"Mapping the New Mental World Created By Radio": Media Messages, Cultural Politics, and Cantril and Allport's the Psychology of Radio

Historians of psychology interested in the roots of social and political activism in psychology have presented important analyses based on the role played by the founding of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) in 1936. It would be premature, however, to assume that activist efforts by psychologists were either restricted to or exhausted by SPSSI’s activities. An important case in point that has been overlooked by scholars is the attention given to radio as "an altogether novel medium of communication, preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men" by Gordon Allport in The Psychology of Radio, a book he co-authored in 1935 with former student Hadley Cantril.

The Psychology of Radio, a book intended for both professional and lay audiences, sought to open discussion on the effects of the pervasive presence of radio, and to throw into relief the political, cultural and economic context in which "radio as a social institution" was embedded. References to Mussolini and Hitler in the opening section indicated the political issues at stake; references to demagogic political figures Huey Long and Father Coughlin signaled their immediate domestic significance. Radio, Cantril and Allport argued, was particularly significant among the "media of public control" in "forming opinion and in guiding action," and as such warranted close investigation by citizens -- and social scientists.

Cantril and Allport’s understanding of the relevant social psychological issues at stake encompassed not only political realities but questions of economic power as well. The authors asserted that, "although human nature may be everywhere potentially the same, the ways in which it actually develops are limited by the constraints of each particular social system." Such constraints were difficult to discern as a matter of everyday routine, for they "become second nature to the individual. He seldom questions them, or, indeed even recognizes their existence and he therefore takes for granted the great majority of the influences that surround him in everyday life."

What radio listeners were taking for granted, Cantril and Allport asserted, was corporate control of the airwaves. As the authors explained, "the problem of the rights and responsibilities of broadcasting companies is a delicate one, for it involves the two explosive issues of censorship and propaganda." By itself, Cantril and Allport stated, radio "is as democratic, as universal, and as free as the ether." Under capitalism, however, "it is an altogether elementary psychological fact that dissenting opinions and germinal attitudes favoring radical change in the American way will not readily be encouraged by an instrument controlled by vested interests." The authors advocated that, "in order best to serve the American public, radio should be removed from the dictatorship of private profits, and at the same time be kept free from narrow political domination."

The audacity and creative intensity characteristic of American science during the 1930s has been overshadowed by presumptions that World War II had such a profound influence on science that what came before is of little consequence for events that followed the war’s end. While it is clearly the case that World War II had a powerful impact on the career of the sciences, and that the atomic age contained within it distinctive cultural imperatives of its own, it would be historically- shortsighted to consign the intellectual activity of 1930s science to footnotes. I believe attention to works such as The Psychology of Radio will help historians gain a fuller and more complex understanding of the place of activist science in 20th-century America.

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