Network Nations

A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting

Michele Hilmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136911187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

In Network Nations, Michele Hilmes reveals and re-conceptualizes the roots of media globalization through a historical look at the productive transnational cultural relationship between British and American broadcasting. Though frequently painted as opposites--the British public service tradition contrasting with the American commercial system--in fact they represent two sides of the same coin. Neither could have developed without the constant presence of the other, in terms not only of industry and policy but of aesthetics, culture, and creativity, despite a long history of oppositional rhetoric.

Based on primary research in British and American archives, Network Nations argues for a new transnational approach to media history, looking across the traditional national boundaries within which media is studied to encourage an awareness that media globalization has a long and fruitful history. Placing media history in the framework of theories of nationalism and national identity, Hilmes examines critical episodes of transnational interaction between the US and Britain, from radio's amateurs to the relationship between early network heads; from the development of radio features and drama to television spy shows and miniseries; as each other's largest suppliers of programming and as competitors on the world stage; and as a network of creative, business, and personal relationships that has rarely been examined, but that shapes television around the world. As the global circuits of television grow and as global regions, particularly Europe, attempt to define a common culture, the historical role played by the British/US media dialogue takes on new significance.

Part 1

The Nations Imagine Radio, 1922–1938

In the beginning we were to some extent guided by the example of America. I do not mean that America indicated the path, but rather that America showed us what pitfalls to avoid; we learnt from her experience. Broadcasting in America was well under way, with a two years’ start, when the service was first inaugurated in Great Britain, and it was soon common knowledge that the lack of control in America was resulting in a chaotic confusion … Britain, as I say, benefited by America’s example, and a centrally controlled system of broadcasting stations was the result.

—John Reith, undated speech @1926¹

I hold up to you the superior scholarship, the superior good taste, the superior urbanity of the British broadcasting system. It is all that can be said for it in comparison with ours. I hold it up to you and I ask you: Will you for that bribe surrender what America has given to you in your inherent passion for all feasible liberty of utterance? Will you for that bribe surrender all your chances of free expression on the whole American air to the autocratic determination of one selected citizen? If so, vote British. If not, vote American.

—William Hard, NAB spokesman, 1933²

Nation and broadcasting are deeply intertwined, as these two quotes demonstrate; they grew up together. “If there was a moment when the nineteenth-century ‘principle of nationality’ triumphed it was at the end of World War I”—so Eric Hobsbawm begins his chapter entitled “The apogee of nationalism, 1918–1950” (1990, 131). Also triumphant was the technology of radio broadcasting, grown from a hobby of Morse-coded amateur exchanges in the ether to a crucial element of warfare and a hotbed of technological innovation. As military-trained radio enthusiasts streamed back home to pursue the beckoning possibilities of transmitting voice and music over the air, and international corporations squared off over issues of patent control, national governments confronted the pressing issue of how best to handle this new medium that both promised and threatened.

This chapter begins the process of tracing the transnational dialectic between Britain and America with a focus on the politics, economics, and discursive positioning that shaped the founding decisions of broadcasting as a medium and a social institution. During this period of national re-grouping after World War I, when radio remained primarily local and governments and corporations experimented with its potential uses, the United States and Britain, along with Germany, led the world in radio technology. Their constitutive dialogue, and the ways in which they resolved the question of how to handle radio’s border-defying and radically democratic properties in an age of nationalism, set up models for all those who would follow.³ While the US forged ahead blithely into the era of amateur radio experimentation and entrepreneurship, only belatedly attempting to impose controls, Britain pondered its example and devised a broadcasting system specifically intended to hold off the worst of the “American chaos,” yet which stifled the democratic potential of radio under a monopoly that protected powerful interests. Later, when pressure built to organize the scattered local business of American radio into national networks and bring it under greater state supervision, the BBC served both as both good and bad example in popular discourse and in regulatory debates. British notions of national “quality” were linked to Progressive social agendas to counter the values of localism and diversity in favor of a higher, more homogenized vision of national culture that strengthened national unity while similarly stifling diversity and protecting powerful interests.

Yet throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, personal and professional relationships, frequent exchanges of observations and ideas, and a growing practice of transnational cultural exchange between the two dominant broadcasting nations stimulated the development of radio as an art and as a cultural force, creating a new space for the kind of cultural internationalism traced by Iriye (1997, 71–2). By the end of the 1930s, as impending war mandated closer collaboration, British and American broadcasters had, in the tension between the two systems, forged the permanent hallmarks of twentieth-century national broadcasting, innovating many of the program forms and genres still prevalent in broadcasting today, extending the reach of music, literature, discussion, and drama into the ordinary domestic sphere, and setting the terms for radio’s global development. Out of the productive clash between the values of private profit and public service, commercial enterprise and state support, decentralization and national control, Britain and America built, between them, an “empire of the air” that exists to this day.

This section, broken into three chapters, sets the early development of radio in both countries side by side, and in so doing not only reveals the frequently overlooked history of mutual influence and interaction between these two leading nations, but also their dialectical impact on twentieth-century notions of national culture and national identity. By situating the birth of broadcasting institutions and policy within a larger, transnational context of political, cultural, and economic developments, both similarities and differences in the two systems can be revealed, paying close attention to primary documentation on both sides of the Atlantic as well as the larger rhetorical uses to which broadcasting was put. The essential localism of America’s broadcasting system, rooted in the structure and philosophy of the American socio-political system, takes on new significance against the essential centralization of Britain’s, and vice versa; the strikingly early formation of national networking in Great Britain, equally relevant to its social and political goals in the early twentieth century, derives greater meaning when counterposed against the slower and more uneven growth of networks in the US. Above all, the fundamental transnationality of radio, despite its national framework, emerges and is shown to be a significant force in the shaping of national identities and relationships as Western nations go from war to peace, and then head for war again.

Chapter 1

Chaos and Control

During the years of World War I and the prosperous though brief peace that ensued, radio technology developed from a medium of Morse code transmitted over increasing distances to a medium of analogue sound transmission. The technologies that permitted this new avenue of culture and communication emerged in various places around the globe, growing out of the telephone and telegraph that had preceded them. Yet their institutionalization and transformation into cultural forms was affected by the models set by the two Western nations first to perceive their value in national terms: the United States and Great Britain. This is not to assert that other nations did not initiate broadcasting, either in the public or the private sector, in the years immediately following the war. But nowhere did it develop with more global impact than in the Great Britain and the United States. In the US, radio experimentation was not interrupted by war as it was in Europe, so radio broadcasting proliferated and diversified quickly as a local, popular, relatively uncontrolled medium. Britain, though slower to achieve wide circulation as a popular medium, created in the British Broadcasting Company in 1922 a national structure for radio that accelerated radio’s growth above most other European nations. Finally, the global dominance of each of these two nations in the interwar years meant that the institutional structures, policies, technological and creative practices, and decisions as to the social function of radio broadcasting hammered out between 1919 and 1926 would serve as models for much of the rest of the world.

The end of World War I sparked an upsurge of developments in radio. Before the war, transnational corporate expansion had prevailed in the nascent field of communication technology, as the international licensing of patents prompted a boom in cross-investment. The globally dominant Marconi Company, based in Britain, established an affiliate, American Marconi, in the United States, where it assumed a pre-eminent position in telecommunications development. Westinghouse, an American corporation, expanded into Britain with its British Westinghouse subsidiary. American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) opened a British branch of its Western Electric division; and the Edison-based General Electric Corporation forged partnerships with companies all over the world, including General Electric in Britain. Wartime alliances encouraged economic and technological cooperation between allies, but with the war over and the spirit of nationalism on the rise, issues of control over key patents in this developing field raised the eyebrows, and hackles, of both corporations and governments.

The Radio Corporation of America

One key piece of technology in particular seemed to mark the major way forward in technological advance: the Alexanderson alternator, an alternating-current generator capable of voice transmission at high power which had been developed by Swiss-born engineer E. F. W. Alexanderson working with Canadian Reginald Fessenden in the General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York. The US Navy had found it very valuable during the war. When, in the spring of 1919, British Marconi approached American GE with a proposal to buy all rights to the innovation, the prospect of foreign control over a key piece of technology prompted a crisis in the United States. Who should oversee radio development? Was it a job for the state—perhaps the Navy—keeping national assets out of the transnational marketplace by bringing radio technology under the direct aegis of government? Or should radio be left in private hands, insulated from the dangers of government control but with few safeguards against “foreign” influence?¹

The post-war temperature of the United States ran against government intervention; many felt that the nation had just spent two useless and bloody years in a war that accomplished very little, provoked by a mass-mediated barrage of propaganda engineered by Great Britain and spread by the Committee on Public Information, formed by President Wilson and headed by George Creel (P. Taylor 1999, Cull 1995). Temporarily, at least to many in the US, the idea of linking a new mass medium to government control seemed the worst possible option, detrimental to democracy and contrary to First Amendment freedoms. Yet if radio were left to develop on its own, a foreign corporation, Marconi, threatened to dominate its development worldwide.

In the end, the US government compromised by intervening in the formation of the Radio Corporation of America. This communications giant, pooling the patents of its three parent companies plus the coercively acquired stock of American Marconi, represented the United States’ response to the era of technological nationalism beginning to emerge around the globe. RCA’s charter stipulated that its stock ownership must be 80% American, that only US citizens were entitled to serve on its board of directors, and that one board member must be a government representative, for most of its early years a Navy man² (Finney 2004, 1163). Russian-born David Sarnoff, formerly Director of American Marconi, became General Manager and would later rise to become president. He would exercise considerable influence on the development of American broadcasting. Radio in the US remained in private hands, though with a far greater degree of government oversight than most other segments of the economy—or of the culture. This would create a precedent for later events. RCA became, indeed, the radio corporation of America, bringing together the combined expertise of American technological innovation and limiting radio manufacturing in the US to those companies licensed by RCA.

However, by 1919 in the United States radio broadcasting, as distinct from radio technology, had already slipped the bounds of both state and corporation and thrived as a field of fiercely defended individual experimentation. Nationalization of patent rights had obvious advantages for America’s economic interests—and perhaps political interests as well, given radio’s utility during the war—but already organized amateur groups, like the American Radio Relay League, founded in 1914, actively pressed for a vision of “citizen radio” protected by First Amendment rights and outside both government and corporate supervision. As an editorial in the July 1921 edition of QST, the ARRL’s publication, cogently argued:

We are trying to … establish before the general public the fact that serious communication is being accomplished by private citizens. Do you realize that our radio provides about the only way by which an individual can communicate intelligence to another beyond the sound of his own voice without paying tribute to a government or a commercial interest? It’s so, and it’s a big thing and becoming increasingly important as new-comers enter the game. When we speak of “Citizen Wireless” we convey a picture … of a vast field in which the private citizen of this country may enter and carry on useful communication. And when we stand up before a Congressional committee it’s a good term too—just think exactly what it means!³

The ARRL did speak up before Congressional committees many times before the decade was out, and its vision of the electromagnetic spectrum as a public resource to be used by private citizens undoubtedly went a long way towards keeping US broadcasting in private hands.

Thus RCA’s mandate did not include a monopoly of broadcasting itself, as the BBC’s would a few years later. RCA and its member companies remained free to operate their own experimental radio stations in the coming years, as did any number of other American businesses, organizations and individuals. For the time being, US broadcasting as a practice and as an emerging mode of cultural expression remained in the hands of the general public, decentralized and largely unsupervised. This fact—taken for granted by most American historians but standing in stark contrast to the status of radio amateurs in most countries in the world—would have a profound effect on the development of broadcasting in the United States, from its financial basis to its emphasis on localism, and on the way it would eventually address the nation. For a brief time, the radically democratic potential of radio broadcasting—communication that paid tribute to neither government nor corporation, in the ARRL’s words—prevailed in the US, the way it did in few other places; the powerful strain in American nationalism of individualism linked to populist democracy temporarily triumphed. It helped that no major international challenge from neighboring airspace troubled US sovereignty (as it did in Europe, and for US neighbors such as Canada and Mexico), and that the US, by organizing early and by virtue of size and geography, gained control over more than 80 frequencies to call its own.

Citizens and Entrepreneurs

The roots of this phenomenon lay in America’s late entry into World War I. During the crucial years 1914–1917, as Europe dissolved into war and brought all radio experimentation under government control, America’s amateurs enjoyed an unrestricted environment. Only between 1918 and 1920 did the US close its airwaves to the public. As soon as wartime restrictions were lifted, thousands of radio amateurs, returning in many cases from training and service in the Signal Corps, perceived radio’s developing potential and began to apply for licenses to transmit at low power, at first mostly in code but increasingly switching over to voice. The Department of Commerce, under whose jurisdiction radio licensing fell, had very little authority with which to exert control over who might receive these licenses; in the US, in contrast to Britain and most European nations, communication systems were lightly regulated by the Commerce department but ownership and operation remained in private hands.

Ambitious individuals, civic-minded organizations, and enterprising small businessmen—proprietors of jewelry stores, dry cleaners, chicken farms, and small-town newspapers; schoolteachers, police and fire departments, railroads, theaters, and churches—began to experiment with the promotional and informational capacities of the newly emerging medium. Playing records, bringing in lecturers, sending out live performances, telling jokes, relaying the news and weather, and interspersing it all with self-promotional messages, they competed for attention among the rising crowd of “listeners-in” with the more formal efforts of the radio manufacturing firms, department stores, city and state governments, and universities. Supporting organizations sprang up, such as the American Radio Relay League’s numerous local chapters, along with magazines, book series, courses of instruction, retail stores, and listener groups.

By January 1922 over 1 million licenses had been issued (all of them authorizing the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Thinking Transnationally—The Anglo-American Axis
• Part 1: The Nations Imagine Radio, 1922–1938
• Part 2: Trans-Atlantic Convergence, 1938–1946
• Part 3: Television, Trade, and Transculturation, 1946–1975
• 10. Towards “Globalization”
• Notes
• Manuscript Collections
• Bibliography
• Index