The Forgotten Network: Du Mont and the Birth of American Television (review)

It is ironic that the most short-lived of the early American television networks should receive the first scholarly treatment, rather than NBC, CBS, or ABC. In 1931, Allen B. DuMont founded a company for making cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) for oscilloscopes. A few years later he began making CRTs for television receivers and in 1938 he allied with Paramount Pictures to finance his move into the manufacture of receivers and into broadcasting. After delays due to the war and conflicts over broadcast standards, the DuMont network went on the air in 1946 and produced ten years of innovative programming, even though underfinanced and in a hostile regulatory climate, before closing down in 1955.

David Weinstein draws on sources ranging from manuscript and video archives to websites and interviews with former DuMont staff. He ties DuMont's evolving programming to broader industrial and cultural trends, asserting that it "helped Americans make sense of the postwar world and shaped the television programming that followed" (p. 1). Whether his analysis supports the first claim is moot. Despite devoting seven of ten chapters to DuMont's pioneering and popular shows, he never mentions the Original Amateur Hour, which topped television's first audience ratings in 1948. And the coverage is hermetic. There is nary a mention of what preceded DuMont's programming on the radio or the programming of its three competitors, with their larger audiences.

Weinstein suggests that what influence DuMont had was the result of a confluence of "money, power, politics, business and the birth of commercial television in America" (p. 2). Here he slants the evidence in DuMont's favor, never critiquing the contingencies or contradictions of his decisions in order to try and explain the network's failure. He devotes fifty pages to the founder and the organization of the network while ignoring DuMont's research and manufacturing operations. "From Basement to Broadway" is one of several oddly titled chapters; DuMont's Manhattan offices were on Madison Avenue. We skim nearly forty years of DuMont's life in just four pages. Yet one wonders whether the maker of oscilloscopes—not oscillographs—might have built a successful business in electronic test equipment. Was it desperation or inspiration that drove his Faustian bargain with Paramount? The sparse financial data Weinstein presents indicate that economic forces drove DuMont into a new, government-regulated industry, but we do not learn if the roots of the crisis were internal or external. Peter A. Kellar's 1991 history of CRTs suggests that a visit to Cossor in England triggered the change, which runs counter to Weinstein's claim that Du-Mont's CRT innovations were crucial to the industry's success. Nor will the reader researching DuMont's devotion to oversized CRTs find anything relevant here.

Weinstein elides DuMont's role in the regulatory battles among broadcasters, manufacturers, and the Federal Communications Commission in order to highlight his democratic character. He portrays DuMont as a naive entrepreneur who campaigned for the logical distribution of VHF and UHF TV channels. Yet the briefest look at his political behavior between 1939 and 1946 (as related in Hugh Slotten's Radio and Television Regulation [1999]) would qualify that image significantly and help ground the reflexive historiography of a so-called lone inventor in commercial reality.

DuMont sealed his company's fate by refusing at the last minute to leave Paramount's symbiotic embrace in 1951. Ten years later he announced that an engineer should "be content with the role of the originator and leave it to those with other functions to use the developments in the best interests of mankind" (p. 189). DuMont did not take his own advice, for Weinstein's book is often suggestive—albeit inadvertently—of his poor business judgment. For example, DuMont loved motorboat racing with his research director, and Weinstein calls this activity "an opportunity to practice engineering . . . on the seas" (p. 4). One wonders how the president of a struggling...