Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

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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 1948 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 offsetting 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 1948 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 the patriotic virtues of foreign investment.

At the other end of the transformation equation, an accelerated movement commodities into consumers' homes was critical. People had to be convinced that life without all these products was undesirable and unpatriotic. It was 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 lifestyle 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?

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