The year was 1920. A huge crowd gathered downtown to listen to a loud
speaker. The city was Pittsburgh. The reason for the crowd? It was
election night. Voters heard over KDKA that the Republicans, after eight
years of President Woodrow Wilson, were returned to office with a ticket
of Senator Warren G. Harding, of Ohio, and Governor Calvin Coolidge, of
Massachusetts. It was the dawning of the radio era. So few homes had
receivers that the only way most people could hear the returns was to
assemble downtown. By 1924, the year Coolidge was nominated for
President, President Harding having died on a West Coast trip, there was
limited broadcasting from the two conventions and much greater coverage
of the election itself. Coolidge remarked that he was President in the
right era inasmuch as he had a good radio voice.
Prior to the advent of radio voters had to wait for the wire services to
report on developments from the States. Sometimes it took days before
the results of the Presidential election were clear. Radio changed all
of that. Radio was it until giving way to television, after World War
II. Some rudimentary television was broadcast at the conventions of
1948, which re-nominated President Harry S. Truman and nominated New
York Governor Thomas E. Dewey but it was 1952 before the networks really
began to cover the conventions and the elections. I still remember the
late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-IL) pointing his accusatory
finger at the Eisenhower delegates, while leaning down from the podium,
saying in his mellifluous voice, "Thou shall not steal." Dirksen had
accused the Eisenhower campaign of stealing delegates from the Taft
campaign by challenging already seated delegates. It was dramatic and
conveyed a scene which only television could produce.
Then in 1960 television, in addition to playing its now customary role
at the conventions (the three networks all covered the conventions,
including the platform debates), televised the Nixon-Kennedy debates.
Those who listened by radio thought Nixon had won the debates. Those who
watched the debates on television thought, by a landslide, that Kennedy
had won. That is because on television viewers saw Nixon's ill-at-ease
body language. They also saw Nixon's heavy beard and the perspiration on
Nixon's forehead. The radio listeners could not see any of those and
upon the basis of audio only believed Nixon had prevailed. Millions more
watched television. There were two additional debates but they were
watched by far fewer viewers.