the power to control the channels of news distribution in America,’’ and this struggle opened up a contentious debate about the relative quality and influence of broadcast and print versions of news stories.26 Some publishers and journalists claimed that news was simply different when heard over the radio, and that print afforded a superior sensory experience for news. Others claimed that the emotional appeal of radio sound did not cultivate a rational public as reading did, but instead created a public that was at best ill informed and at worst ripe for mass deception. These issues emerged later in elite political theoretical circles, for example in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Ju¨rgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, but publishers, broadcasters, and critics already were struggling with these issues during the 1930s as practical and commercial concerns.27 Publishers charged that radio news was harmful to society because it reached the public through sound, a method of delivery that many claimed was vastly inferior to print. The radio listener, in the minds of many publishers, was an easily satisfied and even lazy citizen who did not want to commit to the hard work of reading. In 1932, for example, Ventura Free Press publisher H. O. Davis issued a blistering critique of radio news. ‘‘The printed word,’’ Davis argued, ‘‘the orderly procession of black symbols on the white page, is directed primarily at the reasoning, analytical intellect.’’ Radio, in contrast, appealed to the ‘‘lower brain centers’’ and the ‘‘instincts, fears and prejudices of the uncritical listener.’’ This ‘‘personal, emotional appeal’’ of the radio voice, Davis argued, ‘‘makes it the most potent instrument for good or evil . . . [and] loads the microphone with social TNT,’’ while print ‘‘gives the reader an opportunity to test the arguments in the cold light of reason and analysis.’’ Writing in Harper’s, journalist Isabelle Keating agreed with Davis, asserting that it was a ‘‘psychological truth that the ear is the lazy man’s way of learning; the eye, the intelligent man’s instrument.’’28 For Davis and Keating, print required a greater commitment from readers

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than radio did from listeners, and this 1930s critique of ‘‘sound-bite’’ news promoted newspaper reading as the means to obtain news and information in the more legitimate form. The reader had agency and rationality, the listener passivity and a comfort in shallow satisfactions, and critics like Davis and Keating suggested that obtaining news from the printed page was a more authentic and enriching experience than was hearing news as sound over the radio. As Editor & Publisher concurred, ‘‘Informed opinion is the base of popular government. Public institutions are safe only when public matters are thoroughly aired and interpreted. By no stretch of the imagination can we see radio doing a thorough job. The danger would be that shallow-minded or very busy people might be willing, if radio pretends to cover the news field, to rely upon its narrow and uncertain trickle of fact.’’ Ultimately, many in the newspaper industry claimed, radio was an inferior and even politically dangerous way to experience news.29 The campaigns by anti-radio publishers to contain the perceived threat posed by radio news culminated in December 1933, when representatives from the radio and newspaper industries gathered at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City to negotiate the so-called Biltmore Agreement. The Agreement created the Press-Radio Bureau, a committee with representatives from the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA); the press agencies United Press, Associated Press, and International News Service; the National Association of Broadcasters; and the radio networks NBC and CBS. Under the Agreement, radio stations would receive two daily press reports from the wire services and be allowed two daily five-minute news broadcasts, one in the morning and one in the evening. The morning report could not be given before 9:30 a.m., and the evening report could not be given before 9:00 p.m. The overriding goal of the Biltmore Agreement was to limit radio’s ability to compete directly with newspapers in the dissemination of news, as the ANPA reported that the ‘‘bulletins will be written and broadcast in such a manner as to stimulate public interest in the reading of newspapers.’’30 For anti-radio newspapers in the 1930s, and for a number of historians since, the Press-Radio War was a defining event in early radio history. For the newspapers that owned radio stations, however, the episode had little long-term significance. Their opposition to it prevented the Biltmore Agreement from ever attaining any lasting legitimacy, and they were always much more interested in working with both print and radio than they were in simply defending the newspaper business. By mid1935, the Biltmore Agreement had ‘‘gone down the chute,’’ as Isabelle Keating put it, as publishers and broadcasters across the country openly ignored it. Though the Press-Radio Bureau existed until 1940, it was ultimately far less important than the already ongoing trend of newspapers

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purchasing or starting their own radio stations. Many newspapers had already established themselves in radio in the 1920s, and the number of newspapers owning radio stations went up every year during the 1930s. As early as 1932, Business Week remarked that it was ‘‘only the singularly naı¨ve onlooker who imagines it to be a fight between newspapers and radio’’ and claimed that the ‘‘public expects a grudge fight between natural rivals for a big purse, but insiders know better. It’s really newspaper vs. newspaper.’’ The significant line of competition in the media, in other words, was not between industries producing either print or sound, but rather between corporations trying to gain supremacy in the business of providing news and information in print and sound.31 For the newspapers that owned radio stations, news broadcasting was an increasingly important part of their business, and they worked before, during, and after the Press-Radio War to continue to broadcast news, and also to promote their news broadcasts as the most authoritative on the air. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, used its station, KSD, as part of a multimedia news reporting program that it claimed provided high-quality news coverage. Shortly after the 1932 presidential election, Joseph Pulitzer wrote to L. K. Nicholson, the president of the New Orleans Times-Picayune and a staunch opponent of broadcast news, arguing that it was the duty of newspapers to get breaking news like election results to the people as fast as possible. ‘‘My view,’’ Pulitzer wrote Nicholson, ‘‘[is that] the public on election night looks to the newspapers to inform it promptly as to what happened on election day.’’ Moreover, Pulitzer claimed, the public ‘‘particularly looks to newspapers like the Post-Dispatch which operate radio stations to give it this information by radio,’’ as this was news that Pulitzer believed his audience members felt they could trust. Newspapers simply could not compete with radio when it came to providing spot news reports of ongoing events, Pulitzer claimed, as printed extras were invariably ‘‘hastily prepared and incomplete’’ compared with radio broadcasts. Essentially, Pulitzer told Nicholson, ‘‘we are confronted by a condition and not a theory, and as the radio beats the newspaper extra in speed, accuracy, and public convenience, the newspaper had better utilize the radio and not permit some one else to make use of it and beat the newspaper.’’ One of Pulitzer’s top-ranking executives, A. G. Lincoln, took this a step further, stating that he believed that ‘‘if news must be broadcast it should be broadcast by newspaper-owned stations.’’ Pulitzer and his executives shared some of the anxieties of publishers who took part in the Press-Radio War about the quality of radio news, but their solution was not to fight radio but to simply do the broadcasting themselves.32 Publishers like Pulitzer ultimately used their news broadcasting as a way to initiate an often self-serving discourse about respectability and

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credibility on the air. With no visual marker attesting to the authority and trustworthiness of broadcast news, the argument from publisherbroadcasters went, news broadcasting needed some institutional authority to best present the facts and to prevent the circulation of rumor, innuendo, and unreliable reporting. Editor & Publisher claimed that most broadcasters had no ‘‘trained news judgment,’’ a problem that was compounded by the fact that radio left no ‘‘permanent record.’’ False reports were thus easy to make and ‘‘hard to refute,’’ and for proponents of newspaper-owned radio stations like Joseph Pulitzer and A. G. Lincoln, this was exactly the reason why their institutional connection to print made their stations the best-qualified parties to do news broadcasting.33 Newspapers that embraced radio during the 1920s and 1930s believed that sound and print together benefited listeners by giving them the best news available, as Joseph Pulitzer argued, and many also believed that radio news stimulated further newspaper reading. Paul Kelly, the editor of the Portland Oregonian, asserted that the paper’s station KGW ‘‘whetted interest’’ in the paper for a ‘‘more comprehensive report of the events merely sketched in passing over the air.’’ In 1935 Walter Damm, the promotion manager of the Milwaukee Journal’s WTMJ, noted that ‘‘Milwaukee people do not substitute radio news for the daily newspaper; instead, they tend to become more careful newspaper readers’’ as a result of radio listening. According to surveys that the paper had done, a ‘‘large majority’’ of listeners used radio ‘‘as a guide to the reading of their favorite newspapers.’’ As Damm asserted, people became better informed and were more likely to have their interest piqued by developments in the news if they heard about them on the radio, and he found that this would lead them to then purchase and read the paper to learn more. News as radio sound did not create a lazy, incurious, or non-reading public, Damm concluded, as there was ‘‘definite indication that the news bulletins have increased reader interest in the newspaper.’’ Sales figures supported these kinds of assertions, both at the Milwaukee Journal and elsewhere. Guy Hamilton, the vice president of McClatchy Newspapers, a California-based chain that also owned several radio stations, noted that his papers’ circulations had ‘‘continually increased, with very little circulation promotion, and we attribute it primarily to the good will engendered by the radio service which we have given to the community.’’ Paul Kelley of the Portland Oregonian noted that his paper had experienced increased circulation during the ‘‘period of most intensive radio activity by this newspaper and the period of greatest dissemination of news by radio.’’ In New York, Frank Gannett also noted that radio had ‘‘helped build circulation and prestige’’ for his newspaper. Newspaperowned stations around the United States had succeeded in promoting

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their papers to listeners and in creating a sense that one institution could provide news and information in two forms, one a printed page and the other radio sound, and they developed ways of ensuring that radio did not supplant the printed page, but instead supplemented and even promoted it.34 During the 1920s and 1930s, some of America’s most powerful publishers fully embraced this strategy and created corporations that were responsible for transforming the institutional structure of the American media. William Randolph Hearst, for example, had begun assembling his radio empire in the mid-1920s when he purchased station WISN in Milwaukee in 1925, and by October 1930 his enthusiasm about broadcasting had led him to believe that ‘‘every newspaper in our service ought to own at least a controlling interest in a radio station.’’ These stations, Hearst argued, should ‘‘develop the most popular possible broadcasting personalities and to provide programs over our stations that will be of vital interest to the public, and consequently of great advantage to the paper.’’ Hearst’s success with radio soon inspired highlevel internal discussions about the possibility of purchasing the entire Columbia Broadcasting System. Though this never came to pass, Hearst did acquire several more radio stations around the country during the 1930s and continued to remain enthusiastic about the possibilities of using radio to augment his newspaper holdings. As Hearst claimed in 1933, the company had ‘‘not yet scratched the surface of possibilities in the use of radio as an instrument to build circulation and prestige. Radio can be used for more than just general promotional service—it can be made to intensify interest in the newspaper itself—and ingenuity should constantly be exercised to find ways of accomplishing this.’’ Hearst also remained enthusiastic about the possibilities of cooperating with the major networks and continued to cultivate relationships with CBS and NBC throughout the 1930s.35 Many broadcasters responded positively to these publisher entreaties. NBC president Merlin Hall Aylesworth worked to set up affiliations between NBC-owned stations and newspapers in their home cities, asking publisher Roy Howard to assist the company in obtaining newspaper affiliation for NBC-owned stations in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. NBC also established a partnership with the stations owned by McClatchy Newspapers in 1936. The McClatchy stations became, as NBC executive Lenox Lohr described them, ‘‘great NBC boosters—over their stations as well as in their newspapers, where nearly a page is devoted in each issue to NBC pictures and news.’’ The network cultivated relationships with other key newspaper stations across the country and found ‘‘staunch allies’’ in newspaper-radio owners at the Buffalo Evening News, Detroit News, Kansas City Star, and Milwaukee Journal. NBC executive Niles

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Trammel summed up NBC’s attitude in writing to J. S. McCarrens, the vice president and general manager of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, that ‘‘men such as you and organizations such as yours are the kind of men and the kind of organizations we like to do business with.’’ At the highest levels of America’s leading media corporations, newspapers were seen as vehicles to legitimate and promote broadcasting, a viewpoint embodied publicly in a two-page advertisement that NBC placed in Editor & Publisher. On the left page, a line drawing showed a radio tower perched atop a printing press, the tower sending radio waves in all directions, the press churning out newspapers below. The picture presented a clear message of power and harmony, something the text on the facing page amplified. ‘‘The ideals, aims and accomplishments of newspapers and radio are essentially alike,’’ the advertisement proclaimed. ‘‘As major means of national communication, they join forces many times to transmit news of vital significance,’’ and ‘‘from every angle . . . the press and the microphone complement each other.’’ The text at the bottom of the advertisement made the institutional connections clear: ‘‘There are today thirty-one newspaper owned or affiliated radio stations associated with the NBC Networks.’’ The foundation of radio, the NBC advertisement suggested, was the newspaper press.36

War, The War of the Worlds, and the Consolidation of the Newspaper-Radio Relationship Despite the continuing and positive evolution of the newspaper-radio relationship, the discourse about the relative merits of print and radio as media for news distribution never completely dissipated, as two episodes in the autumn of 1938 illustrated. The first event, radio coverage of the Munich crisis in September, demonstrated the benefits of newspaper-radio partnership, while the second, Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast in October, evoked lingering anxiety about radio’s potential to deceive and manipulate listeners with sound. As newspapers consolidated their positions in the radio industry by establishing and purchasing greater numbers of radio stations during the 1930s, they also consolidated their positions in 1938 as the self-appointed guardians of quality radio broadcasting through their participation in and reaction to these two events. The Munich crisis—Adolf Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia— took place over eighteen days in 1938. From 12 to 29 September, American radio stations delivered what historian Robert Brown describes as the most ‘‘comprehensive news coverage of a foreign event to date.’’ Radio newscasts, Brown argues, ‘‘reported, minute-by-minute, the rapid course of diplomatic activity to an anxious audience,’’ many of whom

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Fig. 10.2: NBC advertisement. Despite lingering hostilities between some companies involved in newspaper publishing and radio broadcasting, productive partnerships encompassing both media developed during the 1930s. By the middle of the decade, NBC was visually representing the press as the metaphorical foundation of radio. Editor & Publisher 68 (27 July 1935): 34–35. Reprinted by permission of NBC Universal.

feared that war on the continent would erupt at any moment.37 James Rorty, a frequent critic of commercial radio broadcasting throughout the 1930s, lauded the American press and radio for their coverage of the crisis. ‘‘For the first time,’’ Rorty claimed, ‘‘history has been made in the hearing of its pawns. Radio has given them not only the words but also the voices of the protagonists. . . . The radio has our ears.’’ This, combined with subsequent newspaper coverage, gave American listeners unprecedented access to significant events, Rorty argued. ‘‘American newspaper correspondents were almost continuously on the air, speaking from European capitals,’’ Rorty stated, and newspapers ‘‘an hour or two later gave the eye a chance to read and digest what the ear had heard; gave us the shaded maps that the radio can’t give us.’’ Radio had come into its own with its Munich coverage, Rorty felt, and it was

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‘‘scarcely too much to say that the future of civilization will be determined to a considerable degree by who rules radio and how.’’38 For many like Rorty, the tremendous public interest in the unfolding events in Europe cemented the cooperative relationship between newspapers and radio stations. Americans alternated between staying close to their radio sets listening for updates and rushing out to purchase and read newspapers for more comprehensive coverage and analysis of the events. The American Newspaper Publishers Association touted the synergy between newspapers and radio during the Munich crisis, calling it a ‘‘new high point of co-operation between radio, newspapers, and newspaper press services. Self interests were subordinated by radio and by the press during this period of national and international concern.’’ The news coverage that these united media produced was ‘‘without precedent in national and world history.’’ Leland Stowe, the Paris correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that ‘‘radio had the whole world by the ears’’ during the crisis and that ‘‘for the first time in our lives we have all taken part in a world crisis.’’ Radio, he claimed, had done a wonderful job, and it ‘‘must be evident to any newspaperman who has eyes to see (and ears to hear!) that radio news-casting has won its spurs, and has become a vital adjunct to the daily press.’’39 After Munich, Joseph Pulitzer stated, ‘‘the American newspaper has given way to the radio as the medium for informing the public as to spot news,’’ and there was no reason for publishers to remain hostile to radio any longer.40 Almost immediately after these laudatory statements about print-radio complementarities, the War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air on 30 October 1938 offered a reminder of how dangerous it might be that radio could, to paraphrase Leland Stowe, grab the world by its ears. In adapting H. G. Wells’s novel as a radio play in the form of a series of realistic-sounding news bulletins, Orson Welles sent millions of Americans into a panic by convincing them that they were, as historian Bruce Lenthall describes it, hearing the ‘‘near destruction of the world as attacking Martians overran humanity.’’ Many critics, Lenthall argues, later felt that Welles’s successful prank ‘‘revealed the thin line between demagoguery and democracy in an era of mass communication,’’ but there is more to understand about the context of the broadcast. Welles was not acting as a demagogue. He was not using radio to gain mass support for an extreme or hateful ideology, nor was he advocating a political cause. Welles was using the power of sound to convince Americans that Martians were attacking the planet Earth, starting with New Jersey, and he was doing this in the form of radio news reports.41 The broadcast began at 8:00 p.m. EST on CBS and, after a brief intro-

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duction from Orson Welles (as himself ), alternated between snippets of ‘‘Ramon Raquello and his orchestra’’ playing in the ‘‘Meridian Room in the Park Plaza in New York City’’ and breaking news reports about what was initially said to be ‘‘explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.’’ The juxtaposition of orchestral music and news reports from New Jersey became increasingly quick and tense, and at the fifteen-minute mark of the broadcast the Martians appear and begin wreaking havoc, a process that the following twenty minutes of the program continue narrating in the form of fake news reports from around the country before fading out to commercial. Though this may have calmed some listeners who had remained near the radio set, the damage had for the most part already been done; over a million listeners had been sent into a panic, as subsequent journalistic reports, academic studies, and audience feedback would show. Welles had exploited the credibility that radio had earned with American listeners, in the process demonstrating that some of the worst fears about the political significance of radio remained relevant. For many, the lesson of the panic was not simply that many Americans put too much trust in radio, but that they put too much trust in news over the radio, and critics of the broadcast were quick to argue that newspapers never would have exploited that trust.42 In the weeks following the broadcast, the Federal Communications Commission received hundreds of letters from listeners, many of whom expressed anger and indignation at Welles for using radio to play on their trust in radio news. Listener T. M. Dekker wrote, ‘‘We, the American people look to radio as our most reliable and quickest source of news. We depend upon the authenticity of this news. If these news flashes turn out to be simply someone’s mistaken idea of Halloween fun, how can we ever rely upon this, our chief source of news?’’ In their letters, many ordinary Americans also echoed themes from publisher criticisms of radio news that had circulated in the early 1930s, arguing that newspaper reading was a superior form of news consumption than radio listening. Listener George Windsor wrote to the FCC that the ‘‘newspapers should be read in order to know the news of the day’’ and argued that the radio was no substitute for this. ‘‘When reading, nobody makes the infernal noise of the sqwacking sqwacking machine. To my mind, intelligent, sensible people tune in on musical or singing programs. Imbeciles, morons and lazy bastards (who are too lazy to even read a newspaper) are the ones who tune in’’ to other sorts of programming.43 For newspapers, the War of the Worlds panic offered perhaps the highest-profile opportunity yet to cast themselves as radio’s guardians. Editor & Publisher, recently a converted radio supporter, revisited old criticisms, asserting that the panic was evidence that the ‘‘nation as a

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whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood . . . news over a medium, which has yet to prove, even to itself, that it is competent to perform a news job.’’ The New York Times editorialized that the broadcast demonstrated that radio still ‘‘has not mastered itself or the material it uses. It does many things which the newspapers learned long ago not do to.’’44 In the wake of the War of the Worlds broadcast, newspapers actively and strategically presented ways to diminish anxieties about both radio’s effect on the newspaper business and its capability to provide news and information in a way that upheld order and democracy. In a 1939 speech, Guy Hamilton of McClatchy Newspapers asserted that the War of the Worlds broadcast was ‘‘one of the important reasons we have for believing newspapermen, who know public reactions, should own and control radio stations.’’45 Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star summed up the commercial and social benefits that companies owning newspapers and radio stations— media for both print and sound—provided. The Star had begun operating station WDAF in the early 1920s, Roberts recalled in 1941, at a time when some publishers were afraid that radio ‘‘was going to kill their circulation . . . [and] going to take the revenue.’’ The Star, Roberts argued, took a different view of radio and saw it not as a threat but as an opportunity. Radio was ‘‘something new coming along, it was interesting, interesting to the public, and we thought we had better join and go with it.’’ The Star was innovative in offering to advertisers a ‘‘combination rate—a discount rate if you take both the paper and the radio’’ to make radio profitable, and as time went on, Roberts claimed, radio ‘‘kept growing and suddenly the stepchild became a beautiful debutante.’’ Roberts was certain not only that the economics of joint ownership made sense, but also that it was better for the public. Looking back from the vantage point of 1941, Roberts felt that radio was a natural extension of the newspaper, and he said, ‘‘It was my view then and it is my view now, that newspapers with long traditional training in public service, in operation—I think the two go right hand in hand, I think they are the best operators you can get for radio. I think they have contributed to radio and I think that if you had more newspaper ownerships, that you would have better radios.’’ In terms of management, public service, and program quality, the newspaper was simply the best kind of owner, Roberts asserted, and he thought radio ‘‘would be better off if you had more newspapers running it.’’46 Cementing the partnership between newspapers and radio was not a seamless process, but there was a clear trend toward institutional and cultural harmony that took place as Americans became radio listeners during the 1920s and 1930s. Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld conducted extensive research on the relationship between radio and the printed

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page in 1940 and remarked in 1941 how newspaper-broadcasters had developed effective strategies to use both. Using print and radio to sell advertising created what Lazarsfeld called a ‘‘clinching effect,’’ as the ‘‘consumer can find confirmed in one medium what he has been made aware of in the other.’’ By selling space in print and time in sound, advertisers could ultimately create ‘‘much more than a double effect from this mutual backing.’’ Lazarsfeld conceived of radio sound as a vital adjunct to the printed newspaper, but he also argued that print remained foundational in the American media. Radio was not ‘‘displacing the newspaper,’’ Lazarsfeld argued, and the ‘‘effect of radio news broadcasting on the reading of news is anything but negative.’’ Print not only was a commercial foundation of radio but also remained a cultural foundation. ‘‘There are many ways to communicate serious ideas,’’ Lazarsfeld argued, and even after Americans had become active radio listeners, reading still ‘‘occup[ied] a place of peculiar primacy and virtue in the world of ideas. Print is the lever, we have come to feel, that can move the world. Whatever other media of communication we may use, we tend to fall back upon reading as the inescapably necessary supplement.’’ After almost two decades of living with radio sound, Americans showed no signs of abandoning their relationship with print.47 Whether the reading of printed texts such as newspapers retains a ‘‘peculiar primacy’’ in a twenty-first century media environment saturated not only by radio but also by television and the Internet is debatable. It is certainly true, however, that since newspapers began incorporating radio broadcasting into their businesses, corporations have developed clear and successful strategies to sell us advertising and content in a variety of media more efficiently, more profitably, and constantly.

Notes

Introduction 1. Gene Weingarten, ‘‘Pearls Before Breakfast,’’ Washington Post, 8 April 2007. 2. Mark Danner, ‘‘Tales from Torture’s Dark World,’’ New York Times, 15 March 2009; Danner, ‘‘U.S. Torture: Voices from the Black Sites,’’ New York Review of Books, 9 April 2009; Danner, ‘‘The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means,’’ New York Review of Books, 30 April 2009. The full text of the Red Cross report, ‘‘ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody,’’ February 2007, is available online at http://www.nybooks.com/ icrc-report.pdf. Accessed 6 April 2009. Music is mentioned in the report on pp. 7, 10, 15, 16, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37 and 38. The details of Shafiq Rasul’s experience come from David Peisner, ‘‘War Is Loud,’’ Spin, December 2006, 86–92. A comprehensive survey of the use of sound in U.S. military detention facilities can be found in Suzanne G. Cusick’s important article ‘‘ ‘You Are in a Place That Is Out of This World . . .’: Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror,’ ’’ Journal of the Society for American Music 2 (February 2008): 1–26. For another account, see Adam Zagorin and Michael Duffy, ‘‘Inside the Interrogation of Detainee 063,’’ Time, 12 June 2005. 3. The concept of the soundscape owes its original exploration to the pioneering work of the composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer, especially in The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977); repr. as The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Ver.: Destiny, 1993), which drew heavily on several of Schafer’s earlier works, including The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher (Don Mills, Ont.: BMI Canada, 1969); The Book of Noise (Vancouver: n.p., 1970); and The Music of the Environment, no. 1 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1973). 4. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962), repr. as The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, Harper & Row, 1964). 5. Washington Post, 8 April 2008. The comments on the story can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/comments/display?contentID⳱ AR2007040401721&start⳱1. Accessed 6 April 2009. 6. Marx quoted in Anthony Synnott, ‘‘Puzzling over the Senses: From Plato to Marx,’’ in The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 61–76; Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–52, quotation on 222.

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7. Lucien Febvre, ‘‘Psychologie et histoire,’’ in Encyclope´die franc¸aise, vol. 8, La Vie mentale (Paris: Socie´te´ de gestion de l’Encyclope´die franc¸aise, 1938); Febvre, ‘‘Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois? La sensibilite´ et l’histoire,’’ Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (1941); both articles reprinted in Febvre, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 1–11 and 12–27. 8. Alain Corbin, ‘‘A History and Anthropology of the Senses,’’ in Time, Desire, and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995), 181–95. See also Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam Kochan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and the other essays in his Time, Desire, and Horror. 9. Robert Ju¨tte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 2004). 10. See, e.g., Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: The Reader (London: Sage, 1999); Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001); Margaret Ruth Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). 11. I have borrowed this means of attracting attention to visual metaphors in common language from Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1, a book that packs at least twenty-one visual metaphors into its opening paragraph. 12. According to one leading practitioner, the prevailing themes in visual culture studies include the following: the reproduction of images; the machine eye; the fetish; the simulacrum; the (male) gaze; the envisioning of the Other; the differentiation of scopic regimes; and the society of the spectacle. See the comments by Susan Buck-Morss in ‘‘Visual Culture Questionnaire,’’ October 77 (Summer 1996): 25–70. 13. Benjamin refers to sound and sound-related phenomena only eleven times in the essay, mostly in passing. When such references do appear, in nearly every instance sound is mentioned primarily as a complement or counterpart to changes he frames in terms of visual technologies and media. Here, for example, is one of several references to the significance of sound film: ‘‘For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a . . . deepening of apperception’’ (emphasis added). Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ 235. Other sound-related references appear on pp. 219, 221, 225, 229, 232, 241, 244n7, 247n12, 248n13, 249n15, 251n21. 14. Allan Sekula, ‘‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,’’ Artforum 13 (January 1975): 36–45; Sekula, ‘‘The Traffic in Photographs,’’ Art Journal 41 (Spring 1981): 15–25; Sekula, ‘‘The Body and the Archive,’’ October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. 15. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 16. See Martin Jay, ‘‘Scopic Regime,’’ International Encyclopedia of Communica-

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tion, ed. Wolfgang Donsbach (Blackwell Publishing, 2008; Blackwell Reference Online), http://www.communicationencyclopedia.com/subscriber/tocnode? id⳱g9781405131995_chunk_g978140513199524_ss20-1, accessed 11 April 2009; Jay, ‘‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity,’’ in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1988), 3–28; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). 17. To date, the most incisive attempts to theorize differential, historically constructed modes of listening have appeared in Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999); Ola Stockfelt, ‘‘Adequate Modes of Listening,’’ in Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 129–46; and Sterne, The Audible Past. Other notable works on sound and listening include Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11–35; Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 18. Hitler quoted in Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 87. 19. See, e.g., Pierre Schaeffer, ‘‘Acousmatics,’’ in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), 76–81. 20. C. Wright Mills, ‘‘The Cultural Apparatus,’’ in Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine and Oxford University Press, 1963), 405–22.

Chapter 1. Distracted Listening I gained a great deal from discussion of this piece at the Hagley conference, and at an Australian Research Council, Cultural Research Network workshop on ‘‘technologies of listening’’ in Sydney in July 2008. I also want to thank the editors of this volume for their engagement with ideas through the editing process. 1. Ola Stockfelt, ‘‘Adequate Modes of Listening,’’ Stanford Humanities Review 3, no. 2 (1993), 156. 2. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999), 27–35. 3. Alain Corbin, ‘‘Identity, Bells and the Nineteenth-Century French Village,’’ in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark Michael Smith (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 185. 4. See the rich discussion of the problem of urban noise in Victorian Britain in John Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 2. 5. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 117–30, 144–68. For an interesting comparative treatment of noise abatement, see Karin Bijsterveld, ‘‘The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of Sound in European and North American Noise Abate-

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ment Campaigns, 1900–1940,’’ Social Studies of Science 31, no. 1 (February 2001): 37–70. 6. Wisconsin State Journal, 28 December 1936, 4. 7. Anderson M. Scruggs, ‘‘Sonnet on Turning a Radio Dial,’’ Forum and Century 93, no. 2 (February 1935): 113. 8. See the interesting material in Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil, and Music in Daily Life Project, My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993), and Tia De Nora’s study of the ways music is used in the ‘‘social process of self-structuration, the constitution and maintenance of the self ’’: Music in Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47. 9. Radio Stars, October 1937, 10. 10. While there is as yet little work directly on the making of sound choices, see Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002), esp. chap. 2, for a general account of the importance of individualization and self-making, and Steven Connor, ‘‘Sound and the Self,’’ in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark Michael Smith, 54–66, for comment on the modern auditory self. 11. Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11–35. 12. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 87. Emphasis in original. 13. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 1, 52, 73. Emphasis in original. 14. On the 1906 formation in New York of the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, see Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, chap. 4. 15. The Federal Radio Commission had made it clear in its 1928 Great Lakes decision that radio stations had to program for ‘‘the tastes, needs and desires of all substantial groups among the listening public.’’ Third Annual Report of the Federal Radio Commission (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929), 34. 16. Waterloo (Iowa) Evening Courier, 21 December 1928, 10. Reprinted from Charles City Press. 17. Stephen Davis, The Law of Radio Communication (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1927), 116. 18. ‘‘Plan National Radio Club,’’ Modesto News Herald, 18 March 1928, 9. 19. Evening Huronite, 14 May 1929, 5. 20. On the Fireside Chats, see Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), chap. 1; Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, The People and the President: America’s Conversation with FDR (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Edward D. Miller, Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). 21. See a photograph of the sculpture at: http://www.segalfoundation.org/ pages/fireside.htm. Accessed 3 April 2009. 22. Sherman Dryer, ‘‘How to Listen to the Radio,’’ draft article in University of Chicago, Office of the Vice President, records 1937–1946, Box 18, folder 1, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois. 23. Cited in Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Broadcasting and the Public: A Case Study in Social Ethics (New York: Abingdon Press, 1938), 12.

Notes to Pages 22–27

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24. Billings Gazette, 17 November 1929, 6. 25. Jefferson City Post Tribune, 18 February 1930, 5. 26. Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, 16 August 1941, 3. 27. NBC Statistical Department, ‘‘Comments from Anderson, Nichols Survey in Worcester, Newark, Cleveland, South Bend and Kansas City August 1935,’’ Box 34, folder 12, NBC Records, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Madison, Wisc. 28. Louis A. Witten, ‘‘The Road to Success in Radio Advertising,’’ Broadcasting, 1 March 1935, 38–39. 29. Kate Lacey, ‘‘Continuities and Change in Women’s Radio,’’ in More Than a Music Box: Radio Cultures and Communities in a Multi-Media World, ed. Andrew Crissell (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), 148. 30. William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 41–42. 31. ‘‘Sunday Is Busiest Day for Radio Sets,’’ Broadcasting, 15 September 1935, 8. 32. See the influential British work in this area: David Morley, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (London: Routledge, 1988), chap. 6; Shaun Moores, Media and Everyday Life in Modern Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), chap. 2. 33. Interview with W. A. and Suzie Crede, 26 January 1939, West Columbia, South Carolina: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/wpa:@field (DOCIDⳭ @lit(wpa331 100206)). Accessed 3 April 2009. 34. Haskins family interview, 1 March 1939, Miami: http://memory.loc.gov/ cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/wpa:@field(DOCIDⳭ@lit(wpa110110418)). Accessed 3 April 2009. 35. Ruth Millett, ‘‘Steady Radio Listening Indicates Jittery Mind,’’ Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel, 23 December 1941, 4. 36. Ibid. 37. Adelaide Hawley, ‘‘Fanmail,’’ 17 July [1944?], box 1, folder 12, Adelaide Fish Hawley Cumming Papers, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, Mass. Emphasis in original. 38. Louise Soslofsky to Adelaide Hawley, 31 March 1944. box 1, folder 12, Adelaide Fish Hawley Cumming Papers, Schlesinger Library, , Cambridge, Mass. 39. Herta Herzog, ‘‘On Borrowed Experience,’’ Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 1 (May 1941): 65–95. Herzog thus generally maintained a negative view of the effects of soaps on audiences; see Tamar Liebes, ‘‘Herzog’s ‘On Borrowed Experience’: Its Place in the Debate Over the Active Audience,’’ in Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These? ed. Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters, Tamar Liebes, and Avril Orloff (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 2002), 39–53. 40. Interview with Mr. Botsford, Thomaston, Connecticut, 25 January 1939: http: / / memory.loc.gov / cgi-bin / query / r?ammem / wpa:@field(DOCIDⳭ@lit (wpa008101006)). Accessed 3 April 2009. 41. Interview with Catherine Healy, Lynn, Massachusetts: http://memory .loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/wpa:@field(DOCIDⳭ@lit(wpa114071205)). Accessed 3 April 2009. 42. Frances Holter, ‘‘Radio Among the Unemployed,’’ Journal of Applied Psychology 23, no. 1 (1939): 164. 43. See the photograph of Chicago hospital patients listening to radio in

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1928 at: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/cdn:@field(NUM BERⳭ@band(ichicdnⳭn079094)). Accessed 3 April 2009. See also the discussion of radio and ‘‘shut ins’’ in Douglas B. Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 234–42. 44. Alice Keith, How to Speak and Write for Radio: A Manual of Broadcasting Technique (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 141. 45. Interview with Lizzie Linberger, Newton, North Carolina, 23 July 1939: http: / / memory.loc.gov / cgi-bin / query / r?ammem / wpa:@field(DOCIDⳭ@lit (wpa227010511)). Accessed 3 April 2009. 46. Interview with Lula and Allison Sizemore, Longtown, North Carolina, 8 November 1938, Federal Writers Project interview: http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/query/r?ammem/wpa:@field(DOCIDⳭ @lit(wpa227 030109)). Accessed 3 April 2009. 47. Marjorie Fiske, Survey of Materials on the Psychology of Radio Listening (New York: Bureau of Applied Social Research, 1943). 48. Interview with Tony Washalaski, New Marlborough, Massachusetts, 2 March 1937: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/wpa:@field (DOCIDⳭ @lit(wpa115 050513)). Accessed 3 April 2009. 49. ‘‘Mayor to Be Honored for Fight on Noise,’’ New York Times, 5 May 1937, 27. 50. Editorial, Woodland (Calif.) Daily Democrat, 22 April 1929, 2. 51. ‘‘Noise List Headed by Loudspeakers,’’ Washington Post, 27 November 1929, 1. 52. Southtown Economist, 24 August 1941, 4. 53. Clara King Voorhees, ‘‘My Neighbor’s Radio,’’ Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, 24 September 1939, 8. 54. ‘‘In the Radio Mail Bag,’’ New York Times, 31 October 1937, 184. 55. ‘‘Amos ’n’ Andy Fan Fights Maker of Noises,’’ Washington Post, 25 December 1931, 1. 56. ‘‘O’Connell Assails ‘Hysterical’ Voices,’’ New York Times, 24 May 1935, 1. 57. ‘‘Radio Nuisance Case Defendant Is Found Shot Dead,’’ New Castle (Penn.) News, 5 July 1930, 9. 58. See, for example: ‘‘Shoots Wife and Then Self,’’ Mason City Globe Gazette, 19 October 1933, 2; ‘‘Body of Divorcee Found in Apartment,’’ San Antonio Express, 24 February 1936, 4. 59. Eugene Pharo, ‘‘Hymn to Saint Decibel,’’ Washington Post, 20 October 1940. 60. Robert Heinl, ‘‘Radio Dial Flashes,’’ New York Times, 24 July 1933, 8. 61. ‘‘The Trials of City Life,’’ New York Times, 11 April 1936, 14. 62. ‘‘Noise and Neurosis,’’ Chicago Tribune, 29 August 1934, 10. 63. Alma Whitaker, ‘‘Let’s Talk It Over,’’ Los Angeles Times, 31 October 1939. 64. J. L. Simpson, letter to the editor, New York Times, 4 January 1933, 18. 65. Helen Ide Morse, ‘‘Music in School and Home,’’ Music Supervisors’ Journal 23, no. 6 (May 1937): 31. 66. Waterloo (Iowa) Evening Courier, 21 December 1928, 10. Reprinted from Charles City Press. 67. Irving S. Cutter, ‘‘Radio Fatigue: A Reality,’’ Chicago Tribune, 1 November 1942, 18. 68. Frances Holter, ‘‘Radio Among the Unemployed,’’ Journal of Applied Psychology 23, no. 1 (1939): 166–67; Francis Olley and Elias Smith, ‘‘An Index of

Notes to Pages 32–36

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‘Radio-Mindedness’ and Some Applications,’’ Journal of Applied Psychology 23, no. 1 (1939): 13–14. 69. Kenneth H. Baker, ‘‘Radio Listening and Socio-economic Status,’’ Psychological Record 1, no. 9 (August 1937): 115. 70. Jane Herbert Goward, ‘‘These Children Have Radio for an Hour, No More,’’ Huntingdon (Pa.) Daily News, 22 September 1934, 8. 71. Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Broadcasting and the Public, 12. 72. Herta Herzog, ‘‘Children and Their Leisure Time Listening to the Radio,’’ typescript paper B0001, in Reports of the Bureau of Applied Social Research [microfiche] (New York : Clearwater, 1981), 41. 73. Myrtle M. Eldred, ‘‘Your Baby and Mine,’’ Fresno (Calif.) Bee, 27 May 1943, 3. Emphasis in original. 74. Herzog, ‘‘Children and Their Leisure Time,’’ 44. 75. The liberal concern was generally about political propaganda, while some on the left also drew the obvious comparison between political and commercial propaganda. See James Rorty, Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (New York: John Day, 1934), and Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935—1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), chap. 2. 76. I. Keith Tyler, ‘‘Developing Discrimination with Regard to Radio,’’ English Journal 26, no. 2 (February 1937): 121–22. 77. Eldred, ‘‘Your Baby and Mine,’’ 3. 78. ‘‘Radio’s Effect on Youth,’’ New York Times, 13 November 1938, 188. 79. ‘‘Habits Are a Puzzle,’’ New York Times, 2 December 1934, 13. 80. I. Keith Tyler, ‘‘The Listening Habits of Oakland (California) People,’’ English Journal 25, no. 3 (March 1936): 211–12. 81. C. O. Arndt and John Husband, ‘‘Listen!’’ English Journal 29, no. 5 (May 1940): 371–72. 82. Ibid., 374. 83. David Cohen, ‘‘Critiques of the ‘ADHD’ Enterprise,’’ in Critical New Perspectives on ADHD, ed. Gwynedd Lloyd, Joan Stead, and David Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17–18. 84. Peter Stearns, Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 316–17. 85. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 1, 49. 86. Lesley Johnson, The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio (London: Routledge, 1988), 79. 87. ‘‘Find Four Main Causes of Insanity and ‘Nerves,’ ’’ New York Times, 10 August 1924, X9. 88. Susie McD. W. Rabourn, ‘‘English Curriculum for Pupils of Low I.Q.,’’ English Journal 20, no. 6 (June 1931): 449–54. 89. ‘‘Survey Finds Pupils’ Radio Tastes Low,’’ New York Times, 5 May 1938, 25. 90. Dryer, ‘‘How to Listen to the Radio.’’ 91. Philip Gordon, ‘‘Dialing Music Appreciation,’’ Music Educators’ Journal 27, no. 6 (May–June 1941): 33. 92. ‘‘What Yale Likes to Hear,’’ New York Times, 20 January 1935, 13. 93. ‘‘New Rule to Ease Ban on Late Radios,’’ Harvard Crimson, 26 May 1941. 94. Charles H. Farnsworth, ‘‘Introduction,’’ NBC Music Appreciation Hour 1932–33—Student Notebook Series B, 3. Folder 209, NBC History Files, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C..

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95. Max J. Hertzberg, ‘‘Tentative Units in Radio Program Appreciation,’’ English Journal 24, no. 7 (September 1935): 546. 96. ‘‘Registrar Opposed Car Radio,’’ Christian Science Monitor, 29 January 1930, 4. 97. ‘‘Vote Shows Drivers Oppose Car Radios,’’ New York Times, 30 March 1934, 23. 98. ‘‘Radios in Autos Described as Safe,’’ Washington Post, 25 May 1930, A5. 99. ‘‘Auto Radio Makes Tremendous Gains,’’ Washington Post, 29 December 1935. 100. Carlton H. Larrabee, ‘‘Ten Radio Lessons,’’ English Journal 22, no. 10 (December 1933), 825–26. 101. Tyler, ‘‘Developing Discrimination,’’ 124, 126. 102. I. Keith Tyler, ‘‘Recent Developments in Radio Education,’’ English Journal 28, no. 3 (March 1939): 196. 103. Lilla Belle Pitts, ‘‘Music and Modern Youth,’’ Music Educators Journal 26, no. 2 (October 1939): 18. 104. Hannah M. Cundiff and Peter W. Dykema, ‘‘Music Attainment in the Grades,’’ Music Educators Journal 25, no. 1 (September 1938): 35. 105. Peter W. Dykema, Women and Radio Music (New York: The Radio Institute of the Audible Arts, 1935), 2. 106. Theodore Francis Green, ‘‘Music in Everyday Life,’’ Music Supervisors’ Journal 19, no. 5 (May 1933): 18. 107. ‘‘What Are the Practical Values of Music Education?’’ Music Supervisors’ Journal 19, no. 4 (March 1933): 58. 108. Theodor Adorno, ‘‘Radio Physiognomies’’ (1939), in Theodor Adorno: Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 156–58. 109. Interview with Mary Anne Meehan, Brookfield, Massachusetts, 20 January 1939: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html. Accessed 3 April 2009. 110. William Arms Fisher, ‘‘Music in a Changing World,’’ Music Supervisors’ Journal 19, no. 4 (March 1933): 62. Emphasis in original. 111. Edward Barry, ‘‘Musicians’ Peeves: Bach for Bathing, Chopin for Shaving,’’ Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 April 1938. 112. Peter W. Dykema, Women and Radio Music (New York: Radio Institute of the Audible Arts, 1935), 4–5. 113. Daniel Barenboim, ‘‘The Neglected Sense,’’ Reith Lecture No. 2, 2006: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture2.shtml. Accessed 3 April 2009. 114. On sacralization, see Joseph Horowitz, ‘‘ ‘Sermons in Tones’: Sacralization as a Theme in American Classical Music,’’ American Music 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 311–40; and Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 115. Gay, The Naked Heart, 14, 22. 116. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York: Dover, 1994), 60. 117. Veblen identified the social function of ‘‘conspicuous consumption’’ as a claim to status and ‘‘personal repute.’’ 118. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 55. 119. Ibid., 56.

Notes to Pages 41–44

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120. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 244, 250. 121. On Muzak, see Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music (New York: St. Martins Press, 1994), 41–42. 122. Ronald M. Radano, ‘‘Interpreting Muzak: Speculations on Musical Experience in Everyday Life,’’ American Music 7, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 457. 123. Theodore Wiesengrund-Adorno, ‘‘Memorandum—Music in Radio,’’ 127. In Paul F. Lazarsfeld papers, Series 1, box 26, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York City. 124. The German word Zerstreuung has, as Samuel Weber points out, strong spatial connotations, sharing the root of the English word ‘‘strewn’’—it suggests not just distraction but dispersal. Samuel Weber, ‘‘Mass Mediasaurus, or, Art, Aura, and Media, in the Work of Walter Benjamin,’’ in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David S. Ferris (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 39. 125. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Glasgow: Fontana, 1973), 242–43, 225. For a reading of some of the ambivalences of Benjamin’s use of the idea of distraction, see Howard Eiland, ‘‘Reception in Distraction,’’ Boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003): 51–66. Benjamin’s valorization of distracted perception was significant in gender terms. As Miriam Hansen observes, ‘‘The affinity with a disposition attributed to female spectatorship crucially distinguishes Benjamin’s notion of ‘distraction’ from a Brechtian concept of distanciation (Verfremdung).’’ Miriam Hansen, ‘‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’ ’’ New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 218. 126. Adorno to Benjamin, 18 March 1936, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin:—The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1999), 130. 127. Ibid., Adorno to Benjamin, 1 February 1938, 236. Emphasis in original. On Adorno’s relations with the Project’s director, Paul Lazarsfeld, see David E. Morrison, ‘‘Kultur and Culture: The Case of Theodor W. Adorno and Paul F. Lazarsfeld,’’ Social Research 45, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 331–55. 128. Theodor Adorno, ‘‘Radio Physiognomics,’’ in Hullot-Kentor, ed., Adorno: Current of Music, 141–42. 129. Theodor Adorno, ‘‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhart (New York: Urizen, 1978), 286. 130. Ibid., 288–90. 131. Ibid., 297. 132. Adorno, ‘‘On Popular Music’’ (1941), in Hullot-Kentor, ed., Adorno: Current of Music, 451. 133. Ibid., 451, 454. 134. Adorno, as a recent study reminds us, lived in the United States for fifteen years and ‘‘immersed himself fully in American culture’’: David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xv. 135. Thomas Clyde Polson, ‘‘An Experimental Study of the Effects of Heterogeneous Auditory Stimuli of Various Sound Levels upon Reading Rate and Reading Comprehension’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1936). 136. Wiesengrund-Adorno, ‘‘Memorandum—Music in Radio,’’ 132. 137. ‘‘Eating Amid Noises Retards Digestion,’’ Chicago Tribune, 2 December

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1931, 23; ‘‘Find That Noises Affect the Stomach,’’ New York Times, 11 May 1930, 24. 138. Wiesengrund-Adorno, ‘‘Memorandum—Music in Radio,’’ 132. 139. Ibid., 117–18. 140. In Adorno and Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 238, note 5. 141. Meaghan Morris, ‘‘Banality in Cultural Studies,’’ in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 24. 142. Douglas, Listening In, 226. 143. F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, Lectures in America (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 5. 144. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 81. 145. See Paul Du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997), 92. 146. Clive Thompson, ‘‘Meet the Life Hackers,’’ New York Times Sunday Magazine, 16 October 2005, 40. 147. Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2008); see Jackson’s Web site at: http://mag gie-jackson.com/. Accessed 3 April 2009. 148. ‘‘Adults with ADHD,’’ U.S. News and World Report, 27 May 2008. 149. Joseph V. Bailey, Slowing Down to the Speed of Love: How to Create a Deeper More Fulfilling Relationship in a Hurried World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 62. Chapter 2. ‘‘Her Voice a Bullet’’ The authors wish to thank Dr. Roderic Vassie, Head of Publishing, Microform Academic Publishers, and Jonathan Mansfield, Marketing and Digital Resources, Adam Matthew Publications, who granted us short-term licenses to view their online records of the BBC Listener Research Department and Mass Observation, respectively. The authors were interviewed on an episode of the Talking History radio program entitled ‘‘World War II Radio Propaganda: Real and Imaginary.’’ The show, initially broadcast 24 April 2008, includes sound clips from wartime broadcasts and is available online at http://www.talkinghistory.org. Throughout this essay, we use the names Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, and Lord Haw Haw to refer to the legends that emerged around German and Japanese English-language radio broadcasts rather than to the real people who read news and commentaries and introduced songs over Axis-controlled airwaves. 1. Tokyo Rose, directed by Lew Landers (Paramount Pictures, 1946); Paramount press book in authors’ possession. 2. Ibid. For more on Iva Toguri, see Masayo Duus, Tokyo Rose: Orphan of the Pacific, trans. Peter Duus (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979); Russell Warren Howe, The Hunt for ‘‘Tokyo Rose’’ (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1990); Rex B. Gunn, They Called Her Tokyo Rose (privately published, 1977). 3. Quoted in Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 3, The War of Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1. 4. On domestic radio propaganda, see Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ernst Kris and Hans Speier, German Radio Propaganda: Report on

Notes to Pages 48–50

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Home Broadcasts During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944); Michael S. Sweeney, Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chap. 4; Philip Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), chap. 7. 5. BBC Monitoring Service, ‘‘Weekly Analysis,’’ 3 January 1940. 6. On propaganda swing, see Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 5. 7. See Ann Pfau, Miss Yourlovin: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), chap. 5; http://www.gutenberge.org/pfau/chapter5.html. Accessed 10 April 2009. 8. The Wild Blue Yonder, directed by Allan Dwan (Republic, 1951). An audio clip of this scene is available at http://www.earthstation1.com/Orphan_Ann/ WBY01.wav. Accessed 10 April 2009. 9. James Bradley and Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers, reissue ed. (New York: Bantam, 2006, 147; Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood (Dreamworks, 2006). 10. See, for example, John Nichol and Tony Rennell, Tail-End Charlies: The Last Battles of the Bomber War, 1944–45 (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006), 54; Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 171; Stephen Ambrose, D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 55, 160, 192. 11. Base Censorship Detachment No. 6, Morale Report for Period Ended 31 July 1944 (1 August 1944), File: Morale Reports, Base Censorship Detachment 噛6, Box: Morale Reports 噛1 thru 噛2, G-2 Headquarters Records, Mediterranean theater of operations, RG 492, National Archives, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NACP). 12. Robert J. Franklin, Medic! How I fought World War II with Morphine, Sulfa, and Iodine Swabs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 109. 13. The Story of G.I. Joe, directed by William A. Wellman (United Artists, 1945). 14. Peter Martland, Lord Haw Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germany (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 45–47; Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939–1945: Organisations, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 138–39; Martin A. Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda: Lord Haw Haw and British Public Opinion in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 111–16. 15. ‘‘Twenty-Seventh Weekly Morale Report,’’ September 1940, File: Report 391, Mass Observation Online, http://www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk (hereafter MO). Accessed 29 December 2007. Established in 1937, Mass Observation was founded to study the everyday life of contemporary Britons. During World War II, it recruited thousands of volunteer informants to keep diaries and to respond to open-ended questionnaires. The organization analyzed this content and reported on wartime morale to the British government. 16. Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, directed by John Rawlins (Universal Pictures, 1942). Joyce’s signature opening was, ‘‘Germany calling, Germany calling.’’ 17. Radio script, 22 February 1944, attachment to Summary of Treason Case, 23 February 1948, Tokyo Rose file, FBI Archives, Washington, D.C. Transcripts

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of the ‘‘Zero Hour’’ are available in Folder 3/7, Item 2, Box 2, Records Related to Criminal Case 31712, RG 118, National Archives Pacific Region, San Bruno, California (hereafter NAPR). For audio clips of Toguri broadcasts, see Earth Station 1, http://www.earthstation1.com/The_Zero_Hour.html. Accessed 10 April 2009. 18. Nathan T. Elliff to Theron L. Caudle, Re: Iva Ikuko Toguri, with aliases Tokyo Rose, Orphan Annie, Ann—Treason (15 May 1946); Nathan T. Elliff to Theron L. Caudle, Re: Iva Ikuko Toguri, with aliases Tokyo Rose, Orphan Annie, Ann—Treason (19 September 1946); Theron L. Caudle to Tom C. Clark (24 September 1946), Re: Iva Ikuko Toguri, with aliases Tokyo Rose, Orphan Annie, Ann; Treason; all in case file 146–28–1941, Criminal Division, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. (Criminal Division documents obtained by authors through a Freedom of Information Act request.) See also Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 10–12. 19. FBIS reported receiving inquiries about Tokyo Rose since the summer of 1943. ‘‘Radio Report on the Far East 噛75: Special Report: Japanese Broadcasts to American Servicemen,’’ 15 June 1945, Box 6, FBIS, RG 262, NACP. 20. For more on Gillars, see John Carver Edwards, Berlin Calling: American Broadcasters in Service to the Third Reich (New York: Praeger, 1991), 88–98. 21. BBC transcript, ‘‘German Overseas Service in English for the American Expeditionary Force in North Africa,’’ 26 November 1943, File 100–232259 (Mildred Elizabeth Gillars), Section 2, Box 91, FBI Headquarters Files Entry 38B, RG 65, NACP. BBC and FBIS transcripts, summaries, and analyses of other broadcasts are available in File 100–232259 (Mildred Elizabeth Gillars), Sections 1 and 2, Box 91, FBI Headquarters Files, Entry 38B, RG 65, NACP. For audio clips of Gillars broadcasts, see Earth Station 1, http://www.earthstation1.com/ Axis_Sally.html. Accessed 10 April 2009. However, the ‘‘Jerry’s Front’’ announcer is Rita Zucca, not Mildred Gillars. 22. FBIS transcript, ‘‘Vision of an Invasion,’’ 11 May 1943, File 100–232259 (Mildred Elizabeth Gillars), Section 3, Box 91, FBI Headquarters Files, Entry 38B, RG 65, NACP. 23. ‘‘Interrogation of Mildred Gillars,’’ 2 April 1946, File: XE004002, Box 62, Records of the Investigative Records Repository, RG 319, NACP. 24. For more on Joyce, see Martland, Lord Haw Haw. 25. Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 148–50, 174; Martland, Lord Haw Haw, 38–47. For audio clips of William Joyce broadcasts, see Earth Station 1, http:// www.earthstation1.com/Lord_Haw_Haw.html. Accessed 10 April 2009. 26. ‘‘Bombing of a Messerschmidt in Streatham,’’ November 1940, File: Report 479; Nancy Satterthwaite diary (5419), 30 November 1940; both in MO. 27. On the malaria epidemic in the Southwest Pacific (1942–43), see Medical Department, United States Army, Preventive Medicine in World War II, vol. 6, Communicable Diseases (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1963), chap. 10, http://history.amedd.army.mil/ booksdocs/wwii/Malaria/frameindex.html. Accessed 20 January 2008. 28. Frank Farrell’s letter to Tokyo Rose was published in Walter Winchell’s column in the Daily Mirror, 28 October 1948, reel 23, series 3, Walter Winchell Papers, New York Public Library, New York City. Farrell repeated this story to the FBI: Report by Joseph T. Genco (25 May 1949), Tokyo Rose file, FBI. 29. Richard Wexler memoir and interview, Rutgers Oral History Archives, http://oralhistory.rutgers.edu/Interviews/wexler_p_richard.html and http://

Notes to Pages 54–57

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oralhistory.rutgers.edu/Docs/memoirs/wexler_p_richard/wexler_p_richard_ my_version.html. Accessed 10 April 2009. 30. 31st Counter-Intelligence Detachment, ‘‘Security Talk for Troops,’’ n.d., File: 31st C.I.C. Det. Weekly Reports November–December 1944, Box G-1465, Weekly Reports & Correspondence of Counter-Intelligence Detachments, 1943– 45, OCCIO, G-2, Southwest Pacific Area and US Army Forces, Pacific, RG 496 (SWPA), NACP. 31. ‘‘Morale,’’ May 1940, File: Report 125, MO; Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 111–16. 32. ‘‘Inter-Services Monthly Security Summary, Counter Intelligence S.E.A. and India Commands,’’ February 1945, File: 117320, Box 1339, Intelligence Reports, Entry 16, Office of Strategic Services, RG 226, NACP; Report by John Charles Seaton Jr., 1 April 1946, Folder 1/4, Item 4, Box 2, Records Related to Criminal Case 31712, RG 118, NAPR. 33. Ambrose, D-Day, 55–56. Andy Rooney in his wartime memoir relates a similar clock story, attributing Sally’s information to British counterintelligence, My War (New York: Public Affairs, 1995), 146–47. [Sir] J[ohn]. C. Masterman, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972); Louis de Jong, The German Fifth Column in the Second World War, trans. C. M. Geyl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). 34. About 500 Britons kept diaries that they sent to Mass Observation monthly. Mass Observation often posed particular questions or issues for diarists to comment on, including their radio listening habits. Although some diarists maintained their diaries regularly for several years, most wrote only for short periods. For an introduction to the Mass Observation diaries and overall project, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/speccoll/collection_descriptions/massobsdiaries.html. Accessed 19 June 2008. 35. BBC Listener Research Division, ‘‘The Effect of Hamburg Propaganda in Great Britain: Interim Report,’’ January 1940, Special Report LR98, BBC Listener Research Department, 1936–ca. 1950, http://www.britishonlinearchives .co.uk (hereafter BBC), accessed 8 January 2008; ‘‘Women in Wartime,’’ June 1940, File: Report 290, MO; ‘‘Public and Private Opinion on Lord Haw Haw’’ (March 1940), File: Report 64, MO; R. J. E. Silvey, ‘‘Methods of Listener Research Employed by the British Broadcasting Corporation,’’ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 107 (1944): 208; Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 93–95; Robert Silvey, Who’s Listening: The Story of BBC Audience Research (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 105–7. 36. Information and Education Division, Army Service Forces, ‘‘Summary of Miscellaneous Materials on Troop Reactions to Enemy Radio Propaganda,’’ 26 September 1945, File: B-167, Box 993, Research Division, Surveys on Troops Attitudes, Entry 93, RG 330, NACP. Research Branch, Army Service Forces, ‘‘Survey of Radio Listening and Facilities,’’ ca. December 1943, File: SWPA-8, Box 1025; Research Branch, Information-Education Section, ‘‘Radio Listening in Pacific Ocean Area,’’ December 1944, File: CPBC 13, Box 1027; both in Research Division, Attitude Reports of Overseas Personnel, Entry 94, RG 330, NACP. Research Unit, Information and Education Section, IBT, ‘‘Radio Listeners Among Enlisted Men in India and Burma,’’ 16 April 1945, File: 730 (Neuropsychiatry) Morale Surveys, IBT, Enlisted Men in India and Burma, Box 1312, Office of the Surgeon General, World War II Administrative Records, Entry 31 (ZI), RG 112; all in NACP. 37. Report by William H. Wilson, 23 January 1946, Folder 2/4, Item 4, Box 3, Records Related to Criminal Case 31712, RG 118, NAPR; Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1943), 29.

256

Notes to Pages 57–60

38. ‘‘War in December Diaries,’’ February 1941, File: Report 574; ‘‘War Coverage and Reaction to the News,’’ Folder 74–1-D, Topic Collection 74, War Coverage and Reactions to the News; all in MO. Frederick Pile to Robert GordonFinlayson, 5 December 1939, quoted in Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 100. For more on American military officers’ attitudes toward Radio Tokyo broadcasts, see FBI reports from 1945 and 1946 in Item 4, Records Related to Criminal Case 31712, RG 118, NAPR. 39. BBC Listener Research Division, ‘‘The Effect of Hamburg Propaganda in Great Britain: Interim Report,’’ January 1940, Special Report LR98, BBC; ‘‘Public and Private Opinion on Lord Haw Haw,’’ March 1940, File: Report 64, MO; ‘‘Women in Wartime,’’ June 1940, File: Report 290, MO; Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, chap. 4. 40. Information and Education Division, Army Service Forces, ‘‘Summary of Miscellaneous Materials on Troop Reactions to Enemy Radio Propaganda,’’ 26 September 1945, File: B-167, Box 993, Research Division, Surveys on Troops Attitudes, Entry 93, RG 330, NACP. 41. Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (1947; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), chaps. 1, 2, and 9; Base Censorship Detachment No. 6, Morale Report for Period Ended 31 July 1944, 1 August 1944, File: Morale Reports, Base Censorship Detachment 噛6, Box: Morale Reports 噛1 thru 噛2, G-2 Headquarters Records, Mediterranean theater of operations, RG 492; ‘‘Censorship Survey of Morale, Rumors, Propaganda,’’ July 1944, Box T-1429, G-2 Theater Censor, Southwest Pacific Area and U.S. Army Forces, Pacific, RG 496 (USAFFE); both in NACP. 42. ‘‘Ninth Weekly Report for Home Intelligence,’’ November 1940, File: Report 508; ‘‘Summary of News Belief and Disbelief,’’ May 1940; File: Report 129; ‘‘The Social Function of the Press,’’ October 1940, File: Report 470; all in MO. Durant, ‘‘Lord Haw-Haw of Hamburg,’’ 444; Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 89–90, 96–97, 100–101, 120. 43. Durant, ‘‘Lord Haw-Haw of Hamburg,’’ 445–48; Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 96–108, 121; Silvey, Who’s Listening, 108–9. Edith Dawson diary (5296), 9, 13, 15 January and 31 December 1940; Diarist 5014, 31 March 1940; both in MO. 44. Tokyo Rose stories from the Pacific theater of operations served a similar function. Pfau, Miss Yourlovin, chap. 5. 45. See examples quoted in Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 105–7. 46. M. Rose Diary (5414), 25 July 1940, MO. See also Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 92. 47. ‘‘Women in Wartime,’’ File Report 290, June 1940, MO. 48. ‘‘The Voice and Lord Haw-Haw, 1939–41,’’ Folder 74–1-B, Topic Collection 74, Radio Listening, 1939–44, MO; Silvey, ‘‘Methods of Listener Research Employed by the British Broadcasting Corporation,’’ 208; Durant, ‘‘Lord HawHaw of Hamburg,’’ 447. 49. Briggs, War of Words, 96–99, 147–50; Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda, 101–3, 108–10. 50. At the beginning of the war, the BBC operated twenty-four transmitters; by the end of the war, the BBC operated 121 transmitters, many of which were for home service over medium waves. One observer thought that the number of broadcasting stations throughout Europe had increased by a factor of three to four by the end of 1943, and that British listeners could hear the equivalent of 300,000 words daily of English-language broadcasts beamed to Britain from

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other countries. Because of the geographical proximity of Britain to western Europe, much Axis broadcasting took place through medium-wave transmitters, capable of reception by ordinary receivers. Briggs, War of Words, 44, 64. 51. Report by Gary W. Sawtelle, 18 April 1949, FBI; Report by Albert J. Roberts, Jr. (1 February 1946), File: 2/4, Item 4, Box 3, Records Related to Criminal Case 31712, RG 118, NAPR. 52. ‘‘Public and Private Opinion on Lord Haw Haw,’’ March 1940, File: Report 64, MO. Rebecca West, The New Meaning of Treason (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 1. 53. ‘‘Women in Wartime,’’ June 1940, File: Report 290; ‘‘Public and Private Opinion on Lord Haw Haw,’’ March 1940, File: Report 64; both in MO. 54. Elliot R. Thorpe, East Wind, Rain: The Intimate Account of an Intelligence Officer in the Pacific, 1939–49 (Boston: Gambit, 1969), 225–27. See also Pfau, Miss Yourlovin, chap. 5. 55. LRD Special Report LR98, ‘‘The Effect of Hamburg Propaganda in Great Britain,’’ January 1940, BBC. 56. Craig, Fireside Politics, 229–31. See, for example, William S. Robinson, ‘‘Radio Comes to the Farmer,’’ in Radio Research 1941, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (1941; reprint, New York: Arno, 1979), 226, 262–63; Sherman H. Dryer, Radio in Wartime (New York: Greenberg, 1942), 36–38. 57. Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport, The Psychology of Radio (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 8–9; Charles J. Rolo, Radio Goes to War: The ‘‘Fourth Front’’ (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942); Robinson, ‘‘Radio Comes to the Farmer,’’ in Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to the Study of Radio and Its Role in the Communication of Ideas, ed. Paul Lazarsfeld (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940). Susan Douglas summarizes the findings of several prominent radio researchers and gives an account of radio as wartime news source in Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999), chaps. 6 and 7. On Coughlin, Long, and other radio ‘‘demagogues,’’ see Douglas Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 159–62; Bruce Lenthal, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture, chap. 4; Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982). 58. ‘‘Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,’’ New York Times, 31 October 1938, 1; ‘‘FCC Is Perplexed on Steps to Take,’’ New York Times, 1 November 1938. See also Craig, Fireside Politics, 232–33; Lenthal, Radio’s America, 1–5. 59. Will Irwin, Propaganda and the News: Or What Makes You Think So? (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1936), 247, 252, 259–60; Oscar W. Riegel, Mobilizing for Chaos: The Story of the New Propaganda (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934), 19–21, 37–39, 87–88, 101–7, 211, 214; Oscar W. Riegel, ‘‘Eavesdropping on Europe at War,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly 6 (Autumn 1942): 471. See also Craig, Fireside Politics, 230–31. 60. Hans Speier and Margaret Otis, ‘‘German Radio Propaganda to France during the Battle of France,’’ in Lazarsfeld and Stanton, eds., Radio Research ; Edmond L. Taylor, The Strategy of Terror: Europe’s Inner Front (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940). 61. The Goebbels Diaries, 1939–1941, ed. and trans. Fred Taylor (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983), 87; The Goebbels Diaries, 1942–1943, ed. and trans. Louis P. Lochner (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1948), 170, 226–27.

258

Notes to Pages 63–70

62. Charles Siepmann, ‘‘Radio in Wartime,’’ no. 26 in pamphlet series ‘‘America in a World at War’’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 6–8, emphasis in original; Charles Siepmann, ‘‘American Radio in Wartime: An Interim Survey of the OWI’s Radio Bureau,’’ in Lazarsfeld and Stanton, eds., Radio Research, 147–48. See also Douglas, Listening In, chap. 6. 63. M. Clayton, diarist 5275, entry for 2 January 1940, MO. 64. Office of Censorship, ‘‘Comment of U.S. Troops on Axis Radio Propaganda,’’ 5 March 1943, Box 389, Entry 10, Office of Censorship, RG 216; ‘‘Censorship Survey of Morale, Rumors, Propaganda,’’ July 1944, Box T-1429, G-2 Theater Censor, Southwest Pacific Area and U.S. Army Forces, Pacific, RG 496 (USAFFE); both in NACP. 65. Floyd L. Ruch and Kimball Young, ‘‘Penetration of Axis Propaganda,’’ Journal of Applied Psychology 26 (August 1942), 448–55. 66. L. R. Forney to George Strong, Re: Origin of Rumors Concerning the WAC, 30 July 1943, File: MID 322.12 WAAC 7–17–43 thru 7–31–43 (6–11–43), Box 579, Army Intelligence Decimal Files, Entry 47B, RG 319, NACP. See also Mattie E. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1954), 214–16; Pfau, Miss Yourlovin, chap. 2, http://www.gutenberge.org/pfau/chapter2.html. Accessed 10 April 2009. 67. Cantril and Allport, The Psychology of Radio, 220, 232–33; Douglas, Listening In, 30–31, 132–33. 68. Jonah Barrington, A Complete Biography of Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen (London: Hutchinson, 1940), 9; Martland, Lord Haw Haw, 12, 41, 49. 69. Pyle, Brave Men, 29. 70. Such ear-witness descriptions can be found in FBI investigation files. 71. Christine Ehrick, ‘‘ ‘Savage Dissonance’: Gender, Voice, and Women’s Radio Speech in Argentina, 1930–1945.’’ 72. Siepmann, ‘‘American Radio in Wartime,’’ 147–48, emphasis in original. 73. Associated Press, ‘‘No Record of Tokyo Rose,’’ New York Times, 8 August 1945. 74. For more on Toguri’s treason trial and the Department of Justice Investigation, see Duus, Tokyo Rose, chaps. 4–6; Howe, Hunt for ‘‘Tokyo Rose,’’ pts. 2 and 3; Kutler, American Inquisition, chap. 1; Pfau, Miss Yourlovin, chap. 5. 75. The Miracle of St. Anna, directed by Spike Lee (Touchstone Pictures, 2008). 76. See the Ubisoft trailer on the Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway Web site, http://brothersinarmsgame.us.ubi.com. Accessed 10 April 2009. 77. Seoul City Sue and Hannoi Hannah, ‘‘Seoul City Sue,’’ Time, 21 August 1950. Seoul City Sue appeared in several episodes of the television show M*A*S*H. On Hanoi Hannah’s supposed omniscience, see Don North’s interview of Trinh Thi Ngo, as part of the Sixties Project at the University of Virginia, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Scholarly/North_ Hanoi_Hannah_01.html. Accessed 10 April 2009. See Michele Hilmes, ‘‘Rethinking Radio,’’ in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–9. Chapter 3. ‘‘Savage Dissonance’’ 1. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 67. 2. For more on radio and negotiations of the public/private divide, see the

Notes to Pages 70–72

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introduction to Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xiii–xxix. 3. Brian Larkin notes that in Nigeria male radio voices reaching female listeners carried similar implications of immorality. See Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 55. 4. Kate Lacey, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 3. 5. While they do not use this same language, many histories of women and gender describe a process similar to the window metaphor used here. See, for example, Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Mary Kay Vaughan, ‘‘Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico, 1930–1940,’’ in Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, eds., Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); and Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L. R. Higonnet, ‘‘The Double Helix,’’ in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 31–47. 6. A similar pattern is observed in the case of early Hollywood cinema. See Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 7. ‘‘Figuras simpa´ticas de la radio: Jenny de Ford Richard.’’ Caras y Caretas, no. 1840, 6 January 1934. 8. Donna Halper, Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women and Broadcasting (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Lacey, Feminine Frequencies. 9. In English, the best works on the history of Latin American radio are: Joy Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920–1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000); Robert Howard Claxton, From Parsifal to Pero´n: Early Radio in Argentina, 1922–1944 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Bryan McCann, Thin Air and Solid State: Radio, Culture and Politics in Brazil’s Vargas Era (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1999). The most important works in Spanish on Argentine radio are: Andrea Matallana, ‘‘Locos por la radio’’: Una historia social de la radiofonı´a en la Argentina, 1923–1947 (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2006); Ricardo Gallo, La radio: Ese mundo tan sonoro, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1991); and Pablo Sirve´n, Pero´n y los medios de comunicacio´n (1943–1955) (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de Ame´rica Latina, 1984). 10. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 1. 11. Helmi Ja¨rviluoma, Pirkko Moisala, and Anni Vilkko, Gender and Qualitative Methods (London: Sage, 2003), 85. 12. Anne Karpf, The Human Voice: How This Extraordinary Instrument Reveals Essential Clues About Who We Are (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 153–95. 13. Cited in Ja¨rviluoma et al., Gender and Qualitative Methods, 100. 14. See, for example, Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 28–30; Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, 67–79.

260

Notes to Pages 72–78

15. ‘‘Editor’s Table,’’ Harper’s New Monthly 7, no. 42 (November 1853): 841. 16. Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 196. See also Joy Damousi’s discussion of gender, speech, and elocution in ‘‘The Filthy American Twang: Elocution, the Advent of American Talkies and Australian Cultural Identity,’’ American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (April 2007): 407–8. 17. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 196. 18. See, for example, Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (New York: Knopf, 1999). 19. James E. Sanders, Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 94. 20. Ibid., 93–94. 21. See Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s discussion of ‘‘Speaker as Whore’’ in Eloquence in an Electronic Age, 70–71. 22. See, for example, the introductions to Kate Lacey, Feminine Frequencies; and Susan Ware, It’s One O’Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 23. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 141. 24. Halper, Invisible Stars, 39. For German discourse about women’s radio voices, see Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 198–206. 25. Halper, Invisible Stars, 41. 26. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 198. 27. Frances Dyson, ‘‘The Genealogy of the Radio Voice,’’ in Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander, eds., Radio Rethink: Art, Sound, and Transmission (Banff, Canada: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994), 167–86. 28. For more on housewives, consumption, and citizenship in South America, see Eduardo Elena, ‘‘Peronist Consumer Politics and the Problem of Domesticating Markets in Argentina, 1943–1955,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 1 (February 2007): 111–49; Katherine French-Fuller, ‘‘Gendered Invisibility, Respectable Cleanliness: The Impact of the Washing Machine on Daily Living in Post-1950 Santiago, Chile,’’ Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 79–101; and Natalia Milanesio, ‘‘The Guardian Angels of the Domestic Economy: Housewives’ Responsible Consumption in Peronist Argentina,’’ Journal of Women’s History 18 no. 3 (Fall 2006): 91–117. 29. Claxton, From Parsifal to Pero´n, 52. 30. Ibid., 106–8; Matallana, Locos por la radio, 36. 31. This portrayal of women’s speech appears elsewhere as well. ‘‘Because it was presumably driven by emotion,’’ writes Kathleen Hall Jamieson, ‘‘womanly speech was thought to be personal, excessive, disorganized, and unduly ornamental.’’ Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, 76. 32. Lea Fletcher, Narrativa de mujeres argentines: bibliografı´a de los siglos XIX y XX (Buenos Aires: Feminaria Editora, 2007); Marı´a Castellanos, ‘‘Po´rtico’’ de Silvia Guerrico Los Prı´ncipes Azules (Montevideo: Alberto Rossi, 1927). 33. ‘‘Un reportaje a nuestra colaboradora Silvia Guerrico,’’ Antena, 6 June 1931. 34. ‘‘Correo,’’ Antena, 30 May 1931, 3. 35. ‘‘Muchachas casaderas,’’ Sintonı´a, 20 June 1931, 5. 36. ‘‘Correo,’’ Antena, 1 August 1931, 5. 37. Adelia Di Carlo, ‘‘Mujeres de actuacio´n destacada: Silvia Guerrico,’’ Caras y Caretas, no. 1888, 8 December 1934. 38. Ricardo Gallo, La radio: Ese mundo tan sonoro: Tomo II Los An˜os 30 (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2001), 202–3.

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39. For more on Argentine feminism during these years, see Asuncio´n Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 278–85. 40. ‘‘Las 500 de Cartel Sonoro,’’ Sintonı´a, 22 July 1933, 31. 41. ‘‘En la gran revista de Cartel Sonoro,’’ Sintonı´a, 23 December 1933. 42. See Hilmes, Radio Voices, 141–44; Halper, Invisible Stars, 39–47; Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 193–220. 43. ‘‘Sinapismo,’’ Sintonı´a, no. 23, 30 September 1933. The writer discussed women’s limited abilities to speak ‘‘en ca´tedra,’’ a term that refers to the authoritative speech of the priest or the professor. 44. ‘‘Perfiles del micro´fono,’’ Caras y Caretas, no. 1845, 10 February 1934. 45. ‘‘Una recitadora de larga fama,’’ Sintonı´a, 14 April 1934. 46. ‘‘Pimienta en grano,’’ Caras y Caretas, no. 1849, 10 March 1934. 47. ‘‘Jenny Ford, mujer charlista,’’ Sintonı´a, 14 April 1934. 48. ‘‘Silvia Guerrico a Ramo´n Novarro,’’ Sintonı´a, 12 May 1934. In this article Sintonı´a reprinted a portion of Guerrico’s comments in the wake of the scandal, so that readers could judge for themselves whether her words were inappropriate. 49. Much has been written about the issue (possibilities and limits) of feminine film spectatorship. See, for example, Miriam Hansen’s ‘‘Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,’’ Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 6–32. See also the responses to Hansen’s essay in subsequent (Winter and Spring 1987) issues of the same journal. Hansen’s essay is especially relevant here, since MGM marketed Ramo´n Novarro as the ‘‘next Valentino,’’ especially following the latter’s death in 1926. 50. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 174. 51. ‘‘Silvia Guerrico a Ramo´n Novarro,’’ Sintonı´a, 12 May 1934. 52. ‘‘El caso de Silvia Guerrico’’ and ‘‘De guardia,’’ Sintonı´a, 19 May 1934. 53. Claxton, From Parsifal to Pero´n, 100–104, 163–64. 54. ‘‘Torre de Babel,’’ Sintonı´a, 19 May 1934. 55. ‘‘Torre de Babel,’’ Sintonı´a, 16 June 1934. 56. ‘‘Sintonizando,’’ Sintonı´a, 26 May 1934. 57. ‘‘Un adio´s a ‘Cartel Sonoro,’ ’’ Sintonı´a, 26 October 1935. 58. ‘‘De la Revista Stentor,’’ Radiolandia, no. 533, 4 June 1938; ‘‘Figuras conocidas en Radio Stentor,’’ Radiolandia, no. 546, 3 September 1938. 59. For more on Argentine radioteatro and gender relations, see Isabella Cosse, ‘‘Relaciones de pareja a mediados de siglo en las representaciones de la radio porten ˜ a: entre suen ˜ os roma´nticos y visos de realidad,’’ Estudios Sociolo´gicos 24, no. 73 (January–April 2007): 131–53. 60. See, for example, chapter 1 in Mariano Ben Plotkin, Man˜ana es San Pero´n: A Cultural History of Pero´n’s Argentina (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2003), 3–18. 61. Otelo Borroni and Roberto Vacca, La vida de Eva Pero´n: Tomo I: Testimonios para su historia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1970), 64. 62. Alicia Dujovne Ortı´z, Eva Pero´n (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 43. 63. Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Grain of the Voice,’’ in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 179–89. 64. Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro, Evita: The Real Life of Eva Pero´n (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 31. 65. Borroni and Vacca, La vida de Eva Pero´n, 67. Other historians dismiss Eva’s radio work during these years and any apparent connection to her later persona. See Dujovne Ortı´z, Eva Pero´n, 53.

262

Notes to Pages 85–100

66. Gloria Alcorta, quoted in Dujovne Ortı´z, Eva Pero´n, 44. 67. Fraser and Navarro, Evita, 33. 68. ‘‘Triunfadora, Eva Duarte vive la etapa decisiva en su lucha artistica,’’ Radiolandia, no. 859, 2 September 1944. 69. Borroni and Vacca, La vida de Eva Pero´n, 74–75. 70. Ibid., 75. 71. Ibid., 76. 72. Evita: The Woman Behind the Myth. A&E Biography, 2004, videocassette. 73. Borroni and Vacca, La vida de Eva Pero´n, 76. 74. Marı´a Flores [Mary Foster Main], The Woman with the Whip: Eva Pero´n (New York: Doubleday, 1952), 68. 75. Britta Sjogren, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 76. Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts, eds., After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (London: Blackwell, 2004), 4. 77. Sjogren, Into the Vortex, 17. Chapter 4. Collectors, Bootleggers, and the Value of Jazz, 1930–1952 1. Charles Edward Smith, ‘‘Background to Bootlegging,’’ Record Changer, January 1952, 3. 2. Wilder Hobson, ‘‘Le Jazz Jubilant,’’ Saturday Review, 25 August 1951, 41. 3. David Suisman, ‘‘The Sound of Money: Music, Machines, and Markets, 1890–1925’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2002), 208. 4. John E. Mason, Jr., ‘‘Performers’ Rights and Copyright: The Protection of Sound Recording from Modern Pirates,’’ California Law Review 59 (1971): 548–49. 5. Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 47. 6. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and ‘‘Inventor of Jazz’’ (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 282–83. 7. J. R. Taylor, ‘‘Jazz Periodicals,’’ in HRS Society Rag (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 1. 8. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, 48. 9. Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London: Verso, 1997), 3. 10. Stephen W. Smith, ‘‘Hot Collecting,’’ in Jazzmen, ed. Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 292. 11. Dick Reiber, ‘‘First Thrills in Beulah Land,’’ H.R.S. Rag, no. 1 (July 1938), 9. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Smith, ‘‘Hot Collecting,’’ 290. 14. Ibid., 291. 15. Mark Jamieson, ‘‘The Place of Counterfeits in Regimes of Value: An Anthropological Approach,’’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (1999): 4. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. Smith, ‘‘Hot Collecting,’’ 291. 18. Smith, ‘‘Background to Bootlegging,’’ 4. 19. See ‘‘dub,’’ in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (London: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1966), 698.

Notes to Pages 100–105

263

20. George Hoefer, ‘‘Few Discerys Cash in on Bechet’s Popularity,’’ Downbeat, 16 June 1948, 12. 21. Bill Russell, ‘‘Boogie Woogie,’’ in Jazzmen, ed. Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939). 22. Hammond ‘‘was born in the kind of family and educated at the kind of school and given the kind of accomplishments, accent (slightly Hahvud) and clothes that mean the future is assured and just cushy. He didn’t choose to be an expensive lawyer like his father, or anything else respectable and gilt-edged that his Westchester family might have wanted.’’ Otis Ferguson, ‘‘John Hammond,’’ H.R.S. Rag, no. 2 (September 1938): 2. 23. David L. Morton Jr., Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 98. 24. S. J. Begun, Magnetic Recording (New York: Murray Hill Books, 1949), 220. 25. Morton, Sound Recording, 98. 26. Charles Delaunay, ‘‘Untitled,’’ HRS Rag, no. 5 (September 1940), 6; Taylor, ‘‘Jazz Periodicals,’’ 2. 27. Smith, ‘‘Background to Bootlegging,’’ 4. 28. Ibid., 4. 29. ‘‘H.R.S. Members—Attention!’’ HRS Rag, no. 1, July 1938. Ferguson, ‘‘John Hammond,’’ 1–7. Frank Norris, ‘‘Wilder Hobson,’’ HRS Rag, no. 3 (January 1939): 1–4. 30. Frederic Ramsey Jr., ‘‘Grand Lama of Jazz,’’ HRS Rag, no. 4 (August 1940): 4. 31. Norris, ‘‘Wilder Hobson,’’ 2. The unusual usage of the word ‘‘philatelist’’—a stamp collector—suggests that Norris conceived of the relatively new practice of record collecting in the familiar terms of established hobbies, as if collecting jazz records was essentially similar to pressing stamps in a book. 32. ‘‘Records—How Experts Rate Them,’’ HRS Rag, no. 4 (August 1940): 30–31. 33. ‘‘Hot Society,’’ Time, 17 May 1937, 50. 34. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, 51. 35. Charles Edward Smith, ‘‘How to Be a Collector,’’ HRS Rag, no. 4 (August 1940): 25. 36. Jamieson, ‘‘Place of Counterfeits,’’ 3. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term ‘‘symbolic capital’’ to describe how cultural brokers such as art dealers use their expertise to accumulate respect, allowing them to confer legitimacy and value on certain objects. See Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 27. 37. Smith, ‘‘Hot Collecting,’’ 296. 38. Smith, ‘‘How to Be a Collector,’’ 27. 39. Frederic Ramsey Jr., ‘‘Contraband Jelly Roll,’’ Saturday Review, 30 September 1950, 64. As for the baker, Ramsey observed, ‘‘Jelly Roll, who once split a vaudeville bill with an entertainer who boasted he was Sweet Papa Cream Puff, would be happy.’’ 40. Ibid., 64. 41. Hobson, ‘‘Le Jazz Jubilant,’’ 41. 42. ‘‘LP Jazz Reissues Squeeze Bootleg Diskers on Old Collector Items,’’ Variety, 9 May 1951, 42. 43. Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 298.

264

Notes to Pages 105–111

44. Ashley Kahn, liner notes in Various Artists, Billy Crystal Presents: The Milt Gabler Story (New York: Verve Records, 2004). 45. Smith, ‘‘Background to Bootlegging,’’ 3. 46. Shapiro, Bernstein and Co. v. Miracle Record, 91 F. Supp. 473 (N.D. Ill. 1950). 47. Shapiro, 91 F. Supp. at 475. 48. Shapiro, 91 F. Supp. at 474. 49. Shapiro, 91 F. Supp. at 475. 50. RCA v. Whiteman, 114 F.2d 86 (U.S. App. 1940). 51. Russell, ‘‘Boogie Woogie,’’ 194. 52. ‘‘Chi Court Ruling on Copyright Status of Recorded Music Stuns Industry,’’ Variety, 14 June 1950, 57. ‘‘Music Biz Maps Midwest Action vs. Diskleggers,’’ Variety, 18 June 1952, 41. 53. ‘‘Granz Wins Injunction Vs. Indie on Piracy,’’ Variety, 15 October 1952, 40. 54. ‘‘Victor Presses Bootlegs!’’ Record Changer, November 1951, 6. As evidence, the magazine published an RCA invoice that showed 466 copies of a Jolly Roger record composed entirely of performances originally released by Columbia. 55. Ibid., front cover. 56. Ibid., 6. 57. ‘‘Fox Called in on Disk-legging,’’ Variety, 15 August 1951, 43. 58. ‘‘RCA Cracks Down on Disk-legging in Policy Switch,’’ Variety 26 September 1951, 131. 59. ‘‘Victor Presses Bootlegs!’’ 6. 60. Cripple Clarence Lofton, Boogie Woogie and Blues (Pax, 195-?), New York Performing Arts Library, Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives, New York City. 61. For example, see notes by Charles Edward Smith of HRS on Eureka Brass Band, New Orleans Parade (Pax, 195-?), and Hoefer’s notes on Jimmy Yancey, Yancey’s Mixture (Pax, 195-?), New York Performing Arts Library, Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives, New York City. 62. ‘‘Pax Productions: Complete Jazz Record Catalog,’’ Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University at Newark, Newark, New Jersey. 63. ‘‘Art and the Dollar,’’ Record Changer, November 1951, 7. 64. ‘‘Jolly Roger: Records for the Connoisseur,’’ Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University at Newark, Newark, New Jersey. 65. For contrast with Pax records, see Jelly Roll Morton, Vol. 1 (Jolly Roger, 195-?), Sound Recordings Archive, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. 66. Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc. v. Wagner-Nichols Recorder Corporation 101 N.Y.S.2d 483 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1950), aff ’d, 107 N.Y.S.2d 795 (1st Dep’t 1951). 67. ‘‘Recorders vs. Bootleggers,’’ Business Week, 9 February 1952. ‘‘Platter Pilfering,’’ Newsweek, 11 February 1952, 71. 68. William Livingstone, ‘‘Piracy in the Record Industry,’’ Stereo Review, February 1970, 62. 69. ‘‘LP Jazz Reissues Squeeze Bootleg Diskers,’’ 42. 70. ‘‘Platter Pilfering.’’ 71. 71. ‘‘Bootlegging: The Battle Rages,’’ Record Changer, December 1951, 3–4. 72. ‘‘Art and the Dollar,’’ 7. 73. ‘‘Our Position,’’ Record Changer, December 1951, 5. 74. ‘‘2 Dealers Charged in Disk Bootlegging,’’ New York Times, 11 June 1960,

Notes to Pages 111–116

265

21. Robert E. Allison, Peter Korelich (a record presser), Larry F. Lee, Carl John Marts, Charles Richards, and William Thompson (a commercial artist) were also arrested. 75. ‘‘Fake Record Ring Broken; 7 Men Held,’’ Los Angeles Times, 3 October 1950, 2. See also ‘‘New Jersey Bootlegging Crackdown Dramatizes ARMADA Convention,’’ The Cash Box, 18 June 1960. 76. ‘‘Pirate Records,’’ Brad McCuen Collection—Piracy 1969, 97–023, Box 噛18, Folder 噛9, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn. 77. ‘‘Swaggie Records Catalogue,’’ Brad McCuen Collection—Piracy 1969, 97–023, Box 噛18, Folder 噛9, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn.; Nevill L. Sherburn, Letter to W. T. Ed Kirkeby, 13 May 1966, Brad McCuen Collection—Piracy 1969, 97–023, Box 噛18, Folder 噛9, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn. 78. Ed Kirkeby, Letter to Stephen H. Sholes, 9 May 1966, Brad McCuen Collection—Piracy 1969, 97–023, Box 噛18, Folder 噛9, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn. 79. Peter Welding, Letter to Brad McCuen, 5 February 1964, Brad McCuen Collection—Piracy 1969, 97–023, Box 噛18, Folder 噛9, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn. 80. Brad McCuen, Letter to Stephen H. Sholes, 6 April 1966, Brad McCuen Collection—Piracy 1969, 97–023, Box 噛18, Folder 噛9, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn. 81. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 32. 82. With the fragmentation and diversification of the industry that accompanied the boom of rock-and-roll music in the late 1950s, more independent labels and record-pressing factories emerged, but in the period of the Hot Record Society and Jolly Roger few options were available for people to press small runs of records. See Robert Burnett, The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry (New York: Routledge, 1996), 106, and Pekka Gronow, ‘‘The Recording Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium,’’ Popular Music: Producers and Markets 3 (1983): 70. Chapter 5. High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961 1. ‘‘At the Audio Fair,’’ New York Times, 11 November 1951. 2. Ibid. 3. John M. Conly, ‘‘Brahms, Thunderheads and Cachalot Courtship,’’ High Fidelity, October 1954, 51. High Fidelity was founded in 1951 as an independent, quickly gaining a circulation of 20,000, and growing to a monthly with over 100,000 readers during the mid-1950s. ‘‘The magazine for music listeners,’’ as its covers declared, was the first high-fidelity magazine aimed specifically at the consumer rather than the professional or do-it-yourselfer. The magazine was sold to Billboard in the late 1950s and supplanted by hobby publisher Ziff-Davis’s HiFi Review (subsequently HiFi/Stereo Review) as the top-selling magazine in the industry around 1960. 4. Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955), 270. 5. John Mowitt, ‘‘Music in the Age of its Electronic Reproducibility’’ in Rich-

266

Notes to Pages 116–121

ard Leppert and Susan McClary, Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) muses on the implications of subsequent Memorex commercials which made a spectacle out of technology’s ability to confound expert listeners, including Fitzgerald herself, with the question ‘‘is it live or is it Memorex,’’ subordinating sound to vision and music to technology. Mary Ann Doane, ‘‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of the Body and Space,’’ in John Belton and Elisabeth Weis, Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) highlights in this same advertisement a claim to transmit not just an empirically equivalent sound, but indeed the charismatic presence of the star. 6. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 33. 7. Simon Zolta`n, ‘‘The Double Edged Sword: The Technological Sublime in American Novels Between 1900 and 1940’’ Philosphiae doctores, 22 (Budapest: Ph.D. dissertation, Akade´miai Kiado´, 2003), traces the origins of the phrase from Perry Miller to Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1963) and John F. Kasson in Civilizing the Machine (1977). 8. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 199. 9. C. G. Burke, ‘‘Five Years of LP,’’ Saturday Review of Literature, 26 September 1953, 59. 10. Morton Gould, ‘‘Upbeat on Two Counts,’’ HiFi Review, March 1959, 37. 11. The essay, which exists in four versions composed in German and French in the late 1930s, is still best known by its original English title, to which the title of this volume pays homage: ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’’ The recent scholarly edition of Benjamin’s Selected Writings (4 vols., 1996–2003) as well as a 2008 volume of Benjamin’s writings on media adopt the translation above. I find the new translation more useful to think with both because it applies to digital and electronic media, and because the crucial term ‘‘reproducibility’’ has more specificity than ‘‘reproduction.’’ 12. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,’’ in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23. 13. Glenn Gould, ‘‘The Prospects of Recording,’’ High Fidelity, April 1966, 48. 14. Tim J. Anderson, Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 113–14. 15. See Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), chapter 3, for a discussion of the history of ideologies of mimesis and realism in American commercial culture. 16. Gould, ‘‘Prospects,’’ 47 (sidebar). It is worth noting that many people through the years have been shocked by the poor natural acoustics of Lincoln Center’s main hall, which underwent a $10 million acoustic makeover, funded by hi-fi magnate Avery Fisher, in 1973, just eleven years after it opened. It is currently slated for another costly renovation toward the same end. 17. Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press), 83; Goddard Lieberson, ‘‘The Insider,’’ High Fidelity, May 1957, 35. 18. Audio Devices advertisement, High Fidelity, June 1956, 1. 19. The pitch of a sound is measured in cycles per second (now more commonly referred to as hertz).

Notes to Pages 121–124

267

20. ‘‘Outdoors in Connecticut,’’ Hartford Courant, 25 October 1954, copy in Emory and Martha Cook Collection, Rinzler Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, Folder 12. 21. ‘‘Audiomania Sweeps the Nation,’’ Pathfinder, 28 November 1951, copy in Emory and Martha Cook Collection, Rinzler Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, Folder 12. 22. Tom Gunning, ‘‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,’’ in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990). 23. Daniel Lang, ‘‘Ear Driven II,’’ New Yorker, 10 March 1956, 60. In addition to his label, Cook operated a pressing plant that did work for independent labels like Folkways. 24. Anthony Seeger and Nicholas Spitzer, ‘‘Emory Cook.’’ CD-R audio recording of interview, 12 February 1990, Emory and Martha Cook Collection, Rinzler Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 25. Conly, ‘‘Brahms, Thunderheads,’’ 130. 26. Harold C. Schonberg, ‘‘Records: Hi-Fi 1956,’’ New York Times, 30 September 1956, X18. 27. ‘‘There’s Profit in High-Fidelity’’ (advertisement), Audio Engineering 36, no. 11 (1952): 53. Emphasis in the original. 28. Lang, ‘‘Ear Driven I,’’ New Yorker, 3 March 1956, 49–50. 29. Ibid., 49. 30. Edward Tatnall Canby, ‘‘The New Recordings,’’ Harper’s, November 1952, 117. 31. ‘‘Noted with Interest: Show Biz,’’ High Fidelity, January 1959, 6. 32. Although this basic story was trotted out repeatedly, perhaps the first example in the press appeared in ‘‘Music For the Home,’’ Fortune, October 1946, 156ff. The story has much to it, though it downplays the key role played by the record industry in the growth of high fidelity, particularly in introducing the vinyl LP. 33. Seeger and Spitzer, ‘‘Emory Cook.’’ 34. Ibid. 35. In the 1950s, Cook was the subject of a lengthy two-part profile in the New Yorker (1956) as well as shorter pieces in Time (1954 and 1956) and High Fidelity (1954) and various regional newspapers. He contributed several articles to High Fidelity and an opinion piece to the New York Times, and these publications regularly reviewed his releases. 36. Instead of using two grooves, each of which is modulated horizontally, as Cook did, standard stereo LPs matrix the left and right channel information onto a single groove that is modulated both horizontally and vertically. 37. Conly, ‘‘Brahms, Thunderheads,’’ 50. 38. Michael Sheridan, ‘‘He Risks Death Daily to Capture Real Sounds,’’ Toronto Star Daily, 30 July 1955. 39. Lang, ‘‘Ear Driven I,’’ 50. 40. Keir Keightley, ‘‘Low Television, High Fidelity: Taste and the Gendering of Home Entertainment Technologies,’’ Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 47, no. 2 (2003): 236–60. 41. Canby, ‘‘The New Recordings,’’ Harper’s, July 1953, 103. 42. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 43. RCA advertisement, Time, 15 November 1954, 62.

268

Notes to Pages 124–128

44. Lang, ‘‘Ear Driven I,’’ 59. 45. Seeger and Spitzer, ‘‘Emory Cook.’’ 46. Ibid. 47. ‘‘Sounds of Our Times,’’ Time, 15 November 1954, 83. 48. Seeger and Spitzer, ‘‘Emory Cook.’’ 49. Liner notes to Cook 1043, Three Rituals (1955). 50. Cook 1032, Zither and Cimbalom (1953). Emphasis in original. Cook himself wrote all liner notes and advertising copy for his label. 51. Cook, Three Rituals. 52. David Spurgeon, ‘‘Recordings Offer Unusual Sounds.’’ Toronto Globe and Mail, 7 December 1955. Another reviewer disagreed, finding the ‘‘Negro cult music out of Cuba . . . almost hypnotic in its unflagging, unchanging rhythmic backdrop.’’ Howard Lafay, ‘‘Folk Music,’’ High Fidelity, March 1956, 93. 53. Unlike other American labels that recorded Trinidadian music, Cook established a partnership in a pressing plant and record label in Trinidad. Seeger and Spitzer, ‘‘Emory Cook.’’ 54. Stephen Struthers, ‘‘Technology in the Art of Recording,’’ in Avron Levine White (ed.), Lost in Music: Culture, Style and the Musical Event (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 249. 55. Milton T. Putnam, ‘‘A Thirty- Five Year History of the Recording Studio,’’ Audio Engineering Society Preprint 1661 (1980). 56. Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music, 1900– 1960 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 25. 57. Rick Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992), 50. 58. Conly, ‘‘Brahms, Thunderheads,’’ 49. 59. Ibid., 50. 60. Spitzer and Seeger, ‘‘Emory Cook.’’ 61. Lafay, ‘‘Folk Music,’’ High Fidelity, March 1956, 93. 62. In fact, he did pay a royalty on the music box album, though not on some others. Seeger and Spitzer, ‘‘Emory Cook.’’ 63. High Fidelity, April 1954, 55. 64. High Fidelity, April 1959, 91. 65. Cook advertisement, High Fidelity, December 1954, 72. 66. Philip C. Geraci, ‘‘Fi Man’s Fancy,’’ High Fidelity, September 1958, 87. 67. J. Gordon Holt, ‘‘Emory: Cut It Out,’’ High Fidelity, April 1956, 88. 68. Lang, ‘‘Ear Driven I,’’ 50. 69. Wes Philips, ‘‘Quarter Notes,’’ Stereophile, December 1995, 249. 70. The album has been discussed countless times in the audiophile journals The Absolute Sound and Stereophile during the past thirty years. In one recent example, the reviewer focuses on spatiality and distance—for example, the ‘‘sensation of a great distance’’ between instrumentalists and audience, the ‘‘solid, convincing, individual images’’ of the performers arrayed front to back, and Belafonte’s ‘‘dramatically apparent’’ movements. Michael Fremer, ‘‘Music Reference RM-200 power amplifier,’’ Stereophile, April 2002, 173. Another reviewer focused instead on psychic transportation, claiming, ‘‘Whatever the magic of the original moment, I was able to reach out and feel it . . . as though my entire psyche had been transported to the scene.’’ Dick Olsher, ‘‘Basis Audio Ovation Turntable,’’ Stereophile, July 1993, 100–101. 71. Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); David Suisman, ‘‘The Sound of Money: Music,

Notes to Pages 128–132

269

Machines, and Markets, 1890–1925’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2002); Louis E. Carlat, ‘‘Sound Values: Radio Broadcasts of Symphonic Music and American Culture, 1922–1939’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1995); and Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York: Knopf, 1987). 72. Mark Coleman, Playback: From the Victrola to Mp3: 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), 52. 73. Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 301. 74. Liner notes to Smetana, Ma Vlast, and Mozart, Symphony Nr. 38, Mercury MG50043 (1952). 75. Mercury advertisement, High Fidelity, November 1955, 78 76. C. G. Burke, ‘‘Five Years of LP,’’ Saturday Review of Literature, 26 September 1953, 59. 77. Canby, ‘‘The New Recordings,’’ Harper’s, May 1953, 109. 78. Ibid. 79. Howard Taubman, ‘‘Records: Kubelik,’’ New York Times, 25 November 1951. 80. Edward Tatnall Canby, Home Music Systems: How to Build and Enjoy Them (New York: Harper, 1953), 4. 81. Ibid., 98. 82. Michel Chion, Claudia Gorbman, and Walter Murch, Audio-Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 114. 83. Harvey Fletcher, ‘‘Auditory Perspective: Basic Requirements.’’ Electrical Engineering, January 1934, 9. 84. J. Gordon Holt, ‘‘The Haunted Loudspeaker,’’ High Fidelity, March 1956, 48. These practices originated sound-film engineering, which early on had abandoned the spatial realism and unitary perspective—that is, aura—and used equalization for the sake of speech intelligibility. See also Altman, Sound Theory, 53–62. 85. Harold C. Schonberg, ‘‘Records: Fidelity—Some Problems of Sound in Relation to Disks,’’ New York Times, 10 May 1953, X14. 86. Liner notes, MG50042. 87. Westminster advertisement, High Fidelity, January–February 1954, 75. 88. Holt, ‘‘The Haunted Loudspeaker.’’ 89. ‘‘Editorial,’’ Musical Quarterly, July 1952, 426. 90. Michael Chanan, Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music From Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1994); James P. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); John Corbett, ‘‘Free, Single and Disengaged,’’ in Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). 91. ‘‘Would Mozart Have Been a Hi-Fi Fan?’’ High Fidelity, January 1956, 56. Despite some discomfort with audiophile folkways, the author did eventually answer the question in the affirmative. 92. In fact, the original performance was cancelled, and the piece entered the repertory with conventional instrumentation. 93. ‘‘The Talk of the Town: Boom!’’ New Yorker, 12 February 1955, 23. 94. Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture (Mercury MG00054, 1956), liner notes. 95. Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph 1877–1977, 2nd. rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1977) 313.

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Notes to Pages 132–135

96. Harold C. Schonberg, ‘‘Records: ‘Ninth,’ New York Times, 22 April 1956, 126. The description is apt. 97. High Fidelity’s Records in Review (1959), 195. 98. Burt Order, Plaza de Toros (Audio Fidelity, 1957), in ‘‘Fi-Man’s Fancy,’’ High Fidelity, July 1957, 58. Audio Fidelity sold 4.2 million records from 1957 to 1960. ‘‘Noise Merchant,’’ Time, 19 May 1961, 87. 99. V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Incredibly Strange Music, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1993), 142–43. Les Baxter, the founder of the genre, also presented a fantasy, noting that at the time he composed his ground-breaking exotica he had ‘‘never got further than Glendale.’’ Francesco Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica: Sounds, Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 62. These fantasies of exotic islands dovetail with the rubric of Cold War orientalism. See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 100. R. D. Darrell, ‘‘Hi-Fi Music,’’ High Fidelity, September 1959, 94. 101. Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica, 60. 102. Liner notes to Martin Denny, Exotica (Liberty LRP 3034). 103. Liner notes to Martin Denny, Exotica I & II (Scamp SCP 9712, 1996). 104. Audio Fidelity disrupted what the industry hoped would be a slow, orderly transition from mono to stereo by ordering test pressings in a proposed stereo format, then releasing those records to the public even before a stereo phono cartridge was available to play them; by 1958, nearly every label had a stereo catalog. 105. Richard A. Gradone, ‘‘Enoch Light (1905–1978): His Contributions to the Recording Industry’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1980), 73. 106. RD 800, 806, 808, 810, 817, 821, 830, 834. To these were added Bongos, Bongos/Flutes/Guitars, Pertinent Percussive Cha-Chas, two volumes of The Percussive Trombone of Urbie Green, Reeds and Percussion, and Off Beat Percussion, all before 1963. 107. Tim J. Anderson makes the spatiality of stereo central to his otherwise excellent discussions of high fidelity’s tension between the fantastic and the real, but a simple chronology of exotica LPs in the mono era shows that stereo was merely an elaboration of an established aesthetic of fantasy space. Further, as Peter Doyle demonstrates in Echo and Reverb, recordings have long conveyed the illusion of space through the use of different microphone placements, acoustic environments, and electronic adulteration. 108. High Fidelity, August 1960, 74–75. The term had originated in non-musical recordings of sounds like a ping-pong ball moving back and forth or a train passing from one side of the stereo to the other. Light’s innovation was to put such movement in a musical context. 109. Herbert Kupferberg, ‘‘They Shall Have Music,’’ Atlantic Monthly, December 1961, 94. 110. Gradone, ‘‘Enoch Light,’’ 211. 111. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 112. Stereo 35/MM (Command RS 826 SD, 1961). 113. Persuasive Percussion (Command SD 801, 1959). 114. High Fidelity, November 1959, 113. 115. In using film Light presumably benefited from Command’s association with Mercury, the only other label at the time to use 35mm film instead of tape for their recording activity.

Notes to Pages 136–141

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116. This verbiage from Persuasive Percussion was duplicated in Command’s print advertisements. 117. Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica, chapter 1. 118. R. D. Darrell, High Fidelity, February 1961, 10. 119. Kupferberg, ‘‘They Shall Have Music,’’ 93. 120. RCA’s ‘‘emphasis was on music and not on sound for sound’s sake.’’ Cash Box, 31 December 1960. 121. Canby, ‘‘Stereo for the Man Who Hates Stereo,’’ High Fidelity, September 1961, 48. 122. J. Gordon Holt, ‘‘Bell, Drum, and Cymbal,’’ High Fidelity, August 1956, 51. 123. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004), 79. 124. New York Sunday News, 5 August 1962. 125. Bill Coss, ‘‘Big Bang in Percussion,’’ Downbeat, 31 March 1961. 126. Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 298. 127. Herbert Kupferberg, ‘‘Markevitch in Transit.’’ High Fidelity, May 1957, 44. 128. Andrew Blake, ‘‘Towards a Musicology of Early-Mid 1960s Recordings by Suvi Raj Grubb,’’ paper delivered at Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, 18 September 2005: http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/ events/s2Blake.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2009. 129. UK Decca released Das Rheingold in the United States under the London imprint. U.S. Decca was an entirely separate entity by the 1950s. U.S. sales in 1959 were an impressive 100,000 for the three-album set. 130. David N. C. Patmore and Eric F. Clarke, ‘‘Making and Hearing Virtual Worlds: John Culshaw and the Art of Record Production,’’ Musicae Scientiae 11, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 275. 131. John Culshaw, Ring Resounding (New York, 1972), 89. Though Culshaw claimed to portray height in promoting the record, and many critics and fans claimed to hear it, others knew stereo could do no such thing. Culshaw was merely demonstrating the power of suggestion and the strength of popular desire for technological illusion, for his own amusement (see p. 98). 132. Patmore and Clarke, 280. 133. Only later did some complain ‘‘that Culshaw’s explosive sound effects, stereophonic spatialization and occasional electronic alteration of voices reduce ‘The Ring,’ [of which Das Rheingold was the first installment] to a sound-surround spectacular.’’ Alex Ross, ‘‘Georg Solti,’’ New York Times, 16 April 1993, C27. 134. See in particular ‘‘The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory’’ and ‘‘Opera and the Long Playing Record’’ in Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Chapter 6. Occupied Listeners I wish to thank David Suisman and Susan Strasser for helpful feedback in this essay. I also wish to thank University of Michigan students Julia Lippman and Edward Sloan. Unless noted elsewhere, all translations are my own. This essay is dedicated to a generous mentor and friend: Andre´-Jean Tudesq. 1. Andre Passeron, ‘‘L’organisation de l’anne´e de Gaulle transcende les clivages politiques,’’ Le Monde, 13 June 1990; Jonathan Fenby, ‘‘Finding His Voice While Losing His Clothes . . . ,’’ Guardian (London), 18 June 1990; Carolyn Mar-

272

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vin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 161. Translation of de Gaulle from Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 385. 2. Robert Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble-Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, 1997), 58. For a detailed examination of events surrounding de Gaulle’s movements in mid-June 1940, culminating in the delivery of the Appeal, see Franc¸ois Delpla, L’Appel du 18 Juin 1940 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2000). This work contains the ‘‘official’’ text of the Appeal, as well as several other versions, including one that which appeared in Le Petit Provenc¸al newspaper on 19 June, and a written transcription from a listening post of the Swiss Secret Service, which picked up de Gaulle’s signal at 10:00 p.m. on the eighteenth. See Delpla, L’Appel, 303–4. A subsequent BBC broadcast by de Gaulle on June 22 was recorded, but it is the first, unrecorded address that has grown to mythic proportions in official commemorative events, such as those of June 1990. 3. Asa Briggs, The War of Words, vol. 3: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 241. 4. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 8. 5. Raymond Kuhn, The Media in France (New York: Routledge, 1995), 78; http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-url_id⳱26500&url_do⳱do_topic& url_section⳱201.html. Accessed 25 March 2009. A poll on the fiftieth anniversary of the event found that 75 percent of secondary school students in France knew the year of the broadcast. Philip Jacobson, ‘‘De Gaulle’s Call to Arms Inspires a Nation Again,’’ The Times (London), 18 June 1990. Quotation is from Ian Davidson, ‘‘Hero-Worship of De Gaulle Comes Back into Vogue in Paris,’’ Financial Times (London), 14 June 1990, 2. 6. Several notable works addressing wartime French radio are He´le`ne Eck, La Guerre des ondes: Histoire des radios de langue franc¸aise pendant la deuxie`me guerre mondiale (Paris: A. Colin; Lausanne: Payot, 1985); Briggs, War of Words; JeanLouis Cre´mieux-Brilhac, La France Libre: De l’appel du 18 juin a` la libe´ration (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, Les Ondes de la liberte´, 1934–1984 (Paris: Jean-Claude Latte`s, 1984); and Jean-Noe¨l Jeanneney, Une Histoire des me´dias: Des origines a` nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Correspondence indicates that the BBC had a limited following in France prior to the Occupation; see Briggs, War of Words, 3:239–41. The notion of mediated communication’s link to national consciousness has been explored in the classic work by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991). 7. See Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), and Jackson, France: The Dark Years. The gendered and racialized limits and uncritical assumptions of discourses of radio’s ‘‘national’’ embrace or broadcasting’s relationship to Republican principles must be qualified given that Franco-French men dominated the industry. Women, immigrants, and minorities found limited routes (if any) to the microphone or studios of interwar national radio, and limited, at times problematic representation on air as well. See Joelle Neulander, ‘‘Broadcasting Morality: Family Values and the Culture of the Radio in 1930s France’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 2001), and Rebecca Scales, ‘‘Radio Broadcasting, Disabled Veterans, and the Politics of National Recovery in Interwar France,’’ French Historical Studies 31, no. 4 (2008): 643–78. 8. The following discussion synthesizes the work of scholars who have assembled the complex institutional history of interwar broadcasting, notably Rene´

Notes to Pages 145–146

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Duval, Histoire de la radio en France (Paris: A. Moreau, 1979), and Andre´-Jean Tudesq and Pierre Albert, Histoire de la radiote´le´vision en France (Paris: PUF, 1981). The reference works I have relied on most are Caroline Ulmann-Mauriat, Naissance d’un me´dia: Histoire politique de la radio en France (1921–1931) (Paris: Harmattan, 1999), and Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio. 9. Caroline Ulmann-Mauriat, ‘‘Apre`s l’enterrement du statut, la coexistence des deux re´seaux—public et prive´ est organise´e,’’ Cahiers d’Histoire de la Radiodiffusion, no. 64 (2000): 5. 10. Quoted in Caroline Ulmann-Mauriat, ‘‘L’e´mergence de la radiodiffusion dans la vie publique Franc¸aise (1921–1931)’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lyon, 1984), 85. In 1925, for example, France had four stations of one kilowatt or more, while Germany had twenty, and Great Britain had eighteen. 11. Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio, 448–49. 12. Ulmann-Mauriat, Naissance d’un me´dia, 45. For a detailed account of Gustave Ferrie´’s role in promoting the development of radio in France, see Michel Amoudry, Le Ge´ne´ral Ferrie´ et la naissance des transmissions et de la radiodiffusion (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1993). Scholars mention different dates for the PTT annexation. I follow Ruth Thomas, Broadcasting and Democracy in France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), 1, and Fabrice d’Almeida and Christian Delporte, Histoire des me´dias en France: De la grande guerre a` nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 75. The decree of 24 November 1924 declared that the government would ‘‘tolerate’’ the unauthorized private stations, but left room for doubt about the government’s long-term commitment to independent broadcast ventures. Prot, Dictionnaire de la Radio, 7. Statistic for 1930 stations from Ulmann-Mauriat, ‘‘Apre`s l’enterrement du statut, la coexistence des deux re´seaux—public et prive´ est organise´e,’’ 5. 13. Ulmann-Mauriat, Naissance d’un me´dia, 245, 248; Pascal Griset, ‘‘La Socie´te´ radio-france dans l’entre-deux-guerres,’’ Histoire, E´ conomie et Socie´te´ 2, no. 1 (1983). 14. The ban on further authorization of private radio led to the formation of stations that served the French market, but were physically located outside of France. Radio Luxembourg, established in the Duchy of Luxembourg, famously served French listeners with commercial fare kept off the PTT network. See Denis Mare´chal, Radio Luxembourg, 1933–1993: Un me´dia au coeur de l’Europe (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1994). 15. Ce´cile Me´adel, Histoire de la radio des anne´es trente: Du sans-filiste a` l’auditeur (Paris: Anthropos Economica, 1994), 36. 16. Station inception data drawn from ibid.; Ulmann-Mauriat, Naissance d’un me´dia; and Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio. 17. Long wave stations transmitted their programs using low radio frequencies on the broadcast band. This permitted reception over large distances. Medium frequency stations produced signals that would reach a reduced geographical area, per Ferrie´’s proposal. 18. Me´adel, Histoire de la radio des anne´es trente, 63–65, and Ulmann-Mauriat, Naissance d’un me´dia, 251. 19. Andre´-Jean Tudesq, ‘‘La Radiodiffusion en Languedoc avant la deuxie`me guerre mondiale,’’ in Economie et socie´te´ en Languedoc-Roussillon (Montpellier: Universite´ Paul Vale´ry, 1978), and Elisabeth Cazenave, ‘‘Histoire de la radio a` Bordeaux et dans le Sud-Ouest’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bordeaux III, 1977). 20. Radio set ownership in the north was greater than elsewhere in France,

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for economic and geographical reasons. Paris had a relative abundance of listenable French-language stations. See Me´adel, Histoire de la radio des anne´es trente, 32. 21. Tudesq, ‘‘La Radiodiffusion en Languedoc avant la deuxie`me guerre mondiale.’’ 22. Cazenave, ‘‘Histoire de la radio a` Bordeaux et dans le Sud-Ouest,’’ and Me´adel, Histoire de la radio des anne´es trente, 31. 23. On economic life in France at this juncture, see H. R. Kedward, France and the French: A Modern History (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2006), 120– 25. On the transition to modern life for the rural population, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976). 24. Such threads connect the story of radio’s development to that of post– World War II technologies. See, for example, Gabrielle Hecht, ‘‘Peasants, Engineers, and Atomic Cathedrals: Narrating Modernization in Postwar Provincial France,’’ French Historical Studies 20, no. 3 (1997): 381–418. 25. Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio, 244. 26. Quoted in Ulmann-Mauriat, ‘‘L’e´mergence de la radiodiffusion,’’ 313–14. 27. Quoted in Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio, 7. 28. Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio, 386–87. 29. John M. Sherwood, Georges Mandel and the Third Republic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970), 152–53. 30. Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio, 487. 31. See Me´adel, Histoire de la radio des anne´es trente, 41–42. 32. Georges Mandel, ‘‘Report to the President of the French Republic,’’ 13 February 1935, Extraits du Journal Officiel de la Republique Franc¸aise du 17 Fe´vrier 1935. 33. Me´adel, Histoire de la radio des anne´es trente, 70. 34. Prot, Dictionnaire de la Radio, 177–78. 35. For this analysis, see Me´adel, Histoire de la radio des anne´es trente, 73. 36. Kedward, France and the French, 176–83. 37. Quoted in Sherwood, Georges Mandel and the Third Republic, 200. 38. Charles Rearick, The French in Love and War: Popular Culture in the Era of the World Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), and Joelle Neulander, ‘‘Family Values and the Radio: The 1937 Radio Elections and the Miniseries France,’’ French Politics, Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (2006): 529–55. 39. Quoted in Elisabeth Cazenave and Andre´-Jean Tudesq, ‘‘Radiodiffusion et politique: Les e´le´ctions radiophoniques de 1937 en France,’’ Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (Oct.–Dec. 1976): 529–55. 40. Scholars estimate an additional five to ten percent of sets went unregistered and uncounted because owners wished to avoid paying the annual government tax. Radio statistics in Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1994), 64; Andre´-Jean Tudesq, ‘‘La Radio des anne´es 30 et la nouvelle perception de l’information,’’ European Journal of Communication 12, no. 3 (1986): 97; and P. J. Kingston, ‘‘A Survey of the French Radio Industry, 1940–1944, as Seen by the BBC,’’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3, no. 2 (1983): 159. On the appeal of private broadcasting over public, see Almeida and Delporte, Histoire des me´dias en France: De la grande guerre a` nos jours, 78–79.

Notes to Pages 151–153

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41. Me´adel, Histoire de la radio des anne´es trente, and Kedward, France and the French, 165–76. 42. For a fuller account of struggles to control clandestine radio, see my 2010 article in French Politics, Culture and Society. 43. Arreˆte´ relatif au controˆle des informations radiodiffuse´es, 13 octobre 1938, reprinted in J.-B. Duvergier, Collection comple`te des lois, de´crets d’inte´reˆt ge´ne´ral, traite´s internationaux, arreˆte´s, circulaires, instructions, etc. (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1938), 925; Almeida and Delporte, Histoire des me´dias, 78. 44. Donald Baker, ‘‘The Surveillance of Subversion in Interwar France: The Carnet B in the Seine, 1922–1940,’’ French Historical Studies 10, no. 3 (1978): 512. During World War I, French cinema and radio were under governmental control, liberty of the press was suspended, and the government ran information campaigns. See Almeida and Delporte, Histoire des me´dias, 13, 34. 45. Thomas, Broadcasting and Democracy in France, 2–3; Jeanneney, Une Histoire des me´dias, 181. Arreˆte´ de 13 octobre 1938, reprinted in Duvergier, Collection comple`te des lois, 925. For more on the Daladier government’s attitudes toward the news media, see Andre´-Jean Tudesq, ‘‘L’utilisation gouvernementale de la radio,’’ in Edouard Daladier, chef de gouvernement, ed. Rene´ Re´mond and Janine Bourdin, Actes du colloque la France sous le gouvernement Daladier, d’avril 1938 a` septembre 1939 tenu a` la fondation nationale des sciences politiques les 4, 5 et 6 de´cembre 1975 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977). 46. ‘‘White’’ propaganda disclosed its origination point and its controlling authority. ‘‘Gray’’ propaganda referred to information provided via uncertain origins, yet whose general trajectory could be readily discerned. See Ortwin Buchbender, Radio humanite´: Les e´metteurs allemands clandestins 1940 (Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1986), 12–14, and Briggs, War of Words, 3:14. On Goebbels’s radio projects, see Lawrence C. Soley, Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda (New York: Praeger, 1989); Michael Leonard Graham Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939–1945: Organisations, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); and H. J. P. Bergmeier, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). For excerpts of the broadcasts of Voix de la Paix, Radio-Humanite´, and others, see E. Tangye Lean, Voices in the Darkness: The Story of the European Radio War (London: Secker and Warburg, 1943), 131–42. 47. Jeanneney, Une Histoire des me´dias, 174, 180; Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 117; Briggs, War of Words, 3:222–23. Briggs quotation cites R. Dorgele`s, La Droˆle de guerre (1957), 3:44–46. The phrase quoted translates as ‘‘Good night, lads. Be seeing you!’’ 48. Jean-Louis Cre´mieux-Brilhac, Les Voix de la liberte´: Ici Londres, 1940–1944 (Paris: La Documentation Franc¸aise, 1975), xiii. Both black stations continued their operations into the early 1940s. See Burgmeier, Hitler’s Airwaves. 49. French intelligence believed radio jamming to be fairly, but not consistently, effective in drowning out German signals with static. See ‘‘Note,’’ 5 October 1939, Controˆle Ge´ne´ral de la Surveillance du Territoire, 12373, 280, Fonds de Police de l’Air, Archives Nationales, Fontainebleau, France (hereafter PA), and ‘‘Note d’Information,’’ 19 December 1939, Inspection Ge´ne´rale des Services de Police Administrative, 12384, 280, PA. See also ‘‘Note,’’ Ministe`re de l’Inte´rieur, Direction Ge´ne´rale de la Suˆrete´ Nationale, Police de l’Air et de la TSF, ‘‘Note,’’ 29 March; 5, 10–12, 15, 18–19, 24, 27–28 April; 3, 6 May 1940, 1280, 280, PA.

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Notes to Pages 153–155

50. A helpful synthesis of French media history and politics that addresses government information campaigns is Elisabeth Cazenave and Caroline Ulmann-Mauriat, Presse, radio et te´le´vision en France de 1631 a` nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1995). See also Philippe Amaury, Les Deux premie`res expe´riences d’un ministe`re de l’information en France, l’apparition d’institutions politiques et administratives, d’information et de propagande sous la IIIe re´publique en temps de crise (Juillet 1939–Juin 1940), leur renouvellement par le re´gime de Vichy (Juillet 1940–Aouˆt 1944), Bibliothe`que de droit public. T. 89 (Paris: Librairie ge´ne´rale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1969). Briggs cites a report on ‘‘Anglo French Broadcasting Liaison’’ by A. P. Ryan and W. Proctor Wilson of 18 December 1939 that mentions PTT newscasts in over a dozen languages. See Briggs, The War of Words, 3:173 n. 3. 51. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 110, 117, and Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio, 273. 52. For an anatomy of an infamous case of supposed direct effects of propaganda during World War II, see Chapter 2 by Ann Elizabeth Pfau and David Hochfelder in this volume. 53. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 118–21. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. ‘‘World War II,’’ http://search.eb.com/eb/article-53540; accessed 17 April 2007. 54. Christian Brochand and Comite´ d’histoire de la radiodiffusion, Histoire ge´ne´rale de la radio et de la te´le´vision en France, vol. 1: 1921–1944 (Paris: La Documentation franc¸aise, 1994), 571. Occupied France consisted of numerous zones under different authorities, which changed over time. See the map in Jackson, France: The Dark Years, xix. 55. Laure Schnapper-Flender, ‘‘La Vie musicale sous l’occupation,’’ Vingtie`me Sie`cle 63 (July–September 1999): 132–43, and Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 256. 56. Henriot was assassinated by the Resistance on 28 June 1944. See Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio, 298. Cre´mieux-Brilhac, Les Voix de la liberte´, 122. 57. Pierre Laval and Jacques Tre´moulet had interests in private stations and collaborated with the Vichy government to continue commercial operations. See Brochand and Comite´ d’histoire de la radiodiffusion, Histoire ge´ne´rale de la radio et de la te´le´vision en France, 574–86. 58. Thomas, Broadcasting and Democracy in France, 3, and Kedward, France and the French, 252–54. An extraordinary film by Claude Chabrol, L’Oeil de Vichy (The Eye of Vichy), deftly assembles Occupation-era French propaganda films and newsreels to show the fantastical erasure of reality by Vichy propagandists. See also Brett Bowles, ‘‘Newsreels, Ideology, and Public Opinion Under Vichy: The Case of La France en Marche,’’ French Historical Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 419–63. 59. Listeners also favored long- and shortwave French-language programs furnished by Radio Sottens in Switzerland, U.S. Armed Forces Radio, and the Voice of America. J. L. Cre´mieux-Brilhac and G. Bensimhon, ‘‘Les Propagandes radiophoniques et l’opinion publique en France de 1940 a` 1944,’’ Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale, no. 101 (1976); Brochand and Comite´ de l’histoire de la radiodiffusion, Histoire ge´ne´rale de la radio et de la te´le´vision en France, 571–73; and Emmanuelle Loyer, ‘‘La Voix de l’Ame´rique’: Un outil de la propagande radiophonique ame´ricaine aux mains d’intellectuels franc¸ais,’’ Vingtie`me Sie`cle. Revue d’histoire 76 (October–December 2002): 79–97. 60. Prot, Dictionnaire de la radio, 252–53, 537. Cre´mieux-Brilhac, La France libre, 218. 61. Martyn Cornick, ‘‘ ‘Fraternity Among Listeners’: The BBC and French

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Resistance: Evidence from Refugees,’’ in Vichy, Resistance, Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France, ed. Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 62. BBC broadcast, 3 July 1940, reprinted in Cre´mieux-Brilhac, Les Voix de la liberte´, 11, 122. 63. 24 July 1940, 21 October 1940, 30 September 1941, reprinted in ibid., 29, 120–21, 307. 64. See transcript of The French Speak to the French, 2 January 1942, reprinted in ibid., 17. 65. Transcript of The French Speak to the French, 3 October 1940, 1 July 1942, and 8 August 1942, reprinted in Cre´mieux-Brilhac, Les Voix de la liberte´, 159–60, 185. Other broadcasts on persecution of Jews aired throughout 1942. 66. Quoted in Cre´mieux-Brilhac, La France libre, 220. 67. Blum quoted in Briggs, War of Words, 3:11. Originally quoted in T. O. Beachcroft, British Broadcasting (London: Longmans Green, 1946). Mandel was not so fortunate. He was released from the camp and murdered on orders of the Vichy government in 1944. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. ‘‘Mandel, Georges’’; accessed 11 July 2008.

Chapter 7. An Audible Sense of Order Note to epigraph: Quoted from David Brodsly, L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 7. 1. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970); Tim Dant, ‘‘The Driver-Car,’’ in Theory, Culture and Society 21, nos. 4–5 (2004): 61–79; Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Penguin Press, 1971). Banham initially published his responses to his time in Los Angeles in the BBC’s publication The Listener, in August and September 1968, following talks he had given on BBC radio. See also Edward Dimendberg, ‘‘The Kinetic Icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as Mobile Metropolis,’’ Urban History 33, no. 1 (2006): 106–25. 2. On connecting mobility and cinematic ways of seeing, the seminal text remains Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 3. For a detailed account of the FCC’s intentions regarding citizens’ band radio, see Carolyn Marvin and Quentin J. Schutze, ‘‘The First Thirty Years’’ [‘‘CB in Perspective,’’ special section], Journal of Communication 27 (Summer 1977): 104–77; especially 109. 4. Citizens Band Radio and the Future of the Portable Telephone (New Canaan, Conn.: International Resources Development, 1977), 54–55. 5. Most magazine and newspaper articles about CB radio published at the height of national interest in CB, from 1975 to 1977, made reference to the recent introduction of the speed limit, the truckers’ strike, and the use of CB to avoid police and highway patrol speed traps. See, for example, ‘‘The Bodacious New World of C.B.,’’ Time, 10 May 1976, 78–79; ‘‘Citizen’s-Band Radio: Danger of Air Pollution?’’ U.S. News and World Report, 7 March 1977, 76–77; ‘‘Hey Good Buddy: CU Rates CB Radios,’’ Consumer Reports 42, no. 10 (October 1977): 563; Brock Yates, ‘‘One Lap of America,’’ Car and Driver, February 1975, 27–30, 75–77; ‘‘Nuisance or a Boon? The Spread of Citizens’ Radios,’’ U.S. News and

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World Report, 29 September 1975, 26–28; William Jeanes, ‘‘Tuning in Justice on Your CB Radio Dial,’’ Car and Driver, July 1975, 10. 6. Most newspaper and magazine articles about CB radio published during the years of the building CB craze commented on the rapidly rising sales of CB radio sets. See, for example, ‘‘The Newest Hobby: Kibitzing by Radio . . . ,’’ Forbes, 15 July 1975, 16–17; J. D. Reed, ‘‘A Big 10–4 on the Call of the Wild,’’ Sports Illustrated, 29 March 1976, 36–38, 47–48. 7. ‘‘The Bodacious New World of C.B.,’’ 78. 8. An article written a few years after the CB craze of the 1970s discusses the gender politics of CB handles: J. Jerome Smith, ‘‘Gender Marking on Citizen Band Radio: Self-Identity in a Limited Channel Speech Community,’’ Sex Roles, 7, no. 6 (1981): 599–606. The author argues that ‘‘differential analysis of a sample of male and female handles reveals that men project virility, while women collectively refrain from any significant degree of gender marking’’ (599). The choice of a handle bearing a close connection to one’s ‘‘real’’ identity was not always typical among CB users in the 1970s. Many CB users chose handles that achieved a certain amount of reimagining and repackaging of themselves. The power to rename oneself as an adult within this new communications environment of (potentially) total anonymity provided CB users the chance to reinvent themselves in the oral/aural nonvisual world of CB. The use of handles also served to connect CB users to the intrigue associated with other uses of code names, such as the world of spies and secret agents; for some CB users, renaming themselves through a handle might have served to override the memory of unchosen names they had been given in their lives, such as unwanted nicknames from childhood. This aspect of CB culture also anticipates the widespread use of online user names on the Internet and of carefully constructed ‘‘avatars’’ in online games such as Second Life. On the construction of online identities, see Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Michael Rymaszewski et al., Second Life: The Official Guide, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: Sybex, 2008); Jesper Juul, Half Life: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 9. Citizens Band Radio and the Future of the Portable Telephone (New Canaan, Conn.: International Resources Development, 1977), 60. 10. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 11. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 12. For the growing secondary literature on the United States in the 1970s, especially that addressing the rise of the ‘‘sunbelt’’ South, see Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: DaCapo Press, 2001), especially chap. 4, ‘‘The Rise of the Sunbelt and the Reddening of America’’; Andreas Killen, 1973: Nervous Breakdown (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), especially 221–26; Edward D. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), especially chap. 8, ‘‘The Me Decade and the Turn to the Right.’’ 13. On gender and race in the 1970s, see Eric Porter, ‘‘Affirming and Disaffirming Actions: Remaking Race in the 1970s,’’ in America in the Seventies, ed.

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Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004) especially 64–70; on masculinity in the 1970s, see Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies, especially 177–85. For an analysis of the reassertion of American masculinity in the 1980s, based in the gender politics of the New Right, as represented in popular film, see Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 14. Number of license applications figures from ‘‘The Newest Hobby,’’ 16; on licensing see, for example, ‘‘The Drivers’ Network,’’ Time, 22 September 1975, 48–49; ‘‘Citizens Band Radios,’’ Changing Times: The Kiplinger Magazine 130, no. 1 (January 1976): 41–42. 15. Beth Ann Krier, ‘‘The Radio That Ate Los Angeles,’’ Los Angeles Times, 2 May 1976. For an example of the popular dissemination of FCC regulation of CB and licensing procedures, see Forest H. Belt, Easi-Guide to CB Radio for the Family (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams and Co., 1975), chap. 3. 16. A 1973 article in the Los Angeles Times reported on a survey about Californians’ attitudes about freeway construction conducted for the newspaper in February of that year. The survey showed that southern Californians were more enthusiastic than northern Californians about continued freeway building. In the combined data from northern and southern California, whites were fairly evenly divided about more building with or without environmental constraints, but ‘‘those interviewed with Spanish or Mexican surnames were even more favorable to unrestricted construction.’’ Blacks polled expressed the least enthusiasm for more freeway construction: 53 percent ‘‘were for moderate cutbacks’’; 13 percent ‘‘wanted drastic controls to discourage auto use and further growth,’’ and 2 percent said they ‘‘would stop all freeway construction.’’ Since the survey gave a racial-ethnic breakdown only in the combined data from northern and southern California, we cannot read it very accurately for its applicability to Los Angeles’s white and non-white populations. It is possible that Latino residents of Los Angeles, if included in the survey among ‘‘those . . . with Spanish or Mexican surnames,’’ may well have represented a generation less negatively affected by freeway construction, since many of the predominantly Mexican and Mexican American communities in East Los Angeles torn apart by freeway construction had suffered those assaults during the late 1950s. The continued resistance to and resentment toward freeway construction by black Californians speaks to their communities having been most negatively affected by such construction projects and reaping the fewest rewards from the completed freeways. See Ted Thackerey Jr., ‘‘Californians Still Like Freeways—With Restraints,’’ Los Angeles Times, 11 March 1973; see also Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) for an insightful analysis of the development of Los Angeles freeways and their impact on black and Latino city residents; see in particular 206–15. 17. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote his comments praising Los Angeles in the July 1913 issue of NAACP’s publication The Crisis. For a discussion of such early twentieth-century ‘‘boosting’’ of Los Angeles by some in the African American community, see Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chap. 1. 18. Sides, L.A. City Limits, especially 183–89. 19. To hear part of a recording of the police dispatcher, go to: http://harry marnell.net/1965.htm. 20. Robert J. Allan, ‘‘Police Push Study for ‘Buck Rogers Age’ Radios,’’ Los Angeles Times, 17 March 1974. 21. Through grants established in connection with the Omnibus Crime

280

Notes to Pages 167–71

Control and Safe Streets Act of 1970, the federal government supplied the vast majority of the funding to improve police telecommunications. 22. Doug Smith, ‘‘Nothing to Fear from Cop(ter) on the Beat,’’ Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1975. See also ‘‘Bird’s Eye Look at Street Crime,’’ Los Angeles Times, 20 September 1977. Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn campaigned throughout the 1960s and 1970s for installing emergency telephones on freeways. Hahn persuaded the local police, sheriffs, and highway patrol departments, as well as the California state government and the FCC, to work together on legislation for the new system, leading to the gradual installation of emergency telephones. Correspondence with local residents, memos from Hahn’s office, and the responses from the phone companies and state legislators can be found in the Kenneth Hahn Collection, Manuscripts Division, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 23. ‘‘3 Gunmen Terrorize and Rob 35 Aboard L.A.-to-S.F. Bus,’’ Los Angeles Times, 12 August 1974; ‘‘Holdup on Freeway Flyer,’’ Los Angeles Times, 3 March 1976. A July 1973 Los Angeles Times article reported a San Diego incident in which Gary Raphael, a black plumber, picked up his white boss to drive him to work but then pulled a gun on him and ordered him to drive around the city. Raphael then stopped his car at the home of a white couple unknown to him, kidnapped them, and put all three of his hostages in the white couple’s van and drove to the Mexican border. Raphael killed his female hostage and, according to his two surviving victims, he had ‘‘vowed’’ to ‘‘get as many white people as possible,’’ and had said, ‘‘I want to get out of the ghetto.’’ See ‘‘Kidnaper Shot to Death After Slaying Woman,’’ Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1973. Additional articles relating freeway-based crimes, some of which explicitly identified the perpetrators as black, include: ‘‘Woman Kidnapped on Santa Ana Freeway,’’ Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1966; ‘‘2 Cyclists Rob Driver on Freeway,’’ Los Angeles Times, 12 July 1967; ‘‘Girl Sighted Talking to Man on Freeway Before She Vanished,’’ Los Angeles Times, 18 November 1970; ‘‘A Holdup Victim Cries for Help—Then Waits 21/2 Hours,’’ Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1972; ‘‘Anatomy of a High-Speed Chase,’’ Los Angeles Times, 26 September 1977; ‘‘Rock-Throwing ‘Phantom’ Tracked to Lair, Arrested,’’ Los Angeles Times, 12 November 1977. 24. Paul Delaney, ‘‘Suburbs Fighting Back as Crime Rises,’’ New York Times, 30 August 1976. 25. The use of CB radio to quell fear of crime by helping citizens feel safer should also be considered within the context of the development of nonlethal weapons and self-protection devices—for example, the Florida-based Mace company’s development of pepper spray as a self-defense product mass-marketed primarily to urban women. Pepper spray had been developed originally in Canada to repel bears, and was adopted by the U.S. Postal Service in the 1970s to provide defense against aggressive dogs. 26. ‘‘Headless Body of Youth Found in Canyon Identified,’’ Los Angeles Times, 21 April 1977, and ‘‘Tenth Girl Found Dead; Nude Body Discovered by Freeway,’’ Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1977. 27. For a recent analysis of the politics of the neighborhood during the 1970s, see Suleiman Osman, ‘‘The Decade of the Neighborhood,’’ in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 1992), especially pp. 35ff.; C. Ray Jeffery, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (Beverley Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1971); Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Preven-

Notes to Pages 171–173

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tion Through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Dennis P. Rosenbaum, ‘‘The Theory and Research Behind Neighborhood Watch: Is It a Sound Fear and Crime Reduction Strategy?’’ Crime and Delinquency 33 (1987): 103–34. See also Joe R. Feagin, ‘‘Home Defense and the Police: Black and White Perspectives,’’ American Behavioral Scientist 13, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1970): 797–815. A 1974 article in Public Opinion Quarterly analyzed poll data collected since the late 1960s concerning Americans’ fears of crime and violence. In short, the data suggested that women from all backgrounds and poor, racial minority urban residents (male and female) had the most fear of crime and violence in their neighborhoods. These were the groups most likely to be victims of such crime and violence but not the most likely to form or to benefit from Neighborhood Watch groups. Hazel Erskine, ‘‘The Polls: Fear of Violence and Crime,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 131–45. 28. Lyn H. Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 66. 29. Ibid., 118. 30. Ibid., 131–32. 31. Ibid., 137. 32. Ibid., 140. 33. Ibid., 151–55. The ‘‘aloof ’’ attitude of the 1970s urban dweller, discussed by Lofland, links her analysis back to a founding text of urban studies, Georg Simmel’s essay ‘‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’’ originally published in 1903. Simmel identified what he called the ‘‘blase´’’ attitude as a characteristic emotional, psychological mode adopted by city inhabitants in response to overstimulation. See Richard Sennett, ed., Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 47–60, esp. 51–53. 34. Quoted in Mary-Lou Weisman, ‘‘Good Buddies: Walter Mitty Rides the Merritt,’’ New York Times, 4 September 1977. 35. The article referred to here is Harold R. Kerbo, Karnie Marshall, and Philip Holley, ‘‘Reestablishing ‘Gemeinschaft’? An Examination of the CB Radio Fad,’’ Urban Life [now Journal of Contemporary Ethnography] 7, no. 3 (October 1978): 337–58. It is perhaps worth noting here that in today’s CB slang usage, ‘‘good buddy’’ refers to ‘‘a homosexual.’’ The term that has replaced ‘‘good buddy’’ is ‘‘good neighbor’’ or simply ‘‘neighbor.’’ Further research might determine if ‘‘good buddy’’ came to denote ‘‘homosexual’’ because the original term suggested too much intimacy and affection between men, and if other CBers went from ‘‘buddies’’ to ‘‘neighbors’’ to defuse that possibility of queerness, or if in fact the higher number of female truckers caused the change from ‘‘buddy’’ to the gender-neutral ‘‘neighbor.’’ 36. Ibid., 6. 37. W. Dale Dannefer and Nicholas Poushinsky, ‘‘Language and Community,’’ Journal of Communication 27, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 126. 38. See, for example, the dedication (‘‘This book is dedicated to a new breed of individualist . . . the American CBer!’’) and the foreword to a popular CB slang dictionary published in 1975 and reprinted in 1976. The author, listed only on the copyright page as Wayne Floyd, calls it ‘‘exciting’’ that CB is a medium ‘‘not controlled or administered by private monopolies and—owing to its fantastic growth—is virtually free of governmental restraint.’’ He continues: ‘‘We American people have found a remarkable instrument for expressing our individuality and, in so doing, preserving our individual freedom.’’ Jason’s Authentic Dictionary of CB Slang (Fort Worth, Tex.: Jason Press, 1975), 6.

282

Notes to Pages 174–177

39. Richard David Ramsey, ‘‘The People Versus Smokey Bear: Metaphor, Argot and CB Radio,’’ Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 2 (1979): 342, 343. 40. The 1970s saw the proliferation of identifiable ‘‘subcultures’’ coming out of the social and cultural movements of the preceding two decades. Most of these subcultures used some kind of distinctive slang. Correct and fluent use of a subculture’s slang signified membership or the potential for membership. The 1970s also saw a renewed academic interest in subcultures. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham proved an especially important site for such studies. Two books from the CCCS in the 1970s became foundational texts to subsequent Marxist cultural studies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere: Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s collection Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain in 1975, and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979. For a concise introduction to the historical and theoretical development of subculture studies, see Ken Gelder, Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (New York: Routledge, 2007). 41. ‘‘The Bodacious New World of C.B.,’’ 78. 42. Jason’s Authentic Dictionary of CB Slang, 5–6. 43. For a historical account of the populist rhetoric of the American Right, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). 44. ‘‘The Bodacious New World of CB,’’ 78. 45. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 38. 46. See ‘‘From Muskogee to Luckenbach: Country Music and the ‘Southernization’ of America,’’ by James C. Cobb. Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 3 (1982): 81–91. 47. See ‘‘Police Battle Busing Foes Marching in South Boston,’’ New York Times, 16 February 1976; ‘‘Boston Whites March in Busing Protest,’’ New York Times, 28 October 1975; ‘‘Teen-Agers in Boston Toss Rocks and Bottles,’’ New York Times, 17 February 1976; ‘‘Large Wallace Vote Reflects Depth of Antibusing Sentiment in Boston’s Working-Class Neighborhoods,’’ New York Times, 8 March 1976; ‘‘Blacks’ Anger Rising in South Boston as Violence over Schools Spreads,’’ New York Times, 2 May 1976; ‘‘School Buses in Louisville Will Carry Guards Today,’’ New York Times, 8 September 1975. 48. Shawn D. Lewis, ‘‘10–4, Bro’,’’ Ebony 31, no. 12 (October 1976): 120–22, 124, 126. 49. Superbowl speaking style has the monologic, declarative quality of rap and, though further research is needed to confirm this, the tendency (if not requirement) to exaggerate competitively, as in the older African American oral tradition of ‘‘the dozens.’’ The so-called superbowl CB channel, channel 6, still exists and remains almost exclusively the domain of African American male CB enthusiasts. I have found no published material on black CB use or black CB language, concerning either the 1970s or the present. I am working on an article on this topic and have started to conduct interviews with ‘‘superbowl’’ participants—past and present—as part of my research. I have gleaned anecdotal evidence from a few Web sites maintained by superbowl enthusiasts. See, for example, http://www.skullcracka.com and http://www.angelfire.com/nj/ear plugger. 50. The voice in the car, and the transmission of one’s voice over CB into others’ cars—their mobile ‘‘home territories’’—connects CB not only to the Nixonian surveillance and self-surveillance epitomized in the President’s White House tapes but also to the development of more recent automobile technolo-

Notes to Pages 178–183

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gies that simultaneously offer increased ‘‘safety’’ through voice communication and (self-)surveillance. The disembodied but supposedly reassuring voices of satellite-based automobile guidance and assistance systems (such as the OnStar system) represent another outcome of the marriage of cars, driving, fear, and mobile communications. 51. On the rise of conservative talk radio and its connection to a history of American masculinity, see Susan J. Douglas, ‘‘Letting the Boys Be Boys: Talk Radio, Male Hysteria, and Political Discourse in the 1980s,’’ in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2002). Chapter 8. ‘‘The People’s Orchestra’’ 1. On the precipitous decline and resurgence of the recording industry, see William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1977), 255–56, 265; Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: The Evolution of the Phonograph (Indianapolis: Howard Sams, 1959), 301–32. During the Depression, one writer pronounced the phonograph industry entirely dead. See Dane York, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of the Phonograph,’’ American Mercury, September 1932, 1–12. For an encyclopedic account of the popular music business during the 1930s and 1940s, see Russell Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 117–290. 2. Walter Hurd, ‘‘America’s New Industry,’’ in ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ supplement, Billboard, 28 September 1940, 3; Hurd, ‘‘A Busy Year,’’ Billboard, 27 September 1941, supplement, ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ 4; ‘‘Phonograph Boom,’’ Time, 4 September 1939, 36; ‘‘America’s Jookbox Craze,’’ Newsweek, 3 June 1940, 50. See also Gelatt, Fabulous Phonograph; Read and Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo, 301–32. 3. Herb J. Allen, ‘‘Records for Operators’ Needs,’’ Billboard, 18 January 1936, 72. On the importance of Prohibition’s end, see ‘‘Flood Gates of Business Opened with Sale of Beer’’ and ‘‘All Machines Will Reap Benefits from Beer,’’ Coin Machine Journal, March 1933, 10–13; Ralph J. Mills, ‘‘Consider the Phonograph!’’ Billboard, 30 November 1935; Leo S. Weinberger, ‘‘Phonographs in the Spotlight,’’ Automatic Age, January 1936, 271. 4. The word ‘‘juke’’ is a Gullah word that means disorderly or wicked, and similar words may be found in other West African languages. In the United States, the word was often used to refer to dancing. See the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed., s.v. ‘‘juke.’’ Arthur E. Yohalem, ‘‘Poor Man’s Orchestra,’’ Billboard, 3 January 1942, 72. See also ‘‘Small Change—Big Business,’’ Billboard, 24 February 1940, 66; Lon Bagnall, ‘‘Why Are Phonos Called Jook Organs? Florida Offers Clue,’’ Billboard, 24 February 1940, 71; ‘‘Juke Box Jitters,’’ Billboard, 8 January 1941, 70; ‘‘Hates Name ‘Juke Box’; Proposes a Term ‘Musophone,’ ’’ Billboard, 6 September 1941, 66. 5. ‘‘Names Wanted,’’ Billboard, 11 May 1940, 66. 6. Theodore Pratt, ‘‘Land of the Jook,’’ Saturday Evening Post, 26 April 1941, 20. See also J. M. Dalziel, ‘‘The ‘Jook,’ ’’ Billboard, 22 February 1941, 73. On the history of juke joints, see Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance

284

Notes to Pages 184–187

Formations and African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); on the word ‘‘juke,’’ see 79–80. The word ‘‘juke’’ may also have retained unpleasant connotations dating to Richard Dugdale’s famous study of the Jukes family, in which Dugdale sought to establish a hereditary basis for poverty and criminal behavior. Richard Louis Dugdale, ‘‘The Jukes’’: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1877). 7. ‘‘RCA Contest Seeks Substitute For ‘Juke Box’ Tag; $150 Prize,’’ Billboard, 20 December 1941, 56. See also ‘‘Names Wanted’’; ‘‘Maloney, of Panther, Launches New Name Contest for Phonos,’’ Billboard, 11 October 1941, 69. 8. Warren Susman, ‘‘The People’s Fair: Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer Society,’’ in his Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 212. 9. James T. Mangan, ‘‘The Pulse of the People,’’ Billboard, 31 January 1942, 98. 10. On the history of the phonographs and recorded sound, see Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 23–42; Millard, America on Record, 17–64; David Suisman, ‘‘The Sound of Money: Music, Machines, and Markets, 1890–1925’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2002); Read and Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo, 105–18. On the player pianos and other music machines, see Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 29–66; Harvey N. Roehl, The Player Piano Treasury: The Scrapbook History of the Mechanical Piano in America (Vestal, N.Y.: Vestal Press, 1961); Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music: An Illustrated History of Mechanical Musical Instruments (New York: Crown, 1973). 11. Allen, ‘‘Records for Operators’ Needs.’’ On the importance of prohibition’s end, see ‘‘Flood Gates of Business Opened with Sale of Beer’’ and ‘‘All Machines Will Reap Benefits from Beer’’; Mills, ‘‘Consider the Phonograph!’’; Weinberger, ‘‘Phonographs in the Spotlight,’’ 271. On the number of records purchased for jukebox play, see Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven, 132–38, 216; Walter Hurd, ‘‘A Busy Year,’’ Billboard, 27 September 1941, pp. 4, 84. 12. Gelatt, Fabulous Phonograph, 267; ‘‘Phonograph Boom’’; Jack Kapp collection, Recorded Sound Reference Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 13. ‘‘Music for Long-Pull Profits,’’ Billboard, 30 November 1935, 114; Bill Gersh, ‘‘About Time,’’ Billboard, 25 March 1939, 76; H. F. Reves, ‘‘Let’s Rationalize Music,’’ Billboard, 26 August 1939, 116–17; H. F. Reves, ‘‘Automatic Music— Real Business,’’ Billboard, 7 September 1940, 79; Bill Gersh, ‘‘The Coin Machine Industry Needs a National Educational Program,’’ Billboard, 16 August 1941, 81. 14. Gersh, ‘‘About Time’’; Bill Lackenbauer, ‘‘Music Machines Make Hit Songs,’’ in ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ supplement, Billboard, 28 September 1940, 30; Walter W. Hurd, ‘‘The Music World Works Together,’’ Billboard, 9 November 1941, 90, 99. 15. See, for example, the advertisement for the Automatic Phonograph Network, Billboard, 18 May 1940, 2; ‘‘Phonos Boost Many Recording Artists into Big Name Class,’’ Billboard, 16 March 1940, 64. 16. Reves, ‘‘Automatic Music,’’ 79; Billboard, August 1941, 68–69. 17. For an example of juke box operators’ desire to attain commercial respectability, see Walter W. Hurd, ‘‘Music,’’ Billboard, 4 September 1937, 76. 18. Reves, ‘‘Automatic Music’’; Hurd, ‘‘Music.’’ 19. Accordingly, the title of Billboard’s section on coin-operated phonographs was changed from ‘‘Weekly Music Notes’’ to ‘‘Music Merchandising’’ beginning in 1939. See also A. C. Hughes, ‘‘Forget Operating . . . You’re Mer-

Notes to Pages 187–190

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chandising Music,’’ Coin Machine Journal, August 1935, 21–22; Ralph G. Neal, ‘‘Music Operator Analyzes His Business,’’ Billboard, 10 April 1937, 182; Henry T. Roberts, ‘‘Music Must Be Merchandised,’’ Billboard, 22 January 1938, 94; Bert Wimble, ‘‘Music for Sale!’’ Billboard, 17 December 1938, 78–79; Ben Boldt, ‘‘Coin Phonograph Turns Salesman,’’ Billboard, 28 January 1939, 76–77. 20. Billboard’s ‘‘Record Buying Guide’’ was compiled from surveys of at least four operators in each of thirty major markets. In 1940 the magazine added a list of ‘‘Machine Hits’’ to its music popularity charts. Billboard, 6 January 1940, 10. 21. Rosso Brothers (of Woodville, Mississippi), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 21 October 1939, 63. 22. Barry Ulanov, ‘‘The Jukes Take over Swing,’’ American Mercury, October 1940, 176–77. 23. ‘‘Phono Ops Cue Diskers,’’ Billboard, 2 August 1941, 9. 24. Ibid. See also Allen, ‘‘Records for Operators’ Needs’’; ‘‘Phono Men’s Opinions Aid Diskers, Pubs,’’ Billboard, 2 August 1941, 74; ‘‘Let the Billboard’s Record Buying Guide Help You or Your Service Men Pick the Hits Every Week,’’ Billboard, 23 September 1939, 35, 46. 25. Walter Hurd, ‘‘More Than Its Share,’’ Billboard, 23 September 1939, supplement, ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ 1; ‘‘Let the Billboard’s Record Buying Guide Help You.’’ See also Walter Hurd, ‘‘Popular Records,’’ Billboard, 27 January 1940, 70. 26. Allen, ‘‘Records for Operators’ Needs’’; Daniel Richman, ‘‘Making Records for Operators,’’ Billboard, 23 September 1939, supplement, ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ 3. 27. Irving Mills, ‘‘Prospecting for Hit Tunes,’’ and Jack Robbins, ‘‘Picking Hit Songs,’’ in ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ supplement, Billboard, 23 September 1939, 11ff.; advertisement for the Wurlitzer company’s Play Meter, Billboard, 21 August 1937, back cover. On the dislike and even violence provoked by some patrons’ habit of playing the same song repeatedly, see ‘‘Critic Opines on Phonographs,’’ Billboard, 8 July 1939, 76; ‘‘Operator Defends High Quality of Juke Box Music,’’ Billboard, 29 April 1944, 66. 28. M. G. Hammergren, ‘‘Is It a Hit? Ask the Automatic Phonograph,’’ Billboard, 31 January 1942, 82–83. See also Hurd, ‘‘More Than Its Share’’; Hurd, ‘‘Popular Records.’’ On efforts to measure songs’ popularity during the 1930s, see Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 158–81. 29. Max Lipen, ‘‘Taverns,’’ Billboard, 28 September 1940, 58; Eva M. Warner, ‘‘Music Operators’ Fantasia; or, Selecting Disks for Phonos,’’ Billboard, 5 April 1941, 80. 30. Hurd, ‘‘Popular Records,’’ 70. 31. Billboard added ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ later shortened to ‘‘What the Records Are Doing,’’ in October 1938. Billboard, 22 October 1938, 65. 32. Coin Machine Journal, August 1935, 21. For examples of operators who marched to the ‘‘Lucky Strike Hit Parade,’’ see the letters of Frank Miles (of Danville, Illinois), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 6 May 1939, 77; Sam Serio (of Natchez, Mississippi), Billboard, 27 May 1939, 84. Mort Siffen of Chicago claimed to rely on ‘‘all purpose records,’’ Billboard, 25 March 1939, 76. For suggestions as to how operators could offer an almost fail-safe selection of records, see J. Harry Payne (of the Wurlitzer-Simplex Co.), ‘‘What Do You Care if the average Is There?’’ Coin Machine Journal, October 1935, 9; Ralph G. Neal, ‘‘Profit Tips for Music Operators,’’ Billboard, 5 December 1936, 78.

286

Notes to Pages 190–192

33. Art Carp (of Los Angeles), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 25 February 1939, 75. 34. Mort Siffen (of Chicago), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 25 March 1939, 76; Dalziel, ‘‘The ‘Jook,’ ’’ 73; ‘‘Hillbilly Disks Pull Most Nickels, Ops Say,’’ Billboard, 2 September 1944, 62. 35. Vince Corroo (of Milwaukee), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 10 December 1938, 75. On the growing popularity of country music, and on the emerging definition of the genre, see Bill C. Malone, Country Music USA, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 93–198; Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 69–116; Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 1–52; David Sanjek, ‘‘Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising over the Mystery Train: The Complex Construction of Country Music,’’ in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 22–44; Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–45; Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 135–57. 36. Examples abound. See the letters of Lloyd L. Barrett (of Oklahoma City), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 29 October 1938, 73; Eddie Schatz Jr. (of Austin, Texas), Billboard, 3 December 1938, 69; W. F. Connor (of Dallas), Billboard, 17 December 1938, 76; M. H. Sparks (of Soperton, Georgia) and Jack Maloney (of Ft. Worth), Billboard, 24 December 1938, 71–72; Texas Novelty Co., Billboard, 4 March 1939, 71; W. F. Daniel (of Corpus Christi), Billboard, 25 March 1939, 76; Louis Murphy (of New Orleans), Billboard, 1 July 1939, 77; Joe and Babe Thorpe (of Tolar, Texas), Billboard, 4 November 1939, 67; M. E. Salyer (of Big Stone Gap, Virginia), Billboard, 11 November 1939, 67; Mr. and Mrs. John Lima (of North Little Rock), Billboard, 9 December 1939, 65. 37. E. M. Perry (of Spokane), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 29 April 1939): 85; Bill Paradise (of Spokane), Billboard, 21 October 1939, 63; Sam Honigberg, ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Boxes,’’ Billboard, 28 December 1940. 38. ‘‘Hillbilly Tunes Score Big Hit in Most Detroit Jukes,’’ Billboard, 9 September 1944, 63; ‘‘Folk Music Here to Stay in Jukes,’’ 3 March 1945, 93. On the spread of country music, see Malone, Country Music USA, 177–97; Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 135–57; Cecilia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. 79–102, 131–66; James Gregory, American Exodus: The Okie Migration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 222–38. 39. ‘‘Hillbilly and Cowboy Songs Attract More Attention on Phonos,’’ Billboard, 19 April 1941, 67. 40. ‘‘Hillbilly Disks Continue as Top Tunes in Jukes,’’ Billboard, 7 October 1941, 61. On the gulf between rural and urban life in country music, see Tichi, High Lonesome, 19–102. 41. Roy Bangs (of Little Rock), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 22 April 1939, 75; ‘‘Find Folk Tunes Please,’’ Billboard, 28 November 1942, 84; ‘‘Hillbilly Disks Pull Most Nickels,’’; ‘‘American Folk Recordings,’’ Billboard, 16 January 1943. 42. ‘‘Folk Music Takes Hold in the Jukes,’’ Billboard, 28 October 1944, 343. See also ‘‘Hillbilly Disks Continue as Top Tunes in Jukes’’; ‘‘Folk Music Here to Stay in Jukes.’’ Operators similarly noted that blues records enjoyed long-stand-

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ing popularity with their fans. See the letters of Al Bloom (of New York City), ‘‘What the Records Are Doing for Me,’’ Billboard, 29 October 1938, 73; Texas Novelty Company, Billboard, 4 March 1939, 71. 43. Daniel Richman, ‘‘Making Music for the Operator,’’ Billboard, 23 September 1939, supplement, ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ 3; ‘‘Phonos Boost Many Recording Artists into Big Name Class,’’ 64; Harold Humphrey, ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ Billboard, 5 April 1941, 72. 44. On radio’s role in popularizing country music, see ‘‘Folk Tune Leaders,’’ Billboard, 10 June 1944, 65. 45. ‘‘Hillbilly and Foreign Record Hits of the Month,’’ Billboard, 24 June 1939, 127. On the effort to define the genre of country music, see Sanjek, ‘‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’’ 22–44. 46. ‘‘American Folk Records,’’ Billboard, 30 May 1942, 101; ‘‘Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Hillbilly and Other American Folk Tunes,’’ in ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Records,’’ supplement, Billboard, 26 September 1942, 86. 47. ‘‘American Folk Records’’; ‘‘Thar’s Gold.’’ 48. Hurd, ‘‘More Than Its Share,’’ 1; Homer Capehart, quoted in Walter W. Hurd, ‘‘Social Policy,’’ Billboard, 27 August 1938, 106. 49. ‘‘Man at Bar Turns into a Music Critic,’’ Billboard, 11 November 1939, 69. See also Gladwin Hill, ‘‘Music Has a Dictator,’’ Automatic Age, January 1940, 69, 73. 50. Advertisements for Wurlitzer automatic phonographs, Billboard, October/November 1937, back cover. 51. Bill Gersh, ‘‘A Million Home Phonographs,’’ Billboard, 13 April 1940, 143–45. 52. Mangan, ‘‘Pulse of the People,’’ 98. 53. Ibid. 54. Allen, ‘‘Records for Operators’ Needs,’’ 72. 55. ‘‘Man at Bar Turns into a Music Critic,’’ 69. 56. Daniel Richman, ‘‘Making Records for the Operator,’’ in ‘‘Talent and Tunes on Music Machines,’’ supplement, Billboard, 23 September 1939, 3; Jack Robbins, ‘‘Picking Hit Songs,’’ Billboard, 7, 45; Richman, ‘‘Pop Music Comes of Age,’’ Billboard, 6 January 1940, 3. 57. ‘‘Critic Opines on Phonographs.’’ 58. ‘‘Operator Defends High Quality of Juke Box Music.’’ 59. ‘‘Phono Patrons Defend Jukes,’’ Billboard, 13 May 1944, 64. Classical music, not surprisingly, fared poorly on jukeboxes. See ‘‘No Chance for Jukes to Use Classics, Reporter Discovers,’’ Billboard, 10 February 1945, 63. 60. Billboard, 21 June 1941, 81. 61. Boldt, ‘‘Coin Phonograph Turns Salesman.’’ 62. Advertisement for Wurlitzer phonographs, Billboard, 27 July 1940, 108. A survey by the Rock-Ola company indicated that 85 percent of patrons enjoyed watching the operation of the phonograph’s mechanism. ‘‘People Like to See What They Hear,’’ Automatic Age, February 1938, 50. 63. Advertisement for Seeburg Wall-O-Matic, Billboard, 4 May 1940, 81. 64. Advertisements for Rock-Ola Dial-A-Tune, Automatic Age, November 1940, 30, 59. See also Frank Petrine, ‘‘Automatic Shots,’’ Automatic Age, November 1940, 13; advertisements for Keeney Wall Box System, Billboard, 1 June 1940, 72; Rock-Ola Dial-A-Tune, Billboard, 8 June 1940, 91; advertisement for Wurlitzer Bar-Boxes, Billboard, 8 June 1940, 92. 65. Advertisements for Rock-Ola’s Tone Column phonographs, Automatic Age, February 1941, 46, 51; April 1941, 2.

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Notes to Pages 196–200

66. Advertisement for Wurlitzer’s Colonial Model 780, Automatic Age, January 1941, 22–23; ‘‘Colonial Model Scores Hit at Distributor Showrooms,’’ Automatic Age, December 1940, 54; ‘‘Top Spots Go for Colonial,’’ Automatic Age, January 1941, 110. 67. ‘‘Folk Music Takes Hold in the Jukes,’’ 343. See also ‘‘American Folk Recordings,’’ Billboard, 16 January 1943; 30 January 1943, 62; ‘‘Music Trends Combined to Give Folk Music a Wider Audience,’’ in ‘‘Coin Machines,’’ supplement, Billboard, 27 February 1943, 93; ‘‘Hillbilly Tunes Gain Popularity in Baltimore,’’ Billboard, 6 March 1943, 60; ‘‘Ops Beating Headaches by Using Oldies and Folk Disks,’’ Billboard, 29 July 1944, 89; ‘‘Hillbilly Disks Pull Most Nickels, Calif. Ops Say,’’ 62; ‘‘Folk Music Here to Stay in Jukes,’’ 92–93. On the effects of wartime rationing of shellac, see Malone, Country Music USA, 180–81. 68. ‘‘Committee Tells What Jukes Want,’’ Billboard, 7 April 1945, 64–65; ‘‘Not Enough Disk Toppers,’’ Billboard, 14 April 1945, 68; ‘‘More Folk Disks, Say Ops,’’ Billboard, 12 May 1945, 65. 69. Billboard, 8 January 1944, 18. The magazine did not publish charts on retail sales of folk records until 1948. 70. ‘‘Music Cheers,’’ Billboard, 1 June 1940, 70; Ben Boldt, ‘‘This Is a Music Year!’’ Automatic Age, June 1941, 64; ‘‘Keep ’Em Singing,’’ Automatic Age December 1941, 28–29. 71. ‘‘Phonograph Operators Enlist in Defense Savings Program,’’ Automatic Age, October 1941, 18; ‘‘Ring the Bell for Uncle Sam,’’ Automatic Age, February 1942, 8–9; ‘‘The Phonograph Verdict,’’ New York Herald Tribune, 17 February 1942; reprinted in Automatic Age, March 1942, 12. 72. ‘‘Music Future,’’ Billboard, 6 May 1944, 61; ‘‘Foresee Many New Uses for Phonos in Post-War Period,’’ Billboard, 13 May 1944, 66; Walter Hurd, ‘‘Reporting Record Sales,’’ Billboard, 9 September 1944, 63; ‘‘Wanted: 2,000,000 Machines,’’ Automatic Age, 12 August 1944, 60; ‘‘Ease Up on Coin Machine Curbs,’’ Automatic Age, May–June 1945, 1. 73. ‘‘Record Conscious,’’ Billboard, 9 December 1939, 64; Bill Gersh, ‘‘A Million Home Phonographs’’; ‘‘Music World Works Together’’; ‘‘Music Future,’’ Billboard, 6 May 1944, 61. 74. ‘‘Music Future.’’ 75. ‘‘Foresee Many New Uses for Phonos in Post-War Period,’’ Billboard, 13 May 1944, 66; ‘‘More Releases and Records; Albums Cut Juke Supply,’’ Billboard, 29 April 1944, 66; ‘‘Committee Tells What Jukes Want’’; ‘‘Not Enough Disk Toppers,’’ Billboard, 14 April 1945, 68; ‘‘More Folk Disks, Say Ops.’’

Chapter 9. Sounds Local I wish to thank David Suisman, Susan Strasser, and Derek Vaillant for valuable feedback on this essay. Thanks also to Christian Faur and Anna Nekola. 1. Federal Radio Commission, ‘‘In re application of H. Verne Spencer, Docket 1787,’’ 22 December 1932, Box 20, ‘‘12/22/32 噛633,’’ Radio Division General Records, 1910–34 (RG173), Minutes of Commission Meetings and Hearings, 1928–70, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter FRC Minutes). 2. Federal Radio Commission, ‘‘In re application of Mavrick Scott et al., Docket 2142,’’ 17 November 1933, Box 24, ‘‘11/17/33 噛719,’’ FRC Minutes. 3. For a book-length exploration of this tendency and its potential conse-

Notes to Pages 200–204

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quences, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). 4. Herbert Hoover, ‘‘Address by Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, by Radio to Convention of National Electric Light Association at Atlantic City May 21, 1924,’’ Box 490, Folder ‘‘Radio Correspondence, Press Releases, Misc. 1924 April–September,’’ Herbert Hoover Archives (Commerce Papers), West Branch, Iowa. 5. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 12. See also Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–1934 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). 6. Jody Berland, ‘‘Radio Space and Industrial Time: The Case of Music Formats,’’ ed. Justin Lewis and Toby Miller, Critical Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 235. 7. Derek Vaillant, ‘‘Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921–1935,’’ American Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 2002): 25–66; Lizabeth Cohen, ‘‘Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s,’’ Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America, ed. Ronald Edsforth and Larry Bennett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Alexander Todd Russo, Points on the Dial: Radio, Space, Attention (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Clifford J. Doerksen, American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 8. For the purposes of this essay I am ignoring mobile transmitters, shortwave radio, HAM radio, maritime communications, and other forms of radio that were relatively incidental to the shifts I am discussing. More pertinent is the problem of defining the ‘‘community of license.’’ Many scholars have discussed the problems of even defining a ‘‘local community,’’ much less determining its needs and interests. Indeed, one of the recurring themes of scholarship on localism in the media system is the difficulty of connecting programming to any coherent, defensible understanding of the local community. See, for example, Chris Anderson and Michael Curtin, ‘‘Mapping the Ethereal City: Chicago Television, the FCC, and the Politics of Place,’’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16, no. 3–4 (1999): 289–305. 9. Doreen Massey, ‘‘A Place Called Home?’’ New Formations 17 (1992): 3–15. 10. See Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 170. For more on Innis’s ideas and their application to radio broadcasting, see Berland, ‘‘Radio Space and Industrial Time,’’ 235–38. Many of the trends that Berland identifies in Canadian broadcasting in the 1990s were present in U.S. radio from the earliest days of broadcasting. 11. Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 12. For more on the national class and its anti-local attitudes, see Bill Kirkpatrick, ‘‘Localism in American Media Policy, 1920–1934: Reconsidering a ‘Bedrock Concept,’ ’’ Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 4, no. 1–3 (October 2006): 87–110. 13. Sally Foreman Griffith, Home Town News: William Allen White and the Emporia Gazette (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6–7. See also Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 14. Daniel T. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), 117.

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Notes to Pages 204–211

15. Ibid., 134. 16. Reproduced in Timothy R. Mahoney, ‘‘A Common Band of Brotherhood: Male Subcultures, the Booster Ethos, and the Origins of Urban Social Order in the Midwest of the 1840s,’’ Journal of Urban History 25, no. 5 (July 1999): 642. Emphasis added. 17. Ibid., 626. 18. See also Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Strasser notes that the efforts of civic boosters to promote their business prospects while simultaneously regulating the behavior of citizens had a self-contradictory, even self-defeating quality: ‘‘The good roads they promoted and the mass-merchandising techniques they attacked were of a piece, two aspects of a transformation that reverberated throughout the culture’’ (221). 19. Quoted in Hal Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 203. 20. Barron, Mixed Harvest, 203–4. 21. ‘‘Cows, Colleges, Contentment,’’ n.s., n.d. (April 1924), WCAL Scrapbooks: Scrapbook I, p. 28, WCAL Collection, St. Olaf Archives, Northfield, Minnesota. 22. Ibid., 202. 23. ‘‘St. Louis’ New Station,’’ Variety, 30 September 1925, 45. 24. These letters are in Radio Division General Records, 1910–34 (RG173), Docketed Case Files, 1927–34, Box 375, ‘‘1724,’’ National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. 25. ‘‘Frogs in Radio Puddles,’’ New York Herald Tribune, August 27, 1928. 26. Carl Dreher, ‘‘One Explanation for the Plethora of Broadcasting Stations,’’ Radio Broadcast 11, no. 1 (May 1927): 36. 27. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1937), 264. 28. See Doerksen, American Babel, especially Chapters 1 and 2. 29. Vaillant, ‘‘Sounds of Whiteness.’’ 30. Bob Landry, ‘‘Take Off Those Handcuffs,’’ Variety, 1 January 1935, 85. 31. Don Davis, ‘‘Indie vs. Network Setups,’’ Variety, 2 January 1934, 57. 32. Ibid., 57. 33. ‘‘Air Showmanship Ratings,’’ Variety, 3 April 1934, 37. 34. Robert L. Hilliard and Michael C. Keith, The Quieted Voice: The Rise and Demise of Localism in American Radio (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 27. 35. Stan Gores, ‘‘Car Dealer With Radio Sideline Sought Business, Started KFIZ,’’ Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter, 24 March 1967, Sec. 2, p. 4. 36. For additional context for such alliances, see Michael Stamm’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 10) on press-radio relations during this period. 37. ‘‘KFIZ Spotlight’’ (advertisement), Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter, 12 September 1936. 38. E. D. Fruth to the Sponsors of the Radio Broadcasts of the Fond du Lac High School Basketball Games of 1934–35, 28 March 1935, Box 1, Scrap Book: 4/8/35–10/10/36, KFIZ (Radio Station: Fond du Lac, Wisc.), Records, 1923– 1967, Wisconsin Historical Society, Oshkosh, Wisconsin (hereafter KFIZ). 39. See Box 1, ‘‘Newsclippings, 1936, 1967 and Radio Schedules, 1940,’’ KFIZ.

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40. ‘‘1935 Showmanship Stunts in Radio,’’ Variety, 1 January 1936, 158. 41. Tide Publishing Company, ‘‘Sustainer Check List,’’ 26 December 1935. National Broadcasting Company Files, 1921–1942, Box 42, Folder 20, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. 42. John Wallace, ‘‘Should the Small Station Exist?’’ Radio Broadcast 11, no. 6 (October 1927): 373. 43. Federal Radio Commission, ‘‘In re application of Theo. F. Zemla et al., Docket 1445,’’ 6 May 1932, Box 17, ‘‘5/6/32 噛546,’’ FRC Minutes. 44. H. A. Bellows, ‘‘Broadcasting—A Universal Advertising Medium,’’ Broadcast Advertising, August 1929, 25. Note that WCCO was not yet owned by CBS at the time of this quote (WCCO became a network-owned and -operated station in 1932), so the competition that Bellows was waging with the network was still acute. 45. Charles G. Burke, quoted in ‘‘How Can We Improve Radio? A StationAgency Symposium,’’ Broadcast Advertising, April 1932, 24. 46. T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 231. 47. Michael Curtin, ‘‘Media Capital: Towards the Study of Spatial Flows,’’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 208. 48. Richard Peterson has looked specifically at country music and the term ‘‘hillbilly’’ during this era and traces its cultural potency to the same class struggle that I have described: ‘‘Urbane, middle-class sophisticates . . . considered [country music] the antithesis of their own aesthetic and worldview because it evoked the image of rural poverty and small-town morality that so many in the rapidly urbanizing American society were trying to escape. It was country to their city; the unchanged to their rapidly changing; traditionalism to their modernism; craft-made to their mass produced.’’ Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 6. 49. ‘‘Meet ‘The Farmer’s Daughter’ from Kansas’’ (WIBW advertisement), Printer’s Ink 34 (January 1937): 62. 50. Federal Radio Commission, ‘‘In re applications of The House of Gurney, Inc. (WMAX), Docket 1578, and Mitchell Broadcasting Corp. (KGDA), Dockets 1613 and 1642,’’ 10 February 1933, 6, Box 21, ‘‘2/10/33 噛646,’’ FRC Minutes. 51. Lears, Fables of Abundance, 205. 52. Barron, Mixed Harvest, 8. 53. Ibid., 225. 54. ‘‘KWKH Has Real Personality,’’ Radio Digest 23, no. 6 (October 1928): 60. 55. Henry Field in the ‘‘Report of Proceedings of Sub-Committee No. 3,’’ Third Radio Conference, 6 October 1924, 3–4, Box 496, Folder ‘‘Radio: Conferences—National Third (Proceedings),’’ Herbert Hoover Archives (Commerce Papers), West Branch, Iowa. 56. Harry Hansen, ‘‘Some Meditations on the Radio,’’ Nation, 3 March 1925, 324–25. 57. Memory Lane, brochure, October 1931, quoted in Hilmes, Radio Voices, 103. 58. ‘‘How Can We Improve Radio? A Station-Agency Symposium,’’ Broadcast Advertising, April 1932, 22; ‘‘My Conception of Radio Showmanship Is—’’ Variety, 26 August 1936, 46. 59. Hilda Matheson, quoted in ‘‘Broadcasting—To All Homes,’’ vol. 1. New York: National Broadcasting Company, 1935, Box 8, Folder 5 (‘‘NBC-Research-

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1935’’), E. P. H. James Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. 60. H. C. Connette, quoted in Hilmes, Radio Voices, 103. 61. Barron, Mixed Harvest, 225. For more on these musical programs and their ‘‘fabricated authenticity,’’ see Peterson, Creating Country Music, especially 97–155. 62. Of special note here is Fred Allen, who was able to bridge cosmopolitanism and translocal localism. For example, the opening of Town Hall Tonight (1935–40), as described by Jason Loviglio, invited listeners to join a parade kicking off each program, ‘‘a radio ritual that cleverly joins quaint notions of smalltown civic pride with the decidedly urbane humor of Allen and his Mighty Allen Art Players.’’ Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and MassMediated Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxv. 63. For more on how and why regulators sought to marginalize local radio, see Kirkpatrick, ‘‘Localism in American Media.’’ Chapter 10. The Sound of Print 1. On the relationship between technological innovation, recorded sound, and American life prior to the development of radio broadcasting, see Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Derek Vaillant, Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873– 1935 (Chapel Hill: University of University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Steve Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 2. Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 269; Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport, The Psychology of Radio (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 259, vii. 3. Douglas Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), xi; ‘‘Radio as Revolutionist,’’ Nation 114 (29 March 1922): 361–62. 4. Between 1920 and 1940, the American population rose from 106.5 million to 132.1 million, a 19.4 percent increase, while daily newspaper circulation rose from 27.8 million to 41.1 million, a 32.4 percent increase. The total number of books published increased from 8.4 million in 1920 to 11.3 million in 1940, a 25.7 percent rise. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 9, 808–9. 5. Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 31. 6. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982; New York: Routledge, 2002), 134. 7. For a detailed study of the specialty sections devoted to radio broadcasting in American newspapers, see Randall Patnode, ‘‘Heralding Radio: The Social Construction of Broadcasting by Newspaper Specialty Sections, 1922–1926’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1999). 8. Catherine Covert, ‘‘ ‘We May Hear Too Much’: American Sensibility and

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the Response to Radio, 1919–1924,’’ in Mass Media Between the Wars: Perceptions of Cultural Tension, 1918–1941, ed. Catherine Covert and John Stevens (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 200–201. 9. Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 292. 10. See, for example, Craig, Fireside Politics; Clifford Doerksen, American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999); Melvin Patrick Ely, The Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon (1991; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Tona Hangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and MassMediated Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Edward Miller, Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); Kathy Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Barbara Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–1934 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). Beyond some brief but incisive discussion in Hilmes’s Radio Voices and Ely’s Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy, little attention is given in these works to the roles played by newspapers as station owners. On newspaper reading and print culture on the eve of the invention of radio broadcasting, see David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 11. On early cross-ownership, see Christopher Sterling, ‘‘Newspaper Ownership of Broadcast Stations, 1920–68,’’ Journalism Quarterly 46 (Summer 1969): 227–36, 254; Harvey Levin, Broadcast Regulation and Joint Ownership of Media (New York: New York University Press, 1960); and Robert McChesney, ‘‘Press-Radio Relations and the Emergence of Network, Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, 1930–1935,’’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 11 (1991): 41–57. 12. W. E. Harkness to Stephen Davis, 4 October 1924, Commerce Period Papers, Box 491, Folder Radio—The Blind 1924, Herbert Hoover Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa; Charles Warner, ‘‘Installing of Sets for Blind About to Start,’’ Chicago Tribune, 8 February 1925, H12. 13. ‘‘Says Ownership of Radio Station an Asset to Small City Daily,’’ Editor & Publisher 70 (13 February 1937): 29; George Brandenburg, ‘‘Radio Rendering Valuable Aid in Circulation Promotion Work,’’ Editor & Publisher 70 (9 October 1937): 9. 14. W. S. Gilmore, ‘‘Radio Serves This Newspaper,’’ The Quill 19 (June 1931): 15; Fred Gaertner Jr., ‘‘Station WWJ Strong Promotion Arm for Detroit News Since 1920,’’ Editor & Publisher 68 (27 July 1935): 6; William S. Hedges, quoted in Winfield Barton, ‘‘What Broadcasting Does for a Newspaper,’’ Radio News 4 (February 1924): 344. 15. Douglas, Listening In, 78–82.

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16. Radio Staff of the Detroit News, WWJ—The Detroit News: The History of Radiophone Broadcasting by the Earliest and Foremost of Newspaper Stations; Together With Information on Radio for Amateur and Expert (Detroit: The Evening News Association, 1922), 21; Gaertner, ‘‘Station WWJ Strong Promotion Arm for Detroit News Since 1920,’’ 6; Reminiscences of Edwin Lloyd Tyson, May 1951, pp. 18–19, Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection, New York City (hereafter CUOHROC); Jules Tygiel, Past Time: Baseball as History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 73; Reminiscences of Rex G. White, May 1951, p. 4, CUOHROC. 17. Interview with Judith Waller by Frank Ernest Hill, 1 June 1951, p. 8, Small Collection 797, Mass Communications Small Collections, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin (hereafter SHSW); Reminiscences of William S. Hedges, 1951, p. 23, CUOHROC. 18. WGN: A Pictorial History (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1961), 18–20; Advertisement, ‘‘W-G-N’s Achievements During 1925,’’ Chicago Tribune, 28 December 1925, 22. 19. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 82; Ely, The Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy, 52–60; Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, 22 April 1926, 34; ‘‘Sam ’n’ Henry, by Correll & Gosden,’’ Chicago Tribune, 6 February 1927, C4; ‘‘Sam ’n’ Henry to Celebrate First Anniversary,’’ Chicago Tribune, 9 January 1927, D8; John Tebbel, An American Dynasty (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947), 137–41. 20. ‘‘A Newspaper Radio ‘Beat,’ ’’ Literary Digest 75 (21 October 1922): 27. 21. Douglas, Listening In, 164; ‘‘Radio Programs for Today,’’ Chicago Tribune, 13 July 1925, 10; ‘‘Broadcast of Scopes Trial Unprecedented,’’ Chicago Tribune, 5 July 1925, C6; James Walter Wesolowski, ‘‘Before Canon 35: WGN Broadcasts the Monkey Trial,’’ Tennessee Historical Quarterly 34 (Winter 1975): 395, 401; ‘‘W-G-N Will Take Scopes Trial to Record Audience,’’ Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1925, 3. 22. Gwenyth Jackaway, Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924– 1939 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995). 23. Newspapers’ advertising revenues declined from $800 million in 1929 to $490 million in 1932 before rebounding to $600 million in 1937, while radio revenues climbed steadily from $40 million in 1929, to $80 million in 1932, to $145 million in 1937. Between 1929 and 1937, newspapers experienced a 25 percent decline in advertising revenue, while radio experienced a 263 percent increase. See Jackaway, Media at War, 86–87. 24. ‘‘Publishers Warned of Radio Dangers,’’ Editor & Publisher 63 (25 April 1931): 19; Editorial, ‘‘Radio,’’ Editor & Publisher 63 (2 May 1931): 30. 25. ‘‘Radio Program Listings Dropped by Three Waterbury Newspapers,’’ Editor & Publisher 63 (14 February 1931): 18; ‘‘Radio Programs Back in Condensed Form,’’ Editor & Publisher 63 (21 February 1931): 8; Jerome Walker, ‘‘Editors Sharply Divided on How to Handle Radio Programs,’’ Editor & Publisher 63 (21 March 1931): 44; Editorial, ‘‘The Radio Case,’’ Editor & Publisher 63 (18 April 1931): 54; Robert Mann, ‘‘Trade Names Barred in Radio Programs by New York City Newspapers,’’ Editor & Publisher 64 (25 July 1931): 5, 42; Robert Mann, ‘‘Trade Names Fading From Radio Programs Survey of 65 Dailies Reveals,’’ Editor & Publisher 64 (22 August 1931): 5–6; Howard London, ‘‘Radio Programs Getting Scant Space,’’ Editor & Publisher 66 (30 September 1933): 9; ‘‘2 Charlotte Papers Ban Radio News,’’ Editor & Publisher 66 (11 November 1933): 8; Editorial, ‘‘Radio Programs,’’ Editor & Publisher 66 (11 November 1933): 24. 26. Jackaway, Media at War, 8. 27. Radio, Horkheimer and Adorno argued, had a ‘‘disinterested, unbiased

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authority which suits Fascism admirably. . . . The inherent tendency of radio is to make the speaker’s word, the false commandment, absolute. A recommendation becomes an order.’’ Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944; New York: Continuum, 1998), 159. For Habermas, radio was part of a constellation of new media including film and television that transformed an active ‘‘rational-critical’’ reading public into a passive network of spectators, in the process creating an inferior public culture and a weak foundation for informed political participation. ‘‘In comparison with printed communications the programs sent by the new media curtail the reactions of their recipients in a particular way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under the spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under ‘tutelage,’ which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to disagree. The critical exchange of a reading public tends to give way to ‘exchanges about tastes and preferences’ between consumers. . . . The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only.’’ Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 51, 170–71. 28. H. O. Davis, The Empire of the Air: The Story of the Exploitation of Radio for Private Profit, With a Plan for the Reorganization of Broadcasting (Ventura, Calif.: Ventura Free Press, 1932), 97; Isabelle Keating, ‘‘Pirates of the Air,’’ Harper’s Monthly Magazine 169 (August 1934): 465. For a similar contemporary view, see Silas Bent, ‘‘Radio Takes Over the News,’’ American Mercury 36 (October 1935): 228–30. 29. Editorial, ‘‘The Radio Question,’’ Editor & Publisher 61 (22 December 1928): 28. 30. T. R. Carskadon, ‘‘The Press-Radio War,’’ New Republic 86 (11 March 1936): 133; ‘‘Plan to End Radio News Competition Formed at New York Conference,’’ Editor & Publisher 66 (16 December 1933): 3, 53; Excerpt from Proceedings of 1934 Annual Convention of American Newspaper Publisher Association, Report of Radio Committee, pp. 1–2, Box 1936, Docket 6051, Records of the Federal Communications Commission, Docketed Case Files, RG 173 (hereafter Docket 6051 Files), National Archives, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NACP); ‘‘Press-Radio Agreement in Operation,’’ Editor & Publisher 66 (3 March 1934): 7. To some degree, broadcasters’ participation in the agreement demonstrated the power that the newspaper press wielded in the mid-1930s, as the industry could force the major broadcasters in the country to dramatically limit the news content that they aired. At the same time, though, broadcasters were also motivated by fear to cooperate with the press. As communications historian Robert McChesney points out, major congressional debates about broadcasting policy were ongoing at the time of the Biltmore Agreement (they would soon after lead to the Communications Act of 1934), and commercial broadcasters were anxious that newspaper publishers could use their power to convince government officials to pass tough new regulations. By assenting to the Biltmore Agreement, broadcasters hoped to mollify newspaper publishers and prevent them from encouraging state action. See McChesney, ‘‘Press-Radio Relations,’’ 45–47. 31. Isabelle Keating, ‘‘Radio Invades Journalism,’’ The Nation 140 (12 June 1935): 677; Carskadon, ‘‘The Press-Radio War,’’ 132–35; Sterling, ‘‘Newspaper Ownership of Broadcast Stations, 1920–68,’’ 232; McChesney, ‘‘Press-Radio Relations,’’ 43–46; ‘‘Radio vs. Newspapers,’’ Business Week, 21 December 1932, 12.

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Notes to Pages 233–238

32. Joseph Pulitzer to L. K. Nicholson, 15 November 1932, Box 46, Folder Associated Press—Radio, 1926–40, The Papers of Joseph Pulitzer (hereafter Pulitzer Papers), Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter LOC), Washington, D.C.; A. G. Lincoln to Joseph Pulitzer, 31 January 1933, ibid. 33. Editorial, ‘‘Spot News and Radio,’’ Editor & Publisher 64 (26 March 1932): 24. 34. Paul Kelly, ‘‘Radio Prized Ally, Not Competitor, Says Daily Owning Two Stations,’’ Editor & Publisher 68 (27 July 1935): 10; Walter Damm, ‘‘Radio News Builds Reader Interest in Daily Newspapers,’’ Broadcasting 9 (15 September 1935): 14; Guy Hamilton, ‘‘Building the Newspaper with Radio’s Aid,’’ Broadcasting 14 (1 March 1938): 17; G. C. Hamilton, ‘‘Circulation Gain Is Traced to Radio,’’ Editor & Publisher 68 (27 July 1935): 6; Frank Gannett, ‘‘Radio Important Adjunct to Daily but Should Stand on Own Feet,’’ Editor & Publisher 68 (27 July 1935): 8. 35. Typescript, ‘‘Report on Hearst Radio Enterprises,’’ undated, ca. 1935, Box 37, Folder 40, National Broadcasting Company Records (hereafter NBC Papers), SHSW; William Randolph Hearst to E. J. Gough, 22 October 1930, pp. 1–2, Carton 36, Folder 1: Hearst Radio Stations, Emile J. Gough, 1930–1937, William Randolph Hearst Papers, 1874–1951, BANC MSS 77/121c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Hearst Papers); Emile Gough, ‘‘Report to Mr. William Randolph Hearst on Radio and Its Relation to His Newspapers,’’ 24 September 1930, pp. 2, 6, Carton 36, Folder 2: Hearst Radio Service, Reports 1930, 1940, Hearst Papers; ‘‘Hearst Interests Buy WBAL and Seek More Radio Outlets,’’ Broadcasting 7 (1 December 1934): 8; Memorandum, Niles Trammell to R. C. Patterson, 23 November 1934, p. 1, Box 28, Folder 6, NBC Papers, SHSW; Emile Gough to J. V. Connolly, 24 January 1933, p. 1, Box 1938, Docket 6051 Files, NACP. 36. M. H. Aylesworth to Roy Howard, 14 January 1935, Box 41, Folder 33, NBC Papers, SHSW; Lenox Lohr to Albert Lasker, 10 March 1937, p.1, Box 55, Folder 21, ibid.; Niles Trammell to J. S. McCarrens, 18 April 1941, Box 82, Folder 26, ibid.; M. H. Aylesworth, untitled memorandum, 19 April 1935, p. 3, Topical Files, Folder 29—Broadcast Ads—Newspapers, NBC Papers, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Advertisement, ‘‘NBC Salutes the Newspaper,’’ Editor & Publisher 68 (27 July 1935): 34–35. 37. Robert Brown, Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998), 160. 38. James Rorty, ‘‘Radio Comes Through,’’ The Nation 147 (15 October 1938): 372. 39. Excerpt from Proceedings of 1939 Annual Convention of American Newspaper Publishers Association, Report of Radio Committee, p. 1, Box 1936, Docket 6051 Files, NACP; Leland Stowe, ‘‘War News on Radio Aided Newspaper Sales—Stowe,’’ Editor & Publisher 71 (8 October 1938): 28. 40. Joseph Pulitzer to Lansing Ray, 17 May 1939, emphasis in original, Box 47, Folder Associated Press—Radio, 1926–40, Joseph Pulitzer Papers, LOC. See also Bruce Robertson, ‘‘ANPA Moves Toward Harmony with Radio,’’ Broadcasting 16 (1 May 1939): 11, 68. For analysis of the key radio newscasters during the Munich crisis, see David Culbert, News for Everyman: Radio and Foreign Affairs in Thirties America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976). 41. Bruce Lenthall, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1, 4.

Notes to Pages 239–241

297

42. War of the Worlds script (1940), reprinted in Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005), 5–6. 43. T. M. Dekker to FCC, 31 October 1938, p. 2, File 44–3, Box 238, War of the Worlds Folder, Federal Communications Commission, Office of the Executive Director, General Correspondence 1927–46, Records of the Federal Communications Commission, RG 173, NACP; George Windsor to FCC, 2 November 1938, emphasis in original, ibid. 44. Editorial, ‘‘That Radio Scare,’’ Editor & Publisher 71 (5 November 1938): 20; Editorial, ‘‘Terror by Radio,’’ New York Times (1 November 1938): 22. 45. Guy Hamilton, ‘‘Radio’s Threat to the Newspaper,’’ speech before the California Newspaper Publishers Association in Fresno, California, 20 January 1939, p. 2, Box 70, Folder 34, NBC Papers, SHSW. Hamilton’s remarks were somewhat disingenuous, as the War of the Worlds broadcast was over the CBS network, which included many newspaper-owned stations. McClatchy’s stations were NBC affiliates, giving Hamilton a platform to criticize the broadcast of a network competitor at the same time that he touted the public service aspirations of newspapers. 46. Roy Roberts, Testimony before the Federal Communications Commission, 18 September 1941, pp. 1001, 1009, 1011, 1031, Box 1933, Docket 6051 Files, NACP. 47. Paul Lazarsfeld, ‘‘Some Notes on the Relationship Between Radio and the Press,’’ Journalism Quarterly 18 (1941): 11; Paul Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to the Study of Radio and Its Role in the Communication of Ideas (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 258, 263, 4.

Contributors

Eric D. Barry is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. His dissertation, ‘‘Sonic Boom: The Business and Culture of High Fidelity Sound, 1930–1973,’’ traces high fidelity’s trajectory from marginal hobby to mainstream appliance. Angela M. Blake is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Ryerson University in Canada. She is the author of How New York Became American, 1890–1924 (2006) and is currently working on Audible City: Sonic Environments and the Politics of Difference in New York and Los Angeles, 1945–Present. Alex Cummings is a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow at Vassar College, where he teaches in the Media Studies Program. He received his doctorate in history from Columbia University in May 2009, and is currently revising his dissertation, on the relationship between music piracy and U.S. copyright law, for publication. Christine Ehrick is Associate Professor of History at the University of Louisville. Her first book, The Shield of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 1903–1933, was published in 2005. She is currently writing Ethereal Citizens: Women and Radio in the Rı´o de la Plata, 1930s–1940s. David Goodman teaches U.S. history at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (1994) and is completing Radio’s Public: The Civic Ambition of 1930s American Radio. David Hochfelder is Assistant Professor of History at University at Albany, SUNY. He is currently finishing a book on the history of the U.S. telegraph industry. Bill Kirkpatrick is Assistant Professor in the Communication department at Denison University. He is completing a book titled Air Space: Localism in American Thought and Media Policy to 1941.

300

Contributors

Ann Elizabeth Pfau is a research associate at the New York State Museum. Her book Miss Yourlovin: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity During World War II (2008) was chosen as a Columbia University Press/American Historical Association Gutenberg-e book, and is available online at http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pfau. Chris Rasmussen is Associate Professor of History at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He is currently writing Automatic Age, a history of coin-operated machines in the United States. Michael Stamm is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and School of Journalism at Michigan State University. He is currently completing a book on newspaper ownership of radio stations in the United States from 1920 to the early 1950s. Susan Strasser is Professor of History at the University of Delaware. Her books include Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash and an earlier book in the first Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture series, Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market. David Suisman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Derek W. Vaillant is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and a faculty associate in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873–1935 (2003) and a forthcoming book on the history of radio in France and the United States in the twentieth century.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Adorno, Theodor, 138, 231, 251n134, 294– 95n27; on distracted listening, 39, 41–44 advertisers: alleged power of, over listeners, 34, 61; concern of, over distracted listening, 23–24; national, in local markets, 10, 213–18; women as primary market for, 75 advertising, 199, 208, 209; in Argentina, 84; for CB radios, 162, 170; government policies toward, in France, 146, 149; Great Depression and, 220, 230, 294n23; for high-fidelity equipment, 116, 117, 122– 24, 265–66n5; for jukeboxes, 193–96; racial stereotyping in, 227, 228; and radio-newspaper relations, 230–31, 236, 237, 240–41, 294n23 African Americans, 102, 183; CB use by, 176–77, 282n49; fear of, 9, 160, 167–68, 173, 280n23; in Los Angeles, 160, 161, 166–69, 279n16; musical tastes of, 95, 97–98, 190–91 Alcorta, Gloria, 85, 91 Allen, Herb J., 184–85 Allport, Gordon, 58, 64, 221 Ambrose, Stephen, 55 American Foundation for the Blind, 224 American Radio Association, 224 Amos ‘n’ Andy radio show, 227 Anderson, Tim J., 119, 270n107 Antena magazine (Argentina), 77 Argentina, 70–71; growth of radio industry in, 75; politics in, 83–85, 89; radio drama in, 83–90; women on radio in, 71, 75–76, 78–80, 82–83, 88–90. See also Duarte, Eva; Guerrico, Silvia Aristotle, 4

Arkin, Robert, 111 Armed Forces Radio Network, 58, 60 attention deficit disorder, 35, 46 attentive listening, 17, 45; exaggerated images of, 19–21; prescriptions for, 18, 33–35, 37–38 audiences. See audiophiles; jukeboxes: and popular musical taste; radio audiences Audio Fairs, 115, 121–22 audiophile recordings, 8, 117, 132–37; and classical music, 117, 118, 120, 127–32, 134, 137–38; documentarian, 120–27 audiophiles, 115–17, 120, 123–24, 127, 135–37; and classical music, 128, 130, 131, 137–38. See also audiophile recordings ‘‘Axis Sally.’’ See Gillars, Mildred Aylesworth, Merlin Hall, 235 bandwidth, 209; and CB radio, 161; and high fidelity, 122 Banham, Reyner, 161 Barenboim, Daniel, 40 Barrington, Jonah, 57, 64 Barron, Hal, 205–6, 215, 218 Barry, Edward, 39 Barzun, Jacques, 128 baseball broadcasts, 226 BBC. See British Broadcasting Corporation Beatles, 120 Begun, S. J., 100 Belafonte, Harry, 125, 127; Carnegie Hall recording of, 127, 268n70 Bell, Joshua, 1, 2 Bellows, Henry A., 213, 291n44 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 124, 125, 244n13; on distracted viewing, 42, 43, 251n125;

302

Index

Benjamin, Walter (continued ) influence of, 12; on modes of perception, 3, 5; on new media, 118–19 Berland, Jody, 201 Billboard magazine, 183, 186–94, 197 Biltmore Agreement, 232, 295n30 ‘‘black’’ propaganda, 153, 275n48 Bloom, Allan, 46 blues, 98, 111; and jukeboxes, 182, 183, 185–86, 190, 191, 194, 286–87n42 Blum, Le´on, 149, 150, 156 Boldt, Ben, 195 Bollard, Bob, 127 Bollettino, Dante, 109–10 Bolter, Jay David, 135 Boorstin, Daniel, 2, 204 boosterism. See civic boosterism bootlegging, 8, 103–14; and copyright laws, 104, 106–7 Borroni, Otelo, 87 Bourdieu, Pierre, 40, 263n36 Bozak, Rudy, 122 Briggs, Asa, 142, 152 Britain, 16; radio listening in, during World War II, 49–50, 52–61. See also British Broadcasting Corporation British Broadcasting Corporation, 57, 58, 256n50; broadcasts of, to wartime France, 141, 143, 153–57; listener research by, 59–61 British Institute of Public Opinion, 56, 58–59 Broadcast Advertising magazine, 213, 218 Brown, Robert, 236–37 Brown, Thad, 30 Bryan, William Jennings, 229, 230 Burke, Charles G., 214 Burke, Edmund, 116 Burnett, Robert, 113 Business Week, 110, 233 Cage, John, 102, 137 Canby, Edward Tatnall, 122, 124, 129–30, 136 Cantril, Hadley, 64, 221 Capehart, Homer, 193 Capitol Records, 117 car radios, 37 Carroll, David, 133 Cartel Sonoro radio show (Argentina), 79– 83, 89

Carter, Jimmy, 164 CB radio. See citizens’ band (CB) radio CB Radio: A New Hue and Cry (film), 159– 60, 168–69, 177 CBS. See Columbia Broadcasting System cell phones, 178 censorship: in Argentina, 82, 85; wartime, 58, 61 Chicago Daily News, 225–27 Chicago Tribune, 30, 39, 224–27 children’s radio listening, 31–34 Chion, Michel, 130 citizens’ band (CB) radio, 9, 159–60, 164, 170, 278n8, 280n25; African Americans’ use of, 176–77, 282n49; and conservative talk radio, 177–78; depictions of, in popular culture, 159–60, 162, 168–69, 174, 177; in Los Angeles, 160, 164–65; market for, 162–63; and misogyny, 175; racialized uses of, 160, 161, 168–69, 173; and sense of community, 172–77 civic boosterism, 10, 204–9, 290n18; and competition among towns, 205–9; cosmopolitan critics of, 208–9; and market localism, 213, 215, 216; radio and, 204, 206–9 class differences: in appreciation of local communities, 203, 208–9, 212, 216; in Britain, 58–59; in CB radio use, 160, 162–63; in listening styles, 18, 28, 35, 39–40, 45; in musical tastes, 186, 188, 190–93, 209–10, 291n48; among women, 73, 89 classical music, 39–40, 43, 118, 120, 128–29; and audiophile recordings, 117, 118, 120, 127–32, 134, 137–38; audiophiles’ appreciation of, 128, 130, 131, 137–38 Cohen, Lizabeth, 201 Coin Machine Journal, 190 ‘‘coin men.’’ See jukebox operators collectors. See records: collectors of Colombia, 73–74 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 21, 25, 128, 232, 235; and local markets, 213–15, 291n44 Columbia Records, 95, 101, 105, 108, 110, 185, 264n54 Command label, 117, 120, 132, 134–36, 270n115 commercials. See advertising

Index Committee for National Morale, 63 Commodore Music Shop, 105 community radio, 220 ‘‘concert hall realism,’’ 116, 118 Conly, John, 122 Cook, Emory, 115, 120–27, 132, 133, 135, 268n53 ‘‘coolness,’’ 41 copyright laws, U.S., 8, 96, 104, 106–8; inclusion of sound recordings in (1972), 113 Corbin, Alain, 3–4, 16, 71 Coughlin, Father Charles, 23, 26, 29–30, 61 country music, 164, 185, 191, 197, 214, 291n48; and jukeboxes, 10, 182, 183, 191–94, 197 courts, 106–8, 110 Covert, Catherine, 223 Craig, Douglas, 61 Crary, Jonathan, 6, 17, 35 Culshaw, John, 137–38, 271nn131,133 cultural studies, 282n40 Cundiff, Hannah, 38 Curtin, Michael, 214 Daladier, Edouard, 151–53 Damm, Walter, 234 Damrosch, Walter, 36 Dant, Tim, 161 Darrow, Clarence, 229, 230 Das Rheingold, 137–38 Davis, Don, 210, 219 Davis, H. O., 231–32 Decca/London, 136 Decca Records, 101, 105, 185, 271n129. See also Decca/London; UK Decca de Ford Richard, Jenny, 79–80 de Gaulle, Charles, 9, 141–43, 155 de Jong, Louis, 55 Delaunay, Charles, 97 Denny, Martin, 133 Depression of 1930s. See Great Depression Detroit News, 225–26 Dial-A-Tune, 196 Didion, Joan, 161 distracted listening, 6, 15–18, 44–46; advertisers’ concern with, 23–24; by children, 31–34; as common occurrence, 6, 15, 21–23; efforts to combat, 34–38; and gender, 24–28; to music, 38–45; as source of urban noise, 28–31

303

Doerksen, Clifford, 201 Doherty, Martin, 56 Douglas, Susan, 15, 223, 225 Down Beat magazine, 97, 104 Doyle, Peter, 125, 270n107 Dreher, Carl, 208–9, 212 Dryer, Sherman, 36 Duarte, Eva, 71, 84–90; contrast of, with Silvia Guerrico, 7; and Juan Pero´n, 7, 71, 84, 85–87; as propagandist for military regime, 86–88; and radio drama, 84–90; speaking voice of, 84, 85, 88, 90 Du Bois, W. E. B., 166 Dutton, Thomas C., 55 Dykema, Peter, 38, 39 Edison, Thomas, 184 Editor & Publisher, 232, 239–40 Esquivel, Juan Garcia, 133 family listening, 19–21, 22, 23; exaggerated images of, 19–21 Fantasia (1942), 131 Farrell, Frank, 54 Febvre, Lucien, 3 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 30, 239; and CB radio, 161, 164–65; and licensing of stations, 201, 215 Federal Radio Commission (FRC), 199– 200, 207–8, 215, 246n15. See also Federal Communications Commission Federal Writers Project, 24, 34, 39 feminism, 69–74, 175; attacks on, 72–73, 175; in Argentina, 78, 89. See also Guerrico, Silvia Ferdonnet, Paul, 152, 153 Ferrie´, General Gustave-Auguste, 146 Ferrie´ Plan, 146, 148 fidelity, 119, 129–30, 134–35, 137–38. See also audiophile recordings; high-fidelity equipment Field, Henry, 216 Fine, Robert C., 129, 134, 135 Fireside Chats, 6, 21 Fisher, William Arms, 39 Fiske, Marjorie, 27 Flags of Our Fathers (book and film), 49 Fletcher, Harvey, 130 Ford, Betty, 162, 175 Ford, Gerald, 162

304

Index

France, 101; German propaganda broadcasts to, 62, 152–53; interwar radio in, 9, 143–53, 156–58, 272n7; popular memory in, 9, 141–43; radio listening in, during German occupation, 143, 144, 154–58, 276n59 Franklin, Robert, 49 freeways, 159, 161, 165–66, 279n16, 280n22 Gabler, Milt, 105 Gaertner, Fred, 225 Gandarias, Roberto, 78–79 Gannett, Frank, 234 Gay, Peter, 40 Gelatt, Roland, 115–16, 132 gender, 7, 69–74; and advertising, 75; and broadcasting roles, 7, 64, 69–76, 84, 87– 90, 272n7; and distracted listening, 24– 28, 32–33, 35 ‘‘gendered soundscape’’ (term), 72 Germany, 6, 74–76, 142; World War II broadcasts from, 49–64 Gillars, Mildred (‘‘Axis Sally’’), 50–52, 53, 58, 67; myths surrounding, 7, 49, 68 Gilmore, W. S., 225 Giraudoux, Jean, 153 Goebbels, Josef, 62, 152 Goldmark, Peter, 128 Goldwater, Barry, 164 Gould, Glenn, 119 Gould, Morton, 118 Grand Award label, 133–34 Granlund, Nils Thor, 216 Great Depression, 31–32, 230; advertising and, 220, 230, 294n23; easing of, 220; and jukeboxes, 181, 182, 184–85; music industry in, 181–82, 184, 185; and radio listening, 26–27, 31–32, 100; and record copying, 100–101 Griffith, Sally Foreman, 204 Grusin, Richard, 135 Guanta´namo Bay prison camp, 1–2 Guernier, Charles, 148 Guerrico, Silvia, 7, 71, 76–83, 86, 89; and feminism, 77 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 231, 295n27 Halper, Donna, 74–75 Hamilton, Guy, 234, 240, 297n45 Hammergren, M. G., 189 Hammond, John, 100–102, 111, 263n22

Hand, Judge Learned, 106–7 Hawley, Adelaide, 25–26 headphones, 45, 46 Hearst, William Randolph, 235 Hedges, William S., 225, 226 Henderson, William K., 216 Henriot, Philippe, 154, 276n56 Henry, Pierre, 127 Herriot, Edouard, 148 Herskovits, Melville, 124 Herzog, Herta, 26, 32, 247n39 high-fidelity equipment, 100, 101, 115–17, 124, 128, 135 High Fidelity magazine, 115, 126, 131, 132, 134, 135, 265n3 high-fidelity sound. See audiophile recordings Hilmes, Michele, 81, 200, 218, 227 Hitler, Adolf, 6 Hobson, Wilder, 95, 102, 104–5 Hoefer, George, 100, 109 Hoover, Herbert, 200, 203 Horkheimer, Max, 231, 294–95n27 Hot Record Society, 95, 99, 101–3. See also HRS Rag housewives, 24–28 HRS Rag, 101–3 Hurd, Walter, 189, 190, 193 ‘‘hypermediacy,’’ 135 Igoe, Judge Michael, 106, 107 imaginary propaganda, 68; and World War II broadcasts, 47–50, 52–55, 63–68 Imus, Don, 178 inattentive listening. See distracted listening Innis, Harold, 202 International Journal of Listening, 15–16 interrogations, 1–2 iPod, 45 Irwin, Will, 62 Isenberg, Nancy, 73 Jackaway, Gwenyth, 231 Jackson, Maggie, 46 Jacobs, Jane, 171, 177 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 69, 260n31 Jamieson, Mark, 98–99, 103 jamming, 60, 153, 275n49 Japan: World War II broadcasts from, 47– 49, 54–57, 61, 64, 67 Jardillier, Robert, 150 Ja¨rviluoma, Helmi, 72

Index Jay, Martin, 6 jazz, 35, 43, 95–97, 126, 176–77; and audiophile recordings, 134; and bootlegging, 103–14; and jukeboxes, 194; record collectors and, 95–103 jazz magazines, 97, 101, 108. See also HRS Rag; Record Changer magazine Johnson, Lesley, 35 Jolly Roger company, 108–10, 113 Joyce, William (‘‘Lord Haw Haw’’), 52, 65, 67, 253n16; audience for, 56–64; myths surrounding, 7, 49–50 jukeboxes, 10, 181–82, 184–85, 287n58; eroded popularity of, 197–98; importance of, to music industry, 10, 181, 182, 188; names for, 183–84; and popular musical taste, 182–83, 185–95. See also jukebox operators jukebox operators, 10, 181, 182–92; role of, in music industry, 10, 185, 188, 189, 193 Kahn, Ashley, 105 Kansas City Star, 240 Kant, Immanuel, 116 Kapp, Jack, 185 Keating, Isabelle, 231–32 Keith, Alice, 27 Kelly, Paul, 234 King, Larry, 178 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 116 Lacey, Kate, 24, 70, 75 Larrabee, Carlton, 37 Lassiter, Matthew, 163 Latin America, 71, 73–74, 80, 84. See also Argentina Lazarsfeld, Paul, 44, 240–41 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 214, 215 Leavis, F. R., 45 Lee, Spike, 68 Lenthall, Bruce, 238 Lewis, E. R., 185 Lewis, Meade ‘‘Lux,’’ 100, 106–7, 109 Lewis, Sinclair, 10, 203, 208 Light, Enoch, 132–37, 270nn108,115 Limbaugh, Rush, 177–78 Lincoln, A. G., 233, 234 listening: prescriptions for, 15–16, 18; styles of: see attentive listening; distracted listening. See also radio listening Lofland, Lyn, 171–72, 281n33 Lohr, Lenox, 235

305

Lomax, Alan, 97, 105 London label, 117, 132. See also Decca/ London Long, Huey, 26, 61 long-playing records (LPs), 119, 123; and high-fidelity boom, 115, 117, 128, 132–35; introduction of, in 1948, 115; stereophonic: see stereo records ‘‘Lord Haw Haw.’’ See Joyce, William Los Angeles, 111, 163, 174; African Americans in, 160, 161, 166–69, 279n16; CB radios in, 9, 160, 164, 169, 172, 173, 176; freeways in, 159, 161, 165–66, 279n16, 280n22; and New Right, 163–64; racial fears in, 9, 160, 167–68, 173, 280n23 Los Angeles Times, 167–69 Luque Lobos, Jorge, 81 Lyman, Arthur, 133 Lynd, Helen Merrell, 209, 221 Lynd, Robert, 209, 221 Mahoney, Timothy, 205 Malone, Bill C., 191 Mandel, Georges, 148–50, 277n67 Mangan, James, 184, 194, 197 market localism, 213–15; and civic boosterism, 213, 215, 216 Markevitch, Igor, 137 Marx, Karl, 3 Marxism, 3, 282n40 masculinity, 32–33, 69, 90–91, 162–63, 175 Massey, Doreen, 202 Mass Observation (Britain), 50, 52–60, 63, 253n15, 255n34 Masterman, Sir John, 55 Maxell company, 116, 118 McClatchy Newspapers, 234, 235 McCuen, Brad, 112 McGirr, Lisa, 163, 164 McGregor, Douglas, 33–34 McNinch, Frank, 61 Me´adel, Ce´cile, 149 Memorex, 116 Mencken, H. L., 203 Mercury Records, 127–32, 136, 270n115 Metz, Christian, 6 microphones, 82, 90, 230; and high fidelity, 118, 119, 124–26, 128–29, 134 Millett, Ruth, 25 Mills, C. Wright, 11, 123 Mills Novelty Company, 184, 194, 197

306

Index

Milwaukee Journal, 224, 234 modernity, 16, 17, 70, 147, 160–61, 215 Moisala, Pirkko, 72 Morris, Meaghan, 45 Morton, David, 100 Morton, Jelly Roll, 97, 105, 108 Munich crisis, 236–38 Musical Quarterly, 130–31 music appreciation movement, 36–37 music: distracted listening to, 38–45; loud, as form of torture, 1–2. See also classical music; popular music; radio music music choice, 17, 18 music industry, 112–13, 128, 181; and bootlegging, 96, 104–6; and jukebox operators, 10, 185, 188, 189, 193; and record collectors, 95. See also specific companies Mutual Broadcasting System, 25 Muzak, 41 Nation, The, 216, 222 National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), 25, 36, 174, 297n45; and local markets, 210, 215, 218; and radio-newspaper relations, 232, 235–36, 237 ‘‘national class.’’ See professional-managerial class national identity, 148, 200 NBC. See National Broadcasting Corporation Neighborhood Watch programs, 169–70 networks. See radio networks New Right, 163, 164, 176, 178 news broadcasting. See radio news newspapers: articles about radio, 223, 238–40; growing circulation, 222; ownership of radio stations, 11, 223–27, 230, 233–36, 240; and radio news, 11, 229– 38, 240–41, 295n30 Newsweek, 110 New York Audio Fair, 115, 121–22 New Yorker, 60, 122–24, 127, 267n35 New York Herald Tribune, 208, 238 New York Times, 35, 115, 122, 129, 130, 168, 172–73, 240; letters to, 29, 30 Nicolaides, Becky, 163 Nixon, Richard, 9, 163, 164, 176, 177 noise, 16; as interrogation tool, 1–2. See also radio noise Norris, Frank, 102, 263n31 Novarro, Ramo´n, 80–81

O’Connell, William Henry Cardinal, 29–30 Ong, Walter, 222, 223 Panassie, Hugues, 97, 101 Pellenc, Marcel, 145–46 ‘‘percussion’’ records, 118, 127, 133, 136– 37. See also Persuasive Percussion series Pero´n, Eva Duarte de. See Duarte, Eva Pero´n, Juan, 7, 84–87 Persuasive Percussion LP series, 132–36, 271n116 Pe´tain, Philippe, 141, 155, 156 Phillips, Sam, 120 phonographs, 38, 40, 100, 115, 181, 184, 197–98; coin-operated: see jukeboxes; and musical choice, 17, 18 photography, 5 ‘‘ping-pong stereo,’’ 118, 134, 270n108 Pitts, Lilla Belle, 38 Plato, 4 Polson, Thomas Clyde, 43–44 Popular Front (France), 150, 151 popular music, 43, 120, 137; Adorno on, 43; jukeboxes and, 182–83, 185–95; in World War II propaganda broadcasts, 48. See also blues; country music; jazz Porter, Eric, 97, 102 Portland Oregonian, 234 Postman, Leo, 58 Presley, Elvis, 120 Press-Radio Bureau, 232 Press-Radio War, 230–33 Princeton Radio Research Project, 41, 42, 44 professional-managerial class, 203, 208–9, 212–14, 216 propaganda: ‘‘black,’’ 153, 275n48; fear of, 26, 32–33, 37–38, 61–67, 249n75; German, 62, 152–53 (see also Gillars, Mildred; Joyce, William); ‘‘gray,’’ 275n46; ‘‘white,’’ 275n46. See also imaginary propaganda Public Opinion Quarterly, 62 Pulitzer, Joseph, 233, 234, 238 Pyle, Ernie, 49, 57, 64 Radano, Ronald, 41 radio audiences: women in, 24–28, 75, 89. See also radio listening radio broadcasting: of drama: see radio drama; and gender roles, 7, 64, 69–76, 78–79, 84, 85, 87–91, 272n7 ; growth of,

Index in 1920s and 1930s, 184; improved technology for, 75; jamming of, 60, 153, 275n49; of music: see radio music; of news: see radio news; as noise: see radio noise; voice quality in, 29–30, 75, 76, 78– 79, 84, 85, 88, 90–91, see also advertising; radio networks; radio stations Radio Broadcast magazine, 208, 212 radio drama, 33; in Argentina, 83–90 ‘‘radio fatigue,’’ 31 Radio Listeners Leagues, 19 radio listening, 143; class differences in, 18, 28, 35, 39–40, 45, 209–10; distracted: see distracted listening; and imaginary propaganda, 47–50, 52–55, 63–68; as social event, 22; by U.S. troops in World War II, 49, 56–58, 61, 63; in wartime Britain, 49–50, 52–61; in wartime France, 9, 62, 152–58 radio magazines, 17, 77, 208, 212. See also Sintonı´a magazine radio music, 36–43, 189; Adorno on, 41–44 radio networks, 25; in France, 145–46, 148–50, 152, 154, 155; and local stations, 200, 209, 210, 213–15, 291n44; and newspapers, 235–36, 237; and ‘‘sounding local,’’ 215–19. See also Columbia Broadcasting System; National Broadcasting Corporation radio news, 229–36; newspapers and, 11, 229–38, 240–41, 295n30; and War of the Worlds broadcast, 239–40 radio noise, 16, 18, 28–31; as background, 21–22, 24; and mental health, 30–31; as new urban nuisance, 28–31 Radio-Paris, 145, 154–56 ‘‘radio parties,’’ 22 Radio Research Project, 42, 44 radio sets, 224; growing number of, 148, 150, 221, 222, 273–74n20 Radio Stars magazine, 17 radio stations, 10–11; and civic boosterism, 204, 206–9; federal licensing of, 199– 201, 207–8, 215, 246n15; in France, 144–47, 151–52, 154, 273–74n20 (see also Radio-Paris; Radio-Vichy); national advertisers and, 10, 213–18; and networks, 200, 209, 210, 213–15, 291n44 Radio Tokyo, 49, 56–57, 61, 63, 67; Iva Toguri’s broadcasts for, 50, 57 Radio-Vichy, 154–55

307

radio voices, 29–30. See also Women’s voices Rag, the (HRS Rag), 101–3 Ramsey, Frederic, Jr., 103–5, 263n39 Rasul, Shafiq, 1–2 RCA Victor, 100, 184, 185; and bootlegging, 108, 109, 112–13; and collectors, 95, 105; and high-fidelity sound, 117, 124, 127, 136 Record Changer magazine, 108–11 record companies. See music industry recording techniques, 100, 114, 117–18, 124–26, 128, 137. See also microphones record players. See phonographs records: bootlegging of: see bootlegging; collectors of, 7–8, 96–103; high-fidelity: see audiophile recordings. See also longplaying records regulation, 201–3. See also censorship; Federal Communications Commission; Federal Radio Commission ‘‘restlessness syndrome,’’ 35 Richman, Daniel, 193 Richman, Milton, 111 Rieber, Dick, 97–98 Riegel, Oscar W., 62 Riesman, David, 123 Roberts, Roy, 240 Rock-Ola Company, 196 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 6, 21 Rorty, James, 237–38 Rose, Nikolas, 17 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 222 Ruch, Floyd, 63 Russell, William, 101–3, 105, 107 Russo, Alexander, 201 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 233 Sam ‘n’ Henry radio show, 227, 228 Sanders, James, 73–74 Satterthwaite, Nancy, 52–53 Saturday Evening Post, 183 Saturday Review, 103, 104, 117 Schaeffer, Pierre, 8 Schafer, R. Murray, 71, 72, 243n3 Schonberg, Harold, 130, 132 Schumann, Maurice, 155 Scopes trial, 229–30 ‘‘scopic regimes,’’ 6 ‘‘secondary orality,’’ 222, 223 Segal, George, 21 Sekula, Allan, 5

308

Index

senses, study of, 3–5 ‘‘sensory addiction,’’ 35 serials, 227 Shapiro, Bernstein v. Miracle Records (1950), 106–7 Sherdeman, Ted, 60 Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (film), 50 shortwave, 62, 146; in interwar France, 150–52; in wartime propaganda broadcasts, 50, 56, 62, 63 ‘‘shut-ins,’’ 27 Sides, Josh, 166 Siepmann, Charles, 62–63, 67 Silvey, Robert, 59–60 Sintonı´a magazine (Argentina), 78–83 Sjogren, Britta, 88–90 Smith, Charles Edward, 95, 100, 101, 103, 106 Smith, Steve, 97– 99, 101–3 sonic metaphors, 72–73 sound-film engineering, 269n84 ‘‘sounding local,’’ 215–19 Sound Recordings Amendment of 1972, 96, 113 soundscape, public: defined, 71–72; domination of, by male voices, 69–70, 72–75, 88; women’s challenge to, 70–71, 74, 84, 87–90 Spector, Phil, 120 ‘‘speech’’ (term), 73 sports broadcasts, 225–26 Stanton, Frank, 24 Stearns, Peter, 35, 41 stereo equipment, 122, 135 stereo records, 117, 120–23, 132–35, 267n36, 270nn104,107, 271n131; percussion, 117, 118, 129, 132–37; ‘‘pingpong,’’ 118, 134, 270n108 Sterne, Jonathan, 5 Stockfelt, Ola, 15 Story of G.I. Joe (film), 49 Stowe, Leland, 238 Susman, Warren, 184 Swaggie company, 111–13 Symes, Colin, 119 talk radio shows, 177–78 Taylor, Deems, 131–32 Taylor, Edmond, 62

technological sublime, 116–17, 121, 128, 131; defined, 116 television, 24, 174, 220 Thompson, Emily, 5, 16, 71–72 Thorpe, Elliot, 61 Timmons, Kirby, 177 Toguri, Iva, 50, 51; prosecution of, 7, 47, 54, 67. See also ‘‘Tokyo Rose,’’ legend of ‘‘Tokyo Rose,’’ legend of, 7, 47–50, 54, 61, 64, 67 Tokyo Rose (film), 47 torture, 1–2 Trammel, Niles, 235–36 transistor radios, 45 ‘‘translocal localism,’’ 215–19 Tre´moulet, Jacques, 146 Tygiel, Jules, 226 Tyler, Keith, 33, 37–38 Tyson, Edwin Lloyd, 225–26 UK Decca, 137–38, 271n129 Ulanov, Barry, 187–88 unemployment, 26–27 urban noise, 16; from radios, 28–31 Vacca, Roberto, 87 Vaillant, Derek, 201, 210 Variety, 107, 109, 110, 210, 218 Veblen, Thorstein, 40, 250n117 Vilkko, Anni, 72 Vision of Invasion (radio play), 51–52 visual culture, study of, 4–6, 244n12 Walker, Frank, 126 Walkman, 45–46 Wallace, George, 9, 164 Wallace, John, 212 Waller, Fats, 112, 194 Waller, Judith, 226 War of the Worlds broadcast (1938), 11, 61, 236, 238–40 Washington Post, 1, 2, 28–29 Welles, Orson, 11, 61, 236, 238–40 West, Rebecca, 60 White, Rex G., 226 whiteness, 161 Whyte, William H., Jr., 123 Wild Blue Yonder (film), 49 Winchell, Walter, 54 Witten, Louis, 23–24

Index women’s voices, 69; on radio, 75, 76, 78–79, 84, 85, 88, 90–91 World War I, 144 World War II, 197; imaginary propaganda in, 47–50, 52–55, 63–68; radio listening in, 9, 31, 47–50, 55–64, 141–43, 152–58

Wurlitzer Company, 189, 193–96 Yancey, Jimmy, 106–7, 109 Young, Kimball, 63 Zucca, Rita, 67

309

Acknowledgments

We have taken special pleasure from working together on this project: too rarely do colleagues in university history departments get the opportunity to plan a conference and edit a book together. With one exception, the chapters in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction rely on research originally presented at a fall 2007 conference of the same name; the author of the remaining chapter, Derek Vaillant, commented at the conference, which was sponsored by the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. We are grateful to Philip Scranton and Roger Horowitz, director and associate director of the center, respectively, for their ideas and support for both the conference and the book. And we thank the Hagley staff— above all Carol Lockman—who make running a conference there such a great pleasure. The authors have contributed to the volume not only their individual efforts, but also by exchanging papers and tying their contributions to our general themes. We all benefited as well from contributions made by conference speakers and commentators not represented here: Court Carney, Tony Grajeda, Keir Keightley, Charles McGovern, David Novak, Elena Razlogova, Fath Davis Ruffins, Emily Thompson, and Shawn Van Cour, as well as members of the lively audience who attended. Finally, we are grateful to Robert Lockhart of the University of Pennsylvania Press, who expressed his enthusiasm when the conference was in its planning stage, attended the event, and has shepherded this book to completion.