Radio Active

Name: Radio Active
Price: 66.10 AUD
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ISBN: 9780520235908

Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947

Kathleen M. Newman

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English

University of California Press
17 May 2004

Consumerism; Advertising

Radio Active tells the story of how radio listeners at the American mid-century were active in their listening practices. While cultural historians have seen this period as one of failed reform-focusing on the failure of activists to win significant changes for commercial radio-Kathy M. Newman argues that the 1930s witnessed the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between advertising and activism. Advertising helped to kindle the consumer activism of union members affiliated with the CIO, middle-class club women, and working-class housewives. Once provoked, these activists became determined to influence-and in some cases eliminate-radio advertising.

As one example of how radio consumption was an active rather than a passive process, Newman cites The Hucksters, Frederick Wakeman's 1946 radio spoof that skewered eccentric sponsors, neurotic account executives, and grating radio jingles. The book sold over 700,000 copies in its first six months and convinced broadcast executives that Americans were unhappy with radio advertising. The Hucksters left its mark on the radio age, showing that radio could inspire collective action and not just passive conformity.

By: Kathleen M. Newman
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 363g
ISBN: 9780520235908
ISBN 10: 0520235908
Pages: 250
Publication Date: 17 May 2004
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , A / AS level
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

"List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction. The Dialectic between Advertising and Activism Part I. Cultural Critics in the Age of Radio Chapter 1. The Psychology of Radio Advertising: Audience Intellectuals and the Resentment of Radio Commercials Chapter 2. ""Poisons, Potions, and Profits"": Radio Activists and the Origins of the Consumer Movement Part II. Consumers on the March: CIO Boycotts, Active Listeners, and Consumer Time Chapter 3. The Consumer Revolt of ""Mr. Average Man"": Boake Carter and the CIO Boycott of Philco Radio Chapter 4. Washboard Weepers: Women Writers, Women Listeners, and the Debate over Soap Operas Chapter 5. ""I Won't Buy You Anything But Love, Baby"": NBC, Donald Montgomery, and the Postwar Consumer Revolt Conclusion. High-Class Hucksters: The Rise and Fall of a Radio Republic Notes Bibliography Index"

Kathy M. Newman is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Reviews for Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947

Age-indeterminate Hiroshima survivor and 20-something librarian form an unlikely alliance while studying cloud-seekers in Audeguy's debut.The shadow of W.B. Sebald looms like cumulonimbus over this novel. In his Paris h tel particulier with its glassed-in third story, Japanese designer Akira Kumo is briefing Virginie, whom he's hired to catalogue his considerable archive on the science and art of cloud observation. Structured as a series of tales exchanged by the pair, the action ranges across two centuries of weather, depicting Quaker missionary Howard, the first man to classify clouds (c. 1802), Carmichael, whose sky paintings eventually drove him mad, and most exhaustively, Richard Abercrombie, an explorer and scientist who journeyed the globe hoping to best his rival, Williamsson, with a photographic atlas of world climates. A mushroom cloud has shaped Kumo's life: His true age (in 2005) could be anything from 71 to 80-plus, due to destroyed birth records, his suppressed memories and his compulsion to continually start anew. Gradually the truth emerges: His parents died in air raids, and his sister was vaporized by the bomb at Hiroshima - Kumo was saved because he was skinny-dipping in a pond. He sends Virginie to London to scout out the missing lynchpin of his collection: the fabled Abercrombie Protocol, supposedly the compendium Abercrombie completed after his world tour. After a brief affair with Abercrombie's grandson, Virginie secures the Protocol. She returns to Paris to find Kumo wheelchair-bound after an abortive suicide leap off his balcony. The Protocol chronicles Abercrombie's disillusionment in a Borneo jungle as he witnesses the death of a noble orangutan at the hands of boorish Englishmen. Abercrombie, a 49-year-old virgin, becomes a determined libertine: The Protocol, it will appear, is largely photographs of women's genitalia. Bent's supple translation enlivens potentially dry meteorological meditations. Readers might wish for more stage time with Kumo and Virginie, which is not possible in a novel that exalts intersecting motifs over character. Unconventional and memorable. (Kirkus Reviews)