By: Andrew Glass

For six hours on the evening of Oct. 28, 1920, some 75,000 New Yorkers strode down Fifth Avenue in an old-fashioned torchlight parade led by Calvin Coolidge, the Republican vice presidential nominee.

That parade through Manhattan presaged an era of GOP dominance: Republicans controlled Congress and the White House for the next dozen years. It also marked the end of the time when candidates could communicate in real time only to those voters who could hear their words.

Radio would change all that. But it had yet to enter the political scene when President Warren Harding spoke at a Nov. 11, 1921, Arlington National Cemetery ceremony marking the burial of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Co. carried Harding’s speech via its lines to rallies organized by the American Legion at New York’s Madison Square Garden and San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium.

“Never before had so many heard simultaneously a single human voice,” Jerry Wallace writes in his recently published book, “Calvin Coolidge: Our First Radio President.”

On Feb. 8, 1922, Harding had a radio installed in the White House. As his successor, Coolidge became the first president to broadcast from the White House. His remarks on Washington’s birthday in 1924 were heard on 42 stations from coast to coast.

Later in that presidential election year, for the first time, millions of Americans were able to tune into the Democratic and Republican national conventions. Then, on the evening before the election, Coolidge again made history when the largest radio audience ever heard his final campaign speech. After Coolidge won handily, Americans listened to the radio, again for the first time, as their president took the oath of office in March 1925.

More widely remembered are President Franklin Roosevelt’s patrician-accented “fireside chats” during the Great Depression, which left a deep impression on the nation’s collective psyche.

In contrast to radio, it took television much longer to have an effect on the nation’s political consciousness.

In 1940, the Republicans invited both RCA and Philco, which were marketing television sets for $7,000 a pop in today’s money, to televise their national convention in Philadelphia. But it was strictly a gee-whiz venture; seven year later, there were still barely 44,000 sets in the United States, compared with 40 million radios.

Television, of course, came to dominate the political airwaves. Most people who listened on the radio to the first presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon in 1960 were convinced that Nixon had won. Television, however, caught Nixon’s pallor and five o’clock shadow and told a different tale.

Given the huge role that politically oriented social networks are playing in the 2008 campaign, it’s hard to recall that when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, the World Wide Web was in its birth pangs. The time had not yet come when a lowly PC, when mated to cyberspace, connects us to a gigantic hive, with endless possibilities to entertain and inform.

Nowadays, to air a political event, you need neither a government license nor a multimillion-dollar broadcast tower. A fast Internet connection mated to a $500 computer and fed by a $500 camcorder will do.

There’s clearly more to come. Folks in rural Sweden will be able to watch this year’s U.S. national political conventions wirelessly and in real time on high-definition monitors. That’s still not normally possible on this side of the Atlantic — even in the White House. But it could be possible soon if U.S. regulators and entrepreneurs got off their duffs.

The next president will have the technological tools in hand to run an administration that lets citizens check on the status of tax refunds or apply for passports on individually customized government Web pages.

If a president inaugurates such a site, I’ll light an old-fashioned torch, click on my iPod and march past the White House in gratitude.

Andrew Glass is a Politico contributing editor.

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