A ’24 campaign transformed by radio

People gathered on the second floor of Wiley’s dry goods store in downtown Glens Falls to listen, via radio, to the inauguration of President Calvin Coolidge on March 4, 1925.

It was another in a series of events through which Coolidge pioneered the use of this new medium in politics.

“No one can contemplate current conditions without finding much that is satisfying and still more that is encouraging,” Coolidge began. His 4,055-word speech was the sixth-longest inaugural address in history, and it was broadcast to an estimated 22.8 million listeners.

“The calm, measured tones of his inaugural address were carried to the greatest audience ever addressed by one man,” The Post-Star of Glens Falls reported on March 6.

Many news reports from across the nation marveled at the new wonder of radio broadcasting.
“All owners of radio receiving sets were listening in, and many entertained large gatherings,” The Frontier of Holt County, Neb., reported on March 5, 1925. “The reception was good, and the president could be distinctly heard.”

The in-person turnout for the Coolidge inauguration was low, but the radio audience represented a vast new dimension.

“When President Harding was inaugurated in 1921, the public address system was employed, enabling a crowd of 125,000 which filled the plaza to hear his voice,” The Glens Falls Times wrote in an editorial published Feb. 19, 1925. “Think of the wonderful advancement during the short period of four years! President Coolidge’s voice will be carried to a national audience of 25,000,000.”

Forty stations carrying the broadcast, including WGY of Schenectady, would be connected via a telephone line, the largest aggregation on a simulcast up to that point.

Sports announcer Graham McNamee would narrate the broadcast, describing the setting and visual aspects of the ceremony that radio listeners otherwise could only imagine.

The Glens Falls Times’ enthusiasm about the new age of radio showed up in a second editorial published Feb. 21.

“If you want to see President Coolidge’s inauguration, go to Washington,” the paper wrote. “If you want to hear it, stay at home.”

The editorial pointed out that many who would see the inauguration would be distant from the lectern, and that distance, noise and inclement weather likely would prevent them from hearing clearly. It was a question of which of the two senses was most important.

Those who attended in person would see the spectacle and would “have been there,” the newspaper wrote. “If you stay at home near a radio, you will have a front seat to everything. You will hear all of the speeches and ceremonies better than anyone in Washington except the official stenographers.”

Attendees began arriving in Washington two days before the March 4 inauguration. (This was in the era before the presidential inauguration was moved up to January beginning in 1937.)
“The inaugural hosts began to descend on the national capital today in earnest,” The Glens Falls Times reported on March 2. “Despite the Coolidge dictum of economy and simplicity, the town began to take on the carnival atmosphere that always attends the quadrennial spectacle.”
Coolidge, a taciturn Vermont native, built his legal and political career in Massachusetts, where he was governor in 1920 when he was tapped to run as vice president on the Republican ticket with Warren G. Harding. He rose to the presidency when Harding died in August 1923.

It was Coolidge who became known as the nation’s “first radio president,” even though Harding was the first to have a speech broadcast over the radio – as keynote speaker at the dedication of the memorial site for Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” on June 4, 1922.

Coolidge became the first U.S. president to make a radio policy speech, essentially his State of the Union speech, on Dec. 6, 1923.

“The voice of President Coolidge, addressing Congress tomorrow, will be carried to a greater portion of the United States and will be heard by more people than the voice of any man in history,” The New York Times reported on Dec. 5.

By winning election to a full term in 1924, Coolidge would serve a total of more than five years as president. In that time, he would make about 50 radio broadcasts, including his 1925 inaugural address, according to history.com.

Some commentators poked fun at Coolidge’s extensive use of the new medium.
In a humorous profile that was widely published in newspapers in 1924, Capt. Francis Drake described his perspective as a South Sea Islands trader.

“Why bless your heart, they’ve got 5 and 10-cent stores all over the islands and the natives listen to Calvin on the radio every time he speaks into it,” Drake quipped.

Even in its infancy, radio changed the nature of politics, and as the 1924 election cycle approached, it was increasing its presence as a provider of news.

As 1924 dawned, there were 573 commercial radio stations in the United States, compared with 382 a year earlier, The Evening Star of Washington, D.C., reported on Dec. 31, 1923.

Fourteen radio stations were set to broadcast from the 1924 National Republican Convention at Cleveland, sharing their signals with hundreds of other broadcast stations, making a political convention, for the first time, accessible “in the most remote corners of the country,” The Evening Star reported on May 31.

Seventeen radio stations broadcast from the Democratic National Convention a few weeks later.
Although the Harding-Coolidge ticket had won in a landslide in 1920 and many expected another Republican victory in 1924, the third-party candidacy of U.S. Sen. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, a former Republican, held the potential to scramble the race.

Radio expedited the potential of rapid response to opponents.
“Senator La Follette, independent candidate for president, intends to use the radio during the campaign, not only to broadcast some of his own speeches, but to get a line on the utterances of his opponents,” The Evening Star reported on Sept. 24, 1924.

La Follette had a receiving set installed in the study of his home in Wisconsin, where he listened to the acceptance speech of Democratic candidate John W. Davis, a former West Virginia congressman, on Aug. 11.

On Aug. 14, La Follette was in Washington and planned to listen via radio to Coolidge’s acceptance speech. Davis listened to the Coolidge broadcast from his home in Clarksburg, W.Va.

“Tuning the loudspeaker set in his home here, with a nearby relay station, the Democratic presidential candidate was able to hear the keynote of his Republican opponent sounded in Washington,” one news wire service reported.

Coolidge’s acceptance speech may have been the first made-for-broadcast campaign event. Instead of the traditional outdoor, afternoon speech perfect for photos, the Coolidge campaign rented Centennial Memorial Hall in Washington, which seated fewer than 2,000, for an indoor, evening broadcast.

“For the scene was unique, and the ceremony itself wholly unlike anything in political campaigns of the past,” political columnist David Lawrence wrote in The Evening Star on Aug. 15, 1924. “In fact, there was a constant struggle to change it from the almost formal social function that it was to a rip-roaring political meeting.”

Lawrence suggested that strategy failed because the audience, comprised mostly of federal government officials and their wives, was not enthusiastic.

“It was a dignified assemblage,” he wrote. “It did not hoot and yell and stamp its feet and cheer to the point of hoarseness.”

The mood fit with Coolidge’s personality.
“Mr. Coolidge himself is a quiet-spoken individual who speaks in a monotone and depends rather on the words he utters than the measure they are delivered,” Lawrence concluded.

As radio became a constant on the campaign trail, candidates began to cut back on traveling the country by train to speak to crowds in person. One radio speech had the potential reach as many listeners as a thousand whistle stops.

Davis, the Democratic candidate, had a railroad car on his campaign train wired with broadcast microphones, according to “The 1924 Radio Election,” an essay Don Moore published in 1992.
On Labor Day, all three candidates made speeches broadcast on radio.

La Follette, the candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party, made the first presidential campaign speech broadcast from a radio studio without an audience.

On the eve of the election, Davis and Coolidge made separate radio campaign speeches, not so much to define their differences, but to get out the vote the next day.

Davis went first.
“The nominee spoke in the presence of the smallest audience and in the smallest room he had visited as a speaker during the campaign,” The Associated Press reported. “Not more than twenty persons were present. Yet, it was heard by numbers too great even for radio experts to estimate.”

 

Maury Thompson was a reporter for The Post-Star of Glens Falls for 21 years before retiring in 2017. He now is a freelance writer focusing on the history of politics, labor and media in the region.