Pioneers In Reality TV

By CBSNews.com's Ray Bassett

(CBS)  Let's look at a year in which a new medium took a landmark baby step in political news coverage as America endured a four-way presidential race.

The Internet in 2000 as George W. Bush, Al Gore, Ralph Nader, and Pat Buchanan all hit the campaign trail?

Right idea, wrong medium, wrong year.

Rewind to the summer of 1948, the last time that Philadelphia played national political convention host - and the first time that television aired live, gavel-to-gavel coverage. Harry Truman was in the White House, but the Democrat's Oval Office days were numbered with his own party split three ways. Or so pundits predicted and Republicans believed.

"It was the first big television special event, because it was a news event you could plan for," said 60 Minutes executive producer and creator Don Hewitt. "Most news events, you can't - they happen in and around you."

Hewitt had joined CBS only a few months earlier, when he was tapped as an associate director for the network's TV convention coverage. Edward R. Murrow, John Daly, Don Hollenbeck, and Douglas Edwards comprised the CBS News team. But radio - where Murrow first made his mark - was still the nation's dominant medium. TV had a lot yet to prove and had just begun to spread its wings, if only a little.

"Events that happened on the spur of the moment were beyond television's ability to do anything about it," Hewitt recalled. TV cameras in those days were enormous, lumbering, immovably tethered to their control rooms. Wireless microphones didn't exist.

Philadelphia hosted three of 1948's conventions to enable TV to cover them all and reach the largest live viewing audience at that time in the days before coast-to-coast television.

"Television's coaxial cable that stretched on the Northeast had its epicenter effectively in Philadelphia," said Zachary Karabell, author of The Last Campaign, a book about the '48 race. The political parties "wanted to reach the widest dispersion of the half a million television sets that were then in homes."

Conventions were ideal for TV broadcasters eager to fulfill then-FCC requirements to air public affairs programs in order to keep their operating licenses.

"Because the FCC was in bed with the political parties," Hewitt explained, "the best way to impress them you were doing public service was to cover their party's conventions ... It was the payback. It was how we paid for a right to broadcast."

Republicans rolled into the City of Brotherly Love first. When they met at Philadelphia Convention Hall in the last week of June, they nominated New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey - who lost to FDR four years earlier - for president. How did TV's presence - as slight as it was - affect the GOP's proceedings, as well as the subsequent summer gatherings in Philly?

For one thing, delegates were told "not to make lots of faces or seem to be distracted during seeches, in case the camera caught them laughing or guffawing at inappropriate times ... or just having conversations," said Karabell.

Nor was the make-up used in the movie newsreels of that era adequately suitable for those newfangled TV cameras.

"People looked a bit like death warmed over if they didn't have the proper pancake make-up" for television, Karabell added.

When the Democrats met at Convention Hall two weeks later, real political fireworks exploded during a fierce platform fight over civil rights. Hubert Humphrey, Minneapolis' boy mayor whom the Democrats would nominate for president two decades later, burst on to the national scene with a passionate speech in favor of toughening the party platform's civil rights plank. After the pro-civil rights forces prevailed, Mississippi's delegates and a chunk of Alabama's stormed out of the hall. TV cameras caught it all.

The Southern delegates' exit was a "moment of very high drama that you don't see in political conventions today," said Harold Gullen, author of The Upset That Wasn't, another book on the '48 campaign.

Unlike 2000's hyperscripted, ready-for-prime-time conventions, Truman did not deliver his acceptance speech until two in the morning due to the roiling civil rights debate. "Give 'Em Hell Harry" jolted his fellow Democrats with a fiery, rousing speech blasting the "do-nothing" GOP Congress. That speech marked the start of Truman's comeback, setting the stage for his surprise win over Republican Dewey that November.

Southern Democrats who bolted their political home over civil rights formed the States Rights - or Dixiecrat - Party in Birmingham, Ala. Their mid-July gathering was the only '48 convention not held in Philadelphia. This segregationist party fielded Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's then-Democratic governor and still GOP U.S. senator, as its presidential candidate.

Not everything was high drama - the conventions featured a few fleeting moments meant for the TV viewers. In 1948, the pocketbook issue on voters' minds was inflation. Congresswoman Claire Boothe Luce, wife of publisher Henry Luce, waved a steak and a carton of milk as props for the TV cameras during her GOP convention speech. Weeks later, Democratic Party official India Edwards tried to match, if not top, that.

"She staged some of her talk knowing that it would also be seen by a television audience," said Karabell.

In her convention speech, Edwards carried in a grocery bag that included a bloody piece of steak, which she eagerly brandished for the small screen. Edwards also opened a hatbox - and up floated a balloon. Like the groceries, that prop was meant to score a partisan point in an "It's the economy, stupid!" way.

Philadelphia's third and final convention of the year took place at an outdoor ballpark at the end of July. The Progressive Party split from Truman's left as the Dixiecrats broke away to his riht. Its agenda: sweeping social welfare programs and a pacifist foreign policy to end the Cold War. Henry Wallace, Truman's predecessor as vice president, was chosen as the Progressives' standard bearer.

Wallace's acceptance speech at Shibe Park "really hearkened back to the old-time politics," said Karabell, because the setting was tailor-made for turn-of-the-century oratory - something that TV would soon render obsolete in American politics.

"1948 is that transitional year between personalized campaigning … to today where the campaigns and conventions in particular are entirely based on television and the electronic media," said Gullen.

While TV was a peripheral player in '48, its role and influence in campaigns only grew from that point onward. Just four years later, CBS News' Walter Cronkite assumed the convention helm for the first time as its "anchorman" - a phrase popularized by his TV coverage. That same year, Dwight Eisenhower, the popular war hero who rejected efforts to draft him for the White House in '48, rolled out what's considered to be the first TV ad for a presidential campaign.

Looking back at TV's first real crack at the conventions, Hewitt said of 1948: "It was so kind of Americana." Even with grocery props, make-up formulas, and etiquette rules in that year's mix, the wall-to-wall scripting of the conventions as informercials by the political parties was yet to come.

"Nobody knew anything about television, so you were really eavedropping on a town meeting, on a convention that was not being produced for television," Hewitt added. "It was being produced for the people in the hall and we were, in effect, eavesdropping, which is great television."

These days, "it's called 'reality television,'" he said.