“I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway on a summer evening. . . . Under [the elms] drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, in old Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it. You had some sense of the weight of trouble that made them so attentive and the ponderable effect, the one common element (Roosevelt), on which so many knowns could agree.”
Thus Saul Bellow, in 1983, remembering one of FDR’s fireside chats. The radio, at the time, was the first and only medium of instant mass communication. It centralized the American experience to the same degree that Americans – and the justly reviled “media” — are fractured today.
During the Depression, during World War II, FDR and radio bonded; he was even, as Murray Horwitz remarks in a recent American Purpose zoom chat (posted above) “the biggest star of old-time radio.”
Another pair of stars were Norman Corwin, with Orson Welles the king of radio drama, and Bernard Herrmann, who working with Corwin and Welles both was the supreme radio composer; this was a seedbed for the supreme Hollywood scores Herrmann composed for Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.
When Corwin and Herrmann created their 1941 salute to the Bill of Rights, “We Hold These Truths,” the listening audience totaled 63 million – nearly half the American population. These were families gathered in the living room, not people cooking or eating or texting.
Three years later, Corwin and Herrmann created another classic World War II radio drama: “Whitman.” As readers of this blog know, a new Naxos CD features PostClassical Ensemble in the world premiere recording. We’ve also produced a film– “Beyond Psycho: The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann.” The American Purpose zoom chat was a sequel to all that, focusing on a pair of urgent topics: What do Whitman’s ideals of democracy say to us today? What can we learn from radio’s early decades as we struggle to piece the United States back together? The result was a memorable hour-long conversation, led by the historian Richard Aldous, which gathered force as different voices weighed in.
What follows is a kind of listener’s guide:
Setting the table, the Whitman scholar Karen Karbinier observed that America’s “pre-Civil War angst was very similar to what we feel right now.” It provoked Whitman’s “efforts to unite Americans” and also governed Corwin’s ingenious selections from Whitman’s poems in fashioning a patriotic paean magically inflected by Herrmann’s orchestra.
Murray Horwitz, who knows a lot about radio past and present, began: “We’ve lost something – with consequences for democracy in America.” FDR’s radio chats “made Americans feel they were one nation.” “Broadcasting,” Murray continued, is a term borrowed from agriculture: “Early radio people saw themselves as cultivators, bringing American values up from the grassroots to be unified at the top.” Today we have “narrowcasting – instead of “e pluribus unum,” one out of many, ever narrower shards of demographics.”
Aldous, a native of Britain, opined that “the BBC still has that kind of punch-through ability to speak pretty much to the nation.”
This got me started on a story I tell in detail in Understanding Toscanini– how the specter of an “American BBC” was defeated by CBS’s William Paley and NBC’s David Sarnoff. Their strategy was visionary: to implement programing so intellectually and artistically ambitious as to make the BBC model superfluous. These high ideals translated into the contributions of Corwin, Herrmann, and Welles – and also Herrmann’s CBS Symphony, which championed Ives and brought in Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartok as studio guests; Sarnoff’s NBC Symphony under Toscanini, and a plethora a kindred initiatives leading, in early TV days, to the NBC Opera and Leonard Bernstein’s music lessons. All of that ended long ago, and NPR and PBS proved no substitute. (Compare the hand-crafted radio and TV productions of Corwin or Bernstein to “Live from Lincoln Center.”)
I further observed: “We have no capacity now, even hypothetically, to bring the nation together or to experience culture as we once knew it, as a bonding agent: to seizing what had been our cultural roots” – “and the arts, if you haven’t noticed, are being erased from the American experience.”
And yet, Richard Aldous pointed out, “Whitman seems to retain a very broad resonance.” Karen Karbinier took up this thread, opining “we are hopefully going ‘in and out’ . . . “a rejuvenation of the arts” could happen.
Not so fast, I replied with sinister glee. “I don’t feel comforted. I wish I did.” I added that nearly every review of our Herrmann/Whitman CD, celebrating iconic American masters, was published abroad. “Sad to say,” confirmed Angel Gil-Ordonez, who conducted the music, “the most profound analyses come from Europe, that’s a reality.”
Then Angel said this: “I’m a son of the generation of the Civil War in Spain. Walt Whitman – in the middle of a civil war he’s trying to unite everybody. That was not the case in Spain. A civil war – that’s the worst thing that can happen to a country. It’s frightening that something that happened to a country over a century ago is still alive. In Spain it’s also the case.”
But Aldous persisted that, from the perspective of a historian of the US born and raised abroad, America and its institutions are notably “resilient.” He invoked de Tocquville. He then invited Murray to comment on “patriotic” cable news services that aspire to “speak to the nation.” Murray would have none of that: “Hogwash – I think it’s all commercial. You make more money by dividing the American people.”
The stage was set for William Sharp, who eloquently recites Whitman on the radio drama recording. “Whitman asks who we are, who do we think we are, who are we really? When I learn and interpret what Whitman said, I find it inspirational, but also aspirational. ‘This is what I believe we are’ – but read between the lines: ‘This is what we should be, what we want to be. It isnt’ what we are.’ And that’s painfully clear.”
Bill added that, as a teacher at the Peabody Institute, he has students that “live in a world that is very different from mine. But those people give me hope.”
My parting sally: Jill Lepore’s bracing new 800-page history of the US, These Truths, contains not a single sentence about the arts. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Aloneand The Upswing, both of which analyze a crisis in diminished “social capital,” do not look to the arts as a bonding agent. (I embellish these observations in a forthcoming essay for The American Purpose.)
Angel had the last word: “Everybody loves music. It’s the arts on which we need to be focused right now.”
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