| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Clifford J. Doerksen. American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 157. $34.95.
In his study of small independent radio stations of the 1920s, Clifford J. Doerksen promises to "provide a sense of what these forgotten radio stations were like and what they meant to the people who listened to them" (p. ix). In his introduction, Doerksen acknowledges some of the difficulties involved in resurrecting radio programming that was never recorded, radio performances that were rarely reviewed, and radio stations whose business papers were even more rarely archived. The combination of serendipity and research skills set the stage for a vivid and exciting detective tale. In unearthing the stories of small, independent urban and rural radio stations from the era before networks, before comprehensive federal regulation, and before the controversy over advertising sponsorship for broadcasting was settled, Doerksen provides a valuable and engaging contribution to the growing shelf of U.S. radio history in the 1920s, which includes Susan Douglas's Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (1987), Susan Smulyan's Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–1934 (1994), and Robert McChesney's Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of US Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (1993).	1
Doerksen's contribution is unique and especially valuable for two reasons. First, he provides detailed accounts of specific stations, their business plans, some sense of their constituencies and critics, and a hint of the cultural, musical, and political populisms that infused their broadcast schedules. For example, WHN, which began in 1921 in what was then Brooklyn, New York (now Queens), took to the air in early 1922 with a 15-watt transmitter, a piano, some records, and unabashedly commercial motives. WHN's popularity, measured in fan mail, grew quickly, and increases in wattage soon followed. So did complaints from citizens and newspapers, offended by the direct advertising, jazz records, and the station's connections to Marcus Loew's vaudeville and nightclub interests, with all their implications of bootlegging, gangsterism, and sexual immorality.	2
Rural independent stations, such as KNFK of Shenandoah, Iowa, mostly eschewed jazz in favor of "old time music" (p. 74), but Doerksen sees more similarities than differences in their populist appeal to listeners who appreciated direct advertising (ads that mention the prices of specific products on the air) and the populist accents in which the "high-brow" stations of the emerging network system were scorned. On "farmer stations" like KFNK, Protestant piety, nineteenth-century hymns, and gospel music were part of an antimodern, anti-urban appeal. In these colorful accounts of urban and rural stations, Doerksen is scrupulous in reminding readers that "complicating exceptions abound" and that generalizations about idionsyncratic small independent stations, most of whom are lost to history, are difficult to make (p. 76). And the handful of portraits he paints of the midwestern "farmer stations" helps to place into context the bizarre but well-known example of Dr. J. R. Brinkley, of KFKB in Kansas, purveyor of the notorious "goat-gland" impotency cure and other dubious nostrums (pp. 85–90). The one constant at the heart of his argument is the early enthusiasm for using the airwaves to advertise products directly to the listening audience.	3
This brings us to the second feature of Doerksen's contribution to the literature on early U.S. radio. Doerksen positions his book as a corrective to work by McChesney, Smulyan, and others that "treats the commercialization of the American airwaves as something engineered from above by corporate interests and consolidated in the face of universal public resistance" (p. ix). It is, I think, more complementary to this scholarship than it is a refutation, however.	. . .

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