It feels fitting, in the country’s semiquincentennial, to reflect on the ways in which we have mythologized ourselves over the past 250 years.
As you might imagine, the Golden Age of Radio, in which the medium was in lock-step with the three major commercial networks and their sponsors, produced a glut of blindly patriotic programming. Most of it was propagandist. There was no radio documentary form in this era, so very little framework for audio as something that questioned the narrative.
Some works directly reflected current events. Time magazine’s intriguing combination of promotion and radio drama, The March of Time, translated one or two of that week’s print stories into short radio plays. This hybrid form provided a sort “slice of life” approach to American life.
(Fast forward to the New York Times podcast The Daily, which unpacks one of the paper’s print articles each day.)
Other programs celebrated the idea of America as an ideal in dramatic form. In 1938, with the Nazis advancing in Europe, radio producer Himan Brown created a series called Main Street U.S.A. that both celebrated American values and warned of how easy it would be to lose the privilege our much-vaunted freedom allowed. When America entered the war, the government approached Brown about re-working the series to highlight all the ways in which ordinary people could help the war effort through their own initiatives. This new version was called Green Valley U.S.A. As Brown recalled it in an oral history interview conducted by the Directors’ Guild of America, “It was a town in which when we needed the doctor, we had the doctor, the postmaster, the general store, the cab drivers, the hotels. It was a total community of several hundred people whom I could draw on to do a government directive on writing to your boy in the army, on conserving fuel, creating a victory garden, on the need for nurses, or for general people in the army, and so on.
Americans All, Immigrants All, was produced in 1938 and 1939 by the U.S. Office of Education. Its 26 episodes celebrated diversity and the country’s immigrant population as cornerstones of what’s meant by democracy, though Inevitably, some of its language is dated, and its tone sententious, and it does nothing to address issues of racism or, ironically, anti-immigration laws. We can measure its successes and shortcomings ourselves as is now featured on Spotify as well as in archival collections.
Thirty years later, Brown, himself the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, created a similar series for Voice of America, also called Americans All, and narrated by Charlton Heston. (Heston, a Hollywood icon, has a problematic history himself. He was at one time a supporter of civil rights who marched on Washington and picketed segregated restaurants, but became, in his later years, a conservative Republican and president of the National Rifle Association).
So how should American media—especially, in this context, works for broadcast and podcast—celebrate our 250th? By recognizing that the country is an experiment that must be tested again and again.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, one of the casualties of the Trump administration, was established in 1967. The original intention was to create an instrument through which Congress could fund educational television, but a last-minute revolt by a handful of Midwestern radio stations resulted in the inclusion of radio in the bill, finally titled the Public Broadcasting Act. This in turn resulted in the creation of National Public Radio. Envisaged at first as a news organization, it slowly developed into a unique media culture, and that culture evolved its own documentary form. Features were usually to scale, to fit into the evolving broadcast clock—four to seven minutes being the sweet spot—but long-form documentaries did begin to both celebrate and question the American dream.
Among the first: Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, NPR’S series on the history and tradition of gospel music and spirituals, produced in cooperation with The Smithsonian by Judi Moore Latta and Sonja Williams.
The public radio system was not ad supported, but, with its limited budget constantly challenged in Congress, it evolved a relationship with private and corporate foundations. While not precisely dancing with the devil, this did add a layer of unexamined compromise, as noted in by Tom McCourt in Conflicting Communications Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio (Prager, 1999): “The organizational structure of public radio ensures that the public must continue to adhere to standards of taste instituted by elites and articulated by nonprofit concerns.
There was an antidote of a kind: The rise of independent producers in the system in the 1980s helped hold to account both public broadcasting and the nation it was reflecting.
For example the maverick producer Larry Massett, one of the field’s first independents, created “Mama Chaos, the Wild Dog of Los Alamos” in which the disordered life of a stray clearly mirrors the state of a country that has ventured into nuclear testing.
More recently (2019) producer Nikole Hannah-Jones, in partnership with writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine, crafted the trenchant The 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the history of slavery and its continuing impact.
On a smaller, but equally powerful scale, producer KalaLea created Blindspot: Tulsa Burning, which explores the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Another participant in the culture of accountability is Indigenous producer Connie Walker, who looked at the forced re-homing and brutal Christian education of Native Americans through the lens of memoir in her series Surviving St. Michaels.
An interesting collective approach to American history was PRX Productions’ provocative series Monumental, in which features by a range of independent producers interrogated the history as reflected in public monuments.
But there have been joyful noises too, around the semiquincentennial.
This Day (An American 250 History Show) celebrates unexpected shaping moments with hosts Jody Avirgan, and historians Nicole Hemmer and Kellie Carter Jackson. GBH and PBS repurposed the celebrated television documentary, American Experience as a podcast; Our American Stories says it highlights extraordinary things done by ordinary people, and Ben Franklin’s America looks at the abiding influence of this contentious, inventive Philadelphian among others. (Of course, we can be thankful that one idea didn’t stick—Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird.)
So how should American media—especially, in this context, works for broadcast and podcast—celebrate our 250th? By recognizing that the country is an experiment that must be tested again and again; by being wary of our certainties—“I stumbled when I saw” says Gloucester in Lear, echoing John 11:9-10—by continuing to refresh the pot. In fact, public radio, and the United States, are very high-concept versions of stone soup, the subject of that trickster Irish parable in which a pot of boiling water comes to feed a village because each person throws something in.
If we’re lucky, that is a truth that will remain self-evident.
