Television and Counterculture

3rd Quarter Reading Assignment

Television and Counterculture The post-World War II technological picket fence. Everyone in the family marvel, television, inadvertently helped dressed neatly, with dad almost always create the counterculture, first by wearing a jacket and mom a dress. Few presenting stories of innocence in the family squabbles erupted, nor did any 1950s and then by presenting reports of crisis that could not be solved within 30 domestic protest and wartime brutality in minutes. No African Americans or the 1960s. The medium and the message Hispanics appeared, nor anyone else thus combined to raise idealistic who might disturb white homogeneity. expectations and later shatter them. And the show's title bespoke the proper family arrangement: father did know Imagine yourself a young girl or boy best and should be the head and the watching television in the 1950s. Much authority. as your parents, you would likely have marveled at this device that captured The moral certainty found in those moving images from thin air, a process shows reflected World War II and the that in itself confirmed America's Cold War, events that said good and evil greatness and the new medium's power. could be easily recognized and the latter You would most likely have watched defeated. The Cold War made westerns and situation comedies, the two Americans feel that moral certainty must predominant types of programs. be embraced in order to preserve Gunsmoke, The Life and Legend of democracy. Wyatt Earp, Have Gun Will Travel, and Wagon Train typified the television With that said, it should be noted that western, along with the characters television's entertainment shows did Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers for criticize society in a minor way, what the youngest kids. Those programs Todd Gitlin, writing in his book The presented simple plots in which a clear Sixties, calls an "opening wedge" in the line separated the good guys from the assault on conformity. For example, bad, and the good guys always won. comedians Steve Allen, Sid Caesar, and They bespoke definite moral rules not Ernie Kovacs satirized mainstream yet under widespread assault, and they attitudes, and rock-and-roll performers stressed community either through appeared, playing music that expressed family or family-like relationships. For teenage rebelliousness—although Ed example, Gunsmoke's hero Matt Dillon, Sullivan and Dick Clark tried hard on marshal of Dodge City, although single, their programs to sanitize the message. still enjoyed a close, loving relationship with the other characters who appeared Further, television showed its own moral each week. inconsistencies when scandal raked its popular quiz shows. Evidence that Situation comedies also made definite producers and contestants had engaged moral proclamations and laid out distinct in rigging the shows contradicted TV's gender roles within a white, suburban effort to present only positive moral setting. In Father Knows Best, a typical messages and shook those who believed situation comedy, the Anderson family in society's innate goodness or that had a comfortable home surrounded by a somehow the new technology would be

1 3rd Quarter Reading Assignment uncorrupted. Then came the Vietnam War. When By and large, though, the conformist television first began covering the war, it fortress held firm, and a young person presented, overall, a positive picture. leaving the 1950s behind and entering a News reporters called the enemy "Reds" new decade felt secure in mainstream and accepted the Cold War rationale for society's goodness. Television had sending American troops into combat. presented it that way. Editorial comments depicted the Viet Cong and the National Liberation Front However, 1960 revealed another side. as untrustworthy. That year, African American college students staged the Greensboro sit-ins That portrayal began to change in 1967, that began at a lunch counter in North when some critical reports of the war Carolina, and television carried the appeared, and even more so after the Tet story, with its vivid pictures, across the Offensive. Launched by communist nation. Brave blacks, hateful whites, and forces early in 1968, Tet showed that, a segregationist society could be seen in contrary to the assurances of America's stark contrast to Father Knows Best. political leaders, victory remained Television's power to shape images and elusive. Although in the 1960s, only 3% consciences worked this time in protest of the news reports from Vietnam against mainstream practices. Thousands showed heavy fighting, the few graphic of black students who watched the images that did appear left an indelible coverage of Greensboro joined the cause impression on the American conscience: and staged sit-ins in communities across a GI using a pocket cigarette lighter to the nation. White students, too, set fire to a fragile-looking Vietnamese displaying a peculiar cross-influence house made of wood and thatched straw; from their experience with television in a general in South Vietnam's army the 1950s, felt compelled to help. walking up to a prisoner who had Attached to democratic ideals as already been bound, hands behind his television had portrayed them, they were back, and shooting him point blank shocked and dismayed that those ideals through the head; the Tet Offensive were not already in force, a reality itself, chaotic and bloody. television had kept hidden. The coverage often contradicted With that exposure at Greensboro, government assertions and revealed television inadvertently contributed to shortcomings in military strategy. the birth of the counterculture, to attacks Writing in David Farber's book The on the very mainstream it championed. Sixties, Chester J. Pach Jr. says, Soon came the Freedom Rides and the "Television presented a war that was Selma to Montgomery March for voting puzzling and incoherent. . . . Night after rights in Alabama, as well as numerous night, television slowly exposed the other civil rights protests that further illogic of attrition." Witnessing what assaulted 1950s illusions and motivated they considered to be another display of college students. Suddenly, America American injustice, one that appeared not just but unjust, not humane complemented racial segregation, young but cruel, not compassionate but cold. people felt compelled, in ever greater

2 3rd Quarter Reading Assignment numbers, to protest. Many other 1968 by radical students at Columbia Americans came to oppose the war, too, University, the bloody confrontations although less stridently. between protesters and the authorities at the 1968 Democratic National Thus, television unintentionally Convention, and, in 1970, the tragic undermined the very values— Kent State University shootings. For conformity and obedience to authority— many young people (certainly not all), it had promoted in the 1950s (and was the televised scenes proved mainstream still promoting with most of its society's barbarity; for the mainstream, programming). In fact, while some they proved young America's anarchistic young people, appalled by the war, insanity. engaged in antiwar protests, others looked at the scenes on television and Television still provided diversionary found proof that society had grown so balm, entertainment shows in the 1960s corrupt and twisted that the only hope to which middle America could escape was to drop out and pursue an in order to relive the previous decade's alternative. Consequently, the hippie moral certainties: The Andy Griffith movement arose and rejected political Show, Green Acres, and Gomer Pyle. protest as irrelevant and useless. However, the new society intervened even in this category: Laugh-In, with its As civil rights workers, antiwar activists, countercultural-like fast pace and bright and hippies grew in number, it was clear colors; The Smothers Brothers Comedy that father no longer knew best. In fact, Hour, with its controversial antiwar the counterculture said he knew least, sentiments; Julia, with its African- whether it be father at home, father as American star. Those shows led to All in president, or father as Uncle Sam. "Don't the Family in the early 1970s, a situation trust authority" was the prevailing comedy that broke new ground with its message. topical humor and whose main story line involved a generational conflict between As the counterculture and turmoil a liberal, long-haired young man and his expanded, television helped to divide the blue-collar, reactionary father-in-law. nation into warring cultural and political camps. The radicals learned how to use There are no statistics that measure TV. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and television's overall influence in the other Yippies, for example, staged media 1950s and the 1960s, but there can be events to expose straight society's little doubt that this technology helped to absurdities. Yet straight society used shape people's values and views. A TV, too, to spread hatred against the young person, raised on Hopalong counterculture, as when President Cassidy and Gunsmoke one decade and Richard Nixon sent Vice President Spiro exposed to racism and Vietnam the next, Agnew on speaking tours to excoriate encountered enormous dissonance. From protesters and college students with that dissonance, the counterculture vituperative language, among the obtained its vitality. harshest ever used by a national leader.

Television showed the violent protest in