Full disclosure: I about cried when I came across the video interviews discussed in this post, a few precious tidbits of which I will share with you below. My near-tears were not from joy, though there was some of that, too.
Mostly, the little emotional roiling going on inside me in the moments after discovering the Mike Wallace interviews of more than 60 years ago was from sheer amazement.
Amazement that within my own lifetime, there was a time when serious discussion on matters of deep philosophical, legal, political, religious and cultural importance was presented on prime time television. Not near midnight, the time slot for today’s night owls to prowl the smart but comedy-based interview shows that cast more of an ironic, sometimes slashing eye on the affairs of the day rather than the sober back-and-forth discussion in which Wallace and his guests engaged.
Not during the dinner-time news hour in 35-second segments of severely edited half-sentences before cutting to a laundry detergent commercial.
Nope—this was prime time, the hours between 8-11 p.m. Prime commercial time, geared toward maximum viewership, for which advertisers pay dearly to attract eyes and ears to their products. The time when the younger kiddos would have been shepherded off to bed and the adults still had enough in the tank to behold, say, 20th century theological giant Reinhold Niebuhr hold forth on, among other topics, the separation of church and state. (Yes, a theologian in prime time, be still my heart!).
Another leading light of the day, Frank Lloyd Wright, was arguably the most influential architect of his era if not every era. Though he and Wallace of course discussed Wright’s field, the little descriptive capsule of the show states they also touched on “religion, war, mercy killing, art, critics, his mile-high skyscraper, America’s youth, sex, morality, politics, nature, and death.”
Prime time deserved prime topics, apparently, and Wallace, legendary for his direct, sometimes combative interviewing style, rarely held back from probing his guests. Lucky for him—and us—that Wright and many others here proved to be eminently probe-able.
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Other guests included the controversial philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand, psychologist Erich Fromm, composer Oscar Hammerstein, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger, the writers Pearl Buck and Aldous Huxley, playwright Tennessee Williams, actress Gloria Swanson, artist Salvador Dali, statesman Henry Kissinger, and First Lady/Co-President (!!) Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even athletes whom Wallace knew had something to say—baseball pitcher Bob Feller and the boxer (you read that right) Carmen Basilio.
All those are among 68 full video interviews available through the University of Texas-Austin Ransom Center website, which encompasses the first two years of Wallace’s three-year run with the show. A half-dozen or so of these interviews and others from the show’s final year are also available on You Tube.
The show debuted in late April, 1957 with silent film heroine Gloria Swanson holding forth on whether she was “through with Hollywood, or are they through with me?” But also: “sex appeal, Hollywood in the 1920s, marriage (she had six of them), plastic surgery, and cancer cures.”
It’s hard to find a Mike Wallace interview that is not lively at the very least and deeply penetrating and revealing of the subject at its best. One could do very much worse than take in every one of these existing interviews for a comprehensive take on the tenor of mid-20th-century America, as well as the age-old universals pondered and wrestled with at every conversational turn. Each episode is just under a half-hour in length.
So I’ll close here with excerpts from select episodes that exemplify the breadth and depth of this most audacious effort to hold both television and the American public it serves to a standard of inquiry and conversation we would be well served to experience again today.
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Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) remains a larger-than-life figure as a visionary architect who sought nothing less than to change the human experience of everyday life by changing the aesthetics of our buildings and public places. He gives as good as he gets here from Wallace, two spirited men enjoying the intellectual tussle of teasing out Wright’s wide-ranging philosophy of what constitutes the good life.
WALLACE: As an architect, how would you like to change the way that we live?
WRIGHT: I wouldn’t like to change so much the way we live, as what we live in, and how we live in it.
WALLACE: Yes, but you cannot differentiate what we live in… from the way we live. We are what we live and when we live.
WRIGHT: We are shifting in what we live now; we don’t really live in it. We don’t really understand what it is to live in an organic building with organic character.
WALLACE: Well now, organic building, organic character, these are words which the “mobocracy” perhaps would have difficulty in…
WRIGHT: Well, let’s say natural, would that suit you better?
WALLACE: I’m still not… I would like specifically, to know what you mean, how would you like to change the way that we live?
WRIGHT: I would like to make it appropriate to the Declaration of Independence, to the center line of our freedom. I’d like to have a free architecture, I’d like to have architecture that belonged where you see it standing, and as a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace. And the letters we receive from our clients tell us how those buildings we built for them have changed the character of their whole lives and their whole existence. And it’s different now than it was before. Well, I’d like to do that for the country.
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Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She immigrated to the United States in 1926, having lived through the Bolshevik Revolution that brought Lenin to power and severely disrupted her professional family’s life. Her “objectivist” philosophy emphasizing reason and heroic self-advancement rather than interdependence can be seen to emerge from the ashes of that experience, exemplified most resoundingly in her two philosophical novels, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” Her ideas continue to inspire and underscore libertarian and conservative thought today, readily exemplified in the excerpt below.
RAND: Now, what is self-sacrifice?
WALLACE: Yes, what is self-sacrifice? You say that you do not like the altruism by which we live. You like a certain kind of Ayn Rand-ist selfishness.
RAND: Well, to say that I don’t “like” is too weak a word. I consider it evil, and self-sacrifice is the precept that man needs to serve others in order to justify his existence, that his moral duty is to serve others. That is what most people believe today.
RAND: The way everybody feels, except more consciously. I feel that it is terrible, that you see destruction all around you, and that you are moving toward disaster until, and unless, all those welfare-state conceptions have been reversed and rejected. It is precisely these trends which are bringing the world to disaster, because we are now moving towards complete collectivism, or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody, and we are moving that way only because of our altruist morality.
WALLACE: Ah, yes, but you say everybody is enslaved to everybody, yet this came about democratically, Ayn. A free people in a free country voted for this kind of government, wanted this kind of legislation. Do you object to the democratic process?
RAND: I object to the idea that the people have the right to vote on everything. The traditional American system was a system based on the idea that majority will prevailed only in public or political affairs. And that it was limited by inalienable individual rights. Therefore I do not believe that a majority can vote a man’s life, or property or freedom away from him.
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Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was the pre-eminent public theologian of his day, in a time when “public theologian” was not a self-canceling phrase. In his widely praised and cited books, “The Nature and Destiny of Man” and “Moral Man in Immoral Society,” he stood at a crossroads between liberal Christians he saw as unwilling to grapple with the human capacity for depravity as exemplified in his century’s two world wars, and conservative Christians who took a literalistic and therefore overly dogmatic view of its holy scriptures.
WALLACE: It would look, Dr. Niebuhr, as though all of our major religions are becoming more influential. I say it would look that way because we hear so much about religious revivals with church attendance increasing, college students returning to religion, the apparent success of the evangelists. Yet, in large measure you have criticized this revival. Why?
NIEBUHR: Well, that’s a long story, too. I wouldn’t criticize the whole revival. I’ve criticized the revival wherever it gives petty and trivial answers to very great and ultimate questions about the meaning of our life. There has been a religious revival because—let me put it like this, the people that weren’t traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down. The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore people have returned to the historic religion. But now when the historic religions give trivial answers to these very tragic questions of our day, when an evangelist says, for instance, we mustn’t hope for a summit meeting, we must hope in Christ without spelling out what this could mean in our particular nuclear age. This is the irrelevant answer, when another Evangelist says if America doesn’t stop being selfish, it will be doomed. This is also a childish answer because nations are selfish and the question about America isn’t whether we will be selfish or unselfish, but will we be sufficiently imaginative to pass the Reciprocal Trade Acts.
WALLACE: In other words, translate religion into a kind of active morality.
NIEBUHR: Yes, a morality of justice and reciprocity.
WALLACE: Well, let me ask you this: Now, we’re constantly being told, Dr. Niebuhr, by our political and by our church leaders, that in our fight against Communism, we are on God’s side, that we’re God-fearing people. They are atheists—the Russians, the Communists are atheists—and therefore we must ultimately win. What about that?
NIEBUHR: I don’t know whether any religious leader would say that we must ultimately win because we’re on God’s side. If they do say that, it’s bad religion, because….
WALLACE: Well, haven’t we heard from the the Old Testament that “right is might”?
NIEBUHR: No, no…that right is might…But in the Old Testament, the God of the Prophets never was completely on Israel’s side. There was a primitive national religion, but it was always a transcendent God who had judgment first in the House of God. This is the true religion. It has a sense of a transcendent majesty and a transcendent meaning so that that puts myself and the foe under the same judgment. “Judge not that ye be not judged.”
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Pearl Buck (1892–1973), was a novelist, biographer, memoirist, short story writer and even children’s author who won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her 1931 historical novel, “The Good Earth,” set in an early 20th century Chinese village. The Nobel Prize for Literature followed in 1938. The daughter of missionaries, Buck grew up in China under parents who had great regard for that country, and Buck’s love affair with it was long and enduring. She returned frequently into her adult life until the Chinese Cultural Revolution saw her dismissed as an imperialist and denied entrance by Chairman Mao. Buck was a strong advocate of anti-racism and the rights of women and the disabled, and came to be quite skeptical of the role of missionaries in foreign lands. Her first daughter was born with multiple disabilities and the birth left Buck unable to have more children; she went on to adopt seven more in her lifetime. In the excerpt below, Wallace cites her role in advancing women’s rights, even as Buck denies his description of her as a “feminist.”
BUCK: If we’re going to go to the root of the problem, I think it isn’t so much the isolation from one another, men from women and women from men, as the fact that you know it it’s very difficult to be an American, did you realize that?
WALLACE: No.
BUCK: We’re actually, we’re in a sense, we’re committed to loneliness. When you have these great ideals of independence, and of freedom, many of the old bulwarks that the older civilizations had are thrown away and it’s a great adventure, so to speak.
WALLACE: I’m not sure that I understand.
BUCK: Not understand? Well, if you’ve lived in an old country such as China or Japan or even the old countries of Europe, you have so much tradition of family, church, the same church, perhaps, at least not such a variety of religions as we have. So much less choice as an individual. You…have supports that we don’t have in our civilization. I think it’s our strength that we don’t have them, but I think that often times what we think of as the loneliness of women or the loneliness of men is really a sort of human loneliness which our freedom and independence commit us to. And so often we think we’re lonely because we’re women or we’re lonely because we’re men but we’re really lonely because we are living in a country with no boundaries, so to speak, and no pattern, and of immense ideals which are difficult for us to follow.
WALLACE: To live up to…
BUCK: ….and yet which give us an enormous responsibility in the eyes of the world’s people.
WALLACE: Let’s come back just to women and look at what some people say is happening in America, apparently because of feminism of which I believe you are a champion.
BUCK: No, you’re quite wrong.
WALLACE: Am I?
BUCK: Yes, I’m not a feminist.
WALLACE: I was under the impression, now, I’m happy to be corrected…I was under the impression that you are rather militant in your desire that a woman find herself as an independent free spirit and that you feel that she cannot find herself or is not finding herself as an independent free spirit currently in the home.
BUCK: No, I think of the fact…I think that what I feel is that women have to find themselves as human beings just as men do, and that they will find themselves as these free spirits that you speak of when they are really fulfilling themselves as human beings.
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There are several obvious takeaways from these Mike Wallace interviews. First, in today’s fragmented, single-focused media environment a primetime Mike Wallace interview would never find the light of day. A corporate board room concerned solely with ratings and the almighty dollar would laugh it away. Second, it seems Americans only want to see and hear stances which reinforce their already strongly held beliefs. The Trinity Broadcasting Network floods its airwaves with the Billy Grahams of the world but, God forbid, ever allow a Reinhold Niebuhr to express an alternative point of view. Third, I also believe the kind of hard hitting, introspective questioning Wallace embraced is teetering on the brink of extinction. Queries like “Mr. Stevenson, as one of the most progressive Presidential candidates in history, how could you possibly choose John Sparkman, a strict Jim Crow segregationist, as your running mate?” or “Ms. Rand, how do you square your abhorrence of socialism with the fact you willingly accept both Social Security and Medicare benefits?” just aren’t asked now. Fourth, “E Pluribus Dumbing Down” has transplanted “E Pluribus Unum” as our national motto. There are people today who consider thinking as the eighth deadly sin. My God, the Caged Bird No Longer Sings in Florida. I also read recently that a majority of our high school graduates couldn’t identify the faces on the penny, nickel and dime. I’ll sum up my comments with a few lines from Edward R. Murrow’s famous 1954 television editorial denouncing Wisconsin Senator Jospeh McCarthy. In doing so, he eloquently threw in a bit of Shakespeare. Murrow said, “the actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it – and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Is that relevant today or what?
It’s but one of the Big Questions of this era, Spence, and perhaps it will require future historians personally untethered to this era to mine it: Are we dumber because of our media, or is our media dumber because of us? Or are we dumber at all, by a more scientifically researched metric? Certainly our mass media seems to be, but then there is outstanding work still being done—is that work still finding the audience it has always been intended for, while mass media is what it has always been—just a passing entertainment? Certainly we’re not featuring Reinhold Niebuhrs in prime time, so that is one data point supporting yesterday’s media. Hard question, though, cuz that was also the era of mindless television entertainment, hackneyed plots in forgettable series. (The Lone Ranger rides again!) Would take some serious social science research to get at this in any definitive way, methinks. Meanwhile…