Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947
Radio Active tells the story of how radio listeners at the American mid-century were active in their listening practices. While cultural historians have seen this period as one of failed reform—focusing on the failure of activists to win significant changes for commercial radio—Kathy M. Newman argues that the 1930s witnessed the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between advertising and activism. Advertising helped to kindle the consumer activism of union members affiliated with the CIO,...
Search in google:
"Irate listeners attacking anti-union advertisers, boycotts of soap operas, a bitter ex-federal official who took up the cause of consumers—Newman brings us all of this and more, revealing in her stunning new book how twentieth-century consumers—especially women—contested commercial radio in its glory years. With tremendous clarity and analytical sophistication, she shows that far from 'duped consumers,' radio listeners were savvy, sassy, and effective activists who talked back plenty to commercial radio. Analyzing the dynamics of as a contested zone between listeners, advertisers, radio stations, and new consumer intellectuals, Newman deftly and persuasively reframes our understanding of the cultural politics of consumption."—Dana Frank, author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism"Cultural historians often claim that audiences were far from passive victims of mass media manipulation, but Kathy Newman is among the first to reveal how ordinary people actually responded. Focusing on the major mass medium of the 1930s and 1940s, the radio, Newman brilliantly tracks the dialectical process through which audience attention became a commodity that broadcasters set out to sell to sponsors and then how listeners, often women, turned their new-found importance to their own ends as assertive consumers. This is cultural history at its best, bringing together as it does the influence of intellectuals, the workings of cultural institutions, and the reactions of popular audiences."—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America"Lively and accessible, Newman's fascinating account of the characters and concerns behind anti-commercial activism illuminates an overlooked facet of radio history. Her cast of middle class reformers who used radio's own commercialized address to mobilize the consumer movement reminds us of advertising's complex and contested relationship to twentieth-century American culture, and points towards the same forces at work today, now on a global scale."—Michele Hilmes, co-editor of Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio"An important contribution. . . . More than any other work to date, Newman deconstructs 'the' radio audience and demonstrates how this often-referred-to singular entity was really a heterogeneous body with multiple forms, faces, and concerns. She shows how radio listeners used information they learned on air to launch social movements that had broad economic and political consequences in American society."—Steven J. Ross, author of Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America
List of tablesAcknowledgmentstroduction : the dialectic between advertising and activism11The psychology of radio advertising : audience intellectuals and the resentment of radio commercials172"Poisons, potions, and profits" : radio activists and the origins of the consumer movement523The consumer revolt of "Mr. average man" : Boake Carter and the CIO boycott of Philco Radio814Washboard weepers : women writers, women listeners, and the debate over soap operas1095"I won't buy you anything but love, baby" : NBC, Donald Montgomery, and the postwar consumer revolt139Conclusion : high-class hucksters : the rise and fall of a radio republic166Notes193Bibliography213Index229
