You're Used To Loudmouths

Understanding the historical rise of mass media is not just about the tech. It’s also about how people used—and abused—those new ways of communicating with the public. That picture becomes clearer when you realize that new innovations in amplification and broadcasting coincided closely with the rise of nationalism in the Western world. Successful nationalist movements in Italy and Germany ushered in new two modern countries by the end of the 1870s. In the first half of the 20th century, those countries’ dictators used new mass-media technology to amplify not just their voices, but their personalities. In so doing, they passed themselves off as larger-than-life figures who claimed to speak for their entire nations.

This episode explores how the convergence between nationalism and industrial mass-media helped prop up these two totalitarian dictatorships, suppressing other voices in the process. Investigating this history allows us to reflect on the nature of nations, how new ways of communication can be disorienting, and how being savvy about the history of media can help to keep you grounded.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | Episode 11 | Doug Sofer

You’re Used To Loudmouths

©2023 Doug Sofer

Cold Open

•   [Fade in theme]

•   Welcome back once again to this bigger-than-life podcast about how history helps us to better comprehend the Strangeness of Now.

•   [pause]

•   Join us today as we take on the final installment of this special-edition trio of episodes on the topic of the history of audio amplification.

•   It’s guaranteed to be yet another cherished product from the You Are A Weirdo Podcast, in association with Temporal Dimension Media, and findyourselfinhistory.com , affiliated with the Present-Day-Unusuality-Network and the League Of Extraordinarily Weird Gentlepeeps—together making up the You-Are-Odd-In-Historical-Context-Cinematic-Universe—

•   —Which all the rad, in-the-know people simply refer to as the Y.A.O.I.H.C.C.U.—or Yowie-huh-Cuh-COO for short.

•   [long pause]

•   Of course, all of those things I just mentioned are basically just me.

•   [pause]

•   And hey listener—I’ve got to admit that it makes me feel kind of arrogant to claim to speak for so many different kinds of entities like that.

•   [pause]

•   But the good news for me—and even better news for anyone who has to spend time being around me—is that I’m not about to break any new records for historical arrogance. Or for a puffed-up individual claiming to speak for other people.

•   [Pause]

•   For example, shortly after the large-scale implementation of new industrialized mass media technologies in-and-around the mid-1920s and beyond, a number of totalitarian dictators—leaders of some of the most powerful countries on earth—claimed to speak not only for themselves—not just for their families—or their communities—or regions—but for entire nations.

•   [Pause]

•   And what’s even more disturbing is that in different times and places—in different historical contexts—many, many people actually took some of those egomaniacal politicians seriously.

•   [pause]

•   Part of the reason they did has to do with how those leaders employed these new industrial mass-media to spread their messages.

•   And precisely because these media were new, it was harder for people to just tune these leaders out.

•   When one of these media-amplified dictators got enough followers, he could force and intimidate others into listening to them—effectively turning himself into the sole spokesman for the nation.

•   [pause]

•   So today, let’s see if we can try to better understand what it was like when politicians first started using these technologies to amplify their personal control over their countries—to supersize their egos.

•   [pause]

•   And sure, I understand that the idea of giant-sized personalities can be terrifying enough to make Jack scramble down the beanstalk and try to get a refund for his enchanted legumes.

•   But it’s going to be just fine. I’m a professional historian and I’ve been trained to help you cut those giants down to size.

•   My name is Doug Sofer, and I’m a weirdo—just like you.

Theme / call for sponsors

•   Let’s grow this podcast as tall as a magic beanstalk! Tell everyone you know about it, and share it on your favorite social media.

•   While you’re at it, check out findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors for additional ways to Jack up this one-of-a-kind history project.

•   [fade out theme]

Nations & Nationalism

•   Here and now in the present—we’re used to audio and visual mass media of many different kinds.

•   Which means that it’s weird that we don’t always stop to think about how revolutionary—and disorienting—the mass media tech we now take for granted was in altering and enhancing the ability of an individual to influence others.

•   And that’s why this episode is called “You’re Used To Loudmouths.”

•   It’s connected to the two prior episodes about technologies of sound amplification.

•   But those were more focused on the tech itself. This one is more about how those media got used—their dangerous consequences.

•   After all, when it comes to the history of technology, the clever people who invent clever devices and employ them in clever ways to do clever things—that’s only part of the story.

•   Just as important—maybe even more important—are the historical contexts in which those technologies operated.

•   The specific times and places when a new tech gets introduced are shaped by specific phenomena: Ideas, cultural assumptions, social hierarchies, economic realities, political structures, religious institutions, environmental factors, demographic truths, and dozens of other phenomena that define any given time and place. 

•   When you take all those defining social and cultural phenomena and institutions and events and ideas of both past and present—and then smoosh them all together, that complex smoosh is what we historians mean when we talk about historical context.

•   [pause]

•   And you are a weirdo—[divebomb]

•   —is the name of this podcast, which means that your historical contextual smoosh is in many ways starkly different than the historical contextual smooshes of those people who came before.

•   [pause]

•   So you can study recording tech and broadcasting tech and vacuum tube-triode tech all you want, but there’s nothing inherent in any of those innovations that explains how they would be used—and abused—to amplify the already-amped-up personalities of politicians.

•   [pause]

•   [Highlight next sentence slowly and deliberately] But when you understand that these technologies emerged within the context of a new age of nationalism, it all starts to make more sense.

•   [pause]

•   Which means we need to talk about nationalism.

•   The basic definition seems pretty simple at first. Nationalism is a movement in support of a nation.

•   [Pause]

•   Pretty straightforward, right?

•   [Pause]

•   But the picture gets more complicated when you realize that the word nation when talking about nationalism—is not just a synonym for the word “country”—the way we often use the term nationtoday.

•   [Pause]

•   When talking about nationalism, a nation is a people.

•   It’s a large group of humans, united by many common factors including—but not limited to: geography, religion, language, political identity, shared customs, clothing, food, celebrations, a common sense of ancestry, even a shared sense of history—among other unifying characteristics.

•   [pause]

•   This aspect of having a shared, collective identity—of having many people believing that they are part of something larger than themselves—part of a nation—is where nationalism—a movement in support of that nation—gets messy.

•   [pause]

•   If you read/watch and/or listen to news, you’ll notice that nationalists do all kinds of things—some of which might even seem contradictory. For instance:

•   Some nationalists might push for greater unity for their people by supporting a particular government;

•   While other nationalists might call for breaking away from that same government.

•   [pause]

•   Or some groups, in the name of nationalism, might approve welcoming certain populations as part of their own people;

•   While other nationalists might try to exclude who should be recognized as part of their nation—narrowing the scope of who really—in their view—belongs.

•   [pause]

•   So the ways that nationalism itself gets expressed is often riddled with contradictions.

•   That’s because there’s more than one way to advocate politically on behalf of one’s nation.

•   And because there are different definitions of who’s part of and who’s outside of any particular nation.

•   And because the only real criterion that makes a large group of people into a nation is the willingness of that large group of people to call themselves a nation.

•   In other words, you are a nation when you say you’re a nation—

•   —that is if you can find a couple tens-of-thousands of your closest friends to join you.

•   [pause]

•   At that point you can become a nationalist when you advocate on behalf of your new self-defined nation’s interests.

•   [pause]

•   So where did this idea of the nation come from, anyway? And how is it different from what came before?

•   [pause]

•   If you’ve never studied the history of nationalism as an idea—you may be surprised to learn that it’s pretty new in the big picture.

•   Now nations themselves are nothing new; there have been groups of people who have been calling themselves peoples for as long as there have been groups of people.

•   And there has been flag-waving and celebration of one’s own home turf for as far back as we have written evidence.

•   [Pause]

•   But neither the existence of nations, nor simple celebrations for one’s home team are necessarily the same thing as nationalism.

•   [pause]

•   Let me explain: Throughout most of human history, when you swore loyalty to a kingdom, it was about affirming a personal bond of allegiance to your king—or to your regional nobles—or to the religious authorities who promoted those political leaders.

•   Or even to the God or gods that those religious authorities represented while they were in service to those political leaders.

•   [Pause]

•   All of those cases are very different from celebrating or swearing loyalty to—or advocating on behalf of a people itself.

•   [pause]

•   In the West, the ingredients for the modern political concept of nationalism began in the final couple of decades of the 1700s and really got going about mid-way through the 1800s.

•   It came about as an attempt to break the deadlock in a fight between two other ways of thinking about politics in Europe—called liberalism and conservatism.

•   That is, the 19th century versions of these two ideologies.

•   19th century liberals sought to break away from past ways of running society. 

•   Up until the French Revolution of 1789, European states were old school; they’d been controlled by kings and queens, by inherited orders of aristocrats, and by officially established church institutions.

•   This new crop of political thinkers sought to liberate Europeans from old ways of doing things. Which is why they called themselves liberals—meaning people who advocated for freedom.

•   Liberalism brought freedom and new opportunities to many European peoples. 

•   But those old regimes didn’t just willingly surrender their power.

•   Kings didn’t give up their pointy, golden, jewel-encrusted ermine-fur covered hats.

•   Nobles didn’t just hand over their inherited lands, titles, tax exemptions, and other privileges.

•   Church institutions and their high-ranking clergy didn’t just give up their religious monopolies.

•   Which means that liberals’ demands often led to conflict, which destabilized those societies. Chaos, confusion, and bloodshed often followed in the wake of liberal political movements.

•   [pause]

•   For that reason, there was another group who wanted to conserve as much of those traditional governments as was reasonable. They pointed to the stabilizing, orderly influence of those older traditions and so wanted governments to conserve monarchies—conserve special treatment for people with inherited noble bloodlines—conserve the role of established church organizations in government.

•   And they called themselves Political-Past-Preserving-Peeps.

•   [pause]

•   No wait sorry: that’s a typo in my notes. It turns out they actually called themselves conservatives.

•   [pause]

•   So from the late 1700s through the mid-1800s, liberals and conservatives often disagreed with one another, and in the process made it hard to govern coherently.

•   But by the mid-19th century, a new political generation had enough and said that these ideological differences needed to be put aside for the sake of the nation itself.

•   [pause]

•   Later in this episode, we’re going to be talking about Italy and Germany, so let’s use those two countries to get a more concrete understanding of how 19th century nationalism initially worked.

•   [pause]

•   We’ll start with the country of Italy—which wasn’t a country at all. In fact, from the end of the Roman Empire in the 5th century until the 19th century, Italy was just the name of a peninsula. On it was a group of multiple espresso-cup-sized micro-kingdoms and mini-states.

•   Italy finally unified in 1861 when the liberal revolutionary Guiseppe Garibaldi and the more conservative King Victor Emmanuel II put aside their political differences for the sake of building a new country called Italy.

•   As a liberal, Garibaldi had been in favor of creating an Italian republic—a word coming from the Latin res publica—meaning a thing of the people—that is, a government without a king.

•   And King Victor Emmanuel II was—as his title strongly suggests—a king— and was therefore not nearly as positively disposed to creating a king-free Italy.

•   [pause]

•   But when their two liberating armies met, rather than try to kill each other, they decided to join forces for the greater cause of Italy.

•   By 1870 after Rome joined up, a new Kingdom of Italy ruled over the entire boot-shaped Italian peninsula.

•   [pause]

•   Between the 1860s and 70s, Germany also unified in its own early nationalist moment—going from a collection of smaller, schnaps-glass sized states and principalities, to a single, unified bier-stein-sized country.

•   In Germany’s case, the emperor of Prussia Kaiser Wilhelm I, turned the job over to his prime minister, Otto Von Bismarck who lived from 1815–98.

•   Political historians and political scientists usually credit Bismarck for inventing what’s called Realpolitik—which literally means politics of realism as opposed to idealism.

•   But it usually also refers to achieving one’s goals at more-or-less any cost, including doing dangerous and unethical things.

•   Along those lines, Bismarck provoked and tricked its neighbors into going to war with various German territories so that other German states would unite behind Prussia to defeat those non-German outsiders.

•   Behind the scenes, he made secret treaties and back-alley deals, and basically treated European politics like his own personal chess match.

•   Which he won!

•   He successfully provoked and cajoled and otherwise manipulated three of Germany’s neighbors on to war—Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and finally France in 1871. After each conflict, other German states turned their state-level leadership roles over to Prussia.

•   In 1871 all of the German speaking territories with the exception of Austria came together in a single, unified empire.

•   [pause]

•   So nationalism had already proven itself to be a powerful force in Europe by the early 1870s.

•   [Pause]

•   Just a few years later, there was an explosion of new technologies of industrially produced mass media.

•   First came the invention of the telephone in 1876, and then in 1877 the invention of the phonograph—which I talk about in episode three.

•   [Pause]

•   Over the next four decades or so, a rapid cascade of systematic invention revolutionized the media of communication—after telephones and phonographs came radios and loudspeakers—each generation better, more reliable, and cheaper-to-produce than the previous one.

•   And those audio technologies enhanced other media too—for instance movie cameras and projectors first developed in the middle of the 1890s became much more powerful—more realistic—more persuasive—when you could sync them with loudspeakers—like the ones in our previous episode.

•   [pause]

•   So let’s explore what happened when these two late-19th century trends of nationalism and industrial mass-media technology joined together in the early 20th century.

•   [Separator music]

The New Spellbinders

•   In December, 1924, the magazine Popular Mechanics featured a short article entitled

•   “[QE] Political Spellbinding by Radio”

•   The central argument of this article is that the best American political speech-makers of the present-day—of 1924—now have to adapt their public-speaking styles to what works best with modern audio technology. That

•   “[QE] …old-fashioned spellbinder…”

•   —according to the article, was a stump speaker—someone who traveled town-to-town. And stood on some kind of raised surface—like a speaker’s platform—or a wooden soap box—or a tree stump—and delivered speeches directly to the nearby folks.

•   A little digging shows that the concept of the political spellbinder seems to have emerged out of the U.S. presidential campaign of 1888. A 1900 article in the newspaper The New York Sun, claims:

•   “[QE] The term spellbinder was first applied generally to campaign speakers in 1888 when thousands of men who could talk in public were employed by the Republican and Democratic National committees.”

•   And it adds, a few paragraphs later:

•   “[QE] A man who can parry leading questions, turn an unexpected interruption to good account and gauge the mood of his audience at a glance is the one who succeeds as a spellbinder.”

•   If you want to nerd out on this historical term like I did, you can go to Google’s N-Gram tool which offers statistics about the frequency of appearance of particular terms at a particular points in time.

•   And you’ll see that there’s no mention of the term “political spellbinder” before 1888, so the New York Sun’s version of the origins of this term seems to check out.

•   [pause]

•   The point is that political spellbinders were speakers who could think on their feet—who reacted to—and fed off of—the emotions of the audience.

•   [pause]

•   And despite all the “he-s” and “his-es” in that 1900 article, women also worked as so-called spellbinders. A different article from 1900 in the Saturday Evening Post mentions that both Democrats and Republicans had also hired a small group of women who are:

•   “[QE]…selected with a view to their ability in appealing to the sympathies of the more intellectual class of voters.”

•   The author then adds:

•   “[QE] their words must be selected with finer discrimination and… their bearing must be always more dignified and reserved than that of the ordinary politician.”

•   [pause]

•   Even with that qualification, it’s pretty amazing to realize that women were part of these political campaigns a full two decades before women even got the vote and finally became full citizens of the United States—just 143 short years after the US Declaration of Independence.

•   [pause]

•   Leaping back to the 1924 Popular Mechanics article: We know that teams of both men and women spellbinders had already been playing to live audiences for about three-and-a-half-decades prior to the advent of radio.

•   And from the vantage point of 1924, it looked like radios and amplifiers were about to change everything when it came to casting those charm spells.

•   [Twinkling faerie magic noise]

•   One of those changes was simply a question of numbers—how much larger a politician’s audience could be in 1924.

•   Four years earlier in the 1920 presidential race, the article explains:

•   “[QE] …the number of listeners who could hear a public speech had been raised from a few hundred within sound of the speaker’s voice, to many thousands, through use of the public-address system of amplifiers.

•   But now in ’24:

•   “[QE] In four short years, the possible audience has leaped from thousands to millions through the development of radio broadcasting. Herbert Hoover estimates there are 5,000,000 radio-receiving sets in the United States, with an average of three listeners for each. Other experts double those figures.”

•   And those numbers continued to climb. In February, 1925, the Indianapolis Times’ included a feature with the headline:

•   “[QE] twenty-five million fans to hear Coolidge”

•   The reporter who wrote the piece explains:

•    “[QE] This will be by far the greatest audience ever assembled in the history of the world.

•   “[QE] That nearly one-quarter of the citizens of a nation should listen at one time to the words of its chief executive is almost beyond the most extended limits of the imagination.”

•   “[QE] Not alone will the voice of the President be carried to every radio set in the United States of America, but a public address system at the Capitol will enable the expected crowd of 125,000 people there assembled to hear, word for word, the amplified voice of the President.”

•   Not too shabby for the famously close-mouthed president Calvin Coolidge whose friends and enemies alike called him “Silent Cal.”

•   [pause]

•   They might just as easily have called him “Loud Coolio”—which they absolutely didn’t.

•   Meanwhile, radios and microphones changed more than just numbers of listeners. The 1924 Popular Mechanics “political spellbinding” article also asserts that the radios have altered audiences’ attention spans:

•   “[QE] Picturesque and vivid personalities are lost on the radio audience. The speaker’s individuality counts for nothing, and what he says for everything when the listener is sitting a hundred or a thousand miles away. Words have displaced gestures as vote getters. In the past, no matter how poor the speaker, he usually found that the voters who were interested enough to turn out to hear him would stay to the finish, whether they liked his arguments or not. This year the voter had but to move a dial a fraction of an inch and pick up a jazz band, or a dramatic recitation instead.”

•   [pause]

•   What’s fascinating is the article’s naïve implication that radio will somehow remove emotional content from politics—make it more about the words—the ideas.

•   But what this 1924 author missed is that emotion isn’t just about how you gesture, or wave your arms, or point meaningfully to your left elbow while speaking—

•   [pause]

•   —for example.

•   [pause]

•   Advances in radio and other audio tech also allow for greater subtlety of voice—more emotional tools in the public speaker’s emotional toolbox. [Use examples for each]

•   Making a voice

•   Higher

•   or lower

•   or quieter

•   or louder!

•   Or saying a string of words more rapidly

•   or more slowly

•   or more enunciated

•   or less enuncihobblesbluh

•   That is, radio rhetoricians can do some things that someone standing on a tree stump may not be able to do while they’re trying to project the voice to as many listeners as possible.

•   [pause]

•   The craftiest politicians of the 1920s and beyond adapted quickly to loudspeakers and to radio—employing new strategies for converting radio and amplification techniques to those leaders’ emotional advantage.

•   They painted in intense, evocative emotional textures, conjuring up in their audiences feelings of nostalgia or joy—or fear—or a feeling of belonging to a larger community.

•   [pause]

•   —like to a nation.

•   [pause]

•   They would take spellbinding to a new level, conjuring up charms and hexes and abra-Kazams in new ways and on an unprecedented scale.

•   And some of the most effective of these enchanters wove together new media technologies with nationalism—and in the process magnified their own reputations in remarkably new—and extraordinarily dangerous—ways.

•   [Separator music]

How New Technology Turned Men into Nations

•   Without question, one of the most effective spellbinders of the 1920s who made use of new media technologies, was the brutal Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who lived from 1883–1945.

•   In 1921, Mussolini—often known to Italians as simply “the leader”—Il Duce— founded a political organization called the Fascist Party.

•   Fascism was named after fasces—a bundle of rods attached to an axe blade that was a symbol of authority figures in ancient Rome.

•   But it turns lots of folks, past and present, use ancient fasces to mean authority—so what exactly is fascism?

•   Fascism is a 20th-century, ultra-nationalist, extreme right-wing, totalitarian political idea that’s organized around the personal mystique of a militaristic, charismatic dictator, and that uses modern, industrial media to convey propaganda to their national audiences.

•   [pause]

•   Let’s break down a few pieces of that definition.

•   What does extreme right-wing mean?

•   The left-right political spectrum has to do with a political movement’s relation to time—to the future and to the past.

•   Left means breaking away from the past—what many leftists call progress.

•   And right means retaining the past—what many rightists call tradition.

•   [pause]

•   So those 19th century liberals we talked about earlier were to the left of center because they wanted to break away from older ways of running society; conservatives—to the right of center—wanted to preserve traditions that they held were valuable.

•   On most schematics of the left-right spectrum, both 19th century liberals and conservatives are fairly close to the center.

•   That’s because both groups pursued their liberating or conserving agendas through moderate means.

•   Liberals believed—and typically believe—in more gradual change—that not all traditions are bad.

•   Conservatives believed—and still usually believe—in preserving the past but also with a realistic acknowledgment that societies change and that not all progressive genies can—or should—be put back into their proverbial progressive genie bottles.

•   [pause]

•   Both liberals and conservatives usually believe in compromise when possible.

•   And they typically support governmental systems that allow for some of that compromise.

•   [Pause]

•   But far-right and far-left are uncompromising—by definition.

•   So extreme leftists like the communists of the Soviet Union created a new uncompromising government, ruled exclusively by the communist party, and protected by a police state—to keep it in power by any means necessary.

•   [pause]

•   Fascism is an extreme right-wing political philosophy for the same reason. Fascists try to pull society back to some version of an ancient—usually semi-mythical past.

•   And the Italian Fascists, talked about creating a new Roman Empire—the place with the fasces. 

•   [Pause]

•   Ultra-nationalism is similar. It refers back to that supporting of one’s nation that we talked about earlier. Except that ultra-nationalism does nationalism in an extreme way by having an aggressive, inflexible understanding of which people and cultural traits are included in—and who is excluded from—a particular nation.

•   And Totalitarians believe that the state should have complete power over society and that individuals need to submit to it. For that reason, fascists assert that the government is the living embodiment of the nation—the ancient, Italian-slash-Roman nation in the case of Mussolini’s Italy.

•   [pause]

•   So: Got that whole definition of fascism now? Great! If you missed some of it, I’ll post it on this episode’s page on findyourselfinhistory.com

•   [pause]

•   Now that we’re all up to speed we can talk about fascists’ use of modern mass media as they attempted to sway the Italian people to their ultranationalist cause.

•   [pause]

•   Stephen Gundle, professor of film and television studies at the University of Warwick [WORR-rick] in England, points out that Mussolini’s early appeal was as much about his cultivation of celebrity status during the early years of Italian movies—and the first generation Italian movie stars—as it was about politics.

•   In his book, The Cult of the Duce, Gundle focuses on how Mussolini built his celebrity by dressing in distinctive ways—specific only to him. He practiced and refined a series of his own gestures, movements and mannerisms. He knew how to create publicity stunts that were what marketing folks today would call ‘on-brand.’

•   And he played up the commercialization of his image to such an extent that Italian salespeople created and sold all kinds of Mussolini-themed merch—though only if his totalitarian government approved of the products—and of the merchants themselves.

•   Such fascist swag included photos, posters, medallions and other trinkets. But also various ceramic busts of Mussolini, and a silhouette of his face to put on the front of a car. And, according to Gundle:

•   “[QE] …a soap bar in the shape of Mussolini’s head.”

•   [pause]

•   So even though Mussolini’s Fascists claimed that they were fighting on behalf of the Italian nation against the evils of modern times, they had no problem using the technologies of modern times—like comprehensive marketing campaigns—to promote Mussolini’s government.

•   Gundle contends that building Mussolini’s star-power first drew upon Italy’s new entertainment industry—and then sought to replace it.

•   He writes that in this kind of authoritarian state:

•   “[QE] …distinctions between politics and entertainment are abolished. Mussolini, ultimately, was not a big star because he was an extraordinary being but because democracy had been quashed.”

•   [pause]

•   In other words, totalitarian dictatorships seek total control. They restrict—even prohibit outright—entertainment for its own sake. In an environment like that, the Mussolini show became the only show.

•   [pause]

•   Mussolini’s preference was for the new visual technologies of his day—movies and photos and posters in particular. But the audio tech of the 1920s and 30s was part of his one-man show as well.

•   [pause]

•   Mussolini and his fascists even inserted his name directly into the country’s new de-facto national anthem—a tune called Giovinezza.

•   Giovinezza is Italian for “youth” and Mussolini and his propagandists claimed as frequently as possible that fascism was first and foremost a movement of youth—of rejuvenation.

•   New, younger technology in service of the fascist state became part of that youth movement.

•   Writes the historian of twentieth century Europe named Konrad Jarausch—[YA-Rowsh] writes:

•   “[QE] Mussolini was quick to recognize the propaganda potential of radio, which grew from modest beginnings in 1924 to one million sets in 1938, eagerly listened to in trattorias and homes.”

•   And the song Giovinezza [Jyo-Vee-NEZZ-a] was played frequently as part of that radio propaganda. In fact, it replaced the official national anthem of Italy as the most important patriotic song.

•   [Pause]

•   The original 1922 version of the song was already pro-fascist, but it wasn’t Mussolini enough for Mussolini and his handlers.

•   So in 1924, they rewrote it—

•   And Mussolini’s name shows up three times—in this three-verse song—including in the chorus that gets repeated multiple times.

•   [Pause]

•   Performing Giovinezza became mandatory at state functions, at celebrations, and at the end of each day of radio programming.

•   It wasn’t until 1943 when Allied forces in the Second World War invaded Sicily and forced Mussolini to resign from government that the anthem stopped being played on a nightly basis.

•   Until that moment, the song had been played every night—for 21 years.

•   [pause]

•   And as we’ll see, Mussolini was not the only European megalomaniac who used radio to relentlessly promote his authoritarian version of the nation—and his own personal brand.

Nazi Radio

•   Mussolini’s fascists sought to control all aspects of mass-media production and consumption in Italy.

•   Nazi Germany’s racially justified variation of a fascist, totalitarian state, took this concept even further.

•   The importance of the radio in Nazi Germany is emphasized in a recent book about a resistance leader in Nazi Germany. Who was born in Wisconsin. And was a young, brave woman named Midred Harnack—who the Nazis eventually executed.

•   The book is a historical biography, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, by Rebecca Donner and it includes a section about how the Nazis’ chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels embraced the radio as a tool of authoritarian propaganda.

•   “[QE] Goebbels seized on the notion that he could use the radio to coax ideas into people’s heads, repeating again and again core messages of Hitler’s ideology. For the first time in history, Germans living in the most remote regions of the country could be reached, even the destitute and uneducated, even the apolitical. All it required was getting radios into their hands.

•   So Goebbels commissioned the mass production of an inexpensive radio to be sold everywhere in Germany.

•   Named “[QE] the People’s Receiver” —The Volksempfänger [FOALKS-emp-faeng-ah] these units were easily affordable to the average worker.

•   And manufacturers deliberately limited the frequencies the devices could pick up; they couldn’t receive foreign stations—so only the stations spewing Nazi propaganda could be heard.

•   [pause]

•   Scholars of Nazi media estimate that from 1933 to 1941, the number of radio receivers available in Germany more than tripled—from 4.5 million to 13.3 million.

•   [pause]

•   Even so, a present-day Dutch media historian named Huub Wijfjes [Hooeb VWY-fyes] points out that the meteoric rise of Nazi radio posed a problem for Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists.

•   That’s because even though Hitler was a charismatic public speaker on a stage, he was notoriously bad at talking via the radio. In fact, he had trouble even standing still in front of a microphone of any kind. Wijfjes writes, referring to the same concept of in-person political spellbinders mentioned earlier:

•   “[QE] [S]ound amplification created a dilemma. On the one hand, bigger audiences could be reached and the intimidating effect of the voice could be amplified enormously. But when Hitler spoke for the first time through a microphone in 1928, he was forced to stay in place and avoid his usual means of getting attention, which included firing a pistol at the beginning, jumping around, and making exaggerated gestures.”

•   The brutal Nazi dictator was in his element when he could scream with abandon at his audiences, feed off of their energy, their passions, their fanaticism—that he himself whipped up to new heights.

•   Although Nazi handlers were eventually able to get Hitler to stand more still when he addressed the public using loudspeakers, he had much more trouble controlling himself in a radio studio, isolated, without the energy of an audience.

•   [pause]

•   And the Nazis—and other European leaders too—were worried about another potential problem:

•   The spellbinding that could be created through a speaker in front of a crowd could lose its magic—its ability to charm the masses—once it was broadcast via radio. Wijfjes again, writing about Hitler, asserts:

•   “[QE] He and Goebbels worried that radio allowed listeners to turn off Hitler's voice or defile his messages. The same fear gripped other clerical, political, and royal authorities of this time. For them the idea that listeners could drink coffee, read the newspaper, or, even worse, tell jokes or get drunk during a radio speech of the king or president or during a radio sermon from a church was repulsive.”

•   The Nazis’ solution was to create special live radio broadcasts of Hitler that were meant to be listened to in public, in crowds—carefully managed by Nazis.

•   “[QE] Throughout the 1930s, when Hitler was about to address the nation, loyal Funkwarte[FOONK-va-tah] (“radio guards”) installed loudspeakers at public places and caught people's attention by sounding sirens, keeping an eye on the public….”

•   They packed these audiences with special loyal Nazi party members who would applaud and yell at key moments—amplified by microphones in order to inflate their own numbers and model for the crowds the kind of enthusiasm they were supposed to exhibit.

•   [pause]

•   At the end of the day, the Nazis and fascists—and their propagandists—were masters of using new technologies in order to keep the magic—the spellbinding—as fresh as possible.

•   [Pause]

•   Other politicians also used these technologies effectively. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought his radio voice inside into American families’ homes—with his so-called fireside chats, designed to make it seem as if you were sitting cozily in a living room in the White House, hanging out with the president—listening to the warm crackle of a fire—a sound that was faked by FDR’s sound people.

•   [Pause]

•   But with totalitarian dictators, the point was to make it seem like you were in a public place, as they were giving a fiery speech to you—and you were surrounded by those dictators’ supporters. So you felt compelled to join in—or face the consequences.

•   [pause]

•   And this point was not lost on astute observers living in the 1930s.

•   An article written in the January 1938 issue of the academic political journal Foreign Affairs, made a similar observation—at a time when these ideas were still fresh and new—and while the totalitarian strategies of radio broadcasting were still unfolding. The author of this1938 article was himself a radio broadcaster and journalist named César Saerchinger. His insight applies to totalitarians, authoritarians, and would-be dictators of all political stripes.

•   “[QE] It is a curious fact that neither Hitler nor Mussolini nor Stalin ever speaks into a microphone from the solitude of an office or a studio. The crowd's cheering in response to his physical presence seems to be an indispensable incitement of the leader's own verbal acrobatics. It is said that when Hitler speaks, even the applause is regulated by a series of signals worked by buttons attached to the reader's desk, so that the dynamics of enthusiasm can be controlled…

•   “[QE] And when Hitler speaks the people of Germany must listen wherever they are. Factory sirens blow, there is a minute or two of silence, and then the voice bursts forth. Loudspeakers in public places relay the speech; not to listen, or appear to listen, is disloyalty. The penetration of the politicized radio into the entire national consciousness is thus complete, its power inescapable. At election times—even though election results are never in doubt—the ubiquity of the government voice turns the country into one great perpetual rally. Needless to say, there is no dissent; the use of radio, as of all vocal expression, is reserved exclusively for those who serve and… own the state.”

•   [pause, giving this quotation the last word.]

•   [Separator music]

Conclusion

•   We can draw at least two big conclusions from today’s journey into the past.

•   The first one is about the power of newness itself, especially when it comes to new media.

•   Some of the techniques that totalitarians used to captivate their audiences—like basically a Nazi equivalent of an applause sign—are very familiar and transparent by today’s standards. We’re used to loudmouths today and many of their techniques are so out-of-date that they seem like cliches to most modern, media savvy audiences.

•   Like any politicians today who would attempt to stick their own name into the national anthem, using many of the tricks that worked in the 1930s would today likely lead to rapid ridicule.

•   But that’s not really the point.

•   The reason those techniques worked when they did is that they were relatively novel. Fascists’ and Nazis’ and Stalinists’ manipulative uses for radios came just a couple of decades after the radios became available to the public.

•   When we study history, we can try to imagine what it would have been like to experience these kinds of propaganda techniques before having the media savvy of the present.

•   [pause]

•   And it becomes a lot more terrifying at that point.

•   But also all the more important to be aware of—because it helps us understand how influential and seductive new media technologies can be when they’re used by dangerous, ill-intentioned people.

•   [Pause]

•   Those loudspeakers we’d been talking about in the prior episode, when combined with radio, enabled individual speakers to bring their messages all over their countries—to make you feel surrounded on all sides—to make a single individual dictator appear to be everywhere.

•   [pause]

•   The second big conclusion is about a paradox—a contradiction—in the history of how new broadcast media and nationalism came together in the first third of the twentieth century.

•   [pause]

•   A nation is a people—so how strange is it that the most allegedly ultra-nationalist states of the twentieth century managed to exclude so many people, so thoroughly?

•   Totalitarians claim that the State represents the entire nation.

•   They claim that a single party speaks for the entire state.

•   And they claim that an individual dictator speaks for the entire party—and therefore the state—and therefore the nation.

•   [pause]

•   But when you think about it, that’s not really about the nation—the people—at all.

•   It’s about a cardboard cutout version of a nation—a superficial, controlled, sandboxed, staged version of a nation—not representing the real people at all—not acknowledging the people’s diversity, complexity, and just plain messiness.

•   [pause]

•   Putting the two conclusions together—we get a sense that perhaps new communication technologies may be at their most dangerous when they can distort in this same way.

•   When the older forms of manipulation get replaced with new techniques—it’s harder to know when we’re being played.

•   And maybe understanding better when we’ve become more vulnerable to new trickery—is an especially important reason to study the history of media—and the ways that those media can be used by new kinds of spellbinders who claim to be speaking for the people, when they’re really only speaking for themselves.

Outro, teaser, credits

·      For next time:

·      Man, this episode took much longer to make than I’d expected! It didn’t help that it was finals week—and finals grading time—but I’m thinking I want to be able to throw some shorter-form episodes into the mix sometimes.

·      So we’ll be talking—a little more briefly—about something that’s not directly related to the history of audio technology! Stay tuned and find out what it will be!

o   I’m on the edge of my seat too.

·      [pause]

·      You may find the references to the historical sources, sound files, and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

·      I’d love to hear what you think about this podcast. Toss me an email at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com .

·      A special thanks to Melissa Kiewiet for assistance on how to pronounce the name of the Dutch scholar Huub Wijfjes.

·      Melissa is one of our many awesome alumni at lovely Maryville College in lovely Maryville, Tennessee, home of many lovely folks where you can learn many lovely things.

·      Maryville College—where the Great Smoky Mountains are our backyard, where the city of Knoxville is our front doorstep, and where the town of Marysville, Washington is 2,637 miles away which is nowhere NEAR Maryville College—which once again is in Tennessee.

·      Maryville College: Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu 

·      [Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Maryville College, its administration, faculty, staff, students, board of directors or any of the political leaders of the eighteen incorporated cities and two towns found in Snohomish County, Washington.

·      This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

·      Thanks for listening.