Hear It Now

A Biography of a Labor Union

English · History, Social Science, Radio

Hear It Now was a CBS radio documentary program that brought listeners reports on current events and issues through recorded voices, interviews, and on-the-scene sound. Rather than presenting a fictional drama, it assembled documentary material to give a close-up account of the people and forces shaping public life.

This recording is identified as “A Biography of a Labor Union.” Its subject points to an examination of organized labor through the history and experience of a union, presented in the program’s reportorial style. The documentary approach lets voices and sounds carry the account, offering a more immediate sense of the subject than a conventional studio discussion.

The result is thoughtful, serious radio journalism: a compact portrait of a social institution and the people connected to it. Hear It Now is especially compelling for listeners interested in labor history and in the sound of postwar American public affairs as radio documented them.

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.