Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Film and Culture) [Hardcover]

Thomas Doherty (Author)

Book Description

Series: Film and Culture | Publication Date: October 15, 2003

Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming.

To the unjaded viewership of Cold War America, the television set was not a harbinger of intellectual degradation and moral decay, but a thrilling new household appliance capable of bringing the wonders of the world directly into the home. The "cool medium" permeated the lives of every American, quickly becoming one of the most powerful cultural forces of the twentieth century. While television has frequently been blamed for spurring the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was also the national stage upon which America witnessed -- and ultimately welcomed -- his downfall. In this provocative and nuanced cultural history, Doherty chronicles some of the most fascinating and ideologically charged episodes in television history: the warm-hearted Jewish sitcom The Goldbergs; the subversive threat from I Love Lucy; the sermons of Fulton J. Sheen on Life Is Worth Living; the anticommunist series I Led 3 Lives; the legendary jousts between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy on See It Now; and the hypnotic, 188-hour political spectacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings.

By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, Cold War, Cool Medium paints a picture of Cold War America that belies many black-and-white clichés. Doherty not only details how the blacklist operated within the television industry but also how the shows themselves struggled to defy it, arguing that television was preprogrammed to reinforce the very freedoms that McCarthyism attempted to curtail.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Invigorating and wide-ranging scholarship... The heart of Cold War, Cool Medium is a lively and compelling retelling of the effect of McCarthyism on television.

(Cineaste ?)

[A] seriously intelligent history.

(Library Journal v. 36 (2004), 3)

Cold War, Cool Medium, by Thomas Doherty, ranks as one of the seminal books ever written about the history of television and politics in the USA.....Doherty brilliantly challenges this conventional wisdom and indeed turns it upside down. He skillfully, systematically, and clearly demonstrates that early television helped the USA become a more tolerant nation, and provided for more open discussion.

(Douglas Gomery Television Quarterly 6/1/205)

Doherty's Cold War, Cool Medium earns its place as a subtle new map of America's politics during television's toddler years. It offers fine-grained images for television's political pontification and purifications from the late 1940s to mid-1950s.... For the study of this awkward period in America's television culture, it is hard to imagine a better text for discussions with students. Colleagues who lived in that era will read it with pained appreciation.

(John Shelton Lawrence Journal of American Culture 10/1/04)

fresh and important insights...an accurate and engrossing account for the nonspecialist, and its methodology provides a revealing context for the specialist as well

(Brenda Murphy The Journal of American History Summer 2005)

thoughtful and nuanced

(Michael C. C. Adams Film & History 10/1/05)

Thomas Doherty's groundbreaking new volume, Cold War, Cool Medium, [is] a sweeping examination of the collision of television and McCarthyism, and one of the most searching looks at the intersection of popular and political culture in years.

(Boston Globe )

Doherty's excellent Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture [is] more timely than its title suggests.... [Doherty] has penned an engaging revisionist account of mass hysteria, forcefully arguing against critics who cast television in its early days as a co-conspirator in conducting witch hunts and stifling dissent.... Doherty's history of the early political uses of television is never less than fascinating.

(Reason Magazine )

A witty, often riveting account of the simultaneous rise of television and McCarthy.

(Film Comment )

Explores TV's wonders and skillfully exposes the power of pressure groups on the new medium, which acted out the psychosis that dominated the 1950s. Relying on thorough and enlightening research, Doherty notes the ironies, anti-Semitism and class prejudices that underlined Senator Joseph McCarthy's ascension.... Doherty chronicles the medium and its players with style and scholarship.

(Publishers Weekly )

A wide-ranging, impressionistic portrait of the era... Mr. Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University and a noted film historian, deftly recaps this familiar story.

(New York Observer )

Doherty succeeds in illuminating both the history of television in the US in the 1950s and television's relationship to the era's anticommunist crusade.... this volume carefully examines the often-overlooked political side of 1950s television. Essential.

(Choice )

Cold War, Cool Medium is an excellent overview of television and American culture at a pivotal moment in United States history. It is also wittily written, with Doherty's sense of humour and irony coming through on nearly every page.

(Jennifer Frost, University of Auckland Australasian Journal of American Studies )

It is not only readable, enlightening and amusing, it does what all good books on the televisual Cold War should do: it can distinguish between hype and substance.

(Adam Piette Journal of American Studies )

Doherty delivers an enlightening and critical reassessment of television, culture, and politics in the early 1950's.

(Michael Curtin American Historical Review )

Cold War, Cool Medium is an engaging and complex account of US commercial television during the 1950's.

(Megan Mullen Technology and Culture )

[A] superbly written analysis of the link between the rise of American television and the fall of Senator McCarthy.

(Vincent Brook American Studies )

Cold War, Cool Medium is engagingly written, offering prose that is brimming with wit and insight.

(Christine Becker Film Quarterly )

Review

A learned and astute historian (and also something of a poet), Thomas Doherty has written an extraordinary book about the close relationship between the Cold War and the rise of television...Doherty has demonstrated that the medium -- a various and even feisty forum in its early days -- would often challenge the prevailing creed of paranoid anti-communism....An exhilarating work of scholarship, revealing that there was another, livelier, and more complex dimension to the period of 'brinksmanship' and blacklists.

(Mark Crispin Miller, New York University, and author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (October 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231129521
• ISBN-13: 978-0231129527
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #393,193 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superior Socio-Cultural History, May 21, 2006

By 

H. Campbell (houston, texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Film and Culture) (Hardcover)

The author should take a bow. He has written a wonderfully balanced, anecdotal-rich account of the simultaneous evolution of the Cold War, TV and political culture in the Age of McCarthy (which is, in all too many ways, an age we are still in.) That the junior senator from the cheeshead state was a craven opportunist is as well known now as it was even then, but what he exploited via the new electronic medium was the pervasive fear that subversion lurked behind every vacuum tube as well as behind every State Department desk.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific, May 17, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Film and Culture) (Hardcover)

Cold War, Cool Medium is a terrific and compulsively readable study of McCarthyism in the context of the early history of television. Doherty astutely establishes the way televison worked in its formative days. Then he shows how its weaknesses aided in the rise of McCarthy and how both its strengths and weaknesses aided in his fall. Superb and easiy to read history.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THIS BOOK IS NEEDED, June 14, 2008

By 

Mark Watterson "Author of Don't Weep for Me, ... - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Film and Culture) (Hardcover)

I purchased this book as part of my research to a follow-up book, Don't Weep for Me, America: How Democracy in America Became the Prince (While We Slept). I wanted to see if the Cold War was the same big fraud as today's War on Terror. Thanks to author, Thomas Doherty, I learned that not only was McCarthy THE chief propagandist for the "red scare", but that television was almost invented for the purspose of providing its platform. The blacklist that author Doherty details in his excellent chapter, "The Gestalt of the Blacklist" is an incredible story that a reasonable person would have trouble understanding could happen in a true constitutional republic. But it did happen. And today, the level of crime committed by the state, through planned and systematic propaganda has reached its...zenith...