Introduction: Radio, Designer of a Decade

Loaded with promise but bereft of context, the field of radio broadcasting descended

upon the world well before anybody really realized its potential. For the first few years of the

existence of wireless broadcasting from 1920 onward, the notion of broadcasting stood as a

discovery without any real place in society, an invention of enormous technological scope that

just happened to lack a public ready to receive it.

The medium received its official introduction to the public in about as casual of a manner

as is conceivable, through the actions of an electric manufacturing company. The company’s

members conceived the idea of stimulating interest in radio by linking their own radio broadcasts

to a fixed program published in newspapers. Each broadcast was accompanied by a poll to the

radio audience with one simple question—“Did you like it?” The public’s response was one of

thorough, overwhelming approval.1 Nonetheless, radio’s spread was initially a slow one.

Talk of radio’s potential made the rounds in publications from the era, but a good deal of

it amounted to little more than vague, sweeping blanket statements; The Saturday Evening Post

printed an article touting how this “new type of service” might “remedy the lack of adequate

means for communication in this day of unprecedented international commerce.”2 The eyes of an

entire nation were filled with wonder at the concept of instant communication, but this sense of

enthusiasm did not really solidify beyond the realm of the theoretical.

Over the course of the next two years, radio’s presence in the national consciousness as a

legitimate bearer of information and entertainment began to manifest itself a little more solidly.

In early 1921, Robert F. Gowen, chief engineer of the De Forest Radio Telegraph and Telephone

1 Waldemaar Kaempffert, “The Progress of Radio Broadcasting.” The American Review of Reviews, September 1922, 303.2 “Everybody’s Business: A New Day in Communication.” The Saturday Evening Post, February 7, 1920, 30.

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Company, broadcast a “wireless vaudeville” performance from his home in Ossening to listeners

over a hundred miles away.3 By the beginning of 1922, Broadway had conquered the airwaves,

broadcasting performances to New York listeners every hour on the hour.4

By the end of 1922, radio broadcasting bore lectures, news, stock market reports and

music to its public, giving it the status of a public utility within two years of public recognition.

“A decade or more had to elapse before the railroad, the telegraph, the generation and

distribution of gas and electricity were regarded as indispensable,” mused Waldemar Kaempffert

in an article for The American Review of Reviews. “And now, after scarcely a year, it may be

seriously questioned whether the public clamor could be ignored, which would undoubtedly

follow the closing of all stations that gratuitously scatter entertainment and instruction.”5

However, as radio’s status as a public utility emerged, the question arose of how to gather

the funds to sustain this service. Considering the advertisement-oriented nature of other forms of

media during the era such as newspapers, surprisingly enough a number of plans came about

involving the earning of funds without any advertising whatsoever. In an article in late 1922,

Scientific American posed the possibility that the United States government take an active role in

the regulation of radio broadcasting.6 Kaempffert’s own idea was more ambitious, involving the

formation of a “Radio Apparatus Section of the Associated Manufacturers of Electrical Supplies”

which would levy a tax upon consumers proportionate to their sales, in order to contribute to the

maintenance of various necessary radio stations.7

Nonetheless, within the confines of America’s capitalist economy, advertising ultimately

stood out as the most logical means of funding such an enormous public venture. In 1923, the

3 “‘Radio Vaudeville’ Heard Miles Away.” The New York Times, March 13, 1921, 10.4 F.A. Collins, “Broadcasting Broadway by Radio.” The New York Times, January 1, 1922, 77.5 Kaempffert, 303.6 “About the Radio Round-Table: Opinions of Radio Leaders Regarding the Past, Present and Future of Broadcasting.” Scientific American, December 1922, 379.7 Kaempffert, 305.

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American Telephone and Telegraph Company, at the time the operators of Station WEAF in

New York, initiated a program in which advertisers could broadcast sales messages at the charge

of $100 for a ten-minute stretch of airtime.8 By 1926, two major networks sustained via

advertising funds, the Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. and the National Broadcasting

Company, had come into being and transformed radio into a national industry.9

Nonetheless, in spite of the capitalist nature of the United States’ economy, the concept

of advertising had not necessarily arisen hand in hand with the concept of radio broadcasting,

and the notion of directly soliciting listeners for sales via the medium of speech was unstable and

untested. From the perspective of the public, the shift into a mode of broadcast communication

was almost disorienting in how sudden it was: “Radio is so epochal in its developments,” wrote

Variety in 1926, “so swift in its almost daily variances of new and important features, that this

‘lead’ to a general radio resume was purposefully deferred until a day before press time.”10

In the middle of 1926, the dam broke between the public and the corporate world

when U.S. Attorney General John Garibaldi Sargent declared that America’s Secretary of

Commerce was without power to control the nation’s rapidly expanding broadcasting system or

assign wavelengths to radio stations. The consequence was a state of virtual anarchy in which

multiple stations were competing for the same wavelength and radio programs blanketed one

another on the airwaves, much to the annoyance of listeners.11

This problem eventually reached a resolution when the United States Congress passed the

Federal Radio Law of 1927, which put all powers of national radio regulation into the hands of

an independent Federal Radio Commission. This commission was intended to be appointed by

8 Herman S. Gettinger, A Decade of Radio Advertising (1933), v.9 Ibid, vi.10 “Radio and Show Business.” Variety, December ??, 1926, ??11 O.H. Caldwell, “How the Federal Radio Commission Brought Order Out of Chaos.” The Congressional Digest, October 1928, 266.

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the president to serve full-time for a term of one year to clear up “radio confusion”—within its

first year, the Commission eliminated some 300 broadcasters from the public roster.12

More importantly for fans of the bourgeoning medium, the Federal Radio Act included a

section which stipulated that, by regulation, the Commission must consider a radio station to be

serving the “public interest, convenience or necessity” before a permit could be granted for its

operation.13 The clause, only mentioned in passing, made up a relatively brief segment of the

Act, but nevertheless became an object of extreme importance in that it was the first official

recognition that radio was an institution geared toward serving the public good.

At the end of the decade, the world of radio did not quite stand at a crossroads,

but as the national networks grew and advertising developed into a more integral factor in the

operation of a radio station, this need to serve the public interest

12 Ibid, 283.13 U.S. Congress, The Radio Act of 1927, Public Law No. 632, February 23, 1927, 69th Congress.

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The Science of Salesmanship “Radio reflects a phase through which much of advertising is passing—a glamorous land of make-believe in which forlorn maidens are told that they will win a husband by the use of a certain soap or face powder; in which young men will succeed in life by avoiding bad breath or by having their hair combed neatly; in which the lures of beauty and success are held out to a public that does not accept them wholeheartedly but wants to try them anyway, just in case they might work. It fattens upon a certain state of mind comparable to the way in which most people approach a fortune teller or a reader of horoscopes. They don’t quite believe it but they aren’t quite willing to disbelieve it.”

—Roy S. Durstine, “The Future of Radio Broadcasting in the United States”

The Annals of the American Academy, January 1935

If the 1920’s were the decade when radio gained its legs as an entertainment medium, the

1930’s were when it became an inescapable, integral part of American culture. By the time the

decade arrived, the institution of radio had worked out its niche within America’s popular

consciousness and made it clear that its grapple on culture was going to persist. The Los Angeles

Times characterized 1930 as likely to be “another period of great advance” for the medium due to

great advances in the field of international broadcasting,14 and the corporate world weighed in

when the Radio Corporation of America, long the dominant company operating within the

market of commercial radio, officially announced the beginning of its existence as an active

manufacturing organization with privately-operated research facilities.15

Even more importantly, the realm of the wireless had cast aside any doubts that once

existed about its commercial potential, and by this point radio had completely come into its own

as a legitimate advertising medium. Over the course of the decade, the number of paid words

crossing the airwaves reportedly rose from an estimated 7 million in 1920 to a formidable 58

million in 1929—a jump applicable not only to increased radio sales but also corporate interest

14 Daggett, John S. “Gains Foreseen in Radio Field.” The Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1930, pg. A12.15 Radio Corporation of America, The Radio Decade (1930), 5.

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in the future of the field.16 In 1930 alone, the amount of cash put forth by advertisers toward

network advertising approached $28,000,000, a significant rise from the previous year’s total of

$19,000,000.17 Although just a decade earlier radio broadcasting was a promising technology

with a hazy, ill-defined future, by the onset of the Great Depression it had officially made a

transition into the stomping ground of the salesman.

At the same time, advertisers were profoundly aware that they were dealing with a

completely new mode of communication with its own boundaries, rules and tics. Announcer

Roy S. Durstine, at the time a prominent figure in the broadcast advertising world, aptly painted

this strange new landscape in an insider piece he wrote for Scribner’s Magazine:

Every one closely associated with broadcasting honestly believes that the constantincrease in its popularity is a wonderful tribute to the inherent hardihood of radio’s appealrather than to the past or present excellence of programme-building. The more a personlearns about it the better he realizes that it is a new and extremely difficult technic, andthat the best results cannot come from borrowing too freely from other kinds ofentertainment.18

Radio operated within a novel, distinctive framework never before experienced in the field of

human communication, and even those directly involved in parallel media, such as newspapers,

essentially had to remap their brains in order to adapt to this sudden paradigm shift. This

technological change in lifestyle on the part of the public was reflected tenfold in the advertising

world; in order to sell and sustain themselves, advertisers had to forge a connection to a listening

public who were themselves coming to terms with an expanding new technology—a change

which required the creation of a completely new set of rules.

The end result was that over the course of the 1930’s and onward, a combination of

advertisers, broadcasters and experts in the broadcasting field independently contributed to the

16 Ibid, 25.17 Volkening, Henry, “The Abuses of Radio Broadcasting.” Current History, December 1930, 396.18 Durstine, Roy S. “We’re On the Air.” Scribner’s Magazine (May 1928), 626.

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building of a body of marketing knowledge that can best be described as a “science of

salesmanship.” This science was expressed primarily through various forms of print media, and

as a whole was geared toward providing sponsors with the ideal means to present advertising

copy to a listening public, all the while bringing in revenue as well as ensuring the success of

both the sponsor and the broadcaster for years to come.

Home Is Where the Hertz Is—The Direct Nature of Radio Broadcasting

The jumping-off point for almost any discussion of radio salesmanship in the ‘30s almost

inevitably concerned the fact that radio broadcasting possessed a direct, in-your-living-room

quality almost unprecedented in the field of communication. At no point in human history had

technology allowed millions of people to listen to the exact same information at the exact same

time, and the potential of this novel ability did not go unnoticed. In its direct appeal to the

public, many likened radio advertising to forms of spoken, in-person advertising of yore such as

the town crier, approaching people directly on the street in a bid to spread news and sell wares.

Orrin G. Dunlap, radio editor of The New York Times, even went so far as to claim that the

medium was “an art, new in details but old in principle, which is little more than a reversion to

the spoken word and the direct appeal of prehistoric days of the tribal camp fires.”19

In spite of its innovations, however, this directness was a tricky, awkward beast, and had

the potential of posing a threat to the success of a radio campaign if an advertiser took advantage

of it in a careless fashion. From the perspective of experts in salesmanship, radio differs from

print media in the sense that, as an auditory medium, it essentially invades the personal space of

the listener, all the while demanding his or her complete and utter attention for a set amount of

time. The ability to capture a listener’s complete attention is in many ways more powerful than

the printed word, but simultaneously the potential for making the listener uncomfortable and

19 Dunlap Jr., Orrin E, Radio in Advertising (1931), 2.

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embittered is high. Consequently, if the exact same advertisement were to print in a newspaper

and be announced on the radio, the radio listener would be all the more likely to be offended,

since the advertisement has taken up a very specific block of their time that goes on for far

longer than the simple turning of a page.20

The specific means by which the directness of a radio advertisement could go wrong

were multiple and varied, but in general the chief concern expressed was that, as a simulated

human presence existing within the home as opposed to ink on paper, there was the chance that

the line could be crossed from friendliness to outright intrusion. “It has been the dream of the

advertiser to find some medium that might walk in the front door and sell wares,” wrote Dunlap.

This dream is realized in radio broadcasting. But for a guest in the home to endeavor tosell toothpaste, bonds or anything else is an extremely doubtful procedure. Many homes,protesting intrusion of agents and peddlers, have posted their doors. Some have peekholes in the door through which they can look to see who is there before they open it andbid him welcome. But it is not the nature of radio to observe placards, peek-holes orlocks, neither will it be debarred by stone walls nor for the want of a key. Nevertheless,radio should be a worthy contribution to intimate fellowship—never an intrusion.21

In working out the social mechanics of sending advertisements straight into the ears of the

listener, care had to be taken in ensuring that this directness did not bleed into disturbance.

Compounding the liminal nature of an advertisement’s command over a listener’s

attention was the assertion that radio’s directness is basically a one-way street; in other words,

broadcasters had no conceivable way to know whether their audience had abandoned them.

“Radio work is something like shadowboxing in the dark,” wrote radio expert Major Ivan Firth,

“and is valuable or useless according to the amount of serious effort that is used. You can’t see

the other fellow out there in the dark, but unless you can imagine him with all the concentration

at your command you will not obtain the results for which you are striving.”22 In that sense,

20 Hettinger, Herman S. A Decade of Radio Advertising (1933), 290.21 Dunlap, 13.22 Major Ivan Firth, Gateway to Radio (1934), 32.

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broadcasting to the masses was essentially seen by experts as a form of social mathematics—

with the exception of whatever listener response might have come about, the only way to tell

whether an advertisement achieved its intended goal entirely rested on whether or not the

sponsor’s product started moving off of the shelves and into the hands of consumers.

On the other hand, although the isolated nature of a typical radio advertisement had its

drawbacks, some advertisers saw this isolation as a potential means to boost sales through the

mechanism of human psychology. One advantage over print ads that a broadcast advertisement

gained through its isolation was that, whereas in a publication, a great number of ads competed

for the same space in the reader’s brain, on the radio a plug puts the listener on the spot and

nearly demands undivided attention for its complete duration.23 With that in mind, the job of the

radio advertiser would therefore be to use that specific, isolated time to appeal to the listener’s

consumer instincts using whatever methods happen to be possible. In essence, the psychological

element to successful broadcasting was that the state of having a listener glued to his or her set

was inherently temporary, with the job of the broadcaster being to use that brief window to play

on whatever the audience was most likely to want.

What, exactly, the listener specifically wanted out of the radio was up in the air and prone

to variation by community, social status, upbringing, gender and a score of other potential

factors. However, a common thread that ran throughout radio salesmanship teachings was that

the element that any given listener always seeks to derive from the radio, more than any other, is

satisfaction.24 Even at its birth, very little radio programming presented information of any

actual utility, so what thus had to make up for it was a sense of pure entertainment, appealing to

the emotions of the listener in a way that would cause him or her to consider the act of listening

23 Hettinger, 26.24 Ibid, 1.

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to the radio a satisfying experience. This process extended into the advertising of a particular

product—the primary goal of any given radio advertiser was to ease a listener into overcoming

resistance against a consumer item by playing up the desirability or necessity of purchasing it.25

Simultaneously, some experts saw radio as a potentially calming presence in the life of a

typical American family; if an advertiser were effectively going to be spending upwards of two

minutes in another’s household, the most solid approach would be to use this time to make this

alien, ephemeral presence come off as a natural element of one’s household life. As radio

psychologists Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport stated,

Radio is perhaps our chief potential bulwark of social solidarity … Take the case of thefamily, the institution that sociologists have always regarded as the keystone of anysociety. In recent years its functions have obviously been weakened. In a modest and unwitting way radio has added a psychological cement to the threatened structure. A radio in the home relieves an evening of boredom and is an effective competitor for entertainment outside. Children troop home from their play an hour earlier than they would otherwise, simply because Little Orphan Annie has her copyrighted adventures at a stated hour.26

Whether or not the idea of children listening to Little Orphan Annie instead of being outside

playing baseball strikes one as a positive development in society, the fact that this shift was

taking place tells countless wonders about the influence of radio on domestic life in the 1930’s.

It makes the ambiguously-appealing nature of radio’s presence in the living room clear; just as

radio possesses the power to terrify and alienate, it is nonetheless in many ways a lot more

personal of a medium than the printed word, and thus possesses a parallel ability to warm the

hearts of listeners and become an inherent part of the household experience. Thus, with the

position of the radio in the consumer world established, the question remained of how to harness

its appeal and make sure that listeners held a consistently positive attitude toward the medium.

Good Will Hunting—How Advertisers Envisioned a Satisfied Radio Audience

25 Ibid, 20.26 Hadley Cantril, Ph.D. and Gordon W. Allport, Ph.D., The Psychology of Radio (1935), 24.

10

“Radio entertainment has become a national institution as popular as breakfast,” wrote

Major Ivan Firth, then adding: “There are plenty of people who don’t like breakfast.”27 Indeed,

radio salesmanship studies were rife with the assertion that reaching out to the public was a

constant struggle to win over the skeptical while still remaining faithful to the choir. The

embittered sector of the radio audience was never afraid to criticize a public service that, price of

the receiver aside, it was basically receiving for free; in that context, it was important for experts

in the salesmanship field to seek out what they perceived to be the common element which

would satisfy the entirety of the listening public without fail.

This common element, touted by nearly every salesmanship advocate imaginable, was

the concept of “good will.” A hopeless buzzword by its very nature, the concept was

nevertheless crucial in the envisioning of the basic needs of a radio audience, and is easily the

goal most frequently cited by radio salesmanship literati. Orrin G. Dunlap defined the term as

“nothing more than the expression of approval for a product which comes in the form of sales

sooner or later”28—a concept almost ludicrously simple on the surface, but applied to a public of

millions of radio listeners, the maintenance of approval of a product across the board becomes a

considerably more daunting task. This expression of approval is ultimately ephemeral and easy

to lose grasp of at the simplest mistake. As Dr. Lee de Forest, American inventor and pioneer in

the field of radio broadcasting, once stated, clumsy salesmanship has the instantaneous ability to

convert the good will carefully cultivated at great expense by a sponsor into ill will … ill will

expressed not only against that particular sponsor and often the entirety of radio broadcasting.29

In general, salesmanship experts viewed the building of good will as an ongoing project

involving identifying elements of broadcasting detested by the public and constructing programs

27 Firth, 19.28 Dunlap, 108.29 Ibid, 4.

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in such a way as to avoid said elements. As a concept, good will is directly connected to every

single aspect for which the name of an institution or company stands in the minds of consumers,

and for that reason, all potentially negative aspects are considered bastions of ill will and should

be purged as swiftly as possible, lest the sponsor’s name be tainted by these aspects.30

The process of fostering good will in the consumer sphere, according to the party line of

radio salesmanship, involved a combination of appealing to the audience’s aesthetic taste as well

as to their sense of ethics. The former was a fairly clear-cut process, and by and large had to do

with the purging of any disgusting or negative aspects of a broadcasted advertisement. The

majority of the listening public detested ugliness, and for that reason broadcasting experts by and

large considered the use of the affirmative in advertising infinitely more useful than that of the

negative.31 At the same time, the coarse and vulgar had the tendency to incite feelings of disgust

and uneasiness in the human psyche, and for that reason deserved to be kept off of the airwaves.

This meant that advertisements for laxatives, toothpaste and deodorant were particularly frowned

upon, especially if these advertisements came equipped with sound effects that illustrated the

bodily functions related to them in murky, graphic detail.32 “With fear and trembling,” wrote

New York advertising agency head Roy S. Durstine,

one of the networks only a few years ago accepted a radio program for a laxative. To itsgreat surprise it has had almost no protest of any kind. The result is that today there aregreat many programs describing in the most intimate detail various ailments of the human body—details which cause an embarrassed silence to drop upon any group of people who may be listening together. Why are there not more protests?33

Durstine’s example illustrates the culture surrounding the concept of good will with pinpoint

efficiency, and builds into the notion of radio as a medium without any direct conduit from

30 B.J. Palmer, Radio Salesmanship (1942), 75.31 Firth, 30.32 Time, “New Radio Rules.” May 20, 1935, 66.33 Roy S. Durstine, “The Future of Radio Advertising in the United States.” The Annals of the American Academy, v. 177 (Jan. 1935), 150.

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public to sponsor. Regardless of whether or not advertisements for laxatives were to cause the

listening public to erupt into outrage, psychologically, the majority of the American populace

possessed no active desire to hear noises and instructions related to how to clean their bowels,

and the end result is an inevitable plunge in good will. It may cause that particular sponsor’s

sales to rise, but at the potential cost of embarrassment and public hatred.

The concept of building and maintaining good will also had ties to the moral and ethical

qualities of a radio advertisement. Regardless of the appeal of a particular plug or the sales of a

sponsor’s product that might ensue, if the a member of the listening public at any point felt that

the plug offended some aspect of his or her set of values, bitterness and consumer alienation

would be the only conceivable end product. For example, radio programs geared specifically

toward children were a tricky lot. Admittedly, these programs hinged on the perception that

younger listeners were impressionable and likely to pressure parents into buying sponsors’

products. “Radio is the most popular form of entertainment for children,” wrote Charles Hull

Wolfe, director of the Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne Radio and Television Testing Bureau.

It provides more emotional impact than books, magazines or comics. Unlike the movies,it is free; and radio is better at story-telling than parents are. A survey indicated that boysand girls would rather listen to the radio than play ball, play an instrument, read a book,solve a puzzle, read an adventure story or listen to the phonograph.”34

However, these programs also came equipped with the caveat of offending said parents’ senses

of what a child should and should not be able to hear. A widespread perception existed that the

same impressionable nature of children that caused them to be so receptive to sales in turn

rendered them receptive to and sometimes imitative of the vices of culture. A child who watches

a gangster shooter, for example, according to this logic, would either only remember the sheer

terror of the shooting or attempt to imitate the gangster in charge of the shooting.35 This self-

34 Charles Hull Wolfe, Modern Radio Broadcasting (1949), 175.35 Firth, 245.

13

same logic applied to the world of advertising; any elements of a radio broadcast that would

strike a parent as course or offensive would strike that same parent tenfold if his or her child

were subject to them, and that family’s sense of good will toward the radio would suffer.

Another aspect which could have potentially derailed an advertising plug’s sense of

moral saliency was whether or not the program played upon issues of misery and carnage as a

selling point. This did not necessarily come up as a problem were radio advertisers to reference

the Great Depression, since the movement of consumer goods could only help the economy

during troubled times. However, as Europe leered closer and closer toward a state of total war,

one which eventually drew U.S. soldiers into direct conflict with enemy forces, the possibilities

for advertisers to be curt with issues of graveness and offhandedly offend large sectors of their

listening public were many. “It would not be a good idea … to link a trade name with terror and

calamity,” wrote Dunlap Jr., “… because that would create ill will for any sponsor who

attempted to capitalize on a scene of death and disaster. But there are more pleasant things in

life … that can be capitalized in an advertising way.”36 Catering to a public growing more and

more sensitive by the year over issues of death, dismemberment, turmoil and carnage, there were

many possibilities for radio advertisers to turn calamity into capital, but whatever brief gains an

advertiser might have made would have been accompanied by a steep plunge in good will.

As abstract of a concept as good will might be, its existence is interesting in that it

basically represented the first time in American, and in fact world history in which a concept like

that could not only be important, but have a profound influence on the operation of an entire

media. With the institution of radio establishing a direct line between sponsor and listener came

a certain responsibility to serve and respect the listeners on the receiving end, lest the public’s

perception of an entire institution be placed in serious jeopardy. Still, maintaining the good faith

36 Dunlap Jr., 109.

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of the public was, in the end, just another component of the science of salesmanship, and the ad

wizards of the 1930’s had an even greater wealth of tricks up their sleeves.

Projecting, Connecting—Amplified Sincerity and an Announcer’s Success

The psychology of broadcasting was important in establishing a framework within which

radio could successfully operate, but without the proper human conduit to convey the sponsor’s

message, all of the effort that went into the construction of an advertisement would be lost. For

that reason, more than almost any other factor in broadcasting, throughout the body of work

related to radio salesmanship, the quality of the announcer himself received perhaps the most

significant importance. A large portion of this idea was simply based on the fact that the

announcer is usually the first aspect of a radio advertisement that a listener would actually pay

attention to; if the first attempt at grabbing a listener’s ear were to be botched, the impact of the

plug as a whole would suffer at the hands of flimsy salesmanship.37 In addition to pushing a

particular product, the most important function of the announcer in a radio advertisement was to

set the mood of the announcement, the establishment of the proper mental attitude on the part of

the listeners being a key foundation for easing them into understanding the merits of a product.38

However, even more important than the announcer’s position at the forefront of a radio

advertisement, salesmanship experts saw said announcer’s tone and delivery as absolutely crucial

to presenting a public face with which listeners would actually identify. In his book Gateway to

Radio, Major Ivan Firth dedicated an entire chapter to the sheer importance of a respectable,

professional announcer, claiming that “too many radio announcers have turned ‘the voice with

the smile’ into ‘the voice with the smirk’” and that radio charm is too often spoiled by “the

supercilious tones of an obviously bored announcer.”39 Indeed, the human voice is a versatile

37 Dunlap Jr., 145.38 Firth, 210.39 Ibid.

15

part of the human anatomy and can be stretched into a wide number of tonal shapes and forms,

but combined with the agency of radio broadcasting, only a select range of these forms actually

come off to the radio listener as natural and worth one’s time and money.

The catch is that radio broadcasting is not merely a science that one can break down into

the formula that sincerity equals success. The default state of human discourse is sincerity, but

that by no means meant that Jumpin’ Joe’s nice-guy neighbor down the street could abandon his

lawnmower, leap onto the radio and enter a state of instantaneous advertising stardom. Radio

has the tendency of skeletonizing the personality of the speaker or performer, develops a use of

imaginative completion in the minds of listeners, and, most important of all, spawns a critical

and individualistic nature in the radio audience that it does not necessarily possess when

speaking to people in person.40 A good example of this approach is President Roosevelt’s radio

“fireside chats” with the public during America’s Great Depression. Roosevelt delivered these

chats in a warm, humble patrician tone that has outlived the ages and become one of the most

famous relics of a bygone era, the reason that these broadcasts were so successful did not

necessarily lay in the fact that Roosevelt spoke in such a way by his very nature. It is likely

more accurate to infer that the president went into his broadcasts with a keen understanding of

the sheer power of the human voice, and in the process became a symbolic glimmer of hope,

beloved by millions and offering a nation a way out of economic turmoil.41

The path toward radio success, as painted by the canon of radio salesmanship scholars,

was to take an approach that effectively combined sincerity with the charisma demanded by the

idea that millions upon millions of people might be listening to you. [Radio expert] Enid Day

summed up this approach with a single sentence: “A daily program must be on a friendly level,

40 Cantril, 14.41 Ibid, 208.

16

with continuity which carries the voice of authority, but not the voice of a snob.”42 In layman’s

terms, listeners came to expect from the typical radio announcer exactly what they received from

Franklin Roosevelt: a simulated physical presence which commanded respect but at the same

time did so in a personable, friendly way which did not succumb to smug condescension.

In Gateway to Radio’s chapter on announcers, Major Ivan Firth declares that the problem

most often encountered by radio announcers is that they adopt a “machine-gun” method of

delivery, aimed deliberately at forcing the attention of the listener, which is “ill-advised in

conception and offensive in result.”43 In contrast to this tone, he sets forth a series of radio

announcers whom he considers masters of their form in different areas of radio expressiveness:

voice, spontaneity, personality, sincerity, charm, enthusiasm, salesmanship, naturalness, diction,

culture, conviction and accuracy.44 Some of these categories come off a bit like salesman patter,

and Firth readily admits that none of the announcers he has chosen are absolutely perfect, but

they nonetheless collectively represent the values of amplified humbleness and sincerity that

defined the dominant trends of radio’s science of salesmanship.

For example, as a master of the quality of “enthusiasm,” Firth cites Graham MacNamee,

a prominent radio personality both before and during the Great Depression. Firth admits that

MacNamee lacks a certain quality of voice usually expected from somebody being broadcast on

the radio, but at the same time, nobody is able to project as much enthusiasm as he could

—“provided that he himself is motivated by what he sees.”45 According to Firth, at one point

MacNamee was assigned to cover a boxing match so thrilling that he “forgot all he knew about

showmanship, and was unable to control his own emotions in describing the sport he loved so

42 Enid Day, Radio Broadcasting for Retailers (1947), 28.43 Firth, 212.44 Ibid.45 Ibid,

17

well.”46 An announcer like MacNamee is emblematic of the type of personality that listeners

expected from a broadcaster—not necessarily professional 100 percent of the time, but engaging

in a thorough, convincing fashion which inevitably came off as endearing regardless of context.

Possibly the most important aspect of this whole culture of picking and choosing the

proper announcer is how much agency and sheer intelligence it places in the consumer’s mind.

Within the wealth of documented information surrounding salesmanship and how to broadcast,

not one writer claims that the road to success is to take advantage of an intellectual high ground

and assume that the listener is an uncultured troglodyte who would take in whatever the radio

might throw at him or her. Instead, the discourse of radio was seen as an amplified form of any

other kind of polite, formal discourse, not so much fooling the listener as much as respecting

their rights to pick and choose whatever consumer product they wish … with the implicit hope

that the product they eventually choose would be the sponsor’s. During a 1934 talk before the

Federal Communications Commission, Columbia Broadcasting Company president William S.

Paley identified that listener interest stems from program content that appeals to the emotions

and self-interest of the listener, and went on to claim that “the radio industry considers this

listener interest its life’s blood.”47 An announcer that fails to live up to standards of friendliness

that any given listener would expect from any of his or her fellow human beings would pose a

significant threat to the flowing of this “life’s blood.”

Do You Copy?—The Incredible Importance of a Wily Wordsmith

“It is amusing that announcers are considered of such importance that their names are

almost invariably given out on every program,” wrote Major Ivan Firth, “whereas the writer, all

too often, remains anonymous.”48 As far as the announcer’s role in the broadcasting of a radio

46 47 William S. Paley, Radio as a Cultural Force (1934), 8.48 Firth, 24.

18

program was concerned, radio experts considered his or her personality a crucial factor in the

success of an advertisement, but if the actual words being tossed out into the wireless ether were

not up to snuff, the entire advertisement would crumble into dust. “The staff writer is considered

a very small cog on a very large wheel,” continued Firth, “his name being carefully withheld

from his listeners, while the announcer, quite wrongly, gets all the blame.”49

Advertising copy was not merely the glue that held a radio program together; it was the

body and soul of said program, with the announcer filling the role of being a talented agent of

amplification. The copy of an announcement was where all of the wit, the pizzazz, the wordplay

and the wisdom of an advertisement lay, and on top of that, it was where the name of the actual

product received its articulation. To underestimate the importance of high-quality copy in a

radio advertisement would have been like holding a cinematic awards show without categories

for the screenwriters—entirely a glamour show without any of the substance that makes the

medium work in the first place.

In addition, according to [radio expert] C.H. Sandage, taking on the role of writing

advertising copy was more than just a matter of being the person responsible for the wittiness of

a plug’s words, as filtered through a really talented mouthpiece. It is the copy writer who

ultimately is the singular individual in charge of the message being conveyed to listeners—in

other words, he or she would be the one who must make sure that the advertisement respects the

feelings and intelligence of the listener, all the while making sure to appeal to the self-interest of

the consumer. At the same time, the role extends beyond the task of being in charge of the

information expressed to the listener—the copy writer also must take into account the image of

the sponsor in the minds of the public, including whether or not the retailer is able and willing to

live up to its claims. In that sense, the copy writer’s role was multi-faceted in that, unlike the

49 Ibid.

19

announcer, he or she had to juggle several forms of public perception at once, coming up with as

close to a perfect balance as possible while still portraying a sponsor’s service in a light that

would make the public want to purchase it.50

Aside from its role in direct communication with the public, copy writing in itself

followed an interesting set of rules and regulations, probably best elaborated in B.J. Palmer’s

tract Radio Broadcasting, a tract sent out to every major radio station in America. A curt and by-

the-books radio theorist and president of Davenport, Iowa’s Basic Blue Network, Palmer wrote

in a style symbolic of his no-frills approach to radio broadcasting: “Difference between rare

successful station and common failure stations, is difference between a successful man and

failure men. THAT difference is pre-determined by RULES THEY FOLLOW, as and when they

think.”51 In the pamphlet, Palmer claims that too much advertising copy is weighed down by

useless drivel, and introduces the concept of “goat feathers”—unnecessary words and negative

phrasings that have the sole consequence of lengthening advertisements and boring the listener.

“The path of least resistance,” wrote Palmer, “is what makes rivers and men crooked! The path

of hardest resistance—is what makes rivers and men straight!”52

To combat this incessant trend, Palmer introduced a counter-concept called “briefing,” in

which unnecessary words and phrases are either deleted from advertising copy or replaced by

more curt phrasings. As an example, Palmer introduced a contemporary radio advertisement by

the Crown Life Insurance company, with edits made displaying how much of it could be outright

deleted for the sake of flow and clarity. Reproduced below is the first paragraph of the plug,

entitled “The Crown.” All purged words are in bold parentheses, with added text in brackets.

Howdy (there) neighbors, howdy! Reckon you’ve been feeling right chipper (here) the

50 C.H. Sandage, Radio Advertising for Retailers (1945), 17.51 Palmer, 22.52 Ibid.

20

last two days (what) with the sun shinin’ so bright and all! (Guess a lot) [Many] of you fellows have been able to get (out) in the corn fields after a delay of some two weeks or more. (You know, s)[S]peaking of (that) delay due to bad weather, makes me think of (some of) the storms we run up against in our (own) lives! We go along singin’ a song thinking (nothin’ will ever happen to our family) [we are immune] when BINGO … the props are knocked (clean out) from under our feet. (Take for instance, w) [W]hen a loved one passes away, and you haven’t (any) spare cash on hand. It’s tough (then), all right, and it’s a hardship (that can be plum) [to] avoid(ed). (If you have a) CROWN LIFE INSURANCE POLICY [will] protect(ing) all (the) members of your family.53

Perhaps even more important than the resulting advertisement being shorter and smoother is the

fact that the edit takes care not to take the humanity out of the advertisement. Though some

worthless words are purged, phrases like “you’ve been feeling right chipper” remain in place,

true to the original spirit of the plug, meant to come off as delivered by a friendly cowboy.

These dueling aspects are emblematic of the role of the copy writer to experts in the field of

radio salesmanship: they had to maintain the flow of the program while still making sure that it

carried a message to consumers that was not only accurate, but appealing.

A Dash of Tonal Flavor—The Role of Music in the Punch of Plugs

The final component of a successful radio advertisement was an element that was in

theory tangential to a listener’s appreciation of a plug, but in many ways was one of the most

important of all: its use of music. Whether in the form of symphony orchestras, commercial

jingles or other accompanying pieces, the reason for its importance was psychological—on an

emotional level, human beings tend to react quite viscerally to the presence of music. “Because

of its ability to induce feelings,” wrote Herman S. Hettinger, “music produces an emotional

reaction which the listener, referring to past experience in an endeavor to classify the impression

which the music makes upon him, terms as ‘sad,’ ‘happy,’ ‘fierce’ or ‘restful,’ as the case may

be.”54 Thus, to experts in the field of radio salesmanship, the proper application of music

53 Ibid, 36.54 Hettinger, 11.

21

received treatment on the level of an element that could easily make or break an advertisement.

As was the case with announcers, however, the mere presence of music in a plug was not

enough in its own right to satiate the listening public. Warren B. Dygert, assistant professor of

marketing at New York University, separated the public with regard to musical knowledge into

two classes—those who know music, and those who do not—but at the same time added that

“everyone, the artist, the craftsman, the factory worker, is as conscious of the rhythmic pattern as

they are of symmetry or sheer beauty.”55 Although the public as a whole did not necessarily

consist of individuals endowed with profound musical expertise, it also did not consist of tone-

deaf idiots, and the musical components of advertisements were to be constructed with reverence

for the standard rules of tone and taste no matter the intended audience.

With regard to the content of the actual plugs themselves, music had the ability to play

the role of augmenting and strengthening specific promotional points while, at the same time,

establishing the tone and atmosphere of the plug in general. In particular, the application of

high-quality music could significantly strengthen the impact of a particularly good announcer.

“When an announcer has a voice of molten gold,” wrote Major Firth in Gateway to Radio, “to

hear the opening poem to ‘Arabesque’ is a joy to nearly everyone. The combination of a

glorious voice and the exquisite music behind it has made radio history.”56 Working in tandem

with the announcer, another heralded element of radio advertising, if employed properly music

could give an ad’s overall point extra emotional impact.

At the same time, in the eyes of radio analysts, music possessed a selling power of its

own independent of the presence of the announcer. In particular, radio salesmen experts viewed

the musical components of an ad, particularly its introduction, as important to the establishment

55 Warren G. Dygert, Radio as an Advertising Medium (1939), 87.56 Firth, 59.

22

of its atmosphere. In general, the use of music provided a sense of flow which rendered an ad

easier on the listener’s ears as a piece of advertising, thus increasing audience receptiveness to

the sponsor’s product.57 But the successful establishment of flow was a careful and meticulous

process: “In order to have the best music for the needs of a show,” wrote Dygert, “a good

musical program must be carefully planned, the selections must be appropriately arranged, the

talent must be tastefully selected, and the instrumentation … must balance and reinforce the

program, and meet the budget of the advertiser.”58

Another important and ever-present musical aspect of the advertising world was the use

of commercial jingles. Still ever-present today in various forms, these miniature musical

signatures served the purpose of solidifying the name and message of a sponsor’s product in a

listener’s mind, entirely through the tricks and tools of songwriting. However, to salesmanship

experts, the use of a jingle in an advertisement was the most potentially dangerous form of

musical advertising by some distance. Whereas background music, employed improperly, could

only have the ultimate consequence of rendering an advertisement awkward and stilted, a poorly-

composed jingle could actively inspire the irritation and wrath of listeners. This advice comes

straight from the pens of Allan Bradley Kent and Austen Croom-Johnson, two of the most

lucrative songwriters in the 1930’s jingle business:

We are serious about musical commercials in view of the fact that we have built abusiness with them. We believe that they should be a pleasing and intriguing form of sugar-coating the advertising pill. But apparently it isn’t that easy. Agencies, clients and writers must increasingly realize that irritant jingles, badly written or produced, will end up by killing the goose that laid the golden egg.59

From the late 1930’s onward, Kent and Johnson wrote more than forty of radio’s most

frequently-rotated jingles.60 Kent, in particular, stood as a shining example of the power of a 57 Ibid, 55.58 Dygert, 92.59 Wolfe, 557.60 Ibid.

23

radio jingle to take over the airwaves. After spot advertisements came into the forefront of

advertising in the mid-1930’s, he was involved in the composition of “Nickel Nickel,” a Pepsi-

Cola jingle advertising the soda brand’s new five-cent, twelve-ounce bargain. The plug aired

more than a million times on 350 separate stations between 1935 and 1941 and, as a result,

became a nigh-on inescapable part of popular culture during the 1930’s.61

Of the components of a successful radio advertisement, jingles were perhaps the most

tricky of all, since, as Charles Hull Wolfe put it, “More than any other style of radio commercial,

jingles are apt to be either brilliantly successful or unhappily mediocre.”62 Since jingles stood as

the aspect of a commercial plug that the public was supposed to remember more than anything

else, the songwriting process involved in the composition of a jingle could be excessively

complex. To achieve commercial success, a jingle had to be fit for the particular product it was

trying to push, composed through close collaboration with the musician or musicians in question,

heavily reliant on emphasizing the title of the product and based on the musical rules of popular

songwriting. Most importantly of all, the jingle had to have one outstanding idea to provide a

reason for its existence. The jingle “Chiquita Banana” originated with the simple idea of

personifying a banana as a Latin-American calypso dancer, and went on to become not only one

of the most popular jingles of its era, but also a stereotype in its own right.63

Most importantly of all, the jingle had to stay on the air long enough to remain lodged in

the radio listener’s memory—without attaining this ultimate goal, the purpose of composing the

jingle would be completely bunk. To accomplish this task, like any other aspect of successful

radio broadcasting, the jingle had to tow the awkward line between shoving itself in the listener’s

ears and doing so without coming off as labored or irritating. The role of music in broadcast

61 Al Graham, “Jingle—Or Jangle.” The New York Times Magazine, October 29, 1944.62 Wolfe, 559.63 Ibid, 561-566.

24

advertising in general bore the arduous task of walking this awkward line—as Irwin Edman

wrote in Harper’s Magazine, “The radio, for all its blare and tawdry music, has put millions

within the reach of formerly impossible musical beauty.”64 More than any other characteristic of

radio broadcasting, music possessed the ability to stand on its own as an entity of pure beauty,

but if carried out in a careless fashion it could render a plug annoying like no other.

Radio Salesmanship—An Unusually Unified Science

The most unusual aspect of the science of salesmanship, as it presented itself throughout

the 1930’s, was that the vision that surrounded it was bizarrely unified. The notion of such a

unified vision arising from a field of study built around masterminding some thing as complex as

the human psyche is strange indeed. In the case of radio salesmanship, this is especially true

considering that it was a science built from experts in fields as divergent as academia, marketing,

psychology and the simple everyday operation of radio stations.

Nonetheless, it is particularly interesting to note that a majority of the maxims set forth in

the plethora of radio salesmanship pamphlets from the 1930’s still apply to listeners today after

the turn of the century. In a nation that has been pervaded by the media ever since radio thrust

itself upon the national scene, the psychology surrounding the base-level human instincts that

cause us to react to advertising have remained surprisingly static. With that assertion in mind, it

is honestly no real surprise that such a broad consensus was achieved over what listeners wanted

out of their listening experience during the 1930’s.

The importance of this science of salesmanship might be called into doubt by skeptics

who assume that the development of such a marketing strategy was just a horn-rimmed means to

categorize the listening audience as a populace that adhered to a series of strict psychological

rules and regulations. However, salesmanship did not exist as an island, and an examination of

64 Irwin Edman, “On American Leisure.” Harper’s Magazine (January 1928), 224.

25

the public’s reaction to radio advertising throughout the 1930’s and onward may suggest that

pundits in the field of salesmanship had a point in their meticulously-planned psychological

charts and calculations.

26

A Public Estranged, Embittered “I note a letter from J.W. Long in which he denounces airplane advertising through a loud-speaker over his home. A similar airplane came over my home a short time ago. The message attracted tremendous attention, but it lasted only a few moments. The method was so striking that my wife became interested and purchased the product advertised. I would rather listen for a moment to such a message and have it over with instead of tuning in on my radio and being compelled to listen to many minutes of blah \ about Ajax Dog Blubber in order to hear a good dance orchestra.”

—George A. Cline, “Radio Advertising”

The New York Times, July 23, 1933 (letter to the editor)

By the early 1930’s, both Variety and The New York Times bore full-fledged sections

devoted entirely to developments in the world of radio broadcasting. The institution had existed

for more than a decade, but this particular development ensured that both journeymen in the field

of show business as well as members of the general public could remain well-informed about the

contemporary state of radio in the United States.

The bleeding of radio into the print domain, however, had the secondary impact of giving

the American public a conduit through which they could vent their frustrations about the content

of radio programming, as well as the medium’s existence and future within the United States.

Throughout the 1930’s, monthly publications as well as the “letters to the editor” pages of daily

newspapers remained consistently clogged with the ventings of a public obsessed with a medium

intended toward the serving of the public good.

By and large, the musings of the public from 1930 onward served as a virtual justification

of the existence of a science of radio salesmanship. Faced with a new technology and the printed

means to voice dissent against it, the members of the American public had no qualms whatsoever

with voicing their opinions consistently, earnestly and—most importantly of all—negatively.

27

Radio: A Distillation of Entertainment’s Lowest Common Denominator?

During a decade when radio was still aching to gain its legs, the listening public’s chief

complaint against the medium, by some distance, was that programming directors consistently

geared it toward appealing to the lowest common denominator of taste. “Advertising has

delivered yet another body blow to the radio,” wrote “The Drifter,” an anonymous contributor to

The Nation, in 1932. “From now on millions of loud speakers will pour into the American home

not only the fatuous and puerile words of sales talks, but even the prices of dust-proof gelatin,

life-preserving tooth paste, and varnished breakfast food.”65 The quality of radio’s sustaining

programming itself admittedly came under consistent criticism, but any blows levied against

programming were always miniscule compared to the public’s sweeping damnation of the paid

advertisements interspersed throughout them.

“The dissatisfied listeners present two counts in their indictment,” wrote Harper’s

Magazine contributor Deems Taylor in 1935. “First, that there is too much vulgar material,

particularly vulgar music, in to-day’s programs; and second, that there is far too much blatant

advertising and selling-talk connected with radio.”66 Taylor’s summation is apt and fitting to the

lay of the land as far as public perception of radio was concerned; listeners often despised the

vulgar content of the medium’s programming, but this ire almost always came packaged with a

broad dismissal of radio’s commercial nature.

Occasionally, the blame for radio’s generally dumbed-down qualities landed in the hands

of the listening public, chastised by intellectuals for appreciating the medium for the wrong

reasons. In an article published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1931, prominent British radio

announcer H.V. Kaltenborn denounced his listening public for ignoring the overall quality and

65 ‘The Drifter,’ “In the Driftway.” The Nation, October 5, 1932, 309.66 Deems Taylor, “Radio—A Brief for the Defense.” Harper’s Magazine, April 1935, 554.

28

societal significance of his program, centering around the important problems of current history,

in favor of sending in fan mail fawning over the expressive qualities of his voice.67

In the drive to identify a singular aggressor in the stilted gentrification of radio, however,

advertisers inevitably received blame either for being a cohort in the pollution of programming,

or stood as the very reason why radio programming was so terrible in the first place. An article

published in December 1935 in the literary journal Commonweal supports the second claim—in

it, contributor A.M. Sullivan posed the notion that radio broadcasting inherently had its roots in

cruder forms of entertainment such as vaudeville, a problem that could be mitigated if advertisers

did not play such a decisive role in the determination of radio content.68 According to Sullivan,

radio advertisers by their very nature served a counterproductive role in the implementation of

high-quality content, always wanting radio to appeal to the basest forms of human intelligence.

“While Ford, General Motors and Packard have given us good musical programs,” wrote

Sullivan, “national advertisers are not usually encouraged by their agency advertisers to feature

arty programs … Their article or service must have a mass sales appeal, and they are afraid to

trim down their potential audience with anything classified as highbrow.”69

Indeed, the dominant view of the problem surrounding advertising’s stranglehold over the

institution of radio was that, in playing such a large role in defining radio programming, the same

advertiser often ends up defining the tastes of the public. In a society where radio stood as a

technological novelty supported financially by advertising dollars, a sense of worry prevailed

among the educated public that sponsors were luring listeners into a sort of sustained servitude.

In a certain sense, radio served as a form of psychological reinforcement and reassurance, which

some literati construed as commercial brainwashing. “The grotesque truth is that a bewildering

67 H.V. Kaltenborn, “Radio: Dollars and Nonsense.” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1931, 492.68 A.M. Sullivan, “Radio and Vaudeville Culture.” Commonweal, December 13, 1935, 178.69 Ibid.

29

percentage of listeners like the advertising,” wrote a contributor to The New Republic in 1937.

“Commercial advertisements of the most appalling blatancy, blurbs that analyze body odor until

your very navel curls in pain, will draw a sustained flurry of responses as blizzards in January.”70

At the same time, writers in the field of print satire were expressing a pervading public

attitude toward radio advertising, implying that advertisers not only controlled public taste, but

also had close to no concept as to what constituted successful entertainment. In a piece written

in 1937 for the Saturday Evening Post, staff writer William Hazlett Upson recounted a

particularly ridiculous experience he had being hired to write copy for an advertising agency.

According to Upson, the agency hired him because of a Post article he wrote about tractors, but

the advertisement was a plug for a brand of chewing gum. Eventually, after the first draft was

written, the advertiser shows up and asks that all of the aspects of the advertisement that put a

“negative spin” on chewing gum be removed, such as gum getting caught in peoples’ hair or the

notion of gum that has already been chewed. Eventually, after an uproar over the use of the

word “stomach” in the advertisement, the advertising agency puts itself in charge of all of the

dialogue. In the end, the writer’s contributions to the finished product are nearly nonexistent,

steamrollered into oblivion by the advertising machine.71

Upson’s article was essentially a fluff piece and clearly intended as a light jab at the

industry, but the fact that an article of such an anti-industry focus could appear in a popular

publication with such a wide readership is a testament to how casual the act of debasing radio

advertising had already become by the tail end of the 1930’s. His piece was not an isolated

incident; this laid-back attitude toward spoofing radio via the use of glib yet biting satire was a

consistent force reflected elsewhere throughout the decade, as well as onward. In 1933 a play by

70 T.R. Carskadon, “Radio: The Happy Slattern.” The New Republic, September 22, 1977, 183.71 William Hazlett Upson, “Writing for the Radio Is Easy.” The Saturday Evening Post, June 26, 1937.

30

Albert G. Miller opened on Broadway for a short period, lampooning the trade of radio

advertising and, fittingly enough, entitled “The Sellout.”72 Even more bluntly, The Atlantic

Monthly published a piece entitled “Clichés on the Air” where the patter of radio plugs was

reduced to lame-brained conversational chatter:

Q. Hello, Mr. Arbuthnot.A. Hello, young man. Does exercise tie your muscles into knots?Q. Why, yes, it does.A. Are you a slave to floors? Are your gums sore and tender to the touch?Q. Now wait a second, Mr. Arbuthnot.A. Do you inhale? Does the wrong soap rob you of a complexion like peaches and cream? Are you a washday wife—does washing leave you so ‘done in’ you can’t even drag yourself to a movie?Q. Oh, I see, Arby. You’re the fellow who writes the commercials for the radio

programs.73

The existence of such satire is far from an anomaly in almost any given culture, but the particular

lampooning born toward advertising on the airwaves during this particular era still bears a

reasonable level of significance. Radio advertisers did not merely receive the treatment expected

of large corporations in a capitalist society; by this point in American history listeners basically

perceived them as ridiculous entities completely out of touch with the values and beliefs that

constitute sane, functional human beings. To the skeptical among the listening public, it was

safe to say that the tastes of the listening public were being defined by corporate lackeys who

had no concept whatsoever of what constituted taste.

In the end, what is ultimately notable is that throughout the 1930’s, the American public

recognized that radio was targeted at as brainless of an audience as could be conceived, and that

a large segment of the listening public at large saw this negative trend as one that could be

ameliorated if advertisers lost their key role within the radio industry. Geared toward profit and

72 Brooks Atkinson, “Spoofing the Trade of Radio Advertising in a Comedy Entitled ‘The Sellout.’” The New York Times, September 7, 1933.73 Frank Sullivan, “Clichés on the Air.” Atlantic Monthly, August 1941, 220.

31

completely out of touch with the tastes and needs of the public, in the minds of many advertisers

spoke a language completely alien to the general public yet exercised control over an industry

that served it. Heywood Brown of The Nation summarized this problem in as curt a fashion as

possible: “Radio will begin to come into its own when the stooges are kept out of the studio.”74

Building the Perfect Beast: Evaluating the Ethics of Advertising

“The first commercial broadcasting stations were opened, in 1920, for the purpose of

selling radios,” wrote Harper’s Magazine contributor Travis Hoke in 1932. “and no time was

lost thereafter in discovering that broadcasting could sell other goods also, as well as services,

beliefs, half-truths and lies.”75 Hoke’s sweeping dismissal of the trends undertaken by radio

advertising underscore another 1930’s public worry over the nature of American advertising:

whether or not the public should put their trust in radio plugs in the first place.

Radio did not operate within an inherently untrustworthy infrastructure; although the

federal government exercised no direct control over radio, it still tried its hardest to watch out for

the best interests of consumers. In 1934, the Federal Trade Commission kicked off a policy

intended to eliminate false and misleading advertising, in line with similar policies that they had

already set into motion in relation to advertising in various forms of print media.76 The FTC’s

decision was made in “response to a great demand” that such action be taken; to avoid being

construed as advocating censorship, they employed a system of requesting copies of advertising

announcements from networks and broadcasting stations on a weekly basis.77

Nonetheless, radio was a means of conveying information to the public, and with that in

mind a significant portion of the advertising world used it as a means of duping the listening

74 Heywood Brown, “Radio.” The Nation, _______?, 686.75 Travis Hoke, “Radio Goes Educational.” Harper’s Magazine, September 1932, 467.76 Special to the New York Times, “Board Will Check Radio Advertising—Federal Trade Commission Asks Stations for Copies of All Commercial Broadcasts.” The New York Times, May 17, 1934.77 Ibid.

32

audience for profit. Skeptic and radio scholar Peter Morell gave his take on the situation as that

of a set of airwaves dominated by the greedy and profit-hungry, likening radio advertising to the

selling of patent medicines and accusing broadcasters of exploiting radio solely for profits at the

expense of the consumer. “Compared with the well-edited Sunday newspaper,” wrote Morell,

“the radio has the cultural value of a tabloid, without the authentic sparkle that gives the tabloid

character of a sort.”78

Morell’s book Poisons, Potions and Profits: The Antidote to Radio Advertising is exactly

what the title suggests, giving consumers a laundry list of untrustworthy radio ad campaigns, all

the while denouncing the medium for being so easily exploitable by those who take the initiative.

One particular example presented in the work is that of Bromo-Seltzer, an effervescent salt

intended for the treatment of headaches. According to Morell, at that point in consumer culture

Bromo-Seltzer was known to cause both sexual impotence and bromide intoxication… yet it was

advertised as a miracle remedy to hundreds of thousands via the institution of radio.79 Capping

off his argument by citing the Federal Radio Act, Morell accused advertisers such as Broma-

Seltzer of operating contrary to the very public interest which the radio industry considered its

source of support.80

Considering that radio advertising was still a relatively new form of communication, it is

understandable that, with regulations surrounding the operation of radio still taking form, certain

opportunistic individuals would take advantage of the fact that radio was a relatively simple

means of communicating with thousands of potential consumers instantaneously. As a cultural

and economic institution, radio might have provided the public with a suitable cause for aesthetic

complaint throughout the 1930s, but ethically, it was not yet quite on the level.

78 Peter Morell, Poisons, Potions and Profits: The Antidote to Radio Advertising (1937), 3.79 Ibid, 5.80 Ibid, 229.

33

The Grass Is Always Greener—Radio Across the Atlantic

During the 1930’s, it is safe to say that the institution of radio advertising received a

consistently critical reception from the American public; however, the public was not unified in

its stance that advertising was a flawed but necessary presence in the radio world. Contrary to

those who merely displayed annoyance at the cruder and less ethical aspects of advertising, a

reasonably large school of thought existed who believed that advertising was an entity that never

belonged on the radio in the first place. Followers of this area of belief held a practically unified

stance over the ideal state of affairs in American broadcasting—namely, that the networks would

loosen their stranglehold over the medium and submit to a structure of governmental regulation

identical to Great Britain’s system of broadcasting.

The primary problem with American broadcasting, according to this mode of belief, was

that, as a medium funded by advertising dollars, its motivations were centered almost entirely

around thriving in a capitalist society. “The chief reproach against American broadcasting … is

that its dominant purpose is commercial,” wrote H.B. Kaltenborn in Scribner’s Magazine. “Just

as most newspapers are published to make money for those who buy and sell advertising, most

radio stations are operated to bring financial returns to those who buy and sell time.”81

The problem with the capitalist system of broadcasting, according to this school of

thought, did not merely lie in the fact that deregulation allowed the existence of advertising. The

problem was that, combined with the United States’ traditional laissez-faire mode of economic

regulation, in which the government takes a reduced role in the operation of economic affairs,

individual advertising agencies were virtually allowed to have free range in the exploitation of

radio content, without repercussions from any federal agency.82

81 Kaltenborn, 492.82 James Rorty, “The Impending Radio War.” Harper’s Magazine, November 1931, 714.

34

In the eyes of many scholars from the early days of radio, Great Britain’s system of

broadcasting, completely free of any form of advertising, was essentially the equivalent of an

entertainment utopia. The general argument toward the implementation of a system of radio

broadcasting based on the British model was that their system of government regulation left the

airwaves not only free of advertising, but also free of the middling programs that existed in

America solely for the sake of offering sponsors a place to advertise their wares. In the opinion

of American Scholar contributor John T. Flynn, America’s approach resulted in a fair amount of

decent programming, but at the same time spawned a lot of glitzy programs whose sole

characteristic was that they were loud, shiny, funded by advertising dollars and centered on the

task of getting the sponsor’s name out to the ears of millions of listeners.83

At the same time, the Anglophile sect of the radio broadcasting sphere attracted more

than its share of detractors. This attitude mostly sprung from the notion that treating America’s

laissez-faire economic policy as a flaw, no matter the situation, was inherently counterproductive

to the spirit upon which the country was built. In the meantime, the British radio system

received criticisms of determining the public interest much in the same way in which many

criticized American advertising—“Across the Atlantic the public is given what somebody thinks

it ought to be given,” wrote Harper’s Magazine contributor Jascha Heifetz. “Here [in America],

nominally at any rate, the public is given what the public wants.”84

On top of that, in the minds of some, the structure of the American political system would

not have allowed for the successful operation of a radio system bearing characteristics similar to

those of Great Britain’s. Unlike Britain’s governmental structure, federal agencies in America

would be largely subordinated to the government’s executive branch, thus resulting in a potential

83 John T. Flynn, “Radio: Medicine Show.” The American Scholar, Autumn 1938, 433.84 Jascha Heifetz, “Radio, American Style.” Harper’s Magazine, October 1937, 497.

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situation where the current administration would be directly in charge of the nation’s radio,

leaving the possibility open for totalitarian control of a public institution.85

In the end, considering the assertion that the idea of adopting the British system of radio

broadcasting was essentially an unfeasible pipe dream, the blame surrounding the problems with

U.S. radio advertising fell right back upon the advertisers themselves. Within a political and

economic system that prides itself on being egalitarian, the only possible “totalitarian” presence

surrounding radio in American culture were the forces exerting financial control over a medium

centered around catering to the public good. “The villain of the piece is the advertiser,” wrote

Deems Taylor. “Not the broadcasting companies who, so long as their customer does not present

obscene or libelous matter, have little control over what he does offer; and not the advertising

agencies, who, although they do prepare the programs and engage the performers, do so within

limitations prescribed by their clients.”86

Placed in a comparative position against a system of broadcasting not feasible within

America’s particular brand of capitalism, the future of radio advertising in America remained

awkward and hazy throughout the 1930’s. Ultimately, according to radio pundits like Harper’s

Magazine contributor Jascha Heifetz, it was the opinion of the American public that would

determine the shape of things to come: “Outside of the United States of course advertising on the

air is virtually unknown … The problem of what our advertisers shall say and how interminably

and emphatically they shall say it is our particular riddle, therefore, and one which we shall need

to solve ourselves.”

85 Taylor, 557.86 Ibid, 561.

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