1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  Amos ’n’ Andy demonstrated the potential for radio programming on a national scale and the benefits of network programming to advertisers; it also illustrated the dangerous spread, on a much larger scale, of stereotypes of African Americans. The dying art form of minstrel shows, although lingering in vaudeville shows and film, made a dramatic comeback on radio, which not only brought these stereotypes to a larger audience than any other medium but also reinforced them daily in the comfort of listeners’ homes. Amos ’n’ Andy and other blackface radio shows, as well as musical shows featuring jazz, created a “sound of whiteness” over the airwaves by marginalizing African Americans and presenting limited and distorted views of black culture to a primarily white audience. These programs “encoded the airwaves as a domain of white pleasure and power produced at the literal and figurative expense of racialized African-Americans.”65 In addition, broadcasting by African Americans faced severe limitations in most markets. The first show produced by and announced by African Americans did not debut until 1928 with WSBC’s The Negro Hour, produced by Jack L. Cooper of the Chicago Defender. This foray into broadcasting coincided with the decline of independent stations and the loss of local control over much radio programming due to the Radio Act of 1927. As a result, both the network expansion of radio to national markets and the nationalization of the industry under the auspices of the Federal Radio Commission solidified the marginal and stereotypical portrayal of African Americans on the radio. In this sense, radio as a modernizing force did not bring new ideas about race to the public but, rather, made traditional prejudices and stereotypes available to more people. It was a modern invention used for traditional ends.

  Advertising goods and services was another traditional goal of the modern medium. In the United States, unlike in Great Britain, radio’s development was influenced by the fact that capital raising and program financing depended on selling airtime to advertisers. This meant that advertisers exercised control over program content and, at times, even over program creation. In his 1927 book Using Radio in Sales Promotion, Edgar H. Felix, a broadcasting and merchandising consultant as well as a contributing editor to Radio Broadcast, provides a manual for advertisers, station managers, and broadcasting artists on exactly how radio can benefit business. Calling radio broadcasting “the new goodwill medium,” Felix recounts the early optimism of advertisers, who were “quick to recognize it as a means of gaining goodwill. Here was a countless audience, sympathetic, pleasure seeking, enthusiastic, curious, interested, approachable in the privacy of their own homes. What a glorious opportunity for the advertising man to spread his sales propaganda.”66

  But, Felix is quick to point out, this opportunity must be used wisely and must not be squandered by the old methods of sales promotion. He describes the earliest attempts at advertising on the air, which came in the form of informational lectures about a product, such as the Queensboro Corporation’s ten-minute presentation on WEAF about the benefits of cooperative apartment ownership. While in its day the advertisement was successful ($27,000 worth of sales were directly attributable to the presentation, which cost the company $50), Felix notes that if the same talk were to be given in 1927, “there would be an outcry of indignation on the part of the radio audience” because “commercial broadcasting has become a specialized art; the radio audience has become discriminative; it does not tolerate educational lectures, however well delivered and authoritative, if their sole purpose is to promote sales” (3). The sophisticated radio audience should not be sold products on the radio; rather, advertisers should focus on “pleasing the listener, upon bringing him features he wants to hear, for the sake of winning his goodwill” (5). Advertisers need to consider not only the programs they present or sponsor but also the overall reputation of the radio station. Stations that recognize that “broadcasting is not an advertising medium” will best serve the needs of advertisers. Broadcasters are invited into the homes of thousands of listeners, and the commercial broadcaster should realize that he is “nothing less than a guest and he should conduct himself as a guest.” Therefore, he no more has “the right to inflict selling propaganda in the midst of a broadcasting entertainment” than “an agreeable weekend guest may suddenly launch into an insurance solicitation at Sunday dinner.” But, thinking like a guest, the right sales promotion “at the proper time, is assured preferred consideration and attention” (9).

  Not only should a company carefully identify the proper station with which to associate itself and its product, but it should exercise great care in selecting the programs it sponsors. Felix outlines seven qualities a radio program should have to be effective for a sponsor: attention-compelling power, continuity, distinctiveness, fitness in relation to the concern presenting it, adaptability to the station’s general character, degree and manner to which it directs attention to the sponsor, and acceptability to the radio audience.67 He notes that mere popularity with an audience is not sufficient reason to associate a product with a program, and he uses the most popular of radio programs, the dance music broadcast, as his example. While many people listen to dance music on the radio, the way they listen to it, without serious attention, means that its effectiveness as a provider of goodwill to its sponsor is limited.

  The most effective programs for advertisers, according to Felix, are those that involve the radio audience. He gives as examples shows presented by Time magazine and the U.S. Playing Card Company. The Pop Question Game, sponsored by Time, was a quiz show in which an announcer asked ten questions about current events based on articles in the magazine. Thirty seconds of silence followed in which the listeners attempted to answer the questions before the announcer provided the correct responses. “Thus a very subtle and successful selling message was put over because the listener was made conscious of his lack of knowledge of the events of the day as an argument for subscribing to Time.” The U.S. Playing Card Company involved its audience by having expert bridge players teach the radio audience the nuances of playing bridge. The show required a group of four listeners to deal hands identical to the ones held by the on-air experts and to play along as the experts provided rationales for each and every move. “Listeners are thus taught the fine points of bridge and sold the desirability and fascination of the game at the same time.” These programs excelled in Felix’s eyes since they were subtle and involved the listeners rather than beating them over the head with a sales pitch. These programs used “the broadcast medium to the greatest advantage” (133).

  Radio programs could also be used in even more subtle ways by bringing good associations to a product. Fansteel Products Company, the sponsors of Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, received the benefits of association with a program whose subject was highly regarded and which, thanks to Damrosch’s explanations of the music performed, was informational as well as entertaining. “That a concern which does broadcasting with such thoroughness, undoubtedly makes a good product, is the inference carried to the listener” (134). The benefit for the advertiser is not primarily in associating a product with a highly regarded institution or genre of music but, rather, in addressing the audience on its own level, which for Felix means uneducated and uncultured. He explains that the Atwater Kent Hour program, even though it presents some of the world’s greatest musical artists, “well appreciated by the concert-hall audience,” does not explain the works to the public, nor does it employ any “radio showmanship” to make the program acceptable to radio audiences, and therefore the effectiveness to the advertiser is limited (134). Felix sees the uses of radio advertising in traditional terms, as dependent on goodwill and reputation, instead of in modern terms, valuing quantity, audience figures, cost, and other statistics. For Felix, the modernity of radio is in its ability to reach audiences, not necessarily in its effect on the audience.

  Throughout his book, Felix takes seriously the subject of radio’s use to advertisers by looking at every aspect of radio, from such general topics as which businesses should use or not us
e radio, how to select an appropriate station and program, how to determine the possible audience for a program, and what kinds of radio programs are the most effective for advertisers, to more specific topics such as how to prepare a script for a program or advertisement and what should be included in opening and closing announcements. What the book illustrates are the facts that by 1927 radio was firmly committed to commercial broadcasting and that the ever-increasing sophistication of the advertising industry was developing new techniques for use on the new medium. While Felix discusses every aspect of broadcasting that he deems important to advertisers, he never discusses radio broadcasting as an art form. He recognizes the entertainment value that listeners gave to radio, but he does not see radio as the conduit through which the world will achieve peace, the nation will become more democratic, the masses will be educated and cultured, or their spirits will be uplifted.

  By 1927, due mainly to the Federal Radio Act, radio practitioners focused more on the practicalities of paying for radio than on the idealistic possibilities of the medium. While many hoped for a bright new world brought about by radio, what radio gave Americans was greater access to more of the same. News, entertainment, and even advertising were not significantly altered by radio but simply made more accessible. Radio technology may have revolutionized the way Americans received their news, entertainment, and information, but it was not revolutionary in its content or purpose. Like the respectable content of motion pictures, the goals of the Harlem Renaissance, and popular performers like Paul Whiteman, radio both propelled the country forward into a modern, mass-mediated, consumer society and at the same time reinforced older, traditional notions of race and class. The ambiguity created by transmitting traditional values through modern media allowed each of these industries a measure of respectability. The degree to which each individual accepted and participated in these industries illustrates the various ways Americans sought to reconcile the past with the present. While no one solution worked for all, what Americans did find in their search for modern America was an identifiable American culture.

  Charles Demuth (1883–1935), My Egypt, 1927. Oil and graphite pencil on fiberboard, 35¾ × 30 in. (90.81 × 76.2 cm) (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 31.172)

  CONCLUSIONThe Search for American Culture

  THE AMBIVALENCE OF AMERICAN CULTURE: Charles Demuth’s painting My Egypt illustrates the ambivalence many felt toward modern America. While it celebrates the achievements of American industry, it also calls into question the costs of industrial modernization. Even as the practical materialism of American consumer culture drew the disdain of many artists, it also served as their foundation and inspiration. Like many Americans, Demuth had a love/hate relationship with modernity.

  In 1927, with the publication of America Comes of Age: A French Analysis, economist André Siegfried presented his take on life in the United States after a six-month tour of the country “talking to people of every class, creed, and colour, and measuring . . . the subtle influences that are today shaping the destiny of the American nation.”1 While the book’s focus is on the ethnic, economic, and political situations in the United States, it presents these issues in a way that exposes the character of American culture. Americans, Siegfried argues, have been thrust upon the world stage in a position of economic and military leadership. While generally reluctant to accept the responsibilities of this position, they nonetheless have accepted and forwarded an attitude of moral superiority over the world. As a result, Americans wish the rest of the world to follow their lead while they themselves focus on national issues of production and economic growth rather than on international leadership. The conflict between this moralistic attitude in world affairs and self-serving pragmatism in domestic matters is, according to Siegfried, not a conflict at all in American minds since the economic successes of American industry justify the sense of superiority. Success has made possible “luxury in every-day consumption and the extension to the many living conditions previously reserved for the few,” resulting in the belief that Americans have reached the height of civilization. “To the American, Europe is a land of paupers, and Asia a continent of starving wretches.”2 But more important than the economic triumph of the United States over the world is the sense that economic prosperity is an expression of moral superiority.

  Not only did the economic success of the United States make Americans feel superior, but the role of U.S. forces in the Great War and the country’s newfound position as a creditor nation reinforced such feelings. “In this lies the danger that America may feel she can do as she likes without consideration for anyone else,” Siegfried warns.

  She can act as arbitrarily as she pleases. She can strangle whole peoples and governments, or she can assist them on her own terms. She can control them and indulge in the pleasant sensation of judging them from her superior moral height, and then impose her verdict. This is bad not only for Europeans, who are humiliated, but also for Americans; for their sovereign independence makes them less and less willing to accept international obligations. Always being sought after as the rich are by the poor, and always giving without receiving, tends to destroy any consideration for the borrower, such as arises from free exchange on an equal footing. They are gradually and surreptitiously assuming the rôle of a missionary bailiff or of an ambitious man in search of power, and from this may arise a new and subtle imperialism unlike anything we have known before. (227)

  Siegfried understood the dangers involved in well-meaning but controlling intrusions into the affairs of other nations, especially when those intrusions were indirectly or unconsciously expressed.

  Siegfried was not the only observer to worry about the role of the United States in the world. Walter Lippmann, in his 1927 essay “Empire: The Days of Our Nonage Are Over,” discusses the danger that arises from Americans’ reluctant encroachment on the world. “All the world thinks of the United States today as an empire, except the people of the United States.” Americans, he writes, “shrink from the word ‘empire,’ and insist that it should not be used to describe the dominion we exercise from Alaska to the Philippines, from Cuba to Panama, and beyond.”3 This feeling among Americans, Lippmann insists, is not intentionally hypocritical in that Americans genuinely believe that the United States is not an empire. Yet the nation’s role in the world, especially in Latin America “is what the world at large calls an empire, or at least an empire in the making” (218). Lippmann suggests that Americans must come to terms with the American empire, or else the nation “shall merely acquire a reputation for hypocrisy while we stumble unconsciously into the cares and perils of empire. Now an unconscious empire has dangers that may be even greater than a conscious one,” primarily “this refusal to admit that we are assuming imperial responsibilities is to turn over the management of our empire to business men with a personal share in it” (219). For Lippmann, the real danger is not American imperialism but American economic imperialism, an empire based on the interests of American business and not the interests and ideals of the American people. The solution for Lippmann is simple: “There can be no remedy for this until Americans make up their minds to recognize the fact that they are no longer a virginal republic in a wicked world, but they are themselves a world power, and one of the most portentous which has appeared in the history of mankind” (222). If Americans realized this fact, he believed, they would willingly accept their role in the world. But while Lippmann sees Americans eventually stepping up to the plate of international power, Siegfried is not so optimistic.

  Siegfried felt that not only are Americans in danger of imposing their ideals on the rest of the world, but American ideals have negative ramifications domestically as well. “Many of the most magnificent material achievements of the United States have been made possible only by sacrificing certain rights of the individual, rights which we in the Old World regard as among the most precious victories of civilization” (America Comes of Age, 347)
. Americans, according to Siegfried, willingly give up aspects of their individuality in order to increase efficiency and production, and this runs counter to the course of western civilization, which has sought out greater and greater freedoms for the individual. “But what is absolutely new about this society which is accomplishing such marvels is that in all aspects—even including idealism and religion—it is working towards the single goal of production. It is a materialistic society, organized to produce things rather than people, with output set up as a god” (348). This singular goal of production means Americans are constantly concerned about being ever more efficient and productive, and therefore they are always active as opposed to contemplative. “The American is entirely at ease only in practical matters, for he is completely out of his element when he is not active,” writes Siegfried. “Simply to exist is not enough; he must always express himself in some tangible way” (40).