American Dreams, unlike Clark’s histories, downplays the question of integration on American Bandstand’s. American Dreams’ version of American Bandstand occasionally includes two or three black teenagers in the crowd, but all of the regular dancers are white. The racial demographics of American Bandstand’s studio audience are noted in the third episode of American Dreams. During a scene in the American Bandstand studio, Meg learns a new dance from a black teenager. The camera pans to the right to show that this interracial pair is dancing in front of the WFIL studio camera, which is presumably broadcasting the image to television affiliates across the country. The camera pans further to the right to find two middle-aged white men in suits watching the couple on the WFIL studio monitor. The show identifies the two men by signs on their chairs that read “sponsor.” Gesturing toward the monitor featuring the image of the interracial couple, one of the men asks “Are we on the air here?”23 This concerned sponsor is assured by his partner that the show is broadcasting a commercial and not the studio image. These two sponsors, portrayed by present-day NBC television executives, are identified in the credits as the “Ad Guys” and do not appear in any other episodes of American Dreams.24 Their brief appearance in this episode is the most direct reference American Dreams’ producers make to American Bandstand’s racial representations. This scene implies that sponsors exercised a great deal of control over the images American Bandstand broadcast and blames these sponsors, rather than Dick Clark or the rest of American Bandstand’s production staff, for the show’s racial segregation.
While this “blame the sponsors” trope is familiar, this scene is interesting because it presents a more historically accurate picture of the “integration” of American Bandstand, one that casts Dick Clark’s claims about ending the show’s racial segregation in a different light. Rather than “charting new territory” or “going where no television show had gone before,” as Clark has previously contended, this scene suggests that one or two black teens very occasionally made it into the studio and that producers consciously kept black teens off camera. In this view, American Bandstand reluctantly practiced token integration, and through selective camera work, even this token integration would have been invisible to television viewers. This definition of integration is a far more modest claim about American Bandstand’s role as a “force for social good,” but it helps explain how Dick Clark could believe that he integrated American Bandstand while the show continued to discriminate against black teenagers.25
Although American Dreams does not address American Bandstand’s racially discriminatory admission policies, by portraying American Bandstand amid the racial discrimination and tensions in Philadelphia, American Dreams encourages its audience to consider the role television played in mediating daily life in the 1960s. To bolster the show’s historical accuracy, American Dreams employed two full-time researchers to find specific details of Philadelphia in this era.26 This research is most evident in the show’s portrayal of the riot in North Philadelphia in the summer of 1964. The climactic riot scene in the first season’s final episode opens with historical American Bandstand footage of Dick Clark introducing Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. The scene moves from this black-and-white footage to the recreated American Bandstand studio, where the band portraying the group performs a rock and roll version of “C.C. Ryder.” The scene then cuts repeatedly between the studio and a street in North Philadelphia, while the song plays continuously in the background. In the street scene, a middle-aged black man and woman are arguing, first with each other and then with two police officers. The police forcibly arrest them for being drunk and disorderly while a number of black motorists and passersby watch the incident unfold. The show’s producers packed this scene with historical details, using the real names of the woman who was arrested and the police officer who arrested her.27 The scene is shifting, therefore, between two historical reenactments. The first is a reenactment of a musical performance that originally broadcast on American Bandstand in 1966 and resembles the musical reenactments featured in almost every episode of American Dreams.28 The reenactment of the altercation and arrest that sparked the Philadelphia riots, in contrast, portrays a moment that happened outside the view of television cameras in the summer of 1964. The latter reenactment is the show’s most specific portrayal of a historical event in Philadelphia other than American Bandstand. The juxtaposition of these reenactments is important because it asks viewers to watch and remember American Bandstand in the context of Philadelphia’s simmering racial tensions.
As the riots develop, the episode continues to move between reenactments of American Bandstand and dramatizations of the different interpretations and implications of the riots. The scene immediately following the arrest cuts among the American Bandstand studio, a group of young black men in North Philadelphia talking about the arrest, and a group of white police officers in a diner doing the same. While the police jokingly recount how the drunken woman hit one of the officers on the scene, the black men express anger and frustration at what they see as police brutality. One of the men, Willie Johnson (Nigel Thatch), appeared in earlier episodes encouraging his peers to develop intra-racial solidarity, using language that resonates with the rhetoric of black nationalism popularized by Malcolm X.29 Henry Walker’s nephew Nathan (Keith Robinson), who is drawn to the racial consciousness encouraged by Willie Johnson, gets the last word in the street corner exchange:
Ain’t nothing right about this. Up in Harlem, police killed that boy James Powell. You think that boy deserved to die? What for? They ain’t got no reason. None. We’re supposed to just stand back until they murder one of us? That’s in Harlem, that’s in St. Augustine, it’s Rochester, it’s Chicago, it’s North Philly. Ain’t never gonna change.30
This scene grounds the anger and frustration of these young black men in historically specific incidents of racial violence. Regarding the place of this scene in the series, Prince added, “[f]rom the very beginning, I told NBC that I wanted the final episode to be the riots. … The idea of the end of episode 25 was to show how one event, the riots, brought everybody together, white, black, old, young.”31 More specifically, American Dreams uses the riots to bring its characters together in a common story line, but the show does not attempt to resolve what the riots mean for the characters, or how viewers might interpret either the historical riots or their fictional portrayal.
Televisual representations are the primary way American Dreams links different characters without erasing their different perspectives on the riots. Willie Johnson and Nathan are the only characters who see the riots start in person, whereas all of the other characters learn about the riots via black-and-white footage on television (the actual footage is of the Watts riots, but the events are here described as taking place in North Philadelphia).32 American Dreams uses these televised images of the riots as a way to locate the show’s characters in relation to the event. Meg’s mother and younger siblings watch the riots unfold on television from the safety of their living room. In American Bandstand’s studio, the show’s producer watches the riots on a monitor in the control room and makes plans to send the studio audience home. Jack Prior and Henry Walker see footage of the riots in the television store, and leave the televised riots behind to find their teenage children, Meg and Sam, in the streets of North Philadelphia. Riot images are also on the televisions in the North Philadelphia store, where Meg and Sam (Arlen Escarpeta) are boarding up the windows in anticipation of the riots reaching their block. For American Dreams’ characters, these historical television images convey both the reality and proximity of the riots. For the show’s television audience, this scene also links American Bandstand as one of several sites with an emotional and geographic relationship to the riot.
The final riot scene also threatens the burgeoning interracial friendship between Sam and Meg. Sam is last shown with his cousin Nathan, kneeling over Willie Johnson who has been shot by a police officer. While Sam stays with Willie, Meg’s uncle remov
es her from the riots. The first season closes with Meg looking back at Sam from the back window of her uncle’s police car. Of this ending, Prince suggests, “[t]o end the first season with Meg in the back of a cop car, staring out, that’s a different girl than the girl who was watching Bandstand in that first pilot episode, filed with nothing but hope.”33 Although this link between American Bandstand and the riots is not, in fact, historically accurate (American Bandstand moved to California several months before the Philadelphia riots in 1964), by portraying American Bandstand in a racially charged local context, American Dreams encourages viewers to see American Bandstand as part of the social history of Philadelphia.
This riot scene, however, also highlights how American Dreams seeks to manage racial tensions to avoid offending contemporary viewers. Producer Jonathan Prince has suggested that, by cutting between the different stories of the event that sparked the riot, he intended to leave the interpretation of the scene open to the viewer. In his DVD commentary on the episode, Prince said, “When I wrote it I just thought, I want to hear both people’s point of view, because somewhere in the middle lay the truth.”34 By giving American Dreams’ representations of history an air of uncertainty, Prince suggests, he intended for viewers to engage more closely with the history and memory of this era.
More simply, however, American Dreams’ narrative ambiguity supports the show’s broad appeal as a commercial network television program. American Dreams pursues the widest possible audience by presenting an array of different characters with whom viewers could identify or not on the basis of age, race, gender, class, religion, or political opinion. The show attempts to appeal across these marketing demographics without offending anyone. The challenge of trying to sell to all of these demographic groups is that viewers’ reactions to the riot scene and the series would vary based on each viewer’s memory, knowledge, and interpretation of what happened before, during, and after the summer of 1964. This is important, especially for a show called American Dreams, because as political scientist Jennifer Hochschild has shown, race and class shape how people understand the American dream. “African Americans increasingly believe that racial discrimination is worsening and that it inhibits their race’s ability to participate in the American dream,” Hochschild argues. “[W]hites increasingly believe that discrimination is lessening and that blacks have the same chance to participate in the dream as whites.”35 Similar to the survey data Hochschild analyzed, a 2002 Gallop poll found that members of different racial groups have very different views of police and the criminal justice system. Eighty-four percent of whites said that the criminal justice system respects the civil rights of black citizens, compared to only 33 percent of blacks.36 This opinion poll, from the same year American Dreams debuted, is indicative of the different ways of seeing race, crime, and policing that viewers would bring to the riot episode. In short, American Dreams approaches race in terms of marketing demographics (e.g., accumulating different viewers from different racial groups), without consideration for the ways race shapes how viewers understand the show’s narratives and even the show’s title.37
American Dreams’ strategy of narrative ambiguity frequently introduces different points of view, but refuses to criticize white racism, even when it takes place “back then” in the diegetic past of the 1960s. The intersecting story lines in the riot scene, for example, present police brutality and black nationalism as equivalents. Willie and Nathan are cast as the dangerous black characters who jeopardize Henry and Sam’s efforts at integration. These representations, Herman Gray notes, look back to portrayals of black people in the civil rights era as either “decent but aggrieved blacks who simply wanted to become a part of the American dream, or as threats to the very notion of citizenship and nation.”38 Setting the “bad” black characters against the “good” black characters presents viewers with a simplistic view of black opinions regarding integration and racial equality.
Closing the season finale with Meg being rescued from North Philadelphia, moreover, reemphasizes the show’s commitment to the innocence of white characters and viewers. Whether Meg has learned anything about race relations or racism in her city is, in the narrative, less important than the fact that she is a “different girl than the girl who was watching Bandstand in that first pilot episode, filed with nothing but hope.”39 Meg’s loss of innocence, marked by her inability to be a carefree teenage consumer, receives more emphasis in the finale than the police brutality and economic, social, and political inequality that precipitated the riots in Philadelphia. Focusing on the danger Meg faces during the riot also echoes the use of urban riots by conservatives as evidence of the failure of liberal antipoverty programs and of the dangers posed by urban communities of color. In response to these perceived dangers, “law and order” became a favorite slogan of conservative politicians during and after the 1960s. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, for example, articulated this argument in the speech that launched his 1964 presidential campaign:
It is on our streets that we see the final, terrible proof of a sickness which not all the social theories of a thousand social experiments has even begun to touch. Crime grows faster that population, while those who break the law are accorded more consideration than those who try to enforce the law. Law-enforcement agencies—the police, the sheriffs, the F.B.I.—are attacked for doing their jobs. Law breakers are defended. Our wives, all women, feel unsafe on our streets.40
This prospect of urban spaces being unsafe for white wives and daughters was a recurring theme in the law and order rhetoric and is evident when Meg is in danger in the riots. Since viewers are encouraged to identify with Meg’s dreams and fears throughout the series, the image of her, clearly scared, driving away from North Philadelphia and looking back at riots is a powerful one. The power of this image, however, draws on ideas about black lawlessness and white innocence that shape American Dreams’ story of the riots.
Similarly, Prince’s suggestion that American Dreams was looking for the truth among multiple viewpoints also underestimates the cultural meanings viewers are likely to ascribe to the idea of urban riots generally. The use of television footage of the Watts riots is important here. This historical footage, appearing on television screens in the Priors’ home and stores, connects the different characters and the audience to the immediacy of the “live” riot. Presumably, Prince elected to use coverage from the Watts riots, the most famous urban rebellion of the decade, because this footage was more plentiful and visceral than similar footage from the Philadelphia riots. American Dreams’ substitution of Watts for Philadelphia, however, is suggestive of the ways in which viewers would bring their own cultural knowledge of urban riots, and urban space more generally, to this episode.
As historian Gerald Horne has shown, the Watts riots became a cultural symbol of urban crisis and influenced the way politicians and citizens talked about race, poverty, and cities in the following decades. Similarly, media studies scholar Steve Macek argues that film, television, magazines, and newspapers have promoted images of “economically depressed urban centers like Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit” as “vast landscapes of fear.”41 Rather than asking viewers to engage critically with their own assumptions about urban riots and, more broadly, race, poverty, and cities, American Dreams’ riot episode presents both “point[s] of view, because somewhere in the middle lay the truth.”
Alternatively, American Dreams might have provided more context for viewers to understand why the show’s black and white characters held different opinions of relevant issues, such as police surveillance and brutality. In his foreword to R&B musician and civil rights activist Johnny Otis’s history of the Watts riots, for example, American studies scholar George Lipsitz writes:
Otis asks his readers to view the destruction in Watts in August 1965 as a product of pressures built up over centuries. Rather than viewing the riots as the product of deranged or criminal elements in the community, Otis depicts the uprising as a political statement by p
eople deprived of any other meaningful way of getting their grievances heard.42
Rather than offering a comforting story, Otis’s Listen to the Lambs challenges readers to understand the everyday realities that produced urban uprisings in places like Watts and Philadelphia. Without this historical context, American Dreams praises its audience for engaging with a serious and dramatic historical moment, but ultimately uses the riots as stage dressing for a story of lost innocence that reinforces what viewers already think about the riots and the American Bandstand era.
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