It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of the radio explosion in these years. In 1925, Denmark and the Netherlands, for example, each had just under 25,000 receivers. By 1936, there were 660,000 and 940,000 respectively. This was almost one per household, the same as in the United States; in Argentina, one in ten people had a radio.129 After an early stage of individual listening, the radio became sociable. The family was at the heart of this shared experience: hours of daily listening went up dramatically the more members a family had.130 But the living room was not sealed off. Quite the opposite: by the late 1920s, Ozark and other makers were advertising portable devices: ‘Camp, fish, hunt, tour with Radio. Make your vacation complete.’131
Above all, the radio amplified relations with neighbours. Sometimes this meant collective listening. Listeners were urged to take their radio to neighbours and to the office: ‘There’s no loneliness where there is Radiola.’ Heinrich Weber recalled with pride how, when he was a young boy in Hildesheim, Germany, in the early 1930s, his father encouraged him to put his apparatus in the window so the whole neighbourhood could listen in. In South Carolina, early radio owners would entertain the whole town.132
Gramophone and radio transformed soundscapes and sensitivities to noise across the globe. At the flick of a switch, radio killed silence and loneliness. It could mean sleepless nights as much as shared joy. In 1934, Singapore’s Legislative Council passed an amendment to the Minor Offences Ordinance which prohibited the playing of gramophones and wireless music after midnight except with the permission of the police.133 Conflict cut two ways. Such was the sensitivity of transformers at the time that reception was easily disturbed by a neighbour switching on an electrical appliance. Studies at the time suggest that one third of the many thousand reported interferences came from private households. Some neighbours fought a war of noise with their new electrical weapons. Denmark was one of the first countries (in 1931) to pass a law protecting listeners from interference. In Germany, naturally, there were fines for troublemakers who deliberately used their electric iron or vacuum cleaner to interfere with their neighbour’s listening habits.134
Radio transformed everyday life in ways that far exceeded anything earlier revolutionaries had tried to achieve with dress reform and other changes from above. People adjusted their daily schedules to follow their favourite programme. Some clergymen called for boycotts of Sunday-evening broadcasts, in vain.135 Public stations such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), founded in 1922, introduced ‘Children’s Hour’ to nurture future citizens. Radio listening was easily coordinated with a range of other home tasks, injecting some fun into chores: ‘Dishwashing does not seem like drudgery and goes much faster accompanied by sprightly jazz,’ one woman wrote in 1925.136 For people with lower education and income, in particular, the radio became the prime instrument of leisure. But even among American women with a college education, almost half listened to two hours of radio or more in the evenings. Early American audience surveys show that women had the radio on fairly constantly during the day – ‘Oh, I tell you, it’s company to me – someone with me all the time in the house.’137 Men mainly listened over breakfast and in the evening. Children lay awake at night, mulling over what they had heard earlier. Some reported nightmares, but most parents endorsed their children’s listening habits. The radio seemed both to educate and make home life more interesting. This was one of the main attractions for many: it diffused conflict, filled silence and got the family together: ‘If we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t have a family.’138
The main critique of the radio came from across the Atlantic, via the émigré Jewish intellectual and music theorist Theodor Adorno. Adorno found refuge from the Nazis in New York at the Columbia radio research project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and run by another émigré, the Viennese Paul Lazarsfeld. Here Adorno consolidated his opinion about the ‘social authoritarianism’ of the radio.139 It is a revealing episode for our story, not only because his ideas would become a central plank in the Marxist critique of the cultural industries which, through the Frankfurt School of Social Research, would inspire a new generation of critics after 1945. It also shows how a Marxist focus on production, combined with an inherited European elite sensibility, could lead a formidable thinker such as Adorno to misunderstand this new medium of consumer culture completely.
To Adorno, everything was serious, especially culture. He did not do fun. True listening meant an all-encompassing critical engagement with music as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. Anything else was just passive entertainment. More was at stake than poor taste. Light, popular music was part of capitalism’s strategy of imposing its commodified spirit on all spheres of life, snuffing out creativity and freedom. It was a short step from mass-produced pot-boilers like ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ to fascism.
Biography and theory were one in Adorno’s case. He was born in 1903 to the half-French, half-Italian singer Maria Calvelli-Adorno, who had performed at the Imperial Court Opera in Vienna; his father was a Jewish wine merchant. At their Frankfurt home, life evolved around the piano. ‘Teddie’, an only child, played duets, learnt violin, attended the conservatory and composed several string quartets and works for piano. Shy and precocious, Adorno affected the guise of the intellectual artist – rather than wear a wristwatch, he carried his watch in his shirt pocket, on a chain. His first forays into music writing in the early 1920s mixed adolescent self-importance with a conviction that only true art, uncompromised by bourgeois sentiment, could save humanity from extinction. Even Stravinsky did not go far enough; Adorno panned his Soldier’s Tale as ‘a dismal Bohemian prank’.140 Only twelve-tone music promised salvation. In 1925, he went to Vienna to study with Alban Berg. In brief, Adorno was the musical equivalent of Bruno Taut, in a Marxist vein: commercial fluff and bourgeois ornamentation had to go.
Radio, Adorno concluded, was the ‘narcotic’ loudspeaker of the bourgeois system. It made for ‘retrogressive tendencies in listening, for the avalanche of fetishism which is overtaking music and burying it under the moraine of entertainment.’ Such snobbery sufficiently irritated his boss, Lazarsfeld, for him to ask Adorno whether the true fetishism was not perhaps rather his indulgence in grand Latin phrases. Adorno was plainly disgusted by the idea of a farmer’s wife listening to Beethoven while washing up. Radio destroyed symphony as a collective experience. It privatized listening, turning music into just another ‘piece of furniture’. Classical music was ‘trivialized’ as it was broken up into recognizable theme songs and served like any other ‘ready-made piecemeal product which can be enjoyed with a minimum of effort’. As the gap between serious and popular music widened, so people moved further away from true consciousness and freedom. What religion had been to Marx, commercial culture was to Adorno: the opiate of the masses. Popular or, as he called it, ‘vulgar’ music, including jazz, was how bourgeois society lulled people into servitude.141
Adorno did theory, not empirical research, and, with the benefit of hindsight, what is perhaps most interesting is how his analysis managed to evolve into its own kind of conformity, leading many in the next generation to rehearse pre-packaged condemnations of consumer culture. It is therefore worth emphasizing how out of touch he was. Radio listeners were intensely active, American researchers found in the 1930s. For men especially, the radio nurtured a love of music. ‘I always liked music,’ an Italian-born shoemaker reported, ‘but being unable to hear much good music prevented my enjoyment of it. But then I began listening to the radio and now I am familiar with most of the great works. I never would enjoy it so much without the radio.’ Some played piano less because ‘I can see my own faults too clearly.’ 142 But, in general, the radio and gramophone gave a boost to music making, spread new styles like jazz, and increased the number of orchestras. Records were sometimes used to challenge power and authority, as when rallying Indian nationalists to boycott British goods during the partition of Bengal in 1905. Instead of much-feared uniformity, the radio crea
ted openings for diverse genres and listening communities, including folk cultures on the brink of extinction. A Swedish machinist working in Norway was deeply moved when he tuned his radio in the evenings to ‘Stockholm-Motala-Jönköping and heard a song of his childhood, sung in my childhood dialect’. Many stations broadcast local programmes in local dialect until the Swedish government took over in 1935.143 In Japan, radio kept alive traditional instruments and forms of storytelling; in Malaya the music of kroncong; in the United States it transmitted the blues and popularized hillbilly music and hearth-and-home songs. By the 1930s, black families were able to listen to black DJs playing black music.144 In a single week, over 30,000 hours of music programmes were presented to the American public.145 The radio encouraged not conformity but a cornucopia of tastes.
How and what people consumed did not follow some prior logic of mass production. Adorno’s shortcoming was to ignore what the radio did inside people’s minds. Radio listening was a new, emotional experience. For men in particular, it opened up a world of feelings. Some early listeners switched off the light to heighten the sensation. Most people listened in the comfort of their home, but in all other respects the radio was everything but private. Commentators in the late 1920s who predicted that the radio’s appeal would be limited to ‘isolated persons like farmers, the sightless, and those who are nearly deaf’ were soon proved wrong.146 Radio stimulated the social imagination. Without an actual orchestra or group of actors, the listener had to imagine the scene and players. Fans of serial shows created a theatre in their minds. An early study of radio psychology compared the experience to people with vision having to learn to be like blind people and visualize the world through their ears. This ‘practice in visualization is helping to restore in adults some of the keenness of imagery dulled since childhood’.147
Day-time serial listeners were not tuning in because of a ‘vacuum’ in their lives, Herta Herzog, a researcher and Lazarsfeld’s wife, found; there was no evidence that active listeners stopped going to clubs and churches. Rather, the home was now the entrance to a virtual social world. Radio created a feeling of community with the thousands of others listening in to the same programme. For some, series such as The Goldbergs – a daily fifteen-minute soap about a poor Jewish family in the Bronx that ran in the 1930s and 1940s – were an escape from their real family. For others, they were a source of comfort, making them ‘feel better to know that other people have troubles, too’. Characters became friends, even better than real ones – ‘Friends are so unpredictable . . . But radio people are reliable.’148 A large number felt they were learning about life from these programmes, from social etiquette and how to handle the kids to why a husband came home grumpy from work.149
The eighteenth century had assigned ‘the spectator’ a central role in the advance of politeness. Imagining themselves in someone else’s position would foster sympathy. People were encouraged to be their own spectators and evaluate their effect on others. The radio was not about politeness. But, perhaps, we can see it as a twentieth-century version of the spectator, a cultural successor to the diary and the conversation club. In their radio imagination, people forged new social solidarities and acted out social roles. Listening to the wireless expanded the emotional horizon of the private person, who learnt to share the joy and pain of distant others.
The ancient Greek idea of the home was the oikos, a household that united production and consumption, family and servants. Long after it had vanished from the landscape, this ideal continued to exercise a hold on the modern imagination. The rise of industry and commerce and the competing demands of private and public worlds caused a crisis of identity. The home had to be more than just a place for consuming stuff. In the utopian novel Looking Backward (1887), Edward Bellamy offered a socialist answer. The hero falls asleep and wakes up in 2000 in the socialist city of Boston to behold the home transformed. Housework has disappeared. Cooking and laundry are done by communal experts. ‘We choose houses no larger than we need, and furnish them so as to involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in order.’150 In the 1950s, real researchers descended on one of the new suburbs outside Toronto and described a very different scene. The home had been entirely taken over by individualist consumerism: it was a dormitory with bloated leisure spaces and showrooms of stuff. The cult of personal possessions was splitting the family into ‘an aggregate of persons with little reason or motivation to stay together’.151
In truth, the history of the home has been more mundane and more paradoxical than either of these two extremes. Production has not left the home. Rather, consumption and homemaking have reinforced each other. Practical usefulness justified the purchase and use of home equipment, including the radio. In the course of the twentieth century, people have spent more material and emotional resources on the home than ever before, just as one half of the population (women) was spending less time in it. Collections, pictures, souvenirs and other objects have become vital family bonds,152 taking on the role once played by shared work.
Even the dystopian picture of acquisitive suburbia was belied by the fact that researchers in the 1950s found old furniture in new homes: inherited sofas, old dining-room tables and old sterling cutlery gave families a sense of stable identity.153 In their kitchen, people preferred sociability to functionalism. Modern design faced formidable barriers of custom and habits. In Finland, working-class and rural residents converted the functional kitchen into the family space they were used to. When working-class families moved to new homes in Britain in the 1940s, one of the first things some did was to erect temporary partitions to create an eating area alongside the new, small kitchen. The partitions came down only when the rent-collector called. ‘Modern’ furniture was all but absent.154 To design-conscious, middle-class observers, living-room suites and deep-pile carpets were all identical abominations of conformity and tastelessness. The people living there, by contrast, had an equally strong sense that they ‘had their own taste’ that set their home apart from their neighbours’.155 What mattered was how things were arranged and the many little objects that said, ‘This is who we are.’ Rather than being primarily about emulation, things were signs of identity and respect.
In the battle between competing ideas of comfort, then, emotions had the edge over rational efficiency. Comfort was about feeling at home. It was ‘good’ consumption and justified spending and buying furniture on instalment plans. ‘We’re not lavish, but we like to be comfortable,’ one British family explained in the 1980s. ‘You feel comfortable in comfortable furniture. Other people buy cheap things to save money for . . . what we would regard as silly things. They’re not concentrating on their home comforts and nice settee. It’s not for people to come and see what we’ve got but to actually feel comfortable. They’re not necessities but they are not luxuries either.’156
6
Age of Ideologies
She was just nineteen and lucky to be alive. Heidi Simon had been born the year Hitler came to power. Frankfurt am Main, her hometown, was among the cities worst hit by Allied bombing; the 1944 raids killed thousands and left half the population homeless. Now, in 1952, Heidi was one of the winners in an amateur photography competition to celebrate the American Marshall plan. Recovery had barely begun. The entries reflected the harsh realities of post-war Europe: ‘Bread for all’; ‘No more hunger’; ‘New homes’. She scooped one of the top prizes: a Vespa moped plus prize money. The officials at the Ministry for the Marshall Plan may well have been surprised by her response. She was very happy about winning but, she wrote, to be honest and without trying to sound ‘impertinent’, she wondered whether she could not rather have a Lambretta than a Vespa. For the entire last year she had ‘passionately’ longed for a Lambretta. The Ministry refused and sent her the Vespa.1
This snapshot of young Heidi Simon, tucked away in the German federal archives, is a reminder of how the large forces of history intersect with the material lives and dreams of ordinary people. The Marshall Plan was a c
ritical moment in the reconstruction of Europe and the advancing Cold War divide between East and West, but its recipients were far from passive. Heidi’s outspoken desire for a particularly stylish consumer good in the midst of rubble also challenges the conventional idea that consumer society was the product of galloping growth in the age of affluence, the mid-1950s to 1973. It jars with the sometimes instinctive assumption that people turn to goods only for identity, communication or sheer fun after they have fulfilled their basic needs for food, shelter, security and health. It is no coincidence that this psychological model of the ‘hierarchy of needs’, initially proposed by the American Abraham Maslow in 1943, gained in popularity just as affluence began to spread. According to this theory, Heidi Simon should have asked to trade in the Vespa for bricks and mortar and perhaps some savings bonds, rather than hoping for an upgrade to the 123cc Lambretta with its sleek single-piece tubular frame.
In the era of the Cold War, consumer society became an American trademark. Consumerism, democracy and capitalism were promoted as one package. It could be embraced for exporting freedom or condemned for fostering soulless, selfish materialism, but there was no doubt amongst contemporaries that consumer society was as American as apple pie. It was at this point that general models were first assembled of what a consumer society really was, most notably by the economist J. K. Galbraith in his bestseller The Affluent Society (1958). The United States was presented as a new society, where people were driven to consume ever more to keep the engine of production running, at the expense of public welfare, the environment and their own happiness. This model has shaped the way we think and talk about consumption ever since. It continues to inform the worldview of many critics today, who trace the dangers of ‘consumerism’ to a post-1945 addiction to growth. The neo-liberal 1990s told a similar story, but celebrated the triumph of choice and markets. The end of our own era of affluence in 2009 and the decline of America are an opportune moment to take a broader view.
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