By 1934, radio was well entrenched as a source of news and entertainment for the American public. In the 1920s, radio has been seen primarily as a budding vehicle for music, humor, and news, and music was the strongest programming form (McMahon 19). Radio was the first truly mass medium of communication, reaching millions of people instantly and altering social attitudes, family relationships, and people's relationships to their environment. Complaints about broadcasting and many of the solutions offered sound very much like controversies still raging today, though the focus has shifted from radio to television.
American radio as a commercial medium came into being in 1920 with the first broadcast of KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The first scheduled, non-experimental, public program broadcast on radio was an evening program of the results from the presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox. As a result of this broadcast, technicians and executives of Westinghouse Electric Company were convinced that radio was commercially and scientifically feasible, and within 18 months radio was a national fad. Those first radios were crystal sets built by individuals all over the country, and by 1921 stores were selling factory-made radios.
The financial potential in opening a radio station caused many businesses, institutions, and wealthy individuals to acquire federal licenses and establish their own broadcasting facilities:
Two years after the KDKA inaugural broadcast, there were 1.5 million sets in the country; there were more than 550 stations; and there was at least one station in every state (MacDonald 4).
By 1925, millions of radio receivers were in American homes, and the consumers spent $430 million on radio products. Radio was now a major part of both the economy and American popular culture, and it would remain so in basically the same niche until the advent of television more than two...