From the issue dated May 21, 2004
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Return With Us Now to Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear: Radio Studies Rise Again
I love old radio stories, and I have a million of them," sighs the narrator of Woody Allen's Radio Days (1987), a sepia-toned, rose-colored homage to the romance of a lost mass-com past. "Now it's all gone ... except for the memories." That so touching an elegy to vintage radio would be delivered from the motion-picture screen is both ironic and fitting. Of all the communications revolutions born of the 20th century, radio may be the most elusive and ephemeral. Slick magazines come shelved and bound, motion-picture film packed in canisters, and television shows on videotape. The auditory ambiance of the golden age of radio -- a period that dawned with the debut of Amos 'n' Andy in 1929 and darkened when Milton Berle and the Friday-night fights took over homes in 1948 -- is harder to play back. Like so much of the programming, the radio gestalt has vanished into the ether. Yet the dearth of tangible material has not stopped an enterprising cadre of radio activists from filling the void. Increasingly, media scholars have tuned in to the remote signals with the zeal of ham operators fiddling with their first shortwave sets. Occupying a research niche between the older, higher-profile province of film studies and the more cutting-edge terrain of television studies -- and aided by an obsessive Internet-linked web of buffs devoted to old-time radio -- scholars are shuffling through the metal disks, wax records, and audiotapes that compose the archival remnants of the original broadcasting medium. Collectively these researchers seek to break through the static of moving-image centricity in media scholarship and remind us of the first true network of simultaneous mass communications in human history. Of course, radio has long been on the radar screen of hard-nosed communications scholars and broad-minded historians. Erik Barnouw's three-volume survey, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, published from 1966 to 1970, remains indispensable, and works such as David Culbert's News for Everyman: Radio and Foreign Affairs in Thirties America (1976) and Alan Brinkley's Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982) have offered valuable guidance. Occasionally, too, even television has paid tribute to the parent medium, notably with that sure sign of cultural validation, a Ken Burns documentary, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1991). However, the current surge in radio-based scholarship tends to embrace a cultural-studies perspective that sends out three identifying call signals: a close analysis of select programs; a due consideration of listener response; and a reliance on the insights of postmodern theory (so far, more Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson than Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault). Michele Hilmes's 1997 Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952 helped start the present wave; a partial list of recent entries includes Tona J. Hangen's Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, & Popular Culture in America (2002), Gerd Horten's Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War II (2002), and Edward D. Miller's Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio (2003). Radio reports have also been annexing turf usually dominated by film and television studies in the pages of such academic showcases as the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television and (title notwithstanding) Cinema Journal. Like every disciplinary bailiwick, radio studies boasts a pantheon of immortal figures and iconic events. In the political realm, the soothing timbre of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the barking demagoguery of the radio priest Father Charles E. Coughlin have come to serve as embryonic instances -- salutary and sinister -- of the now-permanent alliance between ideology and broadcasting. While Coughlin's fiery bombast ultimately proved too heated even for the hot medium of radio, FDR fared better by using the microphone to converse with "my friends." (Over in Germany, another radio-savvy leader made certain that his voice rang throughout the Reich by supporting the production of a cheap, mass-marketed receiver dubbed the Volksempfanger, or "the people's set," a fascinating tale told by the German musicologists Horst J.P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz in the 1997 Hitler's Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing.) In terms of signature radio entertainers, a sampling is bound to be selective, but any discriminating montage shows that the nonvisual medium was surprisingly congenial to ethnic and racial diversity. Realizing that personalities segregated in real space traveled more freely via the imagined space of the airwaves, scholars have expended abundant critical energy on what might be called voices of color: Amos 'n' Andy, the faux-African-American duo, created by the white humorists Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who became radio's first superstars by mimicking the alleged dialect and malapropisms of black English vernacular; the writer-producer-star Gertrude Berg, auteur and mother hen to The Goldbergs, a warm-hearted, Yiddish-inflected sitcom about a Jewish family living in the Bronx (signature catchphrase: "Yoo-hoo! Mrs. Bloom!"); and the beloved comedian Jack Benny, whose smart-mouth servant Rochester (Eddie Anderson) may have been the first black man in American popular culture to routinely get uppity with a white man. Even well-known historical markers today take on fresh resonance when heard. Though vividly captured on newsreel film, the horror of actually beholding the conflagration of the Hindenburg in 1937 was imprinted forever with the anguished cries of the WLS reporter Herb Morrison ("Oh, the humanity!"). Likewise, the first unimpeachable verification of Nazi genocide came to the wartime generation not via the newsreels or still photographs, but in the wrenching eyewitness account of broadcaster Edward R. Murrow on April 15, 1945. "It will not be pleasant listening," Murrow warned his stateside audience as he groped to describe the sight and smell of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Perhaps the best-remembered radio moments of all were two alien invasions, one fictional and one factual: Orson Welles's hysteria-inducing production of Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938, and the interruption of regular programming to report events from Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (Note to educators: snippets from many classic radio moments are available on I Can Hear It Now, a 1948 record album compiled by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, which is still widely available.) So far, a good deal of the impulse behind current radio research has been simply to reclaim and highlight such flash points. Just last April, the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York City and Los Angeles, underscored how rich and untrammeled the field is with the release of radio coverage of the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. The broadcasts revealed that many of the tropes now associated with the 24/7 flow of cable news were improvised for that Trial of the Century: dramatic re-enactment of courtroom testimony, interviews with the principals, and expert commentary from talking heads -- or rather, disembodied voices. The heavy lifting of historical excavation animates Horten's survey, which the author introduces as the first "broad-based study of the role of domestic American radio during the war years." A historian, he lends an ear to the serials, sitcoms, variety shows, and soap operas that did their bit for the war effort -- sometimes with sledgehammer dissonance, as on Fibber McGee and Molly, when the dimwitted Fibber served as foil for the superior patriotic vigilance of his wife; and sometimes with perfect pitch, as with Jack Benny, whose trademark stinginess was ready-made for underscoring the penny-wise lessons of wartime rationing. By contrast, Miller's study is less interested in resurrecting radio history than in exorcising the demons in the machine. Intrigued by the proliferation of horror, mystery, and suspense shows in the 1930s, Miller, a media-studies scholar, likens the initial reception of radio to a kind of electronic séance. To listeners transfixed by voices from nowhere, the medium radiated a spooky, ethereal magic: Like Hamlet's ghost, The Shadow's Lamont Cranston knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men. From that vantage, Miller interprets the panic wrought by Orson Welles not as an expression of invasion jitters incited by Nazi aggression in Europe, but as a consequence of media penetration itself, a mass-com mass hysteria "as much about the terror of radio and the invasion of bodiless voices as about the fear of encroaching world war 'anthropomorphized' into Martians." Hangen, another historian of media and American culture, examines the great awakening inspired by the interstate range of a dynamic new 50,000-watt pulpit. She acknowledges that radio preachers often looked upon listeners less as a sinners to be saved than chickens to be plucked. "What a congregation!" crowed Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, whose 20-year radio ministry at KFSG (Kall FourSquare Gospel), in Los Angeles, was longer-lived -- and more lucrative -- than many entertainment shows. But Hangen also asserts that, of all the new communications technologies, radio uniquely satisfied "an older, human need for aurality/orality" that made the medium especially congenial to evangelical Protestantism, "a religion of the heard word." Arguing against elitist interpretations of radio as an electronic collection plate for Bible-thumping con artists, she insists upon the "agency exercised by the audience for religious radio." Today radio is but one item to be dialed up on a home-entertainment menu bursting with options. Listen closely, scholars of old-time radio say, and remember when the ear, not the eye, was the main organ of the imagination. Thomas Doherty is an associate professor of film studies at Brandeis University. His most recent book is Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2003). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 37, Page B12 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education