The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was not the only momentous event of 1954.
It was also the year when television, which had rapidly established itself as an indispensible presence in American homes, proved its potential as a political force. ABC televised the hearings of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, popularly known as the "Army-McCarthy hearings." The committee chairman, Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy, whose name has become synonymous with "witch-hunt," alleged that the U.S. Army harbored communists.
McCarthy had every reason to think he was running the show. For several years, he had made government functionaries quake, first accusing the State Department of communist infiltration and using television appearances to preserve the charges even after they had been disproved by a Senate investigation. Then, with Republicans in control of Congress and a committee under his thumb, McCarthy took on the Army in the court of the U.S. living room. It was, by all accounts, great theater, demonstrating the entertainment value of "reality" long before The Bachelor was born.
But on June 9, 1954, someone bit back. Joseph Welch, representing the Army, had been questioning McCarthy's aide, Roy Cohn, when McCarthy interrupted to level charges at a young attorney in Welch's firm. The Sun carried an account by Associated Press television writer Frazier Moore last week: "'Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator,' said Welch, about to earn himself entry in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: 'Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of honor?'"
Those words indeed have entered American rhetorical history. Less eloquent, and yet somehow more revealing, was McCarthy's response. He turned to Cohn and asked, "What happened?"
What happened was that McCarthy had just been blistered by his own fire, the first of many to learn how the TV camera can turn and burn. The hearings fizzled and McCarthy faded away, censured by Senate. He died three years later of liver failure.
Earlier that same year, as it happened, and as both local newspapers reported last week, actor Ronald Reagan tried his hand at a Vegas nightclub act, appearing for two weeks in a song-and-dance review at the Last Frontier. It was not just a passing moment in the life of the man who would personify the shrewd and effective use of television. Reagan's movie career was, to put a mild spin on it, slowing down. But if he had ambitions of Vegas glory, they were soon overwhelmed by a better bet.
Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952, and had had his own encounters with congressional inquisition. He appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during its probe of Hollywood, cooperating without naming names. He also helped negotiate a contract that introduced the novel idea of actors earning residuals from television appearances, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which notes that "part of the price SAG might have paid for winning TV residuals was a waiver permitting [talent agency] MCA to get into television production that Reagan convinced the union's board to grant … it ultimately led to a Justice Department investigation, though neither [MCA chief Lew] Wasserman nor Reagan ever faced any charges."
Reagan apparently resented the investigation, which helped shape some of his famous resentment of government. In any event, in April of 1954, not long after that Vegas gig, MCA announced that he would host its new television anthology series, General Electric Theater. For the next eight years, while hosting the series, Reagan toured the country under GE's auspices, speaking to employees, as well as to all kinds of civic groups. By his own account, his standard speech morphed from a genial description of Hollywood life into an impassioned declaration of political conservatism titled "Losing Freedom by Degrees."
And thus was born "The Great Communicator." During his presidency, and in recent weeks, much was made of the apparent seamlessness of politics and entertainment, the ultimate triumph of style over substance. But as David Greenberg pointed out last week in Slate, this overlooks the fact that Reagan's policies were substantive, and his politics were passionately held, not performed. Still, his skills as a television host and stump speaker communicated that zeal in a way no other similarly committed politician had managed to master.
Politicians, good ones at least, have always been performers. But by tradition their milieu was oratory, the conflation of deliberative writing and fervid delivery. The former is precisely what the ardent TV orator omits. Where Jimmy Carter, the homespun technocrat, donned a sweater to reason with the public about "malaise," Reagan waved the flag and blamed the government for everything. His triumph was not that of style over substance, but of emotion over complexity. Under Reagan, politics adapted the unambiguous hero-villain conflicts of B-movies and TV dramas, with their easy appeal to the gut. This is not to say that conservative policies were without thought, only that they proceeded from emotionally grounded givens. Columnist George Will, a Reagan admirer, has pointed out this flaw in so-called "neo-conservatism," and its unexamined belief in an American destiny to spread democracy around the world—for instance, our invasion and occupation of Iraq. Will longs wistfully for the traditional conservative's cold analysis and cautious action.
So might we all, for the TV pitchman's passion is no way to run a country.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.