1920 (30 page)

For creating the League of Nations, which was affirmed by most of the rest of the world and would last from 1920 to 1946, eventually enlisting 63 countries, Woodrow Wilson was voted the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919. He was certainly told the good news, but that does not mean he was aware of it, that it ever sank in. If it did, he surely found it poor consolation. He also, of course, found it impossible to accept the award in person. The United States Minister in Norway, Albert G. Schmedeman, received the prize in Oslo on Wilson's behalf, bringing it back to Washington on his next home leave. Mrs. Wilson put it in her husband's bedroom.

On February 3, 1924, Woodrow Wilson succumbed to a stroke at his home in the nation's capital. Dr. Grayson announced the news to reporters. “Mr. Wilson died at eleven-fifteen this morning. His heart action became feebler and feebler and the heart muscle was so fatigued that it refused to act any longer. The end came peacefully.” The occasion was one of the most sorrowful in the capital's long history, perhaps surpassed only by the deaths of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

A few days after he died, Wilson became the only president to be buried in Washington, D.C.

Ironically, despite his lengthy illness, Wilson would outlive the man who succeeded him in the White House, a man who seemed so much healthier, yet so much less dedicated to world peace, or perhaps any other issue of the time.

O
N NOVEMBER SECOND, WOMEN IN
all forty-eight states joined men in voting Mrs. Wilson out of office. Most of them didn't know that's what they were doing, but it wouldn't have mattered regardless. Her husband, hanging on to a kind of life, as he would do for a few more years, was not one of the candidates.

Americans selected Warren G. Harding, a former small-town businessman and former U.S. senator from Ohio, as the twenty-ninth president of the United States. Harding attracted 16,144,093 votes, compared to a mere 9,139,661 for the Democrat, James M. Cox. Finishing third, even though he was in jail at the time for his opposition to the Great War—specifically, and ludicrously, for violating the Espionage Act of 1917—was the socialist union leader Eugene V. Debs. It was the fifth time that Debs, an electoral tradition by now, had run for the nation's highest office. He received 913,691 votes, a small number for a presidential candidate but rather a large number as a measure of dissatisfaction with ongoing capitalistic excess, especially war profiteering at the top of the list. In other
words, the robber barons, with their services more desperately needed during the war than ever, had figured out ways to make even more money than usual from military demands for materiel.

Carrie Chapman Catt was also on the ballot in 1920, as the vice-presidential candidate of the Commonwealth Land party. It finished fifth, with a mere 5,750 people marking their ballots in its favor.

On the surface, it seemed just another presidential election, with no issues out of the ordinary to be decided, no change in the culture likely to result. Except there was. There was something very different about this election, something that had nothing to do with politics, everything to do with electronics, primitive though it was. For in the long run, the results of the voting in 1920 were not nearly as important as the means by which a small number of Americans learned of them.

For the first time, election returns were broadcast, a word new to the language for a means of communication new to the nation, radio transmission. Signals were sent through the air in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area and, by adjusting knobs on their radio sets, those relatively few people who had them could learn the voters' preferences more quickly than ever before, the same hour as the votes were cast. Radio made the citizenry as much a part of the event as the pollsters counting the votes. It was, for those people able to tune in, an extraordinary sensation, even though the election itself lacked the suspense of a close outcome.

Airplanes and automobiles, women in voting booths and men in picket lines around their places of employment. And now—radio. It was a time like no other in our country, and those of an older generation were dizzied by the changes. It was not something so simple as the world around them gradually taking on a different form; it was as if the world had become a different place, as if a new God had taken command, as if new rules, new possibilities, a completely new atmosphere, had all replaced the old.

The idea for the technology of, in effect, transporting sound came about gradually. And, at the beginning, militarily. Although research on radio had started in earnest late in the nineteenth century, it became a top priority as the Great War began. Even before the United States entered the conflict, the Allies were trying to develop a primitive form of radio technology to help detect the location of enemy vessels at sea. For this
purpose, “a central need” was vacuum tubes. Several American companies entered the race to produce the tubes, most notably the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Corporation, which was in the process drawn into the infancy of the new communications medium after the war.

Westinghouse, like the few other corporate entities dabbling in radio, was trying to decide whether the medium could one day become a profitable venture, which is to say, as historian Geoffrey Perrett informs us, it was trying to decide what might be broadcast and whether or not anyone would listen.

Experimental stations opened in New York, Cliffwood, New Jersey, and Long Beach, California to find out. The Bureau of Standards in Washington began broadcasting music concerts once a week, as did an experimental station created by the
Detroit News
. Another station was opened by Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. No one seemed to have the vaguest idea about what they were doing. They were all optimistic and enthusiastic, however, and it soon became evident that there were thousands, then tens of thousands, of equally zealous amateurs building crystals sets to listen in. At which point it occurred to Westinghouse that broadcasting did have a future after all.

And so, as Perrett points out, several other stations had preceded KDKA in making using of the air waves for commercial enterprise before the historic presidential balloting. Most likely, KDKA is considered the pioneer because it was the only station that provided the results of the voting as they became available. It was covering a news event “live,” and nothing like that had ever happened before. Such was the publicity for election-day coverage that radio sales began to soar in its aftermath, and programming henceforth became more frequent, more regularly scheduled.

KDKA was also the first station in the United States to receive a government license, which is to say that it was the first station permitted to attempt to make a business of radio.

But precisely how would the Pittsburgh station go about it? Westinghouse was stumped, but not for long. On September twenty-ninth, a little
more than a month before the election, Harry P. Davis, a Westinghouse vice president, saw a newspaper advertisement for a product that Pittsburgh's Joseph Horne department store had begun to sell.

AIR CONCERT “PICKED UP” BY RADIO HERE

Victrola music, played into the air over a wireless telephone, was “picked up” by listeners on the wireless receiving station which was recently installed here for patrons interested in wireless experiments. The concert was heard Thursday night about 10 o'clock, and continued 20 minutes. Two orchestra numbers, a soprano solo—which rang particularly high and clear through the air—and a juvenile “talking piece” constituted the program.

The music was from a Victrola pulled up close to the transmitter of a wireless telephone in the home of [Westinghouse executive] Frank Conrad, Penn and Peebles Avenues, Wilkinsburg [a Pittsburgh suburb]. Mr. Conrad is a wireless enthusiast and “puts on” the wireless concerts periodically for the entertainment of the many people in this district who have wireless sets.

Amateur Wireless Sets, made by the maker of the Set which is in operation in our store, are on sale here $10.00 up.

Something about the ad registered with Davis. He called an executive at Horne's and found out that although the wireless sets were not yet selling well, expectations were high. The store had set aside an entire wall of shelves to display different models of radios. It got him to thinking. “If a retail store saw enough in radio to set up a department to sell goods on the strength [of Frank Conrad's twice-a-week broadcast of his records through a primitive microphone] suppose the technology improved, the entertainment were provided daily, broadcast on greater power, and a variety of features were added?”

The next day, Davis asked Conrad whether he could build a larger and more powerful transmitter, not in his home, but at the Westinghouse factory. If so, the company would broadcast a random variety of events
and advertise them all in advance; and, since Davis was that rarity who already thought the future for receiving sets was “limitless,” Westinghouse would eventually not only recoup its return on the investment for the transmitter, but create a product line both unique and extremely profitable. Furthermore, it could advertise its products and the products of other companies who would pay for the air time, during its programs.

But Davis had even more in mind. He would jump-start the new Westinghouse service by broadcasting the most exciting event of the year, the presidential election. If, that is, Conrad could finish putting together the transmitter in time.

Conrad said he could. He knew how soon election day was, knew how complicated the task would be, but still said yes. And, with but a few days to spare, he succeeded.

“On the roof of one of the taller buildings of the East Pittsburgh Westinghouse works,” writes media historian Erik Barnouw, “a shack was built, and a 100-watt transmitter assembled. The antenna ran from a steel pole on the roof to one of the powerhouse smokestacks. … On October 16, Westinghouse applied to the Department of Commerce for a special license to launch a broadcasting service. A week or so later, by telephone, the Department assigned the amateur call letters 8ZZ for use in case the license did not arrive in time. On October 27 the Department assigned the letters KDKA—commercial shore-station call letters—and authorized use of 360 meters, a channel away from amateurs and comparatively free of interference.”

It was close, nerve-rackingly so, for Westinghouse executives; but with less than a week to go, KDKA was in position to make history on the first Tuesday night in November, 1920 by broadcasting, through a persistent—and persistently increasing—rainfall, the results of the Harding-Cox election.

It happened like this: The latest returns were phoned in to the so-called radio station from the editorial room of the Pittsburgh
Post
. The KDKA announcer was the vocally untrained Leo H. Rosenberg, who worked in the Westinghouse publicity department. Whenever he received a bulletin from the
Post
, he repeated the numbers into his microphone. He might have been playing music at the time, reading a commercial, chatting with
the audience about the weather—it didn't matter. He immediately interrupted the proceedings to give the latest news from the nation's polling places. In fact, after a while, the shack began to receive phone calls not just from the
Post
newsroom, but from Westinghouse officials tuning in. More election news, they demanded, less music. It was the returns, not the crooners, who brought the unprecedented sense of immediacy and history to the air that night. And when there were no returns coming in at the moment, Rosenberg was to make a plea for the first “ratings” in media history. “Will anyone hearing this broadcast communicate with us,” he kept saying, over and over, “as we are anxious to know how far the broadcast is reaching and how it is being received.”

KDKA also posted the returns on a bulletin board outside the shack, “while … crowds stood in a driving rain.”

Rosenberg was one of five men in the KDKA shack that night. There were two others answering the phone calls from the
Post
newsroom, jotting down the latest figures, and slipping them to Rosenberg; and two more men—engineers, we should call them—in charge of keeping the makeshift operation on the air and functioning properly. All did their jobs as well as the technology permitted, and to listen to Rosenberg, as is possible to do thanks to a recording of “KDKA's 65th Anniversary Special,” which aired on the station on November 2, 1985, is to marvel at the sound quality the new medium had already achieved.

“And so it seems, ladies and gentlemen, that—just a minute, just a minute here, I've received some new numbers from our newsroom, and here they are for you. …” Every word distinct. Slightly echoing, perhaps, but easily comprehensible.

Hundreds upon hundreds followed along with Rosenberg, “many of whom were Westinghouse employees who had been given sets for the occasion,” and numerous others who were friends, huddled around the radios with them, ears as close to the announcer's voice as they could squeeze them, listening intently as Harding's margin mounted through the night.