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
Defining the public interest: Socialist radio and the case of WEVD
This essay chronicles the early history of New York radio station WEVDAM. Erected as a monument to socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs, WEVD was an electronic voice for the socialist ideas and causes that Debs championed. This essay examines how WEVD struggled to defend its license to become an early radio pioneer for socialist rhetoric and, through the process, guaranteed access to the airwaves for minority viewpoints. These struggles occurred during the formative years of broadcast regulation, and WEVD played a significant role in defining the public interest standard for American broadcasting.
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.