I was tickled—or, rather, pricked—by the snide remarks a certain John Wallace made in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast, in which he expounded on “Radio and the Taste of the Nation.” In particular, Wallace took issue with the assertion that the new medium was threatening to turn the United States into the “Land of the Cretin” and the “Home of the Depraved.”
While not actual quotations, the phrases “Land of the Cretin” and “Home of the Depraved reflected, according to Wallace, the
utterances of any one of several of God’s private secretaries, expressed editorially in any one of several pastel colored periodicals on the occasion of that sage’s discovery of the existence of radio.
Their “pious pessimism,” so Wallace, was
that the taste of the American nation is lower than that of any other similar body of men on this sphere, and that, among the agents engaged in undermining it, radio promises to be one of the most effective.
“[I]n fact,” Wallace opined, the “custom of unfavorably comparing the kultur of America to that of any other nation,” was not restricted to the realm of broadcasting. Adopted by and cultivated among his countrymen and women, it was an attitude rooted in the notion that “America, in respect to its appreciation of the ‘higher things” was an infant among nations. The belief, according to Wallace, was so “widespread” as to constitute “one of the cardinal planks in the American credo.”
It finds place in our code of national convictions along side of such sacred tenets as “We must avoid all entangling alliances,” “The French do not know how to make coffee,” “Success is always the reward of effort,” “Newspaper men are conscienceless scoundrels,” “Abraham Lincoln was the incarnation of all virtue,” and “The Japs are a dangerous little people.”
As a US-educated ex-Academic mindful of his European perspective, I shall refrain from commenting on the US aversion to “entangling alliances,” other than allowing myself the aside that, one hundred years on, said view has experienced a remarkable resurgence in the age of MAGA and to pose the question, if only by the by, what America First might mean for the future of NATO.
And while I have nothing to say about the coffee culture of France, or about prejudicial views thereof, my musings on so-called “legacy media” such as radio and their reception does encourage me to consider the anti-wireless bias of which Wallace speaks vis-à-vis the effectively re-seeded and carefully nurtured suspicion that “Newspaper men are conscienceless scoundrels.”
After all, never has anti-media bias in the United States been more pronounced than in the second coming of MAGA.
As I browse online century-old periodicals like Radio Broadcast in the year of the 250th anniversary of the US of A, I feel compelled to revisit yesteryear’s attitudes toward radio as a moronizing force in the context of today’s radically transformed media landscape, especially in light of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the FCC.
Is ridding ourselves of traditional mass media making us more discerning consumers of news and entertainment?
Engaging with the world while encaged in social media bubbles, drifting apart in a sea of streaming services, with content seemingly tailored to us, we may be fooled into feeling that the imperilment and impending demise—or strategic dismantling—of traditional broadcasting—both public and network—is not all that big of a deal. We may not know where it comes from and why it is there to begin with, if indeed we trouble ourselves to ask, but there is plenty of content out there to keep us scrolling till doomsday.
And yet, what we may welcome as diversity—to use a contentious term whose erasure from socio-political discourse alerts us to the regimentation that underlies what we perceive as personal choice—may be nothing but fragmentation: a symptom of what ails people as a people that can no longer get together or along and that, actively discouraged, ultimately gives up on democracy to give autocracy all but free reign.
Then again, might my suspicion of influencers and their social media platforms be comparable to the bias of which Wallace writes in his column? Just prior to the formation of the National Broadcasting System in the autumn of 1926, which ushered in the age of network radio, the airwaves were still a rather bewildering DIY playground, perhaps not unlike the internet in the early 1990s or the blogosphere of the noughties in the “anything goes” and “anyone can” environment that I embraced and in which this journal originated.
Radio Broadcast’s column “The Listeners’ Point of View”—mind the positioning of the apostrophe—is expressive of this bewilderment and the concomitant feelings of anxiety and enthusiasm. In lieu of recordings, it provides the Lo-Fi curious such as myself with intriguing if patchy second-hand insights into those early, pre-network days of sound-only broadcasting. Just how frustratingly patchy will become apparent in the following.
John Wallace took over the column from editor Kingsley Welles in January 1926 who, Radio Broadcast argued, was “relinquishing his duties […] because of his heavy duties in other departments of the magazine.” Well, that is one way of spinning it.
Sharing his “Point of View” for the last time in December 1925—in which he posed the leading question “Is the Popularity of Jazz Music Waning?”—Welles declared that the “so-called music of jazz” was “largely responsible for the belief that it is moribund.” Dismissing any need for a lament, let alone a remedy, Welles contended, without providing much of an evidentiary base, that the “signs” were “unmistakable that the taste of the radio public is changing, and for the better.”
Perhaps not all readers appreciated the backhanded compliment, being congratulated for demanding something better from broadcasters than the popular music of the day they welcomed into their homes—free of charge, mind. And perhaps, Radio Broadcast realized that the “View” Kingsley represented was not the “Listeners’”—meaning the readers of said periodical—but that of a guardian of taste, presumably appointed by those responsible for the publication—whose highbrow attitudes dial-twisters resented rather than rated.
To wit, this rejoinder published in the March issue of Radio Broadcast. In a letter addressed to Kingsley, a Jazz-loving reader declared:
The only thing that avoided a conflagration in the local post office last night was the fact that I had the mental and moral strength to contain my wrath over a period of hours before putting it on paper.
It’s all about Jazz. It seems to me that you and most of your fraternity of critics are wearing yourselves down to mere shadows over an evil which does not exist. Much as it may astound you to know it, there are those of us who prefer jazz to the more profound type of program, and oddly enough, our radio sets cost just as much to run as do those of the listeners who like the classics.
Not that there was all that much jazz on offer, the irate reader scoffed:
Out here in the great open spaces, I twirled the dials of our Roberts Knockout one night last week (it was not Sunday) and brought in fifteen stations without a single Jazz orchestra among them. I got sermons and speeches; sopranos and bassos; cornetists, pianists, and violinists; organs, bands, long-winded announcers, and a pain in the neck. Conditions must be a lot different in New York.
It seems that Kingsley had not been listening carefully enough, neither to the wireless nor to the tuners-in that his column presumed to represent.
Enter John Wallace. Due to his “central location,” the editors of Radio Broadcasting insisted, the Chicago-based critic was
able to hear broadcast offerings in almost every part of the United States and Canada. Our new broadcast critic is an unusually versatile person, for he is a writer of great charm and not a little wit, as well as an artist of considerable ability. In his college days, his drawings and humorous “pieces” appeared in the Cornell Widow.
Perhaps, a column in a magazine devoted to radio was not quite the ambitious move one might expect from an Ivy League-educated journalist—but, whether motivated by self-consciousness or the superciliousness of his peers, it was a line of mocking commentary on the hostile attitude toward the medium that Wallace pursued in his writings for Radio Broadcast, a magazine whose viability—including the security of Wallace’s position—depended on the success of the wireless.
Whether Wallace subscribed to the views expressed in his column or whether he adopted an attitude suited to his employer is impossible to glean from the column. His words have been quoted by broadcast historians including Susan Smulyan, Michele Hilmes, as well as myself, in Immaterial Culture; but Wallace’s credentials—beyond his contributions to The Widow, of which I learned while researching for this article—have remained unchecked.
His first “Listeners’ View” column of January 1926—in which Wallace argued that the “astounding excellence of design of receiving sets” was the “only phase of the whole phenomenon” of broadcasting to be “worthy of unstinted praise”—suggests a willingness to serve as a promoter of the industry, even if the pitch is undermined by the lack of “praise” for the pleasure that might be derived from costly equipment as opposed to a homemade crystal set. That said, Radio Broadcasting was a publication focussed on technology rather than on programming.
In his second and third efforts, the latter of which I discussed previously, Wallace shifted to another aspect of reception—away from receivers to the question of receptiveness, from technology to taste..
His April 1926 entry, titled “Radio and the Taste of the Nation,” responded to the sweeping dismissal of radio programming and of the wireless as a cultural force in general—an attitude that would prevail in the United States throughout the medium’s quarter-century run as the principal source of home entertainment.
Wallace was careful to insist on the patriotic nature of his defense of the popular:
Try saying aloud; “Why, my dear, you know our people have simply no taste at all. Why any French workman, or Italian ditch digger, or German peasant, or heathen Chinese, has ten times as much appreciation of good art and good music as the average American. They seem to take naturally to the bettah things.”
Declaring the “national delusion that the taste of the average American is inferior to the taste of the average Anything-else” to be “pure and undiluted bunk,” Wallace concluded there was “no evidence to support the contention that the American taste is on a lower level than that of other countries (speaking always of the ‘average man’s’ taste).”
Generalizing about the “Taste of the Nation,” Wallace offers no commentary on his ostensible subject, the radio. The article may have amused and boosted the confidence of some radio-listening readers whom Wallace may be argued to have defended from accusations that they exemplified the “Land of the Cretin” and the “Home of the Depraved.”
However, aside from—and notwithstanding—a caption for two images of Cecilia Hansen (Russian violinist Tsetsiliya Genrikhovna Ganzen) and conductor Walter Damrosch, apparently chosen as poster children of radio’s highbrow aspiration—Wallace’s column has nothing to say about the programming that, I assumed, he was prepared to defend.
Despite the backlash against AI slop, there appear these days to be few confidence-inspiring signs that we—whatever our nationality—are getting any smarter, any more discerning when it comes the consumption of entertainment and whatever goes for news these days.
If we were smarter, would we so readily relinquish our fundamental rights to freedom of expression to those in whose interest it is to keep us from thinking harder, dreaming bigger and learning by way of trial as well as error?
Never mind the French and their coffee. Perhaps, the most enduring and devastatingly harmful credo guiding so many of us to this day is “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
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Harry Heuser 