Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony. It's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television. This is episode number 43, Countdown 64. Have you no sense of decency
[00:00:34] Speaker A: for
[00:00:34] Speaker B: 100 weeks that started in October 2025?
This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it features first appeared on Earth.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, we witnessed the beginning of the shift to color TV in 1954.
Today we're going to talk about one of television's first triumphs in broadcast journalism with its coverage of the Army McCarthy Senate hearings in the spring of 1954.
Stick around till the very end, when, in a bit of a bonus for this episode, we'll meet another unsung hero of early TV history, Alan B. Dumont.
Television's ascendant decade was a confusing time in America, defined in equal parts by prosperity and existential dread.
On the one hand, the Allies triumph in World War II put the great Depression in the rearview mirror of the big shiny cars Americans were driving off the showroom floors.
On the other hand, the whole world was wracked with anxiety over the awesome new force that had been unleashed to end the war in Japan and the spreading realization that Eastern Europe was receding behind an iron curtain.
Then, during the summer of 1949, while audiences across the nation were enjoying the first episodes of these are My Howdy Doody and the Goldbergs, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb.
The specter of the bomb and the growing threat of Communism combined to create a festering atmosphere for anyone inclined to stoke Suspicions.
Joseph R. McCarthy was an otherwise unremarkable junior U.S. senator from Wisconsin until February 1950, when he appeared at a Lincoln Day dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
During his remarks to the mostly partisan Republican crowd, McCarthy waved a piece of paper and exclaimed, I have here in my hand A list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State and as being members of the Communist Party, and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department that there were no such names or that the number changed as often as McCarthy's audience mattered little in the fraught environment of America in the early 1950s.
But with that declaration and the campaign of accusations that followed, the nation entered the era forever remembered by adding the suffix ism to Joe McCarthy's last name.
In the Washington Post on March 29, 1950, cartoonist Herb Block drew a pile of tar buckets labeled McCarthyism. The word stuck and the era had its villain and a new word for anti Communist demagoguery.
Apart from the occasional editorial cartoon, the press was largely compliant with McCarthy's rampage.
Newspapers and newsreels passively reported his crusade against the enemy within.
Editors and publishers were equally reluctant to defy a sitting US Senator who wrapped himself in the flag while exposing traitors.
The major national dailies like the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post mostly reported McCarthy's charges without any corroboration lest they too be accused of being soft on Communism.
Radio was complicit too.
By then a mature medium driven by advertising, the still dominant form of broadcasting was likewise disinclined to challenge McCarthy. Some stations even canceled commentators deemed too liberal or un. American Television, on the other hand, was still the new kid on the journalistic block which may account for the medium's pivotal role in exposing McCarthy's mendacity.
The first to pierce the veil was the CBS program See it now, hosted by Edward R. Murrow, a former radio reporter who gained renown for his this Is London coverage of the Blitz during the war.
On March 9, 1954, Murrow took on McCarthy with footage of the Senator's own speeches.
After seeing for themselves the contradictions in McCarthy's allegations, some 10 million people, about a third of the country's TV households were treated to a closing commentary for the ages as Murrow reminded his audiences of one of the most American of principles.
[00:06:04] Speaker C: We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: After Murrow's televised rebuke, McCarthy demanded equal time and CBS gave it to him. On April 6, 1954, McCarthy himself appeared on See it now, hurling rambling accusations at Murrow for harboring Communist sympathies.
The contrast between Murrow's calm demeanor and McCarthy's belligerent bloviation only deepened the public unease about the Senator.
By the time Murrow and McCarthy faced off on CBS, McCarthy was already embroiled in a contentious dispute with an Even more formidable institution, the United States Army.
With his typical bombast, McCarthy had accused the service of harboring communists.
The army retaliated with charges of its own that McCarthy and his council, Roy Cohn, had sought to secure special treatment for a friend of Cohn's, G. David Schein, the scion of a wealthy family of hotel and theater chain owners who had recently been drafted into the Army.
The dispute between The army and McCarthy became so contentious that the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations announced it would hold hearings in April of 1954 to air it all out.
Television executives immediately insisted on a place in the chamber for their cameras. A petition without precedent in congressional history.
By the time of the Murrow broadcasts, Joseph McCarthy was already one of the most notorious politicians in the country.
His own hearings into alleged communist infiltration of the State Department had drawn large radio and newsreel audiences.
Television executives had gotten a taste for the blood sport of live congressional hearings in 1951 and 52, when millions of Americans tuned to the Kefauver crime Committee.
As those hearings turned reputed mobsters into household names, the medium turned congressional inquiry into national theater.
Still, broadcasting the Army McCarthy hearings to a live national audience presented logistical and financial challenges that only two networks were willing to take on.
ABC and the dumont network, both still struggling to siphon audience share from rivals. NBC and CBS agreed to pool their resources.
They shared cameras and crews and split the cost of transmission lines in order to provide uninterrupted coverage.
The arrangement was an unprecedented act of cooperation between commercial rivals and. And the first time congressional proceedings were carried gavel to gavel nationwide.
A pivotal moment in the Army McCarthy hearings, and indeed in American history, was televised on June 9, 1954.
While an audience of roughly 20 million people watched, the Army's lead counsel, Joseph N. Welch, engaged McCarthy in a line of questions. When the Senator responded by accusing Fred Fisher, a young attorney in Welch's firm, of communist ties, Welch.
[00:09:46] Speaker C: Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.
You've done enough.
Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
[00:10:01] Speaker B: The hearing room fell silent as McCarthy shrank under the bright light of Welch's dignified fury.
Finally, the whole nation could see the anti communist crusader for the narcissistic bully that he was.
McCarthy never recovered.
ABC and the Dumont network carried the Army McCarthy hearings for eight weeks from late April until mid June 1954.
The daily coverage typically ran six to seven hours, four or five days each week and sometimes even on Saturday mornings.
By the end, the two networks had broadcast roughly 187 hours of live testimony, while NBC and CBS continued their regular daytime programming, offering only highlights in their nightly newscasts.
Six months after the hearings, on December 2, 1954, the Senate censured Joseph McCarthy by a vote of 67 to 22 for conduct contrary to senatorial traditions.
Stripped of his committee chairmanship and shunned by colleagues and press alike, McCarthy retreated from public life.
He made only perfunctory appearances until May 2, 1957, when he died from complications of alcohol related hepatitis at just 48 years of age.
Despite the impact of its coverage, the Dumont network did not fare much better.
The name Dumont appears often in these accounts of television's ascendant decade, but like other pioneers of the era, has been swept aside to preserve the dominant corporate narrative this project hopes to correct.
Alan B. Dumont was one of television's true pioneers.
In the 1920s, the self taught engineer took an interest in cathode ray tubes, which at the time were still notoriously cranky and unreliable.
While working at the Forest Radio Company, Dumont developed better vacuum seals, phosphor coatings and manufacturing processes to make the tubes more dependable.
In 1931, he founded the Allen B. Dumont Laboratories in Passaic, N.J. and found steady business building CRTs for oscilloscopes, which became indispensable electronic instruments in the 1930s.
That success supplied the expertise and the capital to produce television picture tubes.
Dumont's technical footing in CRT production led him to expand vertically from tubes to complete TV sets, then to programming. In 1946 he launched the Dumont Television Network and offered coast to coast broadcasts in 1951, the same year as NBC.
Though chronically underfunded and short on affiliates, the Dumont network became a proving ground for television talent and innovation, which culminated in its coverage of the Army McCarthy hearings.
Despite its pioneering efforts, Dumont was always the fourth network in a market barely large enough for three.
Without a broad base of profitable radio affiliates like both NBC and CBS had, Dumont struggled to secure advertisers and expand the continuous coverage of the 1954 hearings was the peak of the network's reach. But by 1955 Dumont had curtailed most of its original programming.
By 1956, the network ceased operations entirely, marking the end of a pioneering entry in both the hardware and software that had made television the indispensable medium by the end of the decade.
This brings us to the end of number 64 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when Ralph Kramden threatens to send his wife Alice to the moon.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown of the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more info, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Shaf Catskin, and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, then why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:14:58] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and hard.
But ho ho ho, who got the laughs at now?
