Radio\u27s waves: Tuning in to a changing American culture in the Great Depression

This project examines what the newly burgeoning medium of radio meant to Americans in the Depression decade. Despite the centralized commercial control of the medium, different groups found their own meanings in radio. All of those groups, though, understood the new medium in terms that helped them explain and navigate their changing world. As Americans made radio a regular part of their lives for the first time in the 1930s, the upheavals of their times were never far away. Diverse forces had unsettled the culture since the late 1800s, but the Great Depression dramatically exacerbated those effects. Various groups shaped their own visions of the medium, but all those groups used their understandings of the medium to help them make sense their modern world. Through radio, popular audiences created new communities for an increasingly impersonal society. Politicians and their listeners believed they could use radio to refashion democracy to fit a world growing more centralized and vast. At the same time, many listeners flocked to and empowered particular charismatic speakers, looking to the voices on the air to take up the struggles of common Americans. Writers who took to the air saw the medium as an ideal canvas for socially meaningful, Modernist art. And academics studying the new social force often believed radio might help reform society along pragmatic and Progressive lines. Public intellectuals, though, attacked radio because they disliked the mass and capitalist society they saw the medium helping to build. As a history of those whose lives radio influenced, this work is both a new lens into the history of radio, and a cultural, social and political history of the United States dealing with the Great Depression and decades of dramatic change. It examines those who experienced radio instead of those who ran it. The meanings these groups found in radio reveal the ways in which diverse people helped shape their own culture and made sense of their society, the Depression and, indeed, the creation of modern America