On July 4, 1941five months before Pearl Harbora long poem titled Listen to the People, written by Stephen Vincent Benet, was presented on nationwide radio. The full text was also printed in Life magazine. Here’s the whole thing. I posted an excerpt of this poem at Chicago Boyz in 2006…in the comments, Steve Barton points to a podcast of a 1943 performance of this work.
UPDATE: Some Independence Day thoughts from Cassandra. Worth reading more than once.
1) OTRPod appears to have stopped ca. Nov 2007.
2) The links in the comments don’t point to the entry any longer.
3) This is a currently working download – Same Time, Same Station for 2006-09-06 (Even if that goes bad, you might still get it via The Wayback Machine)
4) If you want a wider range of their stuff, some of it is here