Across the Waves

How the United States and France Shaped the International Age of Radio

Derek W Vaillant

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780252082931
  9780252041419
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252050015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1931, the United States and France embarked on a broadcasting partnership built around radio. Over time, the transatlantic sonic alliance came to personify and to shape American-French relations in an era of increased global media production and distribution.

Drawing on a broad range of American and French archives, Derek Vaillant joins textual and aural materials with original data analytics and maps to illuminate U.S.-French broadcasting's political and cultural development. Vaillant focuses on the period from 1931 until France dismantled its state media system in 1974. His analysis examines mobile actors, circulating programs, and shifting institutions that shaped international radio's use in times of war and peace. He explores the extraordinary achievements, the miscommunications and failures, and the limits of cooperation between America and France as they shaped a new media environment. Throughout, Vaillant explains how radio's power as an instantaneous mass communications tool produced, legitimized, and circulated various notions of states, cultures, ideologies, and peoples as superior or inferior.

A first comparative history of its subject, Across the Waves provocatively examines how different strategic agendas, aesthetic aims and technical systems shaped U.S.-French broadcasting and the cultural politics linking the United States and France.

PART I

The Rise of U.S.–French Broadcasting, 1925–44

1At the Speed of Sound

Techno-Aesthetic Paradigms in U.S.–French Broadcasting, 1925–39

In summer 1924, David Sarnoff, chairman of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) returned to New York following talks with English, French, and German radio officials. “The era of transoceanic broadcasting is near at hand,” he predicted jubilantly. Soon the medium’s destiny, “to bring the Old and New worlds a little closer together,” would be fulfilled.1 In the coming years, experimental shortwave broadcasts crisscrossed the Atlantic in growing numbers. In September 1929, U.S. listeners heard reports of the Schneider Cup seaplane races from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In December, British, German, Dutch, and U.S. broadcasters exchanged holiday wishes in a series of live two-way shortwave exchanges. RCA reported that advances in international radio circuitry had now “brought all the nations of the world within broadcasting distance of one another.” In fall 1930, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), an RCA subsidiary, broadcast news to Paris of the successful transatlantic flight of French aviators Dieudonné Costes and Maurice Bellonte. (Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 accomplishment came too soon for transatlantic broadcasts from Paris.) On May 6, 1931, France made its first official broadcast to the United States with the government’s new Poste Coloniale (Colonial Station). The opening of the French Colonial Exposition outside Paris offered the perfect showcase for pairing imperial ambition and new world communications.2 As the station’s name indicated, the government planned to use international broadcasting chiefly to influence France’s overseas colonies and départements. It also intended to radiate French culture globally, which included broadcasting to the United States. RCA and NBC assisted at both ends in the special programs sent to the United States, which were relayed from New York to a national audience.3

Amid the excitement, however, the unknown implications of regularized, instantaneous transatlantic mass communication via radio raised concern. There were many unanswered questions about the nature of this new method of communication and its possible effects on individuals, groups, and the integrity of nation-states and nationally identified cultures. The prospect of international exchanges between private U.S. networks and French national broadcasting (controlled by the government) suggested intriguing opportunities, but it also stirred apprehension in France about managing such encounters. U.S. broadcasting embodied the leading edge of global electronic communication. It readily conjured images of U.S. influence spreading in pervasive, and perhaps inexorable, ways.4

This chapter sketches the history of U.S.–French electronic communications prior to broadcasting and then follows the simultaneous national and international emergence of interwar radio broadcasting in the United States and France. Focusing primarily on the French side of the story, it analyzes the anticipatory and reactive discourses to live mass connectivity between the United States and France, as well as reaction to early U.S. transatlantic broadcasts. It examines how French broadcast officials approached the question of U.S.–French broadcast ties and the steps they took to develop international broadcast capability.

The interwar period of U.S.–French broadcast interaction produced two contrasting national techno-aesthetics defining excellence in radio production and the value of radio as an aesthetic form.5 For U.S. broadcasters, technological power, abundance, and high-speed execution demonstrated professional competence and efficiency. Quantity and swift production and distribution were valued. The French paradigm emphasized quality, accepted scarcity, and valued deliberate speed. Many actors and institutions developing U.S.–French broadcasting shaped these emergent models, including public and private broadcasters, electronics firms, the radio press, politicians, and listeners.6 More than mere extensions of preexisting differences in U.S. and French conventions (though these clearly exerted important effects), the broadcast paradigms emerged relationally and cross-nationally. They took shape in popular discourse and in professional settings where U.S. and French radio technicians and producers came in contact with each other to undertake transatlantic projects. The misunderstanding and friction these encounters sometimes produced revealed unacknowledged assumptions about the universality of modern communication. In 1930, RCA announced a corporate mission to build an international and global broadcast “community of sound and vision.” The envisioned community assumed the terms of technical mastery and expertise of broadcasting to be universal and self-evident rather than outcomes of historical and cultural processes that differentiated U.S. and French broadcasters.7

The techno-aesthetic differences of interwar U.S.–French broadcasting were not historically inevitable or without variation and contradiction; they were neither necessarily mutually exclusive nor limited to shortwave broadcasting.8 Some of their characteristics antedated broadcasting entirely. Pascal Griset observed that executives of nineteenth-century private U.S. telegraph and telecommunications firms sometimes fumed over what they perceived as plodding French governmental processes, which clashed with speedy transactions, rationalized systems, and corporatism in the U.S. style.9 Such differences in business and regulatory cultures could not alone explain the contrasts affecting radio. Unlike the case of England and Germany, both public and private stations operated in France during the interwar years. Most French stations used commercial advertising to a greater or lesser extent for about half of the 1930s. Tastes varied sufficiently at the subnational level in France and the United States, such that these paradigms should not be mistaken for reflections of innate national characteristics or a reductive binary of “modern” versus “antimodern” systems or mentalities. Nonetheless, they emerged as powerful forces that characterized the reflexive nature of U.S.–French radio and the kinds of interaction that resulted.10

U.S.–French Electronic Communication before Radio Broadcasting

During the late nineteenth century, the development of submarine telegraphy—undersea cables connecting landmasses—elevated the stakes of communications in service of imperial power and geopolitics. British cable cartels dominated the laying and management of submarine cable lines, which fit into the plans of Great Britain to bind and maintain its imperial territories and peoples. Competitor firms jockeyed with the cartels to develop a French stake in the growing international system of submarine cable, but with limited success. Like many others, France found itself dependent on British firms.11 Anglo–U.S. interests established the first viable transatlantic system in 1858. A submarine cable between France and the United States was laid in summer 1869, but it, too, operated through a pool arrangement outside direct Franco-American control.12

Experiments in wireless telegraphy and wireless telephony at the turn of the century contributed to the rise of a major competitor to cable. In 1901, using a detection device invented by Édouard Branly of France, Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi executed a one-way transatlantic wireless signal. Spark-generated signaling technology permitted point-to-point communication through coded pulses of electricity and freed the telegraph from the necessity of a wired connection. Radiotelephony enabled wireless point-to-point transmission of speech and continuous sound. By 1906, Canadian Reginald Aubrey Fessenden had accomplished two-way transatlantic wireless signaling, as well as voice and musical transmission experiments. In 1907, U.S. physicist and research scientist Lee De Forest patented the Audion tube, which became a critical component in detection and amplification of continuous-wave transmission of vocal and musical signals. The elements of radio broadcasting were now in place.13

Scientific associations and amateur organizations in France, the United States, and elsewhere played a critical role in developing early radio. French organizations supporting experimental point-to-point wireless communication included the Société française d’études de TSF (the French Society for Wireless Studies), established in 1914, and the Radio-Club de France, established in 1920. Their members communicated among themselves and with international counterparts, including members of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), established in 1914 in the United States. After World War I, these organizations coordinated transatlantic point-to-point communication involving scores of enthusiasts. An International Amateur Radio Union composed of members from twenty-three nations met in Paris in April 1925. Nine nations subsequently formed the Union Internationale de Radiodiffusion (International Broadcasting Union) to coordinate spectrum allocation for international broadcasting. As Rebecca Scales demonstrates, the IBU policy debates stirred extensive political discussion in France about the ideal national and cosmopolitan parameters of the emerging “radio nation” relative to its neighbors.14

These technical innovations, social networks, and political discussions took shape within an atmosphere of feverish competition involving corporate and political interests in Europe and the United States. The Marconi Company, based in Britain, controlled essential patents for wireless communication and developed multinational operations dealing in proprietary radio systems. These operations included a growing U.S. subsidiary, popularly known as American Marconi. British Marconi showed every sign that it would extend England’s dominance of international telegraphic communications into wireless communications.15 As it happened, however, unforeseen international events disrupted the agenda.

Adam Tooze argues that World War I changed France in ways that ultimately tipped the balance of U.S.–French power toward the United States. France entered the war with a large army and as the second leading creditor in Europe. It exited victorious, but with a drained population and an economy in shambles. The Third Republic (1870–1940) struggled to recover in the face of economic setbacks and political division. Short-lived coalitions governed France, led mostly after 1900 by the center-right anticlerical party known as the Radicals. The coalitions suffered from ideological polarization, including right-wing extremism and a political left antagonistic to conservative nationalists and suspicious of America’s increasingly powerful status abroad.16

The United States, by contrast, entered the war in April 1917 and suffered heavy losses, but not nearly at the catastrophic scale of France and other major combatants. The United States suffered an estimated 323,000 casualties in comparison with France’s 6.2 million.17 U.S. diplomats worked through the Paris Peace Conference and beyond in support of France’s postwar recovery. During the 1920s, however, difficulties in managing the payment of Germany’s war-debt reparations, France’s fiscal and political problems, and stress across Europe created U.S.–French tension and contributed to isolationism in the United States. In France, postwar trauma, frustration over the nation’s slow recovery, and apprehension about the future, included an undercurrent of resentment toward the United States, an apparent victor in the war. These circumstances shaped the brittle atmosphere in which international shortwave emerged, and in which U.S. and French radio pioneers came together to build transatlantic broadcast connections.18

The war created an opportunity for the United States to check the momentum of Marconi radio communications. The U.S. Navy’s wartime emergency annexation of private radio communications in 1917 included the acquisition of numerous Marconi marine radio systems. The government legally transferred ownership of the equipment to General Electric (GE), which created RCA in 1919. By 1922, Owen D. Young, a lawyer and corporate executive for GE and RCA, had devised a radio patent pool that included RCA, GE, American Telephone and Telegraph, and Westinghouse. The deal permitted the wholesale U.S. manufacture of radio equipment under ideal conditions for business that catapulted U.S. radio and broadcast communications manufacturing and technology to the forefront of the international scene. RCA expanded internationally and made deals with la Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie sans Fil (General Wireless Company), a holding firm with a controlling stake in France’s wireless telegraphy market.19

The French government pursued ties with RCA and other U.S. radio firms partly to build ties with an ally, but also to ease French dependence on British-controlled intercontinental cable lines. Relying exclusively on British lines could be costly in monetary, but also strategic, terms, as Germany discovered when England severed the Kaiser’s cable links into and out of Europe at the start of World War I.20 For such diplomatic and security reasons, France remained motivated in cooperatively advancing the state of transatlantic broadcast connectivity with the United States.21

U.S. networks saw ample reasons to invest in long-distance transmission and reception technology, despite the fact that international communications law prohibited the use of shortwave for direct advertising or other commercial purposes. Broadcasters desired goodwill with foreign governments, which controlled the telecommunications infr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction: At the Border of U.S.–French Broadcasting
• Part I: The Rise of U.S.–French Broadcasting, 1925–44
• Part II: Shaping a U.S.–French Radio Imaginary, 1945–74
• Afterword: Radios at the Heart of Nations
• Appendix: U.S.–French Radio Time Line
• Notes
• Selected Resources
• Index