Radio in 20th-century America

In America, during the 1920s and 1930s, adults expressed concern with the types of music and radio shows that children consumed in the home. Enmeshed in discourses of racial uplift and juvenile delinquency prevention, women's clubs and local branches of the National Parent Teacher Association sent letters of disapproval to NBC radio executives. They disparaged radio shows with violent and corrupting content, advocating for an increased number of music appreciation and children's theater programs. Contemporaneous publications, including _Parents' Magazine_, urged parents to help their children cultivate an understanding of "good" musical taste through early exposure to Western art music. Amid these concerns, educators, parents, and journalists lauded a group of popular songs for children by Tin Pan Alley songwriters Irving Caesar and Gerald Marks that were featured on the radio and at venues such as Carnegie Hall. But what historical conditions allowed for these popular songs to be considered appropriate music for children?


Taking Caesar and Marks's _Sing a Song of Safety_ (1937) as its primary case study, this paper argues that it was not only the promotional tactics employed by Caesar and Marks which framed the songs as good music for the consumption of children, but it was through the writing of educators and journalists and the gendered labor of mothers that the songs gained their worth. While scholars such as Mark Katz (1998 and 2010), Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derno (2004), and John J. Sheinbaum (2018) have examined the historical and cultural conditions of musical value and taste, no one has seriously examined Caesar and Marks's songs or the broader potential of children's music to nuance our understanding of the attribution of value to music. Drawing on archival research, reception history, and tracing the incorporation of Tin Pan Alley stylistic elements with regard to contemporaneous pedagogy, this paper demonstrates that parents and educators were tastemakers. It examines the historical conditions of and boundaries for what was considered appropriate music for children, investigating when music and media technologies became safe, and how this transfiguration arose. 

From the formative years of radio broadcasting in the 1920s until the 1950s, when television superseded it, radio's "golden age" in the United States was a period of scripted programming that embraced a broad scope of formats and genres, and reached an astonishingly wide cross section of the American public. Due to the aural context, music functioned as an integral element of radio: as program content, as advertising jingles, and as "background" in radio drama.


One well-explored avenue of scholarship centers on music's role in developing goodwill within the broadcast audience in order to persuade consumers (e.g. Taylor, 2003, 2012; Asai, 2016; Russo, 2016). Yet, advertising concerned itself not merely with the promotion of products, but also of lifestyles and, by extension, of lives. The molding of subjectivity is key to 20th-century advertising. I argue that it is this interest in subjectivity-communicating how it would feel to have a product in one's life-that cultivated an aesthetic of kitsch in commercial radio, and that a primary role of music was to provide the emotional connection necessary for this form of persuasion.


Drawing on Svetlana Boym's (2002) explication of the "restorative" and "reflective" tendencies in nostalgia, this paper focuses on two long-running series programs to situate radio drama in the context of the commercial broadcast system and theorize the ways in which the music of radio drama participates in the aesthetic of kitsch. Although Boym does not lavish much attention on the kitsch aesthetic, she connects kitsch to nostalgia, noting that both have been commonly viewed as ethical and aesthetic failures. Rather than evaluating nostalgia and kitsch as parallel failures, a view that implies that the producers of culture are always seeking to produce "Art," examples from _Dr. Christian_ and _Death Valley Days_ suggest that nostalgia and kitsch were deliberately entwined due to their success in communicating specific attitudes. Music relayed meaning beyond the level of text, and thus can be seen as central in establishing a uniquely American form of the kitsch aesthetic in a nascent consumer society.

Shortly after radio took hold in the United States in the early 1920s, several large film theaters installed radio broadcasting stations and began airing a variety of programs: performances by theater orchestras and organists, speeches from the theater's stage, even narration of select feature films. Perhaps most famously, Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel and his Capitol Theater Gang started offering weekly programs featuring musical numbers and backstage conversation in 1922. Yet radio receivers and amplifiers were far more ubiquitous in U.S. theaters than broadcast stations. Theater managers across the country played all sorts of radio broadcasts for their audiences as "radio numbers" in presentation programs, and also used radio music to accompany segments of short and feature-length films. More complex experiments emerged, too. In 1921, the film _Heliotrope_ (dir. George Baker) was shown simultaneously at two Omaha theaters, and audiences heard, in alternation, accompaniment by their theater's orchestra and the other house's musicians over the radio. The following year, when _The Storm_ (dir. Reginald Barker) was shown at the Central Theater in New York City, the accompaniment included sound recordings of a forest fire broadcast into the house by Newark station WOR. Quickly, movie theaters across the country began working with local radio stations to receive carefully-timed broadcasts of music, sound effects, and even dialogue to "accompany" and augment their film programs.


In this paper, I examine the complex relationships between the emergent radio industry and silent film exhibition in the early 1920s. Many theater managers integrated radio into their programs as a novelty by which to attract new and expanded audiences; others adopted it in an attempt to absorb a potential competitor and demonstrate film's ongoing relevance in an ever-expanding entertainment culture. Yet radio also quickly came to be understood, I argue, as means of radically re-envisioning silent film music and sound more broadly. The "synchronization stunts" described above, for example, threatened-or promised- to alleviate the need for individual theaters to employ musicians and musical directors; might radio also serve as a means for film studios or theater chains to standardize the music and sounds of film presentations? Placing a series of film-radio experiments from the early 1920s in dialogue with archival materials about their reception and broader debates about the soundscapes of silent films, this paper traces and theorizes radio's challenge to-and in some cases significant reshaping of-the aesthetic, technological, and economic realities of silent film music and sound.