Struggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD during the 1930s
By the early years of the Great Depression, corporate-controlled national radio networks, Hollywood-centered motion picture producers, and large-circulation daily newspapers appeared to dominate the means of ideological and cultural production in the U.S. Labor, progressive, and radical leaders correctly perceived the mass media as an integral part of the larger social and economic relations of production. Echoing the insights of Karl Marx, they warned of how the nation’s dominant propertied classes would seek to control society’s “governing ideas and motives” by manipulating the mass media to justify, among other things, “great inequalities in wealth in the community.” Edward Nockels of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), for example, protested that network radio reinforced the luster of consumption, the holiness of the marketplace, and the infallibility of business. The Socialist Party contended that commercial radio programs were as standardized as anything rolling out of a Ford factory. Nockels described such shows as bland entertainment “when not outright propaganda or delusive special pleading.” Such criticisms foreshadowed the arguments of émigré European intellectuals who, by the late 1930s, would denounce mass culture for its bourgeois “consumerism, intellectual vapidness, and political complacency,” and contend that ruling groups used it “to manipulate, pacify, and control” the general public. In recent decades, historians have come to comprehend popular culture as a complicated arena of social, political, and cultural con ict. One component of this reconceptualization of popular culture has been an emphasis on the active role that workers and working-class organizations themselves played in “consuming” and “producing” cultural goods. Michael Denning has gone the furthest in arguing that the decade of the
‘Gibberish’ On The Air: Foreign Language Radio And American Broadcasting, 1920–1940
To this day, the late entertainer Groucho Marx remains a giant in the history of American popular culture. The immensely talented comedian enjoyed a career on stage, film, radio, and television that spanned the better part of the 20th century. During the height of his popularity before the Second World War, he also made occasional contributions as a humorist to major newspapers. In one such contribution to the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘What This Country Needs,’ Marx joked that he would run for vice president in the upcoming 1940 election. In nearly 2000 words published that June, he offered a political platform that envisioned a country with good ham sandwiches and attractive corset-wearing women. He called for a traffic-free world where people traveled on oxen. He demanded vacuum cleaners that ‘won’t scare the daylights out of you by whining like a Boeing bomber’ and envisioned a ‘national school for lovemaking.’ But when the subject shifted to foreign language broadcasting in the United States, Marx turned serious about what America needed—or did not need. ‘According to all reports, there are thousands of phony and disloyal Americans living in the United States,’ Marx wrote a month and a half after his vice presidential musings. ‘If this is true, it might be a good idea to forbid the broadcasting of foreign language programs.’ Marx was not trying to be funny. He articulated his comments not in his capacity as a comedian or a columnist, but as a concerned citizen. They appeared in a curt letter to the editor published in the August 30, 1940 edition of the Los Angeles Times. ‘The air is full of them,’ Marx railed with obvious disdain toward foreign language
A democracy at war : America's fight at home and abroad in World War II
Introduction Acknowledgments 1. Day of Infamy 2. America in 1941 3. The Lion and the Albatross: FDR and Lindy 4. The Force of Events 5. The Government Cannot Mobilize 6. Rout and Recovery 7. The People Are Willing 8. Operation Torch and the Great Debate over Strategy 9. The Sea of Dreams 10. The Politics of Sacrifice 11. Minorities and Women: The Democratic Failure 12. The Transformation of Everyday Life 13. Two Wars in the Pacific: Guadalcanal to Luzon 14. Air Power: The Democratic Delusion 15. The GI 16. Overlord 17. Victory in Europe 18. The War Winds Down at Home 19. The Destruction of Japan 20. The Reckoning Notes Index