Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture » (New Edition)

Bruce Lenthall is director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture.

Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction: "The Story of the Century"     1
Radio's Challenges: Public Intellectuals and the Problem of Mass Culture     17
William Orton and the Mass-Consumption Critique     21
James Rorty and the Mass-Production Critique     30
African American Intellectuals and the Mass-Production Critique in Action     39
Related Solutions     43
Defenders of the Faith     46
Radio's Listeners: Personalizing Mass Culture     53
The Mass Audience Listens     56
Consumer Bargaining     63
"When You Can't Find a Friend, You've Still Got the Radio"     66
Radio's Democracy: The Politics of the Fireside     83
Roosevelt on the Radio     87
Radio Democracy: The Politics of Intimacy     92
Radio Democracy: The Politics of Information     98
Once and Future Ideals?     105
Radio's Champions: Strange Gods?     115
Radio Stars     118
Voices of the People     123
Power...Corrupts?     130
Limited Amplitude     137
Radio's Students: Media Studies and the Possibility of Mass Communication     143
Paul Lazarsfeld and Social Pragmatism's Hope     146
Herman Hettinger and Commercial Pragmatism's Faith     159
Theodor Adorno's Critical Theory: A Considerably Less Charitable View     165
Radio's Writers: A Public Voice in the Modern World     175
Art of the Air     177
Public Speech, Public Art, and Mass Communication     183
Modernism on the Air     193
Muffled Voices     201
Conclusion     207
Notes     213
Index     255