Lowell Thomas:
"The American Storyteller"

Lowell Thomas certainly ranks among the handful of seminal figures in the history of broadcast journalism. But Thomas brought his remarkable energy, originality and nose for a good story to many fields. He distinguished himself as a newspaperman, war correspondent, lecturer, filmmaker, author, explorer, producer and media entrepreneur. He was best known as one of the most listened to and influential radio newscasters. We are proposing Lowell Thomas: The American Storyteller—a television documentary that will tell the story of his extraordinary, sometimes controversial, life and will use his achievements to shed light on the development of journalism and broadcasting in the 20th century.

In 1918 Thomas made the previously unknown Col. T.E. Lawrence—who had played a brave and important, if not gigantic, role as liaison between the British Army and one of the Arab leaders, Prince Feisal—into the greatest hero of war WW I, and he did it with a significantly embellished and romanticized account of his accomplishments: "And I believe," Thomas proclaimed (according to a surviving script), "that this young man, who built the Arabian Army and liberated Holy Arabia, will go down in history alongside Francis Drake, "Chinese" Gordon and Kitchener of Khartoum." Surely, this ranks among the more impressive examples of hero-making in modern history.

Until recently, Thomas was the lonely villain of this story: the P.T. Barnum-like showman, the shameless storyteller or mythmaker, the unscrupulous journalist, who inflated Lawrence into a hero, into a transatlantic star, in order to make his own fortune. (Thomas did earn over a million dollars, but his expenses were high; he ended up broke.) The assumption was that Lawrence himself did not want any part of the spotlight—an assumption Lawrence supported and then seemed to demonstrate by his behavior later in life, when he actively ran from his fame. However, letters, personal notes, and even photographs recently discovered in the Thomas Collection, and now beginning to circulate in academic circles, demonstrate that Lawrence himself was encouraging and working with Thomas in London, and that Lawrence and those around him were themselves the source of much of the embellishment and romance.

The documentary will pause to explore in some detail this intriguing case study in journalistic ethics. It remains, as does so much in Thomas's life, quite a visual story, since the slides, films and narration, if not the music, survive.

Storytelling is, unabashedly, a form of entertainment. So Thomas's work also raises important questions about the always uncomfortable relationship between journalism and entertainment—a relationship that grew more intense in the 20th century as entertainment media such as film, radio and television (although not often marching bands and orchestras) were put to the service of journalism, frequently with Thomas in the lead.

"As a journalist he was a storyteller," Eric Sevareid, on CBS, said of Lowell Thomas after he died in 1981. "A kind of wandering minstrel in prose. He loved stories about people, and that's the kind of journalism that is almost gone, I'm afraid. We are all too damn serious." Storytelling has a complex relationship with journalism. This documentary will explore that relationship. Given our belief in the political, social and cultural significance of journalism, we consider the issues raised here indeed to be "damn serious."

At the heart of this documentary, Lowell Thomas: The American Storyteller, will be a biography that presents Thomas's life and depict its impact on American media and American life. Thomas traveled from mining camps in Cripple Creek, Colorado, where his family had settled, to Princeton, to his friend Franklin Roosevelt's neighborhood in the Hudson Valley. He was a newspaper reporter, among the most popular lecturers of all time, the preeminent American radio newscaster, the voice of Fox's Movietone newsreels, among the very first newscasters on TV, the driving force behind Cinerama, and the founder and chairman of Capital Cities, which would go on to purchase ABC. He was among the first American reporters to explore the Middle East, Germany after World War I, Central Asia, India, Burma, Malaysia, Africa, New Guinea and Tibet.

This documentary will have an opportunity to watch, over Thomas's shoulder, as the various 20th-century information technologies come, go, merge and eventually begin to form (not without conflict, with Thomas sometimes in the middle of the conflict) the media-mix with which America, and much of the world, currently informs and entertains itself. The documentary may be able to draw, through Thomas's experiences, the occasional lesson in that coming, going and merging. And it will be alert—with the work of Walter Ong, Neil Postman and one of our advisors, Mitchell Stephens, in mind—to the effects of these technologies on storytelling, on journalism and on their audiences.

Thomas's long professional life spanned a time when both journalism and America were growing increasingly conscious of their own strength. The larger story Thomas was telling, perhaps, was the story of an increasingly confident, increasingly powerful, increasingly obligated America. Using journalism's growing power, he told Americans, in other words, of a world in which Americans (or Anglophones) had a heroic role to play. He began telling that story during the First World War; setting off for Europe and the Middle East under the auspices of President Wilson. Thomas continued telling this story through World War II; President Roosevelt wanted to make sure he was safe at home so he could keep telling it. And Thomas told this story through much of the Cold War. This documentary will consider how that story echoed, or even helped inspire, the story America learned to tell about itself in the 20th century.

It will weave in comments from broadcasting notables such as Daniel Schorr and Walter Cronkite. The project will feature interviews with a Lawrence authority, such as John Mach, author of The Prince of Our Disorder or Joel Hogdson, author of Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend, and a Middle Eastern scholar such as David Fromkin, author of "A peace to End All Peace." We will determine the strongest spokespersons for media scholarship from a field including project advisors Ray Fielding, author of History of the American Newsreel and Mitchell Stephens, author of Broadcast News, A History of News, and The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word, as well as project advisors who are among the best of today's media pundits: Excellence in Journalism's Tom Rosenstiel, and Bill Kovach, chair of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. The project has also reached out to working journalists, such as Christiane Amanpour of CNN and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, in an attempt to find the best voices to weigh Thomas's significance.

The production will draw upon Thomas's son, the former Lt. Governor of Alaska, Lowell Thomas Jr. He was involved in many productions with his father, producing Out of this World on Tibet, as well as, Flight to Adventure and the High Adventure television series. A few other people who worked with Thomas are still alive: one of his film directors, Otto Lang; a radio man, Cliff Carpenter; and one of the leaders of Capital Cities, Thomas Murphy who will provide insights and anecdotes.

However, the production's primary resource remains the seventy-year legacy of audio-visual primary sources available through the Thomas Collection, shot and recorded from Akaba to the North Pole, from Tibet to Timbuktu. These sources, saved by Lowell Thomas, have been made available for the first time, for this documentary, by his estate. (We have ,of course, explored other sources for material, such as the Fox Movietone News materials. This documentary, consequently, has the potential to be as rich in video and audio as any documentary ever made about a journalism. The mere opportunity to view some of the material in the Thomas Collection will give early-21st-century viewers a new look at 20th-century history—its biggest news stories, its most exotic locales, some of its most fascinating personages, and the remarkably energetic and accomplished journalist who probably saw and recorded more of them than anyone else.

Working with this compelling material gives us an extraordinary story to tell about one of the great American storytellers. And Lowell Thomas, this compelling and highly important character, gives us an opportunity to explore the nature of storytelling in American journalism.

This project, produced by national award winning filmmakers Richard Moulton and David Wright, is being made under the auspices of The History Institute for Education and Media. Over the past three years, Moulton and Wright have reviewed the Thomas materials with particular focus upon the media elements. Their work has been funded by a $10,000 grant from the Liam Foundation and an $8,000 grant from the National Geographic Society. An additional $20,000 from individual contributions has allowed Moulton to build a film bibliography of the Thomas materials.

To date a significant amount of research has been done to clarify and refine the theme and issues the documentary will explore. Discussions have included subjects beyond Thomas' personal achievements, including aspects of twentieth-century journalism, broadcasting and politics. Contacts have also been established with the ever-churning world of T. E. Lawrence scholarship. This project has been improved by these discussions and research. The project is anticipating a $30,000 planning grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to be awarded in June of 2004. Matching this grant, the Produces will expand the ongoing research into a treatment /script to be completed by November of 2004 for submission to NEH and private foundations for production funding. The film will go into production in 2005 and it is anticipated that it will be available for broadcast in 2006 on PBS through the American Experience series.

Current Projects
Lowell Thomas
Reshaping of the Middle East
Northeast Passage: New York to Montreal
Ongoing Oral History Project