History Comes Alive

Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s

M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469633879
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica della storia

During the 1976 Bicentennial celebration, millions of Americans engaged with the past in brand-new ways. They became absorbed by historical miniseries like Roots, visited museums with new exhibits that immersed them in the past, propelled works of historical fiction onto the bestseller list, and participated in living history events across the nation. While many of these activities were sparked by the Bicentennial, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska shows that, in fact, they were symptomatic of a fundamental shift in Americans' relationship to history during the 1960s and 1970s. For the majority of the twentieth century, Americans thought of the past as foundational to, but separate from, the present, and they learned and thought about history in informational terms. But Rymsza-Pawlowska argues that the popular culture of the 1970s reflected an emerging desire to engage and enact the past on a more emotional level: to consider the feelings and motivations of historic individuals and, most importantly, to use this in reevaluating both the past and the present. This thought-provoking book charts the era's shifting feeling for history, and explores how it serves as a foundation for the experience and practice of history making today.

CHAPTER ONE

Past as Present

History on Television from the 1950s to the 1970s

Every day for the next two years—July 4, 1974 through July 4, 1976—CBS will unfold another chapter in the momentous story of our nation’s struggle for independence. Exactly as it happened “200 years ago today.” These “Bicentennial Minutes,” 732 one-minute programs in all, are unique in broadcasting history. Tremendous in scope, authentic in every detail, the series is a special part of CBS’s salute to the Bicentennial celebration.

Notables from every walk of American life will participate, bringing you both great moments and little known incidents in America’s surge toward freedom. The brave acts of heroes … the impassioned words of statesmen … the everyday lives of citizens caught in the steadily mounting tide—all are brought thrillingly to life in a gigantic historical mosaic that encompasses the full drama of our nation’s birth.

—Advertisement for Bicentennial Minutes, July 2, 1974

On the evening of July 4, 1974, CBS concluded its nightly news broadcast with the inaugural installment of a new program entitled Bicentennial Minutes.1 In this sixty-second segment, the first of more than seven hundred that would be aired nightly through 1976, a celebrity narrator, accompanied by a montage of illustrations, detailed an event that had happened exactly two hundred years prior. The subject matter was diverse; some Minutes described occurrences that led directly to the Revolution; other segments addressed developments in medicine, technology, or the arts.2 Narrators ranged from actors like Lucille Ball, Jessica Tandy, and Leonard Nimoy to political figures like Senators Joseph Montoya and Robert P. Griffin. The Bicentennial Minutes were well received by the press and the public, generating local and regional versions as well as parodies on programs like All in the Family, The Sonny and Cher Show, and Hee Haw.3 The popularity of the Bicentennial Minutes demonstrated the growing position of television as a source of historical information: an association that was activated and undergirded by the larger ways in which conceptions of the past, the present, and the relationship between the two were changing during this period.

This chapter examines history on television: from the moment of the medium’s origin during the high tide of cultural investment in progress and modernity in the 1950s and 1960s, through the 1970s, the moment at which, in the midst of social, political, and economic turmoil, this investment began to weaken as Americans stopped envisioning and anticipating the future and began looking toward the past.4 Responding to these developments, television generated historical programming that reconciled and reconnected past and present, modeling new ways for audiences to think about history. Where once the past had been imagined and shown as unfolding logically and rationally into the present and then the future, television programming now put forth a more complex model. Historical television in the 1970s made use of the medium’s generic traits (seriality, characterization, and immediacy) to call attention to repetitions, parallels, and similarities between past and present and to forge empathetic commonalities between characters and with viewers.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, television depicted the past as distant from and inferior to the present: important to know about, but not worth contemplating deeply. But by the 1970s, history on television was both more common and markedly different, reflecting a new sense of history that was coming to dominate popular engagement with the past across many different forms and formats. In family dramas like Little House on the Prairie and miniseries like Eleanor and Franklin and Roots, “realistic” portrayals of historical events and periods hinged not on an informational depiction of the past, but on an affective identification between audiences and historical figures on television. By the 1970s, television not only exemplified new cultural attitudes toward the past, but also was instrumental in extending these perceptions. While television is often said to be a major site of formation and articulation of culture in the United States, looking closely at how the medium turned to the historical in the 1970s helps to identify larger-scale transformations in American culture.5

I begin with the Bicentennial Minutes because they aptly illustrate how Americans were now thinking about and engaging with the past, and why commercial television programming is so central to understanding these changes. As they charted colonial life day by day, the Bicentennial Minutes performed the passage of historical time as analogous and synchronous to contemporary time, reflecting and advancing a new and closer association between the past and the present. With this, the Minutes also created a space for active viewer identification with, and participation in, the “making” of history. In publicity interviews, Bicentennial Minutes producer Lewis Freedman noted the particular relationship between time, history, and television: “It seemed to me that television is an ideal medium to handle history because like history, it goes on every day very slowly. We decided to do a minute a day to show the process of history.”6 Freedman’s statement helps us to understand and underscore the association between certain properties of television (immediacy, flow between programming, continuity between distinct episodes) and this new conception of history.7 In their adherence to a systematic calendar and their news-like format, the Bicentennial Minutes took advantage of television’s sense of “presentness” and instantaneousness and sutured it onto a new understanding of the progression of history.8 The past had become connected to the present, and history was something to experience empathetically rather than to observe from a distance. A parody Bicentennial Minute that appeared on The Carol Burnett Show in 1975 made this connection literal: as an announcer stood next to a framed painting of a Revolutionary War battle and described its events, a drummer in the painting (actually an elevated stage) moved, reacted, and, finally, reached out from behind the frame and hit the announcer over the head.9 History had come out of the past, and into the present. As advertisements for the Bicentennial Minutes claimed, it was “brought to life.”

The Bicentennial Minutes, in their insistence on moving through Revolutionary history in “real time,” presented a novel mode of engagement with the past. They produced a slowly progressing account of events that were sometimes unrelated and seemingly random (i.e., a segment about political history would be followed by one about technological innovation) but that introduced important information that could eventually be put together to help viewers understand the larger cultural context of the American Revolution. Offered diverse strands of knowledge, viewers were placed into history as it was happening and asked to do their own historical work, explaining and connecting for themselves the events leading up to the Revolution of 1776.

Because it is not likely that any one viewer would see all of the Minutes, the way individual audience members assembled this information varied. The Bicentennial Minutes produced a history that was flexible and depended on one’s own investments (e.g., while some viewers might be drawn to segments concerning scientific advance, others might change the channel at those times) and on the happenstance of watching the news on a particular evening. The segments demonstrate several qualities of historical consciousness that developed in the 1970s: a sense of the past as somehow present in the contemporary; more attention to the everyday life of earlier times; and a sense of history as contingent, flexible, and permeable. All of these transformations were animated and reproduced by television’s expressions of both history and the passage of time.

Television programs like the Bicentennial Minutes and the miniseries that emerged during the same period were critical sites for cultural negotiation of these larger changes, mirroring and ultimately helping to form new relationships with the American past. The medium’s affinity for the historical might have been kindled by its generic and institutional qualities, but this connection was further consolidated when American society became more interested in history and, specifically, in thinking about the past in relational and empathetic terms. In response, television developed formats and genres that explicitly attended to these interests.

The Pedagogical and the Pathological: History on Television in the 1950s and 1960s

To examine the evolution of television’s representation of the past, we must begin in the earliest days of the medium. In the forward-oriented 1950s and 1960s, television fare echoed American culture at large, which was more interested in the present and the future than the past.10 Popular culture reflected this tendency, from modernist architecture of the period to projects like Walt Disney’s utopian Tomorrowland and initiatives like the space program.11 Mirroring these broad cultural sentiments, television typically presented history using two modes: the “pedagogical”: detailing well-known occurrences and persons who shaped the present; and the “pathological”: staging extreme and usually traumatic encounters that stressed the inflexible nature of linear time and the inferiority of the past to the present. Both pedagogical and pathological programming relied on formal devices like framing and contemporary narrators to keep the past separate from the present. Likewise, temporal distance was often underscored through spatial metaphors, casting the past as a remote and often frightening, yet contained, place.

In a similar vein as the educational television documentaries that were popular during this period, pedagogical history television taught viewers about important events in the American past.12 From 1953 to 1957, CBS aired You Are There, in which the newscaster Walter Cronkite and his correspondents simulated broadcasting from politically momentous occurrences, like the Boston Massacre, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, or the assassination of Julius Caesar. Typically, an episode began with Cronkite describing the significance of the event and then cut to interviews between unseen correspondents and actors portraying the key figures.13 The interview format of the program foregrounded the agency of singular actors like Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln in precipitating important events—in these narratives, historical change was not the result of combinations of political, cultural, or social factors, but propelled by individuals, usually powerful white men. You Are There can be described as pedagogical in two different ways: first, the program educated the viewing public about significant events spearheaded by great men in American history. Second, You Are There taught viewers about the value of the new medium, establishing the standing of television newscasters at a time when television news was still relatively new and had not yet reached the levels of prominence that it would gain by the 1960s. Steve Anderson has observed that You Are There used the feelings of immediacy and journalistic integrity associated with news broadcasts to its advantage: on the one hand, working to legitimate television news by placing CBS reporters at all important points in history and, on the other, presenting a seemingly “objective” version of history that was as authentic (i.e., documentary) and impartial as the news itself.14

Pedagogical television programs depended on perceptions of both distance and difference between the present and the past, underscoring this through narrators and other intermediaries. The visual contrast between Cronkite’s modern CBS studio and the historic milieus in the broadcasts reinforced the gulf between past and present. You Are There’s reporters mediated each interaction, keeping the presented historical moments discreet from their audiences. The viewer was therefore positioned as an eyewitness to history, but not as part of it. Through this relationship of exposition and separation, You Are There taught Americans about their national past in a straightforward or...