Radios in 1930 and 1940
The data sets I chose for this week’s blog were Population by Race (1920, 1930, 1940), Total Population, Race, and Total Families Reporting Radios. Choosing the data sets this week was challenging. I tried looking at farm value or farm equipment based off race or population but had difficulty getting a map that accurately depicted what I was trying to determine. After messing around with a bunch of different data set options I decided to use the family radio data set as a base and look at how that changed based off race.
Map 2: 1930 Non-White/Population
After looking into the power grid and why radios and in
relation, electricity, was so prevalent in the north I stumbled on The Grid:
The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke.
The radio first appeared with its wireless communication in 1896.[1] The innovations of power
are seen between 1879 – 1896. The first power grid built in San Francisco (1879)
saw electricity in Sierra Nevada and three years later in 1882 the New York
Times had offices wired for lights. Later that year Wisconsin invested in
the Edison grid. By 1907 8% of American homes had electricity but most were
served by private electricity plants.[2] With the cost of private
power plants, the creation of power grids began rapidly expanding in the north,
due in part to the cost and higher income seen in northern states.
Radios in 1930 could be powered through household electricity or through batteries (farm radios). With the north power grid more robust than the south, it’s reasonable to believe that is a contributing factor to why so many more radios were found in the north in 1930.
Between 1930 and 1960, the U.S. power grid expanded rapidly.[3] In 1930, fewer than 10% of farms had electricity, but by 1960, most rural areas were electrified.[4] Non-farm households saw faster growth earlier, rising from 5% in 1900 to 85% in 1930, while farms lagged behind with under 10% electrified by 1930(Fig. 1).[5]
I broke down the maps and my visualization by showing the ratio
of radios to population for the entire continental US in 1930 (Map 1). Then I showed
the population concentration of non-white Americans within the C.US (Map 2). The last map
I show is the ratio of radios to non-white Americans (Map 3) to see where the
concentration is, which shows the northeast coast (near Niagara Falls) and the
north mid-west (Wisconsin and Minnesota). I wanted to show the large disparity
between population of non-white and the families who own radios.
In an effort to use what was shown in Chapter 11 of How to Lie With Maps I added an additional data set to
see if I could create a more accurate and informational map. To do this I pulled census data for 1940 (to compare the increase in radio usage) in conjunction with my new data set with class information to see if higher class non-white Americans had more radios
than lower class non-white Americans. I added data set “Employed Population 14
Years of Age and Over by Class of Worker by Sex” to compare the class of workers to the number of radios. I thought I would see a
large disparity in ownership, with unpaid Americans showing much lower numbers of
radios and potentially more in the south however, radio hotspots continued to
show more numbers in the North. This made me go back to my initial assessment
that the power grid in the north made it much easier for Americans to use radios
and that is why there are so many in northern USA compared to the south.
I’m unsure if I did my calculations correctly because with
so many variables it made it difficult to combine them to achieve the outcome I
wanted. Here is what I used in ArcGIS for the formula: $feature['nhgis0010_ds78_1940_county.csv.BYF001']/($feature['nhgis0010_ds78_1940_county.csv.BXA005']+$feature['nhgis0010_ds78_1940_county.csv.BXA006'])/$feature['nhgis0010_ds224_1940_county.csv.AF15002']
With the number of radios divided by race and class still showing the north as heavily radio focused, I’d interested to spend more time playing around with this to see if I can
understand it better.
This week I selected data sets on Population by Race (1920,
1930, 1940), Total Population, Race, and Total Families Reporting Radios.
Picking them was more difficult than I expected since I initially tried farm
value or farm equipment by race, but I couldn’t get the maps to clearly reflect
the patterns I was looking for. After experimenting with different
combinations, I settled on radios as a focus and looked at how radio ownership
varied by race. What stood out to me was that while most “non-white” Americans
lived in the South, nearly all non-white families who owned radios were located
in the North. This showed not only that very few non-white families had radios
overall, but also that the concentration of ownership did not align with where
non-white populations were the highest. I then asked myself, “Why the North?”
and discovered this trend also held true for white families, with radio
ownership heavily concentrated in northern states.
To better understand this, I explored the relationship
between electricity access and radios. Using Gretchen Bakke’s The Grid,
I learned that electrification began in the late 19th century, with power grids
developing faster in the North because of higher incomes and lower costs
compared to the South. By 1930, fewer than 10% of farm households nationwide
had electricity, while non-farm households in cities and towns, largely in the
North, had electricity rates as high as 85%. This uneven access helps explain
the geographic disparity in radio ownership. My maps visualize these findings
by showing the ratio of radios to population, the concentration of non-white
Americans, and the ratio of radios to non-white Americans, which highlights
radio “hotspots” in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. In an effort to see if
there was any change in radio ownership over a span of time I looked at the
ownership rates in 1940 as well. I also
tried incorporating class data (after consulting Chapter 11 of How to Lie
With Maps) by adding “Employed Population 14 Years of Age and Over by Class
of Worker by Sex” to see if higher-class non-white Americans had more radios,
but even then, the northern concentration remained strongest. While I’m still
unsure if I calculated everything correctly, experimenting with different
formulas in ArcGIS helped me see how the power grid’s development directly
shaped radio access across racial and regional lines.
[1]
Gretchen Anna Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our
Energy Future (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2017), 26.
[2]
Ibid., 47.
[3]
Joshua Lewis and Edson Severnini, “Short- and Long-Run Impacts of Rural
Electrification: Evidence from the Historical Rollout of the U.S. Power Grid,” Journal
of Development Economics 143 (March 2020): 102412, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2019.102412,
2.
[4]
Ibid., 1-2.
[5]
Ibid., 2.
[6]
Ibid., Fig. 1.
Bibliography
Bakke, Gretchen Anna. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Lewis, Joshua, and Edson Severnini. “Short- and Long-Run Impacts of Rural Electrification: Evidence from the Historical Rollout of the U.S. Power Grid.” Journal of Development Economics 143 (March 2020): 102412. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2019.102412.
NHGIS Data Finder. Accessed September 14-16, 2025. https://data2.nhgis.org/main.
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