The Battle of the Blue Book

Victor Pickard

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139814799.004

3 - The Battle of the Blue Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014

Victor Pickard

Show author details

Victor Pickard: Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania

Book contents

Get access

Summary

In March 1946, FCC Commissioner Clifford Durr received a three-page letter from William Tymous, an African American World War II veteran who was outraged by the radio programming greeting him upon his return home:

On the battlefields of France, on Okinawa, on Iwo Jima ... we fought the devils of fascism, discrimination, hate, prejudice, and Jim Crow. We won that fight. We have come home to find that these same enemies are very much alive here.... It is too often the practice of vehicles of American propaganda such as the movie industry and the radio to depict the American Negro as a buffoon, lazy, shiftless, superstitious, ignorant, loose and servile.... This is not the democratic way of life for which so many of our fallen comrades paid so dearly with their lives. This is the Hitler pattern. This is American fascism.

Racist caricatures in radio programs abounded, Tymous observed: “Rochester in the Jack Benny program, Bill and Beulah in Beulah, the maid in Crime Doctor, the maid in The Great Gildersleeve, the maid in the Judy Canova program and the Amos and Andy troupe.” Tymous worried that these sketches were “nailing down in the minds of millions of listeners derogatory and false judgments of fellow-citizens.” He feared that listeners were “conditioned” by these stereotypes to see “nothing wrong in such disguised fostering of race hatred.” He indicted the “sponsors, producers and executives of networks who permit such bigotry and anti-racial pieces on the air.”

Durr responded that he was sympathetic with Tymous’s views, enclosing with his letter a recently issued report that presented “a pretty fair idea of where the commission stands on the over-all responsibility of station licensees for programming” and offered listeners ideas for contesting “the seamier aspects of broadcasting.” The report arrived in a blue cover, its title in bold black lettering: “Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees.”

Type: Chapter
Information: America's Battle for Media Democracy
The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform
, pp. 62 - 97

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139814799.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Pickard, Victor, “The Battle over the FCC Blue Book: Determining the Role of Broadcast Media in a Democratic Society, 1945–1948,” Media, Culture & Society 33, no. 2, (2011): 171–91Google Scholar

Berkman, Dave, “The ‘Blue Book’ and Charles Siepmann – as Reported in Broadcasting Magazine,” American Journalism 2, no. 1 (1985): 37–48Google Scholar

Berkman, Dave, “Charles Arthur Siepmann 1899–1985: A Biographical Tribute and Personal Reminiscence,” Television Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1986): 77–84Google Scholar

Meyer, Richard, “Reaction to the ‘Blue Book,’” Journal of Broadcasting 7 (1962): 295–312Google Scholar

Socolow, Michael, “Questioning Advertising’s Influence over American Radio: The Blue Book Controversy of 1945–1947,” Journal of Radio Studies 9 (2002): 292–302Google Scholar

Streeter, Tom, Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 147

Tullos, A. and Waid, C., “Clifford Durr: The FCC Years,” Southern Exposure 2 (1975): 18Google Scholar

White, Llewellyn, The American Radio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 184

Meyer, Richard, “Reaction to the ‘Blue Book,’” Journal of Broadcasting 7 (1962): 305–6Google Scholar

Siepmann, Charles, “Radio,” in The Communication of Ideas, ed. Bryson, Lyman (New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies, 1948), 181

Wecter, Dixon, “The Public Domain of the Air,” Saturday Review of Literature IXIX, no. 20 (May 18, 1946): 5–6Google Scholar

Siepmann, Charles, “Storm in the Radio World,” American Mercury 63 (August 1946): 201–7Google Scholar

Hyde, Rosel H., “FCC Policy and Procedures Relating to Hearings on Broadcast Applications in Which a New Applicant Seeks to Displace a Licensee Seeking Renewal,” Duke Law Journal no. 2 (May 1975): 253–78Google Scholar

McChesney, Robert, “Louis G. Caldwell, the American Bar Association and the Debate over the Free Speech Implications of Broadcast Regulation, 1928–1938,” American Journal of Legal History 35, no. 4 (October 1991): 351–92Google Scholar

Rosenberg, Herbert, “Program Content: A Criterion of Public Interest in FCC Licensing,” The Western Political Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1949): 375–401Google Scholar

Barnouw, Erik, “Blacklisted: How FCC Commissioner Clifford Durr Earned His Place on the Cold War’s Roll of Honor,” Television Quarterly 28 (1996): 60–6Google Scholar

Brinson, Susan, The Red Scare, Politics, and the FCC, 1941–1960 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004)

Siepmann, , Radio, Television and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 37

Spingarn, Jerome, Radio Is Yours (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1946), 31

Hilliard, Robert and Keith, Michael, The Quieted Voice: The Rise and Demise of Localism in American Radio (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 53

Douglas, Susan, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ‘n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999), 124–5

Hilmes, Michele, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2011)

Ehrlich, Matthew, “Radio Utopia: Promoting Public Interest in a 1940s Radio Documentary,” Journalism Studies 9, no. 6 (2008): 859–73Google Scholar

Siepmann, Charles and Reisberg, Sidney, “‘To Secure These Rights’: Coverage of a Radio Documentary,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter 1948–9): 650Google Scholar

Book contents

3 - The Battle of the Blue Book

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive