What happened? Some argue that the very coming of a technology like television explains its diffusion. This is a variation on what has been called "technological determinism," the theory that the mere presence of a technology accounts for its spread. Yet recent studies of the popularization of other new technologies in history, including the cheap "penny" newspapers and the telegraph, suggest that potential buyers of such services can and will, for a variety of reasons, resist using them. Consumers must have the time and income; or there must be cultural or social justifications for the purchase of what at the time was an expensive new appliance.
Radio brought news and entertainment to a mass audience. President Roosevelt's famous radio Fireside Chats were a prelude to later presidents' use of the television to keep in touch with the nation.
In the case of TV sets, cost does not appear to have been the major consideration. The prices of receivers did decline somewhat. But the number of stations going on the air rose from 16 in 1948 to 354 in 1954. This availability of TV service—and not the price of sets—fostered the television boom, concluded Alfred R. Oxenfeldt in a careful study of the marketing of TV.
Still other factors having nothing to do with television's sudden appearance rationalized buying a set. The introduction of TV coincided with the baby boom. The Depression and Second World War had caused many couples to delay marriage or starting families. Suddenly in the 1950s and 1960s, every couple (or so it seemed) was having children. According to the 1970 U.S. Census, the number of children under 5 years of age per 1,000 women aged 20 to 44 years, rose from 400 in 1940 to 551 in 1950; ten years later the figure was 667, the highest since 1890. And the baby boom created all sorts of incentives to buy a TV receiver.
Mindful of the baby boomers as a new and ever expanding part of their audience, networks and stations created their own programming for children. On the networks, none had more success than NEC's "Howdy Doody Time," one of many programs that featured puppets. Individual stations had their own shows for children: Chicago's WGN produced "Bozo," with a clown host and, like "Howdy Doody," an audience of excited little ones. Another Chicago station, WNBQ, aired the puppet show, "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie," which enjoyed several network runs. A Los Angeles channel created "Beany and Cecil," which, like "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie," proved appealing to adults as well as children. There were science-fiction programs like "Captain Video."
Stations aired old movie "serials" that had been first produced for children's Saturday matinees at smaller movie houses. The most popular starred Hopalong Cassidy. Through much of the 1950s, Cassidy enjoyed an enormous youthful following and made many product endorsements through the decade. Stations also telecast short film comedies featuring the Little Rascals, the Three Stooges, and Laurel and Hardy. By the mid-1950s came original filmed series intended for kids. The more widely watched were "Lassie," "Rin Tin Tin," "Roy Rogers," "Sgt. Preston of the Yukon," "Superman," and "Sky King."
The most extraordinary programming success involving children came in late 1954 and early 1955, when ABC's new "Disneyland" series aired three
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This early radio broadcasting equipment was awkward and cumbersome
compared to today's sleek high-technology designs.
hour-long programs about the frontiersman Davy Crockett. Starring an easygoing and likeable Fess Parker, the Crockett programs not only proved enormously popular, but sparked a huge demand for replicas of the hero's clothing and other paraphernalia. Children, mostly boys, began crying for Davy Crockett coonskin caps, moccasins, toy rifles, lunch boxes, pajamas, and bath towels. Millions learned the words to the program's theme song, "The Legend of Davy Crockett." Many boomers, settled in their middle age four decades later, could still sing the song's first stanza.
Many old TV comedy series were introduced to a new generation of Americans on the Nickelodeon cable channel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Virtually every Nickelodeon "Nick at Nite" series had originally aired in the late 1950s and 1960s, after televisions were found in most homes.
Other child-related factors caused a TV sales boom. Parents found it hard to deny their children a television, especially as more and more neighborhood families acquired sets. Then, too, parents discovered that the TV, like the videocasette recorder a generation later, kept the little ones entertained and out of trouble. It might even pacify babies. In 1948 a Washington Post reporter realized that his nine-month-old baby would cease crying whenever he was placed before the TV set, regardless of the program.
The baby boom contributed to the success of TV in still another way. The population explosion created a baby-sitter shortage. Parents complained repeatedly of being unable to find baby-sitters for their children, a situation that existed until "boomers" were old enough to be entrusted with their younger sisters and brothers. Parents often had no choice but to stay home. Moreover, many families were moving into new suburbs. Suburbanization complicated going to see a film or patronizing a night club or bar. (Theaters remained centered in downtowns, as did most night spots, until the 1960s.) Commuting time and expenses related to driving and parking a car had risen to a point where many parents collectively threw up their hands and elected to watch television with the kids.
The baby boom and such factors as suburbanization go a long way toward explaining why television entered so many American homes so rapidly.
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Among the last people to buy TV sets were those couples without children. A similar pattern developed with the spread of VCRs in the 1980s. Families with younger children were among the most likely to own VCRs.
What did the advent of television mean for Americans? Two generations of research in the social and behavioral sciences make generalizations about TV's effects tricky, if not impossible. Non-academic observers, unburdened by research, simply assume that television was and remains all-powerful. It is best to treat assertions about the medium's effects with care.
One of the more damning treatments of television's introduction came from a 1990 feature film, Avalon. This otherwise touching story of an immigrant family in Baltimore portrays TV as a great destroyer of tradition. The immigrant's son buys a set, which immediately hypnotizes all. Conversations ended. Meals, even ones that had once been joyous gatherings of relatives, were eaten on TV trays.
This is a wildly inaccurate portrait of what actually happened in most American homes. Yes, during the first year of set ownership, what researcher Bogart called the "pioneer phase," families did watch enormous amounts of television. And the 1950s did see the introduction of pre-cooked "TV dinners." But the pioneer phase passed in nearly every home. People reduced their viewing and became less fawning or passive toward what they watched. In his study of Italian Americans in the West End of Boston in the late 1950s, sociologist Herbert Gans found numerous examples of viewers interacting with their TVs. Although men and women were often divided in their responses, they rejected popular characters or dialogue if they seemed too removed from their own world and value system. Friends and neighbors who "take what they see [on television] too seriously," Gans wrote, "are said to be childish." Gans observed people shouting back derisively at the set. "West Enders enjoy making fun of the media as much as they enjoy the programs."
Many families developed sometimes strict rules for set use. In some cases, the father, as the head of the household and actual purchaser of the set, autocratically decided what was watched. Many children could not view TV after a certain hour or until they had finished their homework. Some parents limited viewing to one hour a night or would not allow their children to watch certain programs. (My mother, for example, though a very relaxed overseer of the set, would not permit me to watch ABC's violent "Untouchables" series in the early 1960s.)
Television and the subsequent video cassette recorder overshadowed the popularity of movie-going. Movie theaters were called palaces for good reason. With their lavish interiors and elaborate exteriors, they were a feast for the eyes.
Moreover, TV proved to be only another form of mass entertainment, a point almost always missed by scholars and others who came to blame TV for a variety of social ills. Most critiques of television idealize the nation's culture before the arrival of the first TV set. Yet high school students in 1947 read newspapers (with special attention to the comic page), popular magazines and paperbacks, listened to radio programs, and regularly went to the movies. Put differently, America's youth before TV did not devote their idle hours thumbing through Plato or Shakespeare.
Still, TV's ascendancy in the 1950s was not absolute. Movie attendance fell sharply, as did radio listening. But Americans continued to read newspapers and magazines, though they appear to have spent less time doing so. Not until the mid-1960s did television begin to eat away at the circulations of some newspapers and periodicals, partly because until then, most Americans considered television to be an entertainment medium. Nightly TV news programs in the 1950s and early 1960s were short—fifteen minutes long—and crudely assembled; relatively few watched the outstanding CBS news show, "See It Now," hosted by Edward R. Murrow.
It is worth remembering that adults in the 1950s had been raised in a different "media mix." They were in the habit of reading the newspaper closely, usually in the evening. Such patterns did not go
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away with television. Only after the many boomers themselves grew into adulthood and failed to subscribe to papers did dailies begin to see their audiences decline.
None of this is to say that TV did not affect Americans. It certainly helped, as had radio and as would the VCR, to "privatize" entertainment, that is, cause more and more to stay home and isolated from others. Television altered American politics, mainly by rewarding those candidates able to think quickly and cleverly and those most attractively packaged by advertising agencies. It would even benefit a presidential candidate who played the saxophone on late-night television.
