ABSTRACT
While Harding was the first president to use radio as a means of political communication, Calvin Coolidge was more adept at it, a fact Coolidge recognized. Despite several efforts during the Roosevelt administration to reorient the radio industry toward the public good, by the 1930s the idea of radio as "the people's university" was dead. Throughout this period, radio's more explicitly political value continued to evolve, often with mixed results. The Republicans outspent Democrats 3-to-l on radio broadcasts in the 1924 election. Herbert Hoover was no match for Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a radio orator, the latter having been selected by broadcasting officials as the best political speaker in the nation. In many ways, the 1930s and '40s marked the zenith of radio's political impact. The early 1950s marked the end of radio's political reign, with television quickly emerging as the dominant form of political communication.
