Regionalist radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake

89. As late as 1947, Wyoming could boast only one broadcast station, KFBU, in Cheyenne. See earlyradiohistory.com.us/1922incr.htm; www.highwestenergy.com/About%20Us/history.htm; and www.census.gov/population/cencounts/wyl90090.txt (accessed summer 2006). Charles Beard and Mary Beard observed in 1939 (America in Midpassage, vol. 2, 644) that "special devices furnishing 'free-wind' power enabled rural homes in regions not yet electrified to have the radio."

90. Wyoming: A Guide, 4.

91. Ibid., 3.

92. Sidney J. Harris, "Art for All of Us," Associated American Artists Bulletin 35 (1946): n.p., AAA papers, reel D255, frame 78.

93. Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An Intimate View, exh. cat., Federal Reserve Branch of Kansas City, Kansas City, Mo., 1985, 5.

94. Thomas Hart Benton, in The Arts of Life in America: A Series of Murals by Thomas Hart Benton (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1932), 5.

95. Thomas Hart Benton, interview by Arlene Jacobowitz, Listening to Pictures, Brooklyn Museum, July 7, 1966, Brooklyn Museum, typescript, 11.

96. C. Beard and W. Beard, The American Leviathan, 5.

97. Kathleen A. Foster et al., Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals (Bloomington: Indiana University Art Museum, in association with Indiana University Press, 2000), 72; and Erika Doss, "New Deal Politics and Regionalist Art: Thomas Hart Benton's A Social History of the State of Indiana," Prospects 17 (1992): 372-73. This section of the mural continues to elicit controversy and criticism on account of its odious and incendiary subject matter; see Nick Riddle, "Black Students Protest Benton Mural," Art News 101 (May 2002): 56.

98. Report of the President, 14, 15.

99. Orrin E. Dunlap, Dunlap's Radio & Television Almanac (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951), 126; and Robert L. Hilliard, The Broadcast Century: A Biography of American Broadcasting (Boston: Focal Press, 1997), 91. See also Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting, 2nd ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1990), 656. As of January 1940, 743 radio stations operated in the United States; Dunlap, 126.

100. See Report of the President, 16.

101. Philip Fisher, "Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency," Representations, no. 24 (Autumn 1988): 66-67.

102. Myers, in Williams, The America of Mister Thomas Hart Benton, 19.

103. Meyer Schapiro, "Populist Realism," Partisan Review 4, no. 2 (1938): 53-57.

104. "Radio Programs Scheduled for Broadcast This Week," New York Times, February 2, 1936, x15.

105. On the fluidity and instability of the regional and transnational in modern literature and culture, see Hsan Hsu, "Literature and Regional Production," American Literary History 17, no. 1 (2005): 36-69.

106. Benton, in The Arts of Life in America, 9-10; and Myers, Lessons in Art Appreciation, 7. On Benton's formal program of connectedness, see Emily Braun and Thomas Branchick, Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today Murals (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1985).