| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 200 words from this article are provided below; about 327 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age. By Clifford J. Doerksen. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xii, 157 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8122-3871-0.)

Clifford J. Doerksen's study focuses on "the volatile utopianism that surrounded the birth of [radio] broadcasting and the bitterness of the warfare over broadcasting's proper cultural context" (p. 57). He has fashioned a vigorous and well-documented, revisionist argument that takes issue both with early historical studies of radio in the United States—studies that were "sponsored by or affiliated with the commercial broadcasting industry"—and with more recent, independent works by Michele Hilmes and Susan Smulyan that "treat the commercialization of the American airways as the consequence of a hostile takeover, engineered from above by corporate interests and consolidated in the face of opposition construed to have been more or less universal" (p. 16). Doerksen insists, to the contrary, that "commercialization triumphed in the American airwaves precisely because most Americans did not object to it." Hostility to broadcast advertising was indeed a consensus among the wealthy and better educated Americans, but they were unable to silence the noisy commercial babel of smaller entrepreneurial, populist, and independent radio broadcasters of the Jazz Age (p. 17).

. . .

There are about 327 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.