Republican Drama

Marriage License Clerk: Now what do you intend to do about the national debt?

Prospective Bridegroom John: National debt? Me?

Clerk: You are going to establish a family and as the head of an American family you will shoulder a debt of more than $1,017.26--and it's growing every day. ... Do you still want to get married?

John: Well--er--I--I--What do you say, Mary?

Mary: Maybe--maybe--we better talk it over first, John. ... All those debts! When we thought we didn't owe anybody in the world.

John: Somebody is giving us a dirty deal. . . . It's a low-down mean trick. . . .

Voice of Doom: And the debts, like the sins of the fathers, shall be visited upon the children; aye, even unto the third and fourth generations! (Music}.

These words and many another like them were last week part of a "suppressed" play, hence fascinating to the U. S. Beneficiary of the "suppression" was the Republican National Committee.

If Franklin Roosevelt first demonstrated the possibilities of radio as a political tool, the Republican National Committee was primed to show him some possibilities he had not thought of. It hired actors, pre pared scripts, whipped together a series of skits to dramatize in homely, human terms its arguments against the New Deal.

Last month the Republican Committee went to the two great broadcasting chains, Columbia and National, asked to buy time on the air to present its skits. Last week the correspondence showing how the Com mittee met refusal in both quarters served as advance publicity to gain more attention for the Republican drama than if it had been broadcast from coast to coast. Excerpts from the correspondence :

President Lenox R. Lohr of National Broadcasting: "To accept such dramatic programs as you have offered would place the discussion of vital political and national issues on the basis of dramatic license rather than upon a basis of responsibility for stated fact or opinion."

President William S. Paley of Columbia Broadcasting: "It is our policy not to sell time for political broadcasts until after the party conventions next summer. We will not allow dramatization of political issues if time is bought after the conventions."

Chairman Fletcher of the Republican National Committee: "I cannot free myself of the impression that the attitude you have taken is affected and perhaps involuntarily controlled by the political party in power which regulates the issuance of your licenses. I believe your policy . . . will leave in the minds of the American public the distinct impression that you are either exercising an unwarranted degree of censorship or that you fear punitive action by the Federal Communications Commission."

With this fine controversial foreword WGN (Chicago Tribune), an independent station, put four Republican skits on the air. The Press printed the dialog next day in snatches, in chunks, in toto. The "March of Time" told the story on the air next evening, broadcasting most of one skit over the same Columbia network which had rejected it as a paying customer. Columnists and editorial writers loudly discussed the "suppression."

Mrs. Paul FitzSimons, Republican National Committeewoman from Rhode Island, in a letter to the New York Herald Tribune told how she and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, speaking from Portsmouth, N. H. last September, had their broadcast spoiled by interference from a brass band whenever they attacked the New Deal. She also told of listening to the Republican broadcast last week over WGN: Reception of WGN in Rhode Island was perfect until five minutes before the political broadcast began. "At that time roars and crashes began which continued incessantly until five minutes after the . . . program ended."

In Georgia Governor Talmadge howled "conspiracy" when the two radio chains declined to broadcast the convention of his anti-New Deal "Constitutional Democrats" scheduled to meet in Macon, Jan. 29.

These incidents footed up to a grand total of political dissatisfaction with the radio and its division of time, gave radio men a great pain. Pundit Walter Lippmann came to their defense, declaring, "Even if [broadcasting companies] are just they will not seem to be just. They will be accused of being unjust. They will never convince every one that they are just. The pie is too small and the boys are too hungry."

Less easily did they get off at the hands of Pundit David Lawrence, who attacked the contention that "political facts" are all right, but "political skits" improper. Said he: "If the broadcasting companies ever attempt to separate fiction from fact in respect to political speeches, they will have to employ censors far more skillful in the separation of truth from untruth than the Justices of the Supreme Court themselves."

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