Radio's America: The Great Depression and the rise of modern culture.(Book review)

Lenthall, B. (2007). Radio's America: The Great Depression and the rise of modern culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 261 pages.

Radio realized its fullest potential during the 1930s when the nation's future prospects seemed to have evaporated as the consequence of economic collapse. The year the stock market imploded was also the year radio's most popular program--Amos 'n' Andy--debuted. It, and myriad programs like it, was exactly what the beleaguered audience sought to distract it from the grim reality of record unemployment and soup lines. Indeed, while radio's escapist entertainment was a much-valued refuge from the storm, the medium became more than a firewall against the national crisis and turmoil.

Bruce Lenthall's discerning study covers a lot of territory, beginning with the seminal perspectives of public intellectuals, such as William Orton and James Rorty, regarding the impact of early radio on cultural standards, democracy, and human identity and individuality. Lenthall astutely observes that critics of the period "asked many of the right and fundamental questions about the age--even as they proved to be wrong about some of the answers" (p. 52).

What follows is a lucid explication of the role radio played in the lives of its users. For what were often compelling reasons, many forged personal relationships with the medium. Lenthall offers an affecting and telling account of a bedridden young woman called Janet Bonthuis, who resorts to a radio quiz show (Vox Pop) to raise enough money to buy her father the tobacco he has been forced to give up to make ends meet at the height of the Depression. When no other options exist to raise the necessary funds to restore her father's modest pleasure, radio becomes her only hope, and it meets her needs. It is a crucial player--an ethereal benefactor-in her otherwise abject existence.

In subsequent chapters, Lenthall evaluates the place of radio in personalizing 1930s American politics, reviews the agendas and impact of its major and often controversial personalities (namely Father Coughlin and Dr. John Brinkley--who Lenthall anoints radio's "strange gods"), and assesses the efforts of early media researchers (Lazarsfeld, Hettinger, Adorno) as they debate the medium's potential to benefit as well as impair society. Finally, the author does a commendable job evaluating the output of some of radio's foremost scribes (Corwin, Oboler, MacLeish, etc.) in terms of its aesthetic heft and value as social document.

In the summary, Lenthall posits the trenchant view that during the Depression "the medium strengthened the hold on America's mass society by enabling many to feel as though they had some control within it" (p. 209). For a population that felt under siege by dark and inscrutable forces, this was a very valuable service.

Radio's America represents an impressive addition to the radio studies canon, which in recent years has seen considerable expansion.

Michael C Keith (Ph.D., University of Rhode Island) is a member of the Communication faculty at Boston College. His research specialty is the role of radio in culture and society.

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