One would hope some of that old footage survives, but the odds aren't very good. Everything was shot on cellulose nitrate film in those days, which is not only highly flamable, but over time will deteriorate in the can so that eventually you end up with a solid mass on the reel. The studios were notoriously careless about preserving old prints and negatives, which is why so many silent classics exist only in disjointed segments (or not at all), and newsreel footage was considered even less valuable, as it would be dated and no longer of interest in a couple of weeks.

This is also why there is virtually no surviving battlefield footage from World War I, most of what shows up on TV history shows actually being outtakes from early war movies. Stock footage of that sort, curiously enough, the studios often preserved more carefully than features, because they could resell it or reuse it in any number of new films. World War II battlefield footage was mostly shot on modern safety film stock, so a lot more survives.

J.T. McDaniel