Bury Him by Radio: Early Funeral Broadcasts and the Mourning of President Warren G. Harding

From magic lanterns to motion pictures, visual media have capitalized on the deaths of prominent figures. In 1901, The Optical Magic Lantern Journal carried an advertisement for slides of Queen Victoria’s funeral, complete with scenes from the mortuary chapel in Osborne to the Hyde Park procession, and finally to the departure of the funeral cortège from Windsor to Frogmore.⁹ The passing of King Edward in 1910 provided another opportunity for film to showcase the pomp of a royal funeral. A write-up in Moving Picture World eagerly marketed the reels that had exhibited in English theaters to great reception.¹⁰ The salesmanship of the piece is remarkable for its positioning of funeral film as a politically relevant and popular commodity. By the time of broadcast radio’s emergence, popular visual media had embraced and profited from the death of public figures by extending their rites to a multitude of spectators-turned-mourners.

The use of recordings or live broadcasts to pay tribute to monarchs and presidents—or to enhance mourning for oneself—requires an understanding of how death rituals have developed over time. Whether rituals are “liminal” (immediately following a death) or “post-liminal” in the form of anniversaries and other commemorations, they are marked by “heightened meaning and emotion” and atypical acts.¹¹ Paul Brusser and Johann Louw assert that death rituals reposition grief as a “collective and social” practice rather than a purely solitary one.¹² Ritual is not just religious; according to David Wendell Moller “it is a social force related to the everyday folkways and practices of social living.”¹³ Although the trappings of religion inserted a “cultural frame of seriousness” into funerals in 19th-century Britain, for example, the bereaved eventually loosened the grip of religiosity and began to adopt secular mourning practices.¹⁴ By reclaiming these rituals from the clergy, mourners customized their practices according to the “vernacular theologies of their community”; subsequently, secular death rituals ran parallel to religious ones.¹⁵ The meeting of technology and mourning rituals created opportunities for less formal, less religious, and in some cases more spectacular engagements with these somber occasions. As radio found itself in the wake of a presidential death, its potential to serve as a funerary medium materialized. Douglas Davies writes that the widespread creation of funeral rituals points to their functionality as “social and personal” practices.¹⁶ Broadcasters faced the possibility of forging their own funerary rituals—sets of production practices that could incorporate death into the “intimate modes of address” the medium would perfect by the early 1930s, creating a profound connection with their audiences in the process.¹⁷

At the time of Harding’s death, radio was three years out from WEAF’s first broadcast in 1920, which announced Harding’s presidential victory, and three years from the formation of the NBC network in 1926. Established businesses ran nearly 70 percent of the stations in existence in 1923; the remaining 30 percent consisted of “educational or amateur” stations.¹⁸ Citing the Department of Commerce, Radio Digest Illustrated noted that from 1922 to 1923, the number of broadcasting stations grew by 191, to 573.¹⁹ Douglas Craig, however, emphasizes the “volatility” of the industry; 1923 saw 249 new stations launch while 298 folded.²⁰ During this formative period, Michele Hilmes argues that “patterns and practices were set that would dominate early broadcasting.”²¹ The schedule was one such practice. For manufacturers that owned stations, radio programming spurred the sales of sets, and a regular schedule proved the sets’ value.²² Linked to the regulatory landscape that sought to define radio and its functions, the schedule was a strategy to organize listening and maximize listeners.²³ Ultimately, the practice of scheduling grew and transformed as radio did.²⁴

Death, of course, cannot be scheduled; its interruption of the schedule ironically manufactured a version of liveness. In 1923, a Dallas fire chief’s funeral procession was enhanced by a “radio loudspeaker” affixed to a fire truck that tuned to WFAA so Chopin’s “Marche Funebre” could play on the way to the cemetery.²⁵ Using the radio to pair music with a procession was not out of the ordinary; aside from the technological upgrade, music and funerals have a longstanding partnership.²⁶ Using radio to broadcast a funeral was quite a different matter. The fact of the broadcast, itself—the relay of an event to a group of listeners—resembled a practice of 19th-century telephony. Marvin refers to the transmission of “independently occurring events” like plays, sports, and church services by telephone as “proto-broadcasting” and stresses its distinctiveness.²⁷ That radio would broadcast an outside event did not break with the past, but that radio would broadcast a funeral did raise eyebrows.

Radio’s inclusion in end-of-life ceremonies stoked curiosity and made news in the 1920s and ’30s, exposing tensions between the “traditional” type of death and modernity and between public affairs and private dwellings.²⁸ A 1926 blurb in Radio Broadcast frowned on the practice, singling out the broadcast of a singer’s funeral in the Midwest as “out of all proportion to the importance of the deceased.”²⁹ By virtue of tuning in, the commentator argued, listeners were “not merely invited, but forced, to attend his obsequies.”³⁰ The entire situation was regarded as an affront to listeners and deceased alike; the writer found it disrespectful “to the deceased to intrude his funeral eulogy into what may be a dancing party, a convivial dinner, or a poker session.”³¹

Early examples of funeral films and broadcasts stood at the vanguard of shifting mourning practices of the 20th century, which is evident in debates about their acceptability. Acceptable or not, popular media expanded the community of mourners and enabled new forms of public mourning. Identified as either “folk” or “official,” public mourning can perform a legitimating role for families and institutions.³² Tony Walter argues that the “increasing emotionality” of the United States coupled with public mourning to yield newer expressions of grief: mourning for loved ones in nontraditional sites and “mourning for public figures” or private individuals thrown into the spotlight because of extraordinary circumstances.³³ Although mourning for public figures differs from “grief for an intimate,” Walter argues that it is both “social” and “emotional.”³⁴ By providing greater access to the funeral of a public figure, radio could enhance this social and emotional process, distributing a farewell to a larger audience than any funeral home or cemetery could.

Radio funerals could also be deeply personal and emblematic of professional or personal attachment to the medium itself. Through their professions as singers or musicians, or through their loyal listening habits, people who requested radio funerals had formed ties to the medium and required acknowledgment of such at the end of life. Under those circumstances, radio could be both a facilitator of mourning and a revered guest. One radio funeral in 1931 honored 33-year-old studio organist and “radio fav” Al Carney; the service was broadcast by his employer, WCFL of Chicago, with “running comment.”³⁵ And in 1930, one terminally ill Kansas listener became so devoted to KFEQ of St. Joseph, Missouri, that she requested the station air her funeral.³⁶ As Radio Digest explained, radio “was her constant solace and joy, hardly a waking moment passed that did not find her listening.”³⁷ Bill Kirkpatrick has shown that the figure of the shut-in was exploited in discourse about radio to more easily connect the “intangible phenomenon” of radio to “bodily consequences and effects” and to align radio with the social welfare.³⁸ In life, the radio devotee in Kansas confirmed radio’s role as caregiver, and in death she transformed radio into something more aligned with clergy—a collaborator to ensure a successful funeral ritual.³⁹

Although funeral broadcasts remained a dubious pursuit, CBS used the occasion of a notable death in 1933 to reposition the funeral broadcast as a “service” to mourners scattered around the country.⁴⁰ In contrast to the Midwestern singer whose profile was deemed too low to warrant a radio tribute, the deceased in this case was “international hero” Floyd Bennett, whose notoriety ostensibly merited the trouble CBS took to broadcast live from Arlington National Cemetery. According to reporter Ted Husing’s account, “many people thought it was the greatest broadcast in the history of radio—many others thought it was in the worst possible taste.”⁴¹ Regardless, Husing claimed it “put Columbia on the map.”⁴² Ten years before the CBS experiment, during a period marked by the formulation of techniques and standards for the new industry, broadcasters found themselves transforming mourning into programming for the most consequential of deaths.

From 1841 to 1963, eight US presidents died while in office.⁴³ President Warren Harding’s death, officially attributed to a “stroke of apoplexy,” occurred unexpectedly in 1923 while he was visiting the West Coast of the United States as part of a two-month tour.⁴⁴ News of his death broke soon after, as a reporter for the Associated Press was stationed conveniently nearby when Harding expired in a San Francisco hotel the evening of August 2.⁴⁵ News traveled quickly. “Within an hour of the death of President Harding,” the Washington Post reported, “the news of the tragedy had sped to every corner of the world that has touch with radio, wire and cable.”⁴⁶ The New York Times announced that New York City’s WOR broadcast news of Harding’s passing “throughout the East and to ships at sea” early on August 3.⁴⁷ Radio broadcasts of the news of the president’s death were a historic first. This “first” for Harding capped a 30-month presidential tenure linked closely with sound technologies. His election victory on November 2, 1920, was announced by Pittsburgh’s KDKA in the station’s inaugural broadcast, but his connection to communication was not limited to his radio coverage.⁴⁸ As curators for the Ohio History Connection write, Harding’s “voice introduced many Americans to the very idea of being able to hear their president.”⁴⁹

Harding was “the first president to deliver an amplified inaugural address, the first to have a radio set installed in the White House, and the first to speak on the radio.”⁵⁰ Despite Harding’s declaration in March 1922 that radio broadcasts were not in his future, the Naval Air Station broadcast two of his speeches in May, with a third speech in June broadcast by WEAR in Baltimore.⁵¹ NOF and NAA broadcast Harding’s “Annual Address” to a joint session of Congress in December in the first-ever broadcast of its kind.⁵²Radio News called the broadcast “epochal” and surmised that the “invisible audience” was “probably […] the largest audience in the world.”⁵³ Even Harding’s railroad car, used during his fateful “Voyage of Understanding” tour, carried a radio transmitter on board.⁵⁴ Jerry Wallace writes that that tour took full advantage of radio, putting on “elaborate broadcasts.”⁵⁵ Ultimately, Harding fell ill before he could deliver an address in San Francisco billed as “a spectacular radio demonstration.”⁵⁶

If Harding’s presidency initiated the relationship between broadcasting and the White House, his death initiated the relationship between broadcasting and national grief. Davies writes that death spurs “community action” if “a community exists and can be activated.”⁵⁷ The death of a president affirmed that broadcasters were active members of their local and national communities. By August 10, the day of Harding’s entombment in Marion, Ohio, urban radio stations had operated as facilitators of grief, as mourners, and as innovators of funeral coverage.

Although we cannot know how many eulogies for Harding traveled over the air by wireless or radio stations in the days following his death, newspaper coverage spotlighted grief-stricken, high-profile mourners and captured their words and demeanor for readers. Newspapers latched onto one eulogy in particular—that of General Charles G. Dawes, budget director in Harding’s administration and soon-to-be vice president under Calvin Coolidge.⁵⁸ WJAZ of Chicago broadcast the tribute by Dawes from its studio on August 3, the day after Harding’s death. The story in the Chicago Daily Tribune led with Dawes’s behavior at the conclusion of his eulogy: “Gen. Dawes broke down and cried as the final words died on his lips. He buried his face in his hands and his sobs went out to the mourning nation.”⁵⁹ The article continued to set the stage for readers who missed the broadcast, describing the emotional moments in detail.

After recounting the titles of hymns sung for the departed president and printing Dawes’s eulogy, the story concluded: “Here Gen. Dawes’ voice broke in emotion. His tears fell on the polished stand of the radio. When he arose he walked silently out of the little curtained room to a distant part of the hotel, glancing neither to right nor left, nor speaking a word until his wife, Mrs. Dawes who followed, reached his side.”⁶¹ The New York Times included the announcer’s words after writing that Dawes “bowed his head and wept, his head in his arms on the table before him and his shoulders shaking with sobs”: “‘This is station WJAZ signing off,’ said the announcer. ‘General Dawes is unable to finish his talk.’”⁶² The Chicago Herald and Examiner (reprinted in Radio Age) dwelled on the emotion carried through the airwaves, writing: “The sound of his sobs sped out on the air, borne on the wings of radio, and found their answers in the hearts of thousands of listeners within a radius of a thousand miles.”⁶³ The article declared the program to be “the most dramatic program ever broadcast by any radio station.”⁶⁴

The Chicago Daily Tribune’s decision to bookend its article with Dawes’s emotional conclusion prioritized both the grief that accompanied the eulogy and radio’s oversight of the grieving process. The breaking voice, the hushed guests, and the silent departure replicated the experience of mourners in a church. The station was the gathering place of the bereaved waiting to speak, each person observing a somber protocol. The story’s language painted radio as a tool to be wielded and as a cold apparatus—both the “broadcasting instrument” that Dawes steeled himself to use and the “polished stand of the radio” that indifferently collected his tears centered the medium as the mechanism by which a lone griever found his audience of mourners.

Radio transmitted the sounds of grief to listeners still navigating the contours of broadcasting. The transmission of this liminal death ritual—the eulogy—signaled the coming together of personal expressions of grief, often delivered by politically powerful men, and an unseen audience of citizens invested in the loss of their president. Well before President Roosevelt’s fireside chats, which Jason Loviglio shows “conflated radio listening with national identity,” Harding’s mourning period collapsed the distinction between public and private.⁶⁵ Republican Job E. Hedges’s eulogy for Harding, which declared that “a soldier of the Republic has fallen,” stressed the commingling of national and personal pain.⁶⁶ Sent over the airwaves, eulogies like these and the memorial services that followed infused the secularity of radio with the religiosity of conventional death rituals. The emerging medium was calling its local branches of the national family together to listen, pray, and pay their respects.

The passing of President Harding created a terrain of shifting sands for radio. The unexpected news thrust onto the medium an almost governmental role; the responsibility to transmit the news of the death quickly and accurately was a matter of national interest. Stories not just about the news but about the delivery and timeliness of the news circulated in the days following the death. When and how Harding’s own family received the news was noteworthy in this regard; his brother and sister reportedly owed their notification to acquaintances with radio sets.⁶⁷

Not everyone was prepared to believe what radio had to say, however. The Boston Daily Globe reported substantial skepticism when the news broke in Dover, New Hampshire, on the night of August 3. The newspapers had reported that “the President was out of danger,” so listeners doubted radio’s death announcement.⁶⁸ “Great was the shock […] when the morning papers arrived with the news,” the Daily Globe wrote.⁶⁹ The uncertainty of listeners underscores some tension between old and new media, but also between speed and the standardized schedule of print journalism. The belief that the evening newspaper was the final word on the events of the day butted up against the newer way for news to break. Newspapers had benefited from the telephone’s speed, but radio’s limberness challenged the print institution.⁷⁰ Nevertheless, the fear of misinformation, particularly around an event of this magnitude, loomed. As Jeffrey Sconce writes, broadcasting was no longer a source of mystery but a source of fear, with listeners vulnerable to “manipulation” and unexpected “traumatic disasters.”⁷¹ One day before Harding died, the Washington Post reported that a mysterious broadcast in New York had announced his death the previous day. The article published on August 1 stated that on July 31,

The eerie premonition showcased the potential for error, intentional or not. While tantalizing, the mystery of the message “picked out of the ether” and gone forever points to another reason for listeners’ reluctance to believe. Sounds that vanish and cannot be recovered as evidence compromised the public’s trust in radio’s ability to document something as serious as the president’s fate; that the angry listeners rushed to the print journalists for verification underscores the challenge for the new medium. The gravity of death weighed on radio as it encountered its inchoate roles and responsibilities.

As the shock of the news dissipated and organized responses emerged to soothe the bereaved, some radio station personnel interpreted their roles according to longstanding conventions. Understanding their power as amplifiers of grief and consolation, rather than solely as bearers and interpreters of news, many stations aired memorial services. On August 5, two Washington, DC, stations—WCAP, the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company’s station, and Radio Corporation of America’s WRC (which had its inaugural broadcast only four days prior)—aired services, one of which was held at Harding’s own church.⁷³ The service WRC aired, complete with a reverend and a soloist, took place at the station.⁷⁴ Taking its cues from traditional memorial services, WRC replicated the pairing of sermon and music, a decision that built upon a precedent set by telephony.⁷⁵

Although multiple memorial services entered listeners’ homes, and clergy, politicians, and singers accompanied listeners in their grief, sound was not uniformly understood to be comforting or proper. Sound was at best incompatible with the national mood and at worst a sign of disrespect. Consequently, as radio station personnel interpreted their roles according to mourning conventions, they did so in opposition to their mandated roles. VanCour shows that the licensing standards created for Class B stations implicitly defined radio as a “studio art based on live performances” according to a “preplanned and preannounced schedule.”⁷⁶ Rather than describing radio, these standards “call[ed] into being a new reality.”⁷⁷ Radio’s responses to Harding’s death showcased an altogether different reality, albeit one that remained in conversation with existing death practices. Several urban stations ceased broadcasting altogether, upending their schedules and assuming the role of silent, respectful mourner. On August 4, the Washington Post reported that “all local programs and the programs of nearly all distant stations have been canceled due to the death of President Harding.”⁷⁸ Washington, DC, stations WCAP and WRC led the way with their cancellations on August 3; “listeners-in” found the night to be “remarkably quiet in the air.”⁷⁹ WJZ’s log for August 3 shows almost every program on the schedule crossed out, with the following handwritten phrase appearing at the bottom of the page: “Program cancelled due to death of Pres. Harding.”⁸⁰ According to the Post, the stations “considered their most appropriate form of respect was to close the station until such time as music and the usual selections would be in order.”⁸¹ In Los Angeles, too, KHJ observed silence with the exception of their midday program.⁸² Sconce explains that some stations scheduled weekly “silent nights” to clear the air for DXers, or listeners attempting to tune into distant stations.⁸³ Stations’ prolonged observance of silence for the president reinscribed that custom, extending it and modifying its meaning to place radio within the national community of citizen mourners. Even still, the Los Angeles Times assured readers that the newspaper would continue to share news updates with its “radio friends,” so that stations like KHJ could continue to “keep thousands of persons informed on the march of important events.”⁸⁴

During the August mourning period, daily radio listings in newspapers included notices of canceled or modified programs. On Sunday, August 5, for example, WEAF canceled its “elaborate musical program out of respect” for Harding and instead broadcast WCAP’s memorial services.⁸⁵ WJZ, which by 1922 broadcast from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., aired a service from the West End Presbyterian Church from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and resumed with music from 8 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.⁸⁶ On August 7, DC stations remained closed, and both WEAF and WJZ of New York were noted to be “silent, through respect for the late President Harding.”⁸⁷ Other major stations, like KDKA in Pittsburg and KWY in Chicago, carried on with regular programming. On August 8, while WEAF and WJZ remained silent (minus one hour of morning programming for WEAF and WJZ’s prayer service broadcast from the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church), WRC devoted its schedule to a memorial service and related music.⁸⁸ WDT in New York was silent save for an hour of a reading of “The Passing of President Harding,” and WOR in Newark was “closed in tribute to the late President Harding.”⁸⁹ On August 9, the day of Harding’s funeral rites in DC, local stations remained closed. The Washington Post had hinted earlier that WCAP might air Harding’s funeral service but provided no definitive plans.⁹⁰ An article on the preparations for the DC funeral did not allude to a scheduled broadcast.⁹¹ In New York and Boston, stations WHN, WRW, and WNAC confined airtime to memorial and church services.⁹² WJZ logs show one broadcast canceled because of Harding and the inclusion of a Jewish prayer service; other programming remained unchanged.⁹³ The following day—the day of Harding’s entombment in Marion, Ohio—WCAP and WEAF remained silent, while WJZ programmed only two memorial services, and WRC programmed evening poetry, memorial addresses, and thematically appropriate music, concluding with Beethoven’s “Funeral March.”⁹⁴

Although just a snapshot of some of the country’s major radio stations, the listings show the stations navigating new territory by incorporating the standard progression of mourning rituals, even if that meant disrupting not just their routine but their broadcasting functions as well. Silence after Harding’s death flew in the face of radio’s competition for listeners.⁹⁵ A report that all stations halted broadcasts on the day of Harding’s Ohio funeral, save for memorial services, likely exaggerated the scale of the practice given the diversity of stations around the country.⁹⁶ Nevertheless, the silencing of all varieties of media and communication technologies was the dominant narrative. The New York Times elaborated on the scheduled silence during Harding’s entombment:

The community of mourners consisted of citizens and institutions, even those that had been instrumental in informing and consoling wide swaths of the public. The cessation of broadcasting for days rather than just minutes demonstrated not that radio lacked a role to play during the mourning period; rather, stations agreed that the role to play was that of mourner. A far cry from what would become elaborate media events during radio’s maturity and in the age of television, early radio stations responded to the death in subdued fashion and according to the rituals performed by religious institutions.

Hilmes offers that in this early period, radio attended to its public “more seriously” than in later years, but she also argues that institutional demands were more powerful than public voices.⁹⁸ In some cases, she writes, “certain early radio practices contradicted purely popular preferences, and indeed that contradiction formed their primary motivation.”⁹⁹ Silence contradicted the official definition of radio outlined by federal regulations, but given the public’s distaste for radio’s involvement in funerals, silence very well may have been a popular preference. Multiple forces intersected to inform stations’ responses to Harding’s death. Histories of early radio remind us of the complications that commercial, regulatory, and popular demands posed for radio, and the case of Harding’s death reveals how regimes of good taste and expectations for liminal death practices operated as additional pain points. Nevertheless, at least one station saw a missed opportunity during this mourning period and set in motion a plan to correct it.

Of the various roles radio played during the mourning period, no evidence suggests that radio covered the president’s final services live. Cameras were abundant, with one account noting “thirty-three motion picture operators and camera men” who captured the procession at the Capitol.¹⁰⁰ A retrospective in Radio Digest cites the broadcast of Harding’s funeral service as one of the “outstanding events” of radio’s first six years, but it makes no mention of a particular station or a particular funeral; likely, the term “funeral service” substituted for the many memorial services covered by radio.¹⁰¹ The two official funeral services—one in Washington, DC, and the other in Marion, Ohio—received no live coverage.¹⁰²

To serve listeners unable to attend the DC service, Chicago station WJAZ took the unusual step of recreating the funeral that same night using a combination of music, sound effects, and dramatic narration. According to Radio Age, the station set out “to visualize by means of music and spoken word a current event of large significance.”¹⁰³ Listeners “were carried in imagination” through every step of the procession to the conclusion of the service.¹⁰⁴Radio Age continued, “All this passed before the mental vision of the listeners with the aid of the word pictures painted by [narrator] N. A. Fegen.”¹⁰⁵ An example of what Amanda Keeler calls a “gap of no sound,” the program exists only in the form of its retelling by Radio Age.¹⁰⁶

Following an introduction by E. F. McDonald Jr., who explained that the program would “repeat the strains of music which echoed the feelings of the throng of sorrowers and fondly enveloped the body of him who had won to an extraordinary degree the love, esteem, and respect of his fellowmen,” a piece of music (“one of Mr. Harding’s favorites”) preceded Fegen’s recounting of events.¹⁰⁷ Fegen’s introduction and the entire broadcast labored to place listeners in each moment of the funeral. After explaining the purpose of the broadcast, Fegen stated:

Sound effects complemented Fegen’s narration. Bells rang out when he related the tolling of the bells of St. John’s Episcopal Church. A quartet played when Fegen described children singing “Nearer, My God to Thee.” In keeping with the “word pictures” Radio Age noted, Fegen’s narration did not shy away from high emotion in his portrayals of various scenes. The singing children were not just any children; they were “3,000 wide-eyed school children, their little hearts oppressed by the national calamity,” who “tenderly and with deep devotion for him so suddenly taken away from his people, strewed flowers in the path of the procession.”¹⁰⁹ At the start of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” Fegen directed his audience to “listen to the majestic strains and know why those who stood in Pennsylvania Avenue felt a catch at their throat and their hearts jump a few beats.”¹¹⁰ Additional narration and music followed, and the broadcast peaked with a recitation of the entire invocation.¹¹¹ Fegen closed by leaving listeners in the Capitol rotunda where the “people of Washington had their last look at their beloved President.”¹¹² “Taps” concluded the broadcast.

Radio Age explained that the program was well received, with some listeners commenting that “it was so realistic as to bring tears.”¹¹³ Calling the broadcast an “aerial picture” and “tonal illustration,” Radio Digest Illustrated reinforced the intended motivation for the reenactment: “So that the mental vision could comprehend that which the ear alone ordinarily could understand, so that millions of the people could by eulogy and melody mourn in unison.”¹¹⁴ WJAZ’s decision to recreate and reenact the DC funeral flexed radio’s burgeoning dramatic muscles while nodding to its potential to shore up nationalistic sentiment in death events of political consequence. The broadcast adhered to the day’s events, but it also interpreted them through the dramatic retelling, upholding the official response to Harding’s death. WJAZ consolidated the narrative and ideological dimensions of radio despite the absence of live coverage. Eventually live funeral coverage would build on this experiment, making space for solemnity while intervening as a commentator and interpreter for the audience.

A 1948 article in Swing reflected on changing programming practices since the earliest days of broadcasting:

The Heinl Radio News Letter, a trade publication, criticized the networks’ decision to disrupt their regular programming for the time between President Roosevelt’s death and burial.¹¹⁶ While Heinl pointed to the lack of a model for death events such as these and the awkwardness of filling time with compatible events, news outlets around the country praised the intensive coverage.¹¹⁷Variety hailed the bold decision to blanket the air: “Radio distinguished itself in this moment of tragedy. That it unhesitantly brushed aside millions in revenue during the period of mourning is proof enough that it is fully cognizant of its obligation to the public. And because it acknowledges its responsibility to the people it gave them its very best.”¹¹⁸Heinl disagreed and argued that time set aside for the immediate aftermath of the death and the funeral was appropriate, but “otherwise it would seem that programs could have gone on pretty much as usual, judgment being used to eliminate those obviously inappropriate.”¹¹⁹Heinl could not have imagined the spectacle that broadcast funerals would become.

Abiding notions of good taste met their test when radio was confronted with the passing of Warren Harding. As a young medium crafting standards, conventions, and schedules, radio had very little to reference when this death event shocked the country. The broadcasting of church services was not atypical, and the practice overlapped cleanly with what seemed a natural step for radio to take in the days following the death. But other decisions made by stations deviated from precedent. Stations made room in their studios for tearful eulogies by powerful men. Dead air replaced regular programming. And, finally, a dramatic reenactment filled a perceived need to be present among the crowds in Washington, DC. WJAZ’s experiment reclaimed Harding’s funeral for radio. Where much of the programming after his death originated from churches or other locations, the funeral recreation was a wholly original studio production. Here, radio extricated itself from its roles as mourner and as transmitter of others’ mourning rituals. Amid the variety of options stations weighed—in-studio services vs. church services, personal tributes vs. religious ones, silence vs. sound—WJAZ crafted a program showcasing the techniques that would make radio a dominant storyteller. This was a new, mediated mourning practice that hinted at a future intervention more sustainable than a template of silence.

The author wishes to thank Sarah Licht for their invaluable research assistance and Rodolfo Fernández, Betsy Walters, and Laura Brown for their feedback.