by Tim Wu
For whatever reason, the second time was the charm. By the end of 1929, Amos ’n’ Andy had become a craze, and the first bona fide hit serial in broadcast history—and the first show people refused to miss, arranging their time around it. No less a cultural arbiter than The New Yorker was now remarking both the show’s quality and the phenomenon: “Amos ’n’ Andy have gone beyond all control. The radio has never had a more amusing feature, nor one that has created so much havoc.”15
The audiences, astounding at the time, are still impressive by today’s standards. While measurements were crude in those days, by 1931, Amos ’n’ Andy is believed to have attracted some 40 million listeners each and every evening—with some episodes reaching 50 million—this out of a population that was then 122 million. It was a result unprecedented for any entertainment product, the equivalent of having today’s Super Bowl audiences each and every evening—and with just one advertiser.
Having seized their audience, the sponsor’s messages soon grew longer, and soon were indistinguishable from the old hard-sell advertising copy, albeit written to be heard, not read:
As we have told you repeatedly, Pepsodent Tooth Paste today contains a new and different cleansing and polishing material. We want to emphasize the fact that this cleansing and polishing material used in Pepsodent Tooth Paste is contained in no other tooth paste. That is very important. It is important to us, because Pepsodent laboratories spent eleven years in developing this remarkable material. It is important to the public, because no other cleansing and polishing material removes film from teeth as effectively as does this new discovery. What’s more, this new material is twice as soft as that commonly used in tooth pastes. Therefore it gives great safety, greater protection to lovely teeth. Use Pepsodent Tooth Paste twice a day—See your dentist at least twice a year.16
In our fragmented age, it is only a few times a year when even a quarter of the entire nation listens to or watches anything at once. But during the height of the Amos ’n’ Andy craze, that happened every day, and consequently the 7 p.m. time slot, according to contemporary reports, began to influence the schedule of everything. Hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters would broadcast the show for their patrons. Fearing displacement, movie theaters advertised the installation of radios to broadcast Amos ’n’ Andy at 7 p.m., before the newsreels and features.
We have yet to ask an obvious question: Just what, exactly, was so enrapturing about Amos ’n’ Andy? It was not necessarily the patter and gags. Despite The New Yorker’s enthusiasm, another early critic panned the show’s national debut in the New York Sun: “Their lines are not good and there is no pretense of whatever to carry out the illusion of comedy. It is a straight dialogue between two common-place ‘darkies’ and is without even the saving asset of a well thought-out situation…on first acquaintance they hardly attract a second glance.”17 Indeed, there were other regional radio minstrel shows in the 1920s, not much funnier, and none reached an audience anything close to that of Amos ’n’ Andy. It seems that what gripped so much attention, what kept millions coming back, were the show’s elaborate and suspenseful plot lines. The New Yorker again: “For Amos ’n’ Andy…have finally mastered the trick of creating suspense. With half a dozen plots running through their sketches, they hold the dramatic tension in a way to arouse the admiration of Professor Baker.” In particular, much of the show turned on the romance between the earnest Amos and Ruby Taylor, whom he’d met in Chicago. Later, the focus was on the engagement of know-it-all Andy and the bossy divorcée Madam Queen. Nowadays we might say that Amos ’n’ Andy resembled a soap opera—but as we shall see, it was really soap operas that copied Amos ’n’ Andy.
Subsequent commentators would remark the obvious appeal of reinforcing stereotypes that justified the second-class social status of blacks. (The NAACP did register complaints, but these had no effect on NBC at the time.) As one historian, Erik Barnouw, wrote in 1966, “In retrospect it is easy…to see the stories and Amos ’n’ Andy as part of the ghetto system. All of it was more readily accepted and maintained if one could hold onto this: ‘they’ were lovely people, essentially happy people, ignorant and somewhat shiftless and lazy in a lovable, quaint way, not fitting in with higher levels of enterprise, better off where they were.”18
But there was also great empathy stirred in some hearts, rather like that provoked by Uncle Tom’s Cabin in antebellum America. As one listener wrote in fan mail, “We have been inspired by the high aims and rigid honesty of Amos, and we have all been close to tears at times when real trials and tribulations beset either of our beloved friends.”
The wild success of Amos ’n’ Andy, and similar shows to follow it, marked something profound, though in a sense quite unexpected. And it represents a turning point in our story, for three different reasons.
First, while NBC might have originally considered itself a way to demonstrate the excellence of RCA’s radios, after Amos ’n’ Andy it was now clearly and irresistibly in the business of selling the attention of enormous audiences to those who could pay for and use it. The broadcaster thus definitively became an attention merchant, in the model pioneered by Benjamin Day at the New York Sun. Some ironies would be papered over: never mind that a sponsor had had to beg to buy the airtime (at a premium) in order to show NBC just how much attention radio could theoretically capture and sell the next time; the attention was now and ever after the broadcaster’s product to develop and to resell to the highest bidder. Needless to say, there would never be a backward glance to the days when the network existed to sell the hardware!19
Second: the power of Amos ’n’ Andy—an entertainment offering—to bring in giant audiences willing to hear advertising effected an unlikely merger between the business of entertainment producers and that of advertisers. Before this point, received wisdom had it that advertising and entertainment did not mix. Books had never enjoyed much success selling ads in their pages; and the experiments with inserting advertising into films had also failed, most dramatically in the 1910s, when a series of silent movie theaters based on advertising, as opposed to box office sales, went bankrupt. But Amos ’n’ Andy and its successors managed to thread the needle, creating a business model by which any medium could, to use a later vernacular, “sell eyeballs.”
The proof was in the pudding, in the sense that the show did save Pepsodent toothpaste, at least for a while. Sales increased more than twofold between 1929 and 1930. Emboldened, Templin doubled down on his bet, sponsoring in 1931 The Rise of the Goldbergs, another fifteen-minute serial, this one about a Jewish family living in the Bronx.*3 And so the epic battle for the attention of America’s white Protestant majority would be waged and won thanks to the chance discovery of its fascination with the perceived hilariousness of blacks and Jews.
Third, and perhaps most momentous: here also began a race for the conquest of time and space that continues to this day. Amos ’n’ Andy demonstrated that an industry could, in effect, wholly “own” a part of the day—in this case, seven p.m., every day, across the land. And it could do so in spaces once inviolable, inconceivable. For with this show, selling had definitively breached the barrier between public and private space. What the agents of commerce could long do “out there” they could now also do “in here,” and no one was grumbling, at least not yet.
Having planted the flag in the evening hours, broadcasters would proceed to colonize other parts of the day laden with attention as yet un-reaped. Soon they would find success with daytime soap operas, targeting women at home with little to do, thanks to all the modern conveniences they had been sold. Using the basic serial template of Amos ’n’ Andy, soap opera plots centered on family relationships among the white middle class, the target consumer. Early soap operas were thus even more natural selling tools than minstrel shows were. As one contemporary boasted, “The transition from commercial announcements to the story can be practically painless, and a great deal of actual selling can be done in the story itself.”20
T
he methods used in daytime radio were more overt than those of prime time. The most respected and trusted characters would testify during the show about the merits of, say, Pillsbury’s new cake mixes. In one episode of the soap opera Today’s Children, for example, the trusted housewife character, “traditional but open to modern ideas,” visits Pillsbury’s kitchen. She exclaims, “The thing that impressed me so much was the orderliness of the kitchen—jest like my kitchen.” Of Pillsbury she said, “They’re always makin’ and testin’ new recipes…they served this cake at luncheon—never have put anythin’ in my mouth so delicious…I got the recipe.”
As Irna Phillips, inventor of the first radio soap operas, explained: “sincerity, honesty, genuineness—true values. If the woman listener is made conscious of these standards in the story itself, how little effort it would take to make her conscious of these same standards with the product advertising.” In Fortune magazine, Phillips revealed her own recipe for engaging female listeners. “You appeal to,” she said, “(1) the instinct for self-preservation, (2) sex, (3) the family instinct, or (4) all three together if you can manage.”
The invention of “Prime time”—the attentional habit of turning on the radio (later, the television) at the designated hour each and every evening of the year—was a momentous cultural as well as commercial innovation at a point when the two categories were drifting steadily closer. For it transformed not only the industries equipped to capture attention, but also the lives of those whose attention was now there for the taking. We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to—how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambience. When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
With the establishment of prime time, daytime, and other new zones of attention, we see in effect another feature of the modern self emerge. Insofar as we are influenced, even formed, to some degree, by whatever we pay attention to, the novel fact of an entire population listening to the same show at the same time every day could not help but create a new degree of shared awareness, even shared identity. Prime time was (and to a lesser degree remains) a massive ritual of collective attention, a force drawing people together.
During World War I, George Creel had envisioned welding the American people into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.”21 God and country had always had special tools for achieving this, the ultimate ones being threats of eternal damnation and external force, respectively. But the attention merchants had no access to such threats, or need for them; they would compel us with carrots, not sticks. They would rely on the power of entertainment to weld audiences into a saleable product. The approach, ultimately, would prove no less effective.
* * *
*1 On the idealistic days of the early radio, see The Master Switch, chapter 2.
*2 The show debuted in January 1926 as a two-man comedy series, Sam ’n’ Henry, on Chicago’s WGN. In March 1928, the show moved to the Chicago Daily News’s radio station, WMAQ, where it was reinvented as Amos ’n’ Andy. See Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz, The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010).
*3 Amazingly, a loose remake—or at least a show with the same title—was launched for television in 2013.
CHAPTER 8
THE PRINCE
William S. Paley, president and chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System, was of a type lost to our times, when vice has ceased to pay virtue its natural tribute, hypocrisy. He was simultaneously well mannered and insatiably hedonistic, cultivating the finest things and the fanciest of friends while maintaining a quiet, understated demeanor. “His strivings were nearly invisible,” wrote an associate, “his actions always veiled in gentility.”1 His several marriages, each to a beautiful socialite, never interfered with his sexual conquests. Paley was, in short, a playboy of the old school. And due to timing, coincidence, and some level of innate talent, he would become a primary, and perhaps the prime, merchant of the twentieth century’s definitive attention industry, broadcasting.
Paley’s entry into it was close to a chance occurrence. Born rich, he had, by age twenty-seven, graduated from college and taken a secure place in the family business, which sold La Palina cigars. His classmates had seen him as destined to do little more than live off his parents’ money and chase women and the other pleasures of the bon vivant. But something happened while he was serving as the advertising manager for the family cigar company: he, like so many others, became entranced by radio. The family had decided to advertise on the new medium, whereupon Paley devised the idea of “La Palina girl,” a glamorous and sultry singer who was depicted as the only female guest at an all-male gathering of smokers, whom she would amuse with her wisecracks and song. While producing the show, Paley fell in love with La Palina girl—the miraculous sensation of coming up with a hit. While no Amos ’n’ Andy, his show did drive sales of the family cigars from 400,000 to one million a day—making it “one of radio’s earliest spectacular achievements.”
So smitten was he that Paley started cajoling his father for a toy, almost as another rich kid might ask for a sports car, and soon, crossing the Atlantic, Samuel Paley would be telling a fellow passenger, “I just bought the Columbia Broadcasting System for my son.” As an investment, it seemed foolish at best. The network had long been available to NBC and its boss, David Sarnoff, but it was so tiny (sixteen part-time, low-wattage stations) and NBC so powerful that Sarnoff had written it off as worth neither buying nor destroying. Columbia was an outsider with a limited following, and concerning its first programming, a reviewer in Radio Broadcast was brutal. “Probably not a dozen people in the country, beside ourselves, heard it. No one not paid to do so, as we are, could have survived it.” Thus, still in his late twenties, Paley became an unlikely captain of what looked like a sinking ship. With his “cocktail slouch” he seemed, according to a contemporary, “just a rich man’s son, another angel with ten fingers to burn.”
But Paley was easy to underestimate, as he soon showed. In the late 1920s, the business worked this way: network shows were produced either by the networks themselves—so-called public interest, or “sustaining” shows—or by other businesses that “sponsored” a show, the way Pepsodent sponsored Amos ’n’ Andy. The broadcast schedule at most affiliated stations was therefore a combination of these sustaining programs, for which they paid the network a licensing fee, and the sponsored shows, plus whatever fare the local station itself might put on. NBC and CBS lost money producing the sustaining shows, but the idea was to make up the difference with the substantial advertising proceeds from the sponsored shows, of which a small portion went to the affiliates.
In 1928, Paley made a bold offer to the nation’s many independent radio stations. The CBS network would provide any of them all of its sustaining content for free—on the sole condition that they agree to carry the sponsored content as well, for which they would, moreover, receive a handsome check. In short, Paley was offering a full slate of programming, and paying stations to take it—an apparent win-win deal, considering they were often desperate to fill their hours anyhow.
In just three months, Paley shocked the broadcast world by signing twenty-five new affiliates. CBS, once a kind of joke, became larger than either of NBC’s Red or Blue networks*1 in just one fiscal quarter. Paley understood that, under the guise of a giveaway, he was in fact buying audiences on the cheap (a trick similar to that of the American penny press of the 1830s). With his requirement of carrying the full CBS schedule, he had also begun a trend toward homog
enizing and nationalizing the content of radio. That would eventually become a cause for complaint, but at the time it was an insuperable competitive advantage: NBC, in contrast, was stingily charging its affiliates to license its sustaining programs, while also driving a hard bargain, on a show-by-show basis, over their share of proceeds from running the sponsored shows—to say nothing of setting very exacting technical requirements to become an NBC station. With CBS and Paley everything was free and easy, good times for all, and so stations were happy to join up.
Paley never understood the technical side of radio well, but he understood from the beginning the very particular and unusual business of being an attention merchant. By that time, there were large new industries, like film, in the relatively straightforward business of selling content. Broadcasting, however, was still in a nebulous state, somewhere between a public service and a business. Officially, radio stations were trustees of the public airwaves and were required, by federal law, to conduct their broadcasting “in the public interest.”2 Accordingly, some stations were noncommercial, and the commercial stations were required to broadcast some programs that were public minded. Nonetheless Paley understood that radio was quickly becoming a business, that amassing a giant audience was key, and that broadcasting would become enormously profitable by growing the network and by offering skillful programming. Yet before any of this would work, he would first need to sell advertisers on the possibilities of broadcasting itself.
Over the 1920s and 1930s, CBS produced a series of pamphlets emphasizing the power of broadcasting to reach into the minds of its listeners. One entitled You Do What You’re Told argued that since people tended to obey human voices, radio advertising would be more compelling than existing print forms. Radio, according to the pamphlet, “presents the living voice of authority,” giving it the “supple power to move people and mold them, to enlist them and command them.”*2