Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947

Abstract

In her incisive return to network radio's golden age, Kathy M. Newman takes on the conventional wisdom that radio listeners in the period of old-time radio were passive and accepting tuners-in to what networks and stations offered. On the contrary, argues Newman (an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University), at least some listeners were active about making their often critical anticommercial reactions known to radio's powers-that-be. Based on her American studies dissertation at Yale University, Newman's book here describes aspects of a rising intellectual consumer movement, one largely dominated by women, who made eighty-five percent of all consumer purchases in this period. Sometimes groups of women were gathered by the broadcasters for listening or in research panels, but often group listening led to concerted action (on occasion, boycotts)—or at least complaints about advertising messages on the air. Newman's book appears in two parts. “Cultural Critics in the Age of Radio” offers two chapters, one on the psychology of radio advertising and radio activists and the other on the origins of the consumer movement. This is followed by “Consumers on the March: CIO Boycotts, Active Listeners, and ‘Consumer Time,’” which provides several consumer activist case studies (the Congress of Industrial Organizations—sponsored boycott of Philco Radio, which had advertising on the program of the antilabor commentator Boake Carter; women writers and listeners and the debate over the content and impact of radio serials; and NBC's Consumer Time broadcasts and the postwar consumer revolt). She concludes by discussing the rise and fall of a “Radio Republic”— an assessment of the arguments found in Frederic Wakeman's novel The Hucksters (1946), which featured radio advertising in a central way.