On Saturday 6 September 1930, an estimated 140,000 people gathered in The Hague in the largest demonstration that had ever been held in the Netherlands. This impressive demonstration was in protest at the government’s decision to allocate radio transmission time in accordance with the geestesrichting, or philosophy of life, of the broadcaster. As a result, one broadcasting association, the General Association of Radio Programming (Algemeene Vereeniging Radio Omroep, AVRO), which wanted to present a programme that ‘could offend no one and could unite our People’, had to watch as its transmission time was halved in favour of the Catholics, the Protestants and the social democrats. According to the speakers, in an increasingly divided country, just one area remained, the radio,

The demonstration took place in ominous times. In the same month, the Algemeen Handelsblad newspaper reported, one year after the Wall Street crash, that ‘speculative sentiment is showing some recovery’. This was meant to be reassuring, but as we know, the economic crisis was far from over. The international political situation was also hardly reassuring. On 6 September the French government had announced that the battlegrounds of the Great War had been cleaned up, the trenches filled in and the visible damage repaired. One week later, the results were announced of elections in Germany, where Hitler's NSDAP had made a breakthrough and become the second largest party in the Reichstag. The results were broadcast on German radio ‘amid extremely sinister dance tunes (“la danse sur le volcan!”)’.

Adversity could also be noted closer to home, however. In the autumn of 1930, a prominent man in the agricultural organizations, H.D. Louwes, declared that the world had become an ‘economic madhouse’. In any case, Dutch farmers could no longer compete on the world market; without an active government policy they would be ruined for good.