The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  The idea of public-service radio—radio for the public good, not financed by advertising—had been around almost from the beginning of broadcasting. Educational radio stations, as they were first called, had sprung up at many of the country’s colleges and universities, especially at the so-called land-grant colleges, which had been established, mostly in the late nineteenth century, on land given for educational purposes by the federal government. In Madison WHA, or 9XM, had, indeed, been one of these stations.

  After the Second World War, many of these stations banded together to try to form a cross-country radio network. Though initially their efforts were unsuccessful, they did win one victory through a moment of clever cunning.

  In the late 1940s the commercial broadcast industry was mainly interested in promoting AM radio and the new medium of television. The steady growth of FM radio did not concern the industry greatly—and this lack of interest allowed the small number of educational stations to band together and successfully petition the government to reserve the left-hand side of the FM radio dial, frequencies 88.1 to 91.9 MHz, permanently for their brand of noncommercial radio alone. The rest of the FM spectrum could be as much of a free-for-all as the AM dial already was; but from 1945 onward any potential listener who wanted educational radio, whether in Seattle or Miami, Bangor or Los Angeles, knew just where on the FM dial to find it. The reservation of twenty channels of guaranteed spectrum space for public radio remains to this day.

  The four hundred stations involved in the first cooperative effort then got themselves more or less organized into a lobbying group, arguing for rather more than the reservation of parts of the spectrum. They wanted recognition, and they wanted some kind of government-sponsored financial help. In the mid-1960s, reports and books like The Hidden Medium and The Public Radio Study began to be circulated among legislators—prompting the country to sit up and take notice of the revolutionary idea of a national network of radio stations that were designed solely for the common good.

  The lobbying proved effective: in 1967, the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law, creating a nonprofit, extragovernmental entity, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which would raise money for the creation of public TV and radio networks. It was then that William Siemering’s thinking started to be taken seriously.

  Bill Siemering was from Wisconsin, and he seemed to have been in radio since birth. His family’s house was almost literally in the shadow of the historic aerials from which WHA, at the land-grant University of Wisconsin, had for the previous four decades been broadcasting its deliberately uplifting, useful, locally beloved—and commercial-free—radio programs. He dived into radio as soon as he was able, working in the mid-1950s, part-time during term, full-time in the summers, as a board operator, an announcer, a newscaster. He came to believe profoundly in his station’s mission.

  By the early 1960s, he had left the small university town of Madison and had become a public radio station manager in the much larger and more racially diverse city of Buffalo, New York. While he was there—“the formative years for NPR” as he was to say later—he changed the station’s direction, making it quite unashamedly a community resource available to everyone in town, and highly successful thereby. He also listened avidly to the broadcasts coming from across Lake Ontario from the government-supported Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stations in Toronto—since the CBC was known then, as today, for producing a vast slate of highly original programming.

  In 1970, and basing his thinking very much on his eight-year experience in the cold of upstate New York, he famously wrote a mission statement that brazenly suggested that what had proved so good for Buffalo and across the border in Ontario would also be good for the nation. “National Public Radio,” as the new system was almost casually named by a radio journalist colleague named Al Hulsen,

  will serve the individual; it will promote personal growth; it will regard the individual differences among men with respect and joy rather than with derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely various rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness.

  Congress had already anticipated the network’s creation. It was now decreed that federal moneys would be earmarked for the new system, with broadcasts scheduled to commence in 1971. Intelligent radio would be given an officially blessed leg-up. Under the banner of Siemering’s mission statement, with a radio newsmagazine program designed by him, NPR was formally incorporated in midwinter 1970 and broadcast the first edition of All Things Considered the following May. That first show began with a twenty-minute report on antigovernment protests in Washington over the Vietnam War, played an interview with Allen Ginsberg about the legality of drugs, ran a portrait of a young girl addicted to heroin, and reported on how a barbershop in Iowa was diversifying by offering to shave women’s legs. NPR, it was abundantly clear, was going to be radio of a very different stripe.

  Few would dispute that in the forty years since, it has gone on to be become a grand success. NPR is now an established and essential part of the American broadcast continuum, admired by most who hear it, held in high esteem both within America and beyond. It has proved to be formidably successful in broadcasting intelligent, nonpartisan information to an immense and ever-growing daily national audience. There is what one might term an NPR culture in the country: decisions are often made, conversations are often begun, conferences often commenced, with a simple commonly heard phrase: I heard it on Morning Edition, or more simply, I heard it on NPR. Despite reaching fewer than one in ten of the American public, NPR seems sometimes, in terms of its influence, to be just about everywhere.

  But can NPR be fairly said to have unified the nation? Did it—indeed, does it today—help connect the people of America in the way that the invention of the telegraph, the laying of the railroad tracks, or the making the Interstate Highway System so unequivocally managed to do? Was that ever the intent of its creators? Was NPR devised to be both a national bulletin board and a social sounding board—or was it to be something with rather more strength, an entity of great size and power that could employ the metaphor of being a network to help link the nation together by an invisible skein of radio waves, and thus forge a bond quite as strong and enduring as any railroad line, telegraph wire, or highway vanishing over the horizon to the mountains?

  To be sure, the country is all too often gathered suddenly together, as it was in grief at the moment of John Kennedy’s killing in November 1963, or on learning of the terrible events of September 2001. Similarly, there can be no more unifying exuberance than was displayed with the broadcast news of the 1969 landing on the moon or the bicentennial in 1976. The part that radio played in alerting Americans to these events was key: people heard the news flash, they gathered around the sets, they remained transfixed, and for days after spoke of little else.

  But what annealed the society into one was the events—not the medium that transmitted the news of them. On ordinary days American public radio somehow retreats, then subsides. It fades into the background to be ever present, always available, like the staff in a country house or the spigot of a hot-water supply, as a supplier of impeccably turned-out news and analysis, of entertainment of a higher order, of music well chosen and worthy. But it performs no other social function than this, on ordinary days. It does not on ordinary days allow the cranberry picker in Maine to feel any kind of national connection with the computer technician in California. The life of an Iowa prairie farmer is scarcely connected by radio to the quotidian routines of the taxi driver in Manhattan. She is quite foreign to him, and he to her, and the presence of the radio set that each has at home or in the car does little to make their relationship otherwise. A scattering of programs—This American Life, Story Corps—attempts a kind of connectivity, but NPR’s basic institutional structure, with member-station fiefdoms whose managers are necessarily occupied with their own parochial concerns, militates against
that.

  This is not quite how NPR saw itself back when it was founded. And it should be recalled that the late 1960s were a time of deep divisions in the country—over the Vietnam war, over race, over the power of youth and the voice of authority—and a time when any attempt to forge a sense of unity should have been blessed, and noble. Siemering was eager to give voice to all in those divisive times, “to celebrate differences,” and by doing so to help bring the fractured community together. To construct the unum from the pluribus, by radio.

  To help accomplish this he planned to have as much as a third of the material on the big nationally made shows come from the local stations, so that America could genuinely be heard talking to itself. Had his plan worked it might well have helped create some sense of national oneness via the medium, rather than wholly through the big events that the medium occasionally broadcast. But it was not to be. Back in 1971 few of the original hundred-odd member stations had the staff or the time to contribute stories to the network; most of the programs were eventually produced by an ever-growing corps of Washington staff—and in the process, some of the pan-American vision slipped; some of the magic vanished.

  Bill Siemering was eventually dislodged from NPR. Internal politics and stated differences about vision did him in. While his fingertips were still grasping the window ledge he took to pleading to stay on at headquarters, if only to cut recording tape. But his colleagues declined the offer.

  In the end he left the capital altogether and took a job far away, up in the great northern plains, managing yet another educational station on the border between North Dakota and Minnesota. He spent a happy five years there, with just a three-person staff, returning to radio basics—finding the news, editing it, recording it himself. Necessity and reality tempered his vision, somewhat. From his new windswept aerie he managed to look both inward—producing a series of radio essays on a scattering of small towns in North Dakota, telling Dakotans more about themselves than perhaps they had ever known—and also outward, setting himself the target of contributing at least one piece of High Plains broadcasting each week down to NPR headquarters, and so having a prairie story told regularly to all America. In this modest goal he succeeded—helping thereby to employ radio to knit Dakotans together, and to more firmly cement in place a part of the magical mosaic of America. In a modest way, in other words, he fulfilled the task with which public service radio around the world is entrusted, and in which he so believed.

  And meanwhile the commercial airwaves of today are loud with the harsher sounds of hectoring and demagoguery. There are national conversations in process, true: the most popular of all, a conservative rabble-rouser broadcasting from Florida, preaches to as many as twenty million listeners a day and earns $50 million a year for doing so. But his is far from being a unifying conversation: it is broadly seen as divisive and unkindly, sharply separating radio audiences into radically opposed camps.

  The radio broadcasting that Reginald Fessenden inaugurated from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, in 1906, has hardly lived up to its promise of creating a kind of continental togetherness. For thirty years, it did: between 1920 and 1950 the cosy image of the walnut-veneered radio in the living room, the family gathered about, all listening in Minneapolis to the same program that was going out to listeners in Manhattan and Montezuma, Iowa, had a solid truth to it. But since, the dream has sputtered, changed, and faded. Television altered much, of course. But in other countries with a strong public broadcasting tradition—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain—the idea of radio as a unifying force still obtains. Public radio in America is undeniably good radio; but aside from those events of great moment that in and of themselves unify the nation, it devotes itself largely to the service of its hundreds of local audiences, each of them typically isolated from the others. And the commercial radio that did once help bind the country now often divides it, and brutally. Reginald Fessenden and his like would probably not wish to be listening.

  TELEVISION: THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

  In the summer of 1963, when I was still a student, I was hitchhiking north of Los Angeles and was given a ride by a helpful middle-aged man who worked as a technician at NBC television studios in Burbank. Like so many of those who gave me rides, this man—his name long forgotten, I’m ashamed to say—was exceptionally well connected. He knew studio chiefs everywhere and happily admitted me to a closed set at the Paramount studios in Hollywood, where people were shooting scenes for a film to be called Seven Days in May.

  The director, John Frankenheimer, took kindly to me also and let me sit briefly in his director’s chair, which was just as I imagined a director’s chair to be. He also introduced me to Kirk Douglas, who was exceptionally warm, told me amusing stories about various Britons with whom he had worked, and signed the brim of the straw hat I had bought in Mexico.

  All of which was fine and exciting and would become the stuff of a wealth of stories when I got back to Oxford. But the real deal, as they said in those days, was another promise that my technician friend had made to me: that he would get me onto the set in Burbank where NBC technicians were taping episodes of The Tonight Show and that if I was exceptionally lucky and well behaved, I might get to meet the now legendary new young star who was just then briefly hosting the show there, Johnny Carson.

  All of which duly came to pass. I met, shook hands with, was bought coffee by, and duly fell under the spell of Mr. Carson. I cannot say I gave any thought to the possibility that he and his late-evening show, screened in bedrooms throughout the land, would tuck millions of Americans into bed for the coming thirty years or that he would become one of the most popular mass entertainers the country would ever know.

  None of these things would have even interested me at the time. I was more interested in the technical aspects of the production, in watching in detail the workings of a full-blown American television operation. And what remains in my mind was driving each night with my new friend and two big metal drums in the backseat of the car. We would place these drums securely on an overnight plane bound for Idlewild Airport, New York. They held precious, freshly recorded tapes of The Tonight Show and would be handed off to the technicians at WNBC’s headquarters in Rockefeller Center and played over the air the next day for the stations on the American East Coast.

  In its youth, television proved as unifying a feature of postwar society as radio had been in the 1930s. Johnny Carson, a late-night television host, can fairly be said to have sent the nation to sleep each night, though not before presiding over a million conceptions that he never witnessed. By the 1990s, cable TV and other later splinterings of the TV networks’ command of the airwaves had diminished the role of such figures.

  The three-hour time difference across the continent had much to do with it. When Carson opted to perform his show in California, and went live on the air in Burbank at 11:30 p.m. Pacific Time, it was 2:30 a.m. the next day in New York, a time when even his most ardent fans were likely to be a-slumber. NBC had at the time the technical capacity to hook up stations for coast-to-coast live broadcasts, but if everyone back east was asleep, there was clearly no reason to. What the network did not have, however, was the ability to send the show down the line and have stations record it for broadcast the following day. Hence the visit to the airport; hence the concern that the tapes were treated royally, being worth millions in potential East Coast revenue.

  Our nightly airport excursions were reminders that television’s true transcontinental network was still not quite finished. Its great potential as a cultural unifier was still a work in progress. Yet perhaps no other device had progressed from invention to near-omnipresent acceptance with such speed.

  The first public demonstration took place on Thursday, April 7, 1927, in Manhattan, at the Bell Telephone laboratories on Bethune Street in what is now Tribeca. It featured the amiable moon face of the secretary of commerce, soon to be president, Herbert Hoover. He was speaking from his offices in Washington. Reporters from the New York Times w
atched him, enthralled, though not a little skeptical.

  FAR-OFF SPEAKERS SEEN AS WELL AS HEARD HERE IN A TEST OF TELEVISION, read the headline on Friday’s page 1, above six decks of subheads: “Like a Photo Come to Life; Hoover’s Face Plainly Imaged as He Speaks in Washington; The First Time in History, Pictures Are Flashed by Wire and Radio Synchronizing with Speaker’s Voice; Commercial Use in Doubt, but AT&T Head Sees a New Step in Conquest of Nature After Years of Research.”

  With a screen measuring three inches by two, the likeness was excellent: “It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life, had begun to talk, smile, nod its head and smile, look this way and that.” On a larger screen, the image was not so good, the secretary’s face difficult to distinguish. But his voice was clear, and he declaimed, appropriately, “Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history. Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.”

  As a slightly ominous hint of the likely caliber of entertainment, Hoover’s formal broadcast was then followed by a link from a studio in New Jersey, featuring a vaudeville act by “A. Dolan, a comedian, as a stage Irishman with side whiskers and a broken pipe [who] did a monologue in brogue . . . then made a quick change and came back in blackface with a new line of quips in negro dialect.”

  The Times reporter did not indicate any particular hostility to the nature of this performance; he did, however, go on to write that the commercial future of television, “if it has one,” was thought to be “largely in public entertainment—super-news reels flashed before audiences at the moment of occurrence, together with dramatic and musical acts shot on the ether waves in sound and picture at the instant they are taking place at the studio.” It would actually be seven years later, in 1934, that the word live was first used to describe this phenomenon, which would become a high-cost hallmark of much early television.