Washington and Welch Talk About Race Public Health, History, and the Politics of Exclusion

Abstract

This article shows how history can be used as a tool to influence political debate. Public health education over the radio became remarkably popular in the United States in the years leading up to World War II. Lectures, monologues, round tables, question and answer sessions, and dramas were all used by health departments to communicate ideas and knowledge about preserving health. In Baltimore, Maryland, a radio series called Keeping Well began in 1932 and ran until 1957. From 1939, 15-minute weekly dramas were broadcast that adopted many of the tropes of contemporary entertainment programs. Some of these dramas were based on interpretations of past events and imposed a particular kind of narrative of medical and social progress that reflected the wider purpose of educational radio programming to uplift and reform listeners. This article demonstrates how public health administrators manipulated historical narratives and fictionalized history for their own purposes. This manipulation was particularly evident in regard to divisive issues such as residential segregation, whereby the public health dramas downplayed Baltimore's troubled encounter with race and health.

There were the steaming jungles, with thatched villages beside wide slowly-flowing rivers. There were great plains where the migrant tribes of hunters drifted slowly on the tides of time. There were the cloud-capped Mountains of the Moon. And over all, the hot sun of Africa blazed, and the children of the sun, hunting, fishing, farming, fighting, and loving lived, in an Eden-like simplicity.

Then, from over the wide waters came the sailing ships of the white men, armed with brass guns, their holds filled with glittering beads and the gee-gaws of trade. Strange men, worshipping strange gods, and scourged forever by twin demons that they called progress and civilization. . . .

They were accustomed to sudden death—the lion’s leap, the warrior’s spear, the snap of the crocodile. Now they met the diseases of the white men and on the ships smallpox and scurvy took many lives . . . in America they met tuberculosis, syphilis and other diseases unknown in the homes they had left behind them.

At 7 pm on Saturday, April 13, 1940, this imposing narrative opened a radio play on station WFBR in Baltimore, Maryland.¹ Entitled “Doctor Welch, Booker T. Washington and Mayor Jackson,” the drama initiated Baltimore’s observance of the 26th annual Negro Health Week and marked the dedication of the new Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD) health center in the Druid Hill area of the city, serving the local African American population.² The program was part of a long-running series of radio health broadcasts called Keeping Well, jointly sponsored by BCHD and the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland (MedChi, the State Medical Society).

Tuberculosis in Baltimore.

Source. Original illustration in private collection of Richard Chaisson, Johns Hopkins University. Used with permission. Edmund Duffy was the editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun between 1924 and 1948, where he won three Pulitzer Prizes. Many of his cartoons addressed race issues, particularly lynching.

Following this opening hyperbole, the drama’s action cuts back to early spring 1915, when Booker T. Washington came to Baltimore to inaugurate National Negro Health Week. He spoke on March 24 at Bethel American Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Druid Hill, and that evening he shared the platform with William H. Welch, the first dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the founding dean of the university’s School of Hygiene and Public Health.³

The drama presented an imagined backstage dialogue between Washington and Welch that focused on race and health improvement. This fictionalized celebratory reconstruction of a significant moment in the history of public health and racial politics is most instructive for what it fails to say about the divisive issue of health and race from the progressive period through to the outbreak of World War II. The fictional conversation between Washington and Welch presented Baltimoreans with a sanguine view of race relations in the city. It completely overlooked the tensions caused by a long history of implicit and explicit residential segregation, sidestepped the chronic lack of access to basic health care for African Americans that the Druid Health Center barely confronted, and skated over the demonization of the African American population as the bearer and transmitter of urban America’s worst disease problems, particularly in the South.⁴

It is not surprising—and was certainly consistent with contemporary cultural mores—that the health department would want to avoid drawing attention to these contentious issues. The health department’s cautious approach was in fact symptomatic of a much wider reluctance on the part of Baltimore’s White politicians to address systematic racial inequalities. In his book about the history of tuberculosis in Baltimore, Samuel K. Roberts uses the term “racial utilitarianism” to underscore the contingent nature of African American participation in the local political system and the uneasy alliances between activist sections of the African American and White communities.⁵ As others have argued, this has had a long-lasting impact on the practice of politics in the city.⁶ In this article I aim to demonstrate how the history of racial uplift and achievement presented in the radio drama was one of what historian Matthew Crenson called the “significant adjustments” Baltimore’s leaders made to depoliticize the question of race. Crenson notes that in Baltimore, the “muffling of racial conflict was not just a matter of elite convenience but widespread political convention.”⁷ As such, the activities of the public health department cannot be divorced from the long-term political phenomenon of passive-aggressive racism in Baltimore.

The main focus of this article is the way in which a dramatized account of an episode in the history of public health was a tool for neutralizing the power of race as a mobilizing force for political action. Consciously or not, public health workers used a particular vision of history to justify apportioning blame and responsibility for ill health. The contribution of radio broadcasting to public health education efforts in early- to mid-20th century America helps us appreciate why and how public health workers at midcentury conjured up a particular interpretation of the past, communicating in a way that conveyed implicit and explicit political messages about present and future health work. Baltimore is an excellent venue for such an assessment because scripts for 200 health talks and 75 dramas survive in published form, dating from 1932 to 1944. Although history was used sparingly in these broadcasts, public health administrators manipulated historical narratives and fictionalized history for their own purposes.

PUBLIC HEALTH EDUCATION ON THE RADIO

Radio arrived in the 1920s and soon complemented other long-standing methods that municipal public health departments used to reach out to the general public, such as bill posters, pamphlets, and exhibits.⁸ Health departments adapted the commercial techniques of marketing, advertising, and public relations.⁹ However, for educators and advertisers alike, radio was a notoriously difficult animal to tame. Writing about the dilemma that radio posed to the advertising industry in the early 1920s, Roland Marchand pointed out the following:

No other media had offered such potential for intimacy with the audience . . . [radio] carried the human voice directly into the privacy of the home, to the center of the revered family circle . . . [which] . . . also created dangers for the advertiser. Any false note on such an inherently “intrusive” medium might bring a very negative reaction.¹⁰

Public health administrations in the United States and elsewhere were well versed in intrusive tactics—such as compulsory disease reporting and hospitalization, mandatory immunizations, and a dense health visiting network.¹¹ Given public health’s propensity to invade privacy in this period, it is hardly surprising that radio’s capacity for intimacy was so enthusiastically seized upon.¹²

The relationship between health departments and radio stations was symbiotic. According to one leading practitioner of radio education, health departments’ broadcasts emphasized authentic material, the communication of a socialized viewpoint, and gravitated toward a “perfectly legitimate” effort at building prestige for the health department.¹³ However, health education programs were equally important for radio stations, which needed to point to a decent record of public service when their broadcasting licenses came up for renewal before the Federal Communications Commission.¹⁴ Consequently, most stations donated airtime for educational programs. For their part, public health educators were mindful that the continued use of free airtime depended on the establishment and maintenance of high-quality programs.¹⁵

A variety of approaches were adopted for conveying information on the radio.¹⁶ Most medically sponsored programs in the early 1930s were monologues and lectures. Alternatively, a question and answer interview or roundtable with medical experts was conducted. Elsewhere, an announcer read out and answered questions. This was frowned upon by public health educators because it replicated methods used by “quacks and cultists . . . [and] . . . fakers,” who ritually discussed diagnoses and therapies over the airwaves.¹⁷ Another sort of transmission was the drama. Between 1931 and 1937, radio health dramas were broadcast with the help of local organizations in Racine, Wisconsin; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Detroit City, Michigan; Wayne County, Michigan; Polk County, Iowa; Connecticut; and New York State. These developments—also witnessed in science and birth control radio programming¹⁸—reflected deeper currents in American commercial radio, in which dramas and serializations were scheduled alongside music.¹⁹

The most well-known health drama was The Health Hunters, which began in August 1933 in New York.²⁰ These 15-minute sketches were set in the imaginary town of Utopia and featured a central medical character, the local health officer Mortimer Jones.²¹ One episode entitled “Dr. Jones Prescribes for General Washington,” reflected on developments in health practice and therapeutics since the American Revolution. Clearly, a niche could be found for history in these sorts of productions, as the radio programs coming out of Baltimore amply demonstrated.

DRAMATIZING HISTORY

The Baltimore City Health Department eagerly participated in the use of radio. A series of 15-minute talks began in 1927, some of which were reproduced in the Baltimore Sun.²² In 1932, BCHD, MedChi, and radio station WBAL inaugurated a regular weekly program called Keeping Well. The first transmission took place on January 12, and the opening broadcasts were delivered by Mayor Howard W. Jackson, William H. Welch, and Health Commissioner C. Hampson Jones. Local physicians, educators, and members of the BCHD staff delivered subsequent talks. The show switched to WFBR in 1936, and two years later, three recorded transcripts of playlets produced by the New York State Department of Health—possibly The Health Hunters—were broadcast.²³ This gave an indication of the direction Keeping Well was headed, and on March 4, 1939, the talks were changed by Health Commissioner George Huntington Williams to “health dramas” performed by the Baltimore Health Players. This was a perspicacious move; although some complained about the dramas’ production costs—$1500 in 1941²⁴—research was beginning to suggest that lower-income listeners preferred general entertainment and drama rather than classical music and educational programs.²⁵

Mayor Howard W. Jackson (right) and William H. Welch inaugurate the new Keeping Well radio service.

Source. Baltimore City Health Department Bureau of Public Health Education, Keeping Well, Volume I: The first hundred broadcasts by the City Health Department and the Medical Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland from station WBAL, January 12, 1932-November 14, 1933, Baltimore, Baltimore City Health Department, nd, 2.

Baltimore’s monologues and dramas covered a wide range of common issues in public health, including tuberculosis and syphilis, which suggests there was little compunction to address sensitive issues. Topicality and immediacy were important; for example, the airwaves were crammed with public health messages during diphtheria immunization drives.²⁶ Keeping Well was also used to reinforce various health-related operations, such as Child Health Day, tuberculosis seal campaigns, and the Baltimore plan for the control of syphilis.²⁷

The structure of the dramas varied little. Most weeks the central character, Richard C. Ashley, discussed ways of restoring and preserving health with his patients, friends, or medical students.²⁸ Ashley guided the ignorant populace of Baltimore toward a state of enlightenment. Ashley was a physician at the fictional Monumental Hospital, although he was not completely office-bound and frequently got out and about in the city. The repeated appearances of Ashley in the dramas were crucial because they replicated the character continuity of successful popular radio shows at the time. Ashley was drawn as an optimistic, down-to-earth, can-do type of physician—very much an everyday American hero. Week after week he demonstrated his faith in the capacity of his patients to absorb and act upon the advice he gave them. In many ways, we see in him the larger shifts that took place in public health education in the second quarter of the 20th century: the neutralization of controversy, the move toward a standardization of practice, and the replacement of coercion with persuasion.

History formed a comparatively small part of the BCHD’s educational mission. Only a handful of the 200 health talks and 75 drama scripts that were published dealt with historical events on an extensive basis. For example, Henry Sigerist, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine, gave a talk about the history of the plague on February 14, 1933. For reasons that are not clear, the broadcasts’ main foray into history was concentrated in the first half of 1940, when seven dramas contained historical scenarios. The relatively low visibility of history in the dramas means that care needs to be taken not to overemphasize the value placed on it by the producers. But such caution does not invalidate the question: why use history at all?

History was an extremely malleable tool. The historical dramas provided scope for more excitement, which was an important consideration in trying to attract listeners. They were also used to impose a particular kind of narrative of medical and social progress, reflecting the wider purpose of educational radio programming to uplift and reform listeners.²⁹ They celebrated public health achievements in Baltimore and the wider world and provided an opportunity to solidify a molded version of events in the city that suited the agenda of BCHD in the early 1940s. Much emphasis was placed on the march of medicine from the dark recesses of ignorance and tradition into the light of scientific reason and modernity.³⁰

The dramas made it clear that such progress is never achieved without persistence in the face of resistance, fear, and stupidity. This emerges in two interrelated ways: first, through specific historical examples of perseverance, such as the determination to establish a dental school in Maryland, or the tortuous but triumphant journey of vaccination lymph across the Atlantic; and second, dogged persistence such as that demonstrated through Ashley’s relentless crusade to educate the population of Baltimore in the modern ways of hygienic behavior and about recent advances in public health policy. For Ashley, the biggest killer of all was

ignorance, stupidity or whatever other name you can find for the way humanity in the mass pushes aside the weapons that might save it. There’s no pill or powder for that disease.³¹

On another occasion he alleged that every case of diphtheria reported in Baltimore was “a direct result of negligence upon the part of the persons responsible for the child’s welfare.”³² These two tropes—conquering poor behaviors and the self-responsibility of Baltimore residents—were the leitmotifs of most of the dramas and encapsulated some of the contradictions in public health policy at the time. On the one hand, health departments in the interwar period came to see themselves as persuaders rather than enforcers. On the other hand, as historian James Colgrove argues, although the virtues of the advisory role had come to prominence as a characteristically American feature of public health education, the specter of coercion remained a potent force in the rhetorical language of public health. Ashley’s crude deployment of guilt and shame was an extremely common tactic.³³

Another purpose of the historical drama was to celebrate landmark achievements in Baltimore’s or Maryland’s medical history: the world’s first school of dentistry, the first official recognition and sanction by American physicians of Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination (by MedChi), the country’s first health department, and the first meeting of the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality. An almost inevitable corollary of such celebrations was the lionization of significant moments and figures in the history of public health. However, the interesting aspect of the totemic historical examples in Keeping Well—such as Jenner’s discovery of the smallpox vaccine, John Snow’s cholera investigations, and Louis Pasteur’s bacteriological discoveries—is that not only were they used for their intrinsic historical interest but also in the service of Baltimore’s pressing current public health issues.

Historical topics also allowed the scriptwriters a certain degree of dramatic license. One of the attractions of history was that it was malleable in ways that contemporary issues were not. There are plentiful examples. In one episode, a worried young mother hears about the achievements of maternal and child health activities in Baltimore over the previous 20 years. The fictional Ashley says that

[a]t the end of 1919 the Bureau of Child Hygiene . . . had already justified its existence by bringing the infant mortality rate under a hundred for the first time in the history of Baltimore.³⁴

What Ashley neglected to say, of course, is that infant mortality had been falling in most cities during this period; that the improvement in 1919 was magnified by the temporary but sharp upturn in infant mortality caused by the 1918 influenza epidemic; that in Baltimore the infant mortality rate had been declining fairly steadily since about 1907 and would likely have fallen below 100 even without the creation of the new bureau; and that the infant mortality rate of African Americans consistently exceeded Whites by more than 50%.³⁵ For the BCHD, historical radio dramas provided an opportunity to plant in the public mind a version of events that pasted over the cracks in the city’s troubled encounter with disease, class, and race.

USING HISTORY TO DEPOLITICIZE RACE

The drama that most vividly draws together many of these themes is the one that I introduced at the outset, “Doctor Welch, Booker T. Washington and Mayor Jackson,” which was broadcast on April 13, 1940 and fictionalized an actual event that took place in Baltimore in 1915. Washington had called for the organization of a national health improvement week to address the enormous health disparities between African Americans and Whites. He framed the poor health status of African Americans as an obstacle to their economic success and, along with education, public health improvement was essential to uplifting African Americans and incrementally progressing toward equality. Washington mobilized the resources of his Tuskegee Institute and the National Negro Business League to realize this goal.³⁶ His idea for a conference and exhibit gained support from the all–African American Maryland Medical, Pharmaceutical and Dental Association and MedChi.³⁷ Estimates of the crowd that came to visit the exhibit and listen to him and Welch speak were between 3000 and 6000 people, predominantly African Americans. Two more evenings of lectures on health, which included African American Baltimore councilman Harry S. Cummings, local African American medical leader Harry S. McCard, and William E. B. Du Bois, were equally well attended.³⁸

Baltimore attorneys and ministers.

Note. This ad hoc committee of attorneys and ministers, who fought successfully to place African American teachers into Baltimore’s Colored High School at the turn of the century, included Harry S. Cummings (first row, center). Also present are Harry S. McCard’s father, attorney William Chester McCard (second row, far right); W. Ashbie Hawkins (second row, center), who mounted a vigorous challenge to the city residential segregation ordinances in the 1910s and was a founding member of the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and Warner T. McQuinn (third row, second from right), who was later elected a city councilman and became a leader in Baltimore’s NAACP.

Source. Maryland State Archives Special Collections (Robert W. Schoeberlein Collection), MSA SC 5354-1-1.

Those lucky enough not to be turned away from the packed church heard explanations and solutions for racial differences in ill health and mortality that were some distance apart. Washington acknowledged that general sanitary improvement was vital, but primarily he made a call “to the negroes of Baltimore to live up to the pace they had set in advancing toward the goal of improvement” and pleaded with them to cooperate with the (White) authorities to fight tuberculosis and lower their death rates. Furthermore, Washington cautioned his African American brethren that their contagious diseases were a threat to the White community:

When food is being prepared the negro woman touches the white man’s life; when food is served the negro woman touches the white man’s life; when children are being nursed the negro woman touches the white man’s life; when clothes are being laundered the negro woman touches the white man’s life.³⁹

Such observations were not designed to overturn the reproduction of racial economic inequality in the city, and Washington played to the fears of the White community when he went on to say that “it was as vital to white persons as to negroes that negroes be freed from contagious diseases.” Welch was familiar with these sorts of observations. He himself had made comments about African American predisposition to disease and their infectious threat during a speech at Howard University in 1912 and said the same thing about African American servants two years later at a meeting held at Johns Hopkins.⁴⁰

By referring to African Americans in the service of Whites, Washington indirectly alluded to what was perhaps the most divisive racial issue in Baltimore: residential segregation.⁴¹ Although there were marked spatial divisions of class, race, and ethnicity in the city, segregation was also manifest at the block level: “the rich lived on the widest and best-paved streets, the middling families on the side streets, and the lower classes in the alleys and courts.”⁴² Residential patterns were determined by a combination of race and class. Many of the African American domestics, nurses, and laundresses who were perceived as a menace to Baltimore’s middle-class Whites lived in precisely those alleys and cramped side streets that were the focus of reformers’ ire.

Compared with other speakers later that week, however, Washington’s description of residential segregation as “unnecessary” and “in most cases unjust,” was lukewarm. The next day, for example, Harry S. McCard “rapped segregation,”⁴³ holding it directly responsible for the high death rates of Baltimore’s African American population, a causal link that he had been condemning for the past 10 years:

Baltimore is the only one of the nation’s 10 big cities that denies to one-sixth of its population the right to live as well as it knows how to live. Other cities, particularly New York, have eliminated alley houses. Baltimore puts a premium on them. This is segregation . . . the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore tell the colored people that they must continue to live in the alleys, where they cannot live. . . . And if you come out of your present quarters they say, “we will put you in jail.” And yet they say we die because we are black and ignorant.⁴⁴

McCard came from a family steeped in African American activism and was a long-time vocal critic of Baltimore’s White political leadership.⁴⁵ And as we know, Du Bois’s approach to racial inequality was radical, interventionist, and rights-based compared with Washington’s more conservative emphasis on parallelism, accommodation, and the role of social institutions rooted in the community.⁴⁶ On this occasion, then, it is unsurprising to find Du Bois agreeing with McCard: “We need a crusade for fresh air among the colored people,” he said, because “the race . . . has been herded in small rooms and congested alleys.”⁴⁷ In 1908, while at Atlanta University, Du Bois conducted a survey that documented the lamentable conditions of the city’s alleys, which motivated Atlanta’s White business community to support water and sewer improvements in African American neighborhoods.⁴⁸ Du Bois admitted that African Americans’ transition from rural to urban living in the wake of emancipation had brought with it “peculiar ideas” about air—the previous day, hadn’t McCard warned against the “alley practices” of nailing down windows at the beginning of the fall?—but ultimately, Baltimore’s African Americans had to “vote for sewers, paving, parks and playgrounds and fight segregation.”⁴⁹ No doubt there was some common ground regarding huge disparities in White and African American mortality, the urgency of sanitary reform, the need for behavioral change, and the existence of segregation. In 1915, however, this shared space did not close the gap in thinking about the root causes of health inequality, where the responsibility for that inequality resided, and the magnitude of political change that was needed to address the issue.

Twenty-five years later, the fictional drama Keeping Well declined to draw attention to these deep fissures; like other broadcasts of the period, the writers probably thought the contentious aspects of race relations were too volatile to discuss.⁵⁰ Keeping Well anointed Washington as the greatest African American leader of the postslavery era and commemorated the occasion of National Negro Health Week in 1940 by imagining a congenial conversation between him and Welch as they prepared to speak to the throngs at Bethel AME Church. The clear purpose of the script was to neutralize the politicization of race in the city and direct responsibility for poor health onto African Americans’ attitudes and behaviors:

Washington: Do you know what the hardest problem was that I had to face?

Welch: I imagine that it was overcoming prejudice. To persuade the men who had given you freedom to implement that freedom with the things that would give it some real meaning.

Washington: Most people believe that. But the real problem was to persuade my own people to fit themselves for freedom. To adapt themselves to new conditions and work as free men.⁵¹

This exchange does not totally exonerate Whites, but the blame is shifted well away from them—they had generously “given freedom” after all—and toward African Americans themselves.

The position was reinforced by Welch’s fictional words, which side-stepped the inequalities of risk in the city:

We know today that health is not a question of race, creed or economic position, that what effects one group effects every other group in society . . . illness is no respector [sic] of individuals. . . . The same diseases beset persons from all walks of life here in Baltimore. Diphtheria, tuberculosis, syphilis and the risk of occupational sickness from industrial work—these are civic problems, which may affect anyone.⁵²

Indeed, they may have affected anyone, but hardly to the same extent between the races. This choice of ailments was far from random. In a previous radio talk for Negro Health Week in 1934, syphilis and tuberculosis had been identified as numbers one and two in the list of “Negro health problems in Baltimore.”⁵³ A more accurate representation of the position in the midteens would have utilized BCHD’s annual reports, which tabulated in great detail the massive racial differences in many causes of death. As a close confidante of the BCHD, Welch would have been very familiar with these data in 1915.

We know relatively little about Welch’s personal views on race. He obviously had deep respect for Washington, agreeing to address a memorial meeting in Baltimore in November 1916 after Washington’s death.⁵⁴ But neither Welch nor the Johns Hopkins University Hospital and School of Medicine were considered friends of Baltimore’s African American community, at least in the opinion of this Afro-American editorial written on the occasion of Welch’s 80th birthday in 1930:

With all the experience and experiments of Dr. Welch and his world-famous pupils with germs, none of them has discovered the microbe of race prejudice, and this is the more unusual, because there are more of these germs at Hopkins than at any other similar university in the country. To be sure, other Negro-hating medical schools exist in the South, but they haven’t the wealth nor the intelligence of Hopkins. . . .

To Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University and Hospital have been a model. Give Dr. Welch credit for the building of the medical school and he must likewise assume the responsibility for the race prejudice and lack of toleration there.

At eighty, his work is about done. He’ll soon put his test tubes and beakers away, and devote himself to something else besides bugs and serums; and well he might, for the biggest and worst bug carried on for a half century under his nose without his ever noticing its presence.⁵⁵

Most strikingly, the 1940 drama shied away from the alternative viewpoints of McCard, Du Bois, and others that were offered up in March 1915. For example, no place could be found to explore Secretary of State Robert P. Graham’s candid admission that the state of Maryland spent $300 000 per year on White tubercular patients “but not one cent for colored” patients.⁵⁶

The drama also made no reference to plenty of other incriminating evidence to do with Jim Crow prejudice in the city. Three times before World War I, Baltimore City Council passed ordinances—the first in the country—that forbade African Americans from moving into White neighborhoods. When the ordinances were challenged in Baltimore’s criminal court, they were deemed unworkable and unlawful, although on the grounds of their linguistic framing and not their inherent racial injustice. Eventually they were declared unconstitutional by the Maryland Court of Appeals, and racial residential segregation was outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1917.⁵⁷ Still, any new housing stock remained largely off limits to African Americans, who predominantly bought and rented secondhand. Furthermore, restrictive covenants in many house deeds prevented the sale of houses owned by Whites to African Americans, and White neighborhoods ringed African American communities in an attempt to contain them, a process that White neighborhood associations were happy to proclaim.⁵⁸

This geography of injustice has been called “racialized space.”⁵⁹ In Baltimore, the production of racialized space did not stop with the failed segregation ordinances; the power of the White spatial imagination found other ways of creating it.⁶⁰ Redlining and blockbusting are the most obvious examples, but there were others. For most years between the Bethel AME Church meetings in 1915 and the Keeping Well broadcast in 1940, Jackson “governed the city according to a probusiness, voluntarist, and antiblack philosophy.”⁶¹ For Jackson, ghettoization of the African American population paid electoral dividends, especially considering that a reduction of the electoral districts in the early 1920s had stifled African American political representation.⁶² In 1934, Jackson refused an offer from the Federal Public Works Administration to build low-rent public housing on undeveloped areas unless the Public Works Administration offered the city compensation for the rates the city would have accrued if the land had been developed privately. Alternative low-rent accommodations did not emerge until 1940, many years after it had been promised to the African American community in 1929, when Druid Hill’s notorious “lung block” was demolished.⁶³ No wonder that Juanita Jackson Mitchell, a local leader of the African American youth freedom movement of the time—the City-Wide Young People’s Forum—later described Mayor Jackson as “an enemy.”⁶⁴ Nonetheless, the forum’s acceptance of Mayor Jackson’s sponsorship and patronage, alongside that of other White establishment figures, demonstrates the accommodationist approach some African American groups felt they had to adopt to survive, if not flourish. Overall, however, an outside listener to Keeping Well would not have recognized Baltimore in the 1930s as a “cauldron of protests” by African Americans to combat the lack of economic opportunity, lynchings, residential segregation, or exclusion from public sector jobs and public housing.⁶⁵

Returning to the drama in 1940, the broadcast closed with a live speech by Huntington Williams, who extolled the recent achievements of the BCHD in employing African American nurses and physicians and called attention to Mayor Jackson’s recent opening of the Druid Health Center in a building that was practically opposite Bethel AME Church. It is no shock that Keeping Well preferred to laud these encouraging landmarks; heaping praise on themselves was a standard practice for public health departments in this period. Yet less than two months before this drama was broadcast, Huntington Williams himself had attended the dedication of the Druid Health Center.⁶⁶ It is revealing that while there he would have heard George MacDonald, president of the Maryland Medical, Pharmaceutical, and Dental Association, call on White officials like Huntington Williams to recognize that “conditions of environment, rather than racial tendencies, are responsible for the prevalence of certain diseases among Negroes.”⁶⁷ The BCHD’s Baltimore Health News—a monthly newsletter with a circulation of 8500 in the 1930s—chose not to include this quote in its report of the dedication. The tactical purpose of public health education was served by emphasizing African American self-responsibility over the structural conditions that reproduced health inequalities.

The Druid Health Center is dedicated.

Source. Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore Health News, April, 1940.

Note. George MacDonald, president of the Maryland Medical, Pharmaceutical and Dental Association (standing center). Other African American physicians in this photograph include H. Maceo Williams (seated far left), the first first African American to be hired for a full-time position by the Baltimore Health Department in 1939 and the first director of the Center. He served in this post until his retirement in 1966. Roscoe C. Brown (standing third from right), a prominent dentist who worked at the US Public Health Service. Brown was chairman of the National Negro Health Week Committee, director of the National Negro Health Movement, and editor of National Negro Health News between 1943 and 1950. Mayor Howard Jackson (seated center); Health Commissioner Huntington Williams (seated second from right).

CONCLUSIONS

Keeping Well was remarkably long-lived. The 15-minute format remained until 1954, when the running time was cut to 10 minutes. For several years the dramas ran alongside Baltimore’s televised health program Your Family Doctor, which began life in 1948 and is thought to be the first television health series in the United States.⁶⁸ After a total of 925 dramas broadcast over a period of 25 years, Keeping Well finally was discontinued in 1957, although I have not been able to uncover why; the program was replaced by a daily 60-second spot announcement about health.⁶⁹

Obviously, the show’s longevity does not necessarily mean it was widely heard, or acted upon, by Baltimore residents. There is little-to-no research on the history of radio-listening habits in the city, never mind this particular program. We do know from other studies of the period that radio listening was incredibly popular among the middle and lower classes. Lizabeth Cohen’s study of industrial workers in interwar Chicago, Illinois, demonstrated that radio rapidly became a focal point of family and community life and universalized working-class experience by at least the mid-1930s.⁷⁰ Having said that, radio ownership in Baltimore, like other large cities, was unevenly distributed along class and racial lines.⁷¹ In Baltimore in 1940, 98.1% of White home owner–occupiers and 94.6% of African American home owner–occupiers owned a radio; the figures for White and African American renters were 93.0% and 80.5%, respectively.⁷²

In conjunction with their proselytizing approach, the radio dramas were put to formal heuristic use. They became tools for public health training when the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health created a course on health education in 1941. On April 21 of that year, 23 students from 14 US states and three foreign countries were treated to a scriptwriting class by Skipwith Gordon, the Keeping Well scriptwriter. The following week they paid a visit to the studios of WFBR, hosted by the station’s program director Bert Hanauer.⁷³ Hanauer also used an episode of the Keeping Well dramas, “Dr. Ashley’s City,” to illustrate the technique of drama in his classes for the Adult Activities Council.⁷⁴

One might plausibly ask whether Ashley’s fictional voice carried the health commissioner’s own views on public health. The Keeping Well dramas allowed Huntington Williams a comparatively free rein. He could put into a character’s mouth his own words and ideas that perhaps were inappropriate in printed outlets, or even in the more straight-laced domain of the health talk monologues. Indeed, according to Mary Connolly, Detroit’s director of health education, this was the main attraction of the fictional approach: chronological order and historical accuracy could be sacrificed for character portrayal, the need to point the listener in the direction of health services, or to encourage change in a particular behavior.⁷⁵ Not everyone agreed with this outlook. Historian Elizabeth Toon has observed that debates about public health education on the radio were very much concerned with

issues of authenticity, of indirect message, and of inappropriate commercialism; defenders cited the needs of the audience and noted that their material compared favorably with that produced by “real” broadcasters.⁷⁶

It would seem that the boundary of authenticity was far more elastic when public health was historicized. The taking of dramatic license was not uncommon, and, as we have seen, Keeping Well’s historical scripts were good examples of this.

It is, of course, a difficult if not impossible task to unravel the intentions of Huntington Williams and the scriptwriters of Keeping Well. They may have set out to deliberately create a version of the past that neutralized the contentious issue of race and health inequalities; alternatively, this historical representation may have been the inevitable consequence of their comprehension of public health and race, which was blind to the critiques of inequality and injustice put forward by Du Bois, McCard, and others. But like all propaganda, the “facts” of history were subservient to apparently greater needs, one of which was proclaiming the success of public health. Such needs would have varied from place to place. In Baltimore, the Health Department downplayed racial conflict in the city to maintain the political status quo, a tactic of repression that has had repercussions into the political present.