Town Meetings

Most popular U. S. adult educational radio program is NBC's America's Town Meeting of the Air. Its weekly Thursday audience is estimated at some 3,000,000. Last week it hit a new high when Utilities Man Wendell L. Wilkie and Assistant U. S. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson debated "How Can Government and Business Work Together?" With-in 36 hours 1,300 letters, six times any previous response, had poured into Manhattan's Town Hall, where the program originates.

Responsible for the phenomenal growth of this program in three years is George V. Denny Jr., director of the League for Political Education which founded Town Hall and the Town Meeting of the Air. Showman Denny had managed the Carolina Playmakers at University of North Carolina, been an actor on Broadway, managed a lecture bureau and directed Columbia University's Institute of Arts and Sciences before he arrived at Town Hall in 1930. The League, founded by a group of women suffragists, had for 40 years provided a platform for civic reformers, outstanding Americans from William Jennings Bryan to Will Rogers, and music concerts. But George Denny conceived a bigger mission for Town Hall. With a zealot's belief that revival of the old New England town meeting was needed to make democracy work, he began in 1935 to put on a weekly town meeting demonstration in Town Hall for a nation-wide radio audience. Soon a good part of the U. S. population was listening to his verbal prize fights and Town Hall had overflow audiences. Some 700 groups have been formed in many a U. S. town to listen to Town Hall's programs and discuss them afterwards. To foster local town meetings all over the U. S.. the League for Political Education, changing its name to Town Hall, Inc., with Denny as its president, last week established an extension division under Chester DeForest Snell, formerly head of the University of Wisconsin Extension Division.

Denny's programs consist of talks on controversial topics by provocative speakers and questions from the audience. What makes them exciting is uninhibited heckling. The speakers heckle each other and the audience heckles everybody. The auditors boo and cheer, are made up of the rich and poor, the well-informed and the ignorant. Once a questioner shouted: "I don't object to President Roosevelt's using the radio to inform the country on the state of the nation but I do object to his using it to propagate."

Spectacled, wide-mouthed George Denny, who acknowledges as his chief inspiration Nicholas Murray Butler, says he bars stuffed shirts and academicians from his programs. He also says he would rather put on Author Will Durant than Philosopher John Dewey. He admits his debates supply listeners with little information but conceives his role as that of stimulator. Mr. Denny wants his 3,000,000 auditors to be open-minded above all. An indefatigable user of hair tonics, bald Mr. Denny is, too.

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