CSotD: Election Day Classic: And it was all downhill from there
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While doing some research for a serialized novel about a kid during Prohibition, I came across this Dorman H. Smith cartoon, which ran in the Plattsburgh (NY) Daily Press on August 27, 1924. I'm not sure it really qualifies as a "classic" except in terms of its age, but it's an interesting document of a particular moment in time.
A few years earlier, Warren G. Harding had become the first president to deliver a speech over radio. A few months later, Calvin Coolidge (who had assumed the presidency on Harding's death in 1923) would become the first to have his inauguration nationally broadcast. Judging from this cartoon, I would suggest that, in between, we would probably find the first political campaign conducted over radio, the off-year election of 1922 having been a bit too early in the medium, though there was likely some coverage of speeches and platforms for those who wanted to make the effort to seek it out.
And that was the difference: Radio in 1924 was just transitioning from a geek toy into a household appliance, from a kit to be assembled and then listened to over earphones, logging the stations you had heard, to a pre-assembled device with a dial that you could simply tune to a station. It was a moment similar to the change that came with the birth of the graphical browser, as the Internet suddenly became accessible to the general public.
Newspapers had, for a few years, been enjoying the geek phase of radio, catering to the fad with regular how-to features about this new device, showing wiring diagrams and talking about the relative qualities of various types of parts. And, as in the early days of the home computer, mostly-young geeks could make a little extra money assembling radios for those who lacked the technical skills but wanted to move that cat's whisker around the crystal and see what they could find out there.
By 1924, those days were over and those features had pretty much disappeared from the papers, in favor of furniture store ads for pre-assembled radios. (Historic aside: Furniture stores would remain as purveyors of radios and audio equipment in nicely finished wooden cabinets for some years to come, long enough for a family-owned furniture store in Liverpood, England, to spin off a separate music shop from which family member Brian Epstein spun himself off on a whole other career path. But I certainly digress.)
At the time this cartoon ran, commercials — think of them as audio pop-up ads — were only two years old, the argument over licensing of radios, extracting a fee from their sales or selling commercial time having been settled in favor of the last method.
It was not a happy time for geeks, as this earlier cartoon indicates.
If there was any revenge lurking around the corner for the geeks, Dorman Smith's cartoon may give an indication of the form it would take. It's going to seem odd, though refreshingly so, to wake up tomorrow and not be pummeled with campaigning.
Mind you, it would be another decade or so before radio really became a constant in people's lives, before the number of stations and quality of broadcasting made it something that people listened to for more than a short time for specific reasons. You could make jokes about the small, easily escapable medium that had the character in Smith's cartoon so enraged, compared to the ubiquitous electronic cocoon in which we find ourselves wrapped.
But think of the quiet, the isolation, in which people had heretofore found themselves, in which the doings in Washington and other national capitals were distant and could be studied at your leisure, on your own schedule and only to the extent that you wanted to, after you had dealt with the local matters that were far more of a priority.
He should have left that pillow stuffed in there.
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