You Burned the City

Note: This post was originally for Continuous Wave’s email subscribers only, but I’ve decided to post it publicly. The excerpts below are from a remarkable artifact of broadcasting history, a slim booklet of speeches given at the end of 1941, just before the US entered WWII. It was a terrible time for most people on this planet, and it was about to get worse.

This little booklet from CBS is worth re-reading now. It is reminder that words are not empty, that the act of witnessing matters more than we know, and that people within flawed institutions can still speak clearly and set the standards by which will media be judged by history — including in ways we cannot anticipate now.

What follows below is a little context for the booklet itself, and then three excerpts from speeches given that night.

One of the pleasures of digging around in the backwaters of radio history, I’m finding, is that pretty much everything is available at a reasonable price.

And so that’s how, after reading about it in a footnote, I ended up with my own copy of the historic booklet “In honor of a man and an ideal…” published December 2, 1941. The 35-page folio is printed on beautiful, cream-colored stock, stapled inside a gray deckle-edged, thicker paper cover. And on the back of my copy is a little extra something which I will reveal below.

But first, I want to share some of the words inside this small but mighty booklet. It contains speeches by three guys that readers of Continuous Wave have already met: the poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, CBS head honcho Bill Paley, and Edward R. Murrow, then in charge of CBS’s European news operations, who was just back on furlough from nearly a decade covering the rise of fascism and war.

It’s a very strange time as a US citizen to read what they said before a ballroom of hundreds of media luminaries at the Waldorf Astoria in New York nearly 85 years ago. It was a moment, all too rare, when people came together to acknowledge the power of the witness — that unloved, vital role in society.

The least we can do is witness the resolve of these men, whatever their imperfections, and whatever would befall them — and us — later. Also, let us pay our respects to good writing, and possibly some ghostwriting, by radio people!

First, a little context to set the scene: During the Nazi Blitz, which began in 1940, the London headquarters of CBS had come under bombardment many times, and Murrow and other reporters had experienced many near misses with falling shells. Through it all, the CBS audience had become mesmerized his articulate, restrained reports, always live and often from a rooftop overlooking the besieged city.

By the time he showed up in a white bowtie and tux at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, Ed Murrow had been reporting on the Blitz for more than a year. It must have felt surreal to be back in the States, though he returned by ship and thus had some time to adjust to life beyond the siege.

All that same year, Murrow’s boss Paley had been under constant pressure to air the anti-war rallies of the “America First” movement, an isolationist wing of politics which took as its mascot the increasingly antisemetic Charles Lindbergh.

So throwing a big party for the network’s star correspondent must have felt like both a relief for the network and a strategic imperative. No one there knew that in just a few days after these remarks, the Japanese would attack the US at Pearl Harbor and the country would end its long debate about whether and how to join the world’s raging conflict. The excerpts below, then, are from a very particular moment in time, but also to my mind, unusually timeless, especially for journalists.

…I am talking to you, Ed Murrow. And what I have to say to you is this — that you have accomplished one of the great miracles of the world. How much of it was you and how much of it was the medium you used I wouldn’t undertake to say — though others have used the medium without the miracle resulting. But however that may be, the fact is that you accomplished it. You destroyed a superstition. You destroyed, in fact, the most obstinate of all the superstitions — the superstition against which poetry and all the arts have fought for centuries — the superstition they too have destroyed. You destroyed the superstition of distance and time. 

I am sorry if I seem to speak in metaphors for there was never a time when I wished more to speak in literal and precisely meaning words. What I wish to say to you is this: that over the period of your months in London you destroyed in the minds of many men and women in this country the superstition that what is done beyond three thousand miles of water is not really done at all; the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are not violence and lies and murder here; the cowardly and brutal superstition that the enslavement of mankind in a country where the sun rises at midnight by our clocks is not enslavement by the time we live by; the black and stifling superstition that what we cannot see and hear and touch can have no meaning for us.

How you did this, I repeat I do not know. But that you did was evident to anyone. You spoke, you said, in London. Sometimes you said you were speaking from a roof in London looking at the London sky. Sometimes you said you spoke from underground beneath that city. But it was not in London really that you spoke. It was in the back kitchens and the front living rooms and the moving automobiles and the hotdog stands and the observation cars of another country that your voice was truly speaking. And what you did was this: You made real and urgent and present to the men and women of those comfortable rooms, those safe enclosures, what these men and women had not known was present there or real. You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead — were all men’s dead — were mankind’s dead — and ours.

…Tonight we’re celebrating both the survival of an ideal and a man’s service to that ideal. It’s because in part of the world freedom of speech still survives and freedom of the air is an inseparable part of it, that Columbia is able to maintain a free and open forum of public discussion without being obliged to further the ideas or the aspirations of any special group, in government or out. It is because of that same freedom of the air that we are able to bring you the news — uncolored, unbiased, with no thought of moulding your ideas to fit a pattern of our choice. 

Indeed the sole purpose is and must be to tell you the news, the meaning of the news, the interrelation of events and ideas. Thus, honestly and intelligently informed, you are left wholly free to take such attitudes and such actions as your own judgment dictates. 

Columbia has striven always to preserve that part of this great freedom which has been in its custody. So have many other broadcasters, and long before we began to serve this human need, the great press services and honest newspapers of America dedicated themselves to the same task. Our common duty to preserve this freedom and to use it solely in the public interest, is a duty not to ourselves but to you.

…If there is a difference between me and other Americans, it is simply that in these critical years I have been there and you have been here. It is for you to judge whether this gives me the advantage of perspective on problems at home or whether it makes me a less competent witness. Perhaps I can say to you that as an American in London, reasonably well informed as to what has been afoot in the world, it seems to me that Americans at home already have made some basic decisions and have some fairly simple further questions to answer — and mind you when I say that the questions are simple, I am not trying to tell you that the answers are necessarily either simple or easy. 

Certainly America has answered the most fundamental question of all — it wills democracy to survive. I am told that over here you no longer debate whether the destruction of Hitler and the isms that he trails in his train are essential to Democracy’s survival. So it seems to me that the debatable area narrows itself pretty much to these two questions —

Must Britain survive in order that democracy may survive? If the answer is no, we have only the devices of insulation to consider. If the answer is yes, the question is — How far, and perhaps even to a greater degree than some over here are willing to admit, how fast shall America go?

Almost I wish that I were so endowed that at this point I could stand before you as a prophet rather than a reporter; but I shall stick to my role and tell you only that to some of the most thoughtful observers to whom I have talked in Britain…it has seemed that if Britain should fall in spite of material aids, speeches, editorials, and knitted garments, it will be necessary to consider a new Britain, driven by ruthless conquerors, into taking her place in the forefront of our enemies. 

These people — and they are lovers of war no more than you or I — have been heard to ask, “If Britain goes down or becomes too exhausted to care, will America not become the most hated nation on earth?” It is not our ability to resist the hatred that troubles them; instead they ask insistently, “Can America withstand the competition both economic and ideological?” Today there is a shuddering recognition that it is the strength of national socialism that it forces those who fear it to imitate it; and those who go down before it to embrace it.

Too Little and Too Late was nearly the epitaph of Great Britain. That much we know. There is no decision that America can make that will be without a price, but for a wrong decision in the present, the future will take its inevitable revenge.

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I’d say those were some decent speeches. If you want to read them in their entirety, as I mentioned, the booklet is online here. After the jump, you’ll find something extra that came with my personal copy of this artifact. Never say history can’t also offer you exclusive content.

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