Spotlight: Woodrow Wilson's Patria Recording—The record

The owner of this record, Clarence Johnson, procured it at auction for around $30 from a vendor in Canada several years ago. While he recalls the sale attracting attention, we believe that today it would garner much more interest among collectors of American historical memorabilia. The record looks poor, and the labels do not appear very serious, so it might easily be passed over.

We had originally thought the speeches on the record were delivered by Wilson himself, but by comparing these two sides with other recordings by Wilson, we are confident that this is some other actor reciting the war speech, probably made in the same month that the speech was delivered, April 1917. We know of no other Patria record releases, but it would seem the disc is the product of its age in terms of start-up record companies. The lateral-grooved patents of Victor and Columbia were still in force, so Patria's discs were vertically cut, just as many other burgeoning disc company's records were engineered at that time. The grooves are tight and the sides very long—each one running nearly five minutes in length. The sound is thin and poor, with the beginning of each side having a loud knocking sound at every revolution for about a minute or so. Light restoration and a few tricks of the trade have been employed to bring the sound of the recordings more forward.

The unnamed artist stuck to the script of Wilson's speech fairly closely. You can follow along with the text on the next page.

Next: The speech 1, 2, 3, 4