The Level of Thirteen-Year-Olds

JANUARY, 1931

BY WILLIAM ORTON

I

THE striking adventures of the two young people in the nursery epic who set out in quest of liquid refreshment furnish a sad example of the instability of popular interest. The tale is singularly incomplete. Whether Jack ever got any water, what happened to his thirsty friends and relations, and the mysterious disappearance of one of the principal characters, were surely matters of some moment. Yet the silence of the legend on these points has been universally ignored by the commentators.

Lest the story of radio should go down to posterity in a similar unsatisfactory condition, it may be well to remind ourselves, before it is too late, of its opening promise. A few years ago we were hearing, from admirals, generals, politicians, inventors, and even quite normal people, ecstatic prophecies of what the industry would accomplish for ‘the glory and honor of our country,’ ‘the cause of international understanding,’ and the dissemination of culture and enlightenment on every hand. It may, of course, be true that the subsequent development of radio fulfills General Harbord’s conception of ‘the glory and honor of our country.’ It is certainly true that a foreigner listening in at random will get a very vivid understanding of contemporary America — though not perhaps the sort of understanding Mr. Baldwin had in mind. But whether we can accept recent assurances of the broadcasters as to the culture and enlightenment is not so certain.

There is another feature of the nursery epic that has escaped notice. Considering the aim of the expedition, the party seems to have set out in a somewhat surprising direction — a fact with which its subsequent fate was not unconnected. Broadcasting in America began, and has largely remained, in the almost unchecked control of the owners of radio patents and the manufacturers of radio receiving sets. If people were to be induced to buy the sets, there must be something on the air for them to listen to. It was at this point that the governments of other countries took hold. But the United States Government did not manage to get an effective control even of wave lengths until 1927; and by that time the good old dogmas of individualism and noninterference had built a ring fence around the broadcasting business.

For a business is what it very rapidly became. The manufacturing concerns which had originally regarded broadcasting as a necessary expense incidental to the sale of radio sets conceived the idea of turning the sales force into an independent source of income. The one demand for the use of radio channels that had money behind it—the government being barred — was that of the advertisers; the size of the demand, and the amount of the money, exceeded all expectations. Accordingly ‘unsponsored’ programmes, — that is, programmes provided and paid for by the broadcasting station, — which were at first the mainstay of broadcasting, came to occupy a mere fraction of the time, used to fill in unsold hours and to maintain a modicum of more or less uncommercial interest for the goodwill of the public and the reputation of the station. But the main business of the six hundred odd stations now licensed is simply to make money for their owners.

Copyright 1930, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

That is as much their main business as it is of any other advertising concern. Managers, entertainment bureaus, contact men, programme directors, continuity writers, publicity departments, are all organized to that supreme end. Broadcasting is more expensive than ever; but it is no longer the makers or the buyers of radio sets who pay that expense — it is the advertisers. They pay, for example, two hundred dollars for thirty minutes’ evening time of the New England Westinghouse stations (and are shortly going to pay double). They pay over two thousand dollars for a half hour on the blue network of the National Broadcasting Company, over three thousand on the red. For the coast-to-coast chain with both systems they pay over twenty thousand dollars an hour. And the demand for time is, on the whole, steadily increasing.

Let us see it at work. Here is Mr. Makem, let us say, small town manufacturer of something we will call the Gadget — to specify would be invidious, since in point of fact it may be anything from bonds to banana oil. Either by the radio contact man or by his own advertising agent Mr. Makem is introduced to the idea of broadcasting the merits of the Gadget. He must promptly decide to what sort of public the Gadget will best appeal, since this (with the length of his purse) will affect his choice of hours and days. If the Gadget is mainly a woman’s affair — dress, kitchen, or housekeeping — he may content himself with the less expensive daytime hours. If it has a family appeal he had better try for a booking in the early evening, when both father and the children may be listening in.

At this stage Mr. Makem perhaps begins to wonder whether a little press display might not serve him as well at the cost of less money and trouble. He is (or should be) reminded that whereas his press advertisement might or might not be glanced at, by one or two members of the family at most, his broadcast will have the undivided attention of his audience while it lasts (machines not yet having been devised to render two programmes at once — not intelligibly, at least); and further, that the computed radio audience is over four persons per set — over four and a half million living souls in New England alone. (Official confirmation of these estimates by the census returns would of course be very useful to the broadcasters; and people like Mr. Owen Young have a good deal of influence.)

Thus fortified, Mr. Makem proceeds to cogitate on the innermost excellencies of the Gadget; for it is these that will determine the nature of the programme.

Is it a smooth, suave, seductive sort of Gadget that can be woven into a Fantasy of the Dreamy East? Or is it a smart, snappy, peppy sort of Gadget with an appeal to youth, health, and vigor, fun and adventure, and the Wide Open Spaces? Can the kiddies be brought in? Can it be dramatized, made to save broken bones, hearts, or reputations in the nick of breathless time (at a hundred dollars a minute)? These matters being more or less decided, the programme manager is discovered to have ‘just the thing’ (he probably has a file of prospects several feet long and a queue of auditions running into the middle of next winter). The continuity department is put to work, evolving a screed in which the smoothness and suavity, pep and virility, safety and sanity of the Gadget are tactfully alluded to — if tactlessly, the public will kick. The programme emphasizes, in content, style, and manner, the same intimate virtues; so must the voice and personality of the announcer. Rehearsals are arranged, the great night comes, and Mr. Makem tunes in, wondering, ‘Will it sell?’

The answer is simple. If it has a good programme, it will; but it must have a good programme. The radio public is not the dumb, long-suffering beast that gazes year in, year out, at roadside posters. It cannot knock down billboards, but it can turn a dial. Moreover, it can, and does, write letters —

thousands of letters. Let Mr. Makem offer to give anything away — it does n’t much matter what — or ask for guidance, and he will be overwhelmed with them. If the Gadget is in fact or semblance worth anything — and a reputable station will not put it on the air unless its claims are reasonably authenticated — the rest is now a matter of decreasing costs versus increasing appropriations for Mr. Makem. Thus another spell of culture and enlightenment finds its way into the American home; and, incidentally, another fillip is given to the demand for radio sets.

II

Apart from the ‘offerings’ of the advertisers, air time is filled out with the ‘sustaining’ or ‘unsponsored’ programmes offered by the stations themselves. These vary all the way from the playing of victrola records to musical and news events of a very high order. Some of the items — national and international relays of significant happenings, for instance — cost a great deal of money. Others are furnished on a fifty-fifty basis, performers making no charge for their services and the primary broadcasting concern no charge for its time. Despite recent improvements in the quality of the advertising programmes, it is the sustaining programmes that furnish practically all material of genuine cultural or educational value. And the question naturally arises whether the growth of advertising will not eventually crowd out the sustaining programme altogether. A decided negative is given by an apparently inspired article in Radio News. ‘The radio executives,’ we are assured, ‘are too conscious of their obligations to the listening public and would no more sacrifice their own time on the air than would the directors of a national magazine sell all space in their publication to advertisers.’ The analogy is not quite accurate; but letting that pass, and accepting the assurance at face value, the fact remains — as no loss an authority than the Federal Radio Commission has stated — that ‘advertising must be accepted for the present as the sole means of support for broadcasting.’ Such, by the way, is the Radio Commission’s idea of the ‘public interest, convenience, and necessity’ which it was created to administer.

No other first-class power has so callously sold its heritage of technique for such a mess of pottage. Compared with other nations in its use of the new means of communication, the land of opportunity looks more like the land of lost opportunities. The current American assumption that every advance in technique is ipso facto an advance in civilization has nowhere had so devastating an exposure. But the blame lies not solely, nor even mainly, with the broadcasting companies. It rests mainly upon the shoulders of the American people. Doing lip service to a degree that is literally unparalleled to what are supposed to be the higher aims of collective living, it has acted, and allowed its rulers to act, consistently on the rule, ‘Seek ye first the maximum percentage, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ And by the time it suspects they are not added, it has ceased to care much whether they are or no. For it must be emphatically asserted that the number of people who are concerned about the American situation in broadcasting is a small and weak minority. The broadcasting companies know this, however little the intellectual may like to admit it. The general public is pretty well satisfied.

Why should it not be? It has entertainment, distraction, in abundance. To call the entertainment free is to take liberties with economics; but the public is not called upon, as it is elsewhere, to pay directly. To expect cultural leadership, artistic or intellectual pioneering, from the mass is more than even Mr. Coolidge would venture. The mass may respond, but cannot initiate. Here is a recent official comment from the movie industry: ‘Many artistically important films are box-office failures. Therefore, those which are ahead of general public taste must be sold in the same lot with box-office successes or they would n’t be sold at all. At this moment the picture which of all pictures in the past year has been most lavishly praised by critics, public groups, and newspaper editors is having the largest number of theatre cancellations of any picture in the year’s programme.’ It is true that Mr. Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation, in a recent newspaper article, dismissed the claims of the intellectuals in a vein as cavalier as Mayor Thompson’s, and pronounced the mass of people quite capable of doing its own cultural pioneering; but he neglected to explain how and adduced no samples. And if Mr. Sarnoff’s views are representative, it is futile to expect this sort of pioneering from an industry that is commercially organized, and psychologically habituated, to rely entirely on mass appeal.

Take education, for instance, as viewed by the vice president of the National Broadcasting Company. ‘What the public demands of radio,’ said he to the Institute of Education this summer, ‘is entertainment. If the educators on the air fail to recognize that fact in the development of education by radio, they are merely firing a blank cartridge. Every person entrusted with teaching by radio should be required to pass an examination on his ability as a showman. When education joins hands with radio it enters the show business.’ Apparently that is the view of the Federal Bureau of Education, to judge from an instruction sheet circulated under its auspices. ‘Write out your exact wording. Begin with one or more striking statements. Present your specialty on the level of thirteen-year-olds. Do not overrate the intelligence of your listeners. Anecdotes, short and clearly to the point, are good.'

Here, at any rate, is one of the reasons for the sorry story of radio education in America, as revealed in recent reports of a committee appointed (ten years too late) by the Secretary of the Interior and an investigation by the American Association for Adult Education. The kind of education that can be made to conform with the conceptions of Messrs. Sarnoff and Ellwood is not the sort of thing in which the best minds of the country can be deeply interested. Broadcasting stations with an educational aim have had, generally speaking, to confine their major efforts to courses of the ‘home economics’ or mildly vocational type, and even at that have had to do a good deal of padding. Seventy-seven out of six hundred and twenty-seven stations in the United States are owned and operated by educational institutions of one sort or another. Fifty-one of these reporting to the Wilbur committee show a weekly (not daily) average of eight hours on the air, of which two and a half are strictly educational. The precise extent of educational broadcasting in America is impossible to ascertain. A recent letter to the New Republic claims that the programmes of the ‘American School of the Air’ (a series of talks on history, literature, civics, music, art, health, and nature study sponsored by the Columbia system in conjunction with the Grigsby-Grunow company) are received by twenty thousand schools. The Wilbur committee, as the result of an inquiry directed to city school superintendents, reports 32.6 per cent of such schools — 1606 in all — possessing radio equipment. Great Britain, with one third the population and one fifth the national income, reports five thousand schools served by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and a circulation of the follow-up pamphlets for school use amounting to a quarter of a million.

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a public monopoly, ultimately responsible, not to a group of private stockholders headed by the radio manufacturers, but to the elected representatives of the people in parliament assembled. In contrast to the United States Bureau of Education, it proceeds on the assumption that a people capable of self-government will be largely composed of adults; and its activities provide a striking comment on the thirteen-year-old theory. It broadcasts, for instance, whole operas. But do the people listen? Well, the sales of libretti of broadcast operas run to close on one million annually. Realizing the deficiencies of radio alone as an educational or cultural medium, the B.B.C. issues a vast amount of supplementary literature. Its publications include two weeklies — one a programme guide, illustrated, with annotations, the other a literary journal centred around the more important cultural features — and their total circulation exceeds one and a half million, bringing an annual income of about half a million dollars. In the field of adult education, the formation of study groups is systematically encouraged, and summer schools are arranged for group leaders and radio lecturers. As a sample of popular interest it may be noted that a single talk last spring by Professor MacMurry on psychology brought 17,000 requests for the supplementary aid-to-study pamphlet, and one by Professor Burt on the study of the mind brought 26,000. Apparently the British like being treated as grown-ups!

III

State efforts in America to assist the educational use of radio have, however, more than the thirteen-year-old theory to contend with. There is quite another set of handicaps. Hours are limited, and air channels are limited. Education has no preference in either respect. It cannot afford to buy the evening hours that are necessary for reaching adults — in fact, it seldom gets the chance. The broadcasting systems do not accept lectures and educational talks between the hours of six and midnight. Even for the daytime hours education is financially unable to compete with commercial customers. Broadcasting stations devoted solely to education are expensive to equip, and cannot fill enough time, or hold large enough audiences, to be sure of their licenses in competition with commercial stations before the Federal Radio Commission. The chairman of that commission, in a recent address, said bluntly that all available radio channels are fully occupied, and that if educators want more than the small number they now have they must persuade Congress to change the law, since the increase would mean closing down some existing stations ‘without sufficient justification.’ ‘If education wants a share in broadcasting,’ says the American Association’s report, ‘it will have to fight for it, and will have to secure it by entering the field of competition on an equal basis with other claimants.’

On the other hand, Mr. Aylesworth, the president of the National Broadcasting Company, speaks of the outlook in more hopeful terms. ‘The pleasing progress that we have made in musical education,’ he says in his last annual report, following a reference to the Damrosch series, ‘leads us to hope that we shall soon undertake general educational work, but I feel very strongly that this should not be done until a carefully considered programme is prepared by nationally recognized educators of outstanding ability. When they are ready we will place our facilities at their disposal without charge.’ This may be either altruism or the more familiar process known as ‘passing the buck.’ It must in any case be taken in conjunction with the repeated assurances of the broadcasters that the educators do not know their job from the broadcasting angle. Meanwhile the broadcasters point with pride to their own achievements in the direction of potted opera. ‘For example,’ says Mr. Aylesworth in the same report, ‘we take a standard grand opera and cut it down to an hour because that seems to be about the right period for opera on the air. I hope for the time when we will create grand opera for radio broadcasting. Such an opera would be performed within the hour and not have to be cut. We have borrowed, and will continue to borrow, dramatic writings originally designed for the legitimate stage.’ The Radio Guild, to which presumably Mr. Aylesworth refers, is an interesting case in point.

The Radio Guild, we are told by one of the trade journals, was originally a group organized by Mr. Aylesworth’s company to present the old melodramas; but the public asked for something more. Accordingly the Guild has presented plays of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Pinero, Shakespeare, St. John Ervine, and other famous authors. And how! ‘The Radio Guild productions are presented in the afternoon in order that an entire hour may be available for the production. The majority of plays selected, it has been found, can be adapted to the hour limit without sacrificing strength or important scenes.’ What happens to the minority we are not informed.

To judge by these presents, it may be some time before Mr. Aylesworth’s ‘nationally recognized educators of outstanding ability’ arc able to agree on anything that will satisfy the broadcasters’ ideas of successful programme material. But the root of the trouble lies deeper than that; it lies in the acceptance, by both the industry and the government, — yes, and even by the educators, — of the broadest mass standards as the only ones with which broadcasting should be concerned.

Education, however, is not the only issue affected. Perhaps it is not even the most important issue. The American maxim — that every advance in technique is ipso facto an advance in civilization — exaggerates the social significance of applied science to a degree at which disappointment is inevitable.

The radio has brought no new asset of major importance to education, and its use involves serious disabilities. It provides a means for reaching people who could not otherwise be reached. It also provides a means for reaching people whose interest in what they are supposed to want is not strong enough to support any effort or sacrifice on their own part to obtain it. It can make available the voices of teachers who could not otherwise be heard (though they might be read) and can bring sound to reënforce teaching in cases like that of language or music, where sound itself is the subject matter. This is certainly much. Listening is for most people not only easier than reading, it is more stimulating; and an inert but well-disposed mind may sometimes be stimulated to a degree at which its reaction ceases to be purely passive.

On the other hand, radio tends naturally to encourage the passive attitude on the part of the learner — the one thing that educational theorists are united to oppose. It tends, the more definitely as it becomes more successful, to standardization of approach and content. It emphasizes the factual and informative rather than the reflective and analytical. And, despite the existence of radio personality, it can hardly compensate for the absence of the immediate teacher-student relationship. The British recognize these limitations and do their best to overcome them. But, when all is said and done, it is probable that the educational possibilities of radio have been much exaggerated.

IV

It is in respect of the everyday programmes that the American situation is at its worst. Whatever is done by way of education will reach only a fraction of the radio public and will fill only a minute part of radio time. But on this wider issue the ground of criticism needs to be very carefully defined.

It is not that programmes are bad. On the contrary, many of the presentations, both sustaining and commercial, are very good, and both are getting better. The trouble arises on ground much more fundamental than that; it springs directly from the commercialization of broadcasting itself, and the consequences which flow therefrom.

The wholesale exploitation of sound in the various perversions of money getting is a far worse thing than the desecration of the countryside by billboards. It is at once more intimate and more degrading. The unctuous bleating of the high priests of salesmanship would be ethically less intolerable were it their own wares they were crying. The fact that their voices, like their machinery, are for hire renders it a form of prostitution essentially akin to its older prototype. The corporation that affronts you with its posters has not only no soul, but no larynx; there is, at worst, a saving impersonality about its impudence. To become accustomed — much more, to become reconciled — to the standards and practices of broadcast advertising is to connive at an irredeemable insult to human decency.

Equally vicious is the conception of the public, and of the industry’s relation to the public, to which its dominant aim gives rise. What that conception is, the utterances already quoted indicate. It is sufficiently epitomized in the remark of one of the leaders that the public will not listen to anything for more than half an hour. It is further illustrated (if further illustration be necessary) in a statement of almost cynical candor recently given out by the National Broadcasting Company’s programme director. ‘The requirements of commercial programmes, of course, make it difficult to achieve perfect balance. In commercial programmes the primary object is to bring to radio as many listeners as possible — the kind of listeners that will most benefit the particular product which is being promoted [sic]. The development of these programmes, therefore, is based almost entirely on this consideration and without particular regard to other programmes scheduled for the same evening. The chief consideration is, Will this programme attract and interest the kind of people who will be influenced to buy the product? — not, Does this programme fit in well with other programmes which precede and follow it?’

One cannot help wondering whether it is to this sort of thing that the ‘magic acropolis’ — the phrase is from a New York Times headline — planned by the Radio Corporation is to be dedicated. Within three years, we are informed, the Rockefeller property between Forty-eighth and Fifty-first streets and Fifth and Sixth avenues is to become ‘a citadel of radio,’ housing broadcasting, television, and four great theatres — ‘a city sired by science, mothered by art, nursed by an economic foster mother, and dedicated to a career of enlightenment and entertainment. It will exist not only for its immediate trade territory but for all the world. Its voice will be multiplied a thousandfold.’

This and other ecstatic prophecies issuing from the offices of the Radio Corporation are the more significant inasmuch as it is officially stated that the Rockefeller interest will be simply that of landlord. Will the voice be the same sort of voice, and the entertainment the same sort of entertainment, that commercial broadcasting has hitherto sent over the much-afflicted ether? A ray of hope is perhaps to be discerned in the report that S. L. Rothafel is to be the presiding genius of the institution. It was ‘Roxy’ who startled the entertainment world a short while back by putting the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven and Strauss’s ‘Heldenleben’ into his theatre programmes; it is Roxy who broadcasts the one weekly concert that is infallibly worth listening to. But if Roxy is the genuine enthusiast we take him for, it is a safe prediction that he has a strenuous time coming to him. For the conception of the public that necessarily arises from the commercialization of broadcasting is that of the mass; and this conception, so long as it is dominant, is utterly fatal to cultural advance.

So long as it is dominant. It would be too much to assert that there is no reality corresponding to this conception. There is, as pornography and war hysteria can always testify. Nor would one maintain that this mass is not entitled to its fair meed of distraction and entertainment. If no more is done for it, to that much at least it has a claim on its masters. But where the thought of it and its demands dominates and colors all other activity, civilization itself may ultimately be in peril. The redemption of the mass cannot come except from minorities.

V

There are two grounds of criticism which may be taken, though the first is hardly relevant to American conditions. It may be maintained — it is maintained by some nations — that the State has a tutelary responsibility toward its subjects; that its duty extends beyond the mere safeguarding of the status quo to the positive encouragement of continually better standards of living; that, in short, prosperity is not enough. This is, of course, the idea behind religious establishment, and to some extent the idea behind monarchy. We see it carried to a dangerous extreme in the European dictatorships. But perhaps the other extreme is no less dangerous. Perhaps the increasing demands that democracy makes, not only upon the intelligence but upon the moral calibre of the citizen, need for their accomplishment an increasing concern with his intellectual and cultural development. But this is dangerous ground. It is difficult to envisage an active concern with these matters on the part of government in America that should not involve a threat to freedom or an opening to venality. It is not impossible, however. The brilliant work done by many departments of government in the field of applied science contrasts strongly with their neglect of the non-economic values; but a day may yet come when it will be realized that these latter are every whit as important to national life as the former.

How far off that day is may be gauged from the report of the Wilbur committee. The most definite step the committee felt it could advocate was ‘that an effort be made to secure from interested persons or foundations an amount of money [$200,000 a year for three years was mentioned] sufficient to bring to the microphone a high-grade programme in certain formal school subjects and to check carefully the results obtained.’ For the richest nation in the world there is something almost shameful in the spectacle of education thus going begging.

The second ground of criticism above referred to is likely to be the more fruitful in the circumstances. It is simply that of the rights of minorities. I make no complaint that the roads are increasingly occupied by the majority who prefer to travel in automobiles; but if I am a member of the group that prefers to walk I claim that it should still be made possible for me to do so. I may go so far as to suggest that walking is in itself sufficiently worth while for my group to receive a little more consideration than that which would be based solely on its numbers or its spending power. In like manner, I refuse to cavil at the quality of the radio programmes based on the mass standards of the advertisers and the broadcasting stations; but I ask protection and service as a member of a group that desires something different.

This sounds unappreciative of such efforts as are now made by the broadcasters to serve minority interests. It is far from being so intended. The dilemma is that financial incentives, which are in the long run necessarily final for commercial broadcasting, do not permit of— let alone encourage — the kind or quantity of presentation that would be anything like fair to the group I claim to speak for. The stock answer of the broadcasters is, of course, that they are in business like anyone else and must sell their service where there is a demand for it; they have for years been fighting the idea of public utility status. But in fact they are not in business like anyone else. No less a person than Mr. Hoover has repeatedly insisted that ‘radio communication is not to be considered as merely a business carried on for private gain, for public advertisement, or for the entertainment of the curious. It is a public concern impressed with the public trust.’ The radio industry did not create, and does not own, the channels over which it operates. It is merely licensed by government to use them. Their number is so limited as to constitute a natural monopoly, and that monopoly is being fully exploited. I maintain that Mr. Hoover’s ‘public’ includes and has a place for me. That of the advertisers has not.

In England, this week in which I write, I could obtain at least one full orchestral programme every night, including whole evenings of Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, and modern work. I could hear the Mozart Festival from Salzburg and the Vienna Philharmonic under Baumgartner. I could listen to Eugene O’Neill’s ’Ile,’ to a first-class debate on the international language question, to various lecturers, including Dean Mozley on Christian theology and Mr. Francis Birrell on the cinema, to two or three recitals of modern chamber music, to a couple of revues (complete), to say nothing of dance music, political addresses, educational programmes, news, sports, humorous features, and the various local offerings. A few years back, orchestra in England was in a most critical impasse, times being hard and the supply of millionaires inadequate. Broadcasting has not only set it on a firm and wide foundation; it has given a better chance to young composers and young literati than they ever had before. And all for a license payment of two dollars a year, of which little over one half now suffices to support all broadcasting! I do not have to be highbrow if I am not that sort of person; though, even if I am very lowbrow, the chances are that curiosity will lead me to a growing interest in something a little better than claptrap. But as a member of a not inconsiderable minority I can still get enjoyment from my radio set for some hours of every day. And that is democracy. Where shall I find it in America?

There is no answer. The state has abdicated. There is no obvious reason why the advertisers that support broadcasting should also consider me. The Radio Corporation has my money, but does not need my vote. I am tired of turning the dial.