On Tuesday night, the eyes of the nation won’t be on the House chamber. Congress, the Supreme Court, and most of the Cabinet won’t be assembled in one room. The House sergeant-at-arms won’t call out, “Madam speaker, the president of the United States!” And most tellingly, there won’t be thunderclaps of applause so powerful they could almost register on radar. Forget curtain calls on Broadway or home runs in the World Series, the applause roaring on Capitol Hill that one night once a year puts them all to shame.
Until now. For the first time ever, the State of the Union Address is being rescheduled due to a partisan squabble — which royally irks President Trump, since the speech is one of the bully pulpit’s biggest perks of all due to one reason: television. It transformed the annual event from stuffy address into must-see TV. Here’s how the evolution happened.
The relatively few people who owned TV sets were glued to them at 1:00 pm on Monday, Jan. 6, 1947. They knew they were witnessing a first. In a grainy, black-and-white transmission that looked like it was beamed from Mars, a short man with thick glasses walked up to a rostrum, shook hands, and then turned to the podium.
Americans were thrilled. This was the first time they could watch a State of the Union address as it was being delivered. True, they had followed it on radio for nearly 20 years. But as this new medium was quickly proving, folks would rather see and hear than just listen to a broadcast. They watched in rapt attention as President Harry S. Truman delivered a long address before their very eyes.
(There was another first that year: 1947 was also the first time the speech was formally called the State of the Union address. Before that, it was simply called the president’s “annual message.”)
Harry’s big talk was a big hit. For the next two decades, soap operas and game shows were interrupted one afternoon every January for the State of the Union.
Then President Lyndon B. Johnson changed everything.
LBJ was a big man and (not surprising for a politician hailing from Texas where everything is bigger) he liked doing things in a big way. Puny daytime TV viewership when most Americans were working wasn’t good enough for him. Johnson wanted a big audience. That meant prime time. Starting in 1966, the address was moved to the evening.
Which then led to the televised response from the opposing party. In fact, future President Gerald Ford helped give the GOP’s very first State of the Union response.
Now on programming equal footing with the likes of “All In the Family,” “Bonanza,” and “Laugh-In,” the event kept evolving.
More people watching at home meant more applause with louder volume inside the Capitol. By the early 1980s, Republicans were putting their hands together for President Ronald Reagan with such precision, Rep. Dennis Eckart, D-Ohio, wondered what was going on. He peeked at an advance copy of the speech that had been given to his Republican colleagues. It specified lines where GOP members were encouraged to applaud. Outraged Democrats from Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., on down stayed silent throughout much of the following year’s address, giving little more than lame golf claps.
Team Reagan also began the tradition of inviting extraordinary Americans to attend the speech starting in 1982. A man named Lenny Skutnik was hailed for having jumped into the icy Potomac River a few weeks earlier to save a woman after the Air Florida plane crash. That proved such a hit, presidents have been doing it ever since.
The address stays in lock step with technology, too. It was first carried live on the Internet via the House’s website in 2002. The first high-definition broadcast came in 2004.
For millions of Americans, watching the State of the Union address is as much a wintertime tradition as watching the Super Bowl.
But nobody will be watching this Tuesday night. You can bet the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue won’t be happy about it, either.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly, offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
