I usually avoid “spoilers” in writing about radio drama, not wanting to discourage folks from listening to the archived original broadcasts. But I also have old-newspaperman guilt about “burying the lede” and wanted to write the headline above. So today’s audio player is the FINAL episode of a 15-part “Adventures of Superman” serial broadcast in February and March of 1947:
“Knights of the White Carnation.”

Vincent Kirby, a powerful businessman and controlling-owner of one of the leading newspapers in Metropolis, is convicted of murder as leader of an American fascist organization. His arrest, trial and conviction take less than 10 broadcast minutes in that final episode, so that the series and get listeners started on its next multi-week cliffhanger storyline. Kirby and his cronies are “accused by the district attorney of murder, abduction, and conspiracy to spread race hatred and violence in the city schools.” The trial itself is not part of the broadcast, which jumps to the judge’s concluding speech:

“Vincent Kirby… You’ve heard the verdict of the jury finding you guilty… In doing what you did you committed crimes not only against humanity, but also against American democracy..
“Only the bigot and the demagogue, the creature whose own mind is twisted and poisoned whose mind is twisted and poisoned stoops to such practices in order to corrupt his countrymen. He’s like a vicious rattlesnake…
“You, Kirby, made the fatal mistake of giving way to blind, unreasonable hatred. You fed your desire for power by discriminating against minorities. You used your money and influence to corrupt, to murder, to become a traitor to your country.”

(“I made a mistake,” Kirby says, after being informed by the judge that plenty of American citizens have names like those, so his excuse of being against “foreigners” is as stupid as his ignorance of American history. But he’s already had three people killed. Oops. Well, this is a children’s show where we have to keep heroes and villains simple.)

Listen to the audio player above to hear the last episode… or hear the preceding 14 episodes of The Knights of the White Carnation series, items 67 to 80 on page 11 of the Old Time Radio Researchers’ Superman collection at the Internet Archive.

The story was broadcast February 26 through March 18, 1947. Is it a coincidence that less than a month later, on April 15, Jackie Robinson played his first Major League Baseball game as a Brooklyn Dodger? 

It might seem strange today that the Knights of the White Carnation story about organized bigotry did not focus on Black athletes — the basketball players attacked as “foreigners” were of Irish, Jewish, Italian and Polish extraction. Were the broadcasters trying to make the program at least marginally acceptable to an America that still had segregated Southern states? I’ll have to ask around, and search some media-history books, to find out whether that theme has been researched.

The story was one of several late-1940s Superman battles against bigotry and hate organizations; the difference here is that the business-suited community leaders dedicated to intolerance and bigotry are headed by the controlling owner of a newspaper, and his hatred of foreigners leads to multiple murders for which he and his minions are prosecuted. In final chapters he plans to use the newspaper to inspire high school students to riot. Along the way, he orders murders and kidnappings.

The unsubtle storyline doesn’t spend any time exploring the theme of bigotry at his newspaper, a Daily Planet competitor. That would have been great for this blog’s original goal of offering journalist-role portrayals for college students to discuss. Going in that direction also might have made the tale less of a rehash of earlier Superman stories. For example, racial discrimination on a youth baseball team set the previous year’s “The Clan of the Fiery Cross” rolling; a year later, “Knights of the White Carnation” opened with its leader obsessed with “foreign-sounding names” on a high school basketball team.

Speaking of lack of subtlety, one of those names is “Pulaski,” and one member of the Knights who knows his Polish-American history objects and delivers a lecture on the Revolutionary War hero by that name. His attempt to give the leader a civics lesson gets him murdered, while the Knights frame the champion high school players in a fake gambling-racket case.

That’s their first step in attempting to stir up hatred among impressionable youngsters in the city. Meanwhile, the Superman radio series is certainly trying hard to impress that same audience! I wonder if in the past 78 years serious academic researchers have gone back to find reactions to this 1947 storyline, including who wrote and produced it, and whether they faced any consequences. This was just before the years of the “red scare” and Hollywood blacklist of radio and TV writers and artists accused of being members of the Communist Party after delivering progressive messages about issues like racial equality? (I guess I’ll have to find their names, then read biographies or obituaries, and see if they are in “Red channels: the report of communist influence in radio and television,” 1950. Digital copies are available in various formats online, along with this column about it.)

Footnotes: This was the third major Superman radio adventure in a year to directly take on an American hate group. I wrote about the other two long ago:

The Hate Mongers Organization (April 1946)

The Clan of the Fiery Cross (June 1946)

Radio collector and historian J. David Goldin speculates (in his RadioGoldIndex database) that some episodes of “Knights of the White Carnation,” like “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” might be based on the Stetson Kennedy book, Inside The Invisible Empire,” discussed in the Fiery Cross item above.

For listeners who heard those two stories, Knights of the White Carnation may have sounded like an over-the-top rehash. Reviewer James Lantz of the Superman Home Page website summed up his disappointment with the story nicely, saying, “The writers gave us this lesson before, but they did a lot better with previous serials. This story was overblown, and performances were nearly laughable… We’ve basically been given a recycled plot that was executed poorly.”

Coincidentally, I just discovered that our late friend, the old-time radio researcher and serial blogger “Jimbo” interviewed James Lantz fourteen years ago about his monumental task of reviewing a decade of Superman radio episodes. Check it out!