Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (16 page)

VII
THE CENTRALIZATION OF CONTROL

A
LTHOUGH
television was invented in the 1920s, it did not exist for any practical purposes until after World War II. It is easy to forget that advertising, at least on the scale we have come to know it, barely existed before then either.

In 1946, advertisers spent about $3 billion. For the previous two decades, advertising expenditures had been fairly constant at about that level. By 1975, however, the national advertising budget had grown by 1,000 percent to $30 billion.

Most of the increase went into television advertising. Within only ten years of its effective inauguration, television was absorbing 60 percent of all advertising spending and driving hundreds of newspapers, magazines and radio stations out of the market.

A symbiotic relationship developed. Advertising financed television’s growth. Television was the greatest delivery system for advertising that had ever been invented. We could call it love at first sight, except in this case, the match may have been prearranged.

If you are old enough, think back to the days immediately after World War II. Although I was only ten in 1945, I remember the expectant and uncertain feeling of the times very well. Everyone was relieved that the war was over and was expecting things to get back to normal, but what was normal? Memories of the Depression loomed. I remember listening to my parents talk with their friends on those backyard summer evenings of 1945, and I could feel the fear.

Like most ordinary people, my parents knew that the war had alleviated the Depression. During the war, American industrial capacity, lying fallow only a few years before, had actually expanded to build the military machine. My father’s own business was an example. Now there were no more uniforms to make, and no more tanks. The war had given men jobs as soldiers and women jobs as factory workers. Full employment had practically become a reality. Now Johnny was marching home again, jobless.

If this was the talk among ordinary people, one can only imagine what was said in industrial boardrooms and at the Department of Commerce. With industrial capacity and capital investment expanded as they were, the consequences of a drop in production could make the 1930s look like golden years. A long-standing criticism of capitalism—that it can stave off cyclic depression only through war—seemed about to be confirmed.

Economic Growth and Patriotic Consumption

Suddenly in 1946, government and industry started making identical pronouncements about regearing American life to consume commodities at a level never before contemplated. It wasn’t that military production was about to be abandoned. Even now it remains the single most important factor in the United States economy. However, in 1946 with the war just over, it was not clear that the decline in military spending would be as temporary as it turned out to be. Some new off-setting factor was needed.

Thus, a new vision was born that equated the good life with consumer goods. An accelerated economy, continuing the booming expansion of wartime, added to a new consumer ideology achieved the greatest economic growth rate in this country’s history from 1946 to 1970.

To make such growth possible, both ends of the transformation process described in the last chapter had to be hyped up. First, we needed to insure an abundant supply of raw materials to convert into commodities. This led to a burst of American investment overseas as well as to enormous aid programs for sympathetic “underdeveloped” countries. Often we secured our supply by the creation of client governments propped up with military aid. Raising anticommunism to the status of a holy war in the 1940s and 1950s formed the political foundation for these military and economic programs and underlay the assertion of the patriotic virtues of foreign investment.

At the other end of the transformation equation, an accelerated movement of commodities into consumers’ homes was critical. People had to be convinced that life without all these products was undesirable and unpatriotic. It was time to forget the rationing of the war years and consume for your country.

Advertising and television were the dynamic duo that would rededicate the consuming American. Advertising’s ability to create a passionate need for what is not needed was already well established. Since economic growth and a consumer economy had to be based upon selling far more commodities than were needed to meet actual needs, economic growth depended upon advertising. Television, which had been lying around in mothballs since the 1920s, was dusted off and enlisted as the means to deliver the advertising life-style fast, right into people’s homes and heads.

Quick to spot any new technology that could aid their urgent cause, big advertisers immediately invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing this idle sales tool. And so advertising gave birth to television, and television gave advertising a whole new world to conquer. Together they made possible an enormous, though temporary, economic bonanza.

Can you recall the TV advertising of the 1940s and 1950s? Smiling, happy people. Scrubbed children. Housewives showing their impossibly clean wash. Smiling junior-executive husbands emerging from their new cars, greeted at the picket fence by their clean, cheerful families? The happy mowing of the lawn. The happy faces reflected off the polished toasters?

The nuclear family was idealized to a greater extent than ever before, because the family was the ideal consumption unit. Women had to get out of those factories and overalls and back into little pink dresses in the kitchen. Those returning soldiers needed jobs. Rosie the Riveter gave way to June Allyson. Separate family units maximized production potential. Private homes. Private cars. Two cars. Private washing machines. Private television sets.

Within a few years, the world started changing. The battery-operated lawn mower I saw on television one day appeared on my lawn the next week. So did the car. The whole neighborhood started looking like a television commercial. The woods near my house disappeared and were replaced by hundreds of identical versions of my house. Neighborhoods everywhere started looking like each other. Freeways replaced country roads. Shopping centers replaced corner markets. Pavements covered everything.

“Prosperity,” “security,” “happiness,” studded ads and presidential speeches alike. This incredible outpouring of commodities, this entire revamping of landscape, this filling of houses with gadgets was supposed to constitute some kind of latter-day Nirvana. That’s what everyone was thinking, saying, and believing. It was what made America America.

One of my high school teachers during the 1950s told my class that it was America’s commitment to a consumption economy that made our country different and better than all others. He told us that by expanding our economy, we would soon make everyone wealthy. America was already the world’s only classless society, he said. Workers and managers were equal partners in a glorious process benefiting everyone. In America everyone was equal. Our standard of living made it that way. Everyone could have a car. Everyone could have a television. Everyone could own a home. Everyone could have a business. We were not like Mexico and Nicaragua, dirty little countries, where there were a few rich people and everyone else was poor and all of them wished they had what we had.

A few years later at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, I learned how and why this commodity life and the economic growth it produces was supposed to be so good for absolutely everyone. I learned what they had been talking about in those boardrooms and at the Department of Commerce. It was called the “trickle-down theory.”

The Trickle-Down Theory

It goes more or less like this: Industrial expansion, rapid economic growth and the consumption economy benefit everyone. The theory—which is the basis of Keynesian American economics—has it that when people buy more and more commodities, they produce more profits for industry, enabling it to expand. When industry expands, more jobs result. This puts more money into circulation, enabling people to buy
more
commodities, expanding profits again, yielding more investments, more jobs and starting the cycle around on another turn.

I have oversimplified the process, leaving out such variables as savings, borrowing, and so on. The way I have presented it is more or less the way it is translated through the media and through our educational system into popular understanding: a beautiful circle of activity, everyone helping everyone else, labor and management rowing the boat together, all serving the common good and growing endlessly. It explained the patriotic urgency of people spending more and more on commodities. The benefits would “trickle down” to everyone in the country, including those at the bottom of the pyramid. Jobs, money, prosperity, happiness, security, democracy, equality were all lumped together as inevitable results of this cycle.

I believed in it. We all believed in it. Most people believe in it still. Presidents get elected based on whether they can convince the public that they will stimulate the beautiful cycle. Jimmy Carter was elected for saying he knew how to do it.

The trickle-down theory is the nice simple kind of economic model that can be sold to a mass population removed from any deeper understanding of how things really work. Trying to come to grips with economic nuance is for most of us no easier than trying to understand how much nuclear radiation is “safe.” Who knows? The “experts” know.

Like every other organizing model in our society, economic processes have been removed from personal participation, appropriated into a nether world of flow charts, financial analyses and circle graphs. Like scientific and technological systems, once economic systems reach a certain size and complexity, they can be controlled only by forces far outside the grasp of the individual and community. One explanation of them sounds as plausible as another. In the absence of a really thorough training in economics—a training which itself supports many arbitrary and fantastic theories—this trickle-down model of the benefits of a consumer society sounds perfectly valid.

It certainly seemed valid for a little while. People had jobs, the economy was growing, and homes were filling up with ever more intricate gadgets.

Only now, thirty years after the trip was launched, can we see the process from the vantage point of joblessness, inflation, bankruptcy and default, and realize that something was terribly wrong somewhere.

In fact, it was a fantasy. It was packaged and sold to us like the seven-piece matching living-room sets on the television screen. Buy now, pay later when you are richer than you are now. But when later came, very few of us were richer.

It turned out that the pursuit of all those happy goodies didn’t produce happy people; it produced isolated, frustrated, alienated people. More important, the economic benefits did not trickle down to create some egalitarian democracy. The benefits trickled
up.

Beneficiaries of the Advertising Fantasy

The period of rapid growth from 1946 to 1970, which coincided with the emergence of television and electronic advertising, concentrated wealth and power in this country to an unheard-of degree. It put effective control of the economy in the hands of a few corporate entities. It concentrated immense wealth among a handful of people. Meanwhile, the working classes, and the more disadvantaged nonworking people, to whom the commodity life had promised dazzling benefits, ended up in a far worse, more desperate and more dependent position than ever before.

A New York advertising man, Lawrence G. Chait, was the first person to articulate clearly the economic concentration made inevitable by economic growth. In a now-famous speech he gave in Detroit in 1968, Chait said, “The factor of overwhelming significance in our business and financial life for some years now has been the trend toward concentration of economic power.”

Pointing out that in 1965 this country had 412,000 business units, he added, “The fifty largest controlled 35.2 percent of the total manufacturing assets.”

As for profits, “The twenty largest manufacturing corporations, [who hold] 25 percent of total corporate assets, had 32 percent of [the nation’s] profits after taxes.” That means that only .005 percent of the corporations in this country enjoyed one-third of all corporate profits.