Radio Mob: Broadcasting Culture and the Question of Fascism in America, 1920-1945

Radio was an extraordinarily influential technology in the period between the two World Wars. While historians from Warren Susman to Michele Hilmes have tended to interpret radio in this period as a homogenizing force, it also provoked fears of anti-democratic demagoguery that were frequently associated with fascism. This essay focuses on the work of the most influential radio theorists of the interwar period, Theodor Adorno, Rudolph Arnheim and Hadley Cantril, to develop a cultural interpretation of radio that addresses its perceived anti-democratic potential. Apparently homogenizing but clearly multiplicitous and chaotic, radio appealed to emotions at the sub-rational level while also attracting listeners into complexly shifting social formations. As Adorno, Arnheim, and Cantril argue, albeit in importantly different ways, the attractions of radio created a homogeneity that was not always conducive to democratic culture. The intervention of these three thinkers is especially important as some of the earliest reflection on the effects of the new mass media on American political culture