“We bring you ‘Voices from America,'” said announcer William Harlan Hale at the start of a 15-minute shortwave radio broadcast that was transmitted into Germany on February 1, 1942.
“Today, and daily from now on, we shall speak to you about America and the war,” he continued. “The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.”
The 15 minute broadcast, made from 270 Madison Avenue in New York City, launched what ultimately became Voice of America, which provides audio and visual news and information in more than 40 languages to an estimated weekly audience of more than 280 million people who access it on a variety of platforms.
To mark that anniversary, today’s #stampoftheday is a 5-cent stamp issued in 1967. The stamp itself is noteworthy because it was designed by George Olden, an award-winning, pioneering Black graphic artist who as the art director for CBS’s television division from 1945 until 1960 was in charge of the graphics for such well-known programs at the I Love Lucy, Ed Sullivan Show, Lassie, Face the Nation, and Gunsmoke and, possibly, CBS’s iconic logo as well. Olden, who in 1963 became the first Black to design a postage stamp also had senior positions at two of the 1960s leading advertising agencies (BBDO and McCann Erickson) but fell on hard times in the 1970s before he was shot to death, allegedly by his girlfriend.
I don’t know if those who created that initial broadcast thought it would be around in 1967, when Olde’s stamp honored VOA’s 25th anniversary. But it’s clear they were filling an important need at the time.
Before World War II, all American shortwave stations were in private hands. But starting in the late 1930s, the US government began providing news and commentary to the commercial American shortwave radio stations as part of its efforts to counter pro-Nazi propaganda in Latin America.
After the US entered the war, President Roosevelt authorized the creation of a government-run international broadcast service. The idea was proposed by Col. William Donovan, who headed the then new Office of the Coordinator of Information (and went on to head the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA) and playwright Robert Sherwood, who worked under Donovon as head of the Foreign Information Service (and also served as Roosevelt’s speechwriter on foreign affairs). Sherwood coined the term “Voice of America,” which, it seems to me, sends a very different message than the phrase “Voices of America” that launched the station.
By the time the war ended, VOA had 39 transmitters offering over 1,000 news, music and commentary programs in 40 languages. But it wasn’t clear that VOA was needed once the war ended. Indeed, by the end of 1945, when the war ended, about half of VOA’s services had been discontinued.
But instead of withering away, VOA became a major tool in the Cold War, starting with a 1947 broadcast to the Soviet Union that began “Hello! This is New York calling.” Over the next few decades VOA expanded its broadcasts to a variety of countries behind the Iron Curtain, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea and other countries.
VOA’s offerings were surprisingly broad. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, it broadcast around-the-clock in Spanish and it broadcast noteworthy events such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 and Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon n 1969. VOA’s Jazz Hour, which broadcast weekly from 1955 until 2003, had over 30 million listeners at its peak and featured special programs from the Newport Jazz Festival as well as broadcasts that highlighted musicians on US sponsored tours, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. And from August 1952 through May 1953, Billy Brown, a high school senior in Yorktown Heights, New York, had a Monday night program in which he shared everyday happenings. His chatty narratives were appealing but the show attracted so much fan mail that VOA cancelled it because it didn’t want to pay the $500 a month in clerical and postage costs needed to respond to listeners’ letters.
Many governments – including the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Poland, and Bulgaria—tried to jam its broadcasts. Most governments also made it clear that those who listened did so at their peril. Former VOA Director David Jackson, for example, noted: “The North Korean government doesn’t jam us, but they try to keep people from listening through intimidation or worse. But people figure out ways to listen despite the odds. They’re very resourceful.”
VOA was supposed to be insulated from overt control by political leaders. That system, however, came under direct assault in the last two years of the Trump Administration, which installed Michael Pack, a conservative documentary filmmaker to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees several entities, including VOA. Pack announced he intended to “drain the swamp” at VOA and other entities which, he claimed, were staffed by journalists seeking to sabotage the president.
His efforts and methods were roundly criticized: “Voice of America CEO Accused Of Fraud, Misuse Of Office All In One Week,” read the headline on a January 7 article by David Folkenflik, who covers the media for NPR. Certain to be fired by President Biden, Pack resigned the day the president was inaugurated. In a statement given to Folkenflik that day, David Kligerman, who in December had resigned as the agency’s general council five months after Pack had suspended him along with several other senior executives he had been unable to fire, said “Pack seemed only to know how to destroy” and that his tenure had been marked by the “firing or otherwise pushing out so many talented journalists, network heads, grantee board members, and civil servants….It was wanton destruction, and shocking disregard for the most basic civility or norms.”
The Biden Administration reportedly is planning to bring back many of the suspended executives and to replace many of the senior officials appointed by Pack. In doing so, hopefully, they will find a way back to the VOA’s roots as an entity that “shall tell you the truth.”
Be well, stay safe, tell the truth, fight for justice and work for peace.