Against the Time

This post is brought to you by librarians — yes, all of them. But especially the ones at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

These particular librarians have to wade through hordes of smug Congressional staffers disembarking at Capitol South Metro to get to work each day. Technically, the librarians share they same bosses as the staffers, and these bosses (Congresspeople in search of cameras) have the power to shut down the Library of Congress for weeks on end. This behavior, of course, is abusive, but librarians show no signs of being timid. When someone visits their windowless domain, they might, after retrieving all the requested items, suggest an extra unknown treasure. Because they want more people to know about it.

That’s how, earlier this year on a research trip to the Library’s Recorded Sound Research Center, I found myself listening to the voice of a young Arthur Miller in a sound truck. One of the reference librarians, Harrison Behl, insisted I check out this 15-minute documentary about Wilmington, NC, narrated by Miller. The year was 1941. Miller tells the story of a city on the verge of war via a kaleidoscope of scenes: a gospel song rewritten and sung as a strike song; an old lady reminiscing in a rocking chair; the rumbling of ships under construction by workers who’d just arrived. 

Last week, after the Eye of Sauron had moved on from its latest 43-day federal government shutdown, I returned to the Library to learn more about the story behind this doc, and others like it.

Back in 1941, Miller was a playwright barely able to make his rent, so it made sense he might try his hand at radio. But his little doc sounded like nothing else on American radio at the time. It had field tape, cross-fades, music, and a quiet, understated pacing. Miller wrote and narrated the piece, but a team at the Library of Congress created the sound.

And that sound, as I said, was not like other stuff on the air at the time. As I’ve written, radio didn’t really become a tape-edited medium in the US until well after World War II, when magnetic tape technology became viable. Almost everything before that sounded studio-bound and scripted. But this series — out of a library no less — was totally different. How did that even happen?

Here’s the short answer: Antifa.

On October 19, 1939, Archibald MacLeish stood before an audience at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and talked about the crisis of war. Nazi Germany had just invaded and defeated Poland (with help from their secret friend, the Soviet Union).

Against that dark backdrop, MacLeish — already one of the best-known poets in the US — was worried about the appeal of Nazi propaganda. After all, American fascists had packed Madison Square Garden earlier the same year. 

“We can either educate the people of this Republic to know and therefore to value and therefore to preserve their own democratic culture, or we can watch the people of this Republic trade their democratic culture for the ignorance and prejudice and the hate of which the just and proper name is fascism,” he declared.

Who was the “we” who should be educating the people of this Republic? Librarians. MacLeish was passionate that libraries had to be active civic institutions, not passive book-lenders. And he had recently been appointed the Librarian of Congress, a move by President Roosevelt that pissed off a lot of librarians, since the poet wasn’t a member of their profession.

Part of the reason MacLeish got the job was his crossover success in radio, which the administration considered very important. His 1937 verse play The Fall of the City was an epic production of CBS’s Columbia Workshop program, an allegory of fascism that starred Burgess Meredith, Orson Welles and more than 200 extras making crowd noises. Now MacLeish was going to drag sound production inside the intellectual and political fortress of the Library.

He applied for a grant to set up a recording lab. Its main purpose was to duplicate and preserve the many wax cylinder and discs of music moldering in the Library’s vaults. But MacLeish also wanted the Library to make radio — so he got a second grant to pay engineers and writers who’d record and describe what was going on around the country. That’s how Arthur Miller eventually joined the crew.

MacLeish was able to attract an all-star team to this “experiment,” the Radio Research Project (not to be confused with a totally different outfit at the time called the Office of Radio Research). The RRP’s first project would be a series of scripts that would bring to life historical artifacts and stories inside the Library’s collections. Called Hidden History, the series was produced and aired on NBC’s Blue Network.

But the restless Radio Research men wanted (as usual, they were all men) to make “documentaries,” much like the New Deal photographers and filmmakers around them. The project’s spiritual leader was a young folklorist from Texas, Alan Lomax. He and MacLeish shared a romantic ideal that Americans would better appreciate their own democracy if they could hear the full regional diversity of accents, songs and stories the country contained.

At first, the RRP team talked about organizing a series of live-remote conversations around the country — basically interviewing people, then writing scripts where the subjects would “perform” themselves live. The team quickly realized this would be ridiculous, not to mention incredibly expensive.

Instead, as Library of Congress Audio-Visual librarian Alan Gevinson writes, the team “began to consider using field recordings as the basis for a series of documentary pieces. Recording engineer Jerome Wiesner, Lomax wrote, ‘assured us that it would be possible to edit field recordings in the Laboratory in such a way so as to eliminate material that would not be pertinent to any story we might wish to tell and to tie smoothly together speeches, interviews and conversations, so that the listener would never be aware that the editing had been done.’”

The guy running the RRP, Philip Cohen, had been a Rockefeller fellow at the BBC, which had long been on a mission to record the voices of people around the UK. So he basically copied the field recording set-up pioneered by producers like Olive Shapley over there.

The main recording technology of 1941 was still the humble lacquer disc. The Library of Congress equipped its sound truck with two disc recorders and a microphone on a long wire connected back to the truck, where an engineer would be listening in and flipping blank discs to keep the recording continuous. Or the disc recorders could be carried into music halls or homes, a feat I hate to imagine.

Even worse to imagine was how producers might edit those recordings later. The process, called “slip disc,” involved multiple disc recorders going at once (Harrison recommends this book for an explanation of how that process worked).

The Library of Congress’s RRP engineer Jerome Wiesner had no patience for this way of doing things. He was going to use a new technique to merge audio and film-recording technologies: The Recordgraph. The Recordgraph recorded sound on a long, continuous loop of celluloid “safety tape.” The recording stylus could record up to a hundred lines on a single loop of tape, like those ancient Dictabelt recorders. You can see a restored Recordgraph in action over at this guy’s shop video. As with a lot of these early tape recorders, it seems so unwieldy that you know people must have been desperate if they were using it.

And the Library of Congress was desperate, because it was ambitious. Its sound truck traveled around the continent, recording people talking and singing. After producers got back to home base, they transcribed their field recordings and wrote scripts. Then the engineers would dub selects from the field-recorded discs onto the Recordgraph’s medium, called Amertape. If the producers wanted to make internal cuts to some long-winded speech, the Amertape could be cued up, cut with scissors, and then taped back together.

“I remember running across boxes of AmerTapes when I worked in the [National Audio-Video Conservation Center] Recorded Sound vaults in Culpeper, and they are weird. Like seeing a marsupial wolf or giant ground sloth: familiar and weirdly foreign at the same time,” Harrison wrote to me.

In the 1940s, thanks to MacLeish, there were studios at the Library of Congress for recording narration. Even though my librarian buddy Harrison is way ahead of me down this rabbit hole, neither of us have found any description of exactly how the engineers mixed all the documentary elements together for the final product. However they did it, it was dubbed back onto a master disc which was then duplicated and sent out to radio stations. The series of six 15-minute documentaries was called “This is History.” 

They’re all a little lacking in plot, tbh — and historians looking at the original transcripts of the raw tape found that some of the more controversial and interesting scenes in the field recordings never made it into the final cut. But these documentaries are still a remarkable example of what radio people could have been doing a lot earlier in the US if they’d had any encouragement.

The LoC’s Radio Research initiative only lasted for only a year and a month. By 1942, the United States had been attacked and joined the war. MacLeish left to run the US Office of Facts and Figures, trying to bring a “strategy of truth” to wartime propaganda. The Library of Congress apparently donated its Recordgraph to the Marines. 

These six short documentaries aired on a few stations, but not the big networks, thanks to their ongoing ban on recorded sound. Soon enough the whole radio-from-the-library experiment was mostly forgotten. But not the people who took part.

Alan Lomax would soon become a major force in American popular music. And the engineer Jerome “Jerry” Wiesner, the one who futzed with Amertape and casually invented documentary techniques years ahead of everyone in commercial radio? He left the field to work on radar development, then became a science adviser to the Kennedy administration, then a computer wonk and an arms control negotiator, and finally an influential president of MIT. 

Archibald MacLeish, still kicking in 1971, wrote some verse on the occasion of his old engineer’s big new job.

A good man! Look at him

there against the time!

He saunters along to his

place in the world's weather,

lights his pipe, hitches his pants,

talks back to accepted opinion.

For further exploration:

Here’s the Library of Congress blog post about Arthur Miller’s documentary, with full audio at the end, of the doc itself! [link]

The Library has also digitized so, so many Radio Research Project scripts, notes and memos. Come join me and Harrison in the rabbit-hole — you can probably leave, though not guaranteed. [link]

I found a 1942 article by Jerome Wiesner on the set-up of his sound lab. The scan is a little blurry but worth the read. [link]