USA — Hormel Foods hates it. Busy email users hate it. Internet service providers hate it. Legitimate business owners resent its impact. Although it must be profitable to someone, everybody seems to agree that spam sucks. A recent article in Modern Mechanix reminds Americans that although there was a time before “spam,” there is a long tradition of vice merchants finding unorthodox ways to promote their goods. In order to prove its point, Modern Mechanix reprinted the 1934 article, “Outlaws May Use Super-Stations at Sea,” which describes how offshore pirate radio stations would spread the word about gambling, booze, mentalists, medical Q&A events, and other, including presumably more fleshly, pleasures, that took place on a ship dedicated to their purposes.
The article estimated that “200 outlaws face war by the government” for having commandeered radio signals and effectively drowned out the rightful users – and then hosting illegal activities 12 miles offshore, where the government could not reach them.
According to the article’s author, Murphy McHenry, “Radio circles on the Pacific Coast were turned topsy turvy not long ago by the continued presence of a radio pirate ship which had taken unto itself a very popular spot on the dial and started broadcasting without regard for the land stations with which it interfered.”
As with modern spam, however badly worded or spelled, thousands responded to the siren’s call, thus plumping the coffers of the radio pirate ships. In time, the advertising method became so successful that McHenry reported “that one Los Angeles station was threatened with a complete loss of audience and business because the ship’s radio signal was the more powerful of the two.”
In time, the floating radio station met its end not through the efforts of local or state authorities, but due to the work of the state department in Washington, DC, which was able to pressure a Central American nation to cancel the ship’s registry; shutting down business once and for all.
At the time of the article’s publication, the issue of offshore illicit pleasure ships and their accompanying radio signal was still an issue for the United States government, especially in the Gulf of Mexico. Although stations beaming their signals from Mexican waters had the advantage of becoming involved with local politics and thus becoming more legally tolerated, McHenry assured readers that “All the so-called ‘radio pirates’ are not across the border or out on the high seas… at least 200 outlaw stations have been under surveillance in the United States alone.”
Ultimately, the US government was able to corral these precursors to modern spammers – although pirate radio stations still pop up throughout the country, generally in an attempt to communicate suppressed ideas, play underground music, or merely to prank the locals. Nonetheless, the presence of these historic audio spammers serves as a reminder to those in the 21st century that sometimes the more things change, the more they really do stay the same.
