Against the Storm

Against the Storm is a soap opera by Sandra Michael, broadcast on NBC between 1939 and 1942.  Although often lauded for being the only Peabody award-winning soap to come from US network radio, radio historians are particularly vague about why it received that accolade.  Furthermore, in trying to dig up information on Michael, I came up mostly empty.  From an interview Irene Kahn Atkins made between 1979-80 with director Axel Gruenberg, we know that Michael was Danish-born, “so was particularly moved when the Germans took that country, and I think that’s what prompted her to go the route against the evils of Nazism” said Gruenberg.  “During the siege of Stalingrad, which turned out to be a turning point of the war for the Russians, Sandra Michael wrote a sort of documentary, My Brother Lives in Stalingrad, a well-written, interesting piece . . . She was a very, very talented writer.”  

In1940 Gruenberg was offered the job of directing Against the Storm by Sandra Michael’s husband, John Gibbs.  He remembered in interview that “the thing about Storm was that it was beautifully written.  It was an outstanding show.  Everybody, all the actors in New York, wanted to be on it.”  Against the Storm is set originally in a fictional university town called Hawthorne.  The main characters were originally Professor Jason McKinley Allen and his family.  As a daily serial, Against the Storm would have produced around 260 fifteen-minute episodes each year; as far as can be ascertained, only sixteen have survived.  As a hallmark of the success of soaps, it is possible to listen to these remaining programs and build up an understanding and even an empathy with fictional characters from seventy years ago. When Michael wanted to expand her episodes to thirty minutes each, despite the Peabody Award, her commercial sponsors reacted by cancelling Against the Storm.  It had been suggested, in any case, that Against the Storm did not appeal to the common housewife, but I really liked it.  I found it involving and engaging.  

    

Against the Storm was sponsored by Procter and Gamble who advertised extensively for Ivory Soap during each broadcast of the serial, using a variety of techniques, appealing often to mothers’ sense of duty, (using Ivory Flakes to wash “baby’s sensitive skin”) thriftiness, and fashion (running a promotion for silk stockings “with a doll finish”), and running contests (“Finish this sentence:  ‘I like Ivory Flakes because . . .’” to enter in a contest to win a Pontiac).  I got extremely annoyed with bloody Ivory Flakes and the single-minded consumerist detritus they slammed my ears with every fifteen minutes I settled down to listen to Against the Storm.  For the first time, I could sympathize with Val Gielgud, D.G. Bridson, and Maurice Gorham spewing vitriol at the US soap opera tradition.  Nevertheless, the constant repetition of their hackneyed slogans on this twenty-first century female researcher eventually became strangely persuasive, due in no small part to the smoothness of the male announcer who is also the narrator of Against the Storm and delivers a great deal of poetic scene-setting.  There I was in my mesmerized state, a woman waiting for the London Tube to whisk me off to Ladbroke Grove and thinking that Ivory Soap might be worth trying, just to see . . . GET A GRIP, YOU NUT!  Despite the blatant commercial sponsorship, many scenarios in Against the Storm seem to play against the traditional gender roles (though it is perfectly in keeping with the strength of portrayals of women in OTR soaps).

In one of the most interesting episodes that exists of Against the Storm, broadcast 15 May 1940, the character Reed Wilson is hesitating over proposing to Kathy Reimer.  Reed is a journalist, Kathy is the daughter of Dr Reimer who knows Professor Allen’s family in Hawthorne; Kathy has emigrated to the US from, we presume, Denmark.  During a warm night in New York City, Reed imagines three situations in which he proposes to Kathy, which makes fascinating use of the “endlessly deferred narrative.”  I found myself quite sympathizing with Reed in his ideal marriage proposal situation, his ludicrously romantic one, and the one in which it all went horribly wrong!  However, it hardly makes Reed a decisive, strong silent type in the mold of cowboy heroes; Kathy Reimer, on the other hand, is represented as a strong, iconoclastic woman.  She is never “nice.”  She speaks her mind.  After she rejects Reed’s eventual proposal, she returns to Hawthorne and takes a job helping Professor Allen during summertime as a research assistant.  So she is not eager to be a housewife.  

Of the other main female characters in Against the Storm, Mrs Allen (the Professor’s wife) is a non-entity. Lucretia Hale in the episode from 24 May 1940 has gone to Arizona with her son Peter Alden Hale, presumably to get away from Philip Cameron.  Although it’s not at first clear, Lucretia and Philip Cameron seem to have had a relationship, and Philip is unaware of Peter Alden’s existence, which certainly does not conform to the nuclear family ideal. We never really get to know Lucretia in the way we do Kathy and never quite understand how it all went down with Philip, but there is definitely a whiff of surprising scandal in the whole thing.  Was it a one-night stand?  What kind of circumstances caused Lucretia to get pregnant and not tell Cameron for several years (Peter Alden Hale must be around 5 or 6)?  In the 29/05/40 episode, Professor Allen tries to talk to his daughter Christy without giving her advice.  Christy Allen (sister of Siri, daughter of the Professor) is married to Philip Cameron (neither of them, until recently, knowing that Lucretia is the mother of Philip’s child).  Philip Cameron, in another set of imagined speculative episodes, imagines life when Peter Allen comes to visit, then contemplates buying a house!  This is another quite atypical episode in that Philip is trying to wrestle with his “blended” family:  will Christy accept Peter Alden as her stepson?  Where the surviving episodes eventually leave us, it seems Christy and Philip will divorce or separate.

Unfortunately, the two most celebrated literary moments in the serial’s history—the longwave reading by British Poet Laureate John Masefield and the reading by Edgar Lee Masters from the Spoon River Anthology incorporated into one of Professor Allen’s classroom scenes—do not survive.  There are several moments that do survive that give an indication of the unusual literary quality of Against the Storm as a “washboard weeper.”  As already mentioned, Reed Wilson’s imagining of the ways he might propose to Kathy casts him as “the writer” or “the actor.”  Shifting the setting to an Arizona ranch (Circle T Ranch, X Bar Ranch) seems quite an unforeseen move, and the incident when Pascal Tyler has to save Lucretia after she has fallen off her horse— “you can tell Arizona wants you to stay by the way it’s taken hold of you, even tried to break your bones”—gives an entirely different mood than the rest of the serial.   Reed is not the only character who has flashbacks—in the New York City “oily, dusty, evil heat,” Kathy thinks back to two years previously when she was in love with Manuel Sandoval in Europe, who has disappeared, along with her brother, as Europe erupted into war.  

Although Against the Storm often gives the impression that Kathy, Lucretia, or Philip are the main characters, the character who carries the most consistently through all the episodes is Professor Allen, suggesting that his classroom and his experiences are the backbone of the serial—quite unusual to have a man in his 60s as the main hero of a soap. Thus the serial is concerned with portraying intellectualism in a positive light, although three other characters (Allen’s assistant Mark Dodd, plain-spoken rancher Pascal Tyler, and Fullerton the Black manual laborer) have their poetic moments.   Just after the death of poet Edwin Markham, a 10 June 1940 episode has Professor Allen and Mark reading his poetry aloud to the audience.  Mark’s last poetry class of the year makes up nearly one entire episode, their harmonious classroom term evidence that society can live in decency and dignity.  He asks his students to “cultivate a sense of joy,” and Kathy says, “there’s no place as sad as an empty school.”   Just before Reed and Kathy share an evening dance on a boat in New York harbour, Kathy says, “New York seems so terribly tremendous.” 

REED:  It certainly is big. 

KATHY:  But you like it also. 

REED:  Never so much as when I’m away from it. 

Sandra Michael and her husband John Gibbs lived and worked in rural Connecticut, so perhaps some of their own love/hate relationship with the big city is expressed in this exchange. 

Finally, as suggested by Axel Gruenberg, a good deal of Against the Storm was taken up by the allegorical (and sometimes not-so-allegorical) discussion of the war in Europe.  In the 17/06/40 episode in which Mark addresses his poetry classroom, he acknowledges the war in a very diffuse sense.   “In a sense we’re isolated from the conflicts of everyday life”:  he meant the classroom, but Sandra Michael probably meant the US (which did not enter the war for another eighteen months).  “Some of you have very difficult and unreasonable conflicts to cope with,” Mark went on, advocating “respect for the rights and the honest thoughts of others.”  The reason (we assume, not having heard her side of the story) that Kathy refused to marry Reed is because she is still in love with Manuel.  Reed is the friend of Chuck Nolan of the American press stationed in Europe, and from him we have the appropriately vague scenic impression of Manuel as part of a chain gang.  Manuel is painted as heroic, selfless, and practical.  Kathy feels a great deal of guilt having escaped to America.

KATHY:  Should I not have stayed and— 

REED:  And what?  Gotten in the same fix as they are?

KATHY:  I feel so shamefully useless here. 

REED:  There’s nothing you can do. 

This is of course also the episode in which Reed lacks the courage to tell Kathy that he has heard of Manuel’s death from Chuck Nolan; being canny audiences, we assume that Manuel has been presumed dead as his “death scene” in Europe was inconclusive.  In an 18/07/1940, Professor Allen and Mark are reading the newspaper and are troubled.  Without referring to any specific headlines, Mark wonders, “Is there any hope at all?”  Professor Allen is a pacifist, so his position is unclear other than, “It’s a time for calling man to his higher destiny.”  

In what is the only Against the Storm episode to have been given much critical notice at all, the Memorial Day episode broadcast on 30/05/41, Professor Allen stands on his porch, feeling that it is Sunday, when he sees “six to seven children walking past” holding “small, rather inflexible flags.”  Speaking with his wife, he has a flashback to 1894 when he and Porky Mason were in a graveyard thinking of their relatives who had died in the Civil War.  Even at this young age, Professor Allen is represented as a pacifist, painting long allegorical shadows toward the First World War.  “Don’t do any good to kill people.  And it’s a sin.  Can you imagine killing anybody, Porky?” Porky admits that his grandfather wakes up and cries at night because he dreams about the man he killed in the Civil War, a soldier who was dying in the battlefield and to whom Porky’s grandfather gave a sip of water.  Jason asks, “Your Grandpa Mason?  He swears!”  Clearly emotion and pacifism are red-blooded American ideals if a Civil War, swearin’, spittin’ veteran can espouse them.  Unsurprisingly, Professor Allen reveals that Porky died on a Belgian battlefield.  This episode, in particular, is quite different fare to the average American soap opera of the period.  Unfortunately, no episodes survive once the US entered the war, nor is it easy to judge what exactly in 1941 moved the Peabody awarding committee to choose Against the Storm, though looking at its fellow recipients—including Norman Corwin’s We Hold These Truths—it may well have been the Memorial Day episode.

I found myself really investing in the characters of Against the Storm, particularly Kathy and Reed, and really wish there were more episodes that existed—or that I could at least find out what ultimately happened to the characters!!