American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  To a Hollywood nearing the height of its influence had come Ronald Reagan in 1937, and it was a declining motion-picture industry that he was to leave two decades later for television and General Electric. He brought with him a finely honed radio voice, a degree from Eureka College, and years of experience as a resourceful sportscaster. He also brought a body of ideas and notions drawn from a childhood in conservative, small-town Illinois, from an Irish-Catholic father whose long career as a salesman had been disintegrating amid alcoholism, from a mother who had musical and theatrical interests along with an abiding devotion to the Disciples of Christ, and from a deep immersion in the life of this middle-class, moralistic, temperance-preaching church. Young Reagan imbibed the dogmas of a small-town rugged individualism, tempered by an admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had inspired optimism during the depression days and helped people like his father. He held no deeply felt political beliefs; he was malleable.

  In Hollywood, Reagan entered a world of illusion. At its zenith of prosperity and of power over social attitudes Hollywood was coming under increasing attack for its superficial plots, bland “message,” insipid preachments of God, country, and home. Hortense Powdermaker called it the “dream factory,” others the world of make-believe, the city of deceptions. Hollywood was escapism, Powdermaker wrote, escapism not into the broadening of experience and the world of the imagination, but into “saccharine sentimentality” and the stylized exaggeration of existing stereotypes, shibboleths, and fears. On the one hand, the Production Code Administration systematically cleared scripts of words like lousy, punk, nuts, jerk, and damn—except for Gable in Gone With the Wind—threw out all suggestions of sexual intimacy outside of marriage, lovemaking in bed, “open-mouthed or lustful kissing,” prostitution, scenes of a wet baby, even doll-wetting, or of the sex organs of animals, of toilets, of the sign LADIES. Yet Hollywood continued to put out pictures with the most torrid love scenes and amoral behavior—as long as sinners were punished or redeemed by the end of the last reel. Hollywood films frowned on adultery and divorce, even while the movie magazines dealt in salacious detail with the marital goings-on of the stars, not always inaccurately.

  Reagan was a performer in the dream factory. The very image of the chaste male, he had become the protégé of the Hearst columnist Louella Parsons, long feared as the maker and breaker of stars and their marriages. In her column Parsons gushed that Jane Wyman, brown eyes sparkling and voice bubbling with happiness, had told her, “Have I got a scoop for you! Ronnie and I are engaged!” The two were married at Forest Lawn, in the Wee Kirk o’ th’ Heather. It was the second marriage for Wyman. When Reagan and Wyman were divorced, Parsons seemed personally affronted. The couple had always stood for “so much that is right in Hollywood.” She was “fighting hard” to bring them to their senses.

  Make-believe of far greater import characterized Reagan’s involvement in a number of organizations—the Screen Actors Guild, Americans for Democratic Action, the Music Corporation of America—despite his distrust of organized social action as against individual initiative. He voluntarily offered the FBI—the government—the names of SAG members suspected of following the Communist party line. Some SAG members were convinced that in granting a blanket waiver in 1952 to one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies, MCA, that would allow it to produce television shows while continuing to represent actors—thus giving MCA an unprecedented advantage over its competitors—SAG president and MCA client Reagan had sold them out to MCA.

  But if Reagan had made a deal with MCA, the agency had much the better part of it. While MCA by 1961 was producing 40 percent of all prime-time television, Reagan’s own film career faltered badly. After a brief stint in a Las Vegas nightclub, he joined General Electric in 1954 as a promoter of the company and of conservatism, an easy step for a man in transition between marriages and careers. At first a liberal dubious about liberalism, later a Democrat who urged Eisenhower to run as a Democrat, still later a Democrat who supported Republican Ike, Reagan shifted steadily rightward across the political spectrum. Not only was he confirmed in his new conservatism by the GE world in which he now moved, but, in Lou Cannon’s judgment, with his growing wealth he resented more and more the bite of a steeply graduated income tax. His second wife, Nancy Davis, and her conservative stepfather helped nudge him toward the right. When General Electric later let him go, evidently in part because he was too conservative and controversial as a spokesman for a corporation with huge government contracts, Reagan was ideologically primed to move into the political right wing—and he was available.

  Hollywood continued to cope with technology. During the 1960s the major studios began to rent to television networks films made within the preceding five years and to create their own TV-film fare—not only the made-for-TV movie but the miniseries and novel-for-television. Pay television came along when Time Inc.’s Home Box Office offered cable TV viewers movies without commercials. A few years later Sony moved in with the Betamax home videocassette recorder, followed by the VHS. Despite the complaints of Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association, that the VCR was a parasitical instrument, Hollywood recouped by grossing over $1.5 billion in 1985 from selling videocassettes mainly as rental copies—which was more than it grossed from the box office. The industry also stepped up its production of blockbuster films that won huge audiences.

  Whether or not the film industry was stabilizing, southern Californians appeared to have emerged from their long bewitchment by Hollywood and to have entered a period of mature growth with the creation of a larger and broader industrial base as well as a steady increase in population. Planning exuberantly for their entrance into the third millennium, southern Californians could boast of having the largest concentration of high technology in the world, the largest port in the United States, one of the leading international financial centers, and superb access to the burgeoning Pacific rim economies. The Los Angeles Times, once the very exemplar of stodgy, conservative journalism, had become one of the best and most aggressive newspapers in the country, and the region’s universities were achieving ever greater prestige. Illusions and make-believe were declining as the region faced the economic and human costs of development.

  As self-delusion slowly died, however, the region’s most salient characteristic once more came to the fore—its social and political and intellectual fragmentation. Los Angeles and many of the other cities were still racially splintered. The megalopolis sprawled ever outward, engorging mountain and desert. Angelenos still insisted on their separate houses on tiny plots. Public transportation remained primitive. Few great writers comparable to Fitzgerald and West were either coming to the area or springing up from its asphalt and desert.

  Above all, southern Californians continued their love affair with their cars and the freeways that slashed through city and country, linking some citizens and diking off others. By the late 1980s the road system had reached the saturation point. Congestion had spread out from central Los Angeles freeways to virtually the whole region. With five million more population expected within the next quarter century in the southern California basin, from Ventura down the coast to San Juan Capistrano and inland as far as Riverside, it was projected that even after planned freeway expansion half of all driving time would be spent stuck in traffic jams, while average rush-hour speeds for all streets and freeways would fall from 37 miles per hour to 19. Meanwhile motorists would be wasting millions of hours a year sitting on freeways.

  Wasting? Drivers were not daunted. Highway police reported that motorists passed their time eating, isometric exercising, brushing and flossing teeth, singing, shaving, smooching, changing clothes, screaming to relieve tension. Said one driver to a reporter, “I think basically the car is like a movable home. You’re in a private world and you can do and say and think anything you want when you’re alone in that car.” Not long after these benign reports there was an outburst of random shooting on the freeways. Making love inside the automobile, shooti
ng up the other highwaymen outside, as in an old Hollywood film—perhaps the South Sea natives had understood something when they reduced things to “kiss-kiss” and “bang-bang.”

  SUPERSPECTATORSHIP

  Even the most jaded habitués of Las Vegas looked up from their gaming tables on hearing this news. The long-anticipated title match between “Marvelous Marvin” Hagler and “Sugar Ray” Leonard would be held on April 6, 1987, in their own remote Nevada town. And it evidently would be the battle of the century, for more than 1,100 reporters from all over the world would be trekking to Vegas. Soon torrents of media publicity turned the boxing match into “Superfight.” Hagler, the self-made brawler—coarse, mean, and hungry—would be pitted against Leonard, an Olympic gold medal winner, a media darling, a strategist surrounded by trainers, publicists, and groupies. And it must be Superfight because of the money involved—an anticipated purse of $25 million, the largest yet.

  Only a spoilsport or two mentioned that both men were past their prime, that even at their best they were second-raters compared to such greats of the past as Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis. For boxing aficionados who remembered the epic contests in the smoky haze of Madison Square Garden, with its tens of thousands of frenzied onlookers, there was something quite depressing about this Vegas bout. Superfight would have a live audience of only a few thousand persons, those who could afford the plane fare to Vegas as well as fight tickets, many of which were reserved for celebrities or scalped far above their face value. A sports event hyped for days and weeks on national and local television was unavailable to the stations that had been ecstatically playing it up. Nor could it be seen on cable television or pay TV. The fight could be viewed only in select establishments, on closed-circuit television for sums ranging from $25 to $100. In the end the fight itself was far less of a spectacle than the media coverage of it.

  Superfight was indeed a supreme achievement not of the boxing world but of the media world. It was a classic merging of television, advertisers, big money, and headline celebrities. It achieved its supreme goal—almost everyone in the country was talking about it. The fight replaced the weather as a topic of conversation, but like the lovely morning that everyone remarked on at the checkout counter or the gas station, it was here today and gone tomorrow.

  Something that almost everyone in America talked about, even for half a minute, was not to be belittled in a nation so lacking in more serious topics of common concern. Countless Americans watched football who had never felt a jolting tackle, followed basketball who had never sunk a three-pointer, viewed hockey who had never shot a puck into a well-guarded cage, gazed at baseball who had never lofted a homer in the neighborhood sandlot. Perhaps that was why they spent hours in front of the tube watching—because they could never do it. And perhaps also because, having watched a game, they knew that they could enjoy instant empathy with the bus driver, the paper boy, the garage mechanic, the library assistant. “Sportswatching,” Janet Podell wrote, “may well be Americans’ truest expression of democratic feeling: far more people watch sports than vote in national elections.”

  A powerful combination of technology and personalism sustained this mass interest. Network television embraced all regions of the country, satellites girdled the globe. VCRs, now in millions of homes, enabled viewers to tape programs and watch them at any hour of the day or night. Cable challenged the preeminence of the three networks. Round-the-clock news and sports programs attracted more and more viewers, especially at times of national crises or scandals. Satellite programming and the promise of optic-fiber communications undermined traditional rationales for federal regulation, posing even greater future threats to the electronic status quo.

  Yet the technology was heavily moralized, sensationalized, even fantasized, especially in athletics. Sport was elementary and moral, the bad guys against the good. The conflict was clear-cut and clearly resolvable. Sport was combat, man-to-man, gladiatorial: when Dave Winfield’s six-foot-six-inch frame sped gracefully to meet an arching shot off George Brett’s agile bat, there was nothing on the field except the beauty of one man’s skill against another’s. Sport was simple: it was “wholly intelligible to the lowest common denominators in society.” Above all, sport was fantasy in a harsh, cynical world. It fed, said Richard Lipsky, “depoliticization by creating a world of meaning, a Utopian refuge, within the larger technical life-world.” And there was always escape into the future: “Wait till next year!” Fantasy allowed oddities too. Fans would journey to an airport to greet a conquering home team made up of numerous blacks—but would not want to live on the same block with them. Blacks were video gladiators, welcomed on the screen, not in the neighborhood.

  Big sport and spectatorship required big money. In 1873, Cornell president Andrew D. White, responding to a request of his football team to travel to Michigan for a game, had proclaimed, “I will not permit thirty men to travel 400 miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.” Nor would he pay thirty train fares. A century later, in January 1988, over a hundred million people watched professional football’s annual championship; a minute of advertising time during that contest cost $1.3 million. This amounted to more than $30 million for the game, but even so was dwarfed by the sums television and cable contracts fetched for season telecast rights. In 1982, the National Football League received a five-year $2 billion contract from the three networks. Baseball’s 1983 deal with the networks netted more than a billion over six years, and rights sales to local broadcast and cable stations brought in still more. And the 1984 Olympics, which cost $525 million to produce, was hyped as pumping $3.3 billion into southern California’s economy.

  Many sports fans questioned the commercialization and industrialization of their games. Large salaries contributed to cleavage between fans and the players with whom they identified; it was easier to picture oneself in a DiMaggio’s shoes when his life off the playing field was not all that unlike one’s own. But when star players made $2 million annually, identification was strained and resentment crept into some fans’ hearts. When Boston Celtics fans were asked whether Larry Bird, the team’s star forward, was worth the $2 million he was paid at the height of his career, the vast majority replied no. Yet the same majority, unwilling to lose him to another team, did not begrudge his demand or the owner’s willingness to meet it.

  Television long since had become one of the nation’s biggest industries, taking a huge slice of the $50 billion that American businesses spent on advertising in 1986. Few TV viewers understood the impact of advertising on their programming. “The economics of television, and thus of political communication,” wrote W. Russell Neuman, “is based not on the providing of programs to audiences but rather on the selling of audiences to advertisers.” While producers also had to attract audiences, some complained that spontaneity was lost somewhere along the line. As a new concept was reached, tested, premarketed, polled, and analyzed before release, intuition and innovation and risk appeared to be giving way to spreadsheet analyses inside boardroom and film studio alike.

  The press was not only subject to big business pressures; it was big business. Newspaper publishing had become more a business and less a journalistic calling. The Wall Street Journal, its circulation at 1,910,000, was not only the preeminent business newspaper; it was a major business in its own right. USA Today, initially designed as a working-class alternative, adopted a TV format of encapsulated news and “factoids,” and was sold in vending machines that looked like television sets. USA Today hoped also to capture the market of young, upwardly mobile business and professional people who wanted to enjoy their news, like their food and entertainment, while on the go.

  As businesses, the newspapers tended toward concentration. In 1986 ten financial and business corporations controlled the three major television and radio networks and 34 affiliated stations, 201 cable TV systems, 62 radio stations, 20 record companies, 59 magazines including Time and Newsweek, 58 newspapers including The New York Times, the Washington Post, The W
all Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, 41 book publishers, and sundry motion-picture companies. And banks accounted for 75 percent of the major stockholders of the three networks. “The American press,” wrote journalist David Broder, “is a private business performing a vital public function under a specially protected constitutional status, exempt from regulation by government, immunized against many of the forms of pressure and persuasion to which other institutions are subject in our system of checks and balances.” To whom, readers or stockholders, was the press corps ultimately accountable? Presumably to the readers who made everything possible. But newspaper after newspaper—some of them respected and “responsible”—had seen their customers slip away to worship electronic gods.

  Its huge reach and alleged cannibalistic tendencies made television the cardinal concern to those worried about balance among the media. In 1974, 46 percent of those interviewed in national polls reported television as their favorite pastime. “Television expanded its audience at the expense of reading, which dropped from 21% to 14%, of movies, from 19% to 9%, and of radio, from 9% to 5%,”wrote Morris Janowitz on the basis of annual reports by the Roper Organization. “Even dancing suffered; from 9% to 5%. Only playing cards held its own.” Americans as a whole were watching television an average of about three hours a day by 1974; the college-educated and the affluent were watching almost as much, about two hours and a half. White-collar and blue-collar workers could not escape the intrusions of television even on the job; increasingly headquarters executives were transmitting via satellite sales information, company news, and pep talks to captive groups of employees.