September 2011 marks the 87th anniversary of a landmark military radio broadcast. Western Electric recorded the broadcast from the telephone lines, which is now one of the oldest existing original radio broadcast recordings in history. I write “original” because a number of famous radio recordings that come from an earlier date (the KDKA 1920 presidential election returns comes to mind) actually were recreations. The KDKA 1920 election returns recording was recreated in 1936 and 1950.
On 12 September 1924, the US military mobilized for a National Defense Test Day. The entire concept alarmed the nations and militaries of Europe, but the military mobilized mostly was a publicity gimmick, a male bonding ritual, and a stunt in honor of General of the Army John Pershing, who retired from the Army the next day.
The culminating event of the Test Day was a live coast-to-coast radio broadcast, starting at 8:00 EST. One old time radio history website described the broadcast and the surviving recording this way:
“9/12/24-- National Defense Test Day Broadcast. WEAF-WCAP network of eighteen stations. Linecheck recorded by Western Electric. A ninety-minute program aired to demonstrate how radio could respond to national emergencies thru the interconnection of stations in various cities. Speeches by Secretary of War Weeks, General Pershing, General Saltzman of the Signal Corps, and General J. F. Carty of AT&T. This broadcast marked the first major demonstration of multiple remote cut-ins on a single program, with engineers in fourteen cities responding on cue, followed by two-way conversations between General Pershing and generals representing each of the Army Corps areas. Most of the program was recorded and pressings of the discs were presented to General Pershing. Sets of the discs are also held by the Library Of Congress and the National Archives. Audio quality of the recording is excellent, but two of the sides recorded were damaged during processing and do not survive.”
Let me clarify some points made in this summary. The broadcast originated from the radio station in Washington D.C. The military selected the other radio stations in this ad hoc network for maximum nation-wide radio coverage. Their selection of stations performed successfully, though the whole intermountain west had limited coverage from one station in Denver – two if you count the station in Omaha. California’s coverage was limited to one station in Oakland. The military could have improved Coverage in The West by adding KSL and KNX, but apparently the generals did not care that much about The West. They provided pretty thorough coverage in The East though.
THE BROADCAST
The recording features numerous joys for old radio enthusiasts. For starters, at the very beginning someone taps on the microphone (a big ancient canister models from the sound of the reverb) like it was amateur night in Weehawken. The voices sound as if they were recorded in a long metal tunnel, which was typical of old radio’s sound. The announcer lists every last radio station in the network, something that soon became impractical to do when NBC and CBS eventually created their national networks in 1926 and 1928. This is the first radio recording of multiple remote cut-ins on a single program; it may have been the very first coast-to-coast multiple radio station broadcast with remote cut-ins. It featured a roll call of radio broadcast telephone operators starting in Washington and sounding off in a line that stretched in less than a minute to Oakland. This is the first radio recording that featured a participant in Salt Lake City – and villages in Wyoming and Nevada for that matter.
Nowadays only listeners with patience can sit through the whole recording. It has no commercials, being a federal broadcast. It has no orchestra or band music. It features a cabinet secretary and a bunch of generals speaking about military strategy and radio technological details – neither of which will leave the audience laughing. However, in 1924 the broadcast must have been revelation to small town and rural radio owners.
General Pershing’s address still feels like revelation, considering how frank he is about his experience in World War I and coordinating the American mobilization in 1917-1918 for the Great War in Europe. He admitted publicly that the military made mistakes in the mobilization. It is true: the American mobilization made many mistakes and missteps, took too much time, too much money, crowded too many boys in too few training camps. It will be darned interesting to see if any modern general will someday make the same sorts of admissions in public about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pershing also talked live over the radio with four generals who oversaw Defense Test Day activities in various regions. He talked first with a general headquartered in New York, then a general in Chicago, then a general in Omaha, and then a general in Oakland. The yokels sat before their radios listening in enraptured silence.
Pershing’s talk with his general in New York is one of the few humorous highlights of the broadcast. The New York general seems to have a few too many martinis to celebrate Test Day’s conclusion or to steady his nerves for the nation-wide radio hook up. At one point, he sings (off key yet) a few lines of an old barracks song, much to Pershing’s horror.
The broadcast also gave the rural radio audience a sense of the scale of America. Pershing in Washington, which was in nighttime, asked the general in Oakland about the sunset, which had just occurred and was then lingering in golden twilight.
The generals’ main broadcast goal consisted in teaching citizens how the government could use radio to instantaneously broadcast information to the entire nation during a crisis using a radio network, ideally a radio network with telephone lines and/or shortwave. It was also clear that the military could use radio for its instantaneous private communications as well. That night saw an altogether prophetic broadcast, maybe THE most prophetic radio broadcast ever done.
QUICK COMMUNICATION
Consider the old days.
It took days for telegraph reporters to get the news of the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to the rest of the northeast USA, even longer out to the west coast.
In contrast, 17 years after the Test Day broadcast, the Japanese Air Force followed a commercial radio station frequency into the Island of Oahu and bombed the US military installations on the island. Within minutes, the commercial radio stations of Oahu were broadcasted information, warning and instructions to the residents. Interestingly enough, the radio news networks did not get wind of the situation for more than two hours. The attack started at noon, eastern time, but John Daly did not read the first live CBS radio report until 2:30 p.m. ET. If KNX in Los Angeles or KCBS in San Francisco had received reports from Honolulu earlier than that, the whole CBS network could have reported the attack considerably sooner.
In contrast, 19 years after the test day broadcast, the allied command in England signaled NBC Radio a warning about the impending D-Day Invasion (a Morris code V repeated three times), NBC warned its executives and radio stations to activate (a special four note NBC chimes), and within minutes, the entire continental USA got the news that the invasion had started.
When President Lincoln was assassinated it took several hours, sometimes a couple of days for the telegraphs and newspapers to disseminate the bad news.
In contrast, consider when President Roosevelt died 20 year after the test day broadcast. Roosevelt died at 3:45 p.m. Central Time in Warm Springs Georgia. Roosevelt’s administration did not release the new for nearly an hour. The first newscaster to broadcast a news bulletin was John Daly on CBS, who interrupted a program at 5:40 p.m. ET (4:40 p.m. CT) with the first report. Never the less the whole nation knew about the death in less than an hour after it occurred, though the nation could have learned quicker if the administration had been willing.
President Kennedy was assassinated nearly 40 years after the Test Day broadcast. Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy at 12:30 p.m. CT, and within 4-10 minutes, radio and TV news reporters broadcast bulletins locally in Dallas and then nation-wide. Walter Cronkite of CBS TV News broadcast its first TV network bulletin ten minutes after the shooting; Alan Jackson of CBS Radio News broadcast its first radio network bulletin shortly thereafter. In the first hour, as evidenced by a recording made by the White House, both an Air Force jet-liner transporting half of the President’s cabinet to Japan and the officials in the White House situation room used the private news services to gather their information. The administration made the official announcement of the death of the president 35 minutes after he died in the Parkland Hospital emergency room.
In October 1958, NBC broadcast live to the entire nation the ceremonies surrounding the grand opening of its new broadcast facilities in Washington D.C. It broadcasted part of that ceremony in color on live TV; the videotape record of that broadcast is the oldest surviving color videotape still in existence. President Eisenhower attended the broadcast and spoke – it was the first time he appeared on a color TV broadcast from Washington. He said that government should attach itself to the very best communications available to keep the citizens alert and informed. Eisenhower’s remarks seem remarkably candid today, considering how many political leaders do not want to keep the citizens in any sort of loop.
On 11 September 2001, at 8:42 ET, an airliner crashed into the almost top floors of the north World Trade Center Tower. The various networks started reporting the news within 1 - 4 minutes. All of them reported and showed the second airliner crashing into the south World Trade Center on live TV. This event broadcast illustrated graphically that TV viewers not only could get instantaneous information all over the world, but that it was also possible from them to get mass induced instantaneous stress disorders from watching disaster. In the 21st Century, one does not have to live through disaster to feel as if one has lived through disaster.
President Bush the Second was visiting a school in Florida at the time of the attacks. The military and the secret service quickly evacuated him and his entourage to Air Force One. The military decided not to fly it directly back to Washington. Instead it took the better part of the day to lolly-gag its way back via Louisiana and Omaha. This was done out of fear that the Washington air space was not secure of lurking terrorists. The president did not make any sort of information speech to the nation until later in the evening, but he could have given the public up to the minute information if he wanted to. He did not.
Thus, the National Defense Test Day broadcast was indeed prophetic about how quickly governments could get important information to the citizens in times of crisis. When it wanted to.
INSTANT MISCOMMUNICATION
What the September 1924 Test Day broadcast did not tell us was how much hatred, propaganda, lying, and out right miscommunication radio and TV networks can broadcast quickly.
For example:
In October 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast a live dramatic adaption of H G Wells’ old science fiction novel “The World of The Worlds.” Welles and his writers gussied up the old book by setting it in modern times and presenting the narrative as if it were a series of radio news bulletins and live news broadcasts. The Mercury Theater did not have a big audience that night (it was opposite Edgar Bergen’s megahit Sunday night comedy-variety program), but a considerable percentage of those who listened to the broadcast thought it was really describing a real invasion of Earth by Martians.
The day before D-Day’s Normandy Invasion in June 1944, news broadcaster Robert Trout at CBS was involved in a miscommunication that resulted in a bulletin announcing that the Normandy Invasion had started when it was in the preparation stage.
I once heard as part of an Old Time Radio program recording, a news bulletin that announced that the USA had dropped an atomic bomb on a Japanese city other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In September 1945, the day before the Japanese surrendered, a couple of networks did bulletins announcing the surrender of Japan – prematurely.
On 8 July 1947, radio stations in New Mexico and some network news broadcasts reported that an unidentified flying object had crashed in the plains near Roswell, New Mexico.
When Kennedy was shot, some reported that a secret service agent had also been killed in the shooting. I suspect they got the details of the Officer Tippetts shooting confused. The networks all reported early on accounts of gun fire coming from the grassy knoll as well.
In 1992, when President Bush the First vomited on the prime minister of Japan at an official state dinner, CNN a few hours later got a report and came very close to announcing on live TV that President Bush had died.
THE LEARNING CURVE
The Defense Test Day radio broadcast demonstrated the future of broadcasting to its listeners that night, and made a number of prophecies that came true very quickly. The generals failed to tell us one important thing about radio and television networks – the technology is morality neutral. It is good or bad depending on the morality of those who control the cameras and microphones.
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