Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947.

Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004)

IT IS DIFFICULT to write about causes or movements that experience infrequent or limited success, but American author Kathy Newman has done so thoughtfully, producing a book that prompts us to qualify our understandings of both radio advertising and consumer activism. Radio Active argues that radio advertising unintentionally moved listeners to recognize that they possessed power as consumers. In that sense, as Sears Roebuck executive Arthur Price noted, radio advertising carried within it the "seed of its own destruction." (158) Clearly, that seed never fully germinated, for radio advertising was, of course, the very engine of radio's golden age in the United States, and it is still with us. Playing watchdog to it was a losing battle. Sponsors policed their own ad scripts lest they offend target audiences, but they relied upon the structure of the radio game to remain essentially unchanged--a commercial space with few regulations to protect consumers.

Newman begins by setting out her work's contributions, which she characterizes as "revisions of the consumer/producer dichotomy." (11) Complicating this task, she notes, is the 'production' of the audience on the part of the radio industry--particularly its advertisers and sponsors--an industry seeking to cultivate a close identification between a hit program and the sponsoring product. An unproblematic relationship between these elements meant a profitable advertising vehicle, but too heavy a hand, too repetitious a jingle, too biased a commentator would bring the threat of lower ratings or, in some more extreme cases, boycotts. The reaction to advertising also created its own intellectual and literary circles, peopled with advice-givers like Ruth Brindze and playwright and whistle-blower Peter Morell.

Consumption (and by implication strategic withdrawals of consumption like the boycott) is for Newman best understood as "a form of work." This holds together well, especially when Newman is discussing the consumption of the ordinary goods most frequently linked with some of the most popular programs (coffee, razor blades, cereal), as buying these goods was clearly part of the (unpaid) domestic labour that fell most often to women. In this sense, even consuming leisure (or products associated with leisure) falls under the category of work, a departure from a clearer work/leisure division drawn by historians such as Roy Rosenzweig and John Kasson. This is a strong departure, and the author might have spent more time early in the book qualifying this important theme.