The March of Time Radio Docudrama: Time Magazine, BBDO, and Radio Sponsors, 1931–39

Abstract

The 1930s live radio docudrama The March of Time, created to promote Time magazine, was actually produced by an advertising agency, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO). Exploiting the sonic possibilities of what was then a new medium, The March of Time featured actors impersonating newsmakers in scripted scenes based on actual events, accompanied by live orchestration and sound effects. Audiences were encouraged to imagine they heard history unfolding. Although now dismissed as an embarrassing detour from journalism, the program was, in fact, innovative and influential. Analysis of BBDO’s role, based on the agency’s private archives, reveals the crucial impact of sponsor control of radio program content on the development of broadcast news in the 1930s.

Notes

1 Ann Case, “A Historical Study of the March of Time Program Including an Analysis of Listener Reaction” (MA thesis, Ohio State University, 1943), 34.

2 The March of Time, originally broadcast July 8, 1937, CBS, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, New York (hereafter NYPL Collection).

3 BBDO Newsletter, May 7, 1937, 5, BBDO Records (private archive), New York (hereafter BBDO Records).

4 BBDO Newsletter, February 10, 1939, 9, BBDO Records.

5 Curtis Mitchell, quoted in BBDO Newsletter, January 12, 1935, 12, BBDO Records.

6 Ibid.

7 Max Wylie, Best Broadcasts of 1938–39 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 139, 140.

8 During the 1930s and 1940s sponsors and their advertising agencies selected the network to broadcast their program—unlike later decades, during which networks selected the programs. Consequently, radio programs often changed networks and time slots based on availabilities and airtime rates that the agencies negotiated with networks. The March of Time was on CBS from March 1931 to October 1937; on NBC Blue from 1937 to summer 1939 and again from October 1941 to July 1942; on NBC Red 1942–44; and on ABC (previously NBC Blue) 1944–45. Usually broadcast as a thirty-minute weekly program, in the 1935–36 season it aired fifteen minutes, five nights a week. Case, “A Historical Study,” 6; L. W. Lichty and T. W. Bond, “Radio’s ‘March of Time’: Dramatized News,” Journalism Quarterly 51 (1974): 458–62.

9 Raymond Fielding, The March of Time: 1935–1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Stephen E. Bowles, “And Time Marched On: The Creation of the March of Time,” Journal of the University Film Association 29, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 7–13.

10 Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 66–68; A. Brad Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015).

11 For example, Robert Herzstein, Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).

12 Because the only on-air authorship credit was given to Time, BBDO’s role has been so little known that one major scholar of The March of Time newsreel never mentions the agency’s central role in the production of the radio program and the newsreel; Fielding, The March of Time, 1935–1951. BBDO personnel were also involved in the filmed newsreel; see Ruth Woodbury Sedgwick, “Time Goes Marching On—The Screen,” n.p., ca. 1935, BBDO Records. The agency has been known as “BBD&O” or “BBDO” for most of its existence; “BBDO,” its current official company name, is used here.

13 BBDO’s historical records have been stored in a warehouse and inaccessible to most researchers since the mid-1990s; however, in 2014 I was given access to see some, but not all, of these records. Unfortunately, the records are not catalogued or organized, so I am unable to provide specific locations such as box or folder, but most documents are dated.

14 Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–1941 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 7, 9.

15 Ibid., 72.

16 Ibid., 93.

17 James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 45.

18 Quoted in Elson, Time Inc., 86.

19 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 147.

20 David Cort, The Sin of Henry R. Luce: An Anatomy of Journalism (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1974), 30.

21 W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 86.

22 The best-known polemic is Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Viking, 1985).

23 For more on Henry Luce, see Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Knopf, 2010); Henry Luce, ed. John K. Jessup, The Ideas of Henry Luce (New York: Atheneum, 1969); Herzstein, Henry R. Luce.

24 Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925). See Leo Ribuffo, “Jesus Christ as Business Statesman,” American Quarterly 33 (Summer 1981): 206–31; Warren Susman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 122–49.

25 Bruce Barton, “What Advertising Has Done for Americans,” Financial Digest, March 1928, 7; Bruce Barton, “Speech to Be Delivered over the Radio,” November 30, 1929, 7, BBDO Records.

26 Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 167, 170, 9.

27 Reproduced in BBDO 1891: The First 100 Years, 24, BBDO Records.

28 Herbert Hoover, “Opening Address,” Recommendations for the Regulation of Radio Adopted by the Third National Radio Conference, October 6–10, 1924, 4; Clifford J. Doerksen, American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 13.

29 Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–34 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 70–71; Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 192. Radio programs from the 1920s named after brands include Clicquot Club Eskimos, The Eveready Hour, A&P Gypsies, and The Goodrich Silver-masked Tenor.

30 Cynthia B. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 55–77.

31 Meyers, Word from Our Sponsor, 175–86.

32 “Personnel and Accounts at Time of Merger,” 1928, BBDO Records; Roy S. Durstine, “General Memorandum,” May 10, 1929, BBDO Records; “Radio Department,” May 1, 1932, BBDO Records.

33 Bruce Barton, A Parade of the States (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1932); William Bird, “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–55 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 32–38.

34 Du Pont press release, September 27, 1935, Box 36, Cavalcade Folder, Public Affairs Department, Accession 1410, Du Pont Records, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.

35 Michael Stamm, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Edward Bliss Jr., Now the News: The Story of Broadcast Journalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Sammy R. Danna, “The Rise of Radio News,” originally published in Freedom of Information Center Report No. 211, School of Journalism, University of Missouri at Columbia, November 1968, 1–7, reprinted in Lawrence Lichty and Malachi Topping, eds., American Broadcasting: A Source Book on the History of Radio and Television (New York: Hastings House, 1975): 338–44.

36 Katharine Seymour and John T. W. Martin, Practical Radio Writing: The Technique for Broadcasting Simply and Thoroughly Explained (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1938), 186–209.

37 Ibid., 193.

38 Ibid., 207.

39 Ibid., 200.

40 Ibid., 194.

41 Verma, Theater of the Mind, 66.

42 Matthew C. Erlich, Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 5.

43 Howard Angus, “The Importance of Stars in Your Radio Program,” Broadcast Advertising, February 1932, 26.

44 For more on the development of US commercial broadcasting, see Smulyan, Selling Radio; Doerksen, American Babel; Meyers, Word from Our Sponsor; Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

45 Roy Durstine, “Do You Plan to Sponsor?” Nation’s Business, June 1930, 28.

46 As Michele Hilmes points out, “Contemporary historians and analysts of television, projecting the decisive role of played by today’s network programming departments backward onto radio, neglect the true originators of most of the broadcast forms still with us: the major advertising agencies.” Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 81.

47 Agencies’ radio program production is so little known in part because a key tenet of advertising ethics was that agency copywriters did not claim public credit for their work; likewise, advertising agencies did not claim on-air credit for producing the sponsors’ programs. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor, 55–77.

48 Memo, “Radio Department,” May 1, 1932, BBDO Records.

49 Victor Herbert, “Do Listeners Associate Radio Stars with the Correct Product?” Sales Management, October 1, 1936, 465.

50 Michael Socolow, “‘We Should Make Money on Our News’: The Problem of Profitability in Network Broadcast Journalism History,” Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism 11, no. 6 (2010): 680.

51 Bliss, Now the News 13; Danna, “The Rise of Radio News,” 344.

52 Danna, “The Rise of Radio News,” 342.

53 Bliss, Now the News, 43.

54 Mitchell Stephens, The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-century Journalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 185.

55 David Culbert, “US Censorship of Radio News in the 1930s: The Case of Boake Carter,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 2, no. 2 (1982): 175.

56 David G. Clark, “H. V. Kaltenborn and His Sponsors: Controversial Broadcasting and the Sponsor’s Role,” Journal of Broadcasting 12, no. 4 (Fall 1968): 309–21, reprinted in American Broadcasting: A Source Book on the History of Radio and Television, ed. Lawrence Lichty and Malachi Topping (New York: Hastings House, 1975): 236–44; David Holbrook Culbert, News for Everyman: Radio and Foreign Affairs in Thirties America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 76–80.

57 Clark, “H. V. Kaltenborn and His Sponsors,” 237.

58 Ibid., 240.

59 Culbert argues it was because the Spanish Civil War had more or less resolved by the time Pure Oil took over sponsorship. News for Everyman, 80.

60 Mitchell V. Charnley, News by Radio (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 46.

61 Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Random House, 1999), 196–97.

62 Lichty and Bond, “Radio’s ‘March of Time’”; Elson, Time Inc., 98; Fielding, The March of Time, 10; Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media, 42.

63 “Marching Faster,” Tide, ca. September 1935, 54.

64 Ibid.

65 Elson, Time Inc., 176.

66 Lichty and Bond, “Radio’s ‘March of Time,’” 459.

67 Fielding, The March of Time, 10. For more on Lowell Thomas, see Stephens, The Voice of America.

68 Elson, Time Inc., 177. Emphasis in original.

69 ^“Making Time March,” Encore, April 1933, 12.

70 Elson, Time Inc., 178.

71 Hally Pomeroy, “Time Marches On,” Radio Guide, July 16, 1936, 20.

72 Ibid., 21.

73 The honeydew melon turns into a cantaloupe in later versions of this story, such as Elson, Time Inc., 181, and Swanberg, Luce and His Empire, 87.

74 Seymour and Martin, Practical Radio Writing, 131.

75 Ibid., 131.

76 Ibid., 132.

77 Ibid., 132–39.

78 The “Voice of Time” was initially voiced by Harry von Zell and Ted Husing, but Westbrook Van Voorhis became the primary announcer in 1933. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 68.

79 The March of Time, originally broadcast January 18, 1937, CBS. https://archive.org/details/1930-1937RadioNews.

80 Verma, Theater of the Mind, 68; BBDO Newsletter, May 7, 1937, 5, BBDO Records.

81 “Making Time March,” 12.

82 Pomeroy, “Time Marches On,” 20.

83 Wylie, Best Broadcasts of 1938–39, 137–38.

84 Roy Durstine, “Account Representatives: Radio in General,” November 4, 1929, BBDO Records.

85 Pryor led BBDO’s radio department from 1927 until his death in 1954. “Arthur Pryor, Radio Pioneer, Dies in New York at 57,” BBDO Press Release, May 25, 1954, BBDO Records. BBDO Credentials, 1938, BBDO Records.

86 Sedgwick, “Time Goes Marching On—The Screen,” 39.

87 BBDO Newsletter, November 10, 1933, 5, BBDO Records.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid.

90 BBDO Newsletter, September 13, 1935, 4, BBDO Records.

91 Ibid.

92 BBDO Newsletter, November 10, 1933, 5, BBDO Records; Elson, 180.

93 The March of Time, originally broadcast February 3, 1938, NBC, accessed at https://archive.org/details/1938RadioNews

94 Examples of March of Time scripts can be found in Wylie, Best Broadcasts of 1938–39, 141–54; Seymour and Martin, Practical Radio Writing, 132–39; Elson, Time Inc., 178; White, News on the Air, 256ff.

95 BBDO Newsletter, March 20, 1931, 3, BBDO Records.

96 Pomeroy, “Time Marches On,” 21.

97 Sedgwick, “Time Goes Marching On—The Screen,” 39.

98 Ibid. One serious drawback to the producers’ claims of verisimilitude was their decision to impersonate foreigners as speakers of English with a foreign accent; the Hitler impersonator, for example, spoke English with a German accent.

99 BBDO Newsletter, February 24, 1933, 5, BBDO Records.

100 Eleanor Roosevelt spoke about education for six broadcasts sponsored by the Typewriter Educational Bureau. BBDO Radio Bulletin, November 7, 1934, 1, BBDO Records.

101 BBDO Newsletter, December 8, 1934, 7.

102 While Roosevelt allowed The March of Time to impersonate him again in 1936, he complained again in 1937. Elson, Time Inc., 185; Pomeroy, “Time Marches On,” 21.

103 “Marching Faster,” Tide, 56.

104 Editorial, Time, February 29, 1932, 32. This point, that radio should be more like a magazine, with its editorial control separate from advertising, was debated in the radio industry. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor, 84–85.

105 The Radio Act of 1927 mandated that in exchange for a broadcast license, stations must serve the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

106 Luce, quoted in Fielding, The March of Time, 1935–1951, 19.

107 See, for example, Erlich, Radio Utopia, 14.

108 F. R. Feland to William Johns, memo, March 1, 1932, BBDO Records.

109 Feland to Johns, March 1, 1932.

110 “Radio Innovation,” Time, August 28, 1933, 41.

111 Ibid.

112 “Remington Rand’s Preview Sells Sales Force on ‘March of Time,’” Sales Management, October 20, 1933, 417.

113 The March of Time, originally broadcast March 29, 1935, CBS, NYPL Collection.

114 The March of Time, originally broadcast August 29, 1935, CBS, NYPL Collection.

115 Arthur Pryor Jr., “Radio Sponsorship Meets Double Success,” System and Business Management, June 1935, 16.

116 BBDO Newsletter, May 2, 1936, 6, BBDO Records.

117 “Marching Faster,” 56. Apparently in 1935 both CBS and NBC had barred a competing program, News Parade, because it sounded too similar to March of Time. BBDO Newsletter, October 19, 1935, 10, BBDO Records.

118 “Wrigley Is New Sponsor of ‘The March of Time,’” BBDO Newsletter, April 4, 1936, 5, BBDO Records.

119 Ibid.

120 The March of Time, originally broadcast August 17, 1936, CBS, NYPL Collection.

121 The March of Time, originally broadcast August 31, 1936, CBS, NYPL Collection.

122 “Off and On,” Tide, October 1, 1936, 27.

123 Fielding, The March of Time, 19.

124 “Off and On,” 27.

125 H. S. Webster, quoted in “Off and On,” 27.

126 Pomeroy, “Time Marches On,” 21.

127 “Off and On,” 27.

128 BBDO Newsletter, July 1, 1938, 4, BBDO Records.

129 The March of Time, originally broadcast July 8, 1937, CBS, NYPL Collection.

130 “‘March of Time’ Program Sponsored by Servel, Inc.,” AGAEM Bulletin, April 1938, 12.

131 Ibid., 13.

132 “‘March of Time’ Program Sponsored by Servel, Inc.,” AGAEM Bulletin, April 1938, 13.

133 For example, agency Benton & Bowles employed performers sipping and discussing the taste of Maxwell House coffee between acts on the variety program Maxwell House Show Boat. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor, 192.

134 BBDO Newsletter, July 1, 1938, 4, BBDO Records.

135 Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor, 195–96.

136 A prominent Young & Rubicam radio producer, Donald Stauffer, had started his career at BBDO helping to produce The March of Time; that may have been a factor in the agency shift. Stauffer’s name is misspelled in Fielding, The March of Time, 12.

137 Bliss Jr., Now the News, 67. Recordings can be found at https://archive.org/details/1945RadioNews.

138 Erlich, Radio Utopia, 155.

139 Ibid., 3.

140 A few recordings are accessible online at the Internet Archive, and more are available at the Paley Center for Media in New York and at the New York Public Library.

141 Pomeroy, “Time Marches On,” 21.

142 Russo, Points on the Dial, 77–114.