Human Misery is On The Air!

Why people treat other people’s misery as entertainment, I’ll never know. I’ve never understood the attraction of TV shows with people yelling and swearing at each other, being held apart by security guards while the studio audience eggs them on and the home audience laughs at them.

This kind of thing has been on the air long before Jerry Springer and that ilk. People bared their pathetic personal lives on radio which, in those less enlightened times, was deemed tacky enough. And there were people (and sponsors and networks) eager to take advantage of it.

Two of the most famous radio varieties had “Goodwill” in their titles. A.L. Alexander’s Goodwill Court started on a New York station in 1935, moved to NBC in 1936 and was gone in 1937 as a result of bar associations upset that non-lawyer Alexander was giving out legal advice. That same year, an announcer named Lester Kroll picked up the Goodwill moniker, invented a history and a persona and dispensed advice as John J. Anthony. If you hear references in old cartoons to “Mr. Anthony,” that’s him. Bob Elliott did a very cutting satire of him; Mr. Agony gave contradictory instructions, repeated statements ad nauseum and dispensed completely impractical advice (“we have an apartment for the gentleman”). Henry Morgan had an almost identical parody on his radio show. In the meantime, Alexander returned to radio with a “board” which mulled over the emotional tales in studio by the troubled and distraught.

Herald Tribune syndicate columnist John Crosby wasn’t impressed, either with the format or the content. We can only imagine what he would have thought of Maury Povich yelling “You are not the father!”

The first column appeared June 6, 1946, the second on July 16th.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
The Human Relations Non-Counselor
Several weeks ago I listened to a distraught woman bare her painful, personal history to John J. Anthony, a sanctimonious and infinitely complacent gentleman, who bills himself as a human relations counselor.
It was quite a history. The woman had met a man and married him years earlier. After three years, during which he did not support her, she left him, taking their two children. Twelve years ago she divorced him and had been supporting herself and her children ever since.
* * *
But that was just her early, or pre-Anthony, misery. Her present problem, she told Mr. Anthony, was her two children, a boy of eighteen and a girl of seventeen. The boy, she said, was quite wild. He stayed up nights and wasn’t “respectable” around the house. The girl was nervous. It caused a lot of confusion in the family. What should she do?
“Children of broken homes,” said Mr. Anthony irritably, “are generally more difficult to rear than other children. It doesn’t mean you haven’t been a good mother. It means you haven’t been good enough. There’s nothing to do except exercise patience and understand. Beyond that I have nothing to offer. Try a psychiatrist. But I see nothing else we can do for you here.”
The woman opened her heart; she got nothing but what sounded like a scolding. Mr. Anthony, I decided, must be off his feed. At about this point the announcer broke in to explain that one of the chief causes of irritability is an upset digestion, and that this could be easily remedied by Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Mr. Anthony, I thought, must have neglected his Little Liver Pills or perhaps he was taking too many.
* * *

I gave Mr. Anthony two weeks to get his disposition in hand and tried again last Tuesday.
“This is a program of kindly and helpful advice,” said the announcer in a voice dripping with sympathy. “It is with a real desire to help you that this program is brought to you.”
A woman stepped to the microphone and related how she had adopted a little boy seventeen years ago. She had had two husbands, both of whom were dead, and the boy was her whole life. The young had gone into the service and taken up with bad companions. He was drinking and, she hinted, doing even worse things. “Don’t worry,” said Mr. Anthony. “Don’t nag. Place your confidence in his officers and his chaplain. Do nothing at all about cautioning your son. That’s good advice and if you follow it you’ll find the happiness you seek.”
That isn’t good advice, Mr. Anthony; that isn’t any advice at all. The first woman you can do nothing for. The second is told to do nothing. I could get sounder advice from the bartender at the corner saloon.
* * *
The second woman on last Tuesday wanted to know if she should adopt her grandson, whose mother was dead and whose father refused to support him. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t adopt him,” said Mr. Anthony.
“Well, whaddaya know?” I thought. “The man’s expressed an opinion.”
That proved to be wishful thinking. “But that’s a legal matter,” he went on. “That’s principally a legal situation and we don’t give legal advice here.” Some hint as to why Mr. Anthony is so tongue-tied comes at the end of the program. Here he tells his radio audience: “Friends, I wish I could help all you people like I help the people in the studio. Why don’t you sit down and write me your problem? I shall keep your name a secret and I shall not invade the province or your lawyer and your doctor.”
It seems quite evident that the Bar Association and the American Medical Association have warned Mr. Anthony to stay out of their lines of work. This has narrowed Mr. Anthony’s inventory of advice down to the vanishing point.
* * *
If the two programs I heard are any criterion, Mr. Anthony persistently digs up people whose lives are an unholy mess. Perhaps they find surcease in unloading their agony to a radio audience. But as for advice, in the two programs I heard, Mr. Anthony either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell. He wasn’t helpful and he didn’t even sound kindly.
After a consultation with our Broad Statement editor, I have decided to add one last observation. Mr. Anthony has the most irritating voice on the air, and that includes Gabriel Heatter’s.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
The Modern Thumb Screw
About two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor used to pitch winsome young Christian girls into his eel pond and watch with great enjoyment while they were devoured by the eels. This served two purposes. It fattened the eels for the table and it amused the emperor.
This practice has been illegal for some time but the enjoyment of human suffering, otherwise known as sadism, is still buried not too deeply in all of us. Since radio is always eager to gratify our instincts, particularly our baser instincts, it has devised its own eel pond, the human misery program, of which one if A.L. Alexander’s mediation board (WOR, 8 p.m., Sundays).

Like John J. Anthony, who was dealt with in this column several weeks ago, Mr. Alexander brings you anonymous persons and lets them writhe in anguish before the microphone. The anguish, you understand, is not physical, which isn’t allowed any more, but mental and emotional. It isn’t as satisfying as the original eel pound but it appeals to the same instincts.
Last Sunday, the first person to step to the microphone was a woman who could afford neither the money nor the physical strength to care for her child. The child had been turned over, presumably by the courts, to foster parents. The foster parents, the mother said, were teaching the child to hate her and even objected to her visiting the child. Why were foster parents allowed to alienate the affections of her own child and how could they possibly be so cruel as to prevent her from seeing the child?
Both Women Distraught
The woman sounded as if she were nearing the breaking point and mike fright increased her agony to the point of hysteria. The foster mother, who was also on the program, was almost equally distraught. She said she was unable to have a child of her own and had become attached to her foster child as if it were her own. She had attempted to adopt the child but could not gain consent of the real mother.
“All kinds of tricks have been tried on me to sign adoption papers, but no one will separate me from my child but Almighty God,” cried the real mother. Mr. Alexander suavely requested both women to keep calm. He was extraordinarily calm himself, since this wasn’t his child and he’s more accustomed to microphones than the two women. The problem was turned over to two mediators, one of whom was former Licence Commissioner Paul Moss. Both mediators agreed that, since the real mother could not adequately care for her child, it was better for its welfare that she suppress her maternal instincts and stay out of the picture entirely.
Whether this was the proper solution I am unable to say, but I violently object to putting it on the air. The whole story was one of those painful experiences which would make any one of sensibility sick with embarrassment if he encountered it in his own living room. The radio removes the embarrassment and leaves only the ugliness.
Presents Undraped Heart

Human misery, I concede, is a proper sphere for an inquiring mind. Literature and art are full of it but in those cases the writer or artist has reflected the experience through the prism of his own intellect. From art and literature we acquire a deeper understanding of the human animal. From Mr. Alexander’s program we get life in the raw without poetry, without art. The tabloid newspapers show us the undraped leg. The human misery program offers us the undraped heart—listen to it fizz.
Both Mr. Alexander and Mr. Anthony make a pretense toward unsnarling these tangled lives. Whom do you think you’re kidding, boys? These painful problems belong in the hands of trained social workers and experienced welfare agencies. By their very nature, discussions of these problems belong behind closed doors. What purpose besides sensationalism is served in broadcasting them and how can such intricate dilemmas be settled in five minutes on the air? The column on Mr. Anthony brought me many letters from heads of welfare agencies, who declared that this sort of program did nothing but harm to the persons involved and also to any one with similar problems listening in.
Any attempt to excuse such programs as educational is sheerest hypocrisy. Their appeal lies in pandering to one of our lowest instincts. It’s a peep show of the worst sort.