{"id":1907,"date":"2020-12-09T01:08:52","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T06:08:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1907"},"modified":"2020-12-09T01:08:55","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T06:08:55","slug":"fdr-radio-and-whats-wrong-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2020\/12\/fdr-radio-and-whats-wrong-today.html","title":{"rendered":"FDR, Radio, and What&#8217;s Wrong Today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1OCuCMhn8o4?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/image.gif\" alt=\"The Fireside Chats: Roosevelt\u2019s Radio Talks - Photo 4\" class=\"wp-image-1908\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI 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\u2019s 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.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thus Saul Bellow, in 1983, remembering one of FDR\u2019s 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 \u2013 and the justly reviled \u201cmedia\u201d &#8212; are fractured today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>During the Depression, during World War II, FDR and radio bonded; he was even, as Murray Horwitz remarks in a recent\u00a0<strong><em>American Purpose<\/em> zoom chat (posted above)<\/strong> \u201cthe biggest star of old-time radio.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Corwin and Herrmann created their 1941 salute to the Bill of Rights, \u201cWe Hold These Truths,\u201d the listening audience totaled 63 million \u2013 nearly half the American population. These were families gathered in the living room, not people cooking or eating or texting.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Three years later, Corwin and Herrmann created another classic World War II radio drama: \u201cWhitman.\u201d As readers of this blog know, a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2020\/10\/bernard-herrmanns-whitman-a-subversive-yet-inspirational-entertainment-for-today.html\"><strong>new Naxos CD<\/strong> <\/a>features PostClassical Ensemble in the world premiere recording. We\u2019ve also produced\u00a0<strong>a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yTPWJWLKSy8&amp;list=UUpecfU6mThu_-lQ3brjP1Qw\">film<\/a><\/strong>\u2013 \u201cBeyond\u00a0<em>Psycho<\/em>: The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann.\u201d The\u00a0<em>American Purpose<\/em> zoom chat was a sequel to all that, focusing on a pair of urgent topics: What do Whitman\u2019s ideals of democracy say to us today? What can we learn from radio\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What follows is a kind of listener\u2019s guide:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Setting the table, the Whitman scholar Karen Karbinier observed that America\u2019s \u201cpre-Civil War angst was very similar to what we feel right now.\u201d It provoked Whitman\u2019s \u201cefforts to unite Americans\u201d and also governed Corwin\u2019s ingenious selections from Whitman\u2019s poems in fashioning a patriotic paean magically inflected by Herrmann\u2019s orchestra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Murray Horwitz, who knows a lot about radio past and present, began: \u201cWe\u2019ve lost something \u2013 with consequences for democracy in America.\u201d FDR\u2019s radio chats \u201cmade Americans feel they were one nation.\u201d \u201cBroadcasting,\u201d Murray continued, is a term borrowed from agriculture: \u201cEarly radio people saw themselves as cultivators, bringing American values up from the grassroots to be unified at the top.\u201d Today we have \u201cnarrowcasting \u2013 instead of \u201ce pluribus\u00a0unum,\u201d one out of many, ever narrower shards of demographics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Aldous, a native of Britain, opined that \u201cthe BBC still has that kind of punch-through ability to speak pretty much to the nation.\u201d&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This got me started on a story I tell in detail in&nbsp;<strong><em>Understanding Toscanini<\/em><\/strong>\u2013 how the specter of an \u201cAmerican BBC\u201d was defeated by CBS\u2019s William Paley and NBC\u2019s 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 \u2013 and also Herrmann\u2019s CBS Symphony, which championed Ives and brought in Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartok as studio guests; Sarnoff\u2019s NBC Symphony under Toscanini, and a plethora a kindred initiatives leading, in early TV days, to the NBC Opera and Leonard Bernstein\u2019s 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 \u201cLive from Lincoln Center.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I further observed: \u201cWe 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\u201d \u2013 \u201cand the arts, if you haven\u2019t noticed, are being erased from the American experience.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And yet, Richard Aldous pointed out, \u201cWhitman seems to retain a very broad resonance.\u201d Karen Karbinier took up this thread, opining \u201cwe are hopefully going \u2018in and out\u2019 . . . \u201ca rejuvenation of the arts\u201d could happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not so fast, I replied with sinister glee. \u201cI don\u2019t feel comforted. I wish I did.\u201d I added that nearly every review of our Herrmann\/Whitman CD, celebrating iconic American masters, was published abroad. \u201cSad to say,\u201d confirmed Angel Gil-Ordonez, who conducted the music, \u201cthe most profound analyses come from Europe, that\u2019s a reality.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then Angel said this: \u201cI\u2019m a son of the generation of the Civil War in Spain. Walt Whitman \u2013 in the middle of a civil war he\u2019s trying to unite everybody. That was not the case in Spain. A civil war \u2013 that\u2019s the worst thing that can happen to a country. It\u2019s frightening that something that happened to a country over a century ago is still alive. In Spain it\u2019s also the case.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Aldous persisted that, from the perspective of a historian of the US born and raised abroad, America and its institutions are notably \u201cresilient.\u201d He invoked de Tocquville. He then invited Murray to comment on \u201cpatriotic\u201d cable news services that aspire to \u201cspeak to the nation.\u201d Murray would have none of that: \u201cHogwash \u2013 I think it\u2019s all commercial. You make more money by dividing the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The stage was set for William Sharp, who eloquently recites Whitman on the radio drama recording. \u201cWhitman 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. \u2018This is what I believe we are\u2019 \u2013 but read between the lines: \u2018This is what we should be, what we want to be. It isnt\u2019 what we are.\u2019 And that\u2019s painfully clear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bill added that, as a teacher at the Peabody Institute, he has students that \u201clive in a world that is very different from mine. But those people give me hope.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My parting sally: Jill Lepore\u2019s bracing new 800-page history of the US,&nbsp;<em>These Truths<\/em>, contains not a single sentence about the arts. Robert Putnam\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Bowling Alone<\/em>and&nbsp;<em>The Upswing<\/em>, both of which analyze a crisis in diminished \u201csocial capital,\u201d do not look to the arts as a bonding agent. (I embellish these observations in a forthcoming essay for&nbsp;<em>The American Purpose<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Angel had the last word: \u201cEverybody loves music. It\u2019s the arts on which we need to be focused right now.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1907","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-uL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1907"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1915,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907\/revisions\/1915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}