America's First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich

7. Postwar Racial Discourse

142 7. Postwar Racial Discourse At the dawn of the U.S. civil-rights era, black stereotypes—the shiftless coon, termagant Mammy, servile Uncle Tom—remained the order of the day in popular American mass entertainment. These stereotypes were toned down considerably after the Second World War, but, with the exception of a few celebrated black entertainers and sports figures, such was still the case on radio and in motion pictures. Nonetheless , some believed commercial network television might be different. This chapter considers the remarkable work of NBC-TV’s chief censor Stockton Helffrich in the area of race on early television. Segregation was a contumacious institution in postwar America and particularly unyielding in the south after World War II.1 Poll taxes, racial discrimination, and a half century of “separate but equal” ideology haunted the era. Even in the north, rabid strains of racism thrived from the 1930s to 1960s. Shameful discrimination by city zoning boards as well as by homeowners, real estate agents, and lending institutions resulted in de facto residential apartheid. This discrimination produced segregated neighborhoods, schools, public recreational facilities, and private shopping areas. Segregation in the “tolerant” northwest was not much better. In some Spokane, Washington, restaurants, “No Colored Patronage Solicited” notices were displayed, and a racist suggestion posted at the Idaho border read, “Nigger, Read This Sign and Run.”2 In virtually all regions of the nation after World War II, white people could still call an adult black man “ boy”—even the President of the United States.3 By the mid-to-late 1960s, race riots had fissured cities across the nation from Boston to Los Angeles. Could TV break the stranglehold of American apartheid? In May 1950, Variety offered perhaps the overstatement of the decade on that question, with the headline, “Negro Talent Coming into Own on TV without Using Stereotypes: A Sure Sign That Television Is Free of Racial Barriers.”4 In a later Ebony interview, Ed Sullivan remarked television helped “the Negro in his fight . . . to win the guarantees [of] his birth3RQGLOOR &KLQGG $0 143 P O S T W A R R A C I A L D I S C O U R S E right [by taking the civil rights battle] into the living rooms of America’s homes where public opinion is formed.”5 To Sullivan’s credit (and the occasional consternation of anxious advertisers), he regularly featured African American musicians, singers, dancers, and comedians on his popular variety program. Also, during television’s experimental years— prior to the Second World War and into the early postwar years—black performers seemed to make significant inroads toward eliminating the color barrier. The medium’s insatiate need for programs and talent meant that African American entertainers were seen regularly on local and network shows and had not yet been cast as caricatures as they were on radio and in movies.6 Television’s breezy attitude toward race before and immediately after the war, Donald Bogle argues, was due in large part to its early absence of significant audience—not enough people were watching to incite controversy and especially not yet in southern markets . Bogle claims at this juncture, television was still relatively free of “any particular social or political pressures . . . [and it was] not yet driven by the concerns of big advertisers.”7 But as millions of TV sets invaded American homes, and more network programming was consumed, commercial sponsorship along with the many restrictions it brought increased. Fear and discrimination by sponsors, abetted by commercial broadcasting’s need for operating revenue from ad sales, could not be ignored. Moreover, racist programming prompted by the hegemonic ideology of the period worked to unconsciously reinforce American bigotry and intolerance for the first two decades of television’s life. Before advertising limited its possibilities, television, like radio before it, was envisioned as an electronic pathway to moral enlightenment. With the coming of television, proclaimed RCA’s David Sarnoff would also come “a new world of educational and cultural opportunities . . . a new philosophy, a new sense of freedom, and greatest of all, perhaps, a finer and broader understanding between [sic] all the peoples of the world.”8 It was advertised as a “magic box,” a window to the world, a portal to unimaginable possibilities. But television would not become a gateway to social utopia and instead worked to fortify consumptive lifestyles. In order to take quick advantage of a nation awash in pentup savings after the war...