Radio Memories: Hope for Haiti II

This week we're presenting not just one but two posts in our -- hopefully..! -- weekly feature, Radio Memories, where we pause to listen to echoes of radio's past, from the days when radio drama, and not television, ruled the [air]waves.

[The second old radio drama we offer this week, Ports Of Call, visiting Haiti in 1935, can be heard here. I think it's worth listening to that one first, if you have time to hear both.]

The radio play awaiting below is from one of radio's most empassioned programs: Destination Freedom.

What a series! As I understand its history, it was a locally-produced show for the Chicago radio market from 1949 until 1951, and never broadcast nationally. After its cancellation a number of transcription discs laid, forgotten, in a studio closet for decades until re-discovered in the 1980s. Today the series probably enjoys wider listenership, in our time, than it did when first broadcast...

Radio drama had a tumultuous life in Chicago; many influential and popular shows, as well as influential talents would get their start in that city, but would eventually move on, following the financial siren song of the more lucrative New York and Los Angeles markets. The resulting brain-drain left things always in flux, with the conflict offering opportunity for new people to keep starting in at the bottom, since so many would be leaving at the top.

One such opportunity came to Richard Durham, a longtime freelance radio playwright, and then-editor of the Chicago Defender, an important weekly civil rights newspaper based in Chicago. His unique idea was pitched, and accepted. Begun with the expectation that the series would likely last only a few weeks, Durham went on to write 91 scripts over two years for a true radio rarity: a civil rights dramatic anthology.

Destination Freedom was carried by the same WMAQ radio station that had originated the well-intentioned but resentfully-received Amos and Andy blackface caricature series in the late 1920s, and Durham later expressed his appreciation for being given a chance to have his series idea welcomed by the local station:

"[WMAQ program director Judith Waller] was quite enthusiastic about the new characterizations that we were presenting, so I look back upon [her] now as quite an innovative promoter in the business of radio", Durham remembered in a 1983 interview quoted at length in John Dunning's 800-page reference book, "On The Air: The Encyclopedia Of Old Radio Drama".

"I had to submit the name and a short description of the character that I wanted to depict. These would generally be accepted; now and then there would be a question," he goes on to say, but also mentions that the station never pressured him to soften the show's assertive rhetoric, making each episode filled with raw emotion in a way that most radio drama of the time was not.

Durham credits two sources as literary inspiration: innovative radio writer/director/producer William N. Robson, for a sympathetic program he produced on the 1943 Detroit race riots, and novelist Charles Dickens:

"I had spent a lot of time studying Dickens... I had discovered that a Dickens character made you love him or hate him almost at once, and I used that same approach, of setting the characters as quickly as possible."

The black writer's scripts would be performed primarily by mostly all-black casts, with the occasional white character roles filled in by local white actors, in an upheaval of radio's usual casting procedures for that era. (I was pleasantly surprised to hear one familiar voice book-ending the show as its announcer: Hugh Downs, recognizeable to my generation as the former host of ABC's long-running late-night news program, 20/20.)

I can't help but perceive two contradictory emotions when I listen in to an episode of Destination Freedom: there's a clear, stark anger to be heard in these plays, yet to my ears it comes across not as anger for anger's sake... it's tempered by a hope, by a prayer, for peace, and a lessening of injustice. Maybe in the end, that's the best thing to hope for.

While the series' focus was on American contemporary figures and US history in general, there were occasional exceptions where the show ranged farther afield, and this Radio Memories post features one such episode: the October 3rd, 1948 entry that takes a look at the Haitian Revolution, with a hopeful portrait of Toussaint L'Ouverture.

One wonders what Richard Durham would make of the election of a black President of his United States, had he lived to see it. Would he say we've arrived at the destination he labored so long to push his nation towards?

Age and life experience tend to conspire to bring a cloud of fatalism to our later years, to counter the spark of youthful idealism enflaming our earlier days. A single life often sees such abundant change, in attitude as well as body, it gives us hope that similar change can befall the entirety of humanity, as well. I fear that the laboratory of history suggests otherwise; for all our "progress", people remain people, generation after generation, still just as capable of continuing cruelty as they are of repentance.

The promise of change for the better means different things to us as we occupy each extreme; for the young, change hits their life in sudden, magnificient bursts, so is it any surprise they push for change on a macro level with expectations of equally immediate results? As we age, our experience with change sees it in more gradual form, and with it comes expectations that progress, if it's to come at all, will also come gradually, slowly. Barely perceived at the time, only noticeable when life is laid out in line, like a long string. Hopefully the young can indulge the pessimism of the old long enough to learn such that they may land farther forward than they would have otherwise, bearing the benefits of the other's experience; maybe the old can forgive the young for the folly of their exuberance, for they were young once themselves.

The fire of youthful indignation drives us forward, the wisdom of age reveals how much farther we have to go, and how little we've in fact truly moved. The relation between each extreme is a messy one, but without that conflicted mess how else would we be able to stumble onward, towards the destination that forgiveness, reconciliation, and mercy would bring; a destination... of freedom.

Radio Memories: Hope For Haiti

I've often wondered what causes a nation more affliction: to possess too much history, or too little.

The attention to Haiti's tragic earthquake has put her recent and long-term history in the spotlight as well, revealing a nation reliving a cycle of enslavement, revolution and retribution. The history of injustice imposed from without (such as the indemnity French king Charles X demanded in 1825 as compensation for lost profits from a lost colony) competes in outrage with the miseries self-imposed from within. It's a textbook example of fallen mankind's inherent ability to hate "the other", how poisonous the natural urge for revenge can be, and how difficult a path it is to look for ways to forgive past transgressions.

If we possess too little knowledge of the past, the loss deprives us of the awareness of the rare good examples to follow, of the suffering of others before us who nevertheless put aside grievances in order to declare, "the past starts today". Yet knowing too much, being fully aware of humanity's endless capacity for cruelty, makes it only too easy to believe that the past is prologue, and that therefore vengeance is likely justified defense against inevitable aggressions to come. It's so hard to bury the hatchet, when everybody remembers precisely where it is buried... and why it was buried in the first place.

Haiti is haunted by its past, as so many of us are as individuals, chained to our own personal histories, to the sins we chose to commit as well as the sins visited upon us by others. In looking for inspiration to keep faith in the belief of a better future for Haiti I looked back this week to earlier examples offering reasons to find hope for Haiti, examples in the form of radio dramas.

The arrival of television in the 1950s came at the expense of an older art form, performed on radio: radio drama. Radio's theatrical tradition has been all but wiped clean from our cultural memories, rarely remembered today despite the fondness with which it was enjoyed back in its prime. Comedy, romance, westerns, and so much more was dramatized as plays for the ear, a "theater of the mind".

For the last year we've tried to present weekly features devoted to the memory of radio drama, doing our little bit to keep its legacy in mind; there is much to learn from the cultural mirror that these cultural memories have to offer us, modern-day explorers trying to imagine what we might become, through discovering all that we've been.

This week I have not one but two Radio Memories, each devoted to Haiti.

The first episode is from the evocative series Ports Of Call. The Ports Of Call show worked around an intriguing gimmick: each week the listening audience of armchair travelers would join the unnamed passengers of an unnamed ship, as they ventured ashore and visited far-away ports in Africa, Asia, Europe... and this week, Haiti.

The format of the show would normally feature the passengers visiting the local sights, markets, rivers, buildings, mountains; their comments and observations would serve as a cue for dramatized re-enactments of historical events associated with whatever highlights the local areas would have to offer. This week's visit to Haiti, however, seems different; it's almost as if the passengers never leave the boat, and the bulk of the show is devoted to recounting a singular historical anecdote, the life of Haiti's liberator, Toussaint L'Ouverture. I wonder: is this because, back then, there just wasn't anything to see or do in Haiti, due to its condition, or were the writers so fascinated with what they learned of Haiti's origins as a free nation that they uncharacteristically focused so heavily on the one incident?

The episode reproduced below originally aired in 1935, when the medium of radio drama was still in its infancy. Like television, radio's growth as a business as well as an art form brought with it a certain compartmentalization, with new shows judged and approved because they fit easily into pre-existing categories: "detective shows", "situation comedies", "horror anthologies", and so on.

In the beginning nobody had any pre-conceived notions of what the emerging art of radio drama should be, leaving open the possibility that it could be... anything. Therefore what the early broadcasts may lack in technical polish, they tend to make up for in the excitement of discovery, and their awareness that no matter what they had already created elsewhere, they were now starting fresh, exploring something new.

For a brief period in 1935 and 1936, one of the explored possibilities was the fascinating travelogue series itself devoted to exploration: Ports Of Call.