Radio played a pivotal role, especially in the first half of the century, in helping us imagine ourselves and our relationships to other Americans differently. It constructed imagined communities—of sports fans, Fred Allen devotees, rock ‘n’ rollers, ham operators, Dittoheads—and thus cultivated both a sense of nationhood and a validation of subcultures, often simultaneously. Radio did indeed, as the cliche goes, bring the country together, and we need to explore more precisely the linguistic and musical mechanisms through which this occurred. In bringing this about, the radio networks cemented New York City’s role as the cultural capital of the nation.
But radio, because it was never totally centralized in America, also did the opposite—provided niches and outposts for different people of different tastes, attitudes, and desires. Even during radio’s “golden era,” that heyday of network programming and a vast national audience, certain listeners identified themselves as Fred Allen fans who would never be caught dead listening to Eddie Cantor or Major Bowes’ [Original] Amateur Hour. Radio, much more than movies, sped up the process whereby people identified themselves, and their relations to others, through the consumerist mirror of taste preferences—in humor, in music, in detergents—a form of identification now rampant today. In part because of radio, such identifications began to destabilize, however imperceptibly over time, those based on ethnicity, locale, political affiliation, and class.
— Susan J. Douglas. Listening In: Radio and the American Imaginaiton. New York: Times Books, 1999.
