John Wallace – Harry Heuser

I was tickled—or, rather, pricked—by the snide remarks a certain John Wallace made in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast, in which he expounded on “Radio and the Taste of the Nation.” In particular, Wallace took issue with the assertion that the new medium was threatening to turn the United States into the “Land of the Cretin” and the “Home of the Depraved.”

While not actual quotations, the phrases “Land of the Cretin” and “Home of the Depraved reflected, according to Wallace, the

utterances of any one of several of God’s private secretaries, expressed editorially in any one of several pastel colored periodicals on the occasion of that sage’s discovery of the existence of radio.

Their “pious pessimism,” so Wallace, was

that the taste of the American nation is lower than that of any other similar body of men on this sphere, and that, among the agents engaged in undermining it, radio promises to be one of the most effective.

“[I]n fact,” Wallace opined, the “custom of unfavorably comparing the kultur of America to that of any other nation,” was not restricted to the realm of broadcasting. Adopted by and cultivated among his countrymen and women, it was an attitude rooted in the notion that “America, in respect to its appreciation of the ‘higher things” was an infant among nations. The belief, according to Wallace, was so “widespread” as to constitute “one of the cardinal planks in the American credo.”

It finds place in our code of national convictions along side of such sacred tenets as “We must avoid all entangling alliances,” “The French do not know how to make coffee,” “Success is always the reward of effort,” “Newspaper men are conscienceless scoundrels,” “Abraham Lincoln was the incarnation of all virtue,” and “The Japs are a dangerous little people.”

As a US-educated ex-Academic mindful of his European perspective, I shall refrain from commenting on the US aversion to “entangling alliances,” other than allowing myself the aside that, one hundred years on, said view has experienced a remarkable resurgence in the age of MAGA and to pose the question, if only by the by, what America First might mean for the future of NATO.

And while I have nothing to say about the coffee culture of France, or about prejudicial views thereof, my musings on so-called “legacy media” such as radio and their reception does encourage me to consider the anti-wireless bias of which Wallace speaks vis-à-vis the effectively re-seeded and carefully nurtured suspicion that “Newspaper men are conscienceless scoundrels.”

After all, never has anti-media bias in the United States been more pronounced than in the second coming of MAGA.

As I browse online century-old periodicals like Radio Broadcast in the year of the 250th anniversary of the US of A, I feel compelled to revisit yesteryear’s attitudes toward radio as a moronizing force in the context of today’s radically transformed media landscape, especially in light of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the FCC.

Is ridding ourselves of traditional mass media making us more discerning consumers of news and entertainment?

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.

Tag: John Wallace

“… this Land of the Cretin and Home of the Depraved”: US Radio Naysaying Anno 1926 and the Silencing of So-called “Legacy Media” in the Age of AI Slop

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