Fuzzy Definition, Poor Resolution: Early Television, The Korean War and the Brainwashed American Mind

by Alan Nadel

Department of Language, Literature, and Communication

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

My childhood was not a happy one. While not scarred by the extremes of deprivation or abuse, it was lonely, full of the anxieties, rejections, and insecurities endemic, we now know, to growing up. My parents, well-intentioned, late to have married, seemed to come from an entirely different universe---my father, in fact, was born in Victorian London—a different universe with which I could communicate only through the dense static of mutual frustration, anger, and disappointment. Although the term "dysfunctional" was not part of my vocabulary, I did have the acute sense that my home life was abnormal in that it differed so drastically from the contented American family life that was —as television relentlessly assured me—the norm.

I remember in that context very specifically wondering as I reached puberty what it felt like to be "well-adjusted," to be what I thought of as "normal." There was at that moment a Presidential election taking place, the first Presidential election in which I took serious interest. Since being normal was inextricably wed, in the lexicon of Cold War American culture, to success, I accepted as prima facie that the two most successful people in the nation—the presidential nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties—must epitomize normality. And I remember wondering at age 13 whether I would ever know what it felt like to be as well-adjusted as John Kennedy or Richard Nixon.

I have started with this anecdote to introduce two central points of this talk: one, that Cold War brainwashing was not a myth, and two, that it was fundamentally connected to understanding the world televisually. In regard to that second point, let us remember that the word television has numerous, discrete meanings. A television is an appliance. It is also a set of programs; the thing one watches when one watches television, after all, in not the television set, but the signals that the appliance receives and decodes, signals produced outside and independent of it. Television is also an activity outside of and independent of the programs, such that one can decide to spend the evening watching television without having any specific program in mind. Television is also a medium, a mode of organization and presentation. Finally, and most subtly but also most pervasively, it is a way of knowing the world, a mediation between knowledge and identity, a way of fixing the self in the matrices of time, space, distance, history, and the myriad nodes of personal affiliation.

On this last sense of television I shall focus in order to suggest some of the connections between it and the sundry indeterminacies that the Korean War introduced into global consciousness, particularly the concept of brainwashing as the evil Other of the national conformity promoted by American television. In this light, I want to suggest that the Korean War and television both helped give credibility to brainwashing as a perpetuation of the narrative of demonic otherness that has infused American culture in numerous forms since the colonial period. Although nearly half a century's distance makes it impossible to reconstruct fully the impact of television's arrival, I think we have to suppose it would have been organized and construed differently had it not entered the public imaginary at roughly the same time as the atomic bomb, the babyboom, McCarthyism, suburbia, and the Korean War; had it not entered the lives of a nation fixated on politically mandated normality and obsessed with uprooting non-conformists; had it not become the unifying common experience of a nation constantly on the watch, lest it blink and its unprecedented prosperity be stolen, unobserved, by subversives.

American television as we know it was thus the apparatus sine qua non of people who thought they had better watch out. For reasons extensive and profound, even in its barest incipience it was set to become the definitive apparatus of American reality, conveying in a manner simultaneously unique and traditional a notion of the American e pluribus unum as a variegated but nonetheless relentless set of lessons in nationalism, "living room lectures," as Nina Lieberman has generically named them.

Television, in other words, supported a way of knowing the world consistent with the principles attributed to communist brainwashing, the chief common characteristic being a relentless indoctrination into a set of homogeneous norms. The goal of brainwashing is to create in the subject a different understanding of reality, an outcome made possible only through a set of scientific advances, allegedly based on the work of the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov. In his classic 1956 study of brainwashing in Korea (a sequel to his 1951 book on brainwashing in China), Edward Hunter portrays as Pavlov an old man duped by the Soviets. Hunter found most threatening the implication in Pavlov’s work that humans are animals. He describes a central scene in a Russian film, titled The Nervous System, demonstrating that a dog could be taught to salivate. Hunter viewed the film with novelist Ayn Rand and another friend named Dr. Leon Freedom. (Dr. Freedom, according to Hunter, was a professional "neuropsychiatrist" not, as one might assume from his name, a professional wrestler). For this sage triumvirate—Hunter, Rand, and Dr. F—the scene revealed something "unnatural," as signified by what they regarded as an oxymoron: the phrase "conditioned-reflex."

The version of the film they saw, moreover, contained edits that hid the Soviets’ sinister designs. In the uncut version: "The incriminating scene began with a young man sitting in a chair, attached to it like the dog in a harness.…A rubber suction tube was stuck into the boy’s mouth to measure his saliva." After some conditioning a subsequent scene resembling a B horror flick shows "the lad stretched out on a hospital cot like a patient awaiting an appendectomy, except that he was fully dressed. The rubber tube was still inserted into his mouth, its other end projecting in the thin glass receptacle." In this setting, we witness the boy reduced to an animal when "the light flashed without any biscuits falling from the cone. The boy’s saliva flowed just the same. He was reacting exactly like a dog." The appalled Hunter goes on to explain:

Equally ominous portents, at least in theory, could have been attributed to the 1927 first public demonstration of television. If, as Hunter believes, "The scene with the harnessed boy could have warned the Free World that these experiments really had human beings in view," the great fear is connected to the uncanny, that is to the uncomfortable relationship between the scientific and the natural. Science reveals natural laws: it is the technology of the possible; science subverts nature: it is the technology of the impossible. Permeating Hunter’s book is the terrible ambivalence toward science that informed the atomic age, such that, as I pointed out in my book Containment Culture, there were even government documents pondering how to deal with the atom’s "dual nature."

Like Pavlovian science, television technology evoked an uncanny power of the real, part of which owes to a faith in visual representation. Noting the commercial value of television, a 1947 article explained about it that "by visual demonstration actual proof can be submitted of many things that now must be accepted on mere statement." Television’s power was further enhanced by its potential for immediacy. It was the instrument of truth because it showed reality before it could undergo alteration. As early as 1942, when certainly less than one per cent of the American population had ever seen a television broadcast, one author predicted that "television is destined to bring into the home total means for participation in the sights and sounds of the entire world."

Since television brought reality into the home, implicitly "real life" existed elsewhere, and television thus threw into unstated comparison the "land of plenty" and the meager living rooms into which the nation’s plenitude was electronically channeled. Access to that plenitude, moreover, rendered television invaluable to citizenship, for, as the word "participation" implied, television was being imagined as an instrument of participatory democracy, allowing citizenship, undaunted by distance, unobstructed by topography, untainted by rhetorical manipulation.

If by 1949 television was still very far from fulfilling its panoptic promise, that promise, nevertheless, remained the privileged criterion by which the medium would be measured. Gilbert Seldes, one of the most articulate early critics of the medium, wrote in that year, "The fact that television can transmit actuality is of prime psychological importance. It invites us to 'the conception of things as they are’; it sets us on the way to maturity….The essential thing is to determine that television will satisfy the deep human desire to look, at times, on the face of reality."

Perhaps the most powerful expression of this perception came 1952 from Pat Weaver who would shortly become the head of NBC programming. "It is because," he wrote,

In Weaver’s conception, television functions as the uber-citizen whose universal scope could elevate the ordinary American. Televisual citizenship, superior to more ignorant, limited, pedestrian, citizenship, comprised the ideal, so that television, by setting the standard and providing the means for achieving it, represented the perfection of American ideology.

At least in theory. But constantly television belied its theoretical promise, functioning less as a conduit to all knowledge and experience than as a relentless rhetorical machine geared at representing its impossible promise as a fait a complit. A significant pillar of the argument rested on underscoring "spontaneity." "Preparation for the unexpected," James Caddigan noted in 1945, "seems like a larger order to fill, yet, that is exactly the job that must be handled if the special event or news incident is to be produced with the ‘immediacy’ that television promises. The television audience of the future is being educated at the present time to expect sight of an incident ‘as it happens’."

This symbiotic relationship between the planned and the unpredictable, moreover, implicitly identified television with the surveillance state mentality pervasive at the moment of the medium’s proliferation. "Television’s surveillance potential," Jeanne Allen points out, "was quickly associated with aircraft intelligence gathering." Army intelligence, in fact, was the model Caddigan recommended for television news gathering. News divisions, he believed, should set up for each area a "television intelligence file" that would include notification contacts, topographic data, weather reports, correct credentials because, "at the time of an incident, intelligence from the field will be most important to the production staff ….at the station" The need for this form of military-style intelligence gathering, moreover, was "a never ending job as each new production will provide added information that can be used to advantage on some future show."

The sense of a world under surveillance was hardly an anathema to the post-WWII American populace. Throughout the mounting search for subversion that characterized the late 1940s and much of the 1950s, television proved significant in several ways. Quickly recognized for its capacity to reveal the obscure, it helped support the idea that America might successfully become a place of universal scrutiny, which would require significant homogeneity. Identifying deviance, after all, requires norms against which to measure the deviation, and nothing was more deft or prolific at supplying them than television. "The aim of television," as David Marc so aptly puts it, "is to be normal. The industry is obsessed with the problem of norms."

During WWII, for example, television was used in New York City to train air raid wardens, based on the idea that, as Orin Dunlap stated, "there is always a best lecturer for any subject and through television he can actually instruct all the parties instantly and uniformly." This concept of a "best lecturer" associated television with the idea of American exceptionalism, in that the technology of television allows all Americans to receive the "best." "In this war program," Dunlap explained, "light has been shed on the ability of television to put into practical use the unlimited possibilities envisaged for it after the war." After the war, through television, the "best" would become the standard, and the standard would be available universally.

Far from deploying the best of American art, performance, or reportage, however, in practice television presented the nation’s lowest common denominators. With two networks monopolizing the competition for viewers, the safe, the cliched, and the uncontroversial had enormous advantage over the experimental, the original, and the challenging. This economic mandate when applied to the concept of citizenship obviously effected a very conservative citizen. Television could thus function as the site of "democracy" to the extent that "democracy"--representing what the most people had in common—was defined in opposition to "idiosyncrasy." Broadcasting nationalized the common person in every way that his or her values were common rather than unique, cliched rather than original, status quo rather than progressive.

At the same time, of course, early television also told us that reality could be apprehended only through elaborate distortions, shrunk to 13 inches, muted to black and white tones (themselves usually reduced to shades of gray), filtered through static, snow, and fuzz, subject to horizontal warping and vertical rolling. In every direction, the face of reality experienced invidious subversion. Television thus signified both the power and the fragility of unmediated truth. That power—to present a world greater than the apparatus that contained it or the viewer who owned that apparatus—aligned television with the supernatural. Its way of knowing the world collapsed the distinctions between inside and outside, between subject and object, between part and whole.

Beyond that, early television was perhaps the most censored mass entertainment in modern history, even more than the film industry that had been, from the early 1930s on, rigorously censored at every level of production, and with the outbreak of WWII even further scrutinized by the Office of War Information. After WWII, the House Committee on Un-American Activities applied yet another microscope to the film industry, attempting to determine whether some films might contain subversive messages, that is, messages so subtle and deeply closeted as to slip past the censors but at the same time blatant enough and powerful enough to subvert the more innocent general population. At work here is a fear of…what else can we call it?…fear of the Devil, that is, of a guile so potent as to evade all ordinary precautions and, as well, every extant form of hypervigilance. The surveillance state, after all, is a testimony to the inadequacy of surveillance. Like much Puritan dogma, the surveillance state constantly reminds us that we have to be ever watchful, more watchful, ever more watchful.

And if we had to be ever more watchful about films, then naturally we had to be even more ever watchful about the medium that everyone was watching. A rabbi, a priest, and a minister were present on the set for the filming of each of the I Love Lucy episodes dealing with Lucy’s pregnancy. The clergy could thus vouchsafe against some indecency that went undetected by the actors, writers, producers, directors, that is, by the normal mechanisms of television production. These clergy, serving as invited agents of the ultimate surveillance state, would make impossible even the inadvertent subversion of American mores.

At the very moment that those episodes were being filmed—Lucy, both the character and the actress, gave birth the day before President Eisenhower’s inauguration—the Devil so carefully banished from Desilu Studios was finding a fertile home in North Korean POW camps, on the edge of the Manchurian border, where, with the aid of communist interrogators and twentieth-century technology, he was washing the brains of American G.I.s.

I want to make clear, at this point, that the experience of American POWs was extremely brutal, cruel, tortured. But brainwashing is not torture; in fact it is exactly the opposite of coercion, for coercion requires threat and force to evoke actions that the victim willfully opposes. Torture is a treatment necessitated by the inability to change the will, wash the brain. Thus throughout Hunter’s discussion of Korean War brainwashing, we see the pavlovian methods constantly failing, always requiring increased threat, deprivation, physical and mental torture.

Hunter starts by explaining the concept of brainwashing using the unmistakable language of alien invasion and conspiracy. (Some time in the last decade I recall hearing that the Connecticut State legislature had mandated that the term "alien" be replaced in state documents with the phrase: "persons of undocumented national origin," to avoid, according to National Public Radio, confusing these aliens with "extra-terrestrials"; in the spirit of that legislated distinction, let me make clear that my use of "alien" in this paper intends the full gamut of otherworldly connotations):

Like the mysterious stranger found in American literature, moreover, "brainwashing" drew on the unnamed powers of darkness. The word, Hunter explained, "described a strategy that had yet no name." Worked on the Chinese people, it resembled "in many peculiar ways…a medical treatment," but Hunter assures that "what they had undergone was more like witchcraft, with its incantations, trances, poisons, and potions, with a strange flair of science about it all, like a devil dancer in a tuxedo carrying his magic brew in a test tube" (an image no doubt meant to hint at Communist infiltration of Mardi Gras).

Since America’s technological supremacy depended on the effectiveness of science, true science could not easily be rebuffed. Thus if brainwashing were absolutely scientific, it could not be resisted by a triumph of the will. But that, according to Hunter, is exactly what was called for. Although brainwashing, according to the experts, was a demonic mixture of science and pseudo-science, of Pavlovian conditioning and overt torture, of direct indoctrination and indirect subversion, this well-honed and virulent technique was nevertheless completely ineffective when used against Americans with adequate strength of character. The fight against brainwashing, in other words, was internal, not a struggle with the forces of evil but with the temptation to succumb to one’s own weakness.

Like televisual reality, it represented a breakdown of the boundary between inside and outside. Hunter’s accounts of Korean brainwashing "and the men who resisted it" reads like a science fiction novel in which an overwhelming external power—that of the all-powerful captor—eventually fails in the face of the will, spirit, character of his captive.

I believe, as I have noted, that this narrative of the struggle between true character and superhuman power was at work in HUAC’s relentless search to discover what American activities were un-American. The narrative also informed one of the most influential books of the postwar period, The Lonely Crowd. This 1951 study written by Yale sociologist David Reisman resembles a somewhat plodding piece of science fiction. Although the work achieved textbook status and is still frequently cited by social historians and cultural critics, its subtitle, "A Study of the Changing American Character," reveals its quasi-fictional foundation.

As Reisman makes clear at the outset, he does not "plan to argue over the many ambiguities of the concept of social character" even over "whether there is any empirical proof that it really exists." In the place of empirical proof he provides what Henry James would call the donee—a fiction’s given premise: "The assumption that a social character exists has always been a more or less invisible premise of ordinary parlance and is becoming today a more or less visible premise of the social sciences." If the source of this invisible character is the equally invisible premise of ordinary parlance, then any alterations to that "character" of course might escape general notice, even in the age of postwar hypervigilance. The Lonely Crowd attempts, therefore, to alert the public to an as-yet-unnoticed mutation. The book, as Reisman makes clear, is "about the way in which one kind of social character, which dominated America in the nineteenth century, is gradually being replaced by a social character of quite a different sort."

That "character" is changing from being what Reisman calls "inner-directed" to what he calls "other-directed," that is, motivated by peer pressure rather than internal values. The inner-directed person, Reisman expalins, in terms worthy, perhaps, of either Ray Bradbury or Popular Mechanics:

For the inner-directed person a scientific device, the "psychic gyroscope" [which now can be ordered, I believe, through the Psychic Hot Line (or over the web at "psycho-gyro.com)] keeps him on course, gives him balance, and this pinnacle of 19^th-century American individualism is built fully equipped with a self-correcting mechanism: guilt. "Contrasted with such a type as this," Reisman explains, "the other-directed person learns to respond to signals from a far wider circle than is constituted by his parents. The family is no longer a closely knit unit to which he belongs but merely part of a wider social environment to which he early becomes attentive." Without a psychic gyroscope, in other words, this new mutation of the American character is receptive to alien signals. Guidance from mother has been replaced with messages from the mother ship. As a result, the other-directed person becomes odd, almost, Reisman’s language implies, eerie: "For him, the border between the familiar and the strange…has broken down." The amorphous, sponge-like receptivity of this mutant, furthermore, effects an inverted reality: "As the family continuously absorbs the strange and so reshapes itself, the strange becomes familiar."

To put it another way, "there’s somethin’ strange in the neighborhood… somethin’ weird and it can’t be good." Americans, like the citizens of Santa Mira California, in the 1956 film classic, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, have undergone a strange, barely noticeable change: their emotions and their individuality have disappeared.

Although the film’s title connects these traits to the body, bodies, in fact, are exactly the parts that that the aliens bring with them, in huge pods. Like the brainwashers of whom Hunter warns us, they snatch minds and, like those brainwashers, they can only succeed if their victim weakens, in the film represented by going to sleep.

Going to sleep in this sense, is like what happens, for Reisman, when one loses his gyroscope. In The Lonely Crowd, the new American character retains its balance not by relying on its own normalizing mechanisms but on norms that it acquires externally. The relatively stable pursuits of the inner-directed person Reisman explains, "are today being replaced by the fluctuating tastes which the other-directed person accepts from his peer group," and this shift produces an "objectless craving."

Reisman is describing what I have briefly outlined as televisual citizenship, a citizenship that relies on a powerful external technology to put the citizen in touch with the face of reality. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of The Lonely Crowd is that it allows no logical position from which the power of this external force can be overcome, because no matter how much Reisman fears the imposition of external norms, he nevertheless must rely on them to posit a concept such as a "social character" upon which his story entirely depends. To put it another way, because other-directedness is the position necessary for constructing the concept of inner-direction, the inside and outside of Reisman’s chronology collapse, revealing the inner-directed character to be the product of an other-directied narrative. Reisman is speaking from a world of inverse causality.

He is behaving, in other words, like one of Hunter’s brainwashers who constantly invert cause-and-effect in order to distort our understanding of reality. Just as television does. Clearly we can see now that like Reisman’s narrative of the mutating American character, television’s obsessively normative reality was a projection onto the American landscape, not a reflection of it. What passed as television’s outside world was just someone else’s internal vision. Both television and brainwashing depended upon faith in the idea of a technically enhanced reality. In juxtaposition, these two technologies of the real remind us of the dangers inherent in looking on the face of reality, since reality, like science, is two-faced and not everyone has the strength of character to sort the rightful from the sinister.

This collapse of the inside and the outside was also being enacted on the Korean geographical and political terrain, where civil war and the international conflict were indistinguishable from each other; where terms such as "start" and "finish" were dislodged from their standard usage; where, as with the television of the period, "definition" and "resolution" were not objective terms, but relative qualities of distortion amid an ever-shifting mix of signals. In the end—a period of fighting that lasted longer than the war that led up to "the end"—the reason we fought the war, according to some official statements, was to determine the disposition of the POWs created by it.

Korea is the place where the dependent and the independent, the inside and the outside merge. It is the real war of the cold war and the cold reality of containment’s permeability. Inside Korea, all of the world’s struggles, all of its superpowers were contained, but only barely. At each stage, they threatened simultaneously to pour in and to pour over. Korea was an impoverished country that was inundated by excess: states and troops exceeding borders, exceeding truces; MacArthur exceeding his authority, not to mention his supply lines; treatment of POWs on both sides exceeding international conventions and exceeding even the temporal margins of repatriation, as some of the American POWs refused to return to America and others became prisoners again when they did. Countless others returned to their homes, their minds, many suspected, still the prisoners of the dark science. The alien had snatched their brains, it was feared, and they were still directed by some Other, an undefined combination of the demonic, the communistic, and the Asian. Secretly manifesting this other direction, this new orientation, they might undermine the normative nuclear family and with it American resolve, that resided in the vestiges of Reisman’s national "social character."

In an other-directed society, after all, one always has to be careful about one’s peers, since they provide the society’s values. To put it another way, conformity was vital to the national interests; deviance was suspect. At the same time, as the Chinese had shown, conformity was deviant, a relinquishing of the normal self to scientific manipulation. To this end, we had to rely on science—the miracle of television—to put us in touch with appropriate norms, but science, as the Korean experience demonstrated, was not reliable; it could establish inappropriate norms; it could make deviance seem normal. Only strength of character could resist the subversion of insidious, inscrutable science, but such strength, Reisman fearfully warns us, is disappearing.

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Alan Nadel is the author of numerous books and articles on post-WWII American literature, film, and culture. His most recent books are Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Duke University Press) and Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan’s America (Rutgers University Press).

The Harry S. Truman Library and The Eisenhower Library are two of ten Presidential Libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.