Mary McLeod Bethune: “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?”

Audience

Bethune’s address was aired live on NBC Radio, a broadcasting company that had emerged out of a complex set of business relationships—and a period of vigorous competition—involving the Radio Corporation of America (known as RCA), Westinghouse Electric, American Telephone & Telegraph, and various independent radio stations as well as other corporations. As early as the 1920s NBC Radio, originally seen as a marketing device for RCA’s radio equipment, was attracting a huge listening audience with its serial programming, including the mass hit Amos ’n’ Andy. The Great Depression boosted demand for radio, which provided people with an inexpensive form of entertainment. NBC Radio emerged as the industry leader by compiling a lineup of highly popular performers, including Al Jolson, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Fred Allen, and Bob Hope. NBC Radio also helped created the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the famed musician Arturo Toscanini. Popular programs during the depression era included Fibber McGee and Molly, One Man’s Family, Ma Perkins, and Death Valley Days. Because NBC affiliate stations were often the most powerful in their markets, they reached broad audiences, particularly at night, when their signals traveled thousands of miles farther than they did during the day.

Thus, a program such as America’s Town Meeting of the Air, on which Bethune delivered her remarks, reached a large coast-to-coast audience. That program, one of America’s first talk-radio shows, had been launched on May 30, 1935; its topic that night was “Which Way America: Fascism, Communism, Socialism or Democracy?” The program’s format was to assemble a group of experts to discuss a topic selected by the moderator George V. Denny, Jr., the executive director of the League for Political Education, which produced the program. The goal of the program was to use modern technology to recreate the feel of a town meeting for a scattered audience, in this way involving a variety of citizens from across the nation in discussion of important public issues. Always present in the studio for the program was a live audience, which alternately cheered or booed in reaction to the speakers. Audience members were also allowed to ask questions; many openly challenged the viewpoints of the panelists and even mocked them or called them names. By 1936 listeners were able to call into the show, and they, too, often responded to what they were hearing with great vigor, sometimes expressing highly inflammatory views.