Book Review—Susan Merrill Squier, ed., Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture

Editor Susan Merrill Squier opens her own first essay of this collection of essays by different authors with a quotation from Marshall McLuhan: “Radio ... transforms the relation of everyone to everybody, regardless of programming” (p. 1). Rarely has meaningless been combined with portentous to less effect. It is not a promising opening to a work that has the potential to be engrossing. Thirteen essays, including two from Squier, attempt to cast light on radio’s place in culture and the previous century. It is a big job and a good try. Inevitably it will either be received enthusiastically, or condemned, according to the reader’s degree of agreement with the topics covered. Inevitably, in a work whose title alludes to such scope, the content is highly selective. The range is wide, from the shape of early use of the technology, to the strategic use of gendered address in the 1950s. The titles are grand, even pretentious: “Compromising Technologies: Government, the Radio Hobby, and the Discourse of Catastrophe in the Twentieth Century” (Bruce Campbell), although Martin Spinelli’s title “Not Hearing Poetry on Public Radio” admirably incorporates humor in its succinct brevity. I was intrigued by Laura Hillenbrand’s passage, mysteriously placed unremarked as an opening to the book, in which she concludes: “Enabling virtually all citizens to experience noteworthy events simultaneously and in entertaining form”—as if this were an admirable and necessary pairing—“radio created a vast common culture in America, arguably the first true mass culture the world has ever seen” (n.p.). There are so many meaningless clichés in this sentence alone that the edifice of the entire book teeters before it even reaches the first page. Suffice to say, from my point of view, radio’s greatest achievement was not “infotainment” as she seems to suggest. Neither was radio ever a homogeneous mass (although it is increasingly becoming more of one than it ever has been, certainly more than it was at the height of Seabiscuit’s racing career). Nor is radio a culture, fortunately. If radio really had created a “vast common culture,” we should have something to worry about. As to it being “the first true mass culture the world has ever seen.” Oh dear! Haven’t we heard of religion? The first part of Squier’s own first essay, “Communities of the Air: Introducing the Radio World,” starts out as what, in the context of a doctoral dissertation, would count as the review of the literature devoted to the subject. In a book, there seems little reason for such a summary of other writings. She then summarizes the content of the book and finally,on the23rdpage, reviewsanotherbook—E.BoydSmith’s, Fun in theRadioWorld (1923)—to which she devotes the remaining 6 pages of her chapter. There are 12 other essays here, to which I judged it impossible to do justice in the space of this review. Instead, I decided to focus my interest on one essay, about something I know little, since I am neither Black nor American: “The Forgotten Fifteen MilJournal of Radio Studies/November 2005