Radio: Voice of History

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Last week The Pilgrims landed and the situation was in hand. Their good ship Mayflower was brought to berth by the hand of Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, Pulitzer Prize poet, former FORTUNE editor. His American Story (NBC, Sat., 7 p.m., E.W.T.) had made the historic landfall in the eighth week after the series opened with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. At this rate Librarian MacLeish's program might well go on for some time.

American Story was MacLeish's idea, and NBC's Inter-American University of the Air adopted it. A frankly educational venture, it is composed chiefly of quotations from the explorers and those who wrote about them in their time. This source material is the core of MacLeish's purpose. He wanted the average, unscholarly American to hear the original accounts of the men who were there, or close by.

American Story has produced some interesting effects. One was a contemporary account of the 1763 defeat of Pontiac and his Indians by a Swiss Colonel named Henri Bouquet at the Battle of Bushy Run. Wrote the Provost of the College of Philadelphia at the time: "Those who have only experienced the severities and dangers of a campaign in Europe, can scarcely form an idea of what is to be done and endured in an American war. . . . In an American campaign everything is terrible; the face of the country, the climate, the enemy. There is no refreshment for the healthy nor relief for the sick. A vast unhospitable desert, unsafe and treacherous, surrounds them, where victories are not decisive but defeats are ruinous; and simple death is the least misfortune which can happen to them." Because Librarian MacLeish conceived American Story as the account of the settlement of America, North and South, his chronicle joins the two continents. Last week, for instance, he gave Governor William Bradford's record of the founding of Plymouth and Pedro de Valdivia's record of the establishment of Santiago, Chile, by the Spaniards. Says MacLeish: "I think one reason the Americas find it so difficult to get along, one with the other, is that we don't understand our common background. From Alaska to the tip of South America, every stage of life was the same."

MacLeish's worthy purpose, however, has yet to be eloquently realized. His scripts which have a certain eloquence, nevertheless seem overloaded with conversation, make little use of advanced, dramatic radio techniques, are dignified and resonant rather than compelling.