A Social—and Personal—History of Silence

As it gained in popularity, the radio had its critics, perhaps none more resounding than the Swiss philosopher Max Picard, who was born in the late nineteenth century. For Picard, silence possessed its own reality. “Silence,” he wrote, “is nothing merely negative.”
 
Picard reserved special scorn for the radio. It was, he wrote, a machine for producing “absolute verbal noise. The content hardly matters any longer; the production of noise is the main concern. . . . Even when the radio is turned off the radio-noise seems to go on inaudibly.” Picard would have been particularly distraught to see a radio pointed out toward workers in the field. He idealized a world out of reach of technological progress and the silence in which a farm worker labored: “The generations of the past are with him in their silence.” In his view, modern life, with its incessant hums and chatter, had destroyed silence, rendering it “simply the place into which noise has not yet penetrated” and “a mere interruption of the continuity of noise.” Writing in 1948, he lamented that “silence no longer exists as a world, but only in fragments, as the remains of the world. And as man is always frightened by remains, so he is frightened by the remains of silence.”

When I was a child, growing up on a farm in Massachusetts, the radio marked regularities in my life. The day and week and weekend were divided into unwavering programming schedules. Late-night listening was distinct from that of the morning. I watched television in the living room, usually with my parents and brothers and sister, but the radio was mine, perched next to my ear as I lay in bed at night, the antenna canted toward the window to pick up the Boston stations. When I nudged the dial and tuned into the smooth-talking WMEX d.j., the world that I wanted to be part of came through, “The Boxer” and “Someday Soon” drowning out the wind in the pines beyond our fields.

When the civil-rights activist and congressman John Lewis was young, the radio pointed him toward his future. Reaching him on his family’s Alabama farm in the nineteen-fifties, it introduced him to the social gospel. “On a Sunday morning in early 1955, I was listening to our radio tuned to WRMA out of Montgomery, as always, when on the air came a sermon by a voice I’d never heard before, a young minister from Atlanta,” he wrote. “I didn’t catch the name until the sermon was finished, but the voice held me right from the start . . . He really could make his words sing . . . But even more than his voice, it was his message that sat me bolt upright with amazement.”

And yet the radio narrowed as effectively as it broadened. Female voices were uncommon in its early years, especially among announcers.