Radio and Movies in the 1930s

Claude describes the new media that took over the country a century ago.

America 1930–1940 — Lecture 3.4

Begin on an ordinary evening in 1936, in three rooms a thousand miles apart.

In a flat on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx — Connie has moved them, at last, out of the old walk-up, to a building with an elevator and a private bath, and Rosa has come with her and complains about it — a walnut console the size of a small dresser stands against the parlor wall, and at seven o’clock the dial glows amber and the family arranges itself in front of it the way an earlier family arranged itself in front of a hearth. In a bungalow in the Bronzeville district of Chicago, Isaiah, past sixty now, twenty-six years off the Delta, turns the same dial to the same station at the same minute, because the program comes once and does not come again. And in a frame farmhouse in Pawnee County, Kansas, where the utility company has still not troubled to string a wire, Frank runs his radio off a wet-cell battery he must carry into town to recharge, and rations its use accordingly, and he too is listening, because the battery is worth spending on this.

Three households that share almost nothing — not a language of origin, not a church, not a bank, not a station in the social order any of them was born into — are at this moment hearing the identical human voice, delivering the identical joke, and laughing, if they laugh, in the same half-second across a continent. Nothing like this had ever happened in the history of the country, or of any country. A generation earlier the United States had been, as the opening lecture of this whole series insisted, a fragmented thing — a quilt of regions and dialects and immigrant villages transplanted whole, a nation on the map that was a hundred nations at the kitchen table. Now a machine costing less than a month’s wages sat in the parlor and spoke to all of them at once, on a single national clock.

The clock is the part hardest to feel across the distance of ninety years. There was no recording in the home, no way to hold a program and take it later. The broadcast happened, and you were there for it or you were not. This gave the medium a quality it has entirely lost: it made an appointment with the whole country simultaneously. When a comedian was funny on Sunday night, he was funny to forty million people in the same instant, and on Monday morning the joke was the common property of the nation, repeated on the assembly line and the elevated platform and the party line, by people who had been, until that machine arrived, strangers to one another’s amusements. A shared culture, of a kind the country had never possessed, was being manufactured in the evenings and distributed for free.

For free — and there is the first of the adaptations worth marking, because it was an American choice and it was not the only choice available. When broadcasting arrived, every advanced country faced the same question: who pays for the voice? The British answer, settled in 1927, was a public corporation, the BBC, funded by a license fee levied on every set and insulated by charter from both the government and the marketplace — radio as a national institution, sober and improving, answerable to the state and to no advertiser. The American answer was the opposite in almost every respect. The federal government licensed the airwaves — it had to; the spectrum is finite and the early years had been chaos, a hundred stations shouting over one another until the Radio Act of 1927 and its Federal Radio Commission imposed order — but having licensed them, it left them to be filled by private networks that paid for the programming by selling the audience’s attention to men with something to sell. The soap opera got its name from this arrangement: the daytime serials aimed at the woman alone with her housework were paid for, and often produced outright, by the makers of Procter & Gamble’s soap. American radio would be a bazaar where the British radio was a cathedral, and the choice reflected an older national instinct — a suspicion of state-run anything, a comfort with commerce — adapting itself to a technology the founders could not have imagined.

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The networks made the national audience possible. The National Broadcasting Company, assembled by the Radio Corporation of America in 1926, and the Columbia Broadcasting System, which a young cigar heir named William Paley bought into and took over in 1928, strung the local stations together with leased telephone lines into coast-to-coast hookups, so that a program originating in a New York studio could be heard the same evening in Portland. By the middle of the decade a set sat in better than two-thirds of American homes, and the figure understates the reach, because the sets that existed were listened to in groups — in parlors, in barbershops, in the corner of a dry-goods store on the South Side of Chicago, where a friend of Isaiah’s kept one going behind the counter and a small congregation of the unemployed gathered in the afternoons to listen to it, buying nothing, and he let them, because a store with men in it looked better than a store without.

What came out of the box, mostly, was not uplift. It was comedy, music, and melodrama, and the country could not get enough of any of it.

The reigning program of the early decade, the one that emptied the streets, was Amos ‘n’ Andy. Two white performers, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, voiced a large cast of Black characters in dialect, drawing on the minstrel tradition that was the oldest form of American mass entertainment. The two title characters ran a Harlem taxi business — the Fresh Air Taxicab Company of America, Incorpolated, the last word mangled in a way the show found endlessly funny — and the comedy turned on a set of types the minstrel stage had fixed a century before. Andy was pompous, lazy, and easily gulled, forever being talked into some scheme that would make him rich without work. The Kingfish, presiding officer of a lodge grandly styled the Mystic Knights of the Sea, was the smooth swindler who did the talking. The humor ran on malapropism and fractured grammar and the swelling of small men into big words they could not manage — a typical evening had the Kingfish luring the gullible Andy into a worthless investment, Andy inflating himself with mispronounced grandeur, and the scheme collapsing about his ears, the joke resting throughout on the premise that these were men who could be counted on to be idle, dishonest, and out of their depth. The program was a national habit of a kind difficult now to convey: theater owners, unable to compete with it, stopped their films at seven-fifteen and piped the broadcast into the auditorium rather than watch the house empty. Its audience crossed the color line; a great many Black listeners were among its devoted, even as the Black press — the Pittsburgh Courier foremost — mounted a petition campaign against its caricatures that gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. The medium was new; the material it reached for was very old; and the country worked out its uneasy relation to that material in public, over the air, in front of everyone.

Around the comedy grew an entire architecture of voices. Jack Benny built the most durable career in the medium out of a single joke about his own stinginess, refined over twenty years. Fred Allen conducted a mock feud with him that the whole country followed as though it were real. And the emblem of the medium’s beautiful absurdity was Edgar Bergen, who was a ventriloquist — a ventriloquist, on the radio. The nation adored his dummy Charlie McCarthy, a wisecracking boy of carved wood in a top hat and monocle who traded insults with visiting movie stars, and the country knew exactly what Charlie looked like, not from the broadcasts but from a thousand newspaper photographs and from the movies the pair made, so that the listener at home had the little painted face ready in his mind’s eye before the wooden boy said a word. What no listener could see was the one thing that was supposed to be the whole art — whether Bergen’s own lips moved as he threw the voice — and on the radio it did not matter in the least, and no one cared. That a ventriloquist became one of radio’s great stars tells you something exact about the medium: it was a theater of the ear, and the country furnished the rooms and the expressions and the timing out of its own head.

For the children there were the late-afternoon serials — Little Orphan Annie, Jack Armstrong, the ones that sold cocoa mixes and sent away decoder badges for a dime and a boxtop. For Frank on the Kansas plains there was, above all, music of a kind the networks in New York would not have chosen for him but the local stations knew he wanted: the National Barn Dance out of Chicago, the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville, string bands and gospel quartets and a comedy that was rural where the network comedy was urban. Radio did not erase the regional country so much as give every corner of it a window on all the others, and the view ran both directions.

And late at night, after the scheduled programs went off, came the thing that would matter most for the other half of this decade’s story. The networks filled the small hours by throwing open a microphone in a hotel ballroom and broadcasting a dance band live — a “remote,” in the trade — so that a band playing to two hundred couples in a Los Angeles ballroom was in fact playing to the entire dark half of the continent. A whole generation learned the new music this way, in the dark, from a box, and the band that broke through on exactly such a broadcast in 1935 will reappear in the next lecture. The technology of the parlor was quietly building the audience for the ballroom.

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The same intimacy that carried a comedian into forty million parlors carried other things, and the decade learned, sometimes with alarm, what a voice speaking directly into the home could do.

The country’s Depression lectures have already put Franklin Roosevelt at the microphone, so recall only the essential mechanism here. When he closed the banks in March of 1933 and then, eight days later, sat down before a microphone and explained to the country in the plainest language what a bank did with a deposit and why the sound ones would now reopen, sixty million people listened, and on Monday they carried their hoarded currency back to the tellers’ windows, and the panic that had seized the whole system was over. No president had ever reached the citizen in his own parlor, in what sounded like a private voice, and the effect was a new kind of power in American public life — the executive speaking over the heads of the press and the Congress and the party, directly to the individual by his radio. It was, measured by result, benign in that instance. The instrument itself was neutral, and the decade would shortly demonstrate the fact.

It demonstrated it through a priest. Charles Coughlin broadcast from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, and by the middle of the decade his Sunday audience was reckoned in the tens of millions — a reach no cleric in the history of the world had commanded. He had a magnificent instrument of a voice, a brogue-tinged baritone built for the microphone, and he began as a friend of the New Deal, coining the slogan that it was Roosevelt or ruin. He curdled by degrees — first into a monetary crank with elaborate theories about silver, then into the founder of a political movement, and at last, as the decade closed, into an open apologist for the European dictatorships and a broadcaster of the anti-Semitic slander that was then circulating out of Berlin, reprinting the forged Protocols in his magazine and defending the violence of Kristallnacht on the air. The networks, which had no settled doctrine for a demagogue in a cassock, temporized and then squirmed and at last declined to sell him time, and he moved to a patchwork of independent stations, and was finally silenced near the decade’s end less by any government edict than by his own Church ordering him to stop. Alongside him for a brief and brilliant span ran Huey Long of Louisiana, the Kingfish, who used the radio to carry his Share Our Wealth crusade past the newspapers that loathed him and directly to the dispossessed, and who might have become something genuinely dangerous to Roosevelt had an assassin not ended him in the marble corridor of the capitol he had built, in September of 1935.

The lesson the responsible men of the decade drew from Coughlin was uncomfortable and permanent: the machine that had let a president calm a panic could let a demagogue inflame a grievance, with the same intimacy and the same reach, and the American tradition — a First Amendment written for a world of pamphlets and public squares, a suspicion of any authority empowered to decide what might be said — had no ready mechanism for the problem and was not sure it wanted one. The Federal Communications Commission, created in 1934, licensed the stations and could in principle decline to renew a license, but a government board sitting in judgment on political speech was a thing the country’s deepest instincts recoiled from, and mostly it did not act. The problem was left, uneasily, to the networks’ own nerve and the sponsors’ own reluctance — a characteristically American solution, which is to say a market solution to a question the market was not built to answer.

One more broadcast belongs here, because it has become a parable and the parable is usually told wrong. On the evening of the thirtieth of October, 1938 — the night before Halloween — a company of young stage actors under a twenty-three-year-old named Orson Welles performed, on CBS, a version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, staged as a series of simulated news bulletins interrupting a program of dance music: Martians landing in a New Jersey field, the militia annihilated, poison gas advancing on New York. The newspapers the next morning reported a nation in panic — highways clogged with refugees, switchboards jammed, citizens fleeing the cities. The legend of the mass hysteria was born that morning and has been repeated ever since. The truth, so far as it can now be reconstructed, is more modest and more interesting: the audience that night was fairly small — a great many sets were tuned to Edgar Bergen and his wooden boy on the rival network — and the evidence for genuine mass flight is thin, assembled largely from the very newspapers that had every commercial reason to portray radio as a reckless and dangerous rival for the advertising dollar. What the episode really documents is not the credulity of the public but the anxiety of the print establishment about the upstart medium, and, underneath that, a genuine and reasonable unease about the new fact the whole decade was absorbing: that a voice in the box, speaking in the accents of authority, could make forty million imaginations see a thing that was not there. The country was right to find the power unsettling. It had never had to reckon with it before.

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The other machine did not come into the home. The country came to it.

The motion picture was not new — it had been the nickelodeon amusement of Rosa’s Mulberry Street in 1908, the flickering novelty where eleven-year-old Concetta spent every nickel she could extract from her brother. What was new, and what made the 1930s the decade the movies came fully into their own, was that in 1927 they learned to talk. The Warner brothers, a struggling studio gambling on a sound-on-disc system called Vitaphone, released The Jazz Singer, in which Al Jolson spoke a few unscripted lines and sang, and the audience, which had sat in silence before moving images for thirty years, heard the screen address it for the first time and would never again accept anything less. The conversion swept the industry inside three years — theaters rewired, careers made and unmade by the sound of a voice that the silent camera had never needed, orchestras in the pits dismissed by the thousands as recorded sound replaced them. By 1930 the American motion picture talked; by 1935 it had begun, through the three-color Technicolor process, to bloom into full and saturated color, so that in 1939 a Kansas farm girl could open a sepia door onto a Technicolor Oz and the whole audience gasp at a thing the medium had not been able to do a decade before.

The scale of the habit is the part that wants stating plainly, because it dwarfs anything in the entertainment of our own time. In the middle of the decade, in a country of a hundred and twenty-seven million people, the studios sold something on the order of sixty to eighty million admissions every week. Not every month; every week. Americans went to the movies the way they went to church, and rather more often. They went twice a week and thought nothing of it, because the price was low and the program was generous: a double feature, a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial chapter, a short — three and four hours in the dark for a quarter, or less in the neighborhood houses, and on a slow night the management gave away a piece of crockery with the ticket so that a family might assemble, saucer by saucer over a season, an entire set of dishes. Dish night, bank night, the double feature — these were the devices by which the exhibitors kept a broke country coming, and they worked.

And where they came was, at its grandest, a kind of accessible palace that has almost no equivalent now. The movie palaces of the great cities — the Roxy, the Paramount, the vast picture houses of every downtown — were built in the boom before the crash as cathedrals of gilt and marble and painted ceiling, with uniformed ushers and a mighty organ rising out of the floor, and in the Depression they offered the ordinary citizen, for the price of a ticket, a couple of hours inside a grandeur he could enter on no other terms. A shopgirl who shared a bathroom down the hall could spend an afternoon in a lobby modeled on Versailles. The democracy of the thing was real and was felt. The palace admitted anyone with a quarter, and inside the dark it did not much matter what you shared a bathroom with.

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The dream sold in those palaces was manufactured by an industry, and the industry had a shape and an origin that are themselves among the more remarkable adaptations of the era.

By the 1930s the business had consolidated into a handful of major studios that between them made most of the pictures, employed most of the stars under long and binding contracts, and — the crucial fact — owned the theaters the pictures played in. The studio wrote the story, built the sets, grew the star, shot the film, and screened it in its own auditorium, collecting the dime at every stage of a process it controlled end to end. It was vertical integration of the kind the Progressive era had gone to war against in oil and tobacco, reassembled now in the manufacture of dreams, and it would eventually draw the government’s antitrust lawyers down upon it — but that reckoning came after the war and belongs to a later lecture. Within the decade, the system stood, and it was a machine of enormous efficiency for turning electricity and gossip into a national mythology.

The men who owned it are the anecdote worth telling, because they were almost to a man improbable authors of the American self-image. Adolph Zukor of Paramount had been a furrier’s apprentice from Hungary. Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been a scrap-metal dealer, a Jewish immigrant by way of Saint John, New Brunswick, who did not know his own birthday and chose to celebrate it on the Fourth of July. The Warner brothers were the sons of a cobbler from a village in Russian Poland. Carl Laemmle of Universal came from Württemberg; Samuel Goldwyn, born Szmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, had walked much of the way across Europe as a boy and sewn gloves in upstate New York. These were the men who, from studios in a California orange grove, manufactured and exported to the world the definitive images of the American small town, the American cavalry, the American Christmas, the clean-jawed native-born hero and the virtuous native-born girl — the very iconography of a Protestant republic that would not have admitted most of them to its country clubs. Outsiders built the myth-machine of the center, and built it partly, one suspects, out of a convert’s love for the country that had taken them in and a shrewd instinct for the version of that country its customers most wished to see.

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A myth-machine that reached sixty million people a week, run by men the respectable feared and the clergy distrusted, was not going to be left to its own devices, and the story of how it was disciplined is the sharpest instance in this lecture of an old institution bending a new medium to its purposes.

The trouble began with the gangster. In 1930 and 1931, at the very bottom of the slump, the studios discovered that the public would pay to watch a poor man claw his way up through crime to money, cars, and fine clothes, and they made a run of pictures — Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson; The Public Enemy, in which James Cagney rose from the slums to the rackets and, in a detail the whole country discussed, ground half a grapefruit into his girl’s face at the breakfast table; and Scarface, produced by Howard Hughes. The films killed their protagonists in the last reel, as such films always had. But the killing was not the problem. The problem was the ninety minutes before it, in which the audience — many of them young, many of them poor, watching in the trough of the Depression — plainly thrilled to the gangster’s ascent, envied his defiance, and, it was widely reported, left the theater imitating his swagger and his slang. Crime was being made to look like a career open to talent at the exact moment the legitimate economy had closed every career it had.

The pressure to do something came, as such pressure so often did in this country, not from the state but from the church. In 1934 the Catholic bishops organized the Legion of Decency, and Catholics in their millions took a pledge from the pulpit to boycott any film the Legion condemned — a threat of organized withdrawal that the studios, with their theaters full of Catholic dishwashers and Catholic shopgirls, could not survive. The industry, which had adopted a written Production Code in 1930 and then largely ignored it, now gave the Code teeth: a Production Code Administration under a stern Irish Catholic layman named Joseph Breen, through whose office every script had to pass and without whose seal no picture could play in a major theater. The threatened boycott had accomplished what no law could have, and it had done so through the machinery of a private voluntary association rather than the machinery of the state — a very American route to censorship.

The doctrine Breen enforced did more than forbid the display of sin. It required, wherever sin, crime, or vice appeared, what the industry came to call compensating moral values — that the wrongdoing be balanced within the same picture by punishment, by retribution, or by an explicit condemnation clear enough that no member of the audience could leave the theater supposing the wrong had paid. The blunt shorthand on the lot was that crime must not pay, and the doctrine made punishment the only dependable way to get a wrongdoer past Breen’s desk. It was not, quite, a written rule that the villain must die; it was a requirement that the moral order be visibly restored before the lights came up, and death was the surest restoration on offer. Scarface is the illustration. Hughes fought the censors for the better part of a year and got his picture into theaters only after bolting on a moralizing subtitle — The Shame of the Nation — inserting a scene of solid citizens denouncing the gangs, and reshooting the end so that Tony Camonte died not defiant but cornered and whimpering, the glamour deliberately drained out of his final minutes. The retribution had to be present, and it had to deflate.

The restriction was, for a certain kind of artist, generative. Forbidden to show the bedroom, the writers and directors of the later thirties drove everything that would have happened in the bedroom up into the dialogue, where it reappeared as innuendo, rapid-fire repartee, and wit — the screwball comedy, in which a man and a woman who plainly want each other are permitted to express it only by talking faster and more cleverly than anyone has talked before or since. The sexual charge did not vanish under the Code; it was displaced into language, and it electrified the language. The constraint made the form. It is the kind of outcome that unsettles both the Whig, who wants every restriction on expression to have been a simple loss, and the reactionary, who wants the Code to have been a simple restoration of decency; the honest account is that a clumsy instrument of moral control, imposed by a frightened industry to head off a boycott, produced as a byproduct some of the wittiest films the country has ever made.

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What the machine produced, under these constraints, was a body of film that reads now like the decade’s own account of itself — its fears and its consolations, projected at twenty-four frames a second onto the palace wall.

There was the dread. Universal, in 1931, gave the country Dracula and Frankenstein in the same year, and the monsters landed on an audience that needed no instruction in the sensation of a settled world coming apart, of forces loosed that no one could put back. There was the anger, licensed within careful limits: Warner Brothers, the studio closest to the street, made I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang in 1932, in which an innocent veteran of the last war is ground to pieces by a brutal Southern penal system and ends the picture a hunted man vanishing into the dark, whispering, when asked how he lives now, that he steals — a final line that got past Breen only because the man is plainly damned by it, and that indicted an entire regional institution so effectively that it contributed to actual reform of the chain gangs. There was the flat denial of the whole catastrophe, in the backstage musicals Busby Berkeley staged for Warner Brothers, geometries of chorus girls shot from directly overhead like the turning of a human kaleidoscope — and note the nerve of it, that Gold Diggers of 1933 opened with a company of showgirls in costumes made of coins singing a number called “We’re in the Money” in the worst year the American economy has ever recorded. The denial was the point. The audience had the Depression at home; it did not need to buy a ticket to it.

And there was the affirmation, which is the vein the decade is most remembered for. Frank Capra, a Sicilian immigrant’s son who had arrived in steerage as a boy, made himself the poet of the American democratic faith at the moment that faith was most in doubt abroad — Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — pictures in which an ordinary decent man stands up in the citadel of power and, against the cynics and the bought men, wins, because the plain people are finally with him. It was sentiment, and Capra knew it was sentiment, and it was also a deliberate act of reassurance aimed at a country watching democracies fail across the ocean and wondering about its own. Walt Disney, a commercial artist from Kansas City, bet his entire studio on the proposition that an audience would sit still for a cartoon that ran the length of a feature and would care about a drawn girl as if she were a living one; the industry called it Disney’s Folly until Snow White opened at the end of 1937 and out-earned nearly everything in the theaters. And presiding over the whole enterprise as its improbable mascot was a curly-haired child, Shirley Temple, who tap-danced and dimpled her way through the darkest years as the studios’ single most bankable star, and of whom the President himself remarked that it was a fine thing that for fifteen cents an American could go to a movie, look at that baby’s face, and forget his troubles.

The whole apparatus reached a kind of summit in a single year. Nineteen thirty-nine, the last year of the decade and of the peace, sent out from the studios in the space of twelve months Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights and Ninotchka — a concentration of enduring pictures the industry has not matched in any year since. And it is worth pausing on what else those films were, beyond their merit. They were how the country saw itself and its past. Millions of Americans took their entire picture of the Civil War and Reconstruction from Gone with the Wind, with its moonlight-and-magnolias plantation and its contented slaves — a version of the national story, manufactured in the orange grove and sold to the world, whose falsehoods this series has spent lectures dismantling and which the screen re-erected in a single Technicolor epic more durably than any textbook. The myth-machine made beauty and it made consolation, and it also made, and fixed in the national mind, historical lies of great tenacity, and a full accounting holds all of that in view at once.

Where did the country get its news, before it had a screen in the home? It got it, in part, from the same seat in the dark. Between the double feature ran the newsreel, ten minutes of the week’s events — the floods, the coronations, the strikes, the marching armies of Europe growing steadily more prominent as the decade closed — narrated in the urgent, march-of-time cadence that was the voice of authority itself. For tens of millions of Americans the newsreel was the only place they ever saw the wider world move, saw the actual face of a foreign dictator or the actual water of a flood, and the studios that controlled it thereby controlled something close to the nation’s visual knowledge of its own time. It is another power the decade invented and had no precedent for weighing.

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Return, at the end, to the three parlors of the beginning — Connie’s on the Grand Concourse, Isaiah’s in Bronzeville, Frank’s in the unwired Kansas dark — and to the single human voice they had all been hearing on the same evening, a thousand miles apart, laughing if they laughed in the same half-second. Nothing in the country of 1914 that this series began in could have assembled them that way. A generation earlier they had been three fragments of a republic of a hundred nations that did not quite know its own mind, because it had no way to hear its own voice all at once. By 1940 two machines had cut windows into the walls of their separate lives: the voice in the parlor, which spoke to all of them in the same instant, and the screen in the palace downtown, before which they sat in an identical dark and took in the same dreams, the same fears, the same manufactured version of their common past. A shared culture of a kind the country had never owned was being run off in the evenings and handed out for the price of a set or a quarter, and it bound those three parlors and sixty million others into something that could, for the first time, be addressed as one.

Whether the thing it showed them was true was a separate question, and it had been all decade — the gangster’s glamour and the plantation’s moonlight and the priest’s grievance and the Martians in the Jersey field, all pouring through the same two windows with the same authority, the false indistinguishable by its tone from the true. The country was learning, unevenly and not always in time, to weigh what came through the glass. It had not finished the lesson when the decade ended. The war would set the next examination, and this time the whole apparatus — the voice, the screen, the newsreel between the features — would be bent to the single purpose of winning it.

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End of Lecture 3.4

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