When Bryan
speaks, then I rejoice.His is the strange composite voice
Of many million singing souls
Who make world-brotherhood their choice
— Vachel Lindsay, American poet, 1915
William Jennings Bryan was rarely at a loss for words. His
impassioned oratory spellbound congressmen during his two terms in the U.S.
House and thrilled thousands of voters during the presidential campaigns of
1896 and1900. But during his third run for the White House, 100 years ago, Bryan had trouble speaking
in the intimacy of his own home.
“Mr. Bryan seemed
a little nervous when he first started, much more so, he said, than he ever
felt in facing an audience of ten thousand people,” Harold Voorhis recalled.
Voorhis, an agent for the National Phonograph Company, was partly responsible
for the candidate’s discomfort: He had brought a phonograph into the library of
Bryan’s house in Lincoln, Neb.,
to record some of his speeches, old and current. “Considering that his words
were to be reproduced all over the world in perhaps a million homes, … I
thought he showed remarkable composure,” Voorhis wrote in the July 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly.
Whether for
profit or prestige, the 1908 campaign was the first in which presidential
candidates recorded their own voices for the mass market. “We now have Records
by Mr. Bryan and Mr. Taft, so that no matter how the November election may
result, we shall have Records by the next President,” an advertisement in the
September 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly
exclaimed. “Now, for the first time, one can introduce the rival candidates for
the Presidency in one’s own home, can listen to their political views,
expressed in their real voices, and make comparisons.”
The sound-bite
era was born.
The recordings by
Bryan and Taft were played at rallies, in concert halls and at local Edison dealerships. Political clubs, depending on their
leaning, featured Taft or Bryan speeches — or, if they wanted to appear
impartial, both. In New York City,
an enterprising businessman set up a penny arcade featuring a Bryan-Taft
“debate.” Mannequins stood before a phonograph that spouted the candidates’
voices.
“You could draw a genealogy from the televised presidential
debates of today straight back to these” recordings, says record historian
Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in Bloomington. “An awful lot of political speechmaking
nowadays is mediated; the idea of someone simply addressing a live audience
[as] the target audience …really doesn’t seem to pertain much anymore.” The
1908 recordings “are really the first step in that direction.”
The phonograph was invented in 1877. By the early 1890s, it
was being used in arcades and exhibition halls. As early as the 1896
presidential campaign, elocutionists and actors had recorded imitations of
presidential speeches, replete with canned applause and other sound
effects. An 1896 catalog for the U.S.
Phonograph Company, Feaster and Indiana
University folklorist Richard Bauman
note, listed what it called recordings of speeches by Bryan and his opponent in that campaign,
William McKinley, but all were re-creations voiced by others.
“The concept of the on-the-spot sound bite, immediate
gratification, news as it happens, didn’t exist,” says Tim Fabrizio, a
phonograph collector and coauthor of several books about the early history of
the phonograph. “What you had was the idea of re-creating things through
various musical and sound-effects presentations — the shelling of Port Arthur during the
Russo-Japanese war, the Battle of Manila the surrender of the Spanish fleet.…[I]t
was considered that the phonographic art was such as to require a different
quality, a different pedigree.”
But in 1908, says Fabrizio, “all of a sudden you had the
real people sitting before the recording horn.”
The “speaking phonograph,” as Edison
called his invention, was already 30 and was no longer an expensive plaything
restricted to an exhibition hall or the homes of the very rich. Now that
inventors had come up with a wind-up, spring-driven model, housewives no longer
had to worry about smelly batteries that could leak acid on the parlor rug.
“The year 1908 marked the first time Bryan had run for the presidency since the
phonograph had become a common household object and since the mass production
of phonograph cylinders had become practical,” says Feaster.
“The phonograph had suddenly come of age, it had gotten to
the point where it can be the dispenser of reality, not just fantasy,” notes
Fabrizio.
Bryan made his recordings in May, before he had
secured the Democratic nomination. Some of the speeches he recorded were
already well known — such as “The Railroad Question,” a plea not to wrest
regulation of the railroad industry away from the federal government and give
it to the states; or “Imperialism,” a shortened version of a talk on the dangers
of the U.S. waging war against smaller countries, such as the Philippines.
“Imperialism” was first delivered during the 1900 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
However, later
that year, for the Columbia Phonograph Company, Bryan recorded a brand-new speech, entitled “Mr.
Taft’s Borrowed Plumes,” specifically criticizing his opponent.
For those first
recordings made in May 1908,Bryan
declaimed into the recording horn in his library as a needle cut grooves on a
hollow, rotating wax cylinder. “Some workmen who were engaged in repairing a porch
annoyed us with their hammering and Mr. Bryan went out to tell them to let up
for awhile. He did not want to arouse their curiosity so told them he was
talking into the phone. For all that, we heard a few stray knocks later on and
one or two of these were caught by the Phonograph in his speech on The Tariff
Question,” Voorhis wrote.
“When our work was at last finished on Saturday, the library
floor looked as it had been visited by a snow storm, so thickly was it covered
with wax shavings,” Voorhis said. “I made apologies to Mrs. Bryan, which she
assured were entirely unnecessary, and as quickly as I could get my things
together I was on the way back to Orange,
N.J., with the Records.”
After the
Democrats nominated Bryan that July, the Edison company began promoting his recordings heavily. “No
one who has ever heard Mr. Bryan speak will fail to recognize all of the
wonderful charm of voice and manner by which he is famous,” noted an ad for the
Edison records placed in a monthly magazine, Youth’s Companion. “‘Where does Bryan stand on the Railroad Question?’ is
being asked on all sides. He has been so widely, and in most cases,
erroneously, quoted. … This Record comes as his personal word on this important
subject.”
Reaction to this novelty might be called mixed. Some political cartoons portrayed Bryan as a blowhard who
loved nothing better than his own voice. The public, Feaster says, was still
used to thinking of the phonograph as an instrument for entertainment, not
serious contemplation.
Taft didn’t immediately agree to do his own recordings. He
may have waited to take the plunge until after he and his advisors saw how Bryan’s records were
received, Feaster speculates. But he ended up making his own 12 cylinders to answer
Bryan’s 10.
“Judge Taft has consented to make several short speeches
into talking machines for reproduction,” the New York Times wrote on August 4, 1908. “As the process of making a phonograph record
is somewhat different than a making a campaign speech from the back of a car
platform or from a front porch, Mr. Taft today found Mrs. Taft laughing at him
as he did a bit of rehearsing for the real records.”
Walter Miller, manager of the Edison Recoding Department,
along with an assistant, George H Werner, visited Taft at Hot
Springs, Va., just after he had
delivered his acceptance speech before the Republican convention in Cincinnati. “On Monday at
3 p.m. we got busy on the Records and by 5 o’clock had four completed,” Miller
and Werner wrote in the September 1908 Edison
Phonograph Monthly. “At 5:15 p.m.
Mr. Taft went for his regular horseback ride and gave us an appointment for
that evening at 9. At that time he dictated two more speeches, which were all
he had expected to make. He had become deeply interested by this time, however,
and said, ‘I’ll give you another.’ He kept ‘giving us another’ until we had
twelve altogether.”
“The last of the Records was finished at 12 o’clock Monday
night. We caught the first train out on the following morning and were at the
factory with the Records Tuesday night, when the work of moulding the
duplicates was begun.”
Both Taft and Bryan, Fabrizio says, took care to speak seriously and in measured tones — the
opposite of the curtain-chewing style that presidential re-enactors usually
adopted for recordings.
Listening to Bryan’s records, “I was a little taken aback that they
weren’t more emotional,” says Bryan biographer
Michael Kazin of Georgetown
University. “But then I
thought that if you’re sitting in a studio with a big horn in front of you,
it’s not the same as speaking to 10,000 people. It’s pretty hard to do.” Nevertheless,
Kazin adds, Bryan
“has a very sort of self-assured, confident voice. … He seems like the voice of authority.”
In contrast, “Taft was a slave to his scripts,” says
Feaster. “In the Edison cylinder ‘Roosevelt
Policies,’ he starts at the beginning of his published speech accepting the
nomination and reads it word for word until he runs out of time,” he notes.
But there was one
exception, notes Feaster. Taft’s “Irish Humor,” a travelogue about the Irish
and his visit to Ireland
25 years earlier “was an unexpected bonus for the company as he got swept up in
the moment with his enthusiasm for the phonograph.”
As the
presidential campaign progressed, the candidates made their usual stump
speeches, greeted crowds at train whistle stops and had their talks excerpted
in the newspapers. In the end, Taft trounced Bryan,
garnering 321 electoral votes to 162 for Bryan.
It was Bryan’s
worst — and final — presidential defeat, with Taft winning the popular vote by
8 percentage points and gaining the support of nearly all the northern states. (Taft
got 51.6 percent of popular vote vs 43 percent for Bryan;
in actual votes Taft got 7,678,335 votes compared to Bryan’s 6,408,979.)
No one has
studied what effect the recordings had on the outcome, Feaster says. But it was
clear that these artifacts were establishing a place in the culture. The
Columbia Phonograph Company also made cylinder recordings of Taft and Bryan,
and the Victor Talking Machine company made the first records of the candidates
on disk. And the recordings of both men remained in the limelight —Taft because
he won, Bryan
because of his continuing popularity as a great orator.
In the case of Taft, the American public could now listen to
the speeches of a real-live president, as the Edison Phonograph Monthly took pains to note in March 1909. “In a few days more, Edison
dealers will have something absolutely unique in the history of the world, namely,
phonograph records made by the ruler of a great nation,” the publication
reported. “A year ago, the mere suggestion that it would be possible to buy
records made by the President of the United States would have been
received with incredulity and yet, in a few days, they will exist and may be
had at a price within the reach of the poorest.”
Further evidence
that the campaign speech recording had staying power came in the 1912 campaign.
Although Theodore Roosevelt had refused to make any recordings while he was
president from 1901 to 1909, he recorded several speeches in his effort to win
a third, nonconsecutive term.
Furious that Taft
— whom Roosevelt had picked as his successor
in 1908 — had not followed through on efforts to preserve parkland and continue
trust-busting, TR ran on the Progressive Party ticket. On the recordings, says
Fabrizio, Roosevelt “doesn’t sound at all like the blustery guy we imagined
him. … He had a very patrician accent; he had a stutter as a child, and you can
still hear the hesitation in the records in a number of instances.”
Taft discovered one of the disadvantages of being so
indelibly on the record. In some of his 1908 recordings, he had clearly
portrayed himself as an ally of Roosevelt. "Two
selections, 'Roosevelt Policies' and 'Function of Next Administration,' do
little but praise Roosevelt's anti-trust work and assure the listener that Taft
will follow respectfully in Roosevelt's footstep,” says Feaster.
“By 1912 he may have wished he hadn’t said some of those things,”
Feaster says, because the recordings “were turned against him.” When that
year’s votes were counted, both Roosevelt and Taft had lost to the Democrat,
Woodrow Wilson.
Bryan,
coincidentally, served as Wilson’s secretary of
state, resigning in 1915 to protest Wilson’s
handling of the sinking of the Lusitania.
Bryan made a
series of evangelical records in the early 1920s, which sound more impassioned
than his 1908 recordings, according to biographer Kazin. But by then, the
phonograph was no longer a novelty. It was about to be superseded by another
media upstart — radio.
The phonograph’s
early political career
Years before the phonograph was successfully used in the
1908 presidential campaign, politicians had jumped on the recording device’s bandwagon.
William Jennings Bryan himself had made a few records during
his 1900 presidential campaign, but for legal reasons, the records were never
widely circulated and existing copies have yet to be found, notes Patrick Feaster,
a record historian at the University
of Indiana in Bloomington.
In 1902, Cassius O. Smith used a phonograph instead of
appearing in person at events during his bid for Chicago’s 31st ward. The Chicago Tribune did not view the effort favorably. “Afraid to
Address a Room Full of Voters,” the paper proclaimed. Smith defended the
practice: “I don’t use a phonograph exactly because I am too bashful to make a
speech myself, but it’s a useful thing to have at the meetings you can’t
attend.” Smith lost the election by 46 votes.
Two years later, Senator-elect Isidor Rayner of Maryland imagined an
elaborate scheme, involving phonographs and moving pictures.
“In the background could be put a moving picture screen, and
on that the orator could be depicted making all the appropriate gestures as the
phonograph ground off the speech, he having been photographed at the time he
was talking into the phonograph,” Rayner said. “Think of the wear and tear on
the orator’s voice — that would be saved, to say nothing of the discomforts of
travel. He could stay quietly at home with his family, and the public would
have a better time that it does under the present system.”
In his bid for the governorship of New York in 1906, media king William
Randolph Hearst attempted to put this notion of a phonograph stand-in into
action. Hearst’s campaign combined a record he had recorded at a New York City studio with
images of a speech the candidate gave at an upstate fair. Hearst tested the record-silent
movie at several locations throughout New
York state.
On October 29, 1906, in Kingston, N.Y.,
one of Hearst’s no-shows did not go well, according to a reporter. “The real
Hearst had been promised as a star attraction for six months. Instead he sent
inanimate eloquence and moving pictures to the faithful Leaguers. These were
unsatisfactory substitutes.… There were several embarrassing pauses while
records were changed.”
The next evening, in another city, drew a smaller crowd.
A correspondent for The
New York Times wrote that the manager of a London music hall expressed interest in
obtaining the Hearst. The manager “is particularly desirous of obtaining a
record of the speech in which Mr. Hearst called [his opponents] Mr. Parker a
cockroach, Mr. Jerome a croton bug, and Mr. Towne a rat.”
Some detractors called it “a sort of Hearst vaudeville
show.”
Hearst not only lost the election but was sued, Feaster
notes, for failing to pay his bill for the phonographs.
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