One World Flight

How It Got Made

The backstory of One World Flight is almost as remarkable as the series itself. In 1942, President Roosevelt asked Wendell Willkie — the Democrat-by-nature who had been nominated by Republicans to challenge Roosevelt's unprecedented third-term run — to travel the world visiting Allied nations and observing the battle fronts. That tour became the basis for Willkie's 1943 book, One World, which argued for building an international organization after the war to keep the peace. Willkie died in 1944 before seeing what came of his idea, but a One World Award was established in his name the following year, co-sponsored by Freedom House and the Common Council for American Unity. One of its first recipients was Norman Corwin of CBS, recognized for his contributions to the concept of world unification through mass communication. The prize was a round-the-world flight.

Corwin was already the most celebrated radio writer in America by then. His broadcasts We Hold These Truths, heard on December 15, 1941, and On a Note of Triumph, which aired on VE Day, May 8, 1945, had made him a figure of genuine national significance. When the One World Award came through, he didn't accept it as a ceremonial honor. He went straight to CBS chief William S. Paley and negotiated permission for a working trip, with CBS recording engineer Lee Bland traveling alongside him and the network committing full support for a documentary series built from whatever they brought back.

Corwin and Bland departed New York in June 1946. Over the next four months they logged more than 40,000 miles and touched sixteen countries: England, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Egypt, India, China, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and Hawaii before returning home. Along the way Corwin interviewed Jawaharlal Nehru at length on the concept of One World, had a private audience with the Pope, visited the coal mines of Prague, and flew over the flooded Ganges to reach Calcutta. Many interviews required on-the-spot interpreters. Time magazine described the range of interviewees as "prince and fellah, commissar and coolie, pundit and stevedore."

The Equipment and the Editing Problem

None of this came easy on the technical side. The recording equipment weighed 200 pounds, and the technology Corwin and Bland were using — recording wire — was, in Corwin's own recollection, horrendous to edit. The wire had to be physically cut, then knotted and fused with a lit cigarette before the material could be transferred to newly developed recording tape. By the time they returned, Corwin had accumulated 100 hours of field recordings. The English transcripts alone filled 3,700 typed pages.

For three months after the trip, Corwin worked with four recording engineers and six typists to condense the raw material into something broadcast-ready. The result was thirteen episodes, each covering a distinct geographic leg of the journey — from an overview episode that previewed the series all the way through to a final postscript. When the shows went out on Tuesday nights starting January 14, 1947, they went out live: Corwin read his narration in the studio while directing an ensemble that included musicians and two producers with turntables, dropping the needle on specially prepared disks containing the edited field actuality recordings.

That live-broadcast structure was itself a workaround. In 1947, both CBS and NBC still maintained a decades-old ban on using recorded sound on air — what Variety had long called the "anti-wax" stance, a holdover from the era of wax-cylinder recording. Corwin had to obtain special permission from Paley to use his wire recordings in the series at all. Competing prestige documentaries of the period, including Robert Lewis Shayon's The Eagle's Brood on CBS, followed standard practice by hiring actors to re-enact interview material rather than broadcasting the real voices. One World Flight was doing something genuinely unusual: putting actual people, in their actual words, with their actual accents and hesitations, on the American airwaves.

Corwin noted the historic weight of the material plainly. He told Time about the recordings: "it was all there for history, if history is interested."

What the Critics Said

The series ran from January 14 to April 8, 1947, thirteen episodes on Tuesday nights at 10 o'clock. Both major news magazines reviewed it, and both largely praised it while noting the inevitable unevenness across thirteen weeks of material. Time cited the series' "heady power" and "wonderfully perceptive, intimate sound track." Newsweek called it "the most accurate diary ever kept by a globe girdler."

Not everyone agreed with the approach. On February 15, 1947, critic Lou Frankel wrote in The Nation that Corwin's actuality-based method amounted to a "pantomime," arguing that tape recording left no room for rehearsals or rewrites. It was a minority view, but it captured a real tension in broadcast documentary at the time — between the polished scripted form and the rawer, more unpredictable quality of recorded reality.

The ratings told a grimmer story. CBS scheduled the series on Tuesday nights directly opposite Bob Hope's NBC program, one of the most popular shows on radio. That scheduling decision severely damaged the audience One World Flight might otherwise have reached, and contributed to the relative obscurity the series carried for decades afterward.

A recurring thread through the interviews — in country after country — was fear of atomic war. The interviewees' worry about "of the things that could lead to another war, this time with atomic consequences" turned out to be the dominant emotional note of the series. When it was over, Corwin's own conclusion was bleak: despite everything he'd seen and heard, "the One World dream of Wendell Willkie was still as remote as ever."

The Politics That Followed

The series was still on the air in April 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed all of Corwin's One World Flight scripts. HUAC never called him as a direct witness, but scholars believe he was effectively graylisted as a result and began losing jobs and commissions. His name later appeared among the 151 listed in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television in 1950.

Meanwhile, Paley asked Corwin after the series concluded to broaden the popular appeal of his work — which Corwin understood as a request to simplify it. A contract dispute the following year formally ended what had been a decade-long partnership. Corwin left CBS in 1948. One World Flight was his last major run at the network. He landed in the early 1950s as head of Special Projects at United Nations Radio, where he continued the internationalist work the CBS series had been built around.

Scholar Matthew C. Ehrlich of the University of Illinois, writing in American Journalism in 2006 and later in his book Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest (University of Illinois Press, 2011), identified the series as the exemplar of postwar radio documentary idealism — and also as a signal of network radio's coming decline, as CBS and NBC began shifting their energies and revenues toward television. Ehrlich described what Corwin achieved in making the series as best exemplifying the "willful, stubborn optimism" of the era's documentary pioneers.

Playwright Jerome Lawrence put it differently: "It was good to send a poet around the world. He has a way of listening to the rhythms of tomorrow."

What Survived and What Came After

Twelve of the thirteen episodes were certified as properly identified in June 2007. The series had been largely forgotten for most of its history — hurt by its unfortunate scheduling, overshadowed by the political turbulence that followed it, and poorly served by the unwieldy wire-recording technology that made it possible in the first place. Billboard magazine took the unusual step of asking Lee Bland to contribute a practical piece in April 1947 on producing with field recordings, aimed at future documentary makers — a sign that the craft questions the series raised were seen as worth passing on even as the show was still finishing its run.

Corwin himself had kept a personal journal during the 1946 trip, intending to write a book. The journal went into a drawer and stayed there for more than sixty years until media historian Michael C. Keith asked him about it. Keith edited the journal into Norman Corwin's One World Flight: The Lost Journal of Radio's Greatest Writer, published by Continuum in 2009. Twelve of the book's first thirteen chapters reproduce Corwin's original journal entries intact. The book drew praise from Walter Cronkite, Studs Terkel, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Larry Gelbart, and Larry King.

In 1999, at age 89, Corwin went back to the One World Flight material for NPR producer Mary Beth Kirchner, contributing to the radio series Lost and Found Sound by playing archival excerpts and providing commentary. A 2006 documentary on his career, A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Feature. Norman Corwin was born on May 3, 1910, and died on October 18, 2011, at age 101. The bulk of his papers, including materials related to One World Flight, are held in a special collection at the Thousand Oaks Library in California. A separate collection at Syracuse University includes a certificate from Pan American Airways marking his crossing of the International Date Line during the 1946 trip.