Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960

Chapter 5: Test Patterns: Making Room for Dissent in Television

119 5 Test Patterns Making Room for Dissent inTelevision As thousands of readers picked up their copies of the August 20, 1945, issue of Newsweek magazine—the first postwar issue— they probably flipped the pages a little more slowly around the article titled “A New Era: The Secrets of Science.” Within the previous week, Japan had succumbed to a “conquest by atom.” Amid the articles detailing how American bombers flew over Japanese cities to unleash this new power, readers found a map showing planes cruising at 30,000 feet to “blanket” the United States with airborne antennas for television sending stations. In this, the same week that the Japanese surrendered, Westinghouse engineers joined with aircraft manufacturers to build B-29-sized planes for this new mission, called Stratovision. The map, duplicated in Henry Luce’s Time magazine as well, showed aircraft hovering over New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Memphis, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Portland, and other cities. Time reported that only fourteen planes were needed to cover 78 percent of the American population. The “new era” in Newsweek’s title certainly referred to the atomic age, but readers quickly realized that modern science also ushered in a “new era” that promised to transform the nation in other fundamental ways. Americans who were fascinated with scientific achievement could marvel at two brilliant flashes of light: the atomic bomb and the television screen. The former ended horrific war; the latter symbolically inaugurated postwar prosperity. The two devices emerged in the national consciousness at the same time; both were seen as pathbreaking, and both developed in a Cold War environment.1 “If it works,” NBC’s president Niles Trammell said of Stratovision, “it will be revolutionary.”2 With the war over, Trammell informed the Federal 120 Test Patterns Communications Commission (FCC) a few weeks later, a new technological age was dawning in television transmission. He explained, “We no longer are required to predicate plans for television on the winning of the war. Victory has been won. Peace is here. Television is ready to go.”3 And the public was ready for television. Government officials, network executives, advertising agencies, the artistic community, and citizen groups believed that television held great promise as a democratizing medium. In particular, NBC archives show that network executives viewed themselves as stewards of the public interest and guarantors of quality television. Their rivals at CBS were little different in this regard. The networks institutionalized censorship as a means to promote liberal themes rather than to excise them hastily. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, these individuals believed television should cultivate an educated populace, avoid racial stereotypes (especially of America’s friends in the nonaligned world), and reject exaggerated advertising claims by overzealous corporations. Though the Hollywood left buckled at this same moment, universalism proved to be a portable ideology, able to move from motion pictures to television. The Democratic Promise of Early Television Looking away from Washington and more deeply into the cultural arena, shifting attention from one industry to another, broadens the scope of foreign relations in general and of the Cold War in particular. Dissenters carried the fight forward for One World values; they found open outlets through which to shape public opinion about American foreign policy. By 1950, the year that the Hollywood Ten lost their final appeals, advocates of global anticommunism had successfully discounted, demonized, and demoralized their varied opponents inside and outside the Hollywood community. Many histories end here, but what happens if we turn the page of the story? What we find is that at the same time, the budding television industry provided a hospitable environment for cultural producers to work, directly engaging the public “under the radar” of even the most vigilant Cold Warriors. Viewing a movie was (and remains) a far different experience from viewing a television program. A film usually offers a singular experience paid for at the door, a venue where viewers sit in public with strangers. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, children could watch “kid flicks,” while for parents there were motion pictures with more mature themes. Early television programs, though, could be seen in a weekly format, for Making Room for Dissent in Television 121 free, with viewers sitting in the privacy of the home, alone or only with family and friends. One historian wryly noted that television was “where families stayed together by staring together.”4 Given this practice...