Civic Participation Within Postwar Suburban Sitcoms, 1952-1972

Sitcom Citizenship: Civic Participation within Postwar Suburban Sitcoms, 1952-1972 A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Michael Cheyne IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Kevin Murphy and Laurie Ouellette May 2014 © Michael Cheyne 2014 i Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the invaluable assistance of my advisers at the University of Minnesota, Kevin Murphy and Laurie Ouellette, as well as the other members of my thesis committee, Tracey Deutsch and Elaine Tyler May. Through the years of researching and writing, they gave me feedback, guidance, and above all, encouragement. In particular, I thank Kevin, who, as my initial graduate adviser, helped shepherd me through life as a doctoral candidate. I also acknowledge the very helpful feedback provided by my peers in the dissertation writing group led by Kevin Murphy and Regina Kunzel during the 2011- 2013 academic years. Their varied suggestions, praise, and criticism were especially helpful during the formative years of turning years of research into a workable thesis. My fellow graduate students within the American Studies program were unfailing in their personal and professional support. My colleagues at the University of Minnesota-Morris, particularly within the history discipline, were extremely supportive to me during my final two years working on this project. They provided time and funding to assist my research and the presentation of my work. I am particularly thankful for their cheerful willingness to support a colleague during a year of teaching and writing. Finally, I thank my family, friends, and church family, who provided years of love and support while I finished this project. I am grateful to their longstanding patience and ability to provide much needed relief from the grind of writing. I especially thank my mother, who remains my biggest source of emotional support. She has never read a word of this project, but none of it would be possible without her. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my mom and dad, who gave me my first book and showed me my first television program. iii Abstract Postwar suburban sitcoms such as Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show are traditionally thought of as wholly focusing on themes of domesticity. This project argues that such programs also served as instruments of good citizenship, modeling civic participation within neighborhoods. In their depictions of this activism, suburban sitcoms emphasized the importance of individual responsibility and the family, themes which both compelled viewers to become civically engaged and also restrained the potential radicalism of their behavior. iv Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………..1 Chapter 1…………………………………………..16 Chapter 2…………………………………………..65 Chapter 3…………………………………………..110 Chapter 4…………………………………………..151 Chapter 5…………………………………………..191 Conclusion…………………………………………238 Bibliography……………………………………….250 Appendix…………………………………………...266 1 Introduction The “Father Knows Best Pose”: What is Sitcom Citizenship? In his 2006 memoir The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, then-Senator Barack Obama inserted a quick reference to a classic television sitcom in the middle of his analysis of the Republican Party. When describing the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, Obama writes he was “unconvinced…by his [Reagan‟s] John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose.”1 Obama goes on to argue that “Reagan spoke to America‟s longing for order,” a desire linked to “our need to believe…that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.” This longing was specifically defined in Reagan‟s 1981 inaugural address, in which he described the American people as “a special interest group…made up of men and women, who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we‟re sick.”2 In framing Americans in this way, Reagan revealed his confidence in the ability of individual citizens to improve not only their own lives but their entire communities through hard work and personal responsibility. In the midst of this familiar history of Reagan Republicanism, Obama‟s reference to Father Knows Best, a program that went off the air roughly a year before he was even born, seems nothing more than a throwaway joke intended to satirize Reagan‟s folksy 1 Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York City, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 31. 2 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 263. 2 image. However, whether intentional or not, Obama‟s mention of the sitcom in the same section as an analysis of citizens‟ civic responsibilities is deeply significant. Father Knows Best was far more than a program that promoted the all-American family values espoused by Reagan. Instead, the show, along with its other suburban sitcom contemporaries, offered a sustained blueprint for the type of active citizenship so important not just to Reagan, but to the postwar liberal consensus that dominated political thinking at the time such shows were on the air, and which, to some extent, continues to do so during the Obama administration. The idealized citizen promoted by suburban sitcoms was exactly the type of citizen valued within postwar America, both in the 1950‟s and beyond. This link between postwar suburban sitcoms (like Father Knows Best, but also shows such as The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, and My Three Sons) and good citizenship may conflict with our pre-established conceptions of these programs as bland shows entirely taking place within the domestic sphere. An online summary of Father Knows Best reads: “Every evening he [Jim Anderson, the title character] would come home from work, take off his sport jacket, put on his comfortable sweater, and deal with the everyday problems of a growing family.”3 How, then, would this domestic family sitcom, or any other such program from this genre, have anything to say about civic responsibility? How did the “everyday problems of a growing family,” which on the shows, seemed to include bad report cards, teenage dances, or broken down appliances, relate to the civic virtues treasured by American politicians? In other words, father may 3 “Father Knows Best,” TV.com, accessed April 13, 2014, http://www.tv.com/shows/father-knows-best/. 3 “know best” in the home, but what about in the public sphere of the neighborhood or town hall? These questions have been unintentionally reinforced by a large portion of the existing scholarship on suburban sitcoms, which has almost entirely focused on the domestic aspects of these programs. The groundbreaking research of authors such as Lynn Spigel and Mary Beth Haralovich has positioned these shows as social instruments which helped to establish a particular definition of domesticity, that of a nuclear family with an authoritative patriarch and submissive wife.4 Spigel writes that family sitcoms like Father “worked to „naturalize‟ family life, to make it appear as if this living arrangement were in the fact the only one possible.”5 Other research, such as Nina Leibman‟s Living Room Lectures, has explored the other types of values communicated by these television shows, such as the denial of ethnicity and the proper use of money.6 As significant as this scholarship is, though, it has tended to overlook the equally important work of citizenship engaged in by suburban sitcoms. Leibman‟s comprehensive work, for example, contains little to no analysis of how these programs depicted the civic or communal spheres and what messages such depictions communicated to their viewers. This project seeks to offer a new perspective on the postwar suburban sitcom by exploring how the genre served as an instrument of citizenship. By watching the fictional protagonists of these shows, viewers developed specific conceptions of what it meant to 4 Among other works, see Lynn Spigel‟s Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), and Mary Beth Haralovich‟s “Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker,” in Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader, ed. Joanne Morreale (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 5 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 178. 6 See Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film & Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 4 be a “good citizen.” Far from entirely focusing on domesticity, suburban sitcoms featured characters who worked to improve their communities through such activities as running traffic safety campaigns or fighting to preserve parks. This model of citizenship, one that emphasized personal responsibility and initiative, aligned with the civic virtues preached by Cold War era politicians. Like other examples of postwar television, the suburban sitcom worked as a Foucauldian tool of governmentality to create citizens useful to their communities and country. Furthermore, by linking good citizenship with familial motivations and activities, not potentially radical politics, the sitcoms limited civic action in ways appealing to the liberal consensus. Even

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