TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

Today’s story delves into the evolution of American society from its agrarian roots to a more urbanized and industrialized nation, culminating in a significant shift in television programming known as the “Rural Purge.”

It begins by tracing the initial push for westward expansion, fueled by government incentives and technological advancements like the transcontinental railroad, which led to rapid settlement and the “closing of the American frontier” by 1890.

The narrative then explores the impact of the Industrial Revolution, illustrating how factory towns emerged and agricultural innovations led to a migration from farms to cities, shaping distinct immigrant enclaves.

Finally, the story highlights the rise of television and its reflection of societal changes, showcasing how early programming catered to a rural audience before a conscious decision was made in 1971 to cancel popular “country folk” shows in favor of more urban, diverse, and contemporary themes, marking a symbolic end to the televised ideal of rural America.

The Settling of the West

In 1804, Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark West to explore his Louisiana Purchase in hopes of expanding his great agrarian nation. Lewis and Clark then put together a report that was published in 1814. That report made it very exciting to settle the rural West. A 157 years later an electronic version of Lewis and Clark provided another report but this one canceled rural America. Build them up then shoot them down.

Between 1607 and 1870, 409,000,000 acres of the American West were settled. That occurred over 236 years. That all changed around 1870 when 430,000,000 additional acres were settled in just 30 years.

This rapid expansion was largely due to advances in transportation and communication along with some incentives from the government. While the 1848 gold rush pulled many from the East Coast and many more from foreign lands, it wasn’t until 1869 when the first transcontinental railroad was complete that westward expansion took off.

The age of the railroad did many things. For starters, it displaced the role of the steamboat. Not only was the railroad more reliable but it could go all year.That allowed shippers to ship more often thus smaller quantities. Railroads also gave rise to non port cities like Scranton and Indianapolis.

Expansion to the rural West also had the help from the US government. In 1860, President Lincoln created legislation that gave 1,000,000 of acres of land to the states for railroad expansion. The Morrill acts of 1860 and 1862 gave land and money for the creation of agricultural colleges.

In 1862, the Homestead Act encouraged people to settle the rural West.

A pioneer could grab a 160 acres, and after living on it for 5 years, it became theirs. In 1873, the Timber Culture Act gave settlers a 160 acres if they planted trees. And in 1877, the Desert Land Act gave settlers 640 acres of arid unplantable land if all they did was irrigate it.

And one thing that helped settlers stay was an 1874 invention by Joseph Glidden.

He invented barbed wire, which made it easier to stake a claim, keep cattle in, and the bad guys out. Before 1870, Philadelphia and New York City were the only 2 cities that had more than 500,000 people. At the time, only 1 sixth of the US population lived in cities and there were only 4 incorporated cities in rural America, but the industrial revolution would begin to reshape the American form from a 100% rural expansion to a mix of city and country.

While the industrial revolution really began way back in 1700 England, it wasn’t until 1880 that its true effect in the US could be measured. The rise of steel, electricity, and other inventions created 2 anomalies.

Factory towns popped up everywhere with eager East Coast investors paving the way and agricultural technologies made farming easier requiring less help.

For farmers that meant children who weren’t needed were sent to town to work at a factory, which needed people. The jobs created by these modern technologies traveled worldwide and immigrants flocked even faster to the United States.

The Melting Pot

But because of the way information is passed from one person to another, instead of creating a melting pot, the United States became more like a muffin tin with different pockets and enclaves of people in different parts of the country.

The US ended up with:

• A rising Polish population working in steel near Pittsburgh.
• In Chicago, which was 80% foreign born, saw an enclave of Serbians working in the meat packing industry.
• Jewish people fleeing the pogroms in Russia gathered in New York working as tailors.
• Slovaks built cars in Detroit.
• And Italians worked in factories in Baltimore.

Modern technology was growing the population everywhere.

There is a myth surrounding the idea of urbanization however, rural residents who sought employment at the factories and cities didn’t in fact pick up and move 100 of miles from home. Instead, factory towns sprouted everywhere.

Only during the 1910 migration due to the boll weevil infestation in the south, did people largely cross state lines. Chicago may have been the exception drawing immigrants and settlers from all over.

In 1850 for example Chicago had 30,000 people but 20 years later there were 300,000 and the railroads helped marry the rural communities with the city factories. In fact meat from as far away as Texas ended up in Chicago’s meat packing plants. 4 fifths of the meat eaten by Americans came through Chicago.

The US government has done everything possible to settle and populate the western 2/3rds of the country. The industrial revolution is the compliment to that, offering rural Americans a way to feed the world with its agricultural and food products.

At this point, it is looking as if America will prosper as an agrarian nation. Which brings us to the first hero of our story.

Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith was born on leap day in 1860 without anyone knowing he was going to change the world.

Herman grew up and graduated from the Columbia University School of Mines. Recall the gold rush in California and the need for people educated in mining. For work during college, he was a statistician at the US Census Bureau.

There in 1880, he got to witness firsthand how laborers of the census of 1880 were doing all the work manually. The work was so intensive, the census wasn’t complete until 1886 just before it was time to start again.

While at the Census Bureau, he and a colleague discussed how much a mechanical device was needed to make the census data collection and reporting easier. Counting everything by hand was truly grueling.

Herman wasn’t with the census long, however, as he graduated and got a job teaching at MIT,  he continued to think about the census solution. 2 things helped Herman craft a solution.

The first was the Jacquard Loom.

He was quite familiar with the workings of a traditional loom, but was fascinated by the simple punch card Jacquard added to the loom to weave very intricate patterns.

And then on a train trip out west he stumbled upon another use for a punch card. At the bottom of a train ticket was space for the conductor to punch a photograph of the ticket holder. It wasn’t a traditional image photograph, but rather a written illustration of the ticket holder. It was used to reduce fraud enabling the conductor to match the ticket to the face as he periodically walked the train.

For instance, if a brown haired boy with a long nose and blue eyes handed the conductor the ticket, the conductor would punch out the opposite words off the card like blonde hair, girl, short nose, and brown eyes so the only words remaining on the card described the blue eyed boy.

Those 2 punch card applications made Herman think he could create a census data photo card of every US citizen instead of data like hair color and eye color perhaps the punch card would list income ranges, employment, owning versus renting.

Each person would have their own punch card.

So he set out to make such a machine, a machine that could count these punch cards. Inside the machine would be a floor of taught pins that would shoot up when the card was slid into place. In the areas of the card where there was a hole punched out, the pin would slip through and complete a circuit with the top panel.

When the circuit was made, data was recorded. Henry’s first client with this new machine was a health census for the city of Baltimore and it worked beautifully. That same year in 1888, the US Census Bureau came to realize that there were potential mechanical solutions out there.

So before taking on the 1890 Census, they announced the contest to see who could process a large set of census data the fastest with the winner getting the 1890 census contract. In order for Herman to compete in this contest he would actually have to create a second machine and the second machine would convert the census data from whatever format they gave it to him into punch cards and then he could slide the punch cards through his machine.

And even though his process required 2 separate machines, he beat the other contestants by hours. He won the 1890 census contract and the US government would use his machine to tabulate the new census data.

Realizing he had the ability to create something special that could have other applications, he decided to turn it into a company, the Tabulating Machine Corporation. Years later in 1911, he would sell the company to Charles Flint where it was then merged with 2 other companies and renamed the Computer Tabulating Recording Company.

And then in 1924, the company would be renamed International Business Machines or IBM.

Herman passed away in 1929, but his punch card machine would be used by the US Census Bureau until 1960. Nevertheless, the 1890 Census, his first one, could be the most important Census in American history. In it, the census made an announcement.

The small independent farm nation Thomas Jefferson espoused was now a place where 1/3 of the nation lived in cities. In 1865, there were few settlements between the Mississippi River specifically Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Mormons in Utah. But in 1890 there were settlements all over the rural West and the census saw no discernible demarcation between the frontier and the settlement.

Therefore in 1890 the US Census Bureau announced that the American frontier was closed.

 Westward expansion was officially over.

Which brings us to the next heroes of our story.

In the booming meat market town of Chicago, Arthur Nielsen was born in 1897.

He went to college at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduating with an electrical engineering degree in 1918, but he really liked the marketing aspects of his engineering company clients and was inspired in 1922 to start his own company.

To start he approached some fraternity friends at his college and borrowed $45,000 so he could focus on doing quality control for conveyor belts and turbine generators.

But in order to really understand the market, he decided to do market research on both. So he completely understood all of his clients competitors and to make a little extra money, he sold his market research reports to the clients.

His approach to market research created the concept of “market share”.

Word got out and his business grew exponentially until 1929 when the Great Depression dramatically slowed his sales. To stay afloat, he added new services like consumer market surveys, drugstore and retail sales surveys, grocery and food indexes. He even developed a method to survey and determine the best positions and patterns for store shelves.

In 1936, clients encouraged him to attend the US market research council meeting at New York City’s Yale Club. There MIT marketing professor Robert Elder was speaking about how advertising could be made much more effective if it could be measured. And as a prop, he introduced a machine he and a colleague invented, the Audimeter.

Attached to a radio, the Audimeter could record minute by minute what radio station was playing. Nielsen loved the idea of the Audimeter he considered their particular machine a work in progress since it recorded its results on paper and tape. But he liked it so much he bought it from the professors.

He thought if he could make more and install them into a percentage of homes in a listening area, he could be the first to create a radio index, a report that showed what stations people were listening to and how many were listening.

By 1940 he had achieved his goal in New York City.

He was single handedly changing how advertising was purchased because advertisers now had data. Gathering the data initially required going door to door, but soon he figured out a way to get the results sent over phone lines instead of on paper.

As he grew, compiling the data became more and more of a problem. He couldn’t scale very quickly to include rural America until he solved this time consuming data reporting and analyzing problem, but he would find the solution on election night in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson, which brings us to the 3rd and 4th heroes of our story.

The ENIAC

World War 1 had proven the United States was a military might. Whether urban or rural, America’s soldiers would gather with one source of pride in defending our nation and our allies. But the massive size of every decision was taking a toll. America needed a better way to calculate and compile data.

The census, the draft, transportation, and military strength needed something that could crunch numbers.

When World War II came around the War Department immediately partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The engineers there were well trained to help with their calculation needs.

2 of the people at Moore School critical to the effort were J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchley. Eckert and Mauchly were from Philadelphia and Cincinnati respectively. Both were raised academically inclined with a pension for engineering.

Among their academic credentials were time at Penn’s Wharton School of Business and John Hopkins before relocating and meeting at the Moore School. When the war department approached them, they needed help creating and calculating ballistic firing tables.

The tables were crucial to the success of their weaponry, but were beyond the manpower capability of the US military. The war department had already employed 45 math smart females who worked furiously behind the scenes developing the tables, but they weren’t enough.

To have a bomb or missile hit its target, a firing a table involved knowing the distance to the target, altitude of origin, the distance cross range, the wind speed downrange, angular velocity of the Earth, the azimuth, air density, and a slew of other things.

When the government had gotten so far behind on getting these tables calculated and there would be no way to catch up, Eckert and Mauchly proposed building a computer to do the calculations.

They proposed a design they called ENIAC.

In 1943, the National Defense Research Council approved the idea of building a computer and then it took 3 years for Eckert and Mauchly to build it. Being employees of the Moore school created problems as to the ownership and intellectual property of the ENIAC so Eckert and Mauchly quit, and started their own company knowing there were also other applications for their computer technology.

Then they pitched it to the US Census Bureau. It was common knowledge in government circles that the US population was now too big for the punch card tabulating machines they’d been using since 1890.

Back then the population was 62,000,000 and now it was a 141,000,000 the computer Eckert and Mauchly would propose for the census they called Univac.

Unfortunately, the Univac was the size of a garage with the price tag of over $1,000,000 and was a tough sell to anyone who did not need to win a war. Eckert and Mauchly were a bit in over their heads. They needed someone with better connections and sales skills so they sold the company to Remington Rand which was already well known for their razors, their guns and their typewriters.

 Remington hoping to get some national exposure turned to the latest craze of television. Remington Rand pitched an idea to CBS. Their suggestion was to have the Univac computer predict the election results live on television. CBS was skeptical of the machines abilities but were interested in the idea of the gimmick.

So on the night of the 1952 presidential election, Walter Kronkite had Eckert explain to America how the computer worked. Then shortly after the broadcast began with only 3,000,000 votes tallied, UNIVAC predicted Eisenhower would win 438 electoral votes to 93, claiming a 100 to 1 chance Eisenhower would win.

But CBS was reluctant.

Their polling stats indicated the race would be much closer. So CBS thought the computer might be wrong and buried Univac’s prediction in the broadcast. But when the night was over Univac was correct, and only within 1% of error. CBS revealed Univac’s prediction.

For Remington Rand, they couldn’t have asked for better exposure.

Watching the broadcast that night was Arthur Nielsen. And after the broadcast, he realized he needed a UNIVAC computer to calculate all that radio consumption data. And now he thought about including television.

Arthur Nielsen was one of the first five to buy a UNIVAC supercomputer. The Census Bureau bought 2.

Finally, Nielsen Ratings!

With TV, now America’s favorite pastime over radio, Nielsen went forward with his TV rating service and slowly cut back on radio. Univac would enable him to cover television nationally and have the capacity to give local and regional market data.

Nielsen’s timing could not have been better. America’s transformation from the days of the 13 colonies had been dramatic, but it wasn’t over. The push for westward expansion had created a largely rural nation with a few big cities and 250 factory towns.

And while the industrial revolution had ushered in planes, trains, and automobiles, the 1929 great depression was a major halt.

Sadly for television whose first broadcast was in 1928, further expansion would take years. It wouldn’t be until 1939 that NBC would feature a regular broadcast and then only to 400 televisions in New York City.

With an average salary of $13.68, the $400 TV was only for the rich. Sales of TVs would only spike when big events were about to be broadcast, like 1936, the Berlin Olympics, and 1937, coronation of King George the 6th, In 1939, the New York World’s Fair and a Roosevelt speech.

And on December 7, 1941, the Pearl Harbor attack became the first news story that was broke on TV.

By the time America entered World War II, the American people had spent 12 years enduring the Great Depression. And with the war effort ramping up, rationing did not make things easier. It wasn’t until late 1945 that Americans were free of the Depression and economic constraints. The war created plenty of jobs and soldiers came home ready to spend.

Like westward expansion, the U. S. Government was ready to help and push along prosperity. To stimulate growth, they allowed the FHA to offer a 30 year mortgage with only 10% down. And the Servicemen’s Readiness Act, also known as the GI Bill, gave soldiers money to go to college and even access to low interest loans to build homes.

All these things created a housing crisis in 1946.

Loans to build homes was a push to develop cities where there wasn’t land to build homes. The only option was to expand cities and move people out. And with the explosion of post war automobile purchases, suburbs were created. And in these houses, people bought televisions. 

By 1948, there were 350,000 TV sets sold.

3/4ths of them were on the East Coast mainly in cities.

And because of that, the programming reflected a more urban audience.

Amos and Andy was a show about 2 black friends in Harlem trying to get rich, and the Goldberg show was a show about a NYC Jewish family. And with such a dense urban audience in the northeast where Broadway was the cultural draw, plays were filmed for TV like 12 Angry Men and Days of Wine and Roses.

Also, vaudeville favorites like Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Jackie Gleason made the move to TV.

But that would change in the 19 fifties when AT&T use their telephone network as the basis for building a nationwide TV network.

Rural America finally had access to channels, meaning by 1955, half the US had televisions. In fact, on March 7, 1955, the world tuned in to see Mary Martin playing Peter Pan.

Never in the history of the world had so many people heard the voice of 1 person. AT&T’s new rural TV watchers plus the movement of urban families to suburban neighborhoods was the next big migration in America.

And in 1957, programs on TV began to reflect this change. It started with Andy Griffith. He’d had a memorable role in Elia Kazan’s movie, Lonesome Roads. He was given a show which was an immediate hit. One of the writers of the Andy Griffith show was Paul Henning.

Paul Henning decided to take a stab at a second show.

This one about country hillbillies who struck it rich and moved to Beverly Hills. It was also a hit.

Henning racked up more rural TV hits with Petticoat Junction, Gomer Pyle, and Green Acres, all for CBS. With rural America seeing TV for the first time and Arthur Nielsen providing statistics, The shows about country folk were the most popular.

Then came Lassie, Mayberry RFD, Hee Haw, Jim Nabors, and Lawrence Welk.

Every show was reassuring, positive, escapist, and largely white. Even though racial tensions were high and there was much strife in the news, TV didn’t dare broach the subject.

It wasn’t hard to see the power of TV, however, as 29,000,000 people turned in in 1962 to watch John Glenn blast into space, which is why advertisers really wanted to be there.

In 1965, Nielsen upgraded his TV rating service by adding viewer profiles. Viewer profiles showed the demographics of who was watching the programs. For advertisers, it was the first time they could really think about targeted reach over reach itself.

Despite the Beatles performing on CBS’s Ed Sullivan program, NBC was finally threatening CBS in the rankings.

But more importantly for advertisers, they had a younger more urban audience. Nielsen’s research in 1965 showed that shows like Hee Haw had an older rural audience.

So CBS trying to stay ahead of the competition brought in a new 37 year old head of programming named Fred Silverman. As Silverman was trying to figure out what to do with CBS’s future programs, the FCC had a new plan of their own.

In 1970, they required that every station give half an hour of programming to local affiliates and one hour on Sundays. For Silverman, that was a loss of 4 hours of programming. To some degree, this was the break CBS needed.

They were going to make some changes and now everyone had to. But CBS would take steps no one could have predicted. It was the 1890 Census that declared the American frontier was closed. Expansion was complete and no further work was needed.

Rural America was there to stay.

For Fred Silverman, however, on March 10, 1971, made a completely opposite announcement.

In their case, there was much work to be done, but rural America would no longer be part of it. T

here would be no more country folk television. On that day, Lassie, Hogan’s Heroes, Hee Haw, Mayberry RFD, Andy Griffith, Jim Nabors, Petticoat Junction, Beverly Hillbillies, and even the Ed Sullivan show were cancelled.

The only act that would survive this rural purge was Lucille Ball.

In their place they’d introduce Scooby Doo, Good Times, Maude, The Jeffersons, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Starsky and Hutch, Carol Burnett, and All in the Family. The days of all white escapist television would be over. 

Politics, modern life, different races, controversy, and up to things shows would now characterize new modern television programming. The rural west was settled on land and on TV. It brings new meaning to the song Edith and Archie would sing at the beginning of each episode of All in the Family.

“Boy the Way Glenn Miller played,
songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us, we had it made
those were the days”.

The government spent oodles of money and time populating the American West and creating rural America.

And in one day, by one person, the rural west was canceled.