Abstract
Although film, television and mass-market CB radio ephemera represented CB as anti-authoritarian, its use frequently allied it with forces of law and order, certainly with a mostly white, male network of “good buddies” eager to effect control over their individual and community lives. In Los Angeles in particular, the local racial-political context during the years of the CB radio fad—roughly 1975–1978—created an ideal environment for such racialized uses of CB radio. I argue here that working- and lower-middle-class white men in Los Angeles in the 1970s used CB radio to create an audible sense of order. Faced with newspaper articles suggesting high levels of crime committed by black men against white people on L.A. freeways, and feeling a keen sense of isolation and cultural or socioeconomic vulnerability in their daily lives, they derived reassurance from hearing other apparently “white” voices of fellow citizens within the paradoxically vulnerable and impregnable environment of the private car on the public roadway.
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Notes
- 1.
Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970); Tim Dant, “The Driver-Car,” in Theory, Culture and Society 21, no. 4/5 (2004): 61–79; Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Penguin Press, 1971). Banham initially published his responses to his time in Los Angeles in the BBC’s publication The Listener, in August and September 1968, following talks he had given on BBC radio. See also Edward Dimendberg, “The Kinetic Icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as Mobile Metropolis,” Urban History 33, no. 1 (2006): 106–25.
- 2.
On connecting mobility and cinematic ways of seeing, the seminal text remains Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
- 3.
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
- 4.
Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
- 5.
For the growing secondary literature on the United States in the 1970s, especially that addressing the rise of the “sunbelt” South, see Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), especially chap. 4, “The Rise of the Sunbelt and the Reddening of America”; Andreas Killen, 1973: Nervous Breakdown (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), especially 221–26; Edward D. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), especially chap. 8, “The Me Decade and the Turn to the Right.”
- 6.
On gender and race in the 1970s, see Eric Porter, “Affirming and Disaffirming Actions: Remaking Race in the 1970s,” in America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), especially 64–70; on masculinity in the 1970s, see Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2001), especially 177–85. For an analysis of the reassertion of American masculinity in the 1980s, based in the gender politics of the New Right, as represented in popular film, see Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
- 7.
Number of license application figures from “The Newest Hobby,” 16; on licensing see, for example, “The Drivers’ Network,” Time 22 September 1975, 48–49; “Citizens Band Radios,” Changing Times: The Kiplinger Magazine 130, no. 1 (January 1976): 41–42.
- 8.
Beth Ann Krier, “‘The Radio That Ate Los Angeles,’” Los Angeles Times, 2 May 1976. For an example of the popular dissemination of FCC regulation of CB and licensing procedures, see Forest H. Belt, Easi-Guide to CB Radio for the Family (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams & Co., 1975), chap. 3.
- 9.
A 1973 article in the Los Angeles Times reported on a survey about Californians’ attitudes about freeway construction conducted for the newspaper in February of that year. The survey showed that southern Californians were more enthusiastic than northern Californians about continued freeway building. In the combined data from northern and southern California, whites were fairly evenly divided about more building with or without environmental constraints, but “those interviewed with Spanish or Mexican surnames were even more favorable to unrestricted construction.” Blacks polled expressed the least enthusiasm for more freeway construction: 53 percent “were for moderate cutbacks”; 13 percent “wanted drastic controls to discourage auto use and further growth”; and 2 percent said they “would stop all freeway construction.” Since the survey gave a racial-ethnic breakdown only in the combined data from northern and southern California, we cannot read it very accurately for its applicability to Los Angeles’s white and non-white populations. It is possible that Latino residents of Los Angeles, if included in the survey among “those … with Spanish or Mexican surnames,” may well have represented a generation less negatively affected by freeway construction, since many of the predominantly Mexican and Mexican American communities in East Los Angeles torn apart by freeway construction had suffered those assaults during the late 1950s. The continued resistance to and resentment toward freeway construction by black Californians speaks to their communities having been most negatively affected by such construction projects and reaping the fewest rewards from the completed freeways. See Ted Thackerey Jr., “Californians Still Like Freeways—With Restraints,” Los Angeles Times, 11 March 1973; see also Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) for an insightful analysis of the development of Los Angeles freeways and their impact on black and Latino city residents; see in particular 206–15.
- 10.
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote his comments praising Los Angeles in the July 1913 issue of NAACP’s publication The Crisis. For a discussion of such early twentieth-century “boosting” of Los Angeles by some in the African American community, see Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chap. 1. On the United States, and Los Angeles in particular, as a site of various “republics of sound,” see Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
- 11.
Sides, L.A. City Limits, especially 183–89.
- 12.
To hear part of a recording of the police dispatcher, go to: http://harrymarnell.net/1965.htm.
- 13.
Robert J. Allan, “Police Push Study for ‘Buck Rogers Age’ Radios,” Los Angeles Times, 17 March 1974.
- 14.
Through grants established in connection with the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1970, the federal government supplied the vast majority of the funding to improve police telecommunications.
- 15.
Doug Smith, “Nothing to Fear from Cop(ter) on the Beat,” Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1975. See also “Bird’s Eye Look at Street Crime,” Los Angeles Times , 20 September 1977. Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn campaigned throughout the 1960s and 1970s for installing emergency telephones on freeways. Hahn persuaded the local police, sheriffs and highway patrol departments, as well as the California state government and the FCC, to work together on legislation for the new system, leading to the gradual installation of emergency telephones. Correspondence with local residents, memos from Hahn’s office and the responses from the phone companies and state legislators can be found in the Kenneth Hahn Collection, Manuscripts Division, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
- 16.
“3 Gunmen Terrorize and Rob 35 Aboard L.A.-to-S.F. Bus,” Los Angeles Times , 12 August 1974; “Holdup on Freeway Flyer,” Los Angeles Times , 3 March 1976. A July 1973 Los Angeles Times article reported a San Diego incident in which Gary Raphael, a black plumber, picked up his white boss to drive him to work but then pulled a gun on him and ordered him to drive around the city. Raphael then stopped his car at the home of a white couple unknown to him, kidnapped them and put all three of his hostages in the white couple’s van and drove to the Mexican border. Raphael killed his female hostage and, according to his two surviving victims, he had “vowed” to “get as many white people as possible,” and had said “I want to get out of the ghetto.” See “Kidnapper Shot to Death After Slaying Woman,” Los Angeles Times , 16 July 1973. Additional articles relating freeway-based crimes, some of which explicitly identified the perpetrators as black, include “Woman Kidnapped on Santa Ana Freeway,” Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1966; “2 Cyclists Rob Driver on Freeway,” Los Angeles Times, 12 July 1967; “Girl Sighted Talking to Man on Freeway Before She Vanished,” Los Angeles Times, 18 November 1970; “A Holdup Victim Cries for Help—Then Waits 2 1/2 Hours,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1972; “Anatomy of a High-Speed Chase,” Los Angeles Times, 26 September 1977; “Rock-Throwing ‘Phantom’ Tracked to Lair, Arrested,” Los Angeles Times, 12 November 1977.
- 17.
Paul Delaney, “Suburbs Fighting Back as Crime Rises,” New York Times, 30 August 1976.
- 18.
The use of CB radio to quell fear of crime by helping citizens feel safer should also be considered within the context of the development of nonlethal weapons and self-protection devices—for example, the Florida-based Mace Company’s development of pepper spray as a self-defense product mass-marketed primarily to urban women. Pepper spray had been developed originally in Canada to repel bears, and was adopted by the U.S. Postal Service in the 1970s to provide defense against aggressive dogs.
- 19.
“Headless Body of Youth Found in Canyon Identified,” Los Angeles Times, 21 April 1977, and “Tenth Girl Found Dead; Nude Body Discovered by Freeway,” Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1977.
- 20.
Historian Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of the Genovese murder in relation to visual perspectives and filmic representations of the locations, underscored by her research into bystander engagement, updates received knowledge about the murder and its contemporary meanings. “Filmic Witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder,” Urban History 43:4 (2016) special issue “Visual Culture and Urban History.” The article is published in Scalar and can be viewed in full at: http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/urban-sights-visual-culture-and-urban-history....
- 21.
For an analysis of the politics of the neighborhood during the 1970s, see Suleiman Osman, “The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 1992), especially pp. 35ff.; C. Ray Jeffery, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (Beverley Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1971); Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972). Dennis P. Rosenbaum, “The Theory and Research Behind Neighborhood Watch: Is It a Sound Fear and Crime Reduction Strategy?” Crime and Delinquency 33 (1987): 103–34. See also Joe R. Feagin, “Home Defense and the Police: Black and White Perspectives,” American Behavioral Scientist 13, no. 5/6 (May–June 1970): 797–815. A 1974 article in Public Opinion Quarterly analyzed poll data collected since the late 1960s concerning Americans’ fears of crime and violence. In short, the data suggested that women from all backgrounds and poor, racial minority urban residents (male and female) had the most fear of crime and violence in their neighborhoods. These were the groups most likely to be victims of such crime and violence but not the most likely to form or to benefit from Neighborhood Watch groups. Hazel Erskine, “The Polls: Fear of Violence and Crime,” Public Opinion Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 131–45.
- 22.
Lyn H. Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 66.
- 23.
Ibid., 118.
- 24.
Ibid., 131–32.
- 25.
Ibid., 137.
- 26.
Ibid., 140.
- 27.
Ibid., 151–55.
- 28.
Quoted in Mary-Lou Weisman, “Good Buddies: Walter Mitty Rides the Merritt,” New York Times, 4 September 1977.
- 29.
The article referred to here is Harold R. Kerbo, Karnie Marshall and Philip Holley, “Reestablishing ‘Gemeinschaft’? An Examination of the CB Radio Fad,” Urban Life [now Journal of Contemporary Ethnography] 7, no. 3 (October 1978): 337–58.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 31.
W. Dale Dannefer and Nicholas Poushinsky, “Language and Community,” Journal of Communication 27, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 126.
- 32.
See, for example, the dedication (“This book is dedicated to a new breed of individualist … the American CBer!”) and the foreword to a popular CB slang dictionary published in 1975 and reprinted in 1976. The author, listed only on the copyright page as Wayne Floyd, calls it “exciting” that CB is a medium “not controlled or administered by private monopolies and—owing to its fantastic growth—is virtually free of governmental restraint.” He continues: “We American people have found a remarkable instrument for expressing our individuality and, in so doing, preserving our individual freedom.” Jason’s Authentic Dictionary of CB Slang (Fort Worth, Tex.: Jason Press, 1975), 6.
- 33.
Richard David Ramsey, “The People Versus Smokey Bear: Metaphor, Argot and CB Radio,” Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 2 (1979): 342, 343.
- 34.
The 1970s saw the proliferation of identifiable “subcultures” coming out of the social and cultural movements of the preceding two decades. Most of these subcultures used some kind of distinctive slang. Correct and fluent use of a subculture’s slang signified membership or the potential for membership. The 1970s also saw a renewed academic interest in subcultures. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham proved an especially important site for such studies. Two books from the CCCS in the 1970s became foundational texts to subsequent Marxist cultural studies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere: Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s collection Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain in 1975, and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979. For a concise introduction to the historical and theoretical development of subculture studies, see Ken Gelder, Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (New York: Routledge, 2007).
- 35.
“The Bodacious New World of C.B.,” 78.
- 36.
Jason’s Authentic Dictionary of CB Slang, 5–6.
- 37.
For a historical account of the populist rhetoric of the American Right, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
- 38.
“The Bodacious New World of CB,” 78.
- 39.
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 38.
- 40.
See “From Muskogee to Luckenbach: Country Music and the ‘Southernization’ of America,” by James C. Cobb. Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 3 (1982): 81–91.
- 41.
The voice in the car, and the transmission of one’s voice over CB into others’ cars—their mobile “home territories”—connects CB not only to the Nixonian surveillance and self-surveillance epitomized in the President’s White House tapes but also to the development of more recent automobile technologies that simultaneously offer increased “safety” through voice communication and (self-) surveillance. The disembodied but supposedly reassuring voices of satellite- and Internet-based automobile guidance and assistance systems (the OnStar system as an early example) represent another outcome of the marriage of cars, driving, fear and mobile communications.
- 42.
See “Police Battle Busing Foes Marching in South Boston,” New York Times, 16 February 1976; “Boston Whites March in Busing Protest,” New York Times, 28 October 1975; “Teen-Agers in Boston Toss Rocks and Bottles,” New York Times, 17 February 1976; “Large Wallace Vote Reflects Depth of Antibusing Sentiment in Boston’s Working-Class Neighborhoods,” New York Times, 8 March 1976; “Blacks’ Anger Rising in South Boston as Violence over Schools Spreads,” New York Times, 2 May 1976; “School Buses in Louisville Will Carry Guards Today,” New York Times, 8 September 1975.
- 43.
Shawn D. Lewis, “10-4, Bro,’” Ebony 31, no. 12 (October 1976): 120–22, 124, 126.
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Blake, A.M. (2019). The Sounds of White Vulnerability. In: Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3_2
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