Cavalcade of America
How It Came to Be
Cavalcade of America started as a public relations problem. The E. I. du Pont de Nemours Company had spent the years after World War I living down a damaging label — "merchants of death" — earned after the 1935 Nye Committee investigation laid out the numbers: more than a billion dollars in gunpowder and explosives sold to the Allies during the war, with profits exceeding $237.9 million. The family-controlled company, whose first plant had been established near Wilmington, Delaware back in 1802, needed to change the story. The advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn came up with the answer. BBDO's creative director Roy S. Durstine proposed a weekly radio anthology built around the company's own motto — "Better things for better living, through chemistry" — and presented Du Pont's executive committee with two competing program ideas, a Channing Pollock monologue and Cavalcade of America. Lammot du Pont II and the committee weighed both before Bruce Barton's involvement tipped the decision toward Cavalcade.
The show premiered on CBS on October 9, 1935 — a Wednesday evening program, 30 minutes, airing at 8 o'clock. Walter Hampden starred in the first broadcast, "No Turning Back," as Edward Winslow. The PR logic shaped the content from day one. Battle scenes were not permitted. The sound of a gunshot was taboo. Explosions were off the table entirely. Writer and later radio historian Erik Barnouw, who worked on the show, described its early atmosphere as pacifist and highly idealistic. Arthur Miller and Norman Rosten — both of whom would later write for the show — had signed the pacifist Oxford Pledge as students at the University of Michigan, and the early Cavalcade's taboo on gunfire was part of what drew them in. The show also made a point of celebrating women's progress in American life, a recurring theme in its early seasons.
The Format That Didn't Work, and the One That Did
The show launched in a vignette format — two thirteen-minute plays per half-hour, bridged with a Du Pont promotional spot. The first episode paired the return of the Mayflower with the great grasshopper plague. The third, "The Spirit of Competition," brought together the Oklahoma land rush and a Mississippi steamer race. It was an ambitious structure, but the ratings told a different story: a 4.9 Crossley for the 1935–36 season, finishing 94th overall — far behind Carlton Morse's family drama on NBC, which pulled a 14.0 and ranked 16th. The vignette format ran for 39 broadcasts.
In the summer of 1936, the show ran a six-week musical series called "The Development of Band Music in America" through July and August. The two-story structure held on until early in the second season, when an episode called "Sentinels of the Deep" — a story about the lighthouse service — marked the shift to single narratives. After that, the show settled into biographical sketches: Charles Goodyear, Samuel Morse, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. The first season had already worked through Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and the frontier widow Ann Harper. Dixon Ryan Fox, president of Union College, and Harvard's Arthur M. Schlesinger — co-editors of the 12-volume A History of American Life — served as historical advisers from 1935 to 1938, which allowed BBDO to market the program as a contribution to the "new social history."
For roughly a dozen years, no African American character appeared on the show, and the writers avoided anything that could be read as criticism of the wealthy. That was the terrain of the early Cavalcade — earnest, careful, and shaped by the sponsor's need to project goodwill without stirring controversy.
The Writing Room
When the show moved to NBC on January 2, 1940, the budget grew substantially and so did the ambition. Weekly production budgets could run as high as $7,500, covering guest stars and original scores for the Donald Voorhees or Robert Armbruster orchestras. Dr. Frank Monaghan, associate professor of history at Yale, came on to oversee production. Historical advisers Marquis James — a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner — and Carl Carmer contributed scripts and kept the research honest. James's biography of Sam Houston, The Raven, was dramatized across two broadcasts in 1940. That same season covered Benedict Arnold, Stephen Foster, Daniel Boone, and Robert E. Lee.
The writing roster that built up around the show reads like a who's-who of mid-century American letters. Arthur Miller joined as a staff writer and, as Barnouw described it, became a kind of "utility man" available for last-minute work on tight deadlines. Norman Rosten, Morton Wishengrad, and Henry Denker were among the regulars. Arch Oboler wrote scripts exclusively for Cavalcade; one Oboler-directed broadcast used a large pile of twigs to simulate the sound of a falling tree. For special projects, the show drew on Carl Sandburg, Stephen Vincent Benét, Maxwell Anderson, and Robert Sherwood. In 1941, a production of Benét's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" aired under the title "All That Money Can Buy," with Edward Arnold, Jane Darwell, and Walter Huston in the cast. That same year, Marc Connelly's "The Green Pastures" — which depicted Scripture through African American eyes — reached the Cavalcade audience, with Juano Hernandez playing De Lawd.
The Cast, New York and Hollywood
The original New York cast was a remarkable collection of radio talent: John McIntire, Jeanette Nolan, Agnes Moorehead, Kenny Delmar, Edwin Jerome, Ray Collins, Orson Welles, Karl Swenson, Ted Jewett, Jack Smart, Paul Stewart, Bill Johnstone, Frank Readick, Raymond Edward Johnson, Ted de Corsia, Everett Sloane, and Luis Van Rooten. Alfred Lunt made his first radio appearance on a Cavalcade production, and Lynn Fontanne did the same on a separate broadcast.
After the move to NBC, the show shifted toward a Hollywood star format. Mickey Rooney, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, and Ronald Reagan took on lead roles. Basil Rathbone made ten appearances, playing George Washington, Thomas Paine, John Adams, and Benedict Arnold among others. Raymond Massey grew so identified with Abraham Lincoln through repeat annual performances that the role became permanently linked to his name. Errol Flynn reprised his screen role from They Died With Their Boots On three days before that film's New York premiere; Henry Fonda reprised his Drums Along the Mohawk role on another broadcast. Ingrid Bergman starred as Jenny Lind opposite John McIntire's P. T. Barnum in "The Silent Heart" on March 30, 1942. Walter Huston served briefly as narrator-host in 1944. The announcer chair changed hands regularly — Frank Singiser through 1938, Gabriel Heatter briefly, then Basil Ruysdael, Bud Collyer, Gayne Whitman, Ted Pearson, with Bill Hamilton and Ross Martin later in the run. Homer Fickett served as producer-director for much of the run, with Roger Pryor, Jack Zoller, Paul Stewart, and Bill Sweets also taking turns.
The War Years
After Pearl Harbor, Cavalcade began treating the ongoing conflict as history in real time. The show moved toward contemporary stories — the African desert campaign, the North Atlantic. Ratings climbed accordingly, reaching 10.5 in 1942–43 and peaking at 10.8 the following season. On January 4, 1943, an episode called "Between Them Both" marked a sharper turn toward homefront stories and the lives of people caught up in the war.
"Diary on a Pigboat" followed a submarine crew. "Soldiers of the Tide" told the story of Guadalcanal. "Fat Girl" put listeners aboard an oiler. "Dear Funny Face" covered the Seabees. One episode linked Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin to the modern assembly line. Another told the story of Dr. Martin Niemöller, who defied Hitler's German Christian Church and was imprisoned for it. The December 7, 1942 broadcast "The Road to Victory," narrated by Carl Sandburg and adapted by Norman Rosten from numerous Sandburg works, carried the largest cast of any Cavalcade production — 73 characters played by a little more than a dozen actors, with a vocal number from the Delta Rhythm Boys. In those years the show carried a narrative urgency it hadn't had before, standing alongside Words at War and William N. Robson's The Man Behind the Gun for wartime dramatic power.
After the war, the show returned to traditional historical subjects with the Hollywood star format intact. When Du Pont became entangled in an antitrust suit in 1949, Cavalcade obligingly broadcast three episodes making the case for large-scale enterprise — "Wire to the West" on Western Union's consolidation of the telegraph business, "Beyond Cheyenne" on the packing industry's growth, and "The Immortal Blacksmith" on the development of Thomas Davenport's electric motor. The series ran on NBC until its final broadcast, "A Time to Grow," on March 31, 1953.
The Sponsor's Fingerprints
Du Pont's commercial approach was notably restrained. There was no midshow advertisement — instead, Du Pont took a two-minute spot at the end, delivered by Bud Collyer or Gayne Whitman. The spots reported on laboratory and field breakthroughs without hard-selling anything. What they did do, episode after episode, was repeat the company's slogan: "Better things for better living, through chemistry." Eighteen years of weekly broadcasts made that phrase part of American life, and by the early 1950s Du Pont's own opinion polling confirmed that the association had taken hold.
The PR logic that had forbidden gunshots in 1935 gradually relaxed as the campaign succeeded. Occasionally the sponsor's interests pushed through more directly: on May 15, 1940 — designated "N-Day" by Du Pont — an entire episode promoted the public launch of nylon hosiery, with a "typical" housewife interviewing G. P. Hoff, the Director of Research of Du Pont's Nylon Division. Du Pont president Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. estimated that some 75 people from NBC, BBDO, and Du Pont contributed to each weekly broadcast, many of them full-time on the program.
What Survives
Du Pont recorded all 781 broadcasts to transcription disc and presented each lead actor with a personal copy — a tradition that ran the length of the series. The discs were housed at Wilmington and eventually transferred to the Hagley Museum and Library, where the phonograph collection now holds more than 2,900 albums covering broadcasts from 1932 through 1957, along with roughly 500 sound tape reels and a scrapbook from a live 1948 Cavalcade performance in Niagara Falls. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts holds a near-complete run of the radio scripts. In the early 1980s a private collector transferred the transcription discs to tape at the Hagley archive but did not finish the job; 17 episodes are now confirmed lost, and a handful of others sit in the Du Pont archives without entering wider circulation. Of the 781 total broadcasts, 764 are known to exist.
A television version premiered October 1, 1952, on NBC with "Poor Richard," a Benjamin Franklin episode. It ran 131 episodes across five seasons, moving to ABC in 1953 and eventually being renamed Du Pont Cavalcade Theater and then simply Du Pont Theater before giving way to the 90-minute Du Pont Show of the Month in 1957. Du Pont deliberately hired five different production companies for the early seasons — including Screen Gems and Jack Chertok Productions — so that the episodes wouldn't look like the work of a single studio. Many kinescopes survive at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The radio Cavalcade remains the longest-running anthology of its kind, an 18-year experiment in turning sponsor money into something that, episode after episode, took American history seriously.