Television

In the post-World War II era, television was an integral part of the return to civilian life, helping to shape key social and political developments of the period.

Several early innovations laid the groundwork for the cultural primacy of television in the postwar United States. In 1923, Vladimir K. Zworykin developed the electronic camera, which, combined with Charles Francis Jenkins’ pioneering efforts in the field of motion picture projection technology, put television on course to supplant radio. Americans first encountered television on a broad scale in the mid-1930s through early telecasts of sports, news, and events like the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Coverage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech at the World’s Fair made him the first president to appear on television.

However, beginning in 1941, the nation’s involvement in World War II stalled any further development of the medium until the conflict’s end, when the technology of war production turned toward producing civilian goods.

The postwar economic boom in the United States aided television’s rise as a key consumer product. To accustom the public to this new form of mass communication, advertisers marketed television as a sign of prestige and social status, particularly for white, middle-class families moving to the suburbs. Frequently portrayed as a new kind of family hearth, television was the centerpiece of the con-sumerist showcase that the suburban home embodied, an incarnation of the domesticity and abundance emphasized in 1950s culture. This suburban ideal, one of traditional gender roles, was also popularized in television programs themselves, as comedies like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver featured a conventional family life of male breadwinners and supportive housewives.

Between 1950 and 1970, the number of television sets in American homes increased from 1 million to almost 60 million. As television became a more common part of domestic life, the variety of programs increased as well. By

1955,  the average family spent four to five hours watching television each day, with programs like The Ed Sullivan Show becoming must-see events during the famed appearances of such pop culture figures as Elvis Presley and the Beatles. For younger viewers, shows like The Mickey Mouse Club and Howdy Doody Time became an iconic part of CHILDHOOD. In keeping with the trend toward mass consumption, advertisers also capitalized on the time that Americans spent watching television and flooded the medium with advertisements. They sponsored and lent their names to entire programs like The Texaco Star Theatre, often with the show’s actors pitching the products in commercials just as they had done on radio.

Network news expanded along with television. Among the big three broadcast networks, CBS was the pioneer, launching its 15-minute nightly news program on August 15, 1948. Anchored by Douglas Edwards, the program was available in five eastern cities until CBS became the first to broadcast its nightly news on both coasts in 1951. NBC experimented with nightly news through the Camel News Caravan in 1949, though its first significant foray into such programming came with the Huntley-Brinkley Report in

1956.  Featuring Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, the program continued a pairing that began with NBC’s coverage of the 1956 political conventions and helped the network dominate the news until Walter Cronkite became anchor at CBS in 1962. Through his coverage of such events as JOHN

F. Kennedy’s assassination and the moon landing, Cronkite quickly gained stature, so much so that he prevailed as “the most trusted man in America” in a 1963 Gallup poll. The poll’s outcome reflected the importance of television news for Americans’ understanding of their world and the anchor’s power to shape that outlook. Cronkite’s 1968 on-air editorial concluding that the United States could only reach a stalemate in Vietnam was widely credited with influencing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to pursue reelection, with Johnson reportedly stating, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

The development of television news underscored how politics became a more visible part of public life through the growth of television. Throughout the 1950s, Richard M. Nixon was one of the first politicians to utilize the medium in significant ways, whether reassuring voters that he did not accept illegal campaign funds in the 1952 “Checkers speech” or heralding American abundance in the 1959 “kitchen debates” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Americans also found themselves riveted as Senator Joseph R. McCarthy interrogated suspected communists in the Army-McCarthy hearings. The decline in public support for McCarthy following the hearings, in part a reaction to his bullying demeanor and disheveled appearance, attested to television’s impact on public opinion. This phenomenon was further reinforced in the legendary 1960 presidential debates between Nixon and John F. Kennedy, in which Kennedy garnered praise for his composed persona while Nixon’s agitated appearance was perceived as a misstep from which his campaign never recovered.

In later years, images from the Vietnam War that television brought into American homes critically contributed to lagging domestic support for the conflict by the end of the 1960s. In the country’s first “television war,” scenes of burning huts, traumatized civilians, and wounded soldiers brought a new level of social consciousness to the medium that also made it a vital tool for the antiwar movement. In this manner, television was once again at the center of how Americans understood their world and themselves in the 1950s and ’60s, a cultural impact further solidified in 1975 by the creation of the Museum of Television and Radio (renamed the Paley Center for Media in 2007).

Nelson Rockefeller (left) and Barry Goldwater (right) with host Ned Brooks on the television program Meet the Press, 1960 (Library of Congress)

Further reading: Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Cecelia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

—Susan V Spellman and Hillary S. Kativa

Termination policy See Native Americans; treaty rights.

1968 Six Flags Over Georgia opened, adding to the change in how and where Americans spent their leisure time.

Further reading: Judith A. Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991); Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

—David E. Goldberg