Primary Sources: The 1950s: Radio, Film & Television

"During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction."

"Adventures of Superman is a radio show which aired between 1938 and 1951 on Mutual and ABC with Kelloggs as a sponsor. While being aired on Mutual it was a 15 minute show but was increased to a half hour aftering moving to ABC."

"Thousands of television commercials created or collected by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) advertising agency, dated 1950s - 1980s."

In testimony "to a 1955 Congressional subcommittee, Hennock [Frieda B.] advocated oversight of commercial television by governmental and civic bodies and championed educational television. The testimony from the general manager of a new Pittsburgh educational station, William Wood, follows. Wood emphasized the lack of violence in his ‘poverty stricken’ station’s programming and included excerpts from fan mail praising an acclaimed children’s show, The Children’s Corner, a program co-produced by Fred Rogers, who later created, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Until 1967, however, when the Federal government established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to appropriate funds for public television, non-commercial stations struggled to survive."

"...the Television Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television has conducted over 750 oral history interviews (over 3000 hours) with the legends of television. These interviews chronicle the birth and growth of American TV History as it evolves, and make the interviews available worldwide. The Archive continues to produce new interviews every year. The collection covers a variety of professions, genres, and topics in electronic media history."

"This digital collection includes materials from the radio broadcasting collections within the Popular Music and Culture Collection. Items include selected photographs from the WSB Radio Records and documents from the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame Collection – including issues of the Southern Music Survey from 1963 to 1966.

Copyrights to the items in this collection are held by various entities. Rights information, if known, is specified in the item’s description."

CBS radio program from the 1950s

"Expressionistic crime dramas of the 40s and 50s: tough cops and private eyes, femme fatales, mean city streets and deserted backroads, bags of loot and dirty double-crossers. "

"Harold Lloyd, Jr. plays a young man who has a compulsion to watch burning buildings. Byron Foulger plays the man who hires him."

UCLA oral history collection: "Interviews in this series preserve the recollections of selected individuals in Los Angeles who were affected by the Hollywood blacklist during the Joseph R. McCarthy-J. Edgar Hoover era. "

Documents from the late '40s and early '50s related to the Hollywood 10 and the Blacklist.

"In 1957 US Army veteran Robert Carl Cohen was studying Social Psychology in Paris. While visiting the USSR he was assigned by NBC-TV's Moscow Chief Irving R. Levine to film a group of young Americans touring China in defiance of the US State Dept.'s travel ban. Arriving in Beijing after a 9 day 6,000 mile trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, he convinced the authorities to permit him to air express his uncensored film via Moscow to NBC in New York. During a 45 day tour he became the first American to film China since the 1949 Communist victory; documenting forbidden things such as bridges, aircraft, tanks, & the "brain washing" of political prisoners. After appearing on the TODAY SHOW & HUNTLEY NEWS, his reports were edited into INSIDE RED CHINA, part of THE SPECIAL OF THE WEEK Series. Highlights of this unique film include: Beijing, Guandong, Shanghai, The Great Wall, Yangtze River, Nanking University, Changchung Auto Plant, Slum & Sampan dwellers, Modern Hospitals & Ancient Acupuncture, Co-op Farms, Chairman Mao Tze Tung, Premier Chou En-Lai, & former Cal Tech & MIT rocket expert Dr. Chen Tzu-Fen, ending with the million marcher National Day Parade before the Forbidden City & its giant fireworks finale. Today, with foreign tourists & business people able to visit a China rapidly filling with modern factories & cities, INSIDE RED CHINA provides a rare insight into that vast nation's tumultuous past."

"...contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, when Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves convinced Dwight Eisenhower that short ads played during such popular TV programs as I Love Lucy would reach more voters than any other form of advertising. " The site is provided by the Museum of the Moving Image

"The Media History Digital Library digitizes collections of classic media periodicals that belong in the public domain for full public access. The project is supported by owners of materials who loan them for scanning, and donors who contribute funds to cover the cost of scanning."

"Copyright of all of the interviews is held by Mike Wallace, who generously agreed to allow the Ransom Center to present them here in their entirety. Any further use of this material requires the permission of both Mike Wallace and the Ransom Center."

"Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 4,000 titles on videotape and a smaller collection of film materials acquired subsequent to the Library of Congress transaction. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions" Available through the Internet Archive

"...Collier’s article from 1954 offered a critique of the four ratings methods in use at that time and discussed adverse consequences caused by the industry’s reliance on ratings. This assessment by author Bill Davidson and the men in the industry whom he quoted showed signs of an assumed disparagement of ordinary American housewives, identified implicitly as the predominant audience for mass media consumption. Both the reliability of housewives as part-time interviewers and their ability as viewers to maintain accurate diaries were deemed suspect in this piece."

"In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, one contestant offered proof that he had been coached, while a second refused to acknowledge “moral qualms” in perpetrating the fraud. A third, a teenager, related how she “goofed” and won a match that she was supposed to tie."

"In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, contestant Herbert Stempel described the process through which every detail of the seemingly spontaneous battle of wits was, in fact, scripted, rehearsed, and acted for dramatic effect."

"In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, a producer described one program’s system of control over the seemingly spontaneous on-air contests. Several congressmen then aired their views on the ethics and effects of such deceptive television practices."

In "... testimony from the 1955 hearings, child psychologist Eleanor E. Maccoby discussed her research findings, while Lazarsfeld advocated the funding of long-term projects. Both stressed the limitations of research for providing reliable evidence that would definitively link juvenile delinquency to television viewing.

"While experimental television broadcasts were first transmitted in the 1920s, mass production of television sets did not occur until after World War II. By 1960 the number of sets in the U.S. had surpassed the number of homes. With this relatively swift introduction of television into domestic American life, concern was voiced over the harmful influence that watching television might have on the nation’s children. Earlier in the century, anxieties by both Progressives and traditionalists about harmful effects of movies on youth had led to Congressional hearings regarding Federal censorship. Reformers, however, lacked convincing evidence to support their claims and the motion picture industry developed an effective self-censoring mechanism to maintain control over screen content. Similarly, after Congress held its first hearing in 1952 on the effect of television on children, they chose not to take any action to interfere with the industry, in part because that year the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a code to regulate broadcast content. A Senate report issued after hearings in 1954 and 1955 on the possible influence of television on juvenile delinquency summarized studies to determine the quantity of criminal and violent acts on television shows accessible for children to view. The report also presented a range of views on whether a “cumulative effect of crime-and-horror television programs” could be harmful to children. Excerpts from the report are followed by additional opinions submitted by the National Association for Better Radio and Television, an advocacy group organized in 1949." GMU History Matters

In 1952, the "National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a code to regulate broadcast content."

"As a result of his appearances as a triumphant contestant on one of the genre’s most popular programs, Twenty-one, Charles Van Doren, an instructor in the English department of Columbia University and son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, tried to use his newfound celebrity to promote values of “true education” to the television-viewing public. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, Van Doren dramatically confessed a long-suppressed secret: Twenty-one had been rigged and he had willingly, though with pained ambivalence, participated in the deception. Prior to airtime he had been told the questions he would be asked and instructed on how to be more “entertaining” as he answered. Van Doren, along with seventeen other contestants, subsequently received a suspended sentence for lying to a grand jury. In later years, he wrote numerous books that dealt with world history and the history of knowledge and served for 20 years as an editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica."