CHAPTER 7
THE INVENTION OF PRIME TIME
In 1928, Walter Templin, the new general manager of Pepsodent toothpaste, was looking for an idea, anything that might save the company, which was on the verge of collapse.
Just a few years earlier, thanks to Claude Hopkins’s inspired “tooth film” campaign, Pepsodent had reigned as king of the dentrifices. But by the late 1920s, the product had suffered from bad, if accurate, publicity. Unlike our toothpastes, Pepsodent didn’t contain fluoride or appropriate cleaning agents. Its vaunted “clean” feeling was produced by an abrasive ingredient that was, according to one Columbia University chemist who tested it, “hard and sharp enough to cut glass.”1 Furthermore, he found that “Mucin placque [technical term for the ‘film’] cannot be digested from teeth by any advertised use of ‘Pepsodent.’ ”2
Another problem was that Pepsodent’s initial success had lured in competitors, so that there were more than one hundred brands of toothpaste on the market by the late 1920s. Some were admittedly even worse: Tartaroff, for example, which claimed to turn teeth “into gems of pearl-like beauty,” in fact whitened them by burning off enamel with hydrochloric acid.3 But Pepsodent was also losing market share to better alternatives, like the upstart Colgate, “the ribbon dental cream,” which promised a “safe” dentifrice with a “delicious flavor.” (A “man is known by the teeth he keeps.”)4 By 1928, Hopkins’s brainchild was on the verge of going out of business.
But Templin, a Canadian who had relocated to Chicago, had an idea. Like many in the 1920s, he was entranced by the invisible miracle of radio broadcast. In fact, before Pepsodent, he’d run a radio set manufacturer. Might there be some way of promoting Pepsodent on the airwaves? But how?
In the 1920s, the idea of advertising on radio was controversial if not contemptible. Even Printer’s Ink had opined that “the family circle is not a public place, and advertising has no business intruding there unless invited.”5 Radio, moreover, was in a utopian phase, and its destiny seemed to be the uplift of the human condition, not selling toothpaste.*1 As the future president Herbert Hoover had put it in 1922, “It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.”6 Some even doubted that radio could be an effective advertising platform, based on failures of ad-supported cinemas in the 1910s. As Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, owner of New York’s largest movie theater, said, “If you try to sell some brand of shoes or anything else over the radio you’ll have no radio audience.”7
At the time, companies with designs on radio’s audiences stalked them indirectly, by sponsoring content. Gillette, for example, underwrote a lecture series on the “history of the beard.” Most, however, sponsored a musical act like La Palina Hour, named after La Palina cigars, or the Clicquot Club Eskimos, a banjo ensemble presented by a popular ginger ale (the “Eskimos” played their banjos in full parkas before their studio audiences).
So perhaps a Pepsodent orchestra? But another toothpaste had gotten there first—the Ipana Troubadours played swing but dressed like Spanish bullfighters. Among the nondental ensembles, listeners could also enjoy the Goodrich Zippers, the Silvertown Cord Orchestra (featuring the Silver Masked Tenor); the Sylvania Foresters; the Champion Sparkers; the Fox Fur Trappers; the Ingram Shavers; the Yeast Foamers’ Orchestra; the Planters Pickers; and, of course, the Freed-Eisemann Orchestradians. The field, suffice to say, was fairly crowded.
One evening in 1928, at a friend’s home in Chicago, at 7 p.m. to be exact, Templin heard something quite different on the radio, something along the lines of:
“Dell me ’dis one ding—is you a democrat, or is you a ree-publican?”
“Well, I was a democrat…”
“mm hmmm”
“Bu’ I believ’ I done switched ovah to da republicans now.”
“Who is da man who’s runnin’ in dese heah elect’n times, explain dat to me.”
“Herbert Hoover. Versuvius Al Smith.”
“Wha’ is da difference?”
“Da one of dem is a mule. And da otha’ is an elephant.”
Two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, speaking in “Negro” voices, were telling a story that never ended—a “serial”—in fifteen-minute installments. It was carried by a local station, one of the countless independents that existed in the early days of the medium.*2 Little did Templin or anyone else realize that his discovery of Amos ’n’ Andy—the ancestor of the sitcoms and other broadcast entertainment that captivated so many for so long—was to revolutionize the business of capturing and selling attention.
The characters, Amos and Andy, were two Southern blacks who’d moved from Georgia to Chicago, only to be perpetually confused and confounded by modern urban life. Andy, voiced by Correll, was the older, brash and overconfident, “absolutely convinced that he had the answers to everything.”8 Amos, meanwhile, was earnest and simple—as later promotional materials read: “It’s ‘Ain’t dat sumpin’?’ when he’s happy or surprised.”9 Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Gosden, who played Amos, was the son of a Confederate soldier. The show, he said, was based on his experiences of being raised by a black nanny alongside a black boy named Snowball.
When Amos ’n’ Andy had come on, Templin noticed something peculiar at this friend’s house: the entire family stopped what it was doing to gather around the radio and listen intently for the show’s entire duration. Radio, he rightly concluded, could not only capture attention, it could do so inside the customer’s home. It could cause a whole family to ignore one another and listen in rapt silence.
We have spoken of the mind’s impressive ability to shut the door to the outside world; but while Amos ’n’ Andy was on, people were apparently glad to fling it wide open. The rapt attention was different from what the musical acts had. Templin recognized that this was an astonishing power, if it could only be harnessed.
His idea was to take the Amos ’n’ Andy show to the NBC radio network, with Pepsodent as sponsor. Kenneth Smith, now head of Pepsodent, and the other executives seemed to like the idea, perhaps because it seemed connected to the old tradition of advertising toothpaste in print using stylized black men with shiny white teeth. (In fact, it was around this time that an English company launched the Darkie brand, with a smiling black man as its logo.)10
But outside Pepsodent, the idea met immediate resistance. As Broadcasting magazine later recounted, “Other advertisers laughed at [Pepsodent’s] foolhardy ignorance of radio.” The conventional wisdom, wrote the magazine, was that “people won’t listen to talk on the radio. They’d rather talk themselves.”11 When Templin went to NBC, its managers offered him a choice: the Vincent Lopez orchestra, or Jesse Crawford, the organist. When Templin insisted on Amos ’n’ Andy, and in “six quarters” (fifteen minutes, six days a week), the network was unresponsive.
A subsequent attempt to sell Amos ’n’ Andy to the new CBS network was no more successful. Informed that the show was a “daily blackface act,” then President H. C. Cox said, “Do you mean to tell me that you believe an act can go on a network at the same time every day in the week, five days in succession?” The answer was yes. “I think you should go back to Chicago,” said Cox. “It’s very plain to see that you know nothing about radio.”12
Even within Pepsodent some had their doubts, arguing that Amos ’n’ Andy’s dialogue format was too simple. They proposed a longer, more elaborate blackface program, with a chorus and an orchestra—a sort of minstrel competitor to the Eskimos or Troubadours. Ultimately, however, after nine months of wrangling, NBC agreed to take the order, for an enormous sum, over $1 million, and introduce its first sponsored serial program—indeed probably the first network “show” that wasn’t musical or educational. It agreed to sell thirteen weeks at 7 p.m. on its farm team Blue network, which, given Pepsodent’s dire financial straits, was effectively a bet on Pepsodent itself. “Never in the history of radio,” said one commentator, “had there been such an order as that.”13
Amos ’n’ Andy would be the same show it was before, with two changes. First, the characters would move from Chicago to Harlem. And second, as a concession to the tradition of musical acts, NBC introduced a theme song. Adding what seems now a further coat of racism, the music director chose “The Perfect Song,” the theme from The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 hit film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.
And of course the sponsor’s message had to be right. Pepsodent and Lord & Thomas hired, on an exclusive basis, an announcer with an exceptionally mellow voice named Bill Hay, who pronounced at the end of every Amos ’n’ Andy segment this message:
“Use Pepsodent Toothpaste Twice a Day—See Your Dentist at Least Twice a Year.”14
In August of 1928 as the series launched on NBC, Amos ’n’ Andy were making their move to Harlem:
AMOS: Heah we is goin’ to New York—we don’t know whut we goin’ do.
ANDY: Dat IS right too. Yo’ know, I been thinkin’ ’bout dis heah thing. We was crazy to come heah.
Templin had gotten his way, but after the first run, Amos ’n’ Andy looked to Pepsodent like a mistake. Despite high hopes, listenership was low and there was little noticeable effect on sales. Realizing he had nothing to lose, however, Templin doubled his bet, spending one of Pepsodent’s last millions on the program.
For whatever reason, the second time was the charm. By the end of 1929, Amos ’n’ Andy had become a craze, and the first bona fide hit serial in broadcast history—and the first show people refused to miss, arranging their time around it. No less a cultural arbiter than The New Yorker was now remarking both the show’s quality and the phenomenon: “Amos ’n’ Andy have gone beyond all control. The radio has never had a more amusing feature, nor one that has created so much havoc.”15
The audiences, astounding at the time, are still impressive by today’s standards. While measurements were crude in those days, by 1931, Amos ’n’ Andy is believed to have attracted some 40 million listeners each and every evening—with some episodes reaching 50 million—this out of a population that was then 122 million. It was a result unprecedented for any entertainment product, the equivalent of having today’s Super Bowl audiences each and every evening—and with just one advertiser.
Having seized their audience, the sponsor’s messages soon grew longer, and soon were indistinguishable from the old hard-sell advertising copy, albeit written to be heard, not read:
As we have told you repeatedly, Pepsodent Tooth Paste today contains a new and different cleansing and polishing material. We want to emphasize the fact that this cleansing and polishing material used in Pepsodent Tooth Paste is contained in no other tooth paste. That is very important. It is important to us, because Pepsodent laboratories spent eleven years in developing this remarkable material. It is important to the public, because no other cleansing and polishing material removes film from teeth as effectively as does this new discovery. What’s more, this new material is twice as soft as that commonly used in tooth pastes. Therefore it gives great safety, greater protection to lovely teeth. Use Pepsodent Tooth Paste twice a day—See your dentist at least twice a year.16
In our fragmented age, it is only a few times a year when even a quarter of the entire nation listens to or watches anything at once. But during the height of the Amos ’n’ Andy craze, that happened every day, and consequently the 7 p.m. time slot, according to contemporary reports, began to influence the schedule of everything. Hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters would broadcast the show for their patrons. Fearing displacement, movie theaters advertised the installation of radios to broadcast Amos ’n’ Andy at 7 p.m., before the newsreels and features.
We have yet to ask an obvious question: Just what, exactly, was so enrapturing about Amos ’n’ Andy? It was not necessarily the patter and gags. Despite The New Yorker’s enthusiasm, another early critic panned the show’s national debut in the New York Sun: “Their lines are not good and there is no pretense of whatever to carry out the illusion of comedy. It is a straight dialogue between two common-place ‘darkies’ and is without even the saving asset of a well thought-out situation…on first acquaintance they hardly attract a second glance.”17 Indeed, there were other regional radio minstrel shows in the 1920s, not much funnier, and none reached an audience anything close to that of Amos ’n’ Andy. It seems that what gripped so much attention, what kept millions coming back, were the show’s elaborate and suspenseful plot lines. The New Yorker again: “For Amos ’n’ Andy…have finally mastered the trick of creating suspense. With half a dozen plots running through their sketches, they hold the dramatic tension in a way to arouse the admiration of Professor Baker.” In particular, much of the show turned on the romance between the earnest Amos and Ruby Taylor, whom he’d met in Chicago. Later, the focus was on the engagement of know-it-all Andy and the bossy divorcée Madam Queen. Nowadays we might say that Amos ’n’ Andy resembled a soap opera—but as we shall see, it was really soap operas that copied Amos ’n’ Andy.
Subsequent commentators would remark the obvious appeal of reinforcing stereotypes that justified the second-class social status of blacks. (The NAACP did register complaints, but these had no effect on NBC at the time.) As one historian, Erik Barnouw, wrote in 1966, “In retrospect it is easy…to see the stories and Amos ’n’ Andy as part of the ghetto system. All of it was more readily accepted and maintained if one could hold onto this: ‘they’ were lovely people, essentially happy people, ignorant and somewhat shiftless and lazy in a lovable, quaint way, not fitting in with higher levels of enterprise, better off where they were.”18
But there was also great empathy stirred in some hearts, rather like that provoked by Uncle Tom’s Cabin in antebellum America. As one listener wrote in fan mail, “We have been inspired by the high aims and rigid honesty of Amos, and we have all been close to tears at times when real trials and tribulations beset either of our beloved friends.”
The wild success of Amos ’n’ Andy, and similar shows to follow it, marked something profound, though in a sense quite unexpected. And it represents a turning point in our story, for three different reasons.
First, while NBC might have originally considered itself a way to demonstrate the excellence of RCA’s radios, after Amos ’n’ Andy it was now clearly and irresistibly in the business of selling the attention of enormous audiences to those who could pay for and use it. The broadcaster thus definitively became an attention merchant, in the model pioneered by Benjamin Day at the New York Sun. Some ironies would be papered over: never mind that a sponsor had had to beg to buy the airtime (at a premium) in order to show NBC just how much attention radio could theoretically capture and sell the next time; the attention was now and ever after the broadcaster’s product to develop and to resell to the highest bidder. Needless to say, there would never be a backward glance to the days when the network existed to sell the hardware!19
Second: the power of Amos ’n’ Andy—an entertainment offering—to bring in giant audiences willing to hear advertising effected an unlikely merger between the business of entertainment producers and that of advertisers. Before this point, received wisdom had it that advertising and entertainment did not mix. Books had never enjoyed much success selling ads in their pages; and the experiments with inserting advertising into films had also failed, most dramatically in the 1910s, when a series of silent movie theaters based on advertising, as opposed to box office sales, went bankrupt. But Amos ’n’ Andy and its successors managed to thread the needle, creating a business model by which any medium could, to use a later vernacular, “sell eyeballs.”
The proof was in the pudding, in the sense that the show did save Pepsodent toothpaste, at least for a while. Sales increased more than twofold between 1929 and 1930. Emboldened, Templin doubled down on his bet, sponsoring in 1931 The Rise of the Goldbergs, another fifteen-minute serial, this one about a Jewish family living in the Bronx.*3 And so the epic battle for the attention of America’s white Protestant majority would be waged and won thanks to the chance discovery of its fascination with the perceived hilariousness of blacks and Jews.
Third, and perhaps most momentous: here also began a race for the conquest of time and space that continues to this day. Amos ’n’ Andy demonstrated that an industry could, in effect, wholly “own” a part of the day—in this case, seven p.m., every day, across the land. And it could do so in spaces once inviolable, inconceivable. For with this show, selling had definitively breached the barrier between public and private space. What the agents of commerce could long do “out there” they could now also do “in here,” and no one was grumbling, at least not yet.
Having planted the flag in the evening hours, broadcasters would proceed to colonize other parts of the day laden with attention as yet un-reaped. Soon they would find success with daytime soap operas, targeting women at home with little to do, thanks to all the modern conveniences they had been sold. Using the basic serial template of Amos ’n’ Andy, soap opera plots centered on family relationships among the white middle class, the target consumer. Early soap operas were thus even more natural selling tools than minstrel shows were. As one contemporary boasted, “The transition from commercial announcements to the story can be practically painless, and a great deal of actual selling can be done in the story itself.”20
The methods used in daytime radio were more overt than those of prime time. The most respected and trusted characters would testify during the show about the merits of, say, Pillsbury’s new cake mixes. In one episode of the soap opera Today’s Children, for example, the trusted housewife character, “traditional but open to modern ideas,” visits Pillsbury’s kitchen. She exclaims, “The thing that impressed me so much was the orderliness of the kitchen—jest like my kitchen.” Of Pillsbury she said, “They’re always makin’ and testin’ new recipes…they served this cake at luncheon—never have put anythin’ in my mouth so delicious…I got the recipe.”
As Irna Phillips, inventor of the first radio soap operas, explained: “sincerity, honesty, genuineness—true values. If the woman listener is made conscious of these standards in the story itself, how little effort it would take to make her conscious of these same standards with the product advertising.” In Fortune magazine, Phillips revealed her own recipe for engaging female listeners. “You appeal to,” she said, “(1) the instinct for self-preservation, (2) sex, (3) the family instinct, or (4) all three together if you can manage.”
The invention of “Prime time”—the attentional habit of turning on the radio (later, the television) at the designated hour each and every evening of the year—was a momentous cultural as well as commercial innovation at a point when the two categories were drifting steadily closer. For it transformed not only the industries equipped to capture attention, but also the lives of those whose attention was now there for the taking. We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to—how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambience. When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
With the establishment of prime time, daytime, and other new zones of attention, we see in effect another feature of the modern self emerge. Insofar as we are influenced, even formed, to some degree, by whatever we pay attention to, the novel fact of an entire population listening to the same show at the same time every day could not help but create a new degree of shared awareness, even shared identity. Prime time was (and to a lesser degree remains) a massive ritual of collective attention, a force drawing people together.
During World War I, George Creel had envisioned welding the American people into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.”21 God and country had always had special tools for achieving this, the ultimate ones being threats of eternal damnation and external force, respectively. But the attention merchants had no access to such threats, or need for them; they would compel us with carrots, not sticks. They would rely on the power of entertainment to weld audiences into a saleable product. The approach, ultimately, would prove no less effective.