Believe It

is where we put stuff we've killed. Stories we liked a lot but couldn't use because the facts in the check there were lies, fakes, hoaxes. We can use this stuff in season one, which is about truth, but in this season, season two, all bets are off because this season is about doubt. Welcome to the Last Archive, Welcome to our vault of fakes. I'm Jillipoor. We've got a nifty old radio in here. Letful, Yeah, I can't see everybody who's that high and a shadow. Nineteen thirties radio

is so good, but also so over the top. Turn the radio dial to the nineteen thirties and be skeptical, Be very very skeptical. Here is the Mandol. Whole life of the Countant worldwide, huntful fact. The man who makes his living by telling the truth, the man who knows the place is making us today. Yes, Bob Ridley has been there then, in more than two hundred countries, traveled over a half million miles, always seeking, always hunting for facts, facts, to foot you right with him on the front row

seat of world events. Believe It or Not was one of the most popular American radio programs of the nineteen thirties. It had two conceits. First, it claimed that no one had traveled the world more widely than the host, Bob Ripley, and the second conceit Believe it or not, It's true, says Bob Ripley, and here he is. It's easy to believe what voices tell you on the radio, just like it's easy to believe stuff you read on the internet.

But should you believe it or not? This episode, I'm going to play you a lot of radio because this episode is about the role of radio in the history of doubt. A few episodes this season are about radio. Listen to this stuff, but carefully me. I have to keep reminding myself because I find Ripley so fun to listen to. Don't have too much fun. Don't let your guard down. You're a historian, damn it. Still, even the ads are fun. Ladies and gentlemen. Believe the evidence of

your own eyes. Pellmell gives you visible proof of its advantage to smokers. Your eye tells why, Your eye tells why. Good Lord. One problem was, just by being on the radio in the nineteen thirties, things sounded like news, or with the right copy and announcer, everything could be made to sound like news. After all, most people at the time got their news from the radio. Radio sounded so authoritative,

so easy to believe. That raises for me a big question, what's the relationship between belief and doubt and democracy and the radio If, as I tried to point out in the last episode, there's something of a conflict between majority rule and freedom of thought. What if the majority starts telling you what to think, then radio is potentially pre dangerous because radio is one way you can lose your sense of what's true and what's not and be really

influenced by other people. Luckily, at the time commentators raise this very same question. People are asking that question now too, just about the internet. So this episode, whenever I say the word radio. You can substitute in your head. The internet got it. It's sneaky this episode. It's a metaphor. When radio started, no technology seemed more exciting. Don't take my word for it. Listen to the President of the

Radio Corporation of America RCA. If the future of our democracy depends upon the intelligence and cooperation of its citizens, radio may contribute to its success more than any other single influence. Early radio stations were often based at universities. Remember when the Internet was only at universities. Two. The earliest goal with each technolog algy was to educate. Radio educated the people, and it also promoted democracy on shows like America's Town Meeting of the Air, The program staged

these crazy, wonderful debates. This one aired in nineteen thirty six. Hey CHR, what's the question tonight? Where will the machine dominate man? Will the machine dominate man? Machine does dominate man? No, the machine has improved living standard. The machine has given us leisure right too much, lenchine. Oh, just use it wisely, that's the thing to do. Will the machine dominate man?

That's a great question. Every new communications technology, from the radio to the internet, up ends both epistemology and politics. People thought radio was powerful enough to save democracy because it could help people know things for certain. But was it also powerful enough to destroy democracy? Did it also make people unknown things. One thing radio could do, with more sophistication than could ever be done before, was to

fake stuff. Believe it or not? Believe It or Not is the Great Temple of radio truthiness and its host, Robert L. Ripley, the High Priest. The first time you listen to it, you might think that it was a show about evidence, a little like the Last Archive, as if Believe It or Not. We're trying to draw a line between what you can know and believe and what you can't. But the second time you listen to it you begin to think, no, it's just mainly a joke.

Figuring out what it really was requires learning a little about its host. Ripley was born in California in eighteen ninety. He had terrible teeth, so crooked that it made it difficult to talk. Eventually got them fixed, but by then he was so famous for his crooked teeth that he got them made slightly less crooked. When he was eighteen, he got a job with a newspaper in San Francisco, drawing cartoons. A few years later he moved to New

York to work for another paper. One day, stumped for sports news, he drew a cartoon illustrating athletic firsts, like a guy who ran one hundred yards backwards in fourteen seconds. This was just at the end of the Great War. Sixteen million people died in that war, and then when it was ending, fifty million people died in the Spanish flu pandemic of nineteen eighteen. Wars and plagues unsettled knowledge.

They unsettled everything. In nineteen twenty two, after the war and the plague had ended and the world had opened up again, Ripley's newspaper decided to send him on the road to hunt down more unbelievable facts for a series called Ripley's Rambles around the World. He went to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, and Singapore and cabled back reports about all

the things he'd seen. He got crazy famous. After all that atrocity and devastation and suffering, Ripley showed Americans an unthreatening world, reassuring and even a ridiculous world, a very silly world. He published a best selling book in nineteen twenty nine. In nineteen thirty he started his own radio show. He started in short films, Well if he wakes them hot news. The fact maybe interesting that icebergs are huh not cold? How amazing? Technically this is true. There's some

thermal energy thing. Not interestingly true, but narrowly true. That's the line Ripley most like to walk. Everything he said was amazing, Everyone he met was incredible. Here he is mister Clayton Bates, better known as Tegley. Ripley says, that's a one leg a tap dancer dancing with a wooden leg. And it's true. Clayton Bates was a real guy, and he did have one leg, and he was a tap dancer. But on the radio, how could you know that this

sound was really Clayton Bates. You couldn't. You just couldn't know. Wondering was at least half the fun of it. Ripley loved to cultivate doubt. We have thousands of sound effects here in the last archive, many of them made by a guy named Harry Jeannette Junior. Around the same time that Ripley was traveling the world hunting facts, Jeannette was traveling the country in an old black Studebaker gathering sounds like this one a gentle rainstorm. But does this sound

like a thunderclap to you? Or could it be a shotgun blast? Slowed way down? Radio opened up a whole new world and a whole new world of fakery. You could fake more than just sound effects on the radio. You could fake people. The very first radio show ever serialized on American radio made its debut in nineteen twenty eight. This show is notorious. It's horrible. Campbell Soups. Bring you Amos and Andy. Amos and Andy was a minstrel show.

Amos is Sunday again. Yeah, Sunday is right. And don't forget he is on the radio every Sunday, and if arenso. Two white guys pretending to be two black guys black face. Early radio did this kind of thing all the time. Incomparable Charlie Chan, not just black face but also yellow face. Charlie Channel humbly gives you greeting and distends warm welcome, say Jess said, nature sometimes reveals steepest truth in wildest joke.

Inspector Chan Charlie Chan, one of the most famous detectives of all time, A Chinese detective created by a white guy. A Harvard graduate from Ohio, Earl Dearer Biggers, a friend of mine, Unto Huang, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote an amazing book about the Charlie Chan franchise, the novels, the films, all of it. I called Huang up in Hong Kong, so maybe we could begin. I just wanted to hear a little bit

about what drew you to Charlie Chan in the first place. Well, usually too friendly and engallible Americans, I would just say, walk, he wasn't my grandfather, and they were usually say, oh really, speaking of galliability. And you know, as a kid, Huang practiced is English by listening to the radio. I inherited a sort of a batter, a transistor radio flowed my city who had inherited from my grandfather. And because in those years there was no TV, and every Chinese household

had a chances to radio. And I was playing with it. And then one night, you know, I turned the knob, you know, the dial up and down, up and down, and I came to a frequency. Then a man's voice came out. It's like This is a voa the Voice of America, broadcasting in special English. Years later in the US, while studying for his PhD, one came across Charlie Chan the way you might in a mystery story. He picked up a book at an estate sale. He was hooked.

He knew he wasn't supposed to love this stuff. He was supposed to be outraged by its racism. But he loved the playfulness, the goofiness, and also the truth to be found within the fake. He read all the books, he watched all the films. He listened to the radio plays. After each episode toward the end, you know, they take a break music, I guess commercial, and then Charlie Chan come back and the host will as you know, mister Chan, what do you you know? What kind of Chinese philosopher

do you have for us? Yes, when we are giving up taking it's time to find good nice Thank you.

Chen has this fortune cookie wisdom aphorisms delivered with lots of gongs in films, A lot of the Charlie Chan things, most of them were really either cooked up by Earlder Biggers himself or you know, invented by young Hollywood screenwriters getting high and trying to imagine what Chinese will say, right, But the radio plays they contain genuine quotes from Loud or Confucius and all that, and that's not like wow, that's actually you know, almost like the commercials they will play, right,

So the Chinese you know, jams, they're they're real kind of commercials. Yeah, for of course, for the radio play, but for I don't know, for for everything else. Like there's sort of like Confucianism as a radio spot, like as a series of jingles or something. Yes, yes, And there's certainly yeah, there's certain naive a tape by the earnestness about it, which doesn't really always exist in in the visual medium. Of course, this attempt at authenticity only

went so far. Charlie Chan's fake Chinese accent is bad enough, but his actual Chinese. I listened very carefully. I'll try to figure out whether it's Cannonese or Vietnamese or whatever. They're not. They just it's not it's not anything. It's really made up gibberish. So on American radio in the nineteen thirties, you've got Ripley traveling the world for wonders, most of which are fake. You've got Amos and Andy fake black men, and you've got Charlie Chan, a fake

Chinese guy. There's a pattern here. Radio wasn't randomly fake. Radio was fake in a way that reflected the racial and national contortions of the age, which included Jim Crow segregation, the restriction of immigration from Asia, and the forest deportation of immigrants from Mexico. In nineteen twenty four, Congress had passed the National Origins Act, which banned all immigration from

Asia and restricted immigration from elsewhere through strict quotas. But the act created a carve out for non quota immigrants, which included Mexicans. Four days after the passage of the National Origins Act, Congress established the US Border Patrol had set up rules for crossing the southern border yet to register and pass literacy test and have proof of work. A few years later, new legislation would criminalize crossing the

border without those documents. Believe it or not, on the radio, Mexico became exotic, the romantic land south of the border. Ripley went there to excavate its history for listeners back home. On one of my many interstinct trips I've made through Mexico, I discovered a Believe it or not about an ancient prophecy that led up to a great historical tragedy believe it or not Mexico. But Mexicans didn't need Ripley to

tell their stories. In the nineteen thirties, there were a lot of other voices on the radio and they weren't fake. Yea when auna. That's Pedro Gonzalez, who started a radio show called Louis Madrugadores the Early Risers in Los Angeles in nineteen twenty nine, the year after Amos and Andy debut and the year before Believe It or Not. Gonzalez Is local show came on at four in the morning when only workers were awake, farm laborers, fruit packing house workers.

They were up early getting ready for the day, listening to the radio into the music in the warmth and the humor in Gonzalz's voice in Sa Fernando Especialitas, Joostantovin and Limpachi. Second, the tape I'm playing for You is Gonzalz. His music and his voice is taken from an oral history that he gave in Spanish. I'm playing in in Spanish without translation. As a reminder that radio used to

be really bilingual. For listeners who don't speak Spanish, I'll explain most of what he's saying, but hearing him in his own voice, in his own language is important, Yes, Bank memo. The Pedro Gonzalz was in eighteen ninety five in Chihuahua, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. He'd worked as a telegraph operator. He moved to Los Angeles when he was in his early thirties. He found his way to radio after we read a flyer looking for Spanish speakers

who could write and sing jingles. Gonzalez got the job and then started his own company making Spanish language radio ads. Dolores z Cassius, another incredible scholar, at U Sezanna Barbara, writes about Gonzalez in her book Sounds of Belonging. When radio came on the scene in the United States in general, it was seen as this coveted, luxurious radio set to own. But as it became cheaper, that's when more working class

communities of color, immigrant communities gravitated towards it. Early Spanish language radio had to be picked up from transmitters across the border in Mexico. Sometimes people would broadcast illegally from the garages on the West Coast. He could hear anything, fortune tellers preach yours, uncensored smart, fake doctors spouting quackery. Listeners love Gonzalez is Los Mugs, which is the first

Spanish language show broadcast in the United States. Once the depression hit, it became harder for Mexican workers in California to find jobs. On a show, Gonzalz would find out where there was work. He announced it on air. Everyone would hear it. It was incredibly effective. It got so boss is looking for workers would just go to Gonzalez and ask him to spread the word. Then manzualis corneus. He the vile We're going better. Unlike Ripley, who was

mostly joshing you, Gonzalez was the real deal. You could trust him. It tied listeners together, so they felt that they weren't alone. So it gave a sense that it wasn't just this Mexican neighborhood or this side of a Mexican city. It gave a sense that they were part of this larger mass, and it gave a sense of power. You feel powerful when you listen to that. Cassia says that Gonzalez. His favorite songs were in Charis and Corrido's ballads.

He wrote them himself and played them on the radio, so one of the most popular corridos during that time. He did not write this, but it was aired a lot. Was called a Laba Blatos, which is the dishwasher, and it's a song about a dishwasher Mexican immigrant and how he spends his days being a dishwasher. But it was a number one song style in the United States. People were requesting that, and I think a lot of people will say, well, it's because you know, pobre Mexicanos. They

missed their patria, they missed their homeland. That's why they wanted to remember. But there's a listener letter in his files that says, I appreciated that song style because you helped us forget. You helped us forget what our existence was like here. And I really admire that that he did that in the sense of not just romanticizing what you left behind, but this realization of what your life

is like right now. Life right now included the US Border Control arresting tens of thousands of people and sending them to jail to await trial. Mexicans charged through the immigration crimes filled prisons. Their sheer numbers led to a massive growth of the prison industry. Then there were their deportations, started by President Hoover. In what we're called repatriation drives. The US government forcibly deported over a million people of

Mexican descent, most of them were US citizens. Gonzalez helped people organize and resist. He could announce a meeting for a union, you know, downtown, and then two hours later all these people would show up. He started giving people um heads up, like yesterday at this train station, people are being deported. The more Gonzalez spoke out against the deportation, the more the authorities hassled him. He later said, the authorities started asking themselves, what if he insights a revolution here?

He say, will make it cool? He does which status let The LA District Attorney ranted about Gonzalez, said he was a madman, said he was conspiring to burn down white people's houses, that sort of thing. He's a conflictum. Once the DA decided to go after Gonzalez, the authorities clearly had him under surveillance. Police arrested him for keeping his daughter home from school. Had turned out she was

taking care of her sick mother. Then they questioned him about picking up miners young girls, which he had done, but they were friends of his daughter and he picked them up to drive all of them to school. Eventually, in nineteen thirty four, police trumped up charges of rape. During the trial, Gonzalez calmly smoked a cigar. His fans filled the courtroom. He was sure he'd be found innocent. Instead, he was found guilty and sentenced to fifty years in prison.

He was sent to San Quentin. His radio listeners wrote him letters year after year he Quentin. They raised money for his defense. Years later, his accuser said that she lied, that the police had convinced her to accuse him of a crime he had never committed. In nineteen forty, after serving six years in San Quentin, Gonzalez was released on parole to Mexico. He was driven to Union station in La to border train to Mexico. He was met by a crowd. He stopped and sang one last song. So

we haven't found any archive broadcasts. Have you ever heard any? Or I have not. I kind of liked that you can't find it. I have to I'm almost like I mean, of course I want to listen to it today, like every once in a while in Spanish in which radio will hear about an ice sighting, and it's so incredibly hard to get that recorded. But that's part of its

mystique and power. It's that you can't capture it. For a long time, radio had afforded that kind of freedom and power, creative and unregulated, small local broadcasters like Gonzalez engaged in a conversation with their communities as an as Cassius reminded me, I mean really reminded me, this kind of radio can sometimes save lives for a group of people who are so legally vulnerable. Radio becomes so important. And I actually just heard and beginning tier because I

just heard reheard a show. It's amazing, and it's bilingual and mistech Mexican indigenous language in Spanish, and you hear these immigrants like calling and they're so desperate and they're using fake names and they're doing all this stuff, and it reminds me like this is why people go to radio, Like you are desperate for help, for information, but you do not want to be identified. In the nineteen thirties, a lot like today, it felt as if the world

was collapsing in on itself. Radio could be a lifeboat in a swelling sea. But then, in that age of immigration restriction, authorities started to puncture to the lifeboat. The government of California tried to ban Spanish from the airwaves. The federal government stepped in two. In nineteen thirty four,

Congress established the Federal Communications Commission. One of its purposes was to regulate radio, to keep signals from interfering with one another, and also to keep radio from messing with the public's mind, not least because psychologists had begun studying the effects of radio a little worried about its incredible power. By then, there were twice as many radios in the United States as telephones, reaching an audience of seventy eight

million people. Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication, pre eminent as a means of social control, and epical in its influence upon the mental horizons of men. Voices have a way of provoking curiosity, arousing a train of imagination. That's a young psychology professor named Hadley Cantrell. He ran the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, which aimed to help the intelligence citizen detect and anallazed propaganda. Cantrill studied all kinds

of propaganda, but radio most of all. In his laboratory, he and his colleague Gordon Alport conducted experiments with which they hoped to be able to determine what radio does to your mind. In one experiment, they'd have multiple people record a passage and then play that passage over a speaker to simulate a radio broadcast. Then the psychologists would ask listeners how they pictured the person speaking, how tall was that person, how old, what color was their skin.

Here's what they found. Radio seemed to expand listeners horizons. It could bring the whole world into your kitchen. But then, weirdly, it also seemed to reinforce people's prejudices. I think some version of that was a consequence of suppressing voices like Pedro Gonzalezes. When little local broadcasters got kicked off the airwaves and more and more programming came from big networks in New York, the world that radio brought into your

kitchen got smaller. You want to hear from foreigners. You could listen to Charlie Chan, But then towards the end of the nineteen thirties, it's almost as if you can hear this ha ha fakery start to deflate, as if someone just punched a big hole right in the middle of it. Once again, it's present time, and tonight we offer the premiere of a fast moving melodrama, a breathtaking love.

In the beginning, radio theater just met theater. On the radio, you were supposed to imagine that you were there in the theater watching a play standing room only. Again, tonight, the stage is at and what's more, we're ready for that magic moment in the theater curtain time. It's sort of like if I said listening to the last archive is the same as attending a lecture. That would just miss the point. This is not a lecture. Radio isn't a play without a stage set or a movie without pictures.

It's something else. It's its own medium. Orson Welles understood that better than anyone. We're starting off tonight with the best story of its kind ever written. With the federal government regulating radio, big broadcasters wanted to prove that they were responsible and didn't need minding, so they began writing a new kind of show, a sustaining program, edifying and without ads, meant to display their virtuous uses of broadcast licenses.

Orson Wells started a sustaining program on CBS Who's called Mercury Theater on the Air. Well said the point of his show wasn't to bring theater to radio, but to bring radio to the listener. It was a radio show, but it was also a show about radio, especially its most famous episode, the War of the Worlds. We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's.

You probably know the story, but I bet it sounds really different if you listen to it after having tuned into all sorts of other stuff on the dial. Ripley's Believe It or Not, Emis and Andy, Charlie Chan and Pedro Gonzalez. On October thirtieth, nineteen thirty eight, on the brink of war in Europe, Orson Welles broadcast an episode about an alien invasion. It began as if it were any other evenings, entertainment, good evening later than gentlemen from

the Meridian Room in the Park Clausa Hotel in New York. Today, we bring you the music of Raymond Raquela in the Chesstra with a touch of the Spanish. Raymond rickelloly Dalt with Laura Company. Just another evening of exotic Spanish music on the radio. When suddenly that concert gets interrupted by news bulletins reporting that a strange object has fallen from space at a nearby farm. Listen to what wells can do with sound effects? Very thin, gentlemen, the car Phillips again.

How did the Wilmot's farm Gralvis nail Newchtis. But here's mister Willmot's, owner of the farm here. Well, as I was saying, I was listening to the radio kind of halfway yes, mister Willet, and then you saw something I've been a kind of greenish streak, and then zingle something smacked the ground, knocked me clear out of my chair. Well, where are you frightened, mister Willmott. Well, I'm quite sure I reckon. I was kind of ryld Hell. Thank you,

mister Wellman, thank you very much. You want me to tell that's right? All right? That's planning. Ladies and gentlemen, you've our frustrated correspondent has given up on the hopeless eye witness one. I don't know it's something happening. I'm shapers rising out of the pit, the fact chad of flame springing from the merrit at least writing the basting men turning the planet rank for the automobiles, writing everywhere coming be ladies and gentlemen. You are the circumstances beyond

our control. We are unable to continue the broadcast from Grover's Mill. People fell for it, or at least that's the legend, because this production was so genius, those layers of voices, announcer, reporter, eyewitness, aliens. Newspapers reported that Americans had collectively lost their minds. They are reports of jammed switchboards and frantic emergency calls. The Los Angeles Times reported

two heart attacks and a stroke. All that panic It might just have been newspapers trying to sell copies and maybe undermine people's faith in radio so they'd start reading the news again instead of listening to it. Then too, it was a perfect story for psychologists like Hadley Cantrell, whose grant money depended on the idea that radio really

could whip people up into a frenzy. Honestly, though, it's impossible to know whether or not there was a panic that day, and I think there's not all that much difference between a panic and a story about a panic. There was plenty of that. One senator from Iowa called for a bill to prevent a broadcast like War of the Worlds from ever happening again. The next day, Wells

tried to defend himself to the press. You must realize that I when I left the broadcast last night, I went into a dress rehearsal for play this opening in two days, and I had almost no sleep. And I know less about this than you do. I haven't read He was mobbed by reporters demanding answers. You think there ought to be a law. I guess such an accidents we had last night, or who thought on that. I

don't know what the legislation would be. I know that almost everybody in radio would do almost anything to avert the kind of thing that has happened. It mightself included, but I don't know what the legislation would be. We simply radio was new, and we are learning about the effect it has on people. Over in Princeton, near where the Aliens supposedly landed, Kantro was floored by War of the World. He couldn't have designed a better experiment if

he'd wanted to. He thought it'd make a perfect study for the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, so he began pitching the idea, collecting news stories and data on the supposed panic. Meanwhile, his colleagues heard a. Hertzog and Hazel goodet. Began to do research and interviews for which they don't receive nearly enough credit. They measured the size and nature of the thing, trying to figure out what made people fall for it. Here's some of what people said. I believe the broadcast.

As soon as I heard the professor from Princeton and the officials in Washington, I knew it was an awfully dangerous situation. When all those military men were there and the Secretary of State spoke. If so many of these astronomers saw the explosions, that they must have been real, they ought, you know. Later, Wells changed his story. He said he'd known what he was doing all along, that he'd been trying to prove just what Cantrell suspected. People

would believe anything they heard on the radio. That's a pretty terrifying conclusion, especially in the nineteen thirties with totalitarianism on the rise around the world. The trick in a democracy in an age of mass communications is to find a way out of doubt and into a set of rules of evidence that allow you to figure out what's

true and what's not. So Americans got really interested in defending themselves against the radio and the way it can cultivate doubt, and also in using the radio to get Americans to believe in America and in the American Experiment. In nineteen thirty nine, on CBS Radio, one year after Orson Wells's infamous broadcast, the celebrated concert artist Paul Robeson sang a new song, a new American anthem about belief

and doubt and the American Creed. I think of it as the long forgotten last act of war of the world. Nobody who was anybody, everybody who was anybody ain't doning it. Nobody had faith, Nobody nobody but Washington, Tom Payne, Benjamin Franklin, I Am a Solomon, Chris mess Adison Nobody Ballad for Americans became Merbison's signature song, an American Creed sung with more power and resonance, maybe because it was sung by

an African American. The performance also made radio history. In the studio, the audience applauded for two minutes while the show was still on the air live, and then for fifteen more minutes after the broadcast moved on. CBS's switchboards got jammed with callers wanting to hear it again. It was like a bizarro American corrido, all about truth and doubt, these truths of the Declaration of Independence, about how nobody who was anybody believed it and everybody who was anybody

doubted it. Then there's the constant questioning by members of the chorus asking who is telling the story, the nobody who believed in the idea of democracy? Who? Yeah, how come all this? Are you an American? Am I an American? I'm just Irish? He wrote Youish, Italian, French, Nis, Russian, Chinese, Ponies, Gots, Hungarian, bit buck sween, He's finished, Canadian, Greek and Turk and check and double check America. It's a knockout, but it's

also unsettling. How do you believe in something when it keeps disappointing you, failing to live up to its own ideals. The United States is an act of belief. You have to believe in its founding ideas. For the thing to work somehow, You're supposed to suspend doubt, But then what about its failures. Out of the cheating, out of the shouting, out of the murders and lynching, out of the wind bags,

the patriotic spouting, out of uncertainty and doubting. I have to say, I'm really moved by thinking about what it must have been like to live in the United States during the years when the country was preparing to enter

the war in Europe. Here's one radio kept trying to instill a belief in a renewed American creed, not the creed of Thomas Jefferson, but a new creed inequality promised, if not realized America in the nineteen thirties, breadlines, starving children, vigilantes lynching people, and then the everyday humiliations of segregation. After performing Ballad for Americans on the radio, Robeson went out to eat with friends, but the restaurant refused to

see them. You can want to believe to believe in America, but you can't allow that will to believe to lead you to ignore its shortcomings. There are a lot of lies and liars and fakers, but not everything is a lie or a fake. The feeling that it's hard to know anything anymore. That happens every time a new technology of communications emerges. But the answer to a mess of lies can never be to doubt everything, because doubting at all means believing none of it and having nothing left

to believe in. Paul Robeson sang his American Creed just weeks after war broke out in Europe on Germany invaded Poland. During this all too reel war of the world, radio began broadcasting a new kind of news, live eyewitness reporting from the scene of battle, announced by Edward R. Morrow, one of the greatest reporters of the twentieth century. Is the oldest Square. The noise that you were here at the moment is the sound of the air range siren.

I'm standing here, just on the steps of Saint Patten's in the fields. A searchlight burst into action of from the distance, then single being slipping the sky above me. All that's not sound effects, that's not fake. That's the sound of war from the other side of the world. The bombing of London. Robert ripped. They tried, briefly, haplessly, to talk about the war the real world. Bob this week in Europe. They certainly have been making history, haven't they. Yes, fun,

this has been a week of astounding historical happening. The map of Europe is being chased before our eyes. But that was no way to talk about atrocity. Ripley's heyday came to an end on the radio anyway. Nineteen thirty nine marked the rise of a new style of radio, with the immediacy and intensity of eyewitness reporting and breaking news, a style that elevated a single voice, the voice of authority,

the on the scene reporter. One of the strangest sounds one've been here in London these days, or rather these dark nights, just the sound of footsteps walking along the street, like most shod with steel shoes. Radio collapsed distances. For the first time, voices could come from anywhere and work their way through your ears, into your head, to the

inside of your brain. Almost a century later, much of this seems to be happening all over again, the world unraveling while the Internet bounces off satellites high above and stomps along the corridors of your mind like ghosts shod with steel shoes. The last archive is written and hosted by me Jillapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon and Ben nat of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is Mio Lobell. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer.

Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Mathis Bossi and John Evans Stillwagon Sympinet. Our research assistants are Olivia Oldham and all of our riskin cuts. Our full proof players are Yoshia mau, Amon Blankenhorne, Matthias Bosse, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becca A Lewis, Andrew Parella, Robert Roccatta and Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries.

At Pushkin Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnarz, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig and Daniella Lacan. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jenette Foundation. Special thanks to Simon Leake, Oliver Leek and Paul Espinoza. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share

and review to find more Pushkin podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Joe Lapour.