Radio Vs. VD

Section 11 of the 1927 Federal Radio Act stated that the Federal Radio Commission could deny broadcast licenses to stations that did not serve "the public interest, convenience and necessity."  However milk toast that sounds, it lacked clear guidelines. That year the NAB created guidelines more conservative than your grandma; forbidding the discussion of anything more risque than Christmas cookies. Looking at the state of broadcasting today obviously there has been significant change since then. Everyone knows about the infamous 7-words incident on Pacifica... but decades earlier there were events that eroded the guidelines for more pragmatic reasons.

In 1934, CBS radio told Health Commissioner Thomas Parran of New York State that he could not mention the words syphilis or gonorrhea during a scheduled radio address on public health. New York health commissioner John Rice wrote to NBC, CBS and 15 newspapers in protest. NBC responded that they thought such remarks might be inappropriate. WEVD-AM stepped in and put Parran on air.That same year the FCC succeeded the FRC but the new communications act did little to change the status quo.

In 1948 Erik Barnouw and Dwight Eisenhower [R] changed everything.  While Erik Barnouw was a professor at Columbia University (1946 - 1973, Dwight Eisenhower it's president (1948 - 1953). This was of course before Eisenhower was President of the United States (1953 - 1961). Eisenhower gave crucial backing to Barnouwwho wanted to produce a syphilis-education program for radio.

The idea game to Barnouw in a visit from Edwin Gurney Clark and Thomas Lefoy Richman of the U.S. Public Health Service. They invited him to apply for federal grant money to create a series of educational programs on Syphilis. Barnouw later won the grant as it's sole applicant. He made several test programs in the formats of soap operas, and hillbilly shows and screened them with Eisenhower who was reported to be "delighted." Creating the programming wasn't the problem... it was getting radio stations to air the content.  Despite protests from Catholic groups the first program aired on ABC April 19th 1948.

The federal program continued and Barnouw continued to get grant money for more programs. He hired Alan Lomax to help write rural dramas that would play better to people outside of the cities.Lomax was able to get the programs introduced by celebrities like Bill Monroe, the Maddox Brothers, Eddy Arnold,  Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Roy Acuff. Stations like WGN-AM, WNBC-AM, KFI-AM, WKY-AM, WPWA-AM, and WIP-AM all participated. Interestingly Columbia Universities' own radio station, 610 WKCR-AM, first licensed in 1941 was not listed among the call letters in news articles. But in November of 1948 they aired interviews with ex-VD Patients on syphilis treatments by George Hicks of ABC. More here.

In the end a broadcasting taboo ended. Where one had fallen others would soon as well. Perhaps that was the idea all along.

Erik Barnouw

You probably don't know his name. He was neither a DJ nor an engineer. He was a raido historian who wrote the books you may have read in your media classes. He wrote some of the most scholarly texts on radio history. Specifically a three part series on radio history published by Oxford in 1966, 1968, and 1970. He won the Bancroft Prize for the third and final volume

• A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States To 1933 , Oxford University Press, 1966.
• The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States 1933-1953, Oxford University Press, 1968.
• The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States from 1953, Oxford University Press, 1970.

He was born in Den Haag in the Netherlands and attended Princeton University in 1928. Against the advice of his professors and his father (A Columbia University Linguist) he skipped graduate studies and went to work. his first job wiring for Fortune magazine lasted less than a month. he traveled abroad on a fellowship and returned for a second try in 1931. He got a job directing the R.J. Reynolds Camel Quarter Hour for the Columbia Broadcasting System. It was a program that aimed at encouraging women to smoke. But it was the great depression and work was work.

That experience got him a job as a writer and editor for CBS in 1939 then as an editor at NBC from in 1942. He became a professor at Columbia University in 1946. During his tenure at Columbia he organized their Film Division MFA and served as department chair until 1968. He was a historian of mass media, radio included. His teaching did not stop his film making or writing. More here.

In 1971 Barnouw received a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism. He retired in 1973 from Columbia University as an emeritus professor. He continued to serve as the President of International Film Seminars, and as a film curator at the Library of Congress until 1981. but he never stopped writing about media. The New York Times, quoted his former editor Sheldon Mayer as saying "He loved [Broadcasting in a way. He had an eye for the scoundrels, and the fakes, and the dangerous people." ...A man after my own heart.

He is best known now for his film about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He had been to japan to film the destruction and the U.S. government seized his film. It disagreed with their propaganda that radiation was harmless. Decades later they released the film to him and he finally edited the movie he'd shot. He talked abotu it on this radio program here.

He was famous to a few, the educators, and the informed, the newsmakers and the news writers. In 1975, John Leonard of The New York Times wrote, ''Erik Barnouw's three-volume 'History of Broadcasting in the United States' is what everybody who writes about television steals from.'' More here.

In 1983 the organization of American Historians issued the first Erik Barnouw Award, honoring his name. One or two awards are given annually in recognition of outstanding programming on network or cable television, or in documentary film, concerned with American history, the study of American history, and/or the promotion of history. Barnouw died of cancer at home in Fair Haven, Vermont.