Review: [Untitled]

Reviewed Work(s):
Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History. by Ralph Engelman
John J. Pauly
The Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 2. (Sep., 1997), pp. 730-731.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723%28199709%2984%3A2%3C730%3APRATIA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9
The Journal of American History is currently published by Organization of American Historians.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/oah.html.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic
journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,
and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take
advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org
Thu Dec 6 13:38:15 2007

The Journal of American History

grander scale because of the presence of huge

quantities of undeveloped land. Notwithstanding these regional differences, the trend in
all these counties was the emergence of postsuburban entities that were radically different
from anything in earlier American experience
and which have been properly called "edge
cities." The entire process involved complex political struggles usually involving existing small
towns and suburbs, jealous of each other, fearful of annexation, and worried about the tax
base. Everyone seems to have been worried about
the specter of "metropolitan government." The
traditional suburban desire for local control
remained strong despite the obvious need for
governmental structures that could deal with
a new order of problems.
In the 1980s, says Teaford, Americans discovered post-suburbia, and many of them expressed strong doubts about the new form that
they had created. It appeared that high-rises,
traffic jams, and increasing population densities were destroying the treasured suburban
amenities of green lawns, clean air, and relaxed
living. A school of environmentalists and slowgrowth advocatesmade themselves heard. New
shopping centers and the "big box stores" were
execrated in many quarters. Water supply, always a hot issue in the arid Southwest, now became a hot topic in DuPage County. Whether
they liked it or not, policy makers had to face
the ideological fact that the old suburban ideals
remained strong. These ideals, the author concludes, pose a major obstacle to metropolitan
reform and the development of regional government. Like many political scientists,Teaford
seems to be an advocate of metro-government
as a solution to all sorts of problems. As a reasonably close observer of a functioning metropolitan government in Portland, Oregon, this reviewer will note that it is extremely difficult
to make the process work and that it is indeed
filled with all kinds of hazards.
It remains to be noted that the book is
attractivelyprinted, that it includes several useful maps, that it is well footnoted, and that
it includes a short but useful bibliographical
essay. The style is adequate but not distinguished. It is a book for specialists in the field.
Leonard K. Eaton
Otter Rock, Oregon

September 1997

Public Radio and Television in America: A PoliticalHistory. By Ralph Engelman. (Thousand

Oaks: Sage, 1996. x, 342 pp. Cloth, $55.00,
ISBN 0-8039-5406-9. Paper, $24.95, ISBN O8039-5407-7.)
There could be no better moment for Ralph
Engelman's new book on the history of public
broadcasting in the United States. This is, after
all, a time of intense scholarly interest in theories of the public sphere and civil society and
a time of popular interest in the health of civic
life. Moreover, public broadcasting has recently borne the brunt of the Right's political thuggery. Engelman's book offers a response to these
attacks, though his evidence suggests that public broadcasting, as a democratic experiment,
has always been rife with its own contradictions.
American broadcast reformers have used radio
and television technology to dream new forms
of democracy, but in the end no consensus on
a "public" system has ever emerged.
Engelman's book demonstrates how frequently reformers in the United States have
proposed public broadcasting as a counterweight to the dominant system of commercial broadcasting. He traces reformets' efforts
through all their myriad forms -from early popular experiments with ham radio, to universitysponsored educational programming, to the
social justice and prolabor concerns of the Pacifica network, to counterculture community
radio stations, to Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation plans for noncommercial television, to production of national programming
by National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. Each experiment has set itself,
in some sense, in opposition to tendencies in
the larger society, though each has imagined
that opposition differently. For some, public
broadcasting (especiallyradio) was the last bastion of the amateur; for others, alternative media were a propaganda vehicle for the Left. Some
saw public media as a venue for adventurous
avant-garde, indigenous, or minority cultural
programs; others saw it as a polite alternative
to raucous, vulgar forms of popular culture.
Engelman's own preferences seem clear. He
admires the early experimental forms of oppositional culture, in which the avant-garde
artist, the political radical, and the amateur

Book Reviews

imagine themselves making common cause. He

dislikes bureaucratic and professional structures
that exclude amateurs, restrict community access, tie financing to corporate sponsors, betray
the political principles of oppositional groups,
or promote national over local programming.
His focus on issues of institutional structure,
financing, and control leads him to a crucial
question: what makes public broadcasting
"public"? Is it being independent of marketplace or state control? Is it providing opportunities for individual artists or guaranteeing
access to marginalized groups? Is it promoting
culturally edifying national programming? Or
offering a national network through which local independent producers might distribute
their work? Predictably, no group in public
broadcasting has ever answered these questions
to every other group's satisfaction.
Engelman's book has its limits. It says little
about cultural content or form, especially about
tensions between the news and cultural programming missions of public broadcasting. In
general, Engelman subordinates questions of
culture to questions of economics. His book
uses few archival sources, though he does make
excellent use of recent work by such scholars
as Robert McChesney and Patricia Aufderheide.
On the whole, however, Engelman offers a valuable, clearly written, convenient, and accurate
history of an important social institution.
John J. Pauly
Saint Louir Univerrity
St. Louis, Missouri'

The Supermen: The Story ofSeymour Cray and

the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputez By CharlesJ . Murray. (New York: Wiley,
1997.viii, 232 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-471-04885-2.)
Supermen is the story of a small group of engineers, based in the Twin Cities area, who
defied conventional wisdom to build and sell
"supercomputers": machines that burst through
limits of computational speed. First among
these "supermen" was William Norris. During
World War I1 Norris worked for the navy in
a group that deciphered enemy codes; only recently has the public learned how critical this

group was in the war effort. The details of his

work were - and remain -secret, but after the
war he founded a company, Engineering Research Associates (ERA),
staffed by some of the
group's alumni and located in a St. Paul glider
factory. The navy gave it "tasks," in part to keep
the talent it had assembled from dispersing.
Task number thirteen was for a computer. They
named it the 1101-thirteen in binary numbers. From then on, ERA became one of the
country's best builders of electronic computers.
In 1951 ERA hired Seymour Cray, just graduated from the University of Minnesota. At
this point the book shifts gears and becomes
a book about him. Cray became not just one
of several "supermen" but the focus of the whole
effort to build supercomputers. Norris remains
in the narrative but fades away, and there are
others like Steve Chen, who designed the Cray
X-MP. But the history of supercomputing is
the story of Seymour Cray, from the day he
first reported to work at ERA to his tragic death
in an automobile accident in 1996.
Supermen is written in a readable and accessible style. But it has flaws. Is the book about
a remarkable group of engineers, or is it about
Cray? If the former, then "supermen" is misleading, as the qualities found among them
have at times appeared elsewhere, for example,
in the Boston and San Francisco Bay areas.
Second, the author has allowed some annoying factual errors into the narrative. The
ENIAC was built by the University of Pennsylvania, not by the "Eckert-MauchlyCorporation."
It had 18,000,not 30,000, vacuum tubes. With
few exceptions, a computer "word" is not the
same as a "byte." On page 38 he suggests that
the UNIVAC had 13,000 vacuum tubes, on page
62 he says 5,000; the actual number was about
5,400. Some early drums may have turned
"slowly," but production versions turned at
speeds up to 7,000 RPM (revolutions per minute). And so on. These errors occur mostly in
the pre-Seymour Cray section of the book,
which leads me to believe that the author did
not care much about the early history after all.
The reader wishing to learn about the early
history O ~ E R Aand Control Data should consult
David E. Lundstrom's A Few Good Men from
UNIVAC (1987). Supermen is useful for the information it provides on the reclusive and shy