Old-Time radio wasn’t merely Bing crooning, Fibber McGee opening a closet, H.V. Kaltenborn with the news, or someone on Ma Perkins getting amnesia. Issues were addressed in a number of ways, issues that still haunt us today. Some were tackled well, others perhaps not.
Herald Tribune Syndicate columnist John Crosby gives some examples in his column of August 28, 1946. And he ponders a conundrum about it as well.
Witchcraft, Past and Present
There are two kinds of bigotry—popular and unpopular—and both are wrong. Bigotry feeds on bigotry as violence feeds on violence. In recent weeks radio’s better minds have made notable efforts to combat the intolerance which alarmingly has flamed again in the South and, in some instances, against Americans of Japanese descent on the west coast. It’s generally assumed that any radio program aimed against intolerance is admirable, but I sometimes wonder.
Recently I heard three such programs, and I’d like to take them up one at a time. First, let’s consider Orson Welles. In his Sunday afternoon broadcast Mr. Welles told of a Negro veteran who was blinded by a brutal beating administered him in South Carolina. Mr. Welles’ heart was in the right place, but he put his foot in his mouth at the outset by accusing the town of Aiken, S.C., of responsibility for the crime. It later developed the beating took place in another town some miles from Aiken. Mr. Welles was forced to apologize to Aiken, thus totally obscuring the original issue. Then Aiken—and I’m taking Mr. Welles word for this—in a torrent of childish wrath, banned Mr. Welles latest picture and made a public bonfire of all the advertisements and posters about it. Welles made a fool of himself over a national network, and the town looked pretty silly, too.
That wasn’t all. In that famous voice Welles threatened to pursue to the grave the sheriff who beat the Negro. If there was a trial, he said, he would attend it. If the sheriff was sentenced, he would accompany him to prison. After he had served this hypothetical sentence, Mr. Welles would be on hand when he was released. Welles, in short, would haunt the man. The Welles curse had been laid on the sheriff. Boo.
* * *
Case No. 2 is that of “David Harding, Counterspy.” This Dick Tracy of the air waves fearlessly confronted a mob intent on burning down the home of an American war veteran of Japanese descent. With magnificent bravado, Mr. Harding collared the ringleader, after standing off the mob with a ringing speech against intolerance. It was cops and robbers with a social significance, blood and thunder with a moral. The head mobster was a villain indistinguishable from any of the bully boys in a Wild West movie.
How much good does this sort of thing achieve beyond publicizing the problem? The mob scene only arouses passions in the listener as furious, though more righteous, than those the mob is exercising. You get mad enough to lynch the ringleader, scarcely an admirable anger. You are confirmed in your righteousness, and the prejudices of the west coast hoodlums probably aren’t altered a whit.
* * *
It’s all right to inform the unbigoted of what’s going on on the west coast, but is it wise to inflame them? Righteous wrath can do more harm than unrighteous wrath and, in fact, it’s frequently hard to distinguish between the two. Rather than making the rest of us mad, why not educate the people who are committing these crimes—a much harder and sometimes seemingly hopeless task.
Let’s take up the third case, which attempted that very thing. It was a superb radio dramatization of the witch burnings in Salem, Mass., in 1692. Its name was “An Interpretation of Cotton Mather,” and it was broadcasted on the Columbia Broadcasting System’s “American Portrait Stories” Saturday, Aug. 17 (6:15 p. m.). The drama soberly presented the tale of those two demonic girls, Abigail and Elizabeth, who feigned convulsions and accused three respected Salem women of bewitching them. Salem was thrown into a ferment of religious bigotry and, before the blood lust had passed, twenty-two persons were hanged or burned for witchcraft and 150 others were awaiting trial. With penetrating insight, and possibly a little hindsight, the dramatist, Irve Tunick, demonstrated how Cotton Mather, that unparalleled religious zealot, used the witchcraft scare to strengthen his hold on the people and to stop the loose talk of religious freedom, then getting uncomfortably loud for Mather’s dictatorial nature.
But the real lesson of this study was that religious conviction, or any conviction—whether good or bad—can lead to the blackest sin when too rigidly held and too blindly followed. To understand the present, study the past. Witchcraft is ridiculous. We all agree on that now. But the passions that led to the slaughter of twenty-two innocents is as contemporary as Harry S. Truman. The juxtaposition of an archaic belief with a modern emotion threw the cool light of historical perspective on own prejudices.
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The same trick was performed in a single line by Bill Mauldin in the most brilliant of his recent cartoons. The cartoon showed two Roman Senators, togas and all, in a heated argument before a colonnaded building.
“Well,” said one Roman to the other, “would you like your daughter to marry a Christian?”
The rest of the week’s columns by Crosby: Monday, Aug. 26th he talked about composer Dick Whiting (father to singers Margaret and Barbara) and American standards. Aug. 27th is about radio solving the problems of teenagers; Aug. 29th is a potpourri including a swipe at Chicago Tribune editor R.R. McCormick (the paper owned WGN), who was quite likely on the other side of the political spectrum than Crosby; Aug. 30th on a programming idea from independent and iconoclastic WNEW and breakfast two-some shows in particular. Enlarge the text with a click.
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