There are several hundred thousand, perhaps several million, moviegoers of all kinds and flavors in the United State who continue to protest in this late spring of 1929 that they do not like talking pictures and will not have them.

Though grousing and whining about the end of silence in movie theaters reminded Stout of a movie theater he visited as a boy. Each night, a small audience would gather, slump into the seats, and snooze through the night while the projectionist changed reels and showed the same movie over and over. “The only comment from the house was a contented snoring,” Stout said.

[I suspect] the outcry against talking pictures is being led by those patrons who have found the dim cathedral light, the overstuffed upholsteries and the easily ignored entertainment to be the perfect soporific. They resent having their sleep interrupted.

Technicians move a microphone boom closer to Renee Adoree.

A majority of whom, until recently, rarely have had a kind word to say of pictures… [Now they] look upon the least silent celluloid as the Ark of the Covenant about to be profaned by vulgar hands.

Not that long ago, Stout reminded readers, silent movies arrived with images of the world without sound.

When pictures first were shown, audiences felt this lack. Lips moved, traffic flowed, shots were fired, horses galloped, pies were thrown, and the Empire State Express flashed through Tarrytown in a world suddenly become stone deaf.

In the course of years we adjusted our ears to this unnatural silence and, creatures of habit that we are, it is the returning sound that now offends our senses.

Now, Stout declared, American audiences would adapt again.

Freed from the constraints of silent filming, studios began producing lavish musicals.

Here is a prediction:

The silent picture will be as dead as the souvenir teaspoon within a very short time, and none but professional adopters of lost causes will mourn at its tomb…

Talking pictures will produce better entertainment for considerably less money.

When the hisses and the catcalls have subsided, we shall proceed…
 
 
 
 
 

The addition of speech, music, and sound-effects to moving pictures has expanded their entertainment and artistic possibilities beyond anything the most farsighted can foresee today.

Talkies wouldn’t just offer talk, they’d bring along their own musical accompaniment— and not just a theater organ or piano, but full orchestras, famous singers, and choruses.

Millions have never seen a real musical comedy or revue. Such entertainment has been confined for years to the larger cities and played at prices prohibitive to John and Mary. Shortly they will be available at movie prices to any town large enough to support a wired movie house.

In Stout’s experience, the sound quality of movies already surpassed the best theatrical production. In 1927, he had seen “Show Boat” performed onstage at New York’s Ziegfield Theater. Even though he sat in the tenth row, “I distinguished no two consecutive words of Helen Morgan’s song “Bill.” Then he saw a film version of the play.

I again saw Miss Morgan, just as on Sixth Avenue, New York, except that I saw her more clearly… And I heard every word of the lyrics of “Bill” — lyrics very well worth hearing.

She was in New York and I in Salt Lake, but, the illusion being complete, I forgot that at her first note.

The arrival of talkies, Stout continued, would let comedies move beyond the limits of sight gags. And in drama, the ability to speak lines would enable movies actors to add depth to their performances, and touch audiences as never before. A theater manager had recently told Stout,

Mary Brian prepares for her voice test. She was one of the actresses who successfully moved from silents to sound.

“[in silent movies] the story was unimportant because the real drama went on in [the viewers’] own imaginations.

“All they asked was a push to start them off, and the regulation clinch at the end… They identified themselves with the stars.

“The screen reached them only with images; the actors had no more reality than the watcher invested them with.

“But once an actress spoke, the real woman broke through. Her personality reaches out and shakes the audience out of its private dreams. They are forced to take note of character now.”
 
 
 
 

The added dimension of speech, according to this manager, would have a “profound effect on daily life.” Movie-makers would be forced to write intelligent dialogue. And youngsters would stop imitating the shallow characters they’d seen in movies because they would see true personalities in movies.

As a prediction, it contained a large dose of wishful thinking. Sound didn’t force movies to become more intelligent and youngsters didn’t stop mimicking insipid role models they saw in movie melodramas. But the potential for sound pictures was still immense— so immense that Stout himself was tempted into making a rash prediction.

Sound recording was soon moving out of the studio onto elaborate backlot stages like this one for "Hearts in Exile."

 

Very probably the stage —musical, vaudeville and legitimate—oh, yes, legitimate! —will not survive the new competition long.

No pencil can figure how the stage of Shakespeare and his successors can compete with them, even under the highly special conditions of Broadway.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Stout fell into the trap that has swallowed up many other prophets. He believed that the latest innovation in entertainment meant the extinction of any older style.  Radio was supposed to bring the death of newspapers. Television would kill radio. The internet would bury television. E-books will replace books in print. And ‘talkies’ meant the end of live theater.

Americans, however, are hungry for entertainment, and never fully abandon any diversion. In a culture where long-playing records continue to survive amid CDs, no medium ever disappears.

Speaking Up For the Talkies in 1929: ‘Silent Movies Are History’ The Saturday Evening Post

Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali, now 70 years old, is one of America’s most admired athletes. He has received an honorary doctorate at Princeton University, the Spirit of America award, the Presidential Citizens Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

All these honors in late life could obscure the fact that Muhammad Ali, in his youth, was a highly controversial figure—a racial revolutionary, some feared.

Ali had been generally popular up to the day he beat Sonny Liston in 1964 to become boxing’s heavyweight champion. Shortly afterward, though, he announced that he’d joined the Nation of Islam, and changed his name from Cassius Marcellus Clay.

The Nation of Islam was then widely regarded by the American media as a highly dangerous group. There were fearful rumors that the Black Muslims would forcibly create a separate nation for black Americans. So when Ali announced his conversion, the media reacted as if they had been betrayed. A Post editorial from ’64 captures the tone of dismissal and fear.

For a time, when he was confining himself to bad poetry, Cassius was a loudmouth but a likable character who seemed to be harmless in or out of the ring. Then he won the championship and became, in his own estimation, “The Greatest.” After the fight, he acknowledged that he was a Black Muslim, converted by the arch-extremist, Malcolm X, the man who crowed that President Kennedy’s assassination was “a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” Malcolm X was separated from the Black Muslim movement after that remark and is now attempting to organize his own black nation. He wants to arm all the Negroes in the U.S. and ultimately take them back to Africa.

One Post writer went so far as to hint that Ali was simply using his status as a Black Muslim to increase ticket sales.

Muhammad Ali training in 1964.

Clay’s history of calculated deceptions now prompts the suspicion, of course, that his present case of galloping religion is but another decoy to serve who knows what end. Clay himself strengthened the suspicion when he declared, “Just by my being a Muslim, that should draw a bigger gate…”

On re-examination, however, Clay’s remarks were nothing more than cute verbiage. He well knows… that his commitment to Islam has cost him roughly two million dollars in commercial endorsements.

The quote came from a ’64 Post article, “Muslim Champ,” by Myron Cope, which generally overlooked Ali the boxer to focus on Ali the Muslim. Cope regarded Ali’s new faith with frank derision.

Cassius Marcellus Clay, who now calls himself Brother Muhammad Ali… is convinced he is a beacon of righteousness in a wicked world.

Having succeeded Malcolm X as the loudest [sic] Black Muslim, Clay has been fighting a socio-religious battle with the Christian world, and this, more than anything else, seems to have taken away his former exuberance. He still acts the clown for TV cameras but only to sell fight tickets.

Ali in Harlem.

Reading the article today, it’s clear that Cope’s preconceptions were obscuring his view of Ali. He claimed that Ali had “completely severed communication with whites,” even though Ali spoke freely with Cope for this article. Ali also proves himself to be more tolerant than Cope concerning the use of his old name.

“Call me Muhammad or call me Ali,” Clay advised as we drove to his house, “but if you forget and call me Cassius, that won’t bother me none.”

Cope didn’t forget. He deliberately referred to him throughout the article as Cassius Clay. And though he portrayed Ali as a zealot of his new “cult,” the champion voiced rather middle-of-the-road political opinions.

Cruising along, the new Clay discussed politics. “Kennedy,” he said, “just seemed so nice, he didn’t seem like a President.” He expressed an admiration for Barry Goldwater, saying that “he say what he thinks.”

In fact, Ali showed himself to be little changed from the spirited, sociable boxer Cope had traveled with in his pre-championship days.

I had been unwilling to believe that a young man with so bright a gift for teasing the world could hate. Henry H. Arrington, a Negro attorney and adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., told me; “I can assure you I have never seen any indication whatsoever of Cassius disliking white people generally.”

Muhammad Ali in 1964.

Whatever the actual teaching propounded in the Muslim meetings, Clay denies that he considers all whites to be devils. “I’m stressing just the works that the whites generally have been doing,” he said in his dressing room. “They blow up all these little colored people in church, wash people down the street with water hoses. It’s not the color that make you a devil, just the deeds that you do.

“It’s as our leader Elijah Muhammad teaches us. Couldn’t nobody argue it. I’m no authority on Islam. I am just a follower. If you be a blue race, and you do the works of the devil, then we can call you a devil. You got white people who died under demonstrations, died under tractor wheels for colored people. I wouldn’t call them no devil.”

He was attracted to the cult, he explained, because its people neither drank nor smoked, and they deported themselves well.

“I am an American; I was born here,” he said softly, trying to make himself understood. “Our leader and teacher will tell you himself, we respect America and respect whites for coming here and making a paradise from nothing. It’s not hate or fighting or arguing. We just want freedom.”

Ali’s religion was still a hot issue in 1965, when he fought former heavyweight champion Floyd Paterson. In an unpublished story, Post writer Bill Bridges described how the Ali-Patterson bout was being regarded as a test of Christianity and Muslim faiths. Some of Ali’s supporters, who had become estranged when he joined the Nation of Islam, were hoping that a Patterson victory would convince Ali to return to his old faith. After Patterson was defeated, however, there was no more talk about the match proving which was the superior faith.
 
The following photos were taken for Bill Bridges’ unpublished Post feature and were never printed.

Photo at top left: Ali exchanges angry looks at his former trainer, who had departed after Ali joined the Nation of Islam. Bottom left: the trainer can be seen mid-picture, with the arm of sports writer George Plimpton around his shoulders. He had hoped a defeat would return Ali to the Christian faith. Instead, with Ali victorious, the trainer returned to Ali who forgave him and rehired him as trainer.

Religion Steps into the Boxing Ring: Ali in ’64 The Saturday Evening Post

If you read in the newspapers every five days or so that a clean-cut chap, with whom you had been doing dips and spirals at a county fair the week before, had been carried lifeless or dying from the field while a morbid crowd tried to tear off his blood-stained collar and tie as “souvenirs” would you want to chuck it all and let a new crop of youngsters develop the art of flying?

I think you would.

The appalling and ever-growing death-list is making even the daredevils think—they are not laughing the specter off and talking about fatalism as they used to. Poor Eugene Ely’s recent death at Macon, Georgia, drove it home that even the most cautious fliers are not immune; and the fellows I have seen are wondering whether their turn will come next.

It might have been the death of Ely that prompted Elser to reassess the risks of flying the fragile, underpowered airplane of 1911. In his Post article, “The Wings of Icarus,” he said Ely had the reputation of being a cautious pilot who shunned risky maneuvers and stunts.  Not long before his death, another pilot, Lincoln Beachey had suggested it was possible to fly a “loop the loop,” i.e., a complete, vertical circle. This maneuver was nearly impossible for the limited engine power and lift of early biplanes, yet performing a loop was the goal of many young pilots, like Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone.

Both had stated that some day they would loop-the-loop in an aeroplane; and it is the opinion of one well-known authority… that Johnstone was actually attempting this when he smashed a wing and fell to his death at Denver.

To the cautious Ely, the idea was ridiculous.  He told Beachey, “You can try it. I won’t.” Yet it was only a short later that Ely was killed while making a short dip in his plane, a maneuver he had performed hundreds of times.

This talk of dying, anyway, when your time comes sounds very well in the abstract, but it doesn’t go very far when you stop to think that you are twenty-five and healthy—and perhaps have a wife and baby. Just naturally you prefer a farm in Iowa or a cottage on Long Island to a place in that new department of the newspaper morgue—that list of now more than one hundred under the heading “Killed in Aviation,” which had its beginning when young Lieutenant Selfridge met death at Fort Myer, Virginia, on September 17, 1908.

The news of Ely’s death came shortly after the crash of 19-year-old Cromwell Dixon. Badly shaken by the news, Elser now realized his future lay not behind rudder control but a desk. It was the choice any pilot would make if he lived long enough.

Lt. Thomas Selfridge, the first man to die in an airplane crash.

The men already in the game may improve it by executive ability and scientific experiments; but most of them will degenerate as fliers. Frequency of flight does not necessarily create a feeling of confidence and safety; rather it brings fuller appreciation of its dangers. The men… ears no longer tingle when the crowd waves its hats and cheers are ready to [make way for] the uninitiated, whose nerve is ignorance.

Down the veteran’s spine, when he risks his life and craft in a devil-may-care swoop, the plaudits of the crowd no longer send a thrill.

The wild exhilaration of flight of which we read so much is apt to be tempered with the sober thought of a young woman in the stand, looking upward with troubled eyes as she breathes a prayer that a cranky lever or missing engine may not widow her. How many times have you read “His young wife was in the crowd and saw him fall”?

Elser also recognized that the flying business had changed. Pilots were no longer the celebrities they’d been just two years earlier.

Now that the newness has worn off, [a flier] is treated just like an ordinary human being, and crowds don’t always follow him right to the door of his room in the hotel. Chambermaids, seeking sentimental souvenirs, used to snitch the pajamas of Willard, of the Curtiss staff, when he was out West. It bothered him greatly at the time. Now he laments that, no matter where he goes, his pajamas are quite as safe as a case of beer at a temperance convention.

Even worse, the public had grown tired of the familiar stunts. They wanted to see bigger, more deadly tricks.

Crowds… are becoming more critical and exacting every day, even to the extent of [taunting] a man into the air to his death during a storm. J. J. Frisbie… was jeered at by a crowd until he ventured into the air during a treacherous wind and was killed.

Yet even with the risks, there was no shortage of applicants. As soon as Ely’s death hit the newspapers, his employer was besieged by applicants, most of whom had never been near an airplane. Both men and women saw flying as a quick and glamorous route to fame. One woman saw it as an personal challenge; when John B. Moisant, a famous pilot and air-race champion, was killed while landing his Bleriot monoplane, his sister, Mathilde Moisant, picked up his career. Becoming the second women in the U.S. to get a pilot license, she continued the fame of the Moisant name, racing competitively until her plane crashed on April 14, 1912, the same day the Titanic sank.

The smooth, uneventful air travel we enjoy today is the product of countless flying lessons taught the hardest way possible to early fliers.

At this writing there have been in this country and in Europe, since 1908, one hundred and two deaths due to aviation accidents. Sixty-four of these occurred during the first ten months of 1911—or at the rate of approximately one every five days

Elser’s article listed many of the pilots who’d already been killed.

What he didn’t know in 1911, however, was how many of other pilots would live far beyond their piloting days.

A Pilot Reflects, Then Grounds Himself: 1911 The Saturday Evening Post

To read the full original article, see below.

From Our Archives: Uncle Sam’s Big Pay-Off The Saturday Evening Post

In the aftermath of his last bout of drinking, Wilson once again entered a detoxification program. He was hoping this time he could end the 13-year struggle with alcohol that had destroyed his career and his health.

He soon realized that simply “drying out” in a sanitarium wouldn’t help. But it was during this hospitalization that he got the inspiration for a better program. Between 1935 and ’36, he worked with a physician (and fellow alcoholic) to create a new approach to ending their addiction to drink. Together they created a program called Alcoholics Anonymous, which Wilson described in a book that he wrote under the pseudonym of “Bill W.”

Six years passed. Two thousand Americans had joined the program and many had recovered sobriety and sanity in their lives. But the program was still relatively unknown, and had never promoted itself to the public. Then, in March, the Post published “Alcoholics Anonymous” by Jack Alexander and introduced this unusual program to the rest of America.

A.A. was unusual for several reasons, as Alexander pointed out. First, it threw out the traditional thinking about alcoholism, which regarded it as a moral failing, a mental weakness, or a personal choice. Rather it defined the condition as a disease, which could never be cured but could be successfully managed. The program’s members told Alexander—

There is…no such thing as an ex-alcoholic. If one is an alcoholic—that is, a person who is unable to drink normally—one remains an alcoholic until he dies, just as a diabetic remains a diabetic. The best he can hope for is to become an arrested case.

Another unusual aspect was the program’s emphasis on personal responsibility and spirituality. A.A. required the alcoholic to be fully committed and willing to seek guidance and strength from some “higher power.”

The program will not work…with those who only “want to want to quit,” or who want to quit because they are afraid of losing their families or their jobs. The effective desire, they state, must be based upon enlightened self-interest; the applicant must want to get away from liquor to head off incarceration or premature death. He must be fed up with the stark social loneliness which engulfs the uncontrolled drinker and he must want to put some order into his bungled life.

If he applies to Alcoholics Anonymous, he is first brought around to admit that alcohol has him whipped and that his life has become unmanageable. Having achieved this state of intellectual humility, he is given a dose of religion in its broadest sense. He is asked to believe in a Power that is greater than himself, or at least to keep an open mind on that subject while he goes on with the rest of the program.

Another unique feature was the absence of ministers, doctors, or other professionals. The program was run by alcoholics, who knew all the dodges, excuses, and denials that applicants would bring to the program.

There is no specious excuse for drinking which the trouble shooters of Alcoholics Anonymous have not heard or used themselves. When one of their prospects hands them a rationalization for getting soused, they match it with half a dozen out of their own experiences.

But of all the remarkable aspects of the program, the most important was its success. Over the years, thousands of Americans were able to reclaim their lives, their families, and their careers through the program.

In 1950, when Alexander wrote a follow-up article, the program had grown to 3,000 groups with 90,000 members.

Ninety thousand persons, roaring drunk or roaring sober, are but a drop in the human puddle, and they represent only a generous dip out of the human alcoholic puddle. [Yet] to anyone who has ever been a drunk or who has had to endure the alcoholic cruelties of a drunk —and that would embrace a large portion of the human family — 90,000 alcoholics reconverted into working citizens represent a massive dose of pure gain. In human terms, the achievements of Alcoholics Anonymous stand out as one of the few encouraging developments of a rather grim and destructive half century.

(The top photo, from the Alexander’s 1941 article, illustrated how some member of A.A. managed to continue drinking when their hands were shaking violently: “[They tied] an end of a towel about a glass, looping the towel around the back of the neck and drawing the free end with the other hand, pulley fashion, to advance the glass to the mouth.”)

Here are the pages of the Post article as they appeared in 1941:

Bill W’s Last Drink The Saturday Evening Post

Ever since 1931, the U.S. had been pressuring Japan to withdraw the army it had sent to conquer Manchuria and, eventually, all of China. America had tried exerting diplomatic pressure, but to no avail. The Japanese Imperial Government’s primary goal was to become the conquering ruler of Asia.

When diplomacy didn’t work, President Roosevelt reduced, then ended American export of machinery to Japan. When that didn’t work, he stopped all sales of American oil. Even though its operations in China were running out of gas, Japan persisted. Finally the government froze Japanese assets in the U.S. Roosevelt knew how the Japanese would respond when he signed the order locking Japan’s wealth in American banks. “This means war,” he told his chief adviser.

Washington expected a declaration of war from Tokyo, to be quickly followed by an attack on a distant base. In late November, 1941, the Defense Department ordered every military base in the Pacific to remain at high alert because “hostile action” with Japan was possible at any moment.

No one anticipated that, within a week, Japan would launch a massive, long-planned attack on our fleet before it even declared war.

However, readers of the Post knew that Japan was desperate and audacious enough to try something like it. Since 1939, they’d read articles by the Asian correspondent Hallett Abend, which chronicled the rising militancy in Japan. In the Post of March 4, 1939, he wrote about Japan’s vast security and espionage networks and the growing recklessness of its military. In August, he told readers how much Japan was willing to gamble on conquering China:

Japan’s foreign gold reserve, which in 1925 totaled about 2,000,000,000 yen, is now entirely exhausted…the yen is so shaky that Americans, British, French, and Dutch banks in Shanghai will not accept Japanese currency.

If Japan can succeed in carrying out her plans for grab in China, she may become one of the richest nations in the world within a decade. But there will be only very small profits, or no profits at all, so long as the Chinese continue their military resistance.

In April of 1941, he exploded the comforting myth that the Japanese would never have an effective air force because they simply couldn’t fly.

Japanese mothers all carry their babies on their backs, you know. Heads wobble around so much in infancy that adult Japanese have no sense of balance.

Very interesting—but nonsense, of course. The story is typical of the dozens of old wives’ tales going the rounds about the congenital unfitness of the Japanese as aviators.

It is believed that the Air Military Academy trained more than 700 new pilots during 1940, with the probability of a much larger class this year.

The present strength of the army’s air force…[and] the navy’s…gives Japan around 6000 pilots.

In September of last year, [Japan] had upward of 4000 efficient war planes. Since then she has been turning out about 250 planes a month, so that by the end of February of this year, allowing deductions for losses in China, Nippon’s war air fleet topped 5,000 planes.

In contrast, Abend admitted, there were no more than 7,000 military aircraft—and 40% of these were sluggish trainer planes.

Japan had planned on building several thousand more planes in 1941. However—

the shortage of alloy steels and the growing difficulty of importing machine tools has prevented this peak from being reached. The United States will sell Japan none.

Just two weeks before the Pearl attack, Abend gave a surprisingly accurate picture of Japan’s current position toward the U.S.

This untitled cartoon by Herbert Johnson appeared alongside Hallett Abend's April 19, 1941 article, "Yes, The Japanese Can Fly"

Japan is exasperated… She finds herself baffled and checked by the two things she fears most—the might of the American Navy in the Pacific, and the possibility of losing her vital trade with the United States. She must retain that trade at all costs. And she must not risk a collision with the American Navy. Yet, if she goes ahead and grabs everything she wants in the Far East, she will almost certainly risk trouble with our Navy.

Japan has jockeyed herself into a position where it is almost necessary to have all or nothing. If she decides that the United States is the barrier to the coveted all, Japan is quite capable of provoking a war with us, just as an individual Japanese commits hara-kiri rather than confess to failure.

America has studiously remained scrupulously neutral during more than two years of the China Japanese hostilities, even though American sympathies have been overwhelmingly on the side of the Chinese. This neutrality has been carried to the extent of continuing a trade in war materials and supplies with Japan. There is only one thing that would drive America to a reluctant abandonment of the neutral attitude. This would be deliberate and intolerable provocation on the part of Japan herself.

That “deliberate and intolerable” provocation arrived two weeks after this article appeared, and left 2,402 Americans dead.

The next time an enemy struck at America, the fatalities—all civilians—reached 2,996. This new enemy, though, hid his intentions even better than did Imperial Japan.

What We Knew Before Pearl Harbor The Saturday Evening Post