The Beatles, Totalitarianism, & The Great Depression: Part 2 - Totalitarianism

I've been working on this Opus for quite a while. It struck me, when I used to explain to you guys what made The Beatles so unique, that that same condition existed for the Big Government and Totalitarian movements of the 20th century. I could maybe tweek it a little more, but I've got to get back to regular posting and want to move on. So here it is!:

As you'll recall, in Part 1 we talked about The Beatles' dominance of the pop music world in the '60's. Though much of their success was due to their undeniable, immense songwriting talent, the thing that made them unique was that this great musical talent arose at a time when there were extremely limited options for obtaining pop music. There were only one or two AM rock 'n' roll/pop music stations in any town and they played virtually the same thing. No FM radio, no internet, no iPods, just cheesy 45 rpm singles and 33 rpm albums. The limited choice amplifed The Beatles' fame in a way that could not be repeated later and won't be again. The dominance of the radio DJ to dictate musical tastes began to fade when FM radio provided a pop alternative beginning around 1970.

But The Beatles were probably the last and definitely the most benign beneficiaries - in the 20th century - of a 'monopoly in the media' situation that occurred frequently throughout developed and developing cultures in the last century and was largely responsible for the 20th century being the most bloody century in history.

RTP readers, behold the face of evil:
Prior to the beginning of commercial operation of the radio broadcasting industry around 1920, there was no such thing as an MSM (MainStream Media) anywhere in the world. People got their news from local newspapers, and those local newspapers (of which there could be many in large cities) were as fiercely partisan as the blogosphere is now (the irrefutable truths written in RTP notwithstanding). People understood that the news and opinions being presented to them had a bias of some form that they could count on in a particular paper, and, just as we do in the blogosphere now, they read the information presented to them with the appropriate bias-filter on, much as is still openly done in the United Kingdom now, where you have major newspapers like the Daily Telegraph (or Torygraph) presenting the conservative view, and the Guardian and others representing Labor and the Left. No one makes any bones about it, and they didn't back then.

In the United States, with the Radio Act of 1927, the federal government took over control of radio broadcast frequencies and forced broadcasters to adhere to frequencies to which they were licensed. They did this by setting up a government organization that was a predecessor to what became the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). As with most things, this encroachment of the federal government into the lives of its citizens was done for the benefit of those citizens: prior to licensing, broadcasting stations would walk all over each others' frequencies, and it was an out of control mess. After licensing, anyone interfering with a licensed broadcaster would be shut down by the government and fined. And how can you blame the government for doing this? This same type of thing happened around the developed world, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes, for maybe not quite so good reasons, but it happened all the same. In the UK, the government-run BBC was formed in 1922, and has had more or less a monopoly in British broadcast media (radio & television) ever since.

As with any new, clearly useful technology, radio became an instant hit. According to the Studies in Popular Culture article "Integrating Radio into the Home":

In 1921 there were approximately 60,000 radio receivers serving an audience of 75,000, and by 1930 radio receivers were in 12,000,000 homes. Americans spent $60 million on radios in 1922 and nearly $850 million by 1929. Over 3.4 billion dollars were spent in eight years."

1920s' dollars, mind you. Those homes with radios represented the upper and middle class of the United States. Doubtless poorer folks and richer Luddites had access to radio as well at certain neighbor's homes or stores or place of employment.

But, because of the government control of the broadcast spectrum that took place over the course of the '20's the diversities of thought and opinion that existed in the newspaper business previously did not show up on the airwaves. Since the goverments now owned the airwaves, they could begin to put regulations on what was said:

In the late 1920s, a right-wing religious broadcaster used a 1,000-watt station in Los Angeles as his pulpit, from which he issued blistering attacks on corrupt city fathers. Though many of his scurrilous assertions were later verified, the reverend nonetheless became one of the country's earliest victims of political manipulation of the airwaves. At his renewal hearing in 1930, the broadcaster's license was revoked because his sensational comments were deemed not to be in "the public interest." On appeal, the D.C. Circuit Court upheld the revocation, ignoring the plaintiff's arguments that broadcasting speech was protected by First Amendment guarantees. By refusing to review the case, the Supreme Court implicitly agreed with the lower court's view that broadcasters did not have the right to freedom of speech.1

As Professor Powe notes, government domination of broadcasters expanded as the influence of the electronic media grew. Franklin Roosevelt, the first president to grasp the political opportunities mass communication offered, also understood the political danger of vigorous and unfettered broadcasting. Roosevelt expanded the reach of the FCC by appointing as its chairman James Lawrence Fly, an activist New Dealer whose principal objective as an administrator was to enact rules barring ownership of broadcasting outlets by newspapers -- especially those newspapers which opposed the Roosevelt administration.2 (emphasis mine)

According to Professor Thomas W. Hazlett of George Mason University:

The 1927 legislation represented a bargain between policymakers, who obtained influence over programming (including such regulations as the “equal time
rule” and, later, the “fairness doctrine”), and radio station owners, who enjoyed
rent protection via regulatory barriers to entry (Hazlett 1990, 1997, 2001a).

In the United Kingdom:

The Sykes Committee concluded in August 1923 by reporting that "broadcasting holds social and political possibilities as great as any attainment of our generation" and that "for these reasons we consider that the control of such a potential power over public opinion and the life of the nation ought to remain with the State, and that the operation of so important a national service ought not to be allowed to become an unrestricted commercial monopoly"

"It's all for the good of the country" (sorry, I couldn't find a good link to that line in Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life').

In the rest of Europe and Asia in the 1920s,

...radio was launched as privately-operated businesses. However, in most cases, central government authorities, realizing- and also fearing- the impact of this new mass medium, quickly established firm control, not only of broadcasting facilities, but especially of program content. 2

To summarize, we see that radio broadcasting first became available to the masses, throughout Europe and North America, in the 1920s, and it immediately became controlled and regulated by the central governments of virtually all countries. We also see that independent broadcasters had to kowtow to these goverments or risk being denied licenses to broadcast, or getting them taken away. In many countries government ran the broadcasting business themselves, with no independent broadcasting. We see that there were many independent newspapers prior to the 1920s that wore their bias' on their sleeves, and that that was the accepted norm. We see that radio broadcast was a wholly different animal, with the government controlling content on the airwaves, whether directly or indirectly.

Now a bit of speculation: There are few people left now who remember life prior to radio, but let's just imagine what that must have been like: growing up and living in a world without any broadcasting of any kind. News is delivered by local newspaper or word of mouth. Music is either live, or available on very primitive, scratchy records. Telephone is available, but even that is mostly confined to local exchanges. I would bet that the number of people that read papers regularly were less (percentage-wise) than the number of people who hear or see broadcast news now but I can't find circulation references for the early 20th century. Generally, people were much less affluent, and I would bet the daily paper would only be a must-read for businessmen. The introduction of radio broadcasting must have been at least as big or probably an even bigger technology leap than the web in the 1990s and early 2000s. A true game changer. For the first time ever, the president could speak directly to the people. In fact, the entire nation would really only be hearing a president speak to them for the first time. National news was delivered by national broadcasting companies (like the National Broadcast Corporation), and the local bias of the newspapers was bypassed. Everybody tuned into music hours, sports events, and entertainment hours like we do for TV now, but this delivered over radio was a brand new event for everyone, whereas TV was just a big improvement on the existing music, sports, and other entertainment delivery system - take a second and think about how spellbinding that must have been when it first came out.

The Roaring '20s was a relatively low-key decade crisis-wise at home and abroad until 1929. Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is Business". The Treaty of Versaille forced the weak democratic Weimar Republic governments on Germany. The only nagging problem for the capitalist (mostly empirialist) trading nations was the rise of Socialist Russia. But Russia was still a weak country economically and militarily. Europeans and Americans of all political stripes had been horrified by the carnage of World War I and no one had an appetite for more armed conflict between the major states. Laissez-faire capitalism was the name of the game, and since the economies of the world were booming, there was no serious opposition to it (though opposition did exist).

But as everyone knows, that all came to an end with the Stock Market Crash of 1929. This article doesn't discuss causes of The Crash, but all RTP readers should familiarize themselves with it, as this was seen as a major failure of laissez-faire capitalism, an economic form this blog generally supports. The stocks on the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 13% of its value in one day and continued to fall after that for the next three years, bottoming out in 1932. The Wikipedia article quotes a New York Times article (published after Black Monday in 1987) stating,

"Most academic experts agree on one aspect of the crash: It wiped out billions of dollars of wealth in one day, and this immediately depressed consumer buying."

The panic caused by The Crash and the ensuing contraction of the American and European economies forced governments to react to stop the job losses. Remember, there was no Welfare at this time. If you lost your job, you were out of money. Many banks had been wiped out and there was no FDIC insurance for peoples' lost accounts. In 1930, the US Congress passed The Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act, placing high tarriffs on many imported goods. Being a fair broker of information, I must report that both Reed Smoot (Utah) and Willis Hawley (from the great state of Oree-gone) were Republicans. They reasoned that this act would force Americans to 'buy local', stimulating the economies in America. European nations complained loudly, but were ignored, and in response, imposed tariffs of their own. The resulting constriction of international trade caused unemployment around the developed world to skyrocket. Wikipedia references the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), p.70:

Unemployment was at 7.8% in 1930 when the Smoot-Hawley tariff was passed (ed-note that this was a year after The Crash), but it jumped to 16.3% in 1931, 24.9% in 1932, and 25.1% in 1933

The public considered The Crash to be a failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism, and laid the blame for the futile and counterproductive government response on the Republican President Herbert Hoover and the Republican Congress; they were probably mostly right in both cases.

Needless to say, Republicans were shellacked in the 1932 elections. Interesting aside from the link: note that the last bastion of Republicanism in 1932 was New England, and note the Solid South - Democrat from the Civil War up until the 1970s, in semi-permanent opposition to the Party of Abe Lincoln.

But what do the 1932 elections have to do with my theme? Those elections took place in a situation that Saul Alinsky later said must be present for revolution-inside-the system to take place:

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.

25% unemployment and no safety net would do that to people. Makes the penny-ante 9.5% unemployment Obambi is trying to scare us with now seem a little...insignificant. I doubt even the redoubtable contributors and readers of RTP would be immune to its temptation;
Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress were swept into power. In Germany, in the elections of March 1933, Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party swept into power and Adolph Hitler assumed dictatorial power. The Soviet Union and Italy had already rejected Democracy prior to the onset of the Depression; Joseph Stalin succeeded Vladimir Lenin as Chairman of the Communist Party in Russia in 1922 and a Fascist coup made Benito Mussolini the Prime Minister of Italy also in 1922.

The rulers in the US and Germany were presented with populations ripe for Alinsky's revolution-inside-the-system (Russia had already experienced its revolutionary crisis in 1917). But Franklin Roosevelt and Adolph Hitler found themselves with something that no other revolutionairies had possessed before: a broadcast medium across their nation under their control. In addition, these two leaders quickly grasped how they could use the medium. In the United States:

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first great American radio voice. As President, his “fireside chats” drew more listeners than even the most popular programs during radio’s Golden Age.

Many heard FDR on the radio for the first time on July 2, 1932 when he promised a “New Deal for the American people” as he accepted his first Democratic nomination for president. Beginning March 12, 1933, Roosevelt spoke directly to the nation many times, on topics ranging from agriculture and banking to war.(emphases mine)

For the first time, the leader of a nation could get his message out directly to the people, bypassing all moderating and editorialising, and the people must have found it thrilling. In Germany,

Nazi Germany was the first totalitarian state to use radio as a propaganda tool and, uniquely, brought out a series of affordable radio sets - the Volksempfänger, or people’s radios - so poorer Germans, who generally did not have radios before 1933, could listen to Nazi propaganda and the infamous Nuremberg rallies, and little else.

The Nazis provided cheap radio receivers to the public to get the message straight to as many people as possible. We see the government bypassing private industry in an economic crisis in an effort to further its control of the population.


This chilling poster says "All of Germany hears the Führer with the People's Radio". You should read both the links above in their entirety, and while you're reading the links, consider whether the acts of the goverments are that of small-government conservatives or large-government liberals. Another extended quote from the Transdiffusion article:

Hitler, and even more so Goebbels, saw the massive propaganda weapon radio could become. With the monopoly Reich Broadcasting Corporation under Nazi control, and its programmes strictly censored and made even more nationalistic than in the last days of the Weimar Republic, the radio offered the easiest way to spread Nazi propaganda. While films such as The Triumph of the Will were the most notable way the Nazis spread their propaganda, most Germans in the thirties would have first encountered the infamous Nuremberg rallies through the radio or through huge loudspeakers mounted in public places broadcasting the latest events from Nuremberg. After all, the radio offered instant propaganda, whereas a film could take several months to produce.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin accomplished things more cheaply through his so-called Stalin Radio:

It was a simple box with speaker vents and a single knob, to adjust volume. There was no antenna and no receiver and you couldn’t turn it off, you could only turn it down. It was, basically, a speaker hard-wired into what once was Soviet propaganda central, and every apartment was required to have one.

The above shouldn't imply that radio wasn't involved. What it means is that the Soviet Union was too poor to distribute radios to the people, but the government-controlled radio system would pipe the message to regional receivers which would then demodulate and distribute the signal to household speakers.

SUMMARY

I don't mean to compare Franklin Roosevelt with either Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin in regards to bloodthirstiness or the degree to which the latter two went to control their populations. But I have shown how Roosevelt and Hitler used the greatest economic crisis in recent history as an 'Alinsky crisis' to force a greatly expanded and powerful federal government and all three placed the new, wonderous technology of Radio under government control and used it to communicate their political policies and directives directly to their publics, bypassing the legislative process to mobilize the public to their will.

In the final article - The Great Depression - we will see how Franklin Roosevelt used the economic crisis and media to enact his New Deal policies and see if it is possible to find a 'monopoly in the media' situation in the multimedia environment of 21st century America.