gunsmoke said:
There were no stations catering to these peoples, most formats were in English, with a few foreign language programs here and there.
Your knowledge of radio history is rather weak.
New York City had many more foreign-language stations in the 1930s and 40s than it does today, in a much broader spectrum of languages. There were full-time signals in Yiddish (WEVD), Italian (WOV) and other stations (WHOM, for instance) that leased time to a whole host of foreign-language broadcasters, many of them affiliated with the dozens of daily (yes, daily!) newspapers that served the city's immigrant communities.
It wasn't just New York, either. WPEN in Philadelphia was a prominent foreign-language voice, one of several in the city. Chicago was a hotbed of foreign-language radio, with entire stations broadcasting in Polish and Ukrainian and other Eastern European languages. Even up here in little ol' Rochester, we had a daily newspaper in German as late as the early 20th century and German-language radio broadcasts well into the 1930s.
Some immigrants learned English. Many first-generation immigrants, like several of my great-grandparents, did not, depending on Yiddish-language media to help them understand their new homes and raise their families. At least two of my grandparents were the first members of their families to be able to speak English...which they did, and went on to raise all-American families.
Here, read this. You might even learn something:
http://yiddishradioproject.org/
Those Yiddish-language recordings happened to survive, but they were hardly unique at the time. The same stories were being played out on the radio in Italian and German and Polish and plenty of other languages, too.
It may well be your "opinion" that "all stations broadcast in English" back then. It is not a factual statement.
