Chapter 6 - Ethical Culture Fieldston School

“Mr. Sinatra Gets Rejected”
station, for example, was established in 1920; by 1922 there were 508, and by the
end of the decade Americans were spending $850 million a year on radio
equipment. 16 What’s significant here is not the technology itself – radio
broadcasting, like other technological innovations such as automobiles, were
developed well before the twenties – but rather the way these once‐cutting edge
inventions had become a part of everyday life on a mass scale.
What’s also significant is the way this technology became part of everyday
life: through a fully mature mass‐market industrial capitalism. Chain retailing,
buying on credit, and especially the rise of pervasive national advertising came
into their own in the twenties. Nothing better illustrates the impact of this new
consumer culture than the development of radio, a crucial medium in the rise of
Sinatra’s idol, Bing Crosby. Originally developed for its shipping and naval uses
for wireless communication between two points, the industry evolved toward
broadcasting in 1920 when a Westinghouse engineer in Pittsburgh played
records – yet another industry that boomed in the twenties – for the enjoyment of
those with receivers. The nascent broadcast industry was a patchwork quilt of
stations and programming run by churches, unions and other institutions at the
start of the decade. But the use of wired networks created for private profit, as
well as the use of advertising to pay for programming, not only quickly became
the dominant way of structuring the industry and its programs – like the soap
opera, an entertainment genre that got its name from its sponsor – but also laid
down the political, organizational, and financial tracks that would be followed
by television (in its infancy in the twenties) and even the Internet.
15
Frederick Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (1931; New York: Harper & Row,
1981), p. 81.
16
Mary Beth Norton, et. al., A People and a Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 703-704.
American History for Cynical Beginners
13