Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century

Less than an hour after the New Jersey State Police sent out the official teletype at 10:46 P.M., radio bulletins were beaming out word of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. The “bulletin”—a recent coinage whose roots traced back to the papal bull posted on a Vatican wall—marked a new way of harking to the news. It was a return to the oldest form of communication—the human voice—though the message was not delivered face to face or bellowed by a town crier but transmitted from a central station and sent out to all, “broadcast” like the seeds tossed onto a field by a farmer.

Across the nation, even before headlines were splashed across the pages of the newspaper extras, the shocking news crackled out over the radio airwaves. No extra edition of a newspaper—whose contents had to be typed on a clunky Underwood, typeset, composited, printed, distributed, and hawked by newsboys—could outpace the speed of electricity. No matter how hot off the presses, the news had cooled by the time it hit the streets. Hungry for up-to-the-minute information on the Lindbergh case, Americans switched media allegiances and answered a new calling. Henceforth, when news broke, they no longer rushed to the corner newsstand; they reached for the dial.

The writing—airing?—had been on the wall since the late 1920s. In 1931, Merlin H. Aylesworth, president of NBC, warned his print-based colleagues of the media future, like it or not. “The public insists on hot news,” he told a conference at Princeton University. “That is why newspapers use telephones, telegraph, and cables. But the speed of transmission of news has far outstripped the speed of the mechanical processes required to convert it into print for readers. Consequently, if radio broadcasting can serve the public with certain kinds of news sooner than the newspaper, are we to ignore the public’s best interests for private gain?”1

Not likely—especially when the public’s best interests coincided with the private gain of the radio industry. In March 1932, the mature state of the hardware and the magnetic pull of the narrative—the penetration of radio technology into American life combined with a ravenous appetite for information about the Lindbergh case—converged to upend a media hierarchy, a first-place position broadcasting would not relinquish until the rise of digital technology. For the newspaper business, the instantaneous alerts of a radio bulletin and the electric jolt of live reporting were bracing portents of a subaltern future. After the Lindbergh kidnapping, print was yesterday’s news.

The formal appearance of radio on the American cultural horizon dates from 1920, when KDKA in Pittsburgh launched its broadcasting days with the announcement of the election of Warren G. Harding, a piece of news almost no one, even in Pittsburgh, heard on radio. By 1924, however, the electoral college tally that put Republican candidate Calvin Coolidge over the top was monitored hour by hour over what the New York Times called “a new feature in national elections this year,” namely “the broadcasting throughout the country of the returns as fast as they were gathered.”² Early adopters tuned in over temperamental, credenza-size radio sets, perhaps drawn less by the need for news or the sound of music than the thrill of homing in on a remote beacon.

While blasting out a soundtrack to the Jazz Age, radio spread through the American atmosphere with astonishing speed. A blue-chip gold mine, it helped fuel the bull market on Wall Street. In 1925, the stock of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the parent company for the National Broadcasting Company, was valued at $11 a share; in 1929, before disaster struck, at $114.³ To be in the radio business was to be in the money.

The sonic racket from the merging of electricity and sound only grew louder as the Jazz Age played on. Along with the rumble of electronic amplification and the songs from the phonograph, the din from radio made the 1920s America’s first sound-crazy decade, a sonic wave of music, voices, and ambient noise coming in at the switch of a dial. On October 6, 1927, with the premiere of Warner Bros.’s landmark musical-melodrama The Jazz Singer, the motion-picture medium got in line with Vitaphone’s sound-on-disk process, another sign that silence was no longer golden.4

What communications scholars call “penetration”—the injection of a mass medium into the bloodstream of a culture—can be measured by statistics and sales, but it can also be pegged to a tipping-point year or linchpin event. Typically, a new media technology prospers by feeding off an item of must-have software, usually an entertainment show, that persuades the consumer to purchase the expensive hardware needed to partake of the tantalizing new diversion. In the late 1940s, Americans bought televisions to watch Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theater; in the early 1960s, they bought color televisions to watch Bonanza; and in the early 2000s, they bought subscriptions to HBO to watch The Sopranos.

For radio, the tipping-point year was 1930, and the must-have software was The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show, a pop cult phenomenon of colossal proportions. Two white men—Charles Correll and Freeman Godsen, a pair of former vaudevillians—built their comedic shtick around the raspy patter of what the trade press called “blackface dialect chatter,” a byplay heavy on thick accents, malapropisms, and fractured syntax.⁵ The fabricated slang bequeathed catchphrases to the American vernacular (“check and double check” “Holy mack’el!”), idioms that floated infectiously “through the ether,” as the phrase went. During its nightly broadcast on NBC from 7:00 to 7:15 P.M., except Sundays, pedestrians strolling down streets in New York never missed a second of the broadcast: radios in every window in every apartment were all tuned in.

But why walk the streets when you could chuckle over Amos ‘n’ Andy in the privacy of your home? Radio soon became a household appliance as desired as—sometimes more desired than—the refrigerator. Not even the stock market crash could halt its incursion into American living rooms. According to NBC’s Aylesworth, by 1931 the number of radio receivers had grown to fifteen million sets serving some fifty million listeners, a surge that made radio the sixth largest industry in the United States.⁶

Gibbons’s debut broadcast was on Chicago’s WGN on Christmas Day, 1925, lured by station manager Quin A. Ryan to talk about the far-distant lands in which he had spent his exotic but lonely Christmas pasts. Five hundred sympathetic listeners were moved to send Gibbons invitations to Christmas dinner. In 1929, Aylesworth recruited him to host a coast-to-coast hookup on NBC. Billed as “The Headline Hunter” and sponsored by the Literary Digest, Gibbons covered the news twice nightly in a patented “staccato machine gun like delivery” clocked at 217 words per minute. By 1930, Gibbons had become “a ‘name’ of prodigious significance on the air.”7

The key to Gibbons’s success—his radiogeniety—was the emotional bond he forged with his listeners. He spoke with a fluency and informality new to radio. “Fortunately, he had never heard of the hackneyed speakers of the radio; he had not fallen a victim to the universal notion that broadcast speakers should imitate one another and thus all speak patronizingly or bombas-tically,” recalled WGN’s Ryan. “From the radio standpoint, he was a sensation!”⁸

Gibbons had instinctively mastered the art of communication before a radio microphone: not as an orator at a podium pompously exhorting an imagined crowd of thousands but as an intimate friend across the table. Gibbons said that his technique was “to imagine I am just sitting in a circle of my friends, yarning away as the spirit moves me—not giving a prepared lecture—not paying painful attention to precise selection of words—to grammatical construction—to logical sequence—just talking in a conversational flow with people that I know and love and people who feel just as I do about a large number of things.”⁹ It was a talent cultivated by all the great maestros of conversational radio in the 1930s—whether cordial politicians like FDR and New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, soft-spoken raconteurs like Arthur Godfrey and Will Rogers, or the new breed of on-air journalists who were a blend of both.

In the days to come, rival radio stations would claim to have beaten WOR on its home turf. WAAB in Boston logged 11:29:30 as the precise time that announcer Don Morton, standing by to give the station’s call letters, broke into programming with a twenty-five-word bulletin after receiving a teletype from the Boston Herald. WIP-WFAN in New York said it flashed the news thirty seconds later at 11:30, and WGST in Atlanta claimed the earliest time of all, at 11:15 P.M.¹¹

At the first alert, the embryonic radio networks marshalled their forces to cover the story in full force. In 1932, two major networks blanketed the nation: NBC, the behemoth, so huge it was divided into the Red and Blue Networks, and CBS, the up-and-coming rival hoping to outhustle the two-headed monster. NBC had an unbeatable entertainment line-up, so CBS counterprogrammed by specializing in news. Being in second—or third—place, CBS was hungry and aggressive.¹²

Shortly after midnight, after CBS got the news from the wire services in New York, a report went out over the entire CBS chain from WBBM in Chicago.¹³ At 12:14 A.M., CBS announcer Harlow Wilcox interrupted an orchestra performing at the Granada Café to read the bulletin to the ninety-one-station network. By the next morning, CBS had established remote hookups in Hopewell, Trenton, and Princeton. “When word of the kidnapping first flashed, CBS press relations men, most of whom by sheer coincidence happened to be in the studios, were quick to realize that the most important story in radio’s history had ‘broken,’ ’’ observed Broadcasting, the radio-centric trade weekly.¹⁴ CBS president William S. Paley understood that news, especially Lindbergh news, drew listeners to his spot on the dial.¹⁵

Yet radio was still not secure in its role as a gatherer and disseminator of information. Though CBS had the story nailed and the police in Trenton on the record, the network refrained from broadcasting the news of the Lindbergh kidnapping until a newspaper or wire service had verified the story. (Trenton police logged a telephone inquiry about the kidnapping from CBS at 11:58 P.M. that night; it was the only radio outlet to call for confirmation.16) Only after the New York Times gave its imprimatur did CBS air the bulletin.¹⁷

NBC played catch-up, breaking the news shortly after CBS and putting into service the superior hardware of its parent company, RCA. “From the morning of March [2] until 2:00 A.M., March 8, a constant vigil was kept, a period of 148 hours, after which normal operating schedules were resumed,” Broadcasting reported. “Even then the engineering crews were kept on duty, ready to put dispatches on the air at a moment’s notice.” NBC assigned William Burke “Skeets” Miller, director of special broadcast events, to the story. Miller possessed sterling credentials: in 1925, for the Louisville Courier Journal, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the doomed spelunker Floyd Collins.18 The first radioman on the scene in Hopewell, however, was NBC announcer Edward Thorgerson, who planted himself in prime real estate: a table in the window of Gebhart’s Lunch Room, where he set up a remote transmitter for live broadcasts.

Both NBC and CBS deployed mobile transmitting stations mounted on trucks to relay news by shortwave from locations around New Jersey. The trucks roamed the state, driving back and forth from Hopewell to Trenton, broadcasting on a fifty-watt transmitter to receiving and relay stations in Princeton and New York, and thence for broadcast “to the whole anxious world.” CBS requisitioned the sound truck from WCAU, its Philadelphia outlet, but its main studio was in a tiny vacant room over Gebhart’s in Hopewell. Its other microphones were in Trenton and Princeton. CBS also established quarters near the Lindbergh home, broadcast from planes, and, Variety recalled disapprovingly, “did all manner of stunts.”¹⁹

Radio edged ever closer to the source of the news when Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf permitted WOR to install a microphone on his desk at state police headquarters in Trenton. By the early morning hours of March 2, WOR had set up a remote broadcasting unit that stayed on the air continuously for the next seventy-two hours. By the second night, Colonel Schwarzkopf was speaking live on WOR from his office in Trenton, giving out updates on the case and reading statements from the Lindberghs. “Much of the most important news given out then reached the public through this medium before newspapermen were even summoned to Schwarzkopf’s office for the bulletins,” gloated Broadcasting.²⁰

Radio solidified its status as the go-to source for breaking news by interrupting entertainment programs with urgent news bulletins—or at least the interruptions made the bulletins seem urgent. “If a commercial program happens to be on the air at the moment, the news flash is immediately inserted if sufficiently important,” Variety reported. “So far no advertiser has complained.”²¹ Nor would they: viewers drawn to radio for Lindbergh news would stick around to hear the commercials. Also, while radio interrupted entertainment shows, it was careful not to step into the airtime allotted for paid advertisements.

“Radio has scooped the daily press on almost all news stories of national and international importance for the past two years,” Variety pointed out in its first think piece on the media aspects of the Lindbergh kidnapping. “Since the simple procedure of getting a story on the air doesn’t include the more involved newspaper process, the element of time gives radio a big edge in high speed dissemination of news.”22 The phrase “big edge” was an understatement. In a business where minutes meant the difference between a hot scoop and a dead letter, newspapers were being left in the dust.

An editorial in Broadcasting savored the reversal of media fortunes. “If anyone has any lingering doubts as to radio’s rightful claim to being a medium of ‘audible journalism,’” boasted the trade publication, the developments in Hopewell “significantly point out the growing stature of broadcasting as a purveyor of news.” The evidence was there for all to hear:

Broadcasters practically cleared their wires and wave lengths for the reports and bulletins on the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Radio reporters, heard via remote controls from strategic points, were accepted by the Lindberghs and by officials on a par with the press reporters who swarmed Hopewell village. When the Lindberghs made their first appeals to the kidnappers in the hope they might be listening in, their statements were given to the radio as well as the press.

What the newspapers found especially galling was that they were often beaten out by their own reporting. How did radio acquire the news it broadcast? “We swiped it,” confessed radio newsman Lowell Thomas.²⁴ Broadcasters subscribed to the wire services and bought the newspapers, read the teletypes aloud, rifled the pages for headlines and details, and copyedited the prose for broadcast over the air. Newspaper editors were not mollified by the appended afterthought: “For further information and complete details, we refer you to your favorite morning and evening newspapers.”

Furious about being outrun on a story they would have owned just a few years earlier, the print press retaliated. On Friday, March 4, the three wire services—AP, UP, and INS—stopped providing news bulletins to NBC and CBS. Finally, said a frustrated newspaper editor, “the news services have awakened to the fact that they were feeding the dogs that bite them.”²⁵

he petulant wire services should have predicted the blowback from the cutoff. Without copy coming in from the teletype, radio stations were forced to send their own correspondents into the field. “Networks also have their own men at the Lindbergh home now, reporting in by remote control,” noted a surprised Variety. The reports on radio, Broadcasting emphasized, were gathered “not merely by the cooperation of the press but by their own ‘radio reporters’ on the scene, provided by remote control.” The quotation marks—“radio reporters”—highlight the novelty of the job description.

Sensing the ground shifting, newspapers lectured the upstart and headlined its mistakes. “The indiscriminate broadcasting of unverified news has marked radio’s activities in the Lindbergh case since its inception,” claimed the Brooklyn Daily Eagle after a New Jersey station broadcast a false report that the baby had been found. “To put it mildly, these broadcasters went ‘haywire’ in their effort to outdo competitors in putting out the very latest developments in the case.”26

A huffy editorial in the New York Daily Mirror distilled the complaints of a regime under siege:

Radio broadcasting, wildly speculative and inaccurate, has done more to complicate the problem and confuse it than any other one element involved in the search. Broadcasters giving ostensible news of the situation at fifteen and thirty-minute intervals have found themselves without information of news value and forced to disseminate purely speculative material, much of it sensational in tone, with the result of creating nationwide hysteria.

Nothing could better illustrate the fact that newspapers remain, as before radio broadcasting began, the sole trustworthy media. The Lindbergh abduction is the first really important news story dealt with by radio broadcasting stations, and it is impossible to evade the conclusion that they have muffed it deplorably.²⁷

Yet for the print press the hard truth was that radio had not muffed its chance but run with the opportunity. Microphone in hand, portable equipment in tow, radio journalists had elbowed into space that was once the exclusive preserve of print reporters. In December 1933, a short-lived nonaggression pact was negotiated in the press-radio wars, but all attempts by newspapers and press syndicates to stifle broadcast news coverage would be doomed by the expansion of the networks’ own in-house news operations.²⁸

For radio, the full-immersion coverage of the Lindbergh case had long-term benefits. A breaking news story often presses untested technology into service and stretches both people and machines to new limits. For Lindbergh news, radio not only interrupted regular programming, it extended its broadcasting day into the wee hours. Between 1 A.M. and 7 A.M., radio stations were off the air, their transmitters turned off and cold, neither sending nor receiving signals. Before becoming operational the next morning, the equipment needed to be turned on and warmed up, a process that took around twenty minutes, potentially eating up precious minutes if news broke. To avoid the time lag, in an unprecedented gambit, “the major networks have protected themselves against a press beat in the Lindbergh case by keeping their transmitters going all night,” reported Variety. “The networks’ staffs have been on the job 24 hours a day, the atmosphere closely resembling that of any paper’s city room.” The trade weekly underlined the takeaway: “The Lindbergh kidnapping which broke shortly after 11 o’ clock at night, when all stations were going full blast … accentuated the radio edge in news reporting more than previous yarns.”29

Not least, the Lindbergh case gave radio technicians priceless experience in the skill sets needed—and the seat-of-the-pants improvisations required—for the broadcasting of live news. Especially valuable was the time spent coordinating transmissions from multiple locations. CBS pulled off an historic “four-point broadcast,” one from a stationary sound truck and the others from units in Hopewell, Princeton, and Trenton. Broadcasting called the remote-control coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping “perhaps the greatest example of spot news reporting by radio in the history of American broadcasting.”³⁰

As radio engineers flaunted their technical proficiency, newsmen were honing their reportorial chops. Beset by static, missed cues, and interviewees frozen by “mike fright,” they remained calm and unfazed in the flop sweat–inducing pressure cooker of live broadcasting. Studio announcers and on-the-scene reporters learned to think and talk on their feet. They mastered the complexities of the case and assumed the proper tone—serious, concerned, never glib or chipper. No longer blustery orators or hectoring pitchmen, they turned into cool and collected journalists.

For technicians and on-air reporters alike, the hard-won expertise acquired during the Lindbergh broadcasts would be put into service for all the great live-action news stories of the 1930s—the raucous disorder of the national political conventions; the stunning abdication of King Edward VIII, broadcast by shortwave live from Windsor Castle on December 11, 1936; and the menacing bark of Adolf Hitler, sent out from faraway Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. The urgent tones of the radio reporters and the static glitches in the live feeds would be mimicked to devastating effect for another epochal story emanating from New Jersey—the invasion from Mars as broadcast by Orson Welles’s production of The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938.

There was little chance of the Lindbergh case boring radio audiences—and plenty of opportunity for “special announcers” to prove their specialness. Just as the plight of Floyd Collins had propelled Skeets Miller to national prominence and Pulitzer plaudits, the kidnapping would enhance—or make—the career of more than one obscure reporter-commentator.

Radio’s prize catch for prestige and dignity was Lowell Thomas. Renowned from his print reporting and books, above all his best-selling With Lawrence in Arabia, published in 1924, Thomas first came to NBC in 1930 as a button-down replacement for the hard-drinking, fast-talking Floyd Gibbons. Billed as “the Literary Digest’s new radio voice, informing and entertaining you with the latest news of the day,” the unflappable Thomas oozed sanity and probity.³² He kept to a prodigious work ethic and maintained a multi-media profile: in addition to his radio broadcasts, he wrote articles and books, starred in the novelty short series Paramount Pictorial (1932), and, beginning in 1934, narrated Fox Movietone News. He greeted his radio listeners with a friendly, even-keeled salutation, “Good evening, everybody.”

In 1932, Thomas’s radio showcase was Topics in Brief, a fifteen-minute news-of-the-day recap broadcast out of WJZ in New York, the flagship station for NBC’s Blue Network. “Besides his experience and talents as a spieler, [Thomas] has an unusual background as a traveler, explorer, and adventurer,” noted media critic Robert Landry. “He’s been places and done things and, like the true citizen of the world, is full of interesting details that fit nicely and neatly into his newscasts.”33

The day after the Lindbergh kidnapping, Thomas devoted most of his broadcast to the crime.

The Lindbergh home near Hopewell, New Jersey, is an isolated house in the country. Last night at seven-thirty the baby was put to bed by his mother and his nurse. At ten o’clock the nurse discovered the child was missing. Sometime between seven-thirty and ten a man stole up to the house and put a ladder to the window of the child’s room. His footprints were later found in the soft ground…. He took the child, and carried him down the ladder.

Thomas signed off with a simple, melancholy statement of fact: “The world’s most famous baby has been kidnapped, and the attention of literally the whole world has been aroused, and in all the civilized countries of this globe, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby has caused the deepest sympathy and interest.”³⁴

Thomas’s competition at CBS was the erudite descendent of a German baron, a man who looked and sounded the part, the full-throated baritone H. V. Kaltenborn—the H stood for Hans and the V stood for Von, and using the initials was a smart career move after the anti-German hysteria of the Great War. A former associate editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle who specialized in fact-finding trips abroad, he nearly matched Thomas in miles logged. In 1922, he got in on the ground floor of the medium with a weekly current-events show on WEAF, billed as a “newspaper of the air.” He could improvise an entire show, going on the air without a written script and speaking off the cuff.

In 1932, Kaltenborn hosted three fifteen-minute programs weekly under the title Kaltenborn Edits the News. Despite the bombastic cadences and oracular persona, he was a gutsy pundit, more cantankerous and opinionated than Thomas. From 1933 onward, he denounced Nazi Germany for reasons as personal as ideological: while Kaltenborn was visiting Berlin on assignment, his son Rolf was punched in the face by a stormtrooper for failing to raise his arm in the Hitler salute.35

The day after the kidnapping, Kaltenborn condemned “the dastardly act” and called for the passing of a federal kidnapping law. He noted that parents—like the Lindberghs—typically prefer to “accede to the ransom demands rather than run the danger of bodily harm coming to their loved ones.” Like many newsmen, Kaltenborn was convinced that the kidnapping was the work of an organized gang spawned by Prohibition.³⁶ As such, the crime was not just an assault on the Lindberghs but “a blot on the country.”³⁷

H. V. Kaltenborn and Lowell Thomas were already brand names in 1932. Boake Carter was not, but the Lindbergh case would make him one. A Philadelphia newspaper reporter who broadcast on CBS affiliate WCAU, Carter cut a dashing figure and boasted an exotic resumé. Born in Baku, Russia, the son of a British oilman, he had served in the Royal Air Force during the Great War. After the war, he knocked around oil fields in South America and Oklahoma, before landing as a newspaperman in Philadelphia.³⁸ Despite years in America, he never quite lost—or stopped affecting—his “peculiarly burred English accent.”

When the Lindbergh story broke, CBS sent its A-team from New York to Hopewell—where, it turned out, nothing was happening—while the B-team, including Carter, was dispatched to Trenton. At the state capital, Governor Moore and Colonel Schwarzkopf were speaking before every microphone thrust into their faces. Though generating little hard news, they provided reams of broadcast-worthy copy. Trenton, not Hopewell, was the place to score interviews and soak up information.

From March 2, 1932, onward, Carter was heard over CBS’s nationwide hookup. His reports kept listeners rapt and faithful. “Looking over the scripts of Carter’s Trenton broadcasts now, it is hard to understand why they clicked,” puzzled New Yorker essayist A. J. Liebling in a profile of the newsman in 1938. Carter favored fatuous expressions like “Great Scott!” and “By jingoes!” and portentous declarations like “That’s a very, very significant fact.” The other signature Carter verbal tick was the chipper British sign off “Cheerio!” “The incongruous valedictory, after a daily record of disappointments, made people remember Carter,” noted Liebling, at a loss to explain why.39

After a few days in Trenton, with no very, very significant facts to report, Carter filled air time by editorializing—decrying the corrosive brew of political corruption, gangsters, and Prohibition that nurtured the epidemic of kidnapping. He also vented his anger at the kidnappers who, “if they had a spark of manhood,” would return the baby to his grieving parents. He broke no scoop, but he connected with listeners who craved Lindbergh news and shared his sentiments. Liebling admitted that “the strange quality of the Boakan voice, grave, energetic and British, impressed itself on minds strained to an attention that has not been duplicated since.” Variety also took note of the curious phenomenon that was Boake Carter. “Carter’s address, in a distinct British accent, sounds artificial, but seems to react well with the general public,” who showered him with fan mail. “At 7:45 P.M. his news summaries are baked over commentaries on what is in everybody’s evening newspaper,” continued Variety. “Carter merely makes it simpler by analyzing for the listener rather than making him read and figure for himself.”40

What Variety saw as a flaw was precisely what drew listeners into the orbit of the special announcers: not to absorb a just-the-facts recital of information read in a detached monotone, but to hear a reassuring voice that sifted and filtered, that lent emotional valance, that brought order to the chaotic news of the day. No less than the characters in a soap opera, the familiar voices of the radio commentator lent the illusion of intimacy, even if the relationship was only one-sided.

The rise of the radio commentators coincided with another landmark innovation in airborne journalism: the introduction of the March of Time radio show. Premiering on March 6, 1931, the March of Time was the broadcasting arm of Henry R. Luce’s Time magazine empire and a pioneering venture in media synergy. The show set the template for what became a broadcasting evergreen: the docudrama.

Founded in 1925, Time was one of the great publishing successes of the twentieth century. The weekly magazine boasted a loyal and seemingly Depression-proof subscription base of 350,000, and its total readership probably doubled or tripled that figure. Yet Luce wanted to expand, not stand pat. According to Fred Smith, managing editor of the March of Time, the original concept behind the show was to make Americans more “Time-conscious” with a “nation-wide radio program which would broadcast from coast-to-coast most effectively the editorial qualities of the weekly magazine which would make people who had not read the magazine conscious of its power.”41 But though conceived as a mere appendage of Time magazine, the March of Time soon emerged as an autonomous entity—and with wider circulation.

Broadcast Fridays from 8:30 to 9:00 P.M. over CBS and bankrolled by Time, the show reported on several stories per episode, a blend of straight news reports and human-interest vignettes. An announcer—first either Ted de Corsia or Harry von Zell, later Westbrook Van Voorhis—provided exposition while a cast of gifted vocal artists impersonated the newsmakers—“ghosting” (in the jargon of the day) the nasal New Yorkese of former governor Al Smith, the operatic bluster of Benito Mussolini, and the patrician tenor of FDR. In the interest of good theater, embellished dialogue punched up the printed record and background music sweetened the mood.

The March of Time was an immediate hit—or at least a succès d’estime. Variety called it “the apex of radio showmanship”; Walter Winchell said “the mag Time’s broadcast is a thrill”; and Jack Foster, radio editor of the New York World-Telegram, spoke of how the series lingered in his mind as “a kind of talkie newsreel creating vividly in words the tales which have stood beneath the headlines.”⁴² Its stentorian opening (“The March of Time!”) and pregnant-with-import sign-off (“Time … Marches On!”) became instant catchphrases.

However, as would often prove the case in the history of broadcasting, critical esteem and the devotion of hard-core listeners failed to translate into high ratings and advertising dollars. In February 1932, seeing no spike in revenue, Luce pulled the plug on the show. Thus, during the fateful arc of the Lindbergh case, the March of Time was off the air.

Listeners bemoaned the lost opportunities. “What a pity that the March of Time was discontinued just at a time when it might have produced an epochal program—a dramatization of the kidnapping of and search for the Lindbergh baby!” complained Harold P. Brown, editor of Radio Digest. With CBS crews on the scene in Hopewell and an ensemble of talented performers in the wings, a show devoted to the stricken father and heartbroken mother would have brought the radio audience to tears. “In the Lindbergh case the Columbia System had established its short-wave station right at the scene of the kidnapping and could have connected directly with instant details of this great mystery drama of the hour. The story of how a nation responded to the distress of this outraged family could have been broadcast as a radio epic.”43

An avalanche of protest followed Luce’s decision to cancel the March of Time—the first true audience rebellion in broadcasting history. Twenty thousand letters poured into the offices of Time. “The worst calamity in the history of broadcasting was the announcement that the March of Time broadcast was to be taken off the air,” wailed an irate listener.⁴⁴

Luce tried to put the onus on the broadcasting industry with a snooty response: “Should Time or any other business feel obliged to be a ‘philanthropist of the air’ to continue paying for radio advertising it does not want to provide radio with something worthwhile?” CBS president William S. Paley fired back that Luce had no obligation to be a “philanthropist of the air.” Moreover, he resented the implication that the March of Time was the sole oasis in a vast radio wasteland. “Both Columbia and its advertisers feel a deep sense of responsibility to the public, and the quick assumption of this responsibility has contributed much to the present high standard of American broadcasting.”⁴⁵ Broadcasting also castigated Luce for his “sour grapes” and print-based arrogance. “It is idle even for the brilliant editors of Time to believe they have a monopoly on ideas.”⁴⁶

Bowing to the firestorm of protest, and seeking to protect his brand, Luce agreed to give the show a second chance. On September 9, 1932, the March of Time returned to its old spot on the dial, Friday at 8:30 P.M. on CBS, with a troupe of fifty vocalists, three sound-effects technicians, and a symphony orchestra performing the news of the week.⁴⁷