Erik Barnouw, the preeminent historian of broadcasting in the United States, belongs to the New Deal generation of American progressive intellectuals whose coming of age in the Depression, wartime experience, and postwar work in public service influenced and inspired generations of students and activists after them. Born in 1908 in the Netherlands, Barnouw emigrated with his family to the United States in 1919. His father, Adriaan Barnouw, took a faculty position at Columbia University and Erik experienced the heady days of 1920s New York as a student at the Horace Mann School. While an undergraduate at Princeton, he became a member of the exclusive Triangle Club, and wrote a series of popular campus musicals, including Zuider Zee in collaboration with Joshua Logan. After brief stints as a theatrical stage manager, a writer for the fledgling Fortune magazine, and a world traveler funded by a Princeton fellowship, Barnouw returned in 1931 to a United States greatly changed by the Depression. He found himself among the ranks of the unemployed, until an encounter with a Princeton classmate in a speakeasy led to an offer of employment at the Erwin, Wasey advertising agency, working on the Camel cigarette account as director of The Camel Quarter-Hour on CBS.

The early, experimental years of sponsored network radio presented the equally inexperienced, experimental Barnouw with ample opportunity to flex his dramatic skills. He produced and directed series such as The True Story Court of Human Relations and Bobby Benson of the H-Bar-O Ranch. But, several years later, when offered a position of vice president in charge of programming at the agency, Barnouw resigned, and accepted an offer from Columbia University to teach a radio writing sequence.

The move to academe led to a growing reputation as a “serious” writer just as the networks moved into their first New Deal-era efforts at program uplift. This led to assignments to work on prestige programs such as Cavalcade of America and Theater Guild of the Air. In 1942 he moved to NBC as script editor of public service programs, an increasingly important area during the war, which led to an appointment as educational director with the Armed Forces Radio Service in 1944–45. In 1946 Barnouw resumed his faculty post at Columbia, now adding television to the curriculum in cooperation with NBC. During this period Barnouw became the president of the Radio Writers Guild, a labor union organized to stabilize and protect the rights of the often unacknowledged writers behind radio’s frenetic production.

Over the next 20 years, Barnouw’s career exhibited a stunning variety of accomplishments, including a barrier-breaking VD awareness campaign for the Pub-lic Health Service, co-founding the Writers Guild of America, producing and writing the film series Decision: The Constitution in Action as well as the groundbreaking documentary Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945, and founding the Center for Mass Communica-tion at Columbia. In 1959 he was commissioned by Oxford University Press to write a three-volume his-tory of U.S. broadcasting. Barnouw produced the first volume, A Tower in Babel, in 1966, followed by The Golden Web in 1968 and The Image Empire in 1970.

It is hard to imagine the situation of broadcasting history in this country without the presence of Erik Barnouw’s overarching yet accessible account of the industry he knew so well. With access to many of the key players from the still-recent early days of radio, Barnouw’s project drew on, but also crucially added to, the Oral History Collection at Columbia, an invaluable resource. His compilation of documents, photographs, and recordings from stations, producers, writers, journalists, industry personnel, and his interpretation and analysis in such a lively and engaging narrative, has made the American broadcasting heritage accessible to generations of students and scholars.

As the one-volume condensation of the larger work, Tube of Plenty, as well as his more pointed summary The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate, demonstrate, Barnouw’s primary allegiance is to the New Deal reformer’s philosophy that broadcasting’s problems lie primarily in its commercial basis. Though more open-minded than many, he reserves his approval—and in later volumes, most of his attention— for the “serious” side of public affairs, documentary and news broadcasting, reflecting his own background and experience as well as the unquestioned cultural hierarchy of the New Deal Ivy League left, posing patrician public service squarely in opposition to vulgar commercialism. No populist, yet not entirely comfortable with the elite disdain for popular culture found in much of the criticism of his contemporaries, a levity and wit run though his writings that often manages to insult all sides equally.

Erik Barnouw’s long career includes over a dozen books, numerous scripts and film and video productions, and numerous articles. He served as Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress from 1978 until 1981, won numerous grants and awards for his work, was extremely active in unions, organizations, and scholarly activities throughout his life, publishing his last book, Conglomerates and the Media, in 1997 at the age of 89. He died on July 19, 2001, at the age of 93.