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 asmembers 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.
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.”[1] 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.”[2] 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 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.[3]
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.[4] 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.”[5]
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 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.”[6]
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.[7]
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 Albert G. Miller opened on Broadway for a short period, lampooning the trade of radio advertising and, fittingly enough, entitled “The Sellout.”[8] 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.[9]
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 werebeing 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 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.”[10]
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.”[11] 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.[12] 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.[13]
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 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.”[14]
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.[15] Capping off his argument by citing the Federal Radio Act, Morell accused advertisers such as Broma-Seltzerof operating contrary to the very public interest which the radio industry considered its source of support.[16]
Considering that radio advertising was still a relatively new form of communication, it isunderstandable 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.
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.”[17]
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.[18]
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 modelwas 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 timespawned 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.[19]
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.”[20]