America’s Town Meeting of the Air. 1938-1941. 58 issues. 11×8.5″. Each issue 3 leaves, or 6pp, offset printed, stapled in upper left corner.  Provenance:  Pamphlet Collection of the Library of Congress.   $1500

• This is an incomplete run, though I can find no other evidence of any substantial number of these publications are held in any institution, though there is an entry in WorldCat for the NYPL having a collection of “miscellaneous pamphlets”. The 102 WorldCat/OCLC listings are almost entirely for individual pamphlets. VG condition.

It turns out that I own a good stack of guideline publications for what was America’s first news talk show: “America’s Town Meeting of the Air”, produced by the Town Hall Advisory board between 1935 and 1955. (“The NBC Radio Network program America’s Town Meeting of the Air was an early form of electronic “townhall” democracy–perhaps the very first such electronic forum. In May of 1935 the program began what would become a 21-year run. In later years the program would be broadcast on the ABC network.”–Social Security Administration, https://www.ssa.gov/history/1935radiodebate.html) The format of the broadcasts pitted two prominent experts in a debate of some aspect of public policy. The program was unique for its time in that it also featured questions from both the live audience and from the listening audience around the country. It was a weekly show, and in general–at least for the 90 examples I have for the 1938-1941 period)–each broadcast came with a three-sheet guideline. The first sheet was a general statement of the show’s interest–for example, “What Shall We Do With the Joads?”, for March 7, 1940 (the Joads being the family in the Steinbeck mega-epic The Grapes of Wrath). These intro pages are usually very concise, very well written, logical, and provocative.

The second sheet is really what surprised me so–a bibliography and suggested reading for the discussion.  That means that before the radio program was broadcast the producers provided listeners a handy sheet with material to read so that they could better follow the discussion–this seems truly exceptional by today’s sub-standards of a great chunk of radio political discussion, where volume/noise dictates correctness over recognized references. I wondered before looking at the list if The Grapes of Wrath would be there, because, well, it wasn’t necessarily a popular read everywhere in spite of the book’s critical reception. It was there, along with (shockingly) Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s (her husband) An American Exodus;  Carey McWilliams’ Factories in the Field the Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California; and You Have Seen Their Faces, by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White (described as “the Southern sharecropper in photographs and prose”).  Actually all of the books and articles are given a similarly very-short description like this, in spite of their Great Classic status of today–the photographs by Bourke-White and Lange and McWilliams and their accompanying texts are really nothing short of masterpieces, difficult and challenging exposes of a national tragedy –and here they are, suggested reading for listeners of a radio talk show.