Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (51 page)

Programming such as this, however, could dominate only so long as most viewers were relatively well-off and highly educated: in 1950 television sets still cost between $400 and $500, sums far beyond the reach of most families. As the price of sets plunged within the next few years, sponsors insisted on shows that would appeal to mass audiences. TV producers then had to be more careful about controversial material. As one advertiser put it, "A program that displeases any substantial segment of the population is a misuse of the advertising dollar."
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CBS slowly downgraded Murrow's show to the point that it became an occasional documentary—"See It Now and Then," cynics called it by 1958. News programs, never important in scheduling decisions, scarcely mattered. Until September 1963 the evening news lasted only fifteen minutes. Newscasters—such as Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who reported the news on NBC for almost fourteen years beginning in 1956—lacked the technology of videotape in the 1950s and mostly contented themselves with showing film footage and reading a script. Marquis Childs, an advocate of serious news programming, concluded in 1956 that "the effect at meaningful and vital communication [of current events] simply has not been made."
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Technological developments further abetted mass production of TV offerings, thereby driving live drama from the screen. As early as 1951 Ball and her co-star–husband Desi Arnaz used edited film instead of live performance. Hollywood, seeking revenues as downtown movie theaters closed, began producing "made-for-TV" films. These could be edited and rerun innumerable times, thereby generating much higher profits for the effort involved.
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By the mid- to late 1950s pre-staged series dominated TV prime-time, among them highly popular westerns such as "Cheyenne," "Gunsmoke," "Maverick," and "Have Gun—Will Travel," detective stories such as "Dragnet," "77 Sunset Strip," "Perry Mason," and "Hawaiian Eye," and comedies featuring performers lured from radio such as Jack Benny and George Burns and Gracie Allen.

By then critics were already assailing the banalities of the "boob tube." T. S. Eliot described TV as a "medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome." Even Eisenhower, who became an avid watcher, said in 1953, "If a citizen has to be bored to death, it is cheaper and more comfortable to sit at home and look at television than it is to go outside and pay a dollar for a ticket."
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The quest for mass audiences led networks (CBS and NBC dominated at the time) to support general-interest programs. One of these was "The Ed Sullivan Show," perennially one of the most highly rated offerings of the late 1950s. Hosted on Sunday nights by the poker-faced and un-charismatic Sullivan, the show paraded the currently most popular entertainers. In 1952 NBC put on its early morning "Today Show" featuring Dave Garroway. Before then the networks had assumed that few people would tune in at an early hour of day: many channels had been blank. At first the show did not do well, but Garroway then brought on stage a chimpanzee, J. Fred Muggs. The chimp excited children, then adults, and "The Today Show" became a popular fixture. Cartoons soon dominated morning TV on weekends.
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The networks made special efforts to chase after the greatly expanding audiences of middle-class white suburbanites. They caught them with programs such as "Father Knows Best," "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," and "Leave It to Beaver," all of which celebrated the comical but mostly triumphant experiences of middle-class, nuclear families. Most shows concerning ethnic or working-class people, such as "The Goldbergs" and "I Remember Mama," were dropped; few programs featured blacks.
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TV producers catered carefully to sponsors (such as cigarette companies) and worked hard to reflect the norms of their viewers. They favorably portrayed businessmen and professional people such as doctors, lawyers, and scientists. Political issues were mainly off limits. So was frankness about sex: Lucy's pregnancy was mostly mentioned as an "expectancy" or some other euphemism.
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Fathers tended to be all-knowing, mothers all-supportive (and always at home), and children (though frisky) ultimately obedient and loving. Except on the soaps, which had a grim.edge not found in prime-time, nothing very bad ever happened.

By the mid-1950s the networks devoted increasing time to quiz shows. These required very little money to produce and attracted sizeable audiences who watched contestants strive to win Big Money. Although the popularity of these shows has been exaggerated, the best-known of them, "The $64,000 Question," was the nation's most widely watched program in the 1955–56 season and fourth in 1956–57. These shows came crashing to earth in October 1959, following scandalous revelations (concerning "Twenty-One") that producers had rigged the outcomes. Staging quizzes in this way assured that telegenic contestants, such as Charles Van Doren, remained on the air. Van Doren, son of a well-known Columbia University professor, stayed for an exciting run of fourteen weeks during which he was given answers in advance. He won $129,000.
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The quiz show scandals so embarrassed network executives that they resolved to promote more public service. ("Public relations" became a necessary adjunct to the consumer culture of the 1950s.) News staffs increased, current affairs documentaries made a comeback, and the networks offered to televise debates between the major presidential candidates in the 1960 campaign. In September 1963 they lengthened evening news shows to thirty minutes. Critics of TV, however, remained unimpressed. Television, they insisted, remained mindless. Programs and commercials pandered shamelessly to the money-making mania of the consumer culture. Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, summed up these criticisms in 1961 by asserting, in a phrase that stuck in public consciousness, that television had become a "vast wasteland." He continued, "You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom."
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Minow overgeneralized, for TV was too diverse to deserve such a blanket characterization. Still, there was no doubting that television highlighted soaps, unsophisticated comedies, and violence (though not nearly so much as in later years). As a uniquely intimate medium that invaded millions of private homes, it also had to guard with special care against offending people. Far from criticizing social mores, it mainly reflected existing norms and institutions.

It remains difficult, however, to assess the impact of television on the values and beliefs of people. Debates over the cultural influence of TV, indeed, raged long after the 1950s. Those who thought this power was large argued that television strengthened violent tendencies in people, sabotaged the reading habit, stifled conversation (especially in families), and induced a general passivity of mind.
Why Johnny Can't Read
, which focused on the role of TV, became a best-seller in 1955.
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Critics added that TV did much to debase politics, both by lowering (through "spots") the level of discussion and by increasing the costs of campaigning. It could make (Kennedy) or break (McCarthy) the careers of politicians. Critics maintained also that television harmed radio, newspapers and magazines, and the motion picture industry, while giving enormous boosts to the advertising business and successful sponsors. When Walt Disney put on one-hour TV shows about the frontiersman Davy Crockett in 1955, he sold $300 million worth of Davy Crockett dolls, toys, T-shirts, and fake coonskin caps.
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Other, less hostile observers thought television did much to develop and define a more national culture. As the networks sent out nationwide messages (and commercials) to people, these analysts concluded, they helped to standardize tastes and to diminish provinciality and social division. One widely noticed version of this argument, by the Canadian critic Marshall McLuhan, went so far as to say that television was creating an interconnected "global village." McLuhan thought this globalization might be a good thing, for the "new electronic interdependence" would lead to a "single consciousness" that would link people not only throughout the country but ultimately throughout the world.
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Some of these generalizations about the impact of television seem irrefutable. Television indeed spurred the growth of advertising and advanced the careers of telegenic politicians such as Kennedy. Over time, mainly after 1960, it accelerated two important political trends: the rise of personalized TV campaigns and the weakening of party discipline and organization. Some magazines and newspapers also suffered a bit because of the surge of TV:
Life
, America's preeminent magazine of photojournalism, lost 21 percent of its circulation within six months in 1954; like other general-interest magazines such as
Saturday Evening Post, Look
, and
Collier's, Life
later collapsed.
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Television advertising helped to work minor miracles for some sponsors, such as Revlon, which rode "The $64,000 Question" to striking increases in sales. There is no doubt that television reinforced the already rising consumerism that was such a prominent feature of the 1950s.

Still, television was hardly all-powerful, even in the early years when it was a novelty for people. Although some magazines struggled against competition from TV, most managed all right, and a few, reaching out to specialized audiences, found growing markets.
Sports Illustrated
, starting in 1954, was but one example of a trend toward such publications, which over time heightened diversity among American magazines. Many women's magazines also flourished. Radio and films, too, found new ways to compete, often by targeting special groups: think of radio stations catering to particular tastes in music.

Television indeed lulled people into hours of sedentary viewing every day, but watchers were often far from passive; on the contrary, they frequently laughed delightedly or argued heatedly about the meaning of what they had seen. Studies of audiences suggested also that commercials did not sweep all before them. Many ads sustained sales or brand-name preferences, but it was harder to establish needs that people did not have already. Millions of people smoked and bought big cars long before the explosive rise of TV commercials. (Steadily high percentages of Americans kept on smoking even after cigarette ads were banned from radio and TV in 1971.) Viewers commonly hooted out loud at exaggerated claims for products.
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In the 1980s and 1990s, when "popular culture studies" became a thriving scholarly pursuit, writers were still debating the influence of television on American culture.
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Many persisted in arguing that it was great, contributing, for instance, to long-run declines in educational test scores and to crime in the streets—developments that grew especially pronounced after 1963. Other analysts, however, doubted the strength of causal connections. Americans, they insisted, look at the "texts" of TV as they do other aspects of mass culture, in highly individualized ways. Viewers are not passive receptacles; they make choices.
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The class, gender, religion, and ethnicity of people especially matter in affecting responses.

Although the jury remains out, this perspective on TV seems persuasive. Millions of American TV-watchers—in the 1950s and thereafter—remained stubbornly attached to regional, ethnic, or racial subcultures and resisted aspects of the more homogenized "outside world" that the mass media thrust at them. Nothing, it seemed, could shake the love that many Italian-Americans maintained for Frank Sinatra. Professional wrestling, a sham, nonetheless attracted large and enthusiastic audiences, especially among the working classes. The power of these personal preferences continued to divide the "global village" and to curb the capacity of TV to affect the behavior of people.
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M
UCH OF THE HAND-WRINGING
about "mass culture" in the 1950s came from the Left. From right-wing contemporaries came different laments: over the rise of sexual liberation, juvenile delinquency, and generational change.

Worries about sexual liberation were hardly new, of course, to the 1950s. Reformers and moralists had battled against prostitution and the "white slave trade" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and fretted about "flappers" and "companionate marriage" in the 1920s. Rising divorce rates had greatly alarmed Americans from 1900 onward. The social turmoil of World War II intensified such fears, as newspapers carried lurid accounts of "Victory girls," "khaki-wackies," and "good-time Charlottes" who gave themselves freely to GIs. Americans worried especially during the war about the exposure of soldiers to venereal diseases. Stories proliferated in the 1950s about "sex crimes." "Petting" seemed rapidly on the rise among unmarried people. Most of these concerns reflected long-standing assumptions about class, race, and gender, especially the double standard applied to the sexes. Lower-class white men (and blacks of both sexes), it was often said, acted like animals. What had to be nipped in the bud, traditionalists said, was greater sexuality among middle-class women, especially the young and the unmarried.
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