Posted on 06/29/2009 9:20:13 AM PDT by neverdem
When Bryan speaks, then I rejoice.
His is the strange composite voice
Of many million singing souls
Who make world-brotherhood their choice
— Vachel Lindsay, American poet, 1915
William Jennings Bryan was rarely at a loss for words. His impassioned oratory spellbound congressmen during his two terms in the U.S. House and thrilled thousands of voters during the presidential campaigns of 1896 and1900. But during his third run for the White House, 100 years ago, Bryan had trouble speaking in the intimacy of his own home.
“Mr. Bryan seemed a little nervous when he first started, much more so, he said, than he ever felt in facing an audience of ten thousand people,” Harold Voorhis recalled. Voorhis, an agent for the National Phonograph Company, was partly responsible for the candidate’s discomfort: He had brought a phonograph into the library of Bryan’s house in Lincoln, Neb., to record some of his speeches, old and current. “Considering that his words were to be reproduced all over the world in perhaps a million homes, … I thought he showed remarkable composure,” Voorhis wrote in the July 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly.
Whether for profit or prestige, the 1908 campaign was the first in which presidential candidates recorded their own voices for the mass market. “We now have Records by Mr. Bryan and Mr. Taft, so that no matter how the November election may result, we shall have Records by the next President,” an advertisement in the September 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly exclaimed. “Now, for the first time, one can introduce the rival candidates for the Presidency in one’s own home, can listen to their political views, expressed in their real voices, and make comparisons.”
The sound-bite era was born.
The recordings by Bryan and Taft were played at rallies, in concert halls and at...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Ping for later! I hope they actually have some samples out there...:)
http://www.sciencenews.org/pictures/bryantaft/bryan_taft.html
On the right hand side of the page, hear samples of Bryan (Guaranty of Bank Deposits) and Taft (Rights and Progress of the Negro)
Thanks for the link.
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Thanks neverdem. |
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