Radio Time Capsule

One fine autumn day sixty-one years ago, a CBS radio station in Washington, D.C., recorded its complete broadcast cycle, from “Sundial with Arthur Godfrey” at 6:29 and a half (“Good morning! This is station WJSV, owned and operated by the Columbia Broadcasting System”) through Bob Chester’s Orchestra at half-past twelve the next morning (“the music of America’s newest band sensation, coming to you from that old jive hive, the Famous Door in New York City”).

The idea was to leave a calling card for future generations, as Westinghouse had done earlier in the year when it buried the famous “time capsule” at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The CBS recordings have now been transferred to tape, and they are available on cassette tapes: eighteen hours worth. They make you feel as if you are listening through a keyhole to a different world on the far side of a shut door — a world with the paradoxical dream quality of being familiar and strange at the same time.

The day was September 21, 1939, three weeks after Germany invaded Poland and kicked off the Second World War. “Warsaw still holds out against Germany,” a news broadcast announced on the evening of the twenty-first. “Every night we report that, it comes a little nearer looking like a miracle.” (But the miracle was almost over; Warsaw surrendered on September 28.) Earlier in the day, we hear WJSV cut to the capitol for a crucial presidential speech: Franklin Roosevelt had called Congress into special session so he could urge it to repeal the embargo provisions of the Neutrality Law, which forbade American weapon sales to the allies. When Roosevelt is done, we join another presidential speech midway through: Prime Minister Daladier of France begging his countrymen to stand firm at their battle stations and not be swayed by relentless Nazi propaganda. According to the evening news, FDR “failed to move isolationist senators” — but in early November, repeal would pass both houses by large margins, and the United States would be a step closer to joining the war that bent history out of shape forever.

In short, it was an eventful day in one of history’s crucial months. But on the whole these recordings are an average armful of leaves from a long-ago fall, tattered brown ones and beautiful scarlet ones and many run-of-the-mill ones. America’s interests in 1939 were basically the same as they are in 2000. The day’s radio shows are a mixture of silly soap operas (Life Can Be Beautiful) and an American League baseball game (Cleveland versus Washington), pop music, game shows, comedy, news broadcasts, news analysis, and the odd documentary, all washed down by one round of commercials after another; Palmolive, Bulova watches, Wrigley’s chewing gum; Post Toasties, Plymouth automobiles, Zlotnick the Furrier. The schedule is strikingly like what you find on network television today.

Many attitudes are the same too. Americans of 1939 were as helplessly enthralled as we by the astounding idea that women can have jobs, just like men. The 1939 soaps are all about working women, from chorus girls Myrt and Marge to social worker Bess Johnson to physician Susan Chandler to The Career of Alice Blair, who is busy “fighting for fame” on the “ladder to success.” Even newly crowned Mrs. America works: She is an elevator operator like her husband. She wants to be a model. So what else is new? (The main difference between 1939 and ourselves on “women’s issues” is that 1939 lacks our ugly contempt for housewives.)

The language on these tapes can be eerily familiar. In his afternoon speech, Roosevelt (a self-described “worker in the field of international peace”) praises the “rich diversity of resources and peoples” in the western hemisphere, “functioning together in mutual respect.” As usual, “diversity” is what you praise when praise is called for and nothing comes to mind. A virtue of last resort.

Of course, at the same time, you would never mistake September 21, 1939, for any day in recent memory. The loudest applause on an evening quiz show goes to a young Navy man; “Step right up, sailor,” says the emcee, “what’s your rate?” — as though the Navy were a comfortable, familiar part of the American scene. The Wizard of Oz was a hit, and songs from Arlen and Harburg’s sappy score crop up in several of the day’s programs. The big-band music that dominated late 1930s radio was mostly bland and forgettable, but it was also wry, dry, and unpretentious. The beat was designed for dancing rather than pile-driving listeners into the mud. The lyrics tended to be about romance rather than sex.

But the important differences go deeper. Nowadays we struggle to attain perfect self-absorption, and we teach our children to be magnificently self-satisfied (or to have “self-esteem” or whatever you want to call it). All sorts of things that once seemed clear, tangible, and sharply defined have gone vague and blurry on us, as if we now need glasses but are too vain to wear them. In 1939, for instance, the future seemed vivid and real, and Americans loved to argue about it (and send it presents — for example, these recordings). Today the future is a blur. In 1939 the past seemed vivid and real; President Roosevelt’s speech hinges on an analogy between the 1935 embargo laws and America’s failed trade policy during the Napoleonic Wars. Today the past is a blur. We have lost interest in history, and have largely given up teaching it to our children. We teach them “social studies” instead — blurry name, blurry topic.

After Roosevelt’s speech, WJSV broadcast French Prime Minister Daladier’s from Paris, followed by an informal translation. Today Europe is a blur, and no American network would dare broadcast nearly twenty minutes of pure unadulterated French. It’s not that our national French proficiency has collapsed in the meantime; French was never our best subject. But in 1939, Americans were thought to be curious about the French president and willing to listen and to judge for themselves, even if they didn’t understand the words. (They would still have caught the rhythm — the massive, majestic sentences rolling forward like surf: the fast friendship between la France and l’Angleterre, the lies of the propagande allemande, France’s only real choice, la liberte ou la mort. It is something to hear.) Today the translator’s voice would be superimposed on Daladier’s, and his speech would be diced into small bits and served with our trademark mixture of archness and schmaltz. (Think of how we cover political conventions and Olympic games nowadays.) Perhaps the medium used to be the message; today the messengers are the message. We are spirited through life by a tight squad of experts, spinmeisters, and anchormen who protect us from ever having to see, hear, or think for ourselves. We object to opinions on principle, and teach our children not to have any. (“Don’t be judgmental, son!”)

In 1939 Americans also had a reasonably clear view of their own souls, and what the country was all about. Joe E. Brown (a comedian of sorts) finishes his broadcast by telling students to “work hard at your studies. That’s the only way you’ll ever amount to anything.” Joe E. Brown (in other words) seems to believe that some people never do amount to anything — and yet he does not favor a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Bummo-Americans, or federal legislation. He seems to feel that if you amount to nothing, it might be your own fault. In 1939 this strange idea was widespread.

The American republics are “joint heirs of European civilization,” says the president in his embargo speech. The Nazis, he says, pose a threat to American peace and security, but more important to “the progress of morality and religion.” “An ordering of society which relegates religion, democracy, and good faith among nations to the background,” says the president, “can find no place within it for the ideals of the Prince of Peace.”

What did he mean? In 1939 the world was at the start of a great war whose coda stretched all the way to the fall of the Soviet empire in 1990. The twentieth century’s most bestial crimes were committed by Nazi Germany, wartime Japan, and Stalinist Russia — regimes that had totalitarianism in common, but something else, too: state paganism. In 1939 Britain and France finally volunteered to stand up to Nazi Germany. Britain and France had democracy in common, yes, but something else, too: They considered themselves Christian nations. Fascist Italy was Hitler’s Axis partner — yet Italy remained a Christian state and proved incapable of Nazi bestiality. What does it mean?

The answer can’t be simple, but nowadays we are not even bright enough to ask the question. Religion is another topic that has gone blurry on us. Under imminent threat of extinction, the Soviets, too, fought the Nazis; Christian France had a mixed record (to say the least) at the moment of truth under Nazi occupation. But the fact remains that if you were about to be occupied by a foreign power during the Second World War, you would a hell of a lot sooner have been occupied by a Christian nation’s soldiers than by a pagan nation’s. And after all, “Thou shalt not murder” is a teaching not of democracy or capitalism but of Judaism and Christianity. It would be simple-minded to reduce the war to a battle about religion, but it is equally simple-minded to erase religion from the picture altogether.

Here is a deeply important, perfectly obvious statement — which, if you comb the huge historical literature about the war we’ve produced in recent decades, you will find almost nowhere: Among other things, World War II was a religious war, pitting the Judeo-Christian against the pagan worldview. Which is exactly what Roosevelt called it at the start. He saw things more clearly three weeks into the fighting than we do with generations of hind-sight in back of us. In May 1941 (with France defeated, Japan bellicose, Russia about to be invaded), Roosevelt underlined the point in another speech: In a Nazi-dominated world, he said, children could be bundled off, “goose-stepping in search of new gods.”

Is there an element of “idealization of the past” in this view of World War II as a fight by Judeo-Christian nations to beat off paganism and all paganism’s brutal consequences? Of course. But we need and ought to idealize the past, and any nation that doesn’t is demonstrating not its sophistication but its arrogance. We look at history with the comfortable certainty that no previous generation was ever half so morally enlightened as we. After all, we have made self-esteem our specialty; it’s no wonder we are good at it.

Of course, presidents and presidential candidates still talk about religion; but what has changed since 1939 is the cultural leadership. In 1939 it shared Franklin Roosevelt’s genial, impious faith — which is not surprising, since the leadership mainly consisted of miniature Roosevelts. Today it consists of intellectuals, who (now as always) tend not to understand religion and to despise it. The Establishment has changed, and there is no evidence that it is changing back. It will change again only when dissidents forget about politics and build new cultural institutions.

As entertainment, the WJSV tapes are not much. When I am in the mood for the late 1930s I prefer newspapers, magazines, and books, movies and newsreels; when you sample 1939 via audiotape, you are sipping through a pretty thin straw. Nonetheless, the crisp, clear air of prewar America is always bracing. And what the tapes do supply is a sense of humility — one item that, somehow or other, our fantastically productive economy can’t seem to make enough of.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, David Gelernter is the author of the novel 1939: The Lost World of the Fair.