Bare-knuckled broadcasting: enlisting manly respectability and racial paternalism in the battle against chain stores, chain stations, and the Federal Radio Commission on Louisiana's KWKH, 1924–33

Between 1924 and 1933 William Kennon Henderson, a clear-channel Shreveport, Louisiana broadcaster, ‘abused’ radio to defend its regional autonomy. Defying principles of the ‘American System’ of commercial network broadcasting, Henderson charged chain and network broadcasters, chain retailers, and the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), the regulatory body overseeing broadcasting, with impinging on local control of the airwaves and of everyday life itself. Henderson's neo-populist critique operated synergistically by interspersing combative political commentaries with cultural programmes that championed white Southern paternalism, manly respectability, and conventional gender and racial modes of social organization. Henderson's ‘abuse’ of the market-friendly cult of respectability heard elsewhere on the dial won supporters across the country and generated consternation in the United States Senate, among corporate retailers, and within the FRC. This essay argues that the Depression exacerbated regional tensions such that the KWKH airwaves readily became a self-reflexive space for debates over modernity and embodiments of economic, social, and cultural power.