Blevins Davis: In Pursuit of Pageantry
By Brian Burnes
For several years Blevins Davis taught English at William Chrisman High School in Independence, earning a reputation for researching and producing historical pageants. ( JCHS Archives: Strauss-Peyton Collection.)
Sixty-nine years ago this month, many Kansas City area admirers of monarchy got up early.
The coronation of Elizabeth II was scheduled to begin at noon London time on June 2, 1953.
In Kansas City, live radio network reporting of the event began at 4:30 a.m.
Those who tuned into KCMO-AM for the broadcast could hear – through the occasional passing clouds of static - the peal of church bells and the voices of network radio correspondents describing one of the year’s most anticipated international news events, the first coronation of a woman sovereign of England since Queen Victoria 114 years before.
Among them was a former Independence, Mo., English teacher who long had exhibited a huge enthusiasm for just the kind of pageantry then on display inside and outside Westminster Abbey.
Throughout the broadcast the New York network radio anchor patched in and out of the live feed being transmitted across the Atlantic.
“We take you now,” he said at one point, “to Blevins Davis…”
PAGEANTS AND PLAYS
Earlier this month four days of events observed the 69th “Platinum Jubilee” anniversary of Elizabeth II’s June 1953 coronation.
From June 2 through 5 experts in British protocol and ceremony held forth on television, detailing the events in and around Buckingham Palace which included – during the “Platinum Party at the Palace” - the rock group Queen and the actual Elizabeth II sitting down to tea with the animated Paddington Bear.
This photo of Blevins Davis posing with a crown and sceptre may date to 1937, when NBC assigned Davis to serve as a radio correspondent at the coronation of George VI in London. (JCHS Archives)
In 1953 Blevins Davis had been one of those royal watchers.
He had been among many commentators describing the coronation live on network radio. Edward R. Murrow, for example, led the Columbia Broadcasting System, or CBS, radio contingent.
Davis, meanwhile, was part of the American Broadcasting Co., or ABC, crew.
Nobody could question his qualifications. By his own estimate he had, by 1953, spent some 30 years researching the customs of coronations.
By that June he had spent several weeks instructing Jackson County residents on what to expect from the ceremonies.
He had co-hosted four weekly KCMO-AM broadcasts describing the upcoming event.
He also had published two articles in The Kansas City Star describing the history of past coronations and the unexpected awkward moments that sometimes had occurred during them.
He expected nothing to go awry during the Elizabeth II coronation.
“This year on June 2 those who remember the good and bad omens of past coronations predict that when Elizabeth is crowned queen and her husband, the popular duke of Edinburgh, pledges his allegiance to her, no ill-omen will mar the pageantry, pomp and ceremony on the greatest day in the lives of the most popular young couple in the world,” Davis wrote.
In 1953 Blevins Davis asked President Harry Truman for help in obtaining credentials admitting him to the upcoming coronation of Elizabeth II that June in London. The official invitation later arrived. (JCHS Archives)
Today the Jackson County Historical Society archives include documents and artifacts that detail Davis’s path from to London from Independence. That includes the framed certificate inviting Davis to the 1953 coronation, as well as his admittance voucher to the 1947 wedding of Elizabeth II to Royal Navy Lt. Philip Mountbatten.
Born in 1903, Davis was the son of Charles Ammon Davis, an Independence banker and businessman, and Julia Blevins Davis. After completing high school, their son attended Kansas City Junior College and then Princeton University before withdrawing apparently because of family financial reverses.
He ultimately graduated from the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1925.
Back in Independence Davis directed plays at William Chrisman High School, where he taught English. He also served as a pianist at Independence weddings and church services.
Historical pageants, however, especially interested him.
A 1914 pageant had been staged in St. Louis to mark the 150th anniversary of that city’s founding. Seven years later a similar production in Sedalia observed Missouri’s 1821 entry into the union.
In 1927 Independence residents staged a similar show to celebrate the community’s centennial.
Davis played piano during the production.
“The platform is crowded with men and women and children out of the past,” the Kansas City Times reported in a review of the show that October.
“There are silk-hatted men with polka dot kerchiefs and puffy iron gray side whiskers. There are young women with lacy parasols, slim waists (and) frilled skirts that sweep the floor.”
The production was sufficiently large – including a 100-voice choir – that workmen had to build a temporary additional stage inside the city’s new Memorial Building, dedicated the year before at the corner of West Maple Avenue and North Pleasant Street.
Davis continued to stage theatrical productions across Independence.
In 1928 he served as co-director of “Miss Cherry Blossom,” an operetta produced at William Chrisman High School.
Five years later Davis co-directed the “Elizabeth, the Queen” - a drama by playwright Maxwell Anderson about the 16th century British monarch Elizabeth I - at Chrisman High. A program from that production is held at the Society archives.
Also in 1933, when workers completed the renovation of what is now the Truman Courthouse in Independence, mayor Roger Sermon appointed Davis chair of the historic pageant to be staged in September.
“A Century of Progress,” written and directed by Davis, included a cast of about 350 persons, which included a 150-voice choir accompanied by a 40-piece orchestra.
“I am the spirit of 1827,” the pageant began, according to the script held in the Society’s archives.
“In all communities the first thing that mankind sought, once he was established, was a seat of justice, so we may safely say that the most famous and the most cherished relic of Jackson County is the old log courthouse, forerunner of all the temples of justice yet erected or to be erected.”
In 1935 local education officials named Davis principal of Independence Junior High School.
But he had displayed ambitions beyond Independence, directing a play by the University of Kansas City Varsity Players. He also signed on as advertising manager for Kansas City’s Jubilesta, a municipal celebration designed to promote the city and featuring much of the same kind of pageantry he already had helped organize in Independence.
Events included a procession through Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium by 47 young women competing to serve as Jubilesta Queen.
In 1935 Davis applied for, and received, a drama fellowship at Yale University.
Education officials in Independence agreed to give him a leave of absence.
It was at Yale that Davis happened to encounter press baron William Randolph Hearst. According to Sharon Bagg, author of “Impresario from Missouri: Blevins Davis and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy,” published in 1998 in “Kawsmouth: A Journal of Regional History,” Hearst commissioned Davis to write a series of articles about the upcoming coronation of George VI.
As a student Davis had compiled a scrapbook detailing past British coronations. He notified his father back in Independence and gave him specific instructions on where he could find it.
“Send me file six, drawer three, folder one on coronations,” Davis told his father, according to a 1949 Kansas City Star article.
The subsequent series of coronation stories for Hearst caught the attention of National Broadcasting Co. executives, who agreed to meet with Davis.
Davis wanted NBC to send him to London to cover the George VI coronation.
The radio executives instead offered Davis $1,000 for his coronation scrapbook, saying the fee would finance his way to London.
Davis, according to The Star, declined.
“Never,” Davis said. “That scrapbook goes with me.”
In the end the scrapbook went with Davis, who received the assignment anyway. For radio audiences across America Davis described the coronation of George VI, who had ascended to the throne upon the abdication of his brother Edward VIII, who later married the American, Wallis Simpson.
The Star, reporting on Davis’s sudden prominence, later described how “Independence residents have long been familiar with his interest and skillful direction of church pageants, school plays, little theater programs and centenary celebrations.”
Not long after, during a June 1937 appearance before the Independence Chamber of Commerce, Davis described the London coronation as “the most splendid medieval pageant in the world today.”
He detailed how he had been stationed in a sound-proof glass booth not far from the west door of Westminster Abbey as he described the arrival of the royal family
The only ceremony in this country capable of arousing similar feelings in the American public, Davis added, was a presidential inauguration.
First lady Bess Truman, speaking with an unidentified woman (left) helped Blevins Davis (right) receive assistance from the State Department when he brought several theatrical productions to Europe after World War II. (JCHS Archives)
A “SEVERE DENT IN HIS FORTUNE”
In a 1919 Kansas City Times social column, readers learned that among the more than 25 high school students attending a recent party at the Davis family home on South Main Street in Independence had been Fred Wallace.
Wallace, a 1919 graduate of Chrisman High School, was the younger brother of Bess Wallace, who married Harry S. Truman that same year.
By 1945 Davis long had grown friendly with both Harry and Bess Truman, sometimes serving as an escort for their daughter Margaret and also requesting their occasional assistance during his career as a theatrical producer.
The Society’s archives do not include any records documenting Davis’s involvement in the planning of the newly-elected President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural ceremonies, nor do the Blevin Davis materials at the Truman Library.
But 1949 proved a busy year for Davis, as that June he staged a production of “Hamlet” in Denmark.
That year, according to Margaret Truman Daniel in “Bess W. Truman,” her 1986 biography of her mother, Davis “put his money and theatrical experience at the disposal of the United States. Mother smoothed his path to State Department approval.”
The “Hamlet” production, along with others Davis staged for international audiences, contributed to the later establishment of a State Department cultural exchange program sponsoring artistic companies abroad, Daniel wrote.
Davis apparently financed these productions with some of his own money, Daniel added, writing how these investments “put a severe dent in his fortune.”
In 1946 Davis had married Marguerite Sawyer Hill, the wealthy widow of James Norman Hill, son of James J. Hill, a railroad tycoon.
Bess Truman had attended their wedding at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington and then had invited the couple to a White House dinner in their honor.
Upon his wife’s death in 1948, Davis inherited $9 million, according to Daniel.
In the late 1940s Davis purchased Glendale Farm, a 410-acre estate on Lee’s Summit Road that once had been the country home of E.F. Swinney, Kansas City banker and philanthropist.
Davis restored the three-story stone-pillared home on the property and invested further in its landscaping.
During the 1948 Christmas season Davis sent embossed invitations to approximately 100 friends, asking them to attend a holiday reception on his estate for Harry, Bess and Margaret Truman.
In the early 1950s Davis helped stage a revival of “Porgy and Bess” featuring an all-Black cast. With State Department blessing it toured London and Berlin to great acclaim. When the production premiered in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), it represented the first time an American theatrical company had been permitted to stage a production in the former Soviet Union.
By 1953 Davis could boast of a long list of theatrical successes.
That January he wrote President Truman requesting that a letter be sent on his behalf to Sir Bernard Marmaduke, the Duke of Norfolk, who was in charge of the upcoming Elizabeth II coronation ceremonies.
The duke, Davis wrote Truman, “has final say on all plans by hereditary right. This letter will serve as a credential for me.”
On January 15, 1953 – five days before he left the presidency - Truman sent a memo to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, asking that he assist Davis.
“He is very anxious to meet the Duke of Norfolk who is Earl Marshal of England,” Truman wrote.
“I was wondering if that arrangement could be made?”
One June 2 Davis was at his appointed spot at Westminster Abbey.
HEAVY ON THE ADJECTIVES
Davis likely knew what his role called for that day.
In the 1950s Blevins Davis co-produced an all-Black revival of “Porgy and Bess” which toured Europe and Russia. Many cast members autographed a program from the show, among them Leontyne Price, Irene Williams and Elizabeth Foster. (JCHS Archives).
So did Russell Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times who, back in 1953, when employed by The Baltimore Sun, traveled to London to take over that newspaper’s London bureau.
Baker, who had won a reputation in Baltimore for his visual prose, believed he had been chosen specifically to cover the coronation.
The event, he later wrote, was made for television. However, in 1950, only about nine percent Americans owned TV sets.
By 1953 “television was still learning to toddle,” Baker wrote in “The Good Times,” his newspaper memoir. The coronation, meanwhile, “was still an immensely important newspaper story.
“The task of a reporter was to bring it to life on a printed page, to make the reader see it with something of the same intensity that television would later produce with cameras, satellite transmission and a thousand other technological wonders still to come.”
Baker described how, once he found his Westminster Abbey seat, he took out his notebook and began compiling notes heavy with adjectives.
“Tier upon tier of dark blue seats edged with gold…the stone walls draped with royal purple and gold…the stained glass of rose windows transforming the gray outer light into streams of red, yellow, green and blue high up against the Abbey roof…”
Most of these descriptions appeared, Baker noted, largely unchanged in the story that appeared in The Baltimore Sun.
Those across Kansas City, meanwhile, listening to the ABC radio feed, heard something quite similar delivered by an unnamed BBC commentator, describing the interior of the abbey in the moments just before the coronation ceremony.
“Already we see the number of processions moving slowly through the abbey,” he says during the broadcast, today accessible by way of AUDRA, the American University Digital Radio Archives in Washington, D.C.
“The four corners of the theater are the four massive fluted stone pillars supporting the great arches which soar into the shadowy heights of the abbey roof high above the arc lamps…and between them to our left and right…are the galleries hung with blue fabric, the blue of a summer sea, the galleries where the peers and the peeresses are seated in their crimson robes with capes of white miniver, in tier upon tier of seats, a mass of miniver and crimson barred with blue, rising to the great rose windows of the abbey…”
Midway through the archived audio, John MacVane of the ABC radio network, serving as program anchor, cues Blevins Davis.
What follows is static and then several seconds of silence.
At one point apparent studio confusion can be heard, with somebody saying he had “lost London commentary.”
Whatever adjectives Davis had at the ready had been lost over the Atlantic.
Framed Coat of Arms to Belvins Davis granted from the College of Arms, in London.
INTERPRETING THE MEANINGS OF MONARCHY
Ultimately, Russell Baker seemed to dismiss the importance of the 1953 coronation.
“The thing was really nothing more than a pageant, an immense pageant, to be sure, but a pageant nevertheless,” he wrote.
British citizens, however, may have felt differently.
“As the coach winds through London arteries, a roar like a vocal powder train follows,” Marcel Wallenstein, Europe correspondent for The Star, wrote in describing the reaction of spectators watching Elizabeth’s procession toward Westminster Abbey.
“To many staid Britishers, it was time for shedding the reserve of decades. Many saw the young queen as a reappearance of the first Elizabeth, who helped an impoverished island kingdom rise to world power.”
Wallenstein, who would report for The Star for decades, could not help feeling the emotion in the crowd.
“The most cynical observer could not watch this roaring demonstration without displaying his bare emotion,” he wrote.
“In a lifetime of reporting, I have seen nothing like this day in London.”
The 1953 coronation since has been examined by communication scholars for its role in the evolution of broadcast media, especially television.
“The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media and the British Public, 1952-53,” a 2019 book by Edward Owens, detailed how the “temporal immediacy of television” combined with the domestic settings in which most British viewers watched the coronation “transformed the emotional dimensions of monarchy…”
For the first time ever, Owens added, “kinship and friendship groups across the country were able, via the BBC’s live transmission, to visually consume and interpret the meanings of monarchy together.”
In Kansas City, the Federal Communications Commission had issued the community’s first VHF permit to WDAF-TV in 1948.
WDAF-TV then was an affiliate of NBC, which went to great lengths to make same-day film coverage of the 1953 coronation available by flying the film by jet over the Atlantic Ocean to Boston.
NBC was scheduled to broadcast a 90-minute wrap-up of the coronation beginning at 8:30 p.m. in Kansas City. Because of an announcers’ strike, however, WDAF-TV was prevented from televising any of the coronation footage.
On June 3, the day after the coronation, the FCC issued a permit for a second VHF permit for the Kansas City market – KCMO-TV (now KCTV)..
By 1959 almost 86 percent of Americans would have a television in their home.
“IN THESE COMPLICATED DAYS”
Davis died in London in 1971, at age 68. His remains are interred, along with those of his parents, at Independence’s Woodlawn Cemetery.
Upon his death his legacy included the State Department’s cultural exchange program that had become official under President Dwight Eisenhower.
Davis’s legacy may also be the continuing appeal of large historical pageants in his own community.
In 1950 Kansas City had observed its centennial with a pageant, “Thrills of a Century,” at Swope Park’s Starlight Theatre.
In 2000 some 42,000 spectators filled Arrowhead Stadium to witness the commemoration of the city’s 150th anniversary with a pageant that included network news anchor and former Kansas City journalist Walter Cronkite, a 1,000-voice choir, a vintage military aircraft flyover and singers Little Richard, Oleta Adams and Kenny Rogers.
In 1921 the state of Missouri had published an instruction guide containing suggestions as to how best plan such pageants.
“It is a pleasure in these complicated days to reverse our vision and see things pass before us in a large outline, simpler and more striking because of the dramatic method in which they are presented through pageantry,” it read.
Davis had his own perspective on the topic.
Upon his return from 1937 coronation of George VI, Davis spoke before the Independence Chamber of Commerce, whose members had invited him to describe his experiences and explain the coronation’s significance.
“It is wrong to consider coronation as a ‘show,’ ’’Davis told chamber members.
“It is a magnificent religious service, symbolic from the bars of ermine on the peers’ robes to the king’s scepter.
“The jewels and decorations were not for the purpose of display, but for tribute.”
Brian Burnes is board president of the Jackson County Historical Society.