Radio's Hidden Voice: Noncommercial Broadcasting, Extension Education, and State Universities during the 1920s

Abstract

Radio’s Hidden Voice:Noncommercial Broadcasting, Extension Education, and State Universities during the 1920s Hugh R. Slotten (bio) A few days after Christmas in 1929, Ralph Goddard died while regulating equipment in the generator room of the radio station at New Mexico State Agricultural and Mechanical College. Goddard, a professor in the school's engineering department, was then forty-two years old. The circumstances of his death remain unclear—no one witnessed the accident—but he seems to have been electrocuted after walking in a drizzle from the studio to the building that housed the generator. The fatal spark could have been conducted by moisture on Goddard's shoes and on the wooden stick he used to adjust the generator. 1 This event marked the end of an era for station KOB. Licensed in 1922, eight years after Goddard moved to New Mexico from New England, it had become one of the most powerful stations in the Southwest under his direction, broadcasting market and weather reports, news, and music by local artists, as well as talks on agriculture and other subjects by school faculty. It remained noncommercial throughout the 1920s, but when it was no longer able to compete with stations that accepted advertising and could no longer rely on Goddard's political support within the college, the institution was forced to consider either sponsored programming or selling the station to a [End Page 1] commercial interest. During the 1930s, the station was first leased to a newspaper in Albuquerque and then sold to a commercial broadcasting company. 2 The early history of station KOB is paradigmatic of a transformation that occurred in American radio during the 1920s: the change from a largely amateur, nonprofit, and local activity conducted by a diverse range of institutions and individuals to a predominantly professional and commercial pursuit dominated by national networks interested in selling audiences to advertisers. The diversity of stations at the end of 1922, about twelve months into the radio boom that began nearly a year after the first regularly scheduled broadcasts from Westinghouse station KDKA in Pittsburgh and other pioneers, is clear in the ownership pattern at that time. On 1 December 1922, 230 of the 570 U.S. stations were licensed by radio and electrical manufacturers and by dealers primarily interested in selling receivers and related electrical components to the public. The rest included seventy stations operated by newspapers, sixty-five owned by educational institutions, thirty established by department stores, and ten operated by churches and YMCAs. Before the mid-1920s, the majority of stations in the country did not accept sponsored advertising. By the 1930s, however, many of the local stations that survived had adopted advertising and become oriented toward national service. As Lizabeth Cohen has pointed out, "where once radio had provided a voice for community groups, by the 1930s it treated these constituencies as potential markets for advertisers' products." 3 Because historians generally focus on analyzing winners, we know a great deal about the "mainstream, hegemonic practices" of large commercial stations connected to networks during the late 1920s and 1930s. Largely unexplored have been the early experiences of stations that provided an alternative model for broadcasting. 4 That few of the primary documents necessary [End Page 2] to such a study have survived complicates the historian's task; however, archival sources do exist for stations such as the one Goddard organized in New Mexico—radio stations operated by institutions of higher education. These were especially important for several reasons: they helped to pioneer the idea and practice of broadcasting, and they provided a potential noncommercial alternative to the emerging commercial broadcast system. It is true that during this early period independent local stations owned by small businesses were operated more to generate goodwill among their listeners (and possible customers) than to enrich their owners, but when advertising became more acceptable during the late 1920s, many of these stations adopted the new practice. Those stations operated by institutions of higher learning, on the other hand, remained both noncommercial and nonprofit. As Robert McChesney has argued, the "existence [of these stations] constitutes what could almost be termed a 'hidden history' of American radio." 5 The number of incompletely...