A positive expression of corporate social leadership supervised by the advertising and public relations specialists of Bat­ ten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBD&O), the Cavalcade exemplified the higher concepts of corporate public affairs, far removed from the give and take of American party politics, which by 19 35 had become manifest in a daily cycle of reaction and attack. By the early 1950s, company advertising and public relations specialists proudly pointed to increasingly favorable opinion polling data associating DuPont with "Better Things for Better Living." Reflecting on BBD&O's long and successful relationship with DuPont, Bruce Barton attributed ​​the turnaround in part to two factors: women's nylons and the Cavalcade of America.

BBD&O's aggressive merchandising of Cavalcade involved celebrated authors, dramatists, actors, actresses, educators, and historians. From 1935 to 1938 the Cavalcade's historical advisers included Dixon Ryan Fox-the president of Union College and the New York Historical Association-and Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger of Harvard. The arrangement enabled BBD&O to merchandise the program as a contribution to the "new social history" with which Fox and Schlesinger had become identified as co-editors of the 12-volume A History of American Life. Suspended between the liberal sensibilities of the new social history, represented by the collaboration of Fox and Schlesinger, and the sponsor's predilection for rhetorical attacks upon Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Cavalcade offered a counter-subversive drama of self-reliance, resourcefulness, and defiance animated by the misfortunes of typically natural phenomena: grasshopper plagues, flash floods, fire, drought, dust storms, blizzards, ice floes, and log jams. Successful resolution demanded heroic acts of voluntarism, community spirit, and the sterner stuff that defined a heritage. As one flinty character explained while he helped extinguish a forest fire threatening his town, "What we struggled to get, we fight to keep."

The dramatization of the personal meaning of business enterprise played a role in the Cavalcade's striking use of female protagonists. In its first season, the Cavalcade presented a hierarchical schedule of broadcasts beginning with "Women's Emancipation," the story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, and Susan B. Anthony; "Women in Public Service," the story of Jane Addams and Hull House; "Loyalty to Family," the story of frontier widow Ann Harper; and "Self-Reliance," the story of planter Eliza Lucas' efforts to establish indigo in Carolina. Many Cavalcade women turned up as agents of production. For example, "The Search for Iron," broadcast in 1938, dramatized the story of the Mer­ rit family's discovery of a massive iron ore deposit in Minne­ sota's Mesabi Range. The search, spanning three generations, featured matriarch Hepzabeth Merrit, log-hewn home life, and a frontier quest for resources. The concluding "story of chemistry" explained how miners used DuPont dynamite to excavate iron ore from "mother Earth," an example of the modern world's extraordinary engineering feats and of dynamite's use for constructive projects. Not without lighter moments, the "Search for Iron" began, as did many early Cavalcade broad­ casts, with a medley of popular show tunes, in this case "Some­ day My Prince Will Come" and "Heigh Ho" from Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

By the early 1940s, the Cavalcade of America had become the commitment to well-merchandised institutional entertainment that its specialists had long sought. Specialists attributed the Cavalcade's success to its capacity to assimilate the functions of broadcast education and entertainment, with each adjusted to fit the circumstances of the changing leadership of the DuPont Company; the inroads of middle management using positivist audience research; and the onset of World War II, which made possible and even desirable the expression of democratic sensibilities.

After 1940 the Cavalcade featured a new mixture of ama­teur and academic historians who assumed greater program responsibilities. Professor Frank Monaghan of Yale delivered on-air story introductions. A memorable broadcast performance by poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg and the performance of poet Stephen Vincent Benet's The People, Yes signaled the relaxation of the program sponsor's editorial outlook. Thereafter, the formulaic dramatization of the American past culminating in "better living" distanced itself from the crisis of Depression-era business leadership that had called the Cavalcade into being. Ever so slowly, the Cavalcade decamped from the usable past for the intimate terrain of "more," "new," and "better living" merchandised in a build-up of stars and stories.

In concert with program producer BBD&O, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) took the Cavalcade on the road for timely broadcast performances before the network's "pressure groups." The first of three remote broadcasts originated from the Chicago Civic Opera House, starring Raymond Massey in Robert Sherwood's adaptation of Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. Another starred Helen Hayes in "Jane Addams of Hull House," broadcast from the Milwaukee convention of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. A third program, attended by DuPont's Richmond, Virginia, employees, featured Philip Merivale in "Robert E. Lee," based on his­ torian Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of the general.

Program specialists acknowledged the advantage of featur­ing characters already familiar to listeners, many of whom regarded historical figures as voices of authority. The ideal protagonist was heroic yet humble. Of the 750 Cavalcade radio programs broadcast from 1935 to 1953, biographical treatments of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln led the list ( 15 programs each), followed by Benjamin Franklin (9 programs) and Thomas Jefferson (8). Washington personified a recurring Cavalcade metaphor cementing America's revolutionary struggle for freedom with business' modern-day struggle to escape the regulatory tyranny of the New Deal. In a dramatization of the first inauguration entitled "Plain Mr. President," for example, the Cavalcade's Washington invoked the "sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican form of government ... staked on the experiment entrusted to the American people." Washington prayed that "the invisible hand of the almighty being guide the people of the United States to wise measures, for our free government must win the affection of its citizens and command the respect of the world." The weekly "story of chemistry," entitled "news of chemistry's work in our world," noted that "Washington, the practice economist, would no doubt have been pleased with modern house paints that actually clean themselves."

Gaining the confidence of their sponsor, who at last warmed to the idea of entertainment, the Cavalcade's producers found themselves able to take advantage of a wider range of story material. This new range of material expanded the program's original basis in the historical past and the world of letters to feature adaptations of Hollywood screenplays and original works for radio that dramatized democratic sensibilities. In fall 1940, the Cavalcade presented the story of "Wild Bill Hickok" woven around a ballad composed and performed by Woody Guthrie; "Town Crier" Alexander Woolcott, on loan from the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), who performed his "word picture" of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"; and a special Christmas night broadcast of Marc Connelly's "The Green Pastures" featuring the Hall Johnson Choir. The adaptation of popular screenplays the following season enlarged upon the plan. In November 1941 the Cavalcade presented Henry Fonda in "Drums along the Mohawk" and Errol Flynn in "They Died with Their Boots On"; in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, the program featured Orson Welles in "The Great Man Votes" and James Cagney in "Captains of the Clouds." The appearance of stars who volunteered personal feelings about the company at the conclusion of select broadcasts spoke volumes for the program sponsor's growing confidence in a corporate public relations strategy inconceivable in the early years of the program.

The Cavalcade signaled an ,appreciation among specialists and business leaders alike that carefully scripted investments in dramatic anthology programming could, in the long run, rees­tablish a political climate conducive to the autonomous expansion of corporate enterprise. Business' contest with the administration for social and political leadership would continue, specialists hoped, divorced from rhetorical reaction and counterproductive short-term effects.

After World War II, the dramatic anthology became the preferred vehicle of corporate public relations among the clients of BBD&O, with tremendous significance for the television of the 1950s. BBD&O-produced programs included Cavalcade of America, General Electric Theater, U.S. Steel Hour (Theater Guild on the Air), and Armstrong Circle Theater. As the proto­ type of well-merchandised institutional entertainment, the Cavalcade set the precedent for them all, including the merchandising of programs undertaken by General Electric Theater host and program supervisor Ronald Reagan.

Ever responsive to the need of the moment, the free enterprise subtext of radio's Cavalcade continued unabated. At times, company public relations and advertising specialists seemed incapable of any other than dramaturgical expression. When the DuPont Company became entangled in an antitrust suit in 1949, for example, the Cavalcade dramatized the benefits of large-scale monopoly in "Wire to the West," the story of Western Union's consolidation of rival telegraph companies; in "Beyond Cheyenne," a story about "how the packing industry started as small business and became big business"; and in "The Immortal Blacksmith," "a story of the invention of the electric motor by Tom Davenport, ... which never amounted to anything until big companies took hold of it and converted its power into conveniences for the millions." The Cavalcade's sponsor's reluctance to broadcast a more explicit defense spoke for a certain dramatic success.