Radio Memories: Service And Leadership

"I was convinced that the President needed three essentials if he was to survive his job: a sense of humor, a belief in the power of prayer, and a refuge away from the Executive Mansion."

In the years before the shadow of television fell upon our culture, families gathered around another item of living room furniture for their entertainment: the radio, closing their eyes and opening their imagination to the wonderful world of radio drama, the theater of the mind.

Every Sunday we tune in to memories of those distant times, to find a link between our present and our past, in the hope of lighting a way to a better future. Rarely do the distances feel as magnified than with this week's offering: the historical drama, Mr President.

Radio drama allowed playwrights and sound effects crews the opportunity to recreate history in detail rarely possible in television, with that visual medium's requirements of physical sets and physical actors needing to look like their historical counterparts. Starting in 1947, the ABC network began a radio program that plunged audiences for the next six years deep into American history in a series built around an interesting hook to make history itself seem more interesting to listeners expecting otherwise from boring history studies endured in school.


Robert Jennings and Dick Woollen created an anthology program starring Edward Arnold entitled "Mr President", dramatizing, and humanizing, a different President of the United States in each episode. The hook was that the actual identity of the President would be withheld, thereby inviting the audience to test their knowledge of US history. At the play's climax, the announcer (in the early seasons) or a character in the story (in the latter days of the series) would reveal whether the audience's best guess had been correct... an interesting intersection with the formula used in detective radio programs so popular with listeners in those days.

Each week the series would open with a short introduction meant to strike a difficult balancing act between establishing the President as a leader worthy of respect, but a mortal man, not an infallible genius:

Mr President, at home in the White House, elected leader of our people, our fellow citizen and neighbor.
These are little known stories of the men who've lived in the White House.
Dramatic, exciting events in their lives that you and I so rarely hear.
True, human stories of... Mr President.

The series starred Edward Arnold week in and week out as Mr President, an actor whose rise from humble beginnings to movie stardom rivals the rags-to-riches biographies of many of the presidential characters he portrayed on the air.

Many of the surviving episodes teach an elusive lesson: that the greatest leaders often arrive at their title through being such excellent servants, and that the secret to effective leadership lies in the humility of a leader's service, and the sincerity of a leader's sacrifice, as they give in order to receive.

This episode of Mr President was first broadcast on a Sunday long ago, on October 31st, 1948. See if you can guess which Chief Executive made the observation opening this week's Radio Memories post; but don't worry, I picked a rather easy one. If you enjoy the challenge, and develop a taste for more, be forewarned: the few surviving Mr President shows tend to be listed in collectors' and dealers' archives by the name of the President, rather than a general episode description... defeating the whole purpose of the historical guessing game in the first place! (It would be like listing whodunit detective programs by titles such as, "the butler shoots the millionaire", "the secretary poisons the boss"...)


Meanwhile, we invite you to listen to a servant of the people renewing his humility through his sense of humor, refreshing his courage through meditative prayer, and remembering his mortality by balancing the stress of duty with a calming, restful peace; all worthy habits that help us survive the tests of character involved in becoming a true leader.




Previous Radio Memories posts:

Mercury Theatre: Hell On Ice
Gunsmoke: Indian Raid?
Biography In Sound: George M. Cohan
Fibber McGee And Molly: The Scrap Drive
D-Day Broadcasts (from June 5, 1944)
Red Skelton: Vacations
Frontier Gentleman: Gambling Lady
Information Please: Guests Walter Duranty and John Gunther
The Aldrich Family: Cleaning The Furnace
Tom Mix, Terry and the Pirates VE Day broadcasts from May 8 1945
You Are There: The Capture Of John Wilkes Booth
Fort Laramie: War Correspondent
CBS Radio Workshop: Son Of Man
Great Gildersleeve: Easter Rabbits
Dimension X: Time And Time Again
An American In England: Women Of Britain
Cavalcade Of America: Bob Hope Reports
The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast
Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War
Escape: Vanishing Lady
Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

Teaching Amnesia To British Youth

"Our face is our autobiography", historian Will Durant remarked in one of his 1,000-page volumes on the Story of Civilization. This observation compliments one made by another Will -- William Shakespeare, in As You Like It:
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts..."

As we make our own individual entrances we are arriving at a mid-way point in an ongoing story. The players we see looking out at us when we face ourselves in the mirror can delude themselves into believing that the play began with the rise of their own individual curtain, but a more humble, and honest, recounting would reveal that the clock started ticking long before our arrival into the scene.

What story are we joining? What role is missing in the play, that we can fulfill? What are the hopes, and regrets, of those already having passed through the drama before us, from which we may take our cues?

Looking into their own mirrors, I wonder what the youth of Great Britain are seeing written into their autobiographies, now that they are no longer being taught about the story they are joining:

History Vanishes From One In 20 Schools

[Michael Gove, the Conservative shadow schools secretary] said: “History is effectively disappearing from some secondary schools. Giving children a proper knowledge of our island story so they can take pride in our historic achievements is the best way to build a modern, inclusive future for our country.
“But after a decade of decline under Labour less than a third of children now take the subject, and yet again we see that it is poorest pupils that are disproportionately missing out.”

Given how history's being taught when it is being taught, maybe it's disappearance is becoming the lesser of evils..?

[T]here is no doubt that something has gone badly wrong when seven out of 10 schoolchildren are no longer studying history at the age of 16, when two out of 10 think Britain was once occupied by the Spanish, and when some identify Sir Winston Churchill as the first man on the moon. And the blame lies at the very top, shared by politicians of both parties, who have been systematically cheating and betraying our children since the 1980s.

During the Thatcher years, it was meddling from the top that downgraded history from a compulsory to an optional subject at the age of 16 – which, because it was seen as "difficult", made it easy pickings for Mickey Mouse subjects such as Beauty Therapy. It was supposedly "progressive" interference, meanwhile, that did away with old-fashioned essay questions and replaced them with empathy exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that sacrificed any sense of intellectual depth or discipline.

And perhaps above all, it was in Westminster and Whitehall that officials designed our absurd Yo! Sushi approach to history, in which schools randomly pick unrelated historical topics like saucers from a conveyor belt, instead of studying our national story as a continuous narrative, which is how any sensible person sees it.

One student survived his youthful education with his curiosity intact, and pursued history as a more serious subject in university, but now admits he seems to spend more time defending his favorite topic than studying it:

Whenever I tell someone outside university that I'm taking history, they look puzzled, suppress a giggle, and ask "Why?"
...
People assume I'm deranged (or just a bit simple) when I mumble my reason for studying history: I enjoy it. I like reading and writing about history.
Basically, I'm doing a hobby degree. "But what will you do with a history degree when you graduate?" is often the next question.

Here's how you answer them: we study history as a precursor to greater understanding of other subjects, not just for its own sake; it helps us recognize the existence of cause-and-effect relationships, the fallibility of Man, the possibility of unintended consequences, and most especially, it teaches us how to learn, so long as history is approached as the study of stories... as learning from experience.

Sadly, in the UK such wisdom is fast becoming history.

How could you see a future, when you don't see a past?