Radio's Intimate Public

Reviewed by: Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy Susan Smulyan (bio) Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy. By Jason Loviglio . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Pp. x+200. $56.95/ $18.95. Jason Loviglio's book represents a second generation of radio history and, as such, moves away from an explanation of the ways in which radio broadcasting was structured, presented, and received, to an examination of how radio, both the technology and the programming it carried, organized American thought. Loviglio began this work as the coeditor of The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (2001). That anthology contributed to a growing understanding that radio history has a central place in American cultural history—playing a role less as a subfield than as an important trope, alongside consumption, in the way historians think about the twentieth century. Beautifully written, well conceived, and extensively researched, this book takes its place among the best of the recent crop of radio monographs that make similar points, including Kathy Newman's Radioactive: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947 (2004); Douglas Craig's Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940 (2000); and several other manuscripts now in press. Loviglio defines and analyzes the way radio reconfigures "public" and "private" and shows how the continuing struggle over their meanings becomes a structuring narrative for [End Page 230] the American experience in the middle part of the century. Because radio's technology made it at once public and private and because radio networks influenced how Americans thought about themselves as a nation, radio marked a "site where public and private . . . temporarily merged to form a national community, an intimate public" (p. xv). Loviglio illustrates how the "merger" of public and private remained unstable and contested. His tracing of these concepts, as important to American thought and as crucially debated on and through the radio, contributes to the case that radio stands at the center of twentieth-century history. The author also uses the public–private dichotomy to examine important gender issues, focusing, for example, not only on Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chats, but also on Eleanor Roosevelt's radio broadcasts. In many ways, the chapter on the radio program "Vox Pop" and its changing format best illustrates Loviglio's skills in juggling the theory, the intellectual history, and a description of how different groups of people, including producers and listeners, used radio. In Radio's Intimate Public, Loviglio does wonderful readings of a large range of texts including archival materials, cartoons, and letters, and his analyses of individual broadcasts and radio shows are the best I've ever read. I also appreciate his interesting use of the works of other historians. In some ways, Loviglio operates like a cultural studies scholar, thinking about and employing the categories developed by others. These references add a depth to his scholarship unusual for a historian. This book will be of great interest to specialists, but also to anyone thinking about the ways in which media technology conflates, disorganizes, and sits between the categories of public and private. I can easily see such a book playing an important role in classes, both introductory and specialized, and will assign it myself in a new course on radio cultures. Jason Loviglio has written an important, accessible, and interesting book on radio and has changed how historians should think about the time period he covers. Susan Smulyan Dr. Smulyan, associate professor in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University, is the author of Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–1934 (1996). Copyright © 2007 The Society for the History of Technology

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