Hilmes' Radio Voices

Michelle Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952 , 1997.
An overview of radio’s impact on American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Corrective to its relative absence at the time in media studies [esp. TV studies, notes SPIGEL]. Influence on later broadcast media, film, TV. Role of amateurs, women. Role in nation-building. [Contrast to technologies US has not led the way in, like mobile phones? CASTELLS]

- Example of study of technology as "a social practice grounded in culture" good def, Bourdieu: "cultural field" of radio's origins xiii [SLACK & WISE]
- Crit of this and DOUGLAS: focus on national over regional/local, she acknowledges this
- Time / space collapse xvi, 14 STANDAGE, SIMON
- Historical method, traces, subjugated, conjectural GINZBURG, CERTEAU xvi-xvii, historical ruptures FOUCAULT OLSSEN
- Comm tech as leveling, uplift 5 [also degenerate? mass culture, ADORNO on jazz], 28
- Association of technology and national identity SIMON 6
- Early ideas of cable, satellite, internet 9
- Print media cited in discussion of benedict Anderson's imagined communities, relate to SCHUDSON, EISENSTEIN? 12-13
- Disease - withdrawal female audio listener 16
- Language decay 19 as in SMS, IM, powerpoint see SIMON

Class notes:
Birth of radio, glory days. p. 23 1924 quote about social destiny of radio, maps of US, Canada. Nation building, imagined communities. What is America? Cites Benedict Anderson: originally print media creates a nation. Not just shared information but shared experience of sharing information, community-building, CAREY.

Hilmes: “Shared Simultaneity” Space compression, national public sphere. Radio a shaping media, or at least intended to be. Tried to be organized to be. Significant in US: Not government-run but commercially run. Privatization of culture is one side of it, other is that while that did happen it also caused problems: invasion of private space of home, disrupts hierarchies of race gender sex ethnicity etc. Black music invasion corruption panic. Hairspray. Urban/rural. Easier to cross lines, young white girls hearing jungle black music and infected by it. So what do we do with CONTENT of radio. 1920s political context: immigration backlash KKK white supremacy 1924 Immigration Act raises immigration restrictions, including eastern European Jews. Segregation.
Amos & Andy, blackface minstrelsy, formative US pop culture. A&A brings minstrel past into present through radio. Stereotype used to maintain social divisions that radio threatened to cross. Although of course different listeners probably had different reactions [HALL]. Cemented idea that most popular pop culture involved blackness. Moments of excess, interpretive spillover lead listeners to think about US racial/cultural mix.
Gender: Risk of female radio listeners: they were dominant listener esp. daytime. Seen as a problem if radio is about imagining American culture makes ultimate American citizen a woman.
BUT moments of interpretation and use CAN but not necessarily trump issues such as these.

Introduction: The Nation's Voice
Radiating Culture
One way to begin is to look at some of the very earliest attempts to speak and the conditions and expectations that motivated and constrained them. Chapter 1 opens by drawing attention to the weight (xviii) placed by early radio on the assimilationist drama, exemplified by the innovative and influential show The Rise of the Goldbergs and the career of its creator, Gertrude Berg. This leads to a consideration of radio a? it helped to build the "imagined community" of the 1920s United States, using concepts developed by Benedict Anderson to examine radio's early concern with the problem of national unity and identity in a diverse and conflicted society. Utopian predictions for radio as a unifying and culturally uplifting medium collide with dystopian fears surrounding its unique ability to transcend traditional boundaries of time and space, and the social distinctions that these boundaries maintain. Pierre Bourdieu's theories on the work that cultural distinctions perform in creating and stabilizing social hierarchies supplies the framework for a consideration of the historical context of radio's initial development and uses. Assimilation, "Americanism," and the complex functions of racial and ethnic "difference," along with the rise of commercialized mass culture and its creation of a preferred, yet feared, buying audience of women, form the backdrop that informs radio's earliest definitions and practices.
How Far Can You Hear?
Chapter 2 takes these social tensions into the field of early radio experimentation and the development of a framework of gradually naturalized structures and practices. Starting with the work of key inventors such as Reginald Fessenden and Lee DeForest, I bring to the fore the important but too often overlooked contributions of early radio amateurs, focusing not only on the practices and problems that influenced early commercial stations, but on the regulatory conflicts and disputes over "good taste" in the ether that had far-reaching effects. In particular, the amateurs' use of jazz records and the racialized cultural hierarchies challenged by this emergent musical form provoked restrictions that helped to separate legitimate from illegitimate interests even as the first stations began to broadcast. Pioneer stations such as KDKA and WJZ benefited from the cultural distinctions encouraged by early regulators, and influential practices begin to emerge. The announcer became. the personification of radio's brash voice in the mid-1920s. Two groundbreaking programs, the National Carbon Company's Eveready Hour, with Wendell Hall, and WEAF's Capitol Theater Gang, with "Roxy" (Samuel Rothafel), deployed what Warren Susman identifies as the "culture of personality" to introduce the expanded and newly constituted listening public to the experience of radio. Finally, I consider Chicago as a fertile site of radio innovation, (XIX) notably through its two great newspaper-owned stations, the Chicago Daily News's WMAQ and the Chicago Tribune's WGN. These important early stations, practitioners, and emerging forms set the scene for the dramatic debut of radio as a national medium as networks spun their webs across the country in the late 1920s.

Who We Are, Who We Are Not: The Emergence of National Narratives
Chapter 3 focuses on the development of radio's influential narratives of national definition, again drawing on Benedict Anderson, with particular attention to the characteristically American tradition of the minstrel show and its influence on U.S. radio. The history of the innovation of radio's most representative textual form, the serial series narrative, is traced from its beginnings in the blackface program Amos 'n' Andy to its eventual domination of network schedules. Within the context of Chicago's melting pot of ethnic groups and Jazz Age culture, the serial comedy/drama provided not only a uniquely useful textual format for radio's technical, industrial, and economic structures, but also created a new kind of relationship between audience and medium. Drawing on the work of theorists and historians such as Homi Bhabha, Toni Morrison, David Roediger, and Ann Douglas,IO I reveal the central role played by race in radio's early narratives and address, constructing a national norm of "whiteness" that emphasized the differences between '~black" and "white" while working to erase distinctions between groups of European descent. The fact that radio was an aural medium meant that it had to work harder than its comparable national form, motion pictures, both to depict and to define racial differences, and thus a consideration ~f the specifics of radio's narrative constructions works particularly well to reveal the hidden workings of race behind naturalized conventions. As radio grew from a local novelty to a great national institution, it built on the forms and tensions exemplified by this extraordinarily influential program.

Eavesdropping on America: Kitchen Table Conversations
Chapter 4 looks at the offshoots of the Amos 'n' Andy phenomenon: the explosion of serial dramas and comedies that debuted in the early 1930s and the cultural tradition on which they drew. This includes such innovators as Bemarr Macfadden (True Story Hour); Marian and Jim Jordan (Fibber McGee and Molly); Chester Lauck and Norris Goff (Lum and Abner); Louise Starkey, Isobel Carothers, and Helen King (Clara, Lu and Em); and Myrtle Vail (Myrt and Marge). I place the success of these shows within the context of the transformation of networks from cultural arbiters providing programming produced in-house to sellers of airtime to advertising agencies (xx) and their clients. In particular, I use the conflict between one of radio's largest program suppliers, the J. Walter Thompson agency, and NBC to illustrate the economic and cultural pressures that shaped radio as a national medium in the 1930s.

The Disembodied Woman
Chapter 5 turns to the suppressed history of women in radio, tracing the efforts of women's voices to be heard. From the female amateurs of the 1910s through the debate over the suitability of women announcers in the 1920s, to the creation of the daytime network schedule as a "ghetto" for feminine audiences, producers, and concerns, this chapter begins the process of reexamining the construction of radio as a medium targeted primarily at women, but preoccupied with containing the transgressive potential that such an emphasis presented. Key female innovators in radio, such as Bertha Brainard and Judith Waller, are exhumed from historical neglect and evaluated for their contributions to radio. The ways in which these and other radio innovators began to define women's interests on the air and to develop programs that spoke, often in subversive and controversial tones, about women's experiences begins in chapter 5 and carries over into chapter 6's focus on the oft-pilloried daytime radio serial.

Under Cover of Daytime
Drawing on Nancy Fraser's theories of "subaltern counterpublics," I place daytime radio dramas within their context of schedule differentiation and tensions surrounding radio's perpetual conflict between public service and private profit and the gender assumptions behind such terms. A closer look at the work of key originators, such as Irna Phillips, Jane Crusinberry, and Frank and Anne Hummert, along with the discursive strategies that worked to denigrate this popular form-and its audiences-reveals what was at stake in the creation of a separate place for women on the airwaves and how audiences used and responded to the potential for resistance and transgression that the serials provided.

The Disciplined Audience: Radio by Night
In chapter 7, the focus shifts to radio at night, and I examine four of radio's most popular and prestigious programs: The Jack Benny Program, Fred Allen in his various settings, The Lux Radio Theatre, and Orson Welles's Mercury Theater of the Air. These two forms-the comedy/variety show and the dramatic adaptation-represent primetime radio's most popular genres and the ones that most clearly mark the differentiation between nighttime and the disparaged daytime. Employing Lawrence Levine's analysis of cultural hierarchy, I show the concepts' of the disciplined audience and the controlling author to be hard at work in these popular programs.12 Radio drew a fine line (xxi) between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" forms, with radio hosts assigned the formidable task of walking that line before live weekly audiences of millions. While self-consciously challenging social pretension and lampooning the institutions of culture, these programs built on and reinforced other social distinctions, notably along the lines of race and gender. And it was precisely these lines that would come under heavy scrutiny and conflict as radio entered the decisive national identity-defining period of World War II.

On the Home Front: Fighting to be Heard
Chapter 8 traces some of the contradictions in radio's embrace of the war effort, including the organization of the Office of War Information and its internal disputes. During this period, radio played a crucial role in the newly urgent task of mobilizing national identity and recruiting excluded groups to the idea of "Americanness." Programs designed explicitly to advocate ethnic unity and interracial solidarity worked simultaneously to draw attention to radio's complicity in the conditions that made such appeals necessary in the face of the Nazi threat. Similarly, radio proved an important aid in recruiting women to war work by expanding the theretofore limited range of female representations and modes of address. However, this expansion also served to indicate the nature of the previous limitations, and ultimately would necessitate strong measures to recontain the marginal voices that were given new space on the airwaves, even if in contained and partial forms.

Conclusion: Terms of Preferment
In my concluding essay, I show how the historical amnesia surrounding the career of radio personality Mary Margaret McBride, particularly as concealed beneath the historically foregrounded practices of Sylvester "Pat" Weaver in the 1950s, reveals this containment process at work in the definition of the emerging medium of television.

Publisher:
The Shadow. Fibber McGee and Molly. Amos 'n' Andy. When we think back on the golden age of radio, we think of the shows. In Radio Voices, Michele Hilmes looks at the way radio programming influenced and was influenced by the United States of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, tracing the history of the medium from its earliest years through the advent of television.

Hilmes places the development of radio within the context of the turmoils of the 1920s: immigration and urbanization, the rise of mass consumer culture, and the changing boundaries of the public and private spheres. Early practices and structures—the role of the announcer, the emergence of program forms from vaudeville, minstrel shows, and the concert stage—are examined.

Central to Radio Voices is a discussion of programs and their relations to popular understandings of race, ethnicity, and gender in the United States of this era. Hilmes explores Amos 'n' Andy and its negotiations of racial tensions and The Rise of the Goldbergs and its concern with ethnic assimilation. She reflects upon the daytime serials--the first soap operas--arguing that these much-disparaged programs provided a space in which women could discuss conflicted issues of gender. Hilmes also explores industry practices, considering the role of advertising agencies and their areas of conflict and cooperation with the emerging networks as well as the impact of World War II on the "mission" of radio.

Radio Voices places the first truly national medium of the United States in its social context, providing an entertaining account of the interplay between programming and popular culture.

"Radio Voices is the most-cited publication in a recent spate of cultural studies of radio. Hilmes analyzes the early practices and programs of radio-such as the daytime serial drama that would evolve into the soap opera-in relation to the emergence, after World War I, of mass consumerism. She argues that, as the United States rose to world power during the Age of Radio, the medium was crucial in helping to form an American national identity and to blur the boundaries between the public and private spheres." —Chronicle of Higher Education

"Hilmes offers a fresh, exciting, path-breaking and insightful history of radio broadcasting. Radio Voices provides an innovative and accessible history of U.S. broadcasting that promises to inspire a new wave of critical cultural analysis of the radio era. Radio Voices may prove to be the most important for the research it promises to inspire by rethinking and enlivening the field of radio history." —Journal of Communication

"The title, Radio Voices, is well chosen: the voices of the radio pioneers, which one might too easily assume to be irrecoverable, emerge through the book's frequent extracts from correspondence and scripts. Radio Voices will remind scholars of popular culture of the pleasures and rewards of archival study." —Journal of American History

"The author's extensive research has turned up many delicious tales not recounted elsewhere." —Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television