Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Television's Conquest of America in the Fifties
Eric Burns
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1439902887
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When the first television was demonstrated in 1927, a headline in "The New York Times "read, OC Like a Photo Come to Life.OCO It was a momentous occasion. But the power of television wasnOCOt fully harnessed until the 1950s, when the medium was, as Eric Burns says, OC At its most preoccupying, its most life-altering.OCO And Burns, a former NBC News correspondent who is an Emmy-winner for his broadcast writing," "knows about the impact of television.
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"Invasion of the Mind Snatchers "chronicles the influence of television that was watched daily by the baby boomer generation. As kids became spellbound by "Howdy Doody "and "The Ed Sullivan Show, "Burns reveals, they often acted out their favorite programs. Likewise, they purchased the merchandise being promoted by performers, and became fascinated by the personalities they saw on screen, often emulating their behavior. It was the first generation raised by TV and Burns looks at both the promise of broadcasting as espoused by the inventors, and how that promise was both redefined and lost by the corporations who helped to spread the technology.
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Yet Burns also contextualizes the social, cultural, and political events that helped shape the FiftiesOCofrom Sputnik and the Rosenberg trial to Senator Joseph McCarthyOCOs Red Scare.a In doing so, he charts the effect of television on politics, religion, race, and sex, and how the medium provided a persuasive message to the young, impressionable viewers.
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were willing to chip in for Sales’s Puerto Rican idyll. By now they were as accustomed to obeying adults on television as they were at home. In the fifties, Captain Kangaroo had told boys and girls to behave kindly toward one another and many of us did, or at least considered the notion. Uncle Johnny Coons had told us to eat food that was good for us and some of us obeyed—occasionally, if not at all meals. Miss Frances had told us to get our homework done on time and the kind of children who
know the extent of underworld influence, its methods, its profitability, its cost to the national economy, its plans for future expansion, its effects on the innocent or unwitting. T H E F I R S T S E N ATO R 13 9 Kefauver’s bill passed easily, and was signed into law without reservation by President Truman. It called for the establishment of a Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. To most people, though, especially reporters, the group was known simply as
Fusion, and Independent parties.” So influential, in fact, was the Kefauver investigation as a media phenomenon that it even led to a new publishing genre. Robert Harrison, already responsible for a number of so-called girlie magazines, was inspired to create Confidential, a scandal magazine to continue titillating the public with criminal misdeeds after the hearings had ended. Confidential’s success in featuring scandal stories about stars and other famous people resulted in dozens of copycat
N O F T H E M I N D S N ATC H E R S through the preemption of its popular daytime soap operas, declined to cover the hearings at all. NBC opted out early on, when it became clear that there was no drama to be had in the initial sessions. In their fifteen-minute evening news programs, both CBS and NBC presented snippets of the hearings, edited from ABC’s live broadcasts.” ABC and Dumont hoped for an audience as large as the one that the Kefauver hearings had gotten. They did not quite make it.
impatient, even suspicious. They wanted McCarthy to get to the point. It was one thing for him to accuse the State Department of being infested with Communists; what better cover could there be for a spy, what better source of information? It was one thing to accuse academia; after all, it was filled with effete Harvard and Yale types who had been born on the far fringes of liberalism and only drifted further to the left in their Ivy League classrooms. It was one thing to accuse show business; it