Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947

Front Cover
University of California Press, May 17, 2004 - Performing Arts - 250 pages
Radio Active tells the story of how radio listeners at the American mid-century were active in their listening practices. While cultural historians have seen this period as one of failed reform—focusing on the failure of activists to win significant changes for commercial radio—Kathy M. Newman argues that the 1930s witnessed the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between advertising and activism. Advertising helped to kindle the consumer activism of union members affiliated with the CIO, middle-class club women, and working-class housewives. Once provoked, these activists became determined to influence—and in some cases eliminate—radio advertising.

As one example of how radio consumption was an active rather than a passive process, Newman cites The Hucksters, Frederick Wakeman's 1946 radio spoof that skewered eccentric sponsors, neurotic account executives, and grating radio jingles. The book sold over 700,000 copies in its first six months and convinced broadcast executives that Americans were unhappy with radio advertising. The Hucksters left its mark on the radio age, showing that radio could inspire collective action and not just passive conformity.
 

Contents

The Psychology of Radio Advertising Audience Intellectuals and the Resentment of Radio Commercials
17
Poisons Potions and Profits Radio Activists and the Origins of the Consumer Movement
52
The Consumer Revolt of Mr Average Man Boake Carter and the CIO Boycott ofPhilco Radio
81
Washboard Weepers Women Writers Women Listeners and the Debate over Soap Operas
109
I Wont Buy You Anything But Love Baby NBC Donald Montgomery and the Postwar Consumer Revolt
139
HighClass Hucksters The Rise and Fall of a Radio Republic
166
Notes
193
Bibliography
213
Index
229
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 20 - Insurance at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. He presented this paper at an "Insurance Clinic...
Page 26 - Because human beings, as subjects, still constitute the limit of reification, mass culture has to renew its hold over them in an endless series of repetitions; the hopeless effort of repetition is the only trace of hope that the repetition may be futile, that human beings cannot be totally controlled."23 Examples such as this one could easily be multiplied.
Page 23 - I could make very little. But this much I did understand: that it was concerned with the collection of data, which were supposed to benefit the planning departments in the field of the mass media, whether in industry itself or in cultural advisory boards and similar bodies. For the first time, I saw 'administrative research
Page 25 - ... Whereas on the one hand standardization necessarily follows from the conditions of contemporary economy, it becomes, on the other hand, one of the means of preserving a commodity society at a stage in which, according to the level of the productive forces, it has already lost its justification. (d) Since in our society the forces of production are highly developed, and, at the same time, the relations of production fetter those productive forces, it is full of antagonisms. These antagonisms are...
Page 4 - ... collectivities these audiences are commodities. As commodities they are dealt with in markets by producers and buyers (the latter being advertisers). Such markets establish prices in the familiar mode of monopoly capitalism. Both these markets and the audience commodities traded in are specialized. The audience commodities bear specifications known in the business as "the demographics." The specifications for the audience commodities include age, sex, income level, family composition, urban or...

References to this book

About the author (2004)

Kathy M. Newman is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Bibliographic information