Cold War, Cool Medium

Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture

Thomas Doherty

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231503273
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming.

To the unjaded viewership of Cold War America, the television set was not a harbinger of intellectual degradation and moral decay, but a thrilling new household appliance capable of bringing the wonders of the world directly into the home. The "cool medium" permeated the lives of every American, quickly becoming one of the most powerful cultural forces of the twentieth century. While television has frequently been blamed for spurring the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was also the national stage upon which America witnessed—and ultimately welcomed—his downfall. In this provocative and nuanced cultural history, Doherty chronicles some of the most fascinating and ideologically charged episodes in television history: the warm-hearted Jewish sitcom The Goldbergs; the subversive threat from I Love Lucy; the sermons of Fulton J. Sheen on Life Is Worth Living; the anticommunist series I Led 3 Lives; the legendary jousts between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy on See It Now; and the hypnotic, 188-hour political spectacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings.

By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, Cold War, Cool Medium paints a picture of Cold War America that belies many black-and-white clichés. Doherty not only details how the blacklist operated within the television industry but also how the shows themselves struggled to defy it, arguing that television was preprogrammed to reinforce the very freedoms that McCarthyism attempted to curtail.

ONE

VIDEO RISING

Before fiber-optic cable and satellite dishes served up a buffet of triple-digit narrowcasting, before videocassette recorders and camcorders put the means of replay and production in the hands of the people, before even the ruthless network troika of NBC, CBS, and ABC acquired dominion over prime-time programming, American television was a different kind of creature comfort. At the halfway mark of the twentieth century, the seedling medium had not yet blossomed into a garden of color, cable, and World Wide Web-bing. Their TV did not look like our TV.

Condemned to a mere handful of channel selections, paleo-televiewers adjusted rooftop antennae to receive clear reception and trudged vast distances across carpeting to rotate dials manually. Drab two-tone images in black and white, fuzzy and flippy, beamed forth from a pitifully small screen. The sets were serious pieces of furniture, mammoth in girth, encased in walnut or mahogany, molded to dominate a living room and displace the upright radio from the family hearth. Once common parlance, even the video lingua franca of the day has all but lapsed into anachronism: “snow,” “ghosts,” “vertical rollover,” “horizontal tear,” “airplane flutter,” “rabbit ears,” “test patterns,” “vacuum tubes,” “Please stand by, we are experiencing technical difficulties,” and—that bracing red alert, perhaps a portent of things to come—THIS IS A TEST OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCASTING SYSTEM.

The half-forgotten phrases and extinct folkways recall the tender years of a millennial force. The shows were mainly live, the programming scarce, and the viewers still somewhat spellbound before a miraculous new communications technology. In the early 1950s, as war raged in Korea and McCarthyism roiled at home, television first mounted its full-scale incursion into American culture. Growing up in parallel waves, the Cold War and the cool medium negotiated a cultural pact that demanded adjustments on both sides of the dial.

The terms of the contract were updated almost on a yearly basis, but eventually one partner gained the upper hand and resolved a vexing point of contention. Of the incalculable ways that television transformed American life—in family and friendships, leisure and literacy, consumer habits and common memories—the expansion of freedom of expression and the embrace of human difference must be counted among its most salutary legacies. During the Cold War, through television, America became a more open and tolerant place.

The conventional wisdom claims otherwise. Not just an aesthetic blight, television is cast as coconspirator in the conformities and repressions of Cold War America. Purveyor of sedative pabulum, facilitator of the blacklist, handmaiden to McCarthyism, the small screen abetted moral cowardice, retarded intellectual growth, and smothered resistance. The dark times and the dumb medium deserved each other.

So dismal a reputation reflects more than critical payback from highbrow tastemakers and wounded liberals. The acute videophobia expresses the resentment of partisans of the sacred word at the rise of the sordid image. Before the primacy of television, democracy in America had always been linked to writing and literacy. For the Enlightened thinkers of the Revolutionary War era, pamphlets and books were invested with an almost divine aura. Comprehended in silence and pondered in tranquility, the founding documents presupposed a well-read, rational citizenry. The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the U.S. Constitution were binding contracts, typeset and permanent, set down in black and white, the secular scripture for a modern demos. “Litera scripta manet,” cautioned the epigrammatic Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, “the written word remains,” and who as author, publisher, and founder of the U.S. Postal Service was as good as his word. It is the motto engraved above the entranceway of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., an agency still more scrupulous about the collection and preservation of pieces of paper than film reels or video cassettes.

Like radio and motion pictures, television rebuked that literate faith. Instantly accessible and immediately apprehensible, it transmitted an alphabet of meaning that required only the senses of sight and sound, not the tedious diligence of book learning. Broadcasting moving images into the home, giving pictures to the radio signals, the hybrid medium grew to be exponentially more powerful and penetrating than its parents. The greatest leap forward in the graphic revolution, television radiated through the life of the present and the memory of the past with a force that dwarfed the impact of the other media. Soon print itself came to seem the hieroglyphics of a lost civilization.

The rise of video was concurrent with a frigid season in the Cold War, a temporal bond that suggests a codependent relationship. Orbiting around television, a cluster of transformations in American culture comes into focus. Economic prosperity and national security, the twin obsessions of the generation forged by the Great Depression and the Second World War, began to share space with freedom of expression and civil rights, the obsessions of the next generations. As prosperity became an expectation not a dream, as the dread of social insecurity faded amid the cornucopia of postwar affluence, the nexus of American culture folded ever inward—to information and expression, to media access and on-screen visibility. Collaborator and catalyst, television acted as a featured player in the action.

Beset from birth by the harsh elements of the Cold War, television came of age oppressed by a “witchhunt atmosphere” and “traumatized by phobias,” asserted Erik Barnouw, the indispensable historian of American broadcasting. “It would learn caution, and cowardice.” True enough—but it would also utter defiance and encourage resistance. The Cold War and the cool medium worked out an elastic arrangement, sometimes constricting but ultimately expanding the boundaries of free expression and relaxing the credentials for inclusion. Within a few short years, television had become the prized proscenium in American culture, and the stage was open to an array of unsettling opinions and unruly talent.

A Television Genealogy

As conventionally personified, the development of television reenacts the life stages of man: an embryonic term of gestation (1939 to 1945), infant steps (1946 to 1950), adolescent growing pains (1951 to 1960), mature adulthood (1961 to 1980), and then, after being grafted onto coaxial cables and computer networks for home delivery, mutation into an entirely new species (1981 and beyond). Like the illustrations in a worn biology textbook, where the amphibian crawls from the sea and shape-shifts through the millennia into mammal, slouched ape, upright Neanderthal, and finally to business-suited Dad, briefcase in hand, walking purposefully to work, television is forever aborning technologically into a crisper, sleeker, toned-up model. Of course, the Darwinian conceit presumes not only that television has attained a heightened stage of evolutionary development but that it is actually going somewhere. Alas, the final destination of television must remain an open question, but the history of the medium—what it once was and what it once meant—is more readily answered. By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, the viewer discovers a picture of Cold War America that belies the black-and-white clichés in cable syndication and current scholarship.

Unjaded as yet to the miracle of light and sound, Cold War Americans looked upon television not as a lesser order of moving imagery, but as a thrilling new household appliance. The monochromatic, washed-out images seen on surviving kinescopes fail to conjure the initial wonder at the magic show.¹ Spectators weaned on high-definition screens gleaming with computer graphics and rumbling with digital sound are apt to find the pictures slow, static, and stunted. Upon first sight, however, the video vista was not a vast wasteland but a cool oasis beheld with eyes of delight and discovery.

Well, not quite all eyes. “In my frayed estimation, television today is nothing more than agitated decalcomania rampant on the tavern wall and in the family living room,” humorist Fred Allen snarled in 1948. “For entertainment, television offers loquacious puppets, stout ladies bending over ovens assembling cucumber ragouts, blurred newsreels, assorted sporting events, antiquated B pictures, and a few entertaining shows.” Allen’s jaundiced perspective summarized elite opinion on the reviled “boob tube,” an attitude in his case fueled also by the flop sweat of an eminent radio star facing obsolescence. Admittedly, Allen’s cranky catalogue of scheduled programming rings true. Hollywood had yet to sell any A-picture attractions to its despised rival, and primitive items like The Adventures of Oky Doky, I Love to Eat, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, and Film Shorts typified the banal lineup during a paltry few hours of prime-time telecasting. Worth remembering too is the social venue for television spectatorship, as likely in 1948 to be watched in noisy taverns as in private homes.

By the middle of the next decade, television had become a living room fixture, ascendant not only over radio but motion pictures and, so it seemed, all of American culture. The seizure of media mastery occurred with dizzying speed. Envisioned and perfected for the 1939 World’s Fair, dormant commercially during the Second World War, television took off as soon as V-J Day sounded the starting gun for the postwar boom in consumer spending. To register the breakneck pace, metaphors of plague and pestilence flowed from the pens of wary journalists. Aerial antennae sprout like noxious weeds from apartment rooftops and suburban homes while video-born catchphrases spread like viruses through the vocabulary of children. A simple statistic suggests the scale of the invasion: in 1949 television was a luxurious indulgence in one out of ten American homes; in 1959, television was essential furniture in nine out of ten American homes.

As early as 1951, guilt-mongering advertisements warned parents that their children would “suffer in school and be shunned by their friends” if the family resisted buying a television set. The prospect of social ostracism was real enough. Soon it would be impossible to participate in schoolyard chatter or watercooler banter without the common reference point of the small screen. No longer an exotic new appliance but basic survival gear, television became an artery as vital to the pulse of American life as the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. More necessary: forced to choose between fresh food and home entertainment, a solid majority of Cold War Americans opted to jettison the ice box for that other box.

Motion picture magic in the living room: an advertisement for DuMont Television (1949).

Though not yet granted the prerogatives it would take as due recognition of its supreme status—unrestricted entry into every nook and cranny of mortal existence—television in the early years of the Cold War was already changing the way the nation did business. In 1954, NBC President Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the reigning visionary of network programming, declared that television would soon become “the shining center of the home,” transmitted in color, recorded on magnetic tape, “with world wide news service, symphony orchestras and opera companies, with telementaries of still undreamed magnitude, with entertainment that in part becomes highly literate, that serves every segment of our population with programming that is valuable and rewarding.” If Weaver’s forecast of a highbrow prime-time lineup was mere wishful thinking, his vision of the shining centrality of ever higher-tech television in American culture was a dead-on prophecy.

Nowhere was the impact of television felt more keenly than in Hollywood, hometown of the precedent and soon-to-be subordinate moving-image medium. The arrival of television in 1946 coincided with classical Hollywood’s last great season, when a weekly audience of 90 million paying spectators flocked to ornate palaces and homey neighborhood theaters. In a few short years, what Hollywood called “free television” (the implication being that anything free could not be worth much) had metastasized to lethal levels. “TV Audience Now Equals Films” blared a frightful headline in the Hollywood Reporter in 1950. The forced boosterism of studio sloganeering (“Movies Are Better Than Ever!” protesteth the official motto) echoed like a whistle past the graveyard.

Every week Hollywood tallied up the escalating ratings for television, gaped at the plummeting box office revenues, and noted the causal relation between small-screen highs and big-screen lows. The Friday Night Fights on The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (1948–1960) provided a weekly lesson in connecting the dots. On October 26, 1951, the epochal match between the aging former champion Joe Louis and the gritty challenger Rocky Marciano emptied theaters like a smoke bomb. Television “tossed Joe Louis right into our living room on his back,” marveled the television critic Dan Jenkins, a lifelong fan of the Brown Bomber. “If it had to happen, we’d much rather have read about it in the cold impersonal print of Saturday morning’s paper. But it did prove that TV has all the impact of one of Marciano’s punches.” Alarmed motion picture executives contemplated a future where the local Bijou crumbled under the nightly onslaught of living room exhibitions comprised of “big fights, maybe the World Series switched into night-time play, the big football games, or incidents of national interest.” Like Joe Louis, Hollywood played the slow, lumbering has-been, down for the count against the scrappy new kid, swift, lean, and hungry.

The turnabout in the media hierarchy foretold and facilitated other shifts. At the start of the new decade, with a suggestive synchronicity, the Cold War and the cool medium collided on the calendar. As simultaneous threats on the international and domestic fronts reached fever pitch, the publication of a thin volume called Red Channels took the fight onto a field that sooner or later all future American conflicts would enter.

Red and Other Menaces

On the morning of June 25, 1950, North Korean military forces burst south through a line of latitude on the Korean Peninsula. The Korean War, a three-year conflict fought to a tense stalemate in a remote locale, was the bloody backdrop to a superpower rivalry that was never merely ideological. Korea would later be labeled “the forgotten war,” but between 1950–1953 Americans were reminded of it in the most tangible ways: newspaper headlines, radio bulletins, newsreels, television reports, and the delivery of 36,914 notices from the Department of Defense containing regrettable information.

A brutal chapter in the fierce struggle with communism, the Korean War was allegedly an international “police action” by the United Nations, but the United States manned the front lines in the order of battle. Lost to the West in 1949, the People’s Republic of China (“Red China” to all but her allies) was perceived as the puppetmaster pulling the North Korean strings while behind Red China was the guiding hand of the Soviet Union. From command central in the Kremlin, the Sino-Soviet alliance gained force and moved forward, a red tide infused with a yellow menace, poised to thrust the dagger of the Korean Peninsula into the heart of Japan and from there move south into Indochina, then west to India and Pakistan, and inexorably eastward across the Pacific. Taught by World War II propaganda films to appreciate the march of totalitarianism on a map, Americans didn’t need Hollywood to draw them the big picture. Just as black swastikas had once slithered outward from the heart of Germany to spread over Poland and France, red hammer and sickles bled into Eastern Europe and Asia and seemed poised to cover the world.

Back on native ground, the arrest of the Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg confirmed the presence of a homegrown fifth column to the overseas menace. In 1949 the reputedly scientifically backward USSR, ahead of schedule and with shocking suddenness, had ended the U.S. monopoly on atomic weaponry. Top secret information had clearly changed hands, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon ensnared two of the principle transfer agents.

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