1926 – Harry Heuser

31st Mar 20261st Apr 2026

“99% slush, hokum and flap-doodle”: Having Words with a Pugnacious Pundit

Walter Prichard Eaton’s words as printed in *Vanity Fair*, April 1926

“Who he?” I thought. Or make that “hooey!” The “he” in question is Walter Prichard Eaton (1878–1957), a theater critic and academic of whose voice I first took note while flicking through the digitized pages of Vanity Fair’s April issue. April 1926, mind. The “hooey!” is Eaton’s, or rather, it is my response to his sweeping dismissal of motion pictures in an article titled “The Strangling of Our Theatre,” the first in a series of reports from the cultural battlefield that Vanity Fair billed as a “Symposium” on the “Future of the Theatre in America.”

In a succession of articles, prognostications on the fortunes of the theater in the United States were made by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sydney Howard (May issue), theater mogul Lee Shubert (June), independent theater manager Brock Pemberton (July), Ralph Block, production manager of the Famous Players-Lasky Film Corporation (August), and John Emerson, President of the Actor’s Equity Association (September). Eaton’s response to them in the October 1926 issue of Vanity Fair drew the curtain on the “Symposium.”

Now that “Motion Picture Producers” were beginning to exert “direct control of the drama,” as the editors of Vanity Fair put it, a number of questions, however leading, arose:

Will this result in the production of only such plays as will make good motion pictures, in other words, cheap, obvious and sensational plays?

Will the intelligent minorities who are sponsoring non-commercial playhouses succeed where the commercial houses have failed?

Is our stage to lend itself still more to the standards of Moronia, or will a new theatre of the Intelligent Minority arise, overthrow the theatre of commerce and release the latent dramatic talent of America?

Now, “Symposium” literally means “drinking together.” Perhaps the water cooler was contaminated to begin with, given this set-up, but the intemperance of Eaton’s verbiage has no convivial air about it.

What follows, which may well be “hooey” to you—or “flap-doodle,” to borrow the term used by Eaton that started me off on this tangent—is an attempt at having a word on having words: words as thought, words as theatrics, and words as troll.

18th Mar 20261st Apr 2026

“Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare”; or, Something Is Rotten in the State of Make-Believe

John Wallace’s column in the March 1926 issue of *Radio Broadcasting*, which offers an intriguing glimpse at a production of “Danger,” even though the play is not discussed

When it comes to second-hand knowledge, I can get a tad—permit the portmanteau—malcontentious. You know, not just dissatisfied but downright disputatious. It frustrates me not to be able to get straight to the source and having to rely instead on a privileged intermediary.

Owing to that frustration, I tend to quote extensively from the primary sources that I discuss so as to enable my readers, whoever they may be, to enter into a conversation with me on whatever matter I happen to advance for discussion. I am not content to alert others, by way of a footnote, to materials to which they may not have immediate access or which they cannot be bothered to dig up when prompted. Inquisitive as I am, I do not expect anyone to take my word for an elusive “it.”

Mind you, the “it” in question is not, say, the US-Israel war on Iran currently underway—a fact-based rationale for which has yet to be cogently articulated—but the special brand of make-believe known, by some, as Hörspiel—plays for the ear that came into being with the advent of broadcasting in the early 1920s. It is that sort of ephemera to which I have devoted this journal, a blog whose title, broadcastellan, is another portmanteau I invented to cast myself as a keeper of the castles in the air that rose and crumbled in the early to mid-twentieth century, some exceptions notwithstanding.

Unlike silent films, almost none of the broadcasts of those pioneer days of wireless storytelling have survived, either as recordings or as scripts. Hardly any have appeared in print, despite the fact that virtually all of them were scripted. As a result, I am obliged to be told about them in contemporary reviews, which likewise are in short supply.

Fact is, we do not today enjoy the same kind of access to early US radio plays than we do to motion pictures of the 1920s. Too little has been preserved, mainly because, despite the existence of sound recording equipment, sound-only broadcasting was not thought of as anything but ephemeral, accountability, commercially understood, only just coming into being as a rationale for keeping records.

This gap—a lacuna not quite matata—leaves me, if not speechless, so at least without confidence adequately to respond to “Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare,” one such early second-hand account of radio listening. The article was published in the March 1926 issue of Radio Broadcasting as part of a tauntingly titled column “The Listener’s Point of View,” as represented by John Wallace, a critic whose remarks on the first radio play published in the United States I previously mentioned here.

Having referenced the article in Immaterial Culture, I did not return to it until now—”now” being the one-hundredth anniversary of Wallace’s remarks on, and recommendations for, the advancement of the radio play in the United States.

“Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare” is worthwhile picking up anew, considering that the attitudes toward the sound-only medium voiced by Wallace would remain valid for at least another decade, by which time, in the summer of 1936, the Columbia Workshop signaled that experimentation was, at last, however tentatively, being given a modicum of attention in US broadcasting.

26th Feb 20261st Apr 2026

“… despite the distortion of the curving horn”: The Wireless, the “Radario,” and the First “Step on the Stairs” (1926)

“What is the basic force that makes the human mind function?” The question was posed not at a symposium attended by noted philosophers and physicians, but to the readers of the 27 February 1926 issue of Radio Digest, who were subsequently asked:

What is telepathy? Is it not fundamentally Radio activity, a form of Radio transmission[?] Can the energy that starts a mass of brain cells into motion, that formulates thought and speech[,] be propelled as the voice is propelled from the vibration of the fragile filament in a vacuum tube? Does this energy ever die? Can it be attuned, converted into controlled ether wave movement, refined to audible sensitiveness?

Whoa! One question at a time, if you please—and, thinking as a public speaker—if you expect a question to sink in and elicit a response. Other than “Whoa!” that is. A bit of context would be helpful.

The above is not a passage from Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio, a treatise written in the late 1920s, published in 1931, and endorsed by Albert Einstein. As the notion that telepathy was “fundamentally” a form of wireless transmission suggests—apart from the fact that it was published in Radio Digest—the context in which the question was posed was wireless transmission—and radio “drama” in particular.

Offering listeners “an opportunity to win fame, honor and bags of gold” for the solution of a mystery about to commence, the editors of Radio Digest got more specific, explaining:

These are questions to be considered in the strange case of Peleg Turner in the first two chapters of A Step on the Stairs, appearing in this issue of Radio Digest. Was it the voice of the dead Peleg that manifested itself, as he had predicted, through the Radio horn for the benefit of his heirs?

The WRC cast of *A Step on the Stairs* featuring Ted Husing (*Radio Digest*, 10 April 1926)

Call it ballyhoo or baloney, with those words, one of the earliest radio serials was launched in February 1926.