Current project: The Morality of Snitching: A Cold War History
On March 8, 1971, an anonymous group the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI office in Media, PA, and got away with all its documents. An antiwar WIN magazine published 271 of the stolen pages. WIN staff carefully redacted the names of ordinary people appearing in the files. But they printed all informers' names; "there was no question" for the activists that these needed to be made public. This decision may seem shocking today: in the fall of 2010, in response to public outrage, Wikileaks volunteers opted to redact the names of informants from US State Department cables. WIN editors' disdain for "the snitch" had more in common with that of their Soviet contemporaries, who by the 1970s also found any form of collaboration with the state despicable.
This book explains antiwar activists' moral judgment by tracing a correlative history of "the morality of snitching" in the US and the USSR during the cold war. During McCarthyism and late Stalinism, the two states compelled their citizens' collaboration. The civil rights and antiwar movements in the US and relative democratization--the "thaw"--in the Soviet Union brought about a crisis of state authority. By then, the FBI rivaled the Soviet secret police in its use of informants, relying on them in 85% of its domestic intelligence investigations. To the inhabitants of both societies, informers showed the personal--moral and affective--dimensions of the rising national security state.
The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
During the Jazz Age and Great Depression, radio broadcasters did not conjure their listening public with a throw of a switch; the public had a hand in its own making. The Listener's Voice describes how a diverse array of Americans--boxing fans, radio amateurs, down-and-out laborers, small-town housewives, black government clerks, and Mexican farmers--participated in the formation of American radio, its genres, and its operations.
Before the advent of sophisticated marketing research, radio producers largely relied on listeners' phone calls, telegrams, and letters to understand their audiences. Mining this rich archive, historian Elena Razlogova meticulously recreates the world of fans who undermined centralized broadcasting at each creative turn in radio history. Radio outlaws, from the earliest squatter stations and radio tube bootleggers to postwar "payola-hungry" rhythm and blues DJs, provided a crucial source of innovation for the medium. Engineers bent patent regulations. Network writers negotiated with devotees. Program managers invited high school students to spin records. Taken together, these and other practices embodied a participatory ethic that listeners articulated when they confronted national corporate networks and the formulaic ratings system that developed.
Using radio as a lens to examine a moral economy that Americans have imagined for their nation, The Listener's Voice demonstrates that tenets of cooperation and reciprocity embedded in today's free software, open access, and filesharing activities apply to earlier instances of cultural production in American history, especially at times when new media have emerged.