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American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age (review)

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Abstract

Technology and Culture 47.3 (2006) 655-656 In 1930, John Brinkley decided to run for governor of Kansas. Brinkley, a quack doctor famous for his reproductive treatments, also owned and operated KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best), a popular and profitable radio station. His gubernatorial campaign failed when 56,000 of the votes cast for him were disqualified; shortly thereafter, the Federal Radio Commission revoked KFKB's license due to Brinkley's "candid treatment of sexual matters." Defeated on two counts, but undeterred, Brinkley moved to Mexico and became one of the pioneer "border blasters," broadcasting hillbilly tunes, gospel singing, Mexican folk music, religious programming, "populist political commentary," and medical huckstering from the high-powered XENT in Nuevo Laredo. Brinkley is one of the many fascinating characters in Clifford J. Doerksen's engaging history of early radio, American Babel. When Doerksen began his research, he intended to focus exclusively on Brinkley and other border blasters. But he soon discovered that, prior to Brinkley, there were hundreds of "rogue broadcasters," men and women who operated successful stations in defiance of highbrow urbanites and corporate radio conglomerates. Now, Doerksen brings these rogue broadcasters into focus, and he makes a surprising yet persuasive claim. While most historians of radio in the Jazz Age (including this reviewer) have championed listener-led fights against radio advertising, Doerksen argues that early advertising practices were embraced by working-class audiences. "Commercialism triumphed in the American airwaves," Doerksen argues, "because most Americans did not object to it" (p. 17). Hostility to radio advertising "was in reality a consensus of the better-off and better-educated" (p. 17). The owners of independent stations defied corporate radio, which considered hillbilly music, jazz, old-time country, and sales pitches to be entirely too lowbrow for the public airwaves. What corporate radio failed to realize in the 1920s, according to Doerksen, was that the vast majority of the public was lowbrow. American Babel is a freshly written, accessible, and engaging tour across the dial of early American radio. Doerksen successfully combines interviews with archival material and various obscure sources to reconstruct the programming of these long-forgotten stations. Though it varied wildly, Doerksen proves that what the stations all rejected was the idea that only the "classiest" of entertainment and advertising would be acceptable for public consumption. Each of these stations served a particular segment of the "public," from the New York working-class listeners who found out where the "drag" acts were being performed by listening to WHN, to the residents of the Mississippi Delta region who appreciated the "shock jock" techniques of "Ol' Man Henderson" on KWKH in Shreveport, to the midwesterners who loved the Seed House Girls, Kitchen Klatter, and the Hawaiian Trio blasting from KFNF in Omaha. Doerksen demonstrates that it was out of this "American babel" that the common sense of American broadcasting was reconstituted in the 1930s and 1940s. Hillbilly music, the jazz of the speakeasies, crass comedy, and bold sales pitches all became the norm on network programs in the "golden age" of radio. Programming by independent stations in the 1920s proved that listeners would tolerate and even relish radio advertising—as long as radio also brought them their old-time fiddling, their down-home religion, their political populism, their jazz, their cures for what ailed them, and their colorful radio personalities. Doerksen's book also helps to explain why these stations have been overlooked. Many of us who write about radio in the early twentieth century feel a kinship with the activists, reformers, and college professors who railed against advertising and the lowbrow culture that was newly available in magazines and newspapers, and over the airwaves. But our own cultural prejudices have blinded us to a simple truth: the "masses" are often the first to embrace the crudest and the most materialistic aspects of culture, including new forms of advertising. Doerksen challenges those of us interested both in mass culture and in working-class movements to set aside our prejudices and to write more truthfully about the preferences of working...

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