Heartland TV

Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U. S. Identity

Victoria E. Johnson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814743027
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique de la télévision

Winner of the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award

The Midwest of popular imagination is a "Heartland" characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively —; as authentic, pastoral, populist, hardworking, and all-American—or negatively—as backward, narrow–minded, unsophisticated, conservative, and out-of-touch—the myth of the Heartland endures.

Heartland TV examines the centrality of this myth to television's promotion and development, programming and marketing appeals, and public debates over the medium's and its audience's cultural worth. Victoria E. Johnson investigates how the "square" image of the heartland has been ritually recuperated on prime time television, from The Lawrence Welk Show in the 1950s, to documentary specials in the 1960s, to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, to Ellen in the 1990s. She also examines news specials on the Oklahoma City bombing to reveal how that city has been inscribed as the epitome of a timeless, pastoral heartland, and concludes with an analysis of network branding practices and appeals to an imagined "red state" audience.

Johnson argues that non-white, queer, and urban culture is consistently erased from depictions of the Midwest in order to reinforce its "reassuring" image as white and straight. Through analyses of policy, industry discourse, and case studies of specific shows, Heartland TV exposes the cultural function of the Midwest as a site of national transference and disavowal with regard to race, sexuality, and citizenship ideals.

1
“Essential, Desirable, and Possible Markets”
Broadcasting Midwestern Tastes and Values

As a technological, infrastructural method of content distribution and market organization, networking developed in the United States coincident with and integral to the final solidification of cross-continental settlement, the emergence of the mass consumer market, and the conceptualization of a national audience, or conjoined, national community. From its emergence in vaudeville, through the radio age and television’s standardization, networking has been prerequisite to the modern, cultural imagination of the nation. Ideally, it allows for the “special kind of contemporaneous community” and “unisonance” theorized by Benedict Anderson as “the technical means for ‘representing’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.”¹ And yet, this idealized notion of “unisonance” effaces the tensions and struggles between region and nation that consistently appear in historical discourse. Such struggles encourage us to consider the significant unevenness with which networking was actually realized (both spatially and temporally). This unevenness is structured into networking by the geographic expanse of the United States, but it also has been encouraged in institutional, regulatory, and cultural struggles to balance the system’s inherently conflicting imperatives: Organized as a for-profit market, broadcasting is also mandated to serve in the public interest.

While, in the interest of national integration, network promotional rhetoric promised “unisonance” via the broad American public’s equal access to broadcasting service, economic imperatives encouraged a much more cautious developmental approach. Behind closed doors, network strategy emphasized universal access as a distant “possibility,” focusing, instead, on the practicality of selective market cultivation. Regional “difference” from the national network remained simultaneously powerful, however, as law and regulatory policy’s locus of expected service ideals and obligations.

“Public interest” refers both to access to broadcast media outlets and to a judgment of the content or “character” of programming provided therein. While national network programming is idealized as shared public culture, locally affiliated stations are charged with providing programs that meet the particular needs and interests of the specifically regional viewing audience each serves. Historically, lawmakers and regulators relied upon recourse to presumed, distinct regional differences to challenge monopolistic network practices and, periodically, to re-calibrate network profit motives. As broadcasting developed and stabilized, nationally, it relied upon regional difference to manage and balance its founding paradox. In network planning documents, broadcast law, and regulatory policy from the 1920s through the immediate postwar era, the Midwest and midwesternness often became the site through which “service in the public interest” and profit imperatives were assessed and defined.

Struggles over regional definitions are, across this history, struggles to define representative American ideals through comparative market value and social ranking. The formation of national corporate culture required the development of differentiated, “perceived … ‘taste markets.’”² The history of broadcast networking exemplifies how these markets were created and addressed. Specifically, network development rationales, broadcast law, and regulatory policy can be studied in terms of broader assumptions regarding midwesternness as a comparative capital relation or “classed” disposition allied with rurality, traditional modes of cultural expression, and relatively homogenous tastes. The networked Midwest is uniquely imagined as distant from cultural trends and as the most “mass,” homogeneous, stable market within the continental expanse.

This chapter examines three interrelated phenomena in network broadcast development, chronologically, from the 1920s until 1950: the emergence of the Midwest as cartographic region and symbolic Heartland in relation to “national” ideals in the period; network development and expansion as it was marked by a conflict between public appeals to universal access and an internal focus on economy of scale; and broadcast law’s and regulatory policy’s struggle to define, balance, and apply local “service” ideals within the framework of national market development. The history of broadcast networking and localism in the United States most typically has been told in one of two ways: either through analysis of broad macro-political institutional struggles (focusing on network development in technical, physical, infrastructural, and economic terms), or through analysis of cultural tensions at the level of everyday engagements with media (focusing on, for example, local resistance to network representation and battles over scheduling and sponsorship control). Here I argue that if the histories of network development and broadcast policy are read in dialogue with contemporary understandings of regionalism, then institutional and cultural struggles over networking, instead, emerge as integral to and inseparable from one another. This chapter interrogates how broadly circulating mythologies of geographic “difference” shaped and became codified within network development plans, broadcast law, and regulatory policy independent of programming and reception. It argues that a particularly selective and limited way of imagining the Midwest as Heartland has been encouraged and reinforced structurally as well as symbolically in broadcast history, and considers how this, in turn, has encouraged certain understandings of the region’s value for the nation.

Historian Leo Marx once proposed that if geography was “a perpetual reminder of American differences,” then technology represented “the possibility of plenty shared by all.”³ Here, Marx points to a key, if often implicit, assumption in media history and theory—that “region” and “network” are conceptually antithetical terms. The basis for this opposition rests in an understanding of networking as a “space-binding” structural and technological phenomenon, while conversely region and region-based markets and culture are “place-bound.” The network expands over territory in ways that benefit national and international market goals, exploiting spatial reach for efficiencies of scale. Networking is understood as a technological, economic, social, and cultural framework for the reorganization of space and time from the region and local expression to seemingly “placeless,” modern, national modes of production and consumption.⁴ Networks’ “bias” relations toward a “high communications policy,… aimed solely at spreading messages further in space and reducing the cost of transmission.”⁵

Media scholar David Morley nuances this conventional network/region tension by pointing out that “while, of course, it must be acknowledged that new communications technologies are producing new definitions of time, space, and community, these are not necessarily erasing but rather overlaying old understandings of distance and duration.” Analysis of this dynamic in broadcast history thus requires interrogation “of how physical and symbolic networks become entwined around each other.”⁶ This sense of entanglement is particularly significant as regards the Midwest-as-Heartland, a geographic and perceptual region that, in a real historical sense, can physically and symbolically only be imagined through networked media.

The Physical and Symbolic Entwined: Regional Labels and National Value

James Shortridge argues that “more than seventy years elapsed between the first use of the term Middle West” in the late 1820s, and the second, in the 1880s, concurrent with the active spatial reordering of a U.S. map that now differentiated the “comparatively settled and stable ‘middle’ states” from the far western frontier and from the newly incorporated southwest.⁷ This sense of the Midwest as comparatively settled was encouraged by the region’s increased centrality in transportation and commerce. With the expansion of railroads and telegraphy through the end of the nineteenth century, the northern channels of trade, which extended west from New York, and the southern channels of trade, which flowed through the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, converged to complete the transformation of Chicago from “hinterland” outpost to critically central, national hub. The Midwest was the nation’s cartographic “middle,” balancing between the relatively untamed West and the established East. And, the region was the nation’s economic “middle,” representative of “the rise of middle class values and institutions of capitalism.”⁸ By extension, the Midwest was linked in the popular discourse of the period to qualities of “balance” and solidity of character—particularly as evidenced in increased reference to the region as the nation’s “heart,” as the country’s “most sensible” region, as a place more “evenly American in tone” than others, and, explicitly, as the “most American part of America.”⁹

British cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City suggests that this late nineteenth-century valorization of the Midwest as the nation’s “heart” should be considered in the context of a broader western cultural revaluation of pastoral life in the face of new national communication and transportation systems, which forged unprecedented modern, economic, and extra-regional relations. The Midwest’s persistent association with the pastoral as temporally past tense—as evocative of former life and culture, as the storehouse of “traditional” modes of production and consumption—here contrasts with the “nation,” imagined as allied with the same sense of simultaneous “empty time” that characterizes space-binding network technology. Rural life and culture are thus counterpoised to modernity and national imperatives of progress. And yet, the Heartland also conjures a nostalgic realm of possibility as the “last” bastion of face-to-face, “knowable” community in modern, market-oriented culture. The apparent need for the Midwest as imagined locus of unchanging values and traditions is striking, considering the market centrality of Chicago and other urban midwestern sites—especially Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis—in the development and success of a truly national economy. However, by the late 1920s, once cross-continental markets were achieved and stabilized, popular representations of the region began to excise such urban hubs from their storehouse of images. The myth of the U.S. Midwest as Heartland began to coalesce around a highly selective set of pastoral values and ideals positively associated with rural life and folk-cultural traditions as a national repository for the values of producerism, thrift, and humility. By the 1930s, cities such as Chicago were explicitly considered “extra-regional” exceptions to the Midwest status-quo which was now, thoroughly, allied with pastoralism and considered to be home to “natural peace, innocence, simple virtue,” a producer ethic, and “authentic” American idealism.¹⁰ Pastoral/rural life and culture and industrial/urban life and culture were now “segregated mentally: the former was assigned to a regional ‘box’ called Middle West; the latter to one called East. . . . This left the term Middle West free to be employed … as a synonym for rural America.”¹¹

Network Development and the Social Ranking of Markets

Though this chapter focuses on network development, broadcast law, and policy particularly as each relates to television, any such history necessitates reference to “pre-TV” precedents. Networking emerged out of transportation and communication infrastructures of the late 1800s. Television followed the same service patterns and is legislated and regulated by the same guidelines and bodies as radio before it. This chapter thus uses the term “broadcasting” to refer to both radio and television, particularly as the laws, policies, and development plans studied here pertain to the development and operation of the “Big Three” radio and TV networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC. Additionally, I here refer to local stations that are affiliates of these networks (rather than independent stations or those of the Big Three’s challengers). While such focus risks “privilege[ing] national consciousness at the expense of local identities,” my intent is exactly this—to theorize how the national imagination is itself built up by reference to the “local,” particularly in ways that license or limit understandings of place.¹²

In historical focus here is the period from the late 1920s through the immediate post–World War II era. Between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, the “Big Three” television networks of NBC, CBS, and ABC were formed, expanded nationally, and solidified as the controlling U.S. network powers—a position of dominance they each held until the early 1990s when cable homes began to outnumber over-air broadcast reception homes for the first time in U.S. history. Paradoxically, as the networks became increasingly national in their distribution capabilities they became simultaneously more “local,” concentrating all network production and business operations in New York City and Los Angeles by the late 1950s. This period includes the development and institution of broadcast laws that remained fundamentally unchanged until the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The period of analysis thus begins with the opening of the broadcast era and concludes with the preeminence of the “Big Three” networks, anchored on either coast, as broadcast policy undergirded the growth and stability of network television which realized its promise to be a national presence in U.S. homes.¹³

While network promotional rhetoric promised that television would be an “immediate” postwar service for all Americans, the reality of the medium’s gradual availability was much more staggered and uneven. The speed with which networking developed to serve a truly national audience—particularly in midwestern and mountain west regions—was biased heavily by the way the pre-existing “bones” of the system encouraged expansion along certain channels of transportation and communication over others. Network expansion plans were mapped to maximize economy of scale and to prioritize service only as it was economically strategic. Thus, while television’s introduction at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 showcased the Middleton family’s eagerness to adopt TV, regular network service in their hometown of Riverdale, Indiana was not yet a guarantee. The public promise of universal access and national service was tempered by institutional imperatives.

In 1926 the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) famously took out full-page newspaper advertisements to announce the formation of its programming and distribution arm, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). The ads promised that, through networking, events of national importance would never again escape a broad American public now guaranteed the best possible programming on an everyday basis. The advertisement promoted networking as an idealized venue for national integration. The resources of a large corporation would allow for “better programs permanently assured … in the interest of the listening public.”¹⁴ And yet, the advertisement also qualified that

[t]he National Broadcasting Company will not only broadcast these programs through station WEAF, but it will make them available to other broadcasting stations throughout the country so far as it may be practicable to do so, … It is hoped that arrangements may be made so that every event of national importance may be broadcast widely throughout the United States.¹⁵

RCA, here, seems somewhat more circumspect regarding the prospect of rapid and immediate network service to the majority of the country than is recounted in most broadcast histories. Perhaps experiences within NBC’s corporate family contributed to this qualified tone. According to historian David Nye, General Electric and Westinghouse were so eager to expand into rural farming markets in the early 1920s that one-fifth of the companies’ magazine advertisements were directed to that market, while each also invested in promotions such as an “all electric farm” installation at the Pennsylvania State Farm Products Show.¹⁶ By the close of the decade, however, these corporations and power comp...