Looking back on one of the weirdest chapters in broadcasting history.
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Zion’s celebrity peaked between 1923 and 1928, when the town was home to WCBD, one of the most popular radio stations in the pioneering age of American broadcasting. Note, please, we’re not talking about the Golden Age of Radio here. Forget about Jack Benny, Walter Winchell, the Shadow, the Lone Ranger, and cornball soap opera dialogue punctuated by swelling organ chords. All that came later, in the 30s and 40s. The 20s were a separate era: call it the “bronze age of radio.” The medium was entirely new, without ratings, rules, or an FCC. Everything that went out on the air was an experiment of sorts.Such were the open-ended circumstances that enabled little Zion, population 6,250, to capture one of the largest listening audiences of the day with homegrown programming that combined faith healing, classical music, sentimental Victorian parlor ballads, fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist preaching, and zealous advocacy of the notion that the earth is flat. The seeds of Zion’s brief season as a mass media capital were sown at the time of the town’s creation. Incorporated in 1902, Zion was a prime example of what the neohippie set would term an “intentional community.” In the words of religious historian Grant Wacker, Zion was an experiment in social engineering “that ranks among the largest and most grandly conceived utopian communities in modern American history.” The architect of this brave new world was the Reverend John Alexander Dowie. A Scot who began his clerical career as a Congregationalist, Dowie left that body in 1878 to launch his own denomination, which, despite its purely Protestant nature, he dubbed the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church (CCC for short). Doctrinally, this start-up faith was distinguished from the competition by Dowie’s ideas about “divine healing.” According to revelations given to Dowie by God, sickness and infirmity were manifestations of sin and inadequate faith. Consequently, he preached a radical rejection of all conventional medical treatment in favor of prayer and clean living. That meant no tobacco or booze, and strict adherence to the pork- and shellfish-free diet prescribed in Leviticus.For a time Dowie plied the trade of an itinerant revivalist, spreading his take on the word of God throughout the English-speaking colonies of the Pacific Rim and building a sizable international following. In the late 1880s, however, mob violence precipitated by Dowie’s radical temperance agitations in Australia led to a short stretch in an Adelaide penitentiary. Upon his release in 1890, Dowie moved his base of operations to Evanston, a bone-dry bastion of the American temperance movement.An intensely charismatic preacher, Dowie quickly accumulated a substantial midwestern following. In 1901 he persuaded 10,000 of his congregants to settle on 6,600 acres of unoccupied land he had mortgaged at the northernmost end of Sheridan Road. There Dowie proposed to build a prosperous theocratic utopia free of sin, vice, class antagonism, and poverty–a veritable anti-Chicago, in other words. The shining city by the lake was conceived as a hybrid of commune and company town. Settlers would be employed in various collectively owned light industries, which included a lace factory, candy factory, print shop, lumber mill, and bakery.To keep this hive of industry on the straight and narrow path, Dowie forbade his followers to purchase property outright. Instead, the citizens of Zion leased their homes for a generous term of 1,100 years, their tenancy subject to swift termination should they attempt to exploit it for any immoral enterprise. Expressly forbidden by the terms of the lease were saloons, tobacco shops, opium joints, theaters, opera houses, gambling dens, dance halls, circuses, brothels, and “any place for the manufacture or sale of drugs or medicines of any kind, or the office of a practicing physician.”A forward thinker on many questions, Dowie possessed a Jules Verne-like understanding of what the future of communications technologies held in store for evangelists like himself. In 1904, for example, 16 years before radio broadcasting began in earnest, he was already making uncanny prophecies about television. “I know not the possibilities of electricity,” Dowie instructed his flock in the course of a Sunday sermon preserved for posterity in the pages of Zion’s weekly magazine, Leaves of Healing. “It is possible that it may yet convey the face of the speaker, and by photoelectricity, show the man as he is talking. Perhaps a discourse delivered here may be heard in every city of the United States. Some day that will be so and the word spoken in Zion will be heard even in the farthest corners of the earth!” Not content to dream of the evangelical tools of tomorrow, Dowie pushed restlessly at the limits of the technology available to him, as if trying to realize the future in the present through sheer force of will. A 1902 magazine profile of Dowie’s innovative ministry gives the impression of a fully formed televangelist anachronistically stranded in the horse-and-buggy era. “He possesses,” marveled the author of the piece, “a clock stamping-machine. When he receives a request for prayer for the sick, he puts it in this machine, and stamps it, for example, ‘Prayed May 10, 3 P.M. John A. Dowie.’ If the patient gets better about that time, he has a record to show what did it. When he receives a request from a man, say, in Boston to pray for a sick wife, he calls up the husband, or, better yet, the wife, on the long-distance telephone, and prays before the receiver, in order that the effect of his words may be felt. In his spare moments he preaches and prays into a phonograph, reproduces the records by a new invention he has recently secured, and advertises that his followers in far-off Australia may now hear his voice conducting services, at so much a service to defray the cost of making the record and forwarding it. He controls a well-known photographer, and has had a lens made large enough for life-size portraits, and has such a picture of himself. In addition, he has a photograph of himself for every time he turns about, and puts one on every periodical or pamphlet that he sends out.”To a man like Dowie, a radio station would have been as cream to a cat. Alas, God had other plans for his faithful servant, and chose instead to stick Dowie with the same bum deal He gave Moses–an advance glance at the promised land and then curtains. Except that Moses was at least permitted to keep all his marbles, whereas Dowie’s mind began to wobble badly just as the Zion experiment was getting off the ground. Around 1903, Dowie cast off the identity he’d been issued at birth and declared himself Elijah the Restorer, messenger of the Second Coming of Christ. Settling into his new persona, Dowie was soon swanning about the globe in an Old Testament prophet costume of his own design, replete with elevated patriarchal headgear, jeweled breastplates, and an ornately carved shepherd’s crook. At about the same time, he began endangering an otherwise promising experiment in Christian industrial socialism by borrowing against Zion’s assets to leverage an even more ambitious utopian initiative: the “Zion Paradise Plantations,” a million-acre agricultural commune he proposed to establish in Mexico.Panicked by Dowie’s increasing instability and by the fact that nearly half of Zion’s original labor force had already abandoned the city, in 1906 the town’s leading citizen-investors summoned Dowie’s second in command, the Reverend Wilbur Glenn Voliva, back from missionary work in Australia. After taking one look at the books and another at Dowie decked out in his Cecil B. De Mille drag, Voliva staged an ecclesiastical coup, usurping Dowie’s position as “General Overseer in Zion.” The following year Dowie, now in an advanced state of dementia, died.An able administrator in a hard-assed, Nixonian sort of way, the new General Overseer managed by the mid-teens to put Zion’s business enterprises back in the black. By the end of World War I things were so rosy in Zion that Voliva began billing himself as “The World’s Richest Holy Man.”Although he possessed little of his predecessor’s charisma, Voliva shared at least some of Dowie’s prescience where telecommunications were concerned, a trait he demonstrated in early 1923 by signing a contract with the Western Electric Company for the delivery of a 500-watt radio transmitter. The easy part of getting into radio circa 1923 was obtaining a broadcast license. The U.S. Department of Commerce was the body nominally in charge of the national airwaves, but its regulatory powers were narrowly circumscribed by the antiquated Radio Act of 1912. The fundamental purpose of this law was to check the anarchic activities of a subculture of teenage techno-geeks known as “wireless amateurs,” protohackers who were building their own radiotelegraph equipment out of household scrap, filling the sky with Morse-coded adolescent chatter, and thus interfering with official users of the airwaves such as the U.S. Navy and the American Marconi Company. As a solution to this problem, the drafters of the Radio Act created a spectral reserve for the wireless amateurs in an out-of-the-way portion of the radio band and imposed a license requirement and a few minimal technical standards for all transmitters operating on American soil. Shortsightedly, however, the drafters of the Radio Act neglected to reserve to the government the discretionary power of denying a license to any qualified applicant. And that was where the law still stood when broadcasting came along in the 1920s; if you could fill out the forms, pass a quick technical inspection, and pay a few minor fees, the commerce department had no choice but to issue you a license. Your support is important to us. Click here to join the Reader Membership Community. As one might imagine, these liberal licensing policies resulted in some supremely crappy broadcasting. Many of the 600-odd radio stations on the air by 1923 were jumped-up hobby sets whose “programs” consisted of a Victrola grinding away next to a microphone. WCBD, however, was destined for higher things. The station’s advantages began with the exceptional wealth of cultural capital in Zion. From the time of Dowie, the CCC had placed a high spiritual premium on musical literacy and performance skills. In keeping with these precepts, music education in Zion was socialistically funded and free to all community members. Unfortunately, the separatist character of Zion sharply limited opportunities for public displays of its musical talent. With the acquisition of WCBD, however, the meaning of this surplus was revealed. “It was God’s plan,” explained church official Michael Mintern in 1928, “to withhold from us the real purpose in providing a corps of trained singers and players for the radio work.”Blessed with what must have been the highest per capita supply of trained musicians in the nation, Zion enlisted more than 10 percent of its citizenry to take an active part in the radio programs. In addition to the Zion Symphony Orchestra and the 300-voice White Robed Choir, this army was subject to reconfiguration into a variety of more intimate permutations: a children’s choir; vocal duos, trios, quartets, and quintets; a marching band; brass, woodwind, and string ensembles; a mandolin and guitar band; a marimba band; a melodic troupe of handbell ringers known as the Celestial Bells; and a host of solo artists. All this talent, as Apostle J.H. DePew, the station manager, proudly pointed out in 1925, was available to WCBD free of charge, thanks to the perfected way of life practiced in Zion: “Not a dollar has been paid to any artist for any service rendered. Even the staff and personnel, with an exception or two, have made the radio work their vocation, maintaining their former duties regularly.”To make the most of these gifts, the citizens of Zion collectively plowed $120,000 into perfecting their broadcasting facilities. It was a figure that placed WCBD among the very best financed stations of the day. After a careful study of the relevant acoustic principles, the enormous Shiloh Tabernacle, epicenter of spiritual life in Zion, was expertly wired for sound. An array of eight microphones strategically distributed throughout the temple and controlled from a central mixing panel located in a soundproof control booth at the rear afforded separate pickups of the speaker’s platform, the choir, the band, the organ, and the orchestra. In addition to this careful retrofitting of the tabernacle, Voliva commissioned the construction of a separate studio building adjacent to the church, a facility that boasted “every convenience,” including an independent power plant, advanced acoustic surfacing from floor to ceiling, and indoor plumbing. Flanking the ultramodern brick studio building was a brace of steel towers 150 feet high, between which was suspended WCBD’s 90-foot horizontal antenna.Zion’s lavish investment in WCBD was money well spent given the station’s extraordinary performance, which far surpassed the manufacturer’s guarantees. At the time they purchased their original 500-watt transmitter, the citizens of Zion were advised by Western Electric to anticipate a 150-mile radius for night transmission and a 100-mile radius for daylight transmission. Whether through God’s favor or some quirk of geography, WCBD’s signal reached much further than expected. “As a matter of fact,” noted a church official with satisfaction, “the evening concerts of this station are heard quite regularly, not only up and down the Atlantic coast, even in midsummer, but last winter, under the most favorable conditions, they were heard clearly and distinctly in remote parts of Canada, in California, Alaska, Mexico, Cuba, Central America, and on ocean steamers far out on the Atlantic.” Capitalizing on WCBD’s atmospheric advantages, in mid-1924 Voliva moved to increase the station’s signal power tenfold by contracting with Western Electric for delivery of a 5,000-watt transmitter, one of only three such “super power” transmitters then in operation. “In signing the contract for the new station,” exulted a CCC spokesman, “the Western Electric Company has guaranteed a 250 percent distance increase over the present station, and if the distance actually reached is as much greater proportionately than that guaranteed for the present station, the results will be gratifying indeed. This will put Zion in the forefront of all radiocasting, such that the concerts and services will be heard regularly in all parts of the United States and Canada.”The new transmitter began operating in early February of 1925 and more than matched these anticipations. For the next three and a half years WCBD enjoyed truly international stature, as demonstrated by the steady stream of correspondence from appreciative year-round listeners in Canada, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, Bermuda, every region of the continental United States, and the territory of Alaska.Signal coverage of this kind was exactly what the Christian utopia needed to combat what it perceived as persistent misrepresentation in the national press. As Voliva explained to a reporter in 1928, WCBD “was conceived and born in prayer to counteract the evil that the newspapers and their atheistic writers have done us.” “For 30 years,” elaborated J.H. DePew, “certain newspapers in this country had lied about Zion with impunity. The radio station took care of this. It was God’s rebuke to a crooked press. We go over their heads now, and reach the ears of the multitudes.”The publicity pr… truncated (21,721 more characters in archive)