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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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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 rear view 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 Children, 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 suspicion.

Communists!

Joseph  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 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^⁠2.” The word stuck, and the era had its villain and 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 U.S. 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 also 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.”

TV: The New Kid

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 veteran 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 audience of the most American of principles: 

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.

Murrow confronts McCarthy on See It Now  – March 9, 1954

After Murrow’s televised rebuke, McCarthy demanded equal time, and CBS gave it to him. On April 6, 1954, McCarthy 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 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 counsel, Roy Cohn, had sought to secure special treatment for a friend of Cohn’s, G. David Schine, the scion of a wealthy family of hotel and theater chain owners who had recently been drafted into the Army. 

Senate Hearings

The dispute between the Army and McCarthy became so contentious that the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations announced it would hold hearings in April 1954.  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 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 got a taste for the blood sport of live Congressional proceedings in 1951-52,  when millions of viewers 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 live to a 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 the first time Congressional proceedings of such critical interest 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 erupted, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Joseph Welch: “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”

The hearing room fell silent as McCarthy shrank under the bright light of Welch’s dignified fury. Finally, the whole nation could see that the anti-Communist crusader was just a narcissistic bully.

McCarthy never recovered. 

The two networks carried the Army/McCarthy hearings  for 8 weeks from late April until mid-June, 1954.  The daily coverage typically ran 6 to 7 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 with their regular daytime programming offering only highlights in their nightly newscasts. 

Six months after the hearings, on December 2, the Senate censured 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. 

The Rise and Fall of DuMont

Despite the impact of its coverage, The DuMont network did not fare much better.

Allen 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 De 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, New Jersey, and found steady business building CRTs for oscilloscopes, which became indispensable electronic instruments during the 1930s.  That success supplied the expertise and the capital to produce television picture tubes.  As early as 1938 the DuMont company was selling some of the first practical home television receivers in America.

DuMont’s technical footing in CRT production let him to expand vertically: from tubes to complete TV sets, and 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 under-funded 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,  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.^⁠3 

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 short documentary traces the history of the DuMont Network

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¹ That’s the canonical version, though no official transcript survives. The text was reconstructed from reporters’ notes, since McCarthy didn’t release a written copy of his remarks.

² The suffix “-ism” itself goes back centuries, used in English since at least the 1600s to denote systems of thought — Calvinism, Marxism, socialism, communism, fascism, and so on. But those earlier isms referred to coherent ideologies or philosophical systems.

What was novel about “McCarthyism” – coined in 1950, only weeks after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech—was that it described not a philosophy but a behavioral pattern: guilt by association, reckless accusation, and the weaponization of fear for political gain.

³ Another structural factor that contributed to DuMont’s demise was a freeze the FCC imposed on licensing and spectrum allocation – first imposed in 1948 and not lifted until 1952 – which restricted the number of VHF channel assignments available in key markets. NBC and CBS already held the most valuable frequencies, relegating DuMont  to weaker UHF channels, which required special tuners and reached far fewer viewers.

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