3rd Quarter Reading Assignment
Television and Counterculture
The post-World War II technological
marvel, television, inadvertently helped
create the counterculture, first by
presenting stories of innocence in the
1950s and then by presenting reports of
domestic protest and wartime brutality in
the 1960s. The medium and the message
thus combined to raise idealistic
expectations and later shatter them.
picket fence. Everyone in the family
dressed neatly, with dad almost always
wearing a jacket and mom a dress. Few
family squabbles erupted, nor did any
crisis that could not be solved within 30
minutes. No African Americans or
Hispanics appeared, nor anyone else
who might disturb white homogeneity.
And the show's title bespoke the proper
family arrangement: father did know
best and should be the head and the
authority.
Imagine yourself a young girl or boy
watching television in the 1950s. Much
as your parents, you would likely have
marveled at this device that captured
moving images from thin air, a process
that in itself confirmed America's
greatness and the new medium's power.
You would most likely have watched
westerns and situation comedies, the two
predominant types of programs.
Gunsmoke, The Life and Legend of
Wyatt Earp, Have Gun Will Travel, and
Wagon Train typified the television
western, along with the characters
Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers for
the youngest kids. Those programs
presented simple plots in which a clear
line separated the good guys from the
bad, and the good guys always won.
They bespoke definite moral rules not
yet under widespread assault, and they
stressed community either through
family or family-like relationships. For
example, Gunsmoke's hero Matt Dillon,
marshal of Dodge City, although single,
still enjoyed a close, loving relationship
with the other characters who appeared
each week.
The moral certainty found in those
shows reflected World War II and the
Cold War, events that said good and evil
could be easily recognized and the latter
defeated. The Cold War made
Americans feel that moral certainty must
be embraced in order to preserve
democracy.
With that said, it should be noted that
television's entertainment shows did
criticize society in a minor way, what
Todd Gitlin, writing in his book The
Sixties, calls an "opening wedge" in the
assault on conformity. For example,
comedians Steve Allen, Sid Caesar, and
Ernie Kovacs satirized mainstream
attitudes, and rock-and-roll performers
appeared, playing music that expressed
teenage rebelliousness—although Ed
Sullivan and Dick Clark tried hard on
their programs to sanitize the message.
Further, television showed its own moral
inconsistencies when scandal raked its
popular quiz shows. Evidence that
producers and contestants had engaged
in rigging the shows contradicted TV's
effort to present only positive moral
messages and shook those who believed
in society's innate goodness or that
somehow the new technology would be
Situation comedies also made definite
moral proclamations and laid out distinct
gender roles within a white, suburban
setting. In Father Knows Best, a typical
situation comedy, the Anderson family
had a comfortable home surrounded by a
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3rd Quarter Reading Assignment
uncorrupted.
Then came the Vietnam War. When
television first began covering the war, it
presented, overall, a positive picture.
News reporters called the enemy "Reds"
and accepted the Cold War rationale for
sending American troops into combat.
Editorial comments depicted the Viet
Cong and the National Liberation Front
as untrustworthy.
By and large, though, the conformist
fortress held firm, and a young person
leaving the 1950s behind and entering a
new decade felt secure in mainstream
society's goodness. Television had
presented it that way.
However, 1960 revealed another side.
That year, African American college
students staged the Greensboro sit-ins
that began at a lunch counter in North
Carolina, and television carried the
story, with its vivid pictures, across the
nation. Brave blacks, hateful whites, and
a segregationist society could be seen in
stark contrast to Father Knows Best.
Television's power to shape images and
consciences worked this time in protest
against mainstream practices. Thousands
of black students who watched the
coverage of Greensboro joined the cause
and staged sit-ins in communities across
the nation. White students, too,
displaying a peculiar cross-influence
from their experience with television in
the 1950s, felt compelled to help.
Attached to democratic ideals as
television had portrayed them, they were
shocked and dismayed that those ideals
were not already in force, a reality
television had kept hidden.
That portrayal began to change in 1967,
when some critical reports of the war
appeared, and even more so after the Tet
Offensive. Launched by communist
forces early in 1968, Tet showed that,
contrary to the assurances of America's
political leaders, victory remained
elusive. Although in the 1960s, only 3%
of the news reports from Vietnam
showed heavy fighting, the few graphic
images that did appear left an indelible
impression on the American conscience:
a GI using a pocket cigarette lighter to
set fire to a fragile-looking Vietnamese
house made of wood and thatched straw;
a general in South Vietnam's army
walking up to a prisoner who had
already been bound, hands behind his
back, and shooting him point blank
through the head; the Tet Offensive
itself, chaotic and bloody.
The coverage often contradicted
government assertions and revealed
shortcomings in military strategy.
Writing in David Farber's book The
Sixties, Chester J. Pach Jr. says,
"Television presented a war that was
puzzling and incoherent. . . . Night after
night, television slowly exposed the
illogic of attrition." Witnessing what
they considered to be another display of
American injustice, one that
complemented racial segregation, young
people felt compelled, in ever greater
With that exposure at Greensboro,
television inadvertently contributed to
the birth of the counterculture, to attacks
on the very mainstream it championed.
Soon came the Freedom Rides and the
Selma to Montgomery March for voting
rights in Alabama, as well as numerous
other civil rights protests that further
assaulted 1950s illusions and motivated
college students. Suddenly, America
appeared not just but unjust, not humane
but cruel, not compassionate but cold.
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3rd Quarter Reading Assignment
numbers, to protest. Many other
Americans came to oppose the war, too,
although less stridently.
1968 by radical students at Columbia
University, the bloody confrontations
between protesters and the authorities at
the 1968 Democratic National
Convention, and, in 1970, the tragic
Kent State University shootings. For
many young people (certainly not all),
the televised scenes proved mainstream
society's barbarity; for the mainstream,
they proved young America's anarchistic
insanity.
Thus, television unintentionally
undermined the very values—
conformity and obedience to authority—
it had promoted in the 1950s (and was
still promoting with most of its
programming). In fact, while some
young people, appalled by the war,
engaged in antiwar protests, others
looked at the scenes on television and
found proof that society had grown so
corrupt and twisted that the only hope
was to drop out and pursue an
alternative. Consequently, the hippie
movement arose and rejected political
protest as irrelevant and useless.
Television still provided diversionary
balm, entertainment shows in the 1960s
to which middle America could escape
in order to relive the previous decade's
moral certainties: The Andy Griffith
Show, Green Acres, and Gomer Pyle.
However, the new society intervened
even in this category: Laugh-In, with its
countercultural-like fast pace and bright
colors; The Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour, with its controversial antiwar
sentiments; Julia, with its AfricanAmerican star. Those shows led to All in
the Family in the early 1970s, a situation
comedy that broke new ground with its
topical humor and whose main story line
involved a generational conflict between
a liberal, long-haired young man and his
blue-collar, reactionary father-in-law.
As civil rights workers, antiwar activists,
and hippies grew in number, it was clear
that father no longer knew best. In fact,
the counterculture said he knew least,
whether it be father at home, father as
president, or father as Uncle Sam. "Don't
trust authority" was the prevailing
message.
As the counterculture and turmoil
expanded, television helped to divide the
nation into warring cultural and political
camps. The radicals learned how to use
TV. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and
other Yippies, for example, staged media
events to expose straight society's
absurdities. Yet straight society used
TV, too, to spread hatred against the
counterculture, as when President
Richard Nixon sent Vice President Spiro
Agnew on speaking tours to excoriate
protesters and college students with
vituperative language, among the
harshest ever used by a national leader.
There are no statistics that measure
television's overall influence in the
1950s and the 1960s, but there can be
little doubt that this technology helped to
shape people's values and views. A
young person, raised on Hopalong
Cassidy and Gunsmoke one decade and
exposed to racism and Vietnam the next,
encountered enormous dissonance. From
that dissonance, the counterculture
obtained its vitality.
Television showed the violent protest in
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