Transcript
The Trial on the Radio
July 1925
July 1925
Radio announcer …hogs steady, cattle slow, lambs about steady…
July 1925, a farm outside Muncie, Indiana. The radio is picking up a courtroom in Tennessee.
Court officer reading the charge …to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible,
Court officer reading the charge and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.
A Chicago station, WGN, was broadcasting the trial live. No American trial had been on the radio before.
Dayton had about 1,800 people. That July it had more than two hundred reporters. The defendant was John Scopes, a 24-year-old science teacher and football coach.
The trial began as a sales pitch. The ACLU offered to pay for a test of the law, and Dayton's businessmen planned one at Robinson's drugstore. Scopes agreed to be the defendant. He couldn't remember whether he'd ever taught evolution.
Ten years earlier, a fight in a small-town Tennessee courtroom would have stayed in Tennessee. Now the whole country could listen at once.
New machines were putting the same cars, movies, songs and voices in front of every American. They also let Americans hear how differently they lived, and what they believed.
One country, one audience. So whose country was it going to be?
The Line
1908–1914
Highland Park, Michigan, 1914. Henry Ford had been building his Model T since 1908. Simple, tough, and high off the ground for bad country roads.
Henry Ford I will build a motor car for the great multitude.
At first, teams of men built each car where it stood.
Then Ford's engineers turned that around. The car would move. The men would stay put.
Henry Ford The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut;
Henry Ford the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it.
A chassis had taken about twelve and a half hours of work. On the moving line it took about an hour and a half.
Ford passed the savings on. A Model T cost $850 in 1908 and as little as $260 by 1925. He built fifteen million.
The work was fast, and it never changed. Workers quit in droves.
A Highland Park worker's wife The chain system you have is a slave driver! My God!, Mr. Ford.
A Highland Park worker's wife My husband has come home & thrown himself down & won't eat his supper—so done out!
Ford's answer, in January 1914, was the five-dollar day, about double the going wage. Thousands lined up in the snow.
A Highland Park worker's wife That $5 a day is a blessing—a bigger one than you know but oh they earn it.
To get the full five dollars, workers had to live as Ford approved. Company investigators checked their homes. Immigrants who finished Ford's English school walked into a giant "melting pot" and came out in American suits.
Any Color
1914–1929
Henry Ford Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.
General Motors sold the opposite: colors, a new model every year, and a car for every budget. And you didn’t have to pay all at once.
By the late 1920s, Americans bought about two of every three new cars on the installment plan. Hold on to that.
In 1927 Chevrolet outsold Ford. After nearly nineteen years, Ford stopped making the Model T.
City homes got electric power, and then things to plug in: washing machines, vacuum cleaners, irons, refrigerators.
By 1930 about two-thirds of American homes had electricity. On farms, about one in ten.
Cars remade the map: highways, gas stations, tourist camps, suburbs. In Muncie, a Sunday-school teacher asked what temptation Jesus never faced. A boy answered, “Speed!”
Advertising became big business. One of its stars, Bruce Barton, wrote a best-seller about Jesus.
Bruce Barton He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.
Not everyone shared the boom. Farmers had borrowed to expand during the war. When crop prices fell, the debts stayed.
The catalog had a page of radios.
One Audience
1920–1927
In 1920 radio was a hobby for boys with headphones and a coil of wire.
That November, Pittsburgh’s KDKA read the presidential election returns into the air. Within two years there were hundreds of stations, and listeners wanted something to hear.
Radio made one audience out of a continent, all hearing the same game. Radio and records carried Nashville fiddles and the blues to people who had never heard them.
Record companies found two new markets: blues for Black buyers, fiddle bands for rural whites.
The movies did the same for faces. By 1929 Americans bought some 80 million tickets a week.
Rudolph Valentino, an immigrant from Italy, became the screen’s great lover. Anna May Wong, born in Los Angeles, starred at seventeen, then spent years cast as villains and victims.
In 1927 the movies began to talk.
Al Jolson Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!
Later in the film Jolson sang in blackface, a minstrel habit the movies carried to millions.
Radio and newsreels made national heroes: Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Gertrude Ederle, Charles Lindbergh.
Now everyone could hear everyone, including the people they disagreed with.
The City Decade
1920–1926
The 1920 census found something new. For the first time, most Americans lived in cities and towns. It counted any place with 2,500 people as urban. Dayton, Tennessee, didn't make the cut.
Cities meant jobs. Young women went to work as typists, clerks, telephone operators and shop girls. Most were expected to quit when they married.
Nearly half a million Mexicans came north legally in the 1920s, to farms, railroads and steel mills.
Black Southerners kept heading north. The Great Migration didn't stop when the war did.
Langston Hughes Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
By 1930 more than 160,000 Black New Yorkers lived in Harlem. Its writers, artists and musicians called themselves the New Negro. Historians call the movement the Harlem Renaissance.
Zora Neale Hurston came to Harlem from Eatonville, Florida, a town Black residents ran themselves.
Zora Neale Hurston But I am not tragically colored.
Marcus Garvey, from Jamaica, led the biggest Black mass movement of its day: race pride, Black-owned business, a return to Africa. Convicted of mail fraud in 1923, he entered prison in 1925 and was deported in 1927.
Langston Hughes The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm, Honey.
Langston Hughes The gods are laughing at us.
Langston Hughes The broken heart of love, the weary, weary heart of pain,
Langston Hughes Overtones, undertones,
Langston Hughes To the rumble of street cars,
Langston Hughes To the swish of rain.
Langston Hughes Lenox Avenue, Honey. Midnight,
Langston Hughes And the gods are laughing at us.
Up the avenue, at the Cotton Club, Black musicians played for white-only audiences. Harlem's own people couldn't buy a ticket.
Whose Country Is This?
1919–1927
Calvin Coolidge, soon to be vice president, asked it in a 1921 magazine article.
Calvin Coolidge Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.
He wrote in a frightened time: strikes, bombs blamed on anarchists, a Red Scare. More than a million immigrants arrived between 1919 and 1921.
Historians call this context. It explains what came next. It doesn’t excuse it.
In 1924 Congress gave each nationality a quota, pegged to the census of 1890.
That census came before most Italians, Poles and Jews arrived. Italy’s quota fell to under 4,000 a year.
The act barred anyone “ineligible to citizenship.” Naturalization law had a racial test. Nearly every Asian failed it.
The Supreme Court ruled a Japanese immigrant wasn’t white, because he wasn’t Caucasian. Three months later it ruled an Indian immigrant, though Caucasian, wasn’t white either.
Eugenics, then a respected science, backed the quotas.
Harry Laughlin advised Congress on immigration. He also wrote a model law for sterilizing people the state judged unfit.
Virginia passed such a law in 1924. Its test case was a young woman named Carrie Buck.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The Court upheld it, eight to one. Carrie Buck’s daughter, Vivian, made her school’s honor roll in 1931.
Massachusetts convicted two Italian anarchists of a payroll robbery and murder. Many around the world believed they were tried as foreigners and radicals.
I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.
August 23, 1927 Charlestown State Prison, Massachusetts
Both men were executed in August 1927. Historians still argue about their guilt. Few defend their trial.
The Invisible Empire
1915–1930
In 1915 the blockbuster The Birth of a Nation made heroes of the Reconstruction Klan. The NAACP picketed it. Crowds packed the theaters anyway.
That Thanksgiving night, William Simmons revived the Klan on Stone Mountain, Georgia. The movie helped him find recruits.
In 1920 Simmons hired two publicists. They sold memberships like insurance: ten dollars each, and the salesman kept four.
By 1924 the Klan had millions of members. It was as strong in the Midwest as in the South. Indiana was a stronghold.
It held picnics and parades, and promised to clean up towns. Its enemies were Black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants.
Behind the picnics came threats, whippings and killings. Crosses burned in front yards at night.
Henry Ford's own weekly paper ran years of lies about Jews. He apologized in 1927, after a lawsuit.
In August 1925 about 30,000 Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, faces uncovered.
The Sunday papers put it on the front page.
That November a jury convicted Indiana's Klan leader, D. C. Stephenson, of murdering Madge Oberholtzer. Members quit by the hundreds of thousands.
By 1930 the Klan was down to about 30,000 members.
Wet and Dry
1920–1928
Prohibition began in January 1920. Drinking fell, especially at first. Then the speakeasies opened.
Two federal agents, Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, made thousands of arrests in disguise. The Bureau let them go in 1925.
His memoir is dedicated: To the 4,932 persons I arrested, hoping they bear me no grudge for having done my duty.
The profits went to gangs. In Chicago, Al Capone's outfit made millions from beer and whiskey, and paid police to look away.
It split the country: dry churches and small towns against wet cities full of immigrants. Supporters pointed to fewer deaths from drink. Opponents pointed to the gangsters.
Young women bobbed their hair, wore skirts to the knee, smoked and drove. Magazines called them flappers. Most women never were one.
Margaret Sanger campaigned for birth control, which the law still treated as obscene.
Alice Paul, who led the suffragists' hardest campaign, now wanted this in the Constitution: Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.
Many women reformers fought it. They feared it would erase laws that protected women workers. Paul's side replied that those laws also kept women out of better-paying jobs.
In Chicago, Henry Gerber founded the first documented gay rights group in the country, in 1924. Months later police arrested him. Charges were dropped, but the post office fired him.
The Courthouse Lawn
July 10–26, 1925
Back to Dayton.
For the prosecution: William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democrats' nominee for president and the country's leading fundamentalist. He argued that Tennessee's voters had the right to decide what their schools taught.
Clarence Darrow If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools…
Tennessee's approved textbook ranked the races, and urged keeping 'degenerate' families from having children.
The judge barred the defense's scientists. On July 20, with the courtroom packed, he moved court outside.
Judge John T. Raulston I am afraid of the building.
On the lawn, the defense called Bryan himself to the stand.
William Jennings Bryan I want the Christian world to know that any atheist, agnostic, or unbeliever, can question me any time as to my belief in God, and I will answer him.
The next morning, the judge struck Bryan's testimony from the record. The jury convicted Scopes in nine minutes. Tennessee's supreme court later threw out his $100 fine on a technicality. The law itself stood until 1967.
A Canadian cartoonist drew Bryan and Darrow as mosquitoes trying to cut down two great oaks, Christianity and science. Neither oak fell.
City reporters called the townspeople 'yokels.' The townspeople read the papers too.
Five days after the verdict, Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton.
Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.
William Jennings Bryan Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.
He had written it for a closing speech he never got to give.
Election Night
November 6, 1928
Radio announcer Indiana for Hoover. Massachusetts for Smith. Tennessee for Hoover.
November 1928. The same parlor, and a new radio, bought on time.
The Democrats had nominated Al Smith of New York: Catholic, wet, and the grandson of immigrants.
He lost badly. Anti-Catholic feeling helped turn five Southern states Republican.
But taken together, the twelve biggest cities went for Smith. Many were immigrants' children, and they were turning out in new numbers.
In 1926 a Lebanese-born poet wrote to young Syrian Americans:
Kahlil Gibran I believe that you can say to the founders of this great nation,
Kahlil Gibran Here I am, a youth, a young tree whose roots were plucked from the hills of Lebanon, yet I am deeply rooted here, and I would be fruitful.
The machines made Americans one audience. They never made them one opinion. Within a year the boom would break. The payments on that radio came due anyway.