The Trouble with Television is America/part 1

The trouble with America is not its television, but the biggest trouble with television may very well be America. Ever since Charles van Doren took his depressing dive inside his “21” isolation booth, television’s disappointing first decade has been connected by various critics and interested citizens with almost every ill afflicting the Republic. In a fundamental way this indictment of the medium that transformed American leisure during the first decade of the Cold War has a basic element of truth; for television’s very success as an attention-holding marketing medium brought with it a responsibility to inform commensurate with our national danger.

Still I think it would be useful to lay off television for a while and see how the problem looks if we blame America for what we don’t like on television. For the more I ponder television’s balance sheet as a cultural institution, the more I come to believe that our national assumptions and illusions are what keep television from maturing fast enough. So my “plan of action” is a call for some deeper thoughts on what we are as a civilization. For we activist Americans tend to forget that thought, sober contemplation and self-analysis, are a form of action; indeed, thought is the most distinctively humane form of activity.

I know this runs against the national style, but part of my message is precisely that: the old style, fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, activism is proving to be just as unsuccessful in the collaborative, interdependent future we face as it has been successful in our individualistic, atomistic past. Because history blessed us in unique measure, we got away with an essentially thoughtless and prodigal national style. No more. And we are pushing our luck if we think that what was so successful for us in the past will continue to be so in the future.

The increasingly false assumptions inhibiting the maturing of our country and its institutions (including the television) seem to me to center in three interrelated areas: 1) the cult of American superiority; 2) the mythology; and 3) the doctrine of popular infallibility. What I am arguing today is that our institutions would more nearly serve our needs, present and anticipated, were we to purge ourselves of these superficially comforting but actually self-defeating illusions.

I. The Cult of American Superiority

Perhaps the most blatant expression of “the cult of American superiority” was Emerson Foote’s contention a few years ago that “America is still the all-time Number One on Humanity Hit Parade.” He meant by this remark to give our businessmen heart during the 1958 recession. But its basic concept is one that all of us have felt to some degree.

Foote was no fool. In 1948 he astonished his advertising peers by resigning the American Tobacco account, then worth $12 million in bookings (about a fifth of the agency's billings). And in 1964 he resigned as chairman of McCann Erickson saying he was opposed to handling cigarette accounts. He was then a member of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke and endorsed the Surgeon General's report that linked cigarette smoking and lung cancer. He ridiculed protestations that advertising had nothing to do with smoking! A business man can be an idealist even when it hurts financially.

Now tribal ethnocentrism is a universal phenomenon. And that local piety and reverence we call patriotism is a positive value quite different from the innocent conviction that the outsider is the barbarian. The cult of American superiority, however, is something less than this valuable virtue of patriotism and quite a bit more than mere tribal ethnocentrism.

The conviction that because America is different it has a unique meaning for all mankind goes back as far as the Puritan divines who regarded their settlement in the wilderness as a city on a hill, a special concern of Providence which became a special lesson to the world. In more secular form, we find the same spirit in de Crèvecœr’s description in the eighteenth century of “this new man, the American.” Emerson expressed the same idea in referring to “the American Adam,” starting history again in a New World Eden.

Down through our intellectual history, from Jefferson to Lincoln to the twentieth century presidents with their New Nationalism, New Freedom, New Deal, and New Frontier, America has been the land of fresh starts, of continuing rebirths to wider purposes and horizons. The trouble starts when we begin to assume by our actions and statements that this American ideal is already reality. We laugh at the cult of superiority when we see it in another half grown-up modern state, Soviet Russia. Their inane claims to have invented everything (including baseball) leave us limp with laughter. Yet our fascination with being biggest, first, the most, springs from the same kind of adolescence.

We are certainly the richest, but are we the happiest? We surely have the most freedom, but can we honestly say we’ve made the most of it? We are the luckiest nation in history, but have we been the wisest in protecting and conserving our good fortune? No one who remembers how we plundered virgin timber and soil, the legacy of millenia, can answer that question affirmatively.

Nor do the rotting slumscapes of our city centers attest to a high level of individual responsibility on the part of respectable but fleeing suburbanites. It becomes clearer to most of us that material possessions are no guarantee of even minimal happiness. They seem to be a necessary but not sufficient condition of well-being. Indeed, we begin to see that a society of abundance generates its own diseases and dilemmas. We know already there is no correlation between gross national product and greater national purpose; nor do we much doubt which GNP we need most.

The trouble with the cult of American superiority began it seems to me when we began to assume that the quantitative revolution of more chickens in every pot and longer tailfins in every two-car garage was what the American dream was all about. On the other hand, addressing ourselves to the unfinished business of letting the underdog two-thirds of the world in on the decencies of abundance could justify the continuing superiority of American civilization. Frankly I don’t think enough of us are touched by that vision of extending maximum opportunity to the rest of man. We have become bemused by a trivial trinity—Las Vegas, Disneyland, and Miami Beach. When we should have been reading John Winthrop, Tom Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, we have been watching Liz and who is it today, Eliot Ness and Kookie.

Our fascination as a people with such nonentities has kept us for longer than television’s existence from repaying history for our unique opportunity. We have been the unquestionably lucky heirs of a once-in-a-race-lifetime kind of convergence—the outpouring of the excess economic and intellectual energies of Europe into the incredible potential of the North American continent.

And to whom so much has been given, surely a great deal must be expected. The lazy argument that America is not as bad as her enemies say she is should be buried once and for all by ourselves. This is the most impoverished criterion imaginable. Let our standard be as exalted as our opportunities have been—let us ask ourselves, are we as good as we think we are, are we as good as we could be, are we as good as we should be, given our opportunities. Think of how our television schedules would look by such criteria. But also remember we must apply such criteria to all our institutions, not just vent our frustrations about the complexities of an industrial society on the newest medium.

I still believe very strongly in the mission of America. But I fear it will founder soon unless it is transformed at home and extended generously abroad. Too many of us complacently assume that our revolution is behind us when the truth of the matter is that we are committed to an unending one. Not only the first, but rather the finest. Not merely the biggest, but preferably the best of its kind. Not simply the most, but also a few things done with care. There are signs that this revolution of quality is about to transform us into an urbane as well as an urban civilization.

If you want to see the next America, take a look at Union Square in San Francisco or Mellon Square in Pittsburgh where the man has mastered the machine by putting a park for people on top of a subterranean parking lot. Or look at General Motors Technical Center, the factory as campus, north of Detroit. Or Victor Gruen’s various shopping centers, latest in Rochester, NY, in which commerce achieves a civilized context. These oases of planned excellence in deserts of aimless and amiable mediocrity are all characterized by the subordination of individual wastefulness to collaborative creativity. This is a new national style, and it’s going to be tough for most of us to learn it, because it goes against the grain of our rural inheritance.

But if these hopeful signs are not to be false dawns, Americans must swiftly learn more about how they have transformed themselves physically from rural innocence to urban complexity, so that their images of themselves can catch up with reality. Our version of our past, partly because of television’s fear of controversy, is much too nostalgic, not enough aware of struggle and failure. It is like a family album thumbed through after Thanksgiving dinner: only the smiling good times seem to show through.

The American people deserve to have a really complex picture of their past that explains them, warts and all. We need to look at the American Revolution and the fumbling that followed it before our Constitution; it would give us greater sympathy for the groping of the new nations. We need to look at the vituperative journalism of the Federalist period; it would demarblize our democratic pantheon and put the struggle back in our national experiment.

We need to look at the abolitionists so that the sit-ins wouldn’t be such a shocking surprise. We need to learn more about the early unions, about struggles for reform in the Jacksonian and Progressive periods. I emphasize struggle because if we saw the tension, violence, and bitterly-fought battles of our history, we might begin to identify more with the underdogs that now constitute two-thirds of the world as well as at least a quarter of those inhabiting our own shores. Only because the popular media’s versions of American history are so bland do we fail to see how not so very long ago we were an underdeveloped area subject to the same contempt and doubt the new nations of Asia and Africa are today.

I think part of our problem in America is that almost all of us are nouveaux riches. Under ordinary circumstances we would have the proverbial three generations to learn how to use our discretionary income and leisure nobly. But we’re not going to have three generations to mature. If history was easy on us in our early squanderings; it appears to be ready to be equally severe in the immediate future. Now the process must be faster.

Facile illusions about our superiority may also keep us from learning enough from other cultures. We must never forget that our real genius, which we often allow to be obscured, is our capacity to assimilate and amalgamate. And we have a lot to learn as well as a lot to teach. We yet need to eschew our tradition of childish prodigality for the husbandry of Europe, our breathy activisim for the serenity of Asia. The best antidote to facile illusions of superiority would be such global sharing.

And we need above all a capacity for failure. By this I don’t mean a loss of the will to succeed, but rather an ability to share success gracefully and learn from failure. Sputnik I was a solar plexus blow to the national pride of the country of know-how. And I think we learned a thing or two about the importance of education from this “failure.” But the shock of being second could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to us. Being second is not the same thing as being second-rate, a truth we can learn from the United Kingdom. What we need, rather than the comforting illusion of superiority, is a superior desire to extend the American idea of maximum opportunity regardless of one’s antecedents to the bottom one-quarter at home and the underdog two-thirds of the world that needs the same breaks history gave us a chance to partly realize.

--from the British Film Institute magazine, Contrast