Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream

Conclusion

Conclusion As a defining site of twentieth-century American culture, the first era of televisionadvertisingisavitalpieceofourhistorythathasbeenlargelyneglected . Retracing the steps of postwar television advertising addresses this historical oversight and, in the process, sheds new light on our understanding of our national ethos to consume, both then and now.The American Dream— stalled during the Depression and World War II—blossomed as never before , nourished by the most powerful advertising medium in history. Unlike other media, television was intended to be a medium of advertising from the get-go, specifically designed to grease the wheels of consumerism. Also contrarytoprintorradio ,televisionadvertisingcarriedwithitauniquepurpose, to raise our national ‘‘consumer consciousness’’ by promoting an ideology grounded in the values of consumption, materialism, and upward mobility. This purpose was achieved beyond anyone’s expectations, as television advertising entered the national psyche and became part and parcel of everyday life. We cannot, then, overestimate the impact television advertising had in shapingourvaluesduringthiskeyjunctureofAmericanhistory,valueswhich remain the foundation for who we are as a people. Our social and economic grounding in consumer capitalism, shared by much of the world, is strongly linkedtotheideologyembeddedincommercialtelevision’sfirsttwodecades. AmericantelevisionanditscoreideologyofconsumptioncanbeseenasCold War artillery, a form of corporate propaganda that proclaimed the rewards of free enterprise and drew upon nationalistic sentiment. Just as government propaganda instructed Americans to save moneyduring the Depression and told those on the home front to make sacrifices to achieve victory, television advertising in the postwar era linked consuming to the ideological corner-  stones of capitalism and democracy. Television advertising thus helped reestablish the American Dream by equating citizenship with consumption, that is, by reinscribing a consumer ethic into the idea of American citizenship .ThemassestofmassmediaimpelledAmericanstospendmoney,selling the message that doing so was beneficial not only for the individual but also for the nation. The amazing story of television advertising, however, has been overshadowed by its host medium, television, with the lattercredited and blamed for a large share of the cultural dynamics of postwar America. Even after the demise of the single-sponsor system, it was advertisers who brought television to us, using the medium to shape consumer behavior in their favor. The golden age of television was thus in many ways actually the golden age of televisionadvertising,asitwasadvertiserswhobroughttheshowstoviewers. The tremendous impact of television advertising was a function of its being in precisely the right place at precisely the right time, in sync with a number of key social, economic, and demographic trends.Television advertisers’ relentless pursuit of a mass audience, homogeneous in nature and middle class intastes,resonatedwiththesocialnormsofconformityandconsensus.Piped into the landscape of domestic life, television advertising catered to Americans ’ desire to fill their new homes with symbols of success and happiness. Television advertising not only helped drive the postwar economy, but also shaped and reflected a growing standardization of American culture, beaming the same images and language into homes across the country. By means of its national reach, television advertising was thus instrumental in turning America into a much more homogeneous country. Commercials helped to spreadthesuburbanand,morespecifically,theSouthernCalifornianlifestyle across the country, promoting the values of an egalitarian consumer paradise . Cultural standards originating in New York City and Hollywood were disseminated coast-to-coast, impacting local community life. Television advertising was also in synch with the nation’s love affair with automobiles and mobility in general, advancing our desire for private transportation and satisfying our perpetual wanderlust. Although television advertising was designed for a mass audience and delivered on a mass scale, it would be wrong to assume that it was simply a vehicle of consensus or agent of conformity.While it did indeed act on a macro level as a force of homogeneity and standardization, television advertising also functioned on the local level as a force of individualization as consumers constructed their identities through the marketplace. As the loudest voice of  [ B         Y   B  capitalism, commercial television thus did indeed exploit the freedom and liberties to be found within consumerism, that each purchase is a form of democracy in action. Rather than being purely a ‘‘top-down’’ form of propaganda , then, television advertising was quite accommodating of diversity, making it clear that each individual was free to choose from the huge array of products and services available in the marketplace. Consumption may have been the common denominator, but how one consumed was up to the individual, deflating the idea that the postwar era, and specifically postwar consumerism, allowed little or no personal expression. When...