Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Note from Julia: The cold-open segments of NBC’s Saturday Night Live often rely on parodies of newsmakers, as cast members don wigs and assume weird accents to portray exaggerated versions of recent events. We might assume that news re-enactments on air have always been ridiculous and over-the-top.

In fact, the “Golden Age” of radio in the US was a golden age of news re-enactments, and these ones were taken seriously. I wrote a little about that here, but I was just scratching the surface.

Radio’s love of re-enactments was so vast, and so mind-bending for us today, that we need help to understand it. We need a media historian who knows why radio relied on re-enactments, and what went into popular “docu-drama” shows — foremost among them, a weekly roundup called March of Time.

Today we have a guest post from Professor Emerita Cynthia Meyers, whose book A Word from Our Sponsor is one of my favorites. She’s done a ton of original research in a neglected corner of radio history: the role of ad agencies in production. Her post today is adapted from a great paper on March of Time she wrote a few years back.

Consider this post a soft launch of a series I’ve been wanting to do on the theme of authenticity. In a mediated world, how do we judge what is “authentic” and why? The program that Meyers writes about here reveals just how much our sense of authenticity can change over time.

Here’s Cynthia:

Amelia Earhart’s voice sounds faint, yet distinct, as she radios her position and announces her airplane’s fuel levels are low. She says she cannot see Howland Island, yet she is sure she is near it. 

Many radio listeners, hearing this on July 8, 1937, believed it to be Earhart’s actual last transmission before she disappeared.¹ In truth, they were hearing  an actress perform in a fictionalized, scripted re-enactment. Dramatic re-enactments were how The March of Time worked, week after week. 

Broadcast live on network radio from 1931 until 1945 — reaching as many as 62 million listeners per broadcast — the program featured a 23-person orchestra and a roster of ten or more actors. 

In this introductory clip from April 5, 1935, you can hear the announcer mention the fact that it was the “re-enacting of memorable scenes from the news of the week.”

The re-enactments, which may sound inauthentic to us today, were hailed as credible and powerful. Here’s how one journalist breathlessly described the program in 1936: “With no trace of exaggeration or caricature, they hold a mirror up to humanity, quoting verbatim the utterances of those in the news. If someone objects, he objects to the sound of his own words.”

The March of Time relied on impersonations, accurate or not, in order to create an aural experience that brought news and newsmakers to life in listeners’ imaginations. The impersonations solved several issues for the producers.

First, in those pre-audiotape days, there were few actuality recordings of newsmakers, and convincing newsmakers to appear in the studio and speak live into a microphone was not practical given the time constraints and the program’s international news coverage. 

Second, the radio networks insisted on live performances, so live actors fulfilled that requirement. Third, the producers and writers could invent speech for newsmakers by paraphrasing, editing, and fictionalizing their words. This enabled the producers to shape the stories narratively and tonally. 

Fourth, such flexibility allowed the producers to make the creative decisions they deemed best for attracting audience attention. By heightening the dramatic elements of a news story and by shaping an actor’s performance to signal a newsmaker’s identity, the producers of March of Time believed that they were providing audiences with a more authentic and engaging version of current events than could be found in other media.

The program’s credibility was based, in part, on it being a production of Time magazine, a newsweekly that featured poached news stories rewritten in a breezy style designed to appeal to busy white-collar professionals. Time founder Henry Luce hoped to attract readership by focusing on newsmakers — the personalities in the news — rather than on dry, abstract topics such as tax policy. 

To stimulate interest and to cross-promote his media properties, Luce extended Time’s content into other media. He launched the March of Time radio program in 1931 and a newsreel version in 1935; in 1936 he reconfigured Life magazine as a pictorial weekly. 

Congruent with Time’s approach to news, the radio program’s producers selected current news events with an eye to entertainment and personalities as well as information. According to Radio Guide, “It is newspaper business. And it is show business. It must be ‘good theater’ because it is show business. Yet no fact may be distorted for theatrical effect.”

The March of Time presented several brief unrelated stories in each episode. For example, the January 18, 1937 broadcast includes these scenes: a boat caught in a storm off Cape Hatteras; a dialogue with a Japanese admiral justifying the invasion of China; a scene with a scam artist who impersonates celebrities; a scene featuring a starving family in Brooklyn discovering that their son has hanged himself to relieve them of expense; a Roosevelt speech about the stock market; British reporters interviewing Haile Selassie; and a debate in the British House of Commons. 

The transition from sketch to sketch was marked by the announcer (referred to as the “Voice of Time”) declaiming, “Time marches on!” accompanied by orchestral fanfare. This sonic style of moving from one imaginary place to another through sound cues is what Neil Verma calls “kaleidosonic.”² Instead of shifting images, the audience experiences “shifting sonic worlds.” 

In this February 3, 1938 excerpt, you can hear the “Voice of Time” — performed by Westbrook von Voorhis — narrate the desperate situation of Soviet scientists stranded on an ice floe in the Arctic.

Despite producers’ claims that most dialogue was “verbatim” and “based on verified quotations,” often the dialogue, characters, and scenes depicted in March of Time were pure invention.³

To give just one example: in 1938 a British ship was torpedoed in the Mediterranean; everybody on board was killed, so no witnesses survived. Nonetheless, in this excerpt from the February 3, 1938 broadcast, writers invented a scene in which listeners could “hear” the ship’s last moments through layers of sound effects including sirens, explosions, and panicking crew members.

To heighten the drama, the disaster is portrayed as the fictionalized last moments of the ship captain’s wife — we even learn her name was “Laura.” The putative innocence and feminine helplessness of the captain’s wife allowed the audience to personalize the injustice and horror of the attack. Thus what might have been a distant foreign incident, the deaths of a ship’s nameless crew, is reconfigured as a tragic love story. 

Staff at Time magazine did not produce the radio program on their own. Instead, from 1931 to 1939 they turned to the magazine’s advertising agency: Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO). Because the only on-air authorship credit was given to Time, BBDO’s role producing the program has been little known. 

The agency’s most famous founder, copywriter Bruce Barton, argued that business could be a form of service, and that advertising, “the voice of business,” could keep manufacturers honest by publicizing brand attributes.⁴

BBDO created advertising and public relations campaigns for large corporate clients such as US Steel (“Helping to Build a Better America”), General Motors (“Motorizing the World”), DuPont (“Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry”), and General Electric (“Live Better Electrically”). BBDO considered advertising to be a form of public education.⁵

Like other top ad agencies, BBDO produced many radio programs during the 1930s and 1940s, including General Motors Hour, General Electric Circle, Cavalcade of America, Armstrong Quakers, and programs for Socony, Goodyear, and Ethyl.⁶

BBDO staff cast, scripted, directed, and arranged the music for the programs that they produced for clients. Often the programs were vehicles for companies hoping to polish their corporate image.

The BBDO executives most responsible for The March of Time — Arthur Pryor Jr., William Spier, and Homer Fickett — were also key personnel for programs BBDO produced. Pryor, gushed a journalist, “is an expert director, with an ear like a lynx for puffy acting.”⁷

Spier had been a music critic for five years before joining BBDO. He and Fickett produced the program, overseeing scripts, casting actors, and directing performances.

The production of March of Time was labor intensive, and this intensity was trumpeted as a signifier of quality: “Two hundred and forty hours is a conservative estimate” for the labor of seven writers, one editor, two researchers, two directors, ten actors, and a 23-person orchestra plus its leader. 

The March of Time producers prided themselves on the program’s credibility and “realism.” They publicized the fact that Time editors helped select the stories and that “a research woman”  from Time stood by “embodying accuracy.” They were pleased when listeners were fooled by the re-enactments and impersonations into thinking they were hearing actual events and the newsmakers themselves. 

In 1933 a listener wrote that the re-enactment of an assassination attempt on Franklin Roosevelt was “so realistic” that she wondered if it had “originate[d] in a studio or was it broadcast from some sort of a sound machine which might have been at the scene.” ⁸

This sonic verisimilitude extended to sound effects. In order to replicate the sound of a beheading, for example, CBS sound effects supervisor Ora Nichols chopped “liverwurst, salami, apples and bananas before the microphone” before trying a honeydew melon, which was deemed most accurate sounding.⁹

The impersonation of actual people raised a host of questions. The program might, for example, be accused of infringing on copyrights, privacy rights, or publicity rights by imitating well-known voices. BBDO protected itself from such accusations by claiming that it was a news program overseen by journalists at Time, and therefore they were not required to get permissions from living people as they would for an advertisement.¹⁰

Time also claimed that “A voice, as a face, is public domain,” and thus they did not need to get permission to impersonate a voice. 

The March of Time producers sought actors who could perform accurate vocal impersonations in order to build credibility for the re-enactments. The actors were never credited on the air (neither were the BBDO staff), because that would have undercut the impression of sonic verisimilitude. Some of the actors went on to later fame, including Agnes Moorehead, Arlene Francis, and Orson Welles (whose 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast drew heavily on his March of Time experiences).

Because the audience could not see the actors, each actor played multiple parts: William Adams impersonated Franklin Roosevelt, Paul von Hindenburg (the German president during the Weimar Republic), and King Edward VIII; Dwight Weist played Adolf Hitler, George Bernard Shaw, William Randolph Hearst, Fred Allen, and Father Coughlin; and Ted di Corsia impersonated Benito Mussolini, Herbert Hoover, and “various gangsters.” 

Each actor claimed to do extensive research into the roles, listening to recordings, newsreels, and radio speeches.¹¹

Marian Hopkinson played Eleanor Roosevelt, and in this April 5, 1935 excerpt, you can hear the Mid-Atlantic accent signifying her upper class origins.¹²

Dwight Weist also impersonated Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the accused kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh’s son, for more than two years. Hauptmann’s arrest, trial, and execution were each re-enacted on the program. To ensure the most accurate performance, Weist studied the doomed Hauptmann: “He analyzed the bone structure of his head. Bone structure affects the voice. He attended the trial to observe the kidnapper. Loathing him, he made himself feel what Bruno was feeling, understand what he understood.” 

In this October 5, 1934 excerpt, you can hear Weist as Hauptmann defending himself. As one journalist recounted, “When the night came for the re-enactment of the execution, [Weist] felt sick, frightened. He felt, he swears, as though part of him died, too.” 

To play President Franklin Roosevelt, actor William Adams “studies newsreels to get personality as well as correct inflection into his impersonations.”¹³

At BBDO, confidence in the accuracy of his impersonation was so high that in 1934 they tested it on Eleanor Roosevelt. While she was visiting the agency for a different broadcast, she was introduced to Adams. According to the BBDO Newsletter account:

Later in 1934 President Roosevelt, fearing his efforts to calm the national mood were undercut by these impersonations, asked BBDO to stop. Not only was he concerned that March of Time’s fictionalized dialogue would confuse his public statements with fictionalized ones, he was also using radio himself to communicate directly with the electorate in his Fireside Chats.

Although the March of Time did later impersonate the president again, more often they sidestepped the issue by having a different character read from his speech. For example, in this January 18, 1937 excerpt, a rapid list of news headlines ends with a clerk reading a statement by Roosevelt. 

Through accents, tone, and voice, March of Time built on audiences’ existing assumptions about vocal stereotypes to help audiences quickly identify and “understand” a character. 

Many newsmakers were not English speakers. Instead of impersonating them in their own language, which most listeners would not understand, the producers directed the actors to speak in heavily accented English, employing a kind of aural shortcut to signal ethnicity through voice instead of appearance. To achieve the most credible accented English, the actors would research the newsmakers and occasionally visit the International House at Columbia University to hear foreigners’ speech.¹⁴ 

Ted di Corsia, when he impersonated an Arabic speaker, would have a Muslim prayer translated phonetically “so that he can get the exact cadence.”¹⁵

In this February 10, 1938 excerpt, we can hear Dwight Weist’s Hitler impersonation sounding more like upperclass European nobility than a fanatical dictator, perhaps because the producers were careful to avoid alienating German-American listeners prior to the outbreak of World War II. 

Audience expectations of English proficiency were colored by ethnic stereotyping. Asian newsmakers were often impersonated in accented pidgin English. In one episode, a Chinese-born actor impersonated Chiang Kai-shek in a heavily accented voice — but some listeners complained that the voice was not “Chinese” enough.¹⁶

In this January 18, 1937 excerpt, a Japanese admiral is distressed at the growing tension between Japan and the US; the clipped, singsong tones are meant to convey the character’s ethnicity. 

Foreigners were not the only characters subject to vocal stereotyping. In this March 29, 1935 broadcast, a reporter interviews a Seminole chief and presents a sympathetic perspective on the need for Native American reparations because “it seems only fair you should have more land”; however, the Seminole chief sounds like a character in a B movie Western.

Although Time was the nominal producer and sponsor, BBDO was asked to find other sponsors to carry the production and transmission costs. At different times, Remington Rand, the appliance manufacturer Servel, and even Wrigley’s spearmint gum all briefly sponsored the program. 

On the August 17, 1936 broadcast, an announcer explained that Time controlled the program content: “The maker of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum has no more control over The March of Time than they have over the editorial policies and magazines in which they advertise.” But Wrigley dropped its sponsorship after six months.

As one observer noted:

Wrigley’s advertising manager explained that “a manufacturer advertises to establish friendly relations with his prospective customers, and even though we try to point out the fact that we did not make the news, nevertheless some of them seemed to figure we were to blame for the news.”¹⁷

BBDO produced the program until 1939, when it went on hiatus. Another advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, took over production from 1941 to 1945, when the show’s radio run came to an end. Because recording technologies had improved for actuality audio, the necessity for re-enactments declined. 

While the theatrical newsreel version of The March of Time continued until 1951 and is today better known, the radio program has been largely forgotten. One reason is that the journalism profession changed its standards; March of Time’s extensive use of fictionalization and impersonation undermined its claims to accuracy.

Historians of Henry Luce’s journalism empire tend to treat radio’s March of Time as an embarrassing footnote better forgotten than valorized. But during its heyday, it was praised as an important contribution to the education of audiences about the news — despite the fictionalization and impersonations.

As the radio critic Max Wylie proclaimed in 1939, the March of Time provided “vision through sound” and brought “before the public accurate information in memorable and provocative style.”¹⁸

JB: Thank you again to Professor Cynthia Meyers for dropping so much knowledge about radio re-enactments, including all the audio she uploaded to YouTube! You can read her original paper on March of Time here.

And go check out more of her work at profcynthiameyers.com.

P.S. There are dozens of episodes of March of Time for the listening in an online library here.

Legit this post has footnotes: