Americans All, Immigrants All

Sometimes it can be hard to pin down just who deserves the credit (or blame) for a radio broadcast, especially a successful one. In 1938, the Department of Interior, the Office of Education, CBS, WNYC, the Service Bureau for Inter-Cultural Education, and the Works Progress Administration came together to produce twenty-six half-hour episodes titled Americans All – Immigrants All.

The programs broadcast over the CBS network on Sunday afternoons between November 1938 and May 1939, then rebroadcast over WNYC in June 1939. According to Radio Guide Weekly, Washington was 'deluged' with congratulatory correspondence about the show. AA-IA took a generally lofty tone but was "not one whit less entertaining because of their solid educational content.

Some of the best written and produced, most artistically compelling productions in all of Old Time Radio was the result of Government and Commercial Network cooperation. This is partially due to the Networks trying to fulfill their mandate to 'serve the public interest' but also reflects the artistic desire to create something good for society. Examples include Corwin's We Hold These Truths and On a Note of Triumph, the atomic educational series The Fifth Horseman, as well as countless War Loan Related programing.

The American Melting Pot has had much greater success integrating along ethnic lines rather than racial ones. People of English, Italian, Irish, Slavic, Germanic, Gallic, Polish, or Spanish extraction may all appear to be different when they first immigrate, but it takes less than a generation for accents to disappear. When they are all dressing more or less the same and eating essentially the same food, differences disappear even more quickly. Even in cases of inter-marriage (which would have been a taboo subject in 1938), racial differences can take generations to fully blend.

This is not to say that AA-IA completely discounts people of color. Some episodes celebrate the contributions of 'Negroes' and 'Orientals'. The injustices done to these peoples are not completely ignored, but they are not emphasized as in modern presentations. Also, these programs seem to be voiced by all-white actors.

• "The Negro in America" broadcast on December 18, 1938. It acknowledges the practice of slavery but only lightly touches upon the horrors of that "peculiar institution". The "Jim Crow" tyrannies of the Reconstruction Period are barely mentioned and implied to be the fault of the Negro by 'not being prepared to govern themselves with freedom'.
• "Orientals In the United States", broadcast on February 26, 1939, treats the Asia race somewhat better, acknowledging the contributions of Chinese Labor on the railroads and other major projects, and touches upon the injustice of the Chinese Immigration Exclusion Acts, and how they led to the import of Japanese Laborers (and their later exclusion). The Asian influence in gardening and landscaping is mentioned. It is interesting to contrast the representation of the Japanese in this program barely two years before the Internment of the Nissei and American citizens in the West.

Although Americans All – Immigrants All might seem less enlightened by the today's standards, the program's message is still a hopeful one.

For more WPA recordings, see also: Former Slave Interviews and WPA Concerts.