| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004)

IT IS DIFFICULT to write about causes or movements that experience infrequent or limited success, but American author Kathy Newman has done so thoughtfully, producing a book that prompts us to qualify our understandings of both radio advertising and consumer activism. Radio Active argues that radio advertising unintentionally moved listeners to recognize that they possessed power as consumers. In that sense, as Sears Roebuck executive Arthur Price noted, radio advertising carried within it the "seed of its own destruction." (158) Clearly, that seed never fully germinated, for radio advertising was, of course, the very engine of radio's golden age in the United States, and it is still with us. Playing watchdog to it was a losing battle. Sponsors policed their own ad scripts lest they offend target audiences, but they relied upon the structure of the radio game to remain essentially unchanged — a commercial space with few regulations to protect consumers.

Newman begins by setting out her work's contributions, which she characterizes as "revisions of the consumer/producer dichotomy." (11) Complicating this task, she notes, is the 'production' of the audience on the part of the radio industry — particularly its advertisers and sponsors — an industry seeking to cultivate a close identification between a hit program and the sponsoring product. An unproblematic relationship between these elements meant a profitable advertising vehicle, but too heavy a hand, too repetitious a jingle, too biased a commentator would bring the threat of lower ratings or, in some more extreme cases, boycotts. The reaction to advertising also created its own intellectual and literary circles, peopled with advice-givers like Ruth Brindze and playwright and whistle-blower Peter Morell.

Consumption (and by implication strategic withdrawals of consumption like the boycott) is for Newman best understood as "a form of work." This holds together well, especially when Newman is discussing the consumption of the ordinary goods most frequently linked with some of the most popular programs (coffee, razor blades, cereal), as buying these goods was clearly part of the (unpaid) domestic labour that fell most often to women. In this sense, even consuming leisure (or products associated with leisure) falls under the category of work, a departure from a clearer work/leisure division drawn by historians such as Roy Rosenzweig and John Kasson. This is a strong departure, and the author might have spent more time early in the book qualifying this important theme.

Before Newman gets to stories of boycotts, soap operas, and the founding of the organization that now puts out Consumer Reports, we meet some of the intellectuals who laid the groundwork for our current understanding of advertising's impact. Paul Lazarsfeld and his short-term colleague at Princeton's Office of Radio Research, Theodor Adorno, need to appear early here, and they do. Adorno's articulation of a "process of listener awareness that could lead to the destabilization of capitalism as a whole" is what worried program sponsors and made 'radio activity' an important force when radio passivity would have been more convenient for sponsors and ad agencies. As we learn, Madison Avenue drove away some of its most talented people (like the disillusioned adman James Rorty), and the market-oriented work undertaken at the Princeton Radio Project was clearly anathema to Adorno. It is vitally important to see how radio is intellectualized, as this sets up some of the conceptual framework we need to appreciate the examples of anti-New Deal, anti-union commentator Boake Carter against the CIO, and the 'washboard weepies' (soap operas) that were churned out by writers like Jane Crusinberry. How listeners/consumers used these shows, at times rejecting plot twists and devices, demonstrated the fragility of the broadcaster-audience relationship.

Newman shows us that organized labour played a role, but perhaps a less active role than it might have taken. The CIO threatened or successfully conducted some boycotts, most notably a boycott of Philco radios initiated by CIO-affiliated Philco employees, a campaign which brought about the beginning of the end of Boake Carter's career. The spectre of labour seemed to have just as potent an effect when networks and advertisers fell over themselves trying not to present a soap opera character who too closely resembled John L. Lewis. More important than labour organizations to the phenomenon of 'radio activity' were organizations that had the potential to mobilize their members as though they were taking strike action — consumer groups refusing to live up to the bargain implicit in the radio ad: patronize the sponsors of the shows you enjoy. Newman's shorthand for this bargain is listener goodwill. Advertisers seemed to be forever interested in maintaining it, and this reviewer certainly found it the sort of compelling theme that could have appeared more prominently throughout.

Perhaps Newman's weakest section comes near the end of the book, and it is a short lapse. Within the space of two facing pages (164–165), she has bureaucrat-turned-radio activist Donald Montgomery's National Association of Consumers [NAC] both folding "for good in 1957" and "collapsing in the 1960s." A few pages later, we are told that the magazine-style of on-air advertising (multiple sponsors buying time on one program) made its debut after the mid-1950s (177), and then (181) that this moment happened in 1960. The tantalizing suggestion (165) that the NAC gave an impetus to 1960s feminism would have been more satisfying to read about had it been followed up by a mention of some of those who were active in both causes or a brief explanation of some of the ideological or strategic congruities between the movements. Even though these examples treat a period outside 1935-47, more attentive editing would have caught these inconsistencies, restoring some impact to the final chapter and conclusion. Its lack is unfortunate, because the conclusion includes a tight and well-argued account of the impact of Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters, a novel which played on public familiarity with radio advertising to drive its plot.

The tone throughout is familiar, friendly, and uncluttered. Comparisons of the Major Bowes Amateur Hour and the current American Idol program, for instance, are welcome signposts for readers not familiar with some of the older shows. There are few hitches in Newman's prose, and most do little to damage the underlying meaning of the surrounding material. For example, how could Boake Carter be second to both Walter Winchell and Dorothy Thompson in syndicated readership? (90) Wouldn't he rank third, still not a mean feat given Thompson's and Winchell's well-known impact? Can "crescendo" (166) be used as a verb? Why not "crest"?

This book is an important and accessible contribution to both the history of radio and the history of the consumer movement. Underlying it is a fascinating perspective on the potential of the left in America, a subject that could easily become a magnet for one's interpretive energy. Fortunately, Newman resists a lengthy wallow in the woes of the left to show us more effectively that although the nascent consumer movement did not fundamentally alter the way radio advertising operated, self-identification as a consumer (especially a consumer with an awareness of the adman's agenda) could be a dramatic political and cultural statement.


Len Kuffert University of Manitoba

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.