The importance of The Columbia Workshop in the history of radio is underscored by the state of the art in mid-1936. Network radio was just a decade old. For much of that time, what was heard was a crude product by its later standards. Radio spent its earliest years groping with fundamental issues. Would it be commercial or a public entity? What would be allowed in the name of "art"? Was radio by its nature simply another vehicle for pop culture, to be absorbed by the lowest common demominator and immediately forgotten? Among those who had little respect for the new medium was a sizable percentage of the country's writers, actors, and musicians. If radio was to become a serious art form, clearly that direction had to come from within the industry. Radio had to develop its own artists, writers actors and musicians.

When The Comumbia Workshop opened, "there was no show on the air without many limitations, taboos, and sacred cows," wrote CBS execcutive Douglas Coulter in Columbia Workshop Plays. "The way was clear for the inauguration of a radio series without precedents, one that would experiment with new ideas, new writers, new techniques; a series that would stand or fall by the impression made on a public of unbiased listeners, with no restriction save the essential and reasonable one of good taste." _{John Dunning}