YESTERYEAR?:

Return With Us Now to Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear: Radio Studies Rise Again (THOMAS DOHERTY, May 21, 2004, The Chronicle Review)

Like every disciplinary bailiwick, radio studies boasts a pantheon of immortal figures and iconic events. In the political realm, the soothing timbre of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the barking demagoguery of the radio priest Father Charles E. Coughlin have come to serve as embryonic instances -- salutary and sinister -- of the now-permanent alliance between ideology and broadcasting. While Coughlin's fiery bombast ultimately proved too heated even for the hot medium of radio, FDR fared better by using the microphone to converse with "my friends." (Over in Germany, another radio-savvy leader made certain that his voice rang throughout the Reich by supporting the production of a cheap, mass-marketed receiver dubbed the Volksempfanger, or "the people's set," a fascinating tale told by the German musicologists Horst J.P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz in the 1997 Hitler's Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing.)

In terms of signature radio entertainers, a sampling is bound to be selective, but any discriminating montage shows that the nonvisual medium was surprisingly congenial to ethnic and racial diversity. Realizing that personalities segregated in real space traveled more freely via the imagined space of the airwaves, scholars have expended abundant critical energy on what might be called voices of color: Amos 'n' Andy, the faux-African-American duo, created by the white humorists Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who became radio's first superstars by mimicking the alleged dialect and malapropisms of black English vernacular; the writer-producer-star Gertrude Berg, auteur and mother hen to The Goldbergs, a warm-hearted, Yiddish-inflected sitcom about a Jewish family living in the Bronx (signature catchphrase: "Yoo-hoo! Mrs. Bloom!"); and the beloved comedian Jack Benny, whose smart-mouth servant Rochester (Eddie Anderson) may have been the first black man in American popular culture to routinely get uppity with a white man.

Even well-known historical markers today take on fresh resonance when heard. Though vividly captured on newsreel film, the horror of actually beholding the conflagration of the Hindenburg in 1937 was imprinted forever with the anguished cries of the WLS reporter Herb Morrison ("Oh, the humanity!"). Likewise, the first unimpeachable verification of Nazi genocide came to the wartime generation not via the newsreels or still photographs, but in the wrenching eyewitness account of broadcaster Edward R. Murrow on April 15, 1945. "It will not be pleasant listening," Murrow warned his stateside audience as he groped to describe the sight and smell of the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Perhaps the best-remembered radio moments of all were two alien invasions, one fictional and one factual: Orson Welles's hysteria-inducing production of Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938, and the interruption of regular programming to report events from Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (Note to educators: snippets from many classic radio moments are available on I Can Hear It Now, a 1948 record album compiled by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, which is still widely available.)

So far, a good deal of the impulse behind current radio research has been simply to reclaim and highlight such flash points. Just last April, the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York City and Los Angeles, underscored how rich and untrammeled the field is with the release of radio coverage of the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. The broadcasts revealed that many of the tropes now associated with the 24/7 flow of cable news were improvised for that Trial of the Century: dramatic re-enactment of courtroom testimony, interviews with the principals, and expert commentary from talking heads -- or rather, disembodied voices.

You mean people don't listen to radio anymore?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 3, 2004 10:45 PM