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Hello
America!
Edward H. Gooch, Ltd., London
While millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic listened,
the voice of King George V welcomed delegates to the Five
Power Naval Conference
CESAR SAERCHINGER
Hello America!
T^adio ^Adventures in Europe
ILLUSTRATED
Boston
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Etfcrrfirtjc press CambriU^r
I 93 8
COPYRIGHT, 1938, BY CESAR SAERCHINGER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
fcfje &toer*fte #refi*
CAMBRIDGE , MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO
MARION
'The time will come, and that presently, when, by making
use of the magnetic waves that permeate the ether which sur-
rounds our world, we shall communicate with the Antipodes.'
JOSEPH GLANVILL, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
WHAT do you do all day?' is a question which sym-
pathetic visitors to my office in London used to ask.
'What sort of work is it? How can you spend all your time
in Europe, working for American radio? Do you broadcast
yourself; if so, why don't we hear it over here? 1
This book tries to answer these questions, to tell how the
foreign radio representative a breed of which I happened
to be the first whiles away the heavy hours. For seven
years it was said by some of my friends that I wouldn't
speak to anyone less than three thousand miles away. I
want to assure them that this was not due to uppishness but
to genuine preoccupation.
In telling my story I do not pretend to completeness.
Others have done as much, and more, for transatlantic radio,
for narrowing the spiritual distance between the two great
continents of the west. For nearly two years I had the
field almost to myself: those were the 'creative' years.
Then, in the heat of competition, many things emerged out
of the flow of world events, of news, of interests often
ephemeral but none the less exciting or amusing, as the
case may be.
It is the privilege and the merit of broadcasting to have
drawn within its orbit the leading and significant person-
alities of contemporary life. These personalities have given
content to an otherwise soulless machine; it is through
personalities and personages that I have tried to
interpret the somewhat confused activities of these tur-
bulent years. The purely informative chapters on the
methods and the structure of international broadcasting
Foreword and ^Acknowledgment
have been relegated to the last section of the book, together
with those general conclusions and speculations which not
even the most matter-of-fact person could forego, if he had
for a considerable time been on the inside of the most as-
tounding mechanism ever devised by the human brain.
Those who don't care for plain, factual information, or for
the wider implications which reside in all functions, mani-
festations and appearances, may stop short of Part IV, which
I consider the most important part of the book.
Acknowledgments, then, are due first of all to my inquiring
friends. Beyond that I am grateful to the heads of the
Columbia Broadcasting System for affording me the leisure
to write this book; to the British Broadcasting Corporation
for allowing me to use its library and some of its documentary
information, as well as for the untiring courtesy of its staff;
to my friendly rivals, Fred Bate and Max Jordan, of the
National Broadcasting Company, for essential information
concerning their own European activities; to the officials of
the broadcasting administrations of the principal European
countries, and in particular to Mr. Arthur E. Burrows,
secretary-general of the International Broadcasting Union,
for their cordial co-operation in the various endeavors which
form the substance of my tale.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Frederic William
Wile for inveigling me into broadcasting, and Henry Adams
Bellows for clinching the deal. Finally I am beholden to
my successor, Edward R. Murrow, for access to his records,
and no words of gratitude can ever repay the unremitting
helpfulness and generous loyalty of that paragon of secre-
taries, Miss Kathryn Campbell. In the planning of this
volume I had the benefit of valuable counsel from Ernestine
Evans, while Raymond Gram Swing and Morris Gilbert read
the manuscript with discernment tempered by friendly for-
bearance.
CESAR SAERCHINGER
NEW YORK, January ', 1938
CONTENTS
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT ix
Part One: People
CHAPTER I. AMERICA HEARS KING GEORGE 3
A New Medium for Transatlantic News The First World Broad-
cast Radio's First 'Ambassador' Enter, the Prince of Wales.
CHAPTER II. MEN OF GOOD WILL 15
'Nation Shall Speak Peace unto Nation* The 'Autocrat' of the
B.B.C. Lord Cecil and Lord Grey Scientific Pacifist; Paci-
fistic Scientist Dick Sheppard of St. Paul's Lord Snowden
Hits Out President Roosevelt Stirs Britain 'Transatlantic
Bulletin.'
CHAPTER III. POETS, PROPHETS, AND BEST-SELLERS 34
Literature Takes a Hand The Poet Speaks Mike-Shy Genius
Wells Looks at Things to Come Chesterton on Christmas
Priestley and the Highbrows Best-Sellers at Work.
CHAPTER IV. 'GET SHAW ON ANYTHING!' 50
The Funniest Joke in the World How to Get Freedom of
Speech Shaw and Einstein at Dinner 'A Little Talk About
Russia' Radio Satirist No. i Facing the 'Boobs.'
CHAPTER V. PUTTING THE POPE ON THE AIR 65
Vatican City Asserts its Sovereignty Marconi Builds a Super-
Station Hearst Takes an Interest The Monsignore Who
Gets the News 'Contact Old Gentleman Direct!' Golden
Microphone and Silver Trumpets.
xii Contents
CHAPTER VI. DICTATORS AND DEMAGOGUES 80
Mussolini Thinks it Over 'Fourteen Years of Shame' Dicta-
tors Need Crowds Papa Doumergue Tries it on The Great-
est Telltale in the World.
CHAPTER VII. DEMOCRATS AND STUFFED SHIRTS 93
Democracy's New Instrument The Tragedy of Ramsay
England's Baldwin Ireland's 'Dev' Liberator Masaryk
Quotes Liberator Washington Frenchmen Should Speak Eng-
lish Herriot to Flandin France's 'New Deal' Not Safe
for Stuffed Shirts.
CHAPTER VIII. WOODEN IDOL IN BERLIN WOODCHOPPER
IN DOORN 113
The Wooden Field Marshal and the Real One Hindenburg
Invokes the Deity Hindenburg's Dream 'You Stole Our
Kaiser!' Hohenzollern or Hitler? Goering Waxes Pious.
CHAPTER IX. GANDHI EATS WHILE AMERICA WAITS 113
Revolutionists on the Move How to Talk to a Saint Sir Sam-
uel Hoare Takes a Chance Gandhi 'Unites' the U.S.A. 'Do
I Talk into this Thing?' A Plea for India's Millions.
CHAPTER X. TROTSKY'S WEEK OUT 135
The Lion is at Large! A Bolshevik's Odyssey Pope of the
World Revolution Prime Minister Stauning Clears the Lines
Trotsky Takes his Coat Off.
CHAPTER XL NEW KINGDOMS FOR OLD 144
'Just an Ordinary Fellow' George V Discovers a New Power
'This Great Family' Three Kings Plead for Sanity King Al-
bert's Little Joke Wilhelmina Speaks; Juliana Makes Radio
History.
CHAPTER XII. ROYAL BROADCASTER NUMBER ONE 160
The 'Prince's Own' Studio The First Royal Broadcast in His-
tory War, Empire, Remembrance Discovering Misery
Unemployment and Social Service 'Lecturing' Big Business
King Edward Calls the Empire.
Contents xiii
Part Two: Events
CHAPTER XIII. RADIO GETS THE NEWS 177
Entertainment versus News Dr. Yen Arraigns Japan The
'Kidnapping' of Amelia Earhart La Coupe Davis Olympic
Games on the Air Elections: Radio's Big Chance.
CHAPTER XIV. RADIO FIGHTS ITS FIRST WAR 193
Vienna Celebrates Brahms Dollfuss Tells America The War
Begins in Munich Dollfuss 'Explains' the Bloodshed A
Dictator's Death.
CHAPTER XV. GERMAN is THE SAAR 107
How Nazis Handle a Plebiscite Geoffrey Knox's 'Terror*
Hitler Decrees Silence A Frenchman Gets Disgusted Heil!
Heil! Heil!
CHAPTER XVI. A MIKESIDE SEAT FOR THE WAR 116
Floyd Gibbons: First War Broadcaster Haile Selassie Calling
The Imperial Band on the Run In the Spanish Firing Line
Madrid Broadcasts from a Bomb-Proof Cellar.
CHAPTER XVII. TEN NIGHTS THAT SHOOK THE ETHER 2.31
The Royal Romance 'Not a Matter for Broadcasting' Ex-
plaining to America Setting the Stage We Scoop the World
Edward's Farewell.
CHAPTER XVIII. ' COMPETITION is THE LIFE OF RADIO' 147
The 'American System' in Europe Laval Sails for the U.S.A.
How King Carol did not Broadcast Two Networks That
Beat as One New York Welcomes the 'Queen.'
Part Three: Atmospheres
CHAPTER XIX. IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND 2.67
Pro and Con Toastmaster, Sports, and the Nightingale
Wordsworth's Birds and Shakespeare's Flowers Curfew Still
Rings Fifty Thousand Dollars' Worth of Coronation The
Man in the Street Lets Himself Go.
xiv Contents
CHAPTER XX. THE TOURIST'S PARADISE 183
Vienna is Still Gay Mozart and Leather Breeches Poland's
Broken Melody The City of the Dead Venice, California,
Hears Venice, Italy Rien ne vaplus! Holland's Silent Charms
What Price Grandeur?
CHAPTER XXI. VIVE LA FRANCE! 301
They Can't be Wrong Jean Patou Talks to the Ladies Bas-
tille Day on Montmartre Charm plus Speed Equals Efficiency
Miss Liberty Celebrates Two Presidents and a Phonograph.
CHAPTER XXII. THE VOICE OF THE OLD COUNTRY 315
Midnight Sun by Radio The Finns and Their Epic Holy
Week in Seville The Bells of Bethlehem Folksongs in Many
Lands.
CHAPTER XXIII. FISHERMAN'S LUCK 318
Mike-Shy Veteran No Papier, no Broadcast The Case of Baron
Aloisi Modern Music, Vesuvius, and Short Wave.
Part Four: Systems and Policies
CHAPTER XXIV. RADIO OVER EUROPE 343
Pre-War Beginnings Dividing up the Air How European
Radio is Run Germany Italy Russia Great Britain
The Enfant Terrible of Europe France and Europe's Little
Countries.
CHAPTER XXV. THE SPEECH-POISONED AIR 366
The Ancient 'Champion' and Modern Equivalent Is the
Air Free? Across the Frontiers The Race for Power
'Moral Disarmament' Ballyhoo by Short Wave The Modern
Tower of Babel The Voice of the League.
EPILOGUE. TOWARD THE FUTURE 381
The Race between Science and Politics Radio in War
Democracy's Chance.
INDEX 3 89
ILLUSTRATIONS
While millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic
listened, the voice of King George V welcomed delegates
to the Five Power Naval Conference Frontispiece
Viscount Cecil of Chelwood 22
Shaw's ' You dear old boobs/ the only talk, thus far, addressed
to America alone 58
Wells talked about 'The World of Our Grandchildren* in
the first American broadcast of his career 58
For the first time in history, a Pope's voice was heard by the
world at large 78
The excitement of a demagogue's speech is provided by the
background mob. Dictators are not anxious to speak their
lines in the quiet of a studio 88
MacDonald liked broadcasting it was a modern thing and
he fancied himself as a modern 94
In Stanley Baldwin's broadcast, America got a sample of
quiet British oratory at its best 94
Masaryk was a democratic statesman who used the radio, not
in the establishment of a regime, but in its consolidation 104
De Valera faced an incredibly primitive-looking microphone
contraption 104
Trotsky's Copenhagen broadcast, November, 1932 142
xvi Illustrations
Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands discovered the radio as
a means of reaching her distant East Indian subjects 158
March, 1936, when for the first time a reigning British king
came to Broadcasting House to speak 172
Broadcasting House opened its portals to receive Amelia
Earhart, heroine of the year 182
Chancellor Dollfuss spoke from the very room in which
eventually he was to meet his fate 198
Emperor Hailie Selassie's address to America, seventy-five
hundred miles away 220
The 'Ceremony of the Keys' at the Tower of London 270
Fred Bate, N.B.C. commentator, outside Buckingham
Palace describing the Coronation Procession of Their
Majesties King George VI and Queen Elizabeth 280
The Foreign Control Room at Middlesex Guild Hall during
the broadcast of the Coronation 280
Radio transmitted to the world the tragic beauty of the dead
city of Pompeii 292
PART ONE
People
L AMERICA HEARS KING GEORGE
A NEW MEDIUM FOR TRANSATLANTIC NEWS
WHEN the George Washington sailed from New York
in January, 1930, carrying the American Delegation
to the Five Power Naval Conference in London, she also had
on board the largest and most variegated complement of
newspaper correspondents that had crossed the ocean since
the ill-starred Peace Conference at Versailles eleven years
before. Among them were two specimens of a type of reporter
that had been unrepresented either at Versailles or any of the
dozen or more conferences from Spa to Locarno which
ushered in the new era of 'open diplomacy/
This journalistic species new in the international field
was the radio commentator. He was not represented at
any of the previous parleys for the simple reason that he had
not yet been invented, although broadcasting the greatest
discovery in mass communication since the invention of
printing had been born in 1920, the very year which saw
the conclusion of Versailles and the birth of the League of
Nations. It had taken ten years for the new baby to grow up.
During that bitter and turbulent decade, in which a new
Europe was laboring to be born, inventors and engineers had
been quietly working to perfect the new discovery. While
long-suffering, disillusioned humanity was pathetically
clamoring for the peace that would not come, the medium
through which 'nation might speak peace unto nation* was
being made effective by these twentieth-century pioneers.
This coincidence may one day appeal to the historian of our
time; for the moment we are interested in those two men
Hello ^America!
aboard the George Washington who, unwittingly perhaps,
were starting a new epoch in the dissemination of thought. 1
The two men were William Hard, representing the Na-
tional Broadcasting Company, and Frederic William Wile,
who was sent by the Columbia Broadcasting System, then in
existence less than two years. Hard was known through
America as a brilliant and fearless commentator on political
affairs, with a trenchant, witty style; Wile was a veteran
journalist of world-wide experience an American whose
pre-war exploits had led Lord Northcliffe to 'discover* him
for the Daily Mail. Both were worthy members of that
hardest-boiled of all newspapermen's fraternities, the
Washington correspondents. Short-bodied, long-headed ' Bill '
Hard, with shrewd, kindly eyes; rotund and white-haired
'Fred* Wile, a hard-hitting go-getter of benign countenance,
were among the most distinctive human animals in that
political Noah's Ark two personalities peculiarly fitted by
destiny for a pioneering job.
Their business was to report every few days, by radio, on
the progress of the Conference, speaking by way of a nation-
wide 'hook-up* direct to the radio audience of the United
States and Canada. This was, essentially, no different from
the daily cable reporting by newspaper correspondents, ex-
cept for the medium employed. In effect, they were to tele-
phone their observations from what amounted to little more
than a telephone booth within a mile of St. James's Palace,
where the Conference met, to a radio control-room in New
York, whence their voices were instantaneously retrans-
mitted to the sixty or more broadcasting stations constituting
a radio 'chain* and simultaneously broadcast from these
stations.
They were thus talking directly to millions of listeners,
1 For the sake of historical accuracy be it recorded that wireless telephony across
the Atlantic was first accomplished in 1915, and the first European radio program
was transmitted to America early in 1924; but these and other spectacular develop-
ments in wireless communication were admittedly experimental. The first scheduled
international and short-wave transmission was a part of a symphony concert in
Queen's Hall, London, on February i, 1929, and Senator Marconi's first transat-
lantic talk for broadcasting was short-waved from Chelmsford, England, on
December 12, 1929, six weeks before the opening of the London Naval Conference.
^America Hears King (jeorge 5
with but a fraction of a second's delay. They had the ad-
vantage over their journalistic rivals in the all-important
factor of time, and also in the superior power of the spoken
over the written word. They could convey, by inflection and
emphasis, what no amount of punctuation could suggest;
they could capture and hold the interest of their audience by
the appeal of their voices instead of relying upon words in
cold print.
Indeed, the qualities of their voices were transmitted with
startling fidelity. The ' telephone booth ' which they used was
a small studio in the building of the British Broadcasting
Corporation, and^they talked, not into an ordinary telephone,
but into that amazing instrument, the microphone, which
reproduced and magnified their voices so as to carry, besides
the meaning of their words, a projection of their personalities.
But their assignment went further. Besides reporting the
Conference and projecting their own personalities, they were
to introduce the chief actors of the drama itself the
delegates and the leading figures in and about the Conference
room and to transmit an impression of the atmosphere of
this important international event. Here is something no
writer for a newspaper or a magazine could do.
The fact that radio could do it illustrated at a flash the
superior power of the new medium in journalism. It could
report at first hand; it could set the scene by means of the
spoken word, and it could then present the actors in the
scene. Ramsay MacDonald, the British Prime Minister and
president of the Conference, Henry L. Stimson, United States
Secretary of State and chief American delegate, and others
directly concerned could if they would give an account
of their purposes and acts. The microphone could pick up,
from the Conference table direct, the speeches, the rumble of
voices, even the whispers and the rustle of papers. And so,
for the first time in the history of 'open diplomacy/ at least
the formalities were transmitted direct to the public.
Hello ^America!
THE FIRST WORLD BROADCAST
On the twenty-first of January, 1930, an announcer of the
British Broadcasting Corporation ('B.B.C.') said, 'We now
take you to the House of Lords,' and there, in the hushed
Royal Gallery, the voice of King George V welcomed the
delegates of the five great Naval Powers, while millions of
people on both sides of the Atlantic listened and heard, for
the first time in history, the royal but quite human voice of
the man whose personality symbolized the unity of the
greatest empire in the world.
It was noon in London, seven o'clock in the morning in
New York, four o'clock long before dawn on the
Pacific coast; yet everywhere men and women rose from their
beds to listen, to witness this miracle of science. During the
middle of the speech a curious thing happened in New York.
By an odd misadventure a mechanic in the Columbia control-
room tripped and tore the wire through which the King's
voice was being transmitted to the broadcasting stations.
With quick presence of mind the control operator picked up
the severed strands and held them in his two hands until the
break was repaired. In the intervening minutes the body of
Harold Vivian formed part of the circuit through which the
voice of George V reached millions of listeners.
The King's speech was followed by those of the British
Prime Minister, the chief delegates of the United States,
France, Italy, Japan, India, and the British Dominions; on
the same day Hard and Wile gave their first eye-witness
accounts, and from then on, almost daily, radio listeners
throughout the United States were able to follow the tortuous
path of this Conference, whose half-success, half-failure fore-
shadowed so much of Europe's and the world's unhappy
history of the subsequent years.
Little need here be said of the Conference itself. Many of
the world's great and near-great flitted across its flood-lit
stage or lingered in the obscure corners behind the wings,
dickering, scheming, strutting, threatening, cajoling. Tar-
^America Hears King (jeorge
dieu and Briand, that ill-matched couple representing a still
intransigent Victorious* France; handsome, black-bearded
Dino Grandi, with his troupe of admirals and propagandists,
for the first time truculently defying Italy's ex-ally, France,
and demanding 'parity* with the Big Latin Brother; Makat-
suki and Matsudaira, bland, smiling Japanese, cunningly
playing one European politician against another, and finally
accepting a sham inferiority that would not survive another
Conference.
Shadows of Abyssinia and Manchukuo, of violent acts to
come and violations being plotted, could have been seen
hurrying like storm-clouds across the horizon of that lowering
political sky by anyone with a grain of historical prescience.
But here was Ramsay MacDonald, self-appointed high-priest
of political righteousness; vain, gullible, persistent, and
sentimentally attached to Anglo-American friendship, bent
on face-saving all round and insisting that humanity was
going 'on and on and up and up.' No five-power treaty could
be signed, but the three-power treaty that emerged at last
postponed the armaments race for another five years. The
essential failure of the main Conference to achieve general
agreement presaged a debacle far more ignominious in 1936.
The United States Senate ratified the treaty, such as it was
the first post-war treaty negotiated in Europe in which
America was anything but an observer. One may perhaps
digress for a moment to ask what might have been the fate of
that other treaty eleven years before if the American
public could have 'listened in* to Versailles as it did to
London in 1930.
Whatever value history may place on the Naval Confer-
ence of 1930, it cannot ignore the fact that with it came a new
method of reporting the march of world events. Henceforth
no conference of world importance is thinkable without the
accompaniment and aid of broadcasting. In the his-
tory of broadcasting itself, the Naval Conference marked an
important date, for it was the beginning of an international
activity which has already had a profound influence on its
development.
Hello ^America!
RADIOES FIRST ' AMBASSADOR '
My own entry into broadcasting, as chance would have it,
was closely connected with this stage of development. The
details are indelibly impressed on my mind. As a member of
the staff of correspondents covering the Naval Conference for
a group of American newspapers J I came into contact with
both 'Bill* Hard and 'Fred* Wile, the only two radio men at
the Conference. Wile arrived in London with a letter of
introduction from a mutual friend, which led to a drive into
the country on the following Sunday. We had to return to
London in time for Wile to 'go on the air* at the old B.B.C.
studios in Savoy Hill.
I had never seen a broadcasting studio and asked to be
taken along. We entered the ugly old building, a converted
Victorian apartment house with its once proud fagade on the
Thames Embankment, a near neighbor of the Savoy Hotel.
It was a fine March evening, and the chattering starlings in
the Savoy Chapel graveyard presaged the coming of Spring.
We were shown into a sound-proof chamber, decorated with a
sham window (for the benefit of sufferers from claustro-
phobia), furnished with a reading-desk over which dangled,
as from a miniature gallows, an old-fashioned carbon micro-
phone. I had never even seen a microphone. A suave young
man with the most perfect of Oxford accents spoke to us in
subdued tones: 'Silence, please/ as a red light flicked over the
door. Then, bending low over the microphone: 'Hello,
America, London calling. And here is Mr. Frederic William
Wile/ By the time Wile started to speak to the 'friends in
America,' I was so fascinated that I thought it all a dream.
Here we were, in this tiny room in an ordinary building,
standing between an ancient churchyard and the river
Thames, and over there, across three thousand miles of ocean,
thousands no, millions could hear every word we said.
A new world had opened to me . . .
1 New York Evening Post and Philadelphia Public Ledger. My colleagues were
Raymond Gram Swing and H. R. Knickerbocker, with the late-lamented Frank
Simonds as 'star' commentator.
^America Hears King (jeorge
Wile must have read my thoughts, for on the way home he
mumbled something about the Conference lasting too long,
and himself having to leave with several things hanging fire
Secretary Stimson, Bernard Shaw, and others still to be
'aired/ Trying to sound unconcerned I offered to help, if
necessary. About a fortnight later, on the eve of Wile's
sailing, we had a farewell dinner. Before we went in, he
handed me the copy of a cable he had just sent to New York.
1 You may not know it/ he said, 'but until further notice you
are our London representative/ While the Conference lin-
gered on toward a probably inglorious end, I was to 'protect '
the network a mere ' dog-watch ' service, to be fitted in
' after hours. *
A few days later the storm broke. Cables poured into my
office, Columbia wanting everything from the Prince of Wales
to the United States Secretary of State. If life was hectic
before, it was frantic now. I was a newspaper correspondent
and a radio reporter all at the same time.
But the Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. I had
the usual beginner's luck. My first guest speaker was that
distinguished veteran of journalism, H. Wickham Steed, and
within three weeks I was able to 'present' two of the princi-
pal American delegates, both at crucial moments in the
Conference. Stimson himself announced to the American
public the signing of the tripartite London Naval Treaty and
expounded its meaning a first-class scoop, which inciden-
tally acquainted me with the uses of the still new transat-
lantic telephone, for it required a midnight argument across
the ocean to convince program managers in New York of the
importance of this speech!
By the end of April the Naval Conference was 'washed
up/ Easter Sunday saw the delegates away, and his Lord-
ship the Bishop of London had kindly consented to convey
his blessings across the Atlantic under our auspices. Ancient
St. James's Palace, which only a few hours ago had been a
giant beehive swarming with politicians, diplomats, journal-
ists, and hangers-on from the four corners of the world, be-
came once more just a noble piece of Tudor architecture.
The historic dull-red weathered brick building with its crenel-
io Hello ^America!
lated walls lapsed again into the drowsy dignity acquired in
four centuries of serene contemplation. Outside, the red-
coated bearskin-topped sentry marched as always across the
open side of Friary Court (from whose central balcony Mrs.
Wallis Warfield Simpson was later to watch the proclamation
of her royal friend, Edward VIII).
Across and across, back and forth he marched, like a toy
actor moving in a groove, executing those absurd rhythmic
tramples at each end, by means of which alone he could
manage, without sacrificing the illusion of a mechanism, to
reverse and march the other way. For two solid months he
and his alternates had to be in constant danger of treading
upon dodging journalists as they hurried in and out of the
palace, foreigners who did not always understand that a
British guardsman is constitutionally unable to swerve
even in order to avoid a collision.
And now at last these sturdy guardsmen could again do
their duty without mental qualms. Inside, the great Queen
Anne's room, which had resounded to the fine Christian
phrases of Ramsay MacDonald and the rich, mellow oratory
of ageing Aristide Briand, was being swept out; below it, the
long room reserved for the journalists and fitted up for all the
world like a schoolroom, with a hundred individual desks and
chairs, was all but deserted. Here and there a straggler was
packing up; a grinning Jap was writing a ' round-up' for his
Tokyo sheet. Scraps of paper, crumpled copies of the last
mimeographed official communiques were strewn about on
the floor. Another event had passed into history; another
newspaperman's job was done. What next?
As I sat at my typewriter, the last news message gone, it
occurred to me that the one real experience of these two
months had been that little microphone in Savoy Hill: the
thrilling telephone conversation across the ocean, the frock-
coated Secretary of State, his private abstract of the treaty in
his hand, sitting at that little reading-desk and speaking to
the millions of America. Here, for better or worse, was some-
thing new, something more direct, more speedy than this
laborious reporting by written symbols. Had it come to
stay? Or was it good only for extraordinary occasions like
^America Hears King (jeorge n
this? Sitting there, in the long, deserted room lit by the
cold afternoon rays of the April sun, I visualized a new kind
of activity a permanent service of spoken messages across
the Atlantic not only of news, but opinions the wisdom
of the outstanding men of the age, scientists, economists,
authors and poets, churchmen and teachers statesmen, too,
who could see in this service a great opportunity for Anglo-
American understanding. My immediate broadcasting as-
signment was finished, but why not try a shot in the dark?
I typed a message on a cable form:
JUST GETTING INTO MY STRIDE. WOULD YOU
BE INTERESTED IN FORTNIGHTLY SERIES OF
TALKS BY EMINENT SPECIALISTS. HAVE PLAN
TO SUBMIT.
When I walked home that evening, past the red-coated
sentry up St. James's Street and across Piccadilly, I had a
vague feeling that I was walking out of journalism as I had
known it into something else. The answer to my cable asked
for details. I cabled back a year's program for Sunday talks,
bristling with great British names, with subjects assigned to
each, and ending with the item 'Shaw on anything/
Within three days I had my answer. It read: 'Your plan
great. Who speaks next Sunday?' That was the beginning
of the first regular transatlantic broadcast service, and a few
weeks later I was the network's officially appointed European
radio representative, the first permanent foreign emissary of
radio.
Within the first four months America had heard thirty or
more leading statesmen, writers, and preachers speaking from
London. The newspapers had discovered a new source of
material for news-hungry editors. The American radio
audience had 'tasted blood.' It was obvious that second-
12. Hello ^America!
hand reporting was no longer enough, even in the inter-
national field. If one could actually hear European states-
men while they were in the throes of shaping the fate of
nations; if one could hear King George solemnly adjuring
the statesmen to ' hasten the time of general disarmament,'
there was no reason why one couldn't hear the voices of any
of the generation's great men. This was, indeed, eaves-
dropping on history.
The public thinks of contemporary history in terms of the
men who shape it. The personalities of those who are
responsible for the work and thought of our time are subjects
for universal curiosity, and the voice of a great man is an
essential part of his personality. The two voices that the
American public wanted most to hear from across the
Atlantic were those of the Prince of Wales and George
Bernard Shaw the most popular Englishman and the
most famous Irishman. It goes without saying that the
efforts of an American radio representative in Europe would
be concentrated on these two.
It was, of course, impossible to a sk the Prince of Wales to
broadcast to America. Royalty cannot be officially ap-
proached by foreigners except through diplomatic channels.
Theoretically royalty does nothing by request; royalty takes
the initiative in everything; royalty 'commands/ as pre-
scribed by precedent. There was no precedent for inter-
national broadcasting.
In his own country the Prince had been heard by radio
many times, opening Wembley, unveiling a monument,
'crowning the bard' at the Welsh Eisteddfod, and doing
other royal chores. Once in fact his voice had been broadcast
in Canada, opening the Peace Bridge across the Niagara
River (1927), and as a hazardous experiment the speech was
' relayed ' to England. Obviously the only way for Americans
to hear their favorite playboy was to await another official
occasion.
It came sooner than expected. In April, soon after the
close of the Naval Conference, it was reported that the
Prince was going to act as sponsor at the launching of the
great new Canadian Pacific liner, the Empress of Brifain, in
^America Hears King }eorge 13
June. It was the largest vessel to be built in England since
the war and would be the largest and fastest to act as a direct
link of the Empire. Here was a great occasion; the country
would want to hear the Prince's speech and, more particu-
larly, Canada would want to hear it, for it was to be a proud
day for the Dominion. But how?
The British Broadcasting Corporation's short-wave station
at Chelmsford was not sufficiently reliable, and there were no
corresponding facilities in Canada to insure a satisfactory
rebroadcast. There was, on the other hand, the transatlantic
radio-telephone service, linking Great Britain with the
United States and indirectly with Canada; so if the speech
was to be transmitted to Canada, it had to be done via the
United States an idea which somehow touched the pride of
those in charge; and it was not thinkable that this event
should be transmitted to the United States alone. In the
end the B.B.C. decided to solve the difficulty by doing
nothing, namely, by refusing permission to 'relay' the broad-
cast to anyone outside Great Britain. So neither Canada
nor the United States would hear the Prince.
June ii arrived and the Prince launched the ship. As he
pulled the lever that released the vessel and smashed the
traditional bottle of champagne on her bow, he spoke in a
loud and clear voice, 'I name this ship Empress of Britain
and may success attend her and all who sail in her/ Then
followed one of those happy speeches which were increasing
his popularity from day to day. I listened to it with mixed
feelings: I had left no stone unturned; had argued and
pleaded up to a few hours before the event. Yet all I could
get was a polite and regretful 'no/ for reasons which seemed
to me absurd.
Late that afternoon, as I sat in my office, a cable was
handed to me. It was from the Columbia office in New York
and it said that the Prince's speech was a great success, that
we scored a great 'scoop/ and how had I done it? Next
morning the American papers carried headlines reading
'Prince of Wales on Radio' and prominently recorded the
fact that the Prince's speech was broadcast by the Columbia
Broadcasting System. It was grand publicity.
14 Hello ^America!
I was dumbfounded. The B.B.C. telephoned to ask why
we had disregarded their veto. We hadn't; but someone, in
the excitement of the battle, and optimistic to the last
moment, had failed to cancel transmission facilities previ-
ously ordered from transatlantic telephone service. When the
time came for the speech, the London operator had simply
'cut through' to New York, and the New York operator had
offered the transmission to Columbia. Columbia's 'master-
control,' convinced that there had been a last-minute change,
cleared the network and out went the speech, to be heard by
thousands of lucky fans who happened to be listening at that
hour.
Bird No. i was in the bag. And now for No. 2.
II. MEN OF GOOD WILL
'NATION SHALL SPEAK PEACE UNTO NATION'
WHAT next? Here I was, a little fellow with a Big
Plan. Could I bring it off? I was not the conven-
tional 'contact man': I had neither the impressive person-
ality nor the advantages of social entree or a well-known
name. It was, moreover, a difficult one to remember and
inordinately long; I had to spell out its eleven letters to all
the skeptical secretaries of the eminent men who were to be
my quarries. Moreover, the name Columbia meant nothing
to any European; I had to explain that we did not manufac-
ture phonographs.
I had tackled many famous men as a newspaper reporter
in my time from Charlie Chaplin to Field Marshal Luden-
dorff but asking questions is one thing and breaking down
prejudice is another. What I had to do now was to pit my
wits against the cream of contemporary minds: had to argue
with them, persuade them what they didn't want to do, or
said they didn't want to do, plan with them, cajole them,
criticize what they wanted to say and how to say it at the
microphone. What is more, I had to make them say it in
fifteen minutes or less. And I was a timid soul! The pub-
licity blurbs called me the first 'ambassador of radio': the
diplomatic metaphor wasn't altogether incompatible with
the job.
In choosing my victims, two things had to be considered
first the trend of the news and international good will.
'Nation shall speak peace unto nation' was the motto of the
British Broadcasting Corporation, and the B.B.C. was my
1 6 Hello ^America!
most important contact in England. I soon found, however,
that there were some obstacles in the way.
The British, having profited by the sad experience of
pioneer America, had avoided the chaotic conditions which
ensued after the early days of broadcasting in the United
States. They had solved their problem in the British way, by
putting their heads together and effecting a compromise.
Their Government, having sensed the importance of the new
medium, had temporarily licensed one single company,
composed of all the chief radio manufacturing interests.
After an experimental period of four years they decided
definitely in favor of the monopoly principle and the original
'company' was converted into a 'corporation* chartered by
the Crown.
The Corporation, licensed by the Government, would
serve everybody the public, by providing programs; the
manufacturers, by creating a demand for radio sets; and the
Government, by providing an effective, unified instrument
for nation-wide communication, especially in a national
emergency not to mention a handsome revenue. 1
So the B.B.C. fully represented Great Britain, so far as
broadcasting was concerned, while neither of the two major
American companies represented the whole United States.
The N.B.C., as the senior American network, had been co-
operating with the B.B.C. in technical experiments for years,
and the two companies had exchanged programs experimen-
tally from the very beginnings of shortwave transmission.
Columbia had been granted temporary facilities only for the
duration of the Naval Conference of 1930, on the presump-
tion that the added 'circulation* for Conference reports
would be good for anglo-American relations.
The snag about establishing a permanent relationship was
that the American competitive system and the British
1 The Government's share of the B.B.C. 's income during the first ten years of
the Corporation's existence was 11,371,000 (approximately 156,000,000), leaving
the B.B.C. 13,031,000 (approximately $65,000,000) for construction, maintenance
and programs. In addition to its income from listeners' licenses the B.B.C. has a
net revenue of about 442,000 (approximately $2,200,000) from its publications.
The Corporation is non-profit-taking, hence all its net income goes to provide pro-
grams, service, and maintenance.
JJf en of (^ood Will
monopoly would not make an equal team. The equation
I : I had to be converted into 2 : i and eventually (with
other American companies coming into the field) into x: I,
without sacrificing the obvious advantages of a tight little
co-operative partnership between two single national con-
cerns. British far-sightedness found a new formula, which
in the end redounded to the benefit of all. The matter is of
some importance, because the action of the B.B.C. in
'recognizing* more than one American company set the pre-
cedent for a general European policy with reference to
United States broadcasting, and the credit was chiefly due
to Sir John Reith, the Director-General, and his (then)
Foreign Director, Major C. F. Atkinson.
THE 'AUTOCRAT* OF THE B.B.C.
Sir John, widely renowned as the 'autocrat* of British
broadcasting, and by all odds the most commanding figure
in the European radio world, first hove into my view in the
summer of 1930, when with Henry A. Bellows, then vice-
president of Columbia, I stepped into his office at the top
of the old Savoy Hill studios for the final negotiations for a
joint agreement. They were brief. Sir John, a towering,
wide-shouldered figure of a Scotsman, with bony, war-
scarred, youngish features, bushy eyebrows and a purpose-
ful jaw, pushed a beautifully drawn-up document out to us
to be read and eventually signed. It had been pre-
pared with the care characteristic of the British civil-service
mind, and it left very little to chance.
The conversation was equally brief. Sir John, looking at
Bellows with a searching eye, said, 'What I'd like to know is
how you Americans can successfully worship God and
Mammon at the same time/ but didn't insist on getting the
recipe, which was just as well. The bargain was made and
Britain's radio relations with America fixed for a long time
to come.
1 8 Hello ^America!
Sir John was nothing if not frank. The first time he met
William S. Paley, the youthful president of Columbia, he
told him he was just waiting for the day when the two great
American companies would merge their interests and com-
bine. Then, with a twinkle in his eyes, 'It's a nuisance to
have to deal with two of ye/ But next time Paley arrived
in London, the Stars and Stripes, hoisted in his honor,
floated over Broadcasting House. As soon as we stepped
into the room Sir John said: 'Did you see the flag?*
Whether he is the 'czar* he is reputed to be I don't know.
He is, however, tremendously proud of his organization,
and probably doesn't think the autocrat story does any
harm. In any case, whenever there's a conversation in his
presence he commands it, and whatever the circumstances
he has never been known to lose his dignity.
The entrance to London's modernist Temple of Radio,
modestly known as Broadcasting House, is adorned by a
large statue of bearded Prospero holding Ariel. The most
prominent thing inside the lobby is a bronze inscription
beginning with 'Dominus omnipotentus* and perpetuating
the name of 'Dominus loannes Reith' as the first 'rector*
of British radio. When the erect form of Sir John walks
through that lobby, the uniformed, bemedalled attendants
stand respectfully to attention while he returns their salute.
He is so tall that it is impossible not to single him out in a
crowd. On the other hand he is able to pass even the man of
average height on the street without seeing him, whether he
worships Mammon or God. For anyone my size to keep
countenance in his presence required self-possession or a
sense of humor, or both. When, at the end of my incum-
bency, Sir John made a farewell speech, I was genuinely
relieved when he asked the guests' permission to remain
seated But this is jumping years ahead of my story.
'Nation shall speak peace unto nation/ The way to
implement that motto was to find, in each nation, the 'men
of good will ' who were able and willing to speak. I wanted
men with something to say, whose voice had the ring of
authority, as well as those whose position of authority was
sufficient reason for being heard. We didn't want the trans-
<Men of Cjood Will
atlantic glad-hander, the international yes-man, any more
than the super-patriot who would lecture his 'American
cousins' on the excellence of things British and the high-
mindedness of British policy. Above all we wanted nobody
with a private mission from Whitehall, or a political axe to
grind.
It was not as easy as it looked. Yet one by one the lions
came out of their lair, and it would now be easier to enu-
merate the really eminent men who have not had their say
than those who have. Which does not mean that the 'say'
was always worth saying.
LORD CECIL AND LORD GREY
The paramount subject in the world news in 1930 was
Peace. The London Naval Treaty was signed and ratified;
the French evacuated the Rhineland before the end of the
legal occupation period; France signed the Optional Clause
of the World Court; Italy and Soviet Russia concluded a
commercial agreement; and Briand's plan for a United
States of Europe was being circulated to the governments.
There had been, it is true, a second Wall Street slump, but
prosperity was rumored to be around that mythical corner,
and recovery was in a vague way associated with the pros-
pects of peace. The world, in the full tide of hope during
that salubrious summer, was looking forward to the World
Disarmament Conference of 1932, the greatest push for
peace in the history of the world. The first person I turned
to in these circumstances was Lord Cecil Viscount Cecil
of Chelwood that most distinguished, most unswervingly
idealistic, of British champions of peace.
Lord Cecil, scion of a family that had served British sov-
ereigns since the days of Elizabeth, son of a great prime
minister and himself holder of three successive portfolios,
had resigned from the Conservative Government because
of its attitude toward the United States in the abortive
zo Hello ^America!
Geneva Naval Conference of 1927. Politically unambitious,
regarding public office only as a means to beneficent action,
Cecil at sixty-six had gone into the 'wilderness* at home in
order to continue to uphold at Geneva the principles of the
League Covenant for which he, even more than Woodrow
Wilson, was responsible. But now the Conservative Gov-
ernment had atoned for its previous sin by reaching agree-
ment with America and Japan. A mere party politician
might have been peeved; Cecil was happy over the propitious
event. But would he talk to America? I proposed as a sub-
ject 'The Next Step Towards Disarmament/
The greater task was still ahead disarmament on land
and that was being prepared under League auspices.
Might he, a world-renowned pro-Leaguer, not jeopardize the
present treaty by talking about that next step? A passionate
believer in the 'collective system/ Cecil's great dream was
to see Britain and the United States within that system,
leading the world to permanent peace. He hesitated; finally
it was decided that he should consult his friends in the
United States. Not till the Naval Treaty was ratified did he
actually speak, and then in August he gave the most
lucid, quintessential, convincing statement of the case for
disarmament I have ever heard.
'No amount of treaties/ he argued, 'can be relied on to
prevent war, so long as the nations continue to have and
exercise the unrestricted right of arming themselves against
one another/ Fear is the atmosphere that leads to war, and
since 'it is the cry of invasion that creates the most danger-
ous panics/ land disarmament is for Continental nations
the key to neutrality (since navies at any rate cannot in-
vade). 'Be not weary of well-doing/ he said to his American
listeners. 'We owe you a deep debt of gratitude for your
initiative and tenacity in the promotion of naval disarma-
ment, but there is still, from the peace point of view, every-
thing to be done/
Sixteen months later, on the eve of the Disarmament Con-
ference, I organized a six-nation radio manifestation and
once again it was Lord Cecil who made the issue clear. His
three points were: i) the abolition of five kinds of offensive
Men of qood Will 2.1
weapons: tanks, war planes, heavy land artillery, battleships
and submarines; 2) establishment of a permanent disarma-
ment commission; 3) limitation of military and naval budg-
ets by agreement. Even though the question of disarma-
ment is now in abeyance, it is well to remember these points,
for the world will some day have to return to them. 1
At various times after that, Lord Cecil has always
unofficially talked to American listeners, and always with
the same mastery of the issue, the same clarity and classical
perfection of phrase. Never an orator in the usual sense of
the word, his style is peculiarly effective at the microphone,
because unaffected yet personal. Of all the broadcasts on
the abdication crisis Lord Cecil's put the case most suc-
cinctly. And when he said that 'next to a British subject
we should welcome an American as queen/ he meant it-
so far as he himself was concerned.
I look back on my interviews with Lord Cecil as a rare
experience. He would receive me in his little ground-floor
study, or, when time permitted, in the grander drawing-
room upstairs, at the modest house on the borders of Ken-
sington and Chelsea. With his tall, top-heavy body mounted
on over-long legs, his bald, dome-shaped head with its
coronet of gray wisps, and the huge hooked nose protruding
beneath the deep-set, luminous eyes, he would swoop into
the room like some great bird of prey; but soon he would
slouch deep into an easy-chair, legs protruding far out into
space, elbows supported and spread hands joined at the
finger-tips, smiling with his small, deep-set eyes, and breath-
ing kindliness, learning, and dignity as he administered a
history lesson or expostulated on the 'situation' always
without rancor, however discouraging it might be.
When he arrived for his broadcasts and once he arrived
too late the always black-clothed, hurrying figure crowned
by an enormously round, wide-brimmed hat, would arouse
the morbid curiosity of autograph hunters at the doors of
1 This broadcast also comprised speeches by the Archbishop of York, a man of
very liberal ideas; Baron Werner von Rheinbaben (for Germany); Don Salvador
de Madariaga, Spanish liberal and a veteran leader in League affairs; Signer
Augusto Rosso, afterward Italian Ambassador in Washington; and Mrs. Ben
Hooper, of the American Federation of Women's Clubs.
2.2. Hello ^America!
Broadcasting House. Nobody recognized him. 'They take
me for a film-star/ he laughed, the night he came to talk
about the fate of Edward VIII. In Geneva, where his por-
trait adorns many a shop window, every child recognizes the
man who personifies, to good Europeans, the ideal of World
Peace, today, as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Lord
Cecil is pre-eminent among Britain's men of good will; I
shall always be proud to have induced him to use the trans-
atlantic radio in the cause to which he dedicated his life.
In surveying the rapidly diminishing roster of Elder
Statesmen surviving the World War generation my eye fell
on the august name of Viscount Grey of Fallodon, the man
to whom, as Sir Edward Grey, fell the fateful duty of de-
claring war on Germany in August, 1914. To the fact that
Lord Grey was an admirer of George Washington and a deep
student of his life I owe one of the unforgettable moments of
my London quest. I wanted a Washington's Birthday
oration by Lord Grey, a task which so appealed to him that
he willingly emerged from the peace and quiet of his Nor-
thumberland estate, to journey to London and face the
microphone for the first time in his life. It was the only
broadcast he ever made; for he died not many months later.
I met Lord Grey on a bleak February day at Dartmouth
House, near Berkeley Square. It gave me a queer feeling to
be in the presence of the man whom many people held re-
sponsible for the tragic sequence of events that converted
England into a house of mourning, and whom the Germans
regarded as the personification of 'perfidious Albion/ But
the sequel to that fateful turn of history was that the two
great English-speaking peoples came together in armed con-
flict against a common adversary for the first time in his-
tory the first time since General George Washington, the
man to be celebrated, took up the sword against the Mother
Country.
'How is it that an Englishman can enthuse about George
Washington, who after all was responsible for the loss of
England's American empire?' I asked Lord Grey.
'The present generation of Englishmen considers that
Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
In Geneva every child recognizes the man who personifies the ideal of
World Peace
Egan Photo
<Men of qood Will
English policy, and not the American colonists, was respon-
sible/ he said. 'We think that Chatham and Burke were
right, and that George III and his ministers failed in their
statesmanship. It was, in fact, inevitable. A Frenchman,
the elder Mirabeau, saw it coming. When he heard that
France had lost its colonies to England he said: "Now they
[the English] will lose their own." He meant that since the
pressure of the French colonies was removed, the English
colonies would not need the support of the Mother Country,
and that all matters between them like taxation would
have to be settled by consent. And this would need a com-
plete change of attitude on the part of the British Govern-
ment, which they would not accept.'
I watched Grey as he spoke. A grave, contemplative man
a scholar, not a politician, I thought. Would he tell his
American listeners what he had told me?
'Ah, yes, if you like. But I also want to talk about Wash-
ington, the man. I love him, you know!*
This was said simply, almost naively; and then he pro-
ceeded to tell me why he thought Washington a great man,
not just a man of genius, or a successful man. 'Success is
apt to stimulate egotism/ he explained. 'A man wants to
retain personal power; he fails to be great because he has
ceased to care or may never have cared for anything
greater than himself/
In this brief analysis Grey, the man, seemed to reveal
himself. He was anything but egotistical; he certainly had
no desire to retain power, once he felt that his usefulness
was gone; and he never ceased to care for things greater than
himself. A profoundly religious man a naturalist, a
philosopher, a recluse in his northern sanctuary, where
the mysteries of bird life held infinitely more charm for him
than the affairs of men. A gentle, sensitive, high-principled
person whom all perfidy and violence must have wounded
to the depth of his soul. And it is with such people at their
head, I reflected, that nations must face their crises and
fight their wars.
Years ago, as a journalist, I had to interview General
Ludendorff on the subject of the war. Sitting here, in a quiet
2.4 Hello ^America!
London room, opposite this tranquil, gracious, ageing figure,
so deeply touched by tragedy, it would have seemed like a
sacrilege to speak of anything so violent. Instead we spoke
of Fallodon, and of Theodore Roosevelt, a brother-naturalist
who had walked with him in its shady glades, observing
water-fowl and musing on bird-life in general . . .
Grey asked if I were going his way towards his club
in St. James's Street; and together we walked to Piccadilly,
which had to be crossed. I knew of his failing eyesight he
was almost blind. Should I guide him across, through the
traffic? I held out a tentative arm. But he walked firmly on,
picking his way through the dangerous street, unrecognized
by the hurrying crowds as the man on whose words, seven-
teen years before, had hung the fate of their race.
Tall, erect, the embodiment of dignity, this septuagenarian
of spiritual countenance walked on, an Englishman among
Englishmen almost an epitome of Englishness, in its most
rarefied mood.
Both Grey and Cecil were, in the last analysis, pacifists,
just as were Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, whose names
are forever associated with war. Both served in the British
War Cabinet, one as Foreign Secretary, the other as 'Minis-
ter of Blockade' a word that conjures up the most cruel
of all the cruel aspects of the World War. Had they to make
their decisions today, would they be the same? England
was a peaceful country in 1914, after 1918 it was upacifistic
one. And out of the war generation has come another type
of men of good will, the bitter-enders of peace, the Norman
Angells, the Ponsonbys and Lansburys, and the Dick Shep-
pards men whose fellows on the other side of the inter-
national fence are languishing in concentration camps, or in
prison.
One of the outstanding figures of this type, who for clear
JVLen of fyod Will
thinking and sheer intellectual honesty has few equals in the
world, was a mousy little member of the House of Commons
named Norman Angell Sir Norman to people who need
to be impressed before they will take a man seriously. Nor-
man Angell is a scientist of peace. Others love peace, pray
for it, suffer for it. He believes in it as the ultimate economic
necessity. In his Great Illusion, written before the World
War, he foretold all that people have since learned by bitter
experience. Millions have read that book, in twenty-five
languages; yet today the world is ablaze at three corners and
it seems only a matter of time when the flames will merge.
When they do, Norman Angell like his more sentimental
friends the religious pacifists will probably find them-
selves in jail; and even while they are yet at large people see
to it that their voices are muffled, for nothing is more dan-
gerous to folly than the truth. Norman Angell, so far as I
know, had never been asked to broadcast when I first ap-
proached him in 1931.
'It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men/ he
said in his first talk to American listeners, ' but their opinions
about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only
make them right by discussion/ I should like to print that
talk, word for word; for in it he destroyed so many false
opinions about 'facts* about nationality and empire and
economics and trade that no one who heard it would want
to listen to the mouthings of the patrioteers and the apostles
of 'national honor' again. Nobody, in fact, dares to say
that Norman Angell is wrong; yet I do not hear his voice on
the radio much oftener than before
I cannot help thinking that this keen-eyed, unimpressive
little man in tweeds did something for Anglo-American rela-
tions even in that one quiet little lecture across the Big Pond.
'Look me up sometime,' he said as we parted in the Strand,
nearly six years ago. I never did, I am ashamed to confess.
But I'm going to do it now.
To Americans, Norman Angell seemed too relentlessly
rational, too dispassionate to stir people into sympathy.
The American audience constantly clamors for 'human'
2.6 Hello ^America!
qualities; Americans want their emotions to be engaged;
their demand for ' personality* is insatiable. So I set about
getting a man who combined high intellectual attainment
with a genius for direct human appeal a man whose great-
ness of mind was matched by his greatness of heart. Such
a man was the venerable scientist, Sir Oliver Lodge, one of
the pioneers not only in the discovery of radio, but also in
its application to human needs a man who could project
his personality, by what he considered an occult force, more
completely than anyone else I have known.
Sir Oliver Lodge, physicist, mathematician, inventor,
philosopher, and researcher into the Unknown, was in his
seventieth year when I first met him in his remote country
house on Salisbury Plain not far from Amesbury and
Stonehenge, where the monuments of Europe's earliest
known civilization stand like lonely stone sentinels against
the uninterrupted expanse of windswept sky. For years a
widower, he lived in the solitude of the gray stone house,
served by an elderly housekeeper and assisted in his labors
by a young woman secretary. I found him, on a burning
hot afternoon, resting in a garden shelter, slowly waving a
palmetto fan. His high, bald, dome-shaped skull, bulging
into an enormous forehead, showed beads of sweat. But
his manner was cordial despite the discomfort of the day.
Looking straight ahead of him, out of deep-set eyes shaded
by sensationally long and bushy eyebrows, he said:
* I should like to speak about the Destiny of America. Is
that what you want?*
Secretly I had hoped for a talk on spiritualism, but I found
that he wasn't ready for this. Did he mean a scientist's fore-
cast of America's future ?
'No/ he said, 'not that. I believe that America has a
great world destiny a political mission. Fifty years ago
I heard your great historian, John Fiske, predicting the fed-
eration of the English-speaking race. Nothing we could do,
he said, could stop it, and it would be a blessing to humanity.
Now Anglo-American friendship is on the increase; the exclu-
sive spirit of nationality is weakening, except among the
small nations like South Ireland and Czechoslovakia, who
<Men of qood Will 17
have just acquired it. The United States probably hardly
realize the part they are to play in human progress. They
are developing into the mightiest nation; they are isolated
from the jealousies of Europe; yet they have begun to realize
that they must stand in with the rest of humanity '
It all sounded a little too Utopian; but I realized he had
meditated on that idea, and wanted to say what was on his
mind. The tenor of his lay was that eventually we Ameri-
cans would have to live up to the professions of our states-
men : that the world needed a police force to keep the peace,
and that nobody else could be trusted to maintain it. Amer-
ica must become the policeman of the world.
'It may be too dangerous to suggest it . . /
I said 'no' for nothing is too 'dangerous* to the jour-
nalist when it issues from the mouths of men who are
acknowledged to be great or wise. And there was something
prophetic even about the appearance of this white-haired sage.
'Not yet/ he mused. 'Much to be done before this
The mills of God grind slowly. . . . The destiny of nations is
too big for haste. - But like John Fiske, I feel that either that
or something better will come '
We were called for tea. Slowly he raised himself up and
with much hard breathing got to the house. We agreed,
around the tea-table, that he should do the talk.
It was a great success. So much so that in response to a
cable I asked him to broadcast again a fortnight later. And
this time it was spiritualism 'The Reality of a Spiritual
World* the logical exposition of a tenet that is so difficult
for agnostics to take seriously. Yet here was an accepted
scientist, who had demonstrated in the physical world the
existence of forces that the ignorant regard as a miracle
the very forces by which he was now, sitting in London,
speaking to millions in America.
'The real fact/ he said, 'is that we are in the midst of a
spiritual world, that it dominates the material. It consti-
tutes the great and omnipresent reality, whose powers we
are only beginning to realize Its forces are prodigious/
And he ended with the assurance that 'all will ultimately be
well/ because he is one of the world's great optimists with
2.8 Hello ^America!
an optimism that the bitterest of life's sacrifices had not
obscured.
As great as Lodge's optimism is his sincerity, and that is
what made his broadcasting unique in its power. Every
breath, every effort of speech ' came across ' the whole of
this lovable old man was pictured in the sound of his voice.
DICK SHEPPARD OF ST. PAUI/S
If you were to ask anyone in the British Isles a profes-
sor, a general, or a bishop, a Durham miner, a white-collar
worker in Birmingham, an Oxford don, or a down-and-out
in London's East End who Dick Sheppard was, he would look
at you as though you were pulling his leg. For Dick Shep-
pard's name is known wherever in England men walk and
talk, and wherever they listen to the radio or listened,
for his voice, too, was a discordant sound in the era of rearma-
ment. Dick Sheppard was an Anglican priest officially he
was the Very Reverend Hugh Richard Laurie Sheppard,
D.D., Companion of Honour, Canon of the Cathedral of St.
Paul. He had even been Dean of Canterbury and ' priest-in-
ordinary' to the King. But to the millions he was known as
the 'broadcasting parson' (for he was the first to broadcast
services in England from his pulpit at St. Martin's-in-the-
Fields) and as the leader of those who will not fight. He
and a British brigadier-general, the late Frank Percy
Crozier, C.B., C.M.G., who fought throughout the war and
earned the D.S.O., the Croix de Guerre, and every conceiv-
able distinction for bravery, organized a Peace Pledge Move-
ment, in which are enrolled hundreds of thousands of young
men (men only !) who have signed their names on open post-
cards under a pledge that in no circumstances will they take
up arms, for King and Country or anything else. I think it is
safe to say that nowhere except in Great Britain is such a
thing possible today. 1
1 General Crozier, who was the author of a much-attacked book, The Men I
Men of good Will
What does this mean? It means that next time Great
Britain goes to war, many thousands of religious young men
will either become guilty of moral perjury or the country
will be dotted with concentration camps, filled with con-
scientious objectors, from end to end.
I wanted Dick Sheppard's appeal to be heard in America.
I found him, a pudgy, middle-sized cleric with a winning
smile a 'practical* Christian to whom Christianity is a
matter of works rather than faith working like a business
man in his office at St. Paul's chapter house, with a secretary
taking letters, making appointments, arranging meetings.
A tiny, inconspicuous advertisement in the daily papers
announcing a mass meeting at which he would speak had
filled the immense Albert Hall with fervent followers; post-
card pledges had been pouring in ever since. Here he was,
surrounded by the hard, lifeless symbols of ecclesiastical
routine advocating the Christian philosophy of non-resist-
ance, as unperturbed by the relentless automatic workings
of organized religion as by the hideous grinding of the traffic
in the streets outside. He was the busiest man I ever saw;
but no effort that might further the cause could be refused;
so he came to Broadcasting House to 'tell America/ He
was already ill, and he died in the midst of his campaign
while Britain was re-arming with all her might.
LORD SNOWDEN HITS OUT
A wide and tenuous arc connects the political rectitude
of a Grey to the bitter-end pacifism of a Dick Sheppard.
Between these two extremes I found many shades many
varieties of 'men of good will/ There was Sir Herbert (now
Lord) Samuel, leader of the Liberals, whose sovereign rem-
edy for war was Free Trade; and Major Attlee, leader of the
Killed, died in the summer of 1937, and Dick Sheppard preached a funeral oration.
A special guard was required to prevent disorder, for patriotic citizens, as well as
Fascists, had become infuriated by his frank confessions of barbarity in war.
30 Hello ^America!
Labour Party, a mild-mannered, Oxford-bred Socialist.
There was Lord Ponsonby, one-time page to Queen Victoria,
a hater of war who resigned his leadership in the House of
Lords when George Lansbury resigned his in the Commons
because neither of them would countenance violence even
in the homeopathic form of ' sanctions/ as advocated by the
League. And there was old side-whiskered George Lansbury
himself, like a photograph out of a Victorian family album,
so full of the milk of human kindness that even his famous
visits to Hitler and Mussolini could not sour it. Not to forget
Lord Snowden, that hard-headed Yorkshireman who had
the reputation of 'leaving no stone unflung' even when
talking about members of his own party. I asked him, as an
honest, neutral expert, to sum up the 'tragedy of the Eco-
nomic Conference for the American radio audience, and he
placed the blame much nearer home than his countryman
liked. Speaking of Franklin D. Roosevelt, accused both in
England and America of ' dynamiting ' the Conference, he said :
'It would not be fair, however, to attribute to Mr. Roose-
velt the full responsibility for the breakdown of the Confer-
ence. The obvious differences amongst the delegates already
manifest would certainly have brought the Conference to
disruption later. The British Government must bear a large
share of the responsibility for the tragic failures of the Con-
ference. They went into the Conference without adequate
preparation and with no policy beyond the statement of a
few generalities. They favored a rise of prices, but they never
contributed any plans to attain that object. They spoke
eloquently about the evils of trade restrictions. They de-
nounced excessive tariffs, not British tariffs, but those of
other countries. They condemned quotas and embargoes,
but insisted on maintaining their own quotas. They ac-
cepted a tariff truce, but reserved the right to go on mean-
while increasing their own tariffs. Though committed to the
policy by the Roosevelt-MacDonald statement, Mr. Runci-
man announced to the Conference that the British Govern-
ment will have nothing to do with public works, either na-
tional or international, as a means of providing employment.
This was the second staggering blow!'
Men of fyod Will
It would be impossible to name all our speakers, but even
this list is varied enough to prove to the most rabid anti-
British American that their talks were not dictated by the
British Government or inspired by national prejudice. On
the other hand, Anglo-American friendship did not suffer
by anything they said always assuming that this friend-
ship of the English-speaking nations is a thing to be cher-
ished and cultivated. Men like Lord Lothian and Sir Evelyn
Wrench, economists like J. Maynard Keynes, Sir William
Beveridge and Sir Josiah Stamp, speaking frankly on the
problems that beset the two countries and the relations be-
tween them have, I believe, done a great deal more than all
the ' hands-across-the-sea ' orations that have been uttered
since the war. 1
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT STIRS BRITAIN
It may be asked with some justice whether this principle
doesn't work both ways. If Englishmen are to be encouraged
to speak their minds freely to Americans, why not the other
way about? It is perfectly true that for at least two years
the voice of America, so far as England was concerned, was
a 'melody unheard/ William Hard read a homily to England
at Christmas, 1931; the president of Exeter Academy spoke
on American education in 1932; a * literary round table*
comprising Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Boyd, and George
Jean Nathan wise-cracked in the hearing of a none-too-
amused British audience in 1933. That was all, until on
March 4 of that year the clarion voice of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, making his first inauguration speech, floated
across the Atlantic and electrified all England with ringing
phrases of hope, such as 'we have nothing to fear but fear/
It was this speech still remembered as a landmark in a
1 Among the women the Duchess of Atholl, Lady Astor, Lady Rhondda, Miss
Ishbel MacDonald, Miss Megan Lloyd George, Mrs. Mary Agnes Hamilton, and
Miss Ellen Wilkinson contributed talks of genuine value.
32. Hello ^America!
country where public speaking is a fine art that awakened
British broadcasting officials to the possibilities of a west-to-
east traffic in radio talks.
' Mr. Roosevelt's inaugural address thrilled the world/
said Lord Snowden, who never flattered anybody in his life.
'I heard it clearly at my own fireside, and I felt that at last
a statesman had arisen to challenge the injustices and shame
of the present and to wage a valiant fight against them. His
bold policy since then is magnificent. It remains to be seen
if it will succeed/
When the following summer I made my periodic visit to
America, the B.B.C. asked me to complete arrangements for
a series of talks by prominent Americans, entitled 'American
Points of View/ to be relayed to England alternately by
Columbia and N.B.C. The first of these was made by Stuart
Chase (on the economic situation), and the series included
Madam Secretary Perkins, Governor John G. Winant of
New Hampshire, and Pearl Buck. One would have thought
that eminent Americans would have seized such an oppor-
tunity with avidity, but strange to relate it was not pos-
sible to enlist Senator Borah, nor Presidents Lowell and
Conant of Harvard University, nor Owen Young, nor Sin-
clair Lewis and Willa Gather. Herbert Hoover was too far
away and William Allen White was taken ill before his
broadcast was to take place. But in 1935 the B.B.C. ap-
pointed a North American representative and an increasing
amount of American material has crept into British pro-
grams since then.
'TRANSATLANTIC BULLETIN*
It was due to a request by William S. Paley for more good
news interpretation that I was able to arrange an exchange
series called Transatlantic Bulletin, which was inaugurated
early in 1935 and has continued, with occasional interrup-
tions and attenuations, to the present time. This consists of
*Men of (food Will 33
entirely uncensored, frank, and remarkably truthful com-
mentaries on events and political trends in the two coun-
tries. Raymond Gram Swing, who proved himself one of the
most masterful commentators in this field, has become the
permanent and most highly accredited American interpreter
known to England, and has created a following throughout
Great Britain which rivals that of the most popular British
commentators on their own ground. People of all classes,
from the so-called intelligentsia to the working masses,
listen to him with keen interest, and knowledge about Amer-
ican conditions and problems among the general public has
in consequence grown to a remarkable degree.
The United States, in return, has heard a series of British
journalists and commentators, of whom Vernon Bartlett,
Sir Frederick Whyte, S. K. Ratcliffe, Stephen King-Hall,
and Gerald Barry have been the most successful. Harold
Nicolson, a first-class broadcaster but afflicted with an in-
tensely English intonation, was it is sad to relate
somewhat less successful, and on one occasion when he
braved a heavy cold in order to do a broadcast at the
inhuman hour of 3 A.M. (10 P.M. in New York), several ladies
of the American audience had nothing better to do than
write and upbraid him for his 'unmannerly' coughing and
sneezing. His profuse apologies had been smothered by
static, or just overheard.
These men, unfettered by any political or other consider-
ation, describing and interpreting fairly the scene in their
own country to the presumably interested spectator across
the Atlantic, must be ranked, and honorably so, with the
' men of good will ' to whom this chapter is devoted. I am
proud to have been associated with an enterprise which is
still fraught with incalculable possibilities for good. 1
1 A similar series of exchanges was subsequently arranged between France and
the United States, and this has continued virtually without interruption. The
leading French speaker of this weekly series is Pierre de Lanux, the American com-
mentators (in French) included Percy Winner, now director of the N.B.C.'s short-
wave service; Professor John B. Whitten of Princeton; and Pierre Bedard.
Ill POETS, PROPHETS, AND
BEST-SELLERS
LITERATURE TAKES A HAND
T)OLITICS at its worst is a device for keeping people
JL and peoples apart. At its best it is a means of bringing
them together. But not the only means. So far as inter-
national radio was concerned, I always felt that literature
could do as much, or more. England and America, despite
Mr. Mencken and his followers, do speak more or less the
same language, and that one fact has shaped their joint
destinies and will continue to shape them, more than any-
thing else. The poets and the prophets of the English-speak-
ing races, irrespective of nationality, are read wherever the
language is spoken, and the best-sellers, thanks to the
publishers, even more. But they should also be heard;
things can be said that cannot be written, and who would
agree that politicians should have a monopoly of the air,
other than hot air?
In the first summer of my radio quest I had a talk with
John Masefield about this. He was then living on Boar's Hill,
some miles outside Oxford in a remote but comfortable
house fronting on a leafy country lane. He had become poet-
laureate not long before, and, as I was gradually closing in on
his retreat after motoring wild circles around it, I had to
think of one of his predecessors, whose behavior caused an
American headline writer to announce that the 'King's
Canary Won't Sing.' Would this 'king's canary' refuse to
sing? Not likely. In fact, as we got talking in one of the
most cultivated and 'homey' interiors imaginable about
the poet in modern life, he developed a theory according to
Voets, TrofhetSj and 'Best-Sellers 35
which poets should be heard rather than seen or read.
Not since ancient times had the 'canary' had such a good
chance to sing as now. Here is the burden of his theory, as he
afterward told it to the American audience, in the first over-
seas broadcast ever made by a poet.
THE POET SPEAKS
'In times past/ he said, 'poetry was the delight of every
member of the community. The poet sang or spoke to all
and was listened to with rapture by all. Then came the
printing press, which at first was thought to be of great
benefit to poets. I think it has become a detriment to
poetical art, though priceless as a distributor of knowledge.
It has had this result it has put away the poet from his
public. Since the printing press came into being, poetry has
ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it
has become the amusement and delight of the few/
Actually this idea was not a new one with him: he had
meditated on it for years, before broadcasting, and what is
more, had done something about it. In the garden of his
house he had built a barn-theatre and here, as a regular
event, took place the 'Oxford Recitations' competitive
recitations of poetry by young men and women at which
Masefield ; his wife, Laurence Binyon, and other poets were
the judges; It was an effort to raise a young generation of
people who would think of poetry in terms of sound; here,
too, the poet himself might speak to a limited but 'enrap-
tured' audience. Masefield showed me his little theatre with
the zest of a youngster showing his toys; play-acting was
evidently the great pastime of the family and its friends, for
heaps of gay costumes hung about ' back-stage,' and I had
heard exciting tales of dramatic house-parties from Oxford
students and young actors who had their first fling in Mase-
field's Thespian barn.
My coming had injected a new element into his theory.
36 Hello ^America!
'It may be that broadcasting may make listening to poetry a
pleasure again. Though this,' he added pensively, 'can only
come about with difficulty with a great deal of hard
work *
I wondered what he meant. Well, he meant that 'poets
will work better at verse if they work before an audience
they can see, so that they may know when their work fails
and why/ Television had hardly been heard of, so that
didn't enter our minds.
Masefield was speaking softly, as is his habit thinking
audibly rather than talking and with a wistful air. He is
an unobtrusive man, this 'people's poet' anything but the
robust and passionate creature you would suspect from the
vigorous cuss- words of 'Nan' and the full-bodied tang of his
sea-roving tales. His imagination was kindled by this new
direction to his thoughts about the poet in modern life. But I
thought he ought not merely to talk about it he ought to
illustrate it by reciting his own verse. It took some time for
him to decide, then one day I got a note:
'Many thanks. Right. 5.15 P.M. the I4th, Sunday/
It was about the usual length of his epistles. A few days
later he was giving his unseen audience one of the simplest
and best definitions of poetry. 'Poetry,' he said, 'is an art in
which the artist by means of rhythm and great sincerity can
convey to others the sentiment which he feels about life.' 'I
speak to you this afternoon,' he concluded, ' in the hope that
poetry will again become one of the main delights of life and
really compete once again with the delights of the market
place/
'Sea Fever' is one of the poems he recited in his radio
debut, and the spoken version turned out to be slightly
ever so slightly different from the printed one:
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by
But Masefield's example hasn't been followed not even by
himself. Except for the reading of his official 'Ode' on King
George's Jubilee, he has, so far as I know, never broadcast
again.
Trophets, and ^Best-Sellers 37
MIKE-SHY GENIUS
As for the rest of the poets, we didn't have much luck.
Not that I didn't try. Take Kipling, for instance. I wrote the
most seductive letters to the man whom Robert Graves has
called 'the literary aspect of the British Empire/ I knew he
hated the very idea of broadcasting and thought I might
persuade him in an interview, but in a most extra-polite letter
from his secretary, pleading the master's crowded schedule, I
was asked to ' correspond/ That was six years before he died,
but not long enough to make him change his mind. In his
idyllic snuggery in a fold of the 1 Sussex Downs he successfully
fended off everything that smacked of publicity, and even
his cousin Stanley Baldwin didn't often rouse him from his
guarded seclusion, except on one or two really patriotic
occasions. One of these came in July, 1933, when the Royal
Society of Literature gave a luncheon in honor of the
Canadian Authors' Association, and Kipling was persuaded to
be one of the speakers. As all the proceedings were broadcast
by the B.B.C. he could not prevent his voice from going to
the outside world. I suggested an American rebroadcast,
but just at this particular time the network was engaged and
I had the chagrin of seeing my rivals walk off with the prize.
The talk had nothing to do with poetry, but I remember one
passage which revealed both the aristocrat of letters and the
man. After speaking of 'our land's deep unconscious delight
through all ages in her own strength and beauty and unjaded
youth,' he said:
'That same headlong surplus of effort and desire goes
forward along other paths today. But our eyes are held.
Like the generations before us, we cannot perceive among
what new births of new wonders we now move. And all these
things, out of our past, in our present, and for our future, are
yours by right.
'They are doubly yours, since the dominant strains of your
blood draw from those twin races French and English
which throughout their histories have been most resolute not
to be decivilised on any pretext or for any gain/
38 Hello ^America!
Once again, and once only, was Kipling's voice heard 'on
the air,' a year before his death at the St. George's Day
dinner of the society which bears the name of England's
patron saint. His words were less felicitous that time:
rearmament was in the air and the British lion was in a mood
to roar.
Then take Sir James Barrie, who, though not a poet in the
literal sense, would be considered so by thousands of ad-
mirers. Barrie held a kind of monopoly for whimsicality at
after-dinner speeches, but must have felt that his whimsies
would evaporate in the ether waves, for he resisted all in-
vitations to broadcast with savage stubbornness. At last,
when he was 'caught' by the B.B.C. on an occasion he
couldn't evade, he came to the microphone, coughed, ex-
cused himself for having a cold, made a quip about shattering
ear-drums, coughed again, and announced that he was
through. That was broadcast to America, and it cost a heap
of money.
John Drinkwater, whose death robbed England of a very
versatile man, broadcast to America not only his own
poetic prose about Lincoln, but the verses of Keats, from
Keats's Hampstead home; and T. S. Eliot, the American-
born poet whom Englishmen rate above most of their own
contemporaries, broadcast a talk on Dryden. I wish it had
been his own poetry instead, but American radio as yet pre-
fers great names to human values.
WELLS LOOKS AT THINGS TO COME
Masefield's hope that broadcasting might restore poetry to
its original purpose might apply equally well to prose. In
other words through radio not only the minstrel but the
soothsayer might be reborn.
This made me think of H. G. Wells, the greatest profes-
sional prophet of our time. The Shape of Things to Come was
his latest work in 1930, and I was fascinated both by its
j Tropbets, and ^Best-Sellers 35
fantasy and its uncanny prescience. Would Wells broadcast
for me, as he had once done for the B.B.C. but on the
world of tomorrow rather than the things of today? Wells
has always soft-pedaled the artistic side of his nature; he
wants to stress the social surgeon, the world-improver, the
pamphleteer. That has tended to dim the glamour of his
name; the public prefers the artist to the reformer, the
crooner to the moralist. But in the role of prophet he gives
himself away: his fantasy gets the better of his common sense.
Or is it because, in the future, Truth and Ideal become inter-
mingled? It takes both Wells's scientific speculation and his
fictional fantasy to build the Utopia of our dreams.
But when it comes to business, Wells is a very mundane,
practical man. Yes, he would speak, but the price is so-and-
so take it or leave it. I don't blame him. American
broadcasting companies are not run by idealists; if you said
so their executives would resent being called names. Having
agreed on the fee and the subject, the next consideration was
Wells's voice. ' From November to April in the English
climate you can't hear me at all/ he laughed, * that's why
I go to the Riviera for the winter. Better wait till I get back/
Well, I didn't want to wait: 'that' war might have come
before spring (despite Wells, who put it at 1940), or the Big
Executives might prefer profits to prophets by then. So we
cleared the earliest possible date and just missed the first
London fog. Wells's voice at best is little better than a
wheeze, and my misgivings were pretty grave.
Wells talked about 'The World of Our Grandchildren* in
the first American broadcast of his career. It wasn't exactly
an inspired talk; it was intensely practical. It took only one
phase of our social life economy and showed where it
would have to go, not whole-hog socialism, but collectivism
from the angle of business. 'Mass consumption,' he said,
would have to complement mass production. And what is
the equivalent of mass production in terms of consumption?
Community buying. He was definitely talking to children
'our grandchildren.' 'Even now we have community buying
for certain things. For instance, you buy battleships on a
community basis. If we can buy battleships and submarines
40 Hello ^America!
and airships as a community, I refuse to believe that we can't
buy hotels, perfectly equipped houses, and boots and shoes
for all the children in the world in the same way. Collectively
we could buy everything which we collectively produce/
And then he proceeded to predict the mass-production of
houses and all sorts of things. Why do we insist on holding on
to old and worn-out things, when there is surplus labor
everywhere? We could, and should, change our houses and
furniture as we change our cars and our clothes newer and
better and more comfortable all the time which would of
course be society's answer to the relentless fecundity of the
machine.
4 Well, how was it?' asked Wells, as I dropped him at the
door of his huge block of flats built over Baker Street railway
station an example of our modern genius for the annihi-
lation of the home atmosphere. 'Did I do my job all right?'
Actually he filled the assignment much better in a talk he
made a year later for the B.B.C. It was a very short talk,
but one of the most terrifying I have ever heard; it illus-
trated, moreover, what broadcasting can and ought to
do, to awaken people's consciences to the most appalling
possibilities of life. For once Wells was not concerned with
Utopia, but with Pandemonium. It was the epilogue to a
demonstration by sound-effects of the progress of Com-
munication our much-vaunted abolition of distance.
'In a little while,' he said, 'there will be no more distance
left, and very little separation Let me ask you how long
you suppose it is before it becomes possible for men to pack
up a parcel of explosives or poison-gas or incendiary matter
or any little thing of that sort and send it up into the air to
travel to just any chosen spot in the world and drop its
load?' _;
So what? The point of the talk was that there are in the
world thousands and thousands of professors working on the
records of the past, but not a single person who makes a
whole-time job of estimating the consequences of new de-
vices in the future. 'There is not a single Professor of
Foresight in the world.' Unless there will be, we shall tumble
into one frightful mess after another, created by our own
j Trophets, and "Best-Sellers 41
cleverness and ingenuity. We shall be doing nothing but
what we have been doing right along, in the case of the
motor car, the aeroplane and we shall probably find
the radio. 'We did nothing to our roads before they were
choked' (with the result of an annual massacre of human
life) to take but one example.
'Let me draw a plain conclusion from tonight's audition/
he concluded. 'Either we must make peace throughout the
world, make one world-state, one world-pax, with one money,
one police, one speech and one brotherhood, however hard
that task may seem, or we must prepare to live with the
voice of the stranger in our ear, with the eyes of the stranger
in our homes, with the knife of the stranger always at our
throats, in fear and in danger of death, enemy neighbors
with the rest of our species. Distance was protection, was
safety, though it meant also ignorance and indifference and
a narrow, unstimulated life. For good or for evil, distance
has been done away with ... Will there be no foresight until
those bombs begin to rain upon us?'
Most people would say, of course, that this is sordid pes-
simism. Wells could almost prove scientifically that his
pessimism is the plain rational truth.
There are few people outside my immediate circle whom I
like better than H. G. Wells. There are few who have applied
their brain power and his brain power is prodigious so
exclusively to the service of mankind. And there are few
more truly modest men that I have met. He has the humility
that goes with greatness; the fine simplicity that is the
attribute of the wise. And even he couldn't be sorrier than
I would be to see him really grow old.
'Don't congratulate me,' he said, when I met him shortly
after his seventieth birthday. 'It's a horrid feeling to be
reminded that one's getting near to the end.' He was looking
quite well, however; his sturdy, always well-groomed figure
and his handsome purposeful face with the boyish smile
were, as ever, a challenge to the Philistine on his own
ground. A few days later, at the P.E.N. Club dinner in his
honor I heard him make the most pathetic speech an anti-
sentimentalist could be capable of. 'I feel as though I were
42. Hello ^America!
still in the nursery, playing with my nicest toys, and Nurse
opens the door to say: "Come now, George, it's bedtime
put those toys away." . . . Well, it'll soon be time to put the
toys away, and there's still so much to be done.' x
Last time I asked him to broadcast, he refused. But it was
the wrong time of the year!
CHESTERTON ON CHRISTMAS
On Christmas Day, 1930 my first broadcasting Christ-
mas I arrived at the old Savoy Hill studios of the B.B.C.
and was told that my speaker was waiting for me in the
drawing-room, a plain, square, modernized room whose sober
walls were enlivened by vivid reproductions of master-
pieces of Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Mattisse. There, on a low
sofa, among the French modernists, squatted the incredible,
flamboyantly anti-modern figure of Gilbert Keith Chester-
ton. This gigantic nineteenth-century Bacchus, with an Eng-
lish tension-spring pince-nez insecurely poised on his nose,
and dressed in the loose garb of the literary Bohemian a
character out of Murger raised to Gargantuan proportions
and adapted to the Dickensian scene was an apparition
so preposterous as to call for reassurance. And he hastened
to reassure me, with a smile and an excuse for not rising,
which indeed seemed an impossible exercise.
I had invited Chesterton to talk about Dickens, because,
according to Chesterton himself, there was nothing else to
talk about on Christmas Day. 'Christmas and Dickens
remain the only things worth talking about,' he said, 'be-
cause modern religion, philosophy, and literature have pro-
duced no substitute for either.' At any rate they were a fit
subject for this uncommon defender of the commonplace,
this religious apostle of sensuality, this virtuoso of the para-
dox, this champion leg-puller of the highbrow 'humorists.'
He was in jolly mood; I had thrown him a bone, and here
1 Wells's literary output consists of eighty-five volumes to date.
'Poets, Trophets, and "Best-Sellers 43
he was, licking his chops over the succulent slivers of
satirical meat. An attendant came to show us to the studio.
1 1 suppose you think I can't get up?' he said. 'See how
I do it!'
And with an astonishing, perfectly calculated movement
he rolled over to kneel on the floor, then gradually raised
himself up by his powerful arms, while his wife watched
him with confident solicitude. There he stood, three-hun-
dred-odd pounds of unashamed vitality, panting but trium-
phant and we went forth to war. One of the party had to
walk to save the elevator.
Christmas and Dickens and Chesterton proved a perfect
combination for sheer intellectual acrobatics. 'There is no
occasion, no date, no day, that has been able to do what
Christmas does; and there is no writer among all the brilliant
modern writers who has been able to do what Dickens did.'
That was his dictum, and for fifteen minutes he defended it
by shooting deft arrows at unseen adversaries, never for-
getting that he was talking to Americans:
'I deny,' he said, 'that Elmer Gantry is a Christmas pre-
sent. I deny that anyone wants Theodore Dreiser thrust
into his Christmas stocking.' The muck-rakers, the pessi-
mists, the heretics, the atheists, the 'modern pagans' all
came in for a dressing-down. Especially the last.
'It has been said that the modern pleasure-seekers are
pagans and that all their life of jazz and cocktails is merely a
life of pagans. This seems to me a harsh judgment. I mean,
of course, that it is hard on the pagans.
'The pagan gods and goddesses of the past were never so
tinselly as the fast sets and smart people of the present.
Venus was never so vulgar as what they now call sex appeal.
Cupid was never so coarse or common as a modern realistic
novel. The old pagans were imaginative and creative. They
made things and built things. ... If we were pagans we
should be content with nothing less than the worship of
beauty. If we were pagans there would be a Temple of
Venus in Hollywood. If we were pagans there would be a
Temple of Bacchus in Milwaukee. There would be a Temple
of Mercury at the end of Wall Street. I admit it is a curious
44 Hello ^America!
coincidence that he was also the god of flight. But anyhow
the point is that the pagans could mix things; they could
make festivals, and if they were still alive they could make
an alternative to Christmas/
As I said, he kept it up for fifteen minutes and he had his
fling at everybody that got in his way; just as he had tilted
at Shaw and Wells in his writings before the war. But now
the spoken word his voice, his dryness, his quiet, half-
disgusted drawl, his wheezes and his pauses, all heightened
the effect; here at last was the radio satirist, the eighteenth-
century wit transferred from the coffee house to the studio.
Had he died fifteen years earlier than he did, radio would
have missed a great pioneer.
The B.B.C. had, indeed, discovered him, and his sparkling
polemics were to enliven their programs increasingly till the
year of his death. Several times he was relayed to America.
The last time he figured in a special American transmission
was when we broadcast, from the heart of Soho, an 'initiation
ceremony* of the Detection Club (so called because it con-
sisted of detective story writers), of which he was presi-
dent. In the rather dilapidated ancient house (once the resi-
dence of Lord Mansfield, chief justice of England), having
been carried up the steep stairs on a chair by four stalwart
members, he administered the oath with appropriate mock
solemnity on the skull of 'Eric/ the mascot of the club. The
ritual, with its weird procession, its bogus mystery and
ridiculous mumbo-jumbo, filled him with childish delight
and brought out unsuspected histrionic powers in the creator
of 'Father Brown/ In the audience, whom he exhorted to
'honor the King's English* and abstain from sundry ab-
surdities in the writing of detective stories, were Dorothy
Sayers, Helen Simpson, Marjory Allingham, Anthony
Berkeley, A. A. Milne, and other best-sellers whose com-
bined circulation reached into millions. Anyone sneezing
influenza germs in that crowded, smoky room could have
cut down the world's output of the best detective fiction by
fifty per cent.
When the grotesque figure of Chesterton, with flying cape
and enormous, broad-brimmed hat, disappeared around the
Toets, Trofbets, and 'Best-Sellers 45
corner of Gerrard Street that Sunday evening, it was the
last I ever saw of him. He loved living too well to grow old.
PRIESTLEY AND THE HIGHBROWS
Now, what about the best-sellers outside this charmed
circle of mystery merchants? On the whole I have found
that popular novelists are not particularly willing broad-
casters. Mr. Noel Coward, for instance, is usually much too
busy producing a play, or somewhere on the Riviera re-
covering from a success. Mr. Michael Arlen's valet is the
nearest I have ever been able to get to him, so that was that.
Aldous Huxley, highbrow among intellectuals, epicure
among esthetes, is a perfectly charming man, but when I
asked him to talk to mere Americans, he didn't reply. For
John Galsworthy quiet, shy man that he was the
microphone held unknown terrors. For five years or more I
tried to lure him and he never really refused. The last time
I saw him, when he was still presiding over the P.E.N. Club,
although illness had been slowing him down for years, he
46 Hello ^America!
said meekly, 'Well, I shall have to do it for you one day/
But he died before he took that hurdle, and his voice was
never heard by anyone but his colleagues and friends.
But even if willing, fiction writers are not always success-
ful at the microphone. I know of two cases where a slight
impediment of speech made it impossible even to ask,
without hurting a man's feelings. And then though it's
dangerous to generalize the radio has taken less kindly to
fiction than to truth. Which does not mean that novelists
can't tell the truth, but they can't always make it as inter-
esting as fiction, and a man always wants to give of his
best.
But there are those that can. J. B. Priestley, for instance,
is so successful at telling people the truth, and in broad York-
shire, too, that he got himself into a peck of trouble with the
newspaper reporters in New York. And only a week or so
earlier he had addressed a large section of the American
public by radio from London, to try to give them an idea of
how thrilled he was over the prospect of discovering the
'Unknown Continent.' That was the title of the talk; we
tried to think of something appropriate, and as he was about
to visit, for the first time, the country that was paying him
the largest part of his royalties, what could be better than
give his fancy free rein about the reputed wonders of New
York's 'ivory and rose and amethyst towers, like Babylon
piled on Babylon, like some starry capital of lost Atlantis'?
That was the way a poetic novelist imagined it; when he got
there he could always tell the truth as he saw it.
That's where he made his mistake. Sailing up New York
Bay on a murky morning, possibly with a hang-over from the
Captain's dinner, facing a platoon of 'tough guys' and a
battery of cameras taking unflattering snap-shots, was the
wrong time for a chunky, unimpressed, and unimpressive
Yorkshireman to tell the unvarnished truth. Also he didn't
know that the New York skyline is the ship reporter's
esthetic religion. The result was some rather disastrous
publicity.
However, publicity is publicity, and Priestley has a talent
for getting it. Next time he broadcast from London it was
"Poets, "Prophets, and ^Best-Sellers 47
for the B.B.C., but we in America were rebroadcasting the
talk. It was called 'To a Highbrow/ and excelled in calling
his particular bete noire all kinds of names. When he arrived
at the studio he was minus his script, thinking that the
B.B.C. staff, who always insist on having duplicates in ad-
vance, would be there with the goods. But they couldn't
find a copy. He offered to improvise, or trust to memory,
but that idea was too revolutionary. It wasn't done. So
the minutes ticked by twenty of them and both Eng-
land and America had a lovely silence, interrupted only
by the announcer's casual words of hope in beautiful
highbrow's English.
The resultant publicity was so 'good' that I had to pro-
cure a copy of the script for the newspapers. Reading such
phrases as, * You're the Pharisee among the arts . . . You
never fail to admire the gulf that lies between you and the
common herd . . . You decide God knows why to over-
emphasize your sibilants . . . You pretend to understand
and enjoy things you don't understand and enjoy' I
wondered if somebody hadn't lost that manuscript acciden-
tally on purpose.
BEST-SELLERS AT WORK
Hugh Walpole, a best-seller in England and a super-best-
seller in America, spoke for me twice in the early days.
He, too, 'looked at America,' but with quite unexceptionable
eyes. The son of a bishop, with a flat in Piccadilly and an
estate in Cumberland, friend of Tenor Melchior and Pugilist
Tunney, collector of Epstein sculptures and Beerbohm
caricatures, as perfect an English gentleman as Hollywood
has ever seen, could not be anything but kind-hearted and
polite but unfortunately I don't remember what he said.
Then there was the late-lamented Edgar Wallace, who
wore the mantle of Conan Doyle with a rakish air. His out-
put was fabulous and suggested the moving belt. One of the
48 Hello ^America!
best-hearted men that ever lived, he started in Fleet Street
and came to live in Portland Place, with a country estate on
the river Thames, a string of racehorses and an income that
was incalculable. His bets were sensational and he was a
famous prophet of the turf. But he lost everything but his
cockney accent, and died though he didn't know it
heavily in debt. His ten-inch ivory cigarette holder, sticking
upwards out of his mouth, was a landmark in the London
hotels and sporting clubs. He couldn't ever deny a favor
asked by a pal (and all newspapermen were his pals) ; so
busy as he was he came along and spoke a piece for me on
Daniel Defoe, the first best-seller in English fiction and the
Father of them all. It was a good journalistic piece of
literary criticism.
Another time I went to him for a short drama to be
written especially for the radio. The price was ridiculously
low for Edgar Wallace since radio drama hasn't the
earning capacity of the stage. While we were talking, his
mind began to work and he became interested. * There
should be three or four characters, not more/ he mused; 'the
woman accused of the murder, her barrister, the Crown's
attorney, and the Judge. She isn't guilty, of course, and the
whole story unravels during her evidence and cross-examina-
tion. The man who was found shot . . . ' And so he was off,
composing the whole scenario in front of me. I realized that
his detractors were wrong: Edgar Wallace wrote everything
himself.
'All right/ he said, 'seeing it's you, my pal; when do you
want it?'
A week or two later he delivered the manuscript. By the
time his check came from America, he was dead. It didn't
go far towards liquidating his debts.
Going farther afield we got Lion Feuchtwanger, German
refugee author, to speak about his c trade ' that of the
historical novelist, and why people read him. And pink-
faced, platinum-blonde Vicki Baum, author of Grand Hotel^
pendulating between Berlin and Hollywood, gave a talk on
America, reversing the process adopted by Priestley, and so
'Poets j TropbetSj and ^Best-Sellers 49
playing safe. As she 'fell in love with America the very
first week, and this kept on growing every day/ her job
wasn't difficult. But she, too, had to tackle that 'skyline I
had heard so much about/ Well:
'It was a chilly, misty morning. The statue of Liberty
stood wrapped in fog and looked a little disappointing. Then
came the reporters boys and girls and they were so
nice awfully nice and they took me into the smoking-
room and asked me questions and had so much patience and
listened so kindly to my stammering answers. And when
they were gone, the skyline was gone too it had passed
during the interviews. And I had to discover in the evening
papers that I thought the famous skyline of New York was
"not so hot!"
And that's the way to handle that situation Mr.
Priestley (and others) please note!
It's a far cry from Masefield to Vicki Baum, and there is
hardly a literary giant of this generation who wouldn't fit
into that wide sweep. Most of them I managed to 'hook' in
the first year of transatlantic broadcasting. Most of them,
with one notable exception. And that was George Bernard
Shaw.
IV. 'GET SHAW ON ANYTHING!'
THE FUNNIEST JOKE IN THE WORLD
NEVER shall I forget my first attempt to 'get Shaw/
I knew it would be a tough job, but the assignment
left me plenty of scope. I was not to get him to talk on any
particular subject, but 'on anything/ George Bernard
Shaw might be the world's greatest living writer to his
biographer; x to the American audience he was Public Joke-
ster No. i, and ' any thing ' would presumably raise the desired
laugh. What most people didn't realize, however, is that he
was very particular about his jokes. 'My way of joking/ he
once said, 'is telling the truth. That is the funniest joke in
the world/
Another mistaken notion about Shaw was that he is just
out for publicity. He may be out for it, but not 'just/ You
can't eat publicity; and, anyway, an ascetic playwright
nearing eighty doesn't eat very much. Nobody since Queen
Victoria has reached that age with so much limelight playing
about him, and there is a limit to the endurance of the human
eye. When, years ago, he put down for Who ' s Who that his
chief recreation was 'showing off,' he probably meant it, but
it is creation without the prefix that has filled out most
of his time.
When, on a chilly afternoon in the spring of 1930, I drove
out to Shaw's modest country place in Hertfordshire, I knew
that this supposedly cantankerous Irishman had never
broadcast before, but I didn't know why. He had, it is true,
read his little play, O'Flaherty, F.C., from a B.B.C. studio
1 Archibald Henderson: Contemporary Immortals, New York, 1930.
(jet Shaw on ^Anything!
in the very earliest days of broadcasting nine years before.
He had, as I found out later, presided at a public debate on
'The Menace of the Leisured Woman ' between Lady
Rhondda and G. K. Chesterton, and that debate had been
broadcast, too. But he had never, in all the ten years of
British broadcasting, done what you would expect Shaw to
do walk up to a microphone in a broadcasting studio and
lecture the people of England, Ireland, and the world in
general on the absurdity of their behavior, in the classic
Shavian way. I didn't know why not; and although I didn't
find out till years afterward, I must, for the purpose of this
story, tell about it now.
HOW TO GET FREEDOM OF SPEECH
All of Shaw's utterances are somehow on the record,
usually in the public prints. No man living or dead has been
as eagerly quoted as he; no public character has been so
persistently fertile as newspaper 'copy* for the last forty
years. Yet, in looking up his case history with reference to
broadcasting, I had not been able to find the text of his
remarks in that debate. I finally looked up the back issues
of Lady Rhondda's weekly, Time and Tide, where the debate
was recorded, but very little was quoted from Shaw. I
appealed to the editor for the complete text, but it couldn't
be found. When I was on the point of sailing for New York,
with the ail-but completed manuscript of this book in my
trunk, I received from Lady Rhondda's assistant editor a
bunch of faded typescript which I hadn't time to look at till
the Queen Mary was out at sea. And then I discovered that
it was a complete, stenographic report of the debate, dug out
of the archives of Time and Tide, and as I began to read it I
discovered the key to Shaw's protracted silence on the air, as
follows.
When broadcasting in England was first authorized by
the Government, the conditions of operation specifically ex-
52. Hello ^America!
eluded all 'controversial' matter from the air. This edict
wasn't directed against anyone in particular, but it auto-
matically excluded a man like Shaw, who refused ever to
submit anything he wanted to say to the scrutiny of any man
on earth. Imagine, therefore, what must have been the dis-
may of the B.B.C. officials when they discovered that the
above-mentioned public debate between two eminently 'safe'
people was to be refereed by Shaw, and that, instead of
confining his remarks to a mere introduction and summing-
up, this referee took the opportunity to explode a verbal
bomb. As might have been expected, he exploited the
situation with diabolical glee.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' he said (according to the ver-
batim report), 'I must ask you to be very specially on your
good behavior tonight because what is happening at present
is not merely Mr. Bernard Shaw addressing a crowded and
prematurely enthusiastic audience in the Kingsway Hall. It
is London calling the British Isles and the universe in
general. 1 . . . We are being broadcast, and the condition
under which broadcasting is conducted in this country is that
nothing of a controversial nature must be spoken from the
platform or anywhere else, except by members of the Govern-
ment. (Laughter and cheers.) How an animated and pos-
sibly embittered controversy is to be carried on if neither of
the speakers is to become controversial, I cannot tell you.
I am sorry to say that I cannot undertake to keep order in
that respect because one of the conditions of broadcasting in
this country is that I myself, individually and personally, am
not to be allowed to broadcast under any terms whatever.
Therefore my task is somewhat difficult. My duty as chair-
man obliges me at all hazards to preserve the right of the
speakers to be as controversial as they please on any subject
whatever, in spite of all the Postmasters and Governments
in the world. (Laughter.) That duty I shall fulfill.
'But now observe what that will lead us to. Probably at
this moment the Postmaster-General is listening in. He is
realizing that I am speaking. His panic is probably growing
with every sentence that falls from my lips. How am I to be
1 A slight Shavian exaggeration, in pre-short-wave days.
Cjet Shaw on ^Anything! 53
stopped? ... I do not know, but it is evident to me that the
Postmaster-General may call out the Guards. If you find,
then, an energetic force of military and police breaking into
this hall, destroying the microphone and leading me away in
custody, I must ask you not to offer any resistance. (Laugh-
ter.) Your remedy is a constitutional one. You must vote
against the Government at the next election. (Laughter and
cheers.)
1 Now some of you may reply that it is no remedy for you
because you already intended to vote against the Government.
Well, you have one more remedy. I believe it to be a strictly
constitutional one. I am now speaking, not only to you,
ladies and gentlemen assembled in this hall, but to the rest of
the eight million persons who are listening in. I suggest to
you that if every one of you writes a letter to the Postmaster-
General telling him what you think of him, you will be
strictly inside the letter of the law, you will contribute an
enormous sum in three-halfpenny stamps to the revenue,
and you will make it absolutely certain that no postmaster-
general will ever attempt to interfere with freedom of speech
in England again.' (Loud cheers.)
That, then, was Shaw's first broadcast and for all one
could tell his last. No wonder he wasn't invited again.
No wonder the Times famous for its verbatim reports
didn't print his remarks. What must have happened be-
hind the scenes between the Government and the B.B.C. is
nobody's business, for no doubt hundreds, perhaps thou-
sands, had taken Shaw's advice about writing to the Post-
master-General. A year or two later his prediction about
free speech had come true: the lid was off, controversy was
permitted on the British air.
But Shaw had not broadcast yet. On his seventieth birth-
day he had been asked to contribute some sage remarks
appropriate to the occasion, if he would submit his manu-
script in advance, but he told the authorities where they
could go. That was the situation when I arrived with the
proposal that Shaw should broadcast to the United States.
The only certainty, at that date, was that you couldn't
censor Shaw.
54 Hello ^America!
SHAW AND EINSTEIN AT DINNER
For me there were other difficulties, too. Shaw himself
hadn't decided what broadcasting really was. Was it author-
ship? In that case who would pay his price? Was it public
speaking? Since it was his principle only to speak when he
had an axe to grind, and then gratuitously, he would have to
make the broadcasting rajahs a valuable present, which
surely they didn't deserve. But my trepidations were chiefly
due to Shaw's reputation as a 'savage,' where intruders are
concerned; the stories of his candid treatment of people he
didn't happen to like were not reassuring in the least. He
was a hard man to interview, the most elusive target for the
lion-hunter, the most impossible man to enlist in the usual
kind of 'good cause.' Nor could he be lured by flattery,
however subtle; his shrewd eye would detect the purpose
and force you to come to the point. And once his mind was
made up, it was impossible to argue him out of his decision.
My previous acquaintance with the great man was slight.
But my friend Albert Coates, orchestral conductor and
Wagner specialist, was my sponsor, so we dropped in with-
out warning and were given tea by that charming home-
body, Mrs. Shaw, after she had sounded a shrill pea-whistle
to summon her spouse from his garden haunt. Here, in a
revolving sunshine hut, Shaw was correcting the proofs of his
collected works, and he was glad of an excuse for interrupting
a 'boresome' task. He didn't take tea, for he never does, but
watched us tolerantly while discoursing on the relative merits
of Wagner and Verdi. (I discovered that this one-time music
critic was still the 'perfect Wagnerite,' who didn't share the
moderns' high opinion of Verdi Billow's 'Italian hurdy-
gurdy man').
How I injected politics and radio into that esthetic
homily I can't remember, but presently he had poured scorn
on the London Naval Treaty, which was about to be signed,
and which was certainly not worth a broadcast from him.
And what about another subject in fact 'anything'?
Shaw on *Any thing! 55
* What will you pay me a million dollars ?' he said, in his
still perceptible Dublin brogue. Then, after a moment,
'Don't bother about it/
I knew he was having his little joke at the expense of
Americans, and found that what he needed first of all was
not anything but something to talk about. 'Whatever
reputation I have/ he confided, 'is due to the fact that I
never open my mouth unless I have something to say.* So
we left it at that until the desired subject should pop into
his head or mine.
I spent the summer holidays trying to think up subjects
for Shaw. Nothing suitable turned up. But by keeping in
touch I managed to get a broadcast not a genuine one,
but a public speech. That autumn a great dinner was given
in London in honor of Professor Einstein, for the benefit of
the suffering Jews in the Near East. Shaw was caught off his
guard: he was persuaded to speak, and the minute I heard
about it, I rang up the B.B.C. It was Shaw's re-entry into
broadcasting by the back door. The result was that the
proceedings were not only broadcast, but 'relayed' to
America.
Toasting the world's most famous Jew was just pie for
Shaw. Sitting beside the Chief Rabbi of London, the fair,
blue-eyed, white-bearded Irish free-thinker donned a black
skull-cap in deference to the Orthodox Jews who were present
in great numbers, and turned eastward while prayers were
intoned. Then, with characteristic Shavian 'cheek/ he
began by putting Isaac Newton in his place.
'Facts/ he said, 'will never stop an Englishman/ So
Newton 'invented' the straight line and gravitation and the
Newtonian universe, which lasted until a young man had a
look at it and said: 'Newton did not know what happened
to the apple and I can prove this when the next eclipse comes
along. The heavenly bodies go in curves because it is the
natural way for them to go/ And so 'the whole Newtonian
Universe crumpled up and was succeeded by the Einstein
Universe/
This was Shaw 'on anything' with a vengeance with
a speech by Einstein thrown in for good measure. But still
56 Hello ^America!
Shaw hadn't 'broadcast* that is, spoken into a micro-
phone for the benefit of unseen listeners alone, nor had he
spoken at a time when all America could listen. Every few
weeks I rang him up. He would come to the telephone him-
self and try to put me off. Now and again he would ask me
to come along and see him, and next morning I would be
sitting in his London flat, high up overlooking the Thames,
with Shaw on one side of the fire, I on the other, and Miss
Patch, his faithful secretary, a few feet away. And in a
conversation that was usually two against one he would
knock down one idea after another.
'The Future of Kingship/ I suggested once. 'I've said all
I have to say on that in The Apple-Cart; let them go and see
that!'
'What about the talkies are they the dramatist's
future vehicle ? '
'Nonsense; talkies don't interest me.'
And so on. Next time another batch of subjects would
share the same fate. Nor could his interest be roused on the
centenary of Mark Twain one of his great favorites and a
'kindred spirit.' Nobody with the sense of Mark Twain
would want any fuss made about him just because he would
be a hundred, had he lived. Still another time there was to be
a broadcast in America by the Irish poet George Russell
('A.E.') and I asked Shaw to 'introduce' him from London.
'Nothing could be sillier,' he wrote me on one of his famous
postcards, 'than this introduction business, wasting half the
speaker's time and dividing the interest. I have no patience
with such folly. Let the Announcer do it, in not more than
thirty words.' But these things were just outbursts of the
professional. My friends at the B.B.C. used to catch it
worse than that.
'You don't mind my bothering you like this?' I asked him
one day, returning to the charge with further suggestions.
'Not in the least,' he retorted; 'but I don't believe it's any
good anyway, your people wouldn't let me say what I
please*
I mustered all the outraged pride I could and told him that
there is no censorship of broadcasts in America.
et Shaw on ^Anything!
57
z
DC
J W
LJ >
h J
CL
LXJ
00
'Suppose, now, I wanted to talk about Russia?'
'Splendid!' I exclaimed; 'let's have a little talk about
Russia.'
'Well,' he chuckled, 'we must see about that You've
certainly advanced matters a bit today' was his good-bye.
*A LITTLE TALK ABOUT RUSSIA*
The following summer Shaw went to Russia, in the com-
pany of Lady Astor and some representative English people.
It is more than likely that our last conversation was respon-
sible for the trip. Soon after it he had seen Sokolnikoff, the
58 Hello ^America!
Soviet ambassador (who a few years later was to be tried
and 'convicted* as a Trotskyist), and Sokolnikoff in answer
to a request for information had suggested that Shaw go and
see for himself. Within a few months of his return he finally
succumbed to my blandishments and agreed to speak. I was
careful not to ask for a 'script/ His public speeches that had
been broadcast were ex tempore; this time he had written out
every word and rehearsed it; he knew he had just fourteen
minutes and he took no risks of overrunning. (My introduc-
tion was short!) I had no idea what was coming, though I
saw a wicked twinkle in his eye, and Mrs. Shaw whispered
to me as we entered the little B.B.C. studio: 'It's very cheeky,
you know/
It was. Shaw is past-master at shocking people into taking
notice. And there is no surer way of doing that than by
calling them names. It may be a crude way, but it worked,
and proved Shaw right in calculating his audience. When he
sat down behind that microphone in old Savoy Hill and
addressed them as 'you dear old boobs/ he knew what he was
doing, for there wasn't a newspaper in the United States
next day that hadn't taken his bait. No radio speech had
ever been more widely quoted, none had drawn such volu-
minous and vituperative comment. If Shaw was indulging
in 'recreation,' he must have been having a marvellous
time; but he was only having his favorite joke telling the
truth, as he saw it. A fellow-playwright of Shaw's, James
Bridie, says that some time ago Mr. Shaw became the
official Sage of the British Isles. Now, at seventy-five, he
may have had an ambition to be recognized as the Sage of
the English-speaking world. In any case, deep down he was
in dead earnest. Not even he would go to the trouble of
writing a little masterpiece of dialectics and delivering it
gratis, unless he were deeply concerned. Think of what it
must have cost him to be facetious about a matter which all
his life has been his religion!
No one least of all Shaw would pretend that the
'Little Talk about Russia' was a great political or economic
document. How long would an accurately thought-out study
of Russian state socialism have held the attention of millions
B. B. C.
Shaw's 'You dear old boobs,' the only talk, thus far, addressed
to America alone
G.P.O. Film Unit
Wells talked about 'The World of Our Grandchildren' in the
first American broadcast of his career
<^et Shaw on *Any thing! 59
of ' boobs ' ? Shaw had sized up the American radio audience,
and his verdict was not flattering. After all, if one must
compete with the inanities of jazz and * script acts/ he must
produce something with the same amount of punch.
'Russia has the laugh on us. She has us fooled, beaten,
shamed, shown up, outpointed, and all but knocked out/
True or not true, this made people sit up.
'Your President [Hoover], who became famous by feeding
the starving millions of waj-devastated Europe, cannot feed
his own people in the time of peace/ If many of his listeners
hadn't agreed with him, they wouldn't have voted for
Roosevelt in such overwhelming numbers the next year.
'Our agriculture is ruined and our industries collapsing
under the weight of their own productiveness because we
have not found out how to distribute our wealth as well as
to produce it.' No professor of economics nowadays would
quarrel with that. Nor will any professor of history deny
that Lenin and his friends 'took command of the Soviets
and established the U.S.S.R. exactly as Washington and
Jefferson and Hamilton and Franklin and Tom Paine had
established the United States of America one hundred and
forty-one years before/
He then suggested an amusing Sunday game. 'Make a col-
lection of the articles in the royalist newspapers and political
pamphlets, American as well as British, issued during the
last quarter of the eighteenth century. Strike out the dates,
the name of the country, and the names of its leaders. The
game is for your friends to fill up the blanks. What country
is this, you will ask, which has broken every social bond and
given itself over to anarchy and infamy at the bidding of a
gang of atheists, drunkards, libertines, thieves and assassins?
Your friends will guess wrong. When the right answer is
America, they will guess Russia. When the right name is
Washington, they will cry Trotsky. They will declare that
. . . Jefferson is Lenin, that Franklin is Litvinoff, that Paine
is Lunacharsky, that Hamilton is Stalin. When you tell
them the truth, they will probably never speak to you
again; but you will have given them a valuable moral lesson,
which ought to be the object of all Sunday games/
60 Hello ^America!
Of course the gibing editorials didn't quote this. They
cited some of Shaw's figures on Russia and dismissed them
by saying 'bosh'; they seized upon his flights of enthusiasm
and omitted his warning that Russia was not yet a paradise.
'Russia is too big a place/ he said, 'for any government to
get rid in fourteen years of the frightful mess of poverty,
ignorance, and dirt left by the Czardom. ... I am afraid
there is a good deal of the poverty, ignorance, and dirt we
know so well at home, but there is hope everywhere in
Russia because these evils are retreating there before the
spread of communism as steadily as they are advancing upon
us before the last desperate struggle of our bankrupt capital-
ism to stave off its inevitable goal by reducing wages, multi-
plying tariffs, and rallying all the latent savagery and greed
in the world to its support in predatory warfare masquerad-
ing as patriotism.'
A jokester? America got what it asked for; but the trouble
is that nobody likes a serious joke. So not only the papers
but the politicians and the churchmen turned on him the
churchmen because of the religious fervor they detected in
his words. (Churches don't attack infidels; they 'convert'
them. But they^/%A/ rival religions.) And so the Columbia
network had to give an eminent cleric a chance to answer
Shaw on the air. Shaw's attackers couldn't have pleased him
better if they tried.
RADIO SATIRIST NO. I
'Part showman, part schoolmaster/ the astute Mr.
Bridie calls Shaw. He thoroughly lived up to it in this
broadcast and those he has made since then. For this talk
and the one he made that summer on Joan of Arc (for
England, but rebroadcast in the United States) broke the ice.
Largely, thanks to Shaw, 'controversial' broadcasting was
now permitted in Great Britain, and if anybody accuses the
British broadcasting authorities of muzzling anybody they
(jet Shaw on ^Anything! 61
need only point to Shaw. In the half-dozen talks he has
made for them, at the rate of about one a year, he has
lectured them without restraint on morals, on politics,
on economics, on education, and even religion with the
fearlessness of a Fox and the wit of a Swift.
He debunked every hero and every subject he touched.
Joan of Arc had 'no sex appeal/ but was an inveterate
soldier who wanted to go on fighting when there was no
more fighting to do. Her career was, according to Shaw, the
career of the Pankhursts and the Trotskys of our day.
Concerning Freedom he told Englishmen to 'stop gassing
about it/ because they didn't know what it was, 'never
having had any/ Disarmament, as discussed in Geneva,
didn't rouse his interest, because 'if I'm to be killed by a shell
I prefer it to be as big as possible, as it will give the occasion
importance and make a bigger noise.' And the pious effusions
about the Empire he countered with this: ' If I were a stranger
from another planet I should say that an attempt to com-
bine England with India before England was combined with
the United States on the one side and with all her Western
neighbors on the other, is a crazy reversal of the natural order
of things, and cannot possibly last.'
One of the most courageous things the B.B.C. ever did
was to allow Shaw to speak about schools in a series designed
'for sixth forms' (which correspond to the top grade in an
American high school). For if, as many people think, the
average grown-up has got Shaw's number and knows that
he's 'just a buffoon/ the young and impressionable, about to
be graduated from school, cannot be trusted to have such
superior judgment. Speaking to the schoolboys of England
just about the time when the air vibrates with valedictories,
when examinations are being struggled with and the Young
Hopefuls are about to go out into the world, Shaw was per-
mitted to tell them that 'school was to me a sentence of
penal servitude'; and that 'I could not read schoolbooks,
because they are written by people who do not know how to
write.'
'Some of your schoolfellows/ he calmly warned his
juvenile audience, 'may surprise you by getting hanged.
62. Hello ^America!
Others, of whom you have the lowest opinion, will turn out
to be geniuses, and become of the great men of your time/
Superficially it was just one joke after another, though
once again, on closer examination, the jokes were all true.
But equally true was the confession of the octogenarian:
' I am an old man before I have quite got the habit of think-
ing of myself as a boy/
By virtue of these talks Shaw is, I think, to be rated
with Chesterton as one of the world's first radio satirists.
As a public speaker he was perhaps less effective than he
would like to have been. His rather pugnacious attitude
and his tendency to a kind of didactic bullying were apt to
defeat their own object. At the microphone, however, his
manner never irritates, though much of his rather brittle
yet benevolent personality always 'registers/ With the
intuition of the born showman he grasped from the begin-
ning the essentials of the new medium intimacy, sim-
plicity, and naturalness and its informality, which is very
different from literary style.
He is, of course, a marvel of vitality. At eighty-one his
rich, compact voice is as steady and vigorous as in middle
age, and his exceptionally clear diction, with its shade of
Irish, has just the tempo and inflection to give it buoyancy
and point. The arresting picture of the lanky, quixotic
figure of the white-bearded youth with the jaunty step and
the devil-may-care look is so vividly before you that tele-
vision seems superfluous. 1
FACING THE ' BOOBS*
Practically all of Shaw's broadcasts, ever since I managed
to break the ice, have been transmitted to America. Untold
1 The first "curtain speech" in television drama was made by Bernard Shaw in
July, 1937, when, after a televised version of How He Lied to Her Husband, he ap-
peared on the B.B.C. television screen to say: 'You might not suppose it from my
veteran appearance, but the truth is that I am the author of that ridiculous little
play you have just heard.'
Cjet Shaw on ^Anything! 63
millions have heard the most famous literary genius of our
time, who had also become one of the must effective as well
as provocative broadcasters in the world. But the famous
'boobs' talk is the only one, thus far, that was addressed
to America alone. No offers of money ever tempted him : he
had to be convinced, not only that he had something to say,
but that it needed saying at the time. Simply 'lecturing*
America never attracted him as a sport and he has the ut-
most contempt for the horde of more or less educated
Englishmen who are ' telling America ' year after year.
On the other hand, no trouble was too great for him when
it came to accommodating a friend. Once I discovered that
a talk that he was booked to make in a B.B.C. series had
been recorded in advance, because the date fell on the eve
of one of his long cruises. It would have meant cancelling
the American transmission, at the end of a series which
both American networks had taken almost solely for the
sake of the talk by G. B. S. We were in danger of playing
Hamlet without the Prince.
I told Shaw that American broadcasting chains couldn't
use recordings because of the existing laws. 'What do you
care about laws, anyway?' he chuckled. 'How about pro-
hibition when you had it?' But a few minutes later he
agreed, not only to come to London on a Sunday night, but
to walk up five flights of stairs in a dormant office building
to make his talk for American listeners all over again.
He was almost indignant at the suggestion of getting the
elevator started for his sake. For a man nearing eighty this
was pretty generous, considering that there was no financial
or other consideration of any kind.
Those who say that Shaw is 'out for money' or 'out for
publicity' should think again.
Early in 1933 Shaw traversed the United States on a trip
around the world, and contrary to all expectations, agreed to
stop in New York. He had blustered again and again that
he wouldn't go to America because he didn't want to be
'mobbed' by his admirers. But somebody collared him, and
he allowed himself to be 'starred' at the Metropolitan Opera
House, whence his speech was to be broadcast on a National
network throughout the United States.
64 Hello ^America!
So here he was, facing the ' boobs,' three thousand of them,
and most of them seem to have decided that, in Queen
Victoria's phrase, they were not amused. The late Clarence
Day, crippled and bedridden for years, who managed by an
incredible effort to crawl into a dress suit and get himself
transported to the Opera House for the purpose of 'seeing
Shaw make a fool of himself,' said he was not disappointed.
Most of the other members of the fashionable audience,
however, were probably because this time Shaw did not
call them names.
The 'getting' of Shaw was not only my outstanding suc-
cess to date, but one of the great experiences of an exciting
career. When he had broadcast, the last of the available
intellectual Big Game in the British Isles had been bagged.
My eyes began to drift to wider fields.
V. PUTTING THE POPE ON THE AIR
VATICAN CITY ASSERTS ITS SOVEREIGNTY
ON THE first of January, 1931, Benito Mussolini made
his first and only broadcast in English. Having taken
daily lessons for months with an English lady resident in
Rome, he was persuaded that he had mastered the language
sufficiently to impress the waiting millions in America and
could project the great message of Fascism to the New World
direct from its fountainhead.
Sometime previous to this, a series of articles from the
Duce's own hand had been commissioned by the Hearst
newspapers to appear serially throughout the United States.
It was a fat contract, and even measured by the sensational
Hearst standards, the cost must have been terrific. So, in
order to launch it with the requisite eclat, Hearst had arranged
for the radio talk to America. This had required the inten-
sive study of a language not hitherto in the great man's
verbal arsenal. The optimism of his tutors was exaggerated,
for the message, though carefully prepared and edited in
idiomatic English, was probably understood better by
Italo-Americans than Americans. By arrangement with
Hearst it was broadcast by short wave from Rome and
rebroadcast in the United States by the National Broad-
casting Company's network. The plans were kept secret al-
most until the very day, in order to prevent the rival Colum-
bia chain from ' horning in.' When Columbia heard about it,
frantic efforts were made in Washington to get permission to
'relay,' but it was too late. Sitting in London, busily occu-
pied in preparing to * scoop' the Opposition in other fields,
66 Hello ^America!
I suddenly found myself Scooped' instead. It was an awful
blow. The polite ambassador and his minions in the London
Embassy were sympathetic, but even their eleventh-hour
intercession didn't do the trick. In my innocence I was
determined that this sort of thing shouldn't happen again,
but I realized that my virtual monopoly on broadcasts from
Europe was at an end.
A few days later I was tipped that the Vatican's short-
wave radio station was nearing completion and that some-
thing even more sensational might happen. Officially I was
still only the London representative of the Columbia net-
work, but as there was no other representative in Europe it
soon became clear that my playground was the entire Euro-
pean continent. So I put ' European Director' on my letter-
head and hoped for the best.
MARCONI BUILDS A SUPER-STATION
Ostensibly the projected Vatican station was for tele-
graphic and possibly telephonic communication. The
historic Lateran Treaty with the Italian Government
Mussolini's greatest master-stroke of statesmanship had
been signed two years before, and for the first time in sixty
years the Vatican enjoyed a temporal, that is, political,
existence. The Pope was no longer the 'prisoner of the
Vatican,' and on February 12, 1929, had signified his new
status by emerging to give the traditional blessing, Urbi
et Orbi> from the balcony of St. Peter's in the presence of a
great multitude.
The newly won 'sovereignty' of the Vatican State had
been asserted by various visible signs. A Vatican coinage
had been minted; Vatican postage stamps had been issued,
to be sold by a tiny post office near the Vatican entrance;
a showy new government building with an imposing Renais-
sance fagade was nearing completion; and a Vatican court
of justice set up for the benefit of four hundred and fifty
Tutting the Tope on the *Air 67
Vatican citizens. Moreover, a railroad siding had been con-
structed, leading by means of a tunnel through a spur of
Vatican Hill to a small and rather pretentious-looking
station. But no trains had ever run over it and the great
portals shutting the tunnel on the Vatican side had not yet
swung wide, although a royal train presented by Mussolini's
Government stood ready to take the Holy Father and his
retinue wherever they wanted to go. The world stood open
to Pius XI.
All this had been done with the financial co-operation of
the Italian Government under the treaty's provisions; now,
with the same financial aid, the Vatican radio station was
being built on the summit of the hill, and connected by
telephone lines to the Palace, so that the Pontiff might
communicate, directly and independently of any Italian or
other ' foreign* aid, with his Nuncios throughout the world.
But the amount payable by the Italian State under this
head had to be supplemented. What was wanted was not
only a very modern and powerful station, such as the su-
preme pontiff should command, but a marble building and
the most sumptuous accessories. The railroad might be
just a symbol of sovereignty, but a radio station opened up
practical possibilities. It was to be built by the Marconi
Company under the personal supervision of Senator Marconi
himself.
Senator Marconi, rated throughout the world as the
leading inventor of wireless communication, had been raised
to the rank of Marchese by the King of Italy, and although
not a Fascist by inclination, had become one of the chief
ornaments of the Fascist State, an elder statesman and
president of the Italian Academy. But he was also a devout
Catholic and a confidant of the Pope. His marriage with his
Irish wife, the Honorable Beatrice O'Brien, had been an-
nulled by the Sacred Rota in 1927 and he was now married
to a beautiful young noblewoman, the Countess Maria
Cristina Bezzi-Scala, member of an old family of papal
aristocracy. He was reputed to be very wealthy. His cup of
happiness, presumably, was full. Most of his time, when he
was not engaged in business in London, was spent in his
68 Hello ^America!
sumptuous apartment on the Via Condotti in Rome or on
his luxurious yacht Elettra, conducting experiments.
The difference between the available funds and the actual
cost of the proposed Vatican station was, it is said, contrib-
uted in part by donations from the Faithful (chiefly in
America), and in part as a homage to the Holy Father by
the generous Marchese himself. It was to be the last word
in scientific perfection and efficiency. A neat and handsome
little building, with the pontifical arms carved over the door,
was to contain the machinery and the office of the director,
Father Gianfranceschi, Jesuit savant and head of the Papal
Academy of Sciences (housed in an idyllic pavilion which is
said to have been a retreat for certain privileged ladies in
days when popes were more worldly but less science-minded
than now).
What use would be made of the new station? It would
certainly not be as passively ornamental as the railroad
station below. Great secrecy was preserved as to its mechan-
ical details and characteristics. It could telegraph to any-
where, certainly; but it also had a speech panel and a duplex
arrangement for two-way conversations with distant points.
What about broadcasting? No one had even dared to sug-
gest that the Holy Father himself would engage in anything
so mundane as broadcasting, although the possibility of
reaching the whole of the Christian world from the centre
of the Catholic Faith was a fascinating prospect.
But fools rush in where clerics fear to tread. And we Ameri-
cans have the imagination of fools. Busy with the problems
of Austria and the League of Nations, I was oblivious to
what was going on in Rome, when a cable from New York
ordered me to go there and 'get' the Pope to broadcast to
America! Had he signified any intention to broadcast at
all? I asked. No, but he might. I was staggered by the very
thought.
Tutting the Tope on the *Air 69
HEARST TAKES AN INTEREST
From Vienna, where Wilhelm Miklas, once a school-
teacher, new president of the Austrian Republic, had to be
introduced to American listeners, I went to Turin, the head-
quarters of Italian broadcasting, to take counsel with the
radio chiefs. The Pope to broadcast? Ludicrous! You can
take it from us, on the inside, that he will not. So off I went
to my next assignment, the meeting of the League Council
in Geneva. German minorities in Poland were to be dis-
cussed, and other inflammable subjects. Doctor Curtius,
Germany's liberal foreign minister, was going to address a
tirade to American listeners, but at the last moment, scared
by Nazi demonstrations, he had ' walked out/ In a half-
hour conversation with him I got the first inkling of that
rising storm in Germany which two years later was to sweep
Hitler into power.
The Pope and his short-wave station were far from my
mind as I fussed and fumed around the Hotel Metropole,
the cheerless headquarters of the German delegation. Fur-
ther inquiries had confirmed me in the belief that a papal
broadcast was music of the far distant future, and in my
pocket was a cable ready to be sent to New York, recommend-
ing the cancellation of my trip to Rome, which would be a
wasteful wild-goose chase.
In the lobby of the hotel were listless groups of secretaries,
journalists, and hangers-on. Suddenly I saw an old friend,
Karl von Wiegand, veteran Hearst correspondent, who said
he had just come from of all places Rome. Somebody
mentioned radio.
'You know I arranged that Mussolini broadcast for
Hearst. And only yesterday I left Prince X down there, who's
going to get us the Pope/
'Great man, Hearst. He stops at nothing/ I said, mentally
crumpling up my cablegram. 'Have you had dinner? Come
along to the Bavaria!'
In that crowded and smoky gastronomic hang-out, whose
70 Hello ^America!
walls are covered with fantastic caricatures of the political
and journalistic Big Shots of Geneva, we talked of the good
old revolutionary days in Berlin, when the Wilhelmstrasse
bristled with barbed wire, and street battles were our diver-
sions between strangely concocted libations in the Adlon
Bar. Before midnight I left Geneva to make connections
with the Rome Express, in my pocket a nice note from Wie-
gand introducing an old colleague to Prince X at the Grand
H6tel.
The Prince was one of those tall willowy Italians of the
north, whom you see either at fashionable hotel bars or
driving a flashy Bugatti to a rendezvous, those ' younger sons
of younger sons' who live by their wits, and whose chief
assets are elegant manners, aristocratic ' contacts ' and a way
with the ladies. This particular Prince was, I was told, the
nephew of a Cardinal, high in the councils of the Vatican.
At the moment he was a Hearst correspondent in Rome. His
English was as elegant as his person and there was usually an
athletic-looking Swiss a trooper of the famous Papal
Guard in his room. Having just bowed out General
Nobile, that ill-starred explorer who had been thrown to the
lions for being an honest man but a poor 'hero' for the young
Fascist State, the Prince turned to me with that easy assur-
ance which gets you into places and over problems at a
bound.
Sure, he was getting the Pope to broadcast February
12 was the probable date. His uncle was a Cardinal, Mar-
coni one of his pals. And Hearst was his boss. His interest in
broadcasting was platonic, and I doubt whether he knew
anything about the bitter rivalry of broadcasting companies
in America. Nevertheless, discretion was the better part of
valor and I decided to try and supplement my information
elsewhere.
Tutting the Tope on the *Air 71
THE MONSIGNORE WHO GETS THE NEWS
The newspapers knew as good as nothing. The other (non-
Hearst) American correspondents were aware of the Vatican's
broadcasting, but thought of it only in terms of communica-
tions. For Vatican news they relied almost exclusively on
two sources, the Osservatore Romano, the official organ which
usually conceals as much as it reveals, and a certain Mon-
signore who ran an unofficial one-man press service for the
benefit of foreign correspondents, tolerated but not endorsed
by the authorities.
The comings and goings of this dignitary a swarthy and
well-fed cleric who shaved on Sundays and feast-days, and
seemed to live day and night in the same soutane, was one of
the social oddities of Rome. He would be seen daily in and
about the Vatican, where the tiny square of purple in the
opening of his collar-band enforced obsequious respect from
all attendants, courtesies from the Vatican police and
military salutes from the medieval Swiss Guards. At night
he could be observed in the Sala della Stampa working on
'copy,' or at the telegraph office filing messages with great
assiduity like any ordinary journalist. In off times and
after hours he would join a convivial group of laymen in one
of those restaurants that enjoy the reputation of a superior
cuisine. (They say in Rome that a good rule to follow when
in doubt about a restaurant is to see whether any clerics are
among the clients. If there are just priests, the food is good;
if there's a Monsignore, the food is excellent.)
But no matter how late he might be on his professional
rounds, mornings at seven would find the Monsignore saying
Mass in his little church somewhere beyond the seven hills of
Rome. And an hour or so later one might have an appoint-
ment to meet him outside the bronze doors of St. Peter's. Nor
would he neglect his meditations; punctual to the dot, one
could see his broad-brimmed clerical felt hat and his flowing
cassock approaching through the majestically sweeping
colonnades that curve around the Plaza in front of St. Peter's,
72. Hello ^America!
breviary in hand, his lips moving with great rapidity through
the last of the rubrics, so perfectly timed that the last Amen
would melt into his cheery 'Bon giorno!' or 'Bonjour!' as the
case might be for with the exception of English the
Monsignore knew a language or two.
I have a notion that he knew more English than he ad-
mitted, too, but while his clients struggled through Italian or
French, their hesitations gave him time to think.
In the difficult task of serving more masters than one the
Monsignore performed miracles. Not a foreign correspond-
ent in Rome would admit that this ubiquitous priest was on
his payroll; yet all profited from his services in a particular
way: everybody got all the news, but yet it wasn't quite the
same news, and everyone had, or thought he had, something
exclusive in fact no one doubted that he, and he alone, en-
joyed the Monsignore's confidence to an exceptional degree.
Despite his prodigious and ubiquitous labors the Monsig-
nore was always reachable by telephone. If he wasn't home,
his housekeeper was, and an hour or so later he would ring
back from somewhere in or about Rome. And his voice was
always reassuring; if there was no news in sight, one felt that
it was just around the corner.
So it was with the rumor about the Big Broadcast. The
Monsignore never denied it, never confirmed it. But in the
long days of waiting, of secrecy, of sinister hearsay, it was a
comfort to hear the soft, courteous, authoritative voice tell-
ing what could be and what could not be, but if the news
should break, it would 'break right' for you.
'CONTACT OLD GENTLEMAN DIRECT!'
Before I met the Monsignore, things looked black indeed.
Against the claims of our Opposition, especially recom-
mended by the Apostolic Delegate in Washington as well as
an American Cardinal, I was to have the friendly offices of a
lesser American prelate who was said to enjoy the special
Tutting the Tope on the *Air 73
confidence of the Pope, and who was supposed to be some-
where on his way to Rome. Perhaps he was already there?
I inquired at the headquarters of his Sacred Order no
news. I cabled my office in New York: 'When does Father
W arrive and where will he stay?' and waited for a
reply.
While I was waiting I thought I'd take my first look at the
Vatican. As I stood all alone in that vast, rectangular inner
court, stretched to the full height of my five-foot-three, I
looked up at the lofty walls of Pope Nicholas' fifteenth-
century Palace of the Thousand Halls, rising canyon-like on
either side of me, and the towering Appartamento Borgia
straight ahead. I looked at the myriad windows, imagined
the countless rooms and miles of corridors behind them, and
I wondered wondered just where in this awe-inspiring
maze might be the Pope in solitary majesty; wondered, too,
whether the whole idea of his broadcasting and my ' arrang-
ing' it for America's upstart radio chain wasn't too fantastic
for thoughts, let alone words.
When I returned to my hotel, feeling rather blue, the
answer to my cable awaited me: 'Father W unsailing.
Contact old gentleman direct.' ('Old gentleman' was code
for Pope!)
I looked again and it was like looking down an empty well
for a pin. My mind went back to the Vatican, to the tower-
ing canyon, the thousand windows, the Papal guards, the
closed doors of bronze that I had seen. ' Contact old gentle-
man direct!'
Well, there was still lots of time. It was near the end of
January and the broadcast, if it happened, wouldn't happen
before February 12. The date certainly sounded right, for
not only was it the date of the Pope's enthronement, but in
America it was a legal holiday, when millions could listen in
and would. Through diligent search I got to know a
nephew of a brother-in-law of the Pope's chamberlain's
brother or some relationship even more remote, yet in
Italy not too remote for a little personal favor for the sake of
family ties. Within a week or so I had an appointment with
the Chamberlain in his red plush and gold office in the
74 Hello ^America!
Vatican, which proved 1 cordial but useless except for the offer
of attendance at an audience, where one might kneel and
receive the papal blessing from afar. Also I got an invitation
to hear His Holiness say Mass in the Sistine Chapel.
It was a festive occasion. I donned my white tie and
' tails/ according to regulations, though it was morning, gave
up hat and coat to silk-stockinged court flunkies, and sat on a
back bench in that apotheosis of all interiors, staring at
Michelangelo's ceiling, listening to the ethereal harmonies of
Palestrina, breathing the incense-drenched atmosphere
while the mitred Pius XI on his portable throne was carried
shoulder-high through the central aisle, attended by the
Noble Guards, a gigantic fan held over him like an Eastern
potentate, attired in the rich, effulgent splendor of ' Christ's
Vicar on Earth/ The spectators applauded with their hands
according to tradition as the august figure approached.
Two nuns next to me had opera-glasses, and as the ceremony
proceeded they stood unabashed on the bench to peer through
them over the heads of those in front.
The Byzantine pomp of the ceremony, the scintillating
splendor of the altar, the age-old canticles intoned by the
Pope's tenuous, quivering voice, the genuflexions of cardinals
and bishops before the enthroned pontiff all the accumula-
tion of the mysticism of two thousand years, calculated to
impress man with the humility of his being these things
were overpowering in their effect. And as these impressions
crowded in upon me, my mind suddenly reverted to that
classic cablegram: * Contact old gentleman direct!'
My next approach was to the Papal Secretary of State,
and there was officially referred to Father Gianfranceschi,
Jesuit scientist, president of the Papal Academy and
Vatican radio chief the key-man in the story, as I shall
relate.
Meantime things had begun to happen. In the night of
January 30-31, speech tests from the Vatican station had
been heard in New York and were acknowledged, worse luck,
by our * hated rivals,' the N.B.C.; and Senator Marconi was
received in private audience by the Pope to report on the
experiment. Special apparatus was to be installed in the
Tutting the Tope on the <Air 75
Pope's study for telephone communications with the over-
seas Nuncios. The American correspondents reported to
their papers that the station probably would be functioning
by February 12. Relying on the Monsignore's confidential
bulletins they said that a papal address would be read by a
cardinal, but seeing me around they added that at the last
minute the Pope himself might decide to speak. Nobody be-
lieved it; everybody around the Vatican stoutly denied the
possibility of anything so unprecedented.
Then the power house, already functioning for tests, was
to be formally 'opened* on February 6, the Pope's birthday,
by the Pontiff. The Osservatore Romano, in an obscurely
placed paragraph printed a statement that the station itself
would be opened on February 12 con gran solennita. That,
said the nephew of the brother-in-law of the Chamberlain's
brother, means the r personal presence of the Pope. It was
high time to see Father Gianfranceschi.
The upper regions of the Vatican City, where the station
was located, had been closed for weeks. Every bend in the
road was guarded by Vatican police. Now, armed with a
direct reference from the Papal Government, the Mon-
signore and I took a motor car; as he approached a police-
man, he flashed his little purple square, the badge of clerical
nobility, whispered a few magic words, and we were waved
on. Up and up, along the medieval ramparts over which the
radio towers and antennae incongruously protruded toward
the sky, over newly made roads, we rolled up to the tiny
marble temple that housed the greatest of miracles that even
the Vatican had seen.
Father Gianfranceschi, an ascetic, slender intellectual in
cassock and skull-cap, received us. In his hand was an
English book of very recent date Eddington's Science and
the Unseen World. His manner had a delightful blend of
fatherliness, urbanity, and simple charm. The childish
delight which he took in his great machine, his tubes and
rectifiers and indicators, broke through his reticence and we
soon became quite good friends. The idea that thousands of
the Faithful might be excluded from listening to the Vatican
unless both networks were given permission to rebroadcast
j6 Hello ^America!
the opening ceremony, gradually softened his partiality.
Armed with a document which not only certified Columbia's
privilege to rebroadcast the 'entire ceremony/ but which
also gave me free passage to the radio station, I became
a daily visitor. Day by day, bit by bit, the details of that
ceremony emerged in conversations with the suave padre,
from the famous silver trumpets to herald the arrival
of the Pope down to the proceedings of the Papal Academy,
where Marconi was to be installed and decorated by the
Holy Father himself.
Father Gianfranceschi, I found, visited the Pope every
day, perfecting the elaborate program, instructing him in
the use of the gold-mounted microphone, assisting in the
articulation of his historic Message to the World. I was, in
fact, as close to 'contacting old gentleman direct* as any lay
mortal could hope to be. Without the slightest desire to sup-
plant the busy Monsignore, I had, for the time being, become
a valuable news source to the most excited group of news-
paper correspondents I had ever seen, since they had been
kept on tenter-hooks by the mystery-mongers about the
Vatican for a fortnight or more.
The reason for this elaborate secrecy over an innocent
matter, though of world-wide interest, I was never able to
detect. Young Prince X, down at the Grand Hotel, who was
never seen in the sacred precincts at all, seemed to be the
only one who all along 'knew/ Could it be that this epoch-
making event in the history of the Church was being nursed
as a scoop for one all-powerful newspaper magnate in New
York? Not until four days before the great broadcast did the
Monsignore release a communique to the effect that ' Senator
Marconi and Father Gianfranceschi in audience with the
Pope this evening have fixed the inauguration of the radio
station for February 12.' The date and other details cor-
responded absolutely with what the Hearst man had con-
fided to me three weeks before!
My only fear now, despite the Secretary of State, despite
Father Gianfranceschi, despite Marconi (who at last, in the
solitude of his Roman drawing-room, had avowed a benevo-
lent neutrality), was that somehow we should be prevented
Tutting the Tope on the JLir 77
in New York from 'picking up' HVJ. 1 An invisible struggle
seemed to be going on behind the scenes to keep me from
muscling in on this all-important event. If I succeeded,
Columbia's claim to equality of status as one of the major
chains would be established; if we failed the blow to our
prestige was too terrible to contemplate. Nowhere else in the
world did a similar situation exist, for nowhere else was com-
petition, if it existed, allowed to affect a broadcast of univer-
sal public interest.
Almost every night New York rang me on the telephone,
only recently extended to Rome. Our own reception facilities
were inadequate; the R.C.A. said there was no available
'channel/ Every day Gaston Matthieu, Marconi's construc-
tion chief, and one of the ablest engineers in Europe, would
give me advice, which, without understanding it, I would
shout into the receiver for our engineers in New York.
' Did I really have permission to pick up the transmission ? '
they would ask. 'Yes, in writing/ Again and again I had to
reassure the administrative heads. Meantime, as the only
American radio man on the spot, I fed them advance in-
formation on every detail of the transmission, and they
passed it on to the press, getting due credit, while the
Opposition was keeping close counsel, for fear of a 'leak* to
us. Thus the public came to regard me, an outsider, as a
leading instigator, the power behind the papal microphone!
Meantime, the fear that something would go wrong had
reduced me to a bundle of ragged nerves. I came to suspect
everybody of duplicity. With a bitter taste in my mouth, I
eyed the Monsignore suspiciously through cheerless meals at
the San Carlo or the Taverna Reale.
GOLDEN MICROPHONE AND SILVER TRUMPETS
At last the great day arrived. Shortly after four in the
afternoon a procession of motor cars wound its way up the
1 HVJ, call-letters of the Vatican station: H for Holy, V for Vatican, J for Jesus.
7 8 Hello ^America!
snaking motor road toward the summit of Vatican Hill.
Swiss Guards, in medieval doublet and hose lining part of
the way, stood at attention, holding tall halberds rigidly at
their side, Palatine Guards and Noble Guards saluted with
their swords. The white-and-yellow papal flag fluttered at
the masts of Palace and public buildings. It was the proud-
est day of the reborn Papal State.
When the papal car approached the station, everybody,
including the Chief of Police in white gloves, knelt. The
aged, white-garbed skull-capped Pius XI, peering through the
thick lenses of his spectacles, alighted, made his way between
cardinals and Palace dignitaries into the little marble build-
ing. The silver trumpets sounded; the ceremony had begun.
Inside, the proud inventor of radio led him between shining
rows of switching panels, generators and transmitting gear,
to a switch which the Pope himself was to throw, formally
starting the station's function. With Marconi and Father
Gianfranceschi standing near him, Pius XI, sitting at
draped desk in a tiny room, began his message with an
alloquy 'to all creation/ speaking in a clear firm voice:
'Qui arcano Dei consilio succedimus loco Prindpis Aposto-
lorum . . .'
It was the first time in history that a pope's voice was
heard by the world at large. Beyond the borders of the
Vatican, in every country of Europe, in all of the five conti-
nents, a multitudinous audience, the greatest that had ever
listened to a single man, listened in devout silence to words
which only very few could understand. In many places
through the far-flung Christian world men and women knelt
in streets and public places, listening with feelings of bliss and
awe. A maze of radio circuits carried the words around the
earth.
Outside the station, on Vatican Hill, silence reigned. In
Rome, in the crowded city, people went about their daily
concerns. Few listened. 'We are so near the centre of
religion/ they said, 'we don't worry much about the Pope/ I
myself listened, for two hours, at a friend's house, but found
it hard to concentrate. Did our stations get it? Or had three
weeks' work and worry been in vain?
,-, , Wide World Photo
bor the first time in history, a Pope's voice was heard by the
world at large
Behind His Holiness is Senator Marconi
Tutting the Tope on the *Air 79
At dinner, an hour after it was all over, a telegram was
handed to me. It was from New York:
MAGNIFICENT WORK. CONGRATULATIONS AND THANKS.
WILLIAM S. PALEY
The job was done; for the first time in three weeks I was
able to relax. But not for long; for now I was expected to
cover not merely England, but all of Europe single-handed,
and to land every dictator, statesman, and 'stuffed shirt'
making front-page headlines in the American press.
VI. DICTATORS AND DEMAGOGUES
MUSSOLINI THINKS IT OVER
THE first of the Dictators was close at hand. At the end
of the long street where I had passed those uneasy
weeks lay the Piazza Venezia, a beautiful Renaissance square,
ruined by the brutally gleaming white marble of a monstrous
monument to King Victor Emanuel I, and on its western side
was the Venetian Palace, where Mussolini received his guests.
From here he had made his first and only broadcast, in
English, for the benefit of American listeners, as related in
the preceding chapter. In it he had assured America that the
modern world was unthinkable without it a statement
which did not surprise the average citizen of our optimistic
land. Without America's aid, he said, the war could not
have been won; and without America's aid prosperity could
not be regained. This last, in the depression year of 1931,
was rather less than might have been expected from a
political miracle man. A pledge that Italy would never take
the initiative in another war (four years before Abyssinia)
and a firm advocacy of deflation (two years before the New
Deal) were, to say the least, not prophetic utterances. It
seemed to me that another speech to offset the effect of the
first one would be a good thing.
So I began to haunt the Palazzo Chigi the Italian
Foreign Office to try and argue the satellites into persuad-
ing the Duce to talk. Day after day I sat in the sumptuous
Renaissance anteroom, admired the gilded carved-wood
ceiling, the opulent tapestries and hangings esthetic de-
lights that comported very imperfectly with some of the
"Dictators and 'Demagogues 81
unkempt loungers waiting at all times to see some Segretario
or Commendatore on business that might be important but
surely was never urgent.
Hours of waiting are nothing to the Italian, who is born to
accept red tape, as he accepts sun and rain. In fact, the
comparatively low unemployment figures of Italy might by
some humorist be ascribed to the fact that one half of the
population is always engaged in waiting for the other half.
Fascism may have done away with delays on the railroads,
but it has not altered the leisurely ways of Italian bureau-
crats nor their delightful operatic demeanor. One could
not say that they didn't take my suggestions seriously, to
judge from the agitated arguments that would ensue among
themselves.
Everything, of course, depended on Mussolini, that man of
iron will and quick, inflexible decisions; the pleasure of //
Duce was law hence nobody could promise or prognosti-
cate anything. Obviously the short cut would be to see the
Duce himself. It took a long time, but at last with the
help of my friend Tom Morgan, of the United Press I got
my summons to the Palazzo Venezia, where the great man
would receive me at six-fifteen one afternoon. I was told to
be on time because the periods were exactly calculated, like
an American radio schedule, on a quarter-hour basis. I ar-
rived punctually and waited in a tiny antechamber, where
another hopeful was already parked. He went in after the
man before him came out; about ten minutes after I, accord-
ing to schedule, should have gone in. I waited altogether
about thirty minutes, which was anyhow a clear 100 per cent
gain over the Palazzo Chigi, down the street.
The usual routine, which has been frequently described by
others, now followed. The smiling flunky opens the door;
you perceive the Duce at the other end of the enormously
long, dusky room, sitting behind a massive, cornered desk,
dressed in morning coat, gray trousers, and the conventional
wing collar and gray tie a stocky man of rather less than
medium height, of swarthy complexion and earnest, almost
weary mien. He rises, greets you with outstretched arm, and
holds it till you are near enough to shake hands; then you sit
down, opposite him at the desk.
Hello ^America!
After apologizing for not speaking Italian, I asked what he
would prefer English, German, or French.
'Let us speak . . . French German English!' he hes-
itatingly announced; so I was as wise as before and con-
tinued in English, with the usual compliments about Rome.
And then, I found, I was through. He took the initiative
and began to interview me, instead of the other way round.
1 \Yhat is the situation in England?' he began.
Well, it was so-so. In 1932 there was the economic crisis
and a lot of unemployed. Had he known slang he might
have answered, 'You're telling me!' But apparently we had
already crossed the English Channel, for he continued:
' What's the situation in France : '
I decided that this was just a technique, so we wouldn't
have to talk about the weather or the business in hand.
'What's the situation in Germany? Who is going to win
the election? Von Epp?'
Here was a funny thing! Hindenburg was a candidate to
succeed himself as President of the Reich; Hi tier was his
most likely opponent yet Mussolini apparently hadn't
thought of him. Von Epp was the general who ' recaptured '
Munich from the Communists in 1919. He might be a
candidate, but his chances were remote.
I gave the most obvious answer: 'Hindenburg.' It re-
quired no clairvoyance.
Down went the Duce's eyeballs in that peculiarly alarming
manner, which might indicate anything from anger to sur-
prise, As one might raise one's eyebrows. It's a special tic of
Mussolini's; just as some people are double-jointed and
others can wriggle their ears. 1 Well, I took refuge in some
funny remark or other: he didn't even smile. But dictators
do smile, so I suspected that my English wasn't as easily
understood as I thought. After saying that Hindenburg was
just a figurehead and too old to take any real part in things, I
repeated it in French and he quickly took it up.
V he said. ' Trop cieux.'
1 NIv dry t oi tytW m^ t4iaf t4iL< rwrosff p^^yKtiK fKfi is usually identified us one
of the symptoms of Graves's disease (V. Graefe's sign), which causes the lids to lag
behind the aum-mutt of the eyeball when looking down. Graves's disease is an
i of the thyroid gland.
"Dictators and Demagogues 83
There followed some more conversation about Germany
and then a little lull. Perceiving that my time was nearly up,
I said we hoped he would broadcast to America on Wash-
ington's centenary, or whenever.
1 You think that would have a good effect : ' he asked, still
speaking French. I assured him it would, and enlarged on
the great influence of radio in America. He said he would
think it over. As I got up, he came out from behind his desk
and slipped his arm into mine as we began to stroll toward the
door. It was all very leisurely and pleasant, and pretty soon
I was out, thinking I had a new pal. But only for a few
minutes. My last glimpse of him was strolling along the
short wall near the door, and I figured out that by squaring
the room he would reach his desk just after the flunky had
helped me on with my coat. Sure enough, as I started to go,
the buzzer rang for Number Next.
I never heard any more about that broadcast; according to
the minions at the Palazzo Chigi he was still thinking it over
the following year. In fact, America didn't hear Mussolini
again till October, 1934, when the Italian elections had once
more confirmed the power of the Fascist regime and the
long-awaited Corporate State was about to be constituted.
His speech, cheered to the echo by thousands of Italian
throats, which we were privileged to relay throughout the
United States, gave Americans a real taste of high-powered
demagogic oratory. But after a while it palled. The excite-
ment was provided by the background mob rather than the
voice itself, though phrase after phrase of thunderous
rhetoric rolled out upon the air.
'FOURTEEN YEARS OF SHAME
To judge from the Duce's remarks one got the impression
that he either had never heard of Hi tier in February,
1932! or else did not consider him a serious factor in the
situation. Or did he purposely avoid mention of his 'imita-
84 Hello ^America!
tor,' who was destined to become his noble ally in the years to
come? It is true that at the time he was not a candidate: he
was not even a German citizen. Yet within a month this
* imitator' had polled over eleven million votes against the
eighteen and a half million cast for Hindenburg, the idol of
the German nation.
As soon as this happened I flew to Berlin to see Ernst
Hanfstaengl, known from Munich to Harvard University as
'Putzi,' to get a line on this political prodigy. 'Putzi,' then a
member of the innermost councils of the Nazi party and a
close friend of the Fiihrer, was in high feather. He was a
grotesquely tall, broad-shouldered, lusty fellow with the
nose and chin of 'Mr. Punch/ Waving his windmill arms in
the direction of the Wilhelmstrasse, he predicted that ' those
people over there' were practically on the rocks. Now, after
reading the inside history of those harrowing months in
John Wheeler-Bennett's admirable book (Wooden Titan,
1936), I realize how nearly right he was, but there was nothing
in the manner of this clownish partisan that inspired con-
fidence in his judgment.
Nor did my first look at Hitler himself, sitting in the lobby
of the Kaiserhof, imbibing a soft drink in the company of
some inconspicuous middle-class ladies, create any impres-
sion but that of sordid disillusionment. Life for him, at the
moment, was at low ebb. The storm troops and the S.S.
were still disbanded; the intrigues of Papen and Schleicher
which were to bring Briining to fall were still too nebulous to
permit any definite hopes; old man Hindenburg was still
contemptuous of the 'Bohemian sergeant' who dreamed of
becoming master of the Third Reich. An ashen-faced, tired,
depressed, altogether unprepossessing person, he sat hunched
down in his chair, unrecognized and unimportant to the
fashionable tea-drinking Berliners around him.
So this was the orator of the fiery tongue, who played on
the wounded sensibilities of the German people, ringing all
the changes from tearful lament to prophetic malediction
the modern Savonarola who had thrown millions under his
mystical spell ! A broadcast from him as a sample of
sheer rabble-rousing should turn out to be a sensation
"Dictators and "Demagogues 85
even in America. But Nazi broadcasts in Germany were
banned; Hitler himself had been kept from the microphone
by the quaking authorities, who possibly might have done
better by letting him talk . . .
This meant, too, that no technical facilities would be
available for a transmission of his voice from Germany to a
foreign country, that is, America. But Putzi, proud of his
American connections, promised to sound the Fiihrer any-
way. I instructed my Berlin representative to 'follow
through/ A few days later, in London, I had a telegram to
say that 'Brillig' (our code- word for Hitler) was willing to
speak from somewhere outside Germany Salzburg, Bale,
The Hague, or Copenhagen before April I, and that his
subject would be 'The German Struggle for Liberty/ in
comparison with the American Fight for Independence.
And the price would be fifteen hundred dollars in other
words, one thousand dollars per minute pretty steep
for a German harangue that couldn't be understood by
most of our listeners. The widows and orphans of the Nazi
martyrs, it seemed, had to be provided for by every possible
means. But the deal didn't come off. The Fiihrer's going to
a foreign country appeared to present insuperable difficulties.
Suddenly, in the summer, the German authorities had a
change of heart: they announced that the Nazi leaders would
be permitted to broadcast, the same as other candidates,
during the ensuing campaign for the Reichstag elections.
I wired New York for new instructions, but the answer was
'Unwant Hitler any price/ Within five weeks Hitler went
over the top as the leader of the largest party in Germany,
winning 230 Reichstag seats a world sensation. Exactly
six months later after a temporary setback he was
Chancellor of the Reich.
Hitler's stock as a radio attraction went skyrocketing in
America. On February i the N.B.C., by virtue of its
preferential agreement with the German broadcasting
authorities, carried part of Hitler's victory speech, relayed by
short wave to America. Listening to it at my loud-speaker in
London, hearing the deafening acclamations of his followers
a continuous crescendo of Hells, brass bands, and roars
86 Hello ^America!
from a hundred thousand throats for hours and hours, I
realized what was happening; an avalanche of pent-up mass
emotion, a tidal wave of political hysteria that would sweep
everything before it and crush anything that got in its way.
A real revolution, someone said to me. No no genuine
revolution ever sounded like this; this 'people's victory* was
of ' superior ' origin, staged by a master hand. Not in vain
had Max Reinhardt developed his art in Germany!
'Fourteen years have passed/ Hitler began, 'since the day
when, blinded by promises from within and without, the
German people lost honor and freedom . . .' His voice,
starting pianissimo, rose and swelled, dropped to liquid
whisper, dilated to a hysterical shout climax after climax,
interminably. And each time the roar of applause and Heils
rose to meet him, giving him respite to recover his emotions
and resume the next cajoling strain. The sheer sound of it
riled one up; words no longer mattered: this was the Medicine
Man, healing souls and inflaming passions with the same
breath.
Again and again the German ether vibrated to this strain.
A new election campaign was on the fifth within twelve
months and the Voice that stirred the millions rose into
the air again, against the same background of obedient
throats shouting themselves hoarse. To appreciate the man,
to judge him dispassionately, it would be necessary to
separate him from this deceptive coulisse. What, really, did
he have to say? What was his appeal to cold reason?
I returned to Putzi, to see if we couldn't get a broadcast
talk by Hitler putting his case to the world not shouting,
but talking. Hitler and a microphone, in the quiet of a small
room; nothing else. Putzi reopened negotiations. He was
now an important man, resplendent in his 'S.A.' officer's
uniform. His room in the Kaiserhof was part of a general
headquarters; the whole hotel was alive with storm troopers
clicking their heels and giving the Nazi salute. Blustering as
ever, towering about two feet above me, he took to calling
me 'the giant,' laughing loudly at his own joke and putting
his arm about my shoulders.
A grand piano stood in the corner, and on it Putzi proudly
"Dictators and "Demagogues 87
played me the latest Hitler march, composed by himself.
A junior brown shirt came in to call for a phonograph record
of it for someone. Putzi signed it proudly, putting the date
and adding in the style of the Italian Fascists ' Year I '
(of the new era!). Before our negotiations were over he was
living with Goring in the Speaker's Palace, situated behind
the Reichstag and connected with it by the famous under-
ground passage which was to figure in the Reichstag fire trial
later on.
Soon everything was 'arranged': Hitler was due to fly to
Cologne, and there from the seclusion of the Brown House
he would speak to America, his talk to be translated on
the spot. But in the last stages this plan, too, collapsed:
other and more important things intervened. The election
campaign became virulent, then vicious; men were being
killed in the streets; sinister plots were being 'discovered';
within a couple of weeks the Reichstag was gutted by flames.
So we waited until the end of the campaign, when Hitler,
once again surrounded by the faithful mob, fired the last
barrage of the campaign in Berlin's Sporthalle, cheered and
supported by the usual roaring cheers. We rebroadcast an
hour of it then cut. Hitler has not made a 'genuine'
broadcast without a crowd to this day.
One of the many stories they tell in Germany about the
Nazi triumvirate is the one about Hitler in the dentist's
chair. He was to have a tooth extracted, and the anesthetist
asked him to count slowly, so he would know when the
patient was 'under.' Hitler counted 'one, two, three,' and
so forth, his voice getting slower and fainter as he went on.
At thirteen it was all but inaudible and the dentist got his
forceps ready. Then suddenly came fourteen and the
voice swelled into full strength. 'Fourteen years have
passed,' it shouted, and Hitler, instead of getting his tooth
pulled, was making his usual harangue. That little story illus-
trates why the speeches of Hitler were not often rebroadcast
abroad. To the finely attuned Nazi ear he may be saying
something new; to the infidel he is making the same speech.
To the foreigner, perceiving with his intelligence and not
with his emotions, it conveys nothing that he does not al-
ready know.
Hello ^America!
DICTATORS NEED CROWDS
In a sort of way, the American listener's clamor for
dictators had now been stilled. But strictly speaking I had
failed had failed to lure any of them to the lonely micro-
phone, to tell what was on their minds. Why was this?
Why were demagogues, usually so anxious to unbosom them-
selves to a crowd, reluctant to speak their minds in the quiet
of a studio?
'The microphone/ says Bernard Shaw, 'is the most won-
derful tell-tale in the world. If you speak insincerely to a
political audience, the more insincere you are, the more
hopelessly you are away from all the facts of life, the more
they cheer you and the more they are delighted. But if you
try that on the microphone it gives you away instantly.
You hear the political ranter you hear that his platitudes
mean nothing and that he does not believe them/
Can it be that the dictators, unlike most other politicians,
have found out the microphone? Can it be that, since
reasonable persuasion is not their forte, they eschew the
dialectic or conversational style? In any case, the attitude of
Europe's strong men showed a singular unanimity in this
respect. Mussolini's first and only attempt would seem to
have been an error of judgment; he has not repeated it in
seven years. Joseph Stalin, sitting in his Kremlin, was as
mike-shy as the rest. I never saw him, but I wrote him most
seductive letters, and even went to Moscow to persuade his
entourage. The argument that Hitler and Mussolini had,
after all, been heard abroad caused a disdainful raising of
eyebrows and holding of noses. Stalin does not allow even
his public speeches to be broadcast except on rare occasions,
and no foreign radio organization has yet been permitted to
rebroadcast his voice.
The assumption that the radio has favored the growth of
dictatorships does not, indeed, hold water, whatever effect it
may have in keeping these men in power once they are there.
The three great totalitarian systems of contemporary Europe
Wide World Photo
The excitement of a demagogue's speech is provided by the
background mob. Dictators are not anxious to speak their
lines in the quiet of a studio
"Dictators and ^Demagogues
grew to power without the aid of the radio; those of Russia
and Italy in fact antedated the organization of radio as an
effective instrument; in Germany the Nazis were deprived of
its use until they were within a few months of reaching
power, and even then they refused to use it, until Hitler was
actually head of the government.
This is, in itself, no proof that the radio might not have
helped the dictators to fasten their hold upon the nations
they desired to rule. But we have at least one instance of an
attempt to establish a Fascist or quasi-Fascist dictatorship
by argument over the air, and that one attempt turned into
a dismal failure. I refer to the sad case of Gaston Dou-
mergue, one-time President, and more recently would-be
dictator, of France.
PAPA DOUMERGUE TRIES IT ON
After the Stavisky scandal, the bloody Paris riots, and the
parliamentary stalemate of 1934, conditions in France were,
as never before, ripe for a Fascist coup in fact, conditions
for violent change were present in almost classic perfection.
If only the opportunity could have been seized! Colonel de
la Roque, leader of the Croix de Feu, failed to come up to
scratch; Tardieu, who afterward admitted that as Premier he
contributed government money to the war chest of the move-
ment, 1 lacked the personal popularity to be anything more
than the power behind the throne. But 'Papa' Doumergue,
a veteran politician who enjoyed the prestige of the elder
statesman, and the dignity of an ex-President of the Republic
was induced to come out of his retirement to 'save the
nation' from civil war. Papa Doumergue enjoyed the
affection of the majority of the people of France; sick and
tired of political trickery and corruption, Frenchmen put
their faith in this venerable People's Friend. Though he had
no black-shirt or brown-shirt army behind him, the armies of
1 See the Paris dispatch in the New York Times , October 27, 1937.
cp Hello ^America!
the Croix de Feu and all the other militant leagues were
ready to march to his support. And he had, as the first would-
be dictator in European history, the radio at his command.
He made the most of it.
Over the heads of his cabinet, from the security of his
executive office, he appealed to the nation in a series of
fatherly talks designed to rally the people behind the man
who had sacrificed for their benefit the well-earned repose of
old age. Then, in his fifth discourse, he not only attacked
the socialists and communists according to the established
Fascist pattern, but proposed certain constitutional changes
which would strengthen the executive power, and allow him
to crush the Red Ogre and establish order and progress
along the familiar lines of national regeneration, regimenta-
tion, and economic reform. 1
At first the people listened sympathetically; then they
became suspicious; finally they got furious. The honeyed
words and the silken voice lost their appeal. And in the end
they rallied to the Opposition and drove Doumergue from
office. The Left, instead of becoming bitter, used the weapon
of ridicule. 'When is Monsieur Doumergue speaking?' asks
a radio purchaser pictured as in a newspaper cartoon. 'On
Wednesday night/ 'Then be sure to deliver my set on
Thursday morning/
Pretty soon the whole nation laughed; the dictatorship
menace was over perhaps for good. Had things turned
otherwise, the whole course of European history would have
been changed: as it is, France remains the bulwark of
Western Democracy in the world.
Are we, then, to suppose that the radio is proof against
Fascist arguments unless they are supported by the shouts of
moron multitudes? I believe, with Bernard Shaw, that sin-
cerity is the ultimate test. The microphone automatically
eliminates most of the histrionic appeal, it vitiates the
demagogue's animal magnetism, strips oratory of its trap-
pings, and reduces it to the bare bones of reason and fact.
1 The Doumergue scheme has been widely represented as an attempt to save
democracy instead of wrecking it. The true facts are ably set forth in Alexander
Werth's book, The Destiny of France, London, 1937.
^Dictators and ^Demagogues
Moreover, it allows the listener to think, to reflect without
being swept off his feet by the wave of crowd hysteria and
the terrifying compulsion of the mob.
THE GREATEST TELLTALE IN THE WORLD
Thus the old-fashioned demagogue, the political rabble-
rouser of pre-war days, whose technique is that of the
stump, has lost much of his power in political life. 'For some
mysterious reason/ in the words of that shrewd observer,
General Charles H. Dawes, ' that personal magnetism which
sometimes deadens the intellectual perception of the crowd
in the physical presence of the orator is not transmitted over
the wireless/ And this applies, not only to dictators and
would-be dictators, but to demagogues of all political
faiths.
A case in point is David Lloyd George. This wizard of the
silver tongue, whose oratory had carried the British nation
through the hardships of the war and the Coalition Govern-
ment over the top in the notorious khaki election of 1919,
was and still is a comparative stranger to the micro-
phone. I tried for years to get Lloyd George to make a radio
talk to America; his reluctance was finally explained to me
by people close to him, who said that he 'hates the wireless/
The reason is not far to seek. Unsurrounded by his admirers,
with nothing but his voice to convey the workings of his
agile mind, Lloyd George's eloquence simply does not come
off. I have watched him addressing his supporters, have
watched him speak in Parliament; age has not dimmed the
glamour of his rhetoric, nor dulled the edge of his invective.
Endowed with all the social graces and the superior gifts of
showmanship, this dynamic white-haired Welshman, whether
right or wrong, still gets the crowd. But on the ether, all his
charm seems to evaporate: of all the speeches that woo the
coy citizen sitting at his loud-speaker at election times,
Lloyd George's are the dullest and least effective, because the
Hello ^America!
histrionics the winning smile, the half-closed eye, the
clenched fist, and the hands toying with the golden spectacles
are simply of no use.
'The microphone is the most tell-tale instrument in the
world/
VII. DEMOCRATS AND STUFFED SHIRTS
DEMOCRACY'S NEW INSTRUMENT
MY FIRST two years of broadcasting from Europe had
convinced me that radio was an instrument of
democracy. Despite the fact that populations were being
regimented and intimidated by the broadcast blusterings of
dictators and their henchmen, I could not help feeling that in
the end the appeal to reason would be stronger than the
assertion of force. Throughout history it has been easier to
propagate ideas than to suppress them, and just as the
printing press had become a mighty instrument of liberation,
so enlightenment by radio would prove irresistible in the end.
Although the leaders of the European democracies had less
attraction even for America as radio headliners, I was
determined that America should take its measure of
dictators and democrats alike, for no instrument so lends
conviction to sincerity, none so easily exposes fraud. The
cavalcade of Europe's statesmen, some of whom would one
day loom to heroic stature in the history books, could, I
thought, be given a new dimension in terms of sound. The
words they would speak, however fragmentary, might help
to heighten our sense of reality, help the ordinary man to
form some sort of judgment of their worth.
The great democratic statesman of the early thirties was
Ramsay MacDonald. Until Franklin Roosevelt loomed on
the international horizon, he was the hope of the liberal
world and the idol of those who believed in peace. No
British statesman had so often filled the air with fine phrases;
none had more often been listened to and with more sym-
94 Hello ^America!
pathy beyond the British Isles. No other politician of his
generation had more of what is vulgarly known as the gift of
gab. His liquid, beguiling voice, his soft Scottish burr, his
heart-warming appeals to 'my frrriends,' and his pious
homilies on the moral progress of the world were consumed
as eagerly as were, later on, the fireside chats of the American
President. Indeed, they had much of the same qualities
the homely phrase, the happy metaphor, the apt hyperbole,
and the clinching peroration.
I first met Ramsay MacDonald before he became Prime
Minister a second time, at a luncheon of the American cor-
respondents in London, where he spoke, simply and con-
fidentially, without cant, confidently looking forward to his
resumption of power and a great constructive work of re-
form. 'Revolution/ he said, 'as a method of progress, is out
of date. We of the Labour Party don't believe in revolution
because we have a better way/ It sounded convincing,
especially from a man who had not yet taken on that fatal
tinge of respectability and self-righteousness which were to
make him one of the most despised of men among the British
working-class later on. He still looked the old left-wing
campaigner, too; his handsome face, his graying and still
flowing locks, and his deep-set, honest eyes were the outer
marks of the idealist.
THE TRAGEDY OF RAMSAY
When MacDonald first spoke to America in 1930 the
one-time revolutionary had taken on the statesman's air; he
fancied himself as settling the affairs of the world, and his
personal vanity made him put the cart before the horse.
But his attachment to Anglo-American friendship was
passionately sincere, and when he spoke to an American
radio audience he meant what he said. One such occasion
was when Ambassador Robert Worth Bingham presented, on
behalf of the American Council of Foreign Relations, a set of
. : : . :
B. B. C.
MacDonald liked broadcasting it was a modern thing and
he fancied himself as a modern
B. B. c.
In Stanley Baldwin's broadcast, America got a sample of
quiet British oratory at its best
"Democrats and Stuffed Shirts 95
American state papers to Chatham House once the home
of Pitt, now the headquarters of the Royal Institute for
Foreign Affairs. MacDonald presided, and made a graceful if
platitudinous speech. I announced him and gave a running
commentary of the proceedings. Afterward, in the private re-
ception room, I thanked him on behalf of American listeners.
Seeing Stephen King-Hall, the famous children's broadcaster,
with me he quickly took his cue from the phrase, known to all
English listeners, with which King-Hall always concluded his
talks: 'Now be good, but not so frightfully good that some-
one will come along and say "What's he been up to now?"
'Well/ said MacDonald, 'was I good, but not too fright-
fully good?' drawing a courteous laugh from the Am-
bassador and ourselves.
By the time the Economic Conference of 1934 was on,
MacDonald had become so absorbed in the higher statesman-
ship that he was estranged from many of his old colleagues.
Clad in immaculately fitting morning coat, his gray hair
slicked and his moustache clipped in fashionable style, he
looked every inch the royal butler as he conducted old King
George to the speaker's dais. His sonorous phrases had be-
come a distressing mixture of truth and humbug, optimism
and eyewash, feeling and sentimentality. He was the
sanctimonious preacher on the hustings, a schoolteacher
scolding others for their lack of a knowledge he had only
just imperfectly acquired. Standing at the death-bed of the
Conference that most humiliating of all pompous inter-
national failures he had the nerve to call it (in words that
were broadcast in Europe and America) ' a fulfilling prophecy
of hope, a whisper of the imperturbable approach of world
co-operation an embodiment of the lilt "It's coming
for a' that." 1 It was no wonder that his followers were
getting fed up.
So long as MacDonald had the truth on his side, so long
as he was in Opposition, his phrases had the power of an
evangel; when he became an apologist for principles contrary
to his own, his words merely smote the empty air. It was his
vanity that forced him into loneliness, that made him proof
against disillusionment and robbed him of sincerity; and it
Hello ^America!
was this lack of sincerity that stripped his broadcasting of its
power.
'We have just crossed the dividing line of a new year/ he
broadcast in mid-depression, ' and once again we look behind
and before. Memory stands on one side of us and hope on
the other. We . . . have been going through a hard time/
The prose was worthy of Dickens, but the sentiments had
a disagreeably Pecksniffian taste. Like Pecksniff, Mac-
Donald was convinced of his own virtue; he spoke his hand-
some phrases so often that he believed what he said. His
Conservative colleagues let him talk so long as he talked
for the National Government. And the less he counted in
that government, the more seriously he took his job.
One evening, after he had been suffering from nervous
eye-strain, I had to go to 10, Downing Street and introduce
him in an American broadcast. His physician, the eminent
Lord Horder, came into the room, and leaned over him as we
were passing the time in small talk. 'You must take care of
yourself/ he whispered to the Prime Minister, ' and get some
sleep/ MacDonald straightened up and said, melodramati-
cally: 'Duty, my dear Horder. Remember duty!' This was
probably not just for my benefit; it was sheer natural show-
manship and an important part of the audience was
himself.
MacDonald liked broadcasting, as he liked flying it
was a modern thing, and he fancied himself as a modern.
'Knowledge is making us giants/ he said in one of his talks,
and he liked to think himself a giant. But long before he
gave up flying and broadcasting the country had given him
up. He still came to the microphone to talk for the very
things he had once fought against. His voice was still rich
and vibrant, his rhetoric intact. But the power of con-
viction had gone out of it: if he fooled anybody at all, it was
because he fooled himself. Listening to him over the air, one
could imagine him posturing, bracing himself against an un-
comprehending, unfeeling world. A democrat who had gone
wrong and the microphone was revealing the sad truth.
Yet, when all is said that must be said, it should not be
forgotten that in his early days Ramsay MacDonald was the
"Democrats and Stuffed Shirts 97
hero he later thought himself to be, and gave an example to
his generation which few others had the courage to give.
He alone among all his colleagues in Parliament opposed the
World War; he alone faced the shout of ' Traitor !' and did
not cringe. He went to prison and worse still he was
expelled from his Scottish golf club, which no blandishments
induced him to rejoin.
ENGLAND S BALDWIN
Even while MacDonald was still in office, Stanley Baldwin
was a power in the land. He represented the great conserva-
tive capitalist class which under one name or another
has been responsible for British leadership for generations;
yet he, rather than MacDonald, was to become the symbol
of British middle-class democracy. For democracy, in
England, is an attitude rather than a political creed, a
method rather than an 'ideology/ And whatever others
might think of Baldwin's democracy, he sincerely believed
himself to be a democrat; it was this that made him one of
the most effective broadcasters of his time.
When, in 1930, Stanley Baldwin was chosen by the Bro-
therhood Movement to make an address on democracy, I
seized the opportunity to rebroadcast it to America, and
America got a sample of quiet British oratory at its best.
'Democracy/ he said, 'is still an aspiration and not a fact. . . .
It is still "an untravelled world, whose margin fades for ever
and for ever as we move." What we have achieved is a
democratic framework of government, which is not the same
thing as a democratic society. We have perfected the machin-
ery of popular government It is terribly easy for those in
power to confuse justice with the interest of the strong, but
oppression of the few by the many is just as ugly as its
opposite/
Baldwin's strength lay in two things: first, in the picture
he conveyed of himself as a sound, average Englishman, a
98 Hello ^America!
man whose mind worked slowly and who made mistakes,
but who had the courage to do what he thought was right;
and second, in a style so apparently simple, so improvisa-
tional that it always seemed to be the plainest kind of truth.
Yet, while not rhetorical, his command of language gave
evidence of a distinctly poetic turn of mind. Only half in
jest, his brother-in-law and cousin, Rudyard Kipling, used
to say that Stanley was the poet of the family. Whether he
spoke of moral abstractions or political realities, he always
seemed to be taking the hearer into his confidence. Even in
election speeches he rarely resorted to attack; he gave an
account of himself or his mental processes and let it go at
that.
With these quiet methods he talked himself to the top.
From complete political obscurity this member of the
widely disliked industrial employer class, whose party
colleagues questioned his abilities for leadership, who
achieved office, as it were, by default, who made expensive
mistakes and meekly admitted them became the political
prodigy of post-war England, rising to the highest office in
the land and keeping himself there, supported by the free
votes of the majority of the people including millions of
workmen at a time when unemployment and industrial
distress were at their worst. Here is a record that no dictator
has equalled to date.
Shortly after the death of King George V and the fiasco of
the Hoare-Laval dicker concerning Abyssinia, Baldwin's
political fortunes were thought to be ebbing and there was
rumor of serious revolt against him in his own party's ranks.
The best he could hope for, it seemed, was to hang on till
after the coronation of Edward VIII, when he and Mrs.
Baldwin would play a transcendent role and he could retire
in an orgy of festive celebration, with his political prestige
unimpaired. A story went the rounds in 1936 according to
which Baldwin had been speaking in a rather too fatherly
way to King Edward about his private concerns. 'See here,
Mr. Baldwin/ the King is supposed to have interrupted him,
'if you don't stop meddling with my personal affairs, I won't
come to your d coronation' (the important word being
the 'your').
T)emocrats and Stuffed Shirts
In the light of subsequent events then unsuspected by
anyone that story, however apocryphal, takes on a
semblance of probability. To everybody's surprise, Edward
made good the threat and, as if to spite him, Baldwin rose
to as yet undreamed-of heights as the Warwick of his time.
For whatever one might think of Baldwin the politician
before the abdication, whatever sympathy one might feel for
the luckless Royal Duke, the story of Baldwin's manage-
ment of the historic crisis in British monarchy, told in the
familiar, pedestrian, simple yet moving Baldwin manner,
was a stupendous exhibition of political strategy and
tact.
Baldwin passed into the somnolent shadows of the House
of Lords with a sort of halo about his homely head, having
triumphed where more brilliant men had failed. Many a
time had his voice been heard in America, by means of the
transatlantic ether waves usually at official occasions,
Lord Mayor's banquets and the like. His mastery of radio
vindicated its claim as an instrument of democracy.
IRELAND'S 'DEV'
Since more Americans are personally interested in little
Ireland than all the rest of the British Isles, I kept a watch-
ful eye on ' Saorstat Eierann,' otherwise the Irish Free State,
from the start. William Cosgrave, still President early in
1931, made his first St. Patrick's Day address to America
on my invitation, but there was a fly in the ointment, as will
be related anon. When less than a year later Eamon de
Valera won his first national election I already had my foot
in the door. On March 4, 1932, he spoke to America on
'The Future of Ireland' exclusively under our auspices,
announcing his intention to abolish immediately the hated
oath of allegiance to the British sovereign and his intention
to repudiate the land annuities paid by Ireland to the
British treasury under the treaty of 1921. Both promises he
zoo Hello ^America!
soon made good. It is a measure of De Valera's determina-
tion and of the faith of his adherents that even with the
weapons of an economic war the British Government has
been unable to make him retreat a single inch.
That American broadcast was the first broadcast 'Dev'
ever made. He came to O'Connell Street the scene of the
barricade fights during the Irish Rebellion which had landed
him in a British jail with the sentence of death hanging over
him and walked into the studio as though he were going
to buy a stamp. Nobody recognized him, nor did he care a
hoot. The director of the broadcasting station, a Cosgrave
job-holder who could sing Irish folksongs in a mellifluous
baritone and sign his name in Gaelic, thought he better
come around personally, Sunday or no Sunday, 'because,
after all, he [De Valera] will soon be my boss/ 'Dev'
faced an incredibly primitive-looking microphone contrap-
tion and meekly took his instructions from this comic char-
acter.
His delivery, in his faint and attractive brogue, was quiet
and matter of fact, almost casual, seeking to convince by the
strength of argument alone. And the gist of the argument
was economics. An old mathematics teacher, Dev is never
at a loss for figures, and he produces them with an almost
childlike faith that they will be understood. He was fully
aware of the value of talking to America the country
which supplied him with the sinews of war when he and his
friends were on the run but he refused to make any
emotional appeal, just as he refused to abandon that 'obliga-
tory* opening paragraph in laboriously perfected Gaelic,
no matter how many thousands of listeners, with American
impatience, might tune out. That was characteristic of the
whole man.
When I first met De Valera he was still only the leader of
Fianna Fail a party which the British fondly regarded as
virtually outlawed and all but on the rocks. When I saw him
in his office in the cheerless, abandoned-looking headquarters
on lower Abbey Street, he seemed just an agitator in a
hopeless cause. A few months later, as President of the
Irish Free State, neither his manner nor his appearance had
"Democrats and Stuffed Shirts 101
changed the rumpled homespun clothes and the old
slouch hat might have been the same he wore when he was
sniping at British soldiers in 1916. But there was no doubt
about the essential nobility and the fanatical ardor of the
man. His almost emaciated, weather-beaten, hawklike
face, the myopic yet piercing eyes, the deep lines descending
from his nostrils to his chin, suggested a terrible determina-
tion. Though he seemed to lack all the accepted graces,
including a sense of humor, his friendly and naturally demo-
cratic manner made me like him at once.
Eamon de Valera would hardly agree with Ramsay Mac-
Donald about the obsolescence of revolution. For he owes
everything he accomplished to revolutionary action, to
desperate and sanguinary revolt. It was he, foolhardy
enough to ambush a crack British regiment with a handful
of volunteers marching on the capitol from Kingstown quay,
to raise the banner of revolt and raise it again after each
escape from jail, and to abandon the safe haven of America to
walk into the very jaws of death; it was this 'crazy Irishman*
who finally won for an unwilling and lethargic people the
realization of a nationalist's dream a merely 'poetic*
liberty if you like, and economic quasi-isolation (in a modern
interdependent world!).
But Dev is a man upheld by an inflexible faith. Today he
believes in the union of all Ireland in the same fanatical way
that before the war he believed in the quasi-independence of
the country that has now come to pass. Ireland and demo-
cracy are the synthesis of his religion. He keeps on and on,
if not by miles then by inches. Conscious of his debt to
America, he has not missed a single St. Patrick's Day since
he first came into office, to give an account by radio to
friends across the water. And he has always had something
to report. When Edward VIII abdicated he, alone among
the Dominion governments, completely ignored both the
abdication and the coronation of George VI, thus loosening
yet another tie with the Empire. Constitutional purists
maintain that legally Edward VIII, and not George VI, is
still King of Ireland. What matters to the Irish is that
foreign diplomats are received at Dublin Castle not by a
IO2. Hello ^America!
royal governor, but by Eamon de Valera, the once out-
lawed rebel, himself. 1
LIBERATOR MASARYK QUOTES LIBERATOR WASHINGTON
My observation of De Valera made me turn to another
democratic nationalist one who might be regarded as his
prototype, namely Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, liberator and
President of Czechoslovakia, then nearing his seventy-third
year. Both Masaryk and De Valera had derived inspiration
as well as material support from the United States. 'Dev'
was born in New York; Masaryk married an American wo-
man and proudly adopted her family's as his middle name.
Both men had been rebels and fugitives in America; Masaryk
indeed had planned the liberation of Czechoslovakia in the
shadow of the White House and declared his country's
independence from Philadelphia's Independence Hall.
Masaryk, the son of a serf, blacksmith in his youth, pro-
fessor of philosophy in early manhood, patriot-conspirator
in middle age, political leader at sixty, father of his country
at seventy, a fighter for moral, intellectual, and cultural
ideals all his life, was now living in the Hracin, once the
palace of the ancient Bohemian kings, elevated high over the
Moldau River at Prague. No head of state was ever more
beloved by a nation than this man, who never sacrificed his
faith in democracy, and even as president lived the simple
ascetic life of the scholar and political philosopher, preaching
tolerance and peace.
His son Jan, raised in America, speaking more unmistak-
able 'American' than some American diplomats, is Czecho-
1 In September, 1932, this 'rebel* was representing the Irish Free State, as an
independent national entity, on the Council of the League of Nations in Geneva.
In a program which we organized he spoke to America together with Sir Eric
Drummond (later Lord Perth), the British Secretary-General of the League. And
in January 1938, in another broadcast speech relayed to America by my successor,
he announced the new Constitution creating the State of 'Eire' (Ireland), sever-
ing its last legal bonds between it and Great Britain.
'Democrats and Stuffed Shirts 103
slovakian Minister to the Court of St. James, a lively young
man who readily fell in with my plan to have his father
address the American people on Washington's birthday
one pater -patrice about another. Strange to say, my New
York office saw nothing very significant in that, so I actu-
ally had to persuade them to accept one of the greatest
political figures of our time.
Here was a democratic statesman who had successfully
used the radio, if not in the establishment of a regime, then
in its consolidation. Without compulsion his people listened
to him, to his quiet words, preaching not hatred but recon-
ciliation, with the federation of European states as his ulti-
mate ideal. And lo! the people rallied to him more closely
than the peoples have rallied round the ' strong men ' preach-
ing self-assertion and force.
Sitting in the study of his castle on Washington's birthday
of 1932, Masaryk addressed an American audience for the
first time since the stormy days of the war. 'Washington
has taught us/ he said, 'that the fortunate outcome of a
revolution depends on the moral and political preparation
of the revolutionists/ The aim in this case was a federated
European continent. And he added significantly: 'Having
recovered our liberty we again follow the example of Wash-
ington in that we must no longer feel the old antagonism and
anger, which originated in the suppression of our liberty.'
I had the great privilege of introducing President Masaryk
in this, the only direct American broadcast he ever made
and that by a curious fluke. I had invited the American
Minister to do the honors, from the studio, and my own
little speech was to precede that of the diplomat. But the
excited engineers (this after all was an event in Czecho-
slovak radio history) switched on the wrong signal, so the
President's voice burst forth while the astonished Minister
stared blankly into his script.
Another comic feature of this broadcast was barely
avoided, for the Czech orchestra rehearsing the Star-
Spangled Banner for the occasion made it sound like a
Slavic dance. With more valor than discretion I accepted
the proffered baton and 'rehearsed' one of the best radio
104 Hello ^America!
orchestras in the world thus making my first and last
appearance as a conductor on this planet.
Masaryk was a handsome old man, white-bearded, with
remnants of white wisps on the top of his head, like late
autumn leaves clinging to an oak. His life and character
were pictured in his face spirituality, probity, kindliness,
steadfastness, hard work. ' Defeat is only a reason for exer-
tion/ he quoted Washington as saying, and exertion had
been his life-long lot. There was nothing that betrayed his
lowly origin; I should have said he was an aristocrat, had I
not known. And he lacked the assertiveness of the self-
made man, because he had the humility of the truly great.
When Masaryk died, not only did the nation mourn for
him, but millions not only in Czechoslovakia had a
sense of personal loss. With him something rare vanished
from the European soil, something that may never appear
again.
FRENCHMEN SHOULD SPEAK ENGLISH
The greatest handicap in this business of presenting
Europe's leaders to America was the problem of language.
While radio had improved the premises for Anglo-American
solidarity, the polyglotism of the European continent stood
in the way of a more widely international program of radio
talks. Now that I was to project not merely Britain but all
of Europe to the American audience, I was disappointed to
find how few of the outstanding men on the Continent com-
manded English to any serviceable degree. Americans are
impatient listeners: a foreign language or even a difficult
foreign accent is enough to reduce an audience to a mere
fraction of itself.
The aged Masaryk and his successor, Eduard Benes, were
exceptions. They were the type of 'good Europeans* whose
equipment was in line with their aims. Others, like Aristide
Briand the ace of good Europeans and one of the most
Radio journale a Prague
Masaryk was a democratic statesman who used the radio, not
in the establishment of a regime, but in its consolidation
Merriman, Dublin
De Valera faced an incredibly primitive-looking microphone
contraption
"Democrats and Stuffed Shirts 105
appealing speakers I had ever heard were, simply because
of their lack of English, debarred from appealing to the un-
seen audience across the sea. Indeed, Frenchmen, being
more insular than the reputedly insular English,^ rarely
speak anything but French. Among those who did, Edouard
Herriot was the nearest to Briand in human qualities, be-
sides being a sincere democrat. Few people in America knew
what he stood for, not many had even heard of him, yet the
fact of his being the undisputed leader of the great French
democratic party (the * Radicals')? the virtually perpetual
mayor of France's greatest industrial city, Lyon, and twice
Prime Minister of France, were certainly enough to make
him a world figure. To American newspaper readers and
radio listeners he became 'news' when, after the Hoover
Moratorium of 1932, he negotiated the Lausanne Treaty,
which ended reparations, on behalf of France. I took my
cue and caught him while he was still in the heat of his task;
he agreed to do his first English broadcast, and thus in the
hearing of America stretch out the hand of conciliation and
friendship to Germany.
'We have shut the door in the face of passion/ said this
corpulent incarnation of the well-intentioned French provin-
cial. 'We, the French people, at the present time are pre-
occupied with our own affairs, but we are very deeply moved
by the sufferings of the German people. . . . National policies
have too long been keeping the nations apart; we must give
them a new aim that of coming together, both materially
and spiritually. The new spirit must prevail/
Phrases, you say? But in 1932 it needed courage to say
these things. France was gripped by the panic of depression,
and the Lausanne settlement was going to cost the French
people billions of francs, and to rub out forever the mirage
of Germany's hidden wealth. It was sensible, rational Her-
riot who had fought against repudiation of the American
debt, who first advocated friendship with the new Russia,
who preached Anglo-French solidarity, disarmament, and
the strengthening of the League. It was this cultured and
rather nostalgic politician who in the hate-filled post-war
atmosphere was able to write a book on the German com-
106 Hello ^America!
poser Beethoven. And now, in the fierce hostile light of pub-
licity, he braved French chauvinist sentiment with words
of friendship which, a little earlier, might have calmed the
fierce tempest of nationalism and rapacity that was to seer
the heart of Europe anew.
It is the fate of nations that such men are not heard in
time. No Frenchman had spoken words such as these in the
presence of German statesmen since the war. Here was good-
natured, square-headed Herriot with his funny, brushed-up
crop of graying hair, with the honest, tender eyes of the
romantic, saying things from his heart, things that Briand
might have said with more eloquence but not more sincerity,
to make people forget the harsh and brutal words that had
been spoken year in year out. But he was too late; after
six more months Adolf Hitler had been swept into power in
Germany, and Herriot was unseated by a camarilla of politi-
cal patrioteers. The next time that French and German
delegates sat around the green table they had blood in their
eyes and the old anger in their hearts.
HERRIOT TO FLANDIN
That was in London, in 1936. Hitler's latest week-end
surprise, the reoccupation of the Rhineland, had been
sprung. According to the current British euphemism, the
Germans had just ' marched in to their own back yard/ and
Anthony Eden was asking everybody to remain calm.
(Afterward some of his compatriots said that the French had
been 'bloody fools' to let the Germans get away with it.
'If they had mobilized, without our permission, we would
have come forward with a beautiful compromise proposal.
Hitler would have had to climb down/ r ) But in France
people had a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs.
The Rhine was France's first line of defense. Across it the
old ogre of war had once again shown its face. The Locarno
1 See Alexander Werth, The Destiny of France, London, 1937.
"Democrats and Stuffed Skirts 107
Pact, that 'most gilt-edged of all scraps of paper/ had been
torn up, and Europe had 'entered a jungle of lawlessness*
from which there is little prospect of escape.
The prime minister of France was Pierre-Etienne Flandin.
A veritable giant of a man, he strode into St. James's Palace
with a look of determination on his handsome, businesslike
face, the straight, thin mouth tightly set and barely showing
under the bristly moustache, his vaulting forehead accentu-
ated by premature baldness. At forty-seven, Flandin was
the youngest prime minister in modern French history.
There was a tense feeling of pessimism as he faced the assem-
bled statesmen of Europe, a new and comparatively youth-
ful galaxy that had replaced the old embittered men of
yesterday: dapper Anthony Eden; Dino Grandi, dark, wary,
and intransigent; Litvinoff, shrewd and cynical, with the
face of a Jewish impresario; tall and slender Paul Van Zee-
land, the youngest of all, of serious ascetic mien, and after
a tense period of waiting Joachim von Ribbentrop, the
typical German Junker, brutally aggressive, speaking in
the tone of the Prussian lieutenant as though not Ger-
many but the rest of the world were on trial, to be judged
by German standards of right.
It was the turning point of post-war history: that delicate
moment when the scales might tip either way. Herded about
the open door of the council chamber, veteran journalists
indulged in flights of fantasy. What if Clemenceau, the
'Tiger/ were to rise from his grave to defy this hapless
brood of waverers, once more to invoke the vengeance of
' victorious ' France? Or again, if a somewhat glorified
Briand were to speak with the tongues of men and angels,
stretching out the hand of brotherhood to appease the rising
devils of hate? But no miracle happened. Flandin, cold,
legalistic, well-meaning but fearful of public opinion, with
renowned French logic pleaded only the testimony of the
bond. It was not good enough. The bankrupt statesmen
of Europe crept home, hearing only the distant crack of
the dictator's whip. Sick at heart we sat huddled in the
Tudor armament chamber, hung with the shields and swords
of ancient days, which served as antechamber to Queen
io8 Hello ^America!
Anne's Room the same room in which exactly five years
before I had listened, with a catch at the throat, to the oily
eloquence of Aristide Briand as he presented to Ramsay Mac-
Donald the gold pen with which the London Naval Treaty
had been signed . . .
I had had bad luck with Flandin. Ever since, in 1929, he
had moved up into that motley political panel from which
French ministers are chosen to make up the changing fagade
of French cabinets, he had moved in and out of governments
in various capacities. Being the only minister with a real
command of English he had, at the end of 1930, promised to
explain his government's policy to American listeners. By
the time the appointed day arrived, the cabinet had fallen
and the policy had changed, so he was no longer entitled to
speak. And so it went, time and again: if you want a French
minister, get him quickly, for you never know how long he
may last. Flandin held a near-record for brevity as minister
of commerce six days.
And now at a crucial moment in France's history he
was at the top. I got him, in the heat of the crisis, to plead
France's case at the microphone. It was excellent English:
cool, dispassionate words that kindled no sympathy for a
potentially bleeding France.
4 France might have mobilized,' he said; 'she might have
taken coercive measures against Germany; she might have
occupied the Rhineland by force. She thought it her duty
to abstain from such measures. She preferred to pin her
faith to the inherent strength of international law and to the
justice of the League of Nations. . . . She kept calm because
she was sure of her strength and of her right France does
not threaten any nation. She wishes peace for all people.
This peace can be founded only on justice.'
Justice? 'Justice,' said Masaryk, 'is the arithmetic of
love.'
We had travelled a long way from Lausanne and Herriot's
sympathy for German suffering, three and a half years ago.
It was March, 1936. Three months later Italian Volunteers'
were fighting in Spain; and a year after that women and
children were being massacred by bombs in Shanghai in
Democrats and Stuffed Shirts 109
breach of a solemn treaty signed by nine nations, including
France.
But there was another new voice raised in London that
gloomy spring. It was the voice of Paul Van Zeeland, Prime
Minister of Belgium at thirty-eight. A tall, svelte thorough-
bred, of calm, scholarly speech. His grave, softly spoken
words were as profound as they were simple in meaning, and
a fit answer to Ribbentrop, lecturing the world on the iniq-
uity of keeping a good nation down. Belgium alone, it is
true, could answer him with a spotless conscience. On the
night before Van Zeeland made his moving appeal for Bel-
gium, he accepted my invitation to speak to the United
States from a London studio. Hardly raising his voice above
a whisper, without a trace of meretricious oratory, he con-
fided the case of war-ravished Belgium to the conscience of
the world. By profession a banker, Van Zeeland's manner
was that of a family trustee advising his client about prudent
investment. Yet his apparently matter-of-fact words were
the only ones spoken at that last abortive Conference which
kindled the sympathies of those outside.
A new political star had risen. A year later Van Zeeland
began his quiet campaign for economic disarmament, begin-
ning with trips to London, Paris, and Washington. Soon
Belgium, as the first Western nation, concluded a bilateral
non-aggression pact with Germany. The pseudo-fascist
machination of the Belgian Sexists' caused Van Zeeland's
resignation from office in 1937, but his disappearance from
the political scene was more formal than real. He is the sort
of man of whom Europe stands in need.
Although this does not pretend to be an account of the
Rhineland Conference, it seems proper to record that not
only Flandin and Van Zeeland were invited to put their case
to America. Through Councillor Dieckhoff, that high-
minded German diplomat, I asked Ribbentrop to come to
the microphone, but the invitation was not accepted. It is a
pity that German statesmen are so reticent when they are
abroad.
no Hello ^America!
FRANCE'S 'NEW DEAL*
Leon Blum, unquestionably one of the outstanding demo-
cratic leaders of today, does not trust himself to address an
English-speaking audience in English. It would have been
interesting, especially to Americans, to hear him tell about
the French * New Deal/ that impressive set of reforms iden-
tified with the government of the Popular Front the
forty-hour week, the paid vacations for workingmen, the
reform of the Bank of France, the nationalization of arma-
ment manufactures, the inauguration of large-scale national
works and other measures against unemployment. The
parallelism of social progress in the two great North Atlantic
republics could not fail to strike even those people who are
not usually given to comparison and analysis.
When Blum did speak to America in his high-pitched,
rather feminine voice (for the N.B.C.), it was in French.
Although the Popular Front Government had not yet taken
office, he gave a succinct statement of its program and the
implication of its advent. 'The recent French elections/ he
said, 'mean three things. They mean, firstly, a victory for
the republican form of government, of democratic institu-
tions and of freedom, both civil and personal, over all forms
of autocracy, oligarchy, and fascism. They mean, secondly,
the stern resolution to seek a way out of economic depression
and an alleviation of the ensuing misery of whatever sort,
along an entirely new line. They mean, finally, the will on
the part of France to keep the peace of Europe and through-
out the world, a peace based on international law and the
respect of contracts, on the effective solidarity of all the
nations and on general disarmament.'
There was nothing startlingly new in this program; in
ordinary circumstances these words might not mean much.
But it has come to this in Europe that a frank and un-
conditional avowal of democratic principles, without recourse
to nationalistic or even patriotic shibboleths is an act of
courage. France, at any rate, had travelled a long way since
'Democrats and Stuffed Shirts 1 1 1
the days of the Stavisky riots, the Fascist leagues, and the
threatened dictatorship of Doumergue a longer way since
the bad old days of Poincare and Tardieu.
Radio had done its share, in France and elsewhere, in
bringing about this change. Radio, by using the appeal of
reason, by calming political passions and clarifying the
issues, by its ability to focus national attention on the real
problems, had given democracy a new chance.
NOT SAFE FOR STUFFED SHIRTS
But it has not made the air safe for 'stuffed shirts/ Con-
trary to supposition, invisibility has not helped those who,
having no ideas of their own, obediently read off what is
written down for them to say. Here, too, the microphone is
'the greatest tell-tale in the world/ Unless the speaker has
thoughts of his own, or has at least made them his own, they
will not convince anyone over the air. And no mere voice,
however seductive, has ever won a man's opinion, though it
may win a lady's heart.
That is why the radio speeches of high dignitaries are often
just so much wind. More often than not they are prepared
by that nameless crew of black-coated officials who, in every
executive palace and every chancery in the world, pro-
duce with ant-like industry the substance, if not the spirit,
of modern diplomacy. I wonder how many people realize,
when they hear the voice of some ruling politician, some
celebrity whose name figures in the world's headlines, that
they are really listening to an obscure bureaucrat, a public
relations expert, or a grandiloquent hack whose name never
appears in print.
Those whose business it is to arrange for the broadcasting
of speeches by public men often have no means of knowing
who is the real author. It is not until the great man is in
the studio that the category of the speech genuine or
ghosted is revealed, and not always then. Introducing
in Hello ^America!
such men, however eminent, as the creators of what they
are about to say has, to me, always seemed a pious but dis-
tasteful fraud.
I remember, for instance, a certain Lord Mayor who had
been invited to talk about the great city of London to the
American audience. Conceiving his job to be a bit of touting
for the tourist trade, he had entrusted the composition to a
travel catalogue writer, and when he arrived at the studio in
his traditional horse and carriage he had no idea of what he
was going to read. 'Won't you do it for me?' he said cyni-
cally. 'It's all the same.' He read the talk so badly that I
almost blushed for him.
Another time the President of a European state, soliciting
the friendship of the Great American People, read several
pages of what newspapermen call ' blah ' in the presence of
the American Minister and several solemn-looking high
officials, and his English reading showed that he didn't un-
derstand the meaning of the words. And an ambassador
whose name is known all over the world came to the studio
in great state, bedizened with glittering decorations, to read
with pompous conviction a document on the issues of the
World Economic Conference. It had been prepared by two
young men who up to an hour before the broadcast couldn't
agree on the text, and the ambassador had never seen it
before.
None of this, of course, is of any use; and radio organiza-
tions should treat these prefabricated broadcasts as the
newspapers treat so-called handouts pick out the 'raisins'
and look for the holes. The time has come, too, for the elim-
ination of those world-wide engineering stunts by which
statesmen in a dozen countries repeat, one after the other,
sublime platitudes about peace collections of phrases
which lie ready-made in every foreign office, to be arranged
and rearranged at will. In 1932 this was an impressive nov-
elty; today it is a bore.
I have tried, in this chapter, to name only the real men,
and speak anonymously of the stuffed shirts. There are,
nevertheless, cases where stuffed-shirt broadcasts have made
history, as will be seen anon.
VIII. WOODEN IDOL IN BERLIN
WOODCHOPPER IN DOORN
THE WOODEN FIELD MARSHAL AND THE REAL ONE
WHEN I first went to Germany as a newspaper cor-
respondent, four months after the Armistice, a mon-
strous wooden statue stood, like a sinister reminder of the
grim years, in the great open space near the Reichstag Build-
ing in Berlin. It was perhaps fifty feet high, and it repre-
sented in crude form the hulking figure of Field Marshal von
Hindenburg, the hero of Tannenberg and the idol of the
German Army now raised to the status of a Teutonic
deity in the patriotic mind. All over the statue were rough
iron nails, which covered it so closely that the huge wooden
body appeared to be covered with a rough, rusty skin. Each
one of those thousands of nails had been bought by some
patriotic citizen of the Fatherland, with money that went to
prosecute the war. Similar wooden Hindenburgs were to be
seen in other German cities all over the land, and millions of
hard-earned nails were driven into them, while the nation
gritted its teeth. And yet the war was lost.
In 1925 the real Hindenburg, nearing eighty, had become
president of the German Republic, risen from the ashes of
the Kaiser's Reich, and in March, 1932, this doughty octo-
genarian was to be put up for re-election against a former
Austrian house-painter who had been an obscure corporal in
the mighty army under Hindenburg's supreme command.
That obscure corporal was by 1931 leading a brown-
shirted army of malcontents which was threatening to boot
the old Field Marshal out of his palace, where he was filling
his slowly ebbing years with dreams of the glorious past.
114 Hello ^America!
Indeed, many people considered that the old gentleman was
all but dead, though no one had thought it wise to tell him so.
Others, however, thought that he was just playing pos-
sum, and biding his time when he would be as alive as he
pleased. One thing only was certain: the palace camarilla
which surrounded him, consisting of certain influential
Junkers, including General von Schleicher, Doctor Meissner,
his private secretary of state, and above all his son, Colonel
Oskar von Hindenburg, kept him in very close seclusion and
saw to it that his picture of the world outside was just what
he could see through their eyes. His only watchword was
Duty; and just now his duty was to sign emergency decree
after emergency decree, which enabled a harassed govern-
ment to rule without the interference of parliament. So
many things were put before him to sign too many for an
old man to read! But he believed so implicitly in his per-
sonal advisers that whatever they approved he signed.
Many humorous tales went the rounds about the pathetic
old man. According to one of them a certain civil servant
came for an audience and was kept waiting in the anteroom.
His sandwiches, spread with sausage meat, reposed ac-
cording to the German fashion in his portfolio, and as the
hands of the clock went past the time for his 'little lunch'
he furtively munched his Butterbrod to sustain him against
the interview, and smoothed out the sandwich paper care-
fully on a near-by table. Presently he was called out of the
room, and when he came back he found that the paper bore
Hindenburg's signature. The Field Marshal had passed
through the room in the man's absence and, according to his
habit, had signed whatever he found lying about.
HINDENBURG INVOKES THE DEITY
On New Year's Eve before his second election this vener-
able head of state was roused long enough to address the
German nation and the world by radio. His voice was
Wooden Idol in "Berlin Woodchopper in T)oorn 115
still as firm as his signature, and he could be trusted to read
a speech in the good old soldier's way. Standing erect at a
microphone in the Chancellor's Palace in the Wilhelmstrasse,
he addressed to his countrymen 'a few but loyal words, to
help you bear the distress of the time/ namely by drawing
belts still tighter than before. It was the annus terribilis of
Germany, and hunger stood hollow-eyed at millions of doors.
'Let no one be faint of heart,' the old man said, 'but let each
of you cherish an unshakable faith in the future of the
Fatherland. God has many times saved Germany in deepest
need; He will not forsake us now.' It was a touching appeal,
and I was glad that the people of the English-speaking world,
of England and the United States, could hear it. Both
American networks carried it from coast to coast.
Midway in this little speech, which must have cost the
old man a great effort, a curious thing happened, though few
people outside Germany knew what it meant. A sudden
break occurred and the words * Achtungl Rotfront!' (Atten-
tion, Red Front!) were followed by the assertion that 'the
shadow of the Red Front is over Germany.' 'Let all pro-
letarians unite,' it went on before anything could be done
about it, 'against the emergency decrees and the dictator-
ship!' Whether it was done by communists, with the help
of a secret radio station (as was claimed), or by wire-tapping
Nazis somewhere on the inside (every government service
was swarming with them), it should have been a warning to
the world that Germany was on the eve of an upheaval. For
democratic Germany this was, indeed, the beginning of the
end.
Three months later, it is true, Hindenburg was duly
elected; but his opponent, Adolf Hitler, polled eleven mil-
lion votes and the turbulent brown tide was threatening to
engulf the nation. Events began to move fast. Doctor
Briining, the Chancellor, was battling against time, hoping
against hope to save Germany from the financial disaster
which would break the last remaining dam; rushing from
Berlin to Paris, from Paris to London, and from London to
Lausanne, bringing back the cancellation of reparations and
the echo of Herriot's fine words, but no loan. One more set
n6 Hello ^America!
of emergency decrees and the battle would be won perhaps.
The tension in the country was terrific; ministers were
scared of their own shadows. I tried to get Doctor Curtius,
the Foreign Minister, to broadcast to America; he agreed,
but not from Berlin. I saw him in Geneva: the text was
prepared, everything set. At the last minute he backed out,
and in a significant interview he explained to me his diffi-
culties. Some anti-international demonstrations had just
taken place in Germany, the question of German minorities
in Poland was being argued in Geneva, and the liberal For-
eign Minister was terrified to speak as he would have to,
for America in conciliatory tones! By the following Sep-
tember, Curtius and several other ministers were out,
though Briining still remained.
HINDENBURG'S DREAM
But mysterious moves were taking place behind his back.
The Junkers had got his range; his credit with Hindenburg
was being undermined; Franz von Papen, wartime military
attache at Washington (whence he had been deported for
promoting acts of sabotage), now the old President's 'fair-
haired boy/ was getting ready to sell the pass. Hypnotized
by his camarilla, Hindenburg 'came to life' and refused to
sign Briining's decrees; on May 30, 1932 ten weeks after
Hindenburg's re-election Briining was forced to resign.
When this happened I was in Frankfort-on-Main, arrang-
ing to broadcast the national German Sdngerfest to America.
Crowds collected outside the newspaper offices to read the
bulletins; something intangible was in the air, reminiscent
of the old revolutionary days in Berlin. In a flash it came
to me that this was 'it': it was the end of Germany as I had
known it; the willing, democratic post-war Germany; the
Germany alive with a new literature, a new art, and a new
culture; the Germany that wanted to be a part of Europe
and forget the past. A friend living in Frankfurt said to me:
Wooden Idol in TZerlin Woodchopper in TJoorn 117
'We've all been reading the wrong papers; if we'd read
the Volkische Beobachter and the other Nazi papers we should
have known what was happening. We were all fools/
What was happening is this. In July, while hundreds of
beer-drinking philistines from all over Germany were war-
bling about blue-eyed maidens and golden wine and the
birds in spring at their annual orgy of song, the Nazis had
just polled their highest vote; the Reichstag, with two hun-
dred and thirty brown shirts in it, was dissolved the day
it met; Papen was Chancellor, but soon had to give way to
the sinister General Schleicher (the name means Creeper),
and straightway opened the negotiations with Hitler which
were to have such momentous results. Meantime the Wooden
Idol, sitting in the mansion of his East Prussian estate,
mourning the departure of his charming Kamerad, Papen,
was thinking furiously and dreaming mighty dreams. Like
unto that legendary dreamer, the Emperor Barbarossa of
German pseudo-history, he saw himself awakening in a
reborn German Reich.
The dream was not to become articulate until the day he
penned his famous testament. 'From the eternally agitated
scene of human life will emerge again that rock to which the
hope of our fathers clung, that rock upon which ... we
founded the German Kaiserreich' (Imperial monarchy). All
his life the old man kept his counsel on his innermost thoughts.
When I left the Emperor, in the afternoon of November 9
[1918],' he wrote, 'I was never to see him again/ His duty
the one duty which in the end invalidated every other vow
was to the Emperor alone.
'YOU STOLE OUR KAISER!'
It was sheer coincidence that my radio quest had led me
that very spring in the direction of Doom. The public has
an almost morbid interest in the hapless creatures whom
fate has singled out to wear a crown, and the interest be-
n8 Hello ^America!
comes acute in the case of an exile from the throne. The
fate of those who have wielded power in the quasi-sanctity
of royal palaces appeals to the perfervid imaginations of
romantic souls in a very particular way. As soon as the
transatlantic radio was functioning, therefore, Americans
wanted to hear the voice of the ex- Kaiser the man who
above all was thought to be responsible for the troubles of
the world.
In a none too hopeful mood I attempted to supply this
doubtful commodity to my 'customers/ I knew that de-
throned monarchs are privileged but carefully guarded
guests, who must not abuse the hospitality of the friendly
country in which they reside. Politically they are severely
restricted by their hosts. Still, the Dutch government offi-
cials whom I approached were not as uncompromising in
their attitude as I had expected. A special civil officer a
sort of official watchdog of the diplomatic proprieties had
been appointed to look after the Kaiser's affairs; and this
gentleman ruled that since in non-political matters the
Kaiser was free, the Government's permission for a non-
political broadcast to America was not required. The road
was therefore clear, provided the Kaiser himself was willing.
I applied to the chamberlain of the ex-Kaiser's 'court' at
Doom House, but soon found that the royal road led via
Berlin. I went.
There, in one of the lesser palaces facing Unter den Linden,
was concealed the headquarters of the Kaiser's estates,
stewarded by a smart, dashing baron of the pre-war type
a trusted member of the imperial entourage. This gentle-
man not only supervised the administration of the ex-Em-
peror's extensive properties which an accommodating So-
cial Democratic government had first confiscated after the
revolution and then legislated back into the Hohenzollern
family but he also kept close contact with his imperial
master, reporting personally in Doom every week or two on
the general state of affairs.
The little palace, when I walked up to it by appointment,
had the appearance of being shut. No one answered my
knock on the stately front door. But a side entrance led
Wooden Idol in "Berlin Woodchopper in TDoorn 119
through a littered maze of backyard passages to an open-air
flight of steps, leading to an unobtrusive side door with a
sign announcing it to be the office of the private estates of
'His Imperial and Royal Majesty, Wilhelm II.' An ordinary
bell brought a servant to the door, who led me through a
long corridor to the handsomer front part of the house, deco-
rated in the neo-classical or pseudo-Empire style of early
nineteenth century Prussia. Eventually I found myself in
the cozy white-and-gilt waiting-room of the Herr Baron.
He was a very charming but temperamental person. When
I told him that I was there on behalf of American interests
he began to bristle. Suddenly, turning toward me in purple
rage, he raised his forefinger and shouted: 'American ha!
Do you know what you have done ? . . . You stole our
Kaiser!"
His attitude was terrifying, his face quivered as he waved
me aside, before I could even voice my astonishment. In
about ten minutes' harangue, delivered in tones of Nemesis,
he went on : ' Yes, you stole our Kaiser Your Mr. Wilson
did it, with his Fourteen Points Never, except for the
lying promises he made to us, would His Majesty have con-
sented to leave German soil. It was on the assurance of fair
terms, in order to save the lives of our starving people, to
avert needless bloodshed that he left, on the solemn promise
of that famous 'peace without victory' (his voice had become
a snarl).
'No! we were not beaten: never believe that the glorious
German army was beaten in the field. We were lured into
surrender after our Kaiser had left to save the German
people from more suffering . . .'
On and on went the flow of angry words, until the excited
baron's voice gave out and I seemed to have wilted under
the lash of his avenging tongue. At last, when I could be
heard, I said that this was indeed an interesting version of
history which I, of course, did not know. I thought that it
ought to be told, and told by the Kaiser himself. The Amer-
ican public would no doubt be keenly interested to hear it.
At this his angry countenance melted into a smile and he
apologized.
Hello ^America!
'I ask your pardon/ he said, 'but you will understand. I
had to get this off my chest. Now that I have said what I
had to say, let us be friends/
I was amazed at such naivete and almost touched. I
seemed to have been the first American he had met to whom
he could 'tell the truth/ Now he was satisfied and we talked
business, quite amicably and intimately. He promised to
put my proposal about the broadcast to His Majesty
on his next trip to Doom. But he wanted me to realize that
the time was not yet ripe. And confidentially (the facts
are now common property, so there is no question of violat-
ing his confidence) he told me that important political devel-
opments were about to take place developments which
would change the whole face of things and then, presum-
ably, the Kaiser might break his silence. In any case, my
suggestion would have serious consideration, and I was
definitely the first in the field. We shook hands cordially as
he saw me out through the front door.
HOHENZOLLERN OR HITLER?
I could not help pondering what he had said. 'Important
developments!' Remember this was in the spring of 1932
at least seven months before the Nazi coup, of which the
world had no inkling then. But was that what he meant?
It seems reasonable to believe that the Hohenzollerns knew
what was in the wind. One of the Kaiser's sons was a promi-
nent storm-troop leader; the Crown Prince himself was a
benevolent friend of the movement. But if they did know,
they must have had reason to hope for a different outcome
of these 'important developments/ Who would have
thought that utter oblivion was in store for them all?
But there was another story, of which I as most people
in and outside Germany had no knowledge. The story
has now been told on what I believe to be the unimpeachable
authority of one of the actors in the shadowy drama that
Wooden Idol in TZerlin Woodchopper in ^Doorn 12.1
was being enacted behind the scenes. 1 Speaking of Chancellor
B riming, this authority says: 'Long hours of contemplation
had convinced him that one course, and one course only,
could prevent Hitler from ultimately obtaining supreme
power the restoration of the monarchy/ In 1932 this
plan had, under cover, become practical politics. It was
known to a very select number of political leaders, it had been
broached to Hindenburg, whose re-election was the first step
in Briining's well-considered plan. Step number 2 was the
end of reparations (accomplished in June); step number 3
the securing of a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag, which
could then change the Constitution and declare Hindenburg
regent for life. Finally, the old man would be succeeded by a
grandson of the Kaiser, who would become a constitutional
sovereign on the English model.
That's where the old gentleman baulked. He was out-
raged at the idea of anything less than a military absolutism
a Greater Prussia, on the principles of the post-Napoleonic
era. And as for a grandson of the Kaiser ' I am the trustee
of the Emperor/ he had said, 'and can never give my consent
to anyone's succeeding to the throne save the Emperor
himself/
GOERING WAXES PIOUS
So that was it! The emotional Baron must have known
or thought that these differences of detail and personnel
were being smoothed out, and then then the dream that
the Old Man was dreaming in the solitude of Neudeck would
come true. Few people shared that dream, but among them
were the Imperial Woodchopper, and the baron who shuttled
back and forth between Berlin and Doom. Yet Germany
was within an ace of getting its Kaiser back. But the Junkers
overplayed their hand: Briining was sent away; Papen and
Schleicher, trying to outsmart each other, got caught in the
1 See John W. Wheeler-Bennett's Wooden Titan, London and New York, 1937.
12.2. Hello ^America!
meshes of their own nets. The very thing that should have
helped the plan the recession of the Nazi flood in Novem-
ber (they lost two million votes at the Reichstag elections)
sealed Wilhelm's fate; for Hitler, realizing that he had
passed his peak, closed the deal with Papen and on Janu-
ary 30, 1933, Hitler's hordes marched through the Branden-
burger Gate.
The Field Marshal's dream was dreamed out. From the
very palace where barely a year before he had made his New
Year's broadcast, he had to review the never-ending flood
of marching 'S.A.' and 'S.S.' And another humorous tale
went the rounds in Berlin. As the old soldier watched the
brown shirts shuffling along rather sloppily, and then beheld
the brisk, precise stepping of the Steel Helmet Corps (old
front soldiers), his tired old mind carried him back to the
great old days of the Battle of Tannenberg. Turning to
LudendorfF he whispered (so the story goes): 'How magnifi-
cently your men march, General! But I didn't think they
had made so many prisoners!'
'God has many times saved Germany in deepest need,'
he had said in his broadcast. 'He will not forsake us now.'
Hermann Goring, seeing the old gentleman reviewing the
Nazi triumph, said, 'How gloriously has the aged Field
Marshal been used as an instrument in the hand of God!'
The dream was dreamed out. Adolf Hitler was Chancellor
of Germany, and woodchopping was still the imperial occu-
pation at Doom.
IX. GANDHI EATS WHILE
AMERICA WAITS
REVOLUTIONISTS ON THE MOVE
TWO of the most memorable events in the pioneer years
of international broadcasting were the radio talks to
America made by Mahatma Gandhi and by Leon Trotsky,
the one from London in 1931, the other from Copenhagen
in 1932. Neither of them had ever faced the microphone
before; one had recently been released from prison; the
other had just been granted a respite from isolation on a
lonely Turkish island. Both were to proceed to further
penance for their revolutionary activity Gandhi to his
Indian jail, Trotsky to perpetual exile. But in the interim
the world had, by means of the new instrument of com-
munication, been able to take an independent measure of
these men.
Here were two revolutionary figures destined to live in
history, yet as different in character and method as Jesus of
Nazareth and Napoleon of Corsica. That two such leaders
should leave their mark on the same generation of men is an
indication of the curious contradiction of heterogeneous
thought in a mechanically more than ever unified world.
But there is a certain analogy to be drawn between these
men's careers. Both are Orientals; both were members of a
middle-class intelligentsia, destined to lead a revolt of
the lowly against their oppressors. The differences in their
philosophy and their technique were determined by the con-
ditions confronting them in their struggles. They were intel-
lectual leaders of the social revolution in the two largest
politically integrated countries in the world, peopled between
Hello ^America!
them by one quarter of the world's population and covering
one fifth of the habitable globe. Coming into contact with
these two dynamic personalities even for a brief space is an
experience not easily forgotten.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, styled by his followers
Mahatma (the Great-Souled), had been the moving spirit of
the Indian revolutionary movement for upwards of twenty
years, but in England his personal power was thought to
have been spent when he retired from active politics in 1924.
But suddenly he emerged from his supposed retirement in
1930, to organize the civil disobedience campaign which was
to result in violent disorder and much bloodshed just at the
moment when Great Britain was tackling the thorny problem
of Indian constitutional reform. 'Civil disobedience' was the
practical expression of the doctrine of Ahimsa (non-violence)
preached by Gandhi as the revolutionary creed and strategy
of India. The campaign had reached its climax in the famous
March to the Sea, the symbolical salt-making expedition
which led to Gandhi's arrest and confinement in Yeravda jail
in May, 1930. The whole country was once more aflame and
a wave of sanguinary fanaticism swept the population
toward revolt. Gandhi in prison and this was not his
first imprisonment proved more dangerous to the British
government than Gandhi at large; for his 'martyrdom'
roused the Moderates to espouse his cause. Their venerable
leader, Vithalbhai Patel, resigned the presidency of the
Legislative Assembly to assume active leadership of the
revolutionary Congress Party while Gandhi was in jail.
Eventually, however, a truce was brought about which
resulted in Gandhi's liberation and his journey to London to
attend the second Round Table Conference.
By the time Gandhi was released and set to go to London,
the Labor Cabinet had made way for the National Govern-
ment. Sir Samuel Hoare was at the head of the India
Office and the atmosphere of the dominant section of the
British public was hostile to Gandhi. The ordinary unin-
formed man regarded him quite frankly as a political crimi-
nal, much as the average American business man regards
even the mildest 'Red.' To that class of Englishman, fed by
(^ and hi tats While ^America Waits 12.5
a ranting imperialistic press, even the personal integrity of
a person like Gandhi was inconceivable. Yet even my own
fleeting contact with this extraordinary man gave me con-
vincing proof of the rarest kind of unselfish honesty an
example of that satyagraha which once enabled him to face a
fanatical patriotic assembly and say that he would, if he had
to, sacrifice even India to Truth.
HOW TO TALK TO A SAINT
The Round Table Conference, convened after elaborate
preparation and tremendous preliminary touting, was to be
opened with all possible pomp and solemnity by King George
V on September 14, 1931. Gandhi, accompanied by his
Indianized European secretary, and devotee, Madeline
Slade, daughter of a British admiral, and several Congress
leaders, sailed from Bombay on a P. and O. liner in August.
In May his coming to England had still been doubtful, but I
kept in touch with several groups of his disciples in London,
who supplied me with a variety of advice, some of it curious.
One of these disciples, who was stated to have spent some six
months the previous year in close contact with the Mahatma,
wrote that if we wanted the latter to broadcast it was ad-
visable to:
(1) State clearly the object of the proposed address (he
would fight shy of it if he thought it just a stunt of a
4 scoop ');
(2) Make no appeal to his vanity, as he has none;
(3) On no account offer him money;
(4) Not try to impress him; and
(5) Spell his name correctly it means (in Hindustani)
'rubbish' or * refuse/
Despite the postscript which said that the letter was 'written
under some difficulty in a pigsty/ I thought the advice very
sound and determined to act on it. However, New York had
already tried to 'impress* the Mahatma with long cablegrams
12.6 Hello ^America!
from Indian Congress representatives in America and heads
of organizations, and there was no reply to these grandilo-
quent invitations to follow in the footseps of Rabindranath
Tagore and address the American audience by radio.
Our Opposition had out-manoeuvred us by sending a
personal emissary to Gandhi in India an American news-
paperman who knew the Mahatma and had orders to accom-
pany him all the way to England. He got a promise from him
to broadcast for the N.B.C., and kept silent on the existence
of any other network.
However, there were other factors to be considered.
One was the British Government; another was Gandhi's
hostess in London, for it had been arranged for him to live
privately in a settlement house in the East End of London,
namely Kingsley Hall at Bow, founded and administered by
Miss Muriel Lester, one of those angels of mercy whose
mission is to bring spiritual sunshine and a little material
warmth into the lives of the poor. I knew Miss Lester's sister
Doris, head of another settlement, the Children's House, just
around the corner from Kingsley Hall. It was a dismal part
of London untidy streets lined with low and melancholy-
looking brick houses from whose narrow doorways swarmed
ill-clad, unwashed children. They would crowd around our
car with frightening familiarity when we arrived with bundles
of hand-me-down clothing for Miss Doris's waifs.
Kingsley Hall was a curious modern structure forming a
square around a courtyard, with a balcony running around
the inside walls, from which doors led to individual tiny
rooms or ' cells ' in which to rest and meditate. In one of these
cells the Mahatma was to live on the simple, abstemious
scale to which he was accustomed, while the rest of the dele-
gates to the great Conference lived at Dorchester House and
other fashionable West End hotels. The fact that this addic-
tion to lowliness involved daily trips of six miles in either
direction did not frighten Gandhi. He was to feel that he was
among his own people the lowly and the poor.
I visited Miss Lester and got her permission to install
the special telephone lines and other equipment that would
be necessary to 'pipe* a talk by Gandhi to the Radio Termi-
Cjandhi tats While ^America Waits 12.7
nal of the General Post Office and thence to Rugby, where it
would be radiated to America. We also arranged that she, as
his hostess, should introduce the Mahatma to his American
audience, and should describe the surroundings in which he
was speaking her own Kingsley Hall. And I gave the
requisite orders to the radio engineers of the Post Office
(with whom at that time we dealt direct, with the consent of
the B.B.C.).
SIR SAMUEL HOARE TAKES A CHANCE
As to the other factor the Government difficulties
were likely to ensue. A speech by Gandhi was considered
dynamite; a speech made direct to America, without the
possibly restraining influence of an English audience, might
be embarrassing to the British Government, which is rather
sensitive on the point of American opinion. (Katherine Mayo
had done too good a job to allow Gandhi to ruin it.) One may
judge the feelings of the Conservative press from a paragraph
in the Morning Post a few days before the broadcast: 'There
does not appear to be any relevant reason why Gandhi should
harangue the American public, but I suppose it is the natural
sequel to the immense flood of Gandhi propaganda in the
U.S.A. . . . Most American broadcast programs are spon-
sored by commercial firms, so perhaps it is an advertisement
for California lemon-growers.'
Luckily I had a slight but pleasant acquaintance with Sir
Samuel Hoare, the Secretary of State for India. I wrote him
a personal note, and although it is rare for a journalist or any-
one of that order to be received privately by a Cabinet
Minister in office, I had a summons to the India Office by
return of post. It is not 'etiquette' to reveal ministerial con-
fidences, but I think it is permissible to say that I was not
deceived in my estimate of the Government's attitude. I laid
all my cards on the table and rather rashly assumed
the responsibility for the content of anything that Gandhi
12.8 Hello ^America!
might say. In other words, I guaranteed that it would con-
tain nothing seditious, and this guarantee covered the entire
enterprise, both for ourselves and any other American
broadcasting organization! Sir Samuel, with one of those
broad gestures of personal confidence, simply made me a
foreigner Gandhi's sponsor, and on that basis gave per-
mission to the Post Office (which at that psychological
moment, as it happened, asked for his O.K.) to lay the lines.
Gandhi landed on one of those wet and hopelessly dreary
autumn days that London excels in producing at all seasons
of the year. He reached London on an ordinary train, arriv-
ing in a chilling, drenching rain. Wearing only his loincloth
and a sort of white cotton sheet slung over his shoulder, with
the usual crude sandals on his feet, he was hustled by a band
of admirers, white and brown, to the Friends' Meeting House
for an official welcome. The Quakers had taken it upon them-
selves to be the first hosts to the World's Non-Resister
Number One. He told his audience he had come on a mission
of peace, simply because he had promised the Viceroy he
would come. Laurence Housman, the English poet, in
introducing him said that 'no man loses by keeping his word
of honor/
GANDHI 'UNITES' THE U.S.A.
I got my first glimpse of the Indian saint a couple of hours
later, at Kingsley Hall, where some twenty of us, mostly
representatives of local organizations led by the Mayor of
Bow, waited for him in a large empty room through which
he had to pass on his way to the ' cell.' It was a long wait, for
a melancholy Saturday afternoon, and outside the rain came
down in sheets. At last we heard a cheer. None the worse for
the wet, the Mahatma arrived, hatless and bald, his thin
brown legs and arms bare, greeted us with a smile exposing
the gaping vacancies between his teeth, and regarded us
through his tin-framed spectacles. A more puny, homely,
Cjandhi ats While ^America Waits 12.9
and unimpressive human being I have never seen. Miss
Lester introduced us all, with an astonishing virtuosity of
memory. The Mahatma looked at each one in turn, patiently
smiled again and said, ' I don't think you'll expect me to re-
member your names/ And that was that. No well-meaning
mendacities. As he disappeared into the corridor I realized
that a Gandhi couldn't tell even a ' white' lie for the sake of
being polite.
A group of dusky turbaned gentlemen followed the
white-bearded Pandit Malvya among them and were
ushered into the 'cell' for a political conference. The picture
had something biblical about it: a council of high-browed
elders, crouching on the floor, listening to the wisdom of the
Master . . .
Hovering outside, on the long narrow balcony, the women,
swathed in homespun s harts draped over their heads with
Sarojini Naida, the Indian poetess, and Madeline Slade
looking dark and Oriental despite her long English face
completed the illusion. There was no interrupting the con-
clave; the fate of a nation was being discussed, while all mun-
dane business waited. At long last I was ushered into the
Mahatma's presence. He was affable and came to the point
at once. He listened to my explanation of the American
broadcasting system and the existence of two major com-
petitive 'chains.' He said he was not willing to make two
broadcasts, but would like the one to be shared by all; the
time I proposed, six in the evening on the next day, a Sunday,
was acceptable; it fitted in with his rigid program of meals
and silences and conferences. It also happened to be our
regular Sunday hour for European programs, to which a vast
audience was accustomed. He proposed a miniature 'round
table conference' with the two American competitors and
himself.
An hour or so later the 'Opposition,' hastily summoned,
arrived, two men strong. Once again we were ushered in. It
was Gandhi's mealtime. Crouching on the floor, with an
appetizing ensemble of fruit and a jug of goat's milk before
him he laughingly bade us be seated, and as there were no
chairs we all squatted in a circle on the floor. Gandhi spoke.
130 Hello ^America!
'Mr. M ,' he began, 'I have promised to broadcast
for you, and I am prepared to do it. Now here is another
broadcasting company, and you did not tell me there was
more than one. Nevertheless, a promise is a promise and I
must fulfill it. I want to accommodate everyone, but I am a
busy man just now and prefer not to make two speeches.
I suggest (with a gesture meant for all of us) you get together
and arrange to help me save time/
He looked at me questioningly and I signified my agree-
ment. The Opposition, represented by the European
Manager of Mr. M 's press association, spoke up and
said:
'We have heard your wishes, Mahatma, and I am sure
we'll now be able to straighten the matter out among our-
selves/
'Hurrah!' cried the Mahatma. 'America is at peace.
That's splendid/ and shook hands all round. Once again we
confirmed the time, and we left the little old man to his
bananas and dates. Outside, on the stairs, my rival calmly
announced that the broadcast was 'exclusive' and could be
given to us only if his New York office agreed. I was dumb-
founded. I reminded him that his office had omitted to do
anything about telephone lines and broadcasting equipment,
and that I was not prepared to let him use mine.
'Oh, I'm glad you mentioned this,' he said. 'In that
case I'll just take the Mahatma in a taxicab to Radio Termi-
nal (the point of distribution for all transoceanic talks), and
make the broadcast from there.'
The mental picture of this struck me as comical and I
heartily agreed to this proposed arrangement if he could
carry it out.
Meantime tremendous and completely useless struggles
were carried out between the rival organizations in New
York. The press agency whose representative had been
acting for the N.B.C. was bombarded with telegrams from
client newspapers who also owned stations on the Columbia
network. Long-distance telephone wires hummed with
pleadings and recriminations; the transatlantic telephone did
a rushing business. Both networks announced 'exclusive'
(jandhi tats While ^America Waits 131
broadcasts in the press. I sat tight, knowing the Mahatma's
mind, and feeling armed against all eventualities by my
government permission and my lines.
Next morning, the morning of the broadcast, a radio tele-
phone official called me at my house to say that N.B.C. had
applied for lines to Kingsley Hall. It was impossible to get
permission for another installation at such short notice; was
I willing for them to be used by our Opposition? 'Yes/ I
said, 'provided they are not used earlier than our broadcast/
That being reasonable, orders were given accordingly.
*DO I TALK INTO THIS THING?'
The time for the broadcast arrived. In my excitement I
had forgotten that I had to introduce another speaker at the
B.B.C.'s studios in Savoy Hill a half hour before Gandhi's
talk. I kept my appointment and had my car ready outside.
Checking by telephone with Miss Lester and the engineers,
I heard that all was going according to plan. Realizing that I
could not reach Bow in time I stopped near St. Paul's
Cathedral and turned into the Radio Terminal building
the very place where my competitor had so confidently
threatened to take the Mahatma. Here I could listen not
only to the broadcast but to the tests and all the preliminary
conversations going on in the room. The engineers were
there, Miss Lester was there, my competitors were there.
The Mahatma was late. Calm and unconcerned, he was
finishing his meal of fruit and goat's milk upstairs. The
clock ticked on; zero hour came and passed. Someone said he
was coming soon; as all America was waiting with bated
breath, some speaker had to fill the empty air. The redoubt-
able press association chief produced a lengthy script an
' introduction ' prepared in advance on behalf of the Opposi-
tion and mentioning that company by name, which he was to
read.
I held my breath; would my absentee diplomacy work?
132. Hello ^America!
The radio engineer in charge spoke up; asked whether I
wasn't present. No, I was delayed, Miss Lester informed
him; but I had invited her to announce the distinguished
guest. General approval around the room. Miss Lester be-
gan. As she described the place, the voices of slum children
playing in the street floated in through the windows. Then
the Mahatma entered. He had never seen a microphone.
'Do I talk into this thing?' he inquired audibly a
stage whisper heard by millions.
Sitting at the table prepared for him, opposite a statuette
of Saint Francis discreetly set into the wall, he folded his
hands and closed his eyes. He had no manuscript. After a
few seconds silence he began, simply, without any attempt at
oratory, in beautiful English which hardly showed a trace of
an Indian accent:
'In my opinion the Indian struggle bears in itself con-
sequences not merely affecting India but the whole world/
In simple, clear-cut, moderate phrases, unadorned by
hyperbole, he stated the Indian problem, in its historical
perspective, in its social aspects, and as a revolutionary
challenge. He had no manuscript; yet there was not an
instant's hesitation. Would he stick to the bargain I had
made without his consent? I knew that government officials
would listen on monitor lines; knew that shorthand tran-
scripts were being made. For nearly a half hour he went on,
slowly and every word distinct, his thin, high-pitched voice
automatically lowered through transmission, but clear and
unwavering, explaining his 'non-violent* revolution:
' I feel in the innermost recesses of my heart that the world
is sick unto death of blood-spilling. The world is seeking a
way out, and I flatter myself with the belief that perhaps it
will be the privilege of the ancient land of India to show that
way out to the hungering world.'
(jandhi ats While ^America Waits 133
A PLEA FOR INDIA'S MILLIONS
But the climax of the speech was his plea for the 'semi-
starved millions scattered throughout the seven hundred
thousand villages dotted over a surface nineteen hundred
miles long and fifteen hundred miles broad/
'It is a painful phenomenon that those simple villages,
through no fault of their own, have nearly six months in the
year idle upon their hands. Time was not long ago when
every village was self-sufficient in regard to the two primary
human wants food and clothing. Unfortunately for us,
when the East India Company, by means which I would
prefer not to describe, destroyed that supplementary village
industry and the millions of spinners who had become
famed through the cunning of their deft fingers for drawing
the finest thread, such as has never been yet drawn by any
modern machinery these village spinners found themselves
one fine morning with their noble occupation gone, and from
that day forward India has become progressively poor, no
matter what may be said to the contrary/ This was the only
note of criticism in the twenty-minute talk. Gandhi was in
England on a mission of peace. I knew he would not abuse
the hospitality of his hosts.
But most eloquent was his plea for the Untouchables
the outcast millions of India whose fate lay in the hands of
his own countrymen and for whom he himself was not long
afterwards to undertake a 'fast unto death/ stopped only
when near his extremity he was assured of their salva-
tion by a pledge of reform.
'It is a matter of still deeper humiliation to me that
we Hindus regard several million of our kith and kin as too
degraded even for our touch. I refer to the so-called Un-
touchables. These are no small weaknesses in a nation
struggling to be free, and hence you find that in this struggle
through self-purification we have assigned a foremost place
to the removal of this curse of untouchability and the attain-
ment of unity among^all the different classes and communities
134 Hello ^America!
of India representing the different creeds. It is along the
same lines that we seek to rid our land of the curse of drink/
The room was hushed; everybody seemed under a spell.
Outside in the twilight, the children were still at their play;
their voices could be heard wherever people listened to
Gandhi, as a reminder that he was speaking from an English
slum. It was heard by millions; it was printed in full by
newspapers in three continents. Nothing Gandhi ever said
reached so many people; it was the largest audience he had
ever had.
He had risen, as usual, at four that morning; had medi-
tated, prayed, and worked. After his broadcast he the
one public figure in the world who lives completely by the
Golden Rule preached a sermon in a Christian service
held in Kingsley Hall, then left for a surprise conference
on neutral ground with the Prime Minister, which lasted
till nearly midnight. Next day, the Round Table Conference
opened on a Monday, Gandhi's ' day of silence/ He sat at
the Conference table, listened, and spoke no word. Even his
dumb presence electrified some who were there. Here, at any
rate, was a man; here, for once, they were confronted with the
inflexible power of Truth. The compromise announced by
Ramsay MacDonald at the end of the Conference he met
with an openly announced resolve that he would resist it with
his life.
He left England as he had come with empty hands and
a pure heart. Six days after his arrival in India he was im-
prisoned and returned to Yeravda jail, where nine months
later he began his historic fast.
X. TROTSKY'S WEEK OUT
THE LION IS AT LARGE!
ONE fine Monday morning in November, 1932, I picked
up my paper and read a report that Leon Trotsky, the
Russian revolutionist, had escaped from Prinkipo, the island
in the Sea of Marmora on which he had been confined for
the past four years. The lion was at large, and the world
pricked up its ears. Ever since, after years of exile in eastern
Siberia, the Trotsky family had been deported at the orders
of Joseph Stalin, the undisputed master of the Soviets, the
Turkish Government as the only one in Europe or Asia
- had given him this refuge, where, like Napoleon at Elba,
he was isolated yet under convenient surveillance. Here
unlike Napoleon this restless rebel had developed a pro-
digious literary activity, the proceeds of which helped to
finance a new world-wide revolutionary movement, the Left
Opposition, and to promote the organization of the Fourth
International.
For most people of literary bent this exile might have en-
tailed no hardships: Trotsky's writings were in fair demand
in 'bourgeois' countries, and the intervals of intellectual
work were filled out by fishing and sailing adventures which
provided excitement of a kind. Faithful disciples had gath-
ered around him, and he was in a fair way to becoming a
revolutionary sage. But physically the old fighter was cut
off from the world; and his autobiography, closing with a
sardonic chapter on 'The World without Visa/ revealed the
exile's grief. Here was the man of action; the revolutionist
who had tasted power; once the War Commissar of the
136 Hello ^America!
world's largest country, who had negotiated the Peace of
Brest-Li to vsk, who had fought the 'white* forces of Europe
to a standstill; sterilized, cut off from active strife in the
midst of a world in turmoil.
Sickness, the hardships of exile and deportation, and per-
sonal bereavement had done little to break this man's spirit;
the untimely death of a son and the suicide of a daughter
were mere episodes in an embattled rebel's life. None of
these things, nor his professed need for medical attention,
had induced the European statesmen some of them his
former Socialist ' comrades' to relax the political quar-
antine which held him prisoner.
And now, all of a sudden, he was to have a week out a
trip to northern Europe, not for rest but for political work.
It seemed incredible. It seemed incredible that a socialist
students' organization in Denmark, which desired to hear
him speak, could secure not only a week's permit for him to
stay, but free passage through Italy and France coun-
tries in which two former Socialist comrades, Mussolini and
Laval, were in command.
The newspapers were none too certain in their first reports.
A man named Lubinsky, supposed to be Trotsky, had em-
barked in the Italian steamer Praga, bound for Naples and
now at sea. The news was both interesting and disquieting
to a radio man in London. Here was one of the actors in
the greatest human mass drama of our time; a man who had
one of the most thrilling inside stories in history to tell.
Europe might be afraid to hear it; but what about America,
where a violent Red scare had made him an object of the
fascinated admiration accorded to first-class gangsters? It
was from America that Trotsky had sailed to Petrograd to
play his role in the ' ten days that shook the world.' I myself
remembered the rather shabby, studious-looking Bohemian
as he came to visit an editorial colleague in the office of a
very bourgeois New York magazine (Current Opinion) in
1916, of whom no one suspected that a few months later
he would help to 'shake the world.'
A broadcast by Trotsky, aside from all other considera-
tions, would be a 'scoop.'
Trotsky's Week Out 137
A BOLSHEVIK'S ODYSSEY
Taking an off chance, I addressed a radiogram to 'Lubin-
sky,' aboard the S.S. Praga. To my surprise, back came a
reply signed 'Lubinsky-Trotsky,' thus disposing of any
doubts as to the passenger's identity. Beyond this the pre-
cious telegram didn't help much, for it deferred everything
to Trotsky's arrival in Copenhagen, which what with
meddlesome governments and an active competition
might be too late. So I * parked' at the telephone for the
rest of that day and the next; frequented Communist ac-
quaintances; ferreted out connections in Paris, London, and
Copenhagen itself. Max Eastman, the translator of Trot-
sky's 'history,' happened to be in London and was helpful
with advice. In Copenhagen the Socialist students were
duly excited and ready to take matters in hand, incidentally
hoping to recoup some of the expenses of Trotsky's trip,
which they had guaranteed; ready, too, to exploit the well-
known American spirit of competition. Everything consid-
ered, I thought it better to go to bat myself on the ground.
Meantime Trotsky's ship had touched Athens, where he
was not allowed to land, while wife and daughter were given
a police escort to help them look at antiques, and at Naples,
where Fascist press men, darting from ambush, clicked
cameras at the sight-seeing revolutionist. By this time the
Trotsky Odyssey had become a world sensation and his sec-
retaries had been promoted in the newspapers to body-
guards. At Marseilles the police were prepared with an
elaborate strategy which infuriated the cheated press. Tak-
ing the 'dangerous' party off on a police boat they landed
them outside the city, motored them to Avignon, and put
them on board a sealed carriage attached to the Paris train.
(In 1917 Lenin was sent in a sealed carriage through Ger-
many to start the revolution in Russia.) The carriage was
later switched on to another train which would reach Dun-
kerque on Tuesday, just eight days after the Trotskys had
left Prinkipo. The news that they were to embark on the
138 Hello ^America!
regular Dunkerque-Esbjerg steamer Bernstorff made me
reserve a cabin on the ship in the hope of clinching the busi-
ness en route.
When I arrived at Dunkerque Harbor on that gray No-
vember morning, there was not a newspaper reporter in sight.
Foiled at Marseilles, the world's press had given up the hunt!
For extra security the train was run right onto the quai.
Trotsky, his small, blonde, and rather tousled-looking wife,
and three youngish disciples were trailed all the way by two
French secret-service men, who seemed to have stepped
straight out of the funnies, unmistakable by the large, round,
black slouch hats favored by their kind with slight inden-
tations to break the monotony. The whole group was mar-
shalled by a sectional chief of the Surete Nationale. I never
saw a police officer who was such a perfect gentleman. His
clothes, speech, and manner were those of a rising diplomat,
and he treated the reputed firebrand with an old-world
courtesy that bordered on deference, viseing the party's
papers, looking after their tickets and accommodations, and
bidding them good-bye with affable charm, but leaving the
two detectives on board.
The harbor police, who were looking after mere folks like
myself, weren't half so pleasant. I had gone ashore in order
to meet the train, and it took quite a lot of explaining and
showing of credentials before I managed to get back. Be-
sides the Trotskyites I was almost the only passenger; at
any rate, if there were others I don't remember them.
POPE OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION
Trotsky and family disappeared into their compartment
as soon as we cast off, and for the duration of the twenty-
four-hour journey were not seen again. At the entrance to
their corridor, day and night, stood a hefty detective; in the
hall, just beyond, day and night, sat a secretary or body-
guard. The three young men who accompanied him one
Trotsky's Week Out 139
German, one French, one Czech were animated by fan-
atical devotion to a worshipped chief, like paladins to a cru-
sading prince. Indeed, a pope in transit through infidel land
could not have been more reverently guarded.
Only once, in the middle of the night, did I see the great
man emerge halfway down the corridor, in shirtsleeves, pen
in hand, to call in one of his aides. He was evidently hard
at work. An interview with him was a hopeless quest. One
of the paladins, who afterwards turned out to be his personal
secretary, eyed me with suspicion from the start, and evinced
a strange curiosity as to my purposes and designs. After
hours of small-talk fencing we came to grips. It was a ques-
tion of money; Trotsky's man was not in a hurry to close the
deal. After all, I might be a spy!
When we arrived at Copenhagen the dock was crowded
with a mob of hooting, whistling, jeering men. They carried
immense red banners inscribed 'Long live the Soviet!* and
'Down with Trotsky, the Traitor!' in Danish and German.
When they saw Trotsky himself, standing on the narrow
upper deck, near the rail, flanked by his family and friends,
they shouted what must have been ugly threats. Trotsky,
calm and undisturbed, peered at them with the professional
curiosity of an entomologist examining a new specimen. We
went down the gangplank; police held back the crowd and
nothing happened.
There was no sealed train this time: the party travelled in
a compartment not far from mine; the rest were filled
with Danish newspaper men. Trotsky, quite alone, stood
in the passage, on the off-side of the train, as it stood at the
station. Suddenly a grease-blacked face appeared in the
doorway and looked furtively around. My heart stood still.
I expected to see the man whip out a revolver. But it was
only a slip of paper. He was an oiler or a brakeman and evi-
dently a left-wing Communist, who had been sent as emis-
sary by the local comrades. Presently a couple of other
workmen appeared outside the window and handed up bits
of paper for Trotsky to autograph. Trotsky signed them,
smiled, and shook hands.
At Copenhagen that evening a terrific crowd met the train.
140 Hello ^America!
In the rush I couldn't see what happened, and I barely cap-
tured a taxicab to take me and belongings to the Palace
Hotel. There, not long after me, appeared the two French
secret-service men, sheepishly inquiring whether I had Mon-
sieur Trotsky concealed presumably in a cupboard or
under the bed. Evidently the porter had sent them to the
newest arrival, as the most likely man. They had tried to
connect with their charge at the station, but he had eluded
them. They looked helpless and worried as they sat on the
edge of my plush chairs and twirled their black hats to hide
their embarrassment. They spoke nothing but French and
here they were, lost lost in a strange, unfeeling world !
I offered to telephone around, and sure enough I got
hold of the head of the Socialist students, who revealed that
Comrade Trotsky was at the suburban house of a trusted
party chief. What had happened was that the Danish police,
unmindful of their French confreres, had stopped the train at
a suburb and quietly taken the Trotskys off, while the
retinue went on t Copenhagen.
The French detectives were profuse in their thanks, but
they wouldn't stay for a drink. Full of fresh hope, they
bowed themselves out.
PRIME MINISTER STAUNING CLEARS THE LINES
My own 'detectives/ who had been taking local soundings,
had bad news. The Danish State Radio Administration
could not give us facilities for a talk by Trotsky, evidently
by reason of orders from higher up. The state telephone
people, who could if they would 'pipe' the talk to
England for transmission to New York, were uncommuni-
cative in the absence of government orders. A young Danish
university lecturer, husband of a charming and radio-
minded American girl of my acquaintance, came to the res-
cue, took me to the government offices, and engineered an
interview with the Prime Minister, Thorvald Stauning, in
person.
Trotsky's Week Out 141
This gentle, fatherly statesman, a Social-Democrat of the
solid pre-war type, who has maintained himself as the
trusted head of a coalition government for eight consecutive
years, was especially friendly because I had invited him some
months before to address Americans on an all-Scandinavian
occasion (with the Prime Ministers of Sweden and Norway)
by way of the transatlantic radio. This had brought him
hundreds of fan letters from former compatriots now citi-
zens of America. He agreed that a talk by a Russian radical,
via the same route, could not be interpreted as an act un-
friendly to the Soviet Government. The Danish telephone,
though a government department, would in fact only act as
a 'common carrier 1 of what was really a private message
until it reached New York. He smiled and stroked his enor-
mous, graying Victorian beard. No, he had no objection,
but it was for the Foreign Minister to decide (who probably
had vetoed the plan in the first place). Might I go to the
Foreign Minister and tell him the Prime Minister's view?
I certainly might. I hustled back to the Foreign Ministry,
and in a few minutes the deadlock was broken; the red tape
was cut and the state telephone chief was at our service.
Moreover, this had been a blessing in disguise. For the
Trotsky camp, which had held out for an astronomical fee,
saw their prospects fade when I betrayed no desire to break
through the official barriers. An amiable American Leftist
intellectual named Gould (one of the growing band of the
faithful surrounding the great man) had, I learned, already
been working on the translation of the proposed talk and
coaching Trotsky, whose English was rusty from lack of
use. Late on Friday night, two days before the projected
broadcast, we came to terms a fee which any first-class
American crooner would consider low. We were all set.
Trotsky was to speak from the Telephone Building on Sun-
day evening, two hours before his great lecture to the mass
meeting assembled by the Socialist students.
142. Hello ^America!
TROTSKY TAKES HIS COAT OFF
Meantime the newspapers had got wind of the negotia-
tions, and were on our trail. Trotsky's one condition was
that there should be no local publicity. So when the day
arrived we calmly referred all reporters to the broadcasting
studios, while Trotsky was spirited in a closed cab to the
main telephone exchange in another part of town. When
he arrived, accompanied only by his Czech secretary, and
was ushered with all ceremony into a room full of people,
with the frock-coated telephone chief playing host, he
thought he had been betrayed.
'What are these? Journalists?* he burst out.
We reassured him. There wasn't a journalist in the room,
though every newspaper had been hounding the man of the
hour for five days. The dignified telephone chief deferen-
tially asked for an autograph (like the greasy workman the
day before) and got it. An improvised studio had been pre-
pared next door, and no one was admitted except myself.
Here I was, alone with the world's most dreaded Red, one
of the acknowledged military geniuses of the century and
one of the greatest orators of all time. And I perceived that
he was nervous. He had never spoken into a microphone:
radio had not been developed in the Russia he had known.
He spoke of his 'bad English* and tried it out on me. We
went over phrase after phrase, he like a good student
marking every wrong accent and inflection as I corrected
him.
Halfway through he asked, politely, might he remove his
coat? He sat down before the 'mike* and tried his voice;
was it all right like that? I suggested his natural, conversa-
tional tone. 'You speak to millions, but to each man sep-
arately/ He agreed that oratory was not called for; he would
try to keep subdued.
He started quietly, without gestures. But as he warmed
up and this was his first public speech in five years or
more ! he was like a warhorse smelling powder. He raised
Trotsky's Copenhagen Broadcast, November, 1932
'Here I was, alone with the world's most dreaded Red, one of the acknowledged
military geniuses of the century and one of the greatest orators of all time'
Trotsky's Week Out 143
his voice; he gesticulated; oblivious of me and the empty
room, he thumped the table with his forefinger, clenched his
fist under the table, swung his arms as best he could. He
was in a visionary's world: a Savonarola, a Dan ton, talking
to imagined multitudes, as ' present ' in that tiny room as
they would be in a crowded hall.
I heard him again that night in an immense auditorium,
crowded to the doors. This time he spoke in perfect, almost
accentless German. His manner at that distance seemed
singularly simple, unrhetorical, almost didactic; yet the
accumulated logic of the facts was compelling. 'An aristo-
crat and an actor/ Stalin once called him in derision. A pro-
fessor and a hypnotist would describe him more truly. His
speech, like the broadcast, was a historical analysis of the
Russian revolution, nothing more. Pure theory; but it was
the theorizing of a clairvoyeur. I thought of the shabby
Bohemian I once saw in New York; I thought of the news-
paper-reading lounger familiar to the cafe waiters of Central
Europe before the war. I tried to think through the story
of the twenty intervening years. Had history ever been
made so fast before?
Less than a week later, this man one of the three or
four who more than any others have made the history of our
time was on his way back to his island exile, guarded as
before by the two comic men with black hats and stubbly
chins, rushed through France in another sealed train, to
spend another two years preparing that mythical Fourth
International. How, like a political werewolf, he was to be
hounded from country to country France, Norway, Mex-
ico still frightening timid souls; how, in the country he
helped to build, his name rightly or wrongly became
the symbol for political heresy and the 'treason' that sent
thousands to their deaths all this is too recent to need
repeating. Trotsky, at sixty, is still a young man. Has the
world drawn his sting?
XL NEW KINGDOMS FOR OLD
*JUST AN ORDINARY FELLOW*
I'M SURE I cannot understand it/ said George V to
the Archbishop of Canterbury, as they were walking in
the garden of Buckingham Palace, in the spring of 1935, 'for
after all I am only a very ordinary fellow/
They had been talking about the Royal Jubilee and the
overwhelming acclamations of the populace on that resound-
ing occasion. The Archbishop silently agreed with the
King's estimate of himself, as later on he confessed in the
same speech by which he revealed this rather intimate con-
versation. For he told his audience that the late British
Sovereign was 'not endowed with any conspicuous gifts of
body or mind' and had 'no fuller education than that which
was given to a sailor voyaging the sea.' And in the same
strain Stanley Baldwin, His Majesty's minister and friend,
spoke of George V as a modest man, 'diffident as to his own
powers, often wondering what his people thought of what he
had done and tried to do for them.'
Yet this 'simple and truly humble' man, whose personal
horizon was bounded by the daily routine of a dutiful civil
servant and the recreations of a country squire inordinately
fond of shooting, whose chief hobby was collecting the post-
age stamps of his own country, and whose literary and musi-
cal tastes hardly went beyond Sherlock Holmes and Balfe's
Bohemian Girl, came to fill the throne more completely than
it had been filled in centuries. George V was the first British
king who was obliged to call a Socialist to power, and early
in his reign he had surrendered the Sovereign's most highly
Kingdoms for Old 145
prized social prerogative to the designs of politicians. Never
before had monarchy been so stripped of even the vestiges
of power. Yet at the end of his reign an American com-
mentator was moved to reflect: 'How much wider is the in-
fluence of a British monarch today how much more per-
vading his personality than ever before in the history of
kings!' J King George, in truth, had given a new and wider
meaning to kingship, in an age when thrones were toppling
as never before, and only a bare remnant of reigning royalty
was left in the world.
In explaining this paradox it is of course necessary to con-
sider the radical changes in the social fabric that had fol-
lowed the Industrial Revolution and the World War, the
depreciation of aristocratic values, and the enthronement of
the bourgeois ideals of which King George and Queen Mary
were the most perfect protagonists. George V was the kind
of person that every genuine middle-class Briton would like
to be a family man with a love for children and animals,
a devotee of country life, simple in taste and suspicious of
intellectual pretensions, a hater of everything foreign and
sophisticated. It is because the King didn't try to be more,
because he was so obviously one of themselves, that the
people came to respect and admire him as they did.
GEORGE V DISCOVERS A NEW POWER
But that is not the whole story. Real affection does not
thrive on hearsay and symbols alone. If King George had
not been able to establish a direct contact with vast numbers
of his subjects, they could not have grown to love him like
a near relative and friend. As the first monarch in history
he came to be on 'speaking terms' with virtually the whole
English-speaking population of his realm and Dominions
by means of the all-pervading ether waves. It was the radio
that enabled him to make his nation into 'one great family,'
1 Raymond Gram Swing, in a transatlantic broadcast, January 1936.
146 Hello ^America!
with himself as the father; it was by means of the radio that
he established that sense of confidence which created a real
feeling of identity with the people. To the radio was largely
due the aura popularis which no previous constitutional
ruler ever enjoyed and which allowed him to practise by
sheer personal influence a statecraft which his earlier prede-
cessors exercised through power.
Perhaps even more than his predecessors King George in
his earliest approaches to his subjects was hindered by the
aloofness and formality which isolates all royalty from the
masses. Gradually he lowered these barriers, but especially
during the last decade of his life, when through quasi-direct
communion with the people he came to know and love them.
When, as Duke of York, he faced the cheering crowds he
spoke to them as his future subjects, and of the Duchess as
his 'royal consort.' When, near the end of his reign, he
addressed them by radio they had become his 'very dear
people' and the Queen his 'dear wife/
King George did not, like his more talented son Edward,
enjoy a long training as orator and after-dinner speaker.
He was thirty-six before he became heir apparent, and nine
years later he was King 'sucked into the swirl of political
controversy* within five years of the outbreak of the war. 1
During the short years of his apprenticeship he hardly did
more than read out the state speeches prepared for him by
sagacious but tradition-bound advisers. Even after his ac-
cession the King's few speeches, formal and prescribed, only
indirectly reached more than a small number of people.
The first time the whole nation heard his voice was in
1924, when, clad in the uniform of an admiral, he opened the
British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, near London. Al-
most a hundred thousand people were present in the flesh;
but millions everywhere listened to the speech of their King,
for it was the first time that radio had come to their aid.
It was probably the first king's speech ever to be broadcast
anywhere. It was a plain speech, with 'the Empire' for its
keynote, and there was only a passing reference to the * diffi-
cult conditions which still surround life in many parts.' The
1 Sir George Arthur: King George V (London, 1929).
Kingdoms for Old 147
following year he reopened the Exhibition for a second spell,
and then his voice was not heard again by the nation at
large until 1927.
He himself, though he had begun to get tempting fan
mail, discouraged too many repetitions of the experiment,
having a shrewd idea that a monarch must be heard and
seen by his people only on rare and important occasions.
But the B.B.C. officials persisted, and during the next two
years he was heard five times, opening new educational
buildings, docks, and bridges in various parts of the coun-
try. Late in 1928 King George fell seriously ill and his life
was despaired of. The astonishing demonstrations of gen-
uine anxiety, the long vigils outside the Palace gates, and
the pious gratitude which followed his recovery were a rev-
elation to the aging monarch, and there can be little doubt
that broadcasting had had a considerable share in creating
that immense wave of popular sympathy.
'THIS GREAT FAMILY*
By the time he was again able to speak in public, radio had
become world-wide, and the speech with which he opened
the Five-Power Naval Conference in 1930 was the first to be
heard throughout the world. A somewhat less formal tone
could be detected in the next two addresses, and when he
opened the King George V Dock in Glasgow the following
year he referred to 'my dear son, the Prince of Wales' in
unwonted accents of affection.
But the really personal note that was to knit his ties with
the people more and more closely came into his utterances
with the first Christmas Message in 1932. It had required
a good deal of persuasion to get him to do anything so un-
conventional and unprecedented as to address his people
without some particular public function to justify his * ap-
pearance/ But he finally agreed, and the necessary instal-
lations were made in his favorite palace of Sandringham,
148 Hello ^America!
where the royal family spent its holidays. Sitting in one
of the smaller rooms of that immense country residence a
room chosen by the engineers as being the most convenient
for the purpose he allowed himself to be instructed in the
intimate art of the microphone. Settling himself down at
the desk all he wanted was to be * comfortable* in his
chair he obediently read a few lines of his talk by way of
voice test, as indeed he did on every similar occasion after
that. The broadcasting official who remained with him (no
one else being present) explained the electric light signals
that had been arranged, and when the red light came on he
conscientiously started the speech, which so far as it is pos-
sible to ascertain he had written virtually alone, and which
as always he was anxious to hide until he had deliv-
ered it.
'I take it as a good omen/ he began prophetically, 'that
wireless should have reached its present perfection at a time
when the Empire has been linked in closer union, for it offers
us immense possibilities to make that union closer still/ He
then spoke of the great purpose in hand ' to regain pros-
perity without self-seeking and to carry with us those whom
the burden of past years has disheartened or overborne/
None of his previous speeches had been so full of sincere
solicitude, nor so intimate (the royal 'we* had been aban-
doned long ago). The Very ordinary fellow* felt that at last
he was talking not to bigwigs but to 'just ordinary fellows/
like himself. And he didn't mind revealing his inmost
thoughts.
1 1 speak now from my own home and from my heart to
you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the des-
ert, or the sea that only voices out of the air can reach them;
to those cut' off from fuller life by blindness, sickness, or
infirmity, and to those who are celebrating this day with
their children and their grandchildren to all, to each, I
wish a happy Christmas/
The Christmas Message, which by virtue of the newly
inaugurated Empire station of the B.B.C. had been heard
in all parts of the Empire, was an overwhelming success.
Thousands upon thousands of messages were received from
Kingdoms for Old 149
all over the world. Yet it took even more persuasion than
before to make the King repeat it the following year. The
resourceful young men at the B.B.C. had to think up some-
thing new. So for Christmas, 1933, they ' built' the most
elaborate intercontinental program that had ever been at-
tempted. It was called ' Absent Friends/ and it consisted
of a chain of messages which girdled the world, by means
of the various short-wave 'beam' services established be-
tween the different parts of the British Empire. London
would begin by calling Dublin; Dublin would reply, ending
with a Christmas wish, and would then call Bermuda.
Bermuda would repeat the process, with variations, and
so on through Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India,
South Africa, and back to England, where a Voice would
pass all the Empire's wishes on to the King. Who could
resist the temptation to reply to such an elaborate homage?
When King George finally spoke again from Sandringham,
to be heard by the whole Empire and indeed most of the
world, emotion was audible in his voice.
The response was such that, as a matter of course, the
Christmas Message became an annual event. So twice more
in his lifetime George V was able to speak to his peoples
direct. 'I should like to think,' he said in 1934, 'that you
who are listening to me, in whatever part of the world you
may be ... are bound to me and to one another by the spirit
of one great family. . . . May I add very simply and sincerely
that if I may be regarded as in some true sense the head
of this great and widespread family, sharing its life and sus-
tained by its affection, this will be a full reward for the long
and sometimes anxious labors of my reign of well-nigh five
and twenty years.' And this led up to his Jubilee Messages
a few months later, which in their genuine feeling and over-
flowing gratitude stand alone in the utterances of kings and
potentates.
'At the close of this memorable day I must speak to my
people everywhere,' he began his first Jubilee broadcast from
Buckingham Palace. 'Yet how can I express what is in my
heart? As I passed this morning through cheering multi-
tudes, ... as I thought of all that these twenty-five years
150 Hello ^America!
have brought to me and to my country and my Empire, how
could I fail to be most deeply moved? Words cannot express
my thoughts and feelings. I can only say to you, my very
dear people, that the Queen and I thank you from the depths
of our hearts for all the loyalty and may I say? the love
with which this day and always you have surrounded us/
It was at this point that his heart overflowed and the 'ordi-
nary fellow* spoke to the Archbishop as above.
He never forgot the children, and in this Jubilee Message
he said: 'To the children I should like to send a special mes-
sage. Let me say this to each of them whom my words may
reach: The King is speaking to you. I ask you to remember
that in days to come you will be the citizens of a great em-
pire. As you grow up always keep this thought before you;
and when the time comes be ready and proud to give to your
country the service of your work, your mind, and your heart/
It was perhaps his longest speech; yet the last one, within
a month of his death, was the most moving of all, because
there was in it an unmistakable premonition of the end. He
had now arrived at complete freedom of communion with
the great Unseen Family of which he felt himself a part
an 'ordinary fellow* among millions of his kind. That was
the new kingdom he had built for himself.
' My words will be very simple, but spoken from the heart,
this family festival of Christmas/ he began. 'How could
I fail to notice in all the rejoicings not merely respect for the
Throne, but a warm and generous remembrance of the man
himself who, may God help him, has been placed upon it?'
This was indubitably his very own speech no official
scrivener would have dared to prescribe these self-revealing
words. And this time, too, he thought ' not so much of the
Empire itself as of the individual men, women and children
who live within it/ as for the last time he sent his 'truest
Christmas wishes and those of my dear wife, my children
and grandchildren who are with me today/
It had been the climax of the most magnificent and truly
moving demonstration of unity of spirit that science and
showmanship had ever made possible. Every nation of the
Empire contributed its share individual messages from
Kingdoms for Old 151
grown-ups and children, from men in cities and in lonely
places, men and women at the farthest corners of the earth
projecting their thoughts to one point, to be flung out again
for millions everywhere to hear. Then the National Anthem
was sung by unseen choirs invisible to each other because
stationed thousands of miles apart but all melting into
one and to be heard by all. And then the quiet voice of the
King, an old man mellowed by life and at peace with his
God, saying words so simple and moving that every child
could feel their weight. No wonder men everywhere wiped
tears from their eyes and for a brief hour felt that the world
after all held better things things of which one had de-
spaired. Be that as it may, a new kind of kingship was born
or a very old one revived a conception of majesty fused
with paternity, in a world of human beings that are very
much alike.
Personally there was nothing so distinctive about King
George as his simplicity and his humanness. A gray-bearded
man well below average height, none too robust, with an
expression that betrayed no profound preoccupations or
speculations, and eyes that suggested a rather grumpy kind-
liness and a quiet sense of humor. He was meticulously at-
tired, but always in the unfashionable yet rather dressy
style that he had adopted long ago the Prince Albert
coat, the four-in-hand tie drawn through a signet ring, the
white carnation in his buttonhole.
Thus attired he came to the World Economic Conference
of 1932 to deliver the speech addressed to all the peoples
of the world and heard by most of them, for short-wave
voice communication by then was girdling the earth. For all
his sixty-eight years he stepped briskly to the raised plat-
form, flanked by his Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald
and M. Avenol, the Secretary-General of the League of
Nations. The representatives of sixty nations stood, while
he delivered his speech from a manuscript before him in a
clear, resonant, well-modulated voice. He bowed to them
with a comic little bow before he began; he bowed again at
the end, and walked off as briskly as he had come. It was a
set ceremony, allowing for no emotional display, yet a touch
152. Hello ^America!
of the quaint dignity of the little man was somehow touch-
ing. Here was a king, not by any quality of superiority but
because he represented the average man a man who as
any man of good average attributes could and did grow into
and beyond his job. A sympathetic figure, a gentle man,
not merely a 'gentleman/
He had the simple delicacies of the ordinary well-bred
citizen. An official who usually supervised his broadcasts and
saw to his comfort on those occasions would be allowed to
sit and chat with him before and after to pass the time
of day and talk about the current events. On one of those
occasions the King proffered what looked like a cigarette
case, but didn't open it. The official didn't know what to
do smoking wasn't the 'done thing' at these times. The
King proffered it again, and when again nothing happened,
a third time, probably enjoying an inward laugh. Finally he
explained the mystery: 'I want to give you my personal
Order, because you've always looked after me so well.' It
was the Victorian Order a much-coveted distinction, given
as you would give a boutonniere out of your garden to a
friend.
That, so far as I know, was his only 'personal' recognition
- except for the more or less official knighthoods of the
great new force that had given royalty a new function and
possibly a fresh lease of life.
The new kingdom that George V had created for himself
to use a trite but nevertheless fitting phrase in the
people's hearts, had every prospect of being held by his suc-
cessor, the first royal broadcaster in the world. But Fate
decreed otherwise: the most potent medium of communica-
tion between a ruler and his subjects was to be all but barred
from the next in line, namely George VI. An early malady
had impaired the new monarch's speech, and much of his
life had been spent in overcoming a difficulty which imposed
a degree of reticence unusual even for an Englishman. Yet
George VI as prince had with great fortitude fulfilled his
formal duties, and his voice had been broadcast a number of
times in connection with public functions of one kind or
another.
Kingdoms for Old 153
What he did on the evening of his coronation, however -
but a short time after his brother's amazing Farewell was
nothing short of heroism. Sitting at a microphone in Buck-
ingham Palace, fatigued by the ceremonial ordeals of the day,
he addressed the waiting millions in England and overseas,
many of whom must have listened with trepidation in their
hearts, for ten minutes or so, carefully pronouncing each word
and overcoming each obstacle by sheer mental effort, with
the psychological aids by which he had learned to conquer
emotional stress. Millions heaved a grateful sigh of relief
when it was over; and it is not likely that this astonishing
performance will be repeated except on exceptional occasions.
The Christmas message of 1938, though brief, was a flawless
performance.
The personalities of George and his consort are being pro-
jected to his peoples by every possible means of publicity,
and by subtle comparison with his father, whom he resem-
bles in many ways. Will he, a virtually silent king, be able
to retain what his father created by means of a voice?
THREE KINGS PLEAD FOR SANITY
Curious as it may seem, no other European monarchs
have made any extensive use of the radio, and certainly not
with a conscious purpose of cultivating a new relationship
with their peoples. There are eleven kingdoms left in Eu-
rope in place of the pre-war seventeen (not counting the
petty states of the old federal Germany). There is also
Hungary, a titular kingdom but not likely soon to have a
king, and the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. All of the remain-
ing rulers are constitutional monarchs, although a kind of
semi-absolutism, or quasi-royal dictatorship, has raised its
head in the Balkan countries. The only real dictator-king,
Alexander of Yugoslavia, fell victim to political assassina-
tion, leaving a regency in his place. It is a mere coincidence,
perhaps, that broadcasting is all but non-existent in the
154 Hello ^-America!
Balkans, except for Rumania. Neither King Carol nor
King Boris, so far as I know, has yet been lured to the radio.
Nor has the King of Italy ever been heard by his subjects,
except for the one time (1934) that the conventional reading
of the speech from the throne was broadcast from the Cham-
ber of Deputies, although Mussolini has allowed the Crown
Prince to help raise enthusiasm for the Abyssinian adven-
ture. There is an old joke about poor King Victor Emman-
uel's saying that his handkerchief is the only thing he is
allowed to put his nose into, and there seems to be no excep-
tion in favor of the microphone.
That narrows our inquiry down to the 'democratic* mon-
archies of the North and West. If none of the three Scandi-
navian kings has made much use of the radio, it is probably
because there is not much need for it. These three are the
most democratic countries in Europe, accepting the monar-
chial form as a symbol and safeguard of their independence
as a part of the mechanics of government: the King being
little more than a royal hat-peg for outgoing and incoming
prime ministers. Their thrones are safe, not despite but
because of their lack of power; too much self-assertion on
their part would only be likely to raise distrust. As it is, an
unobtrusive monarch on the throne is worth more than the
loudest dictator beside it. In Scandinavia the Crown would
almost certainly become the rallying-cry of the democrats
against any threat of a Fascist surge.
A concession to nationalism, the King is on a par with the
national flag, and just as the flags of the Scandinavian coun-
tries have the same design, varying only in color, so their
Kings are made of very much the same stuff (two of them
are brothers), and vary only in name. When they do speak
to the people, it is not so much to identify themselves with
their subjects as to identify the three countries with one
another, in the peaceful policy which has kept them out of
the European turmoil and their kings on the throne.
This was the underlying motive of one of the most remark-
able transmissions that have taken place since the beginning
of radio, namely the joint broadcast of the three Scandina-
vian Kings and the President of Finland, to assert the com-
Kingdoms for Old 155
mon interests and proclaim the unified policy of all the
countries of Scandinavia. The broadcast was simultaneously
radiated throughout the four countries, was listened to in
many parts of Europe, and was rebroadcast in the United
States by the two largest networks. Coming when it did, in
October, 1936, this combined Nordic declaration was a
counterblast to the aggressively nationalistic and autarch-
ical policies of other European countries, as well as an
answer to the pretensions of pseudo-Nordics further south.
Sitting in his sprawling palace overlooking the harbor of
Stockholm, lanky, seventy-eight-year-old Gustaf V, in whose
veins the blood of Napoleon's General Bernadotte is mixed
with that of the redoubtable Vasas of medieval Swedish
history, affirmed that the solidarity of the North is a vital
condition for its future happiness. 'In their common an-
cestry and language and their similar outlook on life and
culture, the Nordic peoples belong together/
In any other country of Europe such language used by
the head of the State would signify an aggressive boast, and
a militant warning of irredentist claims to come. In these
happier northern lands it meant just the opposite; it meant
a prospect for peaceful economic union and political collab-
oration. 'Our governments deliberate the same questions/
announced King Gustaf, 'and solve legislative problems to-
gether; social and industrial groups with practical or ideal-
istic aims co-operate with corresponding groups of the sister
nations' the very essence of that internationalism so
detested and feared by governments claiming a divine mis-
sion to order the welfare of their peoples! Echoing these
sentiments, King Christian X, sixty-six years old and every
inch a soldier, called for even stronger co-operation in the
future. His slightly younger brother, Haakon V of Norway,
expressed the wish that the hitherto largely cultural collab-
oration of the Scandinavian peoples be now extended to the
economic field.
Significant, too, was the inclusion of the Finnish republic
in this manifestation. Its President, Professor Svinhufvud,
in accordance with his age, spoke in second place, a recogni-
tion of the equality of status between kings and presidents.
156 Hello America!
He spoke of the Scandinavian co-operation 'in defense of
the common peace and neutrality of the North . . . which is
of double importance in these turbulent times' words of
prophecy and warning to Europe as a whole. The founda-
tions of Scandinavian neutrality were laid under the shadow
of the World War at the famous Malmo Conference of the
three Kings in 1914; now Finland, having gained her inde-
pendence, has joined the pact, and it was a sign of the times
that the second northern 'conference* took place not in
Malmo but in the air a reaffirmation of common interest
in the hearing of the entire world.
For the sake of completeness let me mention that the first
time in 1933 that King Christian of Denmark (and
Iceland) was heard by radio he spoke to the United States.
Invited to address Dano-Americans, he spoke from his Castle
of Amalienborg, in a program of Danish music and poetry
arranged by Statsradiofonien at my request.
KING ALBERTS LITTLE JOKE
The late King of the Belgians, Albert I, perhaps the most
familiarly democratic of modern monarchs, made no con-
scious effort to capture public sympathies by way of the
new medium, which indeed had its very first tryout in his
little country before the War. Albert was, it is true, in no
need of popularity after the experiences of that war; a more
sympathetic figure could hardly be found among the hered-
itary rulers of the war-torn Continent. Albert was, more-
over, intimately known to masses of the common people,
whose ordinary pleasures he shared. No lover of pomp, cere-
mony, and ostentation, he could be seen chugging along
roads of his country on a motorcycle, unattended, or clam-
bering up the modest mountain sides of his favorite Ardennes.
It was on one of these lonely climbs that he lost his life in
February, 1934. Any ambition to claim for himself more
than the ordinary man's stint of comradeship or popular
Kingdoms for Old 157
affection was foreign to his shy and hesitant nature. If his
advisers refrained from urging him, it was probably because
they realized that after the War, when Flemish nationalism
had become very sensitive, any speech that was not made
or repeated in Flemish would only detract from the pleas-
ant fiction that Albert was a representative national Belgian
monarch. (Albert's son has the advantage of his father in
this respect, for he speaks French and Flemish equally well.)
It therefore required an outside initiative to bring about
a broadcast by King Albert. Both the leading American
companies laid siege to the Belgian authorities, with the
benevolent acquiescence of the American Embassy, my own
efforts having begun in the summer of 1930. It took two
years for the project to mature. At last the Belgian Broad-
casting Institute prevailed upon the King to speak for five
minutes in a special program for America on the Belgian
Independence Day (Fete Nationale, July 21), consisting of
music by Belgian composers, both Flemish and Walloon,
and songs in both national languages. The King's language
problem was solved by the fact that he spoke excellent
English. In simple words he talked about his little country
and its gratitude to the American people who fed its popu-
lation during the War. It was this genuine feeling which at
last persuaded gallant Albert to speak to a foreign audience.
On the evening of the National Festival, microphone and
the usual gear had been installed at the summer palace of
Laeken, and the Director-General of Belgian broadcasting,
as well as a very distinguished radio engineer were in attend-
ance. It was all very simple; the King, in ordinary attire,
came in and had everything explained to him, while the
company stood rather stiffly about. He asked how loud
and how fast he should speak, so the engineer picked up the
manuscript and began to read the English text in an almost
unintelligible French pronunciation to demonstrate the vol-
ume of sound. The King listened attentively. When the
engineer finished he turned to him with a very faint twinkle
in his eye. ' Ah, comme fa,' he said, 'et avec le meme accent?'
(So that's the way! And must I speak with that accent,
too?')
158 Hello ^America!
Everybody laughed, and all stiffness had gone. The King,
however, was so nervous that his paper shook like the
proverbial aspen leaf, and he was obviously relieved when
it was over. It is not likely that it had given the King a
taste for broadcasting; at any rate, he was never heard again.
Sixteen months later, when microphones were once again
installed at Laeken, it was for Albert's funeral.
King Albert's successor, Leopold III, a gifted and pur-
poseful young man, has only been heard once when he
took his oath as sovereign in Parliament, and made an excel-
lent speech in French and Flemish, without the suggestion
of a foreign accent. I had the fun of translating that speech
as he was delivering it, phrase by phrase, for the benefit of
American listeners, but unknown to the King, for I was
sitting in a London studio, listening on earphones to the
incoming telephone circuit from Brussels and speaking into
a microphone connected to the transatlantic radio circuit
carrying his voice to New York. In other words, the transla-
tion was being filtered into the speech, using the natural
intervals between phrases that every deliberate speaker
makes. (This, by the way, was one of the rare occasions
when both rival networks carried my voice, despite compe-
tition, simply because there was nothing else to do.)
Tragedy was to overtake the headstrong young monarch
when a year and a half later his car overturned and his
beautiful Swedish consort, Astrid, was killed. He has the
reputation of being rather autocratic in his manner, and
the world has already had an indication of his active interest
in international politics.
WILHELMINA SPEAKS; JULIANA MAKES RADIO HISTORY
His near neighbor, the portly Queen Wilhelmina of the
Netherlands, discovered the radio as a means of reaching
her distant subjects in the East Indies a few years ago (1931),
when she sent them Christmas greetings via the short-wave
Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands discovered the radio as
a means of reaching her distant East Indian subjects
Princess Juliana accompanied her mother
Kingdoms for Old 159
station in Huizen. Dutchmen at home did not all relish her
speech to the same extent, for poverty was widespread at
the time and the Queen was a strong supporter of the de-
flationist policies of her Prime Minister, Doctor Colijn, a
very orthodox economist. 1 She was, however, heard again
on subsequent Christmases and on several occasions of per-
sonal import to the royal family. In 1934 the twice bereaved
Queen thanked the Dutch people for their sympathy on the
death of the Queen Mother and the Prince Consort; two
years later she announced the betrothal of Princess Juliana,
and she was again heard, throughout the world, in the
summer of 1937, when she addressed the Boy Scouts at their
Jamboree in Amsterdam in excellent English as well as
Dutch.
Her daughter, Juliana, has since her betrothal and mar-
riage to Prince Bernard repeatedly addressed her future sub-
jects by radio; she even made history by choosing this un-
conventional manner of taking them into her confidence on
a very personal matter, namely, the prospect of giving birth
to an heir.
'I should have been happy to attend all the festivities/
she said to the citizens of Amsterdam who had given her
and the Prince a cordial official welcome after their return
from abroad; 'but for joyful reasons of health which you
will all understand and approve I am prevented from
doing so/ And she was followed by the proud prospective
father, who also spoke his thanks for the great welcome.
This undoubtedly was the first time that any person, royal
or otherwise, has used broadcasting for the announcement
of a 'happy event/ and it points to the fact that in Holland,
at any rate, the efficacy of the radio in building up popu-
larity for the ruling family is well understood.
1 Queen Wilhelmina's speeches from the throne, at the traditional opening of
Parliament, by the way, have been broadcast annually since 1932, and have on
occasion been rebroadcast in America.
XII. ROYAL BROADCASTER
NUMBER ONE
THE 'PRINCE'S OWN' STUDIO
IN ONE of the small talks studios on the third floor of
London's handsome Broadcasting House, a bronze por-
trait plaque of Edward VIII adorned an otherwise empty
wall, ever since, as Prince of Wales, he began coming to these
studios to speak in aid of good causes.
It was from here that Edward's voice went forth to the
largest English-speaking audience which had ever listened to
a royal heir. It was here and in an even smaller studio at
the earlier B.B.C. in Savoy Hill rather than in the great
halls and the ornate public banqueting rooms, that he mas-
tered the peculiarly friendly manner with which he beguiled
the millions. It was here that he stirred up sympathy for
Britain's unemployed, appealed for playing fields for the
children, exhorted the country to care for its poor and dis-
tressed. And it was here that he was to introduce himself
to the Kingdom as its King and to the Empire as its Em-
peror.
The decorations of these rooms proclaim the strenuous
simplicity of the modernist plain fawn walls of sound-
absorbing celotex, a false window with cream and brown
curtains of severe design, soft woollen carpets to harmonize,
a table and chair for the speaker, two other easy chairs,
modern diffused lighting, the usual electric clock, thermostat,
and signal lights over the sound-proof door. A strictly
'functional' interior, after the radio engineer's heart. Ed-
ward liked coming to it quietly and simply 'no top-hats,
no fuss,' as he said for he preferred the businesslike broad-
\oyal broadcaster Timber One 161
casting machine to the sumptuous Victorian interiors of the
royal palaces, where his father had sat when addressing the
nation in lonely state.
But his radio experience did not begin at Broadcasting
House. It started with the very inception of broadcasting in
England, before there was any B.B.C. Edward VIII was,
in fact, the first royal broadcaster in the world. And the
story of his broadcasts is interesting because it reflects with
remarkable fidelity his extraordinary and, in the end, soul-
stirring career.
THE FIRST ROYAL BROADCAST IN HISTORY
He was still in his late twenties when broadcasting began.
In 1922 he had only recently returned from his eventful
journey to India when, as Chief Scout for Wales, he addressed
nearly sixty thousand youngsters Boy Scouts and 'Wolf
Cubs' by radio from St. James's Palace. The idea was
proposed to him by Lord Baden-Powell. Interested, as
always, in new and adventurous things, he accepted with
alacrity. It was a highly experimental and very informal affair.
The Marconi Company had erected the first London
station, 2LO, whose aerial was swung along the Strand,
from Marconi House to Bush House, where it aroused the
curiosity of passing crowds. Elaborate tests were necessary
the day before, and the Prince was exceedingly painstaking
under the supervision of the engineers in adjusting his
voice to the primitive and rather insensitive carbon granule
microphone. He entered into the adventure with zest, and his
brothers, later the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent, who came
to the Prince's study in York House, were fascinated specta-
tors. Everybody present felt that this was an historic
occasion, as indeed it was. 1
1 I am indebted for these details to Mr. A. E. Burrows, now secretary-general
of the International Broadcasting Union, who announced the Prince, and whose
book The Story of Broadcasting, (London, 1934) is dedicated to 'the first royal
broadcaster.'
1 62. Hello ^America!
The Prince did not make another studio broadcast for
three years. But many of his public speeches at dinners and
official solemnities were broadcast after 1924, and something
was happening to him that had not happened to any Prince
of Wales before: he was becoming genuinely popular not
so much in high society as with the common people over
whom he was destined one day to rule. He was, in fact, one
of the first public men to discover the power of the new
medium; he became one of the first to master its technique.
In any future history of broadcasting, the engaging figure of
Edward VIII must appear as that of an amateur who handled
the instrument with the skill of the professional. He applied
to it the free and easy manner of the after-dinner speech,
eschewed all oratory and high rhetoric, and as time went on
acquired the intimate and improvisational manner which
distinguishes the microphone speaker from the ordinary
speech-maker. Allowing for the difference in temperament
and nationality, his radio style became effective in much the
same way as that of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His diction differed decidedly from that of the average
cultured Englishman and reflected the influence of all sorts
and conditions of people with whom he mixed as a cadet,
as a midshipman afloat, and in the War. Oxford left no
impression on his speech; it was too transitory an experience.
But during the War he talked, day in day out, with common
soldiers British, Canadians, New Zealanders, cockneys,
yokels, all sorts for here he shed his shyness and became
an easy conversationalist. And so his speech became not so
much the ' King's ' English as the English of the common-
wealth citizen.
If Edward was quick to grasp the power of the radio, those
in charge of his career as national spokesman were not far
behind. The politicians who had been glad to exploit his
ability as 'good-will ambassador* and 'empire salesman '
now found a new method of widening the radius of his in-
fluence and they made the most of it. His speeches got
more and more publicity: after 1930 they were often heard in
America; soon after, in the whole empire as well. Up to 1933
he made an average of eight broadcasts a year. Then sud-
^Broadcaster T^umber One 163
denly the number dropped to two in 1934 and one in 1935
for reasons which were then known only to his intimates.
Many of these speeches were made, of course, on formal occa-
sions to which the appearance of royalty lends dignity; there
were bridges to be opened, new public buildings to be dedi-
cated, ships to be launched. These occasions fall to every
public man's lot; as often as not the speeches are prepared by
others. They would hardly be worth mentioning were it not
for the fact that in the Prince's case one could even here
detect a personal touch a happy informal phrase that
betrayed his humanness and a capacity to turn any
occasion to good account.
WAR, EMPIRE, REMEMBRANCE
It is at any rate remarkable how few of his speeches were
merely perfunctory. Like many other things in his career,
they indicated a certain insistence to decide things for him-
self, a 'wilfulness' which those in authority were to find so
inconvenient later on. A post-facto examination of his
utterances certainly reveal purpose and character, as well as
a real ability for felicitous expression. Equally illuminating,
perhaps, would be a list of the speeches he refused to make.
Through all those post-war years when Allied statesmen and
generals were unveiling monument after monument and
spouting eloquently of victory, this young scion of the House
of Windsor was going about the world speaking of the War
not in terms of glory but of reconciliation, compassion and
hope. The War, in fact, became less and less important, and
its memories receded before the impact of a new emotional
urge sympathy with the victims, and pity for the poor and
distressed.
However cynically sophisticated people might regard
public demonstrations of charity by royalty, there was, until
recently, no doubt in the common man's mind that the
Prince of Wales's preoccupation with the underdog was
164 Hello ^America!
genuine, and his efforts to alleviate suffering sincere. It was
different from the usual salving of the rich man's conscience
because it had its roots in real experience. The Prince was a
mere youth when he went, like thousands of other youngsters,
to satisfy his craving for adventure on the battle-fields of
France. He was twenty, but both in looks and in character
he was nearer eighteen. His eagerness to be 'in it* was
probably that of any average youngster, and he gave those
who were responsible for his safety some sleepless nights.
On one of his private excursions during the battle of Loos
he motored into a village near the front, left his car to go up
to the lines for a few minutes, and came back to find both car
and chauffeur blown to bits. The chauffeur was almost a pal;
he had been his servant at college in Oxford. The Prince
picked up the remnants of the man's belongings, carried them
back to headquarters tied in a handkerchief, kept them, and
on his next trip home restored them personally to the
chauffeur's family.
In the same year 1916 and probably with this tragic
incident in mind, he started a fund for the relief of the families
of those killed in action. By reason of his title he had already
acted as chairman of the first committee under the War
Pensions Act; and from the beginning had come to realize
that State aid would not suffice. 'Our special duties will be/
he said to the committee, ' to initiate schemes for training and
of finding active employment, and thus enable the men to feel
that they are still active members of the community.'
When he returned home at the end of the War, and the
mad whirl of his first empire tour was over, he had plenty of
opportunity to see what was happening to the men who
fought for the 'war to end war' and had come back to a
country 'fit for heroes to live in.' He had become patron of
the British Legion and he had heard the stories of the men.
In a broadcast appeal for the British Legion Fund (there are
no soldiers' 'bonuses' in Great Britain) he said:
'It is not only of those who laid down their lives that we
must think; we must never forget, at any time, both their
dependents and those others who, without losing life, lost
health and strength in the great struggle. There can surely
G I(pyal ^Broadcaster T^umber One 165
be no more sincere act of remembrance of the dead than an
act of service to those of their comrades who are today in
need.../
The word 'remembrance* had a special significance. At
Christmas time during the second year of the War, two
English clergymen founded a soldiers' club behind the lines
at Poperinghe, in Flanders. One of the two was the Reverend
Neville Talbot, whom the Prince had known at Oxford, and
the name of the club became 'Toe H,' the Morse version of
Talbot's initials. The Prince's division came into the Pope-
ringhe sector in 1916, and ever since then he has been identi-
fied with the movement which from a private work of two
kindly men, without funds, has largely through the Prince's
efforts become nation-wide, with clubs throughout the
country and in many parts of the Empire.
The movement is based on the idea of fellowship, and its
symbol is the lighted lamp. It caught the imagination of
England's young men. Every Armistice Day there are Toe
H 'festivals of remembrance' all over the country. In Lon-
don, where thousands gather in Albert Hall, the leader of
every new branch gets his lamp lighted from a central light
which year after year was held by the Prince of Wales. The
Festival of Remembrance was first broadcast from the
Albert Hall in 1927, and the Prince made a speech that
changed the meaning and tenor of Armistice Day celebra-
tions throughout the Empire.
'This Armistice Day,' he said, 'was once a day of rejoicing.
It is now a day of remembrance. The full sum of that remem-
brance not I nor anyone can express in words. ... In the
actual day of battle, every man who fought by our side was
our comrade and our friend. For nine difficult years we have
endured the inevitable consequences of war, and whether he
who fought by our side has fared better or worse than our-
selves, or whatever his luck may be, he is no less our comrade
and friend today.'
The Festival of Remembrance broadcast has become one of
the great occasions for reverent listening throughout England
and the Empire. The Prince, when he has not spoken words
of his own, has recited Laurence Binyon's verses, 'To the
1 66 Hello ^America!
Fallen/ with deeply moving effect. They begin like this:
'They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.'
On November n, 1936, he read them for the last time in
that great assembly, but this time they were not broadcast.
In 1937 he was no longer there.
But his presence at these gatherings, year after year, had
created a faith semi-religious, semi-chivalrous among
the war veterans and the millions whom the War had robbed
of all that was nearest and dearest to them a faith that will
not die while this generation lives. These people, whatever
else they may think about Edward, have no doubt that what
he said he meant.
DISCOVERING MISERY
Outside that charmed circle there has been a rising tide of
skepticism and resentment. More and more frequently the
question has been asked whether the great human note in the
Prince's career was not just part of a policy adjusted to the
needs of the time, was in any case induced by outside sug-
gestions of a more or less specious kind. The question has,
I think, been most convincingly answered by a dramatic
incident related to in Hector Bolitho's recent biography,
Edward VIII. It took place, not many years after the War,
in the poor section of a northern English industrial town,
where the Prince came face to face with stark misery and
destitution, such as he had never seen before.
After a day of depressing experiences he was taken to a soup
kitchen, and there, at close quarters, he saw how hundreds of
hungry men were fed. He watched silently, spellbound by
what he saw. Then, pointing to a young man standing in line
he said to his companion, in a shocked whisper, 'That man
\oyal ^Broadcaster Dumber One 167
has no shirt under his coat!' Later that night, returned to
his quarters, he was seen alone, walking up and down in great
agitation, pressing his hands together and saying, 'What can
I do? What can be done?'
That, in his biographer's words, was the real awakening of
the Prince's social conscience, although the suffering he had
seen in Flanders and in the hospitals and homes for crippled
veterans had already mobilized his sense of compassion. Now
he discovered that 'sympathy is not enough'; so instead of
merely acting as the patron of a great charity, the Lord
Mayor's Fund for distressed miners, he also insisted on going
to the mining areas 'to see for himself.' He mixed with the
people, talked to the men, asked questions, and tried to find
answers to their problems with the help of expert advisers.
More than that, he saw how the families lived, on the edge of
starvation, spoke to the children, comforted the wives. On
one occasion he asked a man about his wife and heard that
she was in the throes of death in the tiny bedroom upstairs.
' If you would hold her hand for a minute, sir, I think she
would never forget it,' said the man. Edward went up and
held the emaciated hand till a contented, almost happy
look came into the sick woman's eyes. There were many
incidents like that.
All this was in 1928 eight years before that fateful trip
to South Wales which was to be his last. Henceforth a new
direction was given to his broadcasting career.
Only twice before had he gone to the old B.B.C. studios to
make his charitable appeals; this time, with a cause he had
made peculiarly his own, he went to Savoy Hill on Christmas
night, to speak as he had never spoken before. The British
miners' leader at that time was Arthur Cook, a tough fighter
whose name was anathema to the upper classes and who had
led the bitterest strike in British history two years before.
'Never have I been so impressed,' said this doughty revolu-
tionary years afterwards, addressing the Prince at a public
gathering. 'I was with two Communist friends, and when
your name was announced . . . they undoubtedly scoffed.
But they listened to what you had to say, and when you
finished, with tears in their eyes, they put their hands in their
pockets and gave what they had on them to the fund/
1 68 Hello ^America!
UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL SERVICE
The miners of Wales and Durham are Britain's permanent
post-war calamity; but soon their tragedy was to spread its
shadow over the whole land. Depression, starting in America
in 1929, reached England in full force the following year:
unemployment rose to three millions, and a quarter of the
working population was idle for years. Under the stress
of this crisis, social service among the unemployed became
Edward's chief concern. To alleviate distress not only by
raising funds, but by organizing a Voluntary Service move-
ment which would save the out-of-work's self-respect and
keep him from becoming a human derelict, he gave unspar-
ingly of his time and energy, becoming more than ever the
acknowledged champion of the underdog. No royal heir
in British history had ever done anything like it before.
Broadcasting came to his aid. The B.B.C., to help the
movement, put on a series of talks entitled 'S. O. S.' by a
nationally popular broadcaster, S. P. B. Mais, and the Prince
went to 'his' studio in Broadcasting House to launch the
series with an eloquent appeal. There were, of course, many
difficulties. In the midst of the Depression in January,
1932 he made a now historic appeal for a reform of the
movement by 'splitting it up into small parts,' so that it
could relieve enforced idleness in villages and poor neighbor-
hoods by co-operative action. This remarkable speech, made
before a huge audience in Albert Hall and broadcast to the
nation, contained passages that are akin in spirit to those
uttered by another famous broadcaster raising his voice a
year or so later on behalf of the Forgotten Man in the United
States.
'There is/ he said, 'a certain doubt whether the social
progress of recent years has not, perhaps, been rather super-
ficial a feeling that, just as many a fine-looking house may
conceal a load of hire-purchase debt, so the better material
conditions that have been won may not represent a very
solid gain There is an enormous call at the present time
"Broadcaster Dumber One 169
for personal service The tasks are there, and every one of
us can play a part, for the race is not necessarily to the swift
nor the battle to the strong!'
That speech had the force of religious revivalism in it, and
the result was a nation-wide activity which went far toward
lifting the 'other half out of the slough of despond into
which it had been thrust. The Prince himself travelled up and
down the country, giving the lead to workers in many locali-
ties, mixing with the people as one of them and spreading
good cheer. At the end of two years he was able to ' report *
to the country in another speech one of the last important
utterances of his that were heard in America as well as in
England. Two thousand occupational centres had been or-
ganized, over a quarter million pounds had been subscribed,
$150,000 by the unemployed themselves in pennies and tup-
pences; clubs and camps had been set up and a new fabric of
social life had taken root, bringing sunshine into the lowliest
circles of the land. That new fabric is the Duke of Windsor's
living monument in the land he was born to rule.
The fellowship idea ran like a leit-motif through all his
activities. He was the Prince of good mixers, and that saved
his social work from the by-taste of condescension. He had
seen these men in the trenches in France; he saw them now
with their families crowded into wretched hovels and tene-
ments that passed for homes. Like no other social worker of
his time, he could compare the utmost luxury with the ut-
most squalor, and while with the gilded youth of his genera-
tion he partook of the giddiest social whirl, he didn't shrink
from the squalor when he saw it. 'We stand and talk,' said
George Lansbury, a Socialist leader who all his life has lived
in London's East End; 'he goes into the houses.'
Housing became a particular fetish with him. With the
impatience of youth he wanted to sweep away the slums, and
inevitably found many obstacles in his way. But, as with
other things, he sought expert knowledge (a sort of brain
trust had grown up about the Prince's staff) and then he
brought his revivalist's methods to bear on the problem. He
harangued the architects to devote themselves to the prob-
lem of mass production in housing; to build for the many
170 Hello ^America!
instead of the ' favored few.' He promoted the fund to build
homes near the big towns for ex-soldiers in memory of Mar-
shal Haig. When he opened the first London group of
one hundred and twenty-three houses, his words once again
were broadcast and new support enlisted.
The practical results of his broadcast appeals for these
movements was, of course, immeasurable; the returns to
charity, in cold cash alone, must have been tremendous. Nor
could the Government of the ruling classes quarrel with him,
for his activities raised the morale of the unemployed, and
eased the constant pressure for more doles; it gave new
hope to the sorely tried working classes and the disillusioned
ex-service man. On the other hand, the cause of the dis-
inherited part of the nation became almost an obsession with
the Prince, and must have been unwelcome to the 'hard-
boiled' industrialist by focussing too much attention on bad
working conditions, wretched housing and the like.
He visited area after area in the most depressed sections of
the country in Durham, in Scotland, in Wales and his
words after a thorough investigation of actual conditions
contrasted sometimes inconveniently with the complacent
remarks of parliamentarians. Before each visit he would
prepare himself by study and consult people with special
knowledge of the subject. He would address proud mayors
and self-satisfied citizens and tell them always to look for-
ward to the 'great occasion when the whole country is clear
of slums.' He would have awkward impulses to vary official
programs by insisting on seeing the seamy side. When his
speech opening the new Severn Bridge was broadcast in 1932
he calmly announced that there was one place he would visit
that was not on the program the centre for the unem-
ployed. When he was taken to see the great ship Queen Mary
just before she left her Tyneside berth, he told his top-hatted
reception committee that he also wanted to see the Glasgow
slums said to be some of the worst in the world. And when
he had seen them he asked how a civilization that could
produce this great ship could tolerate such squalor.
al broadcaster Dumber One 171
'LECTURING* BIG BUSINESS
Another phase of what Basil Maine x calls the Prince's
'crusade' was his drive for more modern methods in industry
and commerce, which got world-wide publicity and ap-
plause, and earned him the epithet the 'Empire's chief
salesman.' Indeed, the commercial Pooh-Bahs had every
reason to be delighted with some of the results of his crusade.
When he launched the 'Buy British' campaign, or when,
during his trip to South America, the city of Buenos Aires
signed a British contract for the materials of a $50,000,000
underground railroad, they applauded, and took a little
advice into the bargain. When in the hearing of the entire
country he told the cream of the British business world at
the British Industries Fair dinner in London that they must
learn to 'adopt, adapt, and improve,' a great chorus of
bravos went up in the press, while the Prince was being
quoted and toasted in the clubs. They even put up with his
flattering references to the methods of American business!
But when he took his job too seriously and told the as-
sembled sales managers of Great Britain that 'all is not well
with our salesmanship,' they applauded with less enthusiasm,
and some members of the older generation certainly felt the
sting when he asked: 'Has Britain taken any steps to make
good the promise of the men who would today be organizing
business but for the fact that they are lying beneath the sod
of many countries?'
Whooping up business was all very well, but this was a
different note, which didn't fit into the go-getter's tune. For
the thought of the ' comrades ' the Prince met in France, the
chaps who first made him come out of his shell, was never
very far from his mind. The big manufacturers and manag-
ing directors were being lectured not merely for their own
good . . .
When the whole story of Edward's estrangement from his
countrymen comes to be written, this feature of his develop-
1 Basil Maine, Our Ambassador King, London, 1936. ,
1 7 2. Hello ^America!
ment must not be overlooked. At any rate, it is a fact that
after 1931 he dropped the role of business counselor, and,
except for his favorite charities, confined himself to that of
good- will ambassador. His 'Americanism/ moreover, was
rinding an outlet in a more private and social sphere
Most of the Prince's broadcast speeches, beginning with a
relay of a Clydebank launching in 1930, have been rebroad-
cast in the United States. No foreign broadcaster, public or
private, professional or amateur, had the ear of the American
public as consistently as this perennially youthful and
attractive 'star/ His famous curtain lecture to the sales
managers; his gingering-up talk to the British manufacturers;
his opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, with its
graceful acknowledgment of American generosity; his un-
veiling of the Somme Memorial in France; his S.O.S. talk on
unemployment; and finally his appeal for 'voluntary service '
in January, 1934, were a few of those that were heard by even
more American than British listeners.
Then, suddenly, something happened. After that last
'voluntary service* talk came a strange silence; he was not
heard again, except for one routine appeal, until 1936, after
his father's death, when once again he went to Broadcasting
House this time to introduce himself to his peoples as King
and Emperor. Except for one other brief obligatory talk, this
was his one and only microphone appearance in over two
years. What had happened in these two years to his public-
spirited activities? What had become of his ardent pre-
occupation with social service, with the unemployed? Dis-
tress in Durham and Wales was still severe; had Edward's
sympathy waned?
If it had, the doubters and the skeptics had perhaps been
right after all; for nothing but a mental aberration or a
cataclysmic emotional experience could blot out the
memory of two decades of genuinely vital activity. But we
now know that a matter of great personal urgency had
supervened. We know, too, that things happen to people
which change the whole course and purpose of their lives
things which shatter the very mainsprings of human volition,
and turn perfectly rational men and women into psycho-
III!
B. B. C.
March, 1936, when for the first time a reigning British king
came to Broadcasting House to speak
'Although I now speak to you as the King, I am still the same man . . /
broadcaster Dumber One 173
physiological phenomena of the strangest kind. And that
is the kind of thing that had happened to Edward. He had
fallen victim to a passion that blotted every other interest out
of his life.
Nothing but such an experience could explain the change
that had come over Britain's favorite son. Report had it that
during his father's last illness he had got completely out of
hand, that is, unapproachable by those who had the most
valid claims of friendship and loyalty. King George's death
brought to a head a crisis of which only the vaguest reports
gave an inkling to the outer world. It was nearly two months
before Edward VIII could be persuaded to declare himself,
in the hearing of all the world, as a sovereign who intended to
reign.
KING EDWARD CALLS THE EMPIRE
It was a pleasant though chilly Sunday afternoon in
March, 1936, when for the first time a reigning British king
came to Broadcasting House to speak. He arrived in an or-
dinary motor car unguarded. With his usual brisk step
and the same nervous, jerky gestures as always, he walked
into the little studio which had become recognized as his own.
The speech he made heard by many millions throughout
the world was short and singularly detached. The only
significant thing in it was his assurance that ' although I now
speak to you as the King, I am still the same man . . . ' It
might have given some people pause. Many others, more-
over, detected a new and strange note in his voice. The use
of the phrase 'over the radio' was definitely an Americanism,
almost unknown in the British Isles; and the short 'Ameri-
can* a in the word 'broadcast' gave the English purists a
shock.
Outside, on the street, a few hundred people had collected
to see him off. A handful of policemen good-naturedly
pushed them back to make a lane for the royal car. The
174 Hello ^America!
King bowed, doffed his hat to acknowledge the cheers. No
one could have guessed that it was for the last time. The
following July he went to France to unveil the Canadian
monument at Vimy Ridge; a few days later he was on his way
to that blissful Adriatic cruise with the woman he loved.
In the autumn, after his return to England, he suddenly
bethought himself of his one-time charges, the Welsh miners,
forgotten these two years or more. Someone had jogged his
memory, perhaps. But his old advisers official and
private had not had his ear for months, it was complained,
though matters of state were crowding in upon him with ever
increasing urgency. Who, then, persuaded him to make that
sudden, unprecedented, and according to some 'un-
constitutional* dash to South Wales, to promise his under-
nourished friends that 'something will be done'? In other
circumstances such a trip, by the reigning monarch, might
have caused Britain's toiling millions to rise to him like one
man. Was that the purpose behind the trip? If it had
' worked/ a great national appeal, a new clarion call by radio,
was the next indicated move.
But it was not to be. The effort, mildly applauded by the
Opposition press, raised a vaguely discordant chorus of
comment. The workers, for some reason, were not impressed.
The radio remained silent, while Edward waited at Fort
Belvedere and Mrs. Simpson in her mansion at Regent's
Park. The 'clarion call' would have fallen on empty air. The
royal broadcaster remained silent.
***********
The portrait plaque which adorned the little broadcasting
studio is gone.
PART TWO
Events
XIII. RADIO GETS THE NEWS
ENTERTAINMENT VERSUS NEWS
INFORMATION, instruction, and entertainment are ac-
knowledged to be the principal functions of radio; but
the greatest of these, by common consent, is entertainment.
This at once sums up radio's similarity to journalism, and
a vital difference between the two.
The newspaper, through centuries of evolution and de-
velopment, has achieved a certain balance between these
three main departments, but there is no doubt that here
information takes precedence over the other two. No merely
instructive article or entertainment feature would in ordinary
circumstances replace information; that is, news. In broad-
casting, however, none but the most urgent or important
news would even displace temporarily a program designed
to entertain. This distinction determines the present place
of broadcasting in the social scheme. It limits its function
as a carrier of news, the more so since its basis of measure-
ment is Time, while that of the newspaper is Space. The
newspaper can expand in size, according to necessity; radio
is forever bound by the twenty-four hours of the clock.
It cannot, like the newspaper, add time to its schedule; it
must defer news until, in some cases, it is no longer news.
Radio is by far the faster medium, and it has much the
greater scope; yet it surrenders to the newspaper its right
of priority in news distribution, except in sensational cases
when the demand so outruns supply that competition is
suspended for the time.
In the field of foreign news the handicap imposed on radio
178 Hello ^America!
is even greater, partly by reason of the censorship to which
most of the world supinely submits, partly because of
mechanical limitations, and the lack of adequate facilities
at the present stage of development. Hence international
broadcasting hitherto has mostly been content to supple-
ment, rather than originate, the news. Actual news-beats by
radio are rare and therefore thrilling occurrences, of which
broadcasters are inordinately proud.
An early instance of such a beat was the transatlantic
radio talk by J. Ramsay MacDonald, then British Prime
Minister, from Chequers, the week-end retreat of British
premiers, in March, 1930, in which he finally killed France's
hopes of collective security based on military guarantees.
This talk was one of the series on the London Naval Con-
ference, arranged by Frederick William Wile. Another
momentous pronouncement by radio was that made by
Henry L. Stimson, the American Secretary of State, from
London the following month, already noted in Chapter I.
Great hopes were set on the World Disarmament Con-
ference of 1932 by broadcasters as well as by the world
at large. By this time both American companies had per-
manent representatives in Europe, and there was assembled
at Geneva a group of six radio people representing the two
principal American chains. Yet so little real news emerged
that after five weeks activities were suspended by all. The
radio commentators competed with each other but not with
the newspapers, and were content to parade the voices of
eminent statesmen Tardieu, Simon, Grandi, Benes, Cecil,
Madariaga, etc. pouring forth more or less wishful
platitudes. The opening speech of honest 'Uncle Arthur'
Henderson, an aging, red-faced British ex-workingman, who
had risen to be foreign minister without ever travelling far
beyond his favorite Brighton, raised hopes of peace in
millions of American hearts, but spread boredom among the
cynical delegates and journalists of the fifty-odd nations
in the hall of Geneva's Batiment Electoral.
\adio Cjets the TSfews 179
DOCTOR YEN ARRAIGNS JAPAN
A real scoop, however, was scored by radio a fortnight
later, when Doctor W. W. Yen, the Chinese Foreign Min-
ister, made his famous indictment of Japan at the ex-
traordinary session of the League of Nations Assembly to
adjudicate the Manchurian dispute. Indignation over
Japan's aggression at the very time when the nations were
supposed to be trying to outlaw war was such that the
Disarmament Conference was shouldered out of the lime-
light for a time. The session opened on March 3 in an at-
mosphere of tense expectation suffused with almost universal
hatred of Japan. The assembly room of the old 'Palais
Wilson* was packed; the press of the entire world was there
with pencils sharpened to needle-point, when M. Paul Hy-
mans, Belgian Foreign Minister, opened proceedings at
4.40 P.M.
Special significance attaches to the hour, which was con-
siderably later than that originally scheduled. Never before
in the history of the League had its proceedings been broad-
cast, and it was important to consider the time difference
between the continents. Frederick William Wile, then in
charge of Columbia's interests at Geneva, had reserved the
hour of five to six for the transatlantic transmission, and had
persuaded both Hymans and Yen to delay proceedings so
that America would lose nothing essential. The elderly
Doctor Yen, handsome even according to European concep-
tions and the very personification of dignity, rose, looked at
the clock, and began to read a sheaf of telegrams about the
situation in Shanghai. He then asked the translator to re-
read them in French, while the clock crept up to 5 P.M. and
past. Wile, in a broadcasting booth near the platform, de-
scribed the historic scene to the American audience: for the
first time a great nation was being brought to the bar of a
world parliament for aggression. Then, for fifty minutes or
so, grave, Harvard-bred Doctor Yen pilloried Japan in
impeccable 'American/ piling evidence upon evidence with
180 Hello ^America!
relentless logic. Thus, for once, the text of an important
public document was known to American listeners before it
could be printed anywhere in the world.
The further sequence of events, leading from calamity to
calamity, and one of the greatest human tragedies of history,
is only too well known to require comment here: that after-
noon, however, the mantle of virtue hitherto assumed by the
Japanese Government dropped from them for good and all,
and their collaboration with the world's civilized nations was
for the time being at an end. Broadcasting had given
the world a glimpse of Woodrow Wilson's open diplomacy
which even its exponent could not have foreseen.
THE 'KIDNAPPING' OF AMELIA EARHART
While the Disarmament Conference at Geneva was still
news, while republican Germany was swaying to its death,
perilously poised between the alternatives of restoration and
Nazism, and I was still in Berlin pondering the mysterious
words of the Kaiser's confidential Baron (as told in Chapter
VIII), news reached me of the sudden take-off of Amelia
Earhart from Floyd Bennett Field near New York on the
first solo transatlantic flight since Lindbergh's spectacular
exploit five years before. Fascinating as the stewing of the
political cauldron was at this time, this daredevil adventure
at once focussed public attention on an adventure which,
if successful, would make history of a more cheerful kind.
Here was an opportunity for the transatlantic radio to catch
news 'on the wing/
When Charles A. Lindbergh made his historic flight in
1927, radio was still in its infancy and international broad-
casting played no part in spreading news of the event.
When four years later Wiley Post and Harold Gatty flew
from New York to Berlin, the N.B.C. was able to interview
the fliers on their arrival at Tempelhof Field, and soon such
transatlantic news-casting was bound to become a common-
*S(adio fyts the *K[ews 181
place, whenever the aviator was lucky enough to land where
he intended to land. But here was a case where the chances
of disaster were so high that a happy landing would be big
news. And the human interest element was as great as the
element of chance. It was as daring an exploit as was ever
undertaken by a member of the ' weaker* sex.
As Earhart's announced objective was Paris, I telephoned
an order for transmission facilities to be installed at Le
Bourget, took a fast Farman plane, and arrived at the
French airport after a bumpy ride, only to find that the
gallant Amelia had been forced down in a remote spot in
northern Ireland, out of reach of any respectable telephone
line. Thence she was trying to reach Croydon, the great
London airport, as soon as her machine could be repaired.
My resourceful secretary actually got into personal touch
with her through Londonderry, while I took off again, on a
dismally foggy morning, from Le Bourget to join a helpful
friend, Raymond Gram Swing, already keeping watch at
Croydon. Once again microphones and transmission gear
were in place.
Meantime the 'Lady Lindy' had taken off again, not in
her own damaged plane but that of an enterprising news-reel
company which had flown to her aid in the hope of getting
exclusive pictures. We hurriedly made an alliance with the
newsreelers and were promised co-operation.
At Croydon the greatest confusion reigned. Newspaper
reporters, sound-film operators, and a miscellaneous lot of
official and unofficial welcomers crowded the airport. Our
engineers were ready; we were in touch with New York;
American listeners were waiting. But no sign of the heroine.
A rumor began to buzz that she would come down or be
set down, since she was no longer her own pilot some-
where else. We queried the operators of the news-reel com-
pany which owned the eagerly awaited plane about this; to
convince us they calmly pointed to their own sound-truck,
standing there ready to 'shoot/ We had no reason to doubt
their word; yet the rumor persisted and the Croydon officials
were at their wits' ends. When the crews of the competitive
news-reel trucks were getting restive, we began to see light.
1 8 2. Hello ^America!
Knowing that the American Ambassador would have to
receive Miss Earhart officially, we telephoned to the Embas-
sy, and here an official revealed that the Ambassador had
left not for Croydon but for Hanworth, a private club air
field to the northwest of London, where the aviatrix was ex-
pected to arrive at any moment! Not a newspaper, not an
official knew this; in fact not even Miss Earhart knew it;
she had, in fact, been temporarily ' kidnapped ' by the clever
news-reel people, in order to score a beat.
By a lucky chance we found a top-hatted gentleman who
was personally commissioned to receive her, with a fast car
and a good chauffeur. He was in a panic. In return for our
sensational information he took us aboard and we drove hell-
for-leather around the outskirts of London, minding no
speed limits and arriving at the club gates just as Earhart
was sighted. We found them closed and guarded; the news-
reel people had done a thorough job. Almost literally crashing
the gate, we ran onto the field as the plane appeared in the
west, against the rays of the setting sun. The Ambassador's
car was waiting in front of the clubhouse, ready to rush the
distinguished lady in her flying kit to a 'welcome dinner'
at the Embassy, for it was getting near to eight o'clock. But
the Ambassador, old Andrew Mellon, was a radio-minded
man, having permitted his almost inaudible dulcet voice to
be transmitted across the Atlantic on various patriotic
occasions. I told him that for once Broadcasting House
would have to take precedence over the American Embassy,
and that listeners throughout the length and breadth of the
United States were all agog to hear the 'Lady LindyV voice.
The aged Ambassador submitted meekly, and his chauffeur
drove us to town in the Embassy car. So for the second time
that day the intrepid lady was kidnapped this time to
make a radio fans' holiday.
The diplomatic flag helped us to make speed, and we
reached Broadcasting House by eight o'clock four hours
later than the scheduled broadcast. All day long the wires
had hummed between London and New York, as the arrival
was postponed and postponed. But no amount of engineer-
ing magic would have made it possible to set up facilities at
Broadcasting House opened its portals to receive Amelia
Earhart, heroine of the year, and let her speak to America
\adto (jets the TS[ews 183
Hanworth in time for the arrival; all our beautiful equipment
in Croydon had to be sent home, as had been done at Le
Bourget the day before an illustration of the hurdles
radio must take in order to get real news.
As it happened, the delay with frequent bulletins issued
to listeners through the day increased the tension and
made the broadcast more valuable. It was a Sunday, too,
and many millions of people must have been listening in
their homes. Only once before had the Atlantic been flown
solo, and never had anything comparable been accomplished
by a woman. It was a chance for the eagle-hens to scream.
The bareheaded 'Lady Lindy' in her breeches and leather
blouse was cool and self-possessed. Boyish, yet graceful in
her movements, she fairly jumped out of the car and into
the lift. Her resemblance to Colonel Lindbergh was arrest-
ing. The slender figure, the long, rather rugged face with the
deep-set, poetic eyes, the large, full-lipped mouth, and the
tousled crop of blond curls made her as engaging a figure as
I have ever seen.
Owing to the news-reel company's 'hoax' there wasn't
a soul to receive us, not a newspaper person in sight. Broad-
casting House, being all but asleep on Sunday, opened its
portals to receive the heroine of the year, let her speak to
America but no one even thought of seizing the chance
for British listeners. x
The experience of interviewing her at the microphone gave
me one of my real thrills. She answered impromptu questions
simply and without hesitation, told of her difficulties with
the engine manifold, the leak in her petrol gauge, the failure
of the altimeter, the ice forming on her wings, her flying
'by trial and error' all night, and hitting Ireland by guess.
'I realize that this flight means nothing to aviation,' she
said. ' Such crossings will become commonplace though
possibly not solo ones.'
Earhart's candid modesty, her charm, and the smile
which lighted up her handsome features were irresistible.
As I write this the search for her in the watery wastes of the
1 Two nights later she was persuaded to talk a few minutes in the 'news' broad-
cast period. Everything in its time is the British motto.
184 Hello ^America!
Pacific is still going on but hope is practically abandoned.
She was of the stuff of which heroes are made.
LA COUPE DAY IS
There is just one department of news in which broad-
casting is supreme, and that is sport. By no possible means
can any other method of reporting beat the c news-caster '
when, opposite a goal, or in the grandstand at a football
game, he gives the result with hardly a second's delay, and
at the same moment a million fans are in possession of the
facts. The broadcasting of sporting events has become,
wherever radio exists, a boon to the stay-at-home.
Transatlantic broadcasting entered this field as soon as
short-wave transmission had reached the practical stage.
The Derby, run on Epsom Downs in June, 1930, was the
start. Then came the Grand National at Aintree; the
Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames; tennis at
Wimbledon; and finally St. Andrews and the other battle-
grounds of championship golf. Tennis and golf presented
the most difficult problems, because it was obviously im-
possible to keep a transoceanic channel open for hours. So
we had to guess, as shrewdly as possible, when the decision
might come, and reserve ' strategic* quarter-hours on a
chance. The first time we did this from the Continent was
for the famous Challenge Round of the Davis Cup matches
at the Stade Roland Garros near Paris, in the summer of
1932. The United States, with Ellsworth Vines, Frank
Shields, Wilmer Allison, and John Van Ryn, faced France,
the holder of the Cup. On the last day the score stood two
matches to one in favor of France, with two more to be played.
The decision might come either in the fourth or fifth match,
and anywhere within the space of two hours. A half-hour
period was all we could get for broadcasting to America.
The French radio men whom we asked for * facilities'
probably thought it was a harebrained scheme. At any rate
\adio (jets the Ifyws 185
they couldn't have taken it very seriously, to judge from
the place they assigned to us, on top of the uppermost roof
of the stadium a mere parapet, crowded with news-reel
men and press photographers. Anyone with the slightest
tendency to giddiness might have fallen to his death. How-
ever, we considered ourselves lucky to have been admitted
at all when we heard that Mr. Davis, the donor of the Cup,
who had either forgotten his badge or couldn't pronounce
Davis in French, was turned back by the stern guardians of
the gate!
Our case was much more serious; we were just radio men
with nothing to prove it. The American sporting expert who
had been appointed to cover the match for Columbia had
suddenly disappeared, complete with admission tickets,
broadcasting permit, and all, and wasn't discovered till days
after the match, recovering from something or other, in the
American Hospital. The stadium was jammed and tickets
were rarer than hens' teeth. Luckily I found John R. Tunis,
one of America's leading tennis writers, in Paris; to help me
out, he took over at a few hours' notice, and that was, so far
as I know, his entrance into radio. Tunis and I literally
fought our way to our perch (for there is no one more skeptical
than a Frenchman guarding a gate) ; found our microphone,
and, flanked by noisy chatterers, did a quick-fire commen-
tary through cupped hands.
But luck was with us. Our half-hour period began in the
fourth set of what turned out to be the decisive match, be-
tween the two veterans, Borotra and Allison. Allison, at
5-3, appeared to be winning, but Borotra (who had un-
expectedly beaten Vines on the first day) was the hero of the
crowd, who were shouting 'Borocco! Borocco!' with savage
enthusiasm. Twice Allison had been within a point of
victory. In the tenth game, within a point of drawing level,
Borotra split a tennis shoe but was obliged to fight on, losing
three points and making it deuce. Then he appealed to the
umpire and was allowed to change his shoes, which he did
very leisurely, sitting on a ball-boy's back. Both men were
highly wrought up, the crowd in an ugly mood, while
thunder clouds darkened the sultry sky.
1 86 Hello ^America!
Despite his rest, Borotra lost the vantage point to Allison,
who was for the third time within an inch of victory. Borotra
then served what looked like a double fault. We broadcast
America's ' victory/ and Allison gleefully threw nis racket in
the air. But the linesmen kept ominous silence: the ball was
declared good. The crowd cheered and jeered and
Allison began to lose his nerve. Borotra summoned his
.remaining strength it was the last great 'chance of his
career winning game, set, and Davis Cup for France.
A terrific roar went up: it was the last flare-up of France's
tennis supremacy. We were so excited that we lost track of
the time; so we kept right on, hoping that America was
hearing us somehow. Our half hour was up it was a
matter of minutes: had we been cut off, according to the
inexorable broadcasting schedule?
Twenty minutes later a cable was handed up the vertical
iron ladder. New York, too, had listened with bated breath,
had allowed the program to run over. So they had every-
thing, including the sad news. America had taken a licking,
but we had made radio history.
Soon transatlantic tennis commentaries became obliga-
tory; today they are regular features of the summer schedule
both in England and America.
OLYMPIC GAMES ON THE AIR
But it was the Olympic Games of 1936, in Germany, that
provided the biggest sporting event to date. No such elabo-
rate broadcasting arrangements had ever been made before.
Not only were the games being broadcast nationally, but
they were being transmitted to some forty other nations of
the world. It was not just a case of * feeding ' one commentary
to all: each country had to be served in its own language, by
its own sports commentators; each country had its particular
pet events, in which its own athletes excelled. Thus America
concentrated on track events, and the diving of its girls;
(jets the T^ews 187
the Japanese on running and swimming; the Finns on
Marathon; the French on bicycling and boxing; the British
on rowing. Only the Germans were interested in practically
everything, but particularly in javelins, weights, and any-
thing that could be thrown.
Great organizers that they are, the Germans in charge of
the Games made a great point of efficiency, and everything
went practically without a hitch. As for 'broadcasting, they
built five additional short-wave transmitters, bringing the
number up to eight, working on eighteen frequencies directed
to every part of the world, thus providing the most magnif-
icent service to the nations concerned and, incidentally, the
biggest propaganda machine in the world for themselves.
The Olympic Games were not only the Nazis' greatest
'circus' to date, but the prestige to be derived from it was
regarded as a matter of life and death.
Radio provided not only the instrument for news-dis-
tribution and the gingering up of morale, but for the mar-
shalling of crowds. This regimentation by means of the
ubiquitous loud-speaker especially in Garmisch, where
arc-light standards and flagpoles were endowed with a
mechanical voice gave one an idea of the uses to which
this new gift to man might be put in time of war.
One night, when the Winter Olympics were in the first
stage, I witnessed a weird and sinister scene; thousands of
workmen were hurriedly completing the immense Nazi
amusement hall, the Kraft durch Freude headquarters, put
up in eighty-eight days for the entertainment of the German
proletariat during the two weeks of the Games. It was dark,
except for the piercing shafts of light from the projectors at
the four corners of the field, and the snow was falling thickly.
The men moved silently, in long files, carrying beams and
materials; others, like giant ants, were swarming to their
tasks. And from a loud-speaker somewhere came the bel-
lowing voice of the invisible overseer urging them on ...
It gave me the creeps; it was Wagner's Nibelheim scene
enlarged to gigantic proportions and transposed to the sur-
face of the earth.
But there were things of beauty, too. A kindly nature had
1 88 Hello ^America!
provided the much-needed snow at the eleventh hour; and
Garmisch, gay with the colors and costumes of all the nations,
was turned into fairyland. The great ski stadium, a white
arena built against a steep wooded mountain side, with its
giant ski-jumps, its flags and its Olympic fire, was a never-
to-be-forgotten sight. During the closing ceremony, timed
with unerring showmanship at the fall of night, a team of
eight skiers, at the word of command, gathered in the giant
Olympic flag white, with the five colored rings represent-
ing the continents of the earth. Spread horizontally between
them, they rushed it at breakneck speed down the mountain
side, while a moving floodlight made it the one luminous
object in the vast natural arena. To the playing of the
Olympic Hymn, the tolling of bells and the gradual dying
down of the Olympic fire, the immense crowd stood, electri-
fied. That was one of the most beautiful spectacles it has been
my fortune to see from a broadcasting booth or anywhere else.
The summer games in Berlin, though more gigantic in
scope, were an emotional anticlimax after this poignant
close, but for two weeks they kept at least a half-dozen
American broadcasters in one mad whirl. I can remember
only a few sensational and some absurdly funny things. I
remember Ted Husing's tour de force in describing, for
American and British listeners, that incredible 2oo-meter
dash won by the American negro, Jesse Owens (who also
won the 100 meters and the long jump and was in fact the
hero of the Olympics, but was not invited to shake Hitler's
hand). Ted, in reporting that race while it was being run
way down in the bottom of that immense bowl, not only
described the runners and their style, but every change of
relative position, spotted changes of pace, forecast the re-
sult, and told his listeners the timing before the official
watcher could get it out. He spoke faster than Owens ran;
every word was distinct and the drama complete.
These direct commentaries had to be made through
'bottle' microphones, which were held close up to the lips,
from an open platform, with the speaker flanked by polyglot
colleagues on either side and completely surrounded by a
sport-frenzied mob.
(adio fyts the TS^ews 189
I remember, too, how the half-prostrated winners of these
mad spurts of physical power came up to the microphone
to say pleasant platitudes with their remaining breath; and
how in the evening we had to lure them out of their 'Olympic
Village' to come to the cubbyhole studios atop the grand-
stand to speak with calculated modesty to the folks at home.
Among them were Helen Stephens, that amazingly mascu-
line woman who won the 100 meters, brainy little Jim
Lovelock, Australia's I5oo-meter world champion, A. F.
Williams, the hero of the 4OO-meter race, and many more.
I remember the weird scene at that woodland colony
(whose builder preferred suicide to political ignominy soon
after the Games), when bands of hefty athletes of different
nationalities stood around in the moonlight and sang their
songs into our microphone, the Germans with determined
precision, the Italians with gay abandon, the Canadians
wearing enormous scarlet maple leaves on their white
sweaters with a lustiness that nearly shattered our ear-
drums. And I remember the terrific excitement at the
swimming tank when Jack Medica won the 4OO-meter swim
for the United States; and also that other American Victory*
- in the same place when a California woman, hunting
autographs, kissed Adolf Hitler on his moustache in front of
a gaping crowd.
But above all I remember that rainy afternoon at Grunau
on the river Havel, when two middle-aged Englishmen,
J. Beresford and L. F. Southwood, won the double-skulls,
and eight mere college boys from Washington State Univer-
sity walked away with the ' eights' both against the super-
trained rowing stars picked from all Germany who were
winning every decisive race that day. We had had to stand
up for the German anthem and the 'Horst Wessel' song after
every event, until we were nauseated.
America was interested only in the eights, though her
chances seemed slim, and we had reserved a transatlantic
circuit for the period of that race alone. Suddenly I dis-
covered that the time had been changed retarded by
fifty minutes and our broadcast would fall into an
empty space. I blanched, harangued the officials: nothing
1 90 Hello ^America!
could be done. I jumped over seats, shouldered my way
past Nazi guards into the clubhouse, grabbed a telephone,
and asked for New York. The bystanders thought I was
mad. In twenty minutes, just before the original timing, I
got the New York control-room to change the program: by
a great stroke of luck it could still be done. Then Bill
Henry, my greatest standby in these frantic weeks, and I
climbed to the roof of the grandstand and waited at our
microphone.
The starting shot rang out; the Italians jumped ahead,
then the Germans would they win again? The Americans
were fifth, with only England trailing them, for three-
quarters of the 2ooo-meter course. Then they pulled up to
third place and 300 yards from the finish it was neck and
neck. They spurted, Italy keeping up with them; but less
than twenty yards from the finish Washington shot forward,
winning by a mere six feet, the most important water race
of the Olympic Games. And what a chance! We were the
only American radio commentators to catch that race, with
millions of Americans listening to us.
A shout went up, and some groans. Then the Star-
Spangled Banner was played, which almost nobody in that
predominantly German crowd could sing. So four of us
two men, two women yelled and sang it into the micro-
phone, thus making our musical radio debut. . . .
Competition between American broadcasters was keener
than ever. Both networks jockeyed for the first broadcast
from the Games. What would it be? The American team's
arrival at Hamburg? We both tried for it; it fell through.
So Columbia arranged to take a short-wave transmitter on
to the special boat-train, and for a half hour Bill Henry
interviewed America's athletic stars while that train sped
at sixty miles an hour toward Berlin, where our competitors
were waiting for them to arrive. So we won the first round.
Needless to say, the Opposition won others; but for once we
were both too busy to notice what was happening in the
other camp. 1 In 1940 the fight will start over again, unless . . .
1 Injustice to our friends of the N.B.C., let me add that for a week or so before
the Games they relayed the Olympic torch-runner's arrival at various points on his
way from Olympia to Berlin.
\adio (jets the
Seeing us broadcast to America from a position in the
stadium grandstand, a pudgy little Japanese squeezed up to
the microphone and asked if he might say a few words to
the American public. He was a member of the Japanese
Parliament, and a graduate of Harvard. Japan having just
been selected for the Games of 1940, he wanted to invite all
his friends to come to Japan. Will they be in a mood to go?
ELECTIONS: RADIO'S BIG CHANCE
Elections are of all news events the most suitable for
broadcasting, outside of sport, both being prearranged yet
speculative; certain in time, but uncertain in outcome.
Election returns by radio can reach more people and by a
more direct route than through any other medium. The first
election to be broadcast anywhere was the United States
presidential contest of 1920 (Warren G. Harding), when the
Westinghouse Company's station KDKA at Pittsburgh sent
out the returns. This, however, reached only a small section
of the public, and the first nation-wide broadcasting of
election returns could not take place in America until 1928,
a year after the National Broadcasting Company had been
established. Meantime the B.B.C. had broadcast the British
General Elections of 1923 and 1924.
Since international broadcasting did not start with any
degree of regularity till 1930, the first opportunity to trans-
mit the results of a European election to America was in
1931, when a sensational landslide swept the first British
National Government into office. Although the matter
received no newspaper notice at the time, it may be worth
mentioning that two people, one sitting in the garden room
of my house in St. John's Wood, London, the other in a
broadcasting studio in New York, were responsible for
stealing a march on the entire American press by broad-
casting an analysis of results at an hour (3 A.M. in London;
five hours earlier, namely 10 P.M., in New York) when the
192. Hello ^America!
decisive returns were already in, and radio listening was at a
peak hour in America.
The man in London was Raymond Gram Swing, then
London correspondent of the New York Evening Post, his
partner in New York was myself. The process was simple:
after sketching the political background of the election in a
five-minute talk I simply gave a cue to the transatlantic
telephone operator to switch me to London, an open circuit
being held in readiness for Swing, and by a series of questions
elicited the outstanding facts the unprecedented debacle
of the Labor Party, the defeat of ex-ministers, the alto-
gether surprising revulsion in public feeling as recorded at
the polls. 1
Since this pioneer job every European election of real
importance has been broadcast to America, notably the
German elections of 1932-33 three within a year!
which prepared the way for Hitler, and the British elections
of November, 1935, when S. K. Ratcliffe and myself broad-
cast 'rival' resumes from London.
But the most exciting and amusing broadcast of this
category was the commentary on the Saar plebiscite in
January, 1935, which is a story worth telling in detail.
1 For the sake of technical accuracy: the telephone transmitter at either end was
of course equipped with microphone and amplifier.
XIV. RADIO FIGHTS ITS FIRST WAR
VIENNA CELEBRATES BRAHMS
IN THE spring of 1933, following the exciting events
which swept Hitler first into office and then after the
burning of the Reichstag into power, I was travelling
through Germany into Austria. It was the centenary year
of Johannes Brahms, the great German composer who some
fifty-five years before had travelled over the same route, to
spend the rest of his life in Vienna. Both Germany and
Austria claim him as their 'son'; both Berlin and Vienna
had planned great celebrations for the month of May.
Turning my back on the brutalities of the Nazi revolution,
I was glad to follow the great master's footsteps and enjoy
his music in the city of his choice.
Vienna, poor and down at the heel, was nevertheless
enjoying its Brahms. The multi-colored kiosks on the
Ringstrasse, where the trees were breaking into feathery
green, announced the concerts; the newspapers were full of
comment on the superlative performances of Furtwangler
and Schnabel, Huberman and Casals. But they were also
full of other, more sinister things. One day they reported
how two Germans of official rank, including a Doctor Frank,
Minister of Justice in the State of Bavaria, had arrived at
the Vienna air field for a speech-making tour of Austria;
they were in Nazi uniform and their manner was that of
conquerors. They were met by representatives of the
Austrian Government and told in so many words that they
were not welcome. Nevertheless they stayed. They were
194 Hello ^America!
given a police escort, which accompanied them until the end
of their much-curtailed tour, and were soon delivered across
the German border into the hands of their compatriots, in
good order but rather ugly mood.
For many months the Austrian Nazis, aided and abetted
by their German comrades, had spread terror through the
Austrian countryside. Their growing legions had been
trained with advice and help from more experienced Germans;
arms had been smuggled across the frontier; a German
'Inspector-General for Austria* was in charge of the move-
ment that was to bring Austria into Hitler's Reich. Now that
Hitler was in power, his agents stalked up and down the land
more arrogantly than before, dangling visions of German
fleshpots before hungry Austrian eyes.
But the worm turned at last. A little man named Engel-
bert Dollfuss, barely five feet high, had made himself
dictator of Austria two months back, almost on the very day
that Hitler's power was confirmed by an overwhelming if
not wholly voluntary vote. He had been in office ten months
before that, but had ruled by virtue of a precarious balance
of numbers in Parliament. But now Parliament had con-
veniently voted itself out of existence, and Dollfuss, with
aid of a private army of green-hatted peasant lads, the
Heimwehr, was in control. It was the chief of the Vienna
Heimwehr detachment, a tough and able operator named
Major Fey, who had provided such a sour welcome for the
flying Nazi missionaries at the Vienna air field.
But people about the Government were worried. The
Nazi battalions in the country grew by leaps and bounds;
violence shooting, burning, hooliganism of an expert
viciousness increased daily. Vienna, except for its hang-
dog look, seemed pretty normal: the cafes were full, as
always; pianists banged their stale Mitropa jazz on tinny
night-bar pianos; people cracked jokes about their 'Milli-
metternich' chancellor. Paraphrasing a famous Austrian
general in the war, they opined that the situation was
'hopeless, but not serious/ But they knew little of what
went on beyond the range of their own vision; like their
German cousins in the years just passed, they read only the
T^adio Fights Its First War 195
papers that printed what they liked to read, not what they
ought to have learned. 1
The German Nazis were furious over the treatment of
their emissaries; their papers dripped venom; their radio
stations, just getting reorganized under a Nazi head, cried
havoc through the land; retaliatory measures were planned,
resulting in the famous tourist boycott and the radio war.
My presence in Vienna, though accidental, seemed pro-
vidential. I felt that the world should think more about
Austria than it did its economic plight, the threat to its
independence, its apparent helplessness before the coming
avalanche. Peace in Europe was at that moment poised on a
delicate arch, and Austria was the keystone of the arch. A
Nazified Austria would mean a solid wall of Fascism from
the Baltic to the Mediterranean, with peaceful democracies
on one side and Stalinism on the other a situation that
was bound to lead to war.
DOLLFUSS TELLS AMERICA
People I talked to felt that Chancellor Dollfuss should be
heard by the world. At that time he was not the inter-
nationally popular figure he was to become: his diminutive
stature was the only thing that got him friendly foreign
publicity. I delayed my departure; before I left I was sum-
moned to the Ballhausplatz that great baroque govern-
ment building in which the map of nineteenth-century
Europe had been drawn after the Napoleonic wars, and
which a year hence was to be the scene of the most melodra-
matic chapter of post-war history. Before these sanguinary
1 The situation at this time is well illustrated by one of the many jokes that passed
from lip to lip. A poor Viennese on the edge of starvation asks a friend what on
earth he can do to keep body and soul together. 'Go up to a policeman and shout
"Heil Hitler!"' says the friend. 'That will get you to jail and there you'll be fed.'
The desperate man takes the advice and picks a policeman at a busy corner: 'Heil
Hitler!' 'Heil Hitler!' answers the policeman in a whisper, 'but get along with you
quick or they'll put us both in the jug.'
196 Hello ^America!
events, however, the access to the historic chancellory was
easy, and the hall porter as gemutlich as only a Viennese can
be. I mounted the long flights of stone steps in the rambling
palace; a labyrinth of corridors guarded by slouching,
bearded attendants relics of Emperor Franz Josef's time
led me to the anteroom of the Government's press chief
a very important official close to the Chancellor and
Foreign Minister, namely, Dollfuss himself.
The attendant in charge of the waiting-room, after con-
siderable head-shaking, finally agreed that I might possibly
see the Herr Gesandter (a title indicating a certain rank in the
Austrian diplomatic service) but doubted whether it would
be today. The fact that I had an appointment failed to
shake his pessimism: they were all so busy not excluding
himself, it seemed, for as quickly as possible he turned his
back on the waiting visitors and applied himself most assid-
uously to some important-looking papers. Long, boresome
waiting, broken only by the arrival of further visitors (none
of whom got more than fleeting and grudging attention from
the busy official), finally made me curious, and I spied over
his shoulder. The supposed document was music band
parts being copied out in government office hours and ob-
viously with official sanction! I looked again to read the
title of the opus; it was 'Weaner Mad'ln* * Viennese
Girls/ a waltz! I had heard of Viennese police inspectors
writing string quartets in their spare time, but that was
before the war. Now, with the country in danger, it was a
waltz. ' Desperate, but not serious ' . . .
Let me hasten to add, however, that there was seriousness
within the guarded doors. The gesture to put Doctor
Dollfuss on the air was appreciated, and the matter was
quickly arranged for the following Sunday afternoon.
I first saw the diminutive statesman in a large, high-
ceilinged state chamber of the Chancellor's palace the
very room in which eventually he was to meet his fate. He
came through one of the gigantic doors, followed by his press
chief and an attache, both of more than average height.
His tiny stature was thereby greatly accentuated: at least
two chancellors his size, standing on top of each other, could
\adio Fights Its First War 197
have walked through that door. Everything in the room was
on the grand scale, in line with the sprawling elephantism
of the Austrian Empire that was no more. But though small,
Dollfuss made a 'complete* impression a finely propor-
tioned, good-looking, well-groomed man with very simple,
disarmingly direct manners.
'I am delighted to meet you/ he said. 'Why, you're not
much taller than I!' And he made me stand back to back
with him so that the rest of the company could see there
wasn't much difference. He seemed pleased for once not to
have to look up in order to talk with a stranger. While
engineers made final adjustments to the microphone on the
table, and press photographers clicked their cameras from
various angles, Dollfuss discussed his broadcast to America.
It had been agreed that it should not be aggressive. It was
to attack nobody, but was to assert Austria's individuality,
its right of self-determination 'Austria for the Austrians,'
in short. Ever since the war the Austrians had been talking
Anschluss, emphasizing their Germanness. Whatever a
party's policies, whether Pan-German, Christian-social, or
Socialist, Anschluss union with Germany had to be one
of its planks. Yet every Austrian hated the 'Prussians'
which meant every German north of Bavaria. I once asked
an Austrian how the politicians reconciled these two ideas.
'You know what the Germans of the eighteenth century,' he
said, 'oppressed by petty tyrants, but dreaming of liberty
and unity, used to whisper to each other? "Never speak of
it, but always think of it!" Well, it's the reverse with
Anschluss. The slogan is: "Always speak of it, but never
think of it!" in other words, don't take it seriously.'
So now the sacred dream of 'union with our German
brethren' had given way to Austria's struggle to 'maintain
its Austrian character in the interest of Germanism as a
whole,' to quote Dollfuss's words. Was that, I thought,
what Mussolini was spending his money for? For it was he
that financed the Heimwehr, while Germany poured millions
into the Austrian Nazis' till.
The speech was, in fact, a string of political euphemisms.
It explained the 'elimination' of the Austrian Parliament as
1 98 Hello ^America!
an epoch in the country's organic development, though it
affirmed the equality of all Austrians before the law and
asserted that all kinds of racial hatred were contrary to the
national character. It eulogized that redoubtable Monsignor
Seipel, the deceased Catholic leader, as the only post-war
Austrian statesman, and ignored the existence of the largest
party in Austria, the Socialists. And it ended on the seduc-
tive note of Vienna's charm (an approved formula of all
Austrian post-war politicians for the attraction of tourists),
but remained silent on the most remarkable achievement of
the Viennese people, the municipal workers' tenements,
erected by opponents of his regime.
This was hardly the stuff I had hoped for; still, it was
Dollfuss, and Americans might as well hear what he stood
for. But, as I heard afterwards, the speech wasn't heard,
because somewhere between Vienna and the Swiss border
(transmission was via the League of Nations' short-wave
station at Prangins) some telephone engineers, either Nazi
or Socialist, recognizing Dollfuss's voice, stopped working
the * repeaters,' without which the volume of sound is in-
sufficient for retransmission. It was another typically
Austrian maneuver. Comically enough, however, the Eng-
lish translation of the speech did go through, evidently be-
cause of the engineers' blissful ignorance of what it was!
The day before this, a jolly company was lunching in an
old-fashioned Viennese Keller when one of those quaint
Viennese characters, a sixty-year-old flower ' girl,' came in to
sell us little bunches of spring flowers. Having done good
business she shouted 'Heil Dollfuss!' by way of good-bye.
We thought that it was a common and spontaneous greeting
and concluded that the little Chancellor was popular among
at least a section of the people. But we never heard it again,
and next day I had quite a different impression. Dollfuss,
having accomplished his broadcast to America, had to go
to the air field to congratulate the winners in the great Race
around the Alps (Alpenflug). He invited me to come along,
and we rode, side by side, in his official car, accompanied by
two high officials. When we reached the field a crowd had
collected at the entrance, marshalled by a couple of police-
Chancellor Dollfuss spoke from the very room in which
eventually he was to meet his fate
T^adio Fights Its First War 199
men, who saluted, as did some soldiers further on. The
sullenly curious crowd stared silently at the Chancellor,
whose face and figure are unmistakable. There wasn't a
cheer, there wasn't a greeting; only one or two people
rather furtively took off their hats. On the other hand, there
were no gestures of hostility, and there was no detective or
bodyguard in attendance. This didn't strike me as note-
worthy at the time, but I thought of it when Dollfuss's name
was on the front pages of the world press a few months later.
Dollfuss's conversation showed him to be even more
naive than I had thought. Or was he merely feigning simpli-
city? We talked about his plans for Austria, and he said
that the crux of the country's prosperity was farming. (He
himself was an expert agriculturist.) It was his plan to
make Austria as nearly self-supporting as possible by or-
ganizing the ' peasant front' and planning the perfect
exploitation of the soil. This, in view of the fact that two
fifths of the country is forest and that nine tenths is moun-
tainous, seemed rather a large contract. Of industry he had
little to say, and of the workingman not a word. This may
all have been political eyewash, but it seemed to show where
his sympathies lay. Dollfuss, beset by enemies on the Right
and Left, had more than one chance to compromise with the
Socialists, the moderate Austrian democratic workingman's
party, but his completely rural sympathies and his rigid
piety made it impossible for him to cross that bridge.
Against the Nazis his feelings were, if anything, less bitter.
It was they who were threatening him openly; to them his
life was forfeit. Yet when someone in the car said that from
now on 'they would be paid back with their own coin/
Dollfuss was eloquently silent.
THE WAR BEGINS IN MUNICH
The Nazis across the border, however, were going strong.
They had been blocked in carrying the torch of revolt to the
loo Hello ^America!
enemy's camp; very well, they would find another way.
Early in July the Munich broadcasting station issued an
official announcement that from then on they would pay
more attention to the situation in Austria, would broadcast
regular talks revealing the 'true position' to listeners in
Germany and Austria. Refugees from Austria would come
to the microphone and tell Germans on both sides of the
frontier about 'the brutal fight which is being fought by a
small separatist clique in Austria against all things German/
The Austrian Government, preaching 'Austria for the
Austrians, in the interest of Germanism as a whole,' were
thus branded as just a clique of separatists, on whom war
had to be declared.
The 'war' started on July 5, when the notorious State-
Leader Habicht, formerly Nazi 'Inspector-General for
Austria,' began his series of harangues against Dollfuss and
his government. Habicht had been expelled from Austria
after preaching disobedience to his followers; he had thou-
sands of partisans, spoke their language, knew their troubles.
He now followed the same tactics from afar, exploiting these
troubles, systematically bringing discontent and revolt to
fever heat. The Munich transmitter could be heard practi-
cally throughout Austria, as well or better than the Austrian
stations, and the Austrians were helpless. Day after day,
night after night, the attacks went on, interspersed with
cleverly produced 'cultural' offerings attractive to the
Austrian peasant and mountaineer.
The Austrian broadcasting authorities, realizing that retal-
iation would be useless, appealed to the International Broad-
casting Union, on the basis of some mild resolutions against
hostile broadcasting that had been adopted. It had little
effect. The Germans boycotted Austria economically, and
that summer in hundreds of Tyrolese hotels empty be-
cause the German customers couldn't come hungry na-
tives listened to broadcasts which blamed the Government
for their country's plight. Little did it matter that at last
the outside world was waking up; little did it matter that
little Dollfuss was the hero of the World Economic Confer-
ence in London that summer, while Doctor Schacht, as
T^adio Fights Its First War 2.01
German delegate, coolly laid down the law to the world's
statesmen who showed no enthusiasm for throwing good
money after bad. Doctor Dollfuss went home a Parthian hero,
while his native Austrian countryside bristled with Nazis,
more and more enraged.
Some three months after his return, on October 3, he was
shot by one of them, but was wounded only in the arm.
Radio, the instrument which had in all likelihood been
the cause of his being laid low, now came to his rescue and
made him popular at last. From his bedside on the day of
the attempted assassination he spoke to millions of listen-
ing Austrians, for even his enemies must have had a morbid
interest in hearing a man who had just by inches escaped
death.
At last the European Powers were aroused. They made
representations to Germany, and a kind of truce ensued
while Dollfuss recovered and succeeded in buttressing his
position within Austria and without. But the worst was yet
to come. The truce, so far as the Nazis were concerned, was
only^a lull the quiet before the storm. Dollfuss, who even
back in May seemed to me very polite about them, was by
January ready to dicker with the very Habicht who had
been thundering imprecations across the frontier by radio. 1
But Major Fey, whose Heimwehr derived its sinews of war
from Italy, found another solution in the nick of time, and
the thunderer returned to his Munich microphone.
The Austrians, having obtained no satisfaction from their
correspondence with the Broadcasting Union (whose Ger-
man vice-president, Doctor Giesecke, was by this time in a
Nazi concentration camp), now proposed to take the matter
of the Munich attacks to the League of Nations. Dollfuss
himself was to go to Geneva to appeal to the January ses-
sion of the Council. This, it seemed to me, was a peculiarly
interesting and apposite occasion for international broad-
casting, so once again I invited Dollfuss to tell his tale to
America and the world by means of the short-wave channel.
My offer was accepted and the date provisionally set for the
first convenient Sunday in February. But fate decided
1 See John Gunther, Inside Europe, p. 295.
2.O2. Hello *Amtnca!
otherwise: momentous events were in preparation; Doctor
Dollfuss never went to Geneva, he went to Hungary on a
4 state visit* instead, while Major Fey was left in charge at
Vienna. Yet the broadcast was not cancelled; it was fixed
for February 18.
DOLLFUSS 'EXPLAINS* THE BLOODSHED
On the twelfth the previous Monday the world was
shaken out of its complacence by one of the most appalling
tragedies of recent times the Austrian civil war. Instead
of counterattacking the Nazis, the Government's troops and
Heimwehr volunteers attacked the quiescent Socialists at
the very moment that their leaders were pleading for peace.
For four days the military poured fire and lead into the
model workers' tenements, which had been the pride of
Vienna and an object of envy to the social-minded of all
nations. My friend John Gunther, who saw this ghastly
massacre with his own eyes, has recorded it vividly in his
Inside Europe. And here he records, too, how Dollfuss
returned from his state visit was at Mass in St. Stephen's
church when the lights went out, and at tea with the Papal
Nuncio while innocent women and children were being
bombed in their homes. Unaware of the inside facts but
fully alive to the importance of these cruel events, I ar-
ranged, by long-distance telephone from Paris (where I had
gone to report on the Stavisky riots), that Doctor Dollfuss
should broadcast as agreed, but instead of the original sub-
ject his talk was to be an explanation, from the Govern-
ment's point of view, of what had happened in this bloody
week.
By Friday the fighting had died down, except for clean-
ing-up actions in the provinces, and by Sunday all calmness
was restored, while victims of the correct political color were
given state funerals. I asked John Gunther to take charge
of the broadcast for me, to introduce the Chancellor at the
*S(adio Fights Its First War 103
microphone, and to 'set the scene/ I realized that the Gov-
ernment would use the opportunity for an interpretation
which might minimize its own responsibility, but like the
rest of the world I was prepared to accept the theory of a
simple revolt, summarily crushed. I knew Dollfuss, and
thought him incapable of wanton cruelty.
The broadcast, in any case, would make headlines, for
it is not often that the head of a government is heard at the
crucial moment of a revolutionary struggle. The Austrian
Government asked me whether we would extend to the
'other chain* in America permission to relay the Chancel-
lor's talk, and in the circumstances I felt we should not
refuse. Austria was entitled to a 100 per cent coverage.
But John Gunther, whose emotions had been stirred by
the events of the previous days, refused to introduce the
Chancellor when he was shown Dollfuss's text. In it the so-
cialists were represented to be the attackers an irre-
sponsible group of enemies of the state. Now, knowing what
I do, I can't blame him; though it would have been quite
permissible for him simply to tell listeners that he disclaimed
responsibility. In the end the matter was settled by having a
government spokesman, in impeccable English, introduce the
Chancellor, whose speech had been read to me in full, for my
approval, over the telephone. I suggested some vital altera-
tions, and they were made. This may have been the only
time that a mere radio representative censored a prime min-
ister's speech and a dictator's at that!
This time no sabotage interfered with the broadcast. The
little Chancellor's voice went out to the world with a steadi-
ness that seemed, if anything, too calm. Almost a thousand
of his compatriots men, women, and children lay dead,
and here he was explaining it was just an 'attack by a
small group of fanatics against state and society' and boast-
ing that 'full order had been restored.' There was no word
of reconciliation, only a promise that all citizens who 'felt
nationally' would be protected; the Chancellor himself
assumed the guardianship of all the dependents of the dead
in 'our' forces, leaving general relief to the Archbishop of
Vienna.
104 Hello ^America!
I thought of the simple, little man talking about the
Austrian farmer, about Austrian scenery and Austrian music
on that short motor trip a year ago, and felt that this was
not good enough.
Nothing more was said about the radio attacks from the
Munich station, which, however, went on unabated. Largely
thanks to them, the Nazi organization within Austria grew
and grew, while on the German side of the border the Aus-
trian Legion, made up of Nazi refugees, was being armed and
drilled. Habicht and Frauenfeld, the fugitive leaders of the
Austrian Nazi Party, were in charge. The Austrian Govern-
ment, having disposed of the Socialists, were more than ever
in the hands of the victorious Heimwehr, and now looked
only to Mussolini for support. Dollfuss was planning to go
to Italy to seal the pact.
Attention had, indeed, been diverted from Austria by the
Nazi blood purge of June 30, and we were busy getting some
sort of a report from inside Germany, an eye-witness ac-
count being out of the question. On July 13 Hitler made
his radio speech on these hair-raising events, and we rebroad-
cast it in America. On July 25, between twelve noon and
one o'clock, Nazi conspirators attacked, almost simultane-
ously, the Federal chancellery (with Dollfuss inside) and
the Austrian broadcasting building ('Ravag') the two
places which I knew more intimately than any others in
Vienna. The story of the Ravag attack has again been told
most vividly by John Gunther, one of the very few out-
siders who happened to witness it; among the five victims
were the Director-General's chauffeur, who on more than
one occasion had driven me on my errands in Vienna, and
a favorite radio comedian. Director-General Czeija him-
self escaped, by virtue of his sang-froid: a Nazi attacker
entered his private office, but was tackled by the jovial and
hefty Herr Direktor, and held tightly till the police arrived.
The important fact, however, is that in this attempted
revolution the broadcasting headquarters was deemed a
primary point of attack and so it will be in all revolutions
from now on. These conspirators had been radio-minded
ever since the Munich radio calumnies started, a year before.
*E(adio Fights Its First War 05
If now they did not wholly succeed, it was due to lack of
technical precautions. They rushed into a studio, covered
the announcer with their revolvers, and made him say:
4 The government of Doctor Dollfuss has resigned; Doctor
Rintelen has assumed power/ That was the agreed signal
for revolt all over Austria. But they were unable to repeat
it every ten minutes, as they had planned to do, because a
Ravag engineer had the presence of mind to sever the cable
connection with the actual broadcasting transmitter, sit-
uated outside Vienna, on the Bisamberg. Had they seized
this station as well, they would have had the entire coun-
try by the ears. Even to this day both the studio building
and the station are guarded day and night with truly Aus-
trian precaution by one lone soldier.
A DICTATOR'S DEATH
But if the ' revolt in the ether* failed, the attack on the
chancellery was pursued to a ghastly, sanguinary end. There
Dollfuss, ignorant of approaching danger, was holding a
cabinet meeting to decide, among other things, the fate of a
theatre devoted to Viennese operetta. A warning reached
him shortly before noon and the cabinet was dismissed; but
Dollfuss and the redoubtable Major Fey (who had sent the
Nazi emissaries packing, as related above) stayed in the build-
ing. A few minutes later, 140 rebels disguised in the uni-
forms of the crack Deutschmeister regiment, arrived in three
huge motor-trucks at the Chancellery, guarded only by two
policemen and a small guard of honor, who were quickly dis-
armed. They entered through the main gates, sped through
the corridors and arrested all the officials in their offices. A
small detachment burst into the oyster-white room the
same in which, only a few months before Dollfuss had broad-
cast his message to America and there they found him,
trapped at the crucial moment because his valet couldn't un-
lock the door!
2.o6 Hello ^America!
At that moment Otto Planetta, the Nazi ex-corporal, shot
the little man down, stepped nearer and shot him again
through the throat. The little man shouted weakly for help.
He was carried to a little rose-colored divan the very divan
on which I had sat correcting my broadcast introduction of
him in 1933 and there he slowly, miserably bled to death.
An hour and a half later, still dying, he meekly whimpered:
'Children, you are so good to me.'
Meantime the Putsch was fought out and lost in the streets.
While the fate of Austria was in the balance, the whole
country because the Vienna station had been wrecked
was being entertained with Viennese waltzes transmitted
from Linz. The Munich transmitter, however, announced
that Dollfuss had been killed and the government over-
turned.
After that the hostile broadcasts ceased. It was the end of
radio's first 'war/
XV. GERMAN IS THE SAAR
HOW NAZIS HANDLE A PLEBISCITE
NOT long after this the political efficacy of radio was
to be demonstrated in even more convincing if less
predatory manner. For months, throughout the summer
and autumn of 1934, the broadcasting stations of western
Germany aimed their blandishments at the little German
territory of the Saar, which was being governed by the
League of Nations, but under one of the clauses of the Treaty
of Versailles was to decide its future status by means of a
plebiscite the following year.
Previous plebiscites under the Treaty in Slesvig, in
Silesia, and in Memel had been held without benefit of
radio. They had gone more or less against Germany. The
case of the Saar territory was different; Germany in the
course of fifteen years had learned many a lesson, and had
acquired a new national status. The Saarlanders, more-
over, had lived for fifteen years in close proximity with
French officials and had evidently made up their minds
to belong to Germany. Nevertheless the Nazis in Germany
were not disposed to take any chances; so aside from the
other effective methods of political penetration they loosed
an evangelical barrage of edification, instruction, and enlight-
enment upon the Saarlanders, bathing them in a flood of
patriotic sounds.
Except for outward appearances the Saar was as Nazified
as it would ever be; the prohibition of uniforms and flags
simply added fuel to the nostalgic flames and persuaded the
good people that they were the victims of an international
2_o8 Hello ^America!
oppression, as they were being told by their compatriots
across the Rhine. It was later admitted, with some pride,
by Doctor Josef Goebbels, Nazi minister for 'propaganda
and public enlightenment/ that small secret Nazi broad-
cast transmitters were also functioning in the Saar before
the plebiscite; but what with Cologne and Stuttgart and
the other great German stations, and what with so many
willing ears, this seems rather like painting the lily, unless
these transmitters were used for more definitely strategic
ends. Neither the League, which governed the Saar, nor
France, which ran the technical services, had thought fit to
provide local broadcasting, thus throwing the population
into the arms of the German propaganda machine. The
Strasbourg station, though partly using the German lan-
fuage, made no effort to offset this influence, and Luxem-
urg, for business reasons, observed the strictest neutrality.
Officially, then, there was no broadcasting of any kind in
the Saar. Yet I realized that the January plebiscite would
be one of the big stories of the year. The one way to get a
radio commentary out of the Saar would be by telephone
lines to Paris and London, whence it could be short-waved
to America. I applied to the League Commissioner, and
at his behest the Frenchmen in charge of the Saar Telephone
Administration were willing to permit the use of their lines,
if we could provide microphones, amplifiers, and a technical
crew to work them. We therefore got a commercial con-
cern, the Standard Electric, to supply the material and an
engineer for importation to the region, at our risk. Shipping
the gear would have meant confiscation by the customs
authorities or at least fatal delay, so we took it along as
travellers' luggage, in huge trunks. Crossing the French
and Saar borders in the early hours of the morning we had
no trouble in convincing the sleepy customs officials that
the goods were 'official/ being consigned to the P.T.T.
(Posts and Telegraphs), without saying for which. It was a
case of 'white* smuggling, but it had to be done. Our en-
gineer, a hefty Briton who had been a top-sergeant in the
World War but spoke no word of French, was an impressive
and formidable-looking guardian of the precious goods.
fyrman is the Saar
GEOFFREY KNOx's 'TERROR*
Saarbriicken was in turmoil when we arrived. The popu-
lation was in a state of suppressed excitement, and the atmo-
sphere was tense. Evergreens and swastikas were every-
where. Any house that did not show its patriotic sentiment
was a potential target for the violence that officials expected
at any moment to break out. They, and especially the
French, were as nervous as witches; the Germans, on the
other hand, though living in perfect peace under the benevo-
lent and neutral government of the League commissioner,
an upright Scotsman named Geoffrey Knox, had hypnotized
themselves into believing that they were sorely oppressed
by the 'Knox terror' (pronounced 'K-nucks terrohr').
Luckily for us, however, the League had entrusted the mili-
tary occupation to neutrals, mostly British, and khaki-clad
Tommies were to be seen everywhere, providing the one
element of stability.
The broadcast had been arranged to take place at an
improvised studio the furnished flat of the American
member of the plebiscite committee, Miss Sarah Wambaugh,
in a residential district on the Saar River. Her presence was
our greatest piece of luck, and saved the whole enterprise.
The B.B.C., who also wanted to broadcast from the region
but had no facilities of their own, made common cause with
us, and that increased our staff by two. Once we got our
equipment transported to the ' studio ' (no simple matter,
with nothing on wheels available and even taxis scarce) we
thought we were ' set/ and while I fell asleep, exhausted from
the all-night journey, my top-sergeant engineer disappeared
in the crowded town. Worried about his safety, I was about
to send out an S.O.S. when he wandered in, late at night,
having made whoopee with Tommies who had recognized
a pal.
Meantime my troubles had started. The French official
who had promised the telephone lines calmly denied all
knowledge of the affair, and said that the permission of the
Hello ^America!
Department of the Interior was necessary. This sent me
scurrying back and forth all next morning between the Gov-
ernment and Telephone Buildings at opposite ends of
town in a frantic attempt to get action. Knox, the High
Commissioner, who had sanctioned the broadcast in the
first place, was invisible. The department head (a German)
was absent in a mysterious conference somewhere, while
long queues of citizens clogged up the passages, trying to
get passes or certificates of origin (45,000 former Saarlanders
came into the town from across the border to vote). The
plebiscite was to be held the next day, and our first broad-
cast was scheduled for that evening. But next day was a
Sunday; miles of telephone lines had to be laid, and there
might be no workmen available. Hours even minutes
counted. I had visions of our broadcast melting, like the
snow in the streets, into mush.
A stern feminine secretary refused to admit me and hear
my case, since the Herr Minister was 'unreachable.' The
uniformed watchdog outside shrugged his shoulders. In
desperation I sat down and wrote the lady what was virtu-
ally a love-letter, in my most poetic German an appeal
that must have melted her heart, or, more likely, made her
laugh.
It did the trick. Violating instructions not to disturb the
Herr Minister on any circumstances, she got him on the
telephone. Orders began to be given, down and down the
line, till they reached our forgetful French friend at the tele-
phone department, who was suffering from jangled nerves.
From his window this petty tyrant in an occupied country
could see hordes of stalwart Nazis arriving on every train;
if the plebiscite went as everyone expected, a French offi-
cial's life wouldn't be worth two Heils or so he thought.
In this jittery state it was difficult for him to remember any-
thing, and even more difficult to handle a German engineer-
ing crew.
Not till noon next day, within six hours of the first broad-
cast, did a couple of jolly-faced German linesmen appear
at Miss Wambaugh's flat, with coils of wire and the familiar
telephone tackle. My top-sergeant shot a mouthful of rich
fyrman is the Saar 2.11
Cockney at them by way of instructions, to which they an-
swered 'Ja> ja? Years of listening to orders in a foreign
language had accustomed them to cheerful acquiescence,
whatever was said. I had the greatest misgivings, but some-
how the technicans of different nations soon find the magic
key of understanding. By midafternoon the studio had been
rigged and our British engineer was calling gadgets by their
German names, pronounced as in Bromley or Bow.
HITLER DECREES SILENCE
All that day the voting went on, in schoolhouses, assembly
rooms, and municipal buildings. Five hundred and twenty-
eight thousand Saarlanders, men and women, trudged
through slush and snow; over ninety per cent of them cast
their vote for Hitler's Third Reich, while only a miserable
8.87 per cent dared to vote for the continuance of League
government. France didn't get even a decent handful of
votes (0.44 per cent). Absolute order was maintained; the
voting machinery was as perfect and fraud-proof as any-
thing can be. Englishmen, Dutchmen, Americans solid
citizens of all neutral countries acted as watchers and
tellers, the most complete example of international collab-
oration in a critical task I had ever seen. I hustled from
polling place to polling place to see how it worked. Old and
young, rich and poor, male and female one by one they
got their ballots, disappeared silently in the booth to make
their cross, and as silently walked off mouths tightly
shut in obedience to orders broadcast from distant Ber-
lin. Feeble old people tottered up the steps, helped by Red
Cross nurses stationed at every entrance; invalids were
rolled in on wheeled chairs not a German able to crawl
stayed indoors that day. The vote was ninety-eight per cent
of the electorate probably an all-time record.
The result was a foregone conclusion, but the extent of
Hitler's victory was a surprise; and the story was full of
2. 12. Hello ^America!
human interest. The snowclad, spired city astride the
lovely river made a fascinating picture. Frederick Voigt, the
diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian,
described it for the English, I for the American audience;
Miss Wambaugh, world authority on plebiscites, explained
the technical procedure. Both broadcasts were successful.
Elated, we went forth to gather more atmosphere for the
next day's stint.
Returns were not to be declared till the day after that,
but the public counting of votes conducted by men of many
nationalities made a story. Then there was a threat of vio-
lence to Separatists and Socialists; the leaders of the anti-
Nazi parties were marked men; some had already fled.
Afraid that the electricity supply might be cut off, we
scoured the garages of the town for batteries that might
supply sufficient emergency 'juice.' The top-sergeant was
in his element, presiding over rows of accumulators and a
system of alternate switches for all eventualities.
Once more we assembled in the 'studio/ ready to perform.
Ralph Murray, a handsome young B.B.C. news-caster
speaking Oxford English, excellent Viennese German, and
Swiss boarding-school French, manned the control circuit
and shouted his 'Hello's* to reach the telephone exchange
and ask to have the broadcast channel set up. No answer-
came. He shouted and shouted, and still no answer came.
We tried the private telephone, but the 'international' op-
erators of the day before were gone, and no line to Paris and
London was on tap. We phoned around town to locate offi-
cials: our French friends had left; their German deputies
were celebrating the victory in places unknown. The clock
ticked on to zero hour, our broadcast time elapsed. We
knew that at the other end, in London, people were like-
wise shouting 'Hello!' trying to reach us; and here we were,
with our own batteries, our own crew, bursting with infor-
mation and nothing but a dead 'mike.' We went home
crushed.
Next day the results were to be announced. I awoke to
the sound of church bells and human voices singing in har-
mony. It was the most extraordinary sound I had ever
(jerman is the Saar
heard. Unseen thousands, afar off, singing, singing, singing
without stop, a wave of sound rising and falling as new
groups, now near now far, joined in. It was the Saarland
song, being sung that day by uncounted multitudes on both
sides of the Rhine; and it went on all day, almost without
break, like continuous round.
' German is the Saar,
German evermore!
And German is our River's shore
My Fathers' Land/
Windows were thrown open and the same song issued from
loud-speakers, tuned to stations across the Rhine; the bells
of Cologne Cathedral, of churches all over the land, mixed
into this strange kaleidoscope of sound; it was the German
people rejoicing over their first triumph since Versailles.
The streets were alive with people, for a national holiday
had been declared. Enormous flags burst from the windows
of every house; the town was a sea of waving scarlet set
against a background of snow. There were parades and
parades, triple shouts of 'Heil!' as group met group. Here
was a sound-picture such as had never been and perhaps
would never be again: it was the picture I wanted to convey
to listeners across the sea. But would our circuits work this
time ? Once again there had to be pilgrimages of protest to
Government and Telephone Department.
A FRENCHMAN GETS DISGUSTED
This time, despite the universal whoopee, we reached the
top. The French telephone chief and de facto Postmaster-
General of the Saar, was in a curiously nostalgic mood. A
middle-aged, grizzly-moustached Parisian of easy-going pre-
war mentality, he had spent fifteen years bossing German
civil servants in this artificial miniature state. He had done
his job, but had done it without learning German in all
those years a triumph of French culture among the ' bar-
Hello ^America!
barians.' Now, within days of his inevitable abdication, the
vision of a peaceful aperitif on the Boulevard des Capucines
began to mollify his inward rage:
l uinze ansT he cried. ' Quinze am dans ce sal pay si Cest
beaucoupy vous savez, pour un Parisien? Fifteen years of
bother with the 'bodies,' and now he would go home to
his slippers and his good French food. 'When I came here,
how they all professed to love the French! How they came
to me, saying their great-great-grandfather had fought under
the Emperor Napoleon: anything to get promotion. And
now now I, who have helped them, been a father to them
for years, no longer exist. They're going to be their own
bosses in their own fatherland, they say, and everything's
going to be fine!
'Mais!' he cried, holding up a wagging forefinger.
1 Ecoutez! I'm coming back. In two years I'm coming back
on a visit, and I'm going to ask these chaps: "Eh bien? Com-
ment $ a va? How do you like your 'freedom' now?" They'll
learn a thing or two after standing at attention and marching
and shouting Heil while there's not enough to eat. They'll
find out how well off they were when / was here ! '
We sympathized with him, and he promised to help. The
boys of the telephone service, he explained, had been out
celebrating last night, but they'd be on the job tonight.
Whether they'd be sober was another question, for the beer
saloons and Kneipen were doing a roaring trade.
HEIL! HEIL! HEIL!
We went into one of these emporia of liquid patriotism,
one which was also the headquarters of the secret S.A.
troop. At last these brownshirts would be able to cut loose;
hitherto they had been kept quiet by the ' K-nucks terrohr.'
Now they'd show these Reds to whom the country belonged.
The beer flowed freely, washing down dozens of the local
breed of hot dogs. The atmosphere was thick with smoke,
fyrman is the Saar
the noise of celebration deafening. A little girl of five was
being taught the Nazi salute. We explained to the troop
leader that we were broadcasting to England and America,
and wanted to be sure to catch the atmosphere of the Big
Day. Would there be celebrations in the vicinity of our stu-
dio tonight?
Well, they'd see to it. In fact there was a beer hall just
down the street, where a detachment would meet, and they
would time their homeward march to pass our house while
the broadcast was on. We compared watches, and sealed
the bargain with another pint. The time of the broadcast
arrived; the town went on Carnaval. Festoons of multi-
colored lights turned the streets into fairyland. Church
bells rang and searchlights swept the river; bands of singing
celebrants marched up and down, interspersing their songs
with l Heill Heill Heil! y
Again we were all set, but just as luck would have it there
was a lull in our remote part of town. I started to talk;
Murray opened the window no sign of the revellers.
Then, remembering the Nazi's beer saloon, he leapt down-
stairs, raced down the street, stormed into the celebration
to ask, in the*richest South-German dialect ever spoken by
an English Public School man, why in blazes they weren't
marching home as agreed? Being blond and tall, more
Aryan-looking than the native 'Aryans/ he got his orders
obeyed by the men and especially - the women. The
crowd poured out into the street and marched past our
windows singing and yelling as only Nazis can, just five
minutes before our time was up.
We shouted down to them to sing the Saarland song,
opened our windows wide, and placed a microphone on the
windowsill. And so we gave America and England an
earful of patriotic singing and ' heil-mg as background to
the plebiscite returns. When it was all over we too felt like
celebrating, for we had transmitted the first plebiscite ever
broadcast, and the first program from a place that had never
been on the air. By the skin of our teeth.
XVI. A MIKESIDE SEAT FOR THE WAR
FLOYD GIBBONS: FIRST WAR BROADCASTER
THE human tragicomedy enacted in Europe through the
spring and summer of 1935 will live as one of the most
curious ironies of modern history. Two months after the
successful Saar plebiscite, universally hailed as a great
League achievement, Germany began officially to rearm.
On Easter Day five Roman Catholic cardinals American,
Irish, French, Austrian, Italian joined in a transoceanic
broadcast for world peace. In June, eleven and a half million
people in Great Britain voluntarily voted against war on
Lord Cecil's famous Peace Ballot, and over ten millions of
them voted for sanctions, thus unwittingly helping to bring
Great Britain and Italy to the verge of war.
In July and August the British fleet assembled in the
Mediterranean in unprecedented strength, while Mussolini
was massing troops in Eritrea and in Libya. In September
the war clouds gathered in Geneva and drifted over most of
Europe, while further east the guns were actually beginning
to growl. The Empress Menen of Ethiopia broadcast a
pathetic appeal to the women of the world from the little
station outside Addis Ababa, and on October 2 the Duce
roared his warlike challenge from the balcony of the Palazzo
Venezia in Rome, while baffled humanity listened at its loud-
speakers in three continents. Then the storm broke in full
force over the hapless people of Abyssinia, and since then
the world has not known a single peaceful month.
Radio was to bring these hideous events closer to peaceful
people's homes than they had ever been brought before,
*Mikeside Seat for the War
for competitive radio cannot ignore the morbid demands of
its listeners; and while people moralize about war they listen
as eagerly as ever to tales of strife. The radio commentator,
in uniform and gas-mask, may well become a permanent ad-
junct of future wars, although his activity will be even more
restricted than that of the newspaper correspondent, because
his reports can be picked up by the enemy.
The first attempt in radio history to convey war news plus
war atmosphere direct from the scene of conflict must be
credited to Floyd Gibbons, veteran war correspondent, who
transmitted a commentary from the Manchurian war zone
in January, 1932, for the N.B.C., which was punctuated by
the sound of Japanese big guns, much to the delight of the
accommodating Japs. Now, in Ethiopia, this high-speed,
battle-scarred radio newshawk was once again in the field,
beating his nearest competitor (John T. Whitaker, acting on
my behalf) by three days. I heard him give a graphic ac-
count of Italian road-building operations near the Eritrean
frontier which, full of breathless excitement, was an amazing
performance, considering that it took place at an altitude of
six thousand feet above the sea.
Whitaker, however, had already surveyed the Italian war
zone from the air a month before and had given a gripping
account of it to our listeners from Rome, where I bade him
Godspeed on his perilous journey across the Mediterranean,
up the Nile, and over the mountains of Ethiopia into Asmara,
undertaken under the auspices of the New York Herald-
Tribune. Young, impetuous, and adventurous, he was the
first foreign correspondent to reach the war zone, and was
privileged to survey it by mule-back, camel-back, motor-car
and an aeroplane piloted by Mussolini's son-in-law, young
Count Ciano, whom he described as a daredevil youth and
4 one of the most likeable men' he had ever known. 'He used
to fly me out over the Red Sea and drop petrol tins so that we
could have target practice with machine guns.' x After mak-
ing his report from Rome late in September, Whitaker was
back in Asmara on October 25 to transmit a description of the
operations, and the obliging Count Ciano broadcast some
1 See John T. Whitaker, Fear Came on Europe , London, 1937.
zi 8 Hello ^America!
rather obvious propaganda both for Gibbons and for Whit-
aker. It was short-waved to Rome and retransmitted to
America, but owing to static the results were none too good.
HAILE SELASSIE CALLING
Meantime, however, the Abyssinians* little short-wave
station near Addis Ababa at an altitude of some nine
thousand feet operating on the ridiculously low power of
one kilowatt, had made itself heard throughout the western
world. Here was a romance of engineering, indeed. The
Italians, who years ago built this station for the Abyssinians
merely as a commercial telegraph terminus, little suspected
that it would one day be used against them by their dusky
enemies. It had no speech panel and no speech-input ampli-
fier, though for some remote contingency there was an old-
fashioned carbon microphone lying about. With this meagre
equipment a Swedish engineer named Ernst Hammar, em-
ployed as director of communications by Emperor Haile
Selassie, managed to rig up something that could actually
make itself heard, first in London and then in New York.
Early in the conflict the engineers of the Radio Corporation
of America tried to get into contact with Hammar, whose
name discovered by my friend Max Jordan working at
Geneva for the N.B.C. proved the ethereal password to
the Ethiopian stronghold. After picking up a talk by Doctor
Malaku Bayan, a nephew of Haile Selassie, early in Septem-
ber, and the Empress's appeal three days later, the R.C.A.
managed to present the Emperor himself in their 'Magic
Key* program on September 13, after which they made
Abyssinian facilities available to American broadcasters in
general.
The first white commentator to report from the station
was Robinson McLean, correspondent of the Toronto Evening
Telegram, who spoke for Columbia three days after the
Emperor; but like that remarkable potentate, he was only
0x4 *Mikeside Seat for the War 2.19
partially heard. Nevertheless the account of conditions,
apparently uncensored, was as graphic as it was revealing,
and I cannot resist the temptation of reproducing what I,
sitting at an ordinary set in London, and others sitting at
their sets all over America, heard on October 16, 1935.
'On the plains outside of Addis Ababa hundreds of tukuls
are pitched when the feudal dukes of Ethiopia gather to their
Emperor. Right now, two miles from this radio station,
there are thirty-five thousand men under the Dejasmatch
of Kambata Province. His men are the toughest babies you
would ever want to see. Though most of them have rifles,
even the ones with only spears are not the sort of men you
would like to meet on a dark night on a lonely African hilltop.
'Tomorrow fifty thousand more brown warriors will pace
through the streets of Addis Ababa, singing their war songs.
They are the men of Dejasmatch Gabre Mariam of Walago
Province, fifteen days' ride from Addis Ababa, and this after-
noon the Minister of War of Ethiopia put on four European
uniforms and drove around the city. Soon he will be headed
for the front with his men two hundred and fifty thousand
of them. . . . So, tomorrow morning when thousands of brown-
faced men gather at the foot of the Throne of Judgment in
the palace in Addis Ababa, in front of the tired little Em-
peror, and sing their war songs, it will be impressive. To see
men of sixty wearing spears and swords and guns and acting
out in pantomime the way in which they will kill their
enemies is something that sometimes makes little cold
shivers run up and down your spine. And you don't feel
much better when you learn that the Government has
ordered all liquor stores closed to prevent any accident to the
newspapermen.
'The warriors yell their hate at us whenever they pass us
in the street. Personally, I don't blame them. So far, all the
whitefaces have brought to Ethiopia is the sewing machine,
the radio station, the phonograph, and a war, although they
don't call it a war as yet. So that when someone we
will say, for example, Private Waldo Mariam from Kambata
shakes his spear in my face because civilization wouldn't
give him a gun, and yells that he would like to break me up
2.2.O Hello ^America!
and feed me to the birds, I don't blame Private Waldo
Mariam. On the other hand, Private Waldo Mariam won't
hurt me if I duck back when he shakes his spear. He just
laughs all over his big brown face and then goes on singing
his song the war song of Ethiopia. It goes something like
this: "Eeya saparack! Ee ya saparack! Asst da lambarackl "
meaning " Break it up and feed it to the birds ! " That is the
closest I can come to the words. It doesn't sound like much
when I sing it, but when you hear seventy-five thousand men
pouring out their voices in their howl of hate, it makes you
think that perhaps the Italians are not going to have the
pushover they expected.
'Of course it's just a little tin-pot kingdom, lost in the
African mountains. Of course it's not a real war, because
these brown men haven't got tanks and airplanes and be-
cause nobody has declared war. Of course, getting excited
over a little Italian skirmish in the African mountains is
rather childish. But I want to tell you a story about a news-
paper correspondent.
4 He had gone down into the Ogaden Desert and written
that Italy was going to have a tough time battling across the
burning sands and through the malaria-filled swamps. His
newspaper, after a few days, sent him back a cable telling
him that their readers, who had seen a real war, did not
share his excitement. Maybe it isn't real war, but the forts
he visited had been bombed. Maybe it isn't a real war, but
when he got that cable from his office he was in hospital with
malaria, and ten days ago he died.
'So maybe it's not a real war, and maybe you will pardon
me for my childish excitement about it. But so far as I can
see, it doesn't really matter much when men, women, and
children die whether they are killed in a real war or merely a
glorious little expedition to bring civilization to a savage tin-
pot kingdom lost in the African hills. Maybe it's not a real
war, but this may be the last broadcast from Ethiopia. I
wouldn't want to have the job the operator of this station
has, and wake up wondering each morning whether or not
civilization was going to explode on the roof.'
While the quality of the transmissions, owing to the poor
Emperor Hailie Selassie's address to America, seventy-five
hundred miles away. With him are Josef Israels II and the
Negus* youngest son
cMikeside Seat for the War
equipment, was imperfect, the sensational nature of these
broadcasts made people strain their ears for every word.
Conditions were absurdly difficult. There was no * talk-
back' arrangement, of course, no radio telephone, and in-
structions had to be given by radiograms, which would some-
times arrive too late. A broadcast might begin several
minutes late or early, and night after night I would sit at a
receiver in London, anxiously waiting for the words to come
through over the noisy carrier-wave. But Abyssinian clocks
rarely corresponded with ours; probably they reacted to
atmospheric conditions at excessive altitudes. And there
were no means of checking with Greenwich or New York.
The problem of quality was finally solved by getting the
co-operation of the Paramount news-reel people, who
eventually sent their own up-to-date equipment to Addis
Ababa. Josef Israels 2nd had been placed in charge of our
interests, while McLean was off somewhere trying to rescue
his mule caravan in the wilds of Tigre Province; and when
Haile Selassie was about to leave for the front, Israels in-
duced him to make a direct talk to the American people in
which he appealed to them 'unofficially' to boycott the
aggressor. With the help of Paramount's dynamic micro-
phone, the ingenious engineer, Hammar, managed to trans-
mit the Emperor's speech (in Amharic) and Israels's transla-
tion with such excellent quality that they arrived in New
York, seventy-five hundred miles away, without a blemish,
and were heard perfectly throughout America. This was
later followed by a speech, in good English, from the Em-
peror's son, the Crown Prince, and further commentaries
from Israels and McLean, which gave American listeners a
sense of the more and more hard-pressed Abyssinian people
and their ultimate doom. The Addis Ababa broadcasts
altogether covered a period of two months; thanks to
Israels, more than anyone else, they were a landmark in
transatlantic broadcasting.
Hello ^America!
THE IMPERIAL BAND ON THE RUN
By way of comic relief to their otherwise unrelieved gloom,
Israels managed to organize two concerts by Ethiopian
musicians with native instruments, and the imperial
Guards Band' playing European martial music by ear. His
account of the adventure is worthy of perpetuation. Ethio-
pian musicians were modest as to financial emolument, but
they required generous libations of the native brandy called
tej to help them face an audience, seen or unseen. The
amateur extras, being more cultivated, needed whiskey.
Both beverages were provided and a first-class ensemble
turned up at Israels's hotel early in the evening, to be enter-
tained and then transported six miles to the outlying station
for rehearsal and the midnight broadcast (5 P.M. in New
York).
As they seemed unresponsive in the Europeanized sur-
roundings of the hotel rooms, they were invited to make
themselves comfortable on the hotel lawn, where a caravan
had pitched a large tent. Here they squatted, tuned up their
instruments, took plenty of tej, and were soon singing their
interminable sagas of love and war and heroism that make
up the native repertoire by the light of a single candle.
According to European ideas they were making the night
hideous with noise. Suddenly, while Israels was at dinner,
the native police arrived and started to arrest the musicians.
It was after curfew, when the natives were to be indoors; and
they had no permits to break the regulations of martial law.
The radio man, warned, rushed out; it was too late. The
balambaras ordered a baton charge, and the frightened
musicians scurried to the four winds. By the time matters
could be explained to the balambaras, the sixteen musicians
had fled to sixteen parts of the scattered town. Finally, an
appeal to the Emperor's chief aide resulted in an order to the
police to round them up. Not till eleven o'clock that night
did the official cars begin to arrive, bearing one or two
musicians at a time, still frightened and in need of further
a/4 tMiksside Seat for the War 2.2.3
applications of strong spirits. Three quarters of an hour
before the broadcast the cavalcade started for the station,
bumping over deserted roads and frightening hyenas and
owls from their midnight repasts . . .
After a twenty-minute rehearsal under the native con-
ductor, the musicians were properly placed around the floor
of the little workshop with the microphone. The testing calls
and English announcements elicited loud guffaws, and
silence was with difficulty restored. The show started at last,
but each piece had to be forcibly suppressed when the time
was up, as Ethiopian musicians, once started, never want to
stop. When the 'program' was over they were just warming
up, and went on and on, drifting into the generator room and
continuing their weird entertainment against the incongru-
ous background of motors, radio tubes, amplifiers, and con-
trol panels playing, singing and dancing, black men and
women, in ever wilder convolutions, through to the early
hours of the morning. Finally the cavalcade started back
through the deserted streets of Addis Ababa, past startled
sentries and packs of roaming dogs, under the tremendously
brilliant stars of the equatorial sky.
After two months of broadcasting from Eritrea and
Ethiopia, American listeners were tired of the subject.
'Consider we have exhausted broadcastable material/ wired
my New York office, and we quit. The rainy season set in
and held up the Italian steam roller for a while. Then, in
February, it thundered on. In April the advance on Addis
Ababa began; Emperor Haile Selassie fled, first to Jeru-
salem, then to Geneva, whence in the following June
eight months after the war began in earnest we broadcast
his pathetic appeal against the removal of sanctions. Seven
weeks earlier, Mussolini, once again addressing a full-
throated crowd on the Piazza Venezia, had proclaimed tiny
King Victor Emanuel Emperor of little Haile Selassie's
empire . . .
One evening the following winter, while we were rushing in
and out of Broadcasting House reporting on the abdication
2.14 Hello ^America!
crisis, I almost bumped into a small, dark-complexioned,
bearded man of arresting countenance, very finely chiselled
features, and high forehead, wearing a long black cape with
a silver clasp. It was Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia,
King of Kings, Lion of Judah, etc., etc., who had just broad-
cast an appeal to America for funds for destitute Abyssinians.
He was attended by one young Ethiopian and drove off in a
common taxi, through the murky London night.
IN THE SPANISH FIRING LINE
Within a few weeks of Haile Selassie's personal appeal
before the League of Nations Assembly, when Italian
journalists distinguished themselves by hooting and whist-
ling, Hell broke loose in Spain. Franco's troops, in their first
formidable offensive, were being held at bay near San
Sebastian by ragged militiamen and undisciplined miners
from Asturias, who were expert at throwing sticks of dyna-
mite. Old men, women, and children were streaming across
the frontier into France, welcomed on the French side of the
international bridge by cheering crowds of Basques and
Frenchmen of the newly constituted Popular Front. Im-
mersed in the for America far more important in-
tricacies of broadcasting the Olympic Games, I sent my
Paris man, Didier van Ackere, scurrying down to refugee-
crowded Hendaye, where he managed to interview a few of
them before the microphone, thus starting the second series
of war broadcasts within considerably less than a year.
By the grace of geography and the friendly French officials
it was possible, for the first time, to report a war actually in
progress from the safe vantage-ground of neutral territory.
As luck would have it, one of Columbia's most experienced
political commentators, H. V. Kaltenborn, a microphone
veteran with an astonishingly fluent technique, was avail-
able, and a few days after the initial Hendaye broadcast he
made his headquarters in the little French town, dashing now
*Mikeside Seat for the War
into loyal, now into insurgent, territory for eye-witness
material and interviews with the leaders of the most brutal of
all civil wars.
As the battle-front approached the frontier town of Irun
he was able to observe, from the roof of an advantageously
placed hotel, the actual progress of the righting, even while
speaking to the peaceful millions at home. Here was an
unprecedented chance for the radio reporter literally an
armchair view of the war. Speaking from his rooftop,
Kaltenborn reported that two Englishmen had their tea while
watching the bombardment that afternoon. The idea of
broadcasting a 'running commentary* on the cruelest kind
of war, just as you do with a football game, was grotesque
but perfectly feasible, though the opportunity is not very
likely to occur again. Kaltenborn and his successor kept it
up for five weeks, with daily fifteen-minute reports at the
most critical time. He was able to describe the bombardment
of Fort Guadalupe by two insurgent men-of-war, while it was
in progress, and to report attack and counterattack near the
frontier to the sinister sound effects of machine-gun fire and
the whirring of fighting aeroplanes.
'We who report the battle/ Americans from New York to
San Francisco could hear, 'sit in plain view of both forces on
the terrace of a little village cafe some hundred yards across
the valley from the combatants. It is so real and yet so
fantastic that it seems like a battle set up for the moving
pictures/
And again: 'In a moment or two, when the machine gun
which has been barking intermittently all evening sounds
again, I will stop talking for a moment in order that you
may get something of the sound of this civil war as it con-
tinues through the night. This farm is the one most near to
the fighting scene . . . located some three hundred yards
from the lines where rebels and government soldiers are
fighting it out tonight. [Sound of rifle fire.] Those are
isolated shots which are being exchanged by the front-line
sentinels on both sides/
'We happen to be straight in the line of fire. Fortunately
for us the bullets are going high. Four times this afternoon,
2.2.6 Hello ^America!
while we were waiting for an opportunity to link up with
New York our wires were cut. And now finally we have put
the radio machinery inside of a house and I'm standing
around the corner of the house with the microphone in the
open, but with a good thick mortar wall between me and the
bullets that are constantly whizzing past/
And so it went on, while the slow and bloody tragedy was
being enacted to its end. Irun fell on September 4, three days
before the last talk from Hendaye.
MADRID BROADCASTS FROM A BOMB-PROOF CELLAR
Soon after this, Franco's Moors were fighting their way
through the Guadalajara mountain passes and threatening
the plain of Madrid. Long before, almost simultaneously
with Hendaye, we started operations in the capital. Condi-
tions there were indescribable, with a provisional government
trying to organize an army out of revolutionary elements
bent on hunting down the enemy within the gates rather than
obeying military leaders charged with the country's defence.
No one knew where anybody stood, and the people on whom
we tried to rely wearing bourgeois clothes were in
constant danger of their lives.
Telegraph and telephone were disorganized; censorship
was brutally and none too discriminatingly enforced. On
July 28 long before the Madrid offensive began we
managed to transmit, from EAQ, the only powerful short-
wave station in Spain, a talk by Ogier Preteceille, a Spanish
journalist in British employ, who had the confidence of the
Defense Junta and the trade unions. Senor Preteceille gave a
talk on the conflict, but it had been so severely censored that
its only value lay in the fact that it actually came out of em-
battled Madrid. Getting a direct broadcast at all was indeed
an achievement, as can be judged from the fact that no one
else duplicated it till over a month later, when the intrepid
Floyd Gibbons managed to get himself heard.
JVLikeside Seat for the War
Here is just one aspect of the tragic inefficiency imposed by
circumstances on a revolutionary leadership relying on the
untutored elements of the population. Distrust of the in-
tellectual, hostility to the middle class, suspicion of the
foreigner, all combine to paralyze potential instruments of
success. Throughout the two first years the Government
had the advantage in the ether; it had the most powerful
medium-wave broadcasting stations, at Madrid and Bar-
celona; it had the only efficient short-wave station at Aran-
juez near Madrid. The insurgents had only lesser stations,
chiefly at Saragossa and Seville, and evidently in ex-
pectation of capturing EAQ had not thought it worth
while to build a short-wave station which could reach
distant and oversea lands.
Yet the Madrid authorities, while using every spare
minute to broadcast inspired 'bulletins* (which, true or un-
true, are taken with a large grain of salt), put every possible
obstacle in the way of neutral reports by friendly foreigners.
Such reports, especially at the time of Madrid's savage
bombardment, would have turned a great deal of sympathy
in the right direction; but an inefficient and unimaginative
censorship make it impossible for the outside world to get a
reliable account of events. Since radio reporters, like
journalists, would obviously resort to 'deferred* eye-witness
accounts, given over neutral channels outside Spain, the only
result was that such reports, entirely beyond the Govern-
ment's control, lacked the dramatic quality which might
arouse more than casual interest.
On both sides the broadcast stations were commandeered
by the authorities for propaganda purposes, while each side
did its best to 'jam* the other, with minor success. The
second Madrid station, for instance, tuned its own trans-
missions to the hostile wave-length of Seville, yet the fan-
tastic broadcasts of the notorious General Queipo de Llano,
of the southern rebel army, were picked up almost anywhere,
except in Madrid, without any trouble.
As the insurgent armies closed in on Madrid, our problem
became more difficult. The authorities were, if anything,
both more inflexible and more dilatory: by the time a broad-
2.18 Hello ^America!
cast could be written, censored, and the lines cleared for
transmission, it would be out of date. The studio building,
within easy range of bombing planes, became a dangerous
place; the station itself was within six to eight miles of the
front, and was probably spared only because the insurgents
expected to make use of it later. Finally, the lives of the
journalists and potential broadcasters were in constant peril.
During the siege of Madrid they worked in the Telefonica, the
central telegraph exchange, which is the loftiest building in
Spain. It was struck by shells again and again, and bombs
fell all around it. Every morning they would drive to the
front, roam perilously among indistinguishable battle lines,
and return in the evening to sleep in their embassies. Lester
Ziffren, of the United Press, records how three journalists
and two diplomats were captured in one week and he himself
narrowly escaped being taken, having been warned by a lone
and straggling militiaman that he was walking into enemy
lines. 1 No less than six foreign journalists were killed in
Spain, and several were wounded.
Yet I managed to speak with Lester Ziffren by telephone
from London, thanks to the patience and help of the Amer-
ican diplomatic staffs in both cities, and it was he who finally
broadcast for us, late in December, when the city was under
fierce bombardment. To escape a terrific aerial attack such
as had taken place the previous night, the broadcast had to
be made from a bomb-proof cellar whose locality could not
be revealed.
When Ziffren left Madrid, his place was taken by Philip
Jordan of the London News Chronicle, who tried again and
again to broadcast to America from the cellar studio, only to
find that the technical quality of the transmissions did not
satisfy the engineers in New York. To me, monitoring the
tests from London, they were perfectly intelligible; what
spoiled them for America I am not able to say.
On the other hand, not only Philip Jordan but Vernon
Bartlett and Jay Allen were able to give graphic and some-
times startling accounts of conditions in Spain after personal
observation, immediately after they reached the safety of
1 Sec Political Opinion Quarterly y Princeton, New Jersey, 1937.
*A tMikeside Seat for the War 2.2.9
Paris, London, or New York. And Bartlett's story of the
Government's attack on the Alcazar is something he would
probably not have been allowed to broadcast from Madrid:
'It certainly is an odd war. The first time I went to
Toledo, while the Alcazar was being besieged, I met a girl
with a lot of hand grenades hung around her belt. She took
me, much against my will, through two smouldering houses
and up a steep bank into the garden of Alcazar. There was
only a wall between us and the followers of General Franco,
who were being besieged inside. She was a Communist and
talked to me a lot about Karl Marx. I protested she had
never read anything that gentleman had written. She just
lugged a hand grenade over the wall and came back to tell
me that, if I looked on such and such a page of the Spanish
translation, I should find such and such a statement. Then
she threw another hand grenade, then she talked about
Karl Marx again. This went on until, in her excitement
about politics, one of her grenades came down on our side of
the wall. After which I decided I wasn't really very in-
terested in Karl Marx and left, rather in a hurry/
And that may be one explanation why the Government
was not winning the war in 1936.
Broadcasting has become an important feature of war;
the radio reporter, as I remarked at the beginning of this
chapter, has evidently come to stay. At the time of writing
the predominating scene of the gradually spreading Second
World War is China, and already the broadcasting organiza-
tions have been engaged in jockeying for vantage-points from
which to describe the horrors to their listeners. Short-wave
transmitters may be set up near battlefields, where the
authorities with cynical complacency will in all probability
grant the necessary privilege to broadcast the operations.
What, we may ask, is the value of all this? Will people
hearing first-hand accounts of brutal conflict, with the noises
of battle for realistic effect, grasp the real horror and so have
their sensibilities roused against war ? Or will war, benefiting
by this new instrument, thrive on the added publicity, as
other ' human' manifestations do? No description can equal
2.30 Hello ^America!
the realities of organized human slaughter, and it does not
seem to me that greater familiarity with it will breed any-
thing but a dangerous contempt.
With the actual use of radio in war we are not here con-
cerned, except to point out that, as in all other methods of
expression and communication, any remaining radio freedom
in the warring country is immediately suppressed.
XVII. TEN NIGHTS THAT SHOOK
THE ETHER
THE ROYAL ROMANCE
IN THE summer of 1936, when rival forces were spreading
carnage and terror through Northern Spain, when the
first miserable contingents of refugees were pouring into
France, and frightened people everywhere saw rising before
them the spectre of another European holocaust, two good-
looking, apparently care-free people in fashionable sports
attire were romping in the sunshine of the Adriatic Sea. One
of them was the new King of England and the other an
American woman, just under middle age, whose name was
being whispered all over Europe, while her picture was
prominently displayed in the international press. Famous
Paris dressmakers competed for the privilege of preparing
their latest masterpieces for her, and advance copies of their
designs were being syndicated to Sunday supplements for the
edification of American girls.
It was known in the fashionable circles and newspaper
offices of European capitals that Mrs. Ernest Simpson of
Baltimore had been the King's favorite for some time.
Although a divorcee, she had 'officially' dined at Bucking-
ham Palace a radical break with the rigid rules of the
British Court under King George V, and a virtual affront to
the widowed Queen Mary, matriarch of the British royal
family. To Europeans this seemed to indicate that the
rigidly Victorian days so incompatible with the freer post-
war moral concepts were over. To Americans, more
na'ive and more imaginative, it opened up romantic vistas
that brought far-away looks into the eyes of shop-girls and
2.32. Hello ^America!
debutantes, and heavy returns to popular newspapers in
search of additional circulation.
The public in general passed over this seemingly trivial
subject to the more diverting events on the international
scene such as the Olympic Games at Berlin, which were
being broadcast throughout the world for the first time in
their history, and the preparations for the Inter-American
Conference, which was expected to fill the American front
pages for many weeks of the following fall. Nevertheless,
one or two of the pictures which made their way into the
European papers, showing a radiantly happy couple rowing
ashore from their luxurious chartered yacht, or disembarking
hand in hand, gave thinking people a jolt.
In Great Britain, however, none of this aroused any gen-
eral attention, for the simple reason that matters concerning
the royal family are sacrosanct and not susceptible of the
usual treatment by the press a voluntary censorship
maintained in the interest of royal prestige, which is con-
sidered to be a national asset and a thing above party politics
and controversy. Moreover, in this particular case the entire
British press had imposed silence upon itself by virtue of a
decision of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, a power-
ful body controlling all the organs of printed publicity in
Great Britain. Thus a grotesque situation was brought
about: the press of the United States and any country that
might be interested could publish all the details of the in-
cipient * royal romance/ while the one country most con-
cerned was kept in utter ignorance of the story that was
being built up. American papers containing references to the
affair arrived in England with pages removed or passages
blacked out by distributors who obeyed the N.P.A. ban.
No broadcasting organizations in the British Isles or the
European Continent so much as mentioned the matter in
their spoken news; nor was it possible, in the circumstances,
for any American radio reporter to mention it in any trans-
atlantic broadcast.
About the middle of October the story had developed to a
point where scandal in high places was hinted at, and British
politicians and statesmen especially the Prime Minister
Ten lights That Shook the ther
were being bombarded with letters enclosing cuttings from
American papers and magazines. William Randolph Hearst,
always more adventurous than his rivals, came out with the
startling story that the King contemplated marriage with
Mrs. Simpson a lady still married to another man.
Thus it happened that the news of Mrs. Simpson's applica-
tion for divorce, in the middle of October, came as a bomb-
shell, especially to those who knew what had gone before.
The English papers printed no details, and when a decree
nisi was granted on October 27, the bare announcement of it
in the legal columns escaped the casual reader's notice.
Once again the B.B.C.'s news department ignored the occur-
rence, as a matter of course, for no divorce is ever mentioned
over the British radio, which takes careful account of its
juvenile listeners.
But the stream of letters and cuttings sent to government
people and members of Parliament from abroad increased,
reaching flood tide in early November. An apparently
innocent question asked in Parliament about the 'scrutiny*
of publications imported from the United States was am-
biguously answered by the President of the Board of Trade;
but a supplementary question from that fiery atom, Miss
Ellen Wilkinson, M.P. for Jarrow, startled the usually
complacent House. 'What is this thing/ Miss Wilkinson
asked, 'that the British public are not allowed to see?'
Still the newspaper ban continued to operate, and the
general public dismissed the matter from its mind. Even the
sophisticated Londoners contemplated nothing more than a
discreet court affair, such as the histories of all monarchies
have recorded through the ages. To continental Europeans,
used to royal intrigues, and also to morganatic marriages, the
matter even in its worst aspects had no political importance.
NOT A MATTER FOR BROADCASTING'
If, in the meantime, momentous conversations were taking
place behind the scenes, no one in either England or America
2.34 Hello ^America!
was aware of these portentous developments. The world had
plenty of other things to think about: Italy and Germany
were defying the League and the Covenant; the three Kings
of Scandinavia were declaring their solidarity and appealing
for European peace; President Roosevelt was on his way to
South America to open the great conference that was to
establish permanent peace in the western hemisphere. He
arrived in Buenos Aires on November 30. My New York
office was cabling me to 'hold down' on European material,
as all available foreign broadcasting periods would be blank-
eted by South American reports.
On the day of the opening of the Inter-American Confer-
ence, another and very different conference was taking place
in Bradford, in the English midlands. It was a conference of
churchmen; and the Bishop of Bradford, Doctor Frank
Blunt, made a speech which bore out both his names.
Speaking of King Edward VIII 'a man like ourselves*
he commended him to God's grace, which he would abun-
dantly need if he was to do his duty faithfully. 'We hope that
he is aware of this need,' added the good Bishop. ' Some of us
wish that he gave more positive signs of his awareness/
No churchman had spoken thus about an English king in
centuries, for no church is more subservient to royalty than
the Church of England, of which the King is the titular head.
Nor was this all: the British press almost without exception
reprinted his words, and many commended him for speaking
out. It seemed more than likely that the bishop's reprimand
was inspired. In fact, the hunt was up and at last the
British press threw reticence to the winds. Only the B.B.C.
remained silent, and still most people in England didn't know
what it was all about. The working classes only remembered
that but a fortnight ago the King had made a sensational
visit to the distressed areas of South Wales, flouting the
Conservative Government and taking with him the former
Commissioner for the Special (anglice Distressed) Areas,
Mr. Malcolm Stewart, who had resigned because his report
proved too radical. They had still ringing in their ears his
words after seeing the destitution in the dead town of Dow-
lais, to the effect that 'something must be done to find these
Ten T^ights That Shook the Ether
people employment/ and his confident promise that 'some-
thing will be done/ To them he was a hero; a king who would
champion the cause of the poor, even against Conservative
politicians.
Some of them may have remembered how, after an all-
night parliamentary debate on the eve of that journey, the
Cabinet had met at six in the morning, an extraordinary
event, obviously occasioned by the action of the King.
What they did not know was that on the day before Mr.
Baldwin, the Prime Minister, had seen the King and learned
from him his intention to marry Mrs. Simpson as soon as she
should be free. Nor did they know that another Cabinet
session, only four days before the Blunt pronouncement, had
dealt, not as was supposed with the war in Spain, but
with the crisis arising out of the King's matrimonial plans.
In fact, the crisis was already coming to a head, although
the papers were still speaking cryptically of a 'constitutional
issue' rather than an affair of the heart. Only in America the
headlines screamed that an American woman was fighting for
a British crown. On Thursday, December 3, the British
papers mentioned Mrs. Simpson's name for the first time in
connection with the crisis, and on that day Mr. Baldwin ad-
mitted to Parliament that a situation had arisen on which he
would make a statement as soon as possible. Also, two
'King's men' had raised their voices in Parliament, namely,
Colonel Wedgwood and Mr. Winston Churchill, to ask
ominous questions which hinted that grave decisions were
imminent.
The issue from now on was to be fought out openly in the
newspapers, while weighty but invisible moves were going
on between the Government, the Church, and the King.
Broadcasting, it was tacitly understood, was not a fit medium
to deal with a situation so delicate so far as England was
concerned; but the question now arose whether American
broadcasting should, like the newspapers, go 'all out.' In
Great Britain broadcasting was a monopoly chartered by the
Crown and licensed by the Government. Any statement
made concerning a controversy between these two arms of
the State might give rise to serious difficulties. In America
2.36 Hello ^America!
the broadcasting companies were giving out brief bulletins
under their restrictive agreement with the press, while the
press was free to indulge in an orgy of prophecy and conjec-
ture, controversy and sensationalism, without let or hin-
drance.
There was just one way in which the radio could counter
the advantage of the press, and that was to get material from
the spot, from England direct. It could do this only with the
concurrence of the B.B.C. and the British Post Office, which
controls the European end of the transatlantic telephone.
Hitherto it had tacitly deferred to the policy of the B.B.C.;
on the crucial Thursday, when the crisis reached Parliament
and Mrs. Simpson's name was mentioned in the British
press, both of the major American chains approached the
heads of the B.B.C., obtained permission to transmit fair
comment on the crisis, and within fifteen minutes of each
other their first broadcasts reached America that afternoon.
Radio had caught the big story at its flood, and from now
on millions of eager people in the United States and Canada
literally hung on their sets with bated breath as it un-
ravelled, chapter by chapter, a story which raced with in-
creasing momentum to its dramatic close. Nothing else
mattered; the great Conference in America, the war in Spain,
the Pope's illness, some of the worst airplane disasters in
years only the love story of a King and an American
woman and their struggle for happiness, against the effulgent
background of the greatest throne and the oldest tradition
in the world.
For the next ten days and nights three American radio
chains (for the Mutual Broadcasting Company had recently
entered the international field) sent an aggregate of about
eighty fifteen-minute commentaries an average of eight a
day from London, occupying a total air time of over
twenty hours, an all-time record for any single subject or
event since international broadcasting began. Most of these
talks, in order to reach American listeners at convenient
evening times, had to be made during the night and early
morning, London time; and the pressure on the technical and
service staff of the B.B.C. was terrific. Broadcasting House,
Ten lights That Shook the ther 2.37
on account of the B.B.C.'s service to Britain's world-encir-
cling empire, is never asleep; at this time it was a beehive of
activity all night.
As for the American broadcasters we practically stood
on our heads. I have worked in newspaper offices at times of
crisis, when the strain and confusion seemed unbearable; but
the downright torture of nervous tension and physical
fatigue of these ten days and nights had a character of their
own. Against the sheer labor of persuasion to get the 'big
shots' to speak at such a time and on such a subject, our
much-vaunted high-pressure salesmanship was a mere
parlor game. Some of our 'prospects ' would figuratively bite
our heads off in their anger or wither us with their righteous
indignation. The higher they were in the social scale (with a
few sensible exceptions), the more sacrosanct were the issues
involved. Fifty telephone calls might be required before one
speaker was booked. One of them, though in London all the
time, actually had to be tracked by telephone via Hollywood!
Yet New York was never satisfied. When we offered a
prominent M.P., they wanted Winston Churchill; when we
proposed Lord Beaverbrook they wanted Lord Rothermere
as well; when we delivered a viscount they wanted an earl, or
a duke. Lady Astor, on the ocean, was bombarded with
radio messages. Hardly had we given the latest available
news in a midnight talk, when they wanted another one at
4 A.M. even if there was nothing new! The public was wild
and we were going mad. New York rang up to confirm every
wild rumor; conservative but reliable information merely
aroused a suspicion that I was 'slow.' Day after day, night
after night we kept it up with almost no sleep hunting
news, hounding speakers, sometimes telling them what to
say and how to say it; and dickering about terms. A noble
earl, having settled the business before tea, raised the stakes
during dinner (my dinner), throwing confusion into the
night's work. For a week my bed was used not for sleep but
as a reference shelf, and two telephones were at my elbows
during meals.
Each of us (my rivals and myself) were a one-man team
with a harassed secretary at our elbow, watching the Opposi-
138 Hello ^America!
tion as a cat watches a mouse. If we booked a transatlantic
circuit at 11.30, the Opposition would counter with 11.15,
scooping us on time if not on facts. The New York-London
telephone rang and rang finally it just rang to make sure I
was still awake or alive.
EXPLAINING TO AMERICA
In telling the story itself, radio could of course do no more
than duplicate the press, and it wisely confined itself to the
bare outward facts. In the matter of interpretation, however,
its limitations proved its strength. To mere speculation and
sensation-mongering it opposed authoritative analyses of the
points at issue. It gave the historical background of the
crisis; interpreted the traditional aspects and the political
implications; presented the trend of public opinion from day
to day. It was soon clear which way this opinion was going:
from ordinary human sympathy with a genuinely beloved
monarch it passed to condemnation on the basis of moral
principles and stern judgment on constitutional grounds;
for, whatever the merits of the sentimental considerations,
no Englishman could contemplate with equanimity another
conflict between Parliament and King a conflict won
after centuries of strife in the fight against James II in 1688.
Lawyers and historians, sociologists and statesmen, nobles
and commoners, men and women, parliamentarians of every
shade were drafted to this task of explanations and inter-
pretation. It was a job worthy of their mettle; for here was
an unprecedented situation involving two people belonging
to two countries whose nationals might well have been at
verbal loggerheads through a misunderstanding that lay so
plausibly at hand. 1
1 Those who assisted in this process of clarification for the American networks
included the Duchess of Atholl, the Marquis of Lothian, the Marquis of Donegall,
the Earl of Birkenhead, Lady Reading, Lady Astor, Lady Rhondda, Viscount Cecil
of Chelwood, Lord Elton, Lord Ponsonby, Lord Strabolgi, Sir Josiah Stamp,
Sir Frederick Whyte, Sir Alfred Zimmern, Professor Harold Laski, Ellen Wilkinson,
Ten Rights That Shook the Sther 2139
One and all these speakers assured their American listeners
that there was nothing repugnant in the idea of an American
woman and a commoner on the British throne. Most people
may have taken this with a large grain of salt; but the fact
remained that this romantic possibility never entered into
the argument, for there were other, more weighty, reasons in
the way. As the case developed through the days, three sim-
ple points emerged: (i) Mrs. Simpson was not acceptable to
the British people as their queen; (2) the idea of a morgana-
tic marriage was repugnant to Anglo-Saxon moral and social
concepts; and (3) in any conflict between King and Parlia-
ment, Parliament must prevail.
The crux of the whole matter lay in point 3, that a constitu-
tional monarch must be guided by the will of the people, as
expressed in the advice of his ministers, in all public concerns
and in the case of a king even his marriage is a public con-
cern. 'The will of Parliament must prevail/ said Lord
Ponsonby, a convinced monarchist whose father for a quarter
of a century had been Queen Victoria's private secretary.
Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science in London Uni-
versity, in saying that 'no precedent must be created that
makes royal authority once more a source of political power
in the State' merely voiced the opinion of the masses
throughout Great Britain, as represented by the Labor
Party in Parliament, whose leaders would have been only
too glad to condemn the Government.
It was true that King Edward had shown more sympathy
with the working classes than that Government; he might
have been a powerful aid in securing a greater measure of
social justice for them. But all personal and class considera-
tions had to be sacrificed for the greater principles of demo-
cracy. 'It is but a minor cruelty of history that the lives of
two people should be bruised in the preservation of the de-
mocratic tradition/ said Philip Jordan in his broadcast
shortly before the abdication. 'In a world seething with less
M.P., Vernon Bartlett, Gerald Barry, Hector Bolitho, Alistair Cooke, Frank
Darvall, John Drinkwater, Joseph Driscoll, Philip Jordan, Commander Stephen
King-Hall, J. B. Priestley, Cesar Saerchinger, H. Wickham Steed, John Steele, and
Frederick Voigt.
140 Hello ^America!
amiable forms of government we can ill spare a jot or tittle
of our heritage, and that is the sad truth/
In the light of these main points of the controversy the
question for the King was clear: was he or was he not willing
to sacrifice his own happiness for the throne, in other words
his duty, or as the plain man put it, his 'job*? The fact that
he was not, settled his fate with his subjects, high and low.
'When we went to war,' said a mob orator in Hyde Park,
'we were told to leave our homes, our wives, our sweet-
hearts, everything we had, for the country's good. We did
it, millions of us. He, the first citizen of the country, isn't
willing to do even less.'
As these broadcast talks went across, some voices of dis-
sent were raised. A Representative asked in Congress of
all places why the Columbia speakers represented only
one side, and why the King's side wasn't heard. It was heard;
but if it wasn't heard more insistently it is simply because
his side had nothing to say. I myself invited his leading
champions, Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook and Mr.
Winston Churchill, to speak; they one and all refused
more or less politely. John Drinkwater and J. B. Priestley,
both professed partisans of the King, had their say. Abdica-
tion was abhorrent to almost every man who spoke.
Yet, when the controversy was three or four days old, it
was almost impossible to find a King's man in London, or in
the country, and least of all in the streets.
'What's going to happen?' I asked a laboring man on the
Sunday of the critical week.
'He's going to get the sack/
'And you think that's just?'
'Yes, because he's let us down. He ought to be an ex-
ample to the rest of us, and he's let us down.'
The day after this typical pronouncement by the man in
the street, the word ' abdication ' was heard for the first time
in Parliament. It was spoken by Colonel Wedgwood, whose
words were lost in the uproar they provoked. From then on
events galloped to their conclusion. Mr. Baldwin made his
fateful report in the House; Mr. Churchill, warning against
irrevocable steps, was shouted down; Mrs. Simpson made
Ten lights That Shook the Ether
her equivocal statement in Cannes. On Tuesday the die
was cast, though Mr. Baldwin's staying for dinner with the
King and his brothers at Fort Belvedere threw the news-
papers off their scent.
On Wednesday the royal family, including Queen Mary,
assembled at the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park to
meet the King, while Cabinet meetings and the comings and
goings of palace officials indicated that a decision was im-
minent. The Prime Minister promised a statement for next
day. According to rumor, only slightly premature, the King
had already abdicated, and Lord Strabolgi, broadcasting
to America, forecast the terms of the Act of Parliament,
conferring the succession on the Duke of York. 'The bill/
he added, 'is now ready/ He also forecast its passage by a
large majority and predicted the King's virtual exile abroad.
As far as it was permissible, the American public had been
told.
SETTING THE STAGE
Yet there was an element of doubt, which would not be
dispelled till Parliament met. Elaborate arrangements
the most elaborate machinery ever provided for a single
event were set up for the flashing of the fateful news.
The leading American press associations leased open tele-
phone circuits from London to New York; all cable and wire-
less telegraphic services were virtually commandeered by
the press; all other business was suspended for the essential
part of the day. Wires between Parliament and the news-
paper offices were doubled and trebled; every great news-
paper had its own system of signals and messengers, its own
private tricks in an unprecedented effort to score a beat.
Presses in New York and all the big cities of America stood
ready to rush extras to the street. It was the climax to the
biggest news story since the Armistice in 1918.
But since the Armistice a new factor had come into the
Z42. Hello ^America!
business of distributing news. Broadcasting companies in
America had two channels through which the decisive news
of the abdication could come the Press-Radio news
bureau, which was limited to flashes and brief bulletins, and
its own representatives on the spot. The rapidity of modern
news transmission at moments of crisis is almost incredible;
relays from Parliament to newspaper offices in this instance
was virtually instantaneous. Yet radio could conceivably
take this a stage further, for a speaker in London would be
heard by listeners all over America. However, the speaker
could not be stationed in Parliament itself, and there were
several possibilities of delay between that point and the
radio circuit across the Atlantic. Moreover, it was obviously
impossible to maintain an open circuit indefinitely; and much
depended, therefore, upon calculating the correct moment
when the news would break. The clue was given by Ellen
Wilkinson, M.P., in her talk on the fateful morning, which
set the stage for the American audience.
'What will happen today?' she said. 'The Country is on
tiptoe, but the House will meet at 2.45 as usual. The Speaker,
tall, slender and dignified, will go with his Chaplain through
the lobby. The Chaplain will lead the assembled members
in prayer, as he does every day. As always, we shall pray for
our sovereign lord, King Edward, and for the safety and
welfare of the realm.
'The Empire is on tiptoe, but the all-important state-
ment from the Premier will not be made first thing. In the
words of the hymn, "Crowns and thrones may perish,
kingdoms rise and fall" but it is the inalienable right of
the members of the House of Commons to question the
Ministers about their departments before any other business
is taken up.
'The world is on tiptoe, but Mr. Gibson, M.P. for Green-
wich, will ask Mr. Brown, Minister of Labor, why the un-
employment benefit of Neal Tonnett, of 160 Ranken Street,
Greenwich, has been reduced from seventeen shillings to
nine shillings per week. There are fifty-three questions on the
paper. All these will be asked before we get to the business
which is in everyone's mind/
Ten lights That Shook the Ether 243
That, I figured, would be not earlier than 3.30 P.M.
Actually a few minutes later, Mr. Baldwin, pale and haggard,
a sealed document in his hand, amid a tense silence, rose
from his seat, bowed to the Speaker and said: 'A Message
from His Majesty the King, signed by His Majesty's own
hand/ At the same moment, approximately, Lord Halifax
made the same announcement in the House of Lords. 1
That was the news.
WE SCOOP THE WORLD
How could I get that news and get it the moment it hap-
pened before the big agencies streaked it like lightning to
all the world ? Obviously there must be some indication
some unfailing sign as to which way the cat would jump
even before the Prime Minister opened his mouth. I ob-
viously can't reveal just what happened in fact I hardly
know myself, except that I had my scouts at three strategic
points, and one of them 'came through/ The essential fact
is that at precisely 3.32 P.M. in London my telephone outside
our Broadcasting House studio rang, and a voice, having
identified mine, announced the fact of abdication. The
terminus of the open circuit to America was but three yards
away, and I shouted for 'the air/ My colleague in New
York asked me to stand by, and while the connection with
master-control, the heart of the broadcasting network, was
made in New York, I rushed to the microphone, ready to
shoot. Bulletins on the crisis were being read to the American
audience at the time, and the announcer in his studio gaily
went on reading, unconscious of being cut off. In the ex-
citement no one thought of telling him. The moment I got
my signal, I was able to announce to the waiting millions
1 By a curious coincidence, another Lord Halifax, in the seventeenth century,
played a leading part in the forced abdication (correctly: flight) of James II. And
chance would have it that Edward VIII left England on December 1 1, the day that
James II, the only other exiled king in English history, fled the country.
Z44 Hello ^America!
that King Edward VIII had abdicated, announce it from the
very studio from which he had introduced himself to the
Empire as King.
In the meantime, over another telephone in Broadcasting
House, the bulletins giving the actual text of the King's
message had begun to come in. This, and Mr. Baldwin's
moving recital of the whole story leading up to this tragic
end, we read direct to the American listener at the very
moment that the story was barely arriving in the newspaper
offices in New York. Listening to the open return circuit
from New York I heard the announcer reading the Press-
Radio bulletin announcing the King's abdication twenty
minutes after I had announced it to the listeners direct. For
twenty minutes the world outside knew through my words
alone that King Edward was King no longer. For once,
radio had ' scooped the world.'
That night, limp with the reaction from effort and excite-
ment, I listened at my radio to the sensational burning of
the Crystal Palace the last gaudy survival from Queen
Victoria's Jubilee . . .
King Edward VIII, the only English king in history to
abdicate voluntarily, had sacrificed his throne for 'the
woman I love,' and that woman was an American, born in
a modest Baltimore house, where her mother like thou-
sands of American mothers with daughters to support
had kept boarders in less prosperous years. The story was
almost unbelievably romantic to the simple American
schoolgirl's mind. Next day the King himself was to con-
firm it in his own words, broadcast to the four corners of the
world. Millions in all the continents listened with strangely
mixed feelings, as the voice of Sir John Reith announced in
the simplest formula: 'This is Windsor Castle. His Royal
Highness, Prince Edward . . .' Stripped of his kingly dignity,
'Prince Edward' once again became the perpetual adolescent
whose eager, youthful figure had flitted through the illus-
trated papers for two decades.
Ten lights That Shook the Ether Z45
EDWARD'S FAREWELL
Future generations of visitors to Windsor Castle will be
shown the room in the Augusta Tower where lovelorn Ed-
ward bared his heart to the peoples of his Empire. Kings
had ruled from here through nine centuries conquerors,
despots, murderers, scholars, saints but none had taken
his subjects into his confidence before all the world to show
that he was but a man like the rest of us.
Three miles away lay Fort Belvedere, that pastoral bower
where Edward's idyll had ripened into drama. He had left
the fort in the darkness, shortly before ten, to make probably
the last broadcast of his career from the ancestral castle
home whose name was henceforth to be his title. Taking a
few loose typewritten sheets from his breast pocket, he laid
them on the table with the microphone and started to make
last-minute corrections. Attendants, engineers everybody
left the room; in this historic moment he wanted to be
alone.
'You all know the reason which has impelled me to re-
nounce the throne. . . . You must believe me when I tell you
that I found it impossible to carry the heavy burden . . .
without the woman I love. . . . The other person most nearly
concerned has tried to the last to persuade me to take a
different course. . . .
'And now we all have a new king God bless you all.
God save the King! '
It was all over. Someone opened the door. Smiling in his
usual cheery manner Edward, a Prince once again, shook
hands with the broadcasting officials and started to go.
Turning back for a moment, he saw the crumpled leaves of
his manuscript lying on the floor. Stooping quickly, he gath-
ered them up, stuck them in his breast pocket and left. A
few minutes later a car with three male passengers sped
through the night toward the south coast to Portsmouth.
After midnight he was there. In the darkness, deepened by
an English fog, the grim Destroyer which was to carry King
Hello ^America!
Edward into exile crept across to France. Her name was
Fury.
The last words spoken to America, before Prince Edward's
own, were those of a woman. * In a world/ said the Duchess
of Atholl, 'where only too often a woman has been sacrificed
to a man's passing fancy, here is a man who has renounced
the greatest throne in the world for the woman he loves/
The story of the crisis started with the words of a bishop;
it ended with those of an archbishop. What role the Church
of England played in all this may never be known, but that
it was not without importance we may be sure. Would the
Archbishop of Canterbury ever have crowned Mrs. Simpson
Queen? As the chief spiritual adviser of the royal family he
was known to have been charged by aging King George to
admonish the Prince; what was the charge the dying mon-
arch confided to the kingdom's chief priest ? How far was the
future of Church and State involved in the crisis, and what
was the meaning of that strangely timed ' Call to Religion/
launched after Edward's departure?
With the farewell speech Edward had had his say; no one
felt that it called for a reply. It was the end of a sad story.
'Let the past bury the past 1 that is what people thought.
Not so the Archbishop. Using the same medium as the
King, he broadcast to the world these bitter words:
'From God he had received a high and sacred trust. Yet,
by his own will, he has abdicated he has surrendered the
trust. With characteristic frankness he has told us his
motive. It was a craving for private happiness. Strange and
sad it must be that for such a motive, however strongly it
pressed upon his heart, he should have disappointed hopes
so high, and abandoned a trust so great/
No stranger message, surely, had ever been broadcast; no
words, however true, that had better have been left unsaid.
XVIII. 'COMPETITION IS THE LIFE
OF RADIO'
THE 'AMERICAN SYSTEM* IN EUROPE
ONE of the grimmer aspects of a radio representative's
life is competition, still widely credited with being the
life of trade. Newspaper correspondents take competition
in their stride; it adds zest to their activity. When they com-
pete on the same story it is a competition for quality, since
the same story can be told in a hundred ways; when they
fight for 'exclusives' it is a battle of wits. Rarely, in the pro-
cess, does anyone get hurt. In radio, the first kind of competi-
tion is exhilarating and in the long run results in better
programs. The second kind, however, often deteriorates in a
ruthless exploitation of advantage or the most gruelling kind
of battle against invisible odds. At worst this kind of rivalry
ends in hard feelings, at best it results in a duplication of
stunts. In newspaper work the fight is general; in radio it is
a single combat to the death. It is also more bitter than in
journalism because the objects are fewer and the defeats
more spectacular. The battle of wits often becomes a battle
of tempers a cock-fight in which the victims are normally
friends. I never had much use for that kind of work, for it
stultifies the imagination and sharpens one's strategy at the
expense of creative thinking. But it does from time to time
result in amusing episodes, and if I recount some of them here
it is because I thought them amusing and not because I ap-
prove of the motives and methods which lay behind.
I first ran up against competition when I heard about the
Mussolini New Year's broadcast in 1931. Competition gave
me a few bad nights during the battle for the Pope's first
Hello ^America!
broadcast a month later. It made me see red the month
after that in Ireland, where I went for the 'wearin' of the
green/
I had had the bright idea to broadcast a Saint Patrick's
Day speech by President Cosgrave, and after some compli-
cated negotiations the matter was arranged. Just two
months before the great day, I received an official letter
from the Irish Foreign Minister telling me that 'the Presi-
dent has much pleasure in accepting the invitation to broad-
cast/ I was elated until, some ten days before Saint Pat-
rick's Day, New York warned me that our rivals had sud-
denly announced a Saint Patrick's Day broadcast also
from Dublin and also with Cosgrave for the fifteenth
two days before Saint Patrick's Day! But due protests were
made through Washington and on the tenth I received a
reassuring cable from New York:
IRISH MINISTER CABLES COSGRAVE POSTPONED
TALK ON FIFTEENTH UNTIL AFTER OUR PRO-
GRAMME.
Imagine my feelings when, on a chill and foggy March 16,
I arrived in Kingstown Harbor, and on my way up to Dublin
in a decrepit boat train saw spread all over the Irish Inde-
pendent: 'President's Radio Message to America Full
Text of Yesterday's Speech.' So he'd made it after all! My
tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth; my breakfast in the
newly swabbed, wet-smelling dining-room of the Gresham
Hotel tasted like gall. Swearing vengeance, I drove in a
rickety taxi to the Government Buildings to learn what?
That the President was very, very sorry, but had been told
that the talk he had made was just an internal affair a
'greeting to the Chicago World's Fair and the Chicago
Tribune,' and so he thought it wouldn't pre-empt my un-
doubted claim to the President's first message to the Ameri-
can people. Moreover, my competitor had arrived in the
company of the American Minister, and how could an Irish
President refuse anything to the American Minister (then
the only foreign diplomat in Dublin) ? I saw it all it was
just Ireland and, worst of all, my 'competitor' was no
Competition is the Life of T$adio 2.49
other than dear old John Steele, correspondent of the Chi-
cago Tribune, acting under orders and entirely innocent of
the mess. 1
What's done is done, and there was nothing for it but to
grin and let the President talk again, on this fine Saint Pat-
rick's Day, for the sun had now begun to make a feeble
effort to pierce the gray sky. I bought myself a Shamrock
from a ragged colleen on O'Connell Street and watched the
entire Irish Army parade across College Green, which made
me long for a real Saint Patrick's Day parade on Fifth
Avenue, New York. Cosgrave, a colorless little man who
looked rather like a dry-goods clerk, except for a sign reading
'President' in Gaelic and English on his office partition,
made an inconsequential speech, calmly ignoring his previous
one and saying that this was 'the first time in history that
the head of an independent Irish government could have
the privilege on Saint Patrick's Day of addressing you from
the Government Buildings in Dublin ' which was of course
the letter of the truth. And he ended up by ' evoking memo-
ries ' in the accepted manner, not forgetting the Battle of the
Boyne, Saint Patrick, and the rest. If it wasn't his first
broadcast, it was certainly his last, for a few months later
Eamon de Valera swept him out of power. Needless to say, I
booked the redoubtable revolutionary for the following Saint
Patrick's Day, with due precautions against 'horners-in/
LAVAL SAILS FOR THE U.S.A.
That autumn Pierre Laval, Prime Minister of France and
one of the wiliest politicians that ever walked, was to make
his famous * buccaneering trip' (in Stephen King-Hall's
phrase) to Washington. I felt I ought to try to get a broad-
cast from him on the eve of sailing with his attractive olive-
skinned daughter Jose. I flew to Paris and began the usual
1 John Steele is now the London representative of the Mutual Broadcasting
System.
150 Hello ^America!
round of harangues in official quarters, to set the machinery
in motion. Politicians of all shades, from Marin to Chau-
temps, were buzzing back and forth, and going into tail
spins in the vicinity of Laval's office, the Ministry of the In-
terior. No special broadcast could be made, Monsieur le
President was much too busy getting ready for President
Hoover, and in the end it was arranged to broadcast a
speech which he would make to the world's press, whose
representatives he was receiving at the Ministry on the eve
of his tour. That, being in the nature of an official occasion,
had to be shared by the two American radio companies,
and * neutral' Ralph Heinzen, of the United Press, was to
read a translation, since Laval didn't speak anything but
French. Faute de mieux, we acquiesced. I was assured that
the technical arrangements would be made.
Thursday evening arrived; the entrance halls of the Min-
istry were a human anthill. Chattering journalists, news-
reel people, politicians, and a nondescript mob of hangers-on
made it impossible to move. Nobody to take a message,
and the broadcast only half an hour away. At last I spied
a French radio man; apparently there would be a broadcast,
but he didn't know when. Time was nothing to him; a
speech by the Premier would be taken when it happened,
like a shower of rain. American broadcasting was run dif-
ferently; they would 'take' the Premier at thirty seconds
after half-past six, or not at all.
I finally charged through the crowd and into the office
of the chef de cabinet. Oh, everything would be ready, he
opined. There was the gentleman making the translation
now! So even the translation wasn't done; and Monsieur
Rueff, an economic expert with some knowledge of English,
was working on page one. 'Ah!' he said when he spied me.
'An American. Perhaps Monsieur will help?' We set to,
working a mile a minute, on alternate pages. Meantime
Laval had arrived; I rushed in, translation in hand, while
cameras clicked and Kleig lights were trained on the swarthy
and perspiring statesman. The noise and confusion were
awful; I ducked through the crowd, reached Laval's desk,
raised my hand to stop the talking, and announced His Excel-
Competition is the Life of T^adio
lency, the French Prime Minister. Everything happened in
the nick of time, or just after. ' Comme toujours,' coolly
remarked a Frenchman, standing near-by. And after all
that heroic effort, not even an 'exclusive!'
Well, next day, I was sailing with Laval and a group of
American and French journalists in the lie de France. I
determined to make one more try from aboard ship. An
exclusive mid-ocean radio talk would be * something/
Watching my chances, I sat in on the daily press conferences
which the wily French politician used to hold in his presi-
dential suite, always wearing his white lawn necktie and
grinning at us through his gnarled, tobacco-stained teeth.
There was something strangely oriental about this son of
the South.
'What earthly connection is there between the war debts
and disarmament? 1 he used to ask, with an ingenuous air.
Til tell you what/ he said one day. 'Til get France to pay
the American debt, if you'll get Mr. Hoover to abolish pro-
hibition/ (Laval hailed from a wine region, so this was a
good joke.) And then he would pour us champagne from a
magnum, but never take any himself. Meantime I was
exchanging messages with New York and getting chummy
with the wireless operators up on the hurricane deck. These
optimistic Frenchmen were sure their radio-telephone equip-
ment could transmit the proposed broadcast to New York
when we were within a day of the American shore. But they
forgot to mention that their 'microphone' was just an
adapted telephone mouthpiece.
Laval was ready to talk to greet the American people
as a 'messenger of peace/ come to help 'ward off the dangers
which menace civilization/ We set the broadcast for ten
o'clock at night, ship's time, and started to make tests. Up
in the wireless room I shouted into the mouthpiece, trying
to get myself heard by the American engineers: 'This is the
lie de France calling WABC, New York/ 'Hello WABC,
hello W2XE, hello WLA and the rest!' No answer. They
put on all their 'juice'; so did I. Finally I had none left; I
was too hoarse to talk. It was a heartbreak. Morse mes-
sages came in to say New York couldn't hear us. I gave it up.
Hello ^America!
Meantime Old Man Competition had raised his head. Half
way across, the Opposition, knowing I was aboard, had ap-
pointed the press agent of the line also aboard their
representative. He told me so himself. Realizing that the
ship's wireless outfit was too weak, the Opposition had
loaded a short-wave transmitter on a seagoing tug, and
while I was up in the wireless room we picked up their mes-
sages to the ship and to the shore. To the captain of the
ship they wirelessed their intention to come aboard and
transmit the Premier's speech; to their home office they sent
dramatic reports like 'Plowing through heavy seas' (the
weather was calm and the moon bright) ' Going strong,
now in touch with tie 1 'All well, ought to reach tie at
1 1 P.M.' and so on. I raced up to the bridge and found
the Captain, Commandant Blancart, a large, full-bearded
Frenchman, in a great state. 'That tug,' I said, 'is going to
cause a lot of trouble, I'm afraid. When do you think they'll
reach us?'
He went over to his map and showed me the position of
the enemy; then, calculating for a minute, he said: 'They
can't be here much before midnight, and I'm not going to
wait up. We have to dock early in the morning I want
some sleep.' Finally he said, categorically, that he would let
no one come aboard. I sent a message to Laval that the
broadcast was off. He was relieved; his minions closed in on
him and put him to bed.
About midnight, the ship slowed down; we looked over
the side and there was the tug. 'Throw us a ladder!' they
cried. 'Nothing doing,' we shouted back. ' Captain's orders,
no one on board.' And so they steamed away. I don't know
what it cost to send that tug, but it wasn't worth two cents.
Next morning we were all taken off by the government tug
Macon, had a microphone shoved up to our faces at the
Battery, and then watched Laval's reception at City Hall,
where the Honorable Hector Fuller, the mayor's official glad-
hander, announced him as 'Paul Laval' and the French
Ambassador as ' Pierre Claudel,' thus giving Mayor Jimmie
Walker a wise-cracking chance to put things right. From
the gallery of the City Hall chamber, an excruciatingly funny
Competition is the Life of T$adio 2.53
brass band played ' See the Conquering Hero Comes/ while
Laval with his daughter, looking like a gangster at his wed-
ding, marched up the aisle. It was my first taste of America
in seven years, and I was dazed.
The principle of competition having now been firmly estab-
lished in transatlantic broadcasting, the Opposition got ready
to swing out. When Fred Wile and myself arrived in Geneva
for the Disarmament Conference the following January, we
found them on the battle-ground, three strong. Doctor
Max Jordan, former German newspaperman in Wash-
ington, a tremendously informed, hard-working, polyglot
globe trotter, had been assigned to the Central European
field by the N.B.C., while an equally formidable competitor,
the suave and convivial Fred Bate, was being put in charge
at London, where he was accredited in the highest social
circles.
This was good news; as a friend of mine put it, it meant
a 'job insurance* for me. It also kept me from putting on
unnecessary fat. In Geneva Max proved a cheery soul and
a good sport, and we had great fun gunning for exclusives
among the world's eminent statesmen then assembled in the
League capital. One of them, Andre Tardieu, we actually
had to share, because he wouldn't talk for less than all of
America, which took the joy out of it for Max. Since Tardieu
was springing his famous idea for a League air force, it was
just as well that all America heard what the French had in
store for us (but they couldn't see the tongue in his cheek).
HOW KING CAROL DID NOT BROADCAST
Max and I were both resting from our labors at Montreux,
where the International Broadcasting Union was holding its
summer conference, when the genius of Competition played
one of his most absurd tricks. 'Exclusivity' had become a
X54 Hello ^America!
fetish by then: a broadcast, however important or interesting,
was only half a trick if it was not exclusive. We had both
done a bit of excluding, and to the European broadcasting
officials we had become a standing joke. At Montreux they
eyed us with amused astonishment when they saw us eating
lunch actually at the same table. I was just gloating
over having landed the first exclusive broadcast by President
Masaryk, one of the grand old men of Europe, on Wash-
ington's Birthday (see Chapter VII), when I was handed
this cable from New York:
EXCLUSIVE AGREEMENT COMPLETED FOR KING
CAROL OF RUMANIA BROADCAST FROM PALACE
BUCHAREST HIS ACCESSION DAY JUNE EIGHTH
YOUR INTRODUCTION TO START PRECISELY 6.05
PM NEW YORK TIME ADVISE EXACT TIME YOUR
ARRIVAL BUCHAREST
I assumed my best poker face and pocketed the cable with
affected nonchalance. This was Thursday. The next Orient
Express passed through Montreux about 6 A.M. Saturday;
that would give me time to get a 'pinch-hitter' to Montreux
to attend meetings and watch Max. I sent the wire giving
my schedule and went about the business of booking trans-
portation. The florid- faced hall porter of the Montreux Pal-
ace Hotel yanked out timetables and began to think out
loud, and his stentorian thoughts echoed from the marble
slabs and mirrors of the hall. ' For the holy cause of Swiss
tourism, shut up!' I said. 'I'm not anxious for the world to
know where I'm going.'
' Par 'don , monsieur!' he cried, and turning around to a
huge blackboard, he chalked 5 A.M. next to my name and the
number of my room. Discretion was clearly not his specialty;
I made him rub out that tell-tale memo just in time. Max
was swinging through the doors for the afternoon meeting.
I tried not to leave him out of my sight; I knew of course
that we had an exclusive agreement, but the question was,
did the Rumanians know it, and if so, did they know the
meaning of the word? I also knew that as soon as C.B.S.
Competition is the Life of T^adio
publicized the proposed broadcast, N.B.C. would tip off
Max.
Next morning, at the meeting of the program commission
I suddenly noticed that Max wasn't there. Remembering
that the only Rumanian at the Conference was an engineer,
I strolled over into the Technical Section and there ye
gods and little fishes! was Max in earnest conclave with
that Rumanian! After lunch I walked over to the post office
to book a call to Bucharest, and casually asked whether the
other gentleman's call had come through all right. Yes, said
the official, the gentleman talked to the Palace.
That was a lovely afternoon . . .
We sat up late. Max didn't go to his room till after mid-
night, so I didn't either. I winked at the porter as I went
upstairs four and a half hours to train time. And then I
packed. It seemed as though I had just dropped to sleep
when a terrific commotion in my room awoke me: I thought
there was a fire. But it was only the night porter in a panic,
shouting that it was ten minutes to six. Never before or
since have I seen an individual so steamed up. I would insist
on having that chalked memorandum rubbed out. How can
a Swiss night porter remember to wake anybody without
seeing the order in chalk?
He threw my night clothes into the bag as I took them off.
I raced downstairs after him as I tied my tie. He was splut-
tering excuses all the way and had a taxi at the door. * Don't
pay him, don't pay him!' he shouted. 'It's my fault!' Only
then did I realize how distressed he was.
The taxi crossed the railway track just before the bars went
down, and raced alongside the incoming train as it pulled up
to the platform. The sleeping-car porter pulled me aboard
while my bags were thrown after me. In another minute I
was speeding along toward the Simplon Pass; I tied my shoe-
lace, felt myself all over, and found I was intact. Anyhow,
it would be hours before Max found out I'd gone.
Italy was hot, but the Italian breakfast was a comfort:
Milan, Venice, Udine then next day a bit of Yugoslavia
(where the frontier police liked my cigarettes so much they
decided to take a ride to the next town in my compart-
Hello ^America!
ment). Then came Belgrade, where they murdered a king
and queen in their beds before the war, and then Rumania,
where the former Boy King was now the Crown Prince, and
his father after having been chucked out of England
the King. And America wanted to hear him broadcast: a
crazy world!
Bucharest was hot and dusty a half-finished southern
metropolis, with white art nouveau buildings and shabby
palms in the littered parks. Its nickname, the Paris of the
Balkans, was hard on Paris or the Balkans. The royal
palace was having a new wing added to it, and the scaffold-
ings looked very ugly. The town's best hotel, the Athenee
Palace, was a cheerless, jerry-built place, but its women were
definitely handsome. They say that the porters usually ask
you whether you want a room with or without. But I was
arriving too early in the morning.
My first call was on the Director of Broadcasting, who had
gone out for a long shave; he came back at last, looking as
though he needed another. He professed complete ignorance
about the King's broadcast, having received some warning
cables, as it developed later. The Foreign Office was more
encouraging, but there was a ministerial crisis on, and things
were hectic. Nevertheless, the King would speak; of course,
he hadn't had time to prepare a speech as yet. They
were charming people, those under-secretaries, but they
hadn't the faintest idea how a broadcast was engineered.
Nor could they control the broadcasting head.
So I went to the head of the telephone company, a hearty
and hefty American named Ogilvie, who was fighting a great
battle to make Rumanian telephones work; hitherto they
had been an expensive but dubious ornament. Now the
King had granted Ogilvie's company a private concession,
which was anything but popular with the local grafters.
Ogilvie had actually been ordered to run lines from the
broadcasting station to the Palace, but didn't know for
whom, as he had had a wire to say that Max Jordan was on
his way.
So my worst fears were realized. Max, as soon as he dis-
covered I had left Montreux had jumped on the next train
Competition is the Life of T$adio
for the 24-hour journey to Bucharest. It pulled into the
station six hours after mine!
I raced back to the Foreign Office. 'Is this an exclusive
broadcast or isn't it?' I asked. It was, so Under-Secretary
Filotti informed me, and he would stand by it. But my sus-
picions were right; they didn't know the meaning of the
word! He called the King's private secretary, the chief of
the palace, everybody who counted except the broad-
casting director. But there was that crisis; the King was
righting the ministers, Queen Marie was fighting the King,
Madame Lupescu was fighting Queen Marie, and the poli-
ticians were fighting each other. Nobody was any surer of
his job than I was of my broadcast; in fact, next day the
cabinet was 'reconstructed* and I saw the amusing spec-
tacle of one foreign minister taking over, with polite speeches
and elaborate bows, from his predecessor, whom no doubt
he had been knifing until a few hours ago. Meantime, in the
Athenee Palace the porter rubbed his hands as usual and
the beauteous denizens would ride down in the lift, casting
handsome looks at you over a rakishly dipped cigarette.
They were the most aristocratic cocottes in Europe, with
plausible hopes of making good in a big way. I was in the
Balkans.
Max, as soon as he arrived, concentrated his efforts on
the broadcasting director, while I stuck to the dapper dip-
lomats at the Foreign Office. Finally I got an interview with
the King's secretary at the palace. That was quite a proce-
dure. You gave up your card to a sentry at the postern gate.
The sentry handed it to a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper tele-
phoned to a flunky at the palace entrance, who checked with
the secretaries inside. Finally word came back, you got a
pass, and then traversed the long courtyards where, when-
ever challenged, you showed your pass.
I waited in an ornate waiting-room, where two officials
were ahead of me. They were talking excitedly, but my
Rumanian was too sketchy to catch anything, so I looked
out of the palace window onto the square. There were
plenty of soldiers; I had never felt so royal before. Sud-
denly my two companions stood up, muttering ' Regelej and
2.58 Hello ^America!
I saw King Carol, in a white uniform, passing our door. He
looked sullen and determined; I somehow felt he wasn't
thinking about that broadcast speech. But his secretary
was courteous, as royal secretaries are, actually showed me
a draft of the speech, and said that if I'd come back at six
he would have definite word for me. At six, when I got
back, he was gone had been gone for an hour and had
no thought of returning. Rumania!
At the Foreign Office things looked very quiet indeed.
My friend the Under-Secretary, considerably perturbed,
said the King had left. 'Left? For where?' For the coun-
try. I guessed the right answer. But next day the anni-
versary day, the day I saw Carol come out on the balcony
to acknowledge the cheers of a crowd, assembled, with
plenty of military and flags, to celebrate his accession day.
He was 'gone,' however, so far as we were concerned, and
that day he rode out of the palace to Sinaia, his country
residence, where Madame Lupescu was said to be awaiting
him. It was about 98 in the shade.
TWO NETWORKS THAT BEAT AS ONE
When I got back to the hotel for dinner I found Max in
the dining-room, and we ate together. On the advice of the
honest Ogilvie I had already proposed to him a united front.
' I hate to see two perfectly good Americans being given the
run-around by these dagoes/ Ogilvie had said in good Amer-
ican slang. 'Can't you see they're just playing you for a
pair of suckers? Why don't you make a truce and end the
agony ? '
I saw that he was right; but Max, who among other ad-
vantages had special lines to Queen Marie, was undecided.
He was getting daily cables and telephone calls from New
York. So was I, incidentally, and the night porter would
get them mixed up, so we had to pass the lines to each other.
Even then we could almost hear each other's conversations,
Competition is the Life of T$adio
what with the prehistoric telephones and the lath-and-plaster
partitions.
Now, at dinner, I returned to the subject of the truce.
'Do you know/ I said, 'that Carol has left for the country?'
'Stop your fooling/ he said; but on my advice he went out
ro check up with his contact, the broadcasting director.
Only an hour before, this worthy had been telling him that
I had offered him a price for the broadcast, and asked
whether he was inclined to raise the bid! Max came back
crestfallen, and ready to sign. The American Minister
wouldn't be party to the contract, but procured the Ameri-
can secretary of the Y.M.C.A. I worded the truce to the
effect that if and when King Carol should broadcast, it
should be for both American networks, with neither's name
mentioned. We also wrote an introduction which the
Y.M.C.A. man should use verbatim, in case the broadcast
ever came off. It never did.
Next day we invited the Director of Broadcasting out to
lunch, in a luxurious open-air restaurant, where the food
was Bucharest's best and the champagne French ---- He
hasn't got over this sample of American competition yet.
Then we booked a joint sleeper on the northern route of the
Orient and left Bucharest in glee. We crossed the border
into Hungary in^the middle of the night, but Rumania was
still with us, as I shall now relate.
When I came to dress, I found my shirt gone, with a fine
pair of specially made cufflinks; it had hung next to the open
window through the torrid Balkan night. If my shirt was
gone my coat must be gone, thought I, for I had hung it
on top. It was; and everything inside it. Only the trousers
were there, securely fastened by their suspenders. In them
thank Heaven was my wallet. And the porter had our
passports.
'What on earth has happened to my clothes?' I stormed
at him.
'Excuse me, gentleman/ he said, 'but it must be thieves.
It happens all the time on this line.' I vaguely remembered
about train burglars, with their long hooks reaching into
windows from the roofs.
2.60 Hello ^America!
'Then why on earth don't you put up a sign? "Beware
of thieves"?'
'Oh we couldn't do that,' he said, shuddering at the
thought. 'You see the Rumanians, they are so touchy!'
We had learned many things about the Rumanians, but
this was a new one. So I arrived in Budapest in a varie-
gated costume, which, as it turned out, was quite the dernier
cri in the Hungarian capital.
As we pulled out of the station, Max and I leaned out of
the window and saw a man selling hot dogs. On his tank
hung the name of his firm 'Picar.' We both started to
speak, and we both stopped ourselves at the same time.
From that moment I knew that he was after a broadcast of
Professor Picard, the stratosphere man who was about to
make his first ascent. So was I. Well, Max won, largely
because we wouldn't beat the N.B.C. bid. The result was
that that broadcast cost hundreds more than it should.
Competition still kept the pots (other people's) boiling.
Our next king in the line of popularity was Albert of Bel-
gium, but once again Max and I had to share. We tossed as
to how we should divide the work; he drew the introduction,
I the epilogue. It was unexciting. Then, five months later,
when he wasn't looking, I walked away with King Christian
of Denmark (and Iceland), and I felt we were square. But
I had forgotten about Max's pal, who was covering England
and France.
The wine harvest in the Bordeaux region was plentiful
that year; and the end of American prohibition was in sight.
So we braved the Anti-Saloon League and staged a half-hour
show from the wine harvest festival at the little town of
St. Julien. The mayor was master of ceremonies, and Amer-
icans could hear the rushing of the fresh-pressed wine from
the great vat. This was so successful that other wine broad-
casts were in demand.
So the Marquis de Polignac agreed to do a broadcast on
champagne, his family being the hereditary producers of a
famous brand of 'bubbly.' At the last minute, however, he
decided in favor of the Opposition, for reasons best known
to himself. Nothing daunted, our Paris man, Percy Noel,
Competition is the Life of ^adio 2.6 1
enlisted the Prince Caramay de Chimay, another scion of
the champagne aristocracy; so they both talked to America
in English about the joys of drinking, and on the very
same day. It was a great day for competition and for
France.
NEW YORK WELCOMES THE ' QUEEN '
In May, 1936, the great liner Queen Mary made her
maiden trip. All the three leading American companies had
carte blanche to broadcast, by means of her very efficient
transmitter, of course. Each of us had our own crew aboard,
and there were broadcasts every day several of them.
The B.B.C. was in full charge and gave everybody first-class
service, without favoritism, and with great good will.
My program was fixed long before the ship sailed; it con-
sisted of a daily broadcast, always at the same hour by
American time, but each day a different hour by the ship's
clock. So we could have programs at bedtime, just before
the 'night-cap/ at dancing time, at lounging time (during
the auction pool), and finally at dinner with a daily change
of scene. Everything was known; only one trick we kept up
our sleeve a broadcast on the morning of arrival, when
two American air liners would circle over the ship with
American notables aboard, who would talk to their col-
leagues or 'opposite numbers' on the ship, while the whole
show was being stage-managed from the shore. So Lily Pons
talked to a singer aboard the ship, a United States Govern-
ment representative exchanged greetings with a British
M.P., an American boy scout conversed with a British boy
scout, Captain Rickenbacker spoke with a brother aviator,
and the Honorable Grover Whalen on behalf of the City of
New York welcomed Sir Edgar Britain, the Captain, to the
port. (When the announcer on the bridge, having heard this
welcome speech, asked Sir Edgar to reply, the Captain whis-
pered audibly, 'And who is Grover Whalen ? ') It was a show
after the stunt broadcaster's heart.
z6x Hello ^America!
But the climax was to come a few hours later, as the ship
was majestically steaming up the bay. It was to be a really
royal welcome, such as no new ship had ever received in
New York or anywhere else. Moreover, the British public
was to hear America's enthusiasm something so wild that
no Englishman could imagine it. For the first time in Brit-
ish maritime history would it be possible to let the people on
both sides of the Atlantic in on this picturesque triumph of
Anglo-American good will. The B.B.C., alive to its respon-
sibility, sent along George Blake, one of its star commenta-
tors, who had known the Queen Mary from her birth and had
broadcast her launching. Blake had never seen New
York, but had dreamed of the fabled beauty of its skyline
and the riotous scene that awaited the Queen. He brushed
up his vocabulary and braced himself for the greatest
descriptive improvisation of his career.
The two leading American networks were to share this
program with the B.B.C., while each was to contribute
something from the shore from airplanes and skyscraper-
tops and other vantage-points. Then, after a half hour or
so, each was to continue with its own supplementary show.
While we were slowly gliding through the sun-bathed
waters of the harbor, bedlam was let loose. Sirens shrieked,
guns fired salutes, jets of water shot up from fireboats, air-
planes circled, swooped, and dived, thousands of flags and
multicolored bunting broke from hundreds of masts a
truly unforgettable sight. High up on the hurricane deck
stood Blake, and one of England's crack announcers, John
Snagge. The great moment of the broadcast arrived, and
Snagge shouted his hello's to the A.T. & T. engineers, just as
I had done from the He three years before and with as
much effect. No answer. Blake, like a thoroughbred, was
rearing to go. No answer and panic came into the burly
Scotsman's eyes. At last Snagge's earphones came to life,
but only to say that the circuit he was* <speaking on had
been cancelled. No one knew why, or by whom.
Wild-eyed, we scouted around the decks, and discovered
that there was indeed another microphone, one deck below,
which was connected up to a small short-wave transmitter,
Competition is the Life of 'Radio 163
brought aboard at Quarantine by one of the rival networks.
And this short-wave circuit was working beautifully. But
instead of Blake's inspired first impression, British and
American listeners were having read to them a prefabricated
script describing a scene which couldn't fail to be true to
prediction.
I have never seen such furious indignation as the faces of
those frustrated Britons showed. Knowing our American
propensities for stealing marches on each other, they sus-
pected that they the neutrals had been outflanked.
Well, George Blake was given a few minutes, by way of con-
solation prize, to vent his remaining eloquence on the Hud-
son River front, but of course he hadn't come all those three
thousand miles for that! I don't know exactly what hap-
pened to this day, nor what anybody gained. But Old Man
Competition was somewhere on the side-lines, no doubt,
playing his tricks.
I have a notion that that particular line of competitive
horse-play is practically played out. American radio has
more important things to think about. There are times when
co-operation is worth more than competition, and in any case
the public is better served when broadcasters get together
for the good of the job.
My mind goes back to 1934 and the funeral of King Albert
of the Belgians. The broadcasting authorities at Brussels
were using all the available equipment for French and Flem-
ish commentaries along the lengthy route; no facilities for
an English commentary were available. Nevertheless the
broadcast was being 'piped' to London and thence to Amer-
ica, for the benefit of England and the two American chains.
I listened to the preliminaries, the solemn music, the muffled
drums, the booming of the guns, the commentary of the
French announcer describing a very moving, impressive
scene. I realized how much more impressive it would be to
American listeners if we could insert an English translation
in the intervals, against the background of the music and
the marching feet.
I appealed to officials, got the consent of both American
networks, and had an additional speech circuit, originating
Hello ^America!
in a London studio, inserted so as to feed into the circuit
from Brussels. Then, for nearly two hours, listening to the
Brussels commentator on earphones, I gave American lis-
teners a detailed English description of what was going on,
until the King's body had been lowered into the crypt. The
trick worked perfectly even the newspapers wanted to know
how the 'miracle' happened. Our rivals cabled their thanks.
For once, two networks had beaten as one for the benefit
of all. To me that broadcast gave more satisfaction than all
the 'scoops' of my career.
PART THREE
Atmospheres
XIX. IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND
PRO AND CON
WHAT is it about England that makes people either
love it or hate it? There are no halfway opinions
about it, no compromises about the Land of Compromise.
You are either crazy about it or crazy to get away. Nor are
these sentiments confined to any one aspect the people,
the scenery, the life, or the climate. You like all these things,
with the exception of the climate (which you must be born
to), or you like none. As for the climate, I have heard people
curse it year in and year out for years, and never leave it
except for a short spell when it is at its best; others to revel
in it at its worst; and still others to revel in the fact that they
can stand it, no matter how bad.
I have known tourists to land for the first time, intending
to 'do' England, and then getting away to Paris on the first
train or plane. I have seen others come here en passant
and stay a lifetime. I myself came to England on a visit
during one of those rare early springs when the almond
blooms peeped over the hedges in March, with the air so
mild and the countryside so ravishing that I determined to
come back for good. I have never experienced another such
spring (which turned out to be nothing short of a hoax),
but I stayed in England for fourteen years.
I have never done England as a tourist, but in the course of
those years I have discovered a great many things by acci-
dent, and then tried to explain them as phenomena. 'To
know all is to understand all ' : you can know all of England,
I have discovered, and understand nothing.
2.68 Hello ^America!
Some people can spend a Sunday in London or a week-end
in the country and find both of them insufferably dull.
Others will think both of them enchanting, and not know
why. One visitor will consider London one of the ugliest
cities on earth; another will fall in love with it at first sight.
A first-time visitor can be made to boil with rage over the
' superior ' casualness of the natives; another will discover
that the English are the politest people in the world, and the
only ones who know how to leave one alone. To some, their
clinging to tradition, to custom and 'form,' is just a slow-
witted inflexibility; to others it is the charm that gives its
peculiar spice to English life. To some, the apparent contra-
dictions in English habits and nomenclature are boresome
affectations; to others, gifted with a sense of the past, they
supply an inexhaustible subject for inquiry and fanciful
speculation.
Why is a chalky upland a 'down/ why do you go 'up' to
London and 'down* to anywhere else, no matter how high?
And why, though you travel down to Oxford, does a student
go 'up/ and why if he doesn't behave himself is he sent
'down'? Why is Manchester a city and London just 'town'
(with a ' City ' as its heart) ? You might as well ask why there
are twelve pence in a shilling instead of a rational ten, and
why some things are paid in guineas instead of pounds.
Other European countries humor the tourist by making
things easy; Englishmen manage to survive by making them
hard.
I soon discovered, in speaking with these visitors, that
their different attitudes are determined by a difference of
approach. Many things, irritating or bewildering at first,
will turn out to be acceptable, because inevitable. Some
things, on the other hand, though beguiling at first, will
make you impatient in the end, for they turn out to be un-
necessary and unnatural. But the first thing to realize is
that Britain is one of the oldest countries in the world, and
that the continuity of its civilization is the longest. And
nearly everything can be explained by reference to history
or the predestination of nature herself.
As for England's landscape, its charm is the most difficult
In Search of England 2.69
to convey, which largely accounts for the wealth of English
poetry. It is rarely startling, never sensational; in describing
it, superlatives are out of place. Switzerland has higher
mountains, Germany more romantic woods. Italy has
brighter colors and contrasts, France lovelier rivers and
plains. America has all of these, and more. But England,
within its restricted gamut, has greater variety, finer grada-
tions, more infinite charm. And nowhere has nature been
so happily nurtured by the hand of man (even though the
commercial vandal is pursuing his nefarious game). The
greatest 'art* of England, as one very discerning critic has
pointed out, is not to be sought on canvases, but in the
landscape and the gardens of its manors. And the great
virtue of English architecture is that it conforms to the
spirit of the land.
Now, the fascination of English life and the abiding beau-
ties of the country began to dawn upon me after six or seven
years. Would it be possible to convey some of these things
to an audience across the ocean an audience of people
who trace their culture and to some extent their ancestry
to this island, a people whose language is similar and whose
literature is the same, people more receptive than any other
to the message of England's past ? Thousands of American
visitors came to England every summer; hundreds of thou-
sands were planning to come one day; millions would never
be able to. Could broadcasting, even without television,
convey something, by way of indemnity, to these?
I wanted to give them the feel of English life the simple
charm and the elaborate pompousness of it; the old customs
and the surviving pageantry; the relics of history and the
abiding beauties that inspired the poets; the atmosphere of
the village church and the village pub; the spirit of the
race as it lives in the folk-music and the madrigals of Tudor
times; the spirit of the crowd at sport and at play; the
sanctity of the cathedral service and the vulgar jollity of
Blackpool. These things have their parallel in both countries
in any country but how different their manifestations!
Men prate about the 'common heritage/ about similarity
and cousinship; to aid understanding, you must explain not
2.70 Hello ^America!
so much the similarities as the differences between peoples.
To supplement the talks that had gone across the Atlantic
in the first two years of my activity, a few actual scenes
would not be out of place. The movies have done a great deal
but, it seemed to me, they had missed a great chance.
TOASTMASTER, SPORTS, AND THE NIGHTINGALE
The first occasion on which American listeners were in
touch, as it were, with an English crowd was early in 1929,
when a Queens Hall concert was picked up experimentally
by the N.B.C. (the first short-wave program on record),
and a few months later, in July, they were able to participate
in the Thanksgiving Service for the recovery of King George
V, which was held in Westminster Abbey. A banquet, given
in January, 1930, at the Guildhall in London, to the delegates
to the Naval Conference, must have been the first time
Americans heard an English toastmaster that flamboyant
flunky unknown outside the British Empire shout his
stentorian 'Your Royal Highness, Your Grace, Your Excel-
lencies, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, pray silence for
your Chairman, the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of
London/ It always creates a sensation among American
visitors in England, and it must have made a great and pos-
sibly hilarious impression on thousands of listeners in the
United States their first taste of real English swank.
Then came a rebroadcast of a football match the
national Cup Final at Wembley, and that gave America
the measure of a British sporting mob. The Derby, broad-
cast from Epsom Downs, was relayed that year by the two
leading American networks, and has not missed a single
year since then, nor has the Oxford-Cambridge boat race,
which was first relayed to America in 1931. Since then
America has listened in to tennis at Wimbledon, golf at St.
Andrews and elsewhere, the Grand National at Aintree, as
regularly as they listen to their own baseball games and
The 'ceremony of the keys' at the Tower of London
A bit of English pageantry which, to the American, is fairyland
B. B. C.
In Search of England i.ji
major sporting events. Sport was the radio listeners' first
step in the discovery of England.
Then came something else. The B.B.C. regularly broad-
cast the 'ceremony of the keys' from the Tower of London,
and in 1932 this was relayed to America. For six centuries
in unbroken daily routine a keeper has gone the rounds of
William the Conqueror's fortress after sunset, to lock the
ancient gates of the various keeps and walls with old-fash-
ioned keys. The burglar who would be baffled by any of
these cumbersome precautions has yet to be discovered;
yet nightly the solemn top-hatted key man goes on his
prescribed round, flanked by two yeoman warders, is chal-
lenged at each gate, while a detachment of guards salutes
and performs some intricate evolutions.
'Who goes there?'
'The keys!'
'Whose keys?'
'King George's keys.'
'God preserve King George!'
When it's all over the band plays 'God save our gracious
King,' the keys go to bed, and anybody entering the Tower
must give the password, as confided to the Lord Mayor over
the sign-manual of the King. It's one of those marvellous
games of make-believe that make Britons feel secure by
binding them to their past and a compliment to their
histrionic ability, outstanding since the days of Elizabeth.
To the American this is fairyland; it shows him a side of
English life that he has seen in picture-books, and which is
not 'real.' It is difficult for him to accept it as such, but it
does indicate an ingredient in the national character, the
love of pageantry and ritual and rural customs that nothing
on earth would persuade an Englishman to abandon. One
such custom is the famous Dunmow Flitch trial, which takes
place each year in the village of Dunmow in Essex, where
with mock solemnity the gentry ' try' by the rules of evidence
the claims of married couples to have attained conjugal bliss.
The prize, if won, is a flitch of bacon. This, too, was relayed
to America, for it is a true picture of English rural life;
and so was a scene in a village public house, not more than
Hello ^America!
forty-five miles from London, where the characters assemble
each Saturday night to listen to the wisdom of 'Uppy'
Andrews, who has never seen a city but can cure warts by
faith.
It may have been rhetorical extravagance, and certainly
an exaggeration, when an American broadcasting executive
said that the greatest thing his company had ever done for
Anglo-American relations was to broadcast the song of an
English nightingale, but it certainly gave some Americans
a touch of the magic stillness of an English night in spring.
At any rate, American radio editors felt justified in voting
this the most interesting broadcast of the year (1932). The
B.B.C. began trapping the nightingale's song back in 1926,
in a Surrey garden, where a well-known lady 'cellist with
romantic turn of mind had succeeded in stimulating the
nightingales' ardor with the seductive tones of her instru-
ment. The bird concert, in turn, lured motorists to the
locality, whose raucous horns spoilt the fun. The following
year the B.B.C. engineers chose a secluded wood in Berk-
shire, where a gramophone proved just as good a decoy.
Shattering more poetic notions, the birds appeared to like
jazz as well as Beethoven, and penny whistles as well as
jazz. The method was to place microphones in the trees, take
the leads to an amplifier some hundred yards away, and con-
nect this via a telephone line to the studio. Then, when the
luring noises awakened response, the operator would warn
the control engineer in London, who would 'fade down* a
dance band and 'fade in' the nightingale.
It occurred to me one day that America has no nightingale,
and as every English poet from Shakespeare to Shelley
celebrates its song, Americans might like to hear how it
sounds. Alas! An amplified nightingale rather exceeds
expectations the quality of its liquid dulcet tones, as I
have heard them for many springs outside my cottage win-
dow, eludes the skill of the engineer.
In Search of England 2.73
WORDSWORTH'S BIRDS AND SHAKESPEARE'S FLOWERS
We were rather more successful with the birds of Words-
worth's cottage garden in Grasmere, by the side of a lovely
lake in romantic Westmoreland. It was on the poet's birth-
day, on April 7, when the flowers in his hillside garden were
bursting into glory, while the birds that sing in his poems
intoned the first polyphony of spring.
The Lake District is distinguished by the fact that it pro-
duces even more rain than the rest of England; but when the
sun does break through its mysterious drifting mists, its
rays are like the laughter of a happy child. It was a perilous
experiment to transmit the rhapsody of nature herself as
a background to the nature poet's verse, for nature herself
was as capricious as the combination of Lakeland and April
could contrive.
When I arrived at that delectable hamlet, with its Gothic
church, its whitewashed inn, and its stone cottages nestling
against the sweeping moorland slopes, the rain was drenching
everything and the engineers with their coils of wire and a
truckful of gear were looking wistfully at the sky. The
kitchen of eighteenth-century Dove Cottage was our control-
room, and a fire in the antiquated range the one cheerful
thing in it. But 'outside' radio engineers are a unique race
of optimists. Pretty soon they had microphones in three
rooms of the house, and in various parts of the garden as well;
and bubbling over with excitement they dropped a pair of
earphones over my head. 'Do you hear it?' gasped Harvey.
' Do you hear the bubbling brook? ' By placing a microphone
in a tree for the birds they had discovered the rustle
of a garden brook, which to bare human ears was shut off by
a stone wall. They were as thrilled as children, but the pro-
blem was: would the rustle sound as poetic as we heard it,
or would listeners think it was just a noise in the line? In
the end we had to abandon Wordsworth's brook for the sake
of Wordsworth's verse.
Next day we were all set, though it drizzled off and on all
174 Hello ^America!
day, and the hooded microphones were dripping rain. The
church bells, a quarter of a mile away, were to be picked up
by a microphone on a high telegraph pole by the road, but
in our excitement we had forgotten the bell-ringers' crew.
Church service was on, and an hour before the broadcast I
sneaked down the aisle to where the 'captain* had been
pointed out: he was doubling in baritone. We did a deal
between prayers, and the eight men would be on duty after
the service. (English church bells require one man per
chime, and their teamwork is a traditional art.)
And now for the birds! We listened at our earphones;
they twittered and sang very sweetly before nesting time.
But the old Lakeland caretaker wasn't satisfied. 'Ye haavn't
got the throosh,' he said. And where was the thrush? Why
in the caretaker's garden across the road. What would
we do? ... Well, fifteen minutes before the broadcast he
came back and asked us to listen, and there was not one
but a whole family of thrushes, mingling their notes with
those of the blackbirds, finches, and larks. Grave as ever,
he informed us that he had lured them over by spreading
bread crumbs on Wordsworth's lawn!
But suddenly we heard too much: a motor car passing the
house at full speed, then another and another. Nothing was
audible but the whirr of their motors and the grinding of
their gears, mounting the hill. Heavens alive, it was Sunday,
and the trippers were enjoying an evening drive along the
lakes. Could they be stopped? Was there no police? The
caretaker's daughter, who up to then had been a nuisance,
telling us the local scandal which was about Wordsworth
and his real sweetheart (not his wife), both of whom were
dead these eighty-five years now bethought herself of a
good-looking young policeman, and we raced to find him at
his cottage, taking his Sunday ease. He was the entire police
force of Grasmere, he confided, as he carefully put on his hel-
met and tunic. Our strange request was for him to establish
himself at one fork of the roads and a volunteer at the other,
to divert the traffic to the highroad. We told him it was for
Wordsworth's birthday and, law or no law, he did the job.
Our broadcast was saved, for as we were talking the clouds
In Search of England 2.75
were clearing away, and in the west the sun was painting
them a glowing apricot pink.
Our program did us proud: we took a Visitor* through the
house, up to Wordsworth's bedroom, giving on the garden,
where Ernest de Selincourt read Wordsworth's verses apper-
taining to the place; we opened up the tree microphones and
our birds sang their symphony; we switched to the church at
the end and the chimes rang out sweetly into the stillness of
the evening, as we painted the landscape in words. Even
the Lakeland dialect was not missing, for the caretaker also
had his little say.
Wordsworth's drawing-room meantime was full of the
village worthies; they sat still as mice, not even a creaking
floor board was heard. And I have never seen a prouder lot
of folks, whose claim to nobility lies in the familiarity with
a poet's life and work. Only the caretaker's daughter was a
little sniffy; talking to the B.B.C. driver, she couldn't under-
stand all that fuss for just fifteen minutes. 'Aye,' said the
driver, 'but after it rains all day and the sun comes out for
fifteen minutes, it makes you happy, doesn't it?'
That was not our first poet's broadcast nor the only
one. I raked the calendar for centenaries, or jubilees or
anything, so the 'special events department' in New York
could be satisfied that the program had news value of a sort.
We went to Anne Hathaway's cottage in Stratford on Will
Shakespeare's birthday, and had a caretaker with her
rich Warwickshire accent explain about the courting settle,
the rushlights, and Anne's rushbottom bed, and the flowers
in the garden, every one of which is named in Shakespeare's
works. We went to Keats' house in Hampstead and read the
'Ode to a Nightingale' from the room in which it was written,
and to Lord Tennyson's pretentious neo-Jacobean palace at
Aldworth, on top of Blackdown, where you look down across
the Sussex plain as far as Chanctonbury Ring, and the local
choir sang 'Sweet and Low' among the bracken and the
heather that Tennyson loved.
But the most ambitious of our broadcasts, to my mind, was
the one from Milton's Cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, where
2.j6 Hello ^America!
we dramatized a scene from the poet's life, with actors and
singers, with verses from 'Comus' sung to contemporary
settings, and accompanied by the instruments of the time.
The acoustic problems of that broadcast in a low-roofed
seventeenth-century cottage with a harpsichord and
strings in one room, actors and singers in another, myself as
author-producer and monitor, with the engineers in a third,
was as intricate as anything the B.B.C. does with its famous
'dramatic panel' and all the modern contraptions of Broad-
casting House.
An experience, too, and great fun into the bargain was
the program we put on for the centenary of Mr. Pickwick.
It began and ended in Dickens's house in Doughty Street,
where he started out on his meteoric literary career. Between
this prologue and epilogue we switched to Broadcasting
House and made Mr. Pickwick live by means of Clinton-
Baddeley's dramatization, which is one of the best things of
its kind.
CURFEW STILL RINGS
But eventually we ran out of anniversaries, so another
type of atmospheric program had to be devised to convey
an impression of the English scene. This formula a friend
of mine called it the 'picture-postcard broadcast' which
eventually begat a whole progeny of programs designed to
give American listeners glimpses, in terms of sound, of places
ranging from the North Cape to Pompeii, and from Cairo to
Iceland and Seville, was born in the little town of Ripon, in
Yorkshire.
Ripon, the second oldest town in England, has one of the
smallest but most interesting English cathedrals, first built
by Saint Wilfrid in the seventh century. It is the city for
which Ripon, Wisconsin, is named and from which it has
taken its coat of arms. On it is pictured the 'wakeman's'
horn the wakeman being the prototype of the modern
In Search of England 2.77
mayor, whose chief business in the Middle Ages was to guard
against fires. 'Unless ye Lord keepeth ye Cittie, ye Wake-
man waketh in vain* is the motto over the town hall; and the
horn, a replica of the ancient cow-horn, is still blown every
evening at the town hall, just as curfew is still rung by a
special curfew bell in the cathedral tower. To complete the
illusion of antiquity, the 'news/ chiefly official announce-
ments, is still cried out by a bellman whose hand-bell re-
sounds in the market place. Ripon was the ideal place for a
sound-picture and we managed to get it all Cathedral
choir, bishop, dean, mayor, bellman, curfew, and wakeman's
horn into a fifteen-minute program a masterpiece of
compression. There were seven microphone points and a
control room in the famous Lady Loft: it all worked like a
charm, and a dog accidentally barking in the market place
added a poignant note of realism.
But the preliminaries to that broadcast were anything but
simple, for the cathedral and the town (i.e., the municipal
government) were found to be at war. The cathedral re-
presented gentility, while the town was run by the common
clay Bottom the Weaver and Snug the Joiner being
much what they were in Shakespeare's day. Difficult ques-
tions of precedence arose which were finally settled by a
small financial transaction, in which the low-comedy charac-
ters turned out to be the nobility.
Which reminds me of another broadcast in which the
question of caste played an important part. The neat,
Scottish town of Dunfermline, where Andrew Carnegie saw
the light of day in a miserable two-roomed cottage, now a
shrine to the city's greatest benefactor, was celebrating the
philanthropist's centenary. I arranged for a special trans-
mission from the cottage itself, in which an eminent Ameri-
can, as well as the mayor of Dunfermline and a certain peer,
were to provide the oratory. A representative of the noble
lord, who called on me in London intimated that the mayor
had better be left out, as his background wasn't appropriate
to the occasion. I argued for this bit of genuine local color,
but was sternly voted down. It was embarrassing to tell the
honest mayor that he wasn't on the program after all, but
2.7 8 Hello ^America!
it had to be done. Afterward I found that his Lordship had
accepted not merely for the honor of Carnegie but for a very
small fee, which he offered to divide with the American
dignitary. I was flummoxed.
An English village church with its churchyard and its
lych gate, its ancient square tower and no less ancient yews,
set in the rolling green of its glebe lands, with cattle grazing
at sundown and a tiny river slowly flowing in the dale, is one
of the most serenely comforting scenes on earth. Here life
has gone on unchanged for centuries, and every stone belies
the transitory nature of man. I long wanted an excuse to
transmit a word-picture of this serene peacefulness, with the
simple religious service as the epilogue. America likes
famous names and associations, so I thought of Stoke Poges,
where Gray's 'Elegy' was inspired. But for some strange
reason the vicar would not permit a broadcast to America
(though a local broadcast had already been made from the
church). The loss was made up by another church, at
Purleigh in Essex, where the fact of Lawrence Washington's
having been the rector, and the restoration of a set of bells
donated by him, was enough to arouse some timely interest.
A grander broadcast and one of the most beautiful I
have ever heard was the dedication service of the re-
stored bell-tower of Boston Parish Church, the famous
' Stump ' the only church tower which at the same time
serves as a beacon to the sailor at sea.
I was touched when a warden of the church came to my
office to offer us this very costly transmission at the expense
of the congregation, in gratitude for the help which the
citizens of Boston, Massachusetts, had given to the ancient
church in Boston, Lincolnshire, in restoring the damage
caused by the * death-watch beetle* in the woodwork of the
tower. The singing in the great church, and the service of
dedication, working up to the point where the long silent
bells once more rang out, as the great beacon flashed its rays
out to sea, must have left an unforgettable impression in the
minds of anyone who heard the broadcast and realized the
implications of the event.
In Search of England 2.79
Aside from the brilliant occasions when the Church of
England played a spectacular part in transatlantic broad-
casting the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Kent,
the funeral of King George V, and the coronation of his son
I feel that the singing of English church music of the
great centuries by the boys of Windsor's Chapel Royal and
the annual singing of Christmas carols by the choir of King's
College, Cambridge, stand out as memorable things. Per-
sonally I shall never forget standing in the richly carved
box of Henry VIII in St. George's Chapel, looking up at the
miraculous fan-vaulting and the incredible beauty of the
Gothic traceries, and down at the riot of color made by the
banners of the Garter knights, while the choir sang an
evening service especially for America. Nor shall I forget
the na'ive answer of the choirmaster when I complimented
him on the angelic voices of the boys : * I told them to sing
so as to melt the hearts of the gangsters in Chicago!' He
meant it literally, too.
FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS' WORTH OF CORONATION
The quaint pageantry of a royal proclamation, the pomp
and panoply of the coronation these things show England
from its * unreal' side; they are the same make-believe Eng-
land which has its daily resurrection in the changing of the
guard at Buckingham Palace while the nursemaids and their
charges look on. The coronation of King George VI the
first coronation ever to be broadcast required three
months of preparation and the services of a small army of
engineers and executants. The equipment, costing $50,000,
comprised 73 microphones, 7 tons of batteries, and 472
miles of wire. The program, lasting five hours, was broad-
cast throughout the British Empire and rebroadcast in
most foreign countries (with the notable exception of Italy,
which was nursing a grudge against 'sanctionist' England),
ten of which sent their own commentators to report the
Hello ^America!
proceedings in their own tongue. The two major American
networks stationed announcers at positions opposite Bucking-
ham Palace as well as Westminster Abbey, on the assump-
tion that they would be better equipped to serve an American
audience than their English colleagues of the B.B.C., and
they made up in liveliness what they lacked in knowledge.
The B.B.C.'s arrangements functioned perfectly, and
within the limits imposed by pious loyalty their men gave a
remarkably clear picture of an event unprecedented in
magnitude in the annals of broadcasting, which certainly
succeeded in demonstrating the might of empire to a world
which seemed in need of reassurance.
Having satisfied the American listeners' supposed desire
for expert advance information and exalted names by pro-
viding a solid week of daily talks from all ranks of British
nobility and learning, and having laid out an elaborate
scheme of direct reporting of the great event in collaboration
with the B.B.C., I had the pleasure of watching the 'works'
from a fine vantage point opposite the palace. The most
impressive moment to me was when the King and Queen,
in their golden coach, swung through the wide-open gates of
the palace to the cheers of the immense multitude. Strange
to relate, the massed bands in front of the palace played
them out to the tune of 'The Stars and Stripes Forever/ but
most people were too excited to notice it probably in-
cluding the bandmaster. Altogether it was a patriotic orgy
such as I have never seen outside a Fascist country, where
such things are provided by command.
Excepting the usual number of fainting women and
men exhausted from standing in the streets since dawn,
nothing untoward happened, much to the disgust of some
American reporters in search of a story. Complete con-
tempt was expressed for the B.B.C.'s arrangements by one
radio man because no provision had been made for the
immediate broadcasting of an accident, should it occur, or
a madman's attempt at assassination or worse. It all
depends on the point of view.
Besides giving the world a powerful impression of Britain's
might, this broadcast demonstrated the world-wide appeal
Fred Bate, NBC commentator, outside Buckingham Palace
describing the Coronation Procession of Their Majesties King
George VI and Queen Elizabeth
The Foreign Control Room at Middlesex Guild Hall during
the broadcast of the Coronation
In Search of England 2.8 1
of a pageantry and the power of a symbolism which can
have little real meaning in the modern world. I think there
was more of the real England in the broadcast of a Christmas
dinner such as we managed to transmit one Christmas Day,
for it conveyed the simple but unalterable customs which,
despite all change, retain a valid meaning so long as the
family remains the prime social unit of the race.
THE MAN IN THE STREET LETS HIMSELF GO
These things are mere indications of what international
broadcasting can do: we have just scratched the surface,
and there is a great deal below that surface which a little
imagination and daring will reveal. Two or three times we
have taken our microphones out into the street and let the
ordinary passer-by, the man in the street, speak his mind.
In the United States this has become a regular feature of
broadcasting on all sorts of occasions, from an election to
New Year's Eve. The first time it was done in London, the
officials of the B.B.C. were palpably nervous, for might not
the man in the street say things that decent ears should not
hear? He might even use swear words. Well, he did.
The police were less dubious than the B.B.C., although we
had picked as our 'stand' a spot just off Piccadilly Circus,
in Regent Street, and as our time n P.M., when the theatre
crowd would be beginning to liven things up. Inspector
Prothero, then in command at Vine Street police station, a
man of the world and a great detective in his day, brought
his sense of humor to bear on the situation. I had explained
our problem: we needed a permit to 'obstruct' the sidewalk;
we needed a policeman or two to prevent disorder. He looked
amused and very wise. To help him decide, my partner in
crime, H. V. Kaltenborn, thought he'd encourage him by
saying that there wouldn't be any obstruction really no
crowds or anything like that. The seasoned police officer,
having presided over the hottest beat in London for many
2.82. Hello ^America!
years, drew up his eyebrows and drawled: 'Mr. Kaltenborn,
your modesty is disarming V
Having thus put us into our places he said it would be all
right and he would take precautions. When we told him
that we wanted to ask all sorts and conditions of people about
the economic situation (anent the Economic Conference)
he volunteered, 'Well, you might ask some of "those" girls
along Regent Street you know?'
When we turned up with our microphone, crew and gear,
outside the Piccadilly Hotel we found not one or two police-
men, but twenty, with a sergeant at their head and before
we got through we needed them. It was the first man-in-the-
street broadcast ever made in England, and at first the
passers-by were shy. But once the ice was broken the fishing
was grand. A crowd collected, and pretty soon people were
struggling to get near that microphone or whatever it was;
our stalwart bobbies did a noble and completely silent job,
and their courtesy was a lesson to any gentleman. Various
opinions on that frightful fiasco, the World Economic Con-
ference, went across, from an intoxicated swell who insisted
on introducing himself as Prime Minister Bennett of Canada,
to a Cockney communist who compared it to ' an old sock
full of 'oles and the sweat runnin' out/
As we were getting near the end of our time, a very pretty
young lady was led up to the 'mike/ I asked her to tell the
American audience what she thought about the econom
'Oh, is that all you wanted, dearie?' said the lady of Regent
Street. The crowd was slightly embarrassed, but they had
a good laugh. Inspector Prothero was right. He knew we
needed twenty policemen, and he knew we'd get one of
'those' ladies in our broadcast. The B.B.C. officials were
duly shocked, and they haven't risked a street broadcast to
this day ! But we have in London, and right in front of
Broadcasting House.
When in search of England, don't forget the man in the
street.
XX. THE TOURISTS PARADISE
VIENNA IS STILL GAY
T TIENNA is often referred to, by post-war writers, as the
V saddest place in the world. A city famed for its gaiety,
the well-being of its citizens, the cosy comfort of its homes,
the beauty of its women, and the prodigal brilliance of its
society a city lying in the midst of one of the sweetest
landscapes, once feeding upon the wealth of a vast polyglot
empire and the trade of half of Europe was now deprived
by the cruel fortunes of war of all those happy circumstances
which gave it its prosperity. 'Wine, Woman, and Song*
had been its slogan of happiness, but after the war the most
ubiquitous woman was Dame Care.
Yet there are qualities in people which do not die. The
war had taken from the Viennese everything they had
most of their land, their emperor, their wealth, and even
their coffee, once the best in Europe, now replaced by
Ersatz. When the Austrian delegation came to St. Germain
after the war they were summoned only to sign the death
warrant of their own once happy land. When they arrived
at their Paris hotel, so the story goes, on a gray and dismal
morning, and sat waiting for breakfast, no one was able to
say a word. Not until some time after the waiter had left
did the Prime Minister of the new Republic open his mouth
for some deeply felt words. 'At last/ he said, 'once again a
good cup of coffee.'
The coffee is good again in Vienna, its original European
home (where it was introduced by the Turks), and the
waiters who serve it are no different from the pre-war breed.
2.84 Hello ^America!
As for sentimentality Vienna is more like itself than ever,
for it can muse ad infinitum on the good old times.
At this no one is more expert than they. There is in
Vienna a society which in effect does nothing else. The
Federal Chancellor belongs to it, and many a solid citizen
with a title before his name titles which denote not so
much a rank as an activity, and usually an activity long
obsolete. Every now and again they foregather in a club-
house which was once the home of an eminent patrician fam-
ily, and which is still furnished in the style which Viennese
call Biedermayer and the unfeeling outer world dubs ' incroy-
able? They dress up in the clothes of the Metternich period,
dance the old dances, sing the old songs, and get tipsy on
Grinzing wine. Early in the year in carnival time they
usher in the season's dances with a Patching ball, in the style
of the long ago.
It was my privilege to attend one of these parties and to
broadcast it to America, and next day the papers hoped that
the Viennese in America who had heard it had wept tears of
longing or of vicarious joy.
It was certainly Vienna at its most. The Chancellor
couldn't come, but his wife, that ill-fated young Frau von
Schuschnigg, who was destined to meet her death in a myste-
rious motor-car accident within a year, came in an Empire
gingham dress, carrying a large bouquet, and got her hand
kissed by innumerable 'court councillors,' barons and majors
in colored tail-coats and stocks. Betty Fischer, the original
'Merry Widow,' now a prosperous Dutch lord mayor's
wife, came to sing the songs that made her famous; a comic
Viennese character, Ernst Arnold, well known to everybody,
sang the ' Fiakerlied,' the comic Viennese coachman's song
which has made five generations of inebriates weep; and the
illustrious Shrammel Quartet led by fat Pepi Wichart, with
red face and his thick moustache curled into spirals at the
ends, furnished the nineteenth-century equivalent of jazz.
(A Schrammel quartet consists of two violins, accordion, and
guitar.) As the party warmed up they sang, swayed to the
music, and praised Old Vienna in many toasts. When the
old clock on the mantelpiece played its ancient tune, the
The Tourist's Taradise
crowd hushed into silence and some wiped furtive tears
from their eyes. When I left, there wasn't a dry eye or
glove in the house, and for all I know they are still
there . . .
Another time we went out to Grinzing that sentimental
suburb where Beethoven worked and Schubert imbibed
while writing songs and broadcast the crowd at their
Heurigen, the new wine drunk outdoors in spring and sum-
mer, and indoors the year round. The result was much the
same, only the songs were different. One of them, 'Fein,
fein schmeckt der WeinJ a particular favorite with the crowd,
went something like this:
'Wine tastes good when you're twenty,
And so does love,
Wine tastes good when you're forty,
And kissing, by Jove.
When you get older, and gradually colder,
Just wine alone
Tastes good.'
There was a scion of the Hapsburg family in our crowd,
and when it came time to go home he refused to go by car.
A Fiaker, the old-time hired carriage-and-pair, was the only
thing fit to ride home from Grinzing in. When the carriage
was found, our princeling discovered a finely engraved crown
on each of the shining lamps, and recognized the carriage as
having belonged to an old aunt, a Hapsburg long dead. The
old cabby, with his bowler hat cocked on the side of his head,
when questioned, confessed that he had been the old lady's
coachman, and when he recognized her once royal relative
he all but broke down. Leopold, the Hapsburg offspring,
mounted the driver's seat with him and they talked about
the good old times all the way to Vienna. For the rest of
the night Leopold drowned his sorrow in a pseudo-modern
Viennese bar, to the strains of strident jazz.
After the war, the cynical Viennese used to sing the old
national anthem to these words:
'Gott erhalte, Gott beschiitze
Unsern Renner, unsern Seitz,
2.86 Hello ^America!
Gott erhalt', man kann nicht wissen,
Unsern Kaiser in der Schweiz.' x
Renner and Seitz the first Chancellor of the Austrian
Republic and the first President of the National Assembly
became political exiles; Kaiser Karl is long dead. But the
spirit is still the same. Vienna is still gay.
MOZART AND LEATHER BREECHES
Austria is a happy hunting ground for the picture postcard
fan, but most of its landscapes are suffused with sound.
Take Salzburg as an example. Salzburg cherishes its
Mozart and its architecture, which is music, too. During
July and August it simply bursts with music and picturesque-
ness, while its fashionable tourists, in leather breeches and
Dirndl dresses, almost burst with good food.
When I first knew Salzburg, just after the war, it was a
different place. It was then the special preserve of Max
Reinhardt and Richard Strauss and a mangy-looking crowd
of composers, mostly Viennese, whose activities aroused the
honest suspicions of the natives. One day two of these
budding geniuses were actually discovered in the hall of
the Mozarteum, playing on one piano at the same time, and
as the piano was public domain, some worthy peasant trustees
proposed their expulsion from the premises, for misuse of
property.
There were two festivals in those days, one consisting of
Mozart and Reinhardt's production of Everyman in front of
the cathedral, the other of the most modern music of all the
nations. The former was patronized by the tourists (mostly
Viennese), and the latter almost exclusively by the modern
composers themselves and their immediate families (also
1 ' God preserve them, God protect them,
Our Renner, our Seitz,
God preserve one can't be certain
Our Kaiser, now abroad.'
The Tourist's Taradise 2.87
mostly Viennese). It was an artistic maxim that one festival
did not know what the other was doing; but the natives
were equally hostile to both. * We want our peace/ said they
with the exception of the innkeepers and restaurateurs.
Everybody, including Stefan Zweig and a few genuine
Salzburgers, would meet in the afternoon at the Cafe Bazar
(nicknamed Cafe Megalomania) to shout at distracted
waiters and hear them shout back ' Komme gleichl ' (Coming
directly!) or 'Bin scho da! y (Am already there!).
There was no festival playhouse but the tiny municipal
theatre, though a hopeful band of 'founders' led by Strauss
and Reinhardt marched to a suburban meadow to watch the
Archbishop lay the foundation stone of a huge and fantastic
opera house which is still waiting to be built; and on the way
home Strauss turned to me to ask whether some rich Ameri-
can woman couldn't be found to sacrifice just one string of
pearls to make that great temple of art a reality.
But it needed no modern temple to listen to Mozart's
serenades in the open air, and Mozart's masses in the cathe-
dral. Those who did, and drank cheap country-wine with
the friars in St. Peter's cellar afterwards, were mostly musi-
cians, poets, and impecunious dreamers of all sorts; the
tourists were modest burghers, and the leather breeches
were worn only by natives and two or three show-offs from
Berlin . . .
Now all that has changed: there is just one Salzburg
festival, and it has become a flourishing industry. Toscanini
reigns supreme, Reinhardt lives in a reconstructed baroque
palace with a private chapel and a lake for swans; but
Strauss and the young composers are gone. There is a
gambling casino, the hotels are full to overflowing, the prices
are high, the predominant language is English, and the
leather breeches and Tyrolean hats have become de rigueur
except for the natives, who dress in ordinary clothes, so
you can tell them from the socialites. Mozart's birth house
is still intact, and his Papageno tune is still played by the
town-hall chimes; but they are smothered by the 'functional*
American bars with indirect lighting, chromium-plated
railings, and 'swing.'
z88 Hello ^America!
Now the microphone needn't hear any of that. It can pick
up the operas and the serenades and the tinkle of Mozart's
piano; it can go on a pilgrimage to the old real Salzburg hid-
den under the gaudy surface. The architecture, at any rate,
is still there that intriguing northern interpretation of
Italian motifs and the ruined castle surging up out of the
middle of the town, and the bells of all the churches, and the
sheer, snowclad mountains rising out of the plain. My first
set of Salzburg broadcasts started July 25, 1931, and in-
cluded the Mozart requiem from the cathedral; the last one,
with Toscanini conducting, comprised Verdi's Fa/staff and
a promenade through the old Salzburg a multiple 'pick-
up' of all its traditional charms. After that, commercialism
stepped in and took what was left.
POLAND'S BROKEN MELODY
A favorite pre-war story about the Poles was the one
concerning the elephant. A group of people of different
nationalities agreed to write about the elephant and compare
the result after two years. The Englishman wrote a handy
volume entitled 'Elephants I Have Shot'; the Frenchman
wrote a monograph on 'The Love Life of Elephants'; and the
German a two- volume 'Introduction to a Study of the
Psychology of Elephants.' But the Pole simply submitted a
pamphlet on 'The Elephant and the Polish Question/
There is no longer a Polish question in the old sense, but
the mentality which produced that strange pamphlet lives on.
There is nothing quite so sentimentally patriotic as a Pole,
and his particular national touchiness is a thing apart.
Although Poland is supposed to be a republic, the shrine of
national glory is Cracow, the city of Polish kings. Here the
Palace of Wawel, used as a military outpost by the Austrians
for nearly a century and a half, has been restored by the
modern decorator's art to its medieval glory, and in its crypt
lie the remains of Poland's kings, including John Sobieski,
The Tourist's "Paradise 2.89
the reputed savior of Vienna from the Turks. But the most
prominent position is now given to Marshal Pilsudski, who
saved Warsaw from the Bolsheviks with the help of
Weygand.
It so happened that on the Sunday afternoon which we had
chosen for a 'picture postcard' broadcast from Cracow,
Pilsudski, dead only a few days, was lying in state in the
crypt, embalmed in the manner reserved for modern dictators
and Caruso, in a casket of silver and glass. Fifteen thousand
people had passed around the Marshal's coffin that day, and
a double line about a mile long was slowly snaking up the hill
when we arrived to do our commentary. A microphone had
been placed next to the Marshal, and I couldn't help feeling
rather sacrilegious to be 'commentating' on the scene with
the same kind of instrument that is associated by most
people with crooners. Pilsudski's features, in death, were
handsome and noble, and showed none of the choleric
violence with which he was credited in life. The young
Polish woman who was helping me a graduate of Bryn
Mawr and Oxford broke into tears and could think of
nothing but Pilsudski for days.
But the most dramatic part of that broadcast aside
from the way in which we ran it was the watchman in the
belfry of St. Mary's Church who, like his predecessors for six
hundred years, every day and every hour of the day, plays a
certain tune, the 'Heynal,' which stops abruptly before the
end. It stops because one day, during the Tartar siege of the
city in the thirteenth century, an arrow shot by a besieger
pierced the trumpeter's throat at that particular point.
Cracovians set their watches by the unfinished tune, which is
supposed never to be a second off. It was the only punctual
item in that broadcast of ours.
Patriotism takes time.
Hello ^America!
THE CITY OF THE DEAD
Nothing more incongruous could be imagined than the
intrusion of radio into the silence of the dead city of Pompeii,
which we picked for a broadcast early one spring. The good
Neapolitans thought we were simpletons, for what could one
tell people from the ruins of Pompeii that you couldn't tell
them from the Naples Museum or for that matter from the
Metropolitan Museum of New York? Nevertheless their
radio engineers humored us (just as they humored Max Jor-
dan when a couple of months later he wanted to broadcast
the rumble of Vesuvius), even though it involved expensive
improvements in the fifteen-mile telephone line from Naples
to Pompeii.
The nearest terminus, moreover, was at Pompeii station,
about half a mile from the far end of the ruined city, which we
wanted to describe. It was necessary to string two insulated
lines of copper wire loosely over the jagged, ruined walls along
the whole of one side of Pompeii. One of them was a fiery
red, and sightseers craned their necks to see what they meant.
Microphones were installed in five or six places in and around
the recently and most perfectly excavated 'House of Me-
nander/ and the broadcast was scheduled for late Sunday
afternoon. My side-kick in Italy, Raymond Hall, and I
managed to make a sort of relay pilgrimage from room to
room, across walls and ruined swimming pools, into the
'House of the Painter/ the 'House of the Two Lovers/ and
finally onto a balcony which brought us bang opposite the
still unexcavated part of Pompeii, where twenty-three feet of
earth, cut straight down like a layer cake, showed the strata
of pumice, ashes, and soil deposited by Vesuvius and Father
Time, crowned by a luscious crop of billowing wheat, under
which lie the remaining secrets of Pompeii's tragedy.
Before we got there we came upon the skeletons of the rich
owner's servants, caught and asphyxiated while guarding the
treasures of their masters, who sought safety in flight. And
the watchdog, whose skeleton is still chained, lies embedded
The Tourist's Taradise 2.91
in ashes three feet above the ground, showing how far he was
able to climb with the mounting floor of ashes an eternal
postscript to stark tragedy.
Looking to the northwest from that balcony, we gazed
upon Vesuvius, lazily smoking as always, its white cloud set
afire by the setting sun. There was no sound in that broad-
cast but that of our voices, as we described our progress, step
by step, save a resounding ring of a great bronze bowl in the
atrium of Menander's House and the inconsequential tinkle
of some Neapolitan tune at the end; yet I cannot help think-
ing that the tragic beauty of the place was made more
poignant to our distant audience than ever before.
VENICE, CALIFORNIA, HEARS VENICE, ITALY
But Italy is full of beauty and curiosity a paradise for
broadcasters with an inquiring mind. Take the utterly
medieval town of Siena, whence we broadcast a commentary
on the Palio that most ancient and most fantastic of all
horse races in the world while the heavy, caparisoned
steeds hurtled around the cobbled market place. Armed
with sticks their riders, each defending the honor of his city
ward, think nothing of hitting out at their competitors'
mounts in order to win the race, and each stable requires an
armed guard to prevent what squeamish Anglo-Saxons call
* tampering/ Here is medieval gallantry in one of its more
robust manifestations! And again, take Venice that in-
credible defiance of nature; one of the most extravagantly
creative boasts in the history of man.
We wanted to present Venice to the American listener
and to the prospective honeymooner with all its romantic
fascination, but with a realism that tourist catalogues and
guide books do not attain. And we must have succeeded, for
here is a fan-letter received some weeks later from Venice,
California some seven thousand miles away.
'It is 8.45 A.M. Sunday, May 19, 1935, in Venice, California,
Hello ^America!
U.S.A., and I am tuning in on Venice, Italy, for the first
broadcast from that classic city. Now I hear the voice of the
narrator . . . describing the panorama spread out before him
St. Mark's, the four bronze horses, with their story, I hear
the flutter of the pigeons, inseparable from St. Mark's, the
bells, the great cathedral organ, and the sacred singing.
Soon I hear the splash of water in the Grand Canal, the
conversation of bride and groom (whether stage bride and
groom doesn't matter) . . . the traffic signals of the canal,
and, to make it seem more natural, a near-accident occurs,
accompanied by the quick, impatient staccato voices of the
gondoliers, as they scold each other in their musical tongue.
Now back to St. Mark's, with more description of the en-
vironment; the bells strike six o'clock in the evening, the sun
is setting, and it is time to say good-bye.'
Perhaps our correspondent had no taste for music, for she
might have mentioned the gondolier's song and the sound of
guitars, and she was certainly too optimistic about radio's
power to bring more sympathy and understanding to the
tribes of humanity. What the poetic lady did not know was
that the preliminaries were a most desperately sordid and
harrowing experience, reminiscent of the days of Casanova,
king of mountebanks and a Venetian among Venetians.
After encountering the various bestie of the Police Depart-
ment, the Prefect's office, the Carabinieri, and the sup-
posedly pious guardians of St. Mark's, not to mention the
brotherhood of gondoliers, the cafe proprietors and the
gentlemen in charge of the city's morals, we were ready to
give up the ghost. A day before the broadcast the police
ordered us to take down our lines and instructed the guards
to remove microphones wherever they should be found!
And all because, apparently, we hadn't tipped either the
right people in the right sequence, or the right amounts.
The guardians of St. Mark's had the greatest qualms about
letting us profane the great church with microphones, and
maybe put americanata (low-brow Americanisms) into our
script. In the end they rang only the tiniest bell (instead of
the famous great one as agreed), because the ducats had not
reached the right hands. Luckily they couldn't stop the
Radio transmitted to the world the tragic beauty of the dead
city of Pompeii
The Tourist's "Paradise 2.93
bronze Moors, who, in the habit of striking the hour for
centuries, could not be deterred.
The show was saved, it should be recorded, by Count
Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law (later Foreign Minister), who
had been appealed to in Rome and sent a * phonogram* to
the Podesta inquiring who dared to obstruct us. But corrup-
tion is a tradition that goes back to the days of Othello, and
Venice for all that is the City of Dreams . . .
'Mi/a dollari per minuto* (One Thousand Dollars a
Minute) was the heading a leading Italian newspaper put
over its report of our broadcast.
RIEN NE VA PLUS I
Turning from the sublime to the ridiculous, I come upon
the following among my collection of scripts:
'Hello, America! This is Monte Carlo calling. We are
going to take you on a flying trip through the world's most
famous gambling resort. Sorry we can't win any money for
you, but we'll have a look-in at the tables and see how others
do it/ And we did. We were going to soften the blow with a
little scene from the opera house, where the curtain was about
to ring down on Glazounoff's ballet Raymonda^ but the stage
manager, after agreeing to retime his show, forgot that his
watch was fast. So, without musical introduction we
switched to the sumptuous Sporting Club, where French
men about town, English aristocrats, Russian emigres, and
faded dowagers of all nationalities were trying to improve
their economic status by staking all they could afford on the
spin of the roulette. Among those present, too, were Prince
Andrew of Greece, the Maharajah of Nepal, Lord de Clifford,
Steve Donoghue, the jockey, H. G. Wells, Somerset
Maugham, and Mr. and Mrs. Berry Wall of New York,
dressed in the style of the gay nineties.
The croupiers were wonderful, and most obliging. We
dangled a microphone over the table, to pick up the spinning
2.54 Hello ^America!
ball and the click of the chips, and another one by the side of
each croupier. They raised their voices as they shouted their
'Faites vos jeux!' and ' Rien ne va plus,' and offered to use
real gold Napoleons instead of chips to make a more impres-
sive noise. They poured a flood of gold out of a bag before
my greedy eyes, but coming through the microphone the
precious coins sounded like tin, so we decided to use chips in
our 'demonstration game/ I then made the only running
sports commentary of my career, except for the Olympic
Games in Berlin, when Bill Henry suddenly handed me the
microphone and asked me to tell the audience what / thought
of a certain race. Both commentaries were of the same degree
of expertness; they left the listener no wiser than he was be-
fore.
Our real trouble in Monte Carlo was not caused by the
chips but by a bevy of 'girls' Les Girls just arrived
from New York, who were doing a dancing show and were to
greet the folks back home. They refused to take anyone
seriously except a weaselly little French ballet-master, who
yelled at them and got kissed in return. This band of ' sugars,'
used to working only with their legs, had to be taught even to
giggle convincingly, and one of them just managed to say,
'This sure is a Ritzy place.' They nearly wrecked the show.
But it was all good, clean fun, and nobody in this Temple
of Mammon needed to be bribed.
HOLLAND S SILENT CHARMS
Holland, you would think, is full of things to broadcast.
If it is not the most beautiful country in Europe, it is the
most picturesque, and it has been almost entirely made by
the hand of man. (The parts that were there before the
Dutch came along, nobody seems to care about.) Holland,
moreover, is a direct ancestor of America: New York was
really New Amsterdam, and our highest claim to aristocracy
is a Dutch name. The Dutch, enterprising as ever, were
The Tourist's Taradise 195
actually trying to produce broadcasts for us, while the rest of
Europe just waited for us to come and make our own. But
Holland is a silent land. William the Silent is the national
hero, and Holland lives up to his name. It is a land of flat,
hand-made squares of soil, called polders, of canals called
grachts, of clean narrow brick houses on clean, brick-paved
streets, of windmills and boats and vegetables and flowers, of
large cheeses and wooden shoes all silent things, except
the clogs, and they are too monotonous for words. Even the
cheeses are rolled along to be loaded on canal-boats, so they
don't make any noise.
We investigated all these things, and finally the energetic
Phillips's man (drumming up business for the short-wave
transmitter) took me to the Island of Marken, where the
people go about in the old Dutch costumes and get them-
selves photographed for money by gullible tourists. I never
saw a sadder place; the inbred population of that little island
has nothing to do but read books, so they are the most
educated as well as the most picturesque peasants in the
world. They used to fish, but now that the Zuider Zee is
gradually being reclaimed and turned into more polders (for
future generations of Dutchmen, who can either eat or export
the surplus vegetables that will be grown), the water is
turning sweet and the fish are getting soured on the locality.
We went to see the mayor of the little town a wizened
old man in shirtsleeves but he had nothing to suggest.
Weren't there any carillons in the church tower? No, the
community is Calvinistic and very strict; there isn't any
music in the church. We went away, sadder and wiser men,
and got rather seasick on the shallow Zuider Zee. And yet
we broadcast from Holland several times. Once it was
Hendrik van Loon, speaking from a diamond factory in
Amsterdam, and a very interesting talk it was; another time
it was from the tulip fields, ablaze in all the colors of the rain-
bow, and much more brilliant.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as
President for the second time, I listened to the proceedings
in a little Dutch town, together with some Dutchmen who
2_c;6 Hello ^America!
took the fact that for the second time a member of the
Roosevelt family had become President of the United
States with remarkable calm, considering that his ancestors
came from that very town Oud-Vossemer, a mere hamlet
on the island of Tholen, near the Hook of Holland. When
the inauguration was over we had a little surprise party, to
which we hoped the President would be able to listen, as
millions of 'my friends and fellow citizens* did.
It took place in the little town hall of Oud-Vossemer,
opposite the Dutch Reformed church and within sight of the
house whence Claes Roosevelt, so they say, emigrated to the
New World. Over the mantelpiece of the Council Chamber
(where that afternoon I had seen clog-wearing Dutchmen
collect their Depression dole) was the Roosevelt coat-of-
arms, together with those of the other patrician families of
the town; and the mayor, a mousy little man, dressed in his
Sunday best, with his chain of office around his neck, was
there to read a speech. So was the American Minister, who
told the story of the Roosevelts of Oud-Vossemer.
But I never saw a stiller town. An immense Dutch flag
hung over the town hall facade; it was Oud-Vossemer's great
day. But not a sound, not a cheer!
Yes, Holland is a silent place.
WHAT PRICE GRANDEUR?
More and more European countries are organizing short-
wave broadcasts for distant lands primarily for their
colonies, if they have any, secondarily for America, because
America is full of ' colonies ' of all nations. These American
colonies have their value: at best they provide spheres of
interest thin wedges of economic penetration; and they
are always customers for 'invisible exports' remittances
to relatives and purchases as tourists help the national
exchequer. In any case national minorities have become a
political preoccupation since the war, and some countries
The Tourist's Taradise 197
regard their hyphenated Americans as fit objects of govern-
mental solicitude. Whenever European statesmen speak to
America they have these prodigal sons in mind. And that
leads to amusing episodes.
The Grand Duchy of Luxemburg is as proud of its inde-
pendence as any power in Europe, possibly even more so
and it has reason to be. This musical-comedy monarchy has
less than a thousand square miles of area, less than 300,000
inhabitants, an army of 250, and one radio station, which is
the most powerful in western Europe, operating on one of the
longest wave lengths in the world but that is another
story, belonging in Chapter XXIV. And it is ruled over by a
charming young Grand Duchess, married to a descendant of
Louis XIV. Its capital is a town of fairy-tale romance, with a
moated castle high up over a river, and in its principal street
you buy delicious pastries from a grand ducal purveyor,
sporting the grand ducal arms over his door. A living pic-
ture postcard, in fact, and an ideal place for a picture post-
card in sound.
When I asked the head of its government to say a few
words three minutes' worth he replied with a full-
length speech, which had to be cut down by very diplomatic
maneuvering. When I discovered that the speech was to be
made in two languages the Luxemburg dialect and
English I almost passed out. ' But/ said the Minister of
State, 'there are over 100,000 Luxemburgers in America*
a national minority, in fact. The one hundred and twenty
million non-Luxemburgers were of minor importance: in-
deed, the dialect speech was to come first. The situation was
desperate, so only desperate measures would do. We in-
duced His Excellency to defer the dialect speech until the
national anthem was played, and didn't tell him that the
time would then be up and that American listeners (Luxem-
burgers and others) would be listening to something else.
But as there was a distinguished audience in the studio, his
oratory wasn't quite wasted. I hated to do it, for I never met
pleasanter folks.
The American charge d'affaires was even more romantic
than the place. A Southerner, from Georgia, he was more
Hello ^America!
royalist than the King. His courtly manners would have
done honor to any Frenchman of the ancien regime^ and he
spoke of the Grand Duchess as Her Serene Highness, with a
voice full of reverence. Walking me along the high river bank
he told me the story of the fair Melusinde, who lived in a
cavern by the river in the long-ago; she married a handsome
prince, but the princess turned into a dreadful ogre, who
plunged into the river where she lives until this day, and will
live so until the perfect youth comes along, who has the
courage to kiss the ogre; then she will be saved. In some way
he seemed to believe that the prophesy would yet come
true and a prince reign once more upon the Luxemburg
throne.
When I left that night, on a modern railway train, seen off
by the courtly American diplomat, I had to pinch myself to
make sure it hadn't all been a dream.
The thing that stuck in my mind after leaving this midget
state was that the people were extraordinarily prosperous,
that there was no unemployment, and that the income tax
was about the lowest in Europe. But then despite its
smallness Luxemburg stands seventh among the world's
producers of steel. Monaco, even smaller in territory, has
hardly any taxes at all; but of course its government lives on
the profits of the gaming halls. Let's have a look, I thought,
at the rest of the Lilliputian states.
High up in the Alps, on the banks of the youthful Rhine, is
the little principality of Liechtenstein, wedged between
Austria and Switzerland, yet independent of both. Its
capital is Vaduz, the Vallis dulcis sweet valley of the
Romans, and its area of sixty square miles contains no
minerals nor is its capital a gaming spa. There are plenty of
rocky mountains, and the rest is peaceful farms. Well, I sent
my friend Raymond Hall to make a broadcast from Liechten-
stein, and he reported that the country supports some twelve
thousand people in perfect comfort, and that the taxes are
very, very low. Moreover, he found that Liechtenstein is
perhaps the most democratic country on earth, for almost
anything can be decided by a referendum of the whole
The Tourist's Taradise
people a large town meeting at best. And the only soldier
in the country, made of wax, is kept in the museum.
As for the country's octogenarian, six-foot-plus monarch,
a Most Serene Highness who thoroughly knows his Vienna
he spends only a little of his time in the ancient battlemented
donjon castle of Vaduz. Since Napoleon confirmed his
country's ancient independence, his family is privileged to
intermarry with the royal houses of Europe, but I seem to re-
member that one of his sons preferred the alliance of a good
bourgeois Jewish family in London's West End.
So what do the large and powerful nations gain by being so
grand? They can be patriotic. But so, we found, can the
little ones. The Liechtensteiners who took part in our
broadcast, from the head of the government down to the
assembled peasants, sang the following anthem with much
more gusto than the British put into 'God Save the King*
and to the same tune:
'Long live our Liechtenstein,
A Jewel on the Rhine,
Happy and true!
Long live our country's Prince,
Long live our Fatherland,
In bond of brother-love,
United, free!'
Smaller than either Luxemburg or Liechtenstein is the
Republic of San Marino, which occupies the flat tops of two-
thousand-foot Mount Titan and is completely surrounded
by Mussolini. Since even Napoleon Bonaparte, defied by
its doughty citizens and two guns, marched around it and
left it intact, a Fascist dictator can do no less. Noblesse
oblige! San Marino, ruled by two Captains Regent (one
noble, one plain) joined the Allies in the World War and has
not made peace with either Austria or Turkey to this day.
When King George V celebrated his Jubilee he received
the felicitations of all the governments of the world, and
from the hands of little Giovanni Sovrani, restaurateur and
Vice-Consul of the Republic of San Marino, he received the
300 Hello ^America!
order of that country's patron saint. Its insignia, in gold and
enamel, are as gorgeous as any I have ever seen.
When we broadcast the inaugural ceremony of the Cap-
tains Regent that same autumn, the San Marinese went ' all
out/ They posted official notices giving the details of the
program; they tolled the palace bell when the announcer
appeared on the palace balcony; had the national anthem
played on time; fired the guns of the fortress as the guards
saluted the flag, and tolled the great Rocca bell at the end,
solely for the benefit of America. The crowd shouted ' Viva
la Reggenza!' 'Viva la Republica!' and 'Viva I' America!'
after the newly elected Noble Regent addressed them thus:
4 The friendship that unites the smallest and oldest re-
public in the world to the largest and one of the youngest
does not date only from today . . .'
Well, if most of the Americans who listened hadn't even
heard of San Marino till N that day, they were taught some-
thing; for, holding a faded letter written by the hand of
Abraham Lincoln, he read:
'Great and good friends,
'Although your Dominion is small, your State is never-
theless the most honored in all history. It has by its ex-
perience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to
the friends of Humanity, that government founded on
republican principles is capable of being so administered as
to be secure and enduring . . .' and so on for three or four
pages.
The Marinese are as proud of that letter as Britain is of
its Magna Carta, or America of its Declaration of Independ-
ence; and as proud of being Marinese as Englishmen and
Americans are proud of being what they are. Nor are their
ceremonies less impressive. The next issue of // Popolo San
Marinese carried a full account of the proceedings, including
the broadcast to America. Just like an inauguration at
Washington, D.C.
I am sorry to say that there is no broadcasting station in
Andorra not even a telephone line that could be used for a
broadcast to the outside world. But the only thing that
The Tourist's Taradise 301
makes me doubt that Andorra is just as happy as the rest of
Europe's tiny lands is a paragraph in my friend Negley Far-
son's book, The Way of a Transgressor. When Negley climbed
up into the remote capital of the Pyrenean republic to
interview its President (annual salary: $3.75), he asked him
what his principal duties were. The answer was: * Relations
with foreign powers/
XXL VIVE LA FRANCE!
THEY CAN'T BE WRONG
OF ALL the broadcasting organizations in Europe,
Great Britain's is the most conscientious, Germany's
the most efficient, Italy's the most ambitious. What shall we
say of France's ? The most casual ? The most haphazard? It
certainly is both of these, but at the same time the most
amiable. Englishmen regard their radio as a great social
force religious, social, artistic, educational. The French,
certainly, have no such ambitions about this latest contrap-
tion of the amusement world. The Frenchman is the world's
individualist, and he refuses to take too seriously anything
that is likely to disturb his own particular routine for the
enjoyment of life. The 'T.S.F.' receiver 1 is by no means
an indispensable furniture in the modern French home,
nor has radio reduced in the slightest the clientele of the
corner cafe.
For years, therefore, radio was a stepchild, born of
industry, and negligently fathered by the state. Succes-
sive governments advanced projects for a great central
studio building, but none of them lasted long enough to get the
money voted in Parliament, and by the time the new govern-
ment came in, the experts decided that the plan was out of
date. So official French broadcasting is still done from the
backyard of the old post-office built under Napoleon III.
During the first year of international broadcasting no
French programs were relayed to America. It was not until
the opening of the Colonial Exposition of 1931 that France
1 T.S.F. is abbreviation for T616phon6e sans Fil, literally 'wireless telephone.'
*Uive la France! 303
erected a short-wave station at Pontoise for the benefit of
the natives in Madagascar, Algiers, etc. If the opening of
the Exposition, by Marshal Lyautey, was transmitted to
New York (the first French broadcast heard in America), it
was due only to the persistence of the American companies;
and in the end it had to be taken via England and the trans-
atlantic telephone because there was no suitable directional
antenna at Pontoise.
JEAN PATOU TALKS TO THE LADIES
After this Colonial Exposition broadcast I thought it was
about time that America should hear some characteristic
French programs and the voices of French public men. The
N.B.C. had broken the ice by rebroadcasting a concert of
the Garde Republicaine band. What, aside from music
which didn't yet come across the Atlantic without consider-
able mutilation could we import from France? What
French things were Americans chiefly interested in ? Fashions,
for one thing; wine for another (America was still dry). Let's
begin with fashions!
The most famous fashion creator of the moment was Jean
Patou; let's have a talk on the autumn fashions a forecast,
* inside stuff' from Jean Patou, for the ladies of America.
I was assured that Patou spoke English; his manager cer-
tainly did, and with him 1 worked out the details. The
crucial day arrived, and the great man, handsome and
temperamental as a film star, arrived at the old post-office
building in the Rue de Grenelle, where a very primitive studio
was placed at our disposal. He arrived rather late and I had
not seen his script. It needed attention, and as for Monsieur
Patou's English a month would have been better than the
fifteen minutes or so in which I tried to brush it up. But,
worst of all, there was no forecast, no real information that
was worth the expense of transmission, only some pretty
words for *ze American leddees' and some near-poetry about
Patou's forthcoming perfume!
304 Hello ^America!
'What/ I asked prosaically, 'are the essential novelties for
the fall ? Give me some general principles and we'll work up
an interview/
'Ah! novelties/ he said. ' II y a deux choses, two cardinal
innovations la mort du noir et la mort du derriere ' (' the
death of black and the death of the backside').
I thought I hadn't heard right. He repeated it. 'But you
can't speak of "the death of the backside/" I said. 'Not to
an American audience/
'But why not?' and he went on to explain how dresses
would be ' straight up and down/ concealing all suggestions of
curves at the stern. This was the Big News and I didn't
appreciate it. We had to find an innocuous English circumlo-
cution, but he remained skeptical. I began to be grateful for
his Gallic pronunciation of English. While we were arguing
someone rushed in from across the hall and said that we
ought to begin (there was no starting signal). We did; we
spoke into the most antediluvian and unconvincing micro-
phone I had seen outside of Ireland.
Almost none of Patou's words could have been understood
by the average high-school graduate, so I repeated his
answers in paraphrased form in language fitting for
flappers' ears. I never heard whether anybody listened.
I hope nobody did. That was our first 'special' from France,
and the first fashion broadcast to be heard in America. 1
BASTILLE DAY ON MONTMARTRE
But the Frenchest of French broadcasts came from the
Quartier Montmartre, on the Fourteenth of July. The idea
was to project across the Atlantic something of the spirit of
the great national festival by which the French celebrate the
fall of the Bastille. We chose the Place Clichy, where we
found the unused upstairs room of a corner cafe, commanding
1 There have been many transatlantic fashion broadcasts since then; in fact,
they have become seasonal events.
IJive la France! 305
a sweeping view of the Boulevard and the Place, and domi-
nating the upper reaches of a comparatively quiet backwater
a favorite spot for the street-dancing that goes on all over
Paris on the night of the Fete Nationale. This large, many-
windowed room would make an ideal studio and control-
room, permitting us to switch on and off at will the gaieties
and noises of the street and square.
They were plenty the usual attractions of a popular
street fair, including side-shows, street vendors, two huge
merry-go-rounds boasting steam calliopes of prodigious
sonority, and at night (our broadcast would take place after
dark) there were to be colored lights, fireworks, and the lurid
brilliance of the Moulin Rouge, with its illuminated wings
gyrating perilously over the heads of the passers-by. Street
traffic didn't worry us, for on this day of days the accommo-
dating Paris police divert motor cars or guide them adroitly
around the orbit of couples waltzing in affectionate em-
brace.
The clou of our show would be a dance band in the side
street, which was subsidized by the proprietor of our cafe.
It was to be conducted by a dubious character known as the
'Clown of Montmartre/ who at desired moments would
conjure up a community chorus from among the dancing
couples under the sway of his baton. For our special benefit
Mile. Floriot, a billowing blonde vedette of the Opera-
Comique, would sing the verses and lead the choruses of
'Les fonts de Paris' and other favorite ditties of old-time
Paris.
From all these riches of entertainment we would choose
at will, tying them in with a little dramatization of cafe
conviviality and a commentary by two American visitors
my Paris mate and myself. I was to run the show. By means
of a 'mixing panel' we would fade in and out the various
sounds of the street and the cafe, and the antics of the clown-
conductor, who would take his cues from an electric torch
signal through the nearly sound-proof windows of the studio.
The arrangements were perfect: only the technical set-up and
the general continuity had to be rehearsed in the early after-
noon, when there would already be some goings-on. The
306 Hello ^America!
engineering was in the hands of the P.T.T., the French
department in charge of French telephones and radio.
In the morning the engineers were to be there, installing
their microphones, amplifiers, and 'leads/ We arrived at the
cafe; Pere Vannoux, the patron, smiling cynical tolerance,
was already behind his bar; Madame was supervising the
cleaning up; chairs were piled on tables; odd characters of
the quartier were standing about having an early bock.
Some of them later turned out to be our engineers. There
seemed to be some insurmountable technical difficulties; the
local characters took a hand in the discussion, and pretty
soon there was a chorus of gesticulation and shrugging of
shoulders that boded ill for our enterprise.
Nobody paid any attention to us until we proposed to
stand a drink all round. That not only focussed the discus-
sion, but gained us some auxiliary volunteers local
mechanics who had come to loaf but remained to work; one
of them, in fact, saved the situation by some master-stroke
which hadn't occurred to the official crew. After all what
would you ? this was a matter of advertising la patrie. So
in the end, instead of the single microphone attached to an
obsolescent telephone installation, we had cables slung
across the street, special leads through cellars of private
houses, and a veritable net of lines converging on the im-
provised studio over the corner.
We returned in the afternoon to rehearse and gather
atmosphere. The street was alive with children and lookers-
on. We waited for our chief actors; gradually they turned
up, but no two of them were there together. People flitted
in and out, but nothing happened. More shrugging of shoul-
ders: Malgre tout, it was the Fourteenth of July!
Above all no engineers; no possibility of trying out
'noises off/ Nobody thought they were important; every-
body was concerned about his own piece. Our prima donna,
in a frilly creation, turned up complete with yellow-gloved,
morning-coated husband, spreading an exotic perfume
through the cafe; the 'mayor* of Montmartre made a visit of
inspection; the hitherto mythical clown looked in between
his turns at the Moulin de la Galette; Pere Vannoux and
la France! 307
Madame, worried about the disturbance, were throwing
ugly looks. We rewrote our script on a marble-topped table,
moist with the remnants of liquid cheer. Darkness was
coming on; we gave up the rehearsal and trusted to luck.
CHARM PLUS SPEED EQUALS EFFICIENCY
Presently the band arrived and started up. More than
that: another band started up fifty yards further down the
street, and the two produced a terrifying cacophony. What
to do? The patron thought he might 'fix* things by in-
demnifying his competitor of the neighboring cafe for the
loss in dance-minded customers. We agreed on a contribu-
tion, and with the diplomatic help of the maire were assured
of a half-hour monopoly. About twenty minutes before the
deadline, the engineers, holding smouldering cigarette-ends
between their lips, sauntered on to the scene. The micro-
phones had still to be connected up; also the earphones which
were to enable me to listen to the entire output and so to
stage-manage the show.
We mounted the dark stairs to the studio. Surprise
number one: no lights in the room! While we sent out an
S.O.S. for electric bulbs, the men began setting up their gear
in the dark. A standard microphone was put in place for
me near a strategic window.
'Now, what about the fireworks?' 'Mais, monsieur, it's
too early for those!' A twelve-year-old lad, named Hip-
poly te, turned up from nowhere and promised to set off some
toy bombs on the glass and tin roof of the sidewalk cafe. How
nice for the customers, I thought, but never mind! Every-
body worked with a will, galvanized into action by the ex-
citement. In an emergency Latins are at their best. (Re-
member Gallieni's taxicabs at the Battle of the Marne!)
At last we were ready to try just a few minutes of the
program. I signalled to the maestro. The band started up;
I listened through the engineers' phones. Great Apollo and
308 Hello ^America!
the Nine Muses! The Mighty Barnum and Igor Stravinsky
together couldn't have equalled this: the two merry-go-
rounds, though 'way across the square, were drowning our
show. Nothing could be heard but their steam calliopes,
coming through the outside mikes.
Once again we appealed to the patron ; this time nothing
could be done. Not even by the maire. Stop the merry-go-
rounds on the Place Clichy? Think of the loss, Monsieur!
j4i pay era? I was ready to throw up my hands when little
Hippolyte, the fireworks expert, sidled up to me and whis-
pered, 'You want the merry-go-rounds to stop?' 'Yes, for
fifteen minutes.' ' I'll do it,' and off he was. In a few minutes
he was back, having with his childish enthusiasm convinced
the boss of the carousels that for the good of the Quartier and
the glory of the French revolution he just had to lay off for a
quarter of an hour. Moreover, a playmate had been posted
near the merry-go-rounds who would watch for the first fire-
cracker, by way of signal, and see that the armistice was
carried out.
We were now as set as we could hope to be, everything
considered. The street was crowded with dancing pairs. I
took my position at the microphone, surrounded by the cafe
characters, ready to flash signals at the maestro below. I
now called for my earphones. Ye gods and little fishes!
They were dangling off a short wire, far beyond my reach in
a spot where I couldn't see the street. I exploded: 'Norn de
Dieu!' this was too much. Still chewing his cigarette, the
engineer came up smiling. 'How many minutes have we
got?' I pointed to my watch exactly two and a half. It
was marvellous to observe him and his helper hauling
wire, twirling, unscrewing, splicing, and twisting a presti-
digitator had been lost in this apparently blase servant of
the state. The seconds ticked off on my stop watch: one
minute to go silence 'Hello, America!' As I said the
words, a silent pair of hands slipped the ear-phones over my
head. The show was saved.
Everybody came up to scratch the prima donna, the
dancers and singers, and even the surly patron, who had to
contribute a few words in his rich Auvergnat accent, just to
la France! 309
show that there were no Parisians in Paris which was the
point of the back-chat we had arranged. Hippolyte's fire-
crackers were a little too enthusiastic, perhaps, but even the
merry-go-round added a touch of color, for out of sheer
gratitude I waited just long enough before stopping them to
give listeners a touch of bedlam at its best.
The end of the show was a clinking of glasses containing
real champagne by way of thanks to the helpers. There
were six or eight of us in the room. After I signed off I saw
that they had increased to thirty or more, and the patron
was bringing up bottle after bottle of his best Veuve Cliquot.
The prima donna had received a bouquet and went off dream-
ing of an American tour; Hippolyte refused all recompense
except the remaining firecrackers, worth about ten cents.
Madame, below, beamed at the crowded cafe, and as in the
wee hours we gathered ourselves up to go, we had but one
thought: 'Charming people, these French!'
MISS LIBERTY CELEBRATES
Franco-American amity is firmly based on history; its
outward symbols to the Frenchman are Lafayette, Pershing,
and Miss Liberty. Miss Liberty meaning the gigantic
bronze statue in New York Harbor, a gift of the Republic of
France to the sister Republic across the sea recently
celebrated her fiftieth birthday in circumstances which her
creator could certainly not have foreseen. Two Presidents,
one speaking in the Elysee Palace in Paris, the other on
Bedloes Island in New York, in the shadow of the statue
itself, took part in the same ceremony and in the hearing of
the peoples of both countries.
The occasion, impressive as it may have been, was not
without a touch of comedy to those who could see the
machinery. The American end was American enough, to be
sure; but the French end was very, very French.
The ceremony on Bedloes Island was to include speeches
io Hello ^America!
by the Mayor of New York, the Secretary of the Interior, and
the President of the United States, the usual salutes and
music by the United States Marine Band; in Paris the
President of the Republic would ' answer ' President Roose-
velt, after being introduced by the American Ambassador.
President Roosevelt would greet France and the ' Marseillaise '
would be played, while a guard of honor saluted the French
tricolor; then, from France, would come 'The Star-Spangled
Banner/ played by the Musique de la Garde the crack
French army band. The ceremony was to start at two P.M.
New York time, corresponding to seven P.M. in Paris. The
United States Department of the Interior had approved the
program, and Ambassador Bullitt had been advised. All I
had to do was to go to Paris, superintend, and announce.
I arrived on the afternoon plane, about four, and started
to check up by telephone. First the American Embassy.
The officials had heard that a broadcast was taking place and
that the Ambassador was expected to speak, but he was in
bed nursing a cold, and while he might dose himself into
condition he certainly could not appear at the President's
Palace without an official invitation from the French
Government. No invitation had arrived!
It was evidently just one of 'those things' that happen in
official circles. The job was to get someone at the Quai
d'Orsay, the French Foreign Office, to 'invite' the Am-
bassador. Nobody was against it, I found; in fact it had
been intimated to the Embassy that if his Excellency would
like to be present it would be all right. The difficulty was,
first, to convince officials that that wasn't enough for an
Ambassador and second, to find a proper person who in
the Minister's absence could do more than 'intimate,' i.e.,
invite. French is the language of diplomacy; I mentally
thanked my school teachers for every word of it. After
many more calls from my bedroom telephone I was able to
try the Embassy again, and sure enough, word had come
from the Quai d'Orsay and national honor was saved. The
Ambassador was at that moment taking spirituous refresh-
ment and literally rising to the occasion.
By this time it had grown pretty late, and the next check-
la France! 311
up with the broadcasting people was near closing time.
Yes, everything was arranged, but what was this about
the music? The President's private secretary had said some-
thing about the Garde. Yes, of course; I reminded him that
the music had been requested weeks ago. 'Well, yes, but
we thought that a recording would do. It's too late now to
mobilize the band of the Garde Republicaine; they're all
over town.' Time was getting short. All I could do was to
repeat for the nth time that American broadcasting chains
do not permit records. I had to leave it to the official to get
the band a band, anything that could play the American
national anthem. After all, I had the President of the
Republic on my side. I rang up his Chef de Cabinet: for all I
knew the President himself might have walked out on me by
now!
Thank God, he hadn't; but my respects were overdue.
I rushed into my dress-suit, which had not even been un-
packed, hopped into a taxi, and arrived, perspiring, at the
Executive Mansion to make my peace with that impressively
weighty dignitary, the Chef de Cabinet, chief secretary and
major-domo of the Elysee. I found him in a rather nervous
state, as the result of sundry wires that were trailing loosely
all over his carpet, and a 'horrid' radio set (through which
President Roosevelt's words were soon to be heard) usurping
space in the sacred precincts where French heads of state
since Napoleon Bonaparte had lived. As a studio, I found,
we had been assigned a tiny waiting-room at the end of a long,
long corridor. It would necessitate about a three minutes'
walk for the President to take his cue. But what's time to
the World's Exalted?
TWO PRESIDENTS AND A PHONOGRAPH
Suddenly the loud-speaker burst forth; the American
program was on. Two o'clock in America: the announcer
revealed that here we were on Bedloes Island, awaiting the
312. Hello ^America!
President's arrival. The Roosevelt party was late, so after
some ' gagging* about the brilliant scene he gave it up and we
went 'back to the studio for a little entertainment by
Harold Levey's band/ American jazz blared out; the Chef de
Cabinet bristled. Peering over the top rim of his gold
pince-nez, he muttered words which happily no one under-
stood.
The Ambassador arrived, and presently I was summoned
into the presidential sanctum. Dapper Albert Lebrun,
President of the Republic, affectionately known to his
enemies as Pou-Pou, sat at an enormous desk. He was in
excellent humor; the Ambassador, Mr. 'Bill' Bullitt, had
evidently been telling an amusing story, possibly about
having risen superior to his cold Although I had visited
him in his Moscow embassy the year before, he didn't
recognize me, which in the circumstances was not surprising.
Lebrun asked me if everything was arranged. 'Yes,
President Roosevelt is due to begin; I'll let you know, so
Monsieur le President can listen to the speech.'
' Et la musique est en place?' ('The band is ready?') asked
Lebrun. ' I don't know, Monsieur le President ',' which was
the honest truth.
l Voila,r cried he, with a sweeping gesture, and turning
to the Ambassador. ' Voyez-vous^ c y est toujours comme fa;
toujours les techniciensj meaning that the technicians never
know. But he didn't seem to mind. We all laughed, and I
blushed with pride, for the President evidently took me for
a compatriot, with authority over the Republican Guards.
In the anteroom, the loud-speaker was still going strong;
the announcer was again taking us back to the studio, for
'some entertainment by Harold Levey's band.' And more
hot jazz, not improved by transmission, boomed forth. This
happened three or four times Franklin D. Roosevelt was
very late indeed. At last we heard the booming baritone of
Mayor La Guardia, then the other speakers, and at last the
American President. Lebrun was duly notified, but evinced
no special interest and continued to laugh at the Ambassa-
dor's yarns. We were listening intently when the weighty
Major-Domo emerged. He seemed quite distraught by now.
la France! 313
Dragging his tired feet over the carpet he tripped and tore
the wires zip! and the Rooseveltian eloquence was cut
off short. There were vociferations and recriminations for
' les technicienSy and for some anxious minutes we thought
we'd miss our cue. But finally the wires were tied, Mr.
Roosevelt wound up with ' Liberty' and 'Democracy/ and
'our friends the citizens of France'; and to the sound of
the 'Marseillaise/ drifting gustily from the loud-speaker,
President Lebrun and the Ambassador picked their way to
the improvised studio.
Outside its door was a pair of ear-phones for me. I intro-
duced the Ambassador, who spoke his piece without a hitch.
The engineer gave the signal to the f musique> presumably
en place somewhere in the inner courts. ' The Star-Spangled
Banner' began; in my ear-phones it sounded magnificent.
That was the Garde Republicaine, sure enough; no other
band could play like that. 'The tune ended a second verse
began. My heavens, we're already twenty minutes late!
Then, incredibly, the tune started a third time. I stormed
at the engineer: where was the band couldn't he stop
it? He calmly pointed to an adjoining room. I rushed in and
there, smiling sheepishly, was an official operating a portable
gramophone. Words failed me, except to mutter that I
would signal him when to stop. We arrived at the last line;
I raised my hand for a vigorous down-beat and without
waiting for it in the middle of the last phrase he stopped
his wretched machine. He didn't know the tune or any
tune, most likely.
I now announced the President, who, blissfully ignorant
of what was happening, began his oration worthy of a
Frenchman and an Academician. Nothing more mattered:
we signed off, rather limp. I had visions of the United States
Marines at present arms, the President of the United States,
cabinet members, diplomats, state and city officials, Daugh-
ters of the American Revolution, and just citizens standing
at attention, while my fat friend in the next room was run-
ning off a record on a portable gramophone ! We had broken
a rule, but we were innocent a small consolation.
The beaming President came out and shook hands.
314 Hello ^America!
After he had gone the French engineer turned to me and
said: 'You're too excited. Why get excited? Who cares?'
I suppose he was right. I stood him and his assistants
a drink. Raising our glasses we murmured: ' Vive la France! 1
XXII. THE VOICE OF THE
OLD COUNTRY
MIDNIGHT SUN BY RADIO
IN THE high summer nights of Europe's northernmost
lands the sun never sets. A reddish-golden orb, sus-
pended above the horizon, it traces a path of mysterious
light upon the waters of the fjords. In these luminous nights
the fisherfolk and peasants of the Arctic Circle light their
bonfires and dance the old dances to the village fiddlers'
tunes. At the summer solstice these nocturnal festivities
reach their climax, and Midsummer Day has become the
national holiday throughout the North.
Civilized nations that they are, Norwegians and Swedes
have the comfort of their remotest citizens at heart; postman
and telephone have done much to soften their isolation. A
few years ago the Norwegian broadcasting administration
opened a broadcasting station at Vadso, almost as far north
as the North Cape, so that even the remotest Laplanders
might feel in touch with the world. All America heard the
Vadso station when it was inaugurated in 1934, for it was
rebroadcast by the two principal American chains; and a year
later the Norwegians organized, at my request, a broadcast
of the festivities at midnight of Midsummer's Day.
From a lonely refuge on Ronvikfjeld Mountain a speaker
described the splendor of nature's spectacle, awe-inspiring
and full of mystic meaning to the simple man. Then, from
the island town of Bodo came the sound of the dancers and
fiddlers and of fireworks and beacons crackling in the wind,
and finally the toll of midnight from the little Bodo church.
Norwegians in the American Middle West heard the songs
316 Hello ^America!
that their parents had learned from their mothers' lips, and
many of them wrote to the old folks back home to tell them
how they had been moved to tears.
Indeed, the voice of the Old Country is something that
many millions in America would strain their ears to hear.
Successive generations of emigrants from European countries
kept the old songs and the old customs alive. Now that
emigration is all but ended, a dimming memory is all that
remains. Radio can and should help to preserve these
elements of national life. In this endeavor it is restricted only
by the public's insistence, or supposed insistence, on an
unlimited amount of the currently fashionable variety of jazz
(using the word in its broadest sense) and the constant de-
mand for timeliness and news.
But programs can have news value by virtue of their
nationality alone, and many an interesting program has been
transmitted across the ocean from a country that happened
to be 'in the news/ It was the tragedy of King Alexander's
assassination that brought us not only the first broadcast
from Yugoslavia but also a program of Serbian and Croatian
folksongs that was full of beauty and interest. And to the
eminence of Nicolai Titulescu, Rumania's great Foreign
Minister now a virtual exile we owed a fascinating
program of Rumanian national music from Bucharest, to
which he added his first and only transatlantic speech.
The World War created no less than eight new independent
states in Europe, and each of them, I found, had its Inde-
pendence Day. That gave Americans a chance to hear not
only the Fourth-of-July oratory of its leading statesman but
more pleasing by far its national tunes. Poles, Czechs,
Slovaks, Letts, and Lithuanians in America thus heard the
Old Country sing, and so did for similar reasons the
Hungarians, the Portuguese, the Swiss, and the Finns.
The *Uoice of the Old Country 317
THE FINNS AND THEIR EPIC
For a thousand years and more the peoples inhabiting the
lake shores and wide river beds of Finland or roaming its
immense wooded plains have recited and sung the runos of a
racial epic built by the imagination of their ancestors but
never written down until a century ago. Today this * Kale-
vala' is the greatest cultural possession of the Finns and the
inspiration of its artists, and musicians. But now, as in cen-
turies past, the primitive poets and rural composers of this
extraordinary race go on creating their own verses and tunes,
and come together to recite and sing them to the 'folk.'
Two years ago a great assembly of these folksingers, as well
as the flower of the country's men of arts and letters, met at
Sortavala, on the shores of Europe's largest lake, Laaokka, to
celebrate the completion of the manuscript of the Kalevala a
hundred years ago, and a part of this great event was broad-
cast to America. Listening at their loud-speakers, thousands
of Finno-Americans, as well as Americans in general, could
hear four thousand Finnish singers intone the opening verses
of the Kalevala, to a runo handed down by uncounted genera-
tions:
' Come and let us sing together
Since at length we meet together
From two widely sundered regions.
Let us clasp our hands together
Let us interlock our fingers
While our dear ones hearken to us.
* While the young are standing round us
Let them learn the words of magic
And recall our songs and legends.'
And they heard, too, a tune played on the kantele, the an-
cient, many-stringed bardic harp, composed and played by
the descendant of an old family of bards, and many other
things beautiful in themselves and of deep significance to
Finns.
3 1 8 Hello ^America!
HOLY WEEK IN SEVILLE
It was a fascinating task to learn about national festivals
and religious customs peculiar to certain countries that could
be transmitted to America in terms of sound. The proces-
sions of Saint Stephen's Week in Budapest, gorgeous as they
are, were difficult to focus into a microphone; but nothing
could surpass the splendor of the Holy Week processions in
Seville.
For sheer barbaric fervor these open-air rites excel even
those of the camp-meetings of the American negro, for they
have in them elements of racial tradition going back through
the centuries of Islamic conversion to an idolatry even more
remote. It would be impossible to describe either the wild
beauty of the picture or the mass emotion that grips the
people of Seville in their Semana santa, and that alone was
good enough reason for projecting its sounds by radio. There
are some seventy pasos in Seville miraculously carved
figures and groups each belonging to a church and cared for
by a Holy 'Brotherhood whose competitive ardor is both
religious and militantly artisan. For two years after the
revolution of 1932 the Holy Week processions were for-
bidden; when they were once again allowed, they were also
broadcast, for the first time in their history.
We placed our microphones on the balcony of the Town
Hall on Good Friday evening, when the most famous images,
the * Virgin of the Macarena,' the * Virgin of Hope/ and the
'Jesus of Great Power' make their slow, tortuous way
through a billowing sea of humanity. What passed before the
announcer's eyes was utterly fantastic: the weirdly hooded
'brothers/ completely covered by black and white mantles,
with only slits for their eyes; the thousands of lighted candles;
the crowd, seized with religious frenzy but hushed into
silence when inspired singers suddenly intoned their rhap-
sodic, quasi-Oriental saetas century-old wails that have
defied all attempts at musical notation. No weirder, more
incongruous running commentary was ever filtered through
a microphone.
The *Uoice of the Old Country 319
The commentator, a cultured young Spaniard, educated in
England and married to an American girl, was, three years
later, broadcasting insurgent bulletins from somewhere in
Spain, having only narrowly escaped death in the early
months of the Civil War.
It was in 1932 when the same Spanish friend took me from
Barcelona to the mountain monastery of Montserrat, on
Catalonia's sacred mountain, whose earliest traditions are
lost in the mists of time. Up and up through vineyards and
olive groves we went, then through forests of oak and pine
until only shrubbery remains in the folds of those bizarre,
tooth-like rocks, high up over the plain, like a mighty group
of sentinels facing the Pyrenees to the north. According to a
local legend the Devil in his fury tore these mountains out of
the ground and turned them upside down; so what are now
the mountain's peaks were originally its roots. Here the
Benedictines have maintained a refuge for many centuries,
and one of their pilgrims was the Ignatius of Loyola who
afterward founded the Jesuit Order. Within its cloistered
walls the monks still sing the age-old chants; but they had
never been heard except by those who made their way to
Montserrat.
We entered the sombrous church and by the mysterious
light of hundreds of tiny candles saw the legendary Black
Virgin, that weirdly beautiful image carved in ebony by un-
known hands, which was discovered many centuries ago in
a cave not far from the summit of the mountain and has been
revered by the faithful ever since. She wore a golden crown
and was clad in one of the richly ornate robes which sovereigns
and popes and the Great of the Earth have bestowed on her
through the ages. A young couple were praying silently be-
fore her, for no Catalan marriage, according to local belief,
can be happy without the Morenetas blessing.
We ascended the winding stairs to the quarters of the Father
Abbot, benign Don Antonio, who interrupted his meditations
to receive us, in cassock and scarf, incongruously nursing a
cold. In awed whispers we arranged for a traditional service
to be transmitted to America the following Christmas tide; for
32.0 Hello ^America!
the singing of the famous choir of monks and boys is especially
beautiful then. The gentle abbot had never heard a radio,
but he was a man of the world though living above it. He not
only gave the permission; he even altered the hour of the
service to suit American time. The idea must have fascinated
him, as it did me.
Telephone lines had only recently been laid to the monas-
tery (along with the rack-and-pinion railway which now
alas! brought pilgrims to his hostelry without the effort
worthy of a holy quest), and on this single line we based our
hopes. With the enthusiastic Catalan radio people helping
us, that line was made to carry music such as few telephone
lines had ever carried before thirty-odd miles to Barce-
lona, thence by telephone cable to Madrid, and by short-
wave to America. The ' Salve Regina ' sung by the monks and
the boys of the Escalonia, one of the most ancient singing
schools in the world, was unique and unforgettable. No
Christmas broadcasts have ever surpassed, in mysterious
beauty, this service from Spain.
THE BELLS OF BETHLEHEM
Christmas is a religious observance in southern and
Catholic countries; it is a family festival in the north. From
France, therefore, America heard the Messe de Noel; from
Italy the quaint children's nativity at the famous church of
Ara Coeli in Rome. From Germany, as from England, we
staged typical Christmas parties, in which the holly and the
waits, the Christmas tree, and Father Christmas were essen-
tial ingredients. Christmas carols from various countries are
now a regular adjunct to American programs at Christmas-
tide. At one Christmas I joined ten European countries in a
single broadcast, each contributing a carol and a Christmas
wish in the native tongue, spoken by a child. 1
1 Christmas greetings were first exchanged by the N.B.C. with England, Ger-
many and Holland, in 1929.
The *Uoice of the Old Country 3x1
One of the genuine early successes of transatlantic broad-
casting was the preview of Christmas toys from the world's
most famous toy-town, Nuremberg, with its traditional toy
market, its gold- tinsel Christmas angels, and its world-famous
gingerbread. Most German toys make a noise, and we made
them all perform before the microphone, against the back-
ground of the ancient town with its medieval ramparts and
the tolling of its bells. Then some forty children intoned
their Christmas songs as only German children can, and were
one and all rewarded under a giant Christmas tree. We had
to repeat this performance the following two years, and each
time the benign democratic mayor of the city added his
greetings in English with a quaint German accent.
Then, after a hiatus, we resumed this broadcast, by request.
This time the jovial mayor had been replaced by a portly
Nazi in brown shirt and gaudy insignia, and other party
dignitaries provided atmosphere. The toys, which included
miniature machine guns, howitzers, tanks, and airplanes
dropping bombs, were duly 'demonstrated' before the micro-
phone, to the delight of the bystanders, and so far as I know
there were no complaints except from a lady in America who
objected to our calling German children anything so dis-
respectful as 'kids/ . . .
But the children, all the same, were sweet kids, just as
before; and they sang like little angels. Their teacher, who
had brought sixty of them, instead of forty, explained that
there were too many tears at the suggestion of any of them
being left behind so we had to buy an extra supply of
Lebkuchen next day.
A new prospect of interesting broadcasts came with the
opening of the radio-telephone link between London and
Cairo, with good land-line connection to Palestine. Through
the united initiative of the N.B.C. and the B.B.C., arrange-
ments were made to transmit the bells of the Church of the
Nativity in Bethlehem to England and thence to America, at
Christmas, 1934. They sounded, of course, very much like
other bells, since nothing was allowed to be added, to set the
scene and identify the historic locality. But that did not
Hello ^America!
detract from the sensation, and the idea of wrapping up this
precious tidbit in elaborate Christmas music and peals of bells
from London and New York was an excellent solution of the
program problem.
What really was wanted, of course, was a complete Christ-
mas program or service from Christianity's traditional birth-
place. But the prospect opened by science could not be
realized because, alas! the Christians who are in charge of
this shrine of shrines do not practise the Golden Rule. The
church, like that of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, is
parcelled out among various Christian sects Armenian,
Latin, and Greek who have been at loggerheads for cen-
turies. The sacred grotto, with the manger, the silver star
and the awe-inspiring inscription, * Hie de Virgine Maria
Jesus Christus Natus EstJ is guarded by armed soldiers day
and night, and the soldiers are Mohammedans; for it is the
Christians who have tried, from time to time, to take posses-
sion by violence, and Christianity's treasure must therefore
be entrusted to non-Christian guards . . .
In Jerusalem the matter is further complicated. Here, be-
sides the Latin, Greek, and Armenian sections of the church
built on the hallowed ground of Golgotha, part ownership is
claimed by Protestants, Copts, and various other sects.
Broadcasts from the sacred interiors, both at Bethlehem
and Jerusalem have been planned again and again; both the
British Postmaster-General (in charge of all communications)
and later the broadcasting authorities eager young men
sent out from London by the B.B.C. did everything they
could to help. But when a transmission was proposed from a
part owned by one sect, the owners of the others would pro-
test. If cable leads were to pass unavoidably through
one section in order to connect up to a microphone in the
next, it was in danger of being cut. So to this day no broad-
cast from any part of the church has yet been made.
The bells of Bethlehem have, however, rung for the two
major American networks every Christmas since 1935. On
the following Christmas Eve we managed to get a little fur-
ther. The choristers of the Anglican church were actually
allowed to sing their carols in the courtyard of the church,
The *Uoice of the Old Country 313
under the starry Bethlehem sky. And in Jerusalem we were
able to transmit sermons and descriptive talks and bells
from the safe vantage-ground of the English church. If the
British succeed in partitioning Palestine and the holy
places will be inside the British part, one may even be able to
transmit an actual street scene, a trick that has been im-
possible until now for the simple reason that the local engi-
neers have been too busy mending lines cut by rioting Arabs
or Jews. Our unsophisticated executives in New York at one
time ordered a program from the famous Wailing Wall. A
broadcaster attempting that had better take poison, and die
a peaceful death.
The Arabs, by the way, complained that Palestine is too
much publicized from the Jewish angle already, and were not
at all friendly to the various Jewish programs that have been
short-waved to America. And except for the riots, we should
have transmitted Arab and Bedouin programs long ago.
Indeed, the transmission of scenes from the Islamic world
was a fascinating idea but difficult to carry out. The Egyp-
tian broadcasting authorities came to the rescue in 1935, and
with their help we constructed a program consisting of a
street scene in Cairo, full of color and movement, a reading
from the Koran by a famous sheik, and a concert of music on
Arab instruments, all of which were clearly described. The
Koran reading, a strange and to Western ears vaguely
melodious performance, had a weird fascination, and students
of such things might detect, if not a similarity, at least traces
of a common ancestry between this Moslem ritual and the
Christian saetas of Seville.
FOLKSONGS IN MANY LANDS
The voice of the Old Country lives most potently in its
songs. Folksong revivals in many countries are a recognition
of this, and both America and England have a strong ear for
the music of the folk, to judge from their concert programs
324 Hello ^America!
and the catalogues of the publishers. But nothing is more
easily distorted, nothing more often debased to a mere
pseudo-art, than these artless expressions of a people's soul.
Strictly speaking, they are neither translatable nor trans-
portable: you must go to the country of origin if you want to
hear the genuine thing.
That is what I thought when, early in 1937, I undertook
the most interesting broadcasting pilgrimage of my career.
This was a folksong journey on behalf of the American
School of the Air, resulting in the first series of transatlantic
radio programs ever designed specifically for schools. But
the interest lay not only in the tapping of these inexhaustible
treasures but also in the human contacts to be made and the
unexpected difficulties to be overcome. And most interesting
of all was the discovery that some commonly held notions
about these countries did not square with the facts: for
instance, that all Italians are musical and most Englishmen
are not; that Frenchmen are temperamental and Germans
just efficient and disciplined; that Northerners are 'cold'
and Southerners 'warm'; that the Orient begins east of
Vienna, where European civilization is supposed to stop;
and so on through the vocabulary of tourist lore.
Nearly all these notions are wrong. The English children
proved to be very musical indeed, and thoroughly alive to
the beauty of their songs. If Italian children are equally so
we were not allowed to know it, for they are supposed to have
'forgotten' the old songs, being too busy with more im-
portant things (such as drilling with miniature rifles, march-
ing, and singing Ballila songs). . . . The French kiddies
didn't suffer from temperament so much as from discipline,
administered by nervous schoolmarms, too anxious to make
them behave; while the German Madchen who sang for us so
beautifully had the time of their life teasing the brown-
shirted Nazi who conducted them.
The question of emotional temperature proved to be more
personal than geographical; and the most ardent singers we
found up north in Scotland where the songs are ' too
passionate' to be entrusted to the bairns. So we had a man
and a woman, with a wee choir to save expense. But the
The *Uoice of the Old Country 32.5
conductor, a gaunt Scots nationalist, treated me to haggis
and whiskey, to produce the proper frame of mind.
In short, the only people who seemed to regard their folk-
songs naturally, and who understood just what was wanted,
were the English, the Irish, the Poles, and the Czechs. And
even the English were a little too artistic about the job.
The story of that journey through twelve countries can
only be told with music, which I hope to do some day. But I
cannot forego paying a tribute to willing helpers of various
nationalities, especially that intelligent Mrs. Boylan, of
Dublin, who has trained her little band of school-children to
sing the traditional Irish songs with something of the old
fantasy and without ironing out the quirks; also to Karel
Haba, that able Czech musician who is getting to the very
heart of the folk, setting its songs in their simple purity; and
to the passionate Czech and Polish schoolmasters who
trained their boys and girls to sing them with such infectious
zest.
The Germans seemed more interested in the new Nazi
marching songs than in the beautiful folksongs of their child-
hood days, but they finally gave us what we wanted, with one
contemporary creation added, as a sop to fashion. In Italy,
alas! we had to be content with a full-sized chorus and or-
chestra, and professional soloists. (Everything had to be
artistically elaborated, and even a Venetian gondolier's song
could not be simply accompanied by a guitar, because the
guitar is no longer considered a 'national* instrument.) And
in Sweden they simply could not scrape up even a few chil-
dren to sing their profoundly beautiful songs. But the per-
formance, with an adult ensemble of sixteen, was the most
efficient of all.
The grandest showing was made by the Hungarians, who
promptly recruited a hundred boys from one high-school and
a hundred girls from another and made them sing intricate
a cappella settings by Bartok and Kodaly, which they did as
easily as rolling off a log. An astounding performance,
though much too highbrow for the purpose.
All in all, I don't think that the voice of the Old Country
had ever before been so effectively presented to American
32.6 Hello ^America!
listeners as in this series of broadcasts, despite the sophisti-
cated bias of some. But it was a mere beginning, a path to be
trodden by people who are genuinely interested in education
by radio. It was a pity to have to omit Wales, with its great
Bardic heritage, and Norway and Belgium and Yugoslavia
and war-torn Spain. (Bulgaria and Greece are still outside
the broadcasting pale.) And above all Russia, richest in
folksong of all the countries of the world. 1
I have said very little in this book about the broadcasting
of what is professionally called 'art music. 1 This, too, has its
place in transatlantic radio exchanges, but I don't attach as
much importance to it as do some. I incline to the opinion of
those who believe that the international rebroadcasting of
symphonic music, for instance, is very much like carrying
coals to Newcastle. Art music is supernational the heri-
tage of the whole world and with few exceptions is exe-
cuted as ably abroad as in the country of its origin, depend-
ing upon the genius of its interpreters. This does not apply,
of course, to the unique cultivation of certain musical species,
such as the Tudor madrigal in England, Mozart operas in
Germany and Austria, or the singing of polyphonic music of
peculiar style by certain European choirs.
For that reason the great traditional festivals have a
broadcasting value of their own. The Bayreuth and Salz-
burg festivals, first broadcast by N.B.C. and Columbia
respectively; the Welsh national Eisteddfod, the Three
Choirs Festival of England, and the great German Sangerfest
are outstanding examples. Nor is it easy to duplicate the
singing of Bach's music by the choristers of his 'own* church
at Leipzig, which was rebroadcast at the Bach tercentenary
and other occasions; nor the singing of Palestrina and other
sixteenth-century church music by the Vatican choirs in
Rome, which I was privileged to transmit for the first time
early in 1932.
1 Russian folk-music has, however, been transmitted to America on various
occasions during the last three or four years, and in January, 1936, we managed to
rebroadcast part of a great folksong festival a kind of musical Olympiad from
Moscow. The difficulty about Russian transmissions to America is that the short-
wave channel passes near the magnetic pole, and conditions are favorable only at
certain times of the day.
The *Uoice of the Old Country 32.7
Much remains to be accomplished, however, in the techni-
cal field of short-wave transmission before such broadcasts
can be regarded as artistically reliable. And above all Ameri-
can stations must be prepared to take complete works and
not just snippets, as now.
XXIII. FISHERMAN'S LUCK
MIKE-SHY VETERAN
TRANSATLANTIC broadcasting was a great adven-
ture, especially in the earliest years when every suc-
cessful transmission seemed like the miracle that it is. Now-
adays people take too much for granted. Had they, sitting
lazily at their loud-speakers and listening to us on the other
side of the earth, known what was involved, they would
have thought the miracle even more miraculous. To us,
contending with a strange, untried instrument, in the hands
of strange and temperamental people, often speaking lan-
guages one did not understand, it was a triumph when a
broadcast came off a heartbreak when it didn't. 'What
an exciting life you have!' people would say when they
heard about this new job. 'What interesting people you
must meet!' Yes. But the fascination is often too exciting
for the nerves; and an interesting man is never less inter-
esting than just before he faces the mike. If he is new to
the game, as often as not he is just plain scared.
That is one reason why some of the most carefully pre-
pared broadcasts aren't better than they are. In the studio,
everything is prepared, rehearsed, tried and tried again; out
in the field nearly everything is impromptu. Sometimes
you're lucky, sometimes not. And luck appears in strange
guises, too; sometimes your luck will land you in the soup.
And sometimes your worst licking will be a blessing in dis-
guise. Here, then, are a few examples of both these dispen-
sations of fate.
Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, the greatest Hamlet of
Fisherman's Luck 32.9
our day, matinee idol of two generations and two continents,
the possessor of the finest speaking voice and noblest stage
presence within living memory, had retired from the stage
when radio came into its own. At seventy-eight, the great
old actor was living quietly in his Bedford Square home, pot-
tering about the house, dreaming of his past glories. I had
an idea that Americans, even if they were not to see him
again, might like to hear once more the sound of that mag-
nificent voice, or what was left of it.
I went to call on him and found that the voice was feeble,
but still vibrant. He spoke with feeling of America, the
country that had been the scene of his mightiest triumphs,
where he had made a fortune, where he was revered as the
greatest tragic actor since Irving; and where he had found
his idol too Gertrude Elliott, who became his wife and
the mother of his talented children. His memory dwelt on
these things, though otherwise it had a tendency to ramble.
He was getting very old.
But he agreed to speak: he would do a short talk on
Shakespeare on the poet's birthday, and read Hamlet's
advice to the players. It was an experiment, not without its
hazards, and to support the program I engaged the famous
English Singers, who would sing Shakespearean madrigals.
There was no chance for a rehearsal, and I trusted to the
fortunes of the moment. Anyhow, as long as I was there it
was all right: I was always prepared to fill in.
The Sunday afternoon chosen for the program was very
wet. As luck would have it, my watch was slow. When I
realized it, it was twenty minutes to air time. I jumped into
my small car and fairly flew down Regent Street toward the
B.B.C. Suddenly something came out of a side street, I
jammed on the brakes, skidded into an iron sand box, and
smashed the front of the car. The windshield was shattered
into a thousand bits, but by a lucky chance I escaped with-
out a scratch. The street was empty except for a cruising
taxi. There was nothing to do but hail it, and with the
cabby's help I pushed the wreck to the side, left it, and taxied
to the studio. I walked in a couple of minutes before the
signal to start. There was only time to place the singers and
330 Hello ^America!
shake hands with my 'star/ I didn't see that he was quiv-
ering with mike fright. The old stager, who had thrilled
millions in thousands of performances, was in terror of that
tiny object dangling in front of him.
The introduction over, the old routine came into action;
he pulled himself up straight; he read his speech, though
haltingly here and there. Everybody was on edge, expecting
something awful to happen. But he reached the last word
in safety, then with a deep sigh he turned to me and asked,
pointing to his huge Shakespeare folio, 'Is there still time
for this ? ' not realizing that all America could hear his
whisper.
I motioned 'yes'; he braced up again, and then the old
Hamlet voice came forth, apparently strong as ever, with
its old bronze glamour, and the lines rolled forth in the grand
manner of the prewar tragedian. It was fascinating and
touching to see the old man. Once finished, he seemed
to shrink in size; then, with utter exhaustion in his voice,
said 'Thank God, that's over!' and all America heard that,
too. Then the English singers burst into their fa-la-las and
we began to cheer up.
When it was all over and Forbes-Robertson had been
tucked into his car, I thought of my own flivver, up in Regent
Street, and expected to be in for a fine for obstructing one
of London's busiest streets. I taxied up to it; a policeman
had just passed along and when he saw me he turned his
back. It was a complete wreck, not worthy of his notice.
Well, that broadcast probably cost me a year of my life:
first, the worry about the old man; the nervous strain of
running an improvised program, after arriving in the nick of
time; then the wrecked car and the near-catastrophe! But
anyway, I had put over what I thought a unique show
something that could never happen again : the greatest actor
of our time was nearing eighty; he had never broadcast
before and never would again. Surely I would get some
swell fan mail after that
A week or so later it came: three or four letters from elderly
ladies, complaining about Forbes-Robertson's ' blasphemous '
remarks.
Well!
Fisherman's Luck 331
NO PAPIER, NO BROADCAST
At the beginning of 1934 Paris was in an ugly mood. The
Stavisky scandals stank in the nostrils of good citizens; the
economic crisis was at its peak; Fascism, as preached by
Colonel de la Rocque and his ' Croix de Feu/ was arrogantly
raising its head. On February 6, seventeen people were
killed and thousands injured in the riots on the Place de la
Concorde. Fascists, communists, socialists, war veterans,
and just angry Frenchmen had tried to force the bridge
leading to the Chamber of Deputies, and except for the
drastic shooting by the police (after provocateurs in the
crowd had fired the first shots) the Chamber might have been
fired, with the Deputies inside. This was France's 'little
revolution/ following upon a period of corruption and a
series of ineffectual governments which preceded the 'na-
tional' government of Doumergue. It was the crisis which
decided, for the time being, whether France would go Fas-
cist or find a way to law and order and yet preserve its her-
itage of liberty.
On Wednesday (the seventh) the morning papers in Lon-
don were full of the bloodshed across the Channel; that night
it broke out afresh and I was on my way to Paris, to see if I
couldn't broadcast an eye-witness account from there. I
decided to get Percy Philip, correspondent of the New York
Times, who had been in the thick of the fighting, to tell his
story that night, and myself give a follow-up next day. The
great advantage was that Philip had already got permission
from the Quai d'Orsay for a similar talk he was making for
Great Britain; he was a highly respected and trusted man.
Next thing was to get the telephone lines set up via Eng-
land, for the sake of safety, for the French short wave was
still risky then. London and New York agreed; the chief of
Radio-Coloniale (our usual studio) agreed, provided the
order came through in time.
Between six and seven the London telephone service
called me at my Paris hotel; said they had telegraphed the
332. Hello ^America!
order to the Paris telephone service but had had no answer.
They tried to reach French officials by telephone, but every-
body at the Paris end had gone home; could I help them to
deliver the order by giving them a 'live' address? I sug-
gested the chief of Radio-Coloniale, with whom I had dealt.
An hour later, at the studio, I checked up and heard that
the message had come through; it was now merely a question
of getting the necessary papier (document, permit, or what-
ever) from the telephone official which would be at-
tended to.
At ten o'clock Philip and I, script in hand, arrived. The
director was gone; his office door locked. Two jovial engi-
neers were on duty. They informed us that there were no
lines. Why not? They had heard nothing; they had no
papier. We remonstrated, talked, argued; millions of lis-
teners were waiting in America, the programs of a hundred
stations would be upset. Nothing moved them; they tried
telephoning to somebody but it didn't sound convincing.
The hour came and passed no lines. The engineers work-
ing the repeaters were gone for the night, said the engineers.
Here we were, with the most graphic and exciting story of
the biggest thing then happening in the world, and New
York, after waiting in vain, switching on a cinema organ
instead! And all because two French minor officials refused
to work without a written order a scrap of paper from
somebody higher up. The sworn word of two Americans
representing a world-renowned newspaper and a universally
known radio chain was not enough. We tore our hair
and left.
Next morning I stormed the office of the broadcasting
service, and told my story to the man in charge of foreign
liaison. ' So it was you who wanted lines last night ? ' he said.
'If I had only known that! The studio telephoned me, but
all they said was that some newspaper man (un journaliste
quelconque) wanted to talk to America. He didn't give the
name, so I couldn't authorize a papier. "No papier, no
broadcast"; you know those are the rules!'
Next day, after seeing the great demonstration at the
Place de la Republique, at which Leon Blum was cheered
Fisherman's Luck 333
as the leader of the Front Commun (which later became the
'Popular Front')> watching the French police clean up the
workingmen's quarters with armored cars and truncheon
charges, and feeling the heavy boot of an enraged Paris
agent in my rear, I thought I had enough local color: so I
flew back to London and told America my story from there.
THE CASE OF BARON ALOISI
When Mussolini, in the summer of 1935, was getting the
Italian steam roller ready to invade Abyssinia, the name of
Mr. F. W. Rickett began to figure dubiously in the British
and American press. The presence in Ethiopia of this oil
prospector started the dogs of scandal barking at John
Bull's heels, thanks to the Italian press campaign. Over-
night this hitherto obscure Mr. Rickett became the symbol
of British mercenary designs. He had secured a concession
from Hailie Selassie, the value of which in the circumstances
seemed very doubtful indeed; but presently it became known
that he was acting for American concerns, and the name of
Standard Oil was being bandied about on the front pages.
There were rumors and denials, accusations and counter-
accusations; the American Government took a hand and
extracted a disclaimer from the suspected tycoons. The
British were worried.
Meantime Mr. Rickett got home to London, having given
an interview on the way, and my smart secretary in my
absence had promptly arranged for a transatlantic talk from
the famous mystery man himself. I thought there might be
trouble, but the order for facilities was duly booked by the
British Post Office, and New York was keen. I bearded the
lion in his den a windowless office at the end of a long
corridor in London's financial district. Rickett was a typi-
cal Englishman of the go-getter type, ruddy-faced, rather
elegant, and close-mouthed about his affairs. He had made
piles of money in the Mosul oil fields and the outposts of
empire and had now achieved the dignity of an M.F.H.
334 Hello ^America!
(Master of the Foxhounds), which in England is almost a
title of nobility. To the mineral wealth of Ethiopia, he
assured me, Mosul was a mere puddle.
An obsequious ex-Fleet Street journalist, acting as his
publicity man, produced the script of the proposed talk. It
was quite innocent; had eloquent words in it about peace,
economic co-operation, and so on. The pioneers of Big
Business were the real champions of civilization shades
of Cecil Rhodes and all that.
Next day it got noised about that Rickett was going to
speak. My telephone began to be busy; not mere secre-
taries or subalterns, but some pretty weighty personages
themselves got on the wire to convince me that a talk by
Rickett would be a nasty bomb. Britain, it is true, had
nothing to do with it, except to supply some telephone
facilities on the usual terms, but would Italy understand
that? Italy was a friendly country; did we want to jeop-
ardize Anglo-Italian relations? We certainly did not, and
the talk was cancelled at very short notice. A perfectly good
scoop gone west, and New York getting excited because the
newspapers were yapping for an explanation. Where was
our vaunted free speech ?
I didn't care a whoop about Mr. Rickett, but it was a
bitter pill.
Well, despite Britain's generous gesture the friendly rela-
tions didn't last very long. The famous Peace Ballot, organ-
ized by the League of Nations Union, showed that Britain
was overwhelmingly not only for peace (11,000,000 votes)
but also for sanctions against the aggressor; the National
Government pushed sanctions at Geneva; Sir Samuel Hoare
made ringing speeches pillorying Italy; on October 9 fifty-odd
nations condemned her, and Baron Pompeo Aloisi left
Geneva in a huff.
Two nights before his departure, Edgar Ansell Mowrer,
Chicago Daily News correspondent, made a talk from the
Geneva studios for Columbia listeners, stating the case for
sanctions and describing the League's historic action, and
for a minute or two he interviewed Tacle Hawariat, the
dusky Abyssinian envoy whose day of triumph this was.
Fisherman's Luck 335
His English was limited, but he did manage to say what he
did in perfectly intelligible words. We were delighted; here
was the Man of the Hour, and radio made him real.
Next night it was Italy's turn. The delegation was pack-
ing up to go; the die was cast. Mowrer was speaking again;
it was obvious that he must let Aloisi have his say. We
worked hard, and by midday the Baron had decided to talk.
A microphone interview was prepared.
Both Hawariat and Aloisi were controversial matter, of
course. According to the rules attaching to the League's
use of the Swiss short-wave station we had to give twenty-
four hours' notice and submit the manuscript if required.
Since that was impossible in this case, we ordered telephone
facilities via London and a radio telephone channel from
Rugby to New York. I notified the British Post Office that
the Baron would speak.
About 6 P.M. five hours before the broadcast I was
told that no facilities would be available for Aloisi or any
other Italian. No argument would convince the officials in
charge that this fiat would have a bad effect. In Rickett's
case we had agreed to cancel a broadcast because the Italians
were a friendly nation; now we were asked to cancel one
because they weren't. It was bewildering.
For the next five hours I was in a stew. I tried to find offi-
cials of the League to see whether we could use the Geneva
transmitter after all; we even tried to set up a channel via
Berlin. Everybody had gone underground. Sitting in Lon-
don, I kept the telephone hot all evening; but not even
my friend Mowrer could be located. To calm his nerves
he'd gone to a cinema! At five minutes to eleven I reached
him as he walked into the Geneva studio, with the Baron
on his arm. I told my tragic tale. The talk was off. The
Baron, speech in hand, had to be told. He acted like a gen-
tleman, pocketed his script and stalked out. Next morning
he was en route to Rome.
I never felt so 'licked'; and wired an apology to New
York. Back came the answer:
CONGRATULATIONS GETTING HAWARIAT STOP
NOT GETTING ALOISI EVEN GREATER SCOOP
336 Hello America!
The American front pages carried streamer headlines
reading 'First Sanctions on Italy Imposed. Aloisi Forbidden
to Talk,' in many variations.
Somebody had blundered, no doubt. And it was costly.
For three days later the suave Baron (who had distinguished
himself in the war by organizing an amazing burglary of
Austrian secret documents from a consulate in Switzerland),
walked into the Rome studios, whence the same interview,
with added spice, was short-waved to America on a Sunday
afternoon. In the interim the publicity had been tremen-
dous and all America was on tiptoe. He gave the Italian
case, in polished, noble-sounding phrases. It was almost
convincing.
Nothing like this is likely ever to happen again. Firstly,
because British government officials human though they
are rarely make the same mistake twice. And secondly,
the United States-European telephone monopoly, held
by Great Britain and the American Telephone and Tele-
graph Company for years, has been split in two at the
European end. The second terminus is Paris. It's an ill
wind .
MODERN MUSIC, VESUVIUS, AND SHORT WAVE
There is just one more episode which illustrates the lin-
gering imperfection of our instrument or the frailty of
the human ear. The International Society for Contempo-
rary Music, which I had helped to found in Salzburg fourteen
years before, was giving its annual festival in Barcelona in
1936. The civil war hadn't yet broken out, and everything
was as peaceful as could be. Telephone lines were intact and
the short-wave station at Madrid was working very well.
There was no reason why the route which had carried the
singing of ancient music by the monks of Montserrat should
not also carry the music of our day.
We arranged for the transmission of one orchestral work
Fisherman's Luck 337
the only one by an American in this musical Olympiad. It
was Carl Ruggles's symphonic piece, 'Sun Treader.' Carl
Ruggles is a middle-aged musical Gandhi whose word is
law to a faithful band of disciples and whose every note is
to the initiates like a rare pearl; also, it takes about
as long for these musical pearls as for real pearls to mature.
And they come in strange clusters, too, like seed pearls,
producing the weirdest harmonies or cacophonies ever
imagined.
The first piece by Ruggles I ever heard was called 'An-
gels* and was scored for six trumpets. When it was played,
at one of the earliest Contemporary Music Festivals, in
Venice, no six trumpeters could be got together until some-
body thought of the Municipal Band, playing the 'Aida' over-
ture on the Piazza of St. Mark's. So they were recruited
and drilled to play Ruggles: it is said that their ears haven't
been right since.
Well, this new piece of Ruggles' was, if anything, even
more advanced. When the time came for the broadcast
a difficult one to arrange, because no Barcelona concert had
ever been known to start on time I listened at my receiver
in London. The radio channel from Madrid to New York
was perfect, and the engineers who were chatting over it by
way of test said 'O.K.' Then came the telephone line from
Barcelona; it wasn't quite so clear, but that too was finally
passed. Then started the announcement of the program
from Barcelona; I understood every word. And then the
music.
Suddenly the circuit was interrupted; New York was in-
quiring of Madrid what was wrong, and Madrid was scold-
ing Barcelona. They tried again; they tried a third time.
Each time the New York engineers made some remark
which could not be heard on my little receiver, but could be
guessed from the worried answers of the Spanish engineers.
Finally New York, after listening to some more of the strange
harmonies, decided to cancel and cut off. I a powerless
bystander had no means of warning them. But I felt
sure I knew what was wrong: I had heard 'Angels' twelve
years ago, when there was no short wave. And Ruggles by
338 Hello ^America!
radio sounded just the same. The radio engineers didn't
know ultramodern music; they were like the nearly deaf
old lady at a modernist concert, who after shaking her ear
trumpet again and again, shook her head and walked out.
They weren't inured to 'atonality,' and mistook the music
for interference, or static, or something worse.
I thought this very bad luck, especially as I remembered
that not long ago the same engineers had accepted the
explosions of erupting Vesuvius as legitimate program ma-
terial from my friend, Max Jordan, of the N.B.C., though
he certainly deserved his luck, after all the effort and
preparation of months.
Vesuvius hadn't made a respectable noise for years. The
minor explosions in its crater are just so many gassy puffs.
The Neapolitan engineers laughed when I asked them about
that broadcast from the fiery mountain one of Max's
long-nursed pet ideas when it was first projected. 'Ha!'
they said; 'it's no good. We've been up there several times
and each time it's the same: pfff, pfff that's all. And the
deeper you go down the softer it gets, because the real
crater is behind the corona, and nobody ever gets to that.'
Moreover, the Italians had no equipment that could be
carted up the steep, lava-strewn slope.
Well, Max got the New York engineers to send over a
specially light American portable transmitter and the requi-
site gear. It was hoisted up and put into place. A half-hour
before the broadcast all was as quiet as ever: only 'pfff!'
Then, just as they get started, Vesuvius opens up, for the
first time in years, to please the American listener, and goes
' boommmm.' And again ' boom-boom ' and so on through
the repertoire. It was a great success, so much so that one
of the microphones got swallowed up by the fury of Vesu-
vius's bad temper which made the show more realistic
to the folks at home.
'But how,' said a skeptical Italian to me some time after,
'did they know it was Vesuvius and not just blasting
on the roads? Are your American listeners so trusting?'
(Well, they are; some people might even call them gullible.)
Now I have a grudge against those above-mentioned New
Fisherman's Luck 339
York engineers. They passed 'boom-boom* as authentic,
but they didn't believe the modern American composer . . .
Yes, people do take too much for granted. They drink
in a dictator's words or a roar produced in the African jungle
as though these were being run off in an effects room around
the corner. And when they've heard them, they say a-hum
and turn over to the next selection of 'swing/ Also, if the
ether waves crackle, or your broadcaster (who may have
braved death to tell his tale) has a cold, they sniff, and turn
the dial again. Ten or twenty years later they'll be acting
the same way when a picture of Vesuvius in action or a
gray-haired Mussolini is flashed on the television screen.
Maybe, after all, it's only the player who really enjoys the
game.
PART FOUR
Systems and Policies
XXIV. RADIO OVER EUROPE
PRE-WAR BEGINNINGS
IN THE year 1913 two young engineers working in the
electrical laboratories of the Royal Palace of Laeken,
near Brussels, were experimenting with the new wonders of
the wireless telephone. The world's first wireless telephone
circuit had recently been established in Germany, and ama-
teurs everywhere were constructing strange-looking con-
traptions for the capturing of radio waves. The two young
engineers, pupils of the great French pioneer, Ferrie, were
transmitting daily, first Morse, then actual sound, using a
grotesquely primitive device a jet of water impinging on
a rotating copper electrode to produce the requisite electrical
oscillations. To vary the monotony and save their
voices they conceived the idea of transmitting phono-
graph records in their tests. Presently letters came in from
grateful amateurs, asking for more; and, for a lark, Messrs.
Raymond Braillard and Robert Goldschmidt began trans-
mitting a series of 'concerts' every Saturday afternoon.
Soon the Royal Family became interested, and one day
a real concert, with live artists, was given under the patron-
age of Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians. It was 'broadcast*
to the amateurs in the presence of a select audience; and the
amateurs with their home-made receivers their musical
'Aladdin's lamps' thought they were in the Arabian
Nights indeed. That was the first true studio broadcast on
record; and might have been the beginning of great things
had not the sound of cannon, coming from the east, cut
the young pioneers short. It was August, 1914. The two
344 Hello ^America!
young men, like everyone else, went off to war, and radio,
having groped its way to the very threshold of its great joy-
giving task, went to work in Europe's charnel house.
Twenty years later Raymond Braillard, one of the two
pioneer broadcasters, reproduced that historic first concert
on its anniversary day for the amusement of radio fans; and
all Belgium listened. Braillard, by then, was the chief en-
gineer of the International Broadcasting Union, Europe's
' traffic policeman of the air/ patrolling the ether lanes of the
world from a point not far from where their first experiments
intrigued the amateurs. Much very much had hap-
pened in the intervening years.
To understand the history of European broadcasting one
must never forget the World War. From the firing of the
first gun in August, 1914, radio became the hand-maiden
of the destroyer; the war departments, the strategists, the
military engineers determined its further course, developed
one side of its possibilities, just as they developed one side
of the possibilities of aviation to the detriment of the
future of both. And they\lso developed a fear a morbid
dread of science's latest child, if it should ever leave the
tutelage of those in charge of a country's defence. That in
part explains why the governments of Europe, once their
hands were on radio, first refused to loosen their grip, and
then continued to hold over it a 'protecting' hand, which
was later to tighten into a stranglehold.
First in France, then in one country after another, the au-
thorities opposed the introduction of broadcasting by radio.
Severe restrictions were placed in the way of amateurs: play-
ing with radio waves which travelled across frontiers as
easily as within them was to the war mentality worse
than playing with fire. Even the postal authorities made
trouble. In June, 1920, when Melba's voice was radiated
from the Marconi station in England, in a historic concert
organized by the Daily Mail, the postmaster-general pro-
tested against this * frivolous' use of a potential national
service. In Germany, Dr. Hans von Bredow, the radio
pioneer who had demonstrated the radio diffusion of music
in America before the war, tried to persuade the German
T^adio Over Europe 345
government in 1919 to institute broadcast entertainment,
but wasn't successful until 1923!
When they finally yielded to popular pressure, it was the
authorities themselves who had to regulate broadcasting,
at least on the technical side. By that time the state of chaos
which overtook the American air after the first scramble for
ether channels, or wave lengths, had already set in. The
European chaos would have been even worse, had the door
been opened wide to private enterprise. As it was, each
country took what it could, anxious primarily to avoid con-
fusion within its own borders and escape interference from
abroad a forlorn hope in view of the strides by which
radio grew up, in terms of watts and kilowatts. Soon it was
realized that the European air had to be apportioned as a
whole, and it was a comfort at least to realize that not more
than about thirty national claims had to be reconciled,
instead of the thousand-odd individual claims to be dealt
with in the United States.
DIVIDING UP THE AIR
The development of European radio is an interesting
story, and it can perhaps be best understood by comparison
with America. The United States is a country almost
exactly the size of Europe (difference: 12,000 square miles
in favor of Europe). It has forty-eight states, against
Europe's forty. In area and division, therefore, the two are
similar, and if their populations differ as one to four (in
favor of Europe), their racial basis is almost the same. But
there are two vital differences. The United States has one
official language, while Europe has twenty-five, not in-
cluding dialects; and American states have only partial
autonomy while European states boast complete sover-
eignty, backed up by force. It is no use discussing here
why they adhere to this troublesome privilege; it happens
to be rooted in the soil of ages, and is as dear to them as
personality is to the individual man.
346 Hello ^America!
Now when Americans came to divide up, among private
individuals, the most recently discovered of the nation's
domains, the ether, none of the forty-eight states had a
thing to say. No one in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or Cheyenne,
Wyoming, for instance, got worked up about states' rights,
or even state pride, when most radio channels were assigned
to broadcasters in the eastern states. But when Europeans,
armed with state sovereignty, and loaded with national
pride, came together for a similar purpose, imagine their
difficulties when asked to relinquish a wave length or to
reduce the power of a station for the benefit of a foreigner
and a potential enemy! Great Britain, first in the field,
and 'in possession' of twenty-two frequencies, had to
sacrifice eleven of them in the interest of Europe as a whole.
Moreover, if there was any trouble among American
broadcasters, the Federal government could settle it out
of hand, by virtue of its constitutional power. In Europe
there was no central authority that could settle anything
except by going to war. The wonder is, not that the ideal
solution was not found, but that a workable plan was
established at all. It was established through peaceful
negotiation, on the principle of give-and-take, by a private
and voluntary organization, the International Broadcasting
Union (U.I.R.). 1 European ether waves are today being
projected without serious interference, and broadcasting
traffic is being regulated by a common ' policeman ' the
Union's checking centre at Brussels maintained at the
common expense.
In other words, radio has achieved unofficially
what the European governments profess to be striving for,
a League of Nations which works. By successive * plans,'
worked out from 1926 to 1929 by the engineers of
various nations (Geneva Plan, Brussels Plan, Prague Plan)
they apportioned the available frequencies within the so-
called broadcast band among the broadcasting countries,
and these became the basis of the more recent Lucerne Plan,
adopted by the governments themselves. By virtue of its
1 Union Internationale de Radiodiffusion, with its central office in Geneva, and
its technical department Centre de Controle in Brussels.
T^adio Over Europe 347
work the U.I.R. became the official broadcasting 'expert*
to the governmental bodies regulating radio services as a
whole. (Communications, marine, aviation, army, navy,
police, etc. occupy overwhelmingly the available ether
space.)
Significantly enough, the U.I.R. was founded (in 1925) in
the old building of the League of Nations, where it now
maintains its headquarters, while the League has moved to
its immense white palace further up the lake. Under the
presidency, first of Admiral Sir Charles Carpendale of
Great Britain, then of M. Maurice Rambert of Switzerland,
it has increased its influence through the world, and broad-
casting in the European area would be unthinkable without
it. Its Centre de Contrble, or checking centre, where the
operation of all broadcasting waves is observed day and
night, and where all necessary rectifications are initiated,
is still located on the outskirts of Brussels not far from
the spot where the first attempts at broadcasting took place
before the war. It is the nerve centre of European broad-
casting, the Greenwich of the Air. 1
The U.I.R., besides regulating the ether traffic, has other
important functions, such as the common discussion of legal
questions and the various problems with which a profes-
sional body deals on behalf of its members, insofar as they
are susceptible of international treatment. And above all,
by virtue of the natural cameraderie which develops among
colleagues, it has pursued with considerable energy the
aims of international understanding and good will, by
organizing program exchanges and collective transmissions
designed to promote world solidarity.
First there were 'national evenings/ then 'European con-
certs/ and finally world programs, of which 'Youth Sings
Across the Frontiers' in 1936, comprising over forty nations
in all the continents, was the first. In 1936 there have been
1 Accuracy in maintaining frequency oscillations is all the more important since
in the crowded European ether there are only 9 cycles of separation between broad-
casting waves. (In the United States the separation is 10 cycles.) Also, it must be
remembered that there is no central authority to limit the power of stations, some
of which develop up to 500 kilowatts.
348 Hello ^America!
no less than 1550 exchanges of programs among European
countries, nearly all of which were due to Union initiative.
These multiple relays are the nearest European approach
to 'chain* broadcasting on a continental scale, such as exists
in America but which is ruled out by the existence of national
frontiers in Europe. In order to make them possible, the
Union has exerted a constant influence on the national tele-
phone administrations, with the result that the European
telephone network has greatly improved in quality and most
of the great international trunk lines have been adapted for
the transmission of music. The wider activity of the organi-
zation, on behalf of Peace, will be touched upon in Chapter
XXV.
Once broadcasting got into its stride in Europe, its develop-
ment, if more orderly, was no less prodigious than in America.
After some abortive French attempts in 1921 and 1922,
Great Britain was the first in the field. The Marconi Com-
pany started its experiments at Writtle in the latter year;
and the British Broadcasting Company (later called Cor-
poration) was founded, with stations in London, Manchester
and Birmingham. France, Denmark and Russia followed;
then, in 1923, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Swit-
zerland and Czechoslovakia. By the end of 1925 eighteen
European countries had organized services; there are now
thirty, operating about 400 medium and long-wave stations
on 357 frequencies. Albania, Liechtenstein, Monaco and
Andorra have no broadcasting of their own as yet.
According to the latest available licence figures there are
nearly twenty-eight million stationary radio sets in operation
in Europe (including the U.S.S.R. and Turkey), as against
twenty-five million in the United States, and it is estimated
that there are between two and three million undeclared sets
in addition. The actual European radio audience is, of
course, much larger than the American, since owing to the
lower economic status of most countries, and the develop-
ment of group listening in some, an immeasurably greater
number of people are served by the average set.
Group listening is the rule rather than the exception in
T^adio Over Europe 349
Russia, where one loud-speaker often serves a whole village;
it is widely developed in Germany, where every school, every
factory and numerous public places are equipped with
loud-speakers, and listening to certain 'official' broadcasts is
obligatory. It is common in Italy, where a group or crowd
listening outside the local store or inn, especially at times of
football matches and other sporting events, is a common
sight. Finally there are in many countries so-called radio
exchanges or local relay systems by wire, through which the
poorer public is being served from a central set.
To give a picture of broadcasting in the various countries
of Europe would require a large volume in itself. No such
book has yet appeared in English, though to French-speaking
readers I should recommend Arnold Huth's Radiodijfusion
Puissance Mondiale^ x a work of encyclopedic proportions.
What I shall attempt to do very briefly is to give the out-
standing principles on which European radio is organized
and operated, and point out the characteristics of the out-
standing prototype of each system.
American radio is run by private enterprise; European
radio is, almost without exception, either operated or con-
trolled by organs of the government. We have seen how the
war was largely responsible for this: but even if private enter-
prise had been given a larger share, it is still certain that in
the absence of a central European authority the govern-
ments would have had to regulate transmissions as a part
of the communications system of the continent. And it is
an interesting speculation whether the 'older* mentality of
many European countries would ever have allowed the com-
plete freedom of 'juvenile* America, the great playboy of the
west.
HOW EUROPEAN RADIO IS RUN
Europe never could regard radio as just another enter-
tainment industry: it was too inclusive, too universal, for
1 Paris, 1937.
350 Hello ^America!
that; and universality imposes responsibility. Radio has
everything except the power to select its audience; it must
provide for all or for none. The people who go to the cinema
do so because they wish to be amused or instructed; those
who listen to the radio are animated by every sort of human
des*ire some want diversion, some instruction, some want
solace and others information. The instrument which sup-
plies all these, to all, and at all times, is first and foremost a
public service a public service which can do even more,
can make the community conscious of itself, fortify the
national character, rally people to a common task, warn
them of danger, avert a crisis and alleviate distress. On the
other hand there are conceivably people who will deny that
any such obligations exist.
Be that as it may, it is certain that government operation
is not exclusively associated with dictatorship, nor is it in
itself any indication of the degree of political restriction to
which broadcasting is subjected. There are, for instance,
democratic countries like Denmark and Norway, where
government ownership is preferred to private exploitation,
after both forms have been tried. On the other hand, there
is Italy, where private ownership does not prevent the state
from exercising the severest control. France, a country in
which democracy and individual liberty are the fundamental
principles of society, has given a wide scope to private enter-
prise; yet has found it advisable to add a governmental
system in order to secure something more than the kind of
entertainment with which the advertiser attracts an audience.
Between the two extremes of government control there is
the system of operation by a chartered public service cor-
poration, which escapes the disadvantages of close govern-
ment interference on the one hand, and of the profit system
on the other. Of this Great Britain, with its genius for com-
promise, is the prototype. And finally there is the unique
system of Holland, where the listeners themselves, organized
in voluntary societies, provide the program organizations,
while the government merely shares ownership of the trans-
mitters, which are leased for alternate periods to the five
societies. Since these are supported by the voluntary contri-
T^adio Over Europe 351
butions of their members, in the absence of either adver-
tising or compulsory payment of any kind, it is in the last
analysis the interested amateur who determines the intellec-
tual bill of fare.
In virtually all the other European countries except
Luxemburg, broadcasting is financed by the so-called licens-
ing system, by which every person operating a receiving set
pays an annual fee, ranging from $2.00 to $3.00, for the pri-
vilege of receiving programs. The most usual fee is an
equivalent of about $2.50. In every case this is collected
through the postal authorities, who usually retain a propor-
tion for collection expense, and in most cases deliver a part
of the total fee to the national treasury. The proportion in
Great Britain at present is a total of 25 per cent total govern-
ment deduction.
It is important to distinguish between a radio license
(which corresponds to a motor-car license) and a tax. It is
not a tax, since it is not based either on the price of a pro-
duct or the income level of the citizen (though there are re-
missions for invalids, crippled veterans and the like). It is,
in effect, an entrance fee to a year's performances supplied
through the facilities or the franchise of the government.
Germany, Russia and Italy, in their several ways, illus-
trate the system of government-controlled radio in the
authoritarian state. Germany, perhaps, is the best example
of all, for radio reached a certain development there even
before the advent of the Nazi dictatorship.
GERMANY
When the government of republican Germany finally
yielded to the importunities of its radio pioneer, Dr. Bredow,
backed by pressure from radio clubs and press, it allowed
private enterprise considerable scope in the various com-
ponent parts of the Reich, with the idea of preserving local
352. Hello ^America!
autonomy and regional characteristics. Companies were
formed in which the government owned the controlling half
of the shares, to operate transmitters erected in various parts
by the technical staff of the postal administration and owned
by the government. There was also a central holding com-
pany, the Reichs-Rundfunkgesellschaft (R.R.G.), headed
by two joint directors, and there were various committees
to supervise program material and exercise political vigilance.
Dr. Bredow became Federal Commissar to supervise radio
on behalf of the postal authorities.
Despite the heterogeneous structure of this complicated
organization, a high degree of artistic quality went into the
making of programs, and Germany's great treasure-house of
music was tapped for the benefit of the masses with the help
of a host of first-rate artists, orchestras and opera houses in
various parts of the country. There was a fair balance of
political discussion and a minimum of propaganda. Techni-
cally the organization, thanks to German ingenuity and
efficiency, soon stood in the front rank of the world's radio.
Artistically it encouraged research and contributed original
experiments, such as special forms of radio drama and music
specifically composed for radio. Nowhere were the young
leaders of music and literature more keenly interested in
developing new ideas and new art forms for broadcasting.
The Nazi coup of 1933 destroyed the old organization at a
stroke. The new regime substituted an almost completely
new personnel, which had been built up as a sort of ' shadow
administration* within the Nazi-dominated Listeners'
League while the party was still in militant opposition. Dr.
Eugen Hadamowsky, the head of that revolutionary organ-
ization, became the new ' leader' of the R.R.G., and the old
directors, as well as the eminent Dr. Bredow, were soon
under arrest on a variety of charges. But the supreme head,
above everybody, was and still is Dr. Josef Goebbels,
minister of 'propaganda and public enlightenment/ who
immediately proclaimed the right of the state to 'supervise
the formation of public opinion ' and asserted that the pur-
pose of all art was to serve the state and exalt the National-
Socialist ideal. Henceforth the policy of German radio was
Over Europe 353
uniform, totalitarian, and subservient to one idea the
dissemination and inculcation of the Nazi doctrine and the
aggrandizement of the German state.
This idea is carried through with the thoroughness for
which Germans are noted. Even music, the * language of
humanity/ is given a political bias: not only is German
music exalted above any other, but some German composers
are regarded as more German than others. The heroic theme
is emphasized, and military marches given a predominant
share in entertainment, to foster the martial spirit. Begin-
ning with physical culture * jerks* in the morning, numerous
transmissions are designed to make Germans into a sporting
athletic nation. The Olympic Games at Berlin gave a new
impulse to this movement. Conveying an indubitable im-
pression of Germany's world supremacy in sport, the radio
has ever since kept up the pace.
Being at all times under orders of the propaganda organi-
zation, German broadcasting throws every political event
into the desired relief. Announcers and commentators have
made the reportage of open-air demonstrations a fine art,
strictly in accordance with the model set by Nazi orators.
Pitching their voices in a high lyrical key, these word-
painters not only describe every important meeting or
triumphal appearance of their Leader in radiant colors, but
aim to make every German feel the thrill of actual presence
and comradeship. Since on such occasions all German
stations form a single unit, the citizen has no choice but to
listen, for even a switched-off loud-speaker might be re-
garded as disloyal.
Not content with one transmission, recordings of day-
time events are re-broadcast in the evening. On the day of
a Nuremberg rally, for instance, the entire time is filled with
high-flown descriptions of triumphant scenes, against a back-
ground of cheering masses and the music of military bands
a cumulative effort at mass suggestion such as the world has
never witnessed before.
The climax to such a day is, of course, the speech of the
Fuhrer himself, and radical precautions are taken throughout
the land that it is heard by all. Sirens in factories call men
354 Hello ^America!
together; loud-speakers in public squares and villages make
listening obligatory to the passer-by. In order to make the
voice of authority more ubiquitous still, loud-speakers are
being installed in street-corner kiosks, the familiar feature
of every German town. The complete regimenting of an
entire population of nearly seventy million people nothing
less is the unique achievement of German radio during
the first five years of the present regime.
It would be giving a false picture of this remarkable coun-
try to omit mention of the still excellent and sometimes
superlative broadcasting of operatic and symphonic per-
formances, which are listened to not only in Germany but
beyond its borders. No country had so highly developed
and decentralized a cultivation of musical and dramatic art,
and even the ruthless removal of 'undesirable* talent has
not destroyed all these values, created through the tradition
of centuries. From the Munich and Bayreuth Festivals
down to the studio performance of classical chamber music
these broadcasts are exemplary; but beside them is a dreary
waste of 'light* music and banal comedy, cut to the taste of
the provincial low-brow and the yokel.
The spoken word, on whatever text, is tuned in the key of
propaganda. Whether it is a book review or a talk on furni-
ture or the fire brigade, it extols the national revival, and
mostly it is pitched in the explosive style of the Nazi orator.
Normal speech, except in the reading of news bulletins, is a
rare exception; and news bulletins, read with studied objec-
tivity, rely upon the arts of interpretation and omission for
their effect. What the ultimate effect of all this is likely to
be one can only surmise; but the fact that nearly 40,000
schools receive six daily half-hour lessons by radio per week
means that virtually the entire youth of Germany has its
mind tuned to the nationalistic key.
T^adio Over Europe 355
ITALY
In Russia and Italy, as in Germany, the radio is the
complete servant of the state and the protagonist of its
political doctrine. But in both of these countries the regime
antedated the coming of radio; it was not, therefore, neces-
sary to destroy in order to build; and the fervor of destruc-
tion is always likely to out-run discretion. Soviet and Fas-
cist broadcasting was conceived as such from the ground up.
Thus in Italy, whereas state supervision is complete in the
political sphere, essentially nothing was altered on the
artistic side. The E.I.A.R., 1 a private company working for
only nominal profit, is in the position of a concessionaire
operating a national monopoly; by virtue of a government
decree it has unfettered access to the output of all the
musical, operatic, dramatic and other entertainment organi-
zations in the country, for which it pays with cash subsidies
through the various professional 'corporations' (syndicates).
It broadcasts the best performances of the Scala and other
opera houses, the leading orchestras, musical societies, etc.,
and during the 'dead* season provides its own series of studio
operas with first-class artists. Opera is outstandingly the
favorite entertainment of the Italian masses, and it is the
pride and glory of Italian radio, which devotes nearly 45
per cent of its time to serious music. These transmissions
leave little to be desired. So-called ' light ' and dance music
is a negligible quantity in Italian broadcasting, and the
comic element is virtually non-existent.
The E.I.A.R.'S purely artistic offerings are not unduly in-
fluenced by the political regime, which, however, exacts a
considerable amount of time for rural and agricultural educa-
tion of prime importance to a country like Italy. Musso-
lini, himself a child of the Italian village, decreed that 'the
village must have radio'; and despite his poverty the Italian
peasant is, by dint of community listening, becoming radio-
minded.
1 Ente Italiana per Audizione Radiofoniche.
356 Hello ^America!
But the Fascist government also takes a large share of
available time for its own propagandistic purposes: two
hours daily for official statements, three periods a week for
'special transmissions' of political complexion. A quarter
of all broadcasting time is devoted to news, 'news' and
'propaganda* being virtually synonymous in dictatorship
countries. However, as Italy's sixteen stations are divided
into two parallel chains, listeners may have a certain amount
of choice, except on days when the great demonstrations of
party and regime overshadow all else.
Be it noted, for what it is worth, that in the proportion of
radio sets to population, Italy is at the bottom of the world
list.
RUSSIA
Geography and language combine to make Russian broad-
casting aside from short-wave propaganda a closed
book to the western world. It would be presumptuous to
deal in a few paragraphs with a subject so vast. The follow-
ing remarks are inadequate and aim to indicate only the
general trend.
Soviet radio organization represents state paternalism in
its most undiluted form, for the state not only owns and
runs everything from technical construction and re-
search to program production; it must also provide the
means of program reception and organized listening, down to
the last factory, farm and village school. Since there was
no private capital or enterprise in Russia, the Soviets had to
be manufacturer and artist, producer and consumer, in
exploiting the new discovery for the benefit of 170,000,000
people, settled on an area of 8^ million square miles (in
Europe and Asia) more than twice the size of the United
States and about eighty-five times the size of Great Britain.
If we bear in mind that 95 per cent of these people were illit-
erate up to twenty years ago, that they comprise two
*I(adio Over Europe 357
hundred nationalities, speaking sixty-five languages and
dialects, we get a mere inkling of the task that is involved.
Allowing for the undeniably important share of communist
and nationalist propaganda, the keynote of Russian radio
today is and must be education. Its mission the most
prodigious ever entrusted to a single organization is the
tutoring of this multi-nation, left intellectually prostrate
through the centuries. And this is a country where communi-
cations were, and still very largely are, in a primitive state,
where telegraph and telephone did not lie ready to hand to
link up a network of stations, and where the ether alone
provided a clear path to the remoter regions of the land.
Today, by means of some forty-odd stations, ranging
from the 5oo-kilowatt giant at Moscow to the little 10-
kilowatt transmitter of the localities, Russia is after a fashion
1 covered* from end to end, and even the dweller of the
Arctic regions is supplied with programs especially designed
for him. The program service is provided by a central Com-
mittee attached to the Council of People's Commissars, aided
by some seventy regional committees twenty-seven in
Russia proper, the rest in the 'autonomous* Soviets, where
broadcasting is done in the languages of the various nation-
alities and tribes. According to official figures, nearly sixty
per cent of all time is devoted to classical and folk-music,
over 17 per cent to genuine education, for children and
adults, exclusive of physical training, and roughly 16 per cent
to news and politics. Sovietism is twenty years old; hence
over 30 per cent of the population has grown up under the
present regime. Propaganda, therefore, need not be so all-
embracing as in the younger dictatorships.
One interesting detail should be mentioned. Listening in
Russia, with less than a million individual radio sets in
operation, must needs be predominantly communal. The
vast majority of listening is done, therefore, either in the
village hall or school and at loud-speakers connected by wire
to a local 'radio exchange.' Every collective farm, every
factory is, or will eventually be, equipped in this way.
Capital for programs and operation is provided by a sliding
scale of charges, ranging from three rubles for a crystal set
358 Hello ^America!
to fifty rubles for the best valve set or a radio exchange for
collective use.
State monopoly, accompanied in the three ' totalitarian '
states by complete ' ideological' control, ranges through
various degrees of supervision down to free democratic
functioning, as in Denmark and Norway, where broadcasting
is wholly non-political (except for election purposes) a
civil service designed in the public interest and with the pub-
lic's benevolent collaboration. The profit motive is elimi-
nated in these countries; there is of course no advertising, and
revenue is collected in the form of licenses. Denmark, largely
by virtue of a well-balanced program schedule, in which in-
formative lectures occupy an uncommonly high percentage
of time, stands first on the list of European countries as to
density of audience. Its proportion of radio homes is only
slightly less than in the United States, although sets are far
more expensive and the license is 10 crowns ($2.50 per year).
These small countries enjoy a special advantage in the prox-
imity of other countries which afford ample opportunity of
program choice. Reciprocally they provide a welcome variety
to the listeners of their neighbors, including those of Great
Britain and Germany.
GREAT BRITAIN
Between the all-political and the non-political extremes
lies the ingenious compromise devised by Great Britain
an autonomous chartered corporation, non-profit making,
licensed to provide a public service, and financed by a 75
per cent share of listeners' licenses collected by the Post
Office. Though its Board of Governors is appointed by the
Crown with the advice of the government of the day, it is
non-partisan, like the civil service; but unlike the civil
service it has complete freedom in the choice and promotion
of its employees, thus giving ample opportunity for enter-
prise and ability.
*(adio Over urope 359
Whatever one may say about the B.B.C., whose programs
are internationally better known than those of any other
European broadcasting organization, it does reflect the
character of the British nation and the British conception
of democracy. British patriotism is a compound of pride,
complacency and benevolence: orderly habits and relaxed
tolerance, pious confidence and easy humor make up a
mentality which dislikes all exaggeration, avoids excitement
and eschews undue competitive effort outside of sport. The
B.B.C. appeals to all these characteristics of the British
citizen, as well as to his philanthropy.
British radio programs are the only ones which begin every
news period with S.O.S. messages; no Briton need die in
loneliness if any of his relatives are within reach of the ether
waves. Every Sunday sees not only its religious services but
its appeal for a good cause. A million dollars was the re-
sponse to these appeals during a single year. Every day be-
gins with morning prayer, ends with a comforting epilogue.
Every year, through B.B.C. appeals, charity procures more
radios for the blind.
By means of fourteen principal stations (three of them
synchronized) ranging from one hundred and fifty kilowatts
to five kilowatts, plus four small relay stations, the B.B.C.
affords effective coverage to the territory under its jurisdic-
tion (all Great Britain and Northern Ireland) in such a
way that two alternate programs are everywhere available
(National and Regional), while many localities theoretically
can tune in to six. While the six 'regions' provide a large
part of their own programs, with due regard for 'national'
interest and language in the case of Scotland, Ireland, and
Wales, it is rare that all of them differ at one time, and at
many periods especially Sundays there is no alter-
native to the national program. This is the subject of much
criticism, but here, too, charitable toleration is exercised,
for it is recognized that broadcasters require leisure, like other
men.
Artistic and technical quality is as high as any in Europe
and, in some respects, America. The B.B.C. Symphony
Orchestra, the musical pride of the country, playing either
360 Hello ^America!
under its own conductor or distinguished foreign guests such
as Toscanini, is today reckoned in the front rank of the
world's orchestras. Several smaller orchestras, for lighter
music, and choral organizations achieve similar standards.
Light music occupies a rather high percentage of time; out-
and-out dance music as a rule is available only at late hours.
Radio drama is taken very seriously and has reached a high
degree of production technique, while musical comedy and
vaudeville are regular favorites with the public. Altogether
music occupies 69 per cent of the time.
Someone has remarked that the ' news' is the Mickey
Mouse of the B.B.C., meaning that it is the most popular
of all radio programs. It is certainly listened to in all circles
of society with almost religious constancy and that is due
both to its unfailing regularity and to the impartiality with
which it is edited. It is often supplemented by 'flashed-in'
talks of observers on the spot, and feature talks by experts,
in the manner of newspaper commentary or editorial com-
ment.
But the highest standard has been established in the de-
partment of lectures on every conceivable subject, with the
collaboration of the greatest experts and personalities in the
country. Controversial matter, at first excluded, is now per-
mitted, with speakers on both sides of the question, or
in the form of debates. The pleasant British fiction that
there must be two sides and no more to every argu-
ment works as admirably on the air as in Parliament.
Contrary to most other countries, there is no direct govern-
ment supervision, and the spectacle of an Advisory Council
with an archbishop as chairman and George Bernard Shaw
as an active member gives an indication of the broad-
minded impartiality which obtains. School broadcasting has
been developed to a high standard of efficiency, and adult
education, supplemented by the organization of 'discussion
groups' among listeners is regarded as especially important.
The social service interests of certain members of the
B.B.C. staff, at one stage especially, gave rise to some out-
standing series of talks; for instance, unemployed men of all
kinds were asked to the microphone to tell their stories
o Over Europe 361
a deeply moving human document which had serious reper-
cussions in Parliament.
THE ENFANT TERRIBLE OF EUROPE
When British listeners get bored with the B.B.C. and
there is no doubt that some do, especially on Sundays
they turn the dial an inch or so to the right and get Luxem-
burg. Luxemburg, as a country, is one of the smallest and
most charming on the continent. In terms of radio it is the
Bad Boy of Europe. The very name is anathema to the
radio nabobs; it is not admitted to membership in the U.I.R.;
its programs are boycotted by the 'official* radio magazines.
The reason for all this is twofold. Luxemburg, as ' sover-
eign * a state as any in Europe, a few years ago chose a wave-
length, just as everybody else had chosen while the choosing
was good. But most of the previous choices had received the
Union's blessings, and when Luxemburg awoke to the pos-
sibilities of radio, there was just one good long wave left
unassigned, because the merits of the various big claimants
had not been decided. Without a 'by your leave,' Luxem-
burg took the wave, put one hundred and fifty kilowatts of
power behind it and so became the smallest broadcasting
country with the loudest voice. 1
The motive behind this manoeuvre was, for once, not
political but commercial. Luxemburg station is a commercial
enterprise a radio station ti FA merica ine, financed by
advertising. It advertises patent medicines and a few other
things not of course to attract merely the 300,000 Luxem-
burgers but chiefly and frankly the forty-odd millions of
inhabitants of the British Isles, for the 'announcements'
are mostly in English. Its programs are the most unexacting
in Europe; it makes little pretense at cultural values; it
gives the British low-brow what it thinks he wants, and
1 'Long* waves in Europe are those over 1500 metres (which in the U.S. are not
available for broadcasting); those under 1000 metres are known as medium waves.
361 Hello ^America!
apparently its efforts are crowned with success. Luxem-
burgers, whose government benefits by a fat share of the
profits, get radio programs without paying for them, espe-
cially on weekdays, when the sponsored programs give way to
something more in keeping with the local taste. Having
applied the 'American system* to the European scene,
Luxemburg represents the single 100 per cent example of
untrammelled private enterprise. Its inhabitants tolerate
it, as the inhabitants of Monaco tolerate gambling, but
there is no evidence that they like it.
Luxemburg, incidentally, is not the only European country
where radio advertising is permitted. Advertising is 'author-
ized ' in twelve out of thirty, but only two or three have made
any extensive use of this source of revenue. The most pro-
minent of these is France.
FRANCE AND EUROPE'S LITTLE COUNTRIES
France is not merely a democracy; it is truly democratic.
It is the classical country of personal liberty and equality,
of individualism and commercial laissez-faire. Despite the
experience of the War, despite its incipient socialism, it
could not abandon the new industry wholly to the state,
without giving private commercial enterprise a run for its
money. Hence it decided temporarily in favor of both.
It established a system of public service broadcasting, run
by the state, and even persuaded the thrifty French citizen
to pay an annual licence, after he had the experience of free
radio for several years. And at the same time it continued
to authorize private companies, privileged to finance them-
selves by selling 'time/ It is a tribute to French tolerance
that the lion could lie down with the lamb. Only one other
European country presents a similar spectacle, and that is
Yugoslavia.
There are in France today fourteen government (P.T.T.)
broadcasting stations (not counting the Colonial short-wave
o Over Europe 363
service) and twelve private ones. The government stations
are connected by cables into a 'chain'; further additions
will make it possible to diffuse two concurrent programs,
national and regional, throughout France, while at present
the national program depends on one station of medium
power, Radio-Paris. The private stations have no cable
connection and each works on its own. The government
stations, animated by the spirit of public service, specialize
in serious music and drama, lectures and news; the private
stations, having no cultural obligations, go in for light enter-
tainment with a dash of higher class material for sweetening.
News also forms an extensive part of the schedule, and there
is apparently no attempt at censorship.
The inspiration of French radio is the theatre opera,
drama, and comedy. Classic beauty alternates with lyric
sentimentality and a generous dose of humor and gaiety.
The national genius for comedy has free play; full-length
operetta has an important place. The government stations
have access to the productions of the subventioned theatres
and there is a large proportion of direct pick-ups from these,
as from the leading symphony orchestras. Poetry readings,
lectures on cultural and artistic subjects rather than 'educa-
tional' subjects predominate. News interpretation, frank
and fair on the whole, supplements the frequent news bulle-
tins; together they furnish the largest single item on the
government schedule. Outdoor pick-ups and commentaries
on public events occupy a moderate place; regional pro-
grams add the flavor of the old provinces of France. There is
very little dance music in the government programs; and
only a little more in the commercial ones. School broad-
casting does not exist, nor adult education as such: French-
men evidently consider they are educated enough.
Up to 1933, before radio was organized on the licence
principle, radio listening in France was rather listless; since
the introduction of the licence system it has gone up by
leaps and bounds, rising from a little above one million to
three within three years thus shattering another popular
notion about the French, namely, that they refuse to pay for
amusement when it can be had for nothing.
364 Hello ^America!
Comprised within the types I have described are virtually
all the European broadcasting systems allowance being
made for variations due to national characteristics. Except
for lack of space I should like to mention in greater detail
Austria where, with an abundance of high-class material,
an exemplary program service has been developed, culminat-
ing in such achievements as the Salzburg Festival. Also
Belgium and Sweden, like Austria private monopolies, with
high cultural aims; and Holland and Switzerland, each giving
satisfaction to a serious-minded audience, with comparatively
modest means. Switzerland has an added complication in
the necessity to furnish tri-lingual entertainment, which it
accomplishes through semi-autonomous regional organiza-
tions; while Belgium provides concurrent programs to satisfy
two national language groups. Finland, Hungary, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Turkey all have private or
semi-private companies working government-operated trans-
mitters; while Bulgaria, Esthonia, the Irish Free State,
Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Portugal have state-con-
trolled radio throughout.
As for Spain, it was, up to the Civil War, served by private
companies subsisting mainly on advertising; after the out-
break of hostilities all radio was commandeered by the
contending sides. What will happen eventually lies in the
lap of the gods.
To sum up, broadcasting in Europe is, for the most part,
either government operated or government controlled.
The reasons for this are partly, though not altogether,
political either national or international. And the uses
to which broadcasting is put, the policy which determines its
operation, and the degree of government supervision are
not determined by the economic structure or the system of
operation, but by the nature and policy of the government
itself, as will be seen in the next chapter.
Any mental picture of Europe today must, however,
include not only the land and the people but the ether above
them. Day in, day out, night and day, that ether is suffused
with signals and messages and intellectual projections of
l^adio Over Europe 365
every kind a stupendous, close-meshed network of speech
in many tongues, of music, of significant sounds, the throb-
bing of a mighty continent breathing out its kaleidoscopic
soul. And in his watch-tower outside Brussels the watchman
of the ether wakes, preventing interference and collision. By
a delicately tempered tuning fork he daily measures every
wave, though its content is beyond his control. So long as
this watchman is at his task, the chaos of Europe is at any
rate not complete.
XXV. THE SPEECH-POISONED AIR
ANCIENT 'CHAMPION* AND MODERN EQUIVALENT
IN ANCIENT times, when warring tribes met on the field
of battle, their leaders went forth to challenge the enemy
with opprobrium. The fiercer the champion's defiance, the
more contemptuous his insults and the more bombastic his
boasts, the more warlike would be the spirit of his followers
and the fiercer the enemy's hate, until at last their armies
would join in combat, to show that actions speak louder than
words. With the introduction of firearms, actions spoke not
only louder but faster; and with the invention of strategy
the leader's life became too valuable to be risked in the
front line. The warrior-challenger became obsolete, so the
recriminations had to be carried on by diplomats or news-
paper editors, reaching their mark with much troublesome
delay.
But with the invention of radio, the old-time champion
has come into his own once more. Instead of going out into
the field and shouting himself hoarse, he or his minions may
sit comfortably at a microphone and let their voices go
forth to their own people to work up pride, and to the enemy
to demoralize his ranks. There is just one difference: in
the old days the people who did the talking had to make
good their talk; nowadays, those who order the talking done
can send others out to risk their lives.
If anyone thinks that this interpretation of history is
merely facetious, let him sit at any good radio set in Europe,
preferably one that will tune to both long and short waves.
At various times of the day and evening, right into the
The Speech-Toisoned *Air 367
night, he can hear from many countries what is usually an-
nounced as 'news/ given very accommodatingly not only
in the language of the country but in languages which
foreigners understand, notably English, Spanish, and French.
The reason for this solicitude toward the foreigner becomes
clear only when one compares the news of some important
event say a battle in China or the sinking of a merchant-
man in the Mediterranean as given by the radio inter-
preters of the different countries. It soon becomes apparent
that their interpretations are just the subtle modern equiva-
lent for the opprobrium of the past.
And as for the boasts? We have a longer word for them
now, commensurate with their greater sophistication and
variety, but fundamentally the meaning is the same. The
word is Propaganda. Broadcast propaganda, both national
and international, economic and political, is the bane of
European radio today. The European ether is suffused with
excellent things beautiful music, drama, ethics, and
poetry; but all this is shot through with propaganda, just
as American radio is shot through with advertising. Only,
while you can always detect advertising, the cloven hoof of
propaganda is often more subtly concealed.
IS THE AIR FREE?
Before we examine the various kinds of propaganda, and
hostile broadcasting generally, it is well to be clear about
who 'owns* the European air. At the risk of repetition, let
us summarize thus: out of thirty European national broad-
casting systems, thirteen are state-owned and operated,
nine are government monopolies operated by autonomous
public bodies or partially government-controlled corpora-
tions, four are physically operated (engineered) by the gov-
ernment and privately serviced as to programs, while only
three are privately owned and run. In two countries (France
and Yugoslavia) government and privately owned com-
panies exist side by side.
368 Hello America!
But all these organizations, whether government or pri-
vate, are under more or less rigorous state supervision as to
their policies. In fifteen of them (including the Vatican
City, which is non-political) political broadcast matter is
forbidden outright, except that which is broadcast by the
Government or at its behest. This, it is needless to add,
includes all the authoritarian countries, as well as some
others, including Germany, Italy, the U.S.S.R., Austria,
Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Danzig, Poland, Por-
tugal, and the Irish Free State. In at least two more coun-
tries, namely, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, all political
controversial talks are censored by the state, and in most
other countries, democratic or otherwise, some sort of cen-
sorship is exercised by the broadcasting officials themselves,
though in most cases simply by the standards of law and good
taste. 1
In Great Britain all supervision is suspended during elec-
tion campaigns, and the same is true of some other demo-
cratic countries. Turkey a phenomenon in this respect
boasts a total absence of supervision, but considering the
undeveloped state of radio in that dictatorship, the boast
need not be taken too seriously.
Even non-political talks are subject to one kind of con-
trol or another. Aside from the state-operated organizations,
some, such as the Czechoslovak! an and Yugoslavian, must
submit all manuscripts to government censorship, and in
many cases there is a direct control of the actual words as
they are spoken over the air. Far from regarding it as a
disadvantage, most countries seem to approve of all this
supervision and control. Broadcasting officials are glad to
escape responsibility, both internally and especially vis-a-vis
their foreign colleagues. Commendatore Gino Montefinale,
radio chief of the Italian Ministry of Communications, giv-
ing his expert opinion to an international committee, 2 made
1 Holland, one of the eleven 'free' countries, is a curiosity: this little country con-
tains five broadcasting organizations (not counting the short-wave service to the
colonies); and two of these, owned respectively by the Catholics and the Socialists,
permit political speeches favoring their own parties and principles only.
a The Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, studying the question of broad-
casting in the cause of peace.
The Speech-Toisoned *Atr 369
a point of saying that Italian radio programs are 'rigorously
controlled by the state/ that even economic and financial
news must be previously submitted to the government, and
that 'nobody is allowed to speak before the microphone of
the Italian stations unless the E.I.A.R. has previously ob-
tained government permission/
It would seem, then, that there is precious little freedom
on the European air. In the authoritarian states we know
that the motive of control is political, and the object is the
total elimination of opposition or criticism of the govern-
ment, the country, and its institutions; further than that,
the elimination of favorable comment on certain other coun-
tries and their institutions, acts, and policies in short,
complete dictation for nationalistic ends.
On the other hand, in democratic countries such as the
Scandinavian kingdoms, even state control does not neces-
sarily mean the abrogation of free speech, any more than
the state operation of posts and telegraphs necessarily means
the censorship of communications. Denmark, for example,
has a state-owned and operated broadcasting system; yet
the control exercised over speakers is wholly on the basis of
decency and good taste. Norway considers that all propa-
ganda, whether political or religious, is out of place on the
air; hence the only political speeches allowed are those at
election time. The B.B.C., through its license arrangement
with the British Post Office, is subject to a certain amount
of parliamentary control. Yet there is no greater liberality
anywhere in Europe when it comes to the broadcasting of
controversial matter. Speakers from the extreme right to
the extreme left, including Fascist and Communist, have
had access to the microphone; though, as in the United
States, one opinion must be balanced against another if
violent protest and attack are to be avoided.
But in the last analysis the air belongs to the governments,
and it is the policies of the governments which determine the
degree of freedom, or otherwise. In dictatorship countries,
and in countries living in the shadow of dictatorship, freedom
in the air does not exist.
37 Hello ^America!
ACROSS THE FRONTIERS
So much for 'internal* broadcasting, subject to internal
laws and regulations and policies. But strictly speaking no
exclusively internal broadcasting exists: no way has yet been
discovered by which ether waves can be restricted in their
radius so as to conform, even remotely, to the eccentric
boundaries of European states. This tremendous thing
the power of radio waves to pass all man-made boundaries,
both physical and spiritual was welcomed at first as a
great new factor for peace. But soon after the setting-up of
broadcasting systems in Europe it was found to be a new and
incalculable element in the propagation of war. Indeed, the
intercepting of radio waves was forbidden for some time after
the World War; and this prohibition, dictated by fear, de-
layed the setting-up of radio services in the European area.
It must not be forgotten that this circumstance, as much
as any, brought about the various measures of control which
today give such an unsatisfactory picture of European
broadcasting from the point of view of freedom. 'Thus it
soon happened/ says Mr. A. E. Burrows, Secretary-General
of the International Broadcasting Union, 'that most broad-
casting organizations, certainly those in the highly complex
and politically sensitive European area, found it necessary
to ask for a previous submission of the manuscript from all
invited to broadcast from their studios/ 1
As early as 1926 the International Broadcasting Union,
which without legislative power of any kind has brought
order into the European ether and maintained it without
government aid for upwards of eight years, negotiated a
gentlemen's agreement to the effect that the member organ-
izations would adopt all possible guarantees against trans-
missions which would harm the spirit of co-operation and
good international understanding. Ever since then an im-
portant part of the Union's activities has been directed to
1 'Broadcasting and Peace,' International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation,
Paris, 1933.
The Speech-Toisoned *Air 371
the restriction of propaganda, hostile comment, and incite-
ment of political unrest.
The first flagrant example of hostile broadcasting came
in 1926 and significantly enough as the result of the
minorities question created by the more well-meaning of the
statesmen responsible for the Treaty of Versailles. As a
result of the plebiscite in Upper Silesia, decided in favor of
Poland, more than 200,000 Germans found themselves on
the Polish side of the border, and their alleged treatment by
the Poles became the subject of border strife. The powerful
German transmitter at Breslau took a hand in the fight by
broadcasting to the expatriated Germans, and the Poles were
furious. The result was that at Geneva Polish and German
statesmen made faces at each other while fiery protests were
aired. In the meantime German and Polish broadcasters,
friendly co-members of the I.B.U., settled the matter by a
regional agreement of non-aggression over the air the
first step toward what was to become known as 'moral dis-
armament/
This agreement has worked, as between Germany and
Poland, to this day; and for years only minor infractions of
the earlier gentlemen's agreement occurred, to be adjudi-
cated by the I.B.U. Then in 1933 the Nazis came to power
in Germany, and within a short time there started the radio
war which has been described in Chapter XIV. It illumi-
nated in lurid colors what hostile broadcasting really meant
how it could precipitate a national tragedy in a neigh-
boring country. The lesson was taken to heart if not by
Germany, then by others. Austria, unable to come to terms
with her most powerful neighbor, concluded a radio non-
aggression pact on the Polish model with Czechoslovakia.
And in far-away South America, six countries concluded
agreements to the same effect. Broadcasting had gained
recognition as a breeder of war.
Hello ^America!
THE RACE FOR POWER
This recognition was in fact already being accorded in
more sinister ways. It started a race for power in the ether.
At the beginning, when it was just a question of frontier sta-
tions, the Union exerted its influence for the reduction of
power; the new power competition concerned not merely
single frontiers but the whole of Europe, for distance was no
longer a serious handicap in the high-power era that had
begun to dawn.
In 1930 the 238 stations of Europe developed an aggregate
power of 1813.9 kilowatts; in 1937 there were 336 medium
and long-wave stations alone with an aggregate power of
7290.8 kilowatts. The average power of the single station
had nearly trebled in the intervening space of time.
Overwhelmingly the greater part of this increase is ac-
counted for by high-powered and super-powered stations,
such as would be neither permitted nor practicable in the
United States. This development is sensational when one
realizes that in 1930 the loo-kilowatt station was unknown.
Then, after the construction of the I2o-kilowatt stations
at Warsaw and Prague in 1931 (presumably in answer to
the previous erection of high-power stations in Russia), the
race began. Stations went up to 100, to 120, even to 150 kil-
owatts all over Europe, and Russia, to top everything, built
Europe's most powerful station at Moscow, developing
500 kilowatts. The following table will show more clearly
what has happened within the short space of five years
years which coincide with the recrudescence of aggressive
nationalism and the greatest armaments race in history:
1932 1937
Stations of 20-29 kw. 9 16
Stations of 30-39 kw. 4 7
Stations of 40-49 kw. 2 I
Stations of 50-59 kw. 8 9
Stations of 60-69 kw. 6 9
Stations of 70-80 kw. I 4
Stations of 100-119 kw. 5 27
Stations of 120-129 kw. 2 27
Stations of 130-150 kw. o 13
Stations of 200-500 kw. o 3
Total high-power stations 37 116
The Speech-Toisoned *Air 373
The great propaganda machine was nearing completion: the
voice of the modern 'champion 1 was acquiring dynamics
commensurate with the power of the guns.
'MORAL DISARMAMENT*
But alongside the 'armament' of the ether, ways were
being sought to ensure peace. The very people that set the
new pace in transmitters the Poles also took the lead
in moral disarmament at the World Disarmament Confer-
ence in 1932. Bearing in mind their bitter experience in
Silesia six years before, they made an ambitious proposal
for a treaty affecting not only radio, but press, theatre, film,
and school; and this met with such hostility on the part of
various countries that it was abandoned, like all the other
beautiful projects of that most ambitious effort of League
of Nations history. 1
But not quite. The League, foiled everywhere else, sal-
vaged the idea of restricting hostile radio activity and com-
missioned its subsidiary body, the Committee on Intel-
lectual Co-operation, to work out a convention which could
be adopted by the Powers. In 1933 the first text was sub-
mitted by the League to the various governments. At a
Conference held in the autumn of 1936 twenty-eight nations
signed the convention, and eventually thirty-seven exe-
cuted the final act, among them most European countries,
including the U.S.S.R., but not including Germany and
Italy.
This 'Convention for the Use of Broadcasting in the
Cause of Peace ' provides that the high contracting parties
mutually undertake to prohibit the broadcasting of anything
which is detrimental to good international understanding,
or which will incite the population of any of each other's
territories; undertake that nothing which is transmitted by
1 Among the most bitter opponents was the American Government, which quite
naturally saw in this scheme an attempt to curtail the sacrosanct right of free speech.
374 Hello ^America!
their broadcasters shall incite to war; that nothing harmful
shall be broadcast which is known or ought to be known
by the responsible persons to be incorrect.
Like most international agreements, this first European
radio treaty is as important for what it omits as for what it
contains. The real disarmament' clauses, which the ideal-
ists responsible for its promotion finally managed to embody
in a series of attached recommendations, concern two very
important things. One of them demands vigilance against
broadcasts which, even though they may not incite a foreign
population, may give offence to its sentiments national,
political, religious, or social. The other calls particular atten-
tion to transmissions in foreign languages. Recent history
has shown that it is just these two points that have led to
international conflict; yet to convert them into treaty obli-
gations would undoubtedly mean a further restriction of
the freedom of the air.
Now, so long as this Convention is not signed by Germany
and Italy it has, of course, very little practical value for
Europe, since the nations who adhere to it are precisely
those who are least likely to give offence in any case. But
whatever its restraining influence may be, it does not affect
the more important, because the more far-reaching, activi-
ties of those Powers which have developed that last word in
stentorian champions, the high-powered short-wave trans-
mitter, with its literally unlimited range. This development
has taken place, in very recent years, without legal or con-
ventional restriction of any sort. No international regula-
tion within the short-wave broadcasting band exists; a wild
scramble for wave lengths has resulted in a wholly arbitrary
and lopsided status quo. Politically this is a major problem
in the world today.
The Specch-Toisoned *Air 375
BALLYHOO BY SHORT WAVE
The peculiarity of short-wave transmission, which at first
was thought to be only of local importance, is that it is most
efficacious over ultra-long distances thousands of miles
and especially in transoceanic work. The direct wave,
or so-called ground wave, fades after a short distance, but
the sky wave, reflected from the Kennelly-Heaviside layer
of the atmosphere, encircles the earth. Through the device
of directional antennae (beam system), these waves can be
aimed at any desired section of the globe, thereby increasing
audibility in that region. Thus it came to be used for trans-
oceanic communications.
As the abstruse science of short-wave transmission came
to be mastered (adaptability of certain waves to light or
darkness, seasonal cycles of efficiency, sun spot activity,
etc.), broadcasters began to exploit the new domain in
hitherto unsuspected ways. In 1930 only three short-wave
transmitters were used for broadcasting in Europe; today
there are over forty sizable ones, and more are being built.
Short waves require proportionately less power to project
them: a two-kilowatt transmitter in Addis Ababa carried
the Negus's voice to America, over seven thousand miles
away. Yet many short-wave transmitters now in use are of
the order of 40 and 50 kilowatts; others now being built will
go up to 100 kilowatts and probably more.
The value of this method of long-distance transmission in
creating a new link between parts of a far-flung community
like the British Empire is obvious. Great Britain therefore
took the lead; the British Empire station at Daventry, with
its six transmitters, reaches virtually every British dominion
and possession with a carefully timed cycle of transmissions.
But the Germans, whose * empire* is of different nature,
were not far behind. Prior to the Olympic Games of 1936
they increased their small but very efficient short-wave sta-
tion at Zeesen to comprise eight powerful transmitters
two more than the British thus making it the largest
376 Hello ^America!
and most potent propaganda machine in the world. After
the Games were over, this giant station, by virtue of highly
intelligent engineering and very astute publicity technique,
became the most terrific agency for the spread of political
doctrine that the world has ever seen.
THE MODERN TOWER OF BABEL
Having no colonial territories, the policy of the German
short-wave service is, first, to reach 'colonies' of overseas
Germans wherever they may be, make them conscious of
their ties to the Fatherland, and preach to them the Nazi
philosophy of national greatness; secondly, to promote
'good will' and create German markets in competition with
other exporting countries; and thirdly, to convince the rest
of the world of German greatness and the justice of German
aspirations. This is being done consistently in six languages
and more, as required. It is carried out with tremendous
thoroughness, broadcasts being aimed with great accuracy
and efficiency at definite communities to be cultivated:
German- Americans in the United States are showered with
brotherly love from ' home ' ; the South Africans, in Afrikaans
language, are mollified on German colonial claims; the South
Americans, in Spanish and Portuguese, learn to revere Ger-
man music and incidentally German machines; and so on.
Nobody is forgotten. A series of broadcasts aimed at Tas-
mania opening with 'Hello, Tasmania, beautiful Apple
Isle* is but one example of this new 'spot* propaganda.
Italy, both master and pupil to German Fascism, is not
far behind the big brother in this field. The short-wave sta-
tion at Prato Smeralda, always one of the best-functioning
in Europe, is, according to official announcement, being sup-
plemented by two short-wave transmitters of 100 kilowatts
each and three of 50 kilowatts each, besides an ultra-short
wave at Monte Mario. This will carry the Italian 'empire
station ' far beyond its British prototype, although the Duce
The Speech-Toisoned *Air 377
still considers his empire in its infancy. The use to which
these transmitters will be put is not in doubt. Even now the
Rome transmitters emit a fairly steady stream of Fascist
propaganda, mostly in the guise of news, history lessons, and
reports regarding the march of Italian civilization in Africa
and elsewhere. During 1937 the Italian short-wave station
was broadcasting regularly in Italian, English, Spanish,
Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Hindustani. As
a result, the British felt themselves politically menaced in
the Mediterranean, in India, in the Near and Far East, and
along their trade routes everywhere, and soon announced
their policy of world-wide broadcasting in six foreign lan-
guages. For this purpose additional powerful short-wave
stations have been authorized, a step which is bound to be
answered by further increases in Germany, and so on.
Other countries with colonial empires the Dutch, the
French, the Belgians, and the Portuguese are all using
short-wave broadcasting to provide their colonists and na-
tives with news and entertainment from home. In none
of these cases does there seem to be a determined effort at
propaganda outside the legitimate scope. But France,
which already broadcasts a cultural program to the United
States, soon ordered the construction of a loo-kilowatt short-
wave transmitter at Pontoise. The French Radio-Colo-
niale, run by the Colonial Ministry, today transmits in
French, English, Arabic, Italian, and Portuguese, all of
which languages are spoken in French territories. Of non-
colonial countries the first to enter the short-wave field is
Czechoslovakia, with its excellent station at Podebrady
(35 kilowatts), which at last accounts was broadcasting in
Czech, Slovak, and for the United States in English. 1
When we give all this activity its right name, we must not
forget that propaganda, in the nationalistic countries of
Europe, is regarded as an entirely praiseworthy endeavor.
Even the regional non-aggression pacts specifically provided
for a certain amount of legitimate propaganda. But much
of this short-wave propaganda is not legitimate by any liberal
1 The foregoing paragraphs are reproduced from the author's 'Radio as a Politi-
cal Instrument,' published in Foreign Affairs for January, 1937.
378 Hello ^America!
standards, and some of it is openly hostile. Russia (which
uses all the leading European languages in its short-wave
transmissions) attacks Germany, and Germany retaliates;
both accuse each other when giving * information 1 about
Spain. The air is filled with recriminations of this sort.
THE VOICE OF THE LEAGUE
The only non-nationalist short-wave transmitters of any
importance, at the present writing, are those of the Vatican,
which is nevertheless ideological, and of Prangins, in Switzer-
land, which for broadcasting purposes is leased to the League
of Nations. This, the only neutral short-wave outlet in
Europe, is available for program traffic to any foreign broad-
caster who wishes to hire it and submit to the rules (due
notice and submission of manuscript if required) ; and it has
been largely used on this basis by the American radio
chains. The League itself has made a practice of broad-
casting bulletins of its own activities in the principal lan-
guages at least once a week for some time. During the
League Assembly of 1937 daily transmissions were broad-
cast for the first time, and parts of the actual speeches were
interpolated, either directly or by the recording method, to
add program value. A broadcasting expert, lent by the
B.B.C., was attached to the staff, and the new broadcasting
budget provides for an increased service. No attempt was
made, however, to broadcast League propaganda, or in any
way to counter the propaganda of anti-League countries; in
other words, international democracy is even less vigorous
than the national democratic governments in defense of its
principles in the air.
Apart from these mild, academic effusions the earth's
ether is suffused with political venom, projected with ever-
increasing efficiency by those countries which profess anti-
democratic creeds. The dictator countries have, roughly,
pre-empted thirty out of the ninety-four effective short-wave
The Speech-Toisoned JLir 370,
frequencies now operated for broadcasting, with an aggre-
gate of 1,033,000 watts out of the available 1,484,000 watts
of short-wave power in the world (1938). In assaying the
opposing forces in this 'war of words/ and comparing the
effectiveness of the authoritarian stentors with the demo-
cratic ones, it must also be remembered that the advantages
of initiative and unscrupulousness are on the side of the
former. It is not likely that any of the Fascist dictatorships
will sign or ratify the 'moral disarmament* pact. Their
mouths as well as their hands are therefore free.
EPILOGUE: TOWARD THE FUTURE
THE RACE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND POLITICS
TWO main currents of thought were reshaping the social
fabric of the western world in the decades preceding the
World War, both issuing from the materialistic philosophy of
the nineteenth century. One found its expression in scientific
discovery and invention which promised great material and
moral benefit to mankind. The other, postulating a new con-
ception of human relationships, resulted in a re-awakening of
the social conscience, increased the class struggle and finally
precipitated international strife. Both of these thought-
forces responded in the last analysis to the deepest needs of
human nature: the mitigation of loneliness and the dispelling
of fear.
The inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries tended to bring people closer together. They centred
on efforts for faster transportation and better communica-
tion. The development of motor traction the automobile,
the aeroplane helped to annihilate space; telegraph, tele-
phone and finally radio brought cities, states and continents
within the hearing of each other. The last remnants of spirit-
ual separation were being removed. The integration of man
on this planet had begun.
Political activity of the corresponding period was bent,
first, on securing the benefit of the new inventions for nations
and for special groups within nations, and to the claiming of
a greater share in these benefits by the masses whom indus-
trial expansion had separated from their tools. Internation-
ally, politics supported the struggle for material supremacy
382. Hello ^America!
by tightening the countries' grip on colonies, on raw materi-
als, on means of scientific and industrial exploitation, on
markets for the new and ampler products of science and
labor at home.
Science, then, was tending to bring men together; politics,
to tear them apart. It is possible to view this era as a race
between the two. If science unhindered by economic
strife could have perfected its devices, could have adapted
the new tools to the works of peace, we might conceivably
not have had the war. But political thought was not alive to
the new implications, either of science or of social change, and
war came. Science was subjected to the purposes of war and
made it more destructive than ever before. Aviation and
radio, the latest gifts of inventive genius, were harnessed to
the war machine; both played their grim part in the struggle;
both were perfected under the stress of military demand;
both received a new and sinister direction through war.
Science helped to decide the war, but war solved no prob-
lems; it created new ones for science to solve.
Radio was still in its infancy when war broke out, but its
beneficent works of peace had already written a glorious page
in history. In 1909 the radio telegraph saved the lives of the
761 passengers of the sinking American steamer Republic,
three years later 703 more from the ill-fated Titanic, and
other remarkable feats of salvage followed in quick suc-
cession. A new type of hero, the marine wireless operator,
was presented to the world. In 1911 the first radio telephone
service was established between Berlin and Vienna; in 1915
the human voice, carried by ether waves, had spanned the
ocean, and the trans-Atlantic radio telephone was in sight.
Meanwhile, in 1910, the De Forest radiophone had relayed
the voices of Caruso and Destinn from the Metropolitan
Opera in New York to listeners outside, portending a great
expansion of artistic enjoyment. In 1913 a year before the
war the first tentative radio transmissions of music were
instituted in Brussels, and broadcasting had virtually begun.
Epilogue: Toward the Future 383
RADIO IN WAR
But the War cut short- these peaceful endeavors; the wire-
less telegraph was used, not for friendly messages but to carry
military intelligence through space; the radio telephone was
used for establishing contact between men-of-war, between
battleship and shore, and for directing the aeroplanes which,
soaring overhead, spread destruction with new and terrifying
force.
Since then radio technique has advanced with gigantic
strides. Industry and business are exploiting it for profit;
governments for offense. Radio, which might have been free
the freest mode of communication yet discovered was
shackled; after the experience of the War no European gov-
ernment could permit its unhampered development; no
country in the world could afford to ignore its sinister
potentialities. Aside from its peaceful functions it is being
used to spread propaganda and hatred through the world.
Radio communications are being perfected and organized to
be capable of terrific efficiency in 'the next war/ The
Powers who in 1914 were isolated from the outer world
because their cable communications were cut, are fortifying
themselves against a similar loading of the dice next time.
'The greater the number of channels of communication under
a country's control, the stronger the position of that nation
in the event of war/ says O. W. Riegel in Mobilizing for
Chaos.* The most important channels of communication
today are in the air.
These ether channels have the advantage, not enjoyed by
other methods of communication, that they cannot be
effectively cut. They can be interfered with over a limited
field, but not consistently, since the unlimited possibility of
changing frequencies would require foreknowledge of every
change. Secrecy, moreover, can be maintained by the tech-
nique of 'scrambling' speech, which, again, is susceptible to
infinite variation. Broadcast messages between governments
1 Yale University Press, 1934.
384 Hello ^America!
and their agents in hostile or neutral countries can, under
modern conditions, be picked up over thousands of miles,
with instruments so minute as to escape detection. A mere
bar of music or a prearranged quotation from literature might
convey important instructions to those in possession of the
code. Thus, no country in the world is safe from the tentacles
of war. The aeroplane will find out the last noncombatant;
the radio will penetrate every defense of neutrality.
The Civil War in Spain has shown in a small way to what
other uses radio may be put in war. Military authorities took
over the radio immediately after hostilities broke out, and
hostile propaganda was emitted from stations on both sides
in a steady stream. General Queipo de Llano, the 'broad-
casting general' of the insurgents, quickly became as im-
portant as the generals at the front. All pre-war arrange-
ments regarding wave lengths were thrown overboard,
regardless of the rights of combatants and neutrals alike.
The defenders of the Alcazar were prevented by Loyalist
'jamming' from receiving messages informing them that
relief was on the way. Madrid broadcast on Seville's wave
length, to drown the rebel propaganda; and the rebels tried
to jam Madrid. Broadcasting to the opposing army by means
of loud-speakers in the trenches has also become a feature of
modern war. Radios were placed in trenches and by means
of a 'loud-speaker offensive' military leaders sought to
spread terror and demoralization in the opposing ranks. The
sinister potentialities of radio defy our imagination, which
has not grasped even its full possibilities in peace.
DEMOCRACY S CHANCE
What of the future? Will science, having lost the first heat
in the race, recoup the balance in the next? It is barely
possible that science may eventually discover some way to
disperse hostile radio waves and screen populations from
verbal attack, just as it aims to screen them against poison
Epilogue: Toward the Future 385
gas. But failing this rather unlikely consummation, it would
seem that the only course would be to meet like with like,
propaganda with propaganda, attack with attack.
The dictatorship states, as we have seen, have already per-
fected their machine. Democracies, at the moment of writ-
ing, have made only a half-hearted effort at retaliation. In
Great Britain the government has taken a hand by giving to
the B.B.C. a mandate to broadcast in foreign languages to the
neutral world. The United States government, afraid of the
charge of authoritarian leanings, is leaving the initiative to
private hands. Private radio, sponsored by industry, is
assumed to be in a better position for this patriotic service
than the government, which is the elected spokesman of the
people's will . . .
In a world divided into two ideological camps what chance
has democracy against dictatorship, projecting its 'ideals'
and its own idealized portrait to the world?
Democracy cannot adopt totalitarian methods or modes of
expression without escaping the charge of totalitarianism
itself. Its only way to counter the verbal batteries is by
words of tolerance and truth. The truth may not always be
pleasant, or complimentary to the country itself, but nothing
else will carry conviction in the long run. Biased news and
partisan argument will not do. Democracy cannot afford
to justify itself by ready-made doctrine; shibboleths and slo-
gans are not enough. It can demonstrate its freedom only by
acting free by admitting differences of opinion, even con-
fessing mistakes. The best it can do is to show that, far from
being ' bankrupt ' it has genuine vitality, a will to progress, a
capacity for adjustment to social needs, for neighborliness
and generosity. Campaigns of propaganda and untruth in
the end are likely to cancel each other out; democracy has
nothing better to show than faith in itself.
But there is more than the spoken word. Propaganda,
political as well as commercial, is made palatable by enter-
tainment, by the 'harmony of sweet sounds/ When those
who listen are to be rewarded, or enticed to listen again,
what do they hear? Beethoven symphonies from Germany,
Verdi operas from Italy, Russian folksongs from Soviet land.
386 Hello ^America!
By drawing on the artistic glories of the past, these countries
lay claim to a civilization superior to any other. Rightly or
wrongly, the word has gone forth that the cultural content
of European radio is higher than our own. Whatever the
treatment meted out to political minorities, the intellectual
minorities are said to be catered for as well as the great mass.
Yet in this the radio of the western democracies can compete
on more than equal terms. Like the Fascist countries they
may draw with equal right on that great heritage which only
the free spirits of a better time could have produced. Like
them they can disseminate the cultural gifts which today are
the legacy of all instead of the privilege of the few.
Owing to economic stress and politico-racial persecution an
overwhelming majority of the world's eminent artists are
gathered together in the democratic countries of the world.
The greatest singers and instrumentalists, the finest orches-
tras, the most gifted writers are here, ready and willing to
devote their talents and their wisdom to the spiritual
recreation and enlightenment of all the people. To release
these intellectual forces for the benefit of the world and in
defense of freedom is, it seems to me, the noblest mission of
radio in a democratic society.
Here, and in radio's ability to integrate the community, to
bridge the gap between high and low, rich and poor, nation
and nation, man and man, lies its incalculable power for
good its greatest potential contribution to the unifying of
mankind. Science has solved many problems of war; will
science, allied with art and the higher manifestations of the
human spirit, ultimately solve the problem of peace?
In the preceding chapters I have attempted to give a pic-
ture of radio in Europe, as it is today. In the earlier sections
of this book I have recounted my own experiences with an
experiment which in a modest way represents a step in the
direction of better international understanding. If a few
more people in the English-speaking world have, by means
of that experiment, become conscious of Europe's problems
and a little more familiar with its personalities and its genius;
if, by the same token a few additional thousands of people in
Epilogue: Toward the Future 387
Europe have become aware of America's problems, as well as
its unlimited possibilities, the effort has been justified.
The exchange thus inaugurated is going on. The American
radio chains are rebroadcasting a certain number of events
from Europe every week; European countries are rebroad-
casting an increasing number of American programs all the
time. If these programs follow a little too closely the drift
of the news, this is to be expected, with the ephemeral appeal
of radio as it is today. But with a more homogeneous organi-
zation of radio programs in America, in the direction of useful
information and genuine enlightenment, the things that are
of lasting value are bound to be forced to the front.
On the other hand, with the gradual perfection of short-
wave technique and the constant increase in the use of short-
wave receivers, the ordinary listener will become increasingly
Europe-conscious and in time world-conscious on his
own account. When that time comes, some way may have
been found by which the treasures of the human mind will
come to us without strident political accompaniment. Then,
too always supposing that there will be peace may
Europe, in the still undreamed-of splendors of the future,
receive from America a complete or at least a representa-
tive projection of American civilization at its best.
THE END
INDEX
Albert I, King, 156-158, 260, 263-264
Alexander, King, 153, 316
Allen, Jay, 228
Allison, Wilmer, 184-186
Aloisi, Baron Pompeo, 334-336
Andorra, 300-301, 348
Angell, Sir Norman, 24, 25
Arlen, Michael, 45
Arnold, Ernst, 284
Astor, Lady, 237
Atholl, Duchess of, 246
Attlee, Major, 29-30
Baden-Powell, Lord, 161
Baldwin, Stanley, 37, 97-99, 144, 235,
240-243
Barrie, Sir James, 38
Bartlett, Vernon, 228-229
Bate, Fred, 253
Baum, Vicki, 48-49
Bayan, Malaku, 218
Beaverbrook, Lord, 237, 240
Bedloes Island, 309-314
Bellows, Henry A., 17
Benes, Eduard, 104, 178
Beresford, J., 189
Bernard, Prince, 159
Beveridge, Sir William, 31
Bezzi-Scala, Countess Maria Cristina, 67
Bingham, Ambassador Robert Worth, 94
Binyon, Laurence, 35, 165
Blake, George, 262-263
Blancart, Commandant, 252
Blum, Leon, no, 332-333
Blunt, Dr. Frank, 234
Bolitho, Hector, 166
Boris, King, 154
Borotra, 184-186
Boston, Lincolnshire, 278
Boylan, Mrs., 325
Bradford, Bishop of, 234
Braillard, Raymond, 343, 344
Bredow, Dr. Hans von, 344, 351-352
Briand, Aristide, 7, 10, 104, 107-108
Bridie, James, 58, 60
Britain, Sir Edgar, 261
British Broadcasting Company, 13-17,
18,348,^359
Broadcasting House, 18
Briining, 84, 115-116, 121
Bullitt, 310-314
Burrows, A. E., 161 n., 370
Canterbury, Archbishop of, 144, 246
Carnegie, Andrew, 277
Carol, King, 154, 254-259
Carpendale, Sir Charles, 347
Casals, Pablo, 193
Cecil, Viscount of Chelwood, 19-22, 24,
178
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 42-45, 51, 62
Chimay, Prince Caramay de, 261
Christian X, King, 155, 156, 260
Churchill, Winston, 235, 237, 240
Ciano, Count, 217, 293
Clemenceau, Georges, 107
Clinton-Baddeley's, 276
Coates, Albert, 54
Colin, Dr., 159
Columbia Broadcasting Company, repre-
sentatives of, 4; scoop Prince of Wales,
13-14; British affiliation, 16
Cook, Arthur, 167
Cosgrave, William, 99, 248-249
Coward, Noel, 45
Cracow, 288-289
Crozier, Frank Percy, 28
Curtius, Doctor, 69, 116
39
Index
Czeija, Director-Gen., 204
Dawes, Gen. Charles H., 91
Day, Clarence, 64
Detection Club, 44
Dickens, Charles, 42-43, 276
Disarmament Conference, 20
Dollfuss, Engelbert, 194-206
Doumergue, Gaston, 89-91, in, 331
Drinkwater, John, 38, 240
Dunfermline, 277
Dunmow Flitch trial, 271
Earhart, Amelia, 180-184
Eastman, Max, 137
Economic Conference, 30
Eden, Anthony, 106, 107
Edward VIII, 7, 98-99, 101, 160-174,
231-246; see also Wales, Prince of
Einstein, Professor Albert, 55
Eliot, T. S., 38
Elisabeth, Queen, 343
Elliott, Gertrude, 329
Empress of Britain, 13
Epp, Von, 82
Ferric", 343
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 48
Fey, Major, 194-195, 201-202, 205
Fischer, Betty, 284
Flandin, Pierre-^tienne, 107-109
Floriot, Mile., 305
Forbes-Robertson, Sir Johnston, 328-330
Franco, Gen., 224, 226, 229
Frank, Dr., 193
Frauenfeld, 204
Fuller, Hon. Hector, 252
Furtwangler, 193
Galsworthy, John, 45
Gandhi, Mahatma, 123-134
Gatty, Harold, 180
George, David Lloyd, 91
George V, King, opening Naval Confer-
ence, 6, 12; Gandhi, 125; personality
of, 144-152; broadcasts, 145-152;
death, 173; also, 231, 270, 279, 299
George VI, King, 101, 152-153, 279-281
Gianfranceschi, Father, 68, 74-78
Gibbons, Floyd, 217-218, 226
Giesecke, Dr., 201
Goebbels, Dr. Josef, 208, 352-353
Goldschmidt, Robert, 343
Goring, Hermann, 87, 122
Gould, 141
Grandi, Dino, 7, 107, 178
Graves, Robert, 37
Grey, Viscount of Fallodon, 22-24
Grinzing, 285-286
Gunther, John, 202-205
Gustaf V, 155
Haakon V, 155
Haba, Karel, 325
Habicht, 200-201, 204
Hadamowsky, Eugen, 352
Halifax, Lord, 243
Hall, Raymond, 290
Hammar, Ernst, 218, 221
Hanfstaengl, Ernst, 'Putzi,' 84-87
Hard, William, 4, 6, 8, 31
Harding, Warren G., 191
Hawariat, Tacle, 334-335
Hearst, Wm. Randolph, 65, 69, 70, 223
Heinzen, Ralph, 250
Henderson, Arthur, 178
Henry, Bill, 190
Herriot, lidouard, 105-106, 108
Hindenburg, Col. Oskar von, 114
Hindenburg, Gen. Paul von, 82, 84, 113-
117, 121, 122
Hitler, Adolf, and Mussolini, 83; first
broadcast, 84-89; week-end surprise,
106; rise of, 115, 117, 121, 122, 192, 193;
Olympic Games, 188, 189; Austria,
204; Saar victory, 211, 215; also, 192,
193
Hoare, Sir Samuel, 124, 127-128, 334
Hohenzollern, Kaiser Wilhelm, 117-122
Holland, 294-296
Hoover, Pres. Herbert, 59, 250, 251
Horder, Lord, 96
Housman, Laurence, 128
Huberman, 193
Husing, Ted, 188
Huxley, Aldous, 45
Hymans, M. Paul, 179
International Broadcasting Union, 345-
349
Israels, Josef, 221, 222
Joan of Arc, 60, 6 1
Jordan, Max, 253-261, 290, 338-339
Index
391
Jordan, Phillip, 228, 239
Juliana, Princess, 159
Kaltenborn, H. V., 224-225, 281-282
Keats, 275
Keynes, J. Maynard, 31
Keys, ceremony of, 271
Kingsley Hall, 126-134
Kipling, Rudyard, 37-38, 98
Knox, Geoffrey, 209-210
Lansbury, George, 24, 30, 169
Laski, Prof. Harold, 239
Laval, Jos6, 249
Laval, Pierre, 136, 249-253
Lebrun, Albert, 310, 312-314
Lenin, Nikolay, 137
Leopold III, 157, 158
Lester, Doris, 126
Lester, Muriel, 126, 129, 132
Liberty, statue of, 309-314
Liechtenstein, 298-299, 348
Lindbergh, Charles A., 180
Litvinoff, 107
Llano, Gen. Queipo de, 227, 384
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 26-28
London, Bishop of, 9
Lothian, Lord, 31
Lovelock, Jim, 1 89
Lubinsky, see Trotsky
Ludendorff, Gen., 23, 122
Lupescu, Madame, 257, 258
Luxemburg, 297-298, 361
MacDonald, Ramsay, Naval Conference,
5> 7> \> J 7 8 ; statesmanship, 93-97;
Gandhi, 134; also, 101, 108, 134, 151
Mais, S. P. B., 1 68
Makatsuki, 7
Malvya, Pandit, 129
Marconi Company, 348
Marconi, Senator, 4 n., 67-68, 70, 74, 76,
78
Marie, Queen, 257, 258
Marken, Island of, 295
Mary, Queen, 145, 231, 24!
Masaryk, Jan, 102-103
Masaryk, Pres. Thomas Garrigue, 102-
104, 108, 254
Masefield, John, 34-36
Matsudaira, 7
Matthieu, Gaston, 77
Mayo, Katherine, 127
McLean, Robinson, 218-221
Medica, Jack, 1 89
Meissner, Dr., 114
Melba, 344
Mellon, Andrew, 182
Menen, Empress, 216
Miklas, Wilhelm, 69
Milton, John, 275-276
Monte Carlo, 293-294
Montefinale, Commendatore Gino, 368
Montmartre, 304-309
Montserrat, monastery of, 319-320
Mowrer, Sir Samuel, 334, 335
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 286-288
Murray, Ralph, 212
Mussolini, Benito, first broadcast, 65, 88;
Lateran Treaty, 66; interview with,
80-83; Dollfuss, 197; Ethiopia, 216,
223; also, 136, 154, 204, 299
Mutual Broadcasting Co., 236
Naida, Sarojini, 129
National Broadcasting Company, repre-
sentatives of, 4; policy, 15-17
Naval Conference, London 1930, 3; 6-9;
20
Newton, Isaac, 55
Nicolson, Harold, 33
Northcliffe, Lord, 4
O'Brien, Honorable Beatrice, 67
Ogilvie, 256, 258
Owens, Jesse, 188
Paley, William S., 18, 32, 79
Papen, Franz von, 84, 116-117, 121
Patel, Vithalbhai, 124
Patou, Jean, 303-304
Peace Pledge Movement, 28-29
Philip, Percy, 331-332
Picard, Prof., 260
Pickwick, 276
Pilsudski, Marshal, 289
Pius XI, Pope, 66-79
Planetta, Otto, 206
Polignac, Marquis de, 260
Pompeii, 290-291
Pons, Lily, 261
Ponsonby, Lord, 24, 30, 239
Post, Wiley, 1 80
Preteceille, Ogier, 226
Index
Priestley, J. B., 46-47, 49, 240
Putzi, see Hanfstaengl, Ernst
Quakers, 128
Queen Mary, 261-263
Rambert, M. Maurice, 347
Reinhardt, Max, 86, 286, 287
Reith, Sir John, 17-19, 244
Remembrance, Festival of, 165-166
Rhondda, Lady, 51
Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 107, 109
Rickenbacker, Capt., 261
Rickett, F. W., 333-334
Riegel, O. W., 383
Rintelen, Dr., 205
Ripon, 276-277
Roosevelt, Claes, 296
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, Economic
Conference, 30, 31-32; Inter-American
Conference, 234; Bedloes Island broad-
cast, 310, 312-314; also, 162, 296
Roosevelt, Theodore, 24
Rocque, Col. de la, 89, 331
Rothermere, Lord, 237, 240
Ruggles, Carl, 337-338
Runciman, 30
Russell, George, 56
St. James's Palace, 9-10
Salzburg, 286-288
Samuel, Sir Herbert, 29
San Marino, 299-300
Schacht, Dr., 200-201
Schleicher, Gen. von, 84, 114, 117, 121
Schnabel, 193
Schuschnigg, Frau von, 284
Seipel, Monsignor, 198
Selassie, Emperor Haile, 218-224, 333
Seville, Holy Week in, 318
Shakespeare, William, 275
Shaw, George Bernard, 9, 12, 44, 49, 50-
64, 88, 360
Sheppard, Dick, 24-25, 28-29
Sheppard, Very Rev. Hugh Richard,
D.D., see Sheppard, Dick
Shrammel Quartet, 284
Siena, 291
Simpson, Mrs. Wallis Warfield, 10, 172-
174, 231-246
Slade, Madeline, 125, 129
Snagge, John, 262
Snowden, Lord, 30, 32
Sobieski, John, 288-289
Sokolnikoff, 57-58
Sortavala, 317
Southwood, L. F., 189
Sovrani, Giovanni, 299
Stalin, Joseph, 88, 135, 143
Stamp, Sir Josiah, 31
Stauning, Thorvald, 140-141
Steed, H. Wickham, 9
Steele, John, 249
Stephens, Helen, 189
Stewart, Malcolm, 234
Stimson, Henry L., 5, 9, 178
Strabolgi, Lord, 241
Strauss, Richard, 286-287
Svinhufvud, Prof., 155
Swing, Raymond Gram, 33, 181, 192
Talbot, Rev. Neville, 165
Tardieu, Andre, 7, 89, in, 178, 253
Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 275
Titulescu, Nicolai, 316
Toscanini, Arturo, 287-288, 360
Trotsky, Leon, 123, 135-143
Tunis, John R., 185
Twain, Mark, 56
Valera, Eamon de, 99-102, 249
Van Loon, Hendrik, 295
Vannoux, Pere, 306-307
Van Zeeland, Paul, 107, 109
Vatican, broadcasting station, 67, 75-79
Venice, 291-293
Vesuvius, 338-339
Victor Emanuel, King, 154, 223
Vienna, 283-285
Vivian, Harold, 6
Voigt, Frederick, 212
Wales, Prince of, 11-14, I 4^~ I 47; see
Edward VIII
Walker, Mayor Jimmie, 252
Wallace, Edgar, 47-48
Walpole, Hugh, 47
Wambaugh, Sarah, 209, 212
Washington, George, 22, 23, 103-104
Washington, Lawrence, 278
Wedgwood, Col., 235, 240
Wells, H. G., 38-42
Whalen, Hon. Grover, 261
Wheeler-Bennett, John, 84
Index
393
Whi taker, John T., 217-218
Wichart, Pepi, 284
Wiegand, Karl von, 69
Wile, Frederick William, 4, 6, 8, 9, 178,
J 79 2 53
Wilhelmina, Queen, 158-159
Wilkinson, Ellen, 233, 242
Williams, A. F., 189
Wilson, Woodrow, 119, 1 80
Wordsworth, William, 273-275
World Disarmament Conference, 19, 178
Wrench, Sir Evelyn, 31
Yen, Dr. W. W., 179
York, Duke of, 241; see George VI
Ziffern, Lester, 228
Zweig, Stefan, 287
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