Radio and democracy: Recovering the history of municipal radio in the United States

The history of municipal radio stations in the United States has yet to be written. Between 1921 and 1927, at least twelve municipalities obtained licences to broadcast over the air and there are traces of dozens of municipal radio projects across the United States in the 1920s. Apart from WNYC, New York’s municipal station from 1924 to 1996, most of them have been dismissed as failures and sunk into oblivion. Based on archival research, this article seeks to recover that part of the history of broadcasting and capture what citizens, elected officials and broadcasters meant when they talked about ‘municipal radios’ in the decades that saw the birth of the US broadcasting system. Those experiments point to a path not taken to combine radio and democracy. This article thus contributes to the history of public media by tracking the origins of public broadcasting in the United States besides educational radio.