Rube Tube

CBS and Rural Comedy in the Sixties

Sara K. Eskridge

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780826222626, 9780826221650
• eBook ISBN: 9780826274175
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Historian Sara Eskridge examines television's rural comedy boom in the 1960s and the political, social, and economic factors that made these shows a perfect fit for CBS. The network, nicknamed the Communist Broadcasting System during the Red Scare of the 1940s, saw its image hurt again in the 1950s with the quiz show scandals and a campaign against violence in westerns. When a rival network introduced rural-themed programs to cater to the growing southern market, CBS latched onto the trend and soon reestablished itself as the Country Broadcasting System. Its rural comedies dominated the ratings throughout the decade, attracting viewers from all parts of the country. With fascinating discussions of The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and other shows, Eskridge reveals how the southern image was used to both entertain and reassure Americans in the turbulent 1960s.

CHAPTER ONE

The Communist Broadcasting System

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the television networks created as culturally diverse a programming schedule as has ever existed in the industry. CBS, more than any of its competitors, loaded its programming slots with ethnic-themed comedies. One of the most popular, Amos ’n’ Andy, the story of two African-American southerners who relocated to Chicago, featured an almost entirely black cast. Bonino and Life with Luigi focused on the experience of the Italian-American family in the big city, while The Honeymooners and Hey, Jeannie! reflected the Irish-American experience. The Goldbergs was the Jewish counterpart to Life with Luigi, although unlike the latter, it focused on an entire family instead of a single man. Beulah, a show about an African-American housekeeper, was the first television program with an African-American woman in a leading role, and it found success as well. All of these programs featured ethnic minorities as the main characters, with white actors present in limited roles. In addition to shows about Italians, Jews, and African-Americans, the networks developed numerous other programs about ethnic minorities that aired with varying degrees of success in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

That television executives chose these programs makes perfect sense for multiple reasons. Many programs on the air in the late 1940s up through 1953 had already established solid audiences as radio shows. Television programs, like their predecessors on the radio, relied on advertisers. In an era where television was still something of a social experiment, advertisers were not interested in throwing money at an untried program. CBS, in particular, raided its stable of radio programs and those of other networks to ensure it had a strong television lineup. In 1948, the network poached Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, Burns and Allen, and Amos ’n’ Andy from various network radio programs for its television division.¹ The shows consistently scored high ratings, ensuring a high rate of return for the investors.

Another element that explains the popularity of these programs is the demographics of early television audiences. All four major networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and DuMont, were headquartered in New York City. Though all developed a network of affiliate stations throughout the country, the New York metropolitan area and its surrounding states had the most receivers and potential viewers, and a wider variety of programs. In the fall of 1948, the FCC put a freeze on applications of new affiliate television stations. At the time of the freeze, fourteen states, most of them in the South and the Midwest, had no transmitters at all. Of those, seven could not even get signals from adjoining states. They had no television access whatsoever.² The FCC did not lift the ban until 1952, so people in those regions had no reason to own what, at the time, would have been an extremely costly piece of furniture. In 1950 the median annual household income was approximately $3,216, and the price of a television set could run anywhere from $200 to $500, a prohibitively high sum for many.³ Of the one million television sets in use by 1950, most were purchased by people within a 75-mile radius of the New York City metropolitan area and a few other major cities like Boston and Los Angeles.⁴

The networks worked with the audience they were given, which happened to be one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse in the nation. According to the 1950 census, New York contained a far higher percentage of persons of non-northern European heritage than almost any other state in the union. The center of the immigrant population in that state was, not surprisingly, New York City. Out of 7.9 million residents, 22.6 percent were foreign born.⁵ Considering these demographics, it seems likely that a sizable percentage of television viewers in the late 1940s and early 1950s were first- and second-generation Americans. By airing a large variety of ethnic-themed programming, television networks attempted to satisfy a large range of viewers based on the diverse ethnic makeup of the audience. In its earliest years, advertisers marketed television as a conduit to reality, and the emphasis on ethnic programming demonstrates that television executives tried to project the realities of its current audience.⁶

At the same time, programs featuring ethnic minorities created a perfect forum for negotiating tensions caused by the economic and social changes of postwar America.⁷ In the midst of the continued Great Migration, increased urbanization, and the ascent of the middle class, each program touched on one or more of these issues and did so in a humorous fashion. Amos ’n’ Andy dealt with two African-American men and the cab business they started after moving to Chicago from the South as part of the Great Migration. The Goldbergs, I Remember Mama, and Life with Luigi all told the stories of immigrants navigating life in the big city. Even Beulah, the story of an African-American maid working for a white family in a non-urban setting, reflected the growing presence of African-Americans in northern cities and the ongoing struggle there to negotiate peaceable relations between the races. These programs were ideal for the urban Northeast because many viewers there could identify with navigating urban life and searching for balance.

Although ethnic programming proved popular with early audiences, ratings were no match for the burgeoning Red Scare. By 1947, America’s postwar anti-communist paranoia had increased dramatically. As the public called for stricter guidelines for vetting federal employees, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) searched for evidence of disloyalty in the government and the U.S. attorney general created a list of subversive organizations deemed too radical for a government employee to support.

HUAC garnered further national recognition after the espionage charges against State Department official Alger Hiss gained traction. The committee wanted to find more cases that would both draw attention to its anti-communist mission and generate positive publicity. Targeting Hollywood seemed the most obvious answer. Communists and people who supported communist causes had supposedly taken over Hollywood, already considered a beacon of liberalism. Beginning in 1947, HUAC held hearings on the extent to which communism pervaded the film industry. Committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas spoke disparagingly of “writers mocking our political system and picking on rich men and portraying the wealthy and powerful as ‘heavies.’”⁸ Those concerned about communists in show business ascribed to the “third violin theory,” meaning that even an anonymous musician, prop master, or sound technician could influence radio, television, and movie stars, who would in turn spew their communist venom on an unsuspecting public.⁹ According to this logic, any person who worked in show business potentially posed a threat to the nation at large. It was not a chance many people wanted to take, and so came a series of actions by both government officials and grassroots movements to prevent the feared communist takeover of Hollywood.

Despite the best efforts of television and radio broadcasters to stem the tide of anti-communist hysteria, HUAC’s fervor for seeking out communists in Hollywood eventually infected the general populace. The level of public concern only rose when a handful of film executives decided to cave in to HUAC’s demands and turn over the names of some of the industry’s most notorious communist writers.¹⁰ HUAC’s investigation of these writers, now known as the Hollywood Ten, generated a huge amount of press. After some of the accused writers refused to give the names of their communist friends before the committee, the issue of communism in the entertainment industry became national news.

Multiple grassroots movements developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s intent on informing the American public about the subversive elements in Hollywood. Chief among them was Counterattack, a newsletter started in 1947 by three ex-FBI agents calling themselves American Business Consultants. Counterattack singled out people in various positions of prominence who had dubious political affiliations. Initially, the members of American Business Consultants did not have any particular concerns about show business, but within a year, Counterattack focused almost solely on the entertainment industry.¹¹ Within months of the newsletter’s first issue, the writers suggested that television networks and sponsors should bar, to the fullest extent permissible by law, all communists from working in television, radio, and movies. By 1948, the articles encouraged readers to contact sponsors whose products were associated with programs that employed known communists and voice their disapproval.¹²

The hysteria over communist infiltration of the television industry reached its height on June 22, 1950, with the publication of Red Channels. Released just as the United States entered the Korean War, Red Channels was a booklet listing all of the people in the entertainment industry suspected of involvement in either communist organizations or groups infiltrated by communists. Published by the same group that published Counterattack, Red Channels listed 151 names and provided exhaustive lists of all the allegedly subversive activities in which each person engaged. The authors of Red Channels utilized numerous sources to compile their information and made a point of only using sources that were in the public record. Those sources included newspapers containing HUAC citations, the communist newspaper The Daily Worker, and the entertainment industry’s own publications. The authors stopped just short of calling anyone on their list a communist, but its introduction clearly implied that all of the people in the book were in league with the “Red fascists and their sympathizers.”¹³

While Red Channels and Counterattack targeted the entire spectrum of liberal organizations, African-American causes were the only ones singled out that specifically benefitted an American minority group. Red Channels’ introduction even singled out the “fight against Jimcrow [sic]” as an issue of particular interest to communists. The supposedly subversive groups listed in Red Channels included the Negro Cultural Committee, United Negro and Allied Veterans of America, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Southern Conference on Human Welfare. Most of these groups also appeared on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, indicating that both the attorney general and the FBI, which supplied most of the information for the list, generally considered civil rights groups subversive.¹⁴ Both black and white artists were penalized for their participation in civil rights groups, but it was the black faces that disappeared from television in the aftermath of the blacklist period.

The anti-Semitic aspect of the anti-communist movement was also highly visible. That the anti-communists drew that connection is unsurprising since there is a long tradition of associating Jews with communism. Because of the pervasive atmosphere of casual anti-Semitism, the American Jewish League assumed that when HUAC first targeted Hollywood, it was because, at the time, all of the major studio heads were Jewish.¹⁵ The publication of Red Channels only solidified that perception, as at least 48 of the 151 names listed in the booklet, or 32 percent, were ethnically Jewish. That percentage indicates an extreme overrepresentation in relation to the percentage of Jews in the entire U.S. population in 1950, which was about 5 million, comprising just over 5 percent of the population.¹⁶

Even though the men behind Counterattack made a conscious effort to disassociate themselves from the racist elements of the anti-communist cause, they too had ideas of what constituted a true American. They even provided an indicator of what they thought a real American looked like. In promotional fliers for Counterattack, Theodore Kirkpatrick, co-founder of the newsletter and one of the men behind Red Channels, billed himself as an “average American.” He went on to list the credentials that proved his membership among those ranks, which included his Scots-Irish heritage, Protestant religious background, and the fact that he was married with two children. Although he did not explicitly mention his race, the picture next to his profile demonstrated his undeniable whiteness.¹⁷ Kirkpatrick’s description of himself, combined with the inclusion of a disproportionate number of ethnic minorities in Red Channels, established that certain people were predisposed to un-American behavior.

Counterattack’s influence on the television industry was immediate. In August 1950, only weeks after the publication of Red Channels, American Business Consultants discovered that actress Jean Muir was scheduled to appear on the NBC-TV sitcom The Aldrich Family, despite her sizable entry in Red Channels. Kirkpatrick used Counterattack as a forum from which to urge readers to protest Muir’s employment. Within days, the program’s sponsor, General Foods, received a number of calls from Counterattack readers. Estimates on the exact number of calls vary between twenty and two hundred. As the calls mounted, both NBC and General Foods panicked. Concerned that the criticism might not subside and her presence on the show might become a problem for viewers, NBC and General Foods fired Muir.¹⁸

Jean Muir’s firing demonstrated that television networks and sponsors took Red Channels very seriously. The authors of Red Channels publicly threatened to organize a boycott of any advertiser endorsing a program that employed writers, directors, producers, and actors suspected of communist sympathies.¹⁹ As leaders in a fledgling industry, no television network executives wanted to risk consumer boycotts. In this environment, Red Channels became the template for an industry-wide blacklist. Soon, those listed within its pages found themselves unemployed. Historians and industry insiders vary widely in their assessment of when the era of blacklisting ended, but for a period of at least a few years, most of the men and women named in Red Channels were virtually unemployable. Although casting agents always claimed either that the blacklist did not exist or that they were unaware of it, people whose names appeared on the list saw an immediate decline in the work available to them.

Within months, yet another grassroots anti-communist organization developed that further threatened the radio and television industry. Lawrence A. Johnson owned a chain of four grocery stores in Syracuse, New York. In 1950, the year of Red Channels’ publication, Johnson’s daughter lived at home while her husband fought in the Korean War. She became incensed at the idea that she bought products advertised on shows that employed communists, the same people her husband was fighting against in Korea. Johnson saw that he was in a position to do something to ease his daughter’s concerns. He founded the Veterans Acti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. The Communist Broadcasting System
• Chapter Two. Quiz Shows, Horse Operas, and the Confederacy
• Chapter Three. A New Sheriff in Town
• Chapter Four. The Country Broadcasting System
• Chapter Five. Rural Comedy: The Principles of Popularity
• Chapter Six. Rural Comedy and the Race-Free South
• Chapter Seven. The Smothers Brothers and the Rural Safety Net
• Chapter Eight. Massacre
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index