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13 1. Stockton Who? The period known as “the fifties” (roughly 1947 to about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963) was an anxious time in America. It was a time of promise and peril as the Cold War raged, and nuclear annihilation was a distinct possibility—indeed, Newsweek reported, “By 1952, 1953, or 1954, the Kremlin may be ready for a major war.”1 There were whispers of clandestine Soviet-directed fifth columns—the enemy within—eating away at the moral foundations of the republic. Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, an iconic figure of the 1950s, often repeated British historian Arnold Toynbee’s observation that “sixteen out of the nineteen civilizations . . . decayed from within.”2 Could that decay happen in America? Some said not only it could but it was happening here, and the godless Communists were the prime suspects. By the early fifties, Communists, real or imagined, seemed just about everywhere, around every corner, under every bed. And by then, something else seemed just about everywhere: television.3 As this new technology insinuated its way into U.S. homes—often coopting entire rooms and changing eating and sleeping habits—Americans at once celebrated television and were a bit wary of it.4 By 1955, it was a brave new TV world populated by legions of writers, producers, directors, actors, singers, dancers, comedians, sales executives, managers , affiliates, commercial sponsors, and hosts of censors. It was these men and women (but mostly men) who decided the appropriateness of television programs during this time of heightened anxiety in America. This story is about one such censor; it is an account of America’s first network TV censor, NBC-TV’s Stockton Helffrich (pronounced HELfrick ). Do not let his aristocratic-sounding name fool you, Helffrich was a middle-class fellow from Yonkers, New York, who paid his way though Penn State University during the twentieth century’s Great Depression. He is quite possibly one of the most significant people from early television that you never heard of. 3RQGLOOR&KLQGG $0 14 S T O C K T O N W H O ? Although this is indeed Helffrich’s story, it is also an historic sketch of his time, for without noting some of the era’s reinforcing ideological discourse—what American postwar culture saw as “common sense”— Helffrich’s censorship may, at first blush, appear quite curious. One has to frequently remind oneself that Helffrich and the others who developed and implemented television standards in the 1950s were trapped in their time’s ideological treacle—what the noted Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci labeled egemonia, or hegemony (i.e., the invisible, dominating influence of power). Media theorist Fred Inglis calls it the “heavy, saturating omnipresence of the way things are.”5 In every age, each person finds him- or herself caught in that era’s own sticky set of commonsensical beliefs. These viscous, everyday values invariably point a society toward a certain cultural calculus, a kind of collective logic that reinforces thinking, believing, and behaving. By understanding postwar Zeitgeist, one may better make sense of Helffrich’s impulse to suppress one idea or image over another. Besides, it is near impossible to grasp a period’s inflection of censorship without a coterminous investigation of the historic milieu that prompted it. And examining a nation’s social taboos can teach what it morally values, what power institutions it protects, and what sociosexual discourse it permits between genders, among lifestyles, and within age groups. It may also offer a glimpse at the ominous fears that lurk in that nation’s communal soul. Helffrich kept notes for eleven years on almost everything he viewed— every program, script, and commercial advertisement, all of which he often censored at the network. “Continuity Acceptance/Radio and Television ,” or CART, is the name he gave his writings, which from 1948 to early 1960 graded the acceptableness of almost all programming worth mentioning on NBC-TV. This opening chapter, then, acts as a brief introduction to the main historic actor, Stockton Helffrich, as well as a cursory impression of the fifties. Although there is abundant literature on censorship of social expression , from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations and Supreme Court rulings to First Amendment issues—and this book does not avoid touching upon some of them—the legal/regulatory aspect of censorship is not its thrust. Instead, the work is limited to the many cultural issues Hel...

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