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
Creating a Favorable Business Climate: Corporations and Radio Broadcasting, 1934 to 1954
Beginning in the 1930s, American corporations increasingly turned to radio for their public relations campaigns. Major firms, including Ford, Du Pont, and General Motors, sponsored network radio programs that carried messages designed to improve their image. Other large corporations funded national radio news commentators, while smaller businesses sponsored weekly or even daily local radio programs. For twenty years, radio was an important component of corporate public relations, allowing businesses to speak more directly to the public than print advertisements had. By the mid-fifties, institutional broadcasting, combined with other public relations activities, had succeeded in helping business improve its status in American society.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.