Beyond the Black and White TV

Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America

Benjamin M. Han

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781978803831, 9781978803848
• eBook ISBN: 9781978803855
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This is the first book that examines how "ethnic spectacle" in the form of Asian and Latin American bodies played a significant role in the cultural Cold War at three historic junctures: the Korean War in 1950, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the statehood of Hawaii in 1959. As a means to strengthen U.S. internationalism and in an effort to combat the growing influence of communism, television variety shows, such as The Xavier Cugat Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Chevy Show, were envisioned as early forms of global television. Beyond the Black and White TV examines the intimate moments of cultural interactions between the white hosts and the ethnic guests to illustrate U.S. aspirations for global power through the medium of television. These depictions of racial harmony aimed to shape a new perception of the United States as an exemplary nation of democracy, equality, and globalism.

1

Narratives of Integration

Ethnic Spectacle and Las Vegas

The popular imagery of Las Vegas in the American cultural imagination consists of bright neon lights, breathtaking shows, and high-rolling casinos—an oasis in the desert. The desert not only epitomizes an empty, arid space but also allegorizes a land waiting to be tamed, civilized, and modernized, further invoking the American frontier myth. According to Catrin Gersdorf, the desert is an iconic metaphor of America, symbolic of its national and cultural identity.1 On the one hand, the names of such Las Vegas hotels as the Sands, the Sahara, and the Desert Inn resonate with the cultural image of the tourist city within the desert. On the other hand, the abundance of bright city lights and entertainment elevates Las Vegas as one of the top tourist destinations of the world. Thus the desert is pivotal in shaping the cultural imagery of Las Vegas. The desert as a geographical landscape undergoes a transformation in its symbolic meaning from a signifier of lack and absence to a signifier of abundance and excess. More specifically, the phrase “The desert will bloom” aptly characterizes the transformation of Las Vegas from a nonsignificant geopolitical space to a flourishing site of ethnic spectacle that was instrumental in integrating the city into the U.S. national imaginary during the Cold War. Indeed, the polarizing Cold War narratives of containment and integration informed the need for Las Vegas to develop into a modern capitalist city in order to curb the threat of Communism.

Las Vegas and the Cold War

While Las Vegas has been relegated to the margins of the cultural Cold War, the desert evolved into an essential geopolitical space in which mythical narratives of racial harmony manifested in Cold War racial logics would enhance U.S. internationalism. Prior to the development of Las Vegas as an entertainment capital featuring Asian Pacific, African American, and Latin American performers, the city was chosen as an important site of military defense during World War II. In 1941, the U.S. government unveiled its plan to establish a large magnesium factory to subsidize the British explosives industry affected by Luftwaffe bombings.2 The issue of civil defense was at the forefront of political debate when President Harry Truman established the Federal Civil Defense Administration in January 1951 “to quell America’s fears about a Soviet attack.”3 Civil defense was believed to be instrumental in training Americans about self-control, and the U.S. government hoped the initiative would “eliminate the moral deficits that made them such unsatisfactory weapons in the struggle against communism.”4 Thus mass media, including radio and television, played a pedagogical role in disseminating information about civil defense to the American public, further instilling the idea that each citizen was personally responsible for helping the United States in the battle against the Soviet Union.5 Hence Las Vegas emerged as an important site of U.S. national security. In the words of Las Vegas historian Eugene P. Moehring, “But as it did for cities in California, New Mexico, Texas and other Sunbelt states, World War II both created and confirmed the strategic importance of Las Vegas, thereby enhancing its chances of attracting future defense programs.”6

Furthermore, Las Vegas was a key entertainment supplier to the United Service Organizations (USO), as it “organized recreation and resident centers” across the country.7 The Las Vegas Army Air Field (LVAAF) was renamed the Nellis Air Force Base in 1950 and became an important site to train pilots for combat duties during the Korean War.8 And President Truman, in 1952, described Las Vegas as a “critical defense area,” as it transformed into a large beneficiary of federal defense and housing funding.9

In the postwar era, Las Vegas was again brought to the forefront of national publicity not only as a benefactor of U.S. defense spending but also for its growing affiliation with the organized crime that was sweeping the country at the time. Las Vegas became the center of public attention when news reports surfaced that there was a strong connection between the mob and the casinos in the city. The city’s strong ties with mobs and gangsters shaped a negative representation of Las Vegas as grounded in gambling, alcohol, and prostitution, which further threatened the national image of the United States and impacted its fight against Communism. As a result, in 1950, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver was appointed to oversee a committee to combat organized crime across the nation.10 The seventeen-month investigation discovered monetary connections between the casinos in Las Vegas and the mafia.11 The Kefauver Committee traveled to fourteen cities across the country to conduct interviews with hundreds of witnesses. These meetings were considered television events, as cameras captured the fascinating details of crime leaders in the nation. While Las Vegas received massive media exposure in the national press, television cameras were not allowed in the room when the committee arrived in the city to conduct its investigation on November 15, 1950. The committee not only aimed to curtail the dangers of organized crimes but also planned to stall the casino operations in Las Vegas by implementing a 10 percent federal tax on gambling. Surprisingly, these efforts did not discourage Americans from visiting Las Vegas; instead, the media attention prompted tourism. In 1952 alone, there were seven million tourists visiting the city, and they spent approximately $122 million on gambling, hotels, food, and entertainment.12

While the federal tax bill on gambling would have been a detrimental blow to the financial economy of the city, Nevada Republican senator Pat McCarran helped kill the bill. McCarran was the man behind the anti-Communist campaign sweeping the nation at the time. According to Michael J. Ybarra, the real force behind the anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s in the United States was not Joseph McCarthy but Pat McCarran.13 In 1952, McCarran, along with Pennsylvania democratic congressman Francis Walter, devised a piece of immigration legislation that became known as the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act. The 1952 act lifted the racial quota on immigration while simultaneously maintaining the national origins quota system, further establishing a restriction of two thousand visas for immigrants from Asian countries. The act controlled Asian immigration to the country because McCarran was concerned about the infiltration of Communism through immigration.14 The intrusion of the “Red Scare” menace into the American political consciousness during this period elevated the U.S. government’s concern that China might be dispatching secret agents to the country.15

While the threat of Communism swept the nation, Las Vegas entered into the U.S. popular consciousness as a city where Communism’s influence could not be ignored. McCarran even attempted to destroy the career of Hank Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, when Greenspun voiced harsh criticisms against McCarran’s immigration policies. As an act of retaliation, in 1952, McCarran ordered every major Las Vegas hotel and casino to pull out their ads from the Las Vegas Sun. Additionally, McCarran arranged Joseph McCarthy’s visit to Las Vegas in 1952 to speak on behalf of Senator W. Malone, who was seeking reelection. In the speech, McCarthy called Greenspun an “ex-communist.”16 While the connection between Las Vegas and Communism was tenuous at the moment, it was becoming more apparent that the city had an important role to play during the Cold War, when containment was the dominant political strategy for U.S. politicians. Las Vegas, then a distant and isolated geography affected by organized crime, violence, and gambling, underwent a drastic makeover with the introduction of television to the city.

Televisual Las Vegas

The arrival of television cameras to the city not only captured the vibrancy of Las Vegas but also promoted the city as contributing to the United States’ cultural battle against the Soviet Union with its flourishing scene of entertainment featuring ethnic performers. When the American audience came into contact with Las Vegas through the medium of television, they witnessed a new cultural image of the city inscribed in racial harmony and solidarity. More significantly, Las Vegas entered the U.S. national imaginary at the height of the Cold War when two local Los Angeles television stations—KTLA and KTTV—broadcast live images of the atomic test bombing on Yucca Flat in Nevada in February 1951. The two stations televised the event atop Mount Wilson near Pasadena.17 Many reporters used the phrase “Doom Town Nevada” to describe the event. As one of the earliest depictions of Las Vegas on television, the destruction of the desert by the bomb was a metaphor of the United States’ military power in the midst of rising fears about a potential nuclear war. On television, the test explosion was visually projected as a “brilliant flash that faded quickly.”18 More specifically, the physical destruction of the desert via a test bomb integrated Las Vegas, often viewed as a wasteland and as Sin City, into the U.S. Cold War imaginary. The live broadcast of atomic bomb tests showed the American public how the city was contributing to U.S. national security. As Nevada senator Dina Titus observes, the atomic bomb was an opportunity to subvert the negative image of Las Vegas within the American popular imagination. She elaborates, “Up until that point, we were just a spot in the desert. We were prostitution. We were gambling. Suddenly, we were helping to win the Cold War, and I think people could grab a hold of that because it was a good thing to do for democracy.”19

The live television broadcast of atomic test bombing drew a positive response from the Las Vegas community, as it meant more government funds would contribute to the financial security of the city. In the realm of popular culture, such marketing items as “atomic hairdo,” “atomic cocktail,” and “Miss Atomic Bomb” all contributed to narratives promoting Las Vegas as a critical site of national security for the American public. More specifically, after the historic broadcast, many Las Vegas hotels and casinos collaborated to disseminate a particular image of the city, making ethnic performers, especially black entertainers, more visible on television in order to circulate false narratives of racial integration. There was not only an increasing visibility of ethnic spectacle in the form of black performances in the Las Vegas nightclub scene but also a growing population of African Americans in the city as a whole. The Nevada test site, located ninety miles northwest of downtown Las Vegas, was in high demand for labor to prepare the ground before and after the atomic bomb tests.20 Despite the harsh working conditions that involved radioactive particles, many African Americans flocked to the city in search of social class mobility, forming a vibrant black community in Berkley Square located on the west side.21 As a result, the population of African Americans in Las Vegas grew from 4,302 in 1950 to 13,484 in 1960, constituting 5 percent of the total population.22

The visibility of blackness in the city and the entertainment scene supplanted the old image of Las Vegas with a new one rooted in ethnic pluralism. The integration of African Americans and Las Vegas into the diegetic world of television not only provided entertainment for the “home” audience but also helped the United States win the cultural Cold War at a time when the nation was under severe criticism from the international community for its discriminatory practices. Thus Las Vegas hotel owners and entertainers saw themselves as informed public citizens contributing to U.S. internationalism efforts. For instance, on April 26, 1955, Jake Freedman, an oil tycoon from Texas who also owned the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, wrote a letter of apology to his guests, explaining that the hotel was not able to accommodate their reservations because of a postponement of the atomic tests. He wrote, “I regret very much to have to disappoint you in your reservations this week at the Sands—but I urge you to read this letter carefully so that as a citizen of this country you might have a better understanding of why the Sands cannot accommodate you at this time.” He added, “As part of the National Defense effort I feel it is my responsibility and duty to help the Government and the Press and the States to fulfill their mission here—and because we realize the importance of this mission so strongly, I must ask you to bear with the Sands when you do not find your accommodation available. We will do everything possible to help you but please try to understand that our first responsibility at this time is to the National Defense effort.”23

Freedman’s statements illustrate how Las Vegas casino owners and entertainment directors firmly believed that they were participating in national security measures as well as helping the United States in its battle against the threat of Communism. Additionally, Las Vegas was no longer just seen as a tourist and entertainment city, as many foreign political leaders stopped at the city when they visited the United States. For example, when Khaireya Khairy of Egypt was a guest of the U.S. Department of State under the Foreign Exchange Program in 1955, her visit to Las Vegas had a lasting impression on her. In a letter written by Robert L. Kirkpatrick of the Governmental Affairs Institute in Washington, DC (affiliated with the American Political Association), to Wilbur Clark, owner of Desert Inn, Kirkpatrick said, “Miss Khairy was most enthusiastic about her visit to your city. . . . It was most kind of you to grant her the interview, for experiences such as these leave the visitor with a good impression of America and Americans.”24 Similarly, two years later in 1957, H. Philip Mettger, vice president of the Governmental Affairs Institute, wrote a letter to Al Freeman, public relations director, asking him to host Abol Hassan Ebtehaj’s visit to Hoover Dam. Mettger cautioned Freeman not to publicize the visit because people in Iran might perceive it as a “recreational trip.”25 These examples illuminate how Las Vegas embodied American values and ideals that made it an exemplary city of the United States.

As Las Vegas was emerging as a geopolitical space of U.S. cultural diplomacy, the city was also evolving into an entertainment mecca of the world with its attraction of top-notch entertainers from across the country. Las Vegas drew n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Narratives of Integration: Ethnic Spectacle and Las Vegas
• Chapter 2. Narratives of Exchange: Asian Performers after the Korean War
• Chapter 3. Narratives of Partnership: Latin American Entertainers after the Cuban Revolution
• Chapter 4. Narratives of Coexistence: Pacific Islanders and the Statehood of Hawai‘i
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author