It’s All Been Down Hill Since…
1908, when the first wax cylinder recordings were made of the two nominees in a Presidential election.
Via Sean at Cosmic Variance, I came across Ron Cowen’s story at the Science News website and learned that William Jennings Bryan used his time in the Edison recording room to advocate insurance for individual bank depositors and William Howard Taft devoted his three minutes or so to an analysis of the “Rights and Progress of the Negro.”
As Sean said, it’s a delight to realize that both of those topics are of purely historical interest.
That was epochal then. No more secretely hired flacks to spread scandal, a la Jefferson and Adams (Good thing we don’t do that sort of stuff anymore). Now, of course, there is an entire industry devoted to using sound and image to permit the candidates to connect to an electorate with the (too intimate?)* illusion of direct one-one contact between individuals who never meet.
But what is so sweet about this story is that we can look back to a specific, single moment when it all began; if nothing else, the fact of such a sharply defined point of origin can help sharpen our thinking about what has happened since, for good and ill, at the intersection of mass media and politics.
Beyond that historical piety, there’s just one thing I’d like to add to Sean’s thought: Taft’s and Bryan’s excellent adventure in audio is simply a reminder of how swiftly what we now take as almost immutable practice evolved from these humble beginnings. It’s in the range of personal memory, of experience that reaches right into the present.
That is: My youngest great uncle lived into the 1980s — I had a chance to speak with him into my own twenties. He was born in 1900 — so soon before the census taker came to my great-grandparents’ house that he is listed on that year’s census form as Baby Levenson.
He was eight when Bryan and Taft and Edison between them made it possible to connect voice to ear, emotional pitch to voter’s limbic system, at a distance of both space and time.
My Uncle Moe and I talked about these recordings, of course — if we had I would hope I would have had the wit to write the story up myself — but we did reach back into that history. He could tell me what it was like to see cars appear; to experience the end of World War I, to go to college and be the first in his Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant family to go to college and be able to major in something as not-obviously-useful as French literature.
The larger point here is that the conventional division of time into generations misses the way historical memory actually works.
If your grandfather is alive, he can tell you what his great aunt told to him. On my mother’s side, that means my grandfather, a career British army officer, would have known senior officers in his mess old enough to have observed the American Civil War, with all the lessons that did not sink in about what happens when you apply industrial methods to infantry tactics. On my father’s side, my grandparents were able to reach back into personal memory and immediate family experience of the life of Jews under Tsarist Russian rule.
This is personal memory — one or two links of conversation at most. 1908 is even closer. In my own adulthood, I reach back with just one conversation to the lived experience of the moment American politicians’ voices first broke out of the constraints of time and place.
All of which to say is that hearing Taft speak as if it were a century ago today should remind us that the transformation of modern politics into one dominated by modern media tactics is not an inevitable by-product of human nature, a required feature of democratic self governance in the 21st century.
It is a very recent technological manipulation that turns, to be sure, on close observation of the ways people receive and interpret information and experience. But the 30 second hate spot is not some required response to a few million years of evolution from savanna to Savannah.
*One of the repeated little pleasures of this election is watching conservative lip-flappers self-immolate. Rich Lowry, however, exceeds expectations (even accounting for the soft bigotry of low expectations), and the quote linked above has to rank with at the top of the OMG-Did-I-Just-Hit-’Publish’ scale.
Image: Francis Barraud painted what became an iconic image of his brother’s dog Nipper listening to the horn of an early phonograph during the winter of 1898. Victor Talking Machine Company began using the symbol in 1900. Source: Wikimedia Commons. This may be a cliche (it is–Ed.) but it’s too good to pass up here.
Tags: Politics, History, William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Edison, Recording, History of Technology, Mass Media
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