Background
George Vernon Denny was born on August 29, 1899, in Washington, North Carolina. He was the son of George Vernon Denny and Carrie Ricks Cobb.
George Vernon Denny was born on August 29, 1899, in Washington, North Carolina. He was the son of George Vernon Denny and Carrie Ricks Cobb.
Denny received the B. S. in commerce from the University of North Carolina in 1922, although by then the theater had become his major interest.
A member of the Carolina Playmakers as a student, Denny remained with the troupe after graduation; and from 1924 to 1926 he taught dramatic production at the university. In 1926 he moved to New York City to act professionally and appeared in two short-lived Broadway productions. The following year he became manager for the W. B. Feakins Lecture Bureau; and in 1928 he was named director of the Columbia University Institute of Arts and Sciences, where he also managed a program of public lectures and concerts.
His growing experience in the field of adult education led to Denny's appointment as associate director of the League for Political Education in 1931. The organization, founded in 1894 by a group of suffragists, had long worked to encourage better citizenship through a more thorough knowledge of public issues. Since 1920 the league had sponsored lectures, short courses, and discussion groups in its headquarters at Town Hall, in New York City. When the director of the league, Robert E. Ely, retired in 1937, Denny was named his replacement. In 1938 the organization was renamed Town Hall, Inc. , and Denny became president, a position that he held until 1951.
Under Ely, Denny had initiated what would become his most notable achievement, the radio program "America's Town Meeting of the Air. " Disturbed at a neighbor's refusal to listen to Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fireside Chats because he bitterly opposed the president's policies, Denny conceived the idea of a radio program that would offer listeners diverse viewpoints on important, controversial national issues. Denny interested the National Broadcasting Company in an experimental series of programs that, "through the miracle of radio, was a nation-wide adaptation of the New England town meeting and a vast extension of the League's work. "
The series of six trial programs began on May 30, 1935, with Lawrence Dennis, A. J. Muste, Norman Thomas, and Raymond Moley discussing the question "Which Way America - Fascism, Communism, Socialism, or Democracy?" Impressed with the program and its audience response, the network agreed to carry "Town Meeting" for the 1935-1936 season as a sustaining (noncommercial) program. Reluctant to accept sponsors who might compromise the program's impartial and educational nature, Dennv broadcast on a sustaining basis except in 1944, when Reader's Digest became sponsor.
"Town Meeting" remained on the air until June 1956. Denny's role as moderator was central to the program's success. A former actor with an ebullient personality, he was able to mix a sufficient amount of showmanship with academic respectability, thus interesting a mass audience in serious issues. Indeed, Denny believed that the entertainment component of the program ensured fulfillment of its serious intent. His flair for the dramatic emerged after the evening's speakers had completed their opening statements.
Taking center stage in Town Hall, or in auditoriums around the country and abroad when the show went on the road, he directed questions from an audience ranging from 1, 000 to 1, 500 people, many of whom were highly agitated and hostile toward one or another of the speakers. Denny's was the first radio program to so involve the studio audience. Among the hundreds of persons who appeared on the program were Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, Harold Ickes, Robert A. Taft, Dorothy Thompson, Frances Perkins, Carl Sandburg, and Pearl Buck. At the height of "Town Meeting's" success in the 1940's, the speakers and topics arranged by Denny and his staff attracted an estimated audience of ten million listeners for each broadcast on approximately 170 stations of the NBC Blue network (later ABC).
The program stimulated the organization of hundreds of discussion groups throughout the nation that, after listening to the broadcast, considered the issues in living room "town meetings. " Denny's program was also one of the first to originate simultaneously from two or more locations. In 1943, for example, audiences in New York and London quizzed representatives of the American and British governments on postwar policies. "Town Meeting" was also one of the few public affairs programs aired in prime time, a fact that reflects its widespread popularity.
Denny left the program in February 1952 in a dispute over its management, believing that it had lost its vitality and sense of controversy. In 1954 he built the Covered Bridge Shopping Area in West Cornwall, Connecticut. He also organized and served as president of International Seminars, Inc. , and under its sponsorship conducted "town meeting" seminars in South America in 1958. He died in Sharon, Connecticut.
In Denny's opinion, "Town Meeting" played a vital role in the American political system. Democracy could survive threats to its existence only if citizens, especially political independents, carefully weighed the pros and cons of significant issues. And in a vast, technological society, only radio could transform the town-meeting concept of citizen involvement into a twentieth-century reality.
On June 12, 1924, Denny married Mary Traill Yellott, an actress with the Playmakers; they had three children. His first marriage had ended in divorce in 1943. On April 2, 1944, Denny married Jeanne Sarasy.