Labor Radio

LABOR RADIO. Radio broadcasting became a popular mass medium during the 1920s. Contemporary commentators proclaimed that radio could enhance democracy, obliterate class differences, and spread education and culture. Trade unionists and radicals, however, recognized that an emerging monopoly of corporate radio stations and networks threatened working-class interests. Chicago labor officials attacked network radio programming for manipulating the myths of consensus and individualism while promoting consumerism, the sacred marketplace, and business infallibility. Socialist party head Norman Thomas insisted that commercial radio tended “to make robots and Babbitts of the American people.”

Denouncing corporate radio’s institutional structure and contesting it adverse cultural and ideological influence on the masses, radical and labor activists sought to use radio in the interest of working-class communities. Labor councils in San Francisco and Saint Louis, the American Fund for Public Service, and other groups considered creating their own radio stations during the 1920s in order to air the alternative perspectives of workers, progressives, and radicals.

The Socialist Party established a radio station in New York City in 1927. Named after Eugene V. Debs, WEVD dedicated itself to becoming “a fighting, militant champion of the rights of the oppressed.” Initially supported by financial contributions from party organs as well as the garment trades unions, WEVD became linked with the Jewish Daily Forward and the centrist wing of the socialist movement. Well into the 1930s, area labor unions used the station’s facilities to educate and organize workers. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, for example, produced programs that combined live entertainment with speeches by prominent labor and political leaders. WEVD also broadcasted a variety of progressive and radical political analyses and shortened versions of workers’ theater productions. By the 1940s and 1950s, WEVD’s labor orientation had yielded to “ethnic” programming, especially Yiddish entertainment and commentary on American Jewish life and the state of Israel. Although WEVD’s political views became increasingly conservative and centered on Israeli concerns by the 1960s, the station never entirely abandoned its social democratic tradition. The Forward Association sold WEVD-FM for $30 million in 1988, while WEVD-AM remained on the air with a smaller audience.

Chicago station WCFL was the nation’s first and longest-surviving labor radio station. Owned and operated by the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), WCFL began in 1926 as a listener-supported station, emphasizing popular entertainment and labor and public affairs programming. CFL secretary Edward N. Nockels became the “voice of labor”’s driving force during its first and most militant decade (1926–1937). He hoped to use radio to help organize workers, increase public support for the union movement, and enhance working-class consciousness and culture. Dependent on voluntary contributions and the resources of its parent body, WCFL suffered financial crises—exacerbated by the Great Depression—and continual harassment by federal authorities and corporate competitors. Nevertheless, WCFL served a broadly defined labor and progressive community. “Service” meant providing “not only entertainment but information; not only music but science, history, economics, and all the other things that make for human welfare.” A variety of labor, civic, consumer, and political activists and organizations utilized WCFL’s microphones well into the 1940s.

Depression-era problems, commercial radio competition, grandiose plans for a Labor radio network, and pressure from the conservative American Federation of Labor, eventually changed WCFL, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, into a station dependent on advertising and mass entertainment programming for its survival. By the 1950s and 1960s WCFL had redefined its “service” to labor as funding its own operations and general CFL activities by maximizing profits. WCFL developed a rock ‘n’ roll format to attract a rapacious consumer audience and, consequently, big-spending advertisers. Successful for a short time, rock radio ultimately failed and led to the station’s sale in 1978. The mere presence of labor radio, especially during the early decades of broadcasting, however, symbolized an alternative to the business-owned mass media and an oppositional force in American politics and culture.

Meanwhile, a variety of network and local broadcasters sympathetic to labor had sharply diminished in the wave of McCarthyism from the late 1940s onward. The creation of non-profit, community-supported Pacifica stations, beginning with San Francisco’s KPFA in 1949, allowed a sympathetic coverage of labor in another, smaller venue. Other KPFA stations grew from 1959, and a proliferation of “community radio” stations emerged in the wake of the 1960s, not all of them affiliated with Pacifica. Of these many stations, perhaps a dozen remain on the air, offering progressive-radical news including news of the labor movement. In 2000, a conference of Labor Notes supporters resolved to form a radio service, the first within fifty years primarily directed at the support of the labor movement. Workers Independent News (WIN), with Frank Emspak as Executive Director, took to the air and remained, despite many obstacles and a diminishing support from unions themselves, for sixteen years. Following the demise of WIN, a variety of local stations, offering “alternative” news, continue to support the labor movement with emphasis on local activities.

Godfried, Nathan. “Legitimizing the Mass Media Structure: The Socialists and American Broadcasting, 1926–1932.” In Culture, Gender, Race, and U.S. Labor History, edited by Ronald Kent, Sara Maikham, David Roedigei, and Herbert Shapiro. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Godfried, Nathan. WCFL: Chicago’s Voice of Labor, 1926–1978. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

McChesney, Robert W. “Labor and the Marketplace of Ideas: WCFL and the Battle for Labor Broadcasting, 1927–1934.” Journalism Monographs 134 (August 1992).