With interference growing and with complaints from listeners increasing, Herbert Hoover, as secretary of commerce, in 1921 refused to renew the license of the Intercity Radio Company, citing its inability to broadcast on a frequency that did not interfere with other stations’ transmissions. Intercity sued the Department of Commerce, and the courts ruled in Hoover v. Intercity Radio Company that the secretary did not have any discretion in granting licenses. Any and all who applied should be granted licenses, according to the ruling. As a result of this attack on the ability of the Commerce Department to regulate the industry and the ever-growing problems of interference, Hoover convened a series of conferences on radio annually from 1922 to 1925. While Hoover directed these conferences, much of the agenda was controlled by the corporations that had the largest stake in the radio industry, such as RCA, Westinghouse, General Electric (GE), and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Participants in the conferences included officials from the Commerce Department and the Department of the Navy, a few politicians (most importantly Representative Wallace White and Senator Frank Kellogg, both vital in introducing radio legislation in Congress), radio inventors, and hobbyists. Participants agreed on the need for order in the industry but disagreed on how to achieve it. Attempts at legislation following each of the conferences failed to produce any results. In 1926 the courts struck down the Department of Commerce’s ability to specify wavelengths and hours of operation in U.S. v. Zenith Radio Corporation, in which Zenith argued that the Commerce Department had created regulations that exceeded its authority as specified in the 1912 Radio Act. As a result of this decision, anarchy ensued in the industry, with stations broadcasting at any frequency and power they wanted, leading Congress finally to pass legislation regulating radio.48
The result was the Radio Act of 1927, which gave the federal government the ability to grant or deny radio operating licenses and to specify broadcast frequencies, broadcasting power, and hours of operation. This power, however, was not granted to the Commerce Department but, rather, fell to the newly created FRC, made up of industry experts who were assigned the task of creating order in the radio industry. The act divided the nation into five radio zones. Each zone was represented on the commission by a commissioner, and the zones were allotted equal numbers of licenses. The intent of the act was to create a commission of radio experts without financial attachment to the radio industry to sort out the industry; after a year, most of its functions would return to the secretary of commerce, and the FRC would act in an advisory capacity when necessary. The federal Radio Act of 1927 did provide order to the industry, and it avoided what industry leaders did not want, government control or ownership over radio. The act is a prime illustration of Hoover’s belief that government and industry should work together to create prosperity. This was especially true in an industry that all believed would have benefits to society far beyond the economic ones. Most saw the potential for radio’s role in the public interest, to inform and educate the public as well as to bring unity to the wide geographic expanse of the nation. Radio was seen as a way to reduce the differences in regions, between rural and urban, and between wealthy and poor; but to do so would require vigilance on the part of the federal government and cooperation on the part of the industry. The radio conferences illustrated the fact that the concerns of the major corporations involved in radio did not fundamentally conflict with Hoover’s desire for order, and as a result the radio industry was able to grow at a much more rapid pace, and more evenly around the country, than it would have without government regulation.49
Adding to the rapid development of radio across the nation was the growth of national networks, pioneered by RCA with the formation of NBC in July 1926. While NBC was not the first network—it had in fact been created through the merging of two separate networks, AT&T’s Red Network and the Radio Group Network formed by a group of stations owned by RCA—it pioneered the idea of national radio, that is, programming designed to appeal to a national audience instead of to a local or regional audience. Newspaper companies were owners of many radio stations, such as Chicago’s WGN (which stood for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”), which was owned by the Chicago Tribune, and therefore duplicated the local and regional interests of their parent companies. But others were created by businesses looking either to boost sales of their radio-related products (Westinghouse and General Electric both made radio receivers and owned stations) or to generate publicity on behalf of their non–radio-related products or services. By owning a string of stations, a single company could advertise its products in multiple markets while reducing the cost of each station by creating shared programming for broadcasts. Therefore, a network could reach a national audience and potential customers more efficiently and effectively than such traditional advertising methods as newspapers and magazines. AT&T’s network consisted of six stations, with WEAF of New York responsible for most of the programming, and RCA owned four stations. AT&T, as the company most responsible for telephone service in the United States, used its own lines to share radio programming between stations, but the Radio Group was not able to secure favorable telephone circuits for its stations, nor did it have the same ability to draw advertising dollars as AT&T. In 1926, RCA formed NBC in an agreement with AT&T in which the telephone company sold its radio stations to NBC in return for a contract to supply telephone circuits to NBC. AT&T’s Red Network became NBC Red in November 1926, while the Radio Group Network became NBC Blue on January 1, 1927. By July 1927, NBC had also acquired a chain of western stations that became known as NBC Orange (also known as the Pacific Network), which allowed for coast-to-coast broadcasts by a single company and helped provide programming for an ever-increasing radio audience listening in on receivers made by RCA.
In September 1927 a competitor to NBC appeared in the form of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), named after the Columbia Phonograph Corporation, which had made an agreement with the Judson Radio Program Corporation and United Independent Broadcasters to buy $163,000 worth of airtime on the new network. They would in turn resell the airtime to other clients. The new entity was a bureaucratic mess, and its initial broadcast was marred by a thunderstorm in upstate New York that disrupted the broadcast everywhere west of Buffalo. While the main association of the network was Columbia Phonograph, the recording company quickly withdrew from the enterprise after losing $100,000 in the first month of operation because they were not able to convince companies to advertise on time that was owned by another company. Columbia did allow the network to keep its name, but the network failed to make a profit until it was reorganized and taken over by a twenty-seven-year-old millionaire, William Paley. By 1929, Paley had turned CBS into a profitable business network firmly entrenched in advertisement-supported programming.
An estimate of the numbers of 1927 radio listeners calculated that there were, on average, five listeners for each of the 6 million sets in the United States, for a total radio audience of 30 million people, or roughly a quarter of the population.50 By 1927 radio had indeed become a mass medium. The rapid development of radio technology and its adoption by Americans led many industry watchers to speculate on the role radio could play in American society. Optimistically, many believed that radio had unlimited potential for social good, that it was the means by which Americans—and by extension the world—would develop world peace, extend democracy at home and abroad, educate and enlighten the masses with refined culture, and save countless souls through religious programming. Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless technology, wrote in 1927 that “the most precious of all human privileges” was “the free and unrestricted exchange of ideas. And that [radio], I maintain, is the only force to which we can look with any degree of hope for the ultimate establishment of permanent world peace.”51 Various writers, both inside and outside the radio industry, believed that radio would serve to equalize and democratize the American people. “It has found a way to dispense with the political middlemen,” proclaimed the New Republic. �
�In a fashion it has restored the demos upon which republican government is founded. No one will capture the radio vote unless he faces the microphones squarely and speaks his mind fully, candidly, and in extenso.”52
Educators saw in radio the possibility of reaching thousands of students outside of the traditional classroom. As early as 1923, Harren High School in New York City broadcast an accounting class over the air, and in the mid-1920s Kansas State University offered a special diploma for completing radio courses that had listeners and students in thirty states, Mexico, and Canada. Many educators, like Virgil E. Dickson, deputy superintendent of schools in Oakland, California, believed that “the lid of the classroom has been blown off” by radio’s ability to reach the masses.53 Not only could radio bring education to the vast public, but it would also raise the general cultural appreciation of classical music among those who now had access to the concert hall and symphonic orchestras. According to the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, Fritz Reiner, “one of the beautiful possibilities of radio, as I see it, is to teach the fundamentals of music to the people. . . . Teach them the fundamentals of music and the genius of the nation will assert itself.”54
In addition to enlightening minds, radio, some believed, could enlighten souls as well. Michael I. Pupin, a professor at Columbia University, believed that radio had the ability to spread inspirational words to a desperate public. “Think of what it would have meant to St. Paul if he had had such a method of communication,” he was quoted as saying. “We need St. Pauls in our universities today—men who will rise up and preach the doctrine of truth and democracy.” Pupin assumed that what was broadcast over the radio would be taken as the truth since people would receive information directly from the speaker rather than through the suspect mediation of newspapers. These writers and leaders who spoke for the potential of radio all assumed that the increased availability of news, educational, cultural, and religious programming would inherently aid democracy by creating a better-informed and more involved public.55 And while technological progress made radio listening available to a greater number of Americans, the way the radio industry developed proved the optimistic predictions of these men false.
the consequences of national radio
While national marketing was one reason for the creation of networks, a separate group of radio broadcasters sought national radio for different reasons. In 1927 approximately one-third of the radio stations in the United States had been created by such nonprofit organizations as universities, churches, and civic organizations. These stations often sought a different type of national radio, one not dominated by large corporations but, rather, controlled by the federal government in the public interest or funded through private donations or listener support mainly for educational and cultural purposes. In 1927, this type of radio industry was still a possibility until the FRC redistributed radio licenses in 1928 with the power granted it in the Radio Act of 1927. The FRC was made up primarily of persons connected to commercial radio, though not directly at the time of their service on the committee. The 1928 reallocation created forty clear channels, on each of which only one high-powered station would broadcast nationally. Thirty-seven of the forty clear channels went to network-affiliated stations, while the number of nonprofit stations dropped from a 1927 high of over a hundred to fewer than thirty by the early 1930s.56 Not only did the networks get most of the licenses, including the most favorable ones, but the amount of capital needed to run a network (creating programming, leasing phone lines, and so on) ensured the dominance of commercial broadcasting paid for by advertisements over government-subsidized or listener-funded broadcasting. According to radio historian Susan Smulyan, “Before the advent of the networks, advertising stood out among the financing options only because it elicited the loudest protests and had the fewest supporters. The network system’s need for large amounts of cash in order to rent wire lines suddenly gave broadcast advertising a privileged position.”57 As a result, broadcast radio solidified its foundation as a private, for-profit enterprise.
This emphasis on commercial broadcasting affected the content of radio programs by forcing broadcasters to focus on programs that would attract listeners, and therefore advertisers. But changes in program content also had to do with the fact that the nature of radio stations changed in the wake of the Radio Act of 1927. Independent radio stations serving smaller ethnic and religious communities lost out to network-affiliated stations in the contest for licenses and for favorable frequencies, power, and hours of operation. This was especially true for a city like Chicago, which had a very vibrant independent radio culture in the early 1920s. Many of these independent stations served white ethnic, working-class communities, broadcasting information and entertainment programming to immigrants in their native languages and religious programs for nonmainstream religions. The Chicago Federation of Labor ran its own station, WCFL, “the Voice of Labor,” to reach the working class over the airwaves.58 When the FRC reallocated frequencies in 1928, many of these smaller stations lost their licenses or had their broadcasting capability reduced (either in power or in hours). They were basically run off the dial by the corporate-based stations (either national networks or stations belonging to large established corporations, such as newspapers). In making its decisions, the FRC relied on a phrase in Section 4f of the Radio Act that claimed broadcasting stations must “promote public convenience or interest” or “serve public necessity.” In the minds of the commissioners, powerful networks were more capable of serving the public interest than small, niche stations because they conceived of the public in the broadest, most homogeneous sense (specifically, as white and nonethnic). And by contrast, small ethnic-based stations were seen as not serving the broader public and therefore not as deserving of consideration. This bias favored the white middle class over other groups, and resulted in such decisions as the FRC’s denial of WCFL’s request to extend its working-class programming to evening hours when most of its audience would be home from work.59
Many supporters of network radio believed that not only would large national networks benefit the largest number of listeners, but networks’ financial stake in radio would ensure the highest-quality programming. RCA argued that because of its role in the manufacture of radio sets by Westinghouse and General Electric, “it is more largely interested, more selfishly interested, if you please, in the best possible broadcasting in the United States than any one else.”60 In addition, a national network could “do much to bring order in the radio field,” according to the Brooklyn Eagle. “The entire [radio] business has been developed in haphazard fashion and the multiplication of local stations, with all manner of programs being cast upon the ether, has brought about a situation that is injurious and a grave hardship in the development of this new form of communication.”61 While the Washington Star wondered “whether the newly formed organization can offer a wider variety and a more attractive series of programs remains to be seen—or heard,” the writer still believed that NBC would have “a distinct value” in the “national distribution of important programs, not merely entertainment.”62 Despite these hopes for the future of the medium, the incorporation of the airwaves meant that there would be less diversity in who created programming and that ethnic and racial portrayals on the air more often than not were based on stereotypes from such existing forms of entertainment as vaudeville and minstrel shows.
The best example of this kind of programming was WGN’s 1926 hit show Sam ’n’ Henry, which became the NBC ratings winner Amos ’n’ Andy. Created by white vaudeville singers Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, Sam ’n’ Henry was a ten-minute serial program that followed the exploits of two African American southerners who had recently migrated to Chicago and depicted the situations they got into as a result of their lack of big-city knowledge. This kind of characterization had been a staple of minstrel shows as far back as the antebellum era as a way to make light of the perceived ignorance of African Americans, especially free blacks. While radio h
ad enabled white audiences to hear such black performers as Paul Robeson, Bert Williams, Duke Ellington, and others, it did not provide for many programs created by African Americans that would provide an avenue for black expression. Instead, mainstream radio, in seeking to attract the largest possible audience, sought programming that had a track record of appealing to large audiences. Vaudeville, minstrel shows, Broadway revues, and other theatrical entertainment provided most of the early programming, along with symphony orchestras, opera performances, and dance and jazz bands. As a result, radio did not provide new avenues of expression for African Americans (or any other ethnic group); rather, it mimicked and reinforced existing forms of entertainment, complete with negative stereotypes.
Sam ’n’ Henry quickly caught on with listeners, many of whom became addicted to the ongoing story line. The Chicago Tribune, WGN’s parent company, promoted the show through news stories highlighting the enthusiastic reactions of fans and through billboards asking the public to “Follow the Radio Comic Strip.”63 By 1927 WGN received fan letters about the show from as far away as New York State, and in both 1926 and 1927, Sam ’n’ Henry was the only show from west of the Appalachians to perform at the annual Radio Industries Banquet in New York. The show received some of its first national exposure when around eighty stations carried the broadcast of the banquet around the country. In 1927 the characters of Sam and Henry could be heard over WGN not only on their daily show but in remote broadcasts from such major sporting events as the Jack Dempsey–Gene Tunney rematch from Chicago’s Soldier Field, the Kentucky Derby, and the Indianapolis 500 auto race. Victor Records released over a dozen Sam ’n’ Henry dialogues along with vaudeville songs by Gosden and Correll, many of which featured blackface dialogue along with the musical numbers. While WGN was based in Chicago, its signal could sometimes be heard as far away as the East Coast and the Deep South; record stores in Philadelphia and New Orleans sold copies of Gosden and Correll’s musical and dialogue records. Through most of 1927, the Tribune capitalized on the popularity of Sam ’n’ Henry by publishing the scripts of current episodes in the Sunday Metropolitan Section, written in “dialect,” and a Chicago book publisher offered a book of twenty-four Sam ’n’ Henry episodes for sale in stores and in the Montgomery Ward catalog. Avid listeners could buy a Sam ’n’ Henry toy featuring the pair on a little metal wagon or a Sam ’n’ Henry candy bar, or they could attend a performance of Gosden and Correll as Sam and Henry. The duo performed for private parties as well as at theater and movie houses, earning $800 or more per performance. When the performers asked WGN to allow the recording of episodes for lease to other stations nationwide, WGN refused, and Gosden and Correll quit, performing their last show on WGN in February 1928. The duo reappeared in March on WMAQ, owned by Tribune rival the Chicago Daily News, as Amos ’n’ Andy before moving to NBC in 1929.64
1927 and the Rise of Modern America Page 22
