Our Town in Cold War America: The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950-1958)

Eagan | Our Town in Cold War America: The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show[1950-1 958) Eileen Eagan University of Southern Maine Our Town in Gold War America: The George Burns and GracieAllen Show(1950-1958) elevision programs-and situation comedies in particular-have often been discussed by scholars as reliable indexes of the temper of American culture in the 1950s. The television set was a symbolic successor to the "machine in the garden," and the medium was a reflection of the values, politics, and social mores of the period.1 In Democratic Vistas: Television inAmerican Culture David Marc describes the 1950s and 1960s sitcom as offering the Depression born, post World War II adult group: a vision of peaceful, prosperous suburban life centered on a stable nuclear family ... The economic , political, and social travail of the thirties and forties had been left behind by a brave new teleworld. Instead there was a family: a husband and wife raising children. This family was white and had a name that bespoke Anglo-Saxon ancestry and Protestant religious affiliation.2 The family was ruled by the father; the mother stayed at home washing the floor while wearing pearls and raising two-and -a-half children who ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread ( which built bodies eight ways). In many ways this is a fair description of a television world that included / Love Lucy, Lassie, Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and FatAer Knows Best. It was a predominantly WASP world, turned inward on the home and family, defined in narrow terms. The era of the "feminine mystique" was evident in the limited roles for women and in the commercials directed toward women as primary consumers . As the decade went on, focus increased on white middle class nuclear families and urban, ethnic or working class programs nearly disappeared.3 But was that the whole story? Was television as homogeneous as the homogeneous society that some ofit portrayed ? Was it only the producer of a nuclear family for a nuclear age?4 Closer examination of 1950s programs suggests that among themselves and sometimes within themselves , the programs— sitcoms in particular— were not so uniform. The cultural forms and characteristics of pre-Cold War America did not disappear overnight, and culture was characterized less by homogeneity than by mutations and permutations, as tensions and contradictions continued on television as they did in the lives of people watching it.5 This examination of one series, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show indicates that television in the 1950s, like society itself, contained ties to past culture and embodied , in indirect ways, subversive elements. 62 I Film & History Regular Feature | Television Whatever the intent ofproducers and advertisers , their messages were filtered through the viewers ' own individual and collective consciousness; their responses were shaped by their experiences and needs. In his study of collective memory and American popular culture, George Lipsitz notes that television, as a "close-up" medium, focuses attention inward on private rather than public life. It also serves as "a therapeutic voice ministering to the wounds of the psyche."6 However, while the viewer's pain may be individual, the historian may ask what common wounds were being tended to in the 1950s? In what ways could television programs offer alternatives to the emerging harsh, and sometimes frightening, public culture of the Cold War? The 1950s sitcoms did not address these questions directly . Television's nuclear families were not portrayed building backyard bomb shelters. As Ella Taylor points out in her study of television culture in post World War II U.S., the medium was not a mirror of the social world.7 It had many purposes to serve. Since the advertisers' business was to sell products and comedians wanted to get laughs (as well as sell products), it is not surprising that ambiguity, contradictions and mixed messages abound and are an important part of The Burns and Allen Show. This indirect social critique may have been especially true of situation comedies, since, as Taylor observes, comedy "can create multiple, conflicting, and oppositional realities within the safe confines of a joke." If, as she notes, television "comments upon and orders...