For almost a century politicians have had their voices shared over the radio and later TV. How did speeches of the past compare in terms of length and substance?
This is a very broad question as there has been tens of thousands of politicians from hundreds of countries in just the last few centuries alone. I am not sure if anyone has done any comprehensive analysis on the may speeches of those tens of thousands of politicians but I would suspect not. I am going to focus in on American politicians because I am guessing that is what you are talking about and I will be looking at American presidents because there is the most information surrounding them.
Radio because popular in the 1920’s. There were only a few decades before that where we have audio recordings of a US President. Specifically a 36 second recording of Benjamin Harrison around 1889 is the oldest we have. So to look at the period before radio, expect for a gap of less then 30 years, we will have to look at whatever speeches have been written down. Ifound this source that has transcripts of all the presidents famous speeches. you can go through them your self if you would like. However, I do not know of an easy way to analyze all those speeches and it is just their most famous speeches which is not necessarily represented of most of their speeches. One area of speeches that I know has been analyzed is inaugural addresses. This graph shows the length of every presidents inaugural address. as you can see, while all the recent presidents have hovered from anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 words, presidents from pre radio tended to vary widely in length, from 1,000-6,000 words, with William Henry Harrison as a notable outlier with over 8,000 words. Despite the wide variations, the average length of an inaugural address was certainly longer pre radio then modern inaugural addresses.
Under my quick analysis, speeches before radio were actually longer then speeches are now. Just guess but one reason could be this may be one of the few times they will hear the political speak, versus now where we hear presidents speak all the time and we would not want to listen to them drone on for hours in a single speech. However, there can certainly be a lot more analysis done to see differences in length.
