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  [38]Politics & History

The People Who Thought Farmers Without Radios Were Rubes

  In the 1920s, some people thought that the new invention of radio would
  make American farmers less “backward.”
  John Frost and daughter listening to radio in their home. Tehama
  County, California
  via [39]LOC
  By: [40]Livia Gershon
  August 20, 2020 August 19, 2020
  3 minutes
  [41]Share [42]Tweet [43]Email [44]Print

  The year 2020 (August 20, to be precise) marks the 100-year anniversary
  of the [45]first broadcast by a federally licensed radio station,
  Detroit’s 8MK. The advent of real-time mass media changed the country
  in all kinds of ways. In the 1920s, media scholar Randall Patnode
  writes, [46]one potential effect on many people’s minds was the
  redemption of the “backward” farmer.

  As one Kentucky paper argued in 1923, “The people of these [rural]
  towns are out of touch with the rest of the world and their chief
  conversation is gossip.” The article concluded, “What these people need
  is radio.” Patnode writes that this patronizing view of farm life was
  particularly striking given that, throughout the nineteenth century,
  farmers were understood as the quintessential Americans. Thomas
  Jefferson called them the “chosen people of God.”

  Ads for radios in the farm press featured mansions with Roman columns
  and well-dressed listeners.

  Patnode suggests a couple of reasons newspapers focused on “redeeming”
  the farm. One was that many people in fast-growing cities—including
  newspaper reporters and editors—had moved away from their family’s farm
  and had mixed feelings about agricultural life. Presenting farms as
  backward reaffirmed their choice to leave. Meanwhile, promising a
  remedy for that backwardness helped alleviate any guilt about those
  left behind. The second reason was commercial. Newspapers were
  supported by advertisements and had a deep interest in constantly
  promoting a narrative of progress through consumption.

  As Patnode explains, the narratives found in both urban newspapers and
  rural magazines suggested that farmers would be interested in radios
  primarily out of practicality. By keeping abreast of information like
  commodity prices, they could optimize their operations for financial
  success. Publications also promoted radio as a source of status. Ads
  for radios in the farm press featured mansions with Roman columns and
  well-dressed listeners. One promised that “no other radio has such
  social prestige.”

  In a story from Wireless Magazine, reprinted in local papers, one
  actress promised that radio productions like performances of
  Shakespeare’s plays would “emancipate” the small town. “The small
  village of the past, with its warped outlook on life, its ignorance of
  current events, its mean and petty superstitions, is in line to be
  completely ‘revamped,’ as it were,” she promised.

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  A 1930 book about radio by journalists Alfred Goldsmith and Austin
  Lescarboura described the radio’s near-miraculous transformation of a
  farmer:

    Now, as the farmer walks down the street of the city, smooth-shaven,
    neatly dressed, self-possessed—nobody turns to stare… [He is] no
    longer a Rube but a man of the world, sympathetic with his fellow
    men, be they rural dwellers like himself or cooped up in two-room
    apartments on Monoxide Lane.

  In reality, Patnode argues, it’s not clear that either market
  information or status improvement were top-of-mind for rural radio
  listeners. A 1925 survey by a Chicago station found that farm families’
  first listening choice was barn dance music. It seems likely that many
  of them had little to no interest in having their communities
  “revamped” by sophisticated urbanites.
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  [55]farming[56]radio[57]Technology and Culture
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  [58]"What These People Need Is Radio": New Technology, the Press, and
  Otherness in 1920s America
  By: Randall Patnode
  Technology and Culture, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 285-305
  The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the History of
  Technology

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