Orignally published 1.04.23.
Legend: The NBC radio broadcast of The Ordering of Moses on 7 May 1937 was cut off because of racist complaints at stations in the South.
Status: Untrue. However, this does NOT mean that racist complaints were not made.
We need to put blame where blame is due, namely, what I have been calling the “long arm of the radio schedule,” which still serves as the primary means to frame on-air advertisements. Newspapers printed the day’s radio listings ahead of time, such as you see here, which is a clip of the schedule from Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle. Mind you, Dett was living in Rochester at this time, plus he had once had his own, weekly show and had since been a repeat-return guest on-air. People here knew about him.
That being said, you can see at the red checkmark that exactly 45 minutes were being devoted to the Cincinnati May Festival, which gave the oratorio’s premiere. It was normal to have the minimal listings like this as well.
So what we have is a local show (“Community Chest”) preceding the network show (marked with an ‘n’), followed by another local show, the all-important and very lucrative reporting of baseball scores. Following that, a regular network show was due (Eddie Vargos’ Orchestra, which might have served up dance music?).
The radio schedule was devastatingly egalitarian. As reviewer Jack Sher had lamented, even Beethoven’s iconic Fifth Symphony proved vulnerable to network interruption. However, in this case the broadcast was so late in the night that there probably was not another show waiting to air, plus it was the day after Christmas, when–back in the old days–lots of things shut down.
In fact, network interruptions occurred so frequently that John Hogan turned New York City’s WQXR into an ad-free radio station for a three-hour portion of each day. He did this, as the article relates, because people tuned into the previous TV station only for the music and not for the screen picture.
Hogan presented the three-hour block in two increments, 4:00-5:00 pm and 7:00-9:00 pm. While entire operas received play, WQXR’s audiences preferred instrumental music, especially symphonies and concertos. If there were ads, “since the station is not a philanthropic venture,” the announcers uttered only 50-100 words. As Hogan said himself, “You wouldn’t admit a loud mouthed salesman to your living room in the flesh, and I won’t be party to sneaking him in, costumed as an entertainer.”
It is also important to note that famous, white men could not escape the schedule, either. You might not recognize Cecil B. DeMille by name alone, but you probably would recognize two movies that he produced, both by the moniker The Ten Commandments. In this clipping here, DeMille does not exactly get cut off because of time constraints. Rather, the reviewer calls DeMille out for using the network cut-off as a device for not crediting a play to its rightful author, and then the reviewer rants about other things.
On a side note: if you get the chance, watch the silent version of Ten Commandments (1923), especially the parting of the Red Sea. It’s on YouTube. Did Dett know it????
Herbert Hoover, POTUS #31, received exactly two minutes of air time (he wasn’t POTUS any more) before the network cut off the punchline to his address. Essentially, he compared the New Deal’s agricultural subsidies to Russian Communism (sound familiar?). I told you the arm of the radio schedule was long.
When the US Congress voted to propose the eventual 21st Amendment to repeal the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), radio audiences listened to the gripping drama unfolding on their wireless sets…until it got cut off. Most interestingly, the action was relayed through the words (and thus interpretations) of the radio announcers, and the article even compared the broadcast to “a football game broadcast..that ended in the closing minutes of play, with the ball on the one-yard line and a down to go.” That is, the proposed Amendment was imminent but anything still might have happened.
The proposed Amendment represented the first, significant challenge to Prohibition since its ratification on 16 January 1919.
All right, you get it, the long arm of the radio schedule was brutal. The question, however, remains: did the radio overseers ever cut anyone off intentionally? If your guess involves a politician, the answer is yes.
Radio broadcasts had stricter obscenity policies than newspapers, as this clipping shows. Ohio Governor Martin L. Davey (1935-1939) received a network “time out” for bad on-air behavior. WAIU is a Columbus-based station that, in all likelihood, possessed strong ties to Ohio State University, the ostensible target of Davey’s invective.
The final example reports an on-air incident at a soccer match in Ireland (and the suspense ends here). The match featured Cavan vs. Galway at the All-Ireland Football Championship being played in Dublin. The background to the incident involves the Irish Republican Army, which had been organized for roughly a dozen years by 1933. President of the (1921) Irish Republic Éamon de Valera attended the match, and he was likely the protestors’ intended audience regarding the alleged mistreatment of political prisoners by his administration.
The article reports that guards were stationed around the radio station (in Cork) for the entire night.
In the end, we must conclude that radio broadcasts of all kinds were interrupted so frequently that we should not read anything extra into what happened for The Ordering‘s premiere. Again, I would like to emphasize that the argument I have presented here in no way affects whether racist complaints were lodged against the music.